Month: March 2010

Classic TV

Weird old title sequences: Monkey

18 March 2010 Rob Buckley 4 Comments

Monkey

It had to happen. You don’t think I could continue this epic nostalgia-fest without mentioning cult kids’ TV show Monkey, do you?

For the uninitiated, Monkey (aka Monkey Magic) was a Japanese kids show that aired on BBC2 in the 80s, dubbed (with a couple of exceptions) by English actors such as Miriam Margolyes doing dodgy Japanese/Chinese accents.

It was based on a Chinese story about the Monkey king and his travels with a priest to recover some Buddhist scrolls, aided only by his natural cunning, a water monster and a pig-man and being a Japanese show it was completely mental: a combination of humour, surrealism, fight scenes and Buddhist philosophy.

For your delectation, the explanatory weird title sequence is below, but I’ve included a “best bits of” video as well. See if any of it makes sense to you.

30 Rock’s Dr Spaceman meets Dr Pepper

18 March 2010 Rob Buckley 1 Comment

Ads are getting odd. TV tie-ins are no new thing for ads – you can look back more than 50 years and find them – but these are generally designed to promote just the products using the influence of the TV shows.

Now we have a Dr Pepper ad featuring the character of Dr Spaceman (played by Chris Parnell, who also voices Cyril on Archer) from 30 Rock that’s promoting both the show and Dr Pepper. That’s just confusing.

[via]

Thursday’s “panic moon” news

18 March 2010 Rob Buckley Post a comment

Doctor Who

  • Steven Moffat offers Steven Spielberg the chance to direct an episode
  • Karen Gillan reveals more about her character, as well as her inability to do anagrams [spoilers]

Films

British TV

Canadian TV

  • CTV acquires The Borgias

US TV

Question of the week: 6Music – thumbs up or thumbs down?

17 March 2010 Rob Buckley 5 Comments

Ooh, a radio question. That’s novel.

For the benefit of overseas readers, 6Music is a BBC radio station that’s available on the Internet or on DAB radios (you don’t have those either). It covers “new music” (something close to US indie music) and other genres that appeal to musophiles.

And the BBC is about to close it. The reasons given are that it competes with commercial radio stations (maybe, but only in terms of the listeners, not in terms of content), it costs too much (it only costs a few million pounds to run), it doesn’t have enough listeners (although it has enough apparently to compete with commercial radio stations, except it doesn’t. Square that circle if you can), and the resources will be used elsewhere (true enough).

To replace it, the current plan is to provide a “Radio 2 Extra” – just as ITV2 gives related content to ITV1 programmes as well as original content of its own, so the new 6Music would do the same for Radio 2.

So this week’s question is:

Why are the BBC really closing 6Music? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Do you care? Will you listen to the replacement? Or is all this a storm in a teamcup, you can’t get this DAB thing anyway, and to hell with Internet radio?

For the advanced reader: repeat but for the closing of the Asian Network.

As always, leave a comment with your answer or a link to your answer on your own blog.