Jason F.C. Clarke

It all started with The Soup, the most recent iteration of E!’s Talk Soup. For those who have never seen it, The Soup is a half-hour show that makes fun of everything that happened on television and pop culture that week. Host Joel McHale pokes fun at clips from reality shows, “news” shows like The Insider, and other random TV-related junk.

One of McHale’s favorite gags is to show the latest cold open from CSI: Miami where Horatio Caine, played by David Caruso, inevitably gets off some awkward one-liner right before cutting to Roger Daltrey’s famous scream from “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” McHale often then does an impression of Caruso, including putting on a pair of glasses before cutting to the scream. This never fails to crack me up. (To see a never-ending compilation of Caruso’s cold open one-liners, click here.)

I remember catching an episode of CSI: Miami during the first season and just being bewildered by Caruso’s odd, affected performance. His Horation Caine speaks in slow, measured tones at all times, whether he’s interrogating a suspect or ordering lunch. He talks like he’s explaining something to a four-year-old, and half the time he doesn’t face the person he’s speaking to. It’s one of those performances that is so idiosyncratic that it both works and it’s laughably easy to parody. It’s like a new William Shatner! (Incidentally, I think Caruso would have been perfect for the title role of Constantine. Of course, anyone would have been better than Keanu “Blank Stare” Reeves.)

I tried to watch the original CSI for a while a couple years back, but I never really got into it. Too little characterization, too much suggestion that any and all deviation from a “normal” lifestyle will get you murdered and tossed unceremoniously in a dumpster.

Anyway, after being amused by McHale’s Caruso impression numerous times, I started watching episodes of the show when I caught them on A&E. And lo and behold, I got hooked.

Most of it is due to Caruso’s wacky performance, I’ll admit. The rest of the cast are okay–I like Emily Procter–but Caruso sells that show. It also has a lot more action and characterization that CSI Vegas, and so it seems I’ve found a new show to tape repeats of on the DVR. That’s right–I’m still behind on Battlestar Galactica, I’ve never watched Lost or The Office, but I’m going to watch reruns of CSI: Miami.

On another note, I mentioned a while back that a pitch I’d made to a fairly major magazine had been accepted. Well, the article’s been turned in and should run in the magazine’s September issue. I’ll provide more details once everything has been finalized, but the hard part is over.

Since my Saturday morning cartoons post proved so popular, I decided to go ahead and compile a list of my top ten cartoons of all time. This list is unrestrained by timeslot or, I should mention, relative quality. I make no claim as to this list representing what I think are the best cartoons ever made. That list would be quite different. Today’s list is about the cartoons that have made a significant impact on me or my life at some point.

Anyone who knows me at all no doubt can guess #1 right now, but we’re going to start at number ten.
(more…)

I’ve often declared my life’s goal to make every day feel like Saturday morning. If there’s anything that makes me regret the linear direction of space-time and ache for the past as all mortals do, it’s that I can never truly recapture what it feels like to be a young kid on a Saturday morning.

Growing up in the 1980s following the FCC’s deregulation of children’s programming, Saturday morning offered a bevy of options for the child who, having woken at six a.m. to enjoy as much of his school-free day as possible, would down three bowls of sugar-loaded cereal while watching colorful talking animals and consequence-free cartoon violence. True, many of the shows were little more than half-hour advertisements for toys (or candy, or Mr. T). Others were genuinely entertaining. But what Saturday morning cartoons really offered children was a time when television catered just to them. No boring adult dramas or shows they weren’t allowed to watch. Saturday morning TV belonged to kids.
(more…)

Last night was quite a night for new Fox cartoons–we got a new Simpsons, Family Guy and American Dad. I remarked to DG that I’m beginning to come around to liking Simpsons a bit more than Family Guy again, if only because Seth MacFarlane &. Co. have become a bit too dependent on cutaways and pop culture references.

I never quite understood the difference that loading up a show with pop culture references made until recently, when I was reading about Spongebob Squarepants and how that show’s appeal to both children and adults lies in its simple (if bizarre) storylines that rely on situation, story, and character for laughs, rather than obvious satire or references to William Shatner singing “Rocket Man.” A show like Fairly Odd Parents, on the other hand, relies heavily on pop culture jokes.

And that’s largely the difference between The Simpsons and Family Guy, though The Simpsons has certainly spread its share of pop culture references over the years. However, even after more than ten years of syndication, The Simpsons isn’t at all dated, whereas the clock is already ticking on the first season or two of Family Guy. Fifty years from now, scholars will be examining The Simpsons to find out about the beliefs and values of 1990s and early twenty-first century America, while Family Guy will probably be fairly oblique to all but the most specialized academics.

That said, the most memorable bit I saw last night was during Family Guy, when Herbert—the elderly pedophile who’s always after Chris—challenges a haunted tree (long story) and battles it in Lord of the Rings-fashion. The best moment is when Herbert is falling down the chasm and grabs his walker in mid-air, just like Gandalf plucking his sword during the beginning of The Two Towers. That’s the sort of thing that keeps me watching the show. And as DG pointed out, the Family Guy skit that got me to laugh the hardest wasn’t a pop culture reference (the “barf-o-rama” in the episode “8 Simple Rules for Buying My Teenage Daughter”). In terms of getting me to laugh out loud, Family Guy is definitely the winner.

