HISTORY CHANNELED: "AIN'T GONNA PLAY SUN CITY"

Here's the last tip of the hat to Black History Month from Toobworld Central. I'd say if anybody wanted to argue that Television changed the world, I'd like to think this played a small part.....

BCnU!

THE SUPER SIX LIST: JOSIE'S KNOB

When I saw Joan Chen was the guest star in a 'Fringe' episode a few weeks ago, my heart gave a little skip - but not because of the pozz'bilities for a connection to 'Twin Peaks'. (I already had that covered when Walter said that he was friends with Dr. Jacoby.)

It was simply because it had been far too long since I had seen her.

So no, I didn't start spinning splainins for her characters in 'Fringe' and 'Twin Peaks', but it did get me thinking about Josie Packard and her strange fate in the town of Twin Peaks.

In case you don't remember, Josie's physical form died, but her spirit was transferred into the knob on the small bureau by the side of the bed. This would become her own personal hell.

Since that occurred in 1991, what has since happened to the soul of Josie Packard? Is she trapped in the knob still? If not, wha' hoppint, as Ricky Ricardo would say.

Here are a few options:

1) She's still trapped in the knob.

2) A spiritualist released her soul to go to her final fate. (I'm thinking maybe defrocked priest John 'Strange'.)

3) The bureau was burned which extinguished her soul.

4) Josie's spirit was transferred to another vessel. (If this was the movie universe, maybe she got "back in de bowl"....)

5) Someone attuned to the spiritual plane touched the knob and became the host to her soul.

Pretty close to a Super Six List right there, but I did come up with a Super Six List connected to the theory that she was still trapped in the bureau:

SIX ORGANIZATIONS WHO WOULD WANT JOSIE'S KNOB*

(This is contingent on the premise that eventually the Great Northern Lodge would want to get rid of the bureau because of it being the locus for unusual occurrences in their hotel, and that they didn't just trash or burn it.)

Here are my six candidates for those who might have tried to gain possession of the possessed bureau. And as always, I cheated at the end......
1) CURIOUS GOODS, 'FRIDAY THE THIRTEENTH'
Curious Goods used to be Vendredi Antiques, owned by Lewis Vendredi. He made a pact with the Devil to sell the accursed inventory which would spread the Devil's evil far and wide. But when he finally reneged on the deal and lost his soul, it was then up to his old friend Jack Marshak, Vendredi's niece Micki Foster, and her cousin Ryan Dallion to retrieve those items.

They could easily have mistaken the possessed bureau for one of those damned objects and brought it back to the Curious Goods store. (This would have happened at least two years after the 'Friday The Thirteenth' series ended. So we have to assume all three of those characters were still alive by late 1991.)
2) THE CANDLEWICK INN, 'HARPER'S ISLAND'
When a hotel decides to get rid of furniture, it could just toss it out if its badly damaged, or it might try to recoup some of its original cost by selling it off - to consignment shops, antique dealers, collectors, or maybe even to another hotel.

An inn like the one on nearby Harper's Island might have been interested in any cast-offs from the Great Northern to heighten their outdoors-y theme in some of the rooms. But the tortured aura of Josie Packard's doomed soul would have proven to be a deadly influence on a youngster who spent summers on the island......
3) 'WAREHOUSE 13'
This is the archive of strange items that are either imbued with mysterious powers, or even have lives of their own. Its curator, Artie Nielsen, calls it America's attic.

Not understanding the reason why, the WH13 agents would have collected the bureau - or at the very least, it's knob - once their detection system picked up on the source of the disturbance. This means that the agents involved would not have been Mika and Pete, who didn't join the Warehouse team until two years ago.
4) THE METROPOLITAN PUBLIC LIBRARY, "THE LIBRARIAN" TRILOGY
The Metropolitan would be the biggest rival to Warehouse 13 for the acquisition of magical artifacts. (And with items in its collection like the Holy Grail, Excalibur (above, right), and Pandora's Box, Chief Librarian Judson would have dispatched the current Librarian (probably Edward Wilde) to retrieve it before the WH13 agents got their mitts on it.

And since Wilde bore an "uncanny resemblance" to FBI Agent Dale Cooper, he probably just bluffed the Great Northern Hotel staff into surrendering the bureau as "evidence".
5) THE TORCHWOOD INSTITUTE, 'TORCHWOOD' ('DOCTOR WHO')
Torchwood would be a major rival to both Warehouse 13 and the Metropolitan Public Library for collecting items, although their interest would lie more with alien technology. After all, their motto is: "If it's alien, it's ours." But they might have assumed the bureau was alien in origin, and like their rivals, national boundaries would not be seen as an impediment in reaching their target.

