The Website of Author Jim Berkin
Dhruv Gaur, a freshman at my alma mater of Brown University, won this year’s Jeopardy College Championship.
FUCK YEAH, BRUNONIA!
Congrats, kid! You’re the first thing in FAR too many years to make me proud of my college instead of embarrassed for it.
He won $100,000, which ought to cover nearly a whole semester of classes these days.
Franz & Jurasik were brilliant together.
It “wasn’t tea with the freakin’ queen,” but it was entertaining.
God’ll get you for that, Wagstaff.
Every Saturday afternoon from the old Channel 56 outta Boston.
Amazing how many clips in that montage I immediately recognize, and how many are from films I’ve seen. Gawd.
The best line up of stars until Robert Evans’ community service “Get High On Yourself,” I would say.
Arguably the stupidest episode of “Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea,” which is saying something.
And that something is that it’s GREAT!
Enjoy some silly TV from yesteryear.
In case yer curious: I came across this while searching out old Walter Pidgeon material. He starred in the film the series was based on, and the surfin’ went from there.
They added a new channel to my satellite, another one of the “let’s run everything in the library” old TV rerun stations.
In other words, something else I’ll be wasting time on. This one runs EVERY version of Star Trek EVERY GOD DAMN NIGHT!!!
They even run the Star Trek Saturday morning cartoon on Sunday nights! The animation is Space Ghost Coast To Coast level, but the scripts are pretty good, and lots of ’em are by original series writers.
“Heroes And Idols” also runs a ton of old cop shows and westerns, albeit during the day when I WORK FOR A LIVING, FELLA. But it’s nice to sporadically watch old reruns of Hill Street Blues again. The show manages to hold up & give me ’80s nostalgia all at once.
“Family Entertainment TV” is another one I found. They run Hart To Hart & TJ Hooker up the wazoo, along with Maude reruns, but they also run Barney Miller & Peter Gunn.
“MeTV” rounds out the pack, maintaining my Rifleman and Hawaii 5-0 interest. They’re putting all of their better sitcoms, now relegated to a late-night Sunday junkyard, into the vault, alas. I’m hoping they rotate stuff they own like Dick Van Dyke, all the MTM ’70s shows, Bilko, The Honeymooners, Get Smart and The Odd Couple into their prime time slate and finally put Andy Griffith and Hogan’s Heroes to bed for a while.
Yes, this is what I spend my time thinking about.
I’d like to see them add Antenna TV and Decades to pretty much take care of all the other old crap I like being put back on, although for the life of me, I have no idea who owns “Burke’s Law,” a marvelous bit of 1960s Madmen-era silly detective cool that’d actually make a great pairing with Peter Gunn. The episodes posted on youtube will have to suffice.
I realize we’re living in what can be accurately called a new golden age of TV, with upper-end shows like The Americans, Game of Thrones, Curb Your Enthusiasm and so forth being produced with cinematic quality, and writing/character development far superior than most feature films.
But I’ll never get tired of watching those old shows. They retain their honor and glory. Just ask Commander Kor. (Or wait a few years for him to be Baltar.)
Perhaps while surfing online, you’ve come across some amazingly campy magazine cover, or album cover, maybe it was a pulp book from a long-ago celeb and couldn’t believe it existed…
Well, that’s because it probably doesn’t, except in the work of graphic artist Cris Shapan.
I highly recommend following Shapan’s Facebook Page where he regularly posts this stuff, as well as his Funny Or Die page.
The style of humor reminds me a lot of Drew Friedman, who loves to pick out his favorite childhood celebrities and illustrate them all too realistically in bizarre settings. Check out “Jimmy Durante Boffs Young Starlets” for example.
I’m surprised he doesn’t maintain some sort of regular website containing all this stuff, it looks like he’s content to use Facebook. My other theory is that this guy clearly gets his jollies posting this stuff & then kicking back to watch people repost it thinking it’s real. Shapan’s handle on the recognizable & realistic graphic designs of the stuff he’s goofing on from yesteryear is amazing. The colors, fonts, details of wear & tear, etc. are absolutely wonderful. Look at the wax paper lighting effects on that Avery Schreiber bubble gum pack (I wish I had one of those!) giving it real texture and depth. Great stuff.
Nice to see he gets work in Hollywood, hopefully they’ll let him apply his comedy genius somewhere.
“They don’t write like that anymore…” – Greg Kihn
UPDATE:
Welcome to all the B3TA people who found this post on your board!
Feel free to look around the rest of this blog. Check out the topic menu. Or just keep scrolling & enjoy. Lots of film & TV articles on everything from film noir to Punk Rock Quincy to The Oscar, cat pictures, stupid jokes, you name it.
And MOST DEFINITELY click on the “Buy My Books” tab and check out my comic detective novels on Amazon. Help feed me, or so help me God, I’ll summon the spirits of Karl Malden and George Kennedy to wreck YOUR toilet. You’ve been warned.
Wait, so is YoYo the SECRET LOVE CHILD of Steve Austin & Jamie Summers? I must have missed that very special episode.
Or are Holmes & Yoyo the opposing candidates in the Presidential debate to follow?
Not sure who I’d vote for. Is Hello Larry running as a third party candidate? America should have a choice.
Jim Berkin 