Classic Themes of the Small Screen - Volume 1

This is the first volume (of potentially many) I've put together dedicated to classic, not-so-classic and occasionally completely unheard of themes from TV shows. I ripped one or two of these tracks myself, but most of them were in a huge pack I stumbled upon on Rapidshare, so thanks to all rippers who were involved.

Or

Even though some of these are not particularly classic (Fish, I'm mainly talking about you here) or old enough to be considered "classic", I chose the title Classic Themes of the Small Screen for several reasons, a) it almost rhymes, 2) it sounds like something someone might title a compilation album, and finally and foremost I couldn't think of anything better. I must've spent a good 9, 10 minutes trying to think of a better title. No avail. One problem, I think, there aren't a lot of good terms for TV that I could work with, we've got Small Screen, Idiot Box, Boob Tube, Goggle Box (that one doesn't even make sense) and that's about it. And let's face it, those aren't good. We need to come up with a new term.

Anyway, at first I was going to break them up into decades, a 60's collection, a 70's collection, 80's collection and so on. This proved to be much more difficult than you'd think. A LOT of shows started in one decade and ended in another. Something like Married w/ Children started in the Eighties, but most of the seasons of the show were in the Nineties. So I've always thought of it as a Nineties show despite knowing the decade it started in. It became too much of a hassle trying to decide which volume to put which show in so instead of wasting too much time worrying about it I decided a more random assortment would be best.

Here are the 37 Themes included in this volume:

Adventures of Pete and Pete (Polaris - Hey Sandy)

Alf

Bottom

Brothers Grunt

Charles in Charge

Chips

Count Duckula

Dragon's Den

Duckman

Family Matters

Father Ted

Fish

Flying Nun

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

Girl From U.N.C.L.E.

Godzilla Cartoon

Green Hornet

Hammer House of Horror

HBO 80's Feature Presentation Theme

Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Hong Kong Phooey

The Incredible Hulk

Liquid Television

Manimal

Mannix

Max Headroom

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

My Mother The Car

Night Gallery

Penelope Pitstop

Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased)

Red Dwarf

Renta Ghost

Silver Spoons

Smother Brothers Comedy Hour

Too Close For COmfort

Unsolved Mysteries

She was like a candle in the wind... unreliable.

For me the highlight is the HBO Feature Presentation theme that played before every movie in the 80's. This thing sounds EPIC. Now they just have the intro with the noisy static that turns into the HBO logo. Which is kind of out of date, I haven't seen static on a TV in years, they should change it to an Invalid Input screen or something at least. Or just bring back this EPIC Feature Presentation theme.

Maybe the next volume will be a bit more organized, but I thought I'd test this out first and see how much interest there was. I ended up with about 1,200 themes from the forum I found them on so if there's one you'd like to see on Volume 2 let me know, there's a good chance I have it.

Jim Davis' The Thing

While looking through some old drawings I found my prototype for my currently still unfinished Jim Davis' The Thing piece. Sure it's sloppy and hastily draw, but then I'm not really much of an artist. I actually did a slightly better one with more detail, but I wasn't thinking when I drew it and put the head right side up, it looked more like Jim Davis' Hiruko The Goblin.

Morgue Inspection - George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead

I'm trying to branch out a bit and do some movie reviews here. I usually end up getting between 30 and 70 movies a month and I think I should try and review one occasionally. My goal, one DVD cover quotes.

I've always wanted to do reviews, and in fact I've done a few very long winded and sloppily written reviews on here before. My goal is to make my new reviews shorter and more to the point, I'd like to try and keep them concise, like 3 or 4 paragraphs long, but I'm not a strong enough writer to really convey what I'm trying to say without going overboard and writing a thousand word essay with little focus or coherence.

I'm a bit soft on movies. So much effort goes into even the worst, most godawful piece of shit movie you can think of (Terror Toons, you still hold that honor for me) that I really try and find positives in anything I watch. So I plan on trying a "like" and "hated" list at the end of the review, see how that works out.

Since I mostly post soundtracks, I will post "Review" or something in the title so nobody gets excited (negatively or positively) about downloading a soundtrack that just came out.

I was one of the very few people who didn't hate Diary of the Dead. It wasn't great, but I didn't get the intense, boiling hatred everyone seemed to have for it. So, that and a very positive review of Survival on CHUD had me excited as I popped this bastard on to see what Georgie had come up with for his sixth undead adventure. As sad as I am to have to say this about one of horrors greatest filmmakers, it turns out CHUD has one of the only positive reviews out there for a reason.

The movie opens on Plum Island, an island off the coast of Delaware, (where everyone has a thick Irish accent for some reason) during a worldwide zombie outbreak. There seems to be only two families on this island, the O'Flynns and the Muldoons. Patrick O'Flynn believes that every zombie should be killed immediately, even if they happen to be small children. His nemesis on the island Seamus Muldoon has apparently seen the movie Fido and feels zombies should be chained up and forced to do mundane housework, like cooking or cleaning gutters. Muldoon has had enough of O'Flynn's zombie killing ways and intends to kill him one night. But Pat's daughter makes a deal with Seamus - In lieu of shooting O'Flynn in the head, waiting a few minutes for him to zombify, then shooting him in the head again Seamus just forces O'Flynn (and a few others) off the island.

We cut to the United States a few weeks later where we meet a roving band of military cliches (hard ass leader Sarge, dopey idiot goofball, tough chick Tomboy, horny hispanic guy Cisco) who, along with a teenager they pick up on the way seek refuge at Plum Island, which they believe to be a safe, zombie-free haven. In order to get to this island they steal a ferry from...you guessed it, O'Flynn who has been tricking people into coming to his dock with false information about Plum Island so he and his partners can steal all their shit.

A big gun fight breaks out between O'Flynn and Co. and Sarge's crew . Zombies show up, a lot of shit blows up but thanks to Tomboy's kindness, O'Flynn ends up on the ferry on the way to Plum Island.

That's the basic set up, to say more would ruin the rest of the movie.

Things I liked:

The practical gore effects were mostly pretty good.

Zombie Horseback

The brief underwater zombie shots were very well done.

Kenneth Welsh answered the question "What if Sean Connery and Malcolm McDowell had a son?"

Fire Extiguisher zombie kill was really pretty awesome.

Alan Van Sprang looked kinda like Ron Livingston after a particularly harrowing bender.

Things I kind of hated:

Terrible Irish accents - and I think some of these guys were actually Irish

Some fairly poor acting from pretty much everyone

Repetitive human deaths, way too much neck "flesh peel" effect.

Shoddy CGI work. I'm still not sure why lower budget films even try CGI.

I wanted to like it, and for a good 40 minute stretch during the middle it was actually pretty engaging. But ultimately, the subpar acting, ridiculous accents (why were they Irish again?), slow start and mediocre ending kind of killed it for me. Romero fans, and zombie aficionados should give it a look, but be prepared to bitch about George losing it shortly after.

If you're wondering where I'd rank it with the rest of the Dead, I'd say:

Day of the Dead

Dawn of the Dead (a better movie than Day, but Day's zombie make-up is top notch, so it edges out Dawn for me a bit)

Night of the Living Dead

Diary of the Dead

Land of the Dead (this and Diary are both kinda so-so, I'm calling a tie between these two)

Survival of the Dead

Get Expended

For those of you who can't wait for August 13th to see Stallone, Statham and Li bust some evil-doer heads in The Expendables, a classic 8-bit style game has been created over on the official Expendables Facebook page. Click here, and click "Like" (man this click "Like" thing is getting out of hand) to be able to play the game. If you like the old NES Contra games, you'll get a kick out of this since it's just Jet Li, Sylvester Stallone and Jason Statham in a Contra game. Your best bet, pick Jet Li - I'm sorry, Yin Yang (ye-ikes) run right and keep hitting A and S the entire time. That seems to do the trick.

Turkaor Soundtrack Series Vol. 2

So, the brilliant and mysterious Turkaor stopped by again with a link to a whole new volume of rare and long lost film music. We have some choice cuts from Garbage Pail Kids (the movie, not the cards), Howard The Duck, Teen Witch and even something called Ninja Kids Phantom Force which sounds totally awful and completely awesome all at once - just the way I like 'em.

Those plus about 20 others - one even performed by Johnathan Stamos of The Rippers. All in all, another tremendous effort by Turkaor. If you enjoy it, leave a comment and let Turk know so we can see future volumes soon.

Get it while it's hot.

Let The Hit Girl In - Let Me In International trailer

An unnecessary remake of course, but I think it looks pretty decent.

I'm sure most of you will disagree, but I'm done getting bent out of shape and bitching about my favorite movies getting redone. If it looks decent I'll check it out, regardless of it being a remake of a 2 year old movie or not. If it sucks, then it sucks, and I'll move onto something different.