And we’re back! Last week, we went to Poland, and the Texans showed that they’re both nicer and less competent than they previously demonstrated. Luckily, a non-elimination leg gave them a reprieve…but can it last?

continue reading "Amazing Race 27, Episode 9: “It’s Always the Quiet Ones”"

And we’re back! Phil reminds us that Justin and Diana bickered hard last week, but came in first, while the Chacs finally retired their catchphrase for good. On with the Race!

continue reading "Amazing Race 27, Episode 8: “Krakow, I’m Gonna Get You”"

There was a time, back around 15-20 years ago, when I was able to get genuinely enthused about “reunion projects”. They were much rarer back then–the archival nature of modern pop culture means that there’s always someone willing to throw a little money at any intellectual property to see whether or not their fans will bite, but back in 2000 or so, if something was coming back, it was usually something pretty amazing that got a second chance mainly due to the unstinting love its fans had for it.

I think that it was ‘Dark Knight Strikes Again’ that cured me of my unquestioning enthusiasm for revivals of long-abandoned properties…well, that or ‘Phantom Menace’. Kind of a one-two punch there. But Lucas was always someone whose reputation was more as an enabler of other people’s good work–seeing Frank Miller utterly shit the bed was far more of a shock. After that, while I could still get excited about the things I loved coming back (Doctor Who, Serenity, and did I mention I chipped in $100 to the MST3K Kickstarter?) my enthusiasm was always tempered with the awareness that sometimes our fannish refusal to let things end results in nothing more than an effort to cash in on that devotion with a lazy and slapdash followup. (Like ‘Before Watchmen’.)

So I was fully aware, walking in, that ‘W/Bob and David’ could wind up terrible. It could be nothing more than the dregs of rejected “Mr. Show’ sketches, cobbled together and performed unenthusiastically to get a paycheck by comedians who wanted to cash in on their status as underappreciated legends. I watched it, but I was emotionally prepared for another ‘Dark Knight Strikes Again’ experience.

It didn’t suck! Actually, it was really amazing. The sketches were pretty much all very strong, both conceptually and in execution, and the performances were extremely funny. Part of that is that they made the smart decision to only do four episodes (plus a making of special)–doing the series for Netflix, rather than having to fulfill a network’s full-season order, meant that they could focus on their strongest material. Bob Odenkirk once said that a big part of the reason their show is funnier than SNL is that SNL has so many handicaps; they have to include musical numbers, they have to write around guest hosts, they have arbitrary limits on sketch lengths due to commercials, they’re performing live and have to include time for costume changes and set swaps, and they can’t swear. Add to that now that they have to produce a lot of comedy in a very short time, and you’ll see why Bob and David have the edge.

More than just being good comedy, though, it feels very much like a continuation of the work they were doing with ‘Mr. Show’. Although they continue their decision to avoid “topical” humor, there are a lot of bits that feel incredibly relevant in today’s climate, like an interview with a documentary director whose vision of the antebellum South omits the word “slave” and has plantation owners who hand out coupons “good for one free hug”. (I’m not saying Ben Carson made this documentary, but he probably gave it thumbs up.) There’s also an excellent gag involving a boy who’s excoriated for returning from a near-death experience with a vision of a non-judgmental Heaven that lets in everybody, because as one woman puts it, “There has to be a Hell, otherwise Heaven wouldn’t be nearly as nice.” These bits don’t make reference to any particular controversy or scandal, but they understand the mindset that produces them.

Not every bit kills–there’s a couple of weak sketches in episode three (one about Muslim terrorists as Hollywood power players that feels a bit too much like punching down and another about people trying to write a shitty Broadway musical that feels a bit too much like the joke is watching untalented people brainstorm boring ideas) but there are tons of new classics, like a cooking competition show where everyone forgets about the cooking entirely to embroider their human interest bios and an interrogation sequence where the “bad cop” and the “good cop” need couples therapy. It’s definitely the kind of triumphant return that makes me hope that the new MST3K will (cross fingers) pick up right where the old one left off.

