Housepets!

Liam wrote:

Seth wrote:(also star trek is very good omg guys why was I not told about this?)

Check out DS9, easily the best show of the bunch.

my roommate is watching it all in order we'll get there at some point

With or without TAS?

That's a great question he's the one more committed to it I just catch random episodes.
I think he's gonna watch it though.

Late as I usually am to these things, I got into O.K. KO yesterday. It's pretty rad!

Waitin' on "Better Call Saul".

Saw the first two episodes of Stranger Things.

Weird, I found it really intriguing, but still haven't brought myself to watch more. I mean, it's pretty good so far.

I've come around to watching the first three eps of Star Trek Discovery and... I'm really liking it so far!

Sure, for all I know the show could become terrible over the rest of the season, but from what I watched they breathed new life into a franchise that suffered under creative exhaustion. They're doing new things! Great!

I can see the criticisms. It's dark (but not much darker as past Trek at its darkest) but I think that's just to underscore the message of maintaining Star Fleet's principles in a crisis. And yeah, it would've been a better fit if they had set it in the post-VOY era. That's studio meddling, I guess.

half of what i dislike about it boils down to sloppy writing on par with early TOS era, which, after TNG and DS9 there is no excuse for any longer, combined with "modern" (read; needlessly rushed) pacing. This is not a blockbuster movie, it's a tv series. it can afford to take it's time. plot threads, even major ones, are allowed to take multiple episodes, or if need be multiple seasons, as long as the pacing doesn't burn out the audience. or heck, you could pull what DS9 did and INTENTIONALLY drag a plotline out to the point of burning out your audience, and then show the cast being just as worn down by those same events, to make the situation relatable and more engaging. point is, fast and sloppy is a bad combination. It's what killed Enterprise and it's going to kill discovery, in the same way and for the same reasons, if they can't get their act together in the second season.

Liam wrote:I think that's just to underscore the message of maintaining Star Fleet's principles in a crisis.

that was the plot driver behind the dominion war during DS9 though. so they're basically rehashing something they've already done, and done better. and it's not just that that's been done before, but reusing that specific plot element of the series, had been done before. if enterprise couldn't get away with that (Xindi conflict), why would discovery?

my last big gripe would be the effects. They're trying too hard. Keep it simple, stupid. again going back to TNG and DS9, (because that's the series best years. TOS hasn't aged well, the movies have always been a mixed bag, and screw voyager with a tire iron, enterprise might have been bland but at least it wasn't a flying reset button.) but the effects there worked SO much better. Why? because they were, comparatively, subtle. Admittedly it was because CG was new and unreliable back then, and practical effects were hard to set up on a TV budget, forcing a lot of improvisation and clever use of stock footage, but accident or not it worked. this doesn't. It's Hollywood levels of cartoonishly excessive effects, and just feels over the top.

the ship design and continuity adherence also can't make up their mind if they're Classic Startrek or Abramstrek and wind up looking like some odd third variant, but that's a minor nitpick, and would have been forgivable, if it weren't for those first three points.

So I just finished watching Infinity Train season 3, and.... Oh boy. That was an absolute roller coaster. If you aren't already watching this show, starting doing so NOW. It is well worth the subscription fee for HBO Max.

And ... at the other end of the spectrum ... it's been years since me and the missus had a TV show favorite enough to "never miss an episode".

I also only have a few television shows that I bother to keep up with and my soap is one of them.

Amazee Dayzee wrote: ↑Sat Aug 29, 2020 1:13 am I also only have a few television shows that I bother to keep up with and my soap is one of them.

... Which one is that? I guess there aren't many left.

"Days of our Lives" though I do read the spoilers for the other 3 also ("General Hospital", "Young and the Restless" and "Bold and the Beautiful")

Some people look down their nose at soap operas, but I kinda like them, I watched All My Children while it was on, and enjoyed it.

When I was in elementary school a lot of the girls watched "Passions" when it was on and sometimes "Days of our Lives" and a lot of people admitted that some of the stories were compelling. Unfortunately as "Passions" began to get more outlandish and twisted, I stopped watching it. Though the beginning of the end for me was when it moved to channel 101 on DirectTV.

"Crusader Rabbit" was about as close as I got. A lot of my schoolmates were into that vampire soap, was it "Dark Towers"?

It was "Dark Shadows" and I think that was the soap that eventually inspired "Passions". Though I think "Dark Shadows" was a lot less convoluted than "Passions".

A long way from "Spin and Marty" ......................

Amazee Dayzee wrote: ↑Sat Aug 29, 2020 1:13 am I also only have a few television shows that I bother to keep up with and my soap is one of them.

Watched the two-hour intro of "Fargo" last night. It was okay, Chris Rock was quite good, and I'm not sure how many "Walking Dead" knock-offs I can tolerate - zombies are gettin' kinda old (accounts for the aroma of rot, I guess).

I have heard of the show but I never knew that it was a take on the show "The Walking Dead". I honestly thought that it was a space drama or something.

Amazee Dayzee wrote: ↑Mon Sep 28, 2020 2:20 pm I have heard of the show but I never knew that it was a take on the show "The Walking Dead". I honestly thought that it was a space drama or something.

It's murky.

If I ever decide to go an look it up, I'm sure I will figure out what the show is about after reading the synopsis.

Just binge-watched an international German TV Show about time travel called Dark.

Big warning though, it's TV-MA, so watch at your own discretion.

Haven't been watching much lately, but I am pretty excited about Star Trek Discovery coming back in a week and a half.

COMCAS-NBC is reportedly thinking about eliminating a number of the channels in its current holdings. SYFY may be one of them. Maybe they'll spin it off instead.

Yeah I've heard how weird the situation with sci fi channels has got down in the states (wrestling? srsly?)
Has sounded to me for quite a few years now that the folks running it have got their minds set on the idea that a dedicated channel for sci fi/fantasy shows couldn't be profitable. I'm pretty sure they're wrong, but, try telling them that, right?

We have a mostly different set of channels up north though, specialty ones in particular.

In case it wasn't obvious from some of my other posts, I've been watching Stargate, Currently in the middle of Season 8 of SG1 and 1 of Atlantis

Vertigo Fox wrote: ↑Mon Oct 05, 2020 12:11 pm Yeah I've heard how weird the situation with sci fi channels has got down in the states (wrestling? srsly?)
Has sounded to me for quite a few years now that the folks running it have got their minds set on the idea that a dedicated channel for sci fi/fantasy shows couldn't be profitable. I'm pretty sure they're wrong, but, try telling them that, right?

We have a mostly different set of channels up north though, specialty ones in particular.

It's kinda ... "desperate people do desperate things". The History Channel, for example, was initially very reputable and professional. Now, they've kinda gone off the rails with occult, extra-terrestrials, and other exotic "filler".

I remember I used to wait for Adventure Time to come on as a kid every Wendsday or so.

Rydr Warklub wrote: ↑Tue Nov 24, 2020 2:13 am I remember I used to wait for Adventure Time to come on as a kid every Wendsday or so.

We got our first TV in 1954 and that's where I discovered the Saturday morning cartoon shows, running from 600am to noon. Just as most channels showed old 30s and 40s movies during weekend afternoons to fill "unprogrammed time", from 600am to noon Saturday morning were filled with old cartoons. These were almost entirely Warner Brothers, Paul Terry, Fleischer, Van Bueren, Columbia, Universal, and other studio libraries (Disney, Walter Lantz, and later Hanna-Barbera would later have their own shows). That's where I got hooked ... and stayed so.

I wouldn't have mind seeing how cartoons in the 50s and 60s would have worked at that time. At least they had Saturday morning cartoons back then because sadly now, they are extinct though because you can get cartoons at any time now.

Amazee Dayzee wrote: ↑Tue Nov 24, 2020 1:05 pm I wouldn't have mind seeing how cartoons in the 50s and 60s would have worked at that time. At least they had Saturday morning cartoons back then because sadly now, they are extinct though because you can get cartoons at any time now.

Well, they just ran `em one after the other in no particular order. Since all TV was black-and-white in the fifties, you didn't get color. Commercials interrupted but not as often as you might have now - mostly toys, clothes, footwear, cereals, get you primed to bug your parents to buy them for you while they were still groggy from sleep. There were also kiddie shows that showed cartoons with a clownish host (Krusty the Klown on The Simpson is a take-off on these programs. The Disneyland program had a "Fantasyland" segment which showed old cartoons or pieces of full-length cartoons about to be released, starting in 1954. In the mid-fifties, original for-TV animation began to appear with Paul Terry's Tom Terrific done under contract for Captain Kangaroo and Crusader Rabbit for some show I don't remember (an afternoon show). The Mickey Mouse Club had some small bits but continued to use library stuff. This was before the Hanna-Barbara onslaught of pure cartoon shows - Huckleberry Hound. Huck and his pals actually picked up an adult following very quickly in the late 50s. (My parents were fans - although my Dad was especially partial to the old Fleischer Popeye cartoons, Dad being a Navy "Lifer" and all.)

I imagine a lot of people from the Navy might have liked Popeye.

Amazee Dayzee wrote: ↑Wed Nov 25, 2020 4:30 pm I imagine a lot of people from the Navy might have liked Popeye.

I did. Another studio - I don't remember who - picked up the license and made new ones in the Hanna-Barbara minimalist style. They were not well made, not terribly well written, and not especially funny.

From what I could find out, the first studio that animated the cartoons were Fleischer Studios cartoons and the second one was Famous Studios.