SOUP'S ON

There's an Argentine soup company that is populating its commercials with really bizarre characters that look to be a cross between the stop-motion clay people of 'Davey & Goliath' and 'Gumby & Pokey'. And as such, they would probably be found in their own pocket of that TV dimension which would also house everything from 'Robot Chicken' to 'Moral Orel' and even the claymation version of the life of Jesus.

Madre, the advertising company that designed these "people" for Lucchetti's, described the process here.

BCnU!
Toby O'B

THE CHRISTMAS COUNTDOWN

TODAY'S TWD: THE BIRTH OF THE CROSSWORD

December 21, 1913:
Arthur Wynne's "word-cross", the first crossword puzzle, is published in the New York World.

In 1995, a professor of comparative religions named Oliver (We never learn if that's his first or last name) was laid off from his university. Presented with a parting gift of matching suitcases, Oliver decided to seek out the mysterious "Aristotle", the man who created the crossword puzzles he was so fixated upon. Along the way, he picked up a traveling companion in a policewoman named Priest, and they became involved in a murder mystery.

'Oliver's Travels' sounds pretty interesting; and since I've been always a fan of British mysteries (This past year I watched 'Cadfael', 'Poirot', 'Rosemary & Thyme', and 'An Unsuitable Job For A Woman'.), I've added it to my Netflix queue, bumping it up to be the next complete series, right after I finish 'Backstairs At The White House'. (The original version of the series was five episodes in length, but it was butchered for its American presentation to be only four episodes in length; so I don't know which version I'll be getting in Netflix.....)

A memorial website dedicated to Alan Bates, who played Oliver in the series has a section dedicated to word games with the late actor as their subject. And one of these is a crossoword puzzle which demands that you know your stuff about Bates.

Speaking about 'Oliver's Travels', Mr. Bates said, "It's a nice original piece. I liked it when I read it and I liked doing it. It's quite ingenious, with a thriller running through it. The thriller is tied into the crossword. It's quirky, but it's also got a philosophy and a love of history and place, a real sense of the past."

A crossword puzzle came into play in "Charma Loves Greb". No, that's not a misprint; that's the title of the 'Dharma & Greg' episode in which Dharma tracked down the creator of Greg's favorite crossword puzzles and cajjoled him into adding a birthday greeting to Greg to one of his puzzles. Unfortunately, it looked as though her husband was going to screw up the clues and totally miss the message!

Over in the Tooniverse, Homer Simpson contacted the two men responsible for the crossword puzzle in the New York Times and they created a puzzle that would gain the attention of Homer's daughter Lisa, who had become totally fixated on their crosswords. Their televersions both showed up in an episode - in animated form, of course, which means they had yellow skin and four fingers on each hand. (That episode of 'The Simpsons' has been nominated for a Toobits award.)

And in his coma-induced world of 1973, NYPD Detective Sam Tyler remembered some pertinent advice from his father - that the secret to solving a crossword puzzle can usually be found in the lower right-hand corner. Using that suggestion, Sam pieced together a clue as to what was happening to him from the lower right-hand corners of police reports connected to various cases he was working on. This led him to a cabin where he got a mysterious phone call from somebody who knew he had been run down in the world of 2008 and was now in a coma. (And that's how the American version of 'Life On Mars' left us hanging at their mid-season break, for all intents & purposes at the same "crossroads" where the British version left off.)
Forty-Two Across: an acronym greeting from 'The Prisoner',
Toby O'B

THE CHRISTMAS COUNTDOWN

SILVER CITY SERENDIPITEEVEE

A little hometown nostalgia crept into my dose of "serendipiteevee" this morning when I got home from work.

I turned on the TV as soon as I got in (of course!), and flipped to CNN - where I caught the tail end of a weather report live on the scene from Meriden, Connecticut.

Unfortunately for the reporter, she ended her report saying that the weather was "going to get much more bad". The anchors back in the studio, as well as the meteorologist, had fun with that!
Usually I have to go online to get a taste of the Silver City's news.....

BCnU!
Toby O'B

TODAY'S TWD: CRASH IN THE EVERGLADES

I never know where my TV investigations will take me online....

I was looking for information about WNKW and its connection to the ABC series 'Invasion' - about the strange alien lights which took possession of the inhabitants of Homestead, Florida, during a hurricane. So while watching the pilot episode, Everglades Park Ranger Russell Varon told his brother-in-law Dave about a plane crash in the preserve back in 1996.

Although he was referring to a plane crash that later played into the 'Invasion' storyline, it may have been influenced by a real world tragedy, that of ValuJet Flight 592. If so, details of that case would have been just as interesting as the plotline in 'Invasion'.....

When ValuJet Flight 592, en route from Miami to Atlanta, crashed in the Florida Everglades on May 11, 1996, 109 people died. Among them was 38-year-old Delmarie Walker, mother of two teen-aged children and wife of a disabled Pennsylvania state policeman.

In February 1997, well before the ValuJet crash suits could be settled or go to trail, the College Park, Georgia, police announced that they were closing their investigation into the March 25, 1996, murder of 48-year-old Catherine Holmes. “Even though we can't charge [Delmarie Walker], we feel the evidence shows she was the suspect who committed this crime,” the lead investigator told the Journal Constitution.