Back again! I know, we’re settling into a schedule of recapping last week’s Race about two days before this week’s Race, but on the other hand you’re not just getting hammered with 12 straight posts of TAR content, so hopefully it evens out. Last week, of course, we had a lot of running around through France that ended with everyone except for budding Southern Gothic Denise and James Earl being told they were still racing and heading for Rotterdam. Which, given that this is the second of back-to-back double legs, means that the Racers are getting tired…

continue reading "Amazing Race 27, Episode 7: “Full Speed Ahead, Captain!”"

Wow. That title sounds a lot more ominous than I planned. No, I was thinking about “the worst” not in the sense of the impending global war between the zombies and the Lizard People (sorry, folks, but this Tuesday is gonna suck) but in the sense of the way we define quality in entertainment, which is after all a highly subjective thing. I recently picked up a book from dim and distant 1980 called, “The Worst TV Shows Ever”, by Bart Andrews and Brad Dunning, primarily because I’m utterly fascinated by failure, and it was interesting to me that in among shows like “Turn On” (a sketch comedy show notable for being canceled in some markets before the end of the first episode) and “My Mother the Car” were long-running hits like “Hee Haw”, which ran 21 seasons, and “Three’s Company”, which was one of ABC’s perennial draws.

So what does it mean when we say something is “the worst ever”? Can something really be “the worst” if tons of people love it? I’m reluctant to credit that idea, I’ll admit, even though there are certainly many times when I’m convinced that I’m right and the rest of the world is wrong about the quality of a TV show or movie. (**cough** Anything Adam Sandler’s ever done **cough**) We all do that, I think, but I like to believe that most of us don’t take ourselves seriously when we do. It’s one thing to be confident in your tastes and to be able to justify your opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to genuinely believe that the average person has terrible judgment and is incapable of appreciating quality entertainment. I feel like it shuts down discussion rather than opening it; if you decide that “Queen for a Day”, to take another example from the book, is nothing but wallowing in other people’s misery, then you won’t be able to understand what made it popular, and what continues to make successors from “Restaurant Impossible” to “Undercover Boss” work. (In all three cases, it’s about the imposition of a moral order onto the universe–good people who do not deserve to suffer are delivered from their suffering, giving the audience a comforting sense that reality works the way they hope it does.)

Taken to its ultimate extreme, this becomes “hipsterism”, the belief that anything popular must be bad because most people like it and we all know that most people have terrible taste. It can be incredibly exhausting dealing with someone like this; they refuse to believe that there can be any intersection between popular success and artistic success, and will reject their own previously established tastes rather than give up their prejudices about society. Ultimately, though, they’re only hurting themselves by ignoring fun and exciting entertainment.

The other type of “worst” is the commercial failure, which I’ll admit is what fascinates me (and what fascinates Nathan Rabin, who continually does yeoman’s work with his series of “My World of Flops” columns for the Onion AV Club that seeks out failures and dives headlong into what made them crash and burn). There’s certainly a lot of these in the book; variety shows by the likes of Jerry Lewis and Sammy Davis Jr that didn’t make it past thirteen weeks, and the aforementioned “Turn On”, which didn’t even make it to Episode Two and which you can’t even find on YouTube. (If I’m wrong on that, please link to it in the comments–I looked like crazy, and all I found was a 45-second clip.) By some standard, these have to be considered to be at least in the running for “the worst”, right?

Except that there’s more to failure than meets the eye, as well. Sometimes the same things that make something a flop can make it a cult classic as well; entertainment that challenges people and makes them uncomfortable can sometimes take a long time to find its audience. (‘Fight Club’, while it didn’t actually flop in theaters, still needed DVD to make its reputation.) Sometimes marketers can fail, sometimes internal politics can doom a project at a studio. Sometimes things just slip between the cracks. (Nathan Rabin calls these “secret successes”, efforts that worked creatively even as they got no box office.)

But I have to admit, my favorite kind of “worst” is always “best worst”, the kind of thing that Rabin labels as “fiascoes”. They’re terrible, and everyone knows it. They’re apocalyptically creatively misguided, generally disastrously bad. But you watch them in a sort of perverse fascination because they’re made with such conviction that you almost feel like if you just tuned your brain to the creators’ frequency, you’d suddenly be seeing a work of staggering genius. “Turn On” is kind of my holy grail for exactly that reason; I want to see it precisely because everyone agreed so instantly and thoroughly that it was a horrible mistake, but at the same time the same people put it on the air in the sure and certain belief they had a hit on their hands. I want to watch it because I want to understand the strange glamour that failure casts, maybe to avoid it or maybe to find a way to recast those ideas free of their flaws. After all, every good idea started as a bad first draft.

Or maybe I just like them. We’re all flawed, we all fail, but good things come out of that. Maybe I just like to remember that some of the most interesting things out there start out as mistakes…but they don’t have to stay that way.

When last we left our intrepid Racers, they were in Zimbabwe. Josh and Tanner continued their poor habit of underestimating the abilities of everyone who isn’t them, Logan and Chris amped up their long-simmering feud with each other, and Jazmine and Danielle went to the Pit Stop twice without having finished the leg and were eliminated as a consequence. On to the next episode!

continue reading "Amazing Race 27, Episode 6: “My Tongue Doesn’t Even Twist That Way”"

Welcome back to the Race! Phil fills us in by reminding us of Josh and Tanner’s devious, brilliant perfect strategy to knock the Green Team out of the Race, which was marred only slightly by its complete and total failure on every level imaginable. We return to the Race, already in progress, as Josh and Tanner are forced to give up their Express Pass…

continue reading "Amazing Race 27, Episode 5: “King of the Jungle”"

I did promise that I’d be providing you with content every week in between Race posts, because as much as I love writing them and as much as some of you love reading them there’s definitely a contingent of people who want something to break up the string of Race-related posts and I don’t blame them.

That said, I didn’t promise it would always be new content. So here’s an old post of mine from my own blog, Fraggmented, that I liked a lot and figured people might not have seen. Enjoy!

The LucasFilm Sale: How It All Went Down

(SCENE: A BOARDROOM AT LUCASARTS, MAY 2011. A KEY EXECUTIVE IS SITTING AT A TABLE, ANXIOUSLY AWAITING THE ARRIVAL OF HIS BOSS.)

(GEORGE LUCAS ENTERS.)

LUCASARTS EXECUTIVE: Hello, sir. You said you had some big news for me?

LUCAS: Very big. I think this could be the biggest thing for this company since 1999.

EXEC: You mean…we’re…?

LUCAS: Exactly.

EXEC: Episode Seven?

LUCAS: Huh? Oh, that. Um, yeah, I have a few ideas I’ve been tossing around. No, I’ve been thinking about new revenue streams for the company. I mean, the movies have always sold well, but eventually we hit saturation on that. People have the originals, they have the Special Editions, they have them on video and DVD and Blu-Ray, and they’ve all seen them in the theater a couple dozen times on top of that. It’s the ancillary revenue streams that keep us in dough, you know that.

EXEC: Um, but Episode Seven would be a new film. They’d want to see that.

LUCAS: But you have to spend money making it, first! Millions of dollars scouting locations, hiring actors, putting them into mo-cap suits so that you don’t actually have to see them on-screen when you’re done…arranging all those pixels into fake aliens costs money, you know. And when you’re all finished, what do people do? Complain that you didn’t do it right and decide not to see it another sixteen times! No, if we’re going to do this, we have to make sure it’s profitable before the first ticket sold. Like ‘Phantom Menace’. That’s where my idea comes in.

EXEC: More merchandising, sir? I’m really not sure there’s anywhere else to go with that. We’ve sold ‘Star Wars’ action figures, ‘Star Wars’ video games, ‘Star Wars’ tissues, ‘Star Wars’ muffin tins…we sold that candy that made you french-kiss Jar Jar Binks! I don’t think we can really put the logo on anything else, not unless you’re willing to sell ‘Star Wars’ toilet paper.

LUCAS: Hmm. Actually, write that one down. But no, I was thinking along the lines of advertising tie-ins.

EXEC: Kids’ meals, drink cups, that sort of thing? I mean, I’m sure we can round some up, no problem, but–

LUCAS: You’re not thinking big enough. Ever watch any sports?

EXEC: Well, um…yes, but–

LUCAS: Not me. Never really had the interest. Not enough CGI. But one of my kids had on a basketball game last night, and do you know where those guys play? Staples Center.

