Month: September 2010

Fall TV Is Upon Us Once Again

This year I’ve decided to watch less TV. I decide this every year, and somehow end up with roughly 17-20 shows I try to watch anyway. Sure enough when I added up all the ones I want to check out this year, I ended up with seventeen. But I’m pretty serious about cutting back, even if it means leaving behind some things.

Definitely Watching – Returning Shows

These are the shows that I just can’t bring myself to give up.

Fringe

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Possibly my most-anticipated returning show this year. Season Two stepped up to the place something fierce after a rocky first season, and last year’s finale had me salivating to return to the Fringe universe – or should I say universes. Fringe is probably the best sci-fi you’ll see this fall, and is starting to get enough ideas going that it may make it onto the list of my all-time favorite sci-fi shows, if it can keep up S2’s momentum.

Community

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I never would’ve guessed it going into last year, but freshman sitcom Community consistently out-classed its more established siblings on NBC’s Thursday line-up, offering a witty and satirical look at self-absorbed types going back to community college. There’s far more here than meets the eye, and if the writing stays half as strong this year as last, I’m totally in.

Castle

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Usually I start each year with several crime procedurals, because they make me happy. Generally, they fall off my schedule fairly quickly as my time runs short, though. Castle is one that hasn’t, because its combination of mystery/procedural, comedy, and character development hits that sweet spot that most procedurals can only manage for a few episodes at a time before it gets old. Thanks to the actors and snappy writing, so far Castle has stayed fresh, and I look forward to seeing much more Nathan Fillion on my TV.

Chuck

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I very nearly threw Chuck over when it spend way too long waffling on the will-they-won’t-they of Chuck and Sarah’s relationship. Now it seems they’ve firmly moved on from that and tied it up in a very satisfying way without letting it get boring, plus the setup for this season, with Chuck probably going rogue, looks to take the show in a whole new direction. This is one show that manages to reinvent itself almost every season and make it work. But if they do start waffling on Chuck and Sarah again? I’m probably out.

Sanctuary

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Syfy shows have been doing right by me lately, and I’ve just about caught up S2 so I can start right in on S3 when it starts (S1 and S2 are on Netflix Instant Watch). It’s not a great show, but it’s fun, geeky, B-movie-like, Nicolas Tesla and Jack the Ripper are characters, and with Warehouse 13 finishing up its season next week, I’m going to want something in this wheelhouse around.

(Also Parks & Recreation is a definitely watch when it returns in spring. I’m still a little miffed at NBC for delaying it.)

Trying Out – New Shows

The Walking Dead

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AMC does zombies? Based on a graphic novel series? Seems a little outside their wheelhouse, but so far every original AMC show has been 100% awesome, plus I gotta check out what they do with the zombies. The trailers released so far look pretty darn good.

Undercovers

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J.J. Abrams + spies = I will at least give it a try. It may be nothing more than Alias-lite, and it’s not like we haven’t seen the married spy angle in countless other shows and movies, but from the clips I’ve seen, looks like there’s a nice mix of action and humor here, with good chemistry between the leads. We’ll see how it goes, but I can’t skip a J.J. show.

Nikita

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This one has already started, and I have the episodes recorded but haven’t watched them yet. Not an auspicious beginning of keeping up with TV this year. But so far reactions from people who like TV I like are quite positive, and have increased my interest. I love spy shows, and I don’t have any nostalgic connection to the earlier series (no one seems to be mentioning the Luc Besson film, which I have seen, but didn’t love), so I’ll be coming into it fairly unbiased, aside from my general bias against CW shows.

No Ordinary Family

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Looks like a live-action The Incredibles, with a family suddenly getting superpowers and having to figure out what to do with them. This could really go either way, but with Julie Benz and Michael Chiklis as the parents, it definitely seems worth a shot. The really REALLY bland marketing so far is not encouraging me, though.

Boardwalk Empire

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Martin Scorsese producing an HBO show sounds like a winner right out of the gate, and the period Atlantic City setting is attractive to me, too. Of course, I don’t get HBO, so I may not actually be watching this right away, but if I did, I would be.

