tv

I have an expression that is used on wifey’s Ebay site: “Treasures, antique to near new, yesterdays discards now precious to you”.  I find great truth in that expression especially around our home. I have mentioned many items in past articles showing just how you can get creative with a little imagination, to use those yesteryear discards found at garage sales or flea markets in new and decorative ways.

Now I won’t start by telling about our yard art, that would be too easy, and anyone can stick a bowling ball or fifteen around their garden, or take a Red Wing crock that had the bottom broken out and use it as a planter. It’s also real easy to hang decorative cast iron sewing machine legs on the outside wall of your home.

No, I would rather point out the elevator buttons that I electrified and stuck on the wall for the grand kids to press and light every time they pass through the hallway. Or the screen door insert that we  turned into wall décor in a powder room. And I must not forget the ‘53 Pontiac dashboard chrome speaker grill that I use as a face plate for a cold air return or the small yard rake with sawed off handle used as a coat rake, Ah! rack on our side door.

The latest purchase I can lay blame onto Wifey. Last Saturday we took a stroll down the isle. It wasn’t a chapel, it was an antique mall, naturally. This time a new place in downtown Waukesha, Wisconsin, Family Heirlooms Antique Mall. By the second row, we had found a few things and I had made one run to the front counter to have them hold our items till we finished. I joined Wifey at a booth near the far end of the isle where she pointed out a very old wooden TV cabinet, less the workings. Looked great we agreed, “I’d put a TV lamp on it for display” she said. “Rabbit ears and an antenna rotator box” I said. And as we walked out Wifey speculated, “Could you put a digital picture frame in the cabinet?”

We walked a little further down isle 3, she found another antique to take up front and I asked the counter for help in getting the old TV box up front for us. Wifey had a super idea, and I couldn’t pass on such a great cabinet like this on.

As we drove out of their parking lot, the discussion started. Rabbit ears antenna, round bulls eye antenna, UHF converter box, or TV lamp. Now you have to understand, wifey has had all of these items at one time or another and has sold them all. So that means more hunting trips in the future.

When back home furthering our inspection and caressing its fine real wood surface, wifey asked what to do about the knobs and dials on the front. Well, as part of all my hobbies I have a box of old radio knobs in a bread pan in the basement, next to my key collection. Issue Solved.

So, here it is finished and sitting in our living room. No antenna, no TV lamp just a doily from  the same period as the TV, the 1930s (or so, our younger readers will innocently guess).

Now the search thru numerous antique shops begins, and with each choice an argument will start.

In my corner are the electronic devices and antennas and Wifey with her figural lamps in her corner. And you know I’ll be against the ropes and land face down on the canvas holding my rabbit ears, while she hoists the trophy prize high into the air. UGH how ugly can one lamp be?

Though the show is well into its third season on Britain’s Channel 4, I’d never heard of ‘The IT Crowd’ – which is unusual, as I’m usually a magnet for all things involving extreme examples of geekdom. If there’s a ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ reference in it, it’s usually within 100 feet of me or headed there quickly. After many, many delays, The Complete First Season is due for a US release on March 31st, and it’s a good watch.

But if there’s one thing that TV shows should never, ever do, it’s slap comparisons or relationships to The Office on themselves. Honestly, it just creates unrealistic expectations. The Office was a genre-redefining work of art. You sit down to a TV show with The Office floating around in your brain and the comparisons are inevitable, and The IT Crowd is NOT The Office. Not by miles. While The Office was a comedy that thrived on quiet and awkwardness, The IT Crowd is the exact opposite. And because they brought up the comparison, it’s pretty much exactly the type of ‘broad comedy’ that Andy Millman was desperately trying to escape in Extras.

‘Broad comedy’ was a new phrase for me, but given the context of its usage, I’m surmising that it means ‘a sitcom that thrives on obvious or crass jokes, slapstick, catch phrases, a laugh track, and lots of bombastic generalizations of character types’. The IT Crowd fits that description pretty tightly, and it has its place. After a few episodes and trying to shake the inappropriate Office comparisons, that place becomes very comfortable & even welcoming.

