#and joel entertaining him at the beginning (and others talking to him throughout the episode but especially joel at the beginning)

[after-nine-at-the-oasis]

Jimmy and Joel this episode were literally the sitcom single men who randomly have to take care of a baby for an episode

[mst3kproject]

504: Secret Agent Super Dragon

Let’s move on to another oft-overlooked subset of MST3K – the Budget Bond films.  These are always very bad, but often a lot of fun if you’re in the right kind of mood.

Brian Cooper is Super Dragon, pulled out of retirement to find out who’s distributing poisoned chewing gum to co-eds!  Boy, if that doesn’t sound like the setup for a thrilling spy caper, nothing does!  The plot seems to revolve around a Dutch student named Christine Bruder, so Cooper goes to Amsterdam looking for her.  There, in between fucking his female colleagues and flirting with every woman he sees, he learns that Bruder was part of a plot to smuggle deadly drugs into the United States, hidden in fake Ming vases.  An evil conspiracy is planning to dope the free world on a chemical that will cause us to violently attack one another, and then… uh, I don’t know what happens after that, but it’s probably safe to assume it’ll end in the bad guys ruling the world.  That’s always the goal.

What’s with that spy movie cliché about the glamorous secret agent who sleeps with every woman he meets?  Friends, enemies, co-workers, random waitresses… our suave hero loses no chance to insert Tab A into Slot B.  He can’t walk down the street without having women throw themselves at him.  This trope has been parodied to hell and back in everything from Austin Powers to The Million Eyes of Sumuru and it’s actually sort of weird to see it played straight, as it is here.  As a PSA to my readers: never sleep with a glamorous secret agent.  He probably has like nine venereal diseases.

The weirdest thing in the movie is a facet of this trope: it’s the bit where Cooper and Agent Farrell are busily smooching when a man breaks into her apartment and tries to kill them.  They fight him off, and he commits suicide so they can’t question him.  Cooper then throws his body out the window, turns the soundtrack back on, and the couple just pick up where they left off!  Maybe it’s because I’m not a glamorous secret agent but I gotta agree with Tom Servo on this one: I don’t think I could have sex in the same room where I just watched a guy kill himself. It wouldn’t be right, you know?

I will say that this indifference towards death bothers me less here than it did in Master Ninja I, but the characters in Secret Agent Super Dragon have presumably have years of both physical training to kill and psychological coaching to deal with the consequences. Even so, just getting right back to the makeout session before the body’s even had a chance to cool seems unnecessarily callous.

The other trope I notice a lot of in Secret Agent Super Dragon is the death trap. Our hero’s life is threatened repeatedly but always in some contrived way that allows him a chance to escape. The first time he’s tied to a rail so some machine can come along and roll over his head.  He gets out in the nick of time and it crushes a can of red paint instead.  The second time he’s nailed into a coffin and thrown into the river.  He holds his breath and inflates a flotation device. The third time, he’s trapped in a building rigged to explode.  His buddy flies in with a helicopter.  Why doesn’t anybody just shoot this guy? Villains that stupid don’t deserve to take over the world!

Yet another thing that stands out as remarkably dumb is the cause the charity auction is supposed to support – ‘an International Hospital for Babies with Malnutrition’.  Okay, so, imagine you’re somebody whose child is starving, which probably means you’re dirt poor.  Instead of sending food to you, these people expect you to bring the baby to a hospital, which may be in another country, so that they can feed the kid there. Is the complete impracticality of this supposed to be our clue that it’s a scam?  The script never references that, though.  Did somebody just pick a bunch of charitable-sounding words?  Was it a bad translation of something that actually made sense in the original language?  Are the writers just that stupid?  We’ll probably never know.

Beyond that… it’s honestly really hard to say anything deeper about Secret Agent Super Dragon, because this is another movie that’s not very ambitious. It has some vague themes about drugs as the downfall of western civilization, but its characters don’t have appreciable arcs and there’s not much by way of symbolism for me to analyze. All it wants is to keep us mindlessly entertained for an hour and a half – and there’s nothing wrong with that, honestly, but Super Dragon isn’t even any good at it.  Trying to watch without Joel and the bots I found myself drifting repeatedly.  There’s the charming super-spy, the parade of blandly beautiful women, the evil mastermind with a vague plan to take over the world, the easily-escaped death traps… we’ve done this all before, and Super Dragon doesn’t even use the stereotypes in skillful or interesting ways.

The thing about spy movie tropes is they’re so easy to parody, and have been parodied so many times, that even somebody who doesn’t actually watch spy movies can spot them because we all absorb them through pop-culture osmosis.  Playing them straight therefore runs a very serious risk of boring the audience.  Of course Agent Farrell is working for the bad guys, because in a story like this, a character like her does – and of course she falls in love with Cooper and betrays her bosses for him.  None of this stuff is even really foreshadowed (except that Farrell dyes her hair – can’t trust those unnatural redheads!) but we still know it’s coming because we’ve seen the same shit in fifty other movies. The bad guy wants to cleanse the world so it can be made anew?  Been there. The movie wallows in misogyny but in all the same old ways, so I’ve got nothing new to say about it.

Throughout the film people talk about the ‘legendary Super Dragon’ but I don’t think we ever get a reason why Cooper’s so great.  Bond films begin with a breathtaking action setpiece to show us that our hero has nifty gadgets and balls of steel – Secret Agent Super Dragon begins with Cooper playing dead by the pool.  His most remarkable ability seems to be holding his breath for a really long time, and his gadgeteer, the kleptomaniacal Babyface, makes most of his gadgets out of literal toys.  I think this might be a joke about the obvious miniatures some of these movies use… but I’m not sure.  All I’m sure of is when that dinosaur waddled into the room I was halfway expecting it to demand the return of the Golden Ninja Warrior.

