You Ever Notice...and What's the Deal...

[CensoredAlso]

So yeah, can't imply two men living together are gay in the early and mid 70s...but you can imply orgies in 1970.

The sexual revolution was largely for heterosexuals. Homosexuals were still regarded as weird or a punchline, even by liberals. It took a few decades before that really changed.

 

[Drtooth]

Minds in the gutter, and always thinking of the least mature thing that can be taken out of context, I'd say.

 

[minor muppetz]

And yet, the pilot episode has the word "Orgy," in the title... in 1970, which was still a year shy of the real big she-bang of shows like ALL IN THE FAMILY coming along. So yeah, can't imply two men living together are gay in the early and mid 70s (Jack Klugman even pointed out the irony of many shows today having to include at least one gay character to keep from seeming politically insensitive), but you can imply orgies in 1970.

Well, the title didn't appear on-screen, and back then (I assume) it wasn't so easy to learn the title of episodes (as there was no internet to look up titles). I wonder if titles could be found in TV listings back then.

On a similar note, on I Love Lucy, the censors wouldn't allow the word "pregnant" to be said, yet one of the episodes about Lucy's pregnancy did have "pregnant" in the title (I think the title was "Pregnant Women are Unpredictable"). But then in the 1980s, Fox delayed broadcast of an episode of Married... with Children because it had the word "Period" in the title, and they ended up giving that episode a completely different title by the time it aired. And that's despite the fact that the title didn't appear on-screen.

 

[minor muppetz]

After getting The Compleat Al for Christmas, I must wonder, what's the deal with Weird Al being so quiet for much of the mockumentary? There's a lot of scenes where he's just silent, letting the others do all the talking and making facial reactions to things. I remember years ago there was a website that listing things about the number 27 in Al's works (can't remember if it's still online) and it said that, outside of the music videos, Al does not talk until 27 minutes in (though it's wrong, he does talk earlier, in a scene representing his job as a campus DJ). But it seems he doesn't talk much until he gets signed on with a record company, getting plenty of dialogue when he asks Michael Jackson for permission to do Eat It (and at that point Jackson is the silent one), his tour of Japan, and the ending.

 

[D'Snowth]

I look back at how ridiculous some controversies can be, such as back in the late 2000s, when everybody was suddenly griping about how inappropriately The Chipettes dressed in the 80s, "For girls their age," such as their infamous "Gettin' Lucky," number, in which they were subjected to wearing harem outfits... never mind the fact that they're chipmunks... and they're cartoon characters.

But, with how so many people are willing to take to time to look for things that were "inappropriate" from years past, I'm wondering how come nobody has been complaining about the Sour Grapes Bunch messenger girls from THE BANANA SPLITS? Preteen girls, if not kids, dancing in and out of the scene in jumpers no longer than their pelvis, tights, and Go-Go boots... nobody in our politically correct/sensitive world today is bothered by any of that? Microminis and Go-Gos were as much a product of their time as much of what The Chipettes wore were in the 80s.

 

[D'Snowth]

Okay... Popeye's has just added ghost pepper wings to their menu...

Really? Uh, do they know what happens when people eat ghost peppers?

 

[Drtooth]

Okay... Popeye's has just added ghost pepper wings to their menu...

Really? Uh, do they know what happens when people eat ghost peppers?

I doubt they'd put all that much of such a dangerously spicy pepper on their food. Somehow, that sounds like a huge liability on their part. If anything, it'd be just spicier of the normal Buffalo style. Otherwise, you know... lawsuit? I once saw some local food critic show where they were talking about some masochistic spicy food night at a restaurant, and anyone who participated had to sign a waiver! Which was read aloud to boot. I don't think it's in the business of a fast food company to make the food any more destructive to the human digestive system than it already is.

 

[minor muppetz]

For the last few years, I've thought about how most of the older "main series" Mario games are very different from each other, while the games in The New Super Mario Bros. series seem to be much more similar to one another (well I haven't played the most recent one), but now something else has hit me: In most of the older games, the average ending to a level would be different. In SMB, Mario would jump on a flagpole. SMB 2, you'd fight Birdos. SMB 3, you'd jump into that square thing in the black background. Super Mario World would have you cross that touchdown-line-thingy. Super Mario Land had Mario going into one of two doors/windows in a building. Can't really remember what the average level ending for Mario 64 was. But then for most Mario games in the past decade, The New Super Mario Bros. sereis and Mario 3D Land/World, Mario, Luigi, and friends go back to jumping on the flagpole. Why suddenly go back to that iconic ending and stick with it? So for the first New Super Mario Bros., it makes a little sense, since it's supposed to be like the older games (and I originally thought it was meant to be a straight-up modern 3D update to Super Mario Bros.), but then couldn't a New Super Mario Bros. game have its levels end like the levels in Mario 3?

In Back to the Future III, it's briefly shown that Buford Tannen had issues with Semus McFly, just like how Biff bullied George and Griff bullied Marty Jr. Yet we never see any scenes with them interacting (it was really there to be like the scenes in all the movies where Marty goes into a popular hang-out place in each year he visits only for a Tannen to enter yelling at a McFly, and for him to have ended up mistaking Marty for Seamus). So maybe it wasn't really needed, but it would have been good to see how Buford treated Seamus. Unlike George and Marty Jr, Seamus wasn't shown to be wimpy or cowardly, though he didn't seem to care about whether people viewed him as a coward. In fact we never meet any of Biff's children and never hear about Marty being bullied by a Tannen relative, but his brother Dave seems like the kind of person who might have been (during the original timeline, that is).

 

[Drtooth]

So...wait.... Now TLC has a show celebrating fat people instead of backhanded inspir-shame-tion of 600 pound people getting disgusting graphic procedures? That blows my mind.

Not in a good way, mind you. More like the "DOES NOT COMPUTE!!!!" Logical trap that they force evil robots into.

 

[minor muppetz]

Tonight I remembered something that I noticed long ago that I hadn't really thought about in years: Almost everybody from WKRP in Cincinnati is similar to characters from other shows, in looks and personalities.

Not counting other characters played by the same actors...

• Les Nessman is very similar to Mr. Peterson from The Bob Newhart Show, and in fact both shows had an episode where the respective character stood on the ledge of a building.
• Herb is a lot like Kirk from Newhart. So maybe he's sleazier and less likable, but both characters hit on women characters who aren't interested in them (with Herb it's Jennifer, with Kirk it's Leslie) and both characters look similar. In fact Steven Kampmann, who played Kirk, was a writer on WKRP, and Frank Bonner, who played Herb, made a guest appearance in one episode of Newhart (and it was an episode from when Kirk was on the show... I was disappointed that the two didn't appear on-screen together).
• Andy looks a bit like Sam from Cheers, and both characters are the stars of their respective shows (or at least in terms of billing.... It seems like Andy didn't really get to do much).
• Bailey looks a bit like Julie Kotter from Welcome Back, Kotter. Though she wasn't married to or in a relationship with Andy (though in the first episode it looks like there's some attraction between them, at least from Andy, but later on she seems more interested in Johnny).

And Arthur Carlson, Dr. Johnny Fever, and Venus Flytrap all seem to be like people I have known (but I doubt many of you would know them so I won't go into it here). Oddly, Jennifer is the only one who doesn't remind me of anything else, even though Loni Anderson is the sister of Pamela Anderson.