When I wrote about our trip to King’s Island (an amusement park near Cincinnati Ohio) a few blog posts ago, I mentioned how I have the behind-the-scenes Brady Bunch book written by the actor who played Greg Brady on the show, Barry Williams. A few nights ago, I looked up the episode in the book where the Bradys visit King’s Island, and I read the synopsis (including the part about how the Bradys almost didn’t make it off The Racer roller coaster alive! If you watch the episode, look for their terrified faces as they pulled into the station - that was not acting!) and dug up clips of the episode on youtube.com
If you’ve been to King’s Island recently or in the past 10 or 20 years, then you will see how much the park has changed since this episode was filmed – enjoy!
This is a strange thing that happened to me; just thought I’d write a little note about it.
I was in my laundry room, folding laundry and humming the song “You Light Up My Life”, which is not a usual song on my playlist - I probably haven’t heard it in a few years. So I’m folding laundry, and the final Jeopardy question comes on the tv:
CATEGORY: Billboard Hot 100
CLUE: Besides Frank and Nancy Sinatra, they’re the only other father and daughter who each had #1 solo hits.
Got your answer? Mine was Nat King Cole and his daughter Natalie. Although wrong, my guess must have been a reasonable one as two of the contestants also incorrectly guessed the Cole’s as their response. The correct answer, however, was Pat Boone and his daughter Debby - whose only #1 hit was ironically enough, “You Light Up My Life” – the same song I had inexplicably had in my head just minutes earlier!!
PS – I’ve never really heard of Debby Boone, and I certainly didn’t know who sang “You Light Up My Life”. For all I knew, it was Lee Ann Rimes, whose version of the song is quite enjoyable.
Do you remember the extremely cheesy Saturday morning kids’ sitcom on NBC called Saved by the Bell? The show saw the beginning of the careers of famous now-adult actors and reality show hosts Mario Lopez, Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and Tiffani-Amber Thiessen.
I used to watch Saved by the Bell every week, and I caught every episode at least once again in syndication. There was at least one spinoff: Saved By The Bell – The College Years, and a few made-for-tv-movies that followed the exploits of the Bayside High School crew. In one of the movies, that famous on-again, off-again couple from the show, Zach and Kelly (played by Gosselaar and Thiessen) were united in holy matrimony… I didn’t know that, since I was only interested in the original show, not so much the spin-offs or updates.
Sometimes I peruse the celebrity gossip (and sometimes current events info) site tmz.com, especially lately when they’ve been reporting a lead in the Stacy Peterson case (a missing woman from the Chicago area whose case I’ve been following because I used to live in the area). For their part, tmz.com seems to have quite accurate info and usually has it much earlier than other news outlets. So the other day, I noticed a headline on Tmz saying that “Kelly” – aka Tiffani-Amber Thiessen – is pregnant and looking ready to pop, as they say. At the bottom of that article, there was a link to another Saved by the Bell story: Zach Morris and Kelly Kapowski - Back Together! If you click the link, you’ll find that the Saved by the Bell actors were out and about together in NYC in September.
Interesting… wasn’t September about 9 months ago? An interesting footnote to this story is that I read that Mark-Paul Gosselaar was divorced from his wife only weeks ago. So are Zach and Kelly from Saved by the Bell having a baby together? Did you read it here first? Most importantly, will the actors continue their name-hyphenating tradition when they name the baby? How about Saved by the Bell – The Baby Years? Stay tuned…
…the end of my desire to re-watch the run of the show on dvd. Here I thought the finale would be so ground-breaking, so explanatory, and so intriguing that it would make me want to re-watch the entire show again, just to see how it looked after it was pulled all together. But I was wrong. I don’t want to watch it again, and they didn’t pull it together. In fact, my feelings couldn’t be further from what I had hoped – I want to forget that I was ever hooked on a show called Lost, and I want to forget that a show called Lost ever existed.