So, it’s a Brit-com about two geeks from the half-forgotten Information Technology (aka computer) department in a large corporation, stuck in an unfurnished basement, but doing pretty well for themselves in their environment. Enter the pretty girl, who throws the proverbial monkey wrench into the situation, and comedy ensues. One might draw similarities to The Big Bang Theory, and they’d be pretty accurate. The prevalence of implied Aspergers is there in both cases, but in the interest of ‘credit where credit is due’, The IT Crowd was here first.

Aside from having the best TV show opening sequence of all time, and DVD menus that very cleverly reference the Atari games of my youth, I blew through all 6 episodes of season one in short order. Some observations :

- For a couple of nerds, their office is curiously devoid of superhero paraphernalia. Instead, the shelves are chock full of designer toys and ‘art’ comics, from Jim Woodring and Dave Cooper, to Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, Pogeybait, and even a few Mad-Ls. The closest thing to anything resembling ‘pop’ culture is a Samurai Jack action figure on a desk. Perhaps these guys are a little too hip, or the set designer didn’t really grasp the nature of these nerds.

- The DVD includes a short film called ‘Hello Friend’, which is really very amazing. It’s much more akin to the subtlety and wit that I expected from, again, something that uses the words ‘The Office’ on itself. The film is by the Graham Linehan – who is also the director of the show in question. It’s part ‘Look Around You’ and part Kafka-esque tale of man vs. technology.

- The DVD also includes a ‘Behind The IT Crowd’ mini-documentary, done in a sarcastic, but again subtly hilarious, style.

- I couldn’t place it at the time, but Richard Aoyade (who plays the traditionally geeky ‘Moss’) also played ‘Dean Learner’ in one of my other favorite, bizarre British TV shows – Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. I’d love to see that on DVD over here, after its short run on [adult swim].

- The DVD subtitles cleverly offer the option of ‘l33t’, though what it actually displays is random strings of letters and numbers. Actual ‘l33tsp34k’ would have been time-consuming to create, but completely awesome.

- Roy’s t-shirts are all quite awesome. Of special note for me was the shirt that depicted the infamous Pac-Man kill screen. It’s both an intensely geeky reference to classic arcade gaming, and a little bit alarming that I even recognized it.

- … and as the guy at my workplace both known for my neat shirts, and my ability to fix the computers, I can totally relate. I just hope I’m not as broad a caricature as these dorks.

After six episodes, it very much grew on me, and even if you’re not into absurdist, slightly surrealist comedy, ‘Hello Friend’ is definitely worth the cost of admission. I’ve even broken my ‘no comedies with laugh tracks’ rule.

I’d like to suggest another collecting New Year’s resolution — this one based on a gripe I have.

Awhile ago I got the WKRP in Cincinnati – The Complete First Season DVD, and while I loved it in general, I was peeved to discover that, like the re-runs of WKRP, the DVD lacks the original music — even the doorbell to Jennifer’s apartment has been changed from Fly Me to the Moon to Beautiful Dreamer! Ugh.

While the DVD discloses the reason — that fees to use the music prohibited the original songs from being on the discs — the music is something I really missed. And WKRP isn’t the only television program to suffer from such royalty, licensing, &/or use fee problems. Shows such as Quantum Leap have suffered thus with DVD releases, and fans of Cold Case (a TV series very intertwined with its musical selections) have been waiting years for its first season to be released specifically because of the music rights issue.

If you’re fans of television shows, I can’t stress highly enough the need to dust-off that slighted-in-favor-of-the-DVD-player-or-TiVo VCR and videotape episodes.  This way you’ll have the original episodes as they aired and not some dubbed & doctored copy minus iconic audio moments.

