Update: Hey, this post was rambling and non-sensical even for me. I’ll leave it as an example of what happens when you put stuff on the internets while tired. But here’s what I would’ve written had I been typing coherently last night:

“The Sopranos” aired its series finale this week. In the seven years the show ran on HBO, and the year or so it’s been in syndication on A&E, I’ve never seen a single episode. And because I’ve heard so much hype about it, I’ve avoided reading any spoilers about the series, knowing that at some point, I’d get around to watching it.

Still, the show is such a cultural phenomenon that just by doing what I normally do, I’ve managed to have some pretty significant points ruined for me. I know of three characters who died or were killed off, one of them involving pool cues. Just [today], I read no less than five blog posts that hinted at what went on in the finale, without really revealing anything.

So here’s the start of a reasonably interesting experiment: I started watching the series this week, and I’m three episodes in. I’m going to see how long I can go without being completely spoiled for the finale. Not looking for recaps or spoilers, just going on as I normally have been — I want to see if the show is significant enough that its finale will just leak into common knowledge, “Rosebud” style.

As for the series itself: So far, I’m liking it. There’ve been several of these series that have been highly recommended, usually by my friend Cory, but when I’ve finally seen them, they just don’t live up to the hype. My reaction to “The Sopranos” pilot was “hell yes, I’d keep watching that.” And the other episodes have me intrigued. Which is actually kind of surprising — except for Miller’s Crossing, I don’t like mob movies, and Goodfellas bores me so much I’ve never seen it all the way through.

Original:

Here’s the start of a reasonably interesting experiment:

And yeah, it’s a pretty good show. It’s been hyped a ton, and at least three episodes in, it lives up to it. Unlike some of the other HBO and Showtime series that I’ve heard about and then finally watched and been completely disappointed, this one looks like it deserves its initial hype.

Now I know how the Geico Caveman feels.

One of my friends has been complaining that a Korean R&B singer has stolen her identity. I don’t know if one Korean singer is better or worse than an entire new series (warning: that link plays video).

The series, which I decree shall never again be mentioned on this site, is supposedly a “drama” about a “Computer geek by day. Government operative by night.” Here are excerpts from two descriptions, with the most egregious segments highlighted in bold:

Chuck Bartowski is just your average computer-whiz-next-door. He spends his days working for Buy-More with his band of nerdy cohorts, longing to find a woman who can appreciate him. But when an old friend, who happens to be a CIA agent, sends Chuck a mysterious encoded email, the world’s greatest spy secrets are embedded into his brain.
He never asked to become the government’s most powerful weapon, but the fate of the country suddenly lies in his unlikely hands. Hopefully, this won’t take away from his video game time! International terrorist plots, sexy spies and cold pizza – it’s all in a day’s work for our trusty hero…Chuck.

And from one of NBC’s press releases:

From executive producer, Josh Schwartz (”The O.C.”) and executive producer-director McG (”Charlie’s Angels,” “We Are Marshall”) comes a one-hour, comedic spy thriller about Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi, “Less Than Perfect”) - a computer geek who is catapulted into a new career as the government’s most vital secret agent. [...] Instead of fighting computer viruses, he must fight assassins and international terrorists. With the government’s most precious secrets in Chuck’s head, Major John Casey (Adam Baldwin, “My Bodyguard”) of the NSA assumes the responsibility of protecting him. His partner is the CIA’s top agent (and Chuck’s first date in years) Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strzechowski, “Gone”). They’ll keep him safe by trading in his pocket protector for a bulletproof vest.

Haw! Nerdy computer guys are named Chuck and they can’t find a woman and they work at Best Buy and play videogames and wear pocket protectors! And hey look — it’s 1985 and that stuff is still funny!

I wouldn’t be bothered by the series appropriating my name if it could at least come up with something original. (Especially since they’re also releasing a US remake of the BBC series “The IT Crowd,” which manages to tell the same jokes, but cleverly). Is it really this easy to get a pitch picked up for TV these days? Maybe the atmosphere is exactly the right time to pitch my series about how lawyers are unethical, or how LA TV executives are vapid and unoriginal.

Until then, the only way to dispel the stereotype of computer geek shut-ins named Chuck is to complain about it on my blog.

On the other hand, the new Bionic Woman series (warning: more video, but better) looks pretty awesome. I almost feel bad for making fun of it before. Granted, it looks to be almost as heavy on the personal drama as I suspected. I expect lots of “they can repair my body, but they can’t fix the damage to my soul!” But it’s also got evil cyborg Starbuck, which makes it okay.

