Category: TV

Instead of my regular column, I’m going to do some special programming today in honor of the brave soldiers who died in The Great Martian War.

We’ll return Saturday with new tales from an alternate universe’s Doctor Who, and War of the Worlds will be back next week. Here’s a sneak peak…

 

 

And coming soon, I’ve told you about the big 40th anniversary revelation, and I’ve alluded to the arrival of The Terrible Zodin for the 2004 series finale. But surely, for the half-century, they’d have to come up with something to top that, wouldn’t they?

 

What is this “it” which is to him “up”, and which he can perhaps “handle”?

It is the not-too-distant future, next Sunday, AD. With War of the Worlds on hiatus at this point in the nexus, I find myself in a situation not too dissimilar from where I was about a year ago when it came time to talk about Max Headroom. You can’t talk about music in 1988 without mentioning “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, you can’t talk about movies in 1988 without mentioning Die Hard, and you can’t talk about Science-Fiction TV in 1988 without mentioning Mystery Science Theater 3000. But really, at this point, what’s left to say about any of them beyond, “They’re really quite good,” and “Okay, I think by now I finally understand all the references.”

From my ramble about Out of this World, you might remember that back in the ’80s, TV stations had a lot more independence, and unaffiliated stations in particular had to scrounge for programming where they could get it, and even very small stations would often end up making some of their own shows. Locally produced TV for a purely local market is something you don’t see a lot of any more, but it used to be a common model (Particularly for kids’ shows. See also: Romper Room).

One of the most popular forms was the Late Night Horror Movies We Can Get the Rights To For Cheap Anthology, and that form’s become kind of enshrined in our culture. Get some crappy old horror movies on the cheap, stick your weather man in a Dracula costume, and have him introduce it. The form had originated in 1954 with Vampira, a Los Angeles-area hostess playing a sexed-up vampire inspired by Morticia Addams (Elvira, Mistress of the Dark was born out of an ’80s attempt to revive the character). By the late ’50s, Screen Gems had packaged the Universal monster movies and early Columbia horror films under the label Shock! for licensing to independent stations, leading to a spate of local shows often titled some variation on “Shock Theater”. By the ’60s, the Creature Features package added many of the films of Roger Corman, Hammer Studios, Toho and Daiei. Hosts such as Vampira, Morgus the Magnificent, Joe Bob Briggs, Zacherly, Count Gore de Vol ( Washington, DC-area host Dick Dyzsel, better known as the host of the local kids’ show Bozo the Clown) and Svengooli would introduce the movies, usually with a short comedy sketch, and reappear at the commercial breaks. For the most part, their schtick and material varied from “bad” to “worse”, but there were more than a few stand-outs, and lots of the hosts became minor local celebrities. Coast to Coast AM‘s George Noory has cited Morgus as an inspiration, Drew Carey was influenced by Ghoulardi. And Roddy MacDowell’s character in Fright Night is an homage to ’60s host Sinister Seymour. So influential was the format that these sorts of Horror Hosts still exist today, despite the fact that the TV environment has changed so much by now that they’re pretty much entirely redundant.

In another part of the late ’60s and early ’70s, CBS had brought back ’50s puppets-and-live-actor trio Kukla, Fran and Ollie to host the CBS Children’s Film Festival. Unrelatedly, in 1972, Douglas Trumbull made an environmentally themed science fiction movie called Silent Running (no relation to the 1985 song by Mike + the Mechanics), about an astronaut who hijacks a space ship carrying the last existing plant life from Earth (the rest having been wiped out by capitalism, because fuck the environment, it’s the ’70s) and heads out into deep space with no companionship save for two maintenance robots he’s reprogrammed in an attempt to keep his sanity. Fast-forward a bit. If you somehow don’t know this, back in 1988, Minneapolis-area prop comic Joel Hodgson came up with a premise for a comedy series and pitched it to the independent Twin Cities TV station KTMA-23 (Now CW-affiliated WUCW). Drawing inspiration from the tradition of late night horror hosts, from Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and from Silent Running, he concocted a backstory about an inventor who’d built a “Satellite of Love” and launched himself into space, where he built three robots, Gypsum (voiced by J. Elvis Weinstein, going by his maiden name “Josh”), Crow (voiced by Trace Beaulieu), and Beeper (voiced by no one, as he spoke only on beeps), to look after the place while he watched movies and offered color commentary. With producer Jim Mallon and cameraman Kevin Murphy, they produced a 30 minute pilot in which Joel demonstrated his latest invention (a chiropractic helmet), saved the station’s plant life from a space virus, and watched selections from the 1969 film The Green Slime.

So here’s the deal. After our little investigation into Zardip’s Search for Healthy Wellness, I thought to myself, “Hey, you should maybe look into that show that the other guest child actor from the second season of War of the Worlds.”

