Every year, there's a bunch of "funniest shows you're not watching," and Fox's The Grinder (no relation to the gay dating app Grindr), which hasn't exactly been pulling in Empire season 1-type numbers but has been devastatingly hilarious, definitely falls under that category this season. Rob Lowe and the showrunning duo of Jarrad Paul, who's best remembered for his role as the struggling screenwriter of the wonderfully titled Beverly Hills Gun Club on the 1999 Fox cult favorite Action, and Andrew Mogel have somehow come up with a character who's even funnier and stranger than Chris Traeger, Lowe's fitness-obsessed, touchy-feely character from the beloved and similarly underwatched Parks and Recreation (although this new show's shtick of Lowe giving other men intense, head-rubbing "man hugs"--"Everyone should get hugs from Rob. It's like a massage,"said Fred Savage about his Grinder co-star in New York magazine--initially felt like a rehash of Chris kissing a typically flustered Ron Swanson on the lips on Ron's birthday or Chris weeping in Ben Wyatt's arms).

On The Grinder, the former Brat Packer stars as Dean Sanderson Jr., a pampered Hollywood actor who grew tired of the network TV, uh, grind. After quitting his role as Mitchard "The Grinder" Grinder, a super-brilliant maverick lawyer, on The Grinder, a long-running Fox legal drama that's as popular overseas as Baywatch was in countries where nobody speaks English but they all speak in worshipful tones about C.J. Parker as if she were a bottle of Coca-Cola, Dean Jr. has returned to his hometown of Boise, Idaho to check in on his younger brother Stewart (Savage) and their close-to-retirement father Dean Sr., who are both actual lawyers (as Dean Sr., William Devane doesn't really get to do much, but Devane does enough with his character to make us realize where Dean Jr. inherited all of his weirdness and sunny optimism, and like everyone else in the Grinder cast, Devane's able to do a lot with just one or two lines).


But Dean's stopover in Boise turns into a permanent stay when he realizes he wants a more normal life like Stewart's--Stew is happily married to Debbie (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), and they have two kids, Lizzie (Hana Hayes) and Ethan (Connor Kalopsis)--and he wants to be the Grinder in real life, and his delusions of taking the most absurd TV tropes from his old show and bringing them into the much more mundane reality of practicing law continually irritate Stew. Unlike Dean, who believes he doesn't need to pass the bar to practice law, Stew went through years of law school and hard work to get to where he's at today at Dad's law firm (Stew has also gotten the chance to blossom far away from his celebrity brother's shadow, so he resents having to go back to being the Sanderson brother who's not the center of attention in Boise).

Dean's favorite response to any person's admission that a goal or strategy is impossible is "But what if it wasn't?," a line his character used to frequently say on the old show. As Todd VanDerWerff notes over at Vox, "Dean doesn't know how our 'real' reality works; nearly everyone he encounters is so excited to get a taste of Dean's version that they go along with whatever he says should happen." However, there are two lone holdouts in Boise who object to whatever he says, and they are Stew and Claire (Natalie Morales, another Parks and Rec alum), the Sanderson & Yao firm's attractive new hire.

Claire is the only character other than Stew who has always found the plot twists on Dean's old show to be ridiculous. Dean is under the impression that Claire's dislike of both his vanity and his cluelessness about legal procedure in the real world is actually that old network TV cliché of masked sexual tension and that she's his love interest on this new show called real life, just like all the equally hot female second-chair characters he got to make out with when he played Mitch (Emmanuelle Chriqui and Arielle Kebbel are among the sultry "Grinder girls," and it's remarkable how they're able to not corpse whenever Lowe overdramatically slides office supplies off his desk before each of his love scenes with them for the show-within-the-show). But Claire is genuinely not interested in Dean (she prefers Dean's nemesis Timothy Olyphant, who nicely plays a very Zen--as well as douchey and childish--version of himself), and feminist viewers have interestingly found Dean's pursuit of Claire to be The Grinder's weakest element and way too reminiscent of the "Boyle wants to date Diaz and won't take no for an answer" storyline that Brooklyn Nine-Nine thankfully abandoned early on in its run.

Meanwhile, Debbie stands by her man Stew, but we get a slight inkling from the body language of Ellis' rather underwritten character (I'm enjoying how Ellis handles Deb's incredulous reactions to anything, particularly whenever junior-high-age Ethan emulates his Uncle Dean, but what the hell does Deb do for a living at her office?) that Deb's secretly enjoying the intrusion of TV reality into our reality a lot more than her husband is. She appears to be as fascinated by that intrusion as she is by the old show's implausible writing (whenever she and the other Sandersons are seen watching The Grinder or The Grinder: New Orleans, a spinoff starring Olyphant as Mitch's brother Rake, Deb's curling up with a relaxing glass of wine, as if the Grinder franchise is some trashy yet highly entertaining paperback, which it essentially is). Deb has the look of someone who sees Dean's weirdness not as an embarrassment but as an advantage for Stew and a welcome challenge to push Stew out of complacency and make him the best lawyer (and Sanderson) in any reality. Maybe the recapper community should start calling her Lady Macdeb.


The Grinder is a great mismatched sibling/business partner/buddy comedy in the vein of The Odd Couple--the Jack Klugman/Tony Randall one, not the Matthew Perry/Thomas Lennon one--and Savage is a terrific and relatable everyman foil to the bizarre Lowe in his first regular series role since 2006 (Savage had taken a quasi-Dean-style break from acting to become a prolific TV comedy director, working for shows like the one that introduced his current TV wife to comedy nerds as "the Waitress,"It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia). But the things that make The Grinder really stand out as a mismatched sibling comedy are the way that, as VanDerWerff puts it, the collision between TV reality and our reality borders on becoming a horror movie and, of course, the show's extra doses of Community-style meta-humor.

Dean, who's quick to recall storylines or tropes from his old show as if he were Manhattan E.A.D.A. Jack McCoy rattling off the names or outcomes of past trials from other courts, is basically Abed with abs. He's constantly talking about the rules of either TV logic or the TV industry like Abed--who, in my favorite moment of Abedness on Community, drove the super-pretentious professor at a Who's the Boss? studies course crazy over his elaborate theory that Who's the Boss? ruled in favor of Angela as the boss--used to do. For instance, Dean brings up the difficulties many showrunners experience whenever they have to follow up the pilot with the second episode while he's playing back his old show's second episode for Stew's family during, of course, The Grinder's second episode.

As clever as those bits of dialogue about TV logic are, the juicy little clips of the show-within-the-show, which foreshadow the themes of the A-plot during each of the cold opens, are actually more enjoyable as moments of meta-humor on The Grinder. In those clips, The Grinder astutely makes fun of a certain kind of early '00s network TV show that, due to changing tastes and the popularity of anti-hero dramas on both streaming services and cable, doesn't really get made anymore, except by CBS or TNT: the procedural as glitzy wish-fulfillment fantasy, anchored by the noble and hyper-competent cop or attorney who can do no wrong and always gets his man (or woman). On the show-within-the-show, the Grinder never settles and never loses a case. This gives him a better win record than that of Perry Mason, who was allowed to lose only once on CBS.









The show-within-the-show contains some nods to the soapy writing from one of Lowe's own post-West Wing attempts at wish-fulfillment TV, the 2003 NBC flop The Lyon's Den, in which he starred as the most idealistic and virtuous attorney in a law firm full of sharks. Mitch's scenes are even lit to look exactly like The Lyon's Den. In the name of justice, Mitch frequently pulls unlawyerly stunts that, in the real world, would either get him disbarred or cause evidence that could have benefited his clients to get thrown out of court, like disguising himself as another litigator with the help of a mask straight out of Mission: Impossible. Every episode of the show-within-the-show also finds him pulling some unbelievable skill out of what the ambiguously gay Craig Robinson thug character from Pineapple Express would have referred to as his little sexy ass, like the ability to canvass a crime scene more effectively than any other homicide detective in the city. All that's missing from Mitch is a cape.

If all this reminds you of Horatio Caine, the Miami-Dade police lieutenant who was written like a superhero and played by David Caruso as if he were auditioning to be Hyperion in a Marvel Studios screen version of Squadron Supreme (Hyperion's the only orange-haired male superhero I could think of), that's exactly who The Grinder is spoofing. Mitch even punctuates a courtroom scene with the Horatio-style donning of shades at one point. There's also a great little jab at Caruso's well-documented ego when Cliff Bemis (Jason Alexander), the creator/showrunner of both Dean's show and its spinoff, plans to kill off Mitch on The Grinder: New Orleans, and Stew reminds Cliff that Dean has a clause in his contract that says only Dean has authority over Mitch's fate--a deal that's similar to the one that was demanded by Caruso, who, in the universe of Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel's show, became so convinced that he was Horatio in real life that he asked for a clause stipulating that Horatio can't be killed without his permission.


Paul and Mogel clearly must have hate-watched a lot of CSI: Miami back when it peaked at number 7 on the end-of-the-season network ratings charts 11 years ago, just like I did for half of CSI: Miami's first season in 2002. I quit hate-watching it after sitting through the episode where Horatio gets a confession out of a murderer who incinerated his ex-girlfriend, who was pregnant with their baby when he murdered her, by presenting the perp with an age-enhanced photo of their dead kid that was made by Horatio's crime lab (that moment with the age-enhanced photo is the type of overblown scene Paul Scheer would love to make fun of on either his now-defunct procedural parody NTSF:SD:SUV:: or his current podcast How Did This Get Made?). I just couldn't take any more preposterous bullshit from this show casual TV watchers enjoyed as they folded laundry and TV nerds with more discerning tastes either hate-watched, ridiculed or turned into an inescapable meme (I was less patient with CSI: Miami than even Stew and Claire are with Dean's old show whenever they have to sit through its reruns).

When you first glimpse the clips of Dean's show, you're like, "It's 2016, and network TV is still riffing on both a hit procedural that's no longer on the air and a meme that's so 2006?" Fortunately, the gags Paul and Mogel have kept in their back pockets about CSI: Miami's ludicrousness are on the timeless side (as long as Horatio-ish network TV protagonists like Gibbs over on NCIS continue to cheat death, deflect bullets and cure cancer just like Horatio used to do, these gags will never be dated) and are mainly about that show's various plot holes and implausible moments, a part of CSI: Miami that hasn't been parodied enough, instead of the corny cold open one-liners and Caruso sunglasses that have been spoofed to death by everything from The Soup to Forgetting Sarah Marshall, aside from Mitch's one moment with a pair of shades. And it's no coincidence that in the laugh-out-loud funny clip during the cold open of "The Olyphant in the Room," the bald cop Mitch is man-hugging for an uncomfortably prolonged time resembles Frank, the bald homicide detective from all those CSI: Miami cold opens.



During Stew's puzzled or appalled reactions to all these over-the-top tropes from the screen that have invaded Boise since his brother's return, Savage's comic timing perfectly sells Stew's mild horror over the two worlds colliding. His timing also perfectly sells Stew's gradual adjustment to Dean's world, which has taken place during my favorite Savage acting moments on The Grinder, and that would be any time Stew stops fighting his brother's loony adherence to TV logic and tries on TV logic--awkwardly, of course, partly because Stew's a terrible public speaker--to help out Dean whenever he's in a pinch. But there's one other player on the show who has done an equally noteworthy job at handling the encroachment of Dean/Mitch's TV universe on Stew's universe, and he hasn't really been noticed for his work. That would be composer Jeff Cardoni, who gets to play along with Lowe and Paul (who cameos as Pincus, a dweeby, by-the-book straw man antagonist who keeps standing in the way of Mitch's heroics on the show-within-the-show) as they each poke fun at their own past TV work. And what was one of the shows Cardoni cut his musical teeth on? None other than CSI: Miami.

But instead of parodying his own Cuban percussion-influenced score music from CSI: Miami, Cardoni pokes fun at a grandiose style of orchestral leitmotif that was prominent during the heyday of The West Wing and makes a comeback on the broadcast networks every now and then (lately, it's kind of faded from network TV, along with the procedural about the cop or attorney who's a ridiculously immaculate human being). Cardoni's very first score cue in the Jake Kasdan-directed Grinder pilot is a noble-sounding diegetic cue on flute and clarinet, and it accompanies the network promo at the start of the broadcast of Dean's final Grinder episode. I'm going to call this West Wing-style flute-and-clarinet motif the "Grinder has an idea" motif (on Cardoni's site, it falls under the title "The Grinder Rests"). Or maybe it should be the "Grinder grinds" motif, like how Stewart Copeland would call his '80s Equalizer main theme "The Equalizer Busy Equalizing."



The "Grinder grinds" motif is all over the clips of the show-within-the-show, particularly whenever Mitch pulls another one of his melodramatic stunts in court or at his firm. There's also a reverbed chimes motif during the show-within-the-show that Paul and Mogel use as the score cue for the opening title card. The chimes motif evokes a gavel, just like how Mike Post's "doink-doink"sound effect for the intertitle cards on Law & Order and all its spinoffs evokes a gavel.

Now here's where the really fun part of Cardoni's score music begins: the encroachment of the TV universe on Stew's universe extends to the score music as well. So whenever Dean hatches a plan and drifts off into another one of his Mitch-style dramatic speeches or whenever, as his old character is so fond of saying, he simply grinds, Cardoni's ordinary-sounding and minimalist score, like the Thomas Newman-lite score he did with Freaks and Geeks composer Mike Andrews for the pilot, gets disrupted by the "Grinder grinds" motif from the show-within-the-show. It's an inspired musical gag that hasn't gotten old yet and probably never will, as long as Cardoni continues to find as many different variations on the motif as possible. Cardoni grinds, and when he grinds, he grinds hard.









It's a good thing that The Grinder is a single-camera comedy with no laugh track instead of a multi-cam shot in front of a studio audience. On Key & Peele, Keegan-Michael Key, Jordan Peele and director Peter Atencio resisted Comedy Central's insistence on studio audience laughter during their sketches because, as Atencio once wrote, "having that laughter cut in during an action movie or sci-fi style opening was like pouring ice-water on the viewer." Atencio added that putting together a sound mix where the dialogue, music and sound FX, which all played a role in the comedy in their sketches, could still be heard over the audience "is almost an impossible task" (to which Dean would have probably replied, "But what if it wasn't?"). Such laughter would have made it similarly difficult for The Grinder's editors, particularly music editor Ryan Castle, to achieve my other favorite recurring musical gag on the show. That would be whenever they abruptly cut off Cardoni's "Grinder grinds" motif or his chimes motif with a line of dialogue from either Stew (like when Stew says to Dean, "No, this is a terrible idea"), a character who objects to Dean's tactics or even Dean himself (like when he stops himself from trying to envision a dramatic synopsis for a newspaper profile about Stew), an editing touch that cracks me up almost every time.

Jeff Cardoni

One of the pilot's funniest moments of editing takes place during the episode's unspoken implication that Dean hears the old show's score music in his head while he's grinding or about to grind: a score cue from the show-within-the-show swells while Dean's experiencing a crisis of conscience inside a neighborhood bar, and then when the pilot cuts from the bar to a courtroom Dean is absent from, the cue is cut off before it can reach its climax. The editors also work that same kind of comedic editing magic when Dean improvises Mitch's death from poison to finally free himself of his old character, but on his own terms, at the end of "Grinder Rests in Peace," the show's best episode so far. Cardoni's score swells as Mitch takes his last few breaths--the presence of a score cue while Dean and Stew are acting in front of a camera is also a joke on how a lot of portrayals of TV or movie sets inadvertently create the misconception that single-camera shows are shot while an orchestra provides music right there on the spot--and then the editors snip the music from the soundtrack right when a crew member on the set says, "Cut!" They're all such entertaining ways to illustrate the tug-of-war between the TV world, where the music is always dramatic or omnipresent, and Stew's world, where the music is far more mundane or completely non-existent.


Cardoni's dead-on faux-procedural score music and the clever things Castle and the show's other editors do with that music are key to why The Grinder is one of the funniest overlooked comedies on network TV right now. It's not surprising that a sharply written and performed satire on hackneyed TV shows isn't conquering the network ratings right now; similarly sharp TV industry-related satires like 30 Rock and Community (yeah, it took place at a community college in the very Hollywood setting of suburban Colorado, but so many of its episodes picked apart or parodied TV clichés) were never network ratings hits either.

However, 30 Rock and Community ended up becoming beloved cult classics, and if it continues to play its cards right, The Grinder could be on its way to becoming a classic as well. There have been a million procedurals. The Grinder is the first one on a major network that's specifically about how the other 999,999 totally distort the jobs or professions they romanticize each week, and that premise is extremely funny--and somehow comforting--to me. The Grinder needs to keep on grinding.


The Grinder currently airs Tuesdays at 9:30pm on Fox, but who the fuck still watches TV shows live anymore? For those of us who prefer to time-shift, The Grinder is streamable on Hulu and Fox Now.

Writer's block is a problem I've been afflicted with since the days when I had to churn out college term papers, and it took me 17 years to realize that film and TV score albums--the kind of album I sometimes listened to as term paper writing music, as well as the kind of radio format I dabbled in for the past 18 years--are ineffective as a solution to writer's block. They're far from a solution. They're the cause of the problem.

Score albums are really shitty as music that helps me to concentrate on writing. In 2013, I wrote, "As study music, score albums were especially effective because... they often don't contain words, so they don't distract you too much from whatever you're reading." But when I'm not reading and I'm trying to write a blog post, score albums distract me, especially when a grandiose-sounding action movie score cue starts blasting in my headphones. That kind of music often wrecks my attempt to concentrate on filling a blank space with a paragraph and causes me to start thinking about the action sequence the cue was written for, followed by all the camerawork that went into it and then how excellent the action sequence choreography was. And then my brain starts to shout, "Yeaaaah, go, Iko Uwais!," or "Yeaaaah, throw that shovel hook, Michael B.!," and my concentration is completely destroyed.

Classical music and instrumental hip-hop don't come with that kind of baggage, which is why a few years ago, I switched to listening to those two genres while trying to write, and they've helped immensely. Having the Bay Area classical music station KDFC in my headphones helped me to finish writing a long post about David Bowie and Labyrinth and a longer post about The Grinder. But the classical music hasn't been working for me while I've been trying to get started on a post I've been wanting to write since December about Creed, Ludwig Goransson's catchy score from that film and Ryan Coogler's sublime use of 2Pac's "Hail Mary" as Donnie Creed's ring entrance music. I don't know why KDFC has failed to prevent writer's block in that instance, and it's made me notice one thing about KDFC: why is Hoyt Smith weirdly obsessed with germs? Every time I've awoken to Smith's program being broadcast in my headphones, it seems like his idea of morning-show levity is to intersperse the classical music suites with either disgusting studies about pillows that contain bacteria or studies about hand-washing. When did Adrian Monk find the time to become a classical music DJ? Because Monk as a classical music DJ is oddly awesome.

Smith mentioned something about hand-washing I was never aware of: people use "Happy Birthday to You" to time their hand-washing. So I Googled "Happy Birthday to You" together with "hand-washing" to see if this is actually a thing, and I found out from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that you should "scrub your hands for at least 20 seconds," and if you need to time yourself, "hum the 'Happy Birthday' song from beginning to end twice."


Uh, "Happy Birthday to You"? I have enough trouble trying to power through that ditty when I have to join in singing it to a person I dislike, and now I'm being told I ought to hum that song to nobody, while I'm washing my hands? Nah, B, I'll pass. "Happy Birthday to You" should only be hummed or sung above a birthday cake. Above a bathroom sink is just weird. Also, "Happy Birthday to You" is expensive to clear, and I might get sued.

There are much more effective--and much less awkwardness-inducing--20-to-40-second pieces of music than "Happy Birthday to You" to time your hand-washing with, and in keeping with my ban on listicles because the AFOS blog is a listicle-free zone, I'm going to replace the CDC's choice of "Happy Birthday to You" with any one of those pieces of music, without inanely organizing them into a list. A KDFC listener suggested to Smith that a snippet of Mozart's take on "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" would work like gangbusters as a hand-washing timer from the classical music world, but if you're a film score music nerd, you don't want to hear "Twinkle, Twinkle" or "Happy Birthday to You" while you're bathing your hands. You want your hand-washing to be soundtracked by the 1997 Men in Black trailer music, a.k.a. Elliot Goldenthal's 32-second "Confronting the Chief" from Demolition Man, the bizarre 1993 sci-fi flick that's either a reflection of Sylvester Stallone's right-leaning politics (many interpret the film as a conservative parody of Clinton's America) or a liberal's satirical nightmare about a conservative's idea of utopia (Sandra Bullock lives in a future where people get fined for swearing and anti-abortionists won out in the abortion debate) or is possibly intended to be both things at the same time.



I use my phone mainly as a music player, and I fill it with hip-hop mixes or singles. I don't have it inside my phone right now, but if it were inside my phone and my headphones were plugged in to my phone while washing my hands, I would put on as a hand-washing timer DJ Shadow's 41-second "Why Hip-Hop Sucks in '96."

Why wash my hands like a brain-dead zombie when I can both wash my hands and think about the greed of the copyright industry and its crippling effect on creativity in hip-hop at the same time? People hate on Sacramento all the time, but if it weren't for Sacramento, we wouldn't have Shadow or the succinct genius of "Why Hip-Hop Sucks in '96."



But if you're a white person with OCD, go with "Kashmir."



And if you're a person of color with OCD? Kanye's "Last Call."


See, CDC? That's what happens while you're busy trying to protect the world from Chipotle. Your Spotify playlist comes off as if it's frozen in 1893. There's a whole world of beautiful music out there besides the song that keeps the pockets of Warner/Chappell's copyright lawyers fat and makes world-weary waiters and waitresses want to shove some cake into the faces of annoying customers who demand that they sing it to them.

The Creed score, the score that will make you frequently say, "Yeaaaah, hit him with the quickness, Michael B.," is the penultimate score to be added to the AFOS playlists. The final score that's been added to the playlists is John Williams' Star Wars: The Force Awakens score. Both scores are currently being streamed on AFOS until the station goes off the air for good on January 31.

(Photo source: Venture Bros. character and prop design supervisor Chris George)

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



Venture Bros. co-writers Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer's decision to burn down the Venture Compound and give the newly wealthy Dr. Venture and his sons Dean and Hank a new home in Publick and Hammer's real-life hometown of New York is often, at a late point in a TV show's lifespan, the kind of risky move that screams out creative bankruptcy. When Jenji Kohan similarly burned down the setting of Agrestic and freed the Botwins from their suburban confines, Weeds experienced a creative decline that was so awful it has made me wary of forming an attachment to Kohan's Orange Is the New Black. Is Orange going to lose its way just like post-Agrestic Weeds did? (I wouldn't know. I actually haven't watched a single episode of Orange on Netflix yet.) So all I could think of while watching the three-minute, online-only epilogue of "All This and Gargantua-2," last year's hour-long setup for The Venture Bros.' move to New York, was Weeds and its long, slow and stoner-paced decline.

Publick himself seems to be aware of the failure that can result from the riskiness of getting rid of a setting viewers have grown attached to and bringing wealth into the lives of characters who are distinctive for their lowliness and desperation, because he has said, "Basically, we just had Dr. Venture win the lottery like Roseanne." The lifestyle porn that was on display in Roseanne's much-maligned final season--a season that seemed to reflect Roseanne Barr's love for Absolutely Fabulous (she, in fact, wanted to produce an American version of AbFab at the time)--was deemed as a betrayal by so many of Roseanne's biggest champions in the TV critic community. But if "Hostile Makeover,"The Venture Bros.' narratively busy (and maybe way too busy for some viewers) but extremely funny sixth-season premiere, is any indication, Publick and Hammer know what they're doing and are doing their damnedest not to have another Weeds or Roseanne on their hands.

(Photo source: Venture Bros. color design supervisor Liz Artinian)

Of course, the pimpin' Columbus Circle penthouse Dr. Venture inherited from his smarter and now-dead twin brother J.J. looks fantastic, and the Titmouse animators' artwork of Ventech Tower at night is so gorgeous I've been thinking of turning it into wallpaper on my Mac. But all signs of Entourage-y lifestyle porn are quickly done away with when 1) the Venture family's power walk to the penthouse is soundtracked not by some recent Top 40 hit but by a parody of "The Power," Snap's very '90s hit single (the chorus declares that "Rusty's back on top now") and 2) Rusty fires all of J.J.'s employees, which proves that the self-absorbed wanna-be genius hasn't lost any of the pettiness, dickishness and narcissism that have made Dr. Venture so compelling as a comedic creation. Losing J.J., a family member he never really liked, to cancer hasn't softened Dr. Venture either.

Rob McElhenney once said he intentionally gained weight in season 7 of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia because he wanted to make fun of how sitcom stars become more handsome or thin when they get richer and begin to wave around cash at personal trainers or plastic surgeons. So McElhenney did the opposite and uglied himself up for just that one season. There's a similar "I don't give a fuck"-ishness to what Publick and Hammer are doing with Dr. Venture (and Hank) at the start of the new season.

The presence of more money hasn't wiped away Dr. Venture's dorkiness. It's made him flaunt that dorkiness, as evidenced by Dr. Venture's visit to Enzo's tailor shop for a rare and expensive speedsuit (I love Enzo's clichéd gasp of "Santa Maria!" when he hears Brock Samson dismissively refer to the speedsuit as a jumpsuit) and his continuing insistence that speedsuits are going to catch on as futuristic couture someday (uh, no, they won't). A lesser show would have Dr. Venture ditch the speedsuits for Armani this season. But The Venture Bros. isn't a lesser show. It's one of the sharpest shows around that's specifically about failure and narcissism, and it's aware that wealth often doesn't make a person who's already a huge asshole less of an asshole: it only amplifies the worst aspects of that person (J.J.'s choice of naming his museum the Jonas Venture Jr. Museum of Jonas Venture is a good previous example of this).

And I hate to quote Biggie like some have done in their reviews of "Hostile Makeover," but mo' money really does bring with it mo' problems: Dr. Venture's newfound wealth has made him a bigger target for supervillains. A Wilson Fisk-ish New York gangster named Wide Wale (Hal Lublin) wants--and gets, thanks to a sketchily explained business deal with Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, who remains the closest to being a voice of reason on The Venture Bros., even more so than Brock--exclusive arching rights to Dr. Venture. It's a great development for those of us who are interested in seeing how The Venture Bros. will bring the mob into its storyteling, but it's bad news for the Monarch, the always-second-tier Guild of Calamitous Intent member who's now sixth-tier.

Being a bigger target also makes Dr. Venture and the protection of his contributions to super-science a bigger priority for the OSI, which removes a disappointed Sgt. Hatred from the task of bodyguarding the Ventures (the compound burned down under Hatred's watch) and reassigns the much more competent Brock to bodyguarding them. Meanwhile, Hank, who's never been familiar with the concept of not attracting attention, acts like all the gangsters after the Lufthansa heist in GoodFellas and uses Dad's money to attract attention and splurge on things he doesn't need. Not even Dean, the more sensible Venture brother, is immune to the things money can buy.







Brock doesn't really care for this new Hank, but thanks to the sublime voice work of Patrick Warburton, Brock's fatherly attachment to this kid who was possibly cloned from his DNA (a longtime rumor among Venture Bros. fans about Hank's DNA that I doubt this show will ever resolve) re-emerges in the two scenes he has with Hank in "Hostile Makeover." His exchanges with Hank--this poor kid who's the way he is because he's been raised by Dr. Venture in a household that's far from normal and who could really use a more sensible father figure like Brock--are an element of The Venture Bros. that I've missed so much during the seasons when Publick and Hammer kept Brock separated from the Ventures.

The blond killing machine has done so many badass acts of action sequence heroism on The Venture Bros. that it's easy to forget during his conversation with Hank about Justin Bieber's douchiness that Brock's a guy with a mullet and it's easy to miss the joke of a guy with a mullet passing judgment on style and fashion.








And I like how Brock's panic in his other (and very nicely animated) scene with Hank turns from fatherly to motherly--has Brock ever looked and sounded this distressed anywhere else?--when Hank attempts to rescue an attractive girl who's been revealed in articles about the show's new season to be Wide Wale's six-gilled daughter (she has no dialogue in "Hostile Makeover," but I assume she's to be voiced by Fargo alum Cristin Milioti, who's currently starring in Lazarus, the off-Broadway musical co-written by one of Publick and Hammer's favorite rock stars, the late David Bowie). He misreads her ability to breathe underwater as a suicide attempt.

