Reasons I Am Watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles Even Though I Never Saw the Last Terminator Film and Haven't Given A Rat's Ass in 10 Years #2

And you thought I was going to go all "Lena 'The New Sarah Connor' Headey" on you. ("Not Hedley... Headey.")

No, she's an attractive woman and all, and she has a name rife with promises, but her forehead just isn't quite big enough for me. As I hinted at last time, according to my work pal Luis, I apparently like chicks that could have played Metalluna mutants in This Island Earth. (This is my phrase, actually. I am fairly certain Luis has never seen This Island Earth, nor knew the planet in it -- besides Earth -- was named Metalluna, nor that they had mutants with abnormally huge heads... all he did was mention to me while we were discussing my attraction to her was that "that chick has a huge forehead.") This might explain my sexual attraction to bobbleheads. All I know is that if I could get Summer "River" Glau and Christina Ricci to make out, I would be a very happy man. And if they were both hot robot chicks, even better...

I fought, scratched, clawed, and slept (just a little) through the first season of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, and finally realized for good that I really don't give a rat's ass about the time-traveling and the cyborgs taking over the future and the world and whether John Connor was going to survive or whether eventually all of the paradoxes in the storyline where going to create some sort of black hole that was going to suck the whole Fox network into it for good (hopefully only leaving House and The Simpsons behind).

But if it gets renewed for a second season, I am sure I will be there, waiting for sweet, petite Summer Glau to hoist a monstrous gun of some variety into her little hands. Of course, it's weight will initially cause her to stagger backwards, and she will have to use her huge forehead to balance herself...

That Familiar Cathode Buzz: So They Weren't Quite Stars...

Ask me why I am the way I am, and I don't have any creepy priests or abusive parents to whom I may point. OK, I did grow up watching and being obsessed with Richard Milhous Nixon, so he might count. Just like anyone, I faced my share of adversity, but overall, that really had little bearing on my shaping as a human-sized monster.

Nah! Like so many others, I was raised on and programmed by the popular media of whatever age it was. Some of it quite excellent by any measure, but mixed in with the excellent were far too many lame movies, too many idiot comic books, too much bad music and way, way, way too much horrible television as a child. Of course, each one of us subjected to such travesties remembers those wonders of our youth with a magical sheen glowing about the edges of each and every item, no matter how rotten they may now seem to modern eyes, even our own.

 

In the past year or so, I slapped a cassette copy (from the original cassette) of the Hudson Brothers second album, Hollywood Situation (released the same year as this show) into the cassette player in my brother Otis' car. Having heard it about a zillion times over the years (I would listen to it once or twice annually just for fun), I have grown quite accustomed to its lightly Beatle-esque, power pop charms, but my brother had not heard it in nearly thirty years. In fact, despite the fact we used to air-guitar along with it and wrote puppet shows around the songs as kids, he didn't remember it at all. Not even their biggest hit, So You Are A Star.

I was actually saddened by the whole affair, but I wasn't counting in the fact that I had subjected myself to it on a regular rotation in the intervening years, while Otis had basically been on the other end of a media blackout concerning the Hudsons. After all, they pretty much disappeared from view after their sole headlining feature film Hysterical (which I also own, by the way) flopped... until Bill's estranged daughter Kate hit it big in L.A. But at that time in my youth, in much the way that D. Boon spoke of punk rock and Bob Dylan, the Hudson Brothers were the Marx Brothers to me. Before I knew who the Marx Brothers were. Before I knew that the comedy I was watching on The Hudson Brothers Razzle Dazzle Show was mostly second, third and sometimes fourth-hand schtick lovingly borrowed from other comedians and acts, including the Marx Brothers.

And this was slightly before I realized how much I needed the Marx Brothers in my life. So the Hudson Brothers weren't quite stars. For me, they were moderately decent placeholders until the real thing came along...

[Notes: Murray Langston is much better known as The Unknown Comic, and the chief reason that "forever puppet-mad me" loved the show was Rod Hull and his amazing Emu. More on them at a later date...]

That Familiar Cathode Buzz: The Curse of Saturday Mornings...

Because I am connected so deeply (and wrongly, and somewhat against my will at this point) to a childhood misspent in front of an RCA television, things like this happen:

Raw Meat and I are knocking out problem after problem at work, and in the midst of this, we tend to throw one-liners back and forth. Raw Meat says something quite out of left field to me, but the word "space" is somewhere in there, and so I call him a "far out space nut."

Why? Because the phrase is stuck in my head. Why? Because I watched every goddamn program on Saturday morning television for years and years. When the shows I really liked went to reruns, I watched the shows I didn't watch the first time. I saw them ALL. And I saw a Sid and Marty Krofft show starring Bob Denver and Chuck McCann called:


 
Raw Meat had never heard of the show, owing to his not having been born at that point in time (1975). And because he was born in another land far removed from our crappy Saturday Morning television shows. When I described the show to him and showed him a picture or two on the internet, he said "It looks funny."

I replied, "No, but it sure seemed that way when I was eleven."