Please leave a comment with your choice for Lame Idiot of 2010!!!
In this episode:
- Rob dreams of a sequel to Dutch starring Ed O’Neill,
- credit card schemes and credit scores,
- actor and comedian Tom Wilson’s funny “The Question Song,”
- Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) starring Dick Van Dyke,
- celebrity deaths (Irwin Kirshner, Dino De Laurentiis, Barbara Billingsley, Kevin McCarthy, and Leslie Nielsen),
- remembering the good and bad movies of Leslie Nielsen,
- Whatever Happened To? (Harry Anderson),
- the retirement (finally) of Larry King,
- Stan Lee rambling on and on with Twitter tweets,
- our culinary review of burger joints (Five Guys, Smash Burger, Elevation Burger),
- our deli review of sandwich shops (Quiznos, Subway, Blimpie),
- factory farming,
- new age and expensive “breadshops” (Panera Bread, Atlanta Bread Co., Saladworks),
- the fall of Howard Stern,
- Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (2011) trailer,
- nominees for Lame Idiot of the Year,
- and new Mike Massé cover songs: “Africa” by Toto, “In the Name of Love” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” by U2, and “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” by John Lennon.
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I have a cousin in her mid twenties who told me she cried when she heard Irving Kershner died. If there’s a mental equivalent of a spit take then that’s what happened in my head. I thought-Whoa, what’s going on here? Who cries over the guy who directed the dullest Star Wars movie ever?
Now Dino De Laurentis-there’s a guy whose passing had me deeply depressed. There’s a guy whose death is worthy of inspiring suicidal thoughts. Man, the way that little lion logo of his silently rose up the screen in the opening moments of the ’86 Transformers movie inspired such awe. It was probably the smoothest animation in the whole movie. I still to this day have no idea what he did for a living but that logo of his was epic. Very classy and stylish.
Thanks for showing me Stan Lee’s Twitter. The Generalissimo shtick is hilarious. Today he promoted his Twitter followers to various made up ranks in his army based on how long they’ve been reading his insane ramblings. “Your beloved Generalissimo has devised a plan, as is his wont. Henceforth, we shall eschew the usual military ranks and create our own!” The man is a genius!
Lame idiots of the year for me are kind of hard to pick. Now that Michael Jackson’s dead there’s a big void. I’d say Iron Maiden for the horrible album they put out, except that I bought it so I don’t know who’s lamer-them or me. I know one guy who disappointed me was that “Barefoot Bandit” kid who for a couple years went on a crime spree and hijacked all sorts of airplanes without pilot training. He ran from the police in the Pacific Northwest and lived in the woods without any formal survival training. He was real impressive until they caught him in June off the coast of Florida in a boat and he tried to kill himself. He could have faced the end of the chase with more dignity. I imagine once he’s out of jail he’ll have a book and movie deal, so why kill himself? Lame.
Also I’d nominate as a lame idiot everyone who thinks your Steven Segal and Sean Connery blog posts are actually being read by Steven Segal and Sean Connery.
So the Barefoot Bandit is sort of like Leonardo DiCaprio in that hideous Spielberg movie Catch Me If You Can? Except he’s dirty and slimy.
You know, speaking of Star Wars, I finally popped open one of my 2006-DVD with the “bonus disc” containing the laser disc version. Dropped it in the PS2 and did a Wide Zoom and watched most of Return of the Jedi last night. It was so nice to be greeted with the original music and even effects.
Yeah, that kid built up a huge internet following from being a criminal and hurting small businesses. He had hundreds of Facebook devotees and a cult following who worshiped him thinking he’s Robin Hood. People are idiots.
What really gets me about those Star Wars DVD releases is that sticker on the package that said “LIMITED TIME ONLY” and then they’ve been out going on 5 years now. I guess anything short of eternity is a limited time, but they’ve been in print so long that they make “limited” meaningless. I should have nominated myself for lame idiot of the year for buying those when they came out and thinking it was a big deal. If they would have been out on DVD in the late 90s as baby Jesus intended their value today would be somewhere between 99 cent movie rental and awesome cereal box premium. But Lucas really milked it and waited and like a sucker I fell for it.
Sort of like Disney constantly putting their movies back into the “vault?” I doubt that they’re still printing those DVD’s of Star Wars, there was just THAT much stock that they had left over. Frankly, without special packaging, the only people who bought those 2006 editions were people like me, who are incensed by Lucas’s molesting of the original movies.