EXEC: …um…

LUCAS: “STAPLES” Center! Don’t you get it? The guys at Staples paid big bucks just to get a building named after them! I looked it up! It’s like, millions of dollars! And I was thinking.

EXEC: OK, maybe we should do a little less of that–

LUCAS: Naming rights! How many of those damned aliens do we stick in the background of each shot? Twenty? Thirty? And every freaking one has an action figure, its own novel tie-in, and something like three comic book series about them! And we’ve just been naming them after our friends and stupid inside jokes! All this time, we’ve had a frigging gold mine right under our noses, and we haven’t touched it!

EXEC: I’ll be honest, sir, this sounds–

LUCAS: Brilliant? Lucrative? Like the future of cinema? Here, I’ve drawn up designs for a few new characters. That’s Wal-Martto, he’s going to be a wacky alien sidekick who does all the bargaining for the heroes. This, this is Darth Verizon. He’s going to be a villain, but a “cool” one. Over here is Starbuck, a new Rebel pilot who loves to fly with the kind of energy only a Chai Latte can give you. And…you’re giving me a look. What’s the look?

EXEC: Well, first off, Starbuck is already a pilot in another series.

LUCAS: I know! And they didn’t charge a dime! Don’t worry, I’ve got a product placement deal going with the BSG people. We’ll get twice the money for the same character, and they’ll get a free ad for their DVD boxsets. It’s win-win…you’re still giving me the look.

EXEC: It’s just that…I mean, doesn’t this kind of cheapen our franchise? I think the fans will see it as kind of, well…lame.

LUCAS: They didn’t complain about Sio Bibble, Salacious Crumb or Elan Sleazebaggano. I think if we can get away with Elan Sleazebaggano, we can get away with Darth Verizon.

EXEC: …OK. Look, George. How much would it cost to get you to not make this movie at all? Or any movies? Ever?

LUCAS: I dunno. Four billion dollars?

EXEC: Let me get Disney on the phone.

(Disclaimer: All kidding towards Lucas aside, I’ll be honest; I really only did this because I wanted to get the name “Wal-Martto” down in print somewhere.)

I’m going to say right off the bat–this episode was great. It’s a Race-themed political thriller that has the seamless thematic unity of a Greek tragedy; we’ve got our hubris, our hamartia, our anagnorisis, and all in a story about two douchey fratboys who see a chance at a million bucks. This is the Race at its finest. Let’s kick it off, shall we?

continue reading "Amazing Race 27, Episode 4: “Good Old-Fashioned Spit In the Face”"

Hi all! Sorry for the delay on posting this, but I got a stomach bug that sidelined me for a few days. I’m feeling much better now, so let’s go ahead and recap, shall we? As you may recall, we were in Buenos Aires, with Justin and Diana coming in first and the Douchebros injuring themselves in an attempt to make up for lost time. But the cousins, Alex and Adam, were the ones who finally went out in defeat. On with the Race!

continue reading "Amazing Race 27, Episode 3: “Where My Dogs At?”"

Last week on the Amazing Race, everyone scrambled to get an advantage so good it put the team who got it in 9th place. The DoucheBros got the Express Pass, and TMZ got a one-way ticket home. On to the next installment!

continue reading "Amazing Race 27, Episode 2: “Get In There And Think Like a Dog”"

Now that the real trailer for ‘Suicide Squad’ is out, I feel like I can make a better stab at predicting its ups and downs than when I was deeply unconvinced that I was actually watching a real thing made by real professional Hollywood types. (Which, don’t get me wrong, it was certainly a very good fan-made production, far better than I could do. But it did not look like a multi-million dollar budgeted movie, is all.) My basic prediction is that it’s going to have trouble finding an audience, and it may have trouble finding its voice. That doesn’t necessarily translate to being bad, but it is two big strikes against it right from the start.

The first problem, and perhaps the biggest, is that it’s coming too early. The thing that makes most of the best incarnations of the Suicide Squad interesting is that it’s about taking known quantities, and putting them into new situations where they reveal unexpected character facets. What made Captain Cold interesting in the Suicide Squad was that everyone thought they knew who Captain Cold was; he was that lame supervillain with the freeze gun who served as Barry Allen’s punching bag every six or seven issues. But when you saw him in the Suicide Squad, you realized there was a lot more to him than that.