And, if you go all old school, taping the entire episodes with the commercials, you’ll have the added bonus of having copies of ads.  I know it may contradict your current viewing habits.  So many of us have purchased our video appliances for the ease of erasing and skipping those ads which are (not) seen as blights on our favorite shows — and if we haven’t the right gadgets, we fast forward through the ads while viewing. But many of these commercials will one day be the classic retro and vintage ads that define childhoods and decades — you know, those favorite cereal and toy commercials you spend hours searching for and viewing on YouTube.

And if you don’t record them today, they’ll be as lost to tomorrow as those episodes with the original music.

We can’t precisely predict what technology will be around in the future, and we don’t know what shows and advertisements that we’re watching today will be the classics of tomorrow; but we can save what we like now on what gadgets we have now.  Just record & save it now — and worry about transforming & converting later.

We’re moving into an almost exclusively digital world, and I can’t say I’m thrilled with it (he says from a digital blog, thereby adding to his perceived problem).

Oh sure, I appreciate the fact than an mp3 is more environmentally conservative and often clearer than printing my music onto plastics, and the chemicals in those beautiful Polaroids are so much more harmful than a quick digital snap off of a rechargeable battery, but I’m an oldschool kinda guy. I love the tactile, the handmade, the imperfect. I have nagging fears that we’re losing all of this.

Maybe that’s why I started collecting animation memorabilia from the golden age of animation – which I consider to be pretty much everything that existed before cartoons became overly reliant upon computers. It’s now actually regarded as some kind of herculean, creative feat to create an entire animation on hand-painted cels, and to eschew the computer’s clever interpolation of movement between keyframes. Draw up an intangible character on a computer screen, jiggle him around a little bit, and it’s a cartoon – but there’s nothing left over as evidence. And that kinda makes me sad.

During the olden days of animation, the visual aspect of almost any given cartoon consisted of two parts : the moving part (usually the foreground characters), and the painted backgrounds. Throughout the course of an episode of a cartoon, there would be a good handful of backgrounds that would be on the screen for extended swaths of time, and hundreds upon hundreds of hand-made paintings on clear plastic that would be laid on top of these backgrounds, one at a time, and photographed in succession.

This sheer quantity would lead you to think that an animation cel would be a really common thing to find – but unfortunately, many studios chose to save money by cleaning off these plastic sheets after they were photographed, to be re-used for subsequent animation frames. As a result, concrete artifacts from many early cartoons have been lost to re-use and recycling. A similar thing happened with those lost Doctor Who episodes, once the ostensible value of the item had run its course, ignoring the value of the actual artifact.

In terms of collecting, an original hand-painted animation cel is like owning a prop from a TV show or a movie – that existed on the screen for about 1/24th of a second. Sure, Hasbro has made Star Wars figures from characters with less screen time, but having that one artifact from one integral moment in the fourth dimension – it means something special if you’re into cartoons. I’ve even gotten into collecting Filmation original storyboard sketches – but only because they have Batman action scenes. The artifacts of creation are important.

The value of cels is fairly intuitive : cels from popular, cult, older and / or Disney films tend to fetch huge prices. In fact, the top ten most valuable cels ever sold exclusively deal with Disney properties, with a dip into Roger Rabbit’s cross-property neatness. One cel from the first full-color Mickey Mouse cartoon sold for $420,000 in 1999. ‘The Little Mermaid’ is also considered a landmark, as it was the last cel animation produced by Disney. Warner Brothers cels are also comparatively rare, as they’ve disposed of much of their archives to make room.

Conversely, the archives of many mass-production 80s cartoons are being cleared out at relatively low prices, which hover between $10 and $40 per cel, depending on the popularity and endurance of the show. Shorter lived shows will have less existing cels, and might sell for a bit more. Auctions seem to be lousy with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, He-Man, She-ra and Ghostbusters cels. Unfortunately, Thundercats cels are sparse and expensive, and I love me some Thundercats. All of these cartoons have been very iconic during my development, so the lack of value in these cels means I can scoop ‘em up easily – just one or two from the shows that were important to me.

If you’re especially lucky, your animation cel will have been preserved with the original background that it was filmed in front of, giving you a whole awesome scene to display, instead of a disembodied Egon, climbing through some mysterious, invisible space.