Hank has all of his possible real dad's bravery but none of his smarts or perceptiveness.













The change in scenery to New York is, so far, a terrific move for The Venture Bros. It allows for Titmouse to come up with gorgeous-looking nighttime action sequences in Columbus Circle like that grappling gun sequence with Hank and the Ventech Tower parachute jump that was briefly glimpsed at the end of the epilogue of "Gargantua-2." The move to New York also allows the Venture Bros. characters to play around in Marvel's favorite setting of Manhattan.

But because the show's a satire on the things Publick and Hammer enjoy, the likes of Gary (who, in one of the show's earlier seasons, was seen possessing one of Marvel's most popular '00s kids' toys, a pair of talking Hulk fists), Brock, Rusty and Dean are interacting not with the actual Avengers and the actual Spider-Man but with the Crusaders Action League--an inept Avengers ripoff that, because this is the overly bureaucratic world of the Guild and its constantly squabbling and rulebook-obsessed members, refuses to help out New Yorkers for free and pesters them for protection money--and a more anatomically correct version of Spidey. "Hostile Makeover" marks the return of Brown Widow (Nathan Fillion), a loser who shoots webbing from his butthole and was first seen interacting with Dean when Dean had an internship in New York in the fourth season. Fillion is the perfect guest star for this show (as are comedians like James Adomian, who voices Crusaders member Night Dick, and SNL MVP Kate McKinnon), but a Spidey parody feels kind of hacky at this late point in Spidey's Hollywood (and Broadway) popularity. I found more laughs in the noisy corduroy suit Wide Wale wears--what other animated show pulls off a corduroy joke and doesn't give a shit about some of its viewers missing the joke in Wide Wale's name?--and the pointlessly invisible chariot Warriana (McKinnon), the Crusaders' Wonder Woman counterpart, uses as her ride.

Wide Wale (Photo source: Chris George)

I thought the not-so-prolific Darin Morgan's return to the initially underwhelming revival of The X-Files was going to be the TV homecoming I'd be the most enthusiastic about this week, and while Morgan's work on "Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster" was indeed immensely satisfying, the return of The Venture Bros. is neck-and-neck with Morgan's return as the most welcome return to TV this week (also, welcome back, Venture Techno Industries robot servants who amusingly speak in my Mac's "Fred" PlainTalk voice). There are still Venture Bros. viewers who complain about Publick and Hammer taking their sweet time crafting material between seasons, but in an age when Larry David and Louis C.K. defy network procedure, prize quality over quantity and take two-year (or longer) breaks between seasons (Aziz Ansari and Alan Yang will perhaps do the same with Master of None), these viewers ought to be used to the long waits by now, especially when they result in a consistently hilarious opener like "Hostile Makeover."

Other memorable quotes:
* Tosh Tompkins, a.k.a. Stars & Garters (Mark Gagliardi), while hassling Mark, a.k.a. Brown Widow: "Ha ha! Mark Knopfler crapped his pants! Again!"
Dean, referring to Tosh: "That guy goes here? He's like 40."
Mark: "Yeah, he's a teacher."



* Dot Comm (McKinnon), a villainess in a Tron costume: "Will the council be more diverse because I for one would like to see more women in positions of authority?"
An African American Guild member in a clover-shaped eyepatch: "And more people of color."
A purple-skinned Guild member in a Baseball Furies outfit: "And more people of color!"

(Photo source: Venture Fails)

* Stars & Garters: "Saved your boy there from this blond bruiser and his killer karate bot!"
Dr. Venture: "They're my bodyguards, Miss Firecracker!"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



"Maybe No Go" catches up with Venture Bros. side characters Billy Quizboy and Pete White--the former, by the way, was last seen constantly being annoyed by the company of Rose, who's both the hydrocephalic super-scientist's mom and a retired superheroine formerly known as Triple Threat, while he was dragged along with Rose and her current boyfriend Action Man to the Gargantua-2 space casino's opening gala--and pretends the ongoing rivalry between the trailer park roommates and Augustus St. Cloud is the subject of a Billy/Pete spinoff. I've said before that so many different shows could be spun off from The Venture Bros.' fully realized (and crowded) universe--I'm not holding out hope for a spinoff about the Order of the Triad because the not-exactly-prolific Jackson Publick isn't really all about that franchising life, but an Order of the Triad series would rock the most out of all possible Venture Bros. spinoffs--and the Doc Hammer-scripted "Maybe No Go" briefly runs with that idea many Venture Bros. viewers like myself have had in our heads about various spinoffs.

The episode presents snippets of the off-screen battles between Dr. Venture's college buddies and their roly-poly arch-frenemy--the snobby heir of the St. Cloud plastics fortune and a sore loser who never got over Billy beating him on the game show Quizboys--via a fake opening title sequence for the Riptide-esque action show Billy Quizboy and the Pink Pilgrim. Back when the late Stephen J. Cannell was the Shonda Rhimes of mid-'80s network TV and Cannell was able to dominate a whole night of programming with his independently made output, Riptide was a Cannell joint that aired back-to-back with the Cannell/Universal hit The A-Team on NBC's '80s Tuesday night schedule. The Magnum, P.I.-esque Riptide was such a disposable piece of Reagan-era fluff that all I can remember about it was that it featured boat chases and a constantly malfunctioning robot buddy. Billy Quizboy and the Pink Pilgrim also features beachside action sequences and a robot buddy. In this case, the robot sidekick is Robo-Bo, who was programmed by Billy and Pete to speak in the PlainTalk Fred-style voice of Jonas Venture Jr.'s J-Bots--I love how Fred is the only kind of robot voice the scientists on this show can get to work--and weirdly bear the face of Bo, as in Bo from The Dukes of Hazzard.

(Photo source: Uproxx)

And like Riptide (which was the type of '80s fantasy that would constantly make an earlier and much more grounded Cannell character like Jim Rockford roll his eyes), Billy and Pete's spinoff is on the bland side, although I'm tantalized by the clips of Augustus cosplaying as the Marvel supervillain Galactus and Billy appearing in the form of a giant lizard like in the old video game Rampage. The big joke about the fake Billy/Pete show is that those clips of Billy, Pete and Robo-Bo tangling with monsters all over the world and scoring babes are misleading, and if their fake show were an actual one, it would largely be just the three of them parked in front of their terminals and speed-typing inside the "Quizcave" (as seen while Augustus sics a Robosaurus on their trailer), which doesn't exactly scream out sexy times. Pete's instruction to "Set the ground at Z-pulse through the electrical, then run diagnostics on the echo. Configure the kickback waves to resonate at that frequency" is the type of hackneyed techno-gibberish I hope Bryan Fuller stays away from when he works on that upcoming CBS All Access Star Trek project I'm now excited about simply because it will be spearheaded by Fuller, the Trek alum who went on to make intriguing cult shows like Wonderfalls and Hannibal and has always dreamed of casting Angela Bassett as a captain and Rosario Dawson as her first officer, a pairing that, in Fuller's hands, would be like the greatest (non-DS9) Trek spinoff of all time.

Billy, Pete and Augustus (the pageboy-wigged billionaire is every single rich asshole you never liked when you were a kid and was forced by either your teacher, your mom or the kid's mom to hang out with) are basically grown men having pathetic-looking play dates that are arranged not by their parents but by themselves. Their battle over possessing the red ball prop from Duran Duran's classic 1983 video for "Is There Something I Should Know?," the song that provided this episode with its title, is amusingly low-stakes in comparison to Wide Wale's threats against Dr. Venture's new business empire and the Monarch nearly getting his ass shrunk by the laser eyes of a villainess named Redusa (Kate McKinnon) while he searches behind his wife's back for the Guild of Calamitous Intent member who secretly talked her into signing away to him the Monarch's arching rights to Dr. Venture (the Monarch doesn't know yet that the Guild member is Wide Wale). The Monarch wants to forever play a game of supervillain-vs.-super-scientist with Dr. Venture, but he's so far up his own ass that he's unaware that he's not very good at arching (he's so lousy at it that he didn't know his parents kept a gigantic supervillain's lair under his childhood home in Newark this whole time) and is nothing without his powerful Guild council chairwoman wife or his sometimes exasperated but eternally loyal henchman Gary.

The Venture Bros. follows in the footsteps of The Simpsons, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic andBob's Burgersand becomes the latest animated show to parody Trainspotting's withdrawal sequence. (Photo source: Uproxx)

Like the tranquilizer-addicted Pirate Captain reminds Dr. Venture at one point in "Maybe No Go," you got to live in reality--a bit of advice that's ignored on this show by anybody who's not a pragmatic type like Brock or Dr. Mrs. the Monarch--and the tug-of-war between reality and fantasy is an old Venture Bros. theme "Maybe No Go" revisits in the Monarch's refusal to let go of arching Dr. Venture and Augustus' inability to move past the fact that dirt-poor Billy is smarter than him. Augustus let that disappointment consume him so much that he had the Quizboys set rebuilt in his mansion for a rematch with Billy in "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?" (and he got beaten again).

In "Maybe No Go," Augustus has another old set pointlessly rebuilt as part of his feud with Billy, and this time it's the set from the "Is There Something I Should Know?" video, whose graphics and scene transitions are perfectly recreated by the Titmouse animators during what has to be the visual and comedic highlight of this episode. The sequence is also the show's first Duran Duran-related sight gag since the enjoyable montage where Dr. Venture relived the racist "Hungry Like the Wolf" video while having a meltdown and running away from his responsibilities in the second-season premiere. Racist video aside, Duran Duran is a band that's impossible to dislike, and "Maybe No Go" will make you want to go YouTube or Spotify a bunch of their best songs afterward. "A View to a Kill" is my favorite Bond song. "Save a Prayer" is the type of stylish and non-cheesy slow jam that should have opened Spectre instead of the underwhelming "Writing's on the Wall," but only if Daniel Craig's Bond had been written as a tormented Catholic like Matt Murdock instead of as a tormented atheist. The Nile Rodgers era of Duran Duran is solid, but I'm more partial to the sounds of "Planet Earth" and "Girls on Film." I even like that single Duran Duran recorded with Justin Timberlake nearly a decade ago. Man, Augustus, get your disgusting sausage fingers off the Duran Duran memorabilia right now.








Augustus' maturity level is akin to the time when Hank thought he was Batman (currently, Hank thinks he's Steve McQueen). He takes the actual Henrietta Pussycat puppet from the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, one of many priceless collectibles he's been able to procure, and uses it as a shower mitt, just to piss off Billy. Augustus has always been obnoxious, but during that shower scene involving a beloved piece of our Mister Rogers-watching childhood, he crosses the line into "This motherfucker needs an ass-whupping from Brock."

Speaking of Brock, the OSI agent finds out in "Maybe No Go" about both Wide Wale's first plan of attack on Ventech and the gangster's connection to Dr. Doug Ong, a mad scientist who worked on finding "a cure for cancer in cuttlefish DNA" in the '80s and fused his DNA with that of a marine mammal known as a dugong (that's actually a Tagalog word, by the way, for "lady of the sea") to become Dr. Dugong. The mad scientist was killed by the Monarch when the Guild forced a disappointed Monarch to arch him a few seasons ago. Wide Wale is revealed to be Dugong's brother Chester, which could mean that he took over as Dr. Venture's arch just to get his revenge on the Monarch (and if Wide Wale wants the Monarch dead, will that lead to the Monarch having to turn to Team Venture for help?), but I was more surprised by the episode's revelation that Wide Wale has the Crusaders Action League in his pocket and is running the Crusaders' protection racket. So in Team Venture's New York, the Avengers work for the Kingpin, which is some depressing shit, but it's perfect for this show's skeptical, almost Iñarritu-esque view of superheroes. On this show, they're either corrupt, sexually dysfunctional or pedophilic.

With the help of Sgt. Hatred, who quit the OSI because of his unhappiness with being removed from Venture security detail and has taken a job as a Ventech Tower tour guide, Brock is able to foil a break-in by Wide Wale's henchmen. Dr. Venture is, of course, totally unaware of how much danger he's now in, especially after he refused to fork over protection money to the Crusaders, and he's now probably doing every night that old Louie De Palma ritual of stripping down to his underwear and rolling around for hours in piles of money that used to belong to his brother. But he does one good thing in "Maybe No Go," and that would have to be the moment when he agrees to follow a suggestion from Dean about forming a team to work on speculative engineering instead of rejecting Dean's suggestion and saying, "I'm the fucking boss of Ven-whatever. Only my ideas matter." It reminds me a bit of the interesting "bonding over super-science" moment shared by Dr. Venture and Dean while they attempted to fix the space station shield in "All This and Gargantua-2." These moments also illustrate how Dean is the kind of brilliant thinker Dr. Venture could be if he stopped coasting on his fame as both a scientist/adventurer's son and the inspiration for The Rusty Venture Show ("Brought to you by smoking!").

I don't know where this new, eight-episode season is headed as far as Wide Wale's scheming goes, but I'm enjoying what "Hostile Makeover" and "Maybe No Go" have done with the season so far. I hate Augustus, but his acquisition of Billy and Pete's company turns out to benefit Billy and Pete when he sells their company to Dr. Venture, who summons them to New York to have them work alongside him, presumably in the speculative engineering department, and that frees Billy and Pete from the boredom they were clearly experiencing while having to humor Augustus. When Jackson Publick discussed the character of Hank with The Mary Sue, he said that "he possesses a childlike wonder about everything, you know? He kinda thinks everything is cool, he has a can-do attitude, he's got a decent amount of confidence, but he doesn't express it in that asshole way that Dr. Venture or the Monarch do." In "Maybe No Go," Billy and Pete represent that kind of optimism as well--after they lose their company to Augustus, there's an unexpectedly moving moment where a despondent Pete questions the magic of Duran Duran's red ball, and Billy, who hasn't lost all hope, says, "Why would you doubt that?" (Doc Hammer's terrific delivery of this line is key to why the moment's unexpectedly moving)--but they're, of course, a bit more mature about that optimism than Hank. I'm curious about what big, bad New York will be like through Billy and Pete's eyes and how the duo will react to the changes that come with their new home. And as they try to make their way to this ordinary world, will they learn to survive?

Other memorable quotes:
* Dr. Mrs. the Monarch: "On the books, y-you're a Six. But that was when you had over 100 henchmen and a flying cocoon. So if I were to reassess, I'd go with Three, maybe Four."
Monarch: "Three or Four?! C'mon, Tantrum Rex is a Level Four! Tantrum Rex! He looks like the 'Not the mama, not the mama' baby dinosaur puppet."

(Photo source: Venture Fails)

"Mousse? I didn't even know they made hair mousse anymore."

"Hey hey hey, check it out, I'm in Flock of Seagulls."

"Hey, look, look, I'm in the Exploited."

"Billy, rememberTool Academy?"

* "Without this ball, the New Romantics could never have happened. Duran Duran would be a jock-rock band."

* "Imagine: no Spandau Ballet to write 'If You Leave.'" Augustus, who thought the 1986 cult favorite Highlander came out in 1983 in "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?," makes another mistake and gets away with it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to remember that OMD wrote and performed "If You Leave," not Spandau Ballet. Even though he gets dates, facts and lyrics wrong (he says, "Reflex is a lonely child," when it's actually "The reflex is an only child"), I love how Augustus appears to be obsessed with the works of Russell Mulcahy, who directed both the "Is There Something I Should Know?" video and Highlander.

* "If there's no New Romantics, stuff like nu rock would have happened way earlier. I mean, Linkin Park and System of a Down would have formed in the '80s. And that would have ruined future hip-hop, and with no good hip-hop, there's no RZA. And I lost my virginity to side A of Wu-Tang Forever. We had to do it! Just think of what your hair would look like."



* Manolo (Hal Lublin), the handyman Gary spoke Spanish to last week (and whose van is still badly dented from Warriana's chariot accident in a funny little bit of continuity): "Your wife no home, so I wait for you. You're not going to believe this!"
Monarch: "I knew you spoke fucking English!"

* Brock: "Buy you a beer?"
Sgt. Hatred: "Uh, still an alcoholic, but, uh… Aw, heck, I'll just go to an extra meeting."

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



In "Faking Miracles," the Monarch--the failed Venture Bros. supervillain who thinks he possesses an intellect equal to that of Phantom Limb, his wife's ex, or even Wide Wale, but he's hardly in their league and is also currently without both an army of henchmen and the floating cocoon he and his minions used to call home--reacts the way you'd expect a wanna-be supervillain to react to discovering his father was a superhero: not very well. His reaction is akin to a white supremacist finding out one of his parents was actually Jewish.

On the other hand, Gary is fascinated with both the Blue Morpho--who based his crimefighting persona on the tropical butterfly known as the morpho, just like how his son is a butterfly-themed arch--and the state-of-the-art-for-the-'60s cave the Morpho kept below the Monarch's childhood home in Newark (color design supervisor Liz Artinian and her color design crew nicely recapture the bold late '60s network TV colors of Batman and Star Trek in their color schemes for the Morpho's cave). Gary tries to get his boss to see that being the son of the Morpho is actually a cool thing, even though the Morpho appears to have been a second-tier superhero who was often drunk on the job in the '60s flashback that opens "Faking Miracles." In Scaramantula's lair on Spider-Skull Island, the Morpho and Kano, a future Team Venture member, are seen rescuing the kidnapped members of the original Team Venture roster, including Jonas Venture Sr., who dislikes the Morpho. His second-rate quality seemed to affect even his own merchandise: the comic book that was based on the Morpho's crimefighting career tanked after only six issues ("Not Kirby's best work," notes Gary, who probably isn't too fond of Jack Kirby's strange 2001: A Space Odyssey comic from the '70s either).

(Photo source: Liz Artinian)

Voiced by Paul F. Tompkins, whose mustache happens to resemble his character's stache, the Morpho is a hybrid of the '60s William Dozier versions of Batman and the Green Hornet. Hank's Adam West-style Batman Halloween mask established that the '60s Batman show exists in the Ventureverse, so that means the Morpho wasn't the Batman or Hornet of this universe and was instead the Monarch's socialite dad ripping off the lead characters from Batman and its much less comedic sister show (a Batman/Green Hornet crossover was Dozier's attempt to get Batman viewers to catch The Green Hornet). Dozier was, by the way, the Greg Berlanti of 1966, but while Berlanti has been able to build an empire out of his network TV adaptations of Green Arrow, The Flash and Supergirl, Dozier found success only with Batman. Based on an old radio drama that oddly took place in the same universe as The Lone Ranger's, The Green Hornet didn't become a popular TV show until a few years after its cancellation, when Bruce Lee's popularity renewed some interest in his role on the show as Kato, while Dozier's 1967 attempt to bring Dick Tracy back to TV failed to get past the pilot stage.

I'm looking forward to whatever Gary and the Monarch will be doing with all the equipment the Monarch's Dozier-style dad left behind. They're going to need to arm themselves with more than just the Monarch's tranq dart shooters now that Wide Wale followed up his act of ousting the Monarch from the position of arching Dr. Venture with the act of framing the Monarch for the violation of Guild of Calamitous Intent arching policy. In another nod to the '60s, "Faking Miracles" writer Jackson Publick has Wide Wale turning to none other than Dean Martin (Toby Huss), who had a cameo in "All This and Gargantua-2," to impersonate the Monarch and ruin this Level Six Guild member he finds to be a nuisance to the Guild, perhaps as retribution for the Monarch killing his brother Doug, a.k.a. Dr. Dugong, out of anger over the first time the Guild took away his arching rights to Dr. Venture.

In the Ventureverse, the Rat Packer never died and is known in the New York arching community as Copy-Cat, a supervillain whose superpower is similar to that of Jamie Madrox, a Marvel character who briefly caught my attention when writer Peter David relaunched him in 2004 as the star of Madrox, an inventive noir-style miniseries under the Marvel Knights imprint. Madrox reintroduced Jamie, a mutant who has the ability to create duplicates of himself, as a promiscuous and less-than-virtuous private eye who has trouble getting his dupes to cooperate with him, and the Marvel Knights mini led to David rebooting the X-Men spinoff X-Factor as a series about Jamie's detective agency (despite enjoying Madrox, I never got into X-Factor or any other post-1992 X-Men spinoff comic because like Deadpool says in his eponymous hit movie, these X-Men timelines can get so confusing). I love how Publick merged Madrox with Dino. I next want to see Peter Lawford drunkenly having trouble getting his adamantium claws to open another bottle of vodka.

Madrox (Photo source: Arion's Archaic Art)

At a party Wide Wale invited Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, the rest of the Council of 13 and a bunch of Manhattan socialites to attend, Wide Wale's requirement that none of the Guild members can bring their henchmen along with them is clearly intended to allow Copy-Cat to take down the Monarch, who's at his most vulnerable when Gary isn't there to protect him. Copy-Cat and his dupes trick Dr. Mrs. the Monarch into thinking her husband betrayed her and stood her up to illegally arch Dr. Venture in the middle of the party (when actually, the Monarch arrived at the party and was on his best behavior before Copy-Cat tranqed him). Dino appears to want the Monarch's wife all to himself. But she's immune to his charms, even though the show established that she and the Monarch have an open marriage.

At one point, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch tries to shoo Copy-Cat away by saying, "I'm not sure we need someone whose superpower seems to be bad pick-up lines." And I'm not sure we need marital discord as a storyline for the one couple on the show that soap opera viewers would refer to as the supercouple of the franchise, because I like how this one pair, aside from gay-for-super-science-but-not-gay-for-each-other roommates Billy Quizboy and Pete White, has managed to remain together amidst all the failure that surrounds them.

Dean Martin in "All This and Gargantua-2"

Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino, Dino and Dino in "Faking Miracles"

But then again, I don't tune in to The Venture Bros. to see relationships with no problems and stories with no stakes. Everyone on this show, except for Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, Triana Orpheus, Shoreleave and maybe Brock, is a huge fuck-up (as well as the kind of fuck-up who speaks like a recognizable human being, instead of like a Chuck Lorre-style joke machine), which is the thing that's kept me intrigued with The Venture Bros., in addition to all the funny references to things like CHiPs, Iggy Pop lyrics, Duran Duran and the LP version of Wu-Tang Forever. But while the Monarch's past mistakes as a Dr. Venture-obsessed arch continue to haunt him and are now affecting his wife's standing in the Council, as well as their marriage, it looks like things are moving up for Dr. Venture and his new Ventech employees Billy and Pete. They might be about to find some Apple-style success for a change, thanks to their discovery of an example of what Dr. Venture refers to as "the miracles": the not-quite-ready-to-be-unveiled-yet inventions J.J. kept stashed away in his company's inventory before his death.

Billy accidentally lets loose a bio-bot, a liquid metal entity composed of nanobots, in Ventech Tower. The bio-bot can be programmed to enhance the strength or brainpower of whatever human body it's injected into. But before Ventech can make gazillions off selling bio-bots to the public (or maybe exclusively to the military-industrial complex as a weapon?), Dr. Venture, Billy and Pete have to deal with a few bio-bot-related mishaps, like the ones that take place while they figure how to control the bio-bot, which seeped into Dean's body when he was in the shower.

I'm glad Publick spared us from seeing the orifice the sentient goo chose to climb into during Dean's shower. Hearing Dean's off-screen scream from the bathroom is unsettling enough already.

Unaware that the body the runaway bio-bot chose as its host belongs to Dean, Billy and Pete disrupt Brock's study session with Dean, who asked Brock to help him prepare for his SATs. They program the bio-bot to cause Dean to puke on Brock, gain enough superhuman strength to lift up a shocked Brock with one arm and speak in Babylonian, which causes Brock to think Dean needs an exorcist. All that's missing from this scene is Billy and Pete trying out on Dean that clever Innerspace tactic in which a shrunken Dennis Quaid uses his ship's tech to transform Martin Short's facial features into Robert Picardo's.


Despite the moments of body horror slapstick Dean experiences with the bio-bot inside him, the bio-bot miraculously provides Dean with enough brainpower to ace the SATs and get accepted to Stuyvesant University, his school of choice. His brother makes some progress too--with water-breathing Sirena (Cristin Milioti), that is. She ignores her dad Wide Wale's feud with Dr. Venture over his refusal to comply with the mob-connected Crusaders Action League's shakedown in "Hostile Makeover," and she agrees at the end of "Faking Miracles" to go out on a date with Hank, who's taken a job as a pizza delivery boy. Publick sets up a joke early on in "Faking Miracles" about the side effects of driving the GoPod, J.J.'s experimental floating car, and nicely has it pay off later when Hank drives the GoPod to deliver a pizza to Sirena. Of course Hank would pay no attention to the Pirate Captain's warning that the GoPod causes its drivers to become sterile.

Had the guest shots in "Faking Miracles" consisted only of Tompkins the podcast veteran as the Monarch's dad and Huss, the former King of the Hill regular who starred in a series of '90s MTV promos as Frank Sinatra, doing a decent impression of Sinatra's pal, "Faking Miracles" would still be a satisfying half-hour. But Milioti's first guest shot as Sirena elevates "Faking Miracles" to "Bot Seeks Bot" territory, if not "Victor. Echo. November." territory (2006's "Victor. Echo. November." remains my favorite Venture Bros. episode). Last season's Publick-scripted "Bot," a surprisingly tense Brock-and-Shoreleave-on-a-stakeout story, and the Doc Hammer-scripted "Victor" are both my favorite kind of Venture Bros. episode: they follow the characters around on a night out on the town that goes south late in the story, especially for Dr. Venture, but the spycraft or the mayhem isn't what makes either episode soar. The hilarious dialogue before the mayhem erupts--a huge chunk of the dialogue is delivered over restaurant tables, so at times, it feels like we're watching Diner, but with supervillains--is what makes them soar.

In "Faking Miracles," the kind of nighttime partying that energized the proceedings in "Bot" and "Victor" isn't so energetic because it's confined to the rather drab 18th birthday party Wide Wale throws for Sirena, and Dean and Hank's separate storylines aren't destined to become classics like their double-date storyline together in "Victor," but Milioti just steals both the Wide Wale and Hank storylines with the raspy, foul-mouthed Jersey Shore voice she came up with for the frequently irritable Sirena. She exclaims "Maron!" (maa-ROAN) at one point--Sopranos fans might remember that phrase, which is basically "Madonna!" or "Dammit!"--and in my favorite bit of Italian slang, she complains about how the thugs her dad has assigned to guard her are buttagots (it means "annoying idiot"). Milioti was a standout on Fargo this season as Betsy, Lou Solverson's dying wife, and after her charming voice work in "Faking Miracles," she's already a standout recurring guest star on this show too.


Oh yeah, and besides Milioti's guest shot, Donald Trump makes a mute appearance in the background at the party. This episode was made long before Trump started running for president and angering both progressives and conservatives alike. I'm tired of both reading about this buttagots and hearing him squawk like a race-baiting Oswald Cobblepot on the mayoral campaign trail, but his cameo in "Faking Miracles" makes a lot of sense. Of course he would hobnob with supervillains.

Is it me or is Wide Wale more likable as a Venture Bros. adversary than Phantom Limb or the Investors? The dichotomy of a ruthless gangster turning out to be a compassionate and understanding dad to his offspring is hardly new to the gangster genre, but it adds some flavor to Wide Wale as a Venture Bros. foe. He has a sweet little moment in "Faking Miracles" where he takes a break from trying to impress all the legitimate businessmen and notices a grumpy Sirena is uncomfortable at her own birthday party, so he tries to cheer her up with an order for some pizza (and he succeeds--but he's unaware that Sirena's attraction to Hank, which is bound to piss him off, also has a lot to do with her shift to a more content mood later that night). This moment already makes Wide Wale a better dad than his party guest Captain Combover, whose vomit-inducing desire to bang his own grown-up daughter and whose taste for women who are young enough to be his daughters are beautifully ridiculed by Robert Smigel in his uproarious Triumph's Election Special 2016 on Hulu.



If there's one thing I dislike about The Venture Bros.' sixth season as deeply as I dislike all things Trump, it's Publick's decision to leave Dr. Orpheus out of the Ventures' move to New York. Steven Rattazzi's bit part in "Faking Miracles" as Hank's Italian boss at the pizzeria makes me miss both Rattazzi's voice for Orpheus and his presence as an additional (and rather sane, in spite of all his melodramatically delivered incantations) member of the Venture household. Plus New York could use some help from Orpheus. The best person to deal with its problems with rats, bedbugs and pigs would definitely not be a Blue Morpho type. It would have to be a person who was trained in the black arts. Unlike the Monarch and Dr. Venture, they're no strangers to miracles.

Other memorable quotes:
* Scaramantula: "If you think you can just waltz in here and muscle in on my racket, you've got another thing coming! [Faints from being shot with a tranq dart by the Blue Morpho.]"
The Blue Morpho: "It's 'another think coming.' God!"


* "He shows up again in issue 36 when they team up to fight L. Ron Hubbard."

* Hank: "Aw, c'mon, Brock! Why not?"
Brock: "Because it's like cheating, Hank."
Hank: "But so is flying in an airplane or having a fake leg when you think about it, which I do."
Brock: "For the last time, no! You cannot have anabolic steroids!"

* Dr. Venture: "Let's toss this baby into production and call it a day!"
Pirate Captain: "Yeah, well, don't punch the clock just yet there, Doc. She's been known to cause sterility and heart murmurs in rhesus monkeys."

* Brock: "Aw jeez, Dean. Your essay reads like a suicide note."
Dean: "Everything I wrote was true."
Brock: "Yeah, but you gotta turn the gas down a notch, Sylvia Plath."

(Photo source: Venture Fails)

A current storyline on CW's The Flash centers on Jay Garrick moping--and then doing some more moping--over the loss of his ability to run at superhuman speeds. Jay fought crime under the name of the Flash in a parallel universe where their version of Barry Allen, the show's main character, doesn't have any superpowers, so Barry's not the Flash over there. Unless he's actually been the Tony Todd-voiced supervillain known as Zoom this whole time, Jay is too much of a goody-goody to regain his speed with the help of cocaine, so the only way Jay can get his speed back temporarily is to inject himself with an experimental drug called Velocity-6.

I suffer from writer's block all the time, which was never a good thing when I worked in the newspaper biz, and it's the last thing you want to deal with when you're running a blog and you're trying to come up with one or two posts per week. But I don't need Velocity-6 or blow to type out a post at a superhuman speed. All I need is the Bay Area classical music station KDFC.

I recently discovered that having KDFC in my headphones has helped me to finish writing posts. DJ mixes sometimes do the trick, but they can occasionally be distracting, especially when the DJ throws on a beat like the one from Pete Rock and CL Smooth's "The Creator" or the one from Kendrick Lamar's "Alright," and then all I want to do is nod my head repeatedly or do the Robot instead of finish writing. Film and TV score music, the Internet radio format I dabbled in from 2002 to last month, is even more distracting. Like I wrote a few weeks ago, score music comes with too much baggage.

"That kind of music often wrecks my attempt to concentrate on filling a blank space with a paragraph and causes me to start thinking about the action sequence the cue was written for, followed by all the camerawork that went into it... And then my brain starts to shout, 'Yeaaaah, go, Iko Uwais!,' or 'Yeaaaah, throw that shovel hook, Michael B.!,' and my concentration is completely destroyed," I wrote on January 26.

Neither classical music nor instrumental hip-hop come with that kind of baggage, so when I need music to help me to concentrate, only those two genres can get me to start typing (classical music has also helped me to sleep well late at night). So right when I've started turning to KDFC as a reliable place for instrumentals that cure my writer's block instead of distracting or annoying me, the station, which tosses in a few movie themes on its playlists here and there, has been increasing the airplay of film score music.

KDFC chose last June's Varèse Sarabande album Back in Time... 1985 at the Movies, Galaxy Quest composer David Newman's re-recording of film score cues from 1985, as its "CD of the Week." All this week, the station has been spotlighting selections from 1985 at the Movies, which is a solid album from Newman, although I would have swapped out the love theme from St. Elmo's Fire for either a selection from the John Morris score to Clue or a Lee Holdridge instrumental from Moonlighting, and I would have packaged the six-disc edition of 1985 at the Movies exactly like a McDLT, so that "The hot stays hot and the cool stays cool!"

Then all next week, KDFC will join in the countdown to Oscar night and play one theme composed by John Williams per hour as a salute to Williams. He's one of this year's Best Original Score Oscar nominees for his work in Star Wars: The Force Awakens ("Rey's Theme" is especially terrific).




After trying to avoid film score music because it doesn't help as an accompaniment for writing, I should be irritated that KDFC is playing more film score music this month. But I'm not. I'm actually kind of delighted to see film score compositions like "Rey's Theme" receiving airplay on terrestrial radio outside of a college station, although KDFC tends to prefer concert arrangements of film score music over the actual score cues that were used in the films. So that means you won't hear "The Scavenger," the cue that nicely introduces Rey in The Force Awakens, but you will hear "Rey's Theme," the concert arrangement of the Daisy Ridley character's motif. But it doesn't matter; it's just sofa king good to hear such cues on a non-college terrestrial station.

Not everyone agrees.


Anonymous needs to go walk into traffic. That's just stupid talk. As someone who streamed film and TV score music for 13 years, I can't stand people like that.

And as a film score music DJ who would then encounter racist, neo-con film music nerds who think hip-hop, one of my favorite genres, is evil or unworthy to be considered music, I can't stand those people either. They need to go walk into traffic too.

KDFC's Dianne Nicolini and KDFC president Bill Lueth (Photo source: SFCV)

I don't have time to deal with narrow minds. I don't miss the part of being a film score music DJ where I'd be subjected to "Hip-hop causes violence!" or "C'mon, really? Who wants to listen to just the instrumentals? Am I right?" I also don't miss the part of it that involved trying to pronounce baffling-looking names of composers, filmmakers (I would love to hear someone say "Krzysztof Kieslowski" while they're on Novocaine) and record labels. But whenever I encountered such a name, I would always Google its pronunciation. I didn't mind doing that. I never wanted to sound like an imbecile or Alec Baldwin in that SNL"Soap Opera Digest" sketch where he's playing a doctor and he keeps mangling medical terms and university names, like when he says, "There's no class at Yeah-leh Medical School that can prepare you for this!"

But how did I find out about mysterious pronunciations before Google? I simply asked around. One particular name that used to make me scratch my head in the '90s was "Varèse Sarabande." That one was cleared up for me by Jeff Bond, the author of The Music of Star Trek and a film score music expert who has written score album liner notes for everyone from Varèse to La-La Land Records. I simply asked him how to pronounce the inkblot-logoed record label's name while recording with him a phoner for my college radio program.

So that's why it's amusing to hear KDFC DJs attempt to tackle "Varèse" during the week of Varèse's 1985 at the Movies in the spotlight, without even checking its pronunciation. Morning host Hoyt Smith pronounced it as "vuh-reez." Early afternoon host Dianne Nicolini said "vuh-rez" (rhymes with Pez). Afternoon drive-time host Ray White went with "vuh-ray-say."

Only Nicolini is correct. It's "vuh-rez."



I'm glad to see 1985 at the Movies--and film and TV score music in general--receiving this much exposure from the KDFC DJs, but they ought to follow Nicolini's lead. The key to pronouncing "Varèse" isn't hard to remember. It would simply be "It rhymes with Pez."

If movie theaters need bouncers, then classical stations need pronunciation consultants. Who wants to end up looking like Alec Baldwin in the SNL"Soap Opera Digest" sketch? No name is too intimidating for a pronunciation consultant. Such a consultant would always be ready and on call to tackle the predicament of trying to figure out how to say a puzzling-looking musician's name on an album cover. There's no class at Yeah-leh that can prepare you for "Sofia Asgatovna Gubaidulina."

Other film and TV score compositions played by KDFC (from snapshots I took of score music appearing on the KDFC site's playlists)

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



Remember Melanie Hutsell? She's the SNL featured player-turned-regular who never really gelled on the show back in the '90s and whose sole highlight was a killer Jan Brady impression she brought over from her time as a cast member of The Real Live Brady Bunch, the '90s stage show that restaged Brady Bunch scripts word-for-word. Like with so many other sketch comics who failed to blow up on SNL, Studio 8H just wasn't the right venue for Hutsell. And then like another short-lived female SNL featured player, Casual star Michaela Watkins, Hutsell resurfaced on the Amazon show Transparent, where she stole one scene (while Watkins has managed to steal two whole Transparent episodes).

It's one of the most satisfying scenes during the largely downbeat second season of Transparent (created and showrun, by the way, by Jill Soloway, who happens to be another Real Live Brady Bunch alum), and the scene made me think, "Wow, this is the same lady whose dorky dance moves forever ruined Van Morrison's 'Moondance' in that unfunny SNL'Moondance' sketch? She's funnier here." On Transparent, Hutsell plays a newly outed lesbian mom at the school attended by the kids of self-absorbed, perpetually unhappy Sarah Pfefferman (Amy Landecker). Hutsell's perceptive character bluntly tells Sarah the words that she, a Pfefferman as selfish as the other Pfeffermans, needed to hear this whole time: "Can I just, like, say something to you and just try to help you out a little bit maybe? Nobody cares about what you do. I mean, I know you think they care, but they don't. You know, people walking around at our school, they're mostly thinking about carpools and play dates and homework..."

The Venture Bros. has a few things in common with Transparent, like the gender fluidity of some of the Ventureverse characters and the way you sometimes root for Dean to get as far away from Dr. Venture as possible (which Brock temporarily did when he quit the OSI and moved out of the Venture Compound) in order to be his own man and live a normal life. It's similar to how you root for Rabbi Raquel (Kathryn Hahn) and Syd (Carrie Brownstein) to get as far away as possible from Josh (Jay Duplass), Sarah's younger brother, and Ali (Gaby Hoffmann), Sarah and Josh's little sister, respectively, because Rabbi Raquel and Syd are such decent, normal people who don't need to be made miserable by their respective lover's insufferable bullshit.

The animated show is also as sharp an exploration of narcissism as Transparent. A minor character in the Doc Hammer-scripted "Rapacity in Blue" experiences with the Monarch a moment just like the Hutsell/Landecker scene from Transparent. Manolo (Hal Lublin) is a Latino handyman who's involved with renovating the Monarch's childhood house. Though his dialogue has largely been unremarkable, "Your wife no home"-type shit, we get a hint that Manolo has a normal, well-adjusted (and apparently, '90s sitcom-watching) life outside the craziness of the Monarch's home when--after having to endure the Monarch's endless chattering about his indecision over suiting up as his deceased socialite dad's recently unearthed alter ego of the Blue Morpho--he basically tells the Monarch he's not the center of the universe in a kind-of-polite-but-not-really way that's unmistakably Hammer.

(Photo source: Venture Fails)

"I don't really care about this" are words that immediately won me over onto Manolo's side, just like how "Nobody cares about what you do" made me take notice of Jan Brady again.

The incongruity of a working-class maintenance guy who's aware of the existence of Mr. Feeny is a trademark of Hammer's writing, as are the show's pop music references, but while those references were all over Hammer's "Maybe No Go" a couple of weeks ago, Hammer reduces them in "Rapacity in Blue" to just the Monarch/Morpho's '60s Batman-style score cues and the episode title. The play on George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" is fitting because of the composition's synonymousness with being an instrumental love letter to Dr. Venture's new home turf of New York.

(Photo source: Venture Fails)

There's double meaning in "Rapacity in Blue." It refers to both the Monarch's increasing enjoyment of donning the Morpho persona--because arching any of Dr. Venture's current enemies as the Morpho can lead to him becoming Dr. Venture's arch again--and the greed of blue-speedsuited Dr. Venture. The title is alluded to in the dialogue when Dr. Venture tells Billy Quizboy to take the two-wheeled vehicle he's driving around inside Ventech Tower and "slap on a coat of Venture blue and call it the Zipper Rounder." Dr. Venture is so out-of-touch he doesn't know that Billy's vehicle is a Segway.

I'm a little disappointed that "Rapacity in Blue" acts as if the bio-bot--a liquid cluster of nanobots Billy found in Ventech's R&D purgatory in "Faking Miracles"--no longer exists because the cluster of nanobots is a nifty sci-fi concept. Apparently off-screen, Billy, Pete White and Dr. Venture wised up to the dangerousness of J.J.'s hidden inventions and have moved on to coming up with their own concepts for a Ventech product to unveil at a super-science conference that's only a couple of days away. Billy suggests an idea he's been working on called "God gas," a mind control gas that stimulates people's pseudo-religious visions. It's basically a love potion, and whether you admire a person or a past pop-culture phenomenon like The Rusty Venture Show, the gas affects your sane and ordinary ways of admiring that person or thing and transforms them into religious worship. Dr. Venture--the type of super-scientist who's sometimes capable of really dark shit that crosses into villainy, like the Cosby-esque act of spiking the punch at his sons' prom with Venture Industries-enhanced Spanish fly, just so he and his fellow chaperones could get some tail--is, of course, all for Billy's creepy-sounding idea.

The God gas is at the center of the episode's funniest running joke. It's not really a new kind of joke--Futurama's "Godfellas" episode, Robert Smigel's Anipal version of a crucifix on an altar in an episode of Comedy Central's TV Funhouse and the Simpsons"Treehouse of Horror" segment where a civilization of microscopic people experiences an entire history of prosperity and war in Lisa's room all have done variations on it before--but it's still funny anyway. Before testing out the God gas on themselves, Billy and Pete test it out on lab mice, and the newly religious mice fight each other over their beliefs and experience at an accelerated rate the history of early Christianity, from the split between Moses and the pagans to Henry VIII's blood-soaked regime and his rejection of the Catholic Church when it doesn't cater to his whims. "Rapacity in Blue" checks in on the mice throughout Act 2 and presents silly visuals like the pagan mice worshiping a golden calf idol that bears Billy's face and the mice weeping over the crucifixion of their savior mouse.







I don't know if this wordless running joke is intended to be a reference to the weird sight of mice being utilized to depict terrible moments in world history in Maus, Art Spiegelman's acclaimed Holocaust comic strip, but it's definitely dark and twisted (in fact, Billy and Pete's Ventech lab arc makes me miss the dark anti-corporate humor of Better Off Ted and BOT's R&D lab duo of Phil and Lem even more). I actually enjoyed the runner about the gassed mice a lot more than the material about the Monarch bumbling through being a hero or a hero/villain or whatever the hell the Morpho was in the '60s, although I like this season's running joke of the Monarch and Gary being so broke and so far from prominence within the Guild of Calamitous Intent (compared to Dr. Mrs. the Monarch and the limo that ferries her, Phantom Limb and the rest of the Council of 13 to work every morning) that the duo has to always take a bus back to Newark (but in "Rapacity in Blue," the Monarch and Gary have to take the bus because the Monarch's forgetfulness about paying the right amount for parking in Manhattan causes the Morphomobile to be towed away).

The last five minutes of "Rapacity in Blue" turn into one of those countless Star Trek episodes where the crew members are under the influence of a virus or drug that unleashes their ids or hidden desires. I was wondering when Billy and Pete's experiments in Ventech's speculative engineering department were going to wreak havoc on the adult characters' behavior after J.J.'s bio-bot wreaked havoc on Dean's body, and they immediately do at the end of "Rapacity in Blue." Billy uses the God gas to subdue Haranguetan (Steven Rattazzi), a villain whose name sounds like a He-Man and the Masters of the Universe bad guy if he got to be designed by Jackson Publick, but a mishap with Billy's God gas gun causes the gas to infect not just Haranguetan but Billy and Brock as well.


The best part of these last five minutes is Billy's tendency to see title cards after the gas intensifies his lifelong love for The Rusty Venture Show. He pictures Dr. Venture as his old animated self from The Rusty Venture Show, so the Titmouse animators get to bring back the old Venture Compound exterior just for young Rusty's title card. Then when the Monarch and Gary rescue Billy from Haranguetan, Billy sees the exact same Super Friends-style graphics that serve as the introduction of the new Morpho and Kano earlier in the episode.

The God gas mishap marks the second time this season that an outside force causes Brock to stray from his usual calm and professional self and act irrationally in regards to his attraction to Crusaders Action League member Warriana (Kate McKinnon), this show's militant take on Wonder Woman (the previous time was when Warriana's truth lasso got Brock to admit to wanting to bang her). But even before he's exposed to God gas, Brock begins to act like the kind of Brock we haven't seen since the time he got frustrated over failing to get into the celibate Molotov Cocktease's pants.


Warriana's ability to knock Haranguetan unconscious (without ever getting into a time-wasting pissing contest with him like Brock does) and her disdain for Brock's machismo both upset Brock. He hates losing his composure while thinking about Warriana and starts to realize that maybe he'll never be able to figure out the opposite sex and that not even he himself is capable of giving advice to Hank about women like he thought he could do earlier in "Rapacity in Blue."

Patrick Warburton clearly loves playing the hell out of this not-so-self-confident side of Brock. The frequent cracks in Warburton's voice during Act 2 cause this angstier Brock to sound exactly like Gary, who's doomed to forever have a Squeaky-Voiced Teen from The Simpsons voice. Tough women like Molotov and Warriana are the only thing that can tear Brock apart inside. What exactly does Brock want out of Warriana, other than rough sex? Not even Brock himself knows.


The Venture Bros. is already halfway through its sixth season now, and it looks like the biggest development of the season will be an answer to the question "Are Dr. Venture and the Monarch actually an additional pair of Venture brothers?""Rapacity in Blue" intensifies like a mind control gas the possible familial link between Dr. Venture and the Monarch by first hinting that their dads, who went from enemies to friends, crossed swords (while frolicking with a pair of '60s hotties who may or may not be Jill St. John and Stella Stevens) and then concluding with Billy assuming (because the Monarch looks even more like Dr. Venture when he dons a Green Hornet-style fedora and mask) that Dr. Venture is suiting up as the Morpho. The Monarch, who can't catch a break, is just going to love finding out that people think the man he hates even more than his dad is riding around as the new Morpho.

And what's going on with the Monarch/Morpho's sidekick? He's hearing the Ray Romano-esque voice of Henchman 24, his dead best friend, in his mind again. Or has Gary actually still been speaking to 24 this whole time after he appeared to have come to grips with 24's death in "Operation P.R.O.M.," but only off-screen? You can practically hear Venture Bros. fans applauding all across America right when Gary--who's cosplaying as a Jedi while getting the Monarch to watch an old home video of his dad and Jonas Venture Sr. that, to the Monarch's horror, turns out to be a primitive version of a sex tape--imagines 24 channeling Obi-Wan and talking to him again. If you had to introduce The Venture Bros. to a viewer who's never seen the show before and is interested in catching up on it and marathoning it on Hulu or DVD (I hate the word "binge-watching"), "Rapacity in Blue" is the worst fucking episode to start with because of all these callbacks to 24, the possible brotherly connection between Dr. Venture and the Monarch, Brock's history with women, The Rusty Venture Show and, at one point early on in the episode, the romance between the invisible-limbed Phantom Limb and a then-invisible-dress-clad Dr. Girlfriend.

But for the rest of us, "Rapacity in Blue" is another hugely entertaining half-hour from one of TV's best shows about people who are way too deluded about being the center of the universe while, like Manolo or Melanie Hutsell says, nobody cares about what they do. Best of all, the episode also gives you an excuse to revisit "Rhapsody in Blue," an amazing Gershwin tune that would probably cost the Venture Bros. music department an invisible arm and an invisible leg.



Other memorable quotes:
* Dr. Venture: "Well, that's why I'm down here! You tell me! Wow me! Stick your finger into my ear and tickle my brain. Reach right up my ass and grab my heart!"
Billy: "Eek, I-I-I could have lived without that last one."

* Gary: "Blue Morpho wore this villain mask. He was all sinister and stuff. You saw the comics!"
Monarch: "Oh yes, the same comics that never mentioned he had a kid! Ironclad historical document that ended with my dad giving fruit pies to troubled teens."


* "Behold: Shuffle Dynamism! Pro: free power in any building. Con: everybody has to wear magnetic booties and drag their feet on a special floor, and it's very loud, and your lawyers informed me that it's actually slave labor."

* Pete: "Why are you down here?"
Dean: "I don't have any class until 1:30. And Hank is following me around looking for advice on how to score with women."
Billy: "Do you know anything about that?"
Dean: "If I did, would I be down here?"

* Brock: "You can't just fly in and do that! There's, uh, there's like a code."
Warriana: "I heed not your 'bro code'! Justice has no gender."
Brock: "I'm pretty sure it's a blind woman actually..."

* "The Monarch, a down-and-out supervillain, claims his birthright as the Blue Morpho, who may or may not be a good guy, along with his faithful bodyguard and chauffeur Kano, who isn't actually an Asian."


* "Using skills taught to him by his high-school home economics teacher Mrs. Althin, Kano makes key alterations to their costumes!"

* "I'm the chauffeur! Let me... chauff!"

* "Dude, you look like the Monarch going to a Mad Men party. You've gotta trim the beard."

* "Look, Doc, we really need more testing. The mice are... on fire! I am so sick of killing mice!"

"I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" is a series of posts that appear sporadically here on the AFOS blog rather than weekly. In each post, I reveal that I never watched a certain popular movie until very recently, and that's largely because I'm Filipino, we're always late to the party and that's how we do.

The 1982 version of Conan the Barbarian--made by John Milius, the director of the TCM staple The Wind and the Lion--is one of several popular '80s movies I just kept missing out on for the oddest reasons. I avoided watching it even when I had the chance to catch it back when my older brother--who was obsessed with D&D and the sword-and-sorcery genre during the years when Arnold Schwarzenegger portrayed the Robert E. Howard character--taped both Conan the Barbarian and its way more family-friendly 1984 sequel off the TV and owned a copy of the first issue of artist John Buscema's two-part 1982 Marvel Comics adaptation of the first movie. His copy of that issue was where I first glimpsed the Milius movie's Wheel of Pain montage and then wondered to myself, "So Conan doesn't get to take any bathroom breaks at all during this shit?"

(Photo source: Marvel Masterworks Resource Page)

Conan the Barbarian, the tale of a former gladiator on a mission to kill the sorcerer who slaughtered his tribe and sent him into child slavery, was R-rated, and my parents rarely allowed me to watch R movies for the first few years of grade school. (Yes, I know Conan the Destroyer was a PG movie, so I could have been able to watch it, but I always skipped it. I still haven't watched it.) So I had to settle for the G-rated Conan, a.k.a. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, that 30-minute commercial for the '80s Mattel toy line that was rumored to have originally been a Conan toy line before Mattel changed it to Masters of the Universe because the company didn't want to be associated with an ultraviolent and brazenly sexual R movie.

Although He-Man gave acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series writer Paul Dini his start in writing for animation, it has not aged well at all as an animated show. But when I was in first grade, He-Man was a decent weekday-afternoon time-waster--it was never a Saturday morning show, by the way, so get your facts straight, HitFix--even though I noticed it would always recycle the same nine or 10 bits of animation like all other cartoons from the Filmation factory used to clumsily do in order to save money.

I lost interest in He-Man after its first two seasons in afternoon syndication and never again formed another attachment to a sword-and-sorcery franchise--until Legend of the Seeker (the hotness of both Bridget Regan and Tabrett Bethell was the main reason why I became interested in that show) and, of course, Game of Thrones came along. So my lack of interest in the sword-and-sorcery genre in the years between He-Man and Legend of the Seeker is mainly to blame for never watching Conan the Barbarian all these years, even though I got myself a copy of the movie's excellent Basil Poledouris score so that I could use "Anvil of Crom" and "Riddle of Steel/Riders of Doom" for radio airplay.


Also, the Milius movie just always came off to me as ponderous and self-important like Man of Steel and--if my skepticism due to the largely dour footage I've seen in its trailers ends up being right--Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Despite those misgivings I had about the Milius movie, I added Conan the Barbarian to my DVD rental queue when I first got a Netflix account because I wanted to see if the movie lived up to its beloved Poledouris score (a score that, by the way, This Is How You Lose Her author Junot Díaz interestingly played repeatedly to keep his creative juices flowing while he worked on his first book). However, the movie was always slipping into "Very long wait" status on Netflix and was always getting pushed aside by other rentals I was much more interested in until one day, it became available to stream. And then like a Cimmerian thief in the night, it was suddenly gone from Netflix streaming. Fortunately, I stopped dilly-dallying and finally made myself watch Conan the Barbarian right before it expired.

You know what? Conan the Barbarian isn't as ponderous as I thought, but it has a certain grandiose style that would be described by younger, fidgetier film critics today as "slow." That "slow" style--contemplative and "devoid of clunky-sounding exposition" would be much better words for it--is actually what elevates Conan the Barbarian and makes it stand out as a sword-and-sorcery flick. It takes its medieval world seriously, but it's never an overly dour slog like Man of Steel. If anybody in the Conan the Barbarian cast is on the dour side, it's often Schwarzenegger, who did Conan the Barbarian way before Hollywood discovered you can work around the limited range of the champion bodybuilder and future California governor by feeding him distinctive and weird-sounding one-liners in movies like the original Terminator, Commando, Predator and Kindergarten Cop.


Schwarzenegger doesn't utter a single wisecrack during Conan the Barbarian, and the only times we get a hint of his future light-comedy skills are a scene where a stoned-out-of-his-mind Conan punches out a camel, a hangover scene where he collapses face-first into a bowl of soup and a moment where he pretends to flirt with a gay priest before knocking him out and stealing his identity to infiltrate an evil cult. But he looks convincingly like the '70s and '80s Marvel version of Conan while he broods and appears as if he's going to skullfuck Crom if he doesn't holler back at his prayers. Like Jim Kelly would have said, man, he comes right out of a comic book. The role of Conan doesn't call for you to do much. You just have to look convincing waving around a heavy sword. Barbarians aren't exactly known for being complicated men.

Conan the Barbarian may have made Schwarzenegger a movie star, but he's overshadowed by his co-stars in that movie (whereas he steals The Terminator from Linda Hamilton, Michael Biehn and Paul Winfield, and he does so with even less lines). In a villainous turn way before he became America's favorite granddad/narrator outside of Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones makes quite an impression chopping the head off Conan's mom and later transforming into a snake. As cult leader Thulsa Doom, the perpetually scowling murderer of Conan's parents, the rather underused Jones sports the same exact hairdo as Janeane Garofalo's in Reality Bites. He looks kind of like Terry Crews when he strapped on one of his co-star Maya Rudolph's weaves to play President Camacho in Idiocracy. But the goofy-looking Jones relishes his lines like wine made from the blood of his character's virginal sacrifices. I cosign Roderick Heath's observation over at Ferdy on Films about how everything Jones says in the movie sounds like an admonition welling up from the depths of Hades.


There are two fascinating '80s movies that star Sab Shimono (who most recently had a guest shot as a Japanese internment camp survivor on Netflix's Longmire) and the late Mako, two Japanese American actors who are just incapable of giving an abysmal performance, even as animation voice actors, like when they both had roles on the beloved Avatar: The Last Airbender. One of the two '80s movies is The Wash, a 1988 indie in which Shimono and Mako play a pair of old Japantown men who are both in love with Nobu McCarthy. Nobody outside of Asian American college professors remembers The Wash, which was based on a play by Bay Area playwright Philip Kan Gotanda, but it was unique for its time because of its all-Asian American cast, the bold decision to have these Asian American actors portray ordinary (and unlike the more affluent Joy Luck Club, lower-middle-class) Americans instead of the stereotypes that were popular at the time and, best of all, the focus on an Asian American man dating an Asian American woman instead of the cliché of yet another white man hooking up with an Asian woman. Fuck all those things out-of-touch film critics like former Washington Post critic Hal Hinson wrote at the time about The Wash being a bland indie. The Wash features a stronger Mako performance than even the standout (and Oscar-nominated) one Mako gave as a coolie-turned-boxer in 1966's The Sand Pebbles.

The other fascinating '80s showcase for the character acting skills of Shimono and Mako is Conan the Barbarian. Shimono never appears on screen, but he did uncredited work on redubbing the voice of Subotai, Conan's Mongolian archer pal, played by Hawaiian surfer Gerry Lopez. The actual voice of Lopez can be heard in a deleted scene where Conan's stoic demeanor briefly disappears.