Well I know the Star Wars DVDs we’ve been seeing on the shelves in the 2 disc sets are the same ones in the trilogy DVD box sets that have been out since 2008 so they’ve been repackaged at least once. It’s gotta be separate print runs. I can’t believe they’d commit so huge an error and make a billion DVDs nobody wants. If the DVDs on the shelves for the last 4 years were the result of a massive overproduction then they should be in the 5 dollar bins! Why doesn’t Lucasfilm want to see Star Wars in the discount DVDs where it belongs?
Disney’s another good lame idiot nominee for not making the original Tron available during the movie hype. I guess they’re expecting the lack of original Tron will whip anticipation up into a frenzy but I think they’re overestimating the demand that’ll exist for original Tron in the future. They should have struck while the iron was hot.
Esteban, I remember vividly seeing Transformers: The Movie in the theater in 1986 and the lion logo at the beginning. I was disappointed that the F.H.E. and Rhino VHS releases didn’t have that and was happy when I saw it at the beginning of the Sony 25th anniversary DVD version. Rhino always finds a way to screw something up, even if it’s something little like that.
Also, I think it was smart of Disney to *not* promote the original Tron on DVD. If people watched it, they’d avoid the sequel like the plague. I doubt I’ll ever see either movie, but supposedly the sequel is better.
I thought I was the only guy left who hadn’t seen the original Tron! I should have known I could count on you to have missed yet another gigantic cultural cinematic milestone. I don’t feel so left out now. I might be misremembering things but even when I was a kid I thought the majority of people didn’t like Tron or its special effects. That was part of the reason Tron Guy was so funny to me-he had such a huge obsession with an obscure movie that wasn’t all that popular even when it came out. He was like the only Tron fan. Now they’re everywhere and I wonder where they came from.
Hey speaking of Transformers, I just saw a Transformer from the new movie that turns into a Nascar car and get this-the robot has a mullet!
That mullet Transformer also looks like it has corn rows on top. I know many Transformers have had ethnic voices, but is this the first ethnic-*looking* one? Is this a milestone for Hasbro?
I agree about the original Tron. It was a lame movie that nobody ever cared about. I admit I’ve always been intrigued by the special effects, especially considering the movie released in 1982, but it looks so insanely boring that I could never bring myself to watch it. And the premise is stupid. A guy gets sucked into a computer or a printer or something dumb like that.
I never cared about the video games that were released for it either.
The problem with the games released for the Atari 2600 and Intellivision were one, they were created by Mattel, and second, the concepts were too advanced for those systems. The original Tron arcade game was very cool I thought, and took a lot of skill to play.
Personally I always liked the original Tron, I’ll explain on the next episode probably while defending it against Decepticon Rob.
I have seen the NASCAR transformers from the third hunk of monkey crap, aka Michael Bay movie. I’m actually looking forward to the movie just so I can laugh my ass off at it.
If the associated hype doesn’t grab me I’m more likely to side with someone who dislikes a movie and hasn’t seen it than someone who has seen that same movie and loves it. I guess that’s why a good trailer is important. The original Tron threw me when I saw its trailer and the guy kind of leaned back in his seat and the lasers scanned him into the computer while he was sitting at his desk. It looked cheesy even back then. It was probably too high concept of a film for the technology of the time. I think the new movie deserves a chance because they can do anything with special effects nowadays but it would have been even more impressive if i could watch the first Tron to have an appreciation for how far they’ve come. Not going to watch the new one because the old one looked bad shouldn’t be the reason people pass up the new one. They should hate it on its own merits.
The original Tron has a cult following, it doesn’t have a large following though. It did things with computer graphics never seen before. I just think of what they did in 1982, and then what was attempted, and resulted in laughingly bad animation, in movies like The Lawnmower Man 10 years later! I really like the new one, it’s one of the first modern 3D movies I liked. Much better than the other garbage in theaters now and soon. Just wait until people see the ridiculous CGI used in The Green Lantern.
I must say that the new Tron was a very good movie and the 3D was very well done! As for the new Transformers movie… do I really need to say anything?
Can you imagine if Michael Bay directed Tron?
tom wilson is multi-talented. have you seen his art? he paints toys from the 60’s / 70’s akin to how robert burden does the same for the 80’s. really simple work, but so striking. so upset at the passing of leslie nielsen. as teenagers, my mates and i used to imitate him loudly slurping milkshakes like he did in ‘police squad’; i’m sure actual mature people found it annoying. i don’t do that now… honest…