Tag Archives: television

“What A Doll! What A Doll!”

16 Jan
Still featuring most of the cast of "Sabrina, The Teenage Witch"

"Sabrina, The Teenage Witch" image from ultimatedisney.com.

by Kevin Wollenweber

As you probably know by now if you’ve stumbled across this page within the last couple of days,  my blogging partner Rachel Newstead and I are thinking of expanding the scope of this blog to include comments on other media, as much as we can with our limited resources, and whatever else is going on in our lives.

I know that Rachel will intrigue you with her memories and current viewpoints and, hopefully (gulp), I can come up with an intriguing point or two.

So what changed my blogger’s viewpoint within the past few months?  Well, I really enjoy animation and know that it still remains the most flexible of all the art forms.  Or at least it is the stepping-off point at which all or most imagery in film exists, again from my own perspective.

As I have stated before, I could easily be accused of far too much TV watching.  At the time I began watching extensively as a kid, TV was already being hailed as this vast wasteland,  and not the medium of hope that some originally saw.  While I agree that TV will never be this artistic variety that we all hope it could possibly turn into, there are some ridiculous things that I have committed to memory over the years as twisted pop art, and that includes TV commercials.

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The Best Thing Since Trash Day: The Flintstones and “The Hot Piano” (1961)

29 Aug

Review by Rachel Newstead

The Flintstones: “The Hot Piano”

Season 1, Episode 19

Original Airdate Feb. 3, 1961

Directors: Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera

Writer: Mike Maltese

In Short: Stuck for an anniversary present for Wilma, Fred learns a valuable lesson in economics–don’t buy a piano out of the back of a van. Especially if the seller is a guy named “88 Fingers Louie…”

(Minor edit, to correct a phrase that annoyed me. Changed the phrase  “one of the things that endeared this cartoon to me” to “one of the things that made this cartoon endearing. “8/22/12–Rachel)

With any great TV show–even some that weren’t so great–one episode is often enough to make a viewer into a fan forever.

For Trekkies, it’s “City On The Edge Of Forever”–or perhaps “Space Seed” (the episode that introduced us to Khan, Captain Kirk’s greatest nemesis.) For “I Love Lucy” fans, it might be the “Vitameatavegamin” episode, or the one in which she finds herself submerged in a vat of grapes.

For fans of Hanna-Barbera’s The Flintstones, however, it’s usually this episode: “The Hot Piano,” from the show’s often brilliant (though critically panned) first season. It certainly was for me.

Looking at the show’s 166 episodes today can seem a bit like watching two different series. There’s the caustic adult sitcom of its first couple of seasons, “inspired” by The Honeymooners but more a sendup of every TV comedy ever known–I Love Lucy, Donna Reed and Ozzie and Harriet turned sideways and transported to the Stone Age.

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