On Notice – Returning Shows

These are shows I’m going to probably start watching, but whether I keep watching them will depend greatly on how much time I have and how compelling they end up being for me this year.

Caprica

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We thought this was going to be a mid-season return, but turns out Syfy is starting it later this fall after all. Good thing, because hopefully it can get enough legs this way that they’ll renew it. And hopefully it will deserve renewing. It has been a pretty slow burn, but there’s so much percolating in there that I love that I really hope it comes into its own this year.

Stargate: Universe

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I enjoy SGU quite a bit and it filled a space-travel-sci-fi-shaped hole last year pretty well, but I’m not going to be too upset if I can’t make time for it this year. I’m going to try, but no promises, unless the writing turns really compelling. It had a couple of really good episodes last year, but tended to meander and backtrack a bit overmuch.

Survivor: Nicaragua

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I’ve had a soft spot for Survivor the last few years, even though I didn’t watch it for the first several seasons. Last season was really good, with the two all-star teams, but I’m afraid it can’t really come up to that again. Survivior is my go-to “I’m too drained to watch anything else tonight” show, but there’s so much on Instant Watch now that I’m likely not to need it for that.

30 Rock

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Oh, 30 Rock. I love you, but the last year or two have been a little lackluster. Both of the two newcomer shows to NBC’s Thursday night outshone even you, and I can’t promise that I’ll keep you if you don’t step it up.

How I Met Your Mother

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This is a comfort show for me. I love the characters, but the storylines haven’t really been grabbing me for a couple of years. These are the kind of cuts that are hard to make, but especially since this isn’t available on hulu, I’m likely to leave it behind.

Family Guy

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Family Guy is one of the few shows that I don’t care about watching in order, or if I miss an episode. So I’ll probably keep it in my hulu queue just for those times when I have 20 minutes and need some quick laughs, but it isn’t something I’ll feel the need to watch every week.

The Office

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*sigh* This one’s hard, but I haven’t really been enjoying it for a couple of years. It’s time to cut the cord. Unless Amy Ryan comes back, which it seems like may happen from last season’s finale. Those episodes I might watch, even though it seems like a rather desperate attempt to recover the one thing that was good about the show the last couple of seasons.

The Amazing Race

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I get a kick out of the whole traveling-around-the-world aspect of the show, but the last couple of years the format has been getting really stale for me, and the contestants more and more annoying. Not really worth it anymore.

Tentatively Checking Out – New Shows

Checking these out, but I’m not totally convinced they’re going to stay on my schedule.

The Event

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Heh, yeah, so this is the only one that ended up down here. I will probably check out an episode or two of this, but the marketing is sooooo earnest and sooooo “this is the next big show” that I’m pretty dubious. My guess is it’ll turn out exactly like FlashForward did last year. In other words, not good.

Review: A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop

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[Rating:4/5]

originally posted on Row Three

Six words that don’t fill me with a lot of confidence: “Remake of a Coen Bros. film.” Four words that do fill me with a lot of confidence: “Directed by Zhang Yimou.” So I was a little torn on what to expect from this film, a period China-set version of Blood Simple. But I figured if someone as stylish and individual as Zhang Yimou wanted to remake the Coen Bros., he probably had some interesting ideas to bring to it, so by and large I was cautiously optimistic. Turns out, that optimism was not misplaced, because I quite enjoyed this both on its own and in relation to the Coen film.

The broad-stroke story remains largely the same. The wife of a small business owner (in this case, the remotely situated Wang’s Noodle Shop), tired of her husband’s abuse, begins an affair with Li, one of the employees. When an unscrupulous guard captain tells Wang what’s going on, he hires the captain to kill the pair of lovers. But there are double-crosses and mistakes and plot twists aplenty in store before all is said and done. But what was formerly a darkly comic noir film has become a bright comic action film, while still retaining the sense of absurdity and morbid inevitability.

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Zhang has added another pair of employees who act as slapstick comic relief, a bumbling man-child and a rather hysterical young girl who complicate the plot greatly by trying to break into the boss’s safe to “steal” the back wages he owes them. But the captain has already turned the tables on the boss by this point, and his world-weary but taciturn annoyance at being constantly interrupted as he’s finishing up business worked well for me, though he’s very different from the Coens’ smarmy detective. A lot of the film takes place in silence or nearly so, and a lot depends on the actors’ physical presence to communicate humor, danger, fear, etc, and they all do a fine job making the film consistently engaging and often surprising.

A lot of people are going to complain about the slapsticky nature of the additional characters, as well as Li quite often, but within the world that Zhang has created, it works well and I found it genuinely arresting. Even more arresting are the simply gorgeous landscapes in which all of this takes place, in the deserts of rural China. The red and cream-striped rolling hills, with the sun rising and setting over them, and our characters often nearly swallowed in them as they try to keep their heads in increasingly absurd and hostile circumstances, are breathtaking – not that I expected anything less from someone as known for his use of flamboyant visuals as Zhang. As far as the slapstick goes, if you make it through the first ten minutes (when the wife purchases a pistol from a traveling Persian salesman), you’ll be fine. Also, despite the quick slapstick of some sections, Zhang takes his time with others, with several of the suspenseful scenes drawn out to almost ludicrous deliberateness.

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I watched Blood Simple a few days after seeing A Woman, a Gun, and a Noodle Shop, and was intrigued with how many little moments Zhang took directly from the earlier film (especially in the final sequence as the wife defends herself) but transformed them to live comfortably within his film’s world. This is a fine example of a film that’s both true to its source and unique to itself, obviously a Zhang film through and through, while still honoring the Coens’ original. It’s not perfect – I wish the wife had been given more agency, and the motivation for the captain’s apparent cruelty is not particularly well-realized – but on a scene-by-scene, moment-by-moment basis, the film is more than enjoyable, as long as you’re willing to let it deviate wildly from the tone of the original.

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Review: Resident Evil: Afterlife

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[Rating:2.5/5]

originally posted on Row Three

It’s a little bit pointless to review Resident Evil: Afterlife, which is why I didn’t even bother seeking out the Rotten Tomatoes score or any other reviews before rushing off to see it opening night. I mean, this is the fourth Resident Evil movie, with basically the same team behind all of them, though directors have changed a few times. You pretty much know what you’re getting into when you buy a ticket for this. If you expect much more than Milla Jovovich and Ali Larter looking hot and kicking zombie ass while spouting ridiculous dialogue in a series of loosely tied together scenes, you’ll probably be disappointed. If not, enjoy it for the even sillier-than-most B movie it is.

Resident Evil: Extinction ended with classic sequel bait, with Alice (Milla Jovovich) promising to find Umbrella Corp bossman Wesker in his underground Tokyo lair and wipe him out, with the help of the army of clones Umbrella had been building to try to find a cure for the T-virus. Resident Evil: Afterlife picks up the story right there, with an all-out attack on Umbrella Tokyo. But Wesker gets away, destroying the facility behind him, and Alice (re-humanized by an injection that neutralizes the T-virus in her) sets off to find the rest of the Extinction group who had left to find Arcadia, a promised infection-free haven. Things don’t go as planned, Alice and Claire (an awesomer-than-I-expected Ali Larter, almost upstaging Milla a time or two) end up with another small group of survivors and eventually face off with Wesker again.

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It’s all pretty standard go-here-do-this, wait-do-this-other-thing-first storytelling that betrays both its video game roots and the rather unimaginative writing of Paul W.S. Anderson, but we’re not here for story. Which is good, because a lot of it is really dumb. I mean, there’s a radio transmission promising a place with no infection, where there is safety, food, and water, and it doesn’t even OCCUR to anyone in the group that this could be a trap? Not to mention all the times that things happen without explanation, motivation, or logic. (Where did the giant hammer-wielding monster come from? One can only assume an offshoot of the Nemesis project from Resident Evil: Apocalypse, but there’s no real basis within the film for that assumption.) Or all the times when they’ve been working toward one thing and then just move on to some completely different plan. But there’s a point at which such earnest silliness in storytelling ceases to matter and almost makes the film more fun. I’m not putting Resident Evil among the class of films like Plan 9 From Outer Space or Troll 2, but I will say that it makes it a lot more fun to think of it that way when you’re watching it.

I do wish the action sequences, since that’s what I was there for, had been a little more intense and extensive – there were very few sequences that felt like they had any stakes, only a couple of Alice fighting her way hand-to-hand through a zombie onslaught, and most of them had too little build-up and were over too quickly. I think part of this might have been because of the 3D, actually – the fight choreography wasn’t nearly as intricate even as in the earlier films in the series. I watched it in 2D, so I can’t vouch for the 3D, but based on 3D films I have seen, fast-moving action scenes with lots of choreography might not work as well since it’s so much harder to focus quickly. (And yes, I will quite possibly go back to see it in 3D next week sometime.)

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So yeah, it’s not a very good movie, but if you’re a fan of the series, or of Milla Jovovich, it’s not going to matter. You’re going to see it, and you’re probably going to enjoy it. If you’re not a fan of either of those things, you’re better off spending your money on many other things. If the screencaps and trailer alone are enough to get you pumped, this is a movie for you. If not, don’t bother reading my words. This is not a movie about words. Personally, I had a great time watching it, and will watch it again, but I can also pick apart what was wrong or could’ve been better about almost every scene. It’s a critical conundrum, but one I’ll live with.

New Hollywood: The Long Goodbye (1973)

[Rating:4.5/5]

originally posted on Row Three as part of the Easy Riders, Raging Bulls marathon.

Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye was not on my original watch list for this marathon for a couple of reasons – I’d already seen it years ago in a college film criticism class, I already had a bunch of Altman films on the list and I wanted to diversify a little bit, and I didn’t particularly like it the first time around and wasn’t sure I wanted to revisit it, even though I suspected I would appreciate it a lot more if I did. But after I named Altman my favorite director of the marathon so far, multiple people recommended I give this film another look, and then it happened to be playing at a local rep cinema, and I figured it was a sign that it was time to rewatch Altman’s nearly revisionist version of Raymond Chandler’s 1940s crime novel. And I’m so glad I did.

I wrote recently about how much I love The Big Sleep, and I think my original distaste for The Long Goodbye was merely an inability to envision any other version of Philip Marlowe than Bogart’s, or any other take on Chandler than a straight-up noir detective film. But the brilliance of The Long Goodbye is precisely in how it takes the Marlowe character and the detective story and drops it into the extremely different milieu of 1970s Los Angeles, turning it into an ironic, knowing version of the very cinema that took Chandler straight in the 1940s.

Elliott Gould’s Philip Marlowe is a mumbling, ambling fellow who’s smarter than most everyone around him, but aloof enough not to bother pointing it out, except barely under his breath in a kind of on-going ironic mutter that feels more like an interior monologue than actual speech. He’s bemused at the spacey Yoga-practicing girls in the apartment across the way, has little use for the police, and spends a great deal of time trying to please his cat. The cat is something of a substitute for human engagement; his general response to any human interaction is “it’s okay with me,” a detached statement of passive affability and implicit refusal to get personally involved.


When a friend asks him for a ride to Mexico, he agrees with little hesitation, little realizing (or perhaps just little caring) that this action would embroil him in the case surrounding the death of the friend’s wife. The police think his friend killed her, but Marlowe won’t believe it, and the rest of the film balances his casual attempts to clear his friend and his work on a seemingly unrelated case for a woman searching for her alcoholic husband. The plot gets considerably more complicated, but through it all, Marlowe maintains his sardonic “it’s okay with me” attitude, allowing himself to drift where events push him and be held static by anything that shows any initiative (note that every animal in the film basically holds him captive until someone else intervenes).

