Summer Reading

Futurama Season 6

Well, it's happening, Futurama has been picked up by Comedy Central for another season, this time with a whopping 26 episodes, which will make it the longest Futurama season to date. I'm ecstatic, though we'll have to wait until 2010 to see them and if I'm assuming correctly and they'll begin airing in the fall, I'll already have my Bachelor's Degree by then... that's a terrifying thought.


I guess you'd call this season six, though things are a little fuzzy considering Fox originally aired Futurama as five seasons, even though they were produced as if they were four. When you add the movies, which were cut up into episodes and aired on Comedy Central, you really have a mess on your hands. Whatever, Futurama is back.

Fall TV Preview

The following are the TV shows I plan on watching this fall and the ones I wish were coming back sooner.


The Definites or the shows I'll definitely be watching every week asap

How I Met Your Mother, Monday 8:30, premieres 9/22 (CBS)
A sit-com that I ran into a couple years ago and have been watching ever since. It's a funny show and manages to avoid a lot of the obvious scenarios that sit-coms always bring up.

House, Tuesday 9:00, premieres 9/16 (FOX)
Everyone watches this show, but Hugh Laurie is just so great as House. The other characters are decent, and I enjoyed the shakeup in the cast last year. The biggest problem is that almost every episode follows the same format: weird disease, first treatment doesn't work, second treatment doesn't work, House finds some strange connection and figures out the problem. It gets old, but the show is definitely worth it for the interactions between characters and House's wit.

The Office, Thursday 9:00, premieres 9/25 (NBC)
Ah, what can I say about The Office. Hilarious, smart, quirky, no laugh track... it's just perfect. Definitely the show I'm looking forward to most.

30 Rock, 9:30, premieres 10/30 (NBC)
Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin and Tracy Morgan at his funniest since he was dancing with meat in that one movie about the black presidential election. It's enough to say that in the first episode Tracy Morgan runs down a busy New York street in his underwear, swinging a lightsaber and yelling that he's a Jedi.

Californication, Sunday 10:00, premieres 9/28 (Showtime)
David Duchovny is a cross between Mulder and Caleb's dad in this drama about a writer who's lost his muse. Full of sex and classic Duchovny humor, the show is simply amazing.


The Probables, or the shows that I'll be watching every week sometime, probably

The Big Bang Theory, Monday 8:00, premieres 9/22 (CBS)
A hot girl moves in next door to two geeks. Sound awful? I thought so too, but the show really gets the dynamics right. The geeks have interesting and very distinct personalities and the hot girl is ditzy, but by no means brain dead. It works very well. The first few episodes were a little heavy on the laugh track, in my opinion, but by midseason they really hit their stide.

Chuck, Monday 8:00, premieres 9/29 (NBC)
From the guy who brought you The OC, Chuck is about some computer guy who becomes a secret agent. While not always having the cleverest of plots and being a bit over the top, it's a good show with very likable characters and good dialog.

My Name is Earl 8:00, premieres 9/25 (NBC)
Jason Lee. That's about all I need to say, but I guess I'll continue... Earl is a self-reformed criminal on a mission to pay back everyone he has wronged.

The Simpsons 8:00, premieres 9/28 (Fox)
It hurts me to put this in the probables, but I just haven't been in love with the last few seasons. Hell, I didn't even watch a new episode last year. It just seems to me that the situations have become way over the top. I miss the simpler plots that relied more on story-telling and character interactions than zaniness. But... it's still gold compared to most of the crap on TV.

Family Guy 9:00, premieres 9/28 (Fox)
I have such a love/hate relationship with this show. At times it appeals to the lowest common denominator so much that it drives me insane. They drive jokes into the ground until I want to pull my hair out, yet they always seem to redeem themselves with a clever, off-beat, dorky joke that is just hilarious.

The Newcomers or shows I have yet to see, but which look interesting

Sanctuary, Friday 9:00, premieres 10/3 (Sci-Fi)
Originally airing (is that the right word?) as webisodes, it follows a doctor who investigates monsters and such. I don't really know much more about it, but I'm in. Though, it's no substitute for Battlestar Galactica.

Fringe, Tuesday 9;00, premiere aired 9/9 (Fox)
A cross between The X-Files and The Twilight Zone? I'll give it a try, especially because the people bringing it to us are pretty decent. I really have no idea what it's about... there's a mad scientist and an FBI agent or something.


The No-Shows or shows that will be airing after the new year

Scrubs (ABC)
Reports of its demise are greatly exaggerated. The long running medical comedy leaves NBC for ABC in what will be it's eighth season. While the show has gotten just a bit stale, I still enjoy it a lot for it's characters, music and yes... even those annoying lessons at the end of every episode.

Lost (ABC)
Oh god... where do I begin? If you haven't seen this show before, don't bother. Start for the beginning if you want to be confused, but jumping in during a random episode is a very bad idea. Sure, it's annoying how badly they string you along in classic drama fashion... but it's an insanely popular sci-fi show on a major network and it really is good. The ensemble cast is great and it does make a lot more sense than most people think. You just have to pay attention.

Battlestar Galactica (Sci-Fi)
It's finally come to this... after a mini-series, three and a half seasons, a straight to DVD movie (which was very good) and numerous webisodes, Battlestar is finally coming to an end. Because of the writer's strike, only the first half of season four was aired last spring, leaving the rest of the season for 2009. It's been a long journey since I first watched the mini-series back when it was uncertain if there even would be a series. One of the best shows on TV, and while I'm sad it's going, I'm glad they are going to end it how they wish without dragging it on.

Jesus and Moses

cml

Happy Black History Month

...from all your pals here at BSD.

CML, Black Manta Historian

Super Friends

I found this and started missing all of my super friends. This is for you guys.

Matt, I hope your trip went well. John, I'm sorry I missed you last time, but next time we'll rocket. Paul, thanks for posting again. KB, thanks for the Gatorade.

CML

The Great Red Ape

From all of us here at BSD, we'd like to wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Festivus, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, a Miserly Celebration of Capitalism and whatever else. Hope your holidays are going as good as mine.



Now the Cybernetic Ghost of Christmas Past will tell you the story of Christmas...

Robot: THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, before the dawn of man as we knew him, there was Sir Santa of Claus, an ape-like creature making crude and pointless toys out of dinobones and his own waste, hurling them at chimp-like creatures with crinkled hands regardless of how they behaved the previous year. These so-called "toys" were buried as witches, and defecated upon, and hurled at predators when wakened by the searing grunts of children. It wasn't a holly jolly Christmas that year. For many were killed.

Frylock: Well, that still doesn't tell me why you--

Robot: I'm not finished. YOU should have gotten a snack. A war-like race of elves from the Red Planet landed on the ice-encased Earth, and they were immediately enslaved by the unevolved Santa Ape to make his confused toys using galactic elfin technology. Toys were made into recognizable shapes and given names like "train," but these toys were also thrown at predators and defecated upon because they were so stupid. Christmas still sucked, in a big way.

Finals Week

It's getting around to that point again. There is a reason why Matt and I list our occupations here on BSD as "student." It's so that when finals week draws around there is an explanation for why I don't have much new to say. There is so much I want to write about this week, but I think instead I'll just fill it with star wars content. Please enjoy, and I'll see you on the light side.
The Alderaanian

part 1
The Boondocks:

Star Wars Robot Chicken

There was a Star Wars special on Cartoon Network that aired a couple weeks ago. I meant to post about it then, but I forgot and then things happened... so, I'm just going to mention it now.

Here's a link to the page about it: Star Wars Robot Chicken. It's really funny, especially if you've seen Star Wars, but maybe if you haven't. I found a few parts a little stupid and unfunny, but for the most part it was great.

I'm not sure when it will air again, but I'm sure it will at some point.

Here's a clip from it.

Tales from the Internets, volume 2

Well, it's that time again... a time to post crazy links, that is. Once again, I got a lot of these from various sources, and I'll try to give credit where credit is due, but I forget a lot of the time where this stuff came from.

One side comment... I understand that it's some sort of marketing ploy to repeat the name of the company/product ad nauseam during a commercial, but it's annoying as fuck. Do I need to hear the word [company name removed to prevent advertising] ten times in three sentences? No, no I don't. I think I need to up my dose or television or something. I'm actually starting to get un-brainwashed by commercialism.

Anyway, on to the links. From the people at Progressive Boink, a hilarious database of Hanna-Barbara cartoon characters. Definitely worth it if you ever watched any of them as a kid (or an adult, I guess). Speaking of which, why the hell did I watch all my parents' cartoons as a kid? Was I the only one?

While still on the subject of cartoons, here's a nice picture of a "realistic" Mario World. It's quite disturbing, really. I have no clue where Caleb found this, either.

This is pretty cool. It gives a new meaning to the idea of bit actors... Ha ha, get it... I really need to stop using these awful puns.

A nice article on Little Leaguers from The Onion. Hey, can you really blame the kid?

For those of you who live around the Detroit area and watch baseball at all, I'm sure you know about Mario Impemba and Rod Allen. While, I definitely don't think they're great broadcasters by any stretch of the imagination, and they certainly aren't fit to shine Ernie Harwell's shoes, at least they have some personality. Proof in point is this little Youtube clip. Someone needs to teach the Japanese about the joys of a baseball brawl. I got this link from Bill Simmons' column, which I highly recommend to any sports fans out there.

Keeping with the sports pattern, here's a list of some of the worst injuries ever. Some of this stuff is just nasty, but it's like a train wreck.

Cylon. I'd be nervous, too... and I'm not sure what the woman is so pissed off about. Battlestar Galactica is awesome.

The Good Book... as told by Denmark. If they had this when I was a kid, I might actually be a Christian right now. I think they should start doing full length movies in Lego. That'd be awesome.

Lastly, a couple of Will Ferrell videos that are must sees: The Landlord, A Hotdog and Space: The Infinite Frontier. "Hey!"

Vader's Head

"Banded together from remote galaxies are thirteen of the most sinister villains of all time: The Legion of Doom. Dedicated to a single objective, the conquest of the universe. Only one group dares to challenge this intergalactic threat: The Super Friends!"

I never read comics much when I was a kid. Sure, I flipped through some of my Uncle’s old ones from the sixties, but I was never really into them. I have no clue why, but I always preferred reading books to comic books. So, it was through a different medium that I learned about super heroes and their villainous counterparts; it was through television, the way every child of the nineties learned about anything.

I loved watching X-Men, Spider-man and The Super Friends on Saturday mornings, but it wasn’t until I decided to watch The Super Friends again about a year ago that I realized something…

The Legion of Doom lives in a giant Darth Vader head.



The archenemies of The Super Friends live in a giant Vader mask! I guess Black Manta must’ve been cruising around the swamps of Dagobah one day in that crazy ass submarine of his, found the Vader head that Luke cut off and decided it would make a good base. If it wasn’t all ridiculous enough, the show came out a year after the original Star Wars released, so they must’ve known what they were doing. But, why? So they decide to hide their base in a fucking swamp with alligators all around them, because I guess they thought the Super Friends wouldn’t want to get their capes dirty. I now know why we’re destroying the Everglades so quickly… it’s to catch Lex Luthor.

The first thing that strikes me about the show now is just how colorful everything is. The colors are badly washed out, but man, are there a lot of them. The second thing is that everyone on the show is a fucking moron. The Super Friends are just retarded, and even Superman and Batman who are a huge step up in intelligence from the rest of their numbskull compatriots, couldn’t find their way out of a paper bag. Luckily for the world, the Legion of Doom is even dumber. I guess you can’t expect much from a group who lives in a swamp, but still… I’m pretty sure my five year old self could have thought up a better plan for taking over the world than they do every episode.

These plans usually consist of one of the members of the Legion complaining that the last plan was awful and that they had a way better one. They would then begin to explain their needlessly complicated and downright stupid plan to send the Super Friends into the sun on a rocket or to cause the Earth’s temperature to rise slightly higher so “Fearians” from Venus would want to colonize it. They were always interrupted by some other member who continued to explain the plan, who was again interrupted. I’m not sure if they had planned it together, or they just all figured the more complicated the plan, the better. I’d guess the latter. Needless to say, the plans always failed. And what villains go around talking about how evil and bad they are all the time? Even Emperor Palpatine thought he was doing the right thing. Lex Luthor even states their enemies are “the forces of good”. Evil people don’t go around say, “Oh, I love being evil, badness is so cool, I’m going to go kill some babies now.” It’s insane!

I really don’t know how a group with two supposed geniuses and a robot could be so dumb, but they were beyond brainless. To make it worse, they didn’t even pretend to be smart. They were like a bunch of monkeys flinging feces at each other and destroying shit because it was fun. They creators expect me to believe that a group of super villains is just going to demolish their base because they feel like it? I guess it’s because half of the damn Legion consists of Superman’s retarded cousin, a giant cave woman, a Cajun zombie, an autistic guy in a wetsuit, and a fucking gorilla. A gorilla! Obviously hanging around these idiots has affected Lex and Brainiac’s intelligence something fierce.

I could go on and on about how the show doesn’t make any damn sense, but you can just watch it yourself. You won’t be disappointed, it’s hilarious.

Ringwraiths

Superman is sent to the anti-matter universe of Qward and he finds...



A robotic... Witch King... with a lance... that shoots laser beams... riding a unicorn...

Yeah...

Lou-Thor

Even Lex Luthor pops his collar....and wears purple.
He must be pimpin'.
He must be a dracula!