I didn’t think much of Illya Woloshyn in the role of Torri. It was a terrible role that no one could have saved, but he’s Carrie Fisher in The Star Wars Holiday Special levels of glazed over. And, I mean, okay. He’s eight. Hardly any eight-year-olds are decent actors, and the fact that he could take direction, say his lines, and keep a straight face puts him way out ahead of the child actors they keep giving small parts to on Power Rangers.

Despite appearances, Illya Woloshyn must have had some skill, as by 1989, he was already a successful stage actor, having played Gavroche in the 1988 Toronto production of Les Misérables and later in the Canadian touring company. All the same, his TV credits are modest, a string of smallish guest roles, with one exception. From 1992 to 1994, he played the lead in the CBC fantasy adventure-series The Odyssey. So I reckoned I’d watch a bit of it and write an essay about it and that would be the end of it, since clearly, I should not be expecting much, given my past experience with the actor and the most ninetiestastic CGI opening sequence I’ve seen in years.

But here’s the thing: it turned out to be really good. Awkward in some places, sure, derivative in a few ways, okay, and with all the attendant problems of having a large, young cast. But still, really good. And kind of trippy. And it is, to a large extent, exactly the sort of thing that is in my wheelhouse. Not technically post-apocalyptic, but definitely eschaton-adjacent.

And so what I’m going to do is not give you a quick rundown on the series as a whole and then be done with it. What I’m going to do is talk about the first episode. And then I’m going to put it on a shelf and come back to it in more depth at some point in the future. Because you, dear reader, deserve it.

Because here is the basic idea that underlies The Odyssey: It’s Life on Mars crossed with The Tribe. In 1992. There’s other stuff mixed in there too, like shades of The Wizard of Oz and The Prisoner (weirdly, the interesting but misguided 2009 miniseries), but those are the big ones. The Odyssey is, of course, a Castaway Story, a theme that’s come up on this blog before. Specifically, it’s a children’s castaway story, which is a genre that seemed really common when I was a kid. They always had the same setup, more or less. A kid falls down a rabbit hole or gets sucked up by a tornado or gets lost on a carnival dark ride, or gets sucked into a mirror, or falls into a wormhole, or gets kidnapped by a weirdo in a police box, or steps into the Quantum Leap accelerator, and ends up in a surreal otherworld under the rule of a mad queen or witch or sorcerer or music company executive or the Borg, who they have to defeat and/or avoid as they look for a way home, a task at which they continually fail in ways which become increasingly contrived as the series progresses.[br]Seems like you don’t see this kind of castaway story so much these days. Certainly, none of Dylan’s favorite shows revolve around the idea, The Doctor gives his companions free cell phone upgrades, and while Stargate tried it twice, Atlantis only stuck out the whole “We’re stranded and can’t go home” thing for a season, and Universe revealed the communication stones in the first episode. I’m not entirely sure why, but I’ve got some guesses. The most obvious and banal might be that it sounds exactly like the sort of thing that the focus-group-driven 1990s would crush out as being “inappropriate” for children in much the same way that it was decided that it was probably a bad idea to base a running gag about Big Bird trying to tell adults something very important and true about his buddy Mr. Snuffleupagus (Big Bird can call him “Snuffy”; they’re besties. I will call him Mr. Snuffleupagus) and have them constantly dismiss and disbelieve him. As much as I have a knee-jerk negative reaction to 1990s focus groups, I can kinda see that perhaps it is not the best idea in the world to have children’s media constantly normalize parental abandonment, and that maybe the constant nagging fear that you might be whisked off to a weird place where supernaturally powerful status-quo-preservation forces keep you from ever getting home or seeing your family again is not something with which we ought to burden our children.[br]But even beyond that, I wonder if the whole idea of being whisked off to a new world and never seeing your family again is something that just doesn’t speak to millennials the way it does to older folks. As the world’s become exponentially more connected over the past few decades, the idea of “We’re moving to a new town so you will never see your old friends again,” doesn’t track with their experience the same way as it did with people from a few decades earlier. In an age before cell phones, Skype, and unlimited long distance, a family member who moved across the country may as well have moved to Mars. And a generation of people who moved back in with their parents after college don’t have the same relationship with the classic American narrative of sticking everything you own in a car and heading off to start a new life on your own in a distant city, so the classic fantasy narrative of being zapped away to Oz (The fictional fantasy land, not Australia.) isn’t one they relate to in the same way: it’s not one that serves as a metaphor for the same real-world anxieties.[br]Or maybe it’s just that it’s played out. After seven years of watching Captain Janeway spuriously sacrifice her crew in order to find new ways each week to sabotage Voyager’s attempts to get home, lest she break the real Prime Directive (Never ever disrupt the status quo), people were just sick and tired of the series of contrivances. Maybe they used up their ability to watch failure be the only option over and over again. The reasons and excuses just weren’t good enough any more. I still get annoyed at an episode of Kidd Video from 1984 where, to save the status quo, Whiz Kid tells a genie, “I wish my friends and I were safe at home,” and the genie insisted that “safe” and “at home” counted as two separate wishes, in order to grant the former without granting the latter. Cheating bastard. The long and short of the premise is that this kid Jay lapses into a coma due to a head injury and is transported to a surreal otherworld (Apparently called “Downworld”, though I haven’t watched far enough to hear anyone use the term yet), drawn from his subconscious and yet apparently with its own independent existence, populated only by children, counterparts of people from Jay’s waking life, who subsist by scavenging and organize themselves into The Warriors-style flamboyantly themed street gangs.