The tv show Lost premiered in 2004. The premise always seemed intriguing – a group of people survive a plane crash only to be faced with unforeseen mysterious challenges that await them on a mystical island. I meant to watch it during its inaugural season, but I had a new baby in 2004, and tv was not one of my top priorities. After Lost’s first season ended, however, the water cooler buzz just became too intriguing for me to resist, so my husband and I began to catch ourselves up on the first season, thinking we could always drop the show if we didn’t like it. But like millions of others, we were hooked – Lost was great. WAS. Somewhere along the line, the show lost (haha) quality and many viewers at the same time – I’m thinking this was around the time of the infamous Hollywood Writers’ Guild strike of 2007-8. Many tv shows went on an indefinite hiatus at that time, some did not return, and some, like Lost, were never the same. Lost became famous for throwing out a ton of loose ends, new characters and questions each new episode – without ever offering answers or resolutions. Many viewers lost (ahem) the ability or desire to follow the show, and Lost lost (cough cough) much of its fan following. And that’s when Darlton (the collective name of the show’s production / writing team Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof) announced an end date to Lost – all of our many questions and loose ends would be concluded at the end of the 2010 season. And my husband and I, like many other almost-lost Lost fans decided to stick around. After all, we reasoned, we had invested all this time already, why not a few more seasons, especially if we were going to get our answers? We were anxiously awaiting the finale tonight, but unlike the anticipation of true Lost fans, we were just excited that we could have our Tuesday nights back. Much of the buzz compared Lost to reading a good book – when you get near the end, you think, what am I going to do when this book is over? It’s so good! I can certainly identify with the good book analogy, but I would not apply it to Lost – we were just happy it was ending. So I guess disappointing isn’t really the word I would use to describe the finale. I was half-expecting no real answers, considering the original bait and switch, but I couldn’t really believe that they could get away with such a thing. And I am disappointed that I wasted a whopping four and a half hours (count ‘em) on this tonight!
The first 2 hours were a re-cap special, which was less helpful than I thought. The first half of it was the actors reflecting on the show and giving inside info about filming techniques, etc. I’m thinking, why would they show this before the final episode airs? It didn’t make sense to me. Now I’m thinking it was just another way to grease the wheels of Lost fans to overwhelm their tiny minds and brainwash them into being happy with the craptastic finale. There were also these “Lost Transmissions” – letters from audience members incorporated into scenes of Lost. They used footage from old episodes of Lost to make it look like Lost characters are actually reading fans’ letters – for example, a scene with computers had a fan’s letter written on a computer screen and the characters reacting to the “letter”. It was really stupid, and no, I’m not just upset that my letter wasn’t chosen. I didn’t care enough to write a letter, just as I don’t care enough to stay up really late, pointing out every one of the clues I found that the cast and crew of Lost KNEW their finale would be incredibly awful and disappointing.
So anyway, then the finale episode itself was TWO and a half hours, and NONE of the questions were answered. NONE. All of the “true lovers” were paired up, and that provided enough fluff to keep Lost fans preoccupied and happy with the end, or so the producers hoped. Not the case in this household. In fact, if you ask me, in many of the interviews with the actors, you can catch hidden statements that they were not happy with the ending and didn’t think the fans would be satisfied. In fact, Darleton themselves made a series of disclaimers during the re-cap special. I’m not going to waste more time on Lost by pointing everything out though. I stayed up until 11:30 to watch this garbage and another 30 minutes writing this, and that’s long enough. Goodbye Lost – and GOOD RIDDANCE!
Oh yeah, a quick list of the few of many Lost loose ends they failed to tie up, just off the top of my head there are plenty more:
The temple and the guy who was in charge of it.
Sayid and Claire changing, having something dark inside them.
Drug smuggling with the Mary statues on the small plane that crashed – a man named Echo and his brother appearing to Lost survivors – for example, Hurley in the mental hospital.
The Numbers
Walt
Walt’s Comic Books
Whidmore’s connection to the island
Polar Bears
Miles’ father – Dharma guy on Dharma Initiative training videos
The whole show in general – the ending didn’t make sense to me at all
And I have one last thing to say – the 10 seconds of the water-skiing squirrel on the news after Lost was more entertaining than the Lost finale. At least my night was redeemed – thank you, water-skiing squirrel!
*An addendum – it was too late last night for me to write about the extremely entertaining Jimmy Kimmel Lost special, so I’ll just share the alternate Lost endings he had on his show – they are very funny and although meant as jokes, any one of them would have been better than the REAL series finale. Sigh.
