WKRP Episode: "The Airplane Show"

This is the first episode of season 3, and the background of it is strangely relevant now with the ongoing Screen Actors' Guild negotiations. The start of the 1980-1 television season was delayed by a SAG strike, and that ruined plans for WKRP to do an episode on location in Cincinnati. But because Richard Sanders and Michael Fairman were the writers of this episode, they received a special waiver from SAG allowing them to act in their own material. (I guess it's similar to the rule that comedians can write some of their own material during a writers' strike.) So they changed their story so they would be the only actors going on location, with Sanders as Les and Fairman as an insane biplane pilot whom Les hires when the station won't give him a helicopter. They shot their scenes in and around Cincinnati with stunt pilot Harold Johnson piloting the plane, and then after the strike, the rest of the cast shot their scenes in the radio station (without an audience). You'll notice that by the end of the story they basically run out of plane footage and have to resort to cheating by dubbing in a lot of ADR dialogue over the same footage.

The episode has a bunch of music, with three songs in particular standing out: the song in the scene with Johnny, Venus and Bailey in the booth is "Whip It" by Devo (WKRP would include more New Wave songs starting with this season); Johnny is playing "Master Blaster" by Stevie Wonder when Les calls him in Act 2, and most memorably, "Had Enough" by the Who accompanies Les and Buddy taking off to carry out Buddy's plan to blackmail the town into holding a Veteran's Day celebration.

Also, in a nice bit of continuity, Les makes a reference to the pilot episode, where Andy promised to get Les a helicopter.

Act 1:


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Act 2:

In Other Action-Movie News...

Stephen Rowley explains why Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is his favorite of the series.

I've already said my piece about why I love this movie (and, yeah, I think it's the one in the series that I return to most often) several years ago. The only thing that's changed since then is that it's no longer possible to consider Doom the weakest link in the Indiana Jones series. (It's a bit like Return of the Jedi breathed a silent prayer of thanks in 1999 when a new movie came along to prove it wasn't so bad after all.)

I also think that Doom and Gremlins stand together not only in that they jointly helped create the PG-13 rating, but in that they both show Spielberg reacting against the success of E.T. Spielberg produced Gremlins and encouraged Joe Dante in making it dark, and what Gremlins basically is, is an open parody of E.T., where cute merchandisable creatures are going to multiply and destroy us all. Doom is the nasty flip side of the sweet E.T., a movie where kids don't have wonderful blissful adventures, but instead are beaten, enslaved, rejected by their father figures. Spielberg always had a mean streak, but here he combines that mean streak with kid-friendly elements (including the gross-out dinner scene, which is definitely aimed at kids). After this movie he retreated from this kind of nastiness, but I find it more interesting than most of what he's done since then. The niceness and goodness of Last Crusade, where bad things only seem to happen to bad people, is very bland by comparison.

Which Bond Movie ISN'T the Best Worst Bond Movie?

Those who provided such great comments on my James Bond posts might enjoy checking out (if you haven't been there already) I Expect You To Die!, a blog entirely devoted to the James Bond movie series; the author is reviewing each of the films in order. (Via Jason Bennion.)

He's up to Live and Let Die now, toward which he is rightly merciless. (I liked it as a kid, but even as a kid I thought there was something a little discomfiting about the film's racial politics. Though at that age I probably wouldn't have called it "racial politics.") But that brings me to my last Bond-related point: it's not just Live and Let Die that doesn't hold together as a movie, and it's not just Diamonds Are Forever and it's not just Moonraker, it's almost every Bond film ever made.

The Bond series followed the normal pattern of any series of movies. The first four movies were very strong, with maybe some falling-off in the fourth movie when the series was trying to cope with its own popularity. (Thunderball has its weaknesses, but it has a good story, Connery's last fully-involved performance, and some of the best female characters in the series. It's not as satisfying as the two before it, but it's a good strong movie.) The fifth movie, You Only Live Twice, saved a weak story with great production values; the series tried something a little different in the sixth film, On Her Majesty's Secret Service. That's a very good run, but OHMSS showed an awareness that they'd done most of what they could do and the only thing left was to explore Bond a bit more as a character. Then they decided, for the most part, that exploring Bond as a character was something they wouldn't do again. You'd think that that would have meant a series of stumbling attempts to recapture the early '60s magic, and that's pretty much what happened.