It’s an interesting approach to a character who is often quite active in 1940s films. (They may be world-weary, but still don’t rest in their quest for the truth; this Marlowe is world-bemused and takes plenty of time to follow other pursuits, treating everything with a bit of a smirk.) This isn’t to say he doesn’t ever do anything – he does his job, he circumvents opposition when he needs to, he refuses to be browbeating by the police, he continues to check in on his client even after the immediate case is complete, etc., but he does so in such a lackadaisical fashion that he almost seems to be doing it because he doesn’t have anything better to do. Yet when it comes down to it in the final few minutes of the film, as he uncovers the truth, his “it’s okay with me” changes to “nobody cares but me.” This Marlowe is a fascinating mixture of detachment and engagement, yet his shifts between the two feel organic, never forced.


Yet though The Long Goodbye is a clear departure from the characterization and style of 1940s hard-boiled detective films, it knows them all. Various scenes pretty clearly evoke the noir of the 1940s-1950s, from the crime noir of The Big Heat and Kiss Me Deadly to the Hollywood melodrama of In a Lonely Place and A Star is Born. Casting Sterling Hayden, dependable lead of many classic noir films, in an important role is no accident, either, nor is the gatekeeper who impersonates classic stars like Jimmy Stewart and Barbara Stanwyck. This being the ’70s, there are also signs of European influence – at least I thought of Pierrot le fou when Marlowe smeared paint over his face in passive rebellion against police authority, and the ending is a pretty clear reference to the enigmatic final scene of The Third Man.

The Long Goodbye is a perfect example of a film very much of its time that both uses and plays against expectations based on previous cinematic tropes. It’s also a very intricate mystery with a good bit of enjoyable humor, though it’s not very suspenseful, largely because the Marlowe character is so detached throughout much of the film. This is part of why it didn’t work for me when I was younger, and I’m sure a good deal of why I enjoyed it more now is my greater knowledge of film history, but the film doesn’t really depend on that. It does depend on coming to it with an open mind and a willingness to buck expectations of detectives on film. Really, the rest of the film plays it pretty straight; it’s the unusual way Marlowe is portrayed that gives it a wild card feeling. It’s also very nicely shot, with a few virtuoso scenes (many of them at the beach house, using windows and reflections to get compositional effect) that will stick in your mind visually for quite a while. I’m really glad I gave the film another chance; it’s jumped right up there with Altman’s other films as one of my favorites in this series.

Short Cuts: Gene Deitch Animation

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Originally posted on Row Three.

Los Angeles’ fabulous repertory company Cinefamily shows an animated series every month hosted by Cartoon Brew‘s Jerry Beck. It’s always a great program, but a recent program focusing on the work of animator Gene Deitch is easily the most impressive of all the ones I’ve been to, despite the fact that I was not familiar with Deitch’s work beforehand. Deitch started off as an animator with UPA in the 1950s, then moved to Fox’s Terrytunes, with stints doing Tom & Jerry, Popeye, and Krazy Kat as well, before finally taking an opportunity to head an animation studio in Prague (where he still lives and works). Quite a varied and unusual career, held together by his unique eye and constant quest for new visual styles and innovative ways to use the medium. Deitch himself was here for the program, talking with Jerry about his career and his films, which was pretty special as he’s rarely back in the United States anymore. And of all the filmmakers who I’ve seen at Cinefamily screenings, he was probably the most engaging, with the most fascinating stories to tell.

But great stories are even better when the films they support are good, and I was quite simply blown away by the quality and creativity of these films, especially considering he was working with MGM and Fox, who are not as well known for pushing the envelope as UPA and Warner Bros. Deitch pushed it anyway, using a very angular, minimalist visual style as well as a highly abstract sense of story and narrative.

Watch what he does with Tom and Jerry here, taking two familiar characters and putting them in a very self-aware, meta-narrative story.

But more of the shorts we saw were original characters, like Flebus, a cartoon that was written and begun by Ernest Pintoff but completed by Gene Deitch, who was also the supervising director.

Or characters from books, like little Munro, who was drafted into the army at the age of four and had a Yossarian-esque odyssey trying to convince the higher-ups that their paperwork was in error.