The Suicide Squad movie does not have that audience familiarity. A few of them may know Killer Croc or Harley Quinn from the Batman cartoons/video games/ancillary tie-in material, and of course the Joker is guaranteed box-office. But most of the characters they picked are obscure even for DC fans. Apart from people who are going to see Will Smith be all Will Smith-y, there’s really nothing to get people into theaters. A trailer for ‘Suicide Squad’ should look like an inverted version of the 2012 Avengers movie, a collection of DC’s worst and darkest coming together to band against something that scares even the bad guys. This feels like a collection of scrubs and oh by the way the Joker.

This leads into the second problem–if the best incarnations of the Suicide Squad work when they’re about familiar villains revealing unexpected character beats, and they’re not familiar villains, then the character beats won’t be that unexpected either. The ‘Suicide Squad’ movie will have to spend its time establishing these characters to audiences who don’t know them, and will then have to provide reasonable-seeming motivations for them to do something out of keeping with those newly-established characters without making it seem like forced, unmotivated writerly fiat. I have some suspicions that this won’t work well.

I think that honestly, this should either have come much later in the development of the DC Cinematic Universe (assuming such a thing doesn’t die a quick death over the performance of ‘Batman v Superman’), or it should have been an ongoing TV series. A series would have given them more room to develop the characters initially and made their transition to wherever they’ll be going as personalities seem more natural. That said, I’m not writing off the movie even with these questions hanging over it. Even the muddy gray-and-brown color palette isn’t enough to make me give up on it just yet.

But if Amanda Waller says in the next trailer, “Actually, it’s more like…a squad,” I’m gone.

I watched ‘Megaforce’ again tonight. I’ll admit, it was the Rifftrax version, which probably labels me as a mere dilettante in the world of terrible movie connoisseurs (although I did see ‘Troll 2’ unriffed all the way back in 1994, so I think I’ve got at least some street cred here). But it’s a perfect example of the kind of movie that is (as they say) so bad it’s good. It’s absolutely terrible–there’s not a single moment of it that’s even remotely coherent, it tries to make Barry Bostwick (Brad from ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’) into an action hero, and it seems to have been written by a committee of 12-year-old boys for a target audience of 10-year-old boys. But it is mesmerizing.

Which is what people mean when they talk about “good bad movies”. They’re talking about movies that are awful, frequently indefensibly awful, but that are nonetheless magnetic in their fascination. They’re movies that you just can’t help watching again and again–watching ironically, perhaps, but nonetheless utterly captivated by the film. Why? What makes them absolutely gripping despite being irredeemably terrible, while a giant-budget monstrosity like ‘Green Lantern’ merely inspires tepid disdain and a desire to watch something else? (Or, for that matter, while a movie like ‘Sharknado’ or ‘Snakes on a Plane’ works hard at being terrible but never really manages to achieve the kind of cult status that ‘The Room’ attains without effort.)

The key to a really great bad movie, in my opinion, is that it has all of the elements of a truly great movie except for quality. That is to say, a good bad movie is a passion project by someone with a singular creative vision and an epic determination to bring it to the screen uncompromised by commercial concerns and Hollywood suits. Like a lot of genuine classics, the result is a reflection of the psyche of the filmmaker, almost entirely unfiltered. It’s a movie that nobody else could have made. Only David Lynch could have made ‘Blue Velvet’, only Werner Herzog could have made ‘Fitzcarraldo’, only Coppola could have made ‘Apocalypse Now’. And only Ed Wood could have made ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’. The fact that one of these is much, much worse than the others is by no means an indictment of it.

These films usually fail in one of two ways. No, that’s incorrect. These films usually fail in two ways simultaneously and spectacularly. The first and most obvious problem is the execution–these are films commonly made by people whose passion far outstrips their understanding of directing, screenwriting and acting (and let’s face it, you know you’re onto something special when the same person is doing all three in one movie) and whose vision is usually impossible to realize on the budget they have to work with. But because they’re true believers, they shoot the film anyway because it’s impossible for them not to make their movie, and trust that people will understand what they’re trying to achieve because it’s so clear to them in their head that they can’t imagine otherwise.

The second problem, and the one that really separates a good bad movie from a mere work of ineptitude, is that the vision of the filmmaker actually does come through in these movies, and it’s so completely and totally at odds with anything anyone else would ever have as a core concept for a creative endeavor that you feel like you’re experiencing a fever dream. At a recent panel at CONvergence on the subject, one of the panelists said that you know you’re watching a really good bad movie when you experience a moment that forces you to pause the film and simply try to process what you just saw, perhaps even rewinding it to watch it a time or two again. It’s the moment when you realize that you’re really watching someone’s unfiltered id put up there on the screen, a moment of almost telepathic connection to a mind so different from yours that the shock of it almost breaks you. If a good good movie conveys a universal truth about the human condition, a good bad movie conveys a very specific truth about the filmmaker that you probably aren’t sure you ever wanted to know.

This means, ironically, that it’s impossible to make a good bad movie by trying to make a good bad movie. The moment you deliberately choose to include elements you know are sub-par, you’re done for, because the key to making a great awful film is an utterly sincere belief in everything you’re putting up on-screen. The maker of ‘Blood Waters of Dr Z’ really thought he was making a compelling environmentalist thriller with a deep message about the danger humanity poses to its own biosphere. The fact that it’s utterly, transcendently bizarre (the opening sequence is simultaneously fascinating and hilarious) never even occurred to him. Tommy Wiseau really believed, despite what he might later claim, that he was making an epic tragedy in the vein of ‘Death of a Salesman’. Nobody can make something that funny without aiming for true tragedy.

Which is, by the way, the last thing that makes a good bad movie. It has to be aiming for seriousness. You can’t make a good bad comedy. Because ultimately, a good bad movie succeeds because it’s enjoyed on an ironic level–you are deriving satisfaction and meaning from something other than the filmmaker’s literal intention. In the case of pretty much every genre other than comedy, the ironic enjoyment is comedic enjoyment. Something that was intended to be horrifying becomes hilarious, something that was intended to be tragic becomes comic, something that was intended to evoke wonder evokes laughter. But a comedy that fails at being a comedy never succeeds at anything else. A bad horror movie is often funny, but a bad comedy is never scary. A comedy that fails simply fails, which may be why Adam Sandler is reviled while Ed Wood is, in his own way, celebrated. Because both of them make bad movies, but only one of them makes us happy we watched them.

I’m probably showing my age when I say that ‘The Love Boat’ was practically ubiquitous when I was a kid. Even if you didn’t make an effort to watch it, it seemed to run in some sort of bizarre, perpetual loop that meant you always wound up catching at least a half an episode here or a few minutes there. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it was one of those weird “Why does anybody watch this?” shows that somehow ran for nine seasons, about a cruise ship called the Pacific Princess, its crew, and the weekly guest stars who found love on the eponymous boat. You could design something more clearly intended to function as comfort viewing and visual wallpaper, but it’d be hard.

And last week, in the comments on my suggestion for a “Jurassic World” series, TrishEM suggested a ‘Love Boat’ reboot with velociraptors. And I have to say, not to diss a readership that is smart and funny and great commenters, but it’s gonna be hard to top that one. In fact, it led me to a whole series of ideas about how to improve the formulaic, generic ‘Love Boat’ simply by mashing it up with some of the other TV shows out there. To wit:

1) The Jurassic Boat. After the failure of Jurassic Park and Jurassic World, no country in the world is willing to host a dinosaur theme park due to potential fears of escaping animals wreaking havoc. So InGen solves two problems at once, creating a floating theme park that cruises in international waters. Each week, a new bunch of guest stars comes to the boat in search of romance, thrills, and adventure! Guessing game for the series: Which guest star will get eaten by raptors this week?

2) Vicki the Vampire Slayer. The Pacific Princess is one of the more…unusual cruise ships out there. It always embarks and disembarks after sunset, it has a full range of 24-hour activities, the cabins all have shutters to block out the sunlight…and it has the highest “fatal accident” rate of any cruise line in the world. Vicki, daughter of ship’s captain Merrill Stubing, finally learns what ties all these things together when she is approached by the ship’s bartender, Isaac, and told that she is a Chosen One–a Slayer. Isaac is her Watcher, and is here to train her in the art of fighting vampires; the Pacific Princess is secretly run by and for vampires who want to travel without risking daylight, and most of the passengers are there as a ready supply of food. She must protect the mortal passengers, slay the vampires, and never let the truth about her identity get out (lest she be kicked off the ship). Guessing game for the series: Which guest star is going to get bitten in the first act?