By the '70s, the Bond series was where you'd expect a series to be after turning out many films, several of them very good: it had used up most of Fleming's material, most of its ideas, and its cultural moment had passed. And that was reflected in the quality of the films. Except maybe The Spy Who Loved Me, which works great on its own terms, I think of every post-'60s Bond film (up to the Casino Royale reboot, anyway) as a "yes, but..." movie. Yes, it's entertaining, but the story goes off the rails (The Man With the Golden Gun) or Bond is way too old and the secondary characters aren't very good (Octopussy) or the comedy is really lame (For Your Eyes Only) or it's just a little drab (The Living Daylights) or it just flat-out sucks (Die Another Day). It's kind of amazing that this series survived so long, despite hardly ever turning out a movie that was a fully satisfying whole. (That's my opinion, obviously, not fact.)

I don't actually lament the decision not to do something else like On Her Majesty's Secret Service because I'm not as sold on that movie as everyone else. (And not because of Lazenby. It's because it's too long, a little slow in parts and seems to rely on editing tricks to compensate for some less-than-great action setpieces.) But it is one of the last Bond movies that is an actual movie, telling an actual story. For decades after that, Bond movies were like revues, a series of acts with a story sketched in between them. And the thing is, it worked. It kept people coming back, and kept the series profitable for a long time. I can't actually object to that, I just find it kind of astonishing that in movies, a storytelling medium, the Bond series managed to keep itself alive by more or less rendering storytelling and character irrelevant for years.

Further Looneyness

Jerry Beck has the list of special features and "bonus" cartoons for the next Looney Tunes DVD set. As you can see, there are fewer special features this time around, but more cartoons, which is a fine trade-off as far as I'm concerned.)

The bonus cartoons aren't rare or censored -- alas, we're going to have to wait and see if the Censored More-than-11 (because there are a lot more than 11 cartoons now that don't get shown anywhere) ever get released -- just additional cartoons that fit in with the theme of the disc. It's good to see Sniffles and Hippety Hopper finally make an appearance on these sets; no, they're not the greatest series, but they were reasonably successful series (especially if you count Sniffles' success in the comics) that deserve some token representation in this series.

And "Punch Trunk" is always nice to see; dating from one of Chuck Jones and Mike Maltese's great years, 1953, it's a one-shot that is in some ways even weirder than their greatest one shot from that year, "Much Ado About Nutting" (which is also on this set). Essentially it's a traditional spot-gag cartoon, except that the subject is totally insane: a realistic-looking but tiny elephant runs around a city. (The elephant and the squirrel in "Nutting" seem to demonstrate an interest on Jones' part in integrating semi-realistic animal behavior into a WB-style gag cartoon.) Someone has suggested that it's a take-off on UFO sightings, which were becoming increasingly common; the scenario is, what if instead of spotting a UFO or a little green man, people spotted a tiny elephant?

Retool!

Jenny notes in comments that it doesn't seem to make a great deal of sense when I wrote the following: "the lawyers have apparently not banned the commentators from talking about the question I've always wondered about: which elements of [Freakazoid!] and which characters, were holdovers from the original Bruce Timm concept."

To clarify, I don't actually know if there would have been any legal problems with talking about the original concept of Freakazoid!, but sometimes companies have been known to cut stuff out of DVD features that talks about where things came from, or what kind of re-tooling something went through. In the former category, WB cut out all mention of the fact that Pinky and the Brain are caricatures of Eddie Fitzgerald and Tom Minton (several people tried to mention it in the DVD special features, and none of it was allowed in); in the latter category, Disney didn't allow a whole lot of talk about the original version of The Emperor's New Groove (which underwent a similar re-tool to Freakazoid! from serious to silly).

The latter thing isn't really a law thing. It's just that when something got extensively re-tooled, companies sometimes don't want to allow discussion of what it was originally supposed to be. But that's silly; if we like something, we won't like it any less from knowing where it came from. So I'm glad that the F! features do mention the Timm concept and why it was retooled. It doesn't make me like F! any less to say that the Timm idea sounds interesting. Especially since he's never really done anything similar except that one Batman episode.