My stinky cold helped me at least make some progress on the dubbing effort. I now have 15 episodes of Ask the Manager committed to DVD-R (including one with Dana and Carla sparring like a couple of kids that had me nearly rolling off the couch for laughing so hard), plus Walt Disney: One Man's Dream and most of my American Experience savers (I still have to do "Journey to America" and "Pearl Harbor: Surprise and Remembrance"--which is narrated by Jason Robards, who was at Pearl Harbor as a sailor during the attack). I also have to transfer "America 1900" if I can find it. I looked through the unlabeled tapes twice last night and didn't see it. It had only a post-it note on it because it was scheduled to be dubbed and I'm afraid the stupid thing fell off and I taped over it. (Oh, and there's "T.R." about Teddy Roosevelt left to do as well.)

I was reminded of all the cool documentaries that I have as I paged through the tape list and also looked through them: Trolley: the Cars That Built Our Cities, two episodes of Bill Moyers' A Walk Through the 20th Century: "Come to the Fairs" (with footage of the 1964 New York World's Fair) and "The Reel World of News" (delightful story of the newsreels). (I may have Moyers' "T.R. and His Times" somewhere as well.) And of course there's James Burke's The Day the Universe Changed and the original Connections, and the Reader's Digest 3-part "America at War" and Boston: The Way It Was and my really snowy but favorite Life Goes to War, narrated by Johnny Carson.

I also have dubbed off the second and the third of NBC's once ubiquitous bloopers specials--the ones hosted by Dick Clark before they morphed into Bloopers and Practical Jokes (some of the practical jokes were funny, but most of the time they were stupid and detracted from the bloopers). The early ones were really the funniest before they descended into endless loops of people missing words; they were fast-paced for the most part, and the celebrity guests were tolerable in general. The third blooper special has the classic "Tim Conway tells the elephant story" clip that twenty years later still has both James and I in tears of laughter.

But these are nostalgic in yet another way. Imagine watching an entire television program that has no "station identification" bug down in one corner during the hour. Or even better, has none of those horrible scrolls on the bottom or "pop-ups" (I recorded Balto III on Cartoon Network the other day and the entire movie was spoilt by these stupid monster pop-ups for some damn fool other thing coming up) advertising what's coming on next. When did our television programs become promos for the next program? Isn't that what the commercial break is for? And as viewers, why do we put up with this crap? I knew there was a reason I had quit watching almost all network TV! The worst you had to put up with in 1982 (or whatever) was the voiceover that drowned out the closing theme song during the credits! And now even that looks good compared to today's shrunken/squeezed credits with some blaring inset for a show you weren't interested in in the first place and now wouldn't watch unless God ordered you to (and then He had better have a good reason...).

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. . . . . noted and logged by Linda at 11:58:00 AM

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