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Over the two weeks I spent alone at home (I meant to put this post up ages ago), I somehow got out of the habit of feeling that I constantly had to do anything useful with my life, put game, music and other projects on hold, and got addicted to watching things on TV Links. If you haven't already been there, this is a site that collects links from the recent explosion of web-based video sharing sites and organizes them neatly by series and episode. Not everything is anywhere near complete, but I was still very surprised at the amount of variety already there - it's constantly updated with programmes released by the day as well as having a decent archive of older shows and cartoon series.
Fantastic Four
The first thing I absolutely leapt on when I was it was the version of Fantastic Four that was made in about 1993. Why? Because when CBBC showed it all those years ago they decided to cut it off handily after two episodes of a three-part storyline and I never found out what happened. The cartoon itself wasn't among the absolute classics, but it was decent enough and had a fantastic 80s-style cheesy plot-summarization theme song that people just can't make these days.
What would make it even better is if they had the episodes of Iron Man that went along with them, as that was always my preferred Marvel series - however, they've just got one two-parter from then that cuts out about five minutes before everything is suddenly solved, and a few from the series a year later on when they gave Tony Stark an absolutely tragic mullet.
Sonic-X
After browsing around the Cartoons section I wanted to have a look at this, because I'd watched the other two animated takes on this series when I was about twelve. This Japanese effort wasn't actually terrible - no more embarrassing than, say, Ranma, and it actually made me laugh a few times. (This could be something to do with the other things that I tend to find funny, see below.) The theme music is one of those infuriating cheesy songs like the ones written by Ted Poley that's clearly appalling but remains stuck in your head and will not go away.
Unfortunately, even though the actors have changed over the last ten years and his voice is now mildly less irritating (it's no longer capable of sanding off a layer of the coffee table), my intense dislike of him has not yet subsided and I feel compelled to shout "You complete wanker" at the screen at least twice per episode. There's also the issue that I'm certain one of the baddies was called "Intellihentai". I'm sure that there must be a very good Japanese grammatical reason why that's a legitimate name, but with my limited vocabulary it just lets the imagination run wild.
Tom and Jerry
You must have seen this. Fred Quimby's series (not Chuck Jones, who ruined it) consists of the famous cat and mouse hitting each other with frying pans, fireworks, anvils and various other instruments of pain, and even though we're obviously far too sophisticated for that in Britain, it never stops being amusing. The best bit of the episodes on there at the moment isn't the physical violence, though - rather, the Robin Hood episode complete with voices that represent what the Americans think people from Britain sound like.
QI
In the moments on TV-links when I wasn't trying to relive my all too quickly vanished childhood, this was the main programme that I watched, and I got through a couple of episodes a night. It seemed like an original idea rather than a Have I Got News For You clone like most other panel games at the time, and it started just after I went down to university without access to television. It's often quite funny, but the previously warm and friendly Stephen Fry really does get quite irritating after a few programmes.
Reboot
Now that every single children's cartoon is either rendered in 3D, drawn in an angsty depressed angular fashion or is from Japan, it's difficult to remember why this was so special, but it was the first (I believe) regularly shown computer-rendered series. Clearly taking some inspiration from Tron and sounding like a strange precursor to The Matrix in places, it's a wonder it became so popular - it's undeniably the nerdiest cartoon in the entire world, with computery in-jokes comprising much of the vocabulary of the characters. And the token British villain was voiced by Tony Jay, the man with the voice so incredible that it qualified as a superpower.
Reboot, set in a city called Mainframe, drifted along in a fairly predictable storyline that didn't actually progress much for a while, then the end of the second series came and the writers went mad. After casually destroying the main character, they switched to doing the same kind of thing without him for a while, then decided they were fed up of that too, killed everyone else off and started again with a continuous hunt across entirely different worlds rather than staying in one location all the time. What happened after that is a mystery to me, because like most everything, Britain gave up showing it after a while and we never found out the conclusion.
MST3K
I was first shown MST3K - or, to give it its never-used massively long full title, Mystery Science Theater 3000 - when I was in first year of university. Being my usual open-minded self I predicted that it would just be over-Americanized rubbish like most of the rest of their TV output, but I was genuinely surprised to find that it was actually quite good. A programme about simply adding commentary to an existing film doesn't need a plot, but they put one in anyway, told in the theme song at the beginning of each episode (which is hilarious, by the way), and some of the observations by the characters are genuinely quite witty.
Bagpuss
This wasn't on TV Links, but it fitted in here - someone put up a Youtube video of an episode of Bagpuss from 1974, and watching it nearly made me cry, I promise you. Most Americans think that his name sounds like an obscenity, and even if they get past that it's difficult to explain what was special about a programme that involved talking wooden bookends, singing mice and a toad playing the banjo without sounding like I'd taken a decent quantity of hallucinogenic drugs. This particular episode has a wonderful a capella ragtime performance from the mice at about 3:40 through.
Later on in the video, another talent of the Bagpuss writers emerges - unintentionally writing incredibly creepy songs. I remember two episodes of this programme giving me nightmares, one that had something about the four seasons and another about ears (set to Dvorák's famous Humoresque). This one has a song about a ragdoll. A ragdoll with stitched-up eyes that dances about in a possessed stop-motion voodoo manner that makes it look like it's from a rejected episode of The Twilight Zone. This is all set to the programme's signature haunting sitar/banjo/detuned piano music (I can't decide which it is).
Overall I wasted just about two entire weekends watching all of the above, and I felt rather good for it. With torrents and sites like these springing up, I can genuinely see television as we know it becoming obsolete before too long - why stick to broadcasting something at a set date and time when you can have downloadable content available for viewing at any time? Of course, if it was to be adopted they'd have to put some sort of amazingly intrusive DRM in it that would render it unable to be viewed by anyone, and that's a fairly major obstacle.
Fantastic Four
The first thing I absolutely leapt on when I was it was the version of Fantastic Four that was made in about 1993. Why? Because when CBBC showed it all those years ago they decided to cut it off handily after two episodes of a three-part storyline and I never found out what happened. The cartoon itself wasn't among the absolute classics, but it was decent enough and had a fantastic 80s-style cheesy plot-summarization theme song that people just can't make these days.
What would make it even better is if they had the episodes of Iron Man that went along with them, as that was always my preferred Marvel series - however, they've just got one two-parter from then that cuts out about five minutes before everything is suddenly solved, and a few from the series a year later on when they gave Tony Stark an absolutely tragic mullet.
Sonic-X
After browsing around the Cartoons section I wanted to have a look at this, because I'd watched the other two animated takes on this series when I was about twelve. This Japanese effort wasn't actually terrible - no more embarrassing than, say, Ranma, and it actually made me laugh a few times. (This could be something to do with the other things that I tend to find funny, see below.) The theme music is one of those infuriating cheesy songs like the ones written by Ted Poley that's clearly appalling but remains stuck in your head and will not go away.
Unfortunately, even though the actors have changed over the last ten years and his voice is now mildly less irritating (it's no longer capable of sanding off a layer of the coffee table), my intense dislike of him has not yet subsided and I feel compelled to shout "You complete wanker" at the screen at least twice per episode. There's also the issue that I'm certain one of the baddies was called "Intellihentai". I'm sure that there must be a very good Japanese grammatical reason why that's a legitimate name, but with my limited vocabulary it just lets the imagination run wild.
Tom and Jerry
You must have seen this. Fred Quimby's series (not Chuck Jones, who ruined it) consists of the famous cat and mouse hitting each other with frying pans, fireworks, anvils and various other instruments of pain, and even though we're obviously far too sophisticated for that in Britain, it never stops being amusing. The best bit of the episodes on there at the moment isn't the physical violence, though - rather, the Robin Hood episode complete with voices that represent what the Americans think people from Britain sound like.
QI
In the moments on TV-links when I wasn't trying to relive my all too quickly vanished childhood, this was the main programme that I watched, and I got through a couple of episodes a night. It seemed like an original idea rather than a Have I Got News For You clone like most other panel games at the time, and it started just after I went down to university without access to television. It's often quite funny, but the previously warm and friendly Stephen Fry really does get quite irritating after a few programmes.
Reboot
Now that every single children's cartoon is either rendered in 3D, drawn in an angsty depressed angular fashion or is from Japan, it's difficult to remember why this was so special, but it was the first (I believe) regularly shown computer-rendered series. Clearly taking some inspiration from Tron and sounding like a strange precursor to The Matrix in places, it's a wonder it became so popular - it's undeniably the nerdiest cartoon in the entire world, with computery in-jokes comprising much of the vocabulary of the characters. And the token British villain was voiced by Tony Jay, the man with the voice so incredible that it qualified as a superpower.
Reboot, set in a city called Mainframe, drifted along in a fairly predictable storyline that didn't actually progress much for a while, then the end of the second series came and the writers went mad. After casually destroying the main character, they switched to doing the same kind of thing without him for a while, then decided they were fed up of that too, killed everyone else off and started again with a continuous hunt across entirely different worlds rather than staying in one location all the time. What happened after that is a mystery to me, because like most everything, Britain gave up showing it after a while and we never found out the conclusion.
MST3K
I was first shown MST3K - or, to give it its never-used massively long full title, Mystery Science Theater 3000 - when I was in first year of university. Being my usual open-minded self I predicted that it would just be over-Americanized rubbish like most of the rest of their TV output, but I was genuinely surprised to find that it was actually quite good. A programme about simply adding commentary to an existing film doesn't need a plot, but they put one in anyway, told in the theme song at the beginning of each episode (which is hilarious, by the way), and some of the observations by the characters are genuinely quite witty.
Bagpuss
This wasn't on TV Links, but it fitted in here - someone put up a Youtube video of an episode of Bagpuss from 1974, and watching it nearly made me cry, I promise you. Most Americans think that his name sounds like an obscenity, and even if they get past that it's difficult to explain what was special about a programme that involved talking wooden bookends, singing mice and a toad playing the banjo without sounding like I'd taken a decent quantity of hallucinogenic drugs. This particular episode has a wonderful a capella ragtime performance from the