My favorite commercial ever, back from when Cartoon Network was still cool, has been impossible to find for years. Once again, YouTube saves the day:

I would’ve been willing to move back to Atlanta and work for Cartoon Network all based on that one ad. And the one where Jinx the Cat is riding a big wheel like in The Shining. And the one where Moltar describes back-to-back “Sailor Moon” episodes as “one solid hour of all-girl action.”

In robotics (and increasingly used in talking about CGI), the term “Uncanny Valley” refers to the point at which the attempt to make an artificial character more human-like backfires, and the character becomes more repulsive and disturbing than realistic.

Scott McCloud gives a simple, easily understandable explanation for why this happens in Understanding Comics: humans naturally look for patterns, and we want to anthropomorphize inanimate objects to better relate to them. So we turn power outlets into faces, and simple combinations of lines and circles into living, breathing people. In fact, the tendency is so hard-wired that once we recognize a face in something, it’s difficult not to see it anymore. Your brain wants to fill in the missing detail.

But once that extra detail is supplied for you, your brain stops trying to turn it into a human and instead starts to focus on the details that make it not human. The glassy, unfocused stare, or the eyes that don’t blink, or the way the mouth doesn’t move quite right. And as a result, a bunch of simple shapes can seem more like a person than the real thing. Or the simple, stylized dwarves in Snow White are more convincing and relatable than the rotoscoped human characters.

“Heroes” is getting precariously close to the edge of the uncanny valley. When it started out, it was “the show you hate to love”: filled with corny attempts at symbolism, clunky performances, sub-par dialogue, but still completely engaging. If only for the promise of seeing somebody getting the top of his head sawed off, or a still-living person splayed out on an autopsy table, or a guy escaping kidnappers by leaping into the air and taking off like a fighter jet.

But apparently somebody at NBC just couldn’t leave well enough alone, because they started trying to make it into a genuinely good series. They’ve still got the gross-out shots and the stunt casting and the improbable plot twists, and are adding signs that they might actually be starting to understand what they’re doing. Annoying and unnecessary characters are being weeded out, or made less annoying. The show is spending less time marveling at itself, presenting super powers we’ve already seen as if they were these amazing and novel concepts that will just blow your mind; now, they’re actually fleshing out the characters and showing them using their powers.

The twists and revelations are actually getting pretty interesting. For a while it looked like Isaac’s power was just to paint like Tim Sale, but they added a great twist of having the supervillain’s paintings come out heavily stylized and demented. Last night, they did a genuinely creepy and effective scene that revealed the new villain’s power isn’t shapeshifting, but making people see whatever she wants them to see. And they also put an interesting twist on their main villain, having him kill people all season but horrified to discover that he may be responsible for the deaths of millions of people.

And one of the episodes that aired a while back, “Company Man,” has been getting a lot of praise for being a turning point in the series — it had the hokey twists and the big climax with the cheerleader having her flesh burned off by a nuclear blast, but also added real characterization and a surprisingly moving ending.

The problem is that as “Heroes” approaches a Real Live TV Show, you stop filling over the plot holes and ignoring the clunky dialogue, and start to notice its flaws. I shouldn’t have to care that the characters are able to recognize the Nuclear Man from drawings that don’t look remotely like him. I shouldn’t be thinking that the plot has gotten so convoluted that there’s absolutely no sense of cause and effect anymore; things just happen randomly. It shouldn’t bother me that people just pop in and out of scenes, often in locations hundreds of miles apart from each other, only to deliver a couple of lines of dialogue that don’t amount to much of anything. And it was somehow more fun when you got the sense nobody involved knew much about comic books; now, the references to Jack Kirby and The Watchmen seem forced.

None of that stuff used to matter, back when the show was just a cartoon. But they’re going to have to come to a decision at some point — the whole bomb in Manhattan thing is so convoluted and overblown at this point, that I couldn’t really care less about it. The real explosion is coming when the show gets to take itself so seriously that it collapses under the weight of its own hype.

Last night Fox aired the two-part pilot for its series “Drive”, with another episode tonight. It’s about an illegal cross-country Cannonball Run-style car race for 32 million dollars, where the racers are coerced into participating, spies hired by the race operators are everywhere, and death is one of the punishments for finishing last (presumably). It’s got cross-overs into the Joss Whedon universe of TV shows: Tim Minear from “Angel” and “Firefly” is one of the show creators; Nathan Fillion of “Firefly” and Serenity stars as a gardner (or is he?!?) coerced into competing in order to rescue his kidnapped wife, played by Amy Acker of “Angel.”

I’ve watched the first two episodes, and I spent the entire time willing myself to like it. At times, it was like when you’re driving and your low fuel light comes on and you start semi-subconsciously trying to scoot the car forward with your butt to help it get to the gas station. I definitely wouldn’t call it “bad,” but it just kept falling just short of “great.”