What seems like ages ago, I was a big fan of Lost. I didn’t watch the first season when it aired, but all the buzz about it got me curious, so my husband and I gave the first season dvd’s a try – and really liked it! But then the second season of Lost wasn’t as good, mainly because there were way too many questions and loose ends brought about – we couldn’t figure out why they weren’t concluding some of the mysteries instead of adding tons of new questions each week! When production was temporarily halted because of the writer’s strike a few years ago, things on Lost really went downhill. But we had invested the time in watching it, and because the show’s creators announced a definitive end date for Lost – this is the last season – we decided to stick it out.
So last night’s highly anticipated last Lost season premiere was… eh. Only so-so, I would say. First, the show opened with really cheap-looking computer animation showing the island underwater, what was that? And there was a recap episode before the premiere, thank goodness for that, but between the 2 episdoes, we saw the same climatic scene 3 times in 12 minutes! And the recap episode didn’t help as much as I would have hoped – 12 minutes into the new Lost, and I was officially lost. My husband tells me that there are now two sets of each character, but I somehow missed that. If it’s true, I don’t like it.
Ugh… I like the concept of seeing flight 815 before it crashed, but all the actors look 6+ years older! Especially Boone!
The end of the episode was breathtaking, although I remain confused… were any of these people aware of what had happened? The time travel throughout the various decades?
I guess I have to watch the premiere again; I feel like I’m missing something… actually I’m missing a lot of things. The show is still entertaining, but I am so glad it’s almost over! It really require more thought and more of a time commitment than I have to give to tv right now!
Last week I really could have used a Thursday night pick-me-up from my favorite show, The Office, but alas, no new episode. I was sure I couldn’t be disappointed two weeks in a row, but this week’s ep is also a re-run! Then I started thinking about how it’s been in the news lately that NBC is changing around their scheduling, most of it having to do with the Olympics and Jay Leno. Then I realized that if the Olympics are on NBC, the Office probably won’t be on for the entire duration of the Winter Games! I did a quick search, and to my relief, I found that a new Office is scheduled to air on January 21 – not this week, but next week thankfully. We might have to wait out the entire airing of the Winter Olympics, but at least they’re not going to make us wait until it’s over and we’ll have at least one new Office episode to enjoy in the meantime. Any other Office fans out there? Does anyone know how many more new episodes we get for the rest of the season, or at least how many we can expect to enjoy before the beginning of the Olympics? How long IS the Olympics, anyway? And fyi, the Jan. 21 episode of the Office is called, “The Banker”, and the plot outline is this: When a prospective buyer for Dunder Mifflin visits, everyone looks to impress and Michael gets nostalgic.
Sounds hilarious, as usual! And don’t get me wrong, this show is so great that reruns are tons of fun too. We were just watching the “Frame Toby” episode from season 5 last night, and we had to rewind 4 times to listen to Creed’s classic line about the quarry – I’m not going to repeat it here because it’s mostly the WAY he says it, but it has to be one of the funniest Office moments EVER! Which got me to thinking about a hypothetical situation - what if Creed were a character who came to our semi-regular game nights? HAHA!
My first Christmas present of 2009 – Clue The Office Collector’s Edition!
Ok, I have to be honest – could you tell I started the draft of this post weeks ago? But I had to finish it, cuz this is a super-cool game given by a very thoughtful friend. In addition, I received some other awesome gifts: Walmart gift cards and a gift certificate to the local pet store so I can get my parakeet – more on that later. My gifts also included something incredibly touching and sentimental from my husband and kids, but that’s all I need to say about that to keep from traveling the dark road of sadness.
Back to Clue – The Office version – it was so fun! In true keeping with Office traditions, the victim in the game is Toby Flenderson! Obvious, especially when the game’s instructions were penned by Michael. Each player chooses an available character, and they get a little Office ID card for their person (Office fans at our church exchanged this game for Christmas, and they replaced the little Office ID’s with pictures of church staff – hilarious!). Players then move about the Office, entering rooms like Michael’s Office or Accounting, and play continues just like the other versions of the game Clue – you make accusations about who killed Toby with which weapon in which room. My favorite part of this game (aside from the fact that I won the first round we played!) are the weapons - pewter figures representing various hilarious Office plot lines; for example, a bike chain, a Dundie award, and my personal favorite: a George Foreman grill!!
