Television

[iainjclark]

I'm not normally one for fan-made videos setting TV clips to music but this one of Firefly/Serenity to the music of Wicked has Joss Whedonian and Tim Minearian endorsement, so I went to look. It's extremely well done.

< insert obligatory *sob* for Firefly here >

While I'm here, the 2007 in Review piece in Strange Horizons has a very small

Comments

[veggiesu]

Cracker is wonderful television - intelligent, confrontational, combines slow-burning character arcs with strong stand-alone stories. I loved it when it was on originally.

[iainjclark]

'tis very good! We bought it because everyone we knew liked it, so we figured it was a good bet.

[despotliz]

That Firefly video is nice. And my DVD rental queue finally spat out The Wire, so soon I shall see what all the fuss is about.

[iainjclark]

The thing about the The Wire, more than just about any other show I've seen, is that each season is structured as a single long story. That means it takes its time setting up characters and plots. It's worth knowing ahead of time!

[abigail_n]

That's a nice vid, and it's really cool that Whedon and Minnear brought so much attention to it, but it's far from the best vid I've ever seen and I'm not even very versed in the field. There's some really good and professional looking stuff out there.

[iainjclark]

I don't look at many of those vids, I must confess, but this one struck me as having fit the images to the music more artfully than most. As for why Joss likes it--he loves musicals. I think it was an easy sell. :-)

[abigail_n]

I'd actually say that the juxtaposition of music and images was no better than OK - at times the music seemed to overwhelm the images rather than complement them. Off the top of my head, this vid does a better job (though you have to be a fan of Heroes to get the joke).

[fba]

If you took out the Merka 'Warriors of the Deep' would be a workmanlike base-under-siege with flashes of genius that pretty much sums up Davison's Doctor. As it stands it will always be the one with the pantomime seahorse getting karate chopped by the main villain... I hope the release Kinda and Snakedance soon - despite the dodgy snake they are really wonderful multi-layered stories and there is something about them that really sums up 80s Who.

[iainjclark]

I liked Davison's Doctor a lot at the time, but now I feel strangely reluctant to go back and rewatch his stuff--unlike, say, Tom Baker where it seems to belong to a more distant and nostalgic era entirely. Not quite sure why. I've seen Earthshock and Caves of Androzani in the last few years and enjoyed them.

You're right about the Merka, and I did like Snakedance/Kinda.

Part of me just doesn't want to own a box set combining two Pertwee stories and a Davison because, anally retentive as I am, I'll only want to break it up to put them in chronological order with my other DVDs. :-)

[fba]

I think you need to watch some of the last two seasons of Baker - there are flashes of the old greatness (City of Death is still totally awesome) but once you get to the eSpace stuff it is all starting to look rather tired and the end of Logopolis comes as blessed relief tbh. What is great about Who - even now - is that they always reach for the stars and even when they don't quite pull it off you can't fault it for lack of ambition. When they do pull it off you get some of the best TV of any genre.

Part of me just doesn't want to own a box set combining two Pertwee stories and a Davison because, anally retentive as I am, I'll only want to break it up to put them in chronological order with my other DVDs. :-)

As the box sets tend to be individual discs in slip cases I nearly always break them up as the slip cases don't fit in the DVD racks properly (and I also like to put them in chronological order).