2 posts tagged “muppets”

So the Question of the Day is about the TV shows I plan to watch in this upcoming season.  I have to say, there are a number of shows that I read about in the Entertainment Weekly Fall TV Preview issue that looked pretty interesting.  But, of course, I will never watch them as I don't have a TV with anything resembling reception.  Well, that's not completely true -- we get Fox pretty clear.  But in general, all of my TV watching either comes in the form of DVDs or downloads.

I planned to download Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip from iTunes, only to find that it wasn't being carried, which surprised me.  So I downloaded a torrent and am planning to watch it tonight.  I regularly download The Office and Lost from iTunes, which has worked out quite nicely.  I'm excited for the new Comedy Central cartoon Freak Show, created by David Cross and Jon Benjamin, which I'm assuming will be on iTunes.  Basically, iTunes is my best friend.  It's cheaper than getting cable and just sitting around frying my brain for hours on end.  This way, I can actively support quality shows.  You can also subscribe and get a month of The Daily Show for $9.99.  I download torrents of Veronica Mars, from a super-secret LJ community that I won't identify in case it were to get shut down.  But if that were on iTunes, I'd pay for it.  I make up for my illegal downloading by purchasing the DVDs when they come out, though.

TV on DVD is my big fascination (and largest recreational expenditure).  I think it's an amazing new form of media distribution: utterly genius.  In the last month or so I've bought season 8 of The Simpsons, season 2 of Veronica Mars, season 2 of The Office (even though I already purchased the individual episodes on iTunes -- I love the show THAT MUCH), and season 2 of Fraggle Rock.  I'm gearing up to buy season 5 of Kids in the Hall, season 7 of Seinfeld, and volume 4 of Family Guy, not to mention the upcoming box set of old Sesame Street episodes and the long-awaited season 2 of Twin Peaks.  The Twin Peaks release is still a rumor, and I doubt it's actually going to happen this fall, but that's what's been floating around.  Much like the constant rumors about The State box set.  I actually already have season 2 of Twin Peaks, but it's a crappy Spanish region 2 bootleg copy that I payed far too much for on eBay.  Other bootleg TV shows I have include My So-Called Life (which was released in 2001 but quickly fell out of print and is ludicrously expensive to get a legit copy of), Sifl and Olly, The Jim Henson Hour, a couple episodes of Muppet Babies, and the mid-80s soap-opera parody miniseries Fresno (best thing EVAR).  And, of course, I still await the eventual release of Daria, so I can get my Trent fix. 

The problem with Daria, and The State, and the delayed-but-definitely-coming season 2 of The Muppet Show, is that they all have a ton of background music that the studios (MTV/Viacom and Disney, respectively) don't have the rights to distribute on video/DVD.  When the music was licensed for the TV show, no one was expecting for there to be a market for TV on video.  And then DVD came out, and it became possible to put an entire season of a show on 4 discs -- super cheap to manufacture, too.  But because the licensing contracts didn't have home video distribution rights written into them, the studios have to go back and sign new contracts for every song.  And a lot of the time, the artists (or their publishing companies, or labels, or whoever) want a lot more money for the rights to the song than the studios are willing to pay.  The first season of The Muppet Show was very nearly complete -- they only had to cut about 4 songs, which for a 24-episode season that's made up pretty much ENTIRELY of songs that aren't in the public domain is pretty impressive.  Unfortunately, the sketch with Vincent Price singing "You Got a Friend" was one of the missing pieces, but I found it on YouTube.

The second season is taking so long to come out because Disney really seems committed to getting the rights to as much content as they possibly can, which takes a while to finagle legally.  Thomas Lennon of The State mentioned recently (at ComicCon, I think, which...why was Tom Lennon at ComicCon?) that MTV has rescored all of The State episodes so that it can finally be released, but that's still merely a rumor.

Working at Kim's, I learned a lot about all of this stuff, which was really helpful to be able to explain to customers why such-and-such show wasn't available.  And Kim's has a fantastic TV on DVD rental section, although it's gone to shit since I left and am not there to pester the buyer to get every random show I could think of.  What's the good of only having season 4 of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air?  I'm a total completist, so things like that bug me a lot.  There are plenty of shows at Kim's that I've been meaning to rent forever.  Foremost on the list is Battlestar Galactica, but also Grey's Anatomy, Nip/Tuck and The L Word.  My friend Ryan loves both The Wire and Deadwood, but I just haven't been able to get into either of them -- though admittedly I only watched the beginning of the first episodes of both of them.

I'm actually enjoying the new version of iTunes, and it's making me covet a video iPod even more than I did before.  I've made a playlist with all of the Sesame Street clips I've downloaded from YouTube, so now I can just put it on shuffle and it's like watching a bunch of episodes straight through.  It links easily to QuickTime settings, making it possible for me to watch things on full screen (I have QuickTime Pro, thanks to my dad's flagrant spurning of terms of use) without having to leave the program.  The interface is pretty nice in general -- the podcast section in particular seems much better organized than I remember it being before.  Which doesn't make much difference to me, because I'm not really that into podcasts.  My dad keeps raving about them, but all the hype doesn't change the fact that they're really just regular old mp3s that happen to have a variety of content within one file.  I don't see how that's particularly revolutionary.  Still, the Muppet podcasts are fun to listen to, if far too short.

I wanted to post a link to the "Alphabet Chat" sketch where Guy Smiley (née Bernie Liederkrantz) does an ad for Bow Wow Chow.  But You Tube's down.  So I'll come back and post it later.  I just wanted to get something up on this blog, cuz, you know, why not?

EDIT:  Let's see if this works: