The Golden Globe

Crap. WTF? used to be quality, but have any of you over twelve years old actually looked at the thing lately? I'm telling you, this old ragbag is starting to make Zippy the Zombie look animated. Folks, WTF? is over the hill. It is stale. Look for it at your local mortuary. Sure, it used to be good, but there's another cardinal rule in TV-land, and it is that nothing lasts forever. WTF? is pushing thirty years old. Bye-bye. Adios.

Quality? Well, like it or not (and I don't, much) the Peppy Show will do for an example. What Peppy does, he does well. The characters are fu

What's that? You say Peppy's show is only ten years old? And he's where in the ratings? Gosh, maybe civilization has a few more months to live.

But that brings us to the topic of today's lesson, children, and that is, what happens to shows that can't seem to decide whether they want to be trashy, or terrific? That brings us to a disastrous effort from the Peppy mill called Sparky and His Gang.

What are we to make of a gobbler like S G? To think of it as an actual turkey is an insult to flightless barnyard poultry everywhere. A genuine turkey knows that it is a turkey, and can therefore work at being the best darn turkey in the coop. S G arrives at your television like a gift-wrapped dead mackerel. You try to figure out, is this fish, or fishwrap? All you know at first is that it smells, vaguely, fishy. And at least part of it is garbage.

It would be pointless to devote a lot of time to a feather-by-feather analysis of this albatross around Gideon Peppy's neck, and I won't subject you to one. Just a short comment, then, and a brief explanation.

Comment: PRESS HERE for HyperText SoundByte©

"Whooooooo fuckiiiiiiing caaaaaaares?"

Explanation: the key to caring about what happens in a show, and I'm talking any show here, from Hamlet to Skunk Cabbage, is believable characters. Characters that bear some resemblance to humans we have known, who display some known human traits. (Exception: the birth-to-five audience, who will watch anything brightly colored and moving; viz. Barney's Boulevard.) Of all the brightly colored, loud, frenetically moving clusters of phosphor dots that call themselves Sparky's Gang, only Sparky himself seems to have anybody at home where a heartbeat should be. Sparky is so good, in fact, so appealing and fu

And that is really too bad. Because it is obvious that somebody put a lot of thought into the character of Sparky himself. As played by young Ken Valentine, Sparky is at the same time wonderfully carefree and charming, smart and stalwart. He is the sort of child we all would like to have been, or failing that, to have been friends with. He makes us eager to join his gang, which makes it all the more appalling that his actual band is such a bunch of radishes. He should have been the core of a group of similarly smart, resourceful moppets, united by his undeniable charisma.

But even if Gideon Peppy hires some writers who can do character, Sparky would not yet be out of the woods. Or into the woods, for that matter. The fact is, nobody on this show has a fucking clue as to where the woods is, or if in fact there are any fucking woods. By that I mean, characters need a milieu. A story must happen in a time and a place. There must be a background.

I've watched four episodes of Sparky so far. One show per month, like the curse. In the first one the Gang was battling pirates on the open seas, for no reason that I can fathom other than that there was a full-scale pirate ship available on the Sensational back lot. In the next show the gang was in present time, and in the third, in no universe I could identify. Some pitiful gallimaufry was advanced to explain these temporal and spatial dislocations, but by then I'm afraid I was far advanced in a diabetic coma.

See, that sort of crap can work for Skunk Cabbage, because Skunk is a crap show. I know it, you know it. The producers know it. The kids don't give a possum's posterior because it's full of violence and very noisy and it smells offensive, and mostly because Mom and Dad hate the sonuvabitch.

That won't work for Sparky and His Gang because Sparky aspires to be more, and that is why it is worse than a skunk.

Go ahead, ask your kids. Why aren't you watching Sparky, little Ambrose and Abigail?

PRESS HERE for HyperText SoundByte©

"Aw, mom. I du

Kids won't be fooled. They'll watch quality, or they'll watch crap. But you better be one or the other, and you better know which that is.

from Hebephrenia, "The Youthpad"

column of 4/10/58

"Spark Plug"

by D. Mentua Precox

So I was hanging out over at the Sen/Sen Studios like hoping to get an interview with the Man Himself, G. Peppy, y'know? When who should like come blitzing by but Velveeta Creemcheese in like a true hurry to ease herself from like point A to point B, y'know? Well, comma, Vel and your totally humble narrator go back to like the last ice age, can you load it? So I was like all "Vel! Exclamation Point! Heard you got 87ed from the i