The way I'd play it out in Toobworld, it would not have been until the end of the 1990's before Torchwood would have become aware of the bureau's existence. And it would have been Torchwood Three, based in Cardiff, who would have been mobilized to bring it back to the Institute. But the presence of the bureau - and Josie's damned spirit - in the close quarters of the "Hub" would have traumatized the psyches of the team members. It would finally be team leader Alex Hopkins who would snap, killing all of the other agents of Torchwood Three on New Year's Eve, 1999.

Alien artifacts remained at the various sub-stations only long enough to be shipped to Torchwood One in the Canary Wharf area of London. So eventually Jack Harkness, who "survived" the New Year's massacre, would have shipped that bureau on to the main facility's storage area. And there it would have been destroyed as collateral damage in the battle of Canary Wharf between the Daleks and the Cybermen.

Finally.....

6) OPTIONS FROM 'DOCTOR WHO'
Yeah, I guess I'm always going to go to the Who well.....

'Doctor Who' serves as an umbrella for three options that appeared in the series. (Torchwood got its own entry because it was spun off to its own show.)
A] THE TARDIS
With the Doctor, he could have discovered the true nature of that bureau while on a trip to the Pacific Northwest (maybe while he was visiting the town of 'Eureka'?). The Time Lord would have then decided it would be safer to store it in the TARDIS (as he did the globe containing the three Carrionite witches) until he could properly dispose of it and/or free Josie Packard's soul.
B] U.N.I.T.
The Unified Intelligence Task-force (formerly the United Nations Intelligence Task-force) has its own warehouse of the alien and the bizarre, which was seen in an episode of the spin-off 'The Sarah Jane Adventures'. Since UNIT is international in scope, they would have no problem in superceding local authorities to O'Btain that bureau.
C] HENRY VAN STATTEN'S UNDERGROUND ARCHIVE IN UTAH
As with almost all of the options I've come up with, Van Statten's main interest lay in the alien ("Lay in" the alien. Heh heh. Heh heh....) But as with the others, he may have made a bid for that bureau as well. However, if he did acquire it, then Josie's soul would probably be doomed for eternity since the underground chambers will be flooded with cement in 2012.

So that's my Super Six List (Plus) on what could have happened to the bureau that contained the soul of Josie Packard. There could have been even more pozz'bilities - like former FBI agent Fox Mulder who used to work 'The X-Files' (and who had a doppelganger DEA agent helping Cooper in Twin Peaks back in the early '90's - Thanks, Sean!), the aforementioned John 'Strange', the NID in cooperation with the 'Stargate SG-1' project, and private collectors looking for items that might have come from 'The Lost Room'.

I do have one final O'Bservation - I don't think we can assume that Joan Chen's character of Reiko in 'Fringe' was the "Over There" counterpart to Josie Packard of the main Toobworld. Born in Hong Kong, it's like her name wasn't originally Josie, but it would have been a Chinese name. Reiko is Japanese in origin. Of course, she might have even been playing the long game about her nationality with Old Man Andrew Packard when he met and married her in Hong Kong so that it would be difficult for him to check her background if he got suspicious. At any rate, whether Reiko and Josie are dimensional counterparts or not is beside the point. It could be that Reiko does have a marriage to Andrew Packard in her background.

But O'Bviously, the "Over There" Josie didn't die and get knobbed up.....

BCnU!

* Yeah, I could have typed "Six Organizations Who Would Want Josie's Bureau", but where's the sport in that? Know what I mean? Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink......

THE HAT SQUAD: DUKE SNIDER

Duke Snider has passed away at the age of 84. He was the centerfielder of the Brooklyn - and then Los Angeles Dodgers - back when they were "The Boys Of Summer". And he was instrumental in bringing the World Series trophy to Brooklyn in the Dodgers' only Series win while they were still in New York.

From the New York Times:
He was the only player to hit four homers twice in a World Series, including in 1955, when the Dodgers ended decades of frustration and defeated the Yankees, bringing Brookyn its only World Series championship.

As if for good measure, in 1957, before the Dodgers left for Los Angeles, he hit the last home run at their famous Brooklyn ballpark, Ebbets Field.

Twice Duke Snider appeared as himself in Toobworld (aside from all of those televised games, talk shows, etc.) First, he appeared in a 1956 episode of 'Father Knows Best' entitled "Hero Father". And then three decades later, he was in a 1988 episode of 'Simon & Simon' known as "Zen And The Art Of The Split Finger Fastball".