There’s a real American Beauty taint to the proceedings; like that movie, the series always one-ups its various cliches… by replacing them with other cliches. By the end of the first two hours, it’s gotten everybody settled into pairs like on “The Amazing Race,” but they’re even more predictable archetypes than on the reality show: the young soldier and his girlfriend, the Latino ex-con and the half-brother he never knew, the Black Girls^TM, the dad reconnecting with his hip teenaged daughter, and a mousy abused wife and an in-it-to-win-it wild girl.

Latino guy drives a Low Rider and calls everyone “homes.” The teenaged daughter refers to him as a “road show production of West Side Story“, which I found out last night is known as “Hanging a lampshade on it.” Normally, I’m all over that kind of thing, but here it just seemed clumsy and bugged me even more.

There’s just something that feels safe and predictable about the whole thing. Even though Fox put frequent “Viewer Discretion Advised” warnings after the commercials, there was never anything particularly shocking, intense, or even surprising. It all seemed like a concept that needed something more than standard network television to really work, but would never work as a movie, either.

Still, I like the main story, as implausible as it is. And while I don’t get the crazy obsessive mania over Nathan Fillion that a lot of internet nerds have, I do like the guy and have never seen him do a bad job in anything. The show’s interesting enough to keep watching (I can’t imagine its lasting longer than a season, and I wouldn’t want to), and I hope it gets an audience if only so I can find out how it ends.

Normally, seeing my favorite things come together three separate times in one week would be downright eerie, but I don’t think Hellboy: Sword of Storms counts. For one thing, it’s old news. It was aired on Cartoon Network back in October, and due to a TiVo mishap, I’m just now catching it on DVD. For another thing, nerdy white American guys who think Japanese stuff is just radical is hardly some eclectic, obscure branch of fandom — it’s basically a demographic.

It’s not that hard to find fans of Hellboy, either — start by looking at the production of the comics or any of the adapations or spin-off projects, and just about everybody involved will confess to being a Hellboy fanboy. So the people making these things really love the source material. In the case of The Amazing Screw-on Head, you end up with a slavish recreation of the comic. That was an admirable effort, but came out a little bit cold, and also revealed the problems that can come when you try to adapt a very graphic comic art style to animation.

The new series doesn’t do that; they made a conscious effort to give it an art style different from the comics. According to the documentaries included on the DVD, it had to suggest Mignola’s style but at the same time he wanted something that would be more modern and streamlined. On top of all that, it had to be animatable on a television production’s budget. Personally, I’m not floored by the result — I think it’s fine, but if they were going to simplify the characters anyway, I wish they’d taken them a little bit further. The character designs regress into Disney Television Animation mode more than I would’ve liked. There are hints of the comic style all over the place (especially the hands, which is a good touch), but the characters frequently look too traditional and too “safe,” like something you’d see on any other TV action series cartoon.

Of course, this is criticism from a guy who knows pretty much nothing about art. And my disappointment that it didn’t go further doesn’t mean I disliked the movie; I’d even say it’s about as good as a TV-animated Hellboy series could possibly turn out. Watching the making-of documentaries, you could really tell that they put a lot of thought into the production, and that they made the right choices all along. And throughout the movie, you can really see what they were doing, even if you don’t entirely agree with how they did it.

As far as subject matter, it was obvious that I was going to be all over it. Most of the movie works like a survey course of The Obakemono Project. (Of course, it also wipes out my plans for NaNoWriMo this year, even though I swear I had the idea a year before I even heard about this movie). Mike Mignola and Guillermo del Toro mention that the original idea just came from wanting to see Hellboy with a samurai sword, and seriously, who wouldn’t want to see that? There are plenty of cool moments taken from the comics, from Japanese folklore in general, and images from classical Japanese art — there’s a great bit with the Gashadokuro, a giant skeleton that was also referenced in Pom Poko.

Apparently the second in the Hellboy Animated series, Blood and Iron, came out last month. I can’t blame the TiVo for missing that one; I was simply unaware that it was coming out. If anbody saw it, let me know how it turned out, because I’m going to have to wait until June to see it.

Speaking of set detail and “Battlestar Galactica,” I think I may have uncovered more shocking evidence that the colonists have connections to Earth. This has all happened before, and it will all happen again:


Like all of the Battlestars, the Galactica relies on NEC’s Multisync Series for the brightest, sharpest LCD displays in the entire galaxy. So see we all.

Has anybody on the internets made a parody video showing a Cylon waking up in the resurrection chamber and hearing the “Intel Inside” start-up sound? If not, pretend I made one and posted it here, because that is high comedy.