About the only place where the movie seems to accidentally brush by a real statement is in a moment that resembles a historical reference.  Cooper has infiltrated a conspiracy meeting (by wearing a half-mask that leaves his rather distinctive chin fully visible) at which the Big Bad, Mr. Lamas, is delivering an expository monologue: their factory in India is in full production of the drug, which will be shipped to America in phony Ming vases and bring the world to its knees!  If you’re going to talk about drugs making and breaking empires, China and India are where it happened.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the East India Company fostered opium addiction in China because they wanted cheap tea and because the British government had vague plans, which never came anywhere close to fruition, to add China to their empire.  The opium to feed this addiction was grown in India, often by farmers who would rather have been growing actual food but owed too much money to the EIC. This all led to the Opium Wars and a lot of other unpleasantness in which the British Empire came out looking even more like assholes than they usually did.  In a story about conquering the world through drug addiction, then, having the drugs created in India and slipped into something Chinese looks like a reference to history repeating itself.

It may also mean something else.  Secret Agent Super Dragon is relentlessly white, set mostly in a city in northwestern Europe, where conspiracies of middle-aged white guys drink booze and decide the fate of nations.  The actual work that makes this possible, however, is being done by people of colour in the east.  Not only does this seem to reference how western nations use other countries as battlegrounds and bargaining chips in their own power struggles, it can also serve as a reminder of something we frequently forget: a lot of what makes our comfortable lives possible comes from other countries, made by people who could never afford to buy it.  My eyeglasses, the sweater I’m wearing, and the chair I’m sitting on were all made in China.  Our entire economy depends on cheap foreign labor, and I wonder sometimes how much longer that can last before the whole thing falls apart.

Is any of this the movie’s intentional theme or message?  I doubt it. The historical reference seems to be just a ‘hey, look how clever we are!’ moment and the rest probably goes no deeper than ‘oh, no, our children are doing drugs!’, which has been on the verge of ending civilization since at least the thirties.  Secret Agent Super Dragon is just a dumb trashy Eurospy movie, and not even a very good one.  I don’t hate it, but mostly because it’s not worth that kind of effort.  The MST3K treatment renders it infinitely more enjoyable, especially when Tom and Crow do Jazz.

Agent Cooper was played by actor Ray Danton, who died in 1992, a year before the episode aired.  Probably all for the best.  I doubt he’d have been into all those jokes about how his character is perfectly smooth.

[odanurr87]

My thoughts on... Altered Carbon

Apologies for not posting this review earlier but a few things happened during the week, one of which was the Farewell episode of Life is Strange: Before the Storm and I simply couldn’t not play it right away. Also, as you may have noticed by now, I hadn’t written up this review yet. I’ll try to keep this brief.

Overall, Altered Carbon is a series I enjoyed a great deal due to several factors, the first of which is its length. Much like British TV shows, Altered Carbon’s first season is short, comprised only of ten episodes, what’s good because it doesn’t dilute the narrative and keeps the momentum going. I’ve lost count of how many filler episodes there are in any given American TV show and I’ve often pondered how much better something like, say, The Flash would be if it were given half the number of episodes to tell a story. Not to mention there are only so many times I can be invested in Barry having to defeat yet another evil speedster. Altered Carbon is given 10 hours to make this work and I believe it succeeds.

The second factor that immediately appealed to me was the blend between sci-fi and crime thriller ala Blade Runner (probably leaning more towards 2049 than the original). The main protagonist, Takeshi Kovacs, is introduced to us as a mercenary on the run who is later hired as a private eye to look into a murder given his... colourful background. The investigation is certainly eventful and well-paced although it doesn’t do as good of a job as other murder mysteries, such as Poirot, or Miss Marple, in involving the audience and trying to get them to play detective themselves. By the time Kovacs decided to gather everyone in the traditional “room scene” I had few concrete reasons to suspect any of them for the murder but Takeshi managed to paint a colourful picture as was, indeed, the intention. 

Perhaps this is compounded by the fact that, in Altered Carbon’s universe, the body is just a shell (wink wink), a sleeve, a skin that can be worn by anyone, what makes it difficult to guess who may be using a person’s sleeve at any given time, a fact that Altered Carbon takes advantage of throughout the series. This leads to a number of plot threads that introduce new characters and potential allies of Takeshi, such as Kristin Ortega (played by Martha Higareda), a police officer who’s aware of Takeshi’s colourful past and decides to keep tabs on him; and Vernon Elliot (played by Ato Essandoh), a former medic in the Tac Marines who initially becomes a prime suspect in Takeshi’s investigation. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Poe (played by Chris Conner), the Raven hotel’s Artificial Intelligence who takes on the appearance of, you guessed it, Edgar Allan Poe and sees himself as Takeshi’s partner in crime. If only. Poe’s introduction in episode 1 is probably the best in the series (certainly the funniest and a tad creepy as well) and I hope he returns in an eventual sequel.

Poe, one of the best supporting characters.

Since we’re talking cast I should mention a few other names that are tied to Takeshi’s past but for that I need to paint you a picture of the setting. As I mentioned earlier, in this alternate future, humanity has unlocked the means to live forever by storing their consciousness in a chip called a “stack.” In so doing however, humanity has paved the way for further differentiation of the classes, where the rich and powerful can practically live forever in the best and most alluring sleeves while the lower classes either die or often get placed in the cheapest bodies they can afford. At one point, a group of rebels called Envoys decided to rise against this system and tried to put an end to immortality. Needless to say, it did not go well for them and the series explores the events that led to their downfall alongside the murder mystery. In fact, Takeshi was the sole surviving member of their group and he was put on ice for a couple hundred of years. You can imagine he was none too thrilled about being brought back to solve the murder of an immortal, as he embodies everything Takeshi fought against.

Takeshi Kovacs, meet the new Takeshi Kovacs.

This segways nicely into an interesting discussion point as Altered Carbon’s main protagonist is played by two actors (three actually, as he’s briefly played by Byron Mann in the beginning as the above picture shows): Will Yun Lee, during his Envoy days; and Joel Kinnaman (whom you may recognize from Suicide Squad), during the murder investigation. Personally, I liked both their performances and I even felt, at times, that I could see Lee’s Takeshi in Kinnaman’s performance, what is no mean feat. Connecting the two is Quellcrist Falconer (played by Renée Elise Goldsberry), the smart and fearless leader of the Envoys and, incidentally, Takeshi’s love interest. I absolutely loved her interactions with Takeshi, be them past or present. Indeed, Altered Carbon successfully weaves and balances the Envoy storyline with the murder mystery in a way reminiscent of how Arrow used to balance Oliver’s past in the island and his day-to-day as a vigilante in Star City. Some, if not all, of the best moments in the series involve these two in some form or another. Quell is always present in Takeshi’s thoughts, even in death, and her wisdom helps him out of many a tight spot. It’s a rather beautiful, if tragic, love story and I’m a sucker for those. The ending of the series perfectly sets up the sequel playing to Quellcrist’s theme, undoubtedly the most emotional of the music tracks in the series and my personal favourite (sadly, it’s not a part of the OST). Since I mentioned music, I must admit Altered Carbon has some badass scenes that are perfectly enhanced by tracks like PJ Harvey’s “The Wicked Tongue.” Is the soundtrack worth listening to on its own? My first answer would be “no” but let me get back to you on that.

Quell is my favourite supporting character and I hope we see more of her in a sequel.

There are a few other positives and negatives I could mention about the show but I’ll do so in the spoilers section of this post. In general lines, the murder mystery is relegated to a second place after a certain point in the series as it switches to the heist genre once the criminal mastermind has been identified (perhaps somewhat sooner than I would’ve liked in retrospect). The reveal came as a bit of a surprise, even when it really shouldn’t have. Personally, I found the conclusion to the investigation more disappointing than the culprit’s identity as a few things line up rather too conveniently. 

The series has also been, to an extent, criticized for its somewhat gratuitous depictions of gore and nudity but, to be fair, it’s nothing we haven’t seen in Game of Thrones before, a series that, if I remember correctly, was praised for that very same fact not too long ago (even though I always felt this was done for the shock value and to attract viewers). However, at least the nudity doesn’t seem too out of place in Altered Carbon when you consider most of the universe’s richer denizens see their bodies, their sleeves, as a sign of their power and would probably waste no opportunity to show off (indeed, one such scene transpires between Takeshi and Miriam Bancroft). Still, I believe the series would work just as well if there was less of it.

Overall, Altered Carbon is a series I would heartily recommend to any fan of science fiction and murder mysteries, not to mention it has a solid romance story between Takeshi and Quell (and maybe between Takeshi and the beautiful Kristin Ortega, you’ll just have to see!). I’m a bit puzzled by the critics’ tepid, if not outright dismissive, reception of this series, but for a while now I’ve had the feeling that critics have become increasingly out of touch with what people look for in entertainment. Their professionalism in analyzing or critiquing a film or a series has, sadly, become more and more influenced by their biases and agendas (be those political or otherwise), as recent releases like Ghostbusters or The Last Jedi would suggest (or the different reception to The Orville vs. Star Trek Discovery insofar TV shows are concerned). In fact, James Raney over at YouTube makes an interesting comparison between reviews for Netflix’s Bright and Disney’s The Last Jedi, highlighting the lack of consistency when reviewing one of the other (you can watch his video here). Erik Kain from Forbes also wrote an article about a month ago arguing some critics didn’t do their due diligence when reviewing Altered Carbon (you can read his article here). Is the takeaway here that I should start watching everything the critics review badly? I should hope not.

With that said, let’s dive into spoiler territory.

I didn’t like the character of Lizzie, Vernon’s daughter. I thought Poe’s therapy took way too long and was meant entirely to have her show up in the last episode to save her parents through Kovacs’ levels of badassery in an outfit that felt out of place, if not out of character. Not to mention she hints at being able to see the future, something that comes entirely out of the left field and certainly adds nothing to this series but perhaps it’s setup for the sequel. It’s also rather convenient that she has the single, most damning, piece of evidence for Takeshi to round up his investigation, something you will probably guess early on and that the show will do its utmost to make you forget (or you will have solved at least half of the puzzle).

Much criticism has also been directed at the character of Reileen Kawahara (played by Dichen Lachman; did I mention the women in this show are all absolutely gorgeous?), Takeshi’s sister. As you can undoubtedly guess, she’s the evil mastermind behind everything that’s going on to the point she even has her version of Oddjob (that’s from James Bond’s Goldfinger in case you didn’t know) to run interference and murder everyone that gets in her way. I personally liked how Lachman played the character as I felt she was very attached to her brother (maybe too much so), to the point I truly believed she was sincere about wanting him back at her side, the two of them against the world, even if it was also crystal clear everyone else was utterly expendable to her. In hindsight, perhaps the flashbacks don’t accurately convey this bond as Takeshi and Reileen have little time to reconnect, after being separated since childhood, before they’re recruited into the Envoys, but Reileen certainly comes across as (overly) protective of her big brother from that point onwards. Props to Joel Kinnaman also as Reileen’s and Takeshi’s last scene aboard the “Head in the Clouds,” is especially poignant as you can see how neither truly wants to harm the other and it tears Takeshi (and the viewer) apart when he finally pulls the trigger and end his sister’s life. As the resort plunges from the skies to its inevitable doom, Takeshi ignores Ortega’s pleas to escape with her and resolves to stay with his little sister to the very end.

