I have been watching...

You have been watching is an excellent show, tossing Charlie Brooker's astute and funny, but slightly grating television criticism together with a classic panel show format. One of the absolute best things, however, is that runs for an hour with commercials, so there's plenty of time for these sort of experiments, which there really ought to be more of. It's like a lemon meringue, an acidic host, dedicated to snarky commentary on pop culture, slashing through panel show fluffy egg white, with plenty of air whipped in. It makes both more palatable.

Congress is important...

Shockingly, Elmo is the only non-human ever to have given testimony to congress. I imagined there must have been some dogs and horses called before the HUAC in the fifties, but no, it's just Elmo. It baffles me that there's no video for this. But that picture says it all, anyway. Most of my google searches for video led to articles complaining about the marginalised role that congress apparently plays in the governing of the U.S., but none of that seemed particularly shocking, though. The executive branch is pretty much the legislative branch as well? Doesn't that always happen? Whether you form your government based on a majority in the parliament or just elect a leader, there still the issue of some kind of support from the legislature. And most shocking, according to the academic papers, congress issues stupid laws that don't work in the real world, but sound good and then shoot down the executive branch for executing them in a cynical way? Have these guys even heard of politicians before?

Sad resolution to childhood mystery...

For years I had nightmares about certain scenes in this show, without remembering it was a cartoon I actually saw. It's crap and not scary at all of course, but pretty gruesome for something ostensibly for children. what's annoying me is that it could have been a great mystery, one of those weird memories that you're never really sure about. the last time I flicked through as many 80's cartoon intros as I could find I was looking for this, almost frantically. When I didn't find it, there was a sense of genuine spookiness. It felt a bit like having seen something unique, unrecoverable, something from somewhere else. I knew it had to be a real cartoon, my own memories are never traditionally cell-animated, but maybe, just maybe it wouldn't be what I thought it was. But of course it wasn't. I came across it and there it is, just an 80's cartoon with a bit more gore than average.

Giant Robots Go!

In a typical 20 minute interval from work I looked up a cartoon I watched as a kid, because that's what you do with those intervals. I remembered this because of it's annoying/awesome theme song and bizarre Japanese dream logic storytelling, barely compensated by an English Dub.



It just looks a little weird, especially compared to the show, which just wasn't as filled with cool for 1985 flip-wipes, and seizure inducing colour effects. This is of course, because the Japanese opening is different and much weirder. Observe:



People who watched this show in America apparently had footage of this show, interspersed with footage of another Japanese giant Robot show, and some unconvincing 'alternate universe' explanation for these two different shows pasted together. Japanese stuff is difficult to make palatable to Western audiences, but there's no doubt in my mind which of these intros I would have preferred as a kid.

Are your kids old enough to learn about Cthulhu?

This just about takes the cake. H.P. Lovecraft's fantastic stories, though usually racist and unwieldy, almost always feature people going mad with the knowledge of older, as he would say eldritch, horrible creatures, to whom human beings are food. There's an endless parade of these creatures, but Cthulu is the famous one, even popping up in stories by Robert Howard and Clark Ashton, contemporary pulp-writers. This video blends the nauseating trend of 'baby' versions of known characters with it in a fantastic way. Hitting all the high points of the Ctulhu mythos and referencing the rest of Lovecraft's diverse collection of supernatural beings. The only one missing I'd still like to see is my favourite Shub-Niggurath, The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. Anyway, this would make an awesomely subversive Saturday morning cartoon, kids need to know this stuff if they're ever going to summon a being from the beyond.

I can't stop watching the Venture Bros.

This little scene just about encapsulates what I love about this show. The total failure of almost all of it's characters at almost everything. The violence, obscure Nerdy references and dead baby comedy would be enough to keep me entertained, but there's very little replay value in it. I just can't get enough of the failure, though, it's just incredibly endearing. I found out recently that the show has a rabid fanbase, and that doesn't surprise me. Everything about it is pitched to the kind of people who care passionately about something weird and it just fills the void perfectly. It's pretty much the same gimmick X-men used, finding the right one-size-fits-all metaphor for a whole generation of people. This show is perfect for the disillusioned nerd of today. Combining Nostalgia and existential dread with snarky pop-culture humour, it catches the flavour of the times better than anything else at the moment.