3) Love the Walking Dead. The Pacific Princess is on a cruise when word comes to them that a strange disease is infecting people on land, causing them to reanimate as flesh-eating zombies. Each week, the crew must find ways to embark and get priceless supplies and rescue survivors, all while avoiding the hordes of undead. Guessing game for the series: Which guest star will get eaten by zombies first?

4) Love Trek. All aboard the Pacific Space Princess for a tour of the galaxy! See the sights, romance the beautiful aliens, and avoid the horndog captain who seems to mack on a new guest star each week! Guessing game for the series: Which guest star will not be making it back from their stops at each port of call? (Hint: It’s the one wearing the red shirt.)

5) Breaking Boat. When Gopher is diagnosed with cancer by Bernie Kopell, he decides to make some money for his family by starting a meth lab with Julie in the ship’s lower decks. Their illicit drug dealing ring gradually brings them further and further into a sordid world of brutality and murder, forcing Gopher to take ever-harsher measures to protect his secrets and his money. Once he’s in…can he ever get out? Guessing game for the series: Will it end in an orgy of violence and rough justice, as each character gets his or her karmic retribution, or do we live in an essentially amoral universe where the good sometimes suffer and the bad sometimes go unpunished?

Originally, I was planning to talk about Groo the Wanderer and how awesome he is, but that requires some screenshots to display Sergio Aragonés’ amazing artwork and WordPress doesn’t seem to want to let me add pictures. I was then thinking about summarizing the whole Hugo debacle, but frankly it’s just not worth it. So I’m giving up and talking about ‘Jurassic World’.

I haven’t seen it yet, because as I keep explaining to people, I want the movie to be about Starlord raising a pack of baby velociraptors and then taking them on space adventures, and anything else is bound to be a disappointment to me. But it does strike me based on what I’ve heard that they went down the wrong tack here, and I mean completely. Because as I’m given to understand it, the movie is about a group of people who manage to successfully clone FREAKING DINOSAURS, build functional habitats for them that also accommodate the needs of thousands of tourists, manage the logistics of running a full hotel and zoo for animals whose habits and biology are for the most part a mystery…and they decide that’s boring, so they build a giant murder monster that breaks loose and kills people just like every other iteration of the franchise.

You know what? I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the successful park might have been more interesting than yet another installment of “People Run Away From Dinosaurs: The Movie”. Seriously, is there anyone whose interest wasn’t piqued by the idea of a velociraptor trainer? Is there anyone who didn’t get a thrill out of seeing a water show with a mosasaur? The idea of Jurassic World as a functioning zoo and theme park is a billion times more interesting than the idea of it failing…which is, let’s face it, the same idea we got in the first three movies, that Dinosaurs Are Dangerous and We Shouldn’t Tamper in God…er, Evolution’s Domain and yet another iteration of what Tony Stark beautifully called the “Mustn’t Meddle Medley”.

I say go the opposite direction. Do the successful park story. Do it as a series, because if it’s a successful Jurassic World it functions as its own story generator and there’s no way you can fit every interesting idea in that concept into two hours. You’d probably want to focus primarily on the keepers, who would have both the most amazing job in the world and the most terrifying all at once; they’re inventing a new field of zoology on the fly, learning the behaviors of the animals while trying to keep them healthy and happy in an environment that’s only a bad guess at their native habitat. They’d obviously interact with the veterinarians studying the animals and the scientists who created them, as well as park visitors.

Plots for the show could range from escaped animals (not always the big ones, either) to illnesses going through the populations to keepers finding ways to deal with behavioral problems…and if ‘House’ for dinosaurs doesn’t sound awesome to you, you’re just a very different person from me…to visitors to the park and the problems they cause. I think you could get at least a couple of seasons out of it. Best of all, it would be a series where dinosaurs were treated as animals and not monsters, which would be a nice change.