Please find a way to reunite brother and sister in a sequel! It’s so sad we spent so little time with her before she was outed as the villain.

I think that about covers it. As you may have noticed, I’ve taken a liking to several of the supporting characters in the show. Sadly, all of these end up dead but I’ve learned not to take death for granted in a sci-fi show, especially one where there a technology exists that can backup a person’s consciousness. Let me add here that I also liked Ortega’s busybody character but I feel her arc was well-rounded at the end of the series so I don’t think it’s necessary for us to see her again in the sequel, but maybe Takeshi will run into Elias Ryker one day? That would be fun to watch.

What did you make of Altered Carbon? Who was your favourite character? Who would you bring back? Also, with the introduction of sleeves, this show could potentially go on for as long as it wants (or has enough material), similarly to Doctor Who. Will Yun Lee could certainly reprise his role as Takeshi Kovacs or perhaps he could be played by someone else. The ending takes every precaution not give away any hint as to his ethnicity, to the point his new sleeve is even wearing gloves. Who would you like to see play Takeshi Kovacs in a sequel?

[satelliteofmstielove]

K17 Time of the Apes

                                                    Monkey wrenching

General notes

          Ah, more Sandy Frank. That name just warms my heart. Oh wait, that’s the rage at having to watch another one of these things. Okay, so maybe it’s not quite that bad, but man, it’s not good. This is the last Sandy Frank episode for KTMA, giving us two seasons of freedom from the hot dog dropped on the beach, until Season 3 when we get to watch almost all of these movies again, but with better riffing.

          Like Cosmic Princess [K10], Fugitive Alien [K12], and Mighty Jack [K14], Time of the Apes is actually assembled from pieces of a TV show. The original show was called Saru no Gundan (“Army of Apes”) and aired in the early ‘70s. Apparently, it’s not too bad, if Planet of the Apes adaptations (one might say “rip-off” instead, but hey) are your thing. I can see how, without bad dubbing and half the story cut out, it could be a fun watch. In this form, however, it’s…well, it’s on MST3K.

          This episode is unique- Joel’s not in it! I don’t know the detailed backstory, but I guess he had to be out of town that week, so they just taped the episode without him. Having just Tom and Crow in the theater makes for a slightly different feel. Let’s go watch some monkeys, shall we?

Prologue

The Mads are having trouble getting the Joel on the phone. Unfortunately for them, the bots are in a trolling mood and aren’t being much help.

It sounds like the Mads send Time of the Apes as retaliation for the bots’ unhelpfulness. Something similar happens in several later episodes, such as Hobgoblins [907]. It seems like Pearl was especially prone to this.

Mr. Potato Head is back on the desk this week. Dr. Forrester takes out his anger on it by ripping off its nose. Or maybe he just felt like dressing it up differently, at that exact moment.

Movie pt. 1

Does anyone else automatically sing “Sandy Frank, Sandy Frank” along to the opening music? I can’t help myself.

Crow sits in Joel’s usual seat.

At 3:06, Tom already says he feels kind of a void without Joel in the theater. He’s also not too happy about sitting right next to Crow, it seems. He tells Crow maybe he should empty his load pan because he doesn’t smell very good. So…did anyone ever figure out what a load pan was actually supposed to be? I’m not sure I want to know, now.

I never noticed before how peppy the music in this section of the movie is.

Crow doubts the monkeyhood of the animal at 5:41. Tom thinks it’s a possum, Crow guesses lemur. Crow was closer- it’s actually a loris.

6:55- Crow continues his already storied career as an incorrigible punster.

Servo mentions Joel’s absence again at 7:16, wondering where he is.

At 8:32, Crow’s already got this movie’s number.

Wow, this advanced scientific compound’s wiring does not seem up to code.

Crow mentions doing experiments in science class at 10:10. I know it’s probably just a joke, but Joel probably would do experiments with the bots for fun. Probably not “destroy the monkey freezing plant” experiments, though.

At 10:48, Tom mocks Crow’s time as a Christmas tree from several episodes ago, which Crow does not particularly appreciate. He compares being frozen to “drinking a Slurpee real fast.”

Tom also calls commercial at 11:23.

When Johnny starts calling for his uncle at 13:10, the bots start up calling out other names. Sort of a proto version of a joke they’d use in multiple later episodes, most memorably in Pod People [303]. They start it up again at 16: 27.

Some of the camera movement and editing choices in this movie are so strange.

Tom begins whistling at 18:47. After a little while, Crow asks him how he gets his “blowport” to pucker to make that sound. Tom says it’s a special program, but…Also, if anyone knows what song(s) he’s whistling, I’d be interested to know.

At 20:48, Crow says Joel should be there, and Servo says he’s getting a little concerned.

Trace has made Josh laugh at least three times so far in the episode. He’s on a roll. Has been for the past few episodes, actually.

Crow mentions Joel’s absence again in a riff at 22:36.

I don’t know why, but Crow’s little “Mm?” at 23:18 is adorable.

The bots decide to go look for Joel as they leave the theater.

Host Segment 1

The bots discuss where Joel might be, and go over where they’ve already looked. It’s sort of cute how they don’t know all the rooms on the ship.

They quickly degenerate into arguing, unsurprisingly. They really are like young siblings.

Crow calls Tom a “spasmodic crofisator” (crophysator?), a term that would be used again at least once in Season 1. It sounds like an insult but I’m not sure what it means. Maybe they don’t know, either.

Gypsy shows up to break up the fight, carrying Joel’s jumpsuit in her mouth. Does Joel only have one jumpsuit? I always sort of assumed he had at least a couple. But I guess in KTMA he only ever wore the one on camera, so maybe he did only have one. He only had one on camera in Season 1, too. Actually, the only season where he clearly had more than one jumpsuit was Season 2, where he had at least 5- teal, bright red, cyan, light green, and his classic maroon one, which he wears in every episode after it first shows up in Godzilla vs. Megalon [212]. Mike wore the same green one throughout Season 5 (unless you count the navy one in Mitchell), got a royal blue one (Zombie Nightmare [604]) and a teal one (The Creeping Terror [606]) in Season 6, and then switched between the three of them for the rest of his time as host. You know, in case you wanted the brief jumpsuit history of MST3K.

Crow doesn’t know what a pod bay is either. Tom is not taking things seriously and activates a “wah-wah-wah” noise. Does that satellite have those built in?

Apparently the only possible conclusion one could reach after finding Joel’s uniform is that he’s floating naked in space. They don’t seem too concerned for his safety, just more interested in seeing him in an embarrassing position. These are the monsters you created, Joel.

Movie pt. 2

The way this is cut makes the story feel really choppy. Was is this bad in the version they used for the Season 3 episode? Probably.

The fire in the movie makes Crow sneeze at 28:52. Somehow. I wonder if Trace is a little sick- his voice cracks, too, at 29:08.

TV23 time and temperature at 35:41. 6:42, and 56°. I wish they’d tell us AM or PM, but I guess the people actually watching when this was on wouldn’t need to be told that. It was probably PM, since they taped during the day and played them in the evenings. I’m not sure if they showed them at other times on the channel as re-runs or not, though. Tom from mst3ktemple.com would probably know.

At 37:24, the bots start talking about how good it is to get your shoes off when you’ve been on your feet for a long time, despite the fact that neither of them wear shoes and only one of them could. (Unless you count that time from Danger Death Ray [620] where Tom wore the shoes on his head and hands. I don’t.)

Crow starts singing about taking the “ape train” at 46:41. It annoys Servo, but apparently Crow has to do it or his head will blow up. Personally, I think he may be exaggerating.

Immediately after, at 47:01, Tom mentions Joel void again. Crow says they’ll just go look at him through the telescope when they get out of the theater again. I guess that means they did locate him outside at the end of the last host segment, even if we didn’t get to see it.

Movie thing- why does the action scene on the train have such slow, ponderous music? I guess it’s not really that much of an action scene anyway.

Host Segment 2

Crow’s wearing Joel’s jumpsuit, which is ridiculously adorable. I wonder how he managed to put it on. It probably would have been entertaining to watch.

Servo and Crow discuss the implication of Joel being stuck outside, with themselves being the only ones who could let him in, all the while ignoring his pounding on the door outside. They like the idea of forcing Joel to do their will in exchange for saving him from the dark vacuum of space.

What does Crow have against breadfruit plants? Do they take up too much of Joel’s time?

Predictably, Tom’s still on about babes.

Crow also suggests sending him adrift with a sextant, charts and a toaster. Servo objects to losing Lucille the toaster, something about four toast slots. I hope hope hope that it’s just because he’s likes making four pieces of toast at a time and not for some other reason…speaking of which, what kind of fun does Crow think Joel would have with the toaster? I guess he’d tinker with it. He wouldn’t have anything else to do, since the sextant and charts sure aren’t going to help him navigate anywhere in space.

The bots decide the pounding they’re hearing is space barnacles that need removal, to justify messing with Joel some more, but get Movie Sign before they get a chance.

Movie pt. 3

At 51:41, I agree with Tom- I’ve never seen anyone that unconcerned about a UFO.

Josh sneezes at 54:12. Crow/Trace says “gesundheit.”

Tom forgets Godo’s name at 57:05. Usually forgetting how to say characters’ names is Joel’s thing. I guess someone had to do it since he’s wasn’t there.

Did Sandy Frank even attempt to make this part coherent? Was it 5 pm on a Friday and he was just like “Eh, this is good enough, those kids won’t know what’s going on anyway”?

Servo calls commercial again at 1:01:43.

At 1:03:23, Crow is unimpressed by Tom’s joke.

1:04:46- Servo mentions Joel again, though I’m not sure whether he means Joel is a naked ape, or someone who is going back to his country. Is he saying that’s why Joel went out into space in the first place? I guess it could be.

Tom and Crow discuss the Academy Awards at 1:06:12.

The cliff in this flashback is, like, the least treacherous cliff ever. You could walk up that.

Host Segment 3

Cambot plays some old footage of Joel (from Invaders from the Deep [K01], with the long hair and turquoise jumpsuit- wait, he did have another jumpsuit in KTMA. Does that invalidate my whole spiel about jumpsuits from earlier? Oh nevermind). It freaks out Tom and Crow for a second because they think they’ll be in trouble. Have we ever seen this part before? I can’t recall if that little bit is in the snippets video of the three missing episodes.

Inevitably, the bots get into another argument, this time about whether the Joel behind the door was real or simulated. Usually the human has to break up the fighting. If something else didn’t interrupt, I wonder how far it would escalate.

Anybody know who that was behind door #2? Whoever it was, he terrified the bots. Maybe just because he was huge? Or perhaps they don’t like baldness.

Things get a little trippy when Tom starts playing with the laws of reality. He seems to have that power. He does something similar in Gunslinger [511], and Crow doesn’t like it any better then than he does here.

Movie pt. 4

At 1:15:17, Crow and Servo talk about whether or not humans have the same number of hairs on their bodies as apes. Crow thinks so, Servo doesn’t believe it.

I think we’re all starting to get impatient along with Crow. This is dragging on forever.

Down to 54° by 7:45, so I’m guessing it is PM, at 1:27:24.

Ah, we’re finally back on track- Wizard of Oz reference #14 at 1:29:23. I knew they’d return someday. The last three episode haven’t had any, at least that I could find, so my original theory about there being a WoZ riff in every Joel episode has been disproven. I still predict that there will be at least one in every Joel ep in the series proper, though.

The impatience continues.

At 1:31:20, Servo says that if Joel were there, they’d have run out of monkey puns much earlier. Is that because they’d have said more of them in a row to annoy him, or because Joel’s presence discourages the creation of monkey puns?

Something about Tom’s timing at 1:32:07 is just great.

Very brief Wizard of Oz reference #15 at 1:33:55.

Movie thing- So they do explain how they got back to their own time, it just makes NO SENSE. I wonder if Tom still feels like exploding.

Servo forgets Godo’s name again at 1:36:16, calling him Gobo.

1:36:58- uh, what other organ were you thinking of, Crow?

Tom falls over onto Crow as they start to leave the theater, but manages to get back up.

Once again, I can’t not sing the Sandy Frank song along with the credits.

Conclusion

We get a rare outside shot of the S.O.L., along with floating-(semi)-naked-in-space Joel, as represented by an action figure of some kind. I…don’t really think Joel would look like that with his shirt off, but hey.

Tom and Crow contemplate life without Joel. They only seem to recall all the mean stuff Joel has done to them since their creation, but they still do say they miss him a little.

They also talk about how they actually like each other, although that “You’re the greatest” remark from Crow could have a bit sarcastic. Hard to tell. I prefer to interpret it in a positive light.

I don’t know if I mentioned it before, but Alexandra Carr is now in the credits as the Fan Club Coordinator and Production Assistant. She’d continue to be on the show’s staff for a long time.

Joel is also still listed as starring in the episode even though he wasn’t there, just like Trace was still credited for Crow in the eps where he was gone.

At least in the copy I linked, the sound on the tape starts flipping out in an amusing way at the very end.

Thoughts on the Movie

          This movie is…really goofy. I won’t go in-depth, since we have to watch it again in a few seasons, but man. Actually, it’s quite refreshing after two confusing 70s TV-movie dramas in a row. It’s not really any less confusing, but it’s much more entertaining to watch. This is also the second movie in a row with a really annoying child, although Johnny is much more amusing in his annoyingness than the kid in City on Fire (Gerald? Was that his name? I don’t care enough to go check). That kid was just not very good, whereas Johnny is not that terrible, he just kind of a spaz. Fits in with the rest of the movie, I guess.

Review

          This was a pretty solid episode. Of course, the definition of a solid episode in KTMA versus Season 1 and beyond is quite different, but this one measures up to what they’ve done so far. Josh and Trace kept the energy nicely throughout. The two of them always played off each other well (favorite riff- Crow: Let’s buy these guys a tripod, whadda ya say?). This episode didn’t provide nearly as many laugh-out-loud moments as the last one, though, which reinforces to me that three really is the magic number. Something about having all of them together brings it up to the right level. The movie itself was pretty lively this week, which probably helped make up for losing a riffer. If it had been say, Cosmic Princess with only Tom and Crow, it might not have worked as well.

[pointofgeeks]

New Post has been published on https://www.pointofgeeks.com/bartlett-tv-show-anthony-veneziale-interview/

EXCLUSIVE: Anthony Veneziale Talks BARTLETT, Freestyle Love Supreme, and the Seeds of HAMILTON

Actor and producer Anthony Veneziale sits down with the Point of Geeks to discuss his new show, Bartlett, his past with Freestyle Love Supreme, diversity in the entertainment industry, the influence of hip-hop, the beginnings of Hamilton, and his work on PBS’ The Electric Company.

Veneziale has appeared in shows such as Sex in the City, SanFranLand, and most notably he’s one of the founders of Freestyle Love Supreme, an interactive stage show that featured future Hamilton stars Lin-Manuel Miranda and Daveed Diggs. The actor’s latest project is the 6-episode streaming series Bartlett, also starring Chrissy Mazzeo (SanFranLand), Don Reed (A Different World), Utkarsh Ambudkar (The Mindy Project), and Lin-Manuel Miranda (Hamilton).

Bartlett follows hapless ad executive Roger Newhouse (Anthony Veneziale), whose life has been on a downward trend. Roger must save his career over a course of a day after his business partner and ex-girlfriend has left him high and dry before a life-changing pitch. However, there is another problem…all Roger want to do is make music. The show is a situational comedy, with full musical segments that bring to life Roger’s dreams and imaginations. 

We were lucky enough to sit down and chat with Bartlett star Anthony Veneziale about his upcoming show. Check out the trailer and interview below!

*****

Point of Geeks: Congrats on the new series airing. How does it feel to finally get it on the air, especially considering you are both (lead) actor and an executive?

Anthony Veneziale: Ah man. Are you kidding me? It’s the best feeling! Like when you have been working on something for so long and you can finally say to people, ‘You can see it here.’ There is like nothing better in the entertainment industry than to be able to do that.

PoG: You have a background performing live, with Freestyle Love Supreme. Tell me a little about that part of your life and how you got here.

Anthony Veneziale: I think that almost everything that I do, even to this day, is somehow rooted in a lot of the things that I learned from Freestyle Love Supreme. And that crew is just this crazy, insane, supergroup. Like soon I think that we will get to the point where people will be like, ‘I didn’t realize everyone was in the Wu-Tang Clan.’ 

The names are just insane. The stuff that we did in the early days, I think, is still very much a part of all of us. So Lin-Manuel Miranda, we used to do – in Freestyle Love Supreme – this game where we would ask the audience for a decade. Any decade throughout time. And then, we would do a rap musical about the decade, for the audience, based off what they asked for. I don’t think that’s a coincidence what came out of that was Chris Jackson’s love of history, him recommending the book to Lin, and then Lin reading Hamilton, and then that being like that was totally natural for us to this point of view around this thing.

PoG: Going off on a little tangent. What do you think about the state of Hip-Hop? Freestyle has become a lost part of the artform. What happened?

Anthony Veneziale: I think that the prosecution is leading the witness. But I do think it’s easy to say ‘Gosh it isn’t like it used to be.’ And there’s something about “nostalgia” that you can paint the past with. But with that said…

I obviously cut my teeth with 90’s hip-hop… It’s going to be really difficult to top… Wu Tang’s 36 Chambers, A Tribe Called Quest with Midnight Marauders. All of these crazy things. Everything kind of happened right then. A lot of people say that was the pinnacle of hip-hop and now we are kind of on the downside of it. But with that said, I think that there is more choice now. A lot more perspective being brought into hip-hop.

I take a page out of Daveed [Diggs] book, which is hip-hop really came out of disenfranchisement and so while you get some you are getting some of the views that aren’t necessarily the disenfranchised voice, you are getting…it’s getting watered down because there are so many different perspectives and when something cuts through though and grinds on that gear and elevates the whole genre…Let’s use Hamilton for an example. I think hip-hop musicals are going to become much more of the groundbreaking part of hip-hop going forward. Then just releasing a commercially successful song. Because let’s be honest. It’s been commodified. It’s been commercialized. Now people understand they can use it in this way and make money off of it. Just my opinion. 

PoG: Kind on that same track. Bartlett seems like the perfect synthesis of your past experiences. You have romantic comedy past, Sex and the City, and of course with Freestyle Love Supreme and the musical bits on the show. How did that come together for you with this project? Were you there from the inception? Because it seems so crafted for your own talents.

Anthony Veneziale: Haha. It’s one of those chicken and the egg type questions. And that’s me quoting Flight of  the Conchords, apologies. So you know Martin Edwards (All The Wrong Places) wrote this a long time  ago and showed me a draft of it. It was something that was going to be done in a theater. And when he showed it to me I thought, ‘Oh wow. This about a lot of white dudes feeling sorry for themself.’ Because it was set in an agency and it was mostly about Roger and a whole bunch of other white people who were like ‘My life is so hard. I want something else.’ So I said I wasn’t interested and then they finished doing the play. And it went pretty well and it was a good show. There was some fun stuff in it! But it’s not stuff that I’m drawn to.

Whether it’s Freestyle Love Supreme or The Electric Company which I helped re-launch. Multiple points of view are things that I value in art. It’s what I’m always looking for and so when Chrissy [Mazzeo] suggested to Martin that they open it up and make it into a web series. I said, ‘That sounds interesting. That sounds cool. But can we do this, this, and this. Can we have a lot more people of color in it? Yes it might be Roger’s point of view but it really should be addressing the topic of sexuality in the workplace. In some light way sort of dismantling the patriarchy, because it serves none of us. And how can we do that in way that’s really fun. 

So at a certain point I said to Martin. What if we make this about a guy that wants to become a musician, instead of a director or something like that. And I can put a lot of original music in there and I can write an original song. I started taking guitar lessons 3 or 4 years ago and I just got so into it. It felt like I should be using this. It was like a new shiny toy. ‘Let me write songs…please!!! And he was like ‘Okay cool. Let’s see what it’s like.’ We would workshop. Do a lot of improv stuff, work scenes. Chrissy and I would work on stuff that Martin wrote. And Martin was always super collaborative and so was Chrissy, so I think that’s what at the heart what made the project really hum and go.

PoG: As far as the musical segments, how long did it take for you to craft them? How did that process go?

Anthony Veneziale: Love the question. Because it’s one of my favorite things. Which is like…how do you make a song? So luckily with this we kind of knew the segments when would be nicefor a breakout moment. We kind of knew what we were trying to accomplish. And for me, I try to find that “feeling word.” The word that encapsulates what we are trying to say. And this all comes out of my freestyle training. I use that word as the pulse… 

The words itself lead me to the pulse. And then from there I get a rhythm that I play over top of it and kind of let that word dissolve away, but it will give that initial beat. Something needs to be the seed and for me it’s the pulse of that beat. And then I will kind of fiddle around on the guitar and try to find the chords that will help to illuminate that concept. I have a little of music theory in my background, so I kind of understand what I’m trying to accomplish when I put together either the riff of the song or a minor resolution or whatever it might be. And then from there I just let it live for awhile. Like the actual melody and song. And then I will start putting words to it and I will just freestyle. I will just sort of make it up and let it happen. And record a bunch of different versions and whittle down until I get the things that I feel like get to the heart of it.

And then by iteration 10 or 12, I’m ready to share it with Martin or… Oh yeah, Bill Sherman who was also big part of Freestyle Love Supreme and is the musical director for Sesame Street, I share it with him, Joel, and Julien who was our musical director on this, And get their feedback and keep reiterating and til it was there. And then it has to have these visual components to it. And this comes for a little bit from my copywriting days where I would do songs for Nickelodeon or whoever it might have been. And you kind of want to make sure that you leaves these options around the visual, so you can make a reference to a thing but it makes a lot sense when you resolve it with the visual on-screen. 

PoG: The show essentially takes place over the course of one day, aside from flashbacks. which is a really fun narrative device. If you are lucky enough for a second season do you plan on using the same type of device where it takes place over a day or week? Have you thought about the second season? 

Anthony Veneziale: Great question. From a producer’s standpoint, we would love to have another season, we have been (sort of) talking about it a bunch. And it seems like it would be a year later and it would still take place during a day. But it would be a different character’s point of view. So probably [Maggie’s] point of view. What’s Maggie going through? What is she dealing with a little more? I think in the first season we were really kind of teeing up this concept of ‘hey what if we don’t abide by societal norms about X, Y, and Z?’ And now for season two, it’s what if we don’t abide by the business norms of X, Y, and Z. And even break free further out of the concept of what women’s roles are and what they have traditionally been and how can we shape it to the world that we want to be living in.

PoG: I like how the show’s focus is on the comedy, but it has a social conscious. It touches on issues of gender, workplace romance, race, sexuality, it’s all there…yet it’s not on the surface. How were you able to layer it so deftly into the writing and performances? It seems like a really important time, even if it’s comedy, for it to have a viewpoint on the world.

Anthony Veneziale: I agree with you wholeheartedly. I think it has to do with the people who are creating it needing to have a shared vision, that they put on the table and they demand to be included in the medium. I think the “Woke” community need to make whatever they are making in a way that includes as many voices as possible and also opens the table for new voices. That’s a very conscious effort that you have to make around that. And that includes casting, to crewing, to how the story gets created, and that’s something that I’m super proud of on this project. We really kept an eye on and worked really hard and had very high standards for each other. And had people talented and visionary enough to make sure that we met those standards. So Chrissy Mazzeo and Rivkah Beth Medow were really the Atlases that held the globe of Bartlett on their shoulders and created a beautiful set and we had 50-60% women in every department across the crew, in the cast, and in the creation. And that to me is the way you do it!

PoG: Bartlett seems to be speaking to two groups of people generally. Millenials that have been accustomed to a faster pace of different employment opportunities and pursuing their dreams more, due to the state of the world today. And also middle-aged people who are also experiencing workplace changes as well. What do you think that show has to say about both groups?

Anthony Veneziale: That’s really cool. I think that they have so much more in common then they are aware. Ultimately I think Millenials are more impowered by the concept of doing something that they love, opposed to doing something so they can afford to live. And I think that for the other generation I think that they have come to that [same] realization just a touch later. So sometimes there’s even a feeling of resentment towards Millenials. Like, ‘Uh, how did they get so empowered. How are they able to ask for exactly what they want.’ (laughs)

But at the end of the day, for both, that you are doing a thing that when you wake up in the morning you feel like it matters to you. You are doing something that you are willing to go whatever extra mile to get done. And that was really true for us on Bartlett. Because all of us are parents. And all of us have other jobby jobs and performance gigs. And we said, ‘Okay bring the kids to set.’ This is a family gig. We get it. And we would work around that. I would leave set around 3 everyday and go pick my daughter up from school, drop her off at home and come back to do more shooting at night. And if you aren’t able to look in the mirror and say what you do matters [to you] you might want to be able to find the thing that does. And it’s easy to say it and hard to do it and I have tons of empathy. 

PoG: You mentioned it in passing. You were involved in the relaunch of The Electric Company on PBS. What can you tell me about that?

Anthony Veneziale: Absolutely. Like most things in my life it came out of the seed of Freestyle Love Supreme. We were doing a off-Broadway run at this beautiful theater called the Ars Nova which is on 54th Street and they just expanded to a new theater down at the Greenwich House, but they will still have the 54th St. theater. We were doing a run there and a friend of the show knew that The Electric Company and some of the people around Sesame Workshop were looking for inspiration around relaunching The Electric Company and this was very early and just throwing some concepts around. And they brought the main creators to our show and afterwards they were like ‘This is what our show is. You doing what you just did up there for Freestyle Love Supreme is exactly the findings that we have around a lot of educational outreach that makes sense for kids to want to learn how to codify language.

So hip-hop, in essence, is this beautiful way to word-chunk. Find chunks of words that have similarities that then make you in your brain say ‘Oh, so these things are like these things.’ And that’s exactly how hip-hop works. And that’s exactly how the human brain that’s developing to learn language actually works. It doesn’t work by memorizing every letter and lining up all the letters. We kind of threw that out the window a long time ago. It’s by codefying. It’s seeing “EE” together and understanding that it sounds like this and “CH” together. And if that isn’t what hip-hop is, right?!? That’s exactly what you are doing, you are grabbing onto those word chunks. And so we started working with them and I had been a teacher for a long time, wo we sort of built out this understanding very early on that this would be the perfect tool to use in this fun way for disenfranchised readers. So kids that don’t see themselves as having the ability or access to reading.

It was super cool. And obviously the original series was a big influence on all of us who were working on it. And we also didn’t want to screw it up. So there was something in the room where we were like ‘this has better be good because the bar is super high.’

PoG: Talk about life coming full circle!

Anthony Veneziale: Totally! Totally!  

*****

Official Synopsis: 

Ad man Roger is desperate to quit his job and follow his dream of becoming a full-time musician. But first, he must correct a year’s worth of bad decisions by making up with his bitter ex-partner (and ex-lover), outwitting his manic boss and winning the pitch of a lifetime. This satirical comedy — featuring original songs by Anthony Veneziale — co-stars Utkarsh Ambudkar and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Bartlett is now available on Amazon Prime Video and Vimeo on Demand.

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