The YouTube clip summary for Conan and Subotai's deleted scene says one of the movie's producers hated Lopez and demanded that he be redubbed, which makes little sense because out of all the performers in the movie, you'd expect Schwarzenegger to be the one who would have gotten completely redubbed (in fact, Universal studio execs were worried about Schwarzenegger's thick Austrian accent, and that's probably why Universal's teaser trailer and main trailer for the movie didn't contain a single line of dialogue from Schwarzenegger). I have no idea what Schwarzenegger's saying when he briefly grumbles over his 20 years in bondage, whereas I can completely understand Lopez.

But Shimono's dubbing work for Subotai is so terrific that I didn't know Lopez was redubbed until after watching the movie and reading a bunch of articles about the physically demanding shoot. And this movie just adores the weather-beaten voice of Mako--who plays a storyteller and Conan crony known as the Wizard--so much that his voice is all over Conan the Barbarian. The gravitas of the voices of Jones, Shimono and Mako, especially during his narration--which Milius wisely uses to establish the movie's setting instead of awkwardly wedging exposition into the dialogue of these laconic warrior characters--is a huge part of why Conan the Barbarian stands up to repeat viewings.

If Jones sounds like he's straight out of Hades, then Mako sounds like the Hyborian Age equivalent of the world's goriest and most batshit audiobook. Potentially cheesy-sounding passages like "Language and writing were made available--the poetry of Khitai, the philosophy of Sung--and he also came to know the pleasures of women, when he was bred to the finest stock. But always, there remained the discipline of steel" become music in Mako's hands (during the bit about "Language and writing," is that the Oliver Stone rough draft talking or is it the Milius rewrite talking?). I wouldn't be surprised if Genndy Tartakovsky cast Mako as the evil Aku on Samurai Jack specifically because of his distinctive narration during Conan the Barbarian.

Though her character of Valeria, a precursor to Xena, Michelle Yeoh's Yu Shu Lien from the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon movies and Lady Sif from the Thor movies, is yet another clichéd example of a leading lady/love interest in an action flick who winds up getting fridged before the climax, the amount of fighting Sandahl Bergman--a professional dancer Bob Fosse recommended to Milius after directing her in All That Jazz--gets to do in Conan the Barbarian is the most surprising part of the material. It's surprising because at around the time of Conan the Barbarian's release, women rarely got to be warriors like Valeria in sword-and-sorcery flicks. They were either damsels-in-distress like Judi Bowker in the original Clash of the Titans or the bedroom conquests and evil sorceresses of Excalibur. TV was way ahead of sword-and-sorcery movies when it came to warrior women, thanks to Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman.

I found myself more taken with Bergman in the action sequences than with Schwarzenegger in action, not just because she's attractive in Conan the Barbarian but because I love heist movies, probably way more than any other genre, and the physicality she brought to both Conan the Barbarian's jewel heist sequence and the swordplay due to her dancing background constantly made me think, "Damn, she missed the heist movie renaissance by 17 years." Just like Schwarzenegger and Lopez, Bergman remarkably did most of her own stunts in Conan the Barbarian. In fact, she ended up accidentally slicing open her forefinger when a weapon she used for the rehearsal of a sword fight came without a handle guard, a good example of how physically rough it was to make Conan the Barbarian.

(Photo source: Unproductive Member of Society)

And then Sandahl Bergman was handed a large sword.... #DOTDChicagopic.twitter.com/lgWKKN3wB9

— Daryl's Wings (@Funnymom2Kim) November 22, 2015

Speaking of rough, it must have been a rough experience for Conan the Barbarian fans to rewatch their favorite ultraviolent sword-and-sorcery flick on network TV. I'm glad I never watched the network TV version of Conan the Barbarian and waited all these years until Netflix. The network censor would have sliced off a lot of the sex and violence from the movie as if he were Conan slicing off his enemies' body parts.

I don't care for the right-wing politics of the filmmaker/surfer who was the basis for Walter Sobchak. But without the nutty traits of Milius (like his worship of real-life warriors like Genghis Khan and his surfer-ish fascination with philosophy, which seeped into some of the dialogue) and his insistence, especially to his sort-of-squeamish producer Dino De Laurentiis, that Conan's world should be as violent as an R would allow, Conan the Barbarian would have just been an average and lifeless sword-and-sorcery flick. Unexpected moments of beauty sometimes emerge from the director's twisted and brutal vision. For instance, Bergman has a quietly effective dramatic scene where Valeria confides to Conan her loneliness as a thief--"I would look into the huts and the tents of others in the coldest dark, and I would see figures holding each other in the night. And I always passed by"--and she expresses so much yearning for him to "let someone else pass by in the night."

Another unexpected moment of beauty takes place over barbecued dinner between Conan and Subotai. I don't think you'd have a scene like the one where the Cimmerian and the Mongol compare religions in a tentpole action movie today ("My god is stronger. He is the everlasting sky. Your god lives underneath him," boasts Subotai). Right after that exchange, the shots of Conan and Subotai running, despite carrying heavy weaponry, from civilization to civilization to the sounds of the superbly written Poledouris cue "Theology/Civilization" are the quintessential moment of Conan the Barbarian for me, much more so than the beheadings, the sword fights and the sex scenes. Those shots of them running--thankfully, not in cheesy slow-motion--to the accompaniment of both "Theology/Civilization" and Schwarzenegger's "Does it always smell like this? How does duh wind evah get in heah?" are the first thing I think of when I recall Conan the Barbarian, mostly because they prove how badly a loss it was for the film music world when Poledouris died in 2006.



And any time Conan the Barbarian eliminates the chatter is a moment of beauty. The Milius movie is the perfect argument for why action flicks work better with minimal dialogue. There's no exposition other than Mako's narration. Take one look at Doom's decapitation of Conan's mother. It's a completely silent sequence. Then look at the excerpt from the Marvel adaptation above, where Conan unloads clunky-sounding exposition about his origin story. It's as if that excerpt comes from a version of Conan the Barbarian that was made by a different director who's much hackier and has no patience for letting movies breathe.

What Milius accomplished was pretty close to Alfred Hitchcock's idea of "pure cinema." Hitchcock chose those words to describe films that tell stories in ways that would be impossible to do in any other medium and frequently rely on the visuals and music rather than dialogue to advance the story (Mad Max: Fury Road is one of the most recent examples of this). I sometimes wish Milius made Conan the Barbarian into a silent action movie, simply because the silent sequence of Doom's raid on young Conan's village is one of the movie's most memorable and effective sequences.



The quirks of Milius as a director also keep Conan from being an incongruously squeaky-clean barbarian, a.k.a. a boring protagonist. Despite his heroics at the end of the movie, Conan's kind of a dick during most of it, and you would be too if you were raised in bondage to be a gladiator and "to crush your enemies, see them driven before you and to hear duh lamentation uff der women." Evan Saathoff did a good piece for Birth.Movies.Death. about how Conan's imperfect qualities make him an intriguing protag in the Milius movie, even though Saathoff has no idea how to spell the name Schwarzenegger. "Once set free upon the world, Conan indulges in the hedonistic revelry befitting a guy restrained by captivity for most of his life," wrote Saathoff, who added, "Conan is a barbarian. It says so right there in the title. And it's a testament to John Milius that he actually lives up to that label."

I've never seen Lionsgate's much-maligned 2011 Conan the Barbarian remake, which starred Jason Momoa as Conan (it sucks that an actor of color who got to play Conan had to do so in a huge flop), and I don't plan to. I wouldn't be surprised if Conan isn't as hedonistic in that version because Lionsgate wanted to imitate the often squeaky-clean Marvel Studios superhero movie template, a template that's recently been turned upside down by the raunch and meta-humor of the non-Marvel Studios (because it's owned by Fox) smash hit Deadpool. I love how Conan, Subotai and Valeria get wasted to celebrate their successful heist in the Milius version. It's realistic. You won't see the protags do that today in superhero movies and tentpole blockbusters that aim for a PG-13. The studios would rather please parents' groups and let the kids in the audience know that heists and hedonistic post-heist partying are wrong.

In his Conan the Barbarian audio commentary with Schwarzenegger, Milius revealed that De Laurentiis wanted him to get rid of the scenes of Conan, Subotai and Valeria partying, but he resisted the producer's request because he wanted to show that "They aren't dignified. They have money, and they're totally drunk and excited with power." Fortunately, Milius doesn't insult the intelligence of the audience by having some character act as a voice of reason and disrupt their night out with "You aren't dignified! You have money, and you're totally drunk and excited with power! Why?!" I'll take Conan, Subotai and Valeria getting fucked up after their heist over Superman's relentless moping in Man of Steel any day of the week.


While I was only mildly interested in watching Conan the Barbarian after buying its score album, I had zero interest in checking out the 1987 Cannon Films version of Masters of the Universe, even though as a kid, I was temporarily a regular viewer of Filmation's He-Man, and I played around with some of Mattel's Masters of the Universe action figures. By the time the Cannon movie came out, I outgrew the Masters of the Universe toys.

The Cannon movie just always looked cheesy to me. After completing Masters of the Universe, Gary Goddard, the movie's first-time director, took another Mattel toy line, Captain Power, and turned it into Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, a post-apocalyptic action show that lasted from 1987 to 1988 in weekend syndication and employed He-Man staff writer (and future Babylon 5 creator) J. Michael Straczynski as a story editor. Of the two Goddard projects based on Mattel toys, Captain Power, with its ambitious and mature storylines about ex-girlfriends who became terrorists and the horrors of fascism, intrigued me more than the Cannon movie. Captain Power also features one of the best end credits sequences for a TV show ever: sure, the dogfight footage that concluded Captain Power each week was a shameless ripoff of the Star Wars Death Star dogfight sequence, and it was strictly designed for the kids in the audience to fire their noise-making Captain Power jet guns at the TV screen, but I always liked how it was shot from the point of a view of a fighter pilot.



The anecdotes about the making of Masters of the Universe during the hugely entertaining documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films made me finally put aside my lack of interest in the 1987 movie to go watch it on Netflix. While Conan the Barbarian goes for long stretches without dialogue and is wonderful for doing that, Masters of the Universe is overly talky and full of characters none of the Masters of the Universe toy line's kid fans would give two shits about. Those characters take away tons of screen time from the more familiar heroes and villains the franchise's kid fans would be much more interested in seeing, whether it's Man-at-Arms (Jon Cypher, an odd choice for a heroic and compassionate Eternian military vet because of his memorably dickish role as Chief Daniels on Hill Street Blues) or Skeletor (Frank Langella). It's a problem that also afflicts Michael Bay's interminable Transformers movies, where the Autobots are basically guest stars in their own movies.

I wish the rumor that the Masters of the Universe toy line grew out of a Conan toy line Mattel rejected because of its discomfort with the 1982 movie's R-rated content were true. Then it would allow you to point out how Mattel is such a toy company of its word because apparently, Mattel experienced a regime change in the '90s and went on to make action figures out of the R-rated Demolition Man. That 1993 Sylvester Stallone blockbuster is an equally violent but much less sexual action flick because any time an oiled-up Stallone gets completely naked, the movie loses all its sexiness. No wonder Michael B. Jordan looks like he's about to vomit at one point in Creed over the thought of Sly walking around nekkid. I love Stallone in the Rocky movies (even though I agree wholeheartedly with the folks behind #OscarsSoWhite, I'm rooting for Sly to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance in Creed just because his Oscar win would mean a Ryan Coogler movie finally gets an Oscar for something), but, man, from 1985 to 2011, Sly always looked like the giant from The Goonies went on a GNC shopping spree and then got basted in Red Lobster butter.

In Masters of the Universe, Dolph Lundgren has all the charisma of a script reader on valium. Sly was wise to give Lundgren just four or five lines in Rocky IV. Lundgren has to say a lot more than that during Masters of the Universe, and his atrocious line readings are unintentionally funny.

(Photo source: ActionFigurePics.com)

Lundgren isn't quite yet the relaxed and nuanced actor we get to see much later in Universal Soldier: Regeneration (try that Jean-Claude Van Damme flick some time; it's surprisingly good for a direct-to-video flick, and director John Hyams interestingly gives Van Damme no dialogue for the entire climax). He's much more wooden in Masters of the Universe than his future Expendables co-star is in Conan. That's also because there's no depth to the character of He-Man like there is to Conan, even though Conan isn't really an angsty barbarian. One of the few good things about Masters of the Universe is that it ditches the animated version's pointless addition of He-Man's civilian identity as Prince Adam (in the DC mini-comics that were packaged with Mattel's first few waves of action figures, He-Man wasn't an Eternian prince and was all-barbarian, all the time). But the movie comes up with nothing interesting for Lundgren to play. He just moves mechanically from point A to point B to homoerotic, subjected-to-whips-and-chains-by-Skeletor point C, without any real internal conflict like the one that affects Chris Hemsworth when Anthony Hopkins strips him of his hammer and his superhuman strength in Kenneth Branagh's Thor.

That homoerotic whipping scene is a great example of then-57-year-old Cannon head Menahem Golan's completely batshit ideas of what he thought would appeal to kids. As a result, the Cannon movie interestingly has a gay following. One of the movie's biggest defenders because of its appeal to gay men is Chris Eggertsen, the openly gay writer from HitFix who keeps erroneously saying that Filmation's He-Man aired on Saturday mornings. As someone who remembers occasionally running home from the school bus stop just to catch He-Man in the same after-school time slot as Oprah's back in the '80s and who now kind of wishes he could get back a lot of those 30 minutes that were wasted watching preachy and poorly animated action on planet Eternia, that typo bugs me. Despite the typo, Eggertsen has a great quip in his HitFix listicle where he describes Skeletor's climactic rise in power and his major costume change as a transformation "from power-hungry Eternian overlord to Chinese contestant in the 1987 Miss Universe pageant." It's cool that gay men can find something to enjoy in Masters of the Universe as if it's The Apple, but it's still not a good action movie.

Even A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson, who got his start in Hollywood working for Masters of the Universe's art department, doesn't think the movie he worked for is a good action movie. In his Trailers from Hell audio commentary for the Masters of the Universe trailer, Olson points out how distracting it is that there are no people in the streets during the villains' nighttime invasion of a small California town (actually Whittier, California).



The lack of extras in the streets is typical of the ineptitude of Cannon action flicks that aren't Runaway Train. Cannon was at the height of spending recklessly on productions that ended up tanking at the box office, so when the studio ran out of dough during the filming of Masters of the Universe, it resulted in things like empty downtown streets and a rushed climactic sword fight that has neither dramatic impact nor cinematic flair.

Masters of the Universe is the kind of movie where the IMDb trivia page about its behind-the-scenes problems is more entertaining than the movie itself. The dozens of weird stories that fill Masters of the Universe's IMDb trivia page were pointed out on Twitter by Gillian Jacobs, the star of both Community (I wonder what her character Britta, who was obsessed with pointing out why she thinks fights between men are their way of sublimating their homosexual urges, would have to say about Masters of the Universe) and Netflix's Love.

The imdb trivia sections for Cannon films are fascinating but the factoids for "Masters of the Universe" are true gems. (1/3)

— Gillian Jacobs (@GillianJacobs) February 16, 2014

Example: Beastman's prosthetic teeth were so large that performer Tony Carroll was unable to close his mouth when in costume. (2/2)

— Gillian Jacobs (@GillianJacobs) February 16, 2014

After a while he would begin to drool, filling his chin-piece with saliva and weighing it down. (3/3)

— Gillian Jacobs (@GillianJacobs) February 16, 2014

Pop Up Video but for Cannon Films like Masters of the Universe and Bloodsport. pic.twitter.com/GVvPIuDeqY

— Gillian Jacobs (@GillianJacobs) July 15, 2014

The Masters of the Universe filmmakers' decision to move the action from Eternia to Earth is clearly intended to both cut costs and give audience members a bunch of audience surrogates to identify with, including a pre-Friends Courteney Cox as a small-town teen who stumbles into He-Man and Skeletor's battle over the McGuffin known as the Cosmic Key. But the move to Earth is pointless, especially when all the screen time that could be spent more often with characters like He-Man, Teela (Chelsea Field), Skeletor and Evil-Lyn (a perfectly cast Meg Foster) or inside the franchise's crucial setting of Castle Grayskull goes to James Tolkan's unfunny and bullheaded police detective character. It feels like somebody from Cannon noticed how popular Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was during the 1986 holiday season and pushed the filmmakers to copy Star Trek IV's fish-out-of-water humor and its moments of comedic conflict between the time-traveling heroes and the arrogant morons who interfere with their mission, but the humor never really gels.

After being a useless sack of shit for most of Masters of the Universe, the bullying and idiotic small-town cop is rewarded with Eternian bling and a supermodel on his lap?! A young blonde as a prize for the vice-principal from Back to the Future is the point of Masters of the Universe when I said, "Fuck this Cannon movie."

Meg Foster and Frank Langella received a visit on the set of Masters of the Universe from Richard Szponder, a young He-Man fan who won both a Mattel contest and a bit part in the movie. (Photo source: He-Man.org)

Only Cox, Foster, Billy Barty as an Eternian inventor whose name neither I nor Tatiana Maslany and the hosts during How Did This Get Made?'s funny Masters of the Universe episode can remember and, of course, Langella emerge unscathed from Masters of the Universe. There are so many reasons to enjoy the Frost/Nixon star as an actor, and they include his evident enthusiasm over playing the rather underdeveloped role of Skeletor. Langella has no regrets about having done Masters of the Universe. In fact, he pursued the role of Skeletor because his son was a fan of the franchise, and he's always considered it one of his favorite roles, which is so unlike the snooty thespian who does a kids' film, hates everything about the project and thinks he's the best member of the ensemble, and then you watch his performance in the film, and he's sleepwalking through the fucking thing.

Langella's spirited performance--he even tosses in a couple of lines from Shakespeare ("I'm not in the giving mood this day")--is the biggest highlight of Masters of the Universe. The real hero of this sluggish sword-and-sorcery flick--in other words, the one individual who makes parts of it bearable--isn't He-Man. It's the Chinese contestant from the 1987 Miss Universe pageant.

"En Garde!"

The 1982 Conan the Barbarian score cue "Death of Rexor" is one of 21 film or TV score cues that were written for moments of swordplay and have been compiled by me into a 100-minute mix I'm calling "En Garde!" On this day when I post "En Garde!," which contains a selection from Tan Dun's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon score, Netflix happens to be premiering Michelle Yeoh's return to the role of Yu Shu Lien in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny. Sword fights are often the most compelling part of an action movie, whether it's Crouching Tiger, an older Shaw Brothers flick or a sword-and-sorcery fantasy like the two '80s movies I discussed at length above.

Sometimes those sword fights have been accompanied by original score cues that turn out to be the real highlight of the sequence. The late James Horner's "The Fencing Lesson" cleverly takes the sounds of the steps of flamenco dancers and makes those sounds function as the percussion for a training montage between Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas in The Mask of Zorro. "Arthur's Farewell," a choral piece composed by the late Jerry Goldsmith for First Knight, is more memorable than the Richard Gere/Ben Cross sword fight it was written for.

Back in 2002, which was the year I launched the AFOS radio station on the Internet, Jay Rendon, a San Francisco listener, suggested to me a playlist of score cues from movies that feature sword fights. He must have either been a fencing nerd or a fantasy nerd because the list of movies he jotted down was a pretty lengthy one.


I always liked Jay's playlist idea, but I never liked the title "Sword Fightin' Soundtracks." The playlist idea deserved a more stylish and succinct title. "En Garde!" was perfect. I never really did anything with that sword fight score cue idea, although I kept typing up a note to myself about making sure I use the fencing sound FX from the 2000 Telarc album Mega Movies (an odd hybrid of a sound FX album and a typical Telarc concert recording of film score cues performed by the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra and its conductor, the late Erich Kunzel), and then a few years ago, I went into my score album cabinets, took out any CD that contained a score from a movie featuring swordplay and placed the CDs together in a storage box, in case I ever felt like making a radio special or a mix out of Jay's idea someday.

I'm glad I waited until now to edit that mix together because in between 2002 and now, Samurai Champloo, John Woo's Red Cliff and Game of Thrones all happened. Also, the new Mixcloud page I launched before the demise of my radio station is the perfect place to post that mix.

Most film score music enthusiasts will probably gravitate towards the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings cues on my playlist, while my favorite cues on the playlist are the ones from Samurai Champloo, Yojimbo and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. "En Garde!" is another mix of mine where instrumental hip-hop gets to co-exist with classical music. Nobody thinks instrumental hip-hop and classical music can co-exist. But in my world, they do.

I don't know how people who like using film or TV scores as study music are able to concentrate. I've said it before: "That kind of music often wrecks my attempt to concentrate on filling a blank space with a paragraph." But if "En Garde!" does motivate someone to get their work done or if it does help someone to breeze through their studies, then that's great. And in that parallel universe where the funniest fictional characters from our favorite comedies are real people, if Britta Perry stumbles into "En Garde!" and it inspires her to get cracking on some thesis about how the men who take their weapons and collide them with other men's weapons during these works of fiction are actually acting out their desires to do each other, then that's great too. Actually, that's a little weird like everything else Britta does, but I'll accept it.

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



Venture Bros. creator Jackson Publick's statement that "this season, like Season Five, lacks a satisfactory finale, because we didn't write one" is an interesting lament because Publick does an outstanding job intertwining this season's storylines and building those storylines towards that unsatisfactory finale in his consistently funny script for "Tanks for Nuthin'." Sometimes I think maybe Publick is trolling his fans and he likes to dupe them into thinking the finale will be a letdown like "The Devil's Grip" was to a segment of the fans (newsflash: "The Devil's Grip" is actually better than those fans think).

Or maybe Publick's just being honest. I don't know. It's all a mystery--like whether or not Dr. Venture and the Monarch are actually a second pair of titular brothers.

The sexual mishaps that have led to Dr. Venture having a brother he doesn't know about (and possibly an additional child out there who was mentioned once in the second season and has never been mentioned again), the narcissism of the wealthy and the failure of a space age that promised us jetpacks and hasn't yet delivered aren't the only recurring themes on The Venture Bros. There's also the recurring idea that many of the second-in-commands or underlings in the Ventureverse are far more deserving to be running things than the idiots who somehow ended up with the keys to the car, whether that idiot is the Monarch or Dr. Venture.


This season, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch--the wifey who's always been too smart to be playing second fiddle to supervillains but is also too principled and levelheaded to be in the business of arching--gets to run things. The Sovereign's death has resulted in her trying to keep both the Guild of Calamitous Intent and the Council of 13 from falling apart, in addition to her new tasks as Councilwoman 1. But "Tanks for Nuthin'" implies that Dr. Mrs. the Monarch is turning into yet another idiot in power. She's apparently developed Lois Lane-itis in the eyes and ears and is unable to look more closely at the evidence of the Blue Morpho's return to recognize that the man in the Morpho's old mask is actually her husband, not Dr. Venture. But unlike the Monarch and Dr. Venture, that's not because she's a lifelong imbecile. It's because she's becoming distracted by both the marital problems that are being caused by her new job and the stress of that very job.

"Tanks for Nuthin'" follows Dr. Mrs. the Monarch (I know it'd be easier to simply call her Sheila, but Dr. Mrs. the Monarch is just a funny name to repeatedly say in its entirety) on a part of that job nobody would enjoy doing: informing the spouse of a Guild member that her husband's dead. Accidentally killed by Gary when he tossed him into a pit in Ventech Tower's under-construction lobby at the end of "Rapacity in Blue" last week, Haranguetan left behind a wife who also happens to be a supervillain: Battleaxe (Barbara Rosenblat from Orange Is the New Black), a Celtic warrior woman who, by day, runs an Irish pub full of costumed villains who drown their misery over the drudgery of arching in booze (one of those villains is Brick Frog, the loser in the frog costume whose whole deal is the throwing of bricks, and a great little touch during one of the pub scenes is the off-screen jukebox blasting some depressing Irish song). While investigating the whereabouts of Haranguetan's unseen killer, whom everyone assumes is the Morpho, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch has to go break the news of his demise to Battleaxe, who turns out to be inconsolable, even though she clearly bickered a lot with Haranguetan and "his breath was crap and he beat me."


Dr. Mrs. the Monarch helps Battleaxe retrieve her husband's cherished Haranguetank from the NYPD impound lot, and this is where "Tanks for Nuthin'" exudes the storytelling confidence of previous Venture Bros. episodes like "Victor. Echo. November." and maybe even those final moments on Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David spins many plates at once as a storyteller and lets them crash to the ground with glee. That same impound lot is where the Morphomobile has been languishing due to the Monarch's cluelessness about parking fees, and the Monarch and Gary have to go break the Morphomobile out of car jail too. Dr. Mrs. the Monarch and the new Morpho stumble into each other, and what ensues is a chaotic and nicely animated chase where the Monarch and Gary discover the Morphomobile can fly, the show adds Battleaxe to its running joke of people who think the Morpho is Dr. Venture, a turd lands in Dr. Venture's rooftop pool and a second running joke gets a delicious payoff when not one but two villains wind up in the same pit where Haranguetan died.

Speaking of one of those two villains in the pit, Jeffrey Wright is a national treasure. I try not to read too much in advance about The Venture Bros. before each season because I prefer to be surprised by the guest stars the show has been able to quietly land. So when Wright's voice first came out of the oversized head of the Guild member known as Think Tank--he's basically a black MODOK (Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing), and I'm glad the show didn't go the hacky route by calling him "BRODOK"--I wouldn't say I squeed because I hate both the word "squee" and the unpleasant, porcine sound anyone makes when they utter that fucking word, but I was genuinely surprised and delighted by the addition of Wright to The Venture Bros.


Wright the character actor just brings so much class wherever he goes, whether it's a biopic like Boycott or a comedy like The Venture Bros. He's the most alive and nuanced actor to have ever played Felix Leiter, a role previously embodied in the official Bond movies by either the slightly comatose likes of David Hedison and Jack Lord, whose ego on the set of Hawaii Five-0 was so inflated it made David Caruso's ego on the sets of NYPD Blue and CSI: Miami look like a Patriots football, or the much more comatose likes of Cec Linder and a pre-Lost, Members Only jacket-wearing John Terry. As Dr. Nidaba, the Nietzsche-worshiping intellectual who teaches Dean's philosophy class by day and incongruously slips into a man-tank costume to arch Dr. Venture by night, Wright is basically parodying a typical Jeffrey Wright villain role, whether it's Dr. Narcisse on Boardwalk Empire, Peoples Hernandez in Shaft or the not-as-villainous-but-verging-on-sinister scientist in Source Code, and he's hilarious in the part.

Chris Rock didn't win Oscar night, or as I prefer to call that night, #JusticeForFlint night. After both his entertaining Venture Bros. guest shot--the highlight of "Tanks for Nuthin'"--and his tweets decrying Rock's hypocrisy when Rock delivered racist and unfunny jokes about us Asians shortly after his monologue about Hollywood racism, the real winner of Oscar night was Wright.

Half-assed Asian joke, #Oscars, and then preach about diversity? #LoseMe

— Jeffrey Wright (@jfreewright) February 29, 2016

'Preciate the response to my note on #Oscars' Asian bit. Simple: Rosa Parks didn't boycott for the right to throw other POC's under the bus.

— Jeffrey Wright (@jfreewright) March 1, 2016

Other memorable quotes:
* "William, there's a Nazi here to see you."

* "I spent all morning putting together a handy chart for everyone currently in line to arch Venture. So Wide Wale's Venture's primary, right? But he ceded sub-arching rights to these other Level 10s, through the Guild 'Fiends and Family' plan..."

* "Please leave your papers on my desk as you wander off to your unexamined lives of gravity bongs, ceaseless tweets and date rapery."

Smack him with a dick, smack him with a dick

Chris Rock is one of a few stand-ups who made me want to become a comedian or at least a writer of some form of comedy. But he's not perfect. He has a history of telling hacky and lazy jokes about Asians that goes all the way back to his Nat X character's now-bleeped-out-in-reruns "I've seen better acting in a Cambodian whorehouse"joke to Tori Spelling on SNL.

Seriously though, when is this going to change?!? Tired of it being "cool" and "ok" to bash Asians smh #Oscarshttps://t.co/1nBvAd3V0q

— Jeremy Lin (@JLin7) February 29, 2016

Lazy, uncreative joke after a brilliant monologue @chrisrock#DiversityMyAss#ISomehowMissedThisParthttps://t.co/fDZMcCLHdo

— Harry Shum Jr (@HarryShumJr) February 29, 2016

To parade little kids on stage w/no speaking lines merely to be the butt of a racist joke is reductive & gross. Antithesis of progress.

— Constance Wu (@ConstanceWu) February 29, 2016

It disappoints me that Rock's inane Asian accountant kid sketch during the 2016 Oscars--a telecast I skipped to watch #JusticeForFlint because unlike the Oscars, #JusticeForFlint would never put me to sleep, and it never did--is proof that Rock, the stand-up who used to come up with so much sharp material about America from a young black man's point of view and also co-produced the much-missed Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, is becoming as out-of-touch as one of his comedic heroes, Jerry Seinfeld. (By the way, that 1980s-ish Asian accountant sketch and Ali G's Minions/Asians joke would never have happened had Rock employed writers from Totally Biased instead of surrounding himself with the likes of Rich Vos. Both those bits reek of the '80s and early '90s and bring me back to a time when early-'90s Comedy Central was nothing but musty McHale's Navy reruns and '80s or '90s clips of white, black and Latino stand-ups telling racist jokes about Asians.) Seinfeld is one of many white comics who love to toss around the white person's term of "political correctness" and blame everything on "PC nonsense" whenever their old white world is being challenged by either diversity or comedy from a point of view that's different from theirs (or dares to question their old point of view). Your world of making Asian Americans and other groups the butt of the joke is fucking dying, Mr. Mom Jeans.

The two-time Oscar host had an old stand-up bit where he said, "I'm tired of defending rap music." Well, I'm tired of defending Chris Rock.

The "Danzón No. 2" sequence from Mozart in the Jungle

"I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" is a series of posts that appear sporadically here on the AFOS blog rather than weekly. In each post, I reveal that I never watched a certain popular movie--or that I never encountered a certain popular piece of music--until very recently, and that's largely because I'm Filipino, we're always late to the party and that's how we do.

When Mozart in the Jungle, the Amazon original series about the New York classical music world, took home Best Comedy Series and Best Actor in a Comedy for Gael García Bernal--as unorthodox conductor Rodrigo de Souza--at the Golden Globes earlier this year on January 10, Amazon celebrated its show's Golden Globe wins by allowing viewers who don't subscribe to Amazon Prime to stream for free every Mozart in the Jungle episode for only one day on January 17. I really wanted to see if Mozart in the Jungle got any better after its so-so pilot, which I watched for free on Amazon during Amazon pilot season a year before (I don't subscribe to Amazon Prime because it's too expensive for my blood), so I had to kiss the whole Sunday goodbye and try to stream Mozart in the Jungle's entire run before it turned back into a pumpkin at midnight.

Streaming two whole seasons in one Sunday is difficult to accomplish, especially when you're like me and you don't believe in binge-watching. I think it's a terrible way to savor scripted TV--I believe in taking my time when it comes to watching shows--and I also don't like to call it binge-watching because that word makes the act of TV-watching sound disgusting and Mr. Creosote-ish. Streaming two seasons in one Sunday is also difficult when you're the kind of viewer who can get fidgety after only two hours of marathoning a show and Sunday isn't the best day to be marathoning the entire lifespan of a show because after much procrastination, Sunday usually ends up being the day when you have to go replenish your fridge with groceries or else you're screwed for the next few days. Despite those obstacles, I was able to get as far as the third-to-last episode of the second season before Mozart in the Jungle turned back into a pumpkin.

As Rodrigo, the mercurial artistic soul whom aspiring oboist Hailey Rutledge (Lola Kirke) falls in love with and whom Mozart in the Jungle creators Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman (Coppola's cousin) and Alex Timbers loosely based on Venezuelan rock-star conductor Gustavo Dudamel, Bernal definitely deserved that Golden Globe. At times, Mozart in the Jungle threatens to turn into Entourage-y lifestyle porn, but it's neither as douchey as Entourage nor as unconvincing in its attempts to establish why its fictional central figure is an A-list star. I never could buy that the rather boring-ass Vincent Chase is a movie star--a CW star maybe, but not the 1997-ish DiCaprio type Entourage frequently hyped up Vinnie to be--whereas thanks to the amount of time Mozart in the Jungle spends on Rodrigo's creative process, as well as the vitality and warmth Bernal brings to Rodrigo, you understand why Rodrigo is such a highly regarded conductor and why every musician in the fictional New York Symphony would take a bullet for him.


While classical music nerds are having tons of quibbles with Mozart in the Jungle's portrayal of the classical music world, I'm unable to find loads of things to nitpick about because I'm only familiar with that world from a film score music standpoint. But I do have one quibble with Mozart in the Jungle: the classical music world is full of Asian stars like violinist Sarah Chang and pianists Lang Lang and Yuja Wang (it's basically the opposite of the film industry in Hollywood and its allergy to Asian American actors), and the only Asian character on the show is frigging Sharon (Jennifer Kim), a subservient non-musician who banged Rodrigo when she was his assistant in the pilot and whose sole characteristic is that she still carries a torch for Rodrigo despite betraying him and the New York Symphony to go work as an assistant for their biggest enemy.

Mozart in the Jungle's first season, the batch of episodes that won Mozart in the Jungle its two Golden Globes, is a bit like The West Wing: nearly everybody on the show is white, they all love working for an enigmatic but charismatic and immensely likable Latino guy and the opening titles are in the Trajan typeface. The second season is more confident of itself storytelling-wise and is better than the first, as well as much less in thrall to The West Wing: the previously unimaginative opening titles have ditched the boring West Wing typeface for much more fanciful--and much more fitting--animated graphics that, unlike the season 1 intro, are customized for each episode.


Amazon's confidence in Mozart in the Jungle after the first season allowed the crew to expand the scope of the show and take its cameras to Rodrigo's old home turf of Mexico for a standout two-parter, and while Bernal remains as charismatic and immensely likable as ever, the Mexico two-parter does an effective job adding extra shading to the character of Rodrigo and making this enigmatic rock star type more relatable ("I'm a nerd just like you," admits Rodrigo to Hailey, or as he awesomely calls her, "Jai Alai," after Jai Alai is surprised by how ordinary his old bedroom at his abuela's house looks). The sycophantic Sharon remains an underwhelming representative of Asians in the show's universe, although the second season kind of makes up for the mistake that is the Sharon character by finally acknowledging the existence of Lang and another Asian classical music star, part-Japanese New York Philharmonic conductor Alan Gilbert, who both guest-star as themselves in the super-sized episode "Touché Maestro, Touché."

But any time Coppola directs an episode like the "Regresso Del Rey/How to Make God Laugh" two-parter in Mexico or last season's "You Go to My Head,"Mozart in the Jungle just plain soars. His episodes are full of the same kinds of dreamlike traits and visual splendor that distinguished 2001's CQ, Coppola's underappreciated feature-length directorial debut about the making of a '60s B-movie.

"How to Make God Laugh" is also special for twice featuring excerpts from composer Arturo Márquez's 1994 classical piece "Danzón No. 2," a composition Rodrigo gets to guest-conduct when Maestro Rivera (Emilio Echevarría), his old mentor, literally passes the baton to him for an outdoor performance with the current members of the Mexican youth orchestra where Rodrigo got his start. The Coppola episode may have introduced me to this exhilarating and soulful Mexican composition I never heard before, but when I heard the Bay Area classical station KDFC present Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra's live performance of "Danzón No. 2" in its entirety a few weeks after I saw the episode, that was the moment when I really fell in love with "Danzón No. 2."



Hearing the composition in its complete nine-minute form (instead of the bits and pieces "How to Make God Laugh" culled from "Danzón No. 2") made me better understand why, according to Peruvian composer Aurelio Tello in an NPR piece about Márquez, "The audience was shouting, and for five or six minutes, the audience were [sic] clapping," when "Danzón No. 2" had its Mexico City premiere in 1994 (hearing Dudamel's nine-minute live version on KDFC also made me purchase the album it comes from, Dudamel's 2008 Deutsche Grammophon album Fiesta). I know nothing about Mexican classical music or the danzón, the Cuban ballroom dance style Márquez stumbled into in Mexico City in the early '90s before he was inspired to write "Danzón No. 2" as a tribute to danzón rhythms and '30s swag. But if this is what Mexican classical music has been like in the last 25 years, wow, America really needs to be exposed to more classical music from Mexico.

Just like what happens whenever I revisit Jay and Biggie enthusiastically dropping bars during "Brooklyn's Finest," I never want "Danzón No. 2" to end whenever I hear it, and I'm always kind of sad when it's over. "Danzón No. 2" radiates hopefulness.

Arturo Márquez, the composer of "Danzón No. 2"

Alondra de la Parra, one of a few conductors who have made "Danzón No. 2" a regular part of their concerts

It's no wonder that, as the Fiesta album liner notes point out, the biggest fans of "Danzón No. 2" in Mexico have considered it an alternate Mexican national anthem, like how some Americans wish George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue" were the national anthem (instead of Francis Scott Key's boring "Star-Spangled Banner," which sprang to life only when either Jimi Hendrix or Marvin Gaye took a stab at it and is so disliked by Esquire's Miles Raymer that he joked that R. Kelly's "Ignition" remix would be a better national anthem than "Star-Spangled Banner"). In fact, the wave of national pride during the 1994 Zapatista Chiapas uprising against the Mexican government also inspired Márquez as he composed "Danzón No. 2."

While many view "Danzón No. 2" as an anthemic type of work, director Guillermo Ortiz Pichardo envisioned "Danzón No. 2" as the story of a torrid love triangle in a '40s Mexico City dance hall when he made a short 2009 film of the same name featuring both "Danzón No. 2" in its entirety and Márquez in a cameo as a pianist. It's remarkable how well "Danzón No. 2" fits in with Pichardo's pulpy vision of dance hall workers becoming entangled with fedora-wearing gangsters.


Danzón No. 2 (2010) from Guillermo Ortiz Pichardo on Vimeo.

It's an interesting time to be discovering "Danzón No. 2" via Mozart in the Jungle and KDFC, especially when Donald Drumpf is in the middle of a bizarre rampage against Mexico as part of his presidential campaign. The next time the ornery Oompa Loompa or any of his deranged followers tries to spread more lies about Mexico being a country of rapists and murderers, a Mexican protester ought to wave around a phone or a boombox and put on "Danzón No. 2"--whether it's a version conducted by Dudamel or a version conducted by the great female conductor Alondra de la Parra--to troll those hatemongers and remind everyone else that Mexico produces many moments of beauty like "Danzón No. 2."

I don't want that protester to just put on "Danzón No. 2" at a reasonable volume that's reasonable enough for Milton Waddams to collate data to. I want that person to blast it loudly and right in the racist Drumpf crowd's faces, until their ears bleed and their combovers slide off their scalp.

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



Brock might not think so, but The Venture Bros.' move to big, bad New York is the best thing to happen to the OSI's toughest agent, probably since the life-changing day he bought his first Zeppelin LP. "It Happening One Night" is the latest Venture Bros. episode to make abundantly clear that the Venture family bodyguard has been off his game ever since he rejoined Team Venture in New York.

Samson's clearly no match for the New York supervillains he's had to tussle with ever since the newly wealthy Dr. Venture went from being small potatoes to an antagonist everyone in the Guild of Calamitous Intent wants to arch (Brock's new fuckbuddy Warriana has had to save Brock twice), and now in "It Happening One Night," he thinks the ninja-themed family restaurant where Hank has his dinner date with Sirena Ong is an actual ninja hideout (the ninja restaurant is a real-life thing in Tribeca, by the way). So Brock roughs up the waiters, including Jared (Nathan Fillion), a.k.a. the Brown Widow, who's so badly in debt he makes flat-broke Peter Parker in Spider-Man 2 look like a Kardashian kid.

Ninja New York in Tribeca

The Venture Bros. version of Ninja New York

Earlier this season, Brock told Hank to Google one of his heroes, Steve McQueen. Maybe if Brock bothered to do the same kind of research online while trying to keep an eye on Hank during his night out with Wide Wale's daughter, he wouldn't have wound up looking kind of stupid after being told that the ninja stronghold he infiltrated--he and his temporary sidekick Rocco (Mark Gagliardi), the Ong family bodyguard Sirena so detests, even go through the trouble of knocking a couple of waiters out and donning their fake ninja garb--is merely a trendy sushi joint.

A lapse in judgment like that may make Brock look bad as a spy who was trained to always be aware of his surroundings, but it's a good creative move for the show, which clearly struggled over what to do with Brock a few seasons ago. I have a theory for why Venture Bros. creator Jackson Publick separated Brock from the Ventures for a while and replaced him with reformed pedophile Sgt. Hatred: he simply got bored with having Brock always save the day. That kind of thing makes for terrific action sequences, but it can also become boring in the middle of a comedy show that's primarily about mediocrity. Brock was becoming too perfect a human being, even though this Swedish murder machine will always somehow be a funny character, thanks to whatever the fuck Patrick Warburton brings to the page, as well as because of the brilliant thing Publick and Doc Hammer wanted to do with Brock from the start.

They wanted to take Race Bannon and make him both psychotic on the battlefield (go revisit "Victor. Echo. November." on Hulu if you've forgotten how psychotic Brock can really be) and a frequently bored-sounding blue-collar type who viewed the guarding of a narcissistic super-scientist like Dr. Venture as work that's beneath him, even though he likes Dean and Hank (and H.E.L.P.e.R. too). It's like how Benson hated being the butler to the Tates but was kind to Jessica, Corinne and Billy because they were the only Tates who weren't snooty or racist. A.V. Club contributor Kevin Johnson's weird assessment that Brock hates Dean and Hank (in a typo-ridden guest review the A.V. Club recently posted when its regular Venture Bros. reviewer was gone for a week) is a total misreading of Brock's relationship with them. The OSI agent's Benson-style attachment to these boys who so badly need someone like him to guide them through--and away from--the craziness Dr. Venture brought into their lives is an essential part of The Venture Bros. It brings some genuine warmth to the show but never crosses into sentimentality (someone in a Reddit forum about Johnson's review interestingly counteracted his misreading by astutely pointing out that whenever Brock gets frustrated with Dean or Hank, it brings to mind Louis C.K. whenever he talks about getting annoyed by his daughters).

Speaking of Benson, competence can become comedy kryptonite, so when Benson became too competent and sensible--and popular--to continue being around the craziness of the other characters on Soap, he was spun off into his own show. Publick and Hammer's way of keeping Brock's similar type of competence from becoming stale was not to give Brock his own show but to sideline Brock and give him a Craig-era-Bond-like identity crisis as a professional killer (like when he went off the grid and lived with the duo of Steve Summers and his boyfriend Sasquatch, the show's parody of The Six Million Dollar Man's Bigfoot storyline) or to bring him down to Earth and depower him a bit, like how Publick and Hammer are depowering him now in New York. I bet that's why Publick and Hammer reinstated him as the family's bodyguard: they finally figured out how to make Brock interesting again, and the soft reboot the show is experiencing in New York has a lot to do with that.

Brock's arc this season is basically "if 007 had to fight someone like MODOK, he would definitely lose, and if you put 007 in the bedroom with a woman like Warriana, he would definitely not be in charge in the bedroom like he's always written to be in the Bond movies." It's an enjoyable way to play around with the spy genre assassin character who's always good at everything and to mock the wish-fulfillment fantasy side of the Bond movies. The Swedish murder machine is at his most interesting when he gets knocked around a bit, whether in battle or in the bedroom, like in "Tanks for Nuthin'."


Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, the voice of reason in the Monarch household, is also being similarly depowered a bit, even though as a Guild member, she now has more power and authority than her husband. If she weren't so distracted by both the stress of being Councilwoman 1 and the marital discord that's developed due to her rise in power, she'd be her old smarter self again and she'd be better able to track down the supervillain-killing mystery man who's been creating a bloodbath within the Guild (but is doing so accidentally, of course). The Monarch uses that state of distractedness--and his wife's love of role-playing during sex--to trick her into getting tranqed and to lure her away from finding out he's been arching other Guild members as the Blue Morpho in order to have Dr. Venture all to himself again.

There have been some complaints in the past from Venture Bros. viewers about how often pedophilia has been used as humor on the show (speaking of which, I rewatched "Everybody Comes to Hank's" the other day because of this week's focus on Hank's love life and was surprised by how the revelation that Dermott Fictel was the product of a relationship between a Woody Allen-esque Dr. Venture and the underage president of his fan club was a rare reference to wrong-on-so-many-levels sex that wasn't totally played for laughs, and, man, Publick and Hammer were really sticking it to Allen in that scene too). But lately, ever since the tranq-addicted Pirate Captain's relapse, I feel like the constant tranqing of characters on the show has become a similarly tiresome gag. Dr. Mrs. the Monarch becomes the latest character to get tranqed--perhaps the repetition of the dart gags is intended to be a joke about how the Morpho and his son (and even the new villains this week) are the hackiest and least creative people when it comes to taking down their enemies--and this umpteenth tranqing sort of ruins the lovely sight of Dr. Mrs. the Monarch cosplaying as Daisy Mae from Li'l Abner and not even bothering to Deep South-ify her incongruous Harvey Fierstein accent.

I could think of a million other non-Cosby-ish ways to keep Dr. Mrs. the Monarch from discovering the Morpho Cave. I know Publick and Hammer hate the minor character of Kim, the really hot, supervillainy-admiring best friend of Triana Orpheus, because Kim's biggest fans keep pestering them about her longtime absence, but "It Happening One Night" could have been an opportunity for the Monarch or Gary to bring back Kim to the show and enlist her to whisk away Dr. Mrs. the Monarch, who once offered to mentor Kim in the ways of supervillainy, and take her shoe-shopping or something.

I also know a live-action Venture Bros. movie isn't currently on anyone's agenda ("I don't know that I need to make a Venture Bros. movie. I'd probably be into it," said Publick to SuicideGirls back in 2006). Let's face it: a two-hour version would be pointless and difficult to pull off in live-action form. It would also be unable to recapture the massive scope of the show's universe. Aside from 2010's surprisingly good Space Battleship Yamato, has there ever been a live-action movie based on an animated show that's actually bearable as a movie? Yet that didn't stop Chris George, The Venture Bros.' character and prop design supervisor, from imagining last week a live-action version starring Masters of the Universe's Meg Foster as Dr. Mrs. the Monarch.


It's too bad America was too chickenshit in the '80s to be like Japan and see the viability and appeal of animated shows for adults like The Venture Bros. If The Venture Bros. had been created in the '80s instead of the '00s and it immediately led to a live-action version, a younger Foster as Sheila would have been a better casting move than sticking Foster in a two-hour toy commercial and giving her very little to do in a 45-pound costume that doesn't allow her to sit down or even move.

Foster, who recently starred in a Rob Zombie movie, is too old to be playing Sheila these days, so if The Venture Bros. made the jump to live action, I would cast either Jade Tailor from The Magicians or Jenna Coleman as Dr. Mrs. the Monarch and then get either Sandy Martin from Napoleon Dynamite and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia or frequent Venture Bros. guest star Kate McKinnon to redub Dr. Mrs. the Monarch. Coleman even has Dr. Mrs. the Monarch's exact same nose.

Jenna Coleman

Jade Tailor (with Arjun Gupta) on The Magicians

Due to how often Coleman has appeared in period costumes on British TV, I wouldn't be surprised if she really took to Dr. Mrs. the Monarch's love of role-playing, which, in "It Happening One Night," is mirrored in Jared and the other waiters' dedication to the role of a ninja and, of course, Hank's love of role-playing. In one season, Hank has gone from modeling himself after Justin Bieber to modeling himself after McQueen and now Bad-era Michael Jackson. I'm kind of experiencing whiplash--or rather, whatever that sound effect was that Weird Al Yankovic parodied in his "Fat" video whenever he would move his body--from trying to keep up with Hank's fashion changes.

But Hank being 29 years late to the party in regards to Martin Scorsese's video for "Bad" is the funniest part of his date with Sirena, in addition to Cristin Milioti's endearing Jersey Shore voice as Sirena (when Sirena invites Hank to join her for an impromptu nighttime swim, I love the way Milioti says, "That's why it's fun-uh!") and Hank getting his Bull Durham on during a Crash Davis-style monologue at the dinner table. Who knew The Venture Bros. would discover a girl who genuinely likes Hank for his weirdness and who knew The Venture Bros. could be capable of being as genuinely romantic as, oh, I don't know, It's Your First Kiss, Charlie Brown (you probably expected me to say Love Actually, but I've never seen Love Actually, and I don't need to see it because it's a waste of time if Liam Neeson doesn't get to kill anybody)? The last time Hank had some luck with the ladies, he slept with the mother of his half-brother Dermott, and nothing as cringe-inducing as that shows up to taint the romantic moments during "It Happening One Night."


An additional bond between characters develops during Hank and Sirena's date night--I'm not going to call it a "bromance" because I hate that word--and it's the unlikely friendship between Brock and Rocco. They quickly get bored with fighting each other in the park--they're like a pair of Star Wars cosplayers who ran out of energy while trying to reenact a lightsaber duel in front of a line outside The Force Awakens on opening night--and after that exhausting weapons duel, which is nicely visualized by the Titmouse animators, they decide to team up to track down their respective missing charges. But Rocco, whom Sirena dislikes due to her disdain for the goons Wide Wale assigns to watch her, winds up irritating Brock in the car by disapproving of his smoking habit and questioning his fashion choices. I like how Rocco is to "Faking Miracles" and "It Happening One Night" what Jerry Gergich used to be to Parks and Recreation: a punching bag to everybody.

Brock becomes so preoccupied with making sure Hank's okay that he's unable to prevent Dr. Venture from being robbed by the Doom Factory, this episode's clever reimagining of the Legion of Doom as Andy Warhol and his avant-garde cohorts (my favorite Doom Factory villain name is Eenie-Meanie, a portmanteau of the names of Edie Sedgwick and shrinking heroines like the Wasp from the Avengers comics). If Brock really hated Hank like Kevin Johnson said, why would he spend an entire night tracking down Hank? Brock may be off his game as a spy at the moment, but that kind of dedication to caring about Hank is a great example of how he'll always be a better father figure to Hank than the self-absorbed Dr. Venture, whose narcissism during both the Doom Factory's party at his penthouse and Doom Factory leader Wes Warhammer's filming of him in his Walter White tightie-whities for one of his "pointless films of celebrities" makes him an easy-to-rob target.

This season's running joke about the outcomes of the Monarch's attempts to arch the Guild members listed on his Pyramid of Peril--nothing ever goes according to plan, but each arch ends up dead anyway--is so good and nicely timed (as well as a lot funnier than the ubiquitous tranq darts) that even when the running joke resurfaced at the end of "It Happening One Night," it still surprised and amused me. The Monarch accidentally kills an entire crew of villains this time. He's hardly the smooth serial killer his wife and the others in her council perceive the Morpho to be.

Notice how the Guild body count each week has escalated like the number of garbage cans Frank Drebin would hit with his car each week on Police Squad. Gary accidentally killed Haranguetan in "Rapacity in Blue." Both the Monarch's actions and the chaos on Columbus Circle led to two villains perishing in "Tanks for Nuthin'" (no corpses were shown, but there's no way Think Tank survived being hit by the Haranguetank, and it's also doubtful that Battleaxe, the Haranguetank's driver, is still alive). This week, 11 villains are blown up when the trigger the Monarch forgot about while trying to plant the Doom Factory's lair with explosives is accidentally pressed.

Unless it actually took place off-screen, that super-science convention we've been hearing about throughout the season is about to happen, and wherever Dr. Venture goes the rest of this season, the arches from the Pyramid of Peril are bound to follow. I wouldn't be surprised if the Monarch ends up killing all the remaining villains who show up at this convention. You know it's an intriguing season of The Venture Bros. when the Monarch has become a far more effective killing machine than the Swedish one.

The inspiration for the Doom Factory's underwater lair design (Photo source: Reddit)

Other memorable quotes:
* William Woodson soundalike (Publick): "Here, 10 of the most ruthlessly self-involved villains on Earth loosely align forces against the powers of good: the cold-hearted ice sculptress Frigid; the toxic tongue of Serpentine..."
Serpentine (James Urbaniak): "Oh, look, everyone! Poor little rich girl needs attention."
Woodson soundalike: "... miniature muse Eenie-Meanie and Gerard the Gorilla; the watchful Black Maria and Trashenstein the Exquisite Corpse; Ultra Violent and Billy Maim; the feminine yet gigantic She-Hemoth and the bittersweet Hard Candy! All sycophantic clingers-on to the evil genius of Wes Warhammer!"

* Sirena: "What is with your outfit?"
Hank: "What? You don't like it?"
Sirena: "It's the... Isn't it the 'Bad' outfit?"
Hank: "No, this is the good one!"


* Rocco: "Where did you learn that jump thing?"
Brock: "Achilles in Troy."
Rocco: "Oh, the Pittster. Nice! It's a totally underrated movie."

* "Okay, okay, okay. Were I king, I would outlaw men in sandals. No, wait, sandals with socks. Wait, Rocco in sandals. Wait, wait, wait, Rocco's mother, so she could never give birth to Rocco."

* Rocco: "So what, did they like freeze you in 1979 and just wake you up? Or were you like part of some time travel thing? I mean, the car, the clothes, the music. [Grabs Brock's mullet.] This Tennessee top hat."
Brock: "[Stops the car.] Hey! Do not touch the hair."



* Sirena: "What do you believe in?"
Hank: "Well, I believe in the soul, the hanging curveball, pretzel rods--not twists--the powdery smell of girls' deodorant, that pets talk to each other when we're not listening. I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted with clones. I believe in the sweet spot, magic invisible gnomes, that cereal is not just for breakfast but for any meal. And I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days, stopping only to go to the bathroom obviously."

* Ninja waiter: "Jared, you're the Brown Widow? Whoa, I-I-I thought you were just a struggling actor like me."
Jared: "I'm both, Justin. And I'm sorry, but one improv class does not make you an actor, sir."

There are three phases of Bruce Willis. There's the Willis who occasionally gives a shit, like the farcical Willis during the early part of Moonlighting's run (before he and Cybill Shepherd got so salty with each other that their off-screen arguments resulted in a lot less scenes between David and Maddie) or the Willis who helped bring some changes to the '80s onslaught of invincible and musclebound action heroes and added both a Moonlighting-esque comic energy and a vulnerable edge to '80s action heroes in the original Die Hard.

You might be a bigger fan of the era when Willis was frequently paired with a little kid who would function as his dramatic or comic sidekick. The biggest hit from that era was The Sixth Sense. Finally, there's the grumpy old man phase of Willis, where he's not as chatty as he used to be on Moonlighting or in the earlier Die Hard movies and he looks like he'd rather be counting his Planet Hollywood money or noodling on his harmonica than engaging with the material ("I'd never work with Bruce Willis again. I did that Blake Edwards film with him, Sunset. Willis is high school. He's not that serious about his work," said the late James Garner to Movieline back in 1994, while grumbling about having to co-star with an early version of this disinterested Willis).

Brock Samson, the tough OSI agent and longtime fan of Led Zeppelin (as well as The Rockford Files, according to a 2004 IGN "interview" with him), is like a weird cross between the Willis who comes to the aid of some troubled kid and a typically laconic Willis character from the grumpy old man era. But this unlikely nanny to Dean and Hank Venture on The Venture Bros.--a nanny with the body of wrestler Psycho Sid Vicious, whom creator Jackson Publick reportedly modeled him after--is slightly younger and, thanks to the sublime voice work of Patrick Warburton, a little more enthusiastic about the art of slaying bad guys, whether it's when he deprives a Guild of Calamitous Intent goon of his internal organs for threatening Dean and Hank or when he creatively kills a bunch of henchmen with his favorite instrument of death, his '69 Charger (Brock has an unexplained disdain for guns).