There’s a wonderful simplicity to these stories – a walking box who just wants to be friends, a little boy who runs head-on into bureaucracy – but they’re both set apart by the uncharacteristically world-weary narration and the unusual animation style. Everyone raves, and rightly so, about the voice work that Mel Blanc did on Looney Tunes, but this is an almost wholly opposite strain of voice acting here that provides a wonderful counterpoint to what was going on over at Warners. It’s a bit more cynical, a bit harder-edged, and a bit more grounded in some ways. (Flebus is voiced by Allen Swift, Munro by Howard Morris.)

After moving to Prague (motivated in part by the promise of financing for Munro, which he obviously got – and the film won an Academy Award soon after), Deitch oversaw a bunch of Czech animators, who were working on animating children’s books. If you’ve seen Czech stop-motion animation, you’ll know how creative and off-beat their style is, and Czech hand-drawn animation is no different. Here’s a very strange short called Giants that was released in Czechoslovakia in 1968 – although Deitch originally meant it to be about Israeli/Palestinian conflict, it was immediately interpreted as a political statement on US/Russia relations, which fit rather well with events in Prague in 1968. I find it a little off-putting, personally, but it is….interesting. Yeah, let’s go with that. YouTube only has the Czech language version, unfortunately.

Here’s The Three Robbers, an example of the children’s book adaptations Deitch oversaw; in this case, he also provided the voiceover and all the sound effects, which makes for a unique experience. I love the abstractness of the animation here, how the robbers’ coats become darkness, and so on.

They ended the show with this short, The Juggler of Our Lady, even though it comes from earlier in Deitch’s career, back when he was with Terrytunes in the early 1960s, and fittingly so – it’s simply breathtaking.

Terrytunes has a reputation for being a little less willing to think outside the box than some of the other studios, for playing it safe, and sticking with formula. That’s surely not the case here, as Deitch and Co. take an existing picture book and stay true to the original minimalist, parchment-looking drawing style. He said he was fascinated by the idea of having this huge wide screen (CinemaScope had just been introduced) and having just little scribbles on it. The amount of negative space here is astounding, and used astoundingly well. It doesn’t show up as well in this version, which is not the CinemaScope version, but shown in the theatre in 35mm CinemaScope? Amazing. Not to mention the gorgeous score, which is also highly unusual for the time period.

He also had some interesting things to say about CinemaScope and how restrictive it actually was, especially on animation. With a nearly square screen, you could use it all and do interesting effects like spins that you couldn’t easily do with a physical camera. With CinemaScope, you couldn’t do those anymore, because the width being so much greater than the height, you couldn’t change orientation without losing a lot of the image – it restricted animation to be more like what you could in live-action. Also interesting was that for cartoons especially, you still had to make them so they looked good in non-CinemaScope theatres and on TV, so you basically had to compose everything for three different ratios (that’s presumably why the non-CinemaScope version of The Juggler of Our Lady is the one that’s prevalent on YouTube).

In addition to the cartoons above, we saw an entry in the Nudnik series, a character original to Deitch. The one we saw, which I think was Here’s Nudnik, I was unable to find on YouTube, but here is a sampling of the ones that are. We also saw an early Howdy Doody cartoon he did that never aired because he and his crew (who were young and rebellious at the time) refused to follow the house style of the show, and also a bit of “Tom Terrific,” a cartoon that aired as part of the Captain Kangaroo show. I quite liked Tom Terrific, which puts simple line drawings to really imaginative use, but again couldn’t find the one we watched. Here’s a little snippet of the opening, but most of the videos on YouTube have embedding disabled, so you’ll have to go there to see more.

All in all, it was a fascinating program with Deitch, and I’m very grateful to have been introduced to his work. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen any of it before, but be sure I’ll look for more of it now. Some of these things are difficult to find outside of YouTube bootlegs; it would be great if some of this stuff, especially the more obscure things like Tom Terrific, could find its way into DVD collections at some point. I’d eat it up.

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