Tinky-Winky may keep Jerry Falwell up at night, but apparently it’s Spongebob Squarepants that haunts the dreams of James Dobson, founder and head of right-wing freak show organization Focus on the Family. (Must’ve been that David Hasselhoff cameo.) At a inaugural function this week, Dobson castigated a new tolerance promotion video featuring Spongebob, Barney, Winnie-the-Pooh, and other children’s characters of suspect orientation as “pro-homosexuality.” Said Dobson’s #2, “We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids…It is a classic bait and switch.” Um, yeah, ok…fight the power, y’all.
Category: Television
The Great Black Hope.
Before the story of the Hurricane, there was another man the authorities came to blame…and he was the Champion of the World. Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, Ken Burns’ new documentary on the much-maligned Progressive Era boxer, premieres this Monday and Tuesday on PBS.
Gallifrey Needs Little People.
By way of Quiddity, the BBC’s Dr. Who revival runs into trouble trying to cast actors of diminuitive stature — they’re all busy being Oompa Loompas and Gringotts goblins for Willy Wonka and Harry Potter IV respectively. Somewhere, Jack Purvis is smiling.
MI:3? That’s Management-Rot.
Take that, Tim. You may well be Arthur Dent, but Ricky Gervais, The Office‘s co-creator and smarmy boss David, has been promoted to the cast of MI:3. No word on whether Finchy will come along for the ride. (As this post suggests, I’ve spent a goodly portion of the past two weeks catching up on both The Office and Freaks & Geeks…good stuff, that.)
Life after Moya.
Ben Browder and Claudia Black, a.k.a. John and Aeryn Crichton of Farscape, will both be joining Stargate SG-1 as regulars in the next few months. Nope, I’m still not watching that Sci-Fi channel dren.
Man out of Time.
BBC One releases a very teaser-ish teaser for the Doctor Who revival. (Via AICN and Triptych Cryptic.)
Stay on Target.
Empires collide as the Dark Lord of the Sith shills for Target (with Heidi Klum). Given that Star Wars was memorialized on Burger King glasses over 25 years ago, it seems a little late to bemoan the saga’s commercialization. Still, this makes it even harder to imagine Episode III as anything but another disappointment.
Fanboy Post-Mortems.
Some pop culture quotes that, applicable or not, have been flitting about my head the past few days:
“And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.“
– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas“Where is the horse and the rider?
Where is the horn that was blowing?
They’ve passed like rain on the mountain, like wind in the meadow.
The days have gone down in the West, behind the hills, into shadow.”
– Theoden, The Two Towers“Ladies and gentlemen, er, we’ve just lost the picture, but, uh, what we’ve seen speaks for itself. The Corvair spacecraft has been taken over — ‘conquered’, if you will — by a master race of giant space ants. It’s difficult to tell from this vantage point whether they will consume the captive earth men or merely enslave them. One thing is for certain, there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar caves.”
– Kent Brockman, “Deep Space Homer” (This last one birddogged, after much mutual quoting, by Mark at Nofeblog.)
Capital W.
“I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” (For some reason, I’m reminded of Homer Simpsons’s cabin fever…”I have powers…political powers!“) To his credit, Dubya gives us fair warning in his press conference today about what to expect from the coming second term. Some choice Dubya quotes, via Value Judgment: “Now that I’ve got the will of the people at my back, I’m going to start enforcing the one-question rule. That was three questions.” or “Again, he violated the one-question rule right off the bat. Obviously you didn’t listen to the will of the people.” Also, by way of Looka: “I will reach out to every one who shares our goals.” The rest of us, it seems, might be in for some trouble.
Exterminate.
Dark Horizons posts some pics of the 2004-era Daleks, soon to be seen on BBC’s Doctor Who revival. No word on if Davros is joining the fun. (And, yes, I’m just going to maintain the ridiculous pretense that there might actually be people out there who give a rip about the frelling Daleks right now.)