That same episode has what might be my favorite shot in the entire “Battlestar Galactica” series to date:

“I suspect this disc might be a fake, Commander. My first clue that it wasn’t an actual Colonial Defense Ministry disc is that we don’t have any devices that will play it because it’s not round.”

One of the comments from Ron Moore’s podcast about the series is that they never bothered to explain how the fleet got its infinite supply of cigarettes. I think the best explanation is that they form them out of all the excess paper they obsessively cut the corners off of.

I was just watching a few minutes of the original “Battlestar Galactica” series, and because I’m a nerd, I noticed that the displays and panels in the Vipers were full of English text. Because I’m a really big nerd, I started to wonder what that means in the context of the series as a whole.

There was a big deal made about the season 3 finale’s choice of music — it’s supposed to be some momentous sign that the colonists haven’t just been following a myth, and they really do have some kind of connection to Earth.

But modern English is all over the place in “Battlestar Galactica.” Some of it you have to have for dramatic impact:

So you can say that they’re just auto-translating whatever language the colonists speak into a version of English that exists thousands of years later. Which is fine, but they’ve also got it in places where it doesn’t matter — in badges and logos, books, and plastered on the side of the ship. The only real attempts at indicating they’re a truly alien group of people is that they’re still polytheistic (very cool), and that they cut the corners off all their paper (I still don’t get that).

The only reason I would’ve noticed any of this at all, is because another franchise already tackled the “problem.” I can still vividly remember seeing The Empire Strikes Back for the first time (Phipps Plaza in Atlanta, represent!) and every little detail just blowing my nine-year-old mind. When Luke is arguing with R2-D2 about flying to Dagobah, all of R2’s speech is translated onto a screen in the cockpit:

There’ve been dozens of documentaries and making-of promotions about the Star Wars movies and how they put insane amounts of effort into production details. But it still impresses me that they thought to invent a language not just for the aliens, but for the main characters. All as a reminder that the story is taking place you know where and you know when.

But I also remembered something from the first movie — I’m not sure how, because I was only six years old at the time. But this has still stood out in my mind just as clearly as any of the other memorable images:

That’s from when Ben Kenobi disables the tractor beam, and apart from the numbers on various displays, it’s the only bit of English text in the whole movie. (There are letters and numbers that flash on Darth Vader’s screen during the final battle, but they’re fuzzy, hard to make out, and aren’t there long enough to read).

The reason I’m only embarrassed to recognize this kind of thing, instead of being completely ashamed, is because I know I’m not alone. The special edition of the movie, in addition to the Greedo nonsense, wacky Jabba, and that damn shockwave, added this:

The same text, now in Basic. (Yes, the common language in Star Wars is called Basic, sometimes called Galactic Standard. You think after all this I’m going to pretend I’m not enough of a nerd to know that?)

I’m not sure if it was changed for the 1978 theatrical release, or if it was just put in for the “special” edition. But still, somebody involved in the production cared enough about creating an alien universe that they put in that detail. And they were thinking of this kind of thing as far back as 1979. Obviously, world-building alone can’t save a movie — the Star Wars prequels had insanely detailed concept art and production design — but I think it’s part of what makes the movies classic.

In case it sounds like I’m faulting the new “Battlestar Galactica” for not doing this, I’m not. They had more hours of content in their first half-season than all of the Star Wars movies combined, and having to constantly translate everything would’ve just been nerd-wankery that would’ve gotten in the way of the story. Their sets are just as detailed, like with Tigh’s fighter squadron logo hanging on the wall, or the minor but ingenious touch of writing “NO STEP” on the Viper bodies just like on a real aircraft. Especially when you compare it to the original series, which pretty clearly all took place on sparse sets somewhere in a Los Angeles studio. The reason the new series has so much resonance is mostly because of the writing, but also because at every step in the production, they’ve treated it as part of a real story that’s really taking place in a real world. Right down to the sparse sets on the Cylon basestars, which seem so alien because they look like they were filmed somewhere in a Los Angeles studio.

Plus, the production designers for “Galactica” realize how to make the civilization non-Earth-like exactly where it counts. A big part of that is the music, which they’ve chosen from the beginning to be foreign and vaguely mystical-sounding. Just like Star Wars wouldn’t have worked as well without the classical space-opera soundtrack, BSG has a constant subtle reminder that you’re watching an alien civilization with an alien religion. So the reason the song from the season finale worked so well at “breaking the fourth wall” and throwing everything off balance isn’t because it’s the only connection to Earth that we’ve ever seen, but because it’s the only pop song we’ve ever seen.

And because I’ve been taking so many screenshots, here’s one from “Battlestar Galactica” where you can totally see Starbuck’s nipple: