Entertainment

I am looking forward to Monday. I don’t think I am going to do anything except to sleep in and watch the shows that I have missed the last few weeks. There are several episodes of 24, Lost, and Battlestar Galactica that I have recorded but refrained from watching.

The wife and I generally watch Lost and Battlestar together so I will refrain from watching them right way, but I will watch 24. She doesn’t particularly care one way or the other about that.

One of my guilty pleasures the last couple of years has been watching ’24’. I started watching at the end of season three and really enjoyed it. When the new season started recently I made sure to watch it every Monday night, but then I ended up working and missed a few. I haven’t seen anything since the first couple of shows this season. Luckily for me I have been recording it with BeyondTV every week in addition to getting spoilers from Denny.

That may be the first thing that I do when I start my vacation this next week. I have eight hours of 24 sitting on my hard drive just waiting to be watched. If I cut out the 20 minutes of commercials in each episode that’s only about five and a half hours of actual watching time. A pot of coffee and a couple of beers later I should be well up to date on everything that I have missed.

The adventures of James Bond have held my captivation for years. The books by Ian Fleming, that is. I enjoy the movies just as much as the next guy but long before I ever had the opportunity to watch Sean Connery on screen (or TV) I read the books. I was introduced to Ian Fleming around the time I was eight-years-old. That may seem a bit young, but I have been an avid reader since I was about four, and the rule in the house was that if I was old enough to understand it and look in the dictionary, I could read it. The first one I ever read was Casino Royale and boy was I hooked.

When I was ten or so, I read ‘James Bond: The Authorised Biography of 007’ by John Pearson. Being extremely gullible and only ten, I was convinced that it was a real biography. The premise of the book is that he was real, and Ian Fleming met him and modeled 007 after a real spy. It was always fiction and never meant to be more than that, but tell that to a ten-year-old. Most Ian Fleming fans I know consider this book to be part of the official series as well.

In 1981 John Gardner took up the James Bond mantle. I read the first couple he wrote (he penned 16 in all I think) and perhaps the third, but I gave up on his writing after that. James Bond under the hand of John Gardner became a shadow of himself. He pussified Bond, just like most of the movies did. Smoked light cigarettes. Cut down drinking. Started driving a sensible Saab. As we get older these are all sensible things to do, but James Bond is a fictional character and the books sort of ruined themselves for me.

I think that the biggest thing that I really liked about Ian Fleming’s Bond is the same thing that made me hate Gardners. I like pulp fiction. Hard boiled detectives. My father made me wait until I was a teenager for them, but Richard Prather’s Shell Scott books are along the same vein. Short easy reads full of action, killing, and titties. Maybe with a bit of gambling and dead Russians and Frenchmen to boot. John Gardner ‘novelized’ Bond. I don’t mean that Ian Fleming didn’t write novels, but I mean that he wrote pulp fiction in the same vein as Prather, Mickey Spillane, and maybe even Dashiell Hammett.

I miss books like that. Strangely enough Stephen King writes the same way, just in a different genre. Pulp Horror Fiction I guess you could call it. That may be why I like him so much.

So anyway, what got me thinking about James Bond is that the Boy and I watched Casino Royale last night. It kicked some serious ass. It was a stretch to fit the story into modern events, and they only partially succeeded, but the movie itself was true to the Bond character. Much more so than the other movies. Somewhere around here I have the original Casino Royale with Peter Sellers and David Niven, and it is no farther away from the Bond character than the flicks with Sean Connery and Roger Moore. The only reason I don’t mention the other actors is because I can’t pull their names out of my ass right at this moment.

Not that I don’t enjoy the movies, I just don’t equate them with the books as much as I did this one. The early ones with Connery came closest, but there is still quite a bit of artistic license with them, particularly the later ones.

If you like Ian Fleming’s James Bond then I would definitely recommend renting Casino Royale, but be prepared for the cold bastard that is in the books.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Perri Nelson’s Website, The Random Yak, Adam’s Blog, basil’s blog, Pursuing Holiness, Rightlinx, Right Celebrity, third world county, Faultline USA, stikNstein… has no mercy, stikNstein… has no mercy, The World According to Carl, Pirate’s Cove, Planck’s Constant, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe

Technorati : Casino Royale, Ian Fleming, James Bond

…but damned if the commercial ain’t funny as hell…

Been there. Done that. Slunk away like a dog.

The latest Postie Carnival is up over at Simple Kind of Life and this weeks theme…Television!

There are some really good posts up, including a few bloggers that had a bit of television experience themselves. Head over and check it out.

Television is like a historical time-line for most of us now. I grew up with television as did most Americans, and can plot my ages and other events along that time-line.

Back when I was small of course, it wasn’t so important, and a lot of what I watched was syndicated stuff that had already been on for twenty years. There are only a few shows that I remember from my early childhood. Anyone remember Romper Room? That crazy lady with the mirror? I don’t remember a heck of a lot about it, but it is still in my head somewhere. Of course Sesame Street, Captain Kangaroo, and Mr Rogers were all part of it. Mr Rogers is dead, as is Captain Kangaroo. Sesame Street of course, is STILL on after all of these years. The people are all different and there are some new Muppet’s on there.

During the first couple of years of elementary school my after school staples were of course, old cartoons and the Mickey Mouse Club. The syndicated black and white version with Annette and the gang, not that crap they put on in the eighties. I remember the serials that were on there. Tripods, the Boy Scouts thing, and a couple of others. I watched them on a crappy old UHF channel local to Atlanta, channel 17. Owned and operated by Ted Turner himself. We all know about WTBS, and then CNN and what happened next. When I was young they showed the Friday Night Frights, horror movies. Man, I loved those.

In the seventies and early eighties it was all about sitcoms. My brother and I would watch TV with our parents from seven in the evening until bedtime. Occasionally we got to stay up late. Happy Days, Welcome Back Kotter, McMillan & Wife, Laverne & Shirley, Three’s Company,WKRP in Cincinnati. BJ and the Bear, the Dukes of Hazzard. My little brother and I were glued to the damn thing in the evenings.

Also back in the eighties came the show that changed everything. Miami Vice. Man, Crockett and Tubbs kicked ass. I was in my mid teens when that came out, and by the time the series had evolved and had finished I had been through my dark drug induced days, spent six months in a treatment center and come out the other side. I still like watching Miami Vice on cable occasionally. The A-Team, Dallas, Little House on the Prairie, Facts of Life, Mork from Ork were all staples. Knight Rider was big as was Night Court. Magnum P.I. was also one of my favorites. My mom and I watched this one.

In the mid eighties I did watch too much TV at all. I hung with my friends and had a good time. By the time I started watching it again, I was 20 and married and my son was on his way. I was managing restaurants and that took up a lot of time but I remember living in a little apartment in Atlanta and my wife and I lying in bed watching the X-Files until I had to go in to oversee shift change. Want some 80’s TV trivia? There are 197 questions below the fold to check out. The answers will be underneath.

By the time the late nineties rolled around I had spent a couple of years in college, was back in restaurant management for the second time, and had another child on the way. Still watching the X-Files and a new addition for awhile, Millennium. I still like Millennium so much that I rented the DVDs for all three seasons recently. We watched a lot of the USA Network. Reruns of Miami Vice and the Hitchhiker. Lots of made for cable movies with Brian Dennehy playing spies and cops. By this time we had a VCR and I record the stuff that I really wanted to watch but might be at work when it came on.

Now that we are in a new millennium for real, my TV watching habits have changed immensely. I only watch TV every once in a while and it is on my schedule. I have three TV tuners in my computer and BeyondTV records movies and shows that I want to watch. I cut the commercials out and shrink them down to a decent size and watch when I want. I keep the ones that I like and delete the rest. Lost, 24, Grey’s Anatomy, Battlestar Galactica, and the Sopranos are the shows I watch. Jericho is also cool. Last year I really like Invasion, but they unfortunately pulled that one. I also loved Farscape and have every episode on my hard drive along with the mini-series that finished it out after the show was canceled. Night Stalker was on for awhile last year or the year before, a remake of the show from the 1960’s and very well done. I downloaded them from iTunes last year, along with the first season of Dora the Explorer for my four year old, who loves Dora and Diego.

Even though the medium has changed over the years it still stays the same. Entertaining, riveting, well created shows spark my interest and keep me watching and I ignore the rest.

Oh, BTW, can’t forget about my secret love from the early and mid seventies. Many and evening was spent with my little brother and I pretending we were Moondog or Mr Wrestling #2 and kicking each others butts. You guys know what I am talking about.

What shows did you watch growing up and what do you watch now?

This is my open trackback post for the rest of the weekend of March 16th-18th as well as my submission for the Carnival of Posties for March 19th.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson’s Website, Blog @ MoreWhat.com, The Virtuous Republic, 123beta, Adam’s Blog, Maggie’s Notebook, basil’s blog, Stuck On Stupid, The Bullwinkle Blog, Phastidio.net, The Amboy Times, Leaning Straight Up, Jo’s Cafe, Conservative Thoughts, Sujet- Celebrities, Rightlinx, third world county, Faultline USA, Right Celebrity, Woman Honor Thyself, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, , stikNstein… has no mercy, The World According to Carl, Blue Star Chronicles, Overtaken by Events, Pirate’s Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Dumb Ox Daily News, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

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