Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Pop Cultural Random Links

The 2009 Fall TV Preview Starring Jonathan Coulton: Geeky music dude Jonathan Coulton offers previews of new fall shows based on nothing but their titles. Personally, I think his versions are almost all way more interesting than the real things. I would totally watch the show about the bored ghosts. And the transhuman family drama. And maybe the Ren Fair one...

The Ten Rules of Time Travel: Handy things to keep in mind before embarking on your temporal travels.

25 Greatest Cult Shows Ever: There clearly weren't enough of these lists in existence, so here's Entertainment Weekly's take. It's actually a fairly interesting list, featuring some old standards, a surprising number of shows I've never even heard of, and a few bold choices of which I wholeheartedly approve (go, Team Venture!). And I cannot argue with their selection for the #1 slot.

Cranial Capacity: 10 of Fiction's Biggest Brains: Also a nicely imaginative list, but, following up on my thoughts on that last link, I do see one glaring omission. I would happily put money on the Doctor vs. any of these dudes. Well, OK. Maybe not Sherlock Holmes. Somehow, I just don't think he could bring himself to take down Sherlock Holmes.

10 comments:

  1. I'd like to know what definition they used for "cult" show. (It appears that only two shows before 1990 were even considered.)

    I disagree with many of the brains. Marvin the Paranoid Android ("brain the size of a planet") wasn't on there, and it took three Trek characters combined to beat out The Brain. What about Data?

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  2. I gotta say the first 15 or so were like what? But the top 10 were good choices as I'm a big fan out 8 out of those. I was happy to see The Prisoner on there. Loved that one. I confess to being into Twin Peaks too.

    With that said there are so many more they could have put on there instead of all those sitcoms that I think the media wanted everyone to love like "Sports Night"

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  3. Comments about the Doctor aside, I've decided to give up doing the, "OMG, they didn't include x, y, and z!" thing with lists like this. Being all-inclusive isn't usually the point, and I'm sure the people who made those lists would have the same reaction to my lists if I made them. That having been said, damn, Captain C, you're right! Where's Data? (Now, Marvin... I dunno. He talked a good game about the size of his brain, but how often did he really use it?) :)

    And Sports Night does seem to have something of a following. I know people who adore it, and am told it's an extremely well-written show, but I can't find any real motivation to watch it, given that, y'know, it's about sports. Then again, I said more or less the same thing about Freaks & Geeks and high school, and once someone pushed me hard enough to get me to watch it, I realized that it deserved every good thing that's been said about it and then some.

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  4. Sports Night is about sports in much the same way that Doctor Who is about medicine.

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  5. Having now read the cult TV list, all I really have to say is...man, I hate those EW lists where you have to click through each entry individually. It's a halfway decent list; there are some shows on it I've not seen, but nothing I'd ever heard of. (I think Police Squad is the closest it comes to obscure.) I do think they're stretching the usage of "cult" to include Battlestar Galactica, but I can't really quibble too much.

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  6. "Nothing I'd never heard of" is what I meant.

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  7. "man, I hate those EW lists where you have to click through each entry individually"

    Hear, hear. It's not so bad for a list of 10 but gets rather tedious for a list of 25.

    They were quite interesting lists. I suppose that "Star Trek" and "M*A*S*H" were too popular to be counted as cult shows.

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  8. Skimming over the comments there, I saw that there were a lot of people crying, "How could you leave off Star Trek?" But, yeah, I think Trek has almost indisputably grown beyond cult status. And I don't know how it was received in the rest of the world, but here in the US, M*A*S*H was practically a national obsession in its day. A damned good show, yes, but not "cult" by any stretch of the definition.

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  9. In my mind, a cult show is one with a brief run and small, fervent audience that tends to grow in popularity after it ends. The original Star Trek and Pinky & the Brain would qualify; the Trek franchises and Doctor Who would not.

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  10. They forgot Nowhere Man....

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