kottke.org posts about TV
The New Republic compared the Qaddafi family with Arrested Developments Bluth family and found some similarities.
Mohammed Qaddafi and Gob Bluth are both the oldest sons of tyrannical fathers, and both stand in the shadows of their younger, more favored brothers. The sibling rivalry can get intense — Mohammed’s feud with younger brother Mutassim over a Coca-Cola plant ended only after a worker had been injured and a cousin had been stuffed into a car trunk, while Michael and Gob’s dueling banana stands ended with the fire department being called twice.
Nicholas Courtney, who played the Brigadier on Doctor Who, died yesterday aged 81.
An episode of CSI:NY “borrowed” quite a few elements from a short story written by Teddy Wayne and they basically won’t admit that they did so. Whenever stuff like this happens, I think about that interview where Vanilla Ice tried to argue that the bassline from Under Pressure and Ice Ice Baby were totally different.
From illustrator Bob Canada, a one-page guide to Doctor Who for first-timers. Best viewed large. See also these illustrated portraits of all eleven Doctors.
The 16-page first draft of Gene Roddenberry’s pitch for Star Trek.
STAR TREK is a “Wagon Train” concept — built arround characters who travel to worlds “similar” to our own, and meet the action-adventure-drama which becomes our stories. Their transportation is the cruiser “S.S. Yorktown”, performing a well-defined and long-range Exploration-Science-Security mission which helps create our format.
The Yorktown! And the captain was to be named Robert April.
The Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Life. These BBC nature series have all neglected to showcase our planet’s most amazing animal. Human Planet is an upcoming nature series about human beings.
No David Attenborough?! Still looks fantastic, though. (via @dunstan)
The political soundbite has gotten progressively shorter over the past few decades.
A professor at the University of California had just published research showing that the length of the average TV sound bite had dropped dramatically, from 43 seconds in the 1968 presidential election to a mere nine seconds in the 1988 election. And this drop had led to lots of hand-wringing — from professors, from journalists, and from politicians themselves. “If you couldn’t say it in less than 10 seconds,” Michael Dukakis complained about the previous campaign, “it wasn’t heard because it wasn’t aired.”
It’s currently just under eight seconds…which, perhaps not coincidentally, is about how long it would take someone to speak a text or tweet.
Brainstorm Digital showcases some of the visual effects that they did for HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.
Every episode of the classic science/history series Connections (as well as Connections 2 and 3) is available online at YouTube.
Connections is a ten-episode documentary television series created, written and presented by science historian James Burke. The series was produced and directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science & Features Department and first aired in 1978 (UK) and 1979 (USA). It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events were built from one another successively in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology.
Connections explores an “Alternative View of Change” (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own motivations (e.g. profit, curiosity, religious) with no concept of the final, modern result of what either their or their contemporaries’ actions finally led to. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.
Here’s the first episode to get you started.
Warning: you may not be able to stop. If you’d like to watch the series in a less irritating format, you can always purchase it on DVD.
Here are a few characters from The Wire categorized by their Dungeons and Dragons alignment (good/neutral/evil and lawful/neutral/chaotic).
There are a few more alignment charts from the same source, including a Mad Men chart with Betty Draper as chaotic evil (justification). (via @juliandibbell)
Somehow a Norwegian television station got a bunch of 80s celebrities — people like Norm from Cheers, Tiffany, Malcolm Jamal Warner, Ricki Lake, Eddie the Eagle, Tanya Harding, Dolph Lundgren, Bananarama, Manuel from Fawlty Towers, etc. etc. — to do promotional music videos for an 80s nostalgia show and the results are nothing less than a supertrainwreck. First they did “We Are the World”:
And followed that up with “Let It Be”:
Unbelievable. (via @sportsguy33)
Here’s Bill Oakley, a former writer and showrunner for The Simpsons, on how the show got made back in the show’s golden years (seasons 4-8).
Twice a year, from at least season three ‘til season eight, there’d be these story retreats where everybody would come and present their ideas for episodes. We’d get a big conference room in a hotel about a hundred yards from the office, and we’d go around and everybody would tell their ideas, one by one. It was sort of like opening Christmas presents on Christmas morning; we’d go around in a circle and everybody would have a turn or two.
It was always a huge treat to see. You had no idea what George Meyer (for instance) was going to say, and suddenly it was like this fantastic Simpsons episode pouring out of his mouth that you never dreamed of. And it was like, wow, this is where this stuff comes from.
Oakley also provided an example of a script as it went through all of its revisions on its way to the airwaves; it’s the one where Principal Skinner gets fired and Bart tries to get him his job back.
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