As we start doing everything with computers, the artifacts at the heart of animation change, as well as the creative approach to them. If you’re lucky, you can score a preproduction sketch, a painted background or a storyboard, but that’s if it’s not somehow stashed away in an artist’s notebook. Creators don’t even need to create tangible series ‘bibles’ anymore to delineate specific character features or colors, since a Photoshop copy ‘n’ paste from a master document is so much more convenient.

This isn’t to say that the quality of cartoons is on a decline. We had a few rough years as horribly substandard anime took over everything in the early 2000s, but [adult swim], Chowder and The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack are all part of this beautiful, non-pandering animation renaissance – even if some of them are reliant upon their cruel digital mistresses. So, collectors, this might just become an even hotter market as we become more and more reliant upon digital cartoons. Just keeps your hands off of my Thundercats.

Those Brits sure do love their rifts through space and time.

Ever since the debut of Doctor Who in 1963 and 1968’s Yellow Submarine (Sea of Holes, anyone?), the UK has been lousy with time and space holes, which have been found most recently in Torchwood (2006) and now, Primeval (2007). These rifts split open, things get sucked in from various points in space and time, and then a crack team of renegade investigators battles to contain the menace and mystery from the general population.

While it might not be possible to ever match the intense, hardcore awesomeness and charm of Torchwood, Primeval has dinosaurs. And futuresaurs. Pretty much any crazy animal that has ever existed or will exist on Earth can show up in the Forest of Dean and its environs. Most of ‘em are pretty ugly.

The first two seasons are now available on one convenient DVD set from BBC Video & Warner Bros., comprised of 13 episodes over four discs, and packaged similarly to previous BBC collections (so they all look great on a shelf together), which I’ve started to amass and enjoy immensely – mostly because there’s usually a different sense of story and aesthetic that’s refreshing to see sometimes, even if it’s immensely campy. Honestly, the Wilhelm Scream was used three times in the first two episodes, and the series even has its completely-expected equivalent of what Slimer was to The Real Ghostbusters. You know, the cute creature from the anomaly that has an unusual kinship with our team of intrepid heroes. It’s pretty much textbook campy sci-fi teambuilding. Orko, Snarf, the Ewoks, Orbitty, and now, a mini-dinosaur that’s just bursting with personality.

When you have a show rife with dinosaurs, you’re going to be heavy on the special effects. This is handled by the folks who did the much-touted ‘Walking with Dinosaurs’ TV program, so they have some kind of experience with the science underlying the look and biology of dinosaurs, even if I still believe that we’re never going to really know what was going on in the Triassic. Part of me believes that the dinosaur-sized top hats, trenchcoats and novelty underoos simply didn’t survive the fossilization process. Without having a solid, common reality to base special effects on, I remain perpetually dubious, even through my legendary suspension of disbelief.

Underlying the infinite possibilities of the rift (which is just begging for crazy, completely unscientific dino action figures) is the tale of the main explorer’s search for his vanished wife, which has something or other to do with the rift. Also underlying the show is the anticipation of seeing Hannah Spearitt in her underwear again, which is just as compelling. They even have me watching with odd geek sympathy for awkward, ambitious nerd Connor, while I’m still warming up to everyone else. This is fine – I found the Torchwood people pretty offputting at first also.

There hasn’t been any viable dinosaur science fiction in… well, too long. Super Mario Brothers didn’t count, and while Jim Henson’s Dinosaurs was surely an accurate portrayal of Jurassic domesticity, I think that Primeval hits it a little closer to home. It’s probably more for dino aficionados than hardcore sci-fi fans, as the plot doesn’t really explore any startlingly new territory, but it’s still a fun romp through giant lizards tearin’ stuff up and has some interesting conjectures about evolution.

The DVD includes the requisite behind-the-scenes stuff, as well as the always entertaining audio commentary tracks. It’ll be out on November 4th, 2008, and retail for around $50 (or less, if you’re savvy). No sci-fi collection is really complete without giant lizards.