A rare exception was The Colony, as a Discovery Channel show about a bunch of people trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic environment seemed tailor-made for me. But the first episode was disappointing, with confessionals and all the other standard-issue reality show trappings present (including contrived inter-personal conflicts, as promised by the previews of upcoming shows). And I'm questioning the presence of a "martial arts expert" and mock raids by actors all done up in a Mad Max stylee - are the survivors expected to get physical with these guys? I mean, I would if some bozo from Central Casting was trying to take away the only snack chips I'd be seeing for the next twelve weeks. But in the first episode, at least, it doesn't appear that the survivors are really taking the whole thing seriously.
Which leads to the show's only real entertainment potential, as I second-guess most of the decisions they make. Sending your only doctor out into the wilds to look for water? Really? And while the survivors earned points for posting a guard all night, they lost them by not planning for what the guard should do if an intruder did turn up. I guess only us geeks have spent any time considering what to do in a post-holocaust situation. Well, except for militia nutters, and who wants to hang out with them?
While I'm tempted to sit through all of The Colony for the nuggets of survival tech that look to be buried therein, I'm probably better off just reading recaps somewhere like Television Without Pity.
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Now, while I might have no time for reality tv, I feel the complete opposite about reality-based tv. I love MythBusters and Top Gear, and now a new show has pinged my radar. Bang Goes the Theory is a BBC program in which graphic demonstrations are used to explore and explain scientific principles. I stumbled across this clip of one of the hosts experimenting with a homemade vortex cannon:
Sadly, they did not unleash their creation on a pig carcass like the MythBusters would've.
In another episode, the team whips up a homemade defense against the US Navy's cutting-edge sonic weapon. I think I really need to start following this show.
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Speaking of doing terrible things to dead animals, about the only thing Spike TV's Deadliest Warrior was good for was the graphic demonstrations of medieval weapons on flesh and bone (which admittedly were pretty neat). Otherwise, the show usually contained less than 1% of your daily recommended allowance of actual fact.
Compare and contrast with Warriors, a History Channel program in which a Henry Rollins look-alike travels the world to learn about great battles and the people that fought them. Here we get historical and cultural context as opposed to propaganda and bluster. We learn how the warriors trained, how they built and used their equipment, and why we consider them important to this day. And imparting this information are actual historians and university professors and not just fans and re-enactors.Even the host is a huge improvement over the swaggering presenters of Deadliest Warrior. Terry Schappert is enthusiastic, modest, and generally the very opposite of what you might assume a Green Beret hosting a program about warfare would be like. He even tears up once or twice when talking about some of the sacrifices and hardships these men and women went through.
A DVD release of the program is imminent; however, for some reason the "Braveheart" episode is being left out of the collection. You can download the missing show via Rapidshare here (the password is dokujunkies.org). The entire dokujunkies site is a great resource for documentary television; the English-language program listings start here.
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I recently caught an episode of Robot Chicken in which the Creature from the Black Lagoon, jealous of Dracula and Frankenstein, attempts to market his own cereal. The resulting "Creature with the Black Macaroons" immediately put me in mind of my buddy Hector's claim for the existence of Mocha Mummy cereal.
I got to poking around on the internet, and Wikipedia has a pretty informative entry on the General Mills monster cereals - I can at long last confirm that my memories of seeing posters for the cereal in my preschool class are not false, as Frankenberry and Count Chocula were first distributed in 1971! I also came across this commercial on YouTube, one that I saw countless times growing up:
I did some business at General Mills HQ last year and was able to pick up some BooBerry from the company store for my cousin Mike. Otherwise, you have to wait until Halloween to find the stuff. Yummy Mummy and Fruit Brute are no longer manufactured, which might be for the best, at least in the case of Fruit Brute. I remember those lime-flavored marshmallows as being pretty nasty.
Still better than trying to eat while staring at a box of Freakies, though. The Seventies, man. The decade of WTF.
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Finally, if you're a fan of 80's action flicks, you'll want to check out this promo for the UK's Channel Five. If only...
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