After spending a couple of seasons away from guarding the Venture family, the Swedish murder machine returned to the household refreshed and reinvigorated, and he's the same old Brock, although the show's new backdrop of New York has been kind of kicking his ass lately, and he's discovered a newfound taste for being dominated during sex. It's been a largely satisfying season of the Adult Swim cult favorite that's made us never look at boy adventurers, the space age or old TV shows from the '70s or '80s the same way again, but now the eight-episode season's coming to a close this weekend with an episode that reportedly "will be very disappointing as a finale," according to Publick in interviews, and it will leave things to be resolved in either the following season or a super-sized special in the style of 2015's "All This and Gargantua-2."

To get ready for the arrival of this disappointing season finale, I put together a new sandwich based on the character of Brock. Because he's Swedish, it's a meatball sandwich, but frankly, Swedish meatballs paired with lingonberry sauce and gravy just like at IKEA's Swedish cafe would be a little boring for a sandwich based on Brock, so I've added some spice to it and topped the meatballs with guacamole instead (Trader Joe's Chunky Guac would be dope). The result is what I'm calling the Guac Samson.

The sandwich consists of:
* six meatballs from a bag of IKEA's Köttbullar, a.k.a. frozen Swedish meatballs (available at the frozen foods section of any IKEA); cook them at 450°F for about 15 minutes first
* as much fucking guacamole as you like
* any kind of hoagie bread


My favorite thing to snack on while marathoning a TV show for an hour or two is either Raisinets or any kind of peanut butter cups from Trader Joe's. But for either a marathon of The Venture Bros. or a viewing of its sixth-season finale, the Guac Samson would be more appropriate as a viewing snack.

Like its mulleted namesake, it will probably kill you before the end of the show.

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



When The Venture Bros. pulled the in medias res trick--an overused storytelling device Rick and Morty, another equally great animated comedy from Team Venture's home network of Adult Swim, made fun of a few months ago--only 25 seconds into "A Party for Tarzan," I was worried. "No! Not you too, Astrobase Go," I thought to myself.

Fortunately, the episode's deployment of in medias res turned out to be a parody of Martin Scorsese's in medias res moments from the opening title sequences of GoodFellas and Casino (as well as Raging Bull). I almost forgot that Scorsese actually did this, decades before Morty Smith would lose his mind on the Purge planet, when an aspiring screenwriter on that planet pissed Morty off by starting his story at the point where it got interesting instead of where its timeframe actually began.

Set during a night when Gary, who doesn't enjoy the homicidal part of henching, reluctantly executes an arch in the Pine Barrens as dirty work and Dr. Mrs. the Monarch experiences some similar hesitation while Wide Wale gives her the chance to pull the trigger on the man she thinks is the supervillain-killing Blue Morpho, "A Party for Tarzan" ranks up there with Community's "Contemporary American Poultry" episode and Mr. Show's hilarious "Pallies" sketch as an entertaining Scorsese parody. "Pallies" was actually more of a parody of the Bill the Butcher-esque treatment commercial TV has subjected all of Scorsese's R-rated movies to than a parody of the director's signature filmmaking techniques, but it's still a great little sketch about the violence of GoodFellas.



"A Party for Tarzan," the penultimate episode of The Venture Bros.' sixth season, even has in common with "Pallies" the brief presence of Paul F. Tompkins. The Mr. Show alum reprises his role from earlier this season as the original Morpho, whose 1973 master plan of disguising himself as the then-closeted Billie Jean King and nakedly seducing Dr. Z (Jackson Publick) into relinquishing a priceless statuette known as the Jade Dragon (while somehow tucking in his dick like Buffalo Bill)--which is detailed in a flashback-within-a-flashback--is definitely something you would never have seen on The Green Hornet.

If you're going to give Patrick Warburton and Mike Sinterniklaas an entire episode off from voicing Brock and Dean, respectively, you better damn well make the episode worthwhile. The Scorsesean flashback gimmick Doc Hammer went with for the episode he scripted--perhaps to compensate for the lack of Warburton and Sinterniklaas--could have turned out to be annoying, like it would have probably been in the hands of some lesser writer whose go-to Scorsese references are limited to Raging Bull and GoodFellas. But luckily, the gimmick works. When Hammer's making fun of Scorsese's overreliance on "Gimme Shelter" instead of recreating Joe Pesci's most profane lines from GoodFellas and Casino, that's how you know "A Party for Tarzan" is a solid Scorsese spoof. The Stones and blues music soundalikes Venture Bros. composer J.G. Thirlwell came up with in place of too-pricey-to-clear Scorsese movie soundtrack cuts like "Gimme Shelter" or "Mannish Boy" are funnier than using the actual songs themselves.

Between the references to Scorsese's 1987 video for Michael Jackson's "Bad" during "It Happening One Night" and the homages to Scorsese's documentary narration-inspired style throughout "A Party for Tarzan," Publick and Hammer must have revisited much of Scorsese's work while looking for inspiration for the New York-based sixth season and planning the whole season out. Doing that must have given Publick and Hammer a renewed appreciation for the legendary New York director whose name is interestingly one of the most frequently misspelled, even by filmmakers who claim to be fans of his work.


In "Once More, With Feeling," Joss Whedon chose musical numbers as a way to get inside the heads of his Buffy characters and uncover sides of those characters they would be uncomfortable with expressing in conversation. Hammer does the same thing with his one-episode experiment with Scorsesean voiceovers (other than the P.I. genre spoof "Everybody Comes to Hank's" and the unreliable narration about Phantom Limb's origin story during "Victor. Echo. November.,"The Venture Bros. has stayed away from voiceover narration).

Unlike the characters during either The Dark Knight Rises or the Greg Berlanti version of Supergirl (which, despite having a weakness for unconvincing, typical-for-a-CBS-show dialogue, actually had its best episode this week when it exposed Supergirl to Red Kryptonite and Supergirl transformed into the show's scariest--and mostattractive--villain, way scarier than either Laura Benanti or Chris Vance), the Venture Bros. characters aren't the kinds of characters who say what they're feeling and thinking all the time. Except for the Monarch and Hank, they talk less like typical TV show characters and more like ordinary people, and ordinary people rarely say what they're feeling and thinking.


So the Scorsesean voiceovers allow us to see what the Monarch is like when he's not trying to be a melodramatic and highly theatrical arch in front of either his wife or his one remaining henchman and he's all by himself in the subway, like Kyle Chandler at the end of The Wolf of Wall Street. The Monarch's just like everyone else in New York: surrounded by eight million people but feeling completely isolated. He's God's lonely Monarch (interestingly, the episode's one actual homage to the film that contains the "God's lonely man" line, Taxi Driver, focuses not on the Monarch but on Dr. Mrs. the Monarch instead). The voiceovers also show Dr. Venture experiencing--right when Dr. Mrs. the Monarch shoots him in a visually striking, Hugo-style sequence that's done from the point of view of Sheila's bullet by the Titmouse animators--a rare moment of clarity and self-awareness. He takes note of the beauty of the lunar eclipse outside his penthouse and realizes his obsession with fame and celebrity and his pursuit of Greystoke and Highlander star Christopher Lambert--the titular Tarzan and, unexpectedly, a fan of speedsuits just like Dr. Venture--in order to get him to show up at his lunar eclipse party are ultimately meaningless.

Hammer's method of using the voiceovers to advance character and deepen some of the characters' struggles is what keeps the voiceovers from being a pointless and shallow gimmick. It also keeps "A Party for Tarzan" from turning into a disaster of New York, New York proportions.

Other memorable quotes:
* "Now because I was a huge kid and because henchmen don't do that much research, I got kidnapped instead of Senator Nighthorse-Campbell."



* "[Professor Vibrations] had me dead to rights. Could have vibrated my head off. And then he suddenly died, like of happiness or something. No, that happens! Remember that video game Berserk? In like 1981, this kid named Jeff Daly died right after he got a high score. 'Got the humanoid.' Clunk! Dead! Then like a year later, another kid dies the same way--of happiness."

* "What are you doing? I meant like create mood lighting and conversation corners. This looks like a baby shower for a teen mom."

* "Well, that's it. Dr. Venture's dead. And nobody cared: his friends, his family, his bodyguard, even his stupid robot. Didn't care. Oh please, I'm kidding! That was my jacket and it has a bulletproof lining. He's fine! Idiot thought his pocket blew up. And because he stole it from a place that makes costumes for villains, he was too ashamed to tell anyone. The next day, he returned it to Enzo's. He even had to pay for my tailoring. [Enzo spits in Dr. Venture's face.]"

Phife Dawg, who passed away at the age of 45, was a huge part of the soundtrack of my teen years, and he continues to be a huge part of the soundtrack of my current years. The following is a reposting of my discussion of Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest from August 27, 2015.

I grew up listening repeatedly to A Tribe Called Quest's first three albums on cassette: 1990's playful People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, 1991's more introspective but somehow even more enjoyable The Low End Theory and 1993's celebratory and communal Midnight Marauders, a rare threequel that actually doesn't suck. So while some ATCQ heads might find the 2011 documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, the first (and so far, only) directorial effort from actor/filmmaker/copy shop employee Michael Rapaport, to be repetitive because "it was all stuff that any Tribe fan either already knew or could pick up from a thousand different bio's on the internet," I marveled at a lot of the footage Rapaport, a Tribe fan himself, was able to gather about the origins of three of my favorite hip-hop albums, as well as the origins of the Native Tongues collective, which consisted of Tribe and several other acts who appeared on classic Tribe joints like "Award Tour" and "Oh My God."







"We don't have to do 'Fuck tha Police.' There's a time and a place for 'Fuck tha Police.' And a group for that. We don't have to do 'Fight the Power.' There's a time and a place and a group for that. We're allowed to be different," says former Native Tongues member Monie Love about the much more whimsical but no less meaningful sounds of Native Tongues artists during the documentary. Besides Tribe and Monie, the revered collective also included the remarkably still-together De La Soul, Queen Latifah, Black Sheep, the Jungle Brothers and Leaders of the New School, whose member Busta Rhymes had a breakout moment that took place not on an LONS track but as a guest MC on Tribe's "Scenario," a classic posse cut Rapaport wasn't able to include in his documentary due to clearance issues. Since "Scenario," Busta has gone on to have an unusual (and tabloid-riddled) solo career, whether he's reuniting with former Tribe frontman/beatmaker Q-Tip on the 2013 track "Thank You" or rapping in the form of either Prince Akeem or liquid metal. The last time we saw Busta, his eyes haven't been looking so good. They've been starting to get rather googly lately.



Viewers who don't know what it's like to go crate digging in a record store might not care for the footage Rapaport and cinematographer Robert Benavides lovingly shot of Q-Tip and former Tribe DJ Ali Shaheed Muhammad browsing for potential beats like kids getting lost in a candy store, but as someone who did an awful lot of crate digging as a college radio DJ, that portion of The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest resonates with me. There's an equally lovely moment where Questlove--whose choice of the letter Q for his moniker was his way of shouting out ATCQ--equates Phife Dawg's "Yo!" at the start of his classic opening verse in "Buggin' Out" with N.W.A. bursting through the Martin Luther King "I have a dream" sign at the start of the "Express Yourself" video.



Despite these great touches, Tip famously distanced himself from the final product after he watched it (he would later backpedal on his negative opinion of the film). He launched a war of words with Rapaport and told him, "All you gotta do is stay white and be privileged" (both Tip and Ali's gripes with the documentary led to Tip calling for other rappers and beatmakers to "tell your own stories" and take more control of images of themselves, which is precisely what Tip and Ali have been doing: about a year before Friday director F. Gary Gray's hugely popular N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton took the summer by storm, Tip announced his plans to co-produce with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill a similar TV project about Native Tongues, while Ali launched with music journalist Frannie Kelley the NPR hip-hop musician interview show Microphone Check). But no such anger is evident in Tip's gregarious conversations with the largely off-screen Rapaport about the early days of Tribe, like when Tip recalls how he came across the drum sample for "Can I Kick It?" or when he and Ali visit their old Manhattan high school Murry Bergtraum and Tip demonstrates how effective a classroom desk can be as a percussion instrument.

As for myself when I was in high school, I was such an ATCQ head that when I took drama class and each student was assigned to recite a song or poem without any beats and as if it were a stage monologue, I chose "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo" as my piece of spoken word to perform. So I particularly love the moment in The Travels of ATCQ when Tip does his best Redd Foxx--also peep Tip's dead-on impression of batshit crazy KRS-One--and reveals that the inspiration for "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo," which was made into an above-average music video filmed in guerrilla mode and on location in Las Vegas by future "What They Do" video mastermind Charles Stone III, came from Fred Sanford, a reference I stupidly never noticed until Tip pointed it out. "Son, you gonna sit down and watch a late-night movie with me," says Tip-as-Sanford while discussing the birth of "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo.""It's a good one: Godzilla Ate El Segundo."



Besides verses about wallet misplacement, the Tribe sound and steez were also all about empowerment, black unity, the love of making music as an art form (and subtweeting pop-rappers when they have no artistic integrity or are terrible at making music--or if they're MC Hammer, not even bothering to subtweet them) and perhaps the most relatable subject if you're not black but still a person of color: the love of music as a way to lift yourself out of whatever doldrums you're stuck with as a person of color. I cringe at some of the high-falutin' and vague adjectives either music critics or reviewers of the Rapaport documentary have used to distinguish the Tribe sound from the more popular gangsta rap Straight Outta Compton has brought back into the limelight this summer. The sound of the Queens trio (originally a quartet, before third MC Jarobi White, whom Tip describes in the film as the "spirit" of ATCQ, stepped away from the recording side of things to pursue a culinary career) is always "bohemian." What the fuck does that mean? Or it's always "positive."

Far less vague words like "unique" or "entrancing" would make more sense as descriptions of the Tribe sound. Here are four even better words: "gets your head nodding." That's precisely what Tip and Ali's low-end beats, combined with Phife's witty wordplay and his chemistry on the mic with Tip, did to your head, especially during The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. It made it constantly nod, out of both delight over the sonic beauty of the beats perfected by Tip, Ali and engineer Bob Power (or the musicality of Tip and Phife's voices) and approval over Phife's one-liners, and man, "Electric Relaxation" is full of gems from Phife, like "Not to come across as a thug or a hood/But hon, you got the goods like Madelyne Woods" or the simultaneously boastful and self-deprecating "Let me hit it from the back, girl, I won't catch a hernia/Bust off on your couch, now you got Seaman's Furniture."



The first 60 minutes of Rapaport's documentary beautifully get that point across about the group's ability to get your head nodding. Like Questlove says about Tip and Phife's rhymes during the film, "Tip is very smooth. Phife is very hype. The yin and yang of those two, that to me was the perfect marriage."

And like so many marriages, Tip and Phife's had its rough patches. At exactly the one-hour mark, the documentary switches gears and details the sad dissolution of the group, which began to take place during the recording of 1996's Beats, Rhymes and Life and is given amusingly horror-like dissonant score cues by Madlib, who, with some assists from Beastie Boys keyboardist Money Mark, composed the documentary's original score and proves he has a future in scoring horror movies. The film's last half-hour turns into every single melodramatic VH1 Behind the Music documentary you've seen about a dissolving rock band. When Rapaport hastily speeds through the Beats, Rhymes and Life album and the fifth and final Tribe album, 1998's The Love Movement, as if he's going to get Beats, Rhymes and Life/The Love Movement cooties and as if those albums are the Lil Wayne's Rebirth of Native Tongues hip-hop--which they're actually not--you're thinking to yourself, "Yo, Behind the Music announcer who always says, 'And then it all came crashing down,' get your ass out here!"



Tribe's breakup is more complicated than how Rapaport portrays it. Sure, the group's demise was due to the rift between childhood friends Tip and Phife, who's even more of a reluctant star than the reluctant star Tip is portrayed as in both the Rapaport film and Benji B's 2014 BBC Radio 1 production The Story of Q-Tip, a documentary you'll actually prefer over the Rapaport film if the craft of beatmaking is more compelling to you than melodramatic, reality TV-style infighting. The self-described "funky diabetic"--who shunned rapping after briefly pursuing a solo career (a career the documentary oddly neglects to mention) and became a basketball scout--grew tired of Tip's perfectionist ways, what he felt was Tip's insensitive, bullying gym coach-like attitude towards his struggles with diabetes and inexplicable decisions by Tip like the much-maligned prominence of Tip's cousin, then-newcomer Consequence, as a guest MC on the 1996 album (even Consequence himself admits in a deleted scene that being thrust into the spotlight on a Tribe album by Tip like that was baffling to him too). But the circumstances that led to the breakup are actually more than just "lifelong friends who got on each other's nerves." In 1998, Phife grumbled to The Source about the business side of the rap game and said, "As time went on, [the business side] started to slap me in my face. But as far as record labels, or whoever, they're not gonna do us right."

There's a whole thread about the now-defunct Jive Records, Tribe's label, also playing a role in the dissolution that Rapaport's film gives only a cursory mention to and just plain ignores the rest of the time. That's perhaps because Rapaport was trying to appease Sony, Jive's parent company, so that he could get permission to include the De La Soul/ATCQ/Native Tongues posse cut "Buddy," which Sony partially owns and which he almost couldn't get clearance for. There's a more interesting story to be told about the record industry screwing over hip-hop acts, like how both the greed of plaintiffs and lawyers and an elephant in the room called anti-rapracism has caused the art of sampling--something Tip continues to excel at, like during his Black Ivory-sampling 2008 joint "Gettin' Up"--to lose the prominence it once had in hip-hop (no wonder so many hip-hop acts jump ship to indie labels or start self-releasing their work). But The Travels of ATCQ, which has a commercial TV-friendly 100-minute running time and could use a few more minutes of examples of Tip's frequently quoted "Industry rule number 4080/Record company people are shady" line from "Check the Rhime," oddly doesn't seize the opportunity to be the first mainstream hip-hop documentary to elaborate on that story.

From left to right: Phife Dawg, Q-Tip and Jarobi.

The "J Dilla caused Tribe to jump the shark when his musical idol Tip recruited him as a co-producer" opinion that some ATCQ heads have about the Beats, Rhymes and Life album and The Love Movement is equally bananas. The late Dilla isn't to blame for the last two albums not measuring up to the other three. Actually, thanks to the addition of the about-to-be-legendary Detroit producer--fresh off producing several of the best tracks on The Pharcyde's last great album, 1995's Labcabincalifornia--to Tip and Ali's partnership, the production work by the trio that came to be known as the Ummah fortunately didn't turn into a rehash of the boom bap of The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders. So there are quite a few cuts on the Ummah-era albums (like "Get a Hold") that stand out due to Dilla and were ahead of their time (the beloved beatmaker's role in helping evolve Tribe's sound was omitted from the film because Rapaport said he felt Dilla deserved a separate documentary of his own, but he could have at least kept the segment about everyone's admiration of Dilla, which appears in the Sony Pictures Blu-ray's extended scenes section). The now-veteran musicians' unhappiness with both Jive (the label pissed off Tribe so much the group didn't go back to record one more contractually obligated album for them) and each other was what actually soured the last two albums.

Jive alienated so many artists during its existence, like when they wouldn't allow Big Boi to release guest features his former OutKast partner Andre 3000 recorded for Big's 2010 solo album Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, and I wouldn't be surprised if "Industry rule number 4080" was Tip's way of biting the hand that fed them as early as The Low End Theory. So whenever Rapaport's interviewees bring up their frustrations with Jive and its then-CEO Barry Weiss, whom Rapaport also interviews, I wish the documentary--which, interestingly, was lucky to snag Tribe manager Chris Lighty, whose discussion of his unintentional role in the demise of Native Tongues shouldn't have been deleted from the film, and Beastie Boys member MCA as interviewees before they died about a year after the film's release--would be a little more journalistic and delve into those frustrations with Jive instead of burying the lede. That's what keeps Rapaport's otherwise satisfying film from reaching the upper echelon of hip-hop documentaries like 1983's Style Wars and even the completely light-hearted Michel Gondry film Dave Chappelle's Block Party. De La Soul member Posdnuos, another interviewee during Rapaport's film, once said he thought an earlier cut of the documentary he got to see was better than the final cut because it "had a little more spice in it." His comments make me curious about material that didn't survive the final cut and didn't even get included in the deleted scenes, perhaps due to either pressure from evil record industry bastards or pressure from Tribe.

Rapaport's film also doesn't bother to take the time to clarify one of the most frequently misheard lyrics of all time, a lyric even I continued to mishear for years: the semi-audible hook during "Electric Relaxation." Is it "Relax yourself, girl, preset plan"? Or is it "Relax yourself, girl, peace out, Premier"? The hook is actually "Relax yourself, girl, please settle down." You had one job, The Travels of ATCQ.

So why can't Tip and Phife just relax themselves and please settle down and record another album together? While, as Rapaport once noted about audience reactions after the documentary screenings, "people have walked away saying, 'I wish they could get along and make more music,'" I'm satisfied with the five Tribe albums we have, plus all those Tip/Busta collabos that I like to pretend are Tribe tracks with Busta as the new Phife. Recording another album that will measure up to those first three isn't easy. Just look at the mixed reviews Beats, Rhymes and Life and The Love Movement received. By 1996, Tip and an increasingly disillusioned Phife were no longer the same artists they were when they burst onto the scene with tunes like "Bonita Applebum"--or in the case of Phife, "Buggin' Out." They can never get back to that happy-go-lucky sound. Why try to go back? Right now, Tip is happy with both his solo career and not having to deal with intrusive and impatient types like the suits from Jive while his perfectionist self gets to spend as much time as he wants fine-tuning every nook and cranny of a project like The Renaissance or The Last Zulu; Phife is happy with his life away from the music industry.

Art isn't easy. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it, and Tip would be finished with The Last Zulu by now.

"You ever been in a fight?," wonders Joe Manganiello--who stars as himself in the new Netflix original movie Pee-wee's Big Holiday--to Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens), the Magic Mike star's new best friend, as Joe realizes Pee-wee has never left his hometown of Fairville and has basically lived an uneventful life.

"No," replies Pee-wee.

"You ever broken a rule?"

"No."

"You ever had two women fight over you?"

But this time Pee-wee has to pause for a couple of beats to try to remember. If you've been down with Pee-wee since the classic 1985 Tim Burton movie Pee-wee's Big Adventure (or maybe even as far back as The Pee-wee Herman Show, Reubens' early '80s L.A. stage show at the Roxy, which the Groundlings alum revived on Broadway to much success in 2010), you might recall that the bow-tied man-child had to choose between the affections of a really hot Italian trapeze artist played by Valeria Golino--her hotness is the most rewatchable part of 1988's poorly received Big Top Pee-wee, the last Pee-wee flick--and a schoolteacher played by Penelope Ann Miller during Big Top. In this age of meta-humor permeating everything from Rick and Morty to Deadpool, you'd expect Pee-wee to break the fourth wall, wink at the audience and make a reference to that love triangle from 28 years ago.

But Pee-wee doesn't do so. He instead replies with "Have I? No." Or maybe Reubens is indeed referencing the last movie, and the brief pause is his way of saying, "Yeah, the public was right: Big Top Pee-wee was kind of a mistake. But enough about that movie!"


Whatever the case, Pee-wee movies aren't known for being constantly self-aware and meta like the Muppet movies. Pee-wee's Big Holiday, which centers on Pee-wee's cross-country odyssey to attend Joe's star-studded birthday party at his Manhattan penthouse, doesn't really acknowledge any of the events from the prior Pee-wee movies because it actually takes place in its own separate continuity, just like how the Randal Kleiser-directed Big Top doesn't take place in the same continuity as Pee-wee's Big Adventure's. Certain traits of Pee-wee's will always remain constant--the red bow tie, the too-small gray suit, the white shoes, the mischievous giggling, the Rube Goldberg gadgets, the weird animal sidekicks (whether they're puppets or actual animals)--but Reubens has interestingly always rebooted his own character in each Pee-wee project, including the beloved and timeless Pee-wee's Playhouse. Even after 38 years of man-child antics, Pee-wee's basically still a work-in-progress.

You know the amiable Pee-wee who hosted a Saturday morning kids' show that--aside from an occasional double entendre related to Miss Yvonne, the most beautiful woman in Puppetland, or an L.A. Law-era Jimmy Smits cameoing as a repairman who catches Miss Yvonne's eye and suggestively talks about his "tools" and knowing how to use them--was meant for all ages? That Pee-wee was quite different from the more devilish Pee-wee who attached mirrors to his shoes to peek at girls' panties in the not-for-kids Pee-wee Herman Show, which was a parody of the type of old-fashioned, Howdy Doody-ish kids' show Pee-wee's Playhouse would later channel in a much less parodic--but still somehow subversive, due mostly to the presence of then-unprecedented-on-American-TV characters like a black cowboy and an animated Latino superhero who speaks only in unsubtitled Spanish--fashion.



One of the funniest running jokes in Pee-wee's Big Adventure centers on Pee-wee's obliviousness to how much Dottie (future legendary voice actor E.G. Daily), the pretty bike shop employee who tries to cajole him into taking her out to the drive-in, is in love with him. He's more in love with his bike. It's a riff on the weird behavior of little boys who think the opposite sex is yucky and haven't quite figured out yet that the opposite sex--or whatever sex they'll later become attracted to--isn't really so yucky. In another bit of soft rebooting way before the term existed, Big Top rebooted the "Ew, girls are gross" Pee-wee as a slightly more mature Pee-wee who juggles two women and gets laid off-screen.

Big Top turned Pee-wee into yet another conventional rom-com lead, and it wasn't what the public wanted from Reubens at the time. They weren't interested in a more sensitive and lovey-dovey Pee-wee (they also clearly wanted to see the playhouse itself make the jump to the big screen, not Pee-wee in some '50s circus movie). The public was right: Big Top's elimination of one of Big Adventure's best running jokes ended up sapping Pee-wee of a lot of the comic anarchy that made Big Adventure so enjoyable and endlessly rewatchable.

But Reubens' refusal to repeat himself in Big Top, even when it results in artistic failure, is also one of the most admirable things about the Pee-wee movies as a comedy franchise in a world of comedy franchises that misguidedly believe that constantly rehashing jokes is a wise creative move. When the audience wanted Pee-wee to remain asexual, Reubens pushed against that. Or when the audience was itching for the immensely popular likes of Chairy, Pterri and Conky 2000 to share the big screen with Pee-wee, Reubens gave them a talking pig instead.


In Pee-wee's Big Holiday, the 60-something Reubens has mellowed a bit and appears to be slightly more open to fanservice. So he's returned to the road-movie structure that resulted in so much comedy gold during Big Adventure, and he's even brought back past collaborators like frequent Pee-wee's Playhouse composer Mark Mothersbaugh and a few performers from both Big Adventure and Playhouse. But those actors aren't reprising their previous roles (Lynne Marie Stewart, who played Miss Yvonne and appeared in Big Adventure as a frustrated Warner Bros. studio actor who gets chewed out by a spoiled child star, is completely unrecognizable in Big Holiday as a tough and rumpled-looking snake farm owner). Better yet, Reubens' refusal to repeat himself continues in the ways that he, Love star Paul Rust, the film's co-writer, and director Paul Lee of Wonder Showzen fame have come up with amusing gags that aren't mere rehashes of gags from Big Adventure and Big Top (my favorite new gag: Fairville is so old-timey that an old man in a Colonel Sanders bow tie sits beside the town limits sign just to update its population tally whenever a resident leaves).

Reubens reboots his own character again as a sort of agoraphobic and timid Pee-wee who's neither the wanna-be daredevil bicyclist who tries to impress other kids with his stunts at the start of Big Adventure nor the genius farmer/scientist/circus performer who was the bold (but rather bland) hero of Big Top. At the start of Big Holiday, Pee-wee is afraid to leave the frozen-in-the-'50s Fairville because an accident during a botched trip to Salt Lake City resulted in a metal plate in his head. It's up to the brawny but kindly Joe Manganiello, who makes a quick stop in Fairville for a chocolate shake while embarking on a solo cross-country motorcycle trip right before his birthday, to shake--no pun intended--Pee-wee out of his dull small-town routines as both a short-order cook/soda jerk and a voracious reader of adventure novels who prefers to read about the high sea rather than experiencing it, via the library books recommended to him by Emily (Katherine VanderLinden), a young blond librarian who dotes on Pee-wee just like Dottie did in Big Adventure.