One thing that’s surprised me is how American Dad has improved from its first season. Initially I didn’t find it funny at all. In the first few episodes, it was clearly an outlet for MacFarlane’s rage against both the political and cultural conservatism of the country, and that sort of satire just wasn’t working. That’s been toned down in recent episodes and the writers have been letting the characters grow a bit, even throwing in a few good gags here and there. It’s not nearly as reliant upon pop cultural references as Family Guy (perhaps a conscious decision on the producers’ part), which I think helps distinguish it from that show. Oddly, American Dad is more of a show about family function and dysfunction than Family Guy.

Of course, I have to wonder how long Fox will allow three cartoon shows to dominate its Sunday night programming block. All I do know is that DG and I always find something else to do from 8:30-9. Maybe they should bring back Futurama…

Speaking of American Dad and Family Guy, this is pretty fun.

Lately I’ve been watching reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation on G4. Why a channel ostensibly devoted to videogames is running three hours of Star Trek each weeknight is beyond me, but I’ll take it.

Watching the show has reminded me just how much of a Star Trek fan (aka geek) I was as a kid. I never watched the original show, but my father was a huge fan of it, so when TNG came around, he got me watching it. And thus was born an adolescent love that lasted for many years.

I watched the show pretty religiously until around the sixth season, when my burgeoning social life in elementary and high school drew my interests in other directions. But from 1988 to 1992, I was really into Star Trek. This was expressed primarily in my reading many of the tie-in novels, especially those written by Peter David. (If I ever make it as a writer, I’ll owe a debt to David’s Star Trek novels.) I also played Star Trek during recess with a childhood friend, Chris, who vaguely resembled a blond Spock and was given to using two taped-together batteries as a phaser. I was usually the commanding officer (I continually promoted myself over time until I became the “Starfleet Commander”) whereas Chris was always my second banana. While I was always fighting some enemy ship or setting the self-destruct on our own vessel, Chris was happy to pretend we were on an alien planet examining some exotic life-form. The most amusing thing I recall from those days (if anything can be more amusing than the entire situation) was that my “character” eventually developed the ability to morph into the Alien (from the Alien movies) at will, much like the Incredible Hulk.

Eventually, Chris moved away and I lost interest in Star Trek, though I did catch the last episode of TNG, and I always made sure to see the films when they came out.

As a kid, I enjoyed a lot of the more superficial aspects of ST:TNG: the starships, the weird aliens, the Borg, Data, and whatnot. But watching it now—especially in the current political environment—I’m drawn in by how incredibly optimistic the show is. Everyone on the show is so understanding, so respectful of one another. There’s not much shouting and hardly any conflict among the main characters. Realistic? Hard to say. Four centuries is a long time to try and get it right. But realistic or not, it’s certainly optimistic.

TNG took a lot of flack for its optimism in later years. Ronald D. Moore, the man behind the revamped Battlestar Galactica, cut his teeth on the various Star Trek shows, and judging from BSG, I have to wonder whether he felt smothered by the feel-good nature of TNG. Certainly when he got his hands on Deep Space Nine he set to work darkening the tone and creating conflict among the characters.

I’ve long stated that American pop culture seems to have a nostalgia cycle of about twenty years, and if that’s true, TNG nostalgia should be coming up pretty soon. And watching the reruns on G4, I think it might happen. That optimism is immensely refreshing, and a stark contrast to BSG, which tends to augment our cultural anxiety through its paranoid and depressing storylines. More than any other Star Trek series (including the original), TNG emphasized the potential of the human species to grow and evolve, to move beyond our petty conflicts and respect one another. It was about exploration of both the galaxy and—to use a hoary expression—the human condition.

It’s interesting that TNG aired just before the boom of the mid-to-late nineties. Then, during the boom, the other Star Trek shows—Deep Space Nine in particular—became darker and more action-oriented. Like TNG, they were just slightly ahead of the cultural milieu.

Given the near-self-destruction of the Star Wars franchise, I think Star Trek has the potential for a good nostalgic boost and renewed cultural cache. It’s a great time to rediscover the show; it’s been out of the public eye for some time, and the recent films have been box office failures with storylines that were quite different in style and tone than the television series anyway. Yes, TNG is a bit stiff at times—fans of the original series sometimes referred to it as a “talk show in space”—but the ideas are still interesting and the characters are like old, familiar friends.

My father was a very big fan of the original series, and to this day it’s a little weird for me to watch it because he picked up so many of Shatner’s mannerisms (no, not the odd speech patterns—mostly facial expressions, particularly the wry humorous ones). While I don’t seem to have picked up any of Captain Picard’s mannerisms (unfortunately, mine seem to have come entirely from a youthful fondness for the early work of Jim Carrey), I certainly looked up the man, and would happily share a drink with him any day—no doubt a stiff, British drink (despite his ostensible French heritage), followed by slightly awkward conversation and eventually an unspoken, respectful, but obvious dismissal from the good captain, who has determined I am an odd fellow and would probably have ended up in the blue uniform instead of red.