It’s a must-have for any fan of The Office, to be especially appreciated by game collectors like myself!
I’m talking about the nuptials of Jim Halpert and Pam Beesly, of course! If you’re not a fan of The Office, you can stop reading now. But for everyone else, how about that special 1-hour episode the other night? Hubby and I thought it to be amazing – I laughed, I cried, I laughed until I cried… Thursday’s episode was heartwarming, hilarious, and humongous with its 1-hour run time!
Now I will be the first to admit that some of the plot lines contained within this episode were so outrageous that they were almost silly. But given this show’s talented cast and production staff, things that would normally be ridiculous on other shows instead made for some great tv in this case. I won’t waste your time with a recap; you can get that here from the quick-witted tvguide.com writers. But I absolutely loved this episode, so after much deliberation, here are my top 3 moments from The Office episode “Niagara”:
3. Pam’s 80-year-old “Nema” saying, “I had to sit there while it happened to me.” – Pam’s grandmother is referring to the previous night in her hotel room when she couldn’t figure out how to get the tv channel switched from the movie “Bruno”. Having been exposed to the same trash, her line echoed my sentiments exactly!
2. This exchange was the one that had me crying laughing:
Pam Beesly: Hey hey! Where are you? Can you take Andy to the hospital?
Jim Halpert: What?
Pam Beesly: He tore his scrotum dancing.
Jim Halpert: What?
Pam Beesly: He is in my room icing his balls.
Jim Halpert: What?
Oh, my – TOO funny, enough said!
And the best moment of the episode was… (drum roll please)…
1. The wedding dance! The attendants and attendees of Pam and Jim’s wedding danced down the aisle, imitating a popular youtube video. I struggled deciding which version to post on my blog, the real one or The Office’s version, and I went with the original. Not only is it entertaining to watch this happen at a real wedding (can’t believe they allowed this in a church, but if you look, the officiant is standing on the altar, grooving along!), but I decided not to post the clip from The Office because I think much of its entertainment value comes from being a fan of the show. If you are a fan of the show, then you’ve already seen the musical montage in this episode set to Chris Brown’s Forever (shows what I know – after his arrest, I just assumed that Brown was another trouble-plagued hip-hop star, but this song actually has me tapping my toes. Am I a Chris Brown fan?). Non-Office fans wouldn’t appreciate all of the significance of the events that take place during this scene of the show, so I figured, why show it? I LOVED this part; it’s the part that made me cry, albeit with happy tears, of course. Every moment between Pam and Jim for the past 5 seasons has been leading up to this moment, and despite all of the anticipation by fans and viewers, it did not disappoint! I won’t say much more – don’t want to spoil it for fans who haven’t yet watched, but let’s just say (assume Comic Book Guy’s voice from the Simpsons): “Best. Episode. EVER.” One I will be watching over and over, laughing and crying each time.
The original version of the Forever wedding dance (this couple also made a parody of their own wedding video with them doing the Forever dance in court during their (fake) divorce proceedings if you want to check it out):
You may have heard all the brouhaha about the TLC reality show Jon and Kate Plus Eight that’s been in the news lately. If not, a quick re-cap: Jon and Kate Gosselin were a young couple who had a set of twins and a set of sextuplets, giving them a grand total of 8 kids before either one of them had even hit the age of 30. They filmed a show for TLC chronicling their lives with all the little ones, and the special was such a success that they soon found themselves celebrities with their own reality show. Apparently the sudden mega-stardom caused too much strain on the family, and the marriage did not survive. Amidst accusations of infidelity and other ugly, yet very public issues, the couple filed for divorce earlier this year. Scarcely a move has been made by either party since without full coverage from the media.
I watched a few episodes of the show back when the Gosselin’s were one big happy family, mostly because it was interesting to watch such a large family function as well as they did, err, as well as they seemed to function anyway. But ever since the big family fall-out, things have been getting increasingly worse for the clan. TLC announced yesterday that Jon would no longer be a major part of the show, and they were re-naming it Kate Plus Eight. Ouch. There are millions of people who follow the plight of the Gosselins; there are Kate fans and there are Jon fans, and then there are people who are mainly concerned for the welfare of the 8 kids. The media has certainly vilified Jon, though it’s difficult to determine how much of it he has done to himself. No matter how much the accusations about Kate’s controlling and domineering nature tend to be proven true by her behavior, she is always able to appear to be the better person through her public statements. Maybe she really is the better person of the two, or perhaps she is more intelligent or has a better spokesperson advising her than Jon has. But whatever the case, one thing is clear – those 8 kids they created together should not have to be caught in the middle of all of this, it’s disgusting.
The reason I decided to join in on the media storm and write about this is because of the latest chapter that broke yesterday – when TLC kicked Jon off the show. His response? He legally banned all production crews from the house he still co-owns with Kate, where the children live and the parents take turns visiting. He has threatened to slap TLC with criminal charges if they come onto his property. He hasn’t said whether this includes a ban on filming the children, but one can guess, based upon his actions, that it’s no longer ok with Jon that his kids star in a reality show. It’s completely understandable – many people, including child psychology experts, etc, were constantly saying how unhealthy it was for the 8 kids to be filmed on a daily basis. But Jon (along with Kate, back when they actually agreed on something) was always a staunch defender of the show and the fact that he and Kate had the kids’ best interests at heart. But now that Jon got himself kicked off the show, it looks like he’s decided that reality tv is no longer a healthy lifestyle for his children. And that’s fine and even makes sense, but one does have to question his intentions when his legal action to stop the show comes the very day that news is released that he is no longer a part of the show himself. As a well-written gossip column stated, “Jon is acting like the kid who didn’t get picked to be on a team for the neighborhood baseball game, so he’s taking his ball and going home.” Whatever his intentions, I am among the many former fans who just want what is best for the 8 kids while the rest of it goes away. But before that happens, I am very interested to hear the spin Jon puts on his reasons for his actions – all of them. He is giving a live interview on Larry King Live tonight on CNN, and I’m almost ashamed to admit that I will be watching (the midnight replay of course – there is no way this would ever take precedent over a new episode of The Office). Then again, why bother watching the interview when I know the “highlights” will be shoved down our throats for the next few days – or at least until Jon’s careless behavior provides enough fodder to make yet another story…
I think I could use a Tivo. That way, I could Tivo Dr. Phil and watch it when I fold laundry – that would certainly be better on my ears and more entertaining than the screaming parrot. Well, actually, I don’t know how Tivo works – I could probably only watch what I tape record (I grew up in the 80′s – we “taped” our movies and our music) on the tv that has the Tivo, right? But anyway, I could pause it when someone needed a diaper change or help with something or a snack or a drink to be able to watch more tv instead of just never getting to commit to watching shows (except really good ones like The Office) because of my lack of time and my lack of Tivo. I wonder how much they cost; I have no idea. It occurred to me that I don’t watch much tv anymore; a hobby I really liked as a kid. It’s not a bad thing, really, I’m busy doing other more worthwhile things. But I do miss getting to watch Dr. Phil – my tv has been hijacked by the likes of Dora, Diego, and Max and Ruby in the morning when it’s on, and I don’t like not being able to watch the Office until it’s available online. We try to watch The Office when it airs on Thursday night and without fail, all hell always breaks loose with the kids even though it’s on at 9 and they should be in bed.
I got the movie Mr. Mom from the library for the kids to watch. I figured since my husband and I liked the movie as kids, we should show it to our kids – after all, they loved Annie (the 1982 version, the update is awful). But apparently Mr. Mom came out before the MPAA came up with the PG-13 rating – there were a few scenes (funny how neither one of us remembered they were in the movie) I would rather not be in the type of movies my children enjoy. At least we were able to skip over the strip club scene without them even noticing, yikes. I surely don’t remember that from watching that movie as a kid. Maybe there was an edited-for-television version… Anyway, all this got me to thinking that they should have a function for dvd players where you can edit the movie to play while skipping certain parts of your choosing. Maybe this already exists, but I don’t know a lot about the latest gadgets and such.
Well, anyway… sorry for the randomness, just had a little time to blog for a change, so I just wrote what was on my mind at the moment! Maybe I’ll check into that Tivo…