​​And the bad guy is played by 16-year-old Ryan Reynolds dressed as a Nazi. Though we don’t actually meet him in this episode. But still.

They waste little time getting started. Jay and his friend Donna (Also inexplicable, a pre-teen girl in 1992 being named “Donna”, as the name had gone pretty much extinct among names for newborns in North America by 1980) are, kind of inexplicably, standing by the side of a suburban street with his dog, playing chess. The local middle school bully Keith has offered Jay membership in his tree fort club in exchange for showing  the gang the antique brass pocket telescope he inherited from his missing-presumed-dead father, and Donna thinks this is a terrible idea, what with Keith being a jerk and obviously setting him up. Jay won’t be swayed though, because man is that treehouse hella cool. I  mean, it’s got trap doors and a climbing rope on a pulley and it’s surrounded on three sides by a stream and the only way to it is over its own private bridge, and it’s just freaking awesome.

So despite Donna’s reservations, he goes home and retrieves the telescope from a little shrine that includes a framed black-and-white childhood photo of his father in a navy uniform, holding the antique. Okay. Technically there’s nothing weird about someone Jay’s age having a black-and-white photo of his father. All of the childhood photos I’ve seen of my dad are black-and-white. But… Is that the most recent photo they had? That photo is of Jay’s dad at (we will learn by implication) fifteen. And why was his dad in the navy at fifteen?

Jay’s cool spyglass meets with the approval of Keith and the treehouse gang, because World War I-era boy scout gear is all the rage with early ’90s suburban Canadian bullies, and grant him membership in the club. Then Keith pretty much immediately gives the game away by declaring the spyglass their new official lookout device, despite his promise to give it back. Honestly, I don’t know how much to blame Keith here since it didn’t actually seem like he was trying to hide the fact that membership dues consisted of contributing something with which to enrich the fort. He spies Donna approaching via the footbridge — she never gives any specific reason for being there, presumably she’d anticipated the sudden but inevitable betrayal Jay’s about to suffer — and they use the pretense of ordering Jay to send her away to shove him out the (trap) door and shoot water guns at him until he leaves.

Jay has a brief exchange with Donna where neither of them say very much, but it’s communicated pretty clearly that (a) she told him so, but (b) he doesn’t need her rubbing it in right now, however, (3) she’s got his back. Donna gets a lot better as the show goes on, but for right now she kinda bugs me. She’s like every female character in a Dr. Seuss book (Sorry for ruining Dr. Seuss for you, but he’s basically complete shit at writing female characters, and at least once was rude and insulting to “silly women” who called him out on it. There’s some evidence that he did occasionally <em>try</em> to do better at it, but never managed to succeed), existing purely to look disapproving and remind heroic boys that their mother would not approve of him having fun adventures.

All the same, she runs interference for him by… Standing there and looking dour. Realizing that perhaps they should have waited until after Jay completed his assigned task to lock him out, the entire tree fort gang climbs down to get rid of her, taunting her and stealing her glasses and crutch (Donna has some sort of disability and uses a forearm crutch), though Keith seems to realize this crosses a line and gives it back to her a moment later, his indignant bully sneer turning to a look of shame. She just stands there and gives them a resigned, disapproving look.

Jay circles around and slips back into the tree fort, but that treasonous dog gives him away. As the gang forces their way back into the fort to catch him, he tries to escape via the climbing rope, but, what with the whole thing having been designed by twelve-year-olds, the pulley breaks off its mount and drops him down the side of the hill, where he rolls until his head whacks a large rock in a way that does not look at all realistic but nevertheless conveys unambiguously that he’s seriously injured his brain. As he falls, the beloved telescope goes flying into the air, landing in Keith’s hand as though magically drawn to him. He panics and throws it into the stream before hoofing it with the rest of the gang. Donna prods Jay with her crutch and tries to rouse him.

Continue reading Grapevine: The Odyssey