Oh yeah, Pee-wee is back to being "Ew, girls are gross" Pee-wee again. It's no surprise that Big Holiday was co-produced by the former master of "Ew, girls are gross," Judd Apatow, who, in the last few years, has responded to criticisms that his films are way too male-centric by producing Girls, directing Trainwreck and shifting to focusing more often on female leads. "A lot of people wrote, 'Pee-wee doesn't seem to like his girlfriend [in Big Adventure],' and so I thought, 'Okay, I'll show you. I'll have two girlfriends in my next movie,'" recalled Reubens in an interview the A.V. Club posted earlier this week. In the movie after Big Top, Reubens tinkers with Pee-wee's sexuality once again and presents the complete opposite of the libidinous Pee-wee we saw in Big Top. He has his character recoil at the very thought of kissy-face with not just Emily, but nine other women.

At one point in Big Holiday, Pee-wee winds up as a guest at the home of an old farmer (Hal Landon Jr.) and a bevy of daughters who come in all shapes and sizes and are all attracted to a very weirded-out Pee-wee (one of the nine farmer's daughters is played by Alexandra Ella, a.k.a. Clara, the secretary to Pete and later Ken on Mad Men). Pee-wee is much more comfortable around the presence of Joe, whom he bonds with over their shared love for both root beer barrel candy and building miniature models of their hometowns. This results in Big Holiday turning into the most homoerotic Apatow production since director David Gordon Green's Pineapple Express, which had both Craig Robinson pining for James Franco and Danny McBride mending fences with his frenemy Franco by telling him, "I wanna be inside you, homes."


Reubens further stirs up all the old talk about his character's sexual ambiguity with a treehouse scene where Pee-wee and Manganiello--whose skill for tinging his chiseled male-model looks with impeccable comic timing was best previously exemplified by his funny guest shots as a dude-bro-type lawyer on How I Met Your Mother--look like they're about to kiss, but they never do. He's never been the kind of comedian who goes for the easy joke of ridiculing homosexuality. His shtick, whether it would involve himself, Tito Larriva's Pee-wee Herman Show character Hammy or the villainous Francis Buxton camping it up in a blue speedsuit that must have been one of many inspirations for Dr. Venture's blue speedsuit on The Venture Bros., has always been more about the silliness of little boys who are too unaware--or simply too little--to notice the gayness of their behavior (Pee-wee was basically a live-action precursor to the animated likes of Bobby Hill, Gene Belcher and the much less innocent and much less likable Cartman, who's fond of dismissively saying, "That's gay," while being too clueless to realize how gay he is). The absence of that shtick in Big Top is mainly why it's a less interesting movie than Big Adventure or Big Holiday.

The world of Pee-wee has always tended to be quietly inclusive, whether sexually or racially. That's why it kind of bugs me when The Atlantic's Megan Garber lumps in both Pee-wee, whose Christmas special was famously populated with gay icons and whose playhouse was a racially progressive crib, and his new movie with the kind of retrograde comedy she's criticized in her takedowns of the badly dated brand of humor represented by recent stereotype-ridden Adam Sandler fiascos like Netflix's The Ridiculous 6.

But as someone who's not gay, gayness was never why I regularly watched Pee-wee's Playhouse as a kid. I simply dug the irreverence of the show and the way it would constantly and seamlessly shift back and forth between live action and stop-motion animation, and I admired anything that would disgust my sword-and-sorcery-genre-worshiping older brother, whether it was Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Young Ones, the earlier seasons of The Simpsons or the archery-related violence of The Road Warrior. At the time of Playhouse's run on CBS, I was heavily into the irreverence of both that show and the less popular CBS cult favorite Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, particularly whenever the Mighty Mouse crew would make mincemeat out of either a lesser animated show like Alvin and the Chipmunks or the extreme datedness of Scooby-Doo in syndication. However, when I took a UC Santa Cruz film course taught by Playhouse fan Harry M. Benshoff and I was, at about the same time, starting to reject the homophobia that was unfortunately part of my homophobic and socially conservative Filipino upbringing, the same kind of upbringing Filipino American GQ writer Chris Gayomali sharply looked back at with some disdain in his February piece "Goddammit, Manny," Benshoff's praise of Playhouse as a reaction against the conservatism of the Reagan/Bush/Moral Majority era made me start to see the show in a whole new light. I realized that the show helped gay kids feel a little less alone during that era, and that made me appreciate Playhouse a little more.

So while Big Holiday is similarly progressive, one unexpected drawback slightly mars the new movie--other than the drawback of Big Holiday having been made in a slightly lesser comedy world where neither Phil Hartman nor Jan Hooks are no longer alive--and it's the fact that it doesn't have enough of the visual inventiveness of Playhouse and Big Adventure. The cinematography in Big Adventure, which was done by Dog Day Afternoon cinematographer Victor J. Kemper, wasn't extraordinary, but it occasionally resulted in distinctive imagery like the beautiful nighttime shots of the neon-colored Cabazon dinosaurs that surrounded Pee-wee and his waitress friend Simone (Diane Salinger, who appears in Big Holiday as a Katharine Hepburn-style socialite who attempts to drive Pee-wee to New York in an experimental flying car she built).


Big Holiday's cinematographer is Pineapple Express cinematographer Tim Orr, who happens to be the Pineapple Express director's regular cinematographer, and my favorite credit of Orr's remains his visually radiant work on DGG's 2000 indie breakthrough George Washington. Back in 2001, I wrote that Orr and DGG's "decision to shoot in color and CinemaScope is a welcome departure from the anemic aesthetic approaches of most indie directors: too many of them come from the tiresome 'my technique is to have no technique' school of filmmaking. (And don't get me started on all those directors who tout the pleasures of digital video, which, though economical and easy to work with, just looks ugly on the big screen.)" For Big Holiday, Orr opted to do the opposite of George Washington and not shoot on film--he admitted in 2012 that he's started to come to grips with the shift from film stock to digital--but he hasn't completely mastered digital cinematography yet, so Big Holiday winds up with a largely drab '90s ABC movie-of-the-week look that pales in comparison to Kemper's work on Big Adventure.

I also didn't expect Pepper (newcomer Jessica Pohly), Freckles (Stephanie Beatriz) and Bella (Alia Shawkat), the bank robbers Pee-wee crosses paths with a couple of times in Big Holiday, to briefly steal--no pun intended--the movie just like Large Marge and Godzilla briefly do in Big Adventure. When Pee-wee's being chased by Warner Bros. studio security through a Godzilla movie shoot, Big Adventure makes the filming of a Godzilla flick look like the absolute most fun thing in the world, even though the cameo by Twisted Sister right after Godzilla's cameo actually ended up receiving the most applause from the audience when I rewatched Big Adventure at an outdoor nighttime screening right outside my apartment building in downtown San Jose many years ago.



If Big Adventure's studio chase sequence causes some folks in the audience to revisit or sample some Godzilla movies, then the antics of the girl gang in Big Holiday will make younger viewers want to check out the Russ Meyer estate's new (and rather expensive) Blu-ray of the film the girl gang is a reference to: the 1965 Meyer indie flick Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, a gutsy little thriller about a crime spree by a crew of murderous female thieves who work as go-go dancers on the side. Everyone from John Waters to red-blooded males loves Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and it's a film I was totally unaware of for a long time, due mainly to its longtime unavailability on disc in America, until I saw it for the first time on TCM several years ago and fell in love with it as well. Pepper is clearly based on Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! star Tura Satana, whose quick-witted gang leader character's name in Faster, Pussycat! is Varla, while Freckles is basically the Lori Williams character.

Bella isn't modeled after anybody from Faster, Pussycat! But Big Holiday has the former Maeby Fünke donning a '50s angora sweater, and the sight of Shawkat, whose Broad City guest shot as Ilana's doppelgänger last season helped make "Coat Check" become one of the most genuinely erotically-charged episodes of a half-hour comedy ever, in a tight angora sweater does things to me.


Meanwhile, Beatriz, who's so great as the grim-faced, husky-voiced Detective Rosa Diaz on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, plays against type as an enthusiastic, almost Harley Quinn-like criminal. Her bit part as Freckles is one of the few times you get to hear Beatriz's actual speaking voice outside of interviews, where you're always thrown off by how high an octave Beatriz speaks in off-camera (her voice is, in real life, closer to Maria Bamford's). She's basically been doing her version of a Batman voice on Brooklyn Nine-Nine this whole time.

As the innocuous, Pleasantville-type movie Pee-wee emerges from basically brushes up against Faster, Pussycat!, you wish at times that John Lee, whose Wonder Showzen was often way stranger than the weirdest stuff Reubens could ever imagine for Playhouse or even his not-for-kids stage show, just said "Fuck it," decided to think about entertaining only the all-adult Wonder Showzen fans who were attuned to the MTV kids' show spoof's surreality and then went full-tilt crazy while juxtaposing Pee-wee with Faster, Pussycat! Part of me wishes Pee-wee stopped everything in the middle of his cross-country journey to New York--or totally developed Stockholm syndrome while the girls held him captive in their motel room--and just went along with the girl gang for the rest of the movie.

While some critics find Pepper, Freckles and Bella--they're women out of time, just like how their temporary criminal accomplice Pee-wee is a man-child out of time--to be inconsequential as characters in Big Holiday, I find them to be the most unexpectedly compelling side characters during Pee-wee's trek to NYC, simply because of their connection to Faster, Pussycat! That's how powerful an impact Faster, Pussycat! leaves on you as a viewer. It's such a great little cult flick that every time some other movie or show alludes to it, that movie or show becomes 80 percent more intriguing. You also take one look at Meyer's movie, and you immediately think to yourself, "There's no way this was made in 1965. It's too contemporary. A woman of color is the lead, and she's not playing a racial stereotype."

(Photo source: The Oak Drive-In)

(Photo source: The Oak Drive-In)

(Photo source: The Oak Drive-In)

(Photo source: The Oak Drive-In)

Meyer's twisted sense of humor in Faster, Pussycat! feels too modern. How was the rather stodgy Hollywood of the pre-Bonnie and Clyde'60s even capable of putting at the center of a movie a strong-willed and physically intimidating woman like Satana? She's so intimidating she'd make someone like Barbara Stanwyck immediately curl up into a fetal position.

As you watch Varla kick the shit out of some guy, you think to yourself, "This all has to be a fake B-movie like Black Dynamite or Planet Terror. Come on outta there, Robert Rodriguez!"

But it's not a fake B-movie. It's the kind of oddity only Meyer, the same director behind Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a deadpan Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker comedy way before such a thing even existed, could be capable of in the '60s.





Playwright and YOMYOMF blogger Philip W. Chung, another Faster, Pussycat! fan, is right about Faster, Pussycat! containing "the best kickass lead performance by an Asian American woman ever committed to celluloid" (let's face it: the late Satana never got to play another role as juicy as Varla because of racism). Satana was, in fact, in her own words during a San Francisco Bay Guardian interview she did when she was alive, "half Japanese and Chinese, a little Filipino, Scotch Irish and Cheyenne Indian."

A burlesque dancer who dated Elvis Presley in the '50s and actually turned him down when he proposed to her (if you ever peep archived photos of Priscilla Presley when she married Elvis, notice how he clearly Vertigoed his bride into making herself look more like his ex), Satana lived a fascinating, biopic-worthy life that would shock even the PG-rated crooks Pee-wee encounters in Big Adventure and Big Holiday. During World War II, she, her brother and their Japanese father were interned at Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp. Then when she was only nine years old, she was the victim of a racially motivated gang rape, so her father taught her martial arts to defend herself.

The father of one of her rapists used his wealth to bribe a judge into getting his son and the other rapists off. According to Chung, Satana spent the next 15 years perfecting her martial arts training--the same kind of fighting moves she would later put to use in Faster, Pussycat!--and tracking down each of her acquitted rapists. She proceeded to beat each of them up. It's no wonder Chung and the YOMYOMF folks are Satana worshipers.


Perhaps the craziest part of Chung's 2011 post about Satana is when he recalls taking an Asian American studies course at the exact same university I attended many years after he did so. The T.A. at Chung's class asked the students for examples of pioneering Asian American women in the arts. Chung tossed out Satana's name, and the T.A. responded to Chung's pick with the following: "A whore is not a pioneer. A pioneer is someone like Amy Tan who actually did something worthwhile besides lying on her back."

Chung adds that when he got the opportunity to meet Meyer, he told the filmmaker about the T.A.'s bizarre bit of slut-shaming, and Meyer said, "That T.A. was an ignorant bitch." He then pointed out to Meyer that the T.A. was actually male.

"Like I said, he was an ignorant bitch. Tura was very proud of being Asian and talked about it all the time. I think she was always a little sad that her own community never really accepted her," replied Meyer to Chung.

But Satana also had the last laugh.

"I know of several little girls named either Tura or Varla. I'm flattered. I think it's because the character I play in that film empowered women so much. Varla was a person who was looking to get her own thrills at that time in her life," said Satana to the Bay Guardian.

Now that I think about it, Satana got into fights and broke plenty of rules. I don't know if two men ever fought over her, but she definitely broke Elvis' heart. She lived the exact kind of life Joe Manganiello urges Pee-wee to go out and experience on the open road.



It's remarkable how in his 60s, Reubens hasn't lost a lot of the comic energy or spark he previously brought to Pee-wee, even after surviving a box-office flop, burnout from working on his hit TV show, an indecent exposure scandal and the mediocre writing on Gotham. But his performance actually isn't the best thing about Big Holiday.

The best thing about Reubens' new movie reminds me of what the King of Cartoons used to always do on Playhouse, and that would be any time he introduced '80s kids who suffered through terrible '80s half-hour toy commercials to the nicer pleasures of much older and higher-quality cartoons. In a similar fashion, Big Holiday is bound to persuade more viewers who are unfamiliar with Faster, Pussycat! to go discover the Meyer cult classic and have an even wilder time than during the family-friendly Big Holiday, as they examine closely the way that, as the Faster, Pussycat! narrator puts it, "violence doesn't only destroy, it creates and molds as well" and they become acquainted with a "rapacious new breed" of woman that "prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, any time, anywhere and with anybody."

Who are they? One might be your secretary, your doctor's receptionist or a robber in a Pee-wee movie!

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. The 130th edition of the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week happens to focus on the final episode of a show that will be back with new episodes someday, but when? Oh yeah, and stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now, or don't. Barely anybody has.



Somewhere, there's a crazy parallel universe where Clancy Brown is an international movie star, in addition to being a great character actor, and he--not Liam Neeson--starred as the retired CIA agent who tears apart Paris to rescue his kidnapped daughter in Taken. "Red Means Stop," the Venture Bros. sixth-season finale, presents a glimpse of that parallel universe during the moment when Brown gets to parody Neeson's famous "I don't have money, but what I do have are a very particular set of skills" speech from Taken. The episode makes me wish some creepy Akira kid with extra-sensory powers or someone like the Rufus Sewell character from Dark City could will that universe into existence.

The imposing Brown is best known for his villainous roles in Highlander (his guest shot in "Red Means Stop" makes it an interesting episode to be airing right after the Christopher Lambert subplot of "A Party for Tarzan") and on both the short-lived HBO cult favorite Carnivàle and Superman: The Animated Series. He was so perfect as the voice of Lex Luthor that whenever I flip open Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's All-Star Superman, it's Brown's voice I hear in my brain when I'm reading Luthor's dialogue, not Gene Hackman's, not Kevin Spacey's, not Michael Rosenbaum's and certainly not Jesse Eisenberg's.

Brown would have been terrific as Bryan Mills in Taken. He can convincingly shift between being intimidating to someone his character's about to kill and being kind to whoever's playing his wife or daughter (like on, for example, Fox's Sleepy Hollow, where he had a rare good guy role as Abbie and Jenny's deceased surrogate dad). So that makes Brown the perfect guest star to voice the cloaked Red Death, a terrifying-looking, Red Skull-style arch who strikes fear into the hearts of his victims atop a flying satanic horse one moment and is sweet to his wife (Cristin Milioti, voicing a character who's much closer to her Fargo housewife role this time, instead of a gangster's bratty teen daughter) or his preschooler daughter the next. In fact, that's where we first meet the Red Death: he's at the park, looking after his daughter Lila, who doesn't have any skin like her dad, while his sweater's hilariously tied around his neck.



Doc Hammer, who scripted this episode, and Jackson Publick always love to toy with our perceptions of sci-fi characters like superheroes and supervillains. On The Venture Bros., the superheroes are more screwed-up than their mildly flawed counterparts over at Marvel: Captain Sunshine is a pedo, the Crusaders Action League is corrupt and mob-connected and the Brown Widow is a poorer and uglier-looking Peter Parker (Jared's spider powers are more anatomically correct, and while Peter is currently a CEO in the Marvel books' recently rebooted continuity, Jared is a broke actor/waiter/college campus tour guide in a lame '80s Mark Knopfler headband--is the headband actually more of a parody of both the way struggling actor Tony Manero looks and dresses in the much-maligned Saturday Night Fever sequel Staying Alive and Staying Alive director Sylvester Stallone's bizarre headband fetish?). The supervillains, the characters you'd expect to be the worst people in the Ventureverse, have turned out to be more likable than the superheroes, and the problems Publick and Hammer saddle the arches with are hilariously mundane ones that completely sap the villains of their menacing qualities.

The arches' problems range from sexual dysfunction--like when we find out in this episode that the Monarch's sex life with Sheila is going through a rough patch and he's been spanking it to hentai lately--to the red tape at the Guild of Calamitous Intent. The Red Death is the latest arch to be seen acting far from supervillain-ish when he's at home. Like Wide Wale in "Faking Miracles," the Red Death is just a normal dad, having affectionate and mundane domestic conversations with his loved ones that would sound strange coming out of the evil mouths of the Kingpin or Dr. Doom. "Red Means Stop" may be divisive as a season finale--viewers who wanted a sense of closure right before another long hiatus from Astrobase Go are disappointed over how anticlimactic the episode is and how Sheila's sting operation to flush out the Blue Morpho, which calls for Guild agents Watch and Ward to disguise themselves as Hank and Dean, doesn't build towards any explosive developments--but it's hard to dislike "Red Means Stop" when it has Clancy Brown, the guy who was the insane and imposing Kurgan and the equally imposing and power-hungry Luthor, discussing corn chips.


Garry Shandling's death this week has made me frequently think about how brilliant and funny the writing was on both It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show. Shandling's Show was a multi-cam sitcom that amusingly deconstructed multi-cam sitcoms, while Larry Sanders went for a darker and more challenging approach when it peeled back the curtain on the set of a late-night talk show and revealed that the wealthy and pampered Larry and his seemingly benign announcer Hank Kingsley were way more petty and attention-craving than the worst attention-craving asshole at some office you worked for. The Venture Bros. peels back the curtain on sci-fi characters and boy adventurers in a similarly brilliant fashion, like when "Red Means Stop" points out that one of the many reasons for Dr. Venture being such a screwed-up adult is the unnecessary cruelty Action Man subjected eight-year-old Rusty to when he was his bodyguard. In addition to imagining a world where Brown is the star of the Taken movies, "Red Means Stop" cleverly imagines a world where Race Bannon wasn't as noble as he appeared to be on Jonny Quest and off-screen, he frequently pulled cruel pranks on the boys he was supposed to be keeping safe.

As the Monarch's henchman, Gary is often competent, but in "Red Means Stop," he screws up big-time--the consequences of young Action Man's actions are echoed in the consequences Gary winds up facing right before the end credits are rolled--when his method of refraining from killing the arches the Monarch wants out of his way (so that he can arch Dr. Venture again) only makes things worse. "Red Means Stop" reveals that Gary has been keeping arches like the Termite (James Adomian) and Maestro Wave (Misha Collins from Supernatural)--who were first glimpsed in their costumes as arches the Red Death ceded his sub-arching rights to on Gary's diagram of the Monarch's current rivals in "Tanks for Nuthin'"--chained up in the Morpho Cave's bathroom instead of snuffing them out, just like how Major Lillywhite has been secretly keeping alive the zombies Vaughn Du Clark has ordered him to kill over on iZombie.


Imprisoning the arches seems like a good idea, except Gary forgot to consider that maybe captivity would drive the arches insane and result in a gory mess. And that's exactly what happens when Maestro Wave goes crazy from the captivity. He's started to believe he's talking to some sort of god, so he sacrifices the other prisoners to appease that god. Though I was intrigued by the guessing game Doc Hammer came up with during the mysterious earlier scenes between the Termite and Maestro Wave--for most of the episode, I thought the Red Death was behind their predicament--I found it to be a weird and off-putting time for The Venture Bros. to be doing a prolonged Saw parody in the middle of a finale that would have been better spent functioning as a summation of the season.

"A Party for Tarzan" really should have been the finale instead of "Red Means Stop" because it has a better sense of closure. Dr. Venture's surprisingly profound moment alone under the lunar eclipse (right when Dr. Mrs. the Monarch mistakes him for the Morpho and tries to kill him) at the end of "A Party for Tarzan" is a stronger and punchier way to conclude Dr. Venture's sixth-season arc of New York serving as an enabler for his ego than the water polo party at his penthouse at the end of "Red Means Stop." The Monarch's closing narration in "A Party for Tarzan" is also a stronger and punchier conclusion to the Monarch's sixth-season arc than the speech the Red Death gives to the Monarch when he basically enables his unexpected new friend to continue on with his irrational rage against Dr. Venture, just like how New York enables Dr. Venture to continue to rest on his laurels and not do much actual work as a super-scientist. I'm not surprised about Jackson Publick admitting in an interview that the penultimate episode "actually should have been the season finale. We actually tried at the last minute to retcon that and the one that follows it to make it into the season finale because it felt just a little more epic and pretty and compelling than some of the other ones, but there were continuity issues we couldn't get around."

The Venture Bros. may be a show about narcissism, failure and impotence (whether sexual or career-wise), but it also has an optimistic side, and "A Party for Tarzan" is the kind of summation of both that optimism and Publick and Hammer's clear-eyed exploration of narcissism, failure and impotence that "Red Means Stop" should have been more like as a finale. In The Atlantic in 2013, Armin Rosen wrote, "Venture Bros. has the same slacker optimism as The Simpsons: Springfield is kind of an objectively horrible place, after all. But it lives and breathes, and that's what vindicates it and everyone who lives there... there's still a strong sense of some coming redemption for Hank, Dean and Rusty--and the Monarch--even if it won't be through super-science or super-villainy."

Dr. Venture's brief realization in "A Party for Tarzan" that maybe his enormous self-absorption won't amount to much is a small push towards that redemption. But it wouldn't be The Venture Bros. if Dr. Venture didn't screw up many more times again while fumbling towards that redemption and trying to figure out his place in the delightfully twisted world of Team Venture.


Memorable quotes:
* "[Groans.] It's too much. The Wandering Spider? Uh, those darts had neurotoxin in 'em. I had a week of priapism, and I still can't feel my toes."

* The Termite: "What the hell? Why is your chain way longer than mine?"
Maestro Wave: "Who cares whose is longer? What is this? Eighth-grade gym class?"





* "This is what he wants. It's his plan for me. I'm so sorry. You-you have to die. It's his plan. He needs me to feed on your butt."

* "YOU'D BETTER BE TELLING ME THE TRUTH BECAUSE I SWEAR TO... [Changes his tone when his mother-in-law's on the line.] Carol? Hi. Hi, is Kate there? Yes, I'm fine. Uh, th-there's a bag in the trunk of the car. But can... Can you get Kate, please? [Puts his cell down and addresses the Monarch.] Lila needs her corn chips. [Puts his cell back up to his ear.] Kate! Kate, are you... Well, I-I-I told her there's some in the... Sweetie, they don't go stale overnight."

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now.



Two seasons ago, Archer's season-long experiment as "Archer Vice" was a divisive one for fans of the animated spy spoof. The viewers who disliked the kinds of storytelling that resulted from Archer creator Adam Reed's decision to change the characters' jobs from spies to drug dealers found the fifth season to be aimless, while I enjoyed Reed's willingness to experiment that season and found the subsequent season, in which the perpetually immature Archer, new mom Lana, Malory and Ray returned to spying and worked as independent contractors for the CIA, to be the more aimless season.

But as Archer has gotten older, the show's animators have developed a knack for crafting satisfying action sequences that have gotten more impressive in scale and scope with each year. That's mostly why my favorite episode from Archer's sixth season is "The Kanes." Lana's visit to her parents' house in Berkeley presented a great balance of large-scale action (the episode's homage to the classic Bullitt car chase was second to the avalanche in "The Archer Sanction" as an impressive sixth-season set piece) and the smaller-scale kind of character-based comedy that's pulled off well by bottle episodes like "Vision Quest."

A lot of the rest of Archer's sixth season suffered from a lack of stakes. Sure, the addition of a baby to the relationship between Archer and Lana brought a bit of welcome depth to the character of Archer, but Reed seemed to be sleepwalking through the same kinds of espionage storylines he appeared to be getting bored with shortly before the "Archer Vice" revamp. Archer's new season seeks to rectify the lack of stakes by changing the show's backdrop again to Hollywood and putting the disgraced (and after the disastrous events in "Drastic Voyage," unemployed) spies to work as private investigators. The P.I. storylines will hopefully restore some stakes to the show and allow for the animators to continue to outdo themselves in the action department, and if "The Figgis Agency,"Archer's seventh-season premiere, is any indication, Archer's new detective agency may just turn out to be a better creative shot in the arm for the show than the cocaine-slinging thing.


Technically, it's Cyril's detective agency, and Archer, Lana and Ray are his unlicensed gumshoes, applying their spying skills to investigative work. So far, Archer isn't exactly Michael Westen yet. In "The Figgis Agency," he gets badly bitten by a couple of attack dogs in a scene that made me wince and is straight out of The Boys from Brazil, the same movie that inspired Krieger's possible origins as a Hitler clone. He also falls down the same canyon twice and fails to notice that Cyril's client (Ona Grauer, a.k.a. Bionic Katya), a movie star who hired the titular agency to retrieve a disk that's in the hands of powerful L.A. sleazebag Alan Shapiro (Patton Oswalt, who seems to be channeling both the villainous Henry Gibson and Mark Rydell characters from The Long Goodbye), is actually an imposter. It's like if all the spy tips that pulled Michael out of countless jams as a P.I. during Burn Notice went wrong.

While Archer's adjustment to both P.I. work and L.A. isn't a smooth one ("California is assholes!," whines Archer about the Bureau of Security and Investigative Services' refusal to consider his credentials as a spy as sufficient enough for a P.I. license), the show exudes confidence in its new setting, whether comedically or stylistically. I love how each act on Archer now closes with Charlie's Angels-style graphics and the exact same musical sting that used to conclude each act on Charlie's Angels. And Venture Bros. score composer J.G. Thirlwell is a great addition to the Archer crew. He brings a nice cinematic sheen to the show's music, which previously consisted largely of library music cues from the '60s and '70s.

Reed's return to the slightly more ambitious kind of storytelling he briefly experimented with during the fifth season is especially exemplified by the premiere's cold open, which has J.K. Simmons and Keegan-Michael Key voicing a pair of homicide detectives for a scene that's a rarity for Archer. The scene was reportedly performed by Simmons and Key in the same booth--the cast members never record their lines together on Archer--and having them actually record their lines together is another good example of Reed's willingness to experiment this season. The Simmons and Key characters are investigating a corpse that appears to be Archer's, and he's floating face down in a pool just like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard. It's, ugh, yet another in medias res cold open on TV, but unlike other in medias res cold opens, I actually give a shit about how Archer winds up in the pool six months after "The Figgis Agency."

And I'll continue to give a shit, as long as Archer continues to bring on the funny, like in the premiere's funniest scene, one of the show's many references to underappreciated or lesser-known movies. When the crazy Krieger presents Archer and Lana with an array of new gadgets for their break-in of Shapiro's house, he reveals himself to be a fan of one of my favorite Michael Mann flicks, Thief, and offers them a hilariously unnecessary thermal lance.

The thermal lance scene from Thief

It's classic Krieger: why settle for a visually boring safecracking kit when James Caan's thermal lance from Thief will make your heist look much cooler, even though the lance will most likely burn your face off? It's a moment that also seems to echo something Reed must have realized as he noticed the show's return to spy work last season was kind of a creative dead end: Archer is more entertaining when it doesn't play things safe.

Other memorable quotes:
* Fake Veronica Deane, objecting to Archer offering her booze: "It's 9:00 in the morning."
Archer: "I'm still on Eastern time."
Lana: "Archer..."
Archer: "It's lunchtime there."

* Cyril: "Hey, in case you've forgotten, the writing is literally on the wall, and I give the orders around here."
Archer: "Oh, I'm so sorry. Please, by all means."
Cyril: "Uh-huh. Um, well, our... Okay... Archer has your assignments, so listen up!"
Malory: "Truly inspiring, Cyril. It's like Patton and Churchill had a baby."



* Archer: "Okay, make sure they're secure 'cause they're our only way out of here."
Ray: "Aw, I was hoping T.C. was gonna come pick us up in the chopper."
Lana: "Ha!"
Archer: "Well, but he's gonna be busy flying around searching for your battered corpses, only to find out later that all the coyotes left was a pile of titanium gears and a shitty weave. [Hoists himself up to Shapiro's cliffside house.]"
Lana: "[Appalled gasp.] First of all... [Points to her hair.] This is not a weave!"
Ray: "[Chuckles.] Okay. [Follows Archer up to the house.]"
Lana: "Well, it ain't a shitty one."


* Lana, after Archer falls down the canyon: "Guess we oughta get crackin'."
Ray: "Rimshot."
Lana: "That would be a good porn name."
Ray: "Mine would be Lance Biggerstaff."
Lana: "I'm picturing a gay wizard."
Ray: "I always am."
Archer, after surviving his first of two falls down the canyon: "[Coughs.] Eat a dick, gravity."

* Lana, puzzled by an abstract painting: "No, I don't get this at all."
Ray: "Maybe 'cause it's upside down."
Lana: "Wait, really?"
Ray: "Uh, you're just kind of a hick."
Lana: "Said the man with a relative called Uncle Poppa."
Ray: "That's 'cause he's my mother's... Yeah, no, never mind."

Even though it's been nearly a year since the demise of Pitchfork Media's smartly written film discussion site The Dissolve, the now-defunct site's animated short about PG-13's negative effect on the quality of American movies continues to resonate. From May 8, 2015, here's a repost of my discussion of "A Brief History of PG-13."

The Pitchfork.tv webseries Frames takes musicians' NSFW anecdotes and reinterprets them in animated form. For example, Detroit rapper Danny Brown's tales of his days as a drug dealer were transformed by Frames into the Hanna-Barbera cartoon I always dreamed of. All that was missing from Frames' Danny Brown episode was Don Messick voicing a Philly blunt that talks and greets Danny Brown with "What up doe?" Now Frames director Mack Williams has taken "The ongoing failure of the PG-13 rating," an excellent 2014 article Chris Klimek wrote for Pitchfork's sister site The Dissolve, and given it the animated treatment for Pitchfork.tv as well. In only two minutes full of genuinely funny sight gags by Williams and the animators at the Brooklyn studio Pig Apple (my favorite sight gag has to be the MPAA disrupting the duo from Once), "A Brief History of PG-13" amusingly elucidates how much the MPAA rating system is bullshit.



As narrator Radam Pooman says in "A Brief History of PG-13," the MPAA created PG-13 in 1984 as a response to the outcry from parents over the violence or intense moments in blockbusters Steven Spielberg either produced or directed. The subversive dark comedy Gremlins, which Spielberg produced and Joe Dante directed, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (and to a lesser extent, the Spielberg-produced, credited-solely-to-Tobe-Hooper-but-Spielberg-actually-did-a-shitload-of-the-directing-too original version of Poltergeist in 1982) were too graphic and harrowing as PG films. But they also weren't R enough--or rather, as Bullhorn pronounces it in the ad campaign for the original Black Dynamite, R-uh enough--to be stamped with R-uh. In fact, Temple of Doom's posters and ads got stamped with a box that said, "This film may be too intense for younger children." The Dissolve article points out that Spielberg himself approached the MPAA with an idea for a rating between PG and R-uh. So PG-13 was born, crawling out of the MPAA's slimy sac like Stripe in Gremlins, but while Stripe caused small-town mayhem, PG-13 has done something far worse in the years since its inception.

"It makes movies more generic and less adventurous," wrote Andrew Whalen in a 2014 iDigitalTimes article that, just like the Dissolve piece and the Pitchfork.tv animated short, decries the damage PG-13 has done to American filmmaking and the overall brokenness of the rating system. "It was meant to provide more flexibility to filmmakers, not less. It failed because it soon became clear that the PG-13 rating hit the sweet spot for putting butts in seats: not too mature that a family can't attend together, edgy enough that teens don't look down their noses at it."


When film critics like Matt Zoller Seitz complain about a certain sameness in present-day, live-action superhero movies and their lack of inventive filmmaking or even human personality (the fact that the animated superhero movies The Incredibles, Big Hero 6 and Batman: Mask of the Phantasm have more personality in their filmmaking than most of their live-action counterparts is proof that animation is where the superhero genre works best), PG-13 is mostly to blame for those things. In trying to conform to a PG-13, the directors of these movies have ended up stifling their own creativity (or maybe they never had it to begin with). Does anybody ever wonder why Paul Verhoeven, at one time the king of hard R, returned to the Netherlands? It has to be because a film like his hard-R original version of RoboCop--the kind of subversive and offbeat superhero movie the likes of Seitz must be longing to see more of these days--couldn't get made today by a major Hollywood studio. Those studios are too busy chasing PG-13s. In fact, that's exactly what happened to RoboCop when Elite Squad director José Padilha rebooted the former Orion Pictures franchise last year for Sony. It spawned a bland-as-fuck PG-13 remake. When Gremlins gets remade too, that version's bound to get a PG-13 as well, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be blander than the PG-rated Dante version.

Speaking of which, PG-13 has also led to strange contradictions. As "A Brief History of PG-13" points out, affection between gay characters in Love Is Strange and F-bombs in Once landed those inoffensive and non-violent indies an R. Meanwhile, the exploding head in the 1989 Bond flick Licence to Kill--an example of graphic violence neither "A Brief History of PG-13" nor the Dissolve essay mentions, as well as the most gruesome moment in the Bond franchise, before Daniel Craig's nads came into contact with a carpet beater in Casino Royale--merited only a PG-13. And what did Casino Royale also receive, in spite of that brutal torture scene, the gore and the 22-person body count? Yep: a PG-13.


"A Brief History of PG-13" is such a good animated short that I'd like to see Williams do more animated tie-ins with The Dissolve. The site's discussions of Midnight Run with Adam Scott and Running Scared with Paul Scheer are crying out for the animated treatment, as is Noel Murray's essay "Why great comics don't always make great movies." If there's one thing that's missing from "A Brief History of PG-13," it's an idea for a solution that's better than PG-13. But what would that idea be? /Film's David Chen was onto something when he implied that the MPAA should be dismantled.

"We're heading towards an age when we don't need a mommy-like organization to dictate what our delicate sensibilities can and can't be exposed to," wrote Chen in 2010. "I deeply hope that the MPAA's irrelevance is imminent."

The following contains spoilers for the first-season finale of The Magicians.

So Syfy's bawdy and foul-mouthed The Magicians, which wrapped up its first season earlier this week, is Harry Potter for grown-ups, right? Well, I wouldn't really know. I never read any of J.K. Rowling's novels, and I've watched only Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, better known in America as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. I found the 2001 Chris Columbus movie to be a ponderous slog back in 2002, so I never sat through another Harry Potter flick again. Not even Daniel Radcliffe can sit through most of his own Potter movies: he actually dislikes most of his performances as the titular boy wizard ("My acting is very one-note and I can see I got complacent and what I was trying to do just didn't come across," he once admitted) and considers his performance in the fifth movie to be his least flawed.

Potter is a franchise that just won't die, even after I resisted watching the seven other Potter movies for so long because of both the tedium of much of the 152-minute (!) first movie and the fact that the Potter franchise is white as fuck. Universal opened the Wizarding World of Harry Potter attraction at its Universal Studios Hollywood theme park last weekend. In July, the Wizarding World attraction will be followed by the West End premiere of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a two-part stage play that takes place 19 years after the events of Rowling's final Potter novel, and then in November, Warner Bros. will attempt to build a series of Potter prequel movies out of the 2001 Rowling book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a fake school textbook about the creatures Harry and his Hogwarts classmates encountered in the Potter novels.

So because of the onslaught of all this Potter shit (and because that new Fantastic Beasts teaser trailer actually looks enticing), I've lately been considering doing a rewatch of Sorcerer's Stone and a marathon in which I would be viewing the Potter sequels for the first time, as homework for the AFOS blog's "I Can't Believe I've Never Seen It Till Now!" series. For now though, if I want my magic school genre fix, I prefer Syfy's adaptation of Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy, a series of novels I was unfamiliar with before the January debut of the Syfy version, which has been renewed for a second season.

"Potter for grown-ups"--the most frequently repeated shorthand description of The Magicians by the press--isn't a completely accurate breakdown of the show, although there are a few campus scenes of beloved character actors (whattup, "Cutthroat Bitch"!) teaching difficult sorcery techniques to the younger cast members, just like the only scenes in Sorcerer's Stone that didn't make me snooze. In its first season, The Magicians has been more like a millennial In the Mouth of Madness, which, for me, is a more enticing hook than "Potter for grown-ups."


Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) and Julia Wicker (Stella Maeve) are lifelong friends who remain fans of an old series of Narnia-esque YA fantasy novels known as Fillory and Further. The Fillory books led to Quentin and Julia both pursuing magic--not the fluffy-haired Vegas kind of magic but a much more powerful and ancient kind where its most skilled practitioners can manipulate time or teleport themselves. Quentin attends Brakebills University, an Ivy League grad school for magicians and the show's equivalent of Hogwarts, while Julia, who failed to get in to Brakebills, is part of an underground community of unsanctioned magicians known as hedge witches. The second Fantastic Beasts teaser trailer reveals that Newt Scamander, the film's hero, was expelled from Hogwarts, but he doesn't seem to be broken up about getting kicked out, whereas Julia, Newt's outcast counterpart, winds up enormously depressed after flunking the Brakebills entrance exam. She puts so much pressure on herself to become a legit magician that she doesn't care about either venturing into dangerous territory--the hedge witches' favorite kind of territory--or betraying Quentin to become one.

Depression also fucks with Quentin, who's first seen at the start of the first season in a psychiatric hospital--kind of like Sam Neill at the start of In the Mouth of Madness--due to his depression over how real life is nothing like the fantasy world of Fillory, a world Quentin suspects is real, and he later turns out to be right about its existence. The most memorable section of The World of Star Trek, sci-fi author David Gerrold's candid book about the things he loved and hated about the show that launched his writing career, is Gerrold's description of an unsettling urban legend about a Star Trek fan who wanted to repress his emotions like Spock and committed suicide over failing to transform himself completely into his Vulcan hero. Quentin is every Star Trek fan who's fallen so much in love with Star Trek's utopian future that when real life sucks in comparison to the Trekverse, his disappointment consumes him. Some nerds might kill themselves over that disappointment, while others are more like Quentin and are less extreme about coping with it.


The Magicians is precisely about people's idolatry of Star Trek without ever making Trek the object of Quentin's obsession, although he does turn out to be, in addition to being a Fillory and Further fanboy, a Trekkie who sometimes references the '60s show, as well as 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Quentin's extremely nerdy ST:TMP reference takes place during a moment when he and his classmates follow the advice of Brakebills dropout Kady Orloff-Diaz (Jade Tailor) and purge themselves of their emotions in order to be more skilled at battle magic. We even see Quentin chatting up another Trek fan at school to barter his collection of Leonard Nimoy record albums for a spot as a lab partner with Alice Quinn (Olivia Taylor Dudley), an introverted classmate who comes from a family of not-so-introverted, sexually adventurous magicians (Alice's parents are played by Judith Hoag, the former April O'Neil, and Tom Amandes, this season's go-to guy for mildly scummy dads of blond nerd girls) and becomes Quentin's love interest.

As much as I love the spellcasting scenes on The Magicians--instead of waving around clichéd magic wands, Quentin, Julia, Kady and the other characters are seen casting spells via finger tutting, a real-life offshoot of the hip-hop dance technique known as tutting, and the finger tutting, choreographed for the show by Paul Becker and Kevin Li, looks badass and perfectly conveys the power and weight of the characters' spells--the magic isn't really the most intriguing part of The Magicians. Neither is the sex, although sex is the subject of one of the season's best-written bits of dialogue, an honest and rare-to-see-on-basic-cable conversation between Quentin and Alice where they open up about the difficulties of satisfying each other in bed.







The most intriguing part of The Magicians is the equally honest way that Quentin's journey is similar to the experience of every fantasy or sci-fi nerd who's had to come to grips with the fact that his or her favorite pop-culture phenomenon since childhood--this doesn't apply just to Trek, and it could also apply to Potter, Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars or even A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones--is full of imperfections that can't be ignored as an adult, and the creator of that beloved phenomenon isn't an immaculate human being. For some nerds, that moment can be as saddening or impactful as the day when a child who admires his or her parents realizes they aren't perfect.

"As we know from life, blowing up childhood heroes is part of growing up. It's the most difficult part of growing up," said Supernatural veteran Sera Gamble, The Magicians' showrunner, in a Syfy featurette where she discussed Quentin's pivotal discovery that Fillory and Further series author Christopher Plover (Charles Shaughnessy) was a child molester and that both Plover's monstrous behavior and the books themselves are the source of an unstoppable form of evil--this is where The Magicians reminds me the most of In the Mouth of Madness. Quentin is also every Star Wars nerd who's had to deal with the limitations of George Lucas as a storyteller after the first couple of Star Wars movies--or every person of color who used to love the Lord of the Rings trilogy before realizing that J.R.R. Tolkien's writing is full of racist overtones.

Plover's sexual abuse of Martin Chatwin (Nicholas Croucher), the boy who was the basis for the Fillory and Further protagonist of the same name, caused the traumatized Martin to study magic to get his revenge on Plover and then ruthlessly conquer Fillory under a new monstrous identity he created for himself: the faceless menace known as the Beast (Charles Mesure). The six-fingered Beast is the reason why Quentin and his new friends at Brakebills spend much of the back half of the first season training themselves in the difficult art of battle magic. In addition to holding captive both Plover and a Brakebills student who went missing during spring break two years ago, the elusive Beast kills a couple of Brakebills instructors and blinds another faculty member, Dean Fogg (Rick Worthy, who--in what has to be a twisted shout-out to Eyes, the entertaining and short-lived P.I. show where Worthy previously worked with both Gamble and Magicians co-showrunner John McNamara--is gorily deprived of his eyes). The pilot episode's trippy introduction of the Beast, whose powers immobilize Quentin and his classmates in the middle of class so that they're unable to lift an elaborately choreographed finger against the mayhem the Beast forces them to witness, is a creepy and effectively directed moment of prolonged and silent horror on a par with perhaps my all-time favorite moment of sustained horror on TV. That would be the moment when a perspiring Carl Kolchak attempts to not awake a sleeping zombie while pouring salt into the zombie's mouth and sewing his mouth shut to end the zombie's reign of terror.





The Beast's lecture hall attack is--other than the sex scenes and the storylines about depression, addiction and, later on in the season, the harrowing subject of rape--the first major sign that The Magicians isn't a show for kids, as well as a highlight of the show's horror side. At times, The Magicians does old-fashioned horror better than even Penny Dreadful--a show about Frankenstein, Satan and werewolves--does, and I like that show too. One of the advantages of an hour-long serialized drama over a 152-minute movie is that the former allows for richer and more varied storytelling, so The Magicians can switch from eye-gouging horror to comedy and back again without resulting in the tonal whiplash that often occurs in movies that want to pile everything but the kitchen sink into two and a half hours.

Richer storytelling means richer characters, and that's why Gamble and McNamara's adaptation of The Magicians appeals to me more than the Potter franchise. Because the characters are older and have been through some shit, the dramatic conflicts are more interesting. In a kids' film, Julia would be simplistically rewritten into being a villain, partly because there isn't much time during a kids' film to show many sides to each character, whereas Gamble and McNamara's show, despite its occasional weakness for burning through story too quickly in one hour, takes its time developing most of the characters, so what we get is not Snidely Whiplash but an ordinary human being who constantly makes bad decisions and can't be easily placed in a hero category or a villain category.


A lot of viewers complain about how unheroic and overly emo they find Quentin to be. Over at Uproxx, Pilot Viruet, whose favorite character from the Magicians novels is Julia, grumbles about Quentin's frequent whininess, which she says was actually much less tolerable during the book version, while Ken Tucker, the Yahoo TV columnist and ex-Entertainment Weekly critic whom I best remember from EW for his bizarre moments of Star Trek-bashing, was put off by the "excessively morose and jittery" qualities of Jason Ralph's acting in the first couple of episodes because Quentin reminded him of "too many ostentatiously moody, arty types" from college. What the fuck do you want, Ken Tucker? Robbie Amell as Quentin? That's what 994 other hour-long shows about young and attractive folks with powers would do, and The Magicians isn't one of those 994 other shows.

But Quentin's unheroic qualities--Ralph looks and speaks like a young, unbearded Martin Scorsese, and if some director ever makes another period piece that takes place at the first Woodstock, Ralph ought to be cast as Scorsese--are precisely what makes the character fun to watch (and perhaps an annoying person to talk to in real life). Scorsese is a film nerd rather than a fantasy or sci-fi nerd, but if he added Trek, Game of Thrones and Doctor Who to his leanings for the films of Kenji Mizoguchi and Michael Powell, I bet he'd sound a lot like Quentin, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the Fillory novels brings to mind any interview where Scorsese recalls moments and details from obscure foreign films.




Quentin is a big dork in frumpy and completely unbuttoned button-down shirts, like a lot of nerds really are. He isn't a Hollywood idea of a nerd like Trek's own Reginald Barclay, the franchise's well-meaning but flawed attempt to give its most socially awkward fans a character to relate to, or the unconvincing, "hey, we're cartoonish, so we wear the same clothes every day like the kids on Scooby-Doo!"-type nerds on The Big Bang Theory. There's no "Bazinga!"-type bullshit on The Magicians, and thank fuck for that. He's a realistic and more grounded depiction of a nerd--like the teens on Freaks and Geeks and a lot of the characters on The Venture Bros., the animated Adult Swim show I like to think of as the anti-Big Bang Theory.

And I never expected to hear a scripted TV show mention the Bechdel Test in its dialogue, but that's precisely what happens during the very funny cold open of "Homecoming," my favorite episode of The Magicians' first season. "Homecoming" visits Quentin's extremely nerdy subconscious, where he fantasizes about both Alice and Julia and feels guilty about it, as we learn from a bit of dialogue that's straight out of real life and perfectly nails any moment when those of us who are progressive-thinking straight men find ourselves wondering, "I totally agree with the Bechdel Test's critique of the underwhelming ways that female characters are often written, but what do I do when an attractive actress' bit of fanservice turns me into a drooling vegetable? Is it wrong to have enjoyed it?"



Since I've never ventured past Sorcerer's Stone, I highly doubt the Potter flicks contain a character of color as compelling or entertaining as William "Penny" Adiyodi (Arjun Gupta), the reluctant visitor of Quentin's subconscious in the "Homecoming" cold open due to his not-yet-fully-mastered abilities as a Traveler (a person with the power to astrally project and teleport through time and space). I love how The Magicians put an Indian American guy into a role that's usually written for black folks and never for Asian guys (except when Justin Lin intervenes): the gruff--as well as infinitely cooler and more sexually experienced--foil who often rolls his eyes at his friend's whiteness and dorky ways.

Quentin and Penny aren't friends for the first few episodes of the season and even come to blows via battle magic at one point in one of those earlier episodes. Their dynamic brings to mind the rivalry-turned-friendship between Brisco County and Bowler during an earlier McNamara show, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Some Magicians viewers would complain early on in comments sections about Penny's prickly attitude being one-note. But as the season wears on, that prickliness becomes more understandable: Penny is able to hear other people's most private thoughts, like when Quentin hears nothing but Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" in his head, and he finds himself teleporting (often inadvertently) into private places no person in their right mind would want to visit, whether it's someone else's dreams, the Beast's dungeon or Quentin's bedroom while he's in the middle of banging Alice, so no wonder he's often grumpy. Gupta nicely handles the Bowler-ish half of Quentin and Penny's Brisco-and-Bowler-style interactions, whether during Penny's enjoyment of the embarrassing dorkiness of Quentin's sex dream about Alice and Julia or during Penny's appalled reaction to Quentin's racist thoughts about Penny while Quentin's trapped in a dream about being reinstitutionalized, due to a spell cast by Julia to allow Marina Andrieski (Kacey Rohl), her mentor from the hedge witch community, to find her way back to Brakebills, which expelled Marina.


Penny and Alice are clearly stronger and more confident magicians than Quentin, who has a great moment of maturity in this week's season finale when he realizes he's not cut out to be the Chosen One in the Chosen One narrative Jane Chatwin (Game of Thrones alum Esme Bianco), the Beast's sister, guided him to play a part in at the start of the season, so he encourages Alice to take over and lead the battle against the Beast. When The Magicians intriguingly turns the Chosen One narrative on its head at that moment, it makes me wonder if Quentin is actually just a Trojan horse for the heroics of Alice, Julia, Kady, Penny and openly gay senior grad student Eliot Waugh (Hale Appleman), much like how white characters like Meredith Grey and Piper Chapman functioned as Trojan horses to introduce viewers to certain kinds of rarely-seen-elsewhere-on-TV stories about women of color that Shonda Rhimes and Jenji Kohan were eager to include on Grey's Anatomy and Orange Is the New Black, respectively. Despite having enjoyed its first season, The Magicians hasn't made me want to go read Lev Grossman's original novels, so I don't know what happens after this point in the book version.

But whatever happens next season, The Magicians has already accomplished plenty of remarkable shit during its first season to become a worthwhile highlight of Syfy's current lineup, whether it's the show's sense of humor, like the season finale's meta jab at its own typical-for-basic-cable low budget ("The truth is the castle was constructed to be invisible, primarily for budgetary reasons. The royals had spent their entire seasonal allowance and then realized they still had a castle to build, so they figured builder's grade material is just fine if you can't see it"), or the way the show takes many of its viewers' past experiences with geek-friendly franchises they've either loved or ended up hate-watching and cleverly infuses those experiences into a coming-of-age narrative. Remember how everyone thought Heroes was going to be a worthwhile and sharply written epic drama about the consequences of extraordinary powers, before Alan Sepinwall understandably lost his mind over its monotonous humorlessness (outside of Hiro and Ando) and aimless wheel-spinning? The Magicians on Syfy is that sharply written drama.

I never got to see Prince perform live. But every time the eccentric musical genius and consummate guitarist performed live on TV (instead of lip-syncing on TV, aside from earlier appearances on The Midnight Special and American Bandstand), it was a can't-miss event, even whenever I had to sit through a bunch of unfunny SNL sketches just to watch that SNL episode's purple-loving musical guest, who died yesterday at the too-young age of 57.

Sure, it would have been dope to attend a Prince concert or better yet, rock out to one of his even more legendary surprise sets inside smaller and more intimate venues. But I didn't have to check out Prince live to know that he was tremendously skilled when it came to both putting on a show and making a song (whether it was one of his own songs or another artist's) sound even more alive and vibrant than the original recording of it, especially when he shredded on his electric guitar like there's no tomorrow. On stage, nothing compares to Prince.



Inside both my MacBook and my phone, I have a good-quality mp3 of a terrific Prince cover of Radiohead's "Creep" from Coachella 2008 that I've never removed. Prince, who hated encountering footage of his music he had no control over, assigned one of his techie goons to wipe out all traces of his live "Creep" cover. That goon clearly sucked at attempting to wipe them all out.

I love Prince's epic take on "Creep" more than Radiohead's original version. Even Thom Yorke himself agrees that Prince improved upon "Creep."

(Photo source: Prince Vault)

My preference for a lot of the live versions of Prince songs over the studio versions goes further back than "Creep" and as far back as "I Would Die 4 U" and "Baby I'm a Star." My first exposure to those two classic Purple Rain tracks wasn't through radio or the R-rated 1984 movie itself, which I was too young to watch in the theater at the time (it was also a movie I didn't watch until 1998). It was through a Purple Rain Tour concert special MTV aired repeatedly in 1984 and 1985, back when everyone who wasn't either Tipper Gore or an uptight white parent from the town in Footloose loved every Purple Rain track and didn't care about any of Prince's racy lyrical content because they were too busy either singing along with Prince or dancing to give a shit.

The showstopper of the shot-on-videotape Purple Rain Tour special was the "I Would Die 4 U"/"Baby I'm a Star" medley. The Purple Rain Tour special made me love the combo of "I Would Die 4 U" and "Baby I'm a Star" even more than "When Doves Cry,""Let's Go Crazy,""Purple Rain" or Tipper Gore's favorite song, "Darling Nikki," and I disliked so much how the Purple Rain album sequencing (and radio stations) separated "I Would Die 4 U" from "Baby I'm a Star" that when I used to run a film score music radio station on the Internet and I added a few Purple Rain tracks to rotation, I opened Adobe Premiere and fused "I Would Die 4 U" and "Baby I'm a Star" together so that they were always one. That 1984 MTV special was a trip. Prince was clad in a strange white lace top and a stranger pair of white lace pants. He looked like the world's funkiest and naughtiest Egyptian mummy.


The medley and Prince's outfit are all I remember of the MTV special because the last time I saw it on MTV or anywhere else was 1985. And if somebody posted a digitized version of their VHS copy of the special on YouTube, I never got the chance to revisit the special on YouTube because Prince most likely sent one of his online goons to immediately get rid of it as if he were a Bond villain sending a henchman to garrote 007 inside a spa. Did I mention the dude was eccentric?

The control Prince exerted over anything that contained his likeness must have also been one of the reasons why his concert film Sign o' the Times remains out of print in America long after its '80s VHS release, while the film has been released on DVD in Canada and other countries. Maybe Prince was dissatisfied with his own concert film, a combination of actual concert footage and reshoots of the footage that were directed by Prince inside a Paisley Park soundstage because much of the original concert footage was poorly recorded and unusable.


But Sign o' the Times' out-of-print status appears to be more related to rights issues, the same kind of issues that caused the '60s Batman TV show, whose Neal Hefti theme music was, in fact, the first melody Prince taught himself to play on the piano, to take such a long time to debut on DVD and Blu-ray. The film was released in America in 1987 by a Canadian company that was later bought by Alliance Atlantis, the now-defunct Canadian company that was best known for co-producing the CSI franchise with Jerry Bruckheimer. I wish one of the forensics experts from CSI could sort out who currently owns the American home video rights to Sign o' the Times.

It's a film I've been dying to watch in its entirety ever since I became a fan of the Sign o' the Times album in the early '00s, and that album made me go from admiring Prince the producer to admiring Prince the songwriter, the same wordsmith who came up with the words "creamy thighs" for "Erotic City." What exactly is a creamy thigh? It doesn't make much sense, but who gives a shit? The phrase beautifully conveys how irresistible Prince's woman is. Prince made you want to get a taste of her creamy thighs.

The 1987 film contains a live version of "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" that's better than the album version of "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man," the tune that's described by Genius as "the greatest of the (relatively few) 'not tonight, baby' songs in all of rock n' roll." I haven't heard that version since the late '80s, back when MTV used to put into rotation the "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man" number from the film, and that lively number would pull you out of whatever doldrums you were stuck in at the time.

Prince's death is bound to revive interest in the 1987 film, and if that does lead to a new American home video release of Sign o' the Times, it's about damn time. Generations of teens ought to get to know Prince as an extraordinary live performer. He shouldn't be known to them only as the quirky old Magic Negro who cheered up Zooey Deschanel with a rom-com clothes-shopping montage during the Super Bowl episode of New Girl.