Tealin's Weekly Junk Drawer
Jan. 21st, 2012 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinI've been working so much I've run out of interesting things on the iPlayer, so I went to YouTube in search of shows I liked as a kid. One of the reasons I gave up on television was the degradation of the Discovery and Learning Channels, which (with PBS) were pretty much all I watched, but which have since abandoned the sort of shows that drew me to them. Luckily, in our dazzling modern age, they've surfaced again on YouTube!
First up, prompted by a conversation about childhood nightmares, was Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious Universe. I remember it giving me the willies when I was young, and the crystal skull in the intro was the scariest thing ever. For a show on scientific mysteries and the paranormal it's refreshingly non-sensational by modern standards, levelly presenting the audience with information on both sides of an argument with a minimum of theatricality ... though I swear one-on-one on-screen testimonials are more engaging/fascinating/creepier than all the heavily-scored CG reconstructions you could throw at a subject. What surprised me was how old the show was – it looks like it's roughly contemporary with Monty Python, and its frequent man-on-the-street interviews with people who look and talk like characters from a Pythons sketch had me always expecting a punchline. Sometimes it delivered – I mean, this guy? This is a comedy sketch. And it has little gems like the best newsreel title card ever and historican characters who ought not to have existed but really did. (Crazy Edwardians!)
The next show I looked up was one of my favourites from later in my youth, which I remember TLC running on their Friday night marathons. I was curious to see whether I thought it was so good because it was good, or if it was just because I had a very limited frame of reference ... but no, with all adult objectivity, I can say I was incredibly spoiled by awesome television when I was young.
James Burke's Connections
Either TLC would run them out of order, or I was just bad at putting the pieces together, but I was surprised that the episodes hooked up with each other, as well as being a chain of connections within themselves.
I think this is where I got introduced to most of what I knew about world history before high school, as well as gin and tonics, exploding billiard balls, the Little Ice Age, the maximum height to which water can be sucked ... but more importantly, and surprisingly, I found in it a lot of the ideas and modes of thought that I believed I'd picked up from other things much later, but which were apparently planted by Connections and just re-activated. The first episode is about our dependence on technology and what would happen if one little thing took it away from us. The intro to episode 8 is amazingly prescient – it's a little eerie to hear about a debt-based cashless economy, identity theft, planned obsolescence, and privacy issues in a visual world of archaic computers and oversized spectacles. And the last episode is probably the most directly challenging television program I have ever seen.
And anyone who wants to see the dumbing down of TV in action need only watch the much more recent series – the second is to a large extent a slicker rehash of many elements in the first, but with the teeth (i.e. big ideas and confrontation of the audience) taken out, and the third is so fizzy I couldn't even finish the first episode.
This week's fascinating synthesis of art and science:
1. Cut down tree (or limb thereof)
2. Slice cross-wise into thin disks
3. 'Play' on modified turntable with a camera for a needle
... and you get this.
And finally, did anyone hear the Scott segment on Weekend Edition Saturday today? Wow, NPR, way to completely fail at research. Listening to them stumble through error after error put me in mind of Rocky trying to escape the pie machine. Is this what 'experts' feel like all the time?
First up, prompted by a conversation about childhood nightmares, was Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious Universe. I remember it giving me the willies when I was young, and the crystal skull in the intro was the scariest thing ever. For a show on scientific mysteries and the paranormal it's refreshingly non-sensational by modern standards, levelly presenting the audience with information on both sides of an argument with a minimum of theatricality ... though I swear one-on-one on-screen testimonials are more engaging/fascinating/creepier than all the heavily-scored CG reconstructions you could throw at a subject. What surprised me was how old the show was – it looks like it's roughly contemporary with Monty Python, and its frequent man-on-the-street interviews with people who look and talk like characters from a Pythons sketch had me always expecting a punchline. Sometimes it delivered – I mean, this guy? This is a comedy sketch. And it has little gems like the best newsreel title card ever and historican characters who ought not to have existed but really did. (Crazy Edwardians!)
The next show I looked up was one of my favourites from later in my youth, which I remember TLC running on their Friday night marathons. I was curious to see whether I thought it was so good because it was good, or if it was just because I had a very limited frame of reference ... but no, with all adult objectivity, I can say I was incredibly spoiled by awesome television when I was young.
James Burke's Connections
Either TLC would run them out of order, or I was just bad at putting the pieces together, but I was surprised that the episodes hooked up with each other, as well as being a chain of connections within themselves.
I think this is where I got introduced to most of what I knew about world history before high school, as well as gin and tonics, exploding billiard balls, the Little Ice Age, the maximum height to which water can be sucked ... but more importantly, and surprisingly, I found in it a lot of the ideas and modes of thought that I believed I'd picked up from other things much later, but which were apparently planted by Connections and just re-activated. The first episode is about our dependence on technology and what would happen if one little thing took it away from us. The intro to episode 8 is amazingly prescient – it's a little eerie to hear about a debt-based cashless economy, identity theft, planned obsolescence, and privacy issues in a visual world of archaic computers and oversized spectacles. And the last episode is probably the most directly challenging television program I have ever seen.
And anyone who wants to see the dumbing down of TV in action need only watch the much more recent series – the second is to a large extent a slicker rehash of many elements in the first, but with the teeth (i.e. big ideas and confrontation of the audience) taken out, and the third is so fizzy I couldn't even finish the first episode.
This week's fascinating synthesis of art and science:
1. Cut down tree (or limb thereof)
2. Slice cross-wise into thin disks
3. 'Play' on modified turntable with a camera for a needle
... and you get this.
And finally, did anyone hear the Scott segment on Weekend Edition Saturday today? Wow, NPR, way to completely fail at research. Listening to them stumble through error after error put me in mind of Rocky trying to escape the pie machine. Is this what 'experts' feel like all the time?
no subject
Date: 2012-01-23 01:52 am (UTC)