He may have also been in at least one of those classic "Less Filling vs Tastes Great" blipverts for Miller Lite......

BCnU.....

AS SEEN ON TV: THURGOOD MARSHALL

Toobworld Central brings its O'Bservation of Black History Month to a close with a biggie for the "As Seen On TV" showcase.....

THURGOOD MARSHALL

AS SEEN IN:
"Thurgood"

AS PLAYED BY:
Laurence Fishburne

From Wikipedia:
Thurgood Marshall (July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993) was an American jurist and the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Before becoming a judge, he was a lawyer who was best remembered for his high success rate in arguing before the Supreme Court and for the victory in Brown v. Board of Education. He was nominated to the court by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967.

On November 30, 1993, Justice Marshall was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Bill Clinton.

We upped the ante with this year's collection, but there's always room for improvement. At the same time, the portrayal of historical blacks is a limited Toobworld resource without filling the roster with SNL parodies. Those just defeat the purpose if that's all you use.

The one place where there could have been true improvement this year was in the portrayal of black women. We had only six historical blacks represented last year in February, but half of those were women. This year we had nine black historical characters, yet none of them were women.

We'll see what we can do for 2012.

BCnU!

RECASTAWAYS: KINGS & QUEENS

It's looking to be the typical love affair Hollywood has with all things British when it comes to the Best Picture race at the Oscars, with "The King's Speech" getting all the buzz to be the winner. I still think "The Social Network" has a chance to snatch it away from what I thought was a well-made, but rather ordinary movie with two stellar performances that should be recognized. But what do I know? I think "Inception" was the best movie of the year for what it represented as the push forward in what film-making is all about. THAT is the movie that people will still be talking about and watching years from now, but then... this is "E.T." vs. "Gandhi" all over again.....

Anyhoo, here's a video compilation of the line of kings and queens who have ruled over England and then Great Britain right up to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Both movies and TV are represented here, and it was nice to see a touch of 'Doctor Who' flit past during the collection of Queen Victorias.

This video was made before "The King's Speech" came out; othewise, there could have been three more entries to be presented - George V (Michael Gambon), Edward VIII (Guy Pearce), and George VI (Colin Firth).

My favorite moment? When contact is made with that cannonball! You'll know it when you see it!

BCnU!

PYTHONIAE

How about a couple of fat juicy Python sketches from outside of 'Monty Python's Flying Circus'?



MONTY PYTHON IN AMERICA



TOP OF THE FORM



BCnU!

BLIPVERTS: ADIDAS "STAR WARS"

Time to make believe to pay the bills....

BCnU!

MISTER FREEMAN

Words fail me. But I do see a little bit o' myself in this guy!

I'm glad he's only in the Tooniverse.....

BCnU!

ASOTV VIDEO: JAMES FRANCO

In connection to James Franco being one of the co-hosts for the Oscars tonight.....

BCnU!

AS SEEN ON TV: THE OSCARS HOSTS

Sunday's the big night for the annual Academy Awards presentation on ABC. And this year the hosts are Anne Hathaway and James Franco (who's also nominated for Best Actor for his role in "127 Hours").......

From the Academy's press release:
Beverly Hills, CA (November 29, 2010) – James Franco and Anne Hathaway will serve as co-hosts of the 83rd Academy Awards®, Oscar telecast producers Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer announced today. Both have previously appeared on the telecast but not in hosting capacities.
"James Franco and Anne Hathaway personify the next generation of Hollywood icons— fresh, exciting and multi-talented. We hope to create an Oscar broadcast that will both showcase their incredible talents and entertain the world on February 27," said Cohen and Mischer. "We are completely thrilled that James and Anne will be joining forces with our brilliant creative team to do just that."

Franco, who currently can be seen in "127 Hours," will be making his second appearance on an Oscar telecast. His other film credits include "Eat, Pray, Love," "Date Night," "Milk" and "Pineapple Express." Franco is also known for his portrayals of Harry Osborn in the "Spider-Man" trilogy.

Hathaway will be making her fifth appearance on an Academy Awards telecast. She was recently seen in "Alice in Wonderland" and currently can be seen in "Love and Other Drugs." Hathaway's other film credits include "Bride Wars," "Becoming Jane," "The Devil Wears Prada" and "The Princess Diaries." She was nominated for an Oscar in 2008 for her lead performance in "Rachel Getting Married."

AS SEEN ON:
'Saturday Night Live'

AS PLAYED BY:
James Franco:
Paul Brittain

Anne Hathaway:
Abby Elliot

BCnU!