Holmes had choked to death on some object, possibly a sock, which had been forced into her throat. In the course of an apparent struggle she had received more than twenty stab wounds. Hogtied with a pillowcase covering her head, Holmes died cluching tufts of her assailant’s hair.

Then Walker died in the ValuJet crash in the Everglades. Eight months later (after delays attributed to the Olympic bombing) the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s crime lab confirmed that Walker’s hair matched the hair found in Holmes’ grasp and that Walker’s fingerprints were found in Holmes’ apartment. Evidence that Holmes had previously written checks to Walker and that Holmes was known to have received $1,800 from her mother shortly before her death was apparently sufficient to convince police that Walker had murdered Holmes in a dispute over money.

However, because Walker’s body was never recovered from the Everglades, it was not possible to verify a match between Walker’s DNA and the blood spatter at the murder scene. Thus, the evidence on which the police based their conclusion that Walker was Holmes’ murderer and their consequent decision to close the investigation was largely circumstantial and arguably less than conclusive.

What if the televersion of DelMarie Walker's body became a hybrid of the creatures, as did Sheriff Tom Underlay's in that 1996 plane crash? Could they protect her from the authorities by hiding her in Homestead?

Here's the full story by Stephen Dresch......

BCnU!
Toby O'B

THE ECHO OF SPUNK

I think that'll be the name of my porn movie......

LOU GRANT:
"You know what? You've got spunk."
MARY RICHARDS:
"Well....."
LOU GRANT:
"I HATE SPUNK!"
'The Mary Tyler Moore Show'

"You've got spunk... and balls.
I like that in a woman."
DOUGLAS REYNHOLM
'The IT Crowd'

BCnU!
Toby O'B
[Post #3333]

The Christmas Countdown

TODAY'S TWD: SAKHAROV

December 19, 1986:
Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev releases Andrei Sakharov and his wife from internal exile in Gorky.

Two years earlier, Jason Robards and Glenda Jackson portrayed the Sakharovs in a TV movie about what led to this form of imprisonment. HBO moved up the film's premiere date because of Sakharov's hunger strike, which was undertaken in hopes it would force the authorities to let his wife leave the country for a needed operation.

Here is an extended excerpt from the New York Times review of that TV movie:

Essential biographical details are taken care of in the very first scene as a Soviet official lectures an unidentified group, who may or may not be members of the K.G.B., about Dr. Sakharov's background: born in 1921, a doctorate in physics in 1953, the year he also became the youngest member ever to be elected to the Academy of Sciences. As the physicist credited with developing the hydrogen bomb for the Soviet Union, Dr. Sakharov is one of the country's elite. He is a respected academician and, as another dissident later explains, more than that - ''You're one of them, not a Jew.''

Portrayed powerfully by Jason Robards, whose lean and craggy face comes closer to resembling Boris Pasternak, this Sakharov is a quiet, rather dour man who insists that he doesn't always seek out trouble. Yes, someone agrees, but ''you don't always avoid it either.'' When approached to sign a petition for an arrested dissident, Sakharov tells his first wife (Anna Massey), ''If I was in a prison camp, wouldn't you want people signing petitions for me.'' As he drifts slowly but unhesitatingly into more unpopular causes, his privileges are cut back and eventually he loses his top position as a teacher of physics. After the death of his wife, he sits alone on a park bench, still being watched by the authorities from a distance.

Through his association with dissident causes he meets Miss Bonner, a divorced woman with grown children. She is played by Glenda Jackson, whose special chemistry with Mr. Robards gives their scenes an extraordinary weight. Half-Jewish and long an active Communist, Miss Bonner becomes the driving force in Dr. Sakharov's life. When they eventually marry, he acquires the family he never had and becomes dedicated to its survival, especially when it becomes apparent that the Bonner children are being threatened and punished for the supposed transgressions of their parents.

It is Miss Bonner's elderly mother who prophetically warns her son-in- law that things are not so different from what they were under Stalin. Today they don't need terror, she observes, they have other ways, such as marshaling ''world opinion'' and having colleagues denounce you. ''They'' are not different, she insists, only smarter.

Why does Dr. Sakharov resist? He tells Western journalists that he has a need to create ideals. No ideals, no hope, he says, ''and then one is completely in the dark, in a hopeless blind alley.''

Needless to say, the Sakharov fight for human rights knows no geographical limitations. Among his more personal causes is his resistance to arguments for nuclear superiority or the death penalty. If he were outside the Soviet Union, he doubtless would be at the forefront of demonstrations that wouldn't necessarily be sanctioned by some of his current supporters. This is the crucial point scored quietly in this film, even as it shows George Orwell's vision of ''Nineteen Eighty-Four'' harrowingly close to being fully realized in the Soviet Union.

Writing up this piece only makes it more imperative that I finally get myself a scanner for Toobworld Central. I can't find a single decent photo or video clip from that TV movie online, but I do have one in a massive book on TV movies in the Great Library. Oh well. I'll post it eventually, so that anybody else who might find themselves in need of a picture of the televersion of Sakharov can find one......

BCnU!
Toby O'B

THE CHRISTMAS COUNTDOWN