Rediscovering nothing...
Aug. 5th, 2012 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpIt's tough to say what the best feature of the Roku box is, but if pressed, I'd probably cast my vote for the hulu service. The selection just seems superior to that of Netflix, and although Amazon puts in a fine showing—enhanced by the presence of videos that come as part of a Prime subscription—I'm not that much of a slave to "gotta see it" that I'll shell out $3.99 or more for a look.
One of the aspects of hulu that tickles me is the availability of so many old television shows, not so much because I want to watch them again, as I want to watch their first episodes.
Take McHale's Navy, for example. I vaguely recall the series as a sort of pass-the-time comedy, but I never really paid attention to it as a kid, not particularly curious as to its roots, nor to any story arc. So when the show popped up among those available on hulu, I decided to check out the first episode.
Recalling what I do about the show, the first episode wasn't a real eye-opener, but it was interesting to see the series theme—seriously not letting regs get in the way of the mission—come together around how Quentin McHale's crew rallied around making a not-yet-goofy Ensign Parker look good in front of nincompoop Captain Binghamton, and equally interesting to see Binghamton come face-to-face with Fuji, the crew's "man Friday" who just happens to be a Japanese POW. One piece of trivia that I hadn't known was that McHale had been made a PT boat captain on the basis of having captained tramp steamers in that area of the Pacific before the war (which probably accounted for his, um, relaxed attitude toward things).
Yesterday, I watched the first episode of Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I can recall really looking forward to watching this show as a kid (although most of my friends preferred The Man From U.N.C.L.E.), but I did not recall seeing the first episode. Nor do I recall any episodes, of those that I did see, in which an unnamed "enemy power" played any significant role the way it did in the premiere episode.
The episode plot was laughable ("our scientists have determined that in exactly eleven hours, two earthquakes will occur that will wreak havoc on the world's coastal regions"), visual continuity was terrible, and special effects were (I suppose) as good as could be expected for the early 1960s (shots of the Seaview hurtling at top speed between undersea mountains made about as much sense as most sci-fi movies of that era did showing rocket flight, which is to say: not much).
The whole thing about the "enemy power" business got me to thinking about how Hollywood has gone about depicting "bad guys" over the years. During the Cold War, there appeared to be a concerted effort to downplay the idea that the Soviets were the enemy.
Indeed, if memory serves, the plot of Ian Fleming's From Russia, With Love (the book) depicted the Soviets as the bad guys out to embarrass the British Secret Service as payback for the Le Chiffre affair (that Fleming wrote about in Casino Royale, his first book featuring James Bond). In the film version, however, although the same characters remained Soviets working for the country's security apparatus (including Smersh, which was an actual organization whose name was a portmanteau of "Death to Spies!"), their actions were actually undertaken on behalf of a global criminal organization called SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion).
The idea was copied in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which featured American and Soviet agents working together to thwart the world-domination plans of a powerful criminal organization called THRUSH (doubtless an acronym whose expansion I never bothered to remember).
(We are, of course, much more sophisticated these days. Virtually all of the "bad guys" in films are either powerful international corporations or rogue individuals or departments within the CIA or other government agency.)
Galina and I (and mostly Galina) finished watching Doc Martin on hulu. Galina enjoyed the series; I, personally, had expected a little bit more evolution in Ellingham's character, and am not terribly sorry to have missed the episodes that I did, as there does not seem to be any suggestion of "motion" as far as character development is concerned.
We've started watching another British series, Foyle's War, about a policeman who investigates crime (murder, naturally) in England during the Second World War. The stories so far (we've watched four episodes) have been compelling, well-plotted, and steeped in a kind of "greatest generation" atmosphere that's strong enough to be noted, but not so strong as to be cloying, in my opinion.
In between wasting all this time, I've been learning about metalworking and picking through boxes in the garage.
Cheers...
One of the aspects of hulu that tickles me is the availability of so many old television shows, not so much because I want to watch them again, as I want to watch their first episodes.
Take McHale's Navy, for example. I vaguely recall the series as a sort of pass-the-time comedy, but I never really paid attention to it as a kid, not particularly curious as to its roots, nor to any story arc. So when the show popped up among those available on hulu, I decided to check out the first episode.
Recalling what I do about the show, the first episode wasn't a real eye-opener, but it was interesting to see the series theme—seriously not letting regs get in the way of the mission—come together around how Quentin McHale's crew rallied around making a not-yet-goofy Ensign Parker look good in front of nincompoop Captain Binghamton, and equally interesting to see Binghamton come face-to-face with Fuji, the crew's "man Friday" who just happens to be a Japanese POW. One piece of trivia that I hadn't known was that McHale had been made a PT boat captain on the basis of having captained tramp steamers in that area of the Pacific before the war (which probably accounted for his, um, relaxed attitude toward things).
Yesterday, I watched the first episode of Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. I can recall really looking forward to watching this show as a kid (although most of my friends preferred The Man From U.N.C.L.E.), but I did not recall seeing the first episode. Nor do I recall any episodes, of those that I did see, in which an unnamed "enemy power" played any significant role the way it did in the premiere episode.
The episode plot was laughable ("our scientists have determined that in exactly eleven hours, two earthquakes will occur that will wreak havoc on the world's coastal regions"), visual continuity was terrible, and special effects were (I suppose) as good as could be expected for the early 1960s (shots of the Seaview hurtling at top speed between undersea mountains made about as much sense as most sci-fi movies of that era did showing rocket flight, which is to say: not much).
The whole thing about the "enemy power" business got me to thinking about how Hollywood has gone about depicting "bad guys" over the years. During the Cold War, there appeared to be a concerted effort to downplay the idea that the Soviets were the enemy.
Indeed, if memory serves, the plot of Ian Fleming's From Russia, With Love (the book) depicted the Soviets as the bad guys out to embarrass the British Secret Service as payback for the Le Chiffre affair (that Fleming wrote about in Casino Royale, his first book featuring James Bond). In the film version, however, although the same characters remained Soviets working for the country's security apparatus (including Smersh, which was an actual organization whose name was a portmanteau of "Death to Spies!"), their actions were actually undertaken on behalf of a global criminal organization called SPECTRE (the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion).
The idea was copied in The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which featured American and Soviet agents working together to thwart the world-domination plans of a powerful criminal organization called THRUSH (doubtless an acronym whose expansion I never bothered to remember).
(We are, of course, much more sophisticated these days. Virtually all of the "bad guys" in films are either powerful international corporations or rogue individuals or departments within the CIA or other government agency.)
Galina and I (and mostly Galina) finished watching Doc Martin on hulu. Galina enjoyed the series; I, personally, had expected a little bit more evolution in Ellingham's character, and am not terribly sorry to have missed the episodes that I did, as there does not seem to be any suggestion of "motion" as far as character development is concerned.
We've started watching another British series, Foyle's War, about a policeman who investigates crime (murder, naturally) in England during the Second World War. The stories so far (we've watched four episodes) have been compelling, well-plotted, and steeped in a kind of "greatest generation" atmosphere that's strong enough to be noted, but not so strong as to be cloying, in my opinion.
In between wasting all this time, I've been learning about metalworking and picking through boxes in the garage.
Cheers...
