the original cgi is stuck in 4:3 in sd because warner bros didn’t want to buy the effects team a $5000 16:9 reference monitor in 199X. they’d have to rerender all the cgi scenes at modern resolutions for the whole show to finally be in 16:9 and hd. doesn’t seem like it’d be too difficult though since some guy on youtube got ahold of some source files from people who worked on the show and has rerendered a couple of scenes in hd in his spare time.
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watching The Wire on Amazon/HBO. at the beginning of s3, they’ve put a helpful disclaimer, a quick interview of Simon and Pelecanos saying “in the 3rd season we tackle the issue of drug legalization. as you can see, that’s not the solution.”
i couldn’t believe the brazenness of it. “hey there audience. please don’t think about this stuff. just a tv show! ha ha”
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Finished season 1 of “For All Mankind”, Ronald D. Moore’s latest show. It’s an alt-history where the soviets landed on the moon first, and the space race never ended. It’s great stuff.
Season 1 takes place throughout the 60’s and 70’s, following NASA. Watching it is like watching Apollo 13, with a little juicy drama mixed in.
Looks like season 2 is dropping later this month, so I’m pretty pumped for that. Seems like it’s in the 80’s and covers the nuclear proliferation of space.
trying to figure out if this is the absolute furthest an snl sketch has been stretched out i mean there are two wayne’s world/blues brothers movies. coneheads had a movie and a tv special…when this show comes out macgruber might have em beat for most hours? anyway this is a truly terrible idea although the same could be said for all of macgruber and it has been funny despite that
weird but it kind of demands attention just as something that they are both writing?
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Loving this insane streaming service arms race of reviving/rebooting/reimagining every IP in their archives. Not sure if these novelties are enough to get people to pay for another service, but it’s pretty funny that they are chasing each other in circles with this stuff.
Was anyone watching Your Honor?
I tried watching this last night. After two episodes, I don’t think I’ll proceed further. I would like to find a new Asian horror thing that’s actually good, but I found this mediocre at best. It tries hard to be shocking, but in uninteresting ways.
But I knew I was going to be disappointed as soon as they said in the first ten seconds that the movies were fiction but based on this true story that’s even more disturbing. Sure.
It wasn’t any good. It’s really disjointed and fails with the scares. It’s an entire season of trying to convey that the house exists outside of time, but like, that’s something they should’ve just done and gotten over with in an episode and moved on because you can already ascertain early on that this is the case. I don’t know, the Grudge and its lore was never all that interesting and I constantly conflate it with Ring’s lore. They should’ve just given Koji Shiraishi some money and told him to make a series, it almost certainly would’ve been better than this and had a better ending.
tim burton’s addams family show is wednesday as a student using her psychic powers(!?) to stop a serial killer lol. is this a riverdalelike?
Why would Wednesday stop a serial killer
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I mean except out of jealousy maybe
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or if she’s Joan Cusack
Started rewatching Freaks and Geeks because it’s on Hulu now. I was in my early 20s the last time I watched it all the way through. I feel like a decade in between watchings feels right. I liked it a lot then and like it more now. I really feel for all those kids. And, yeah, highschool blows man.
This scene has always stuck with me:
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I think Martin Starr’s performance as Bill is an all-time great performance
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Don’t forget A Night at the Roxbury or Superstar. And hell I think the latter was more of a recurring character than dedicated sketches? Both are so of their time they never could really break loose of the SNL gravity well the way others did.
watching my first christianity-themed x-file and must say that so far it’s a lot less fun than that description implies, come on, don’t just give me mulder rooting around his mom’s house while the world’s most WASPy jesus analogue argues with an evil cia guy about whether people “deserve hope”. at least throw in a line about how stigmata are actually alien blowholes or something. anyway other than that i’ve been enjoying the show, or at least the abridged mythology-focused episode guide i’ve been watching along with for the sake of skipping all the ones about serial killers.
something about the episode format that works well with the murky conspiracy shit form, where nothing actually has to “resolve” so much as always feel like further resolution might be possible sometime ahead. i also like the degree of haplessness the two leads are allowed as they pretty routinely fuck up, chase the wrong leads, walk right by the person they were looking for, etc.
also - what the fuck was up with that one scene where scully gets abducted and her belly gets inflated like a balloon??? really seems like one of those things that ends up feeling pre-familiarised through inspiring 20+ years of hyperspecific fetish imagery after it airs, so weird to just have it happen out of nowhere in the middle of a random ep.
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I watched a few episodes of Freddy’s Nightmares, but it’s kind of boring. The first episode is about the trial of Freddy Kruger, but most of it follows this cop who feels guilty about shooting Freddy. The structure for the regular episodes is kind of cool – the first half of the episode will follow one person until they die and then it shifts to somebody they were close to or had some interaction with and then they die at the end, usually after having encountered the person who died earlier in the episode in some form (possibly influenced by a Nightmare on Elm Street 4 killing off the last movie’s protagonist early on and then shifting to another protagonist). None of the episodes are particularly interesting, I was scrolling through the episodes and reading the synopsis for each one and none of them sounded very interesting. I’m downloading the Friday the 13th series now, we’ll see if that’s better.
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watching I Wanna Marry “Harry”, a reality tv show from 2014(!) about 12 american girls who go to a castle in the UK to romance someone who is very strongly implied to be prince harry. the way they imply this is, he has red hair and a british accent and flies around in a helicopter, and they all take turns asking “are you prince harry” and he replies by saying “hm… rather not say… haha…” in a suspiciously posh voice. and then they ask “do you live in a palace? is your mother the queen?” and he replies with “that’s for me to know and you to find out… haha.” and then there’s a wooshing sound and a zoom on the girl’s face making a shocked expression. for some reason this is all very compelling to me.
like, what if that flavor flav reality tv show didn’t actually have flavor flav, if it just had some guy who looked vaguely similar to him in a bad light but he kept insisting he was the real thing. and also the producers hired a fake therapist to sit down with the contestants and tell them they were crazy whenever they went “you know, i don’t think that’s flavor flav.” or maybe not since that part is pretty creepy. in fairness they extend the gaslighting to the viewer with an intro sequence in which an unknown computer program scans the main guy’s face and tells us it’s a 99% MATCH. but having the whole thing be based on the unconvincing imitation of a real person does lend a weird layer of abstraction to procedures. it is all kinda standard dating show otherwise but i did like the lady whose response to being kicked off was just to say that she didn’t like gingers anyway.
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they could call it the “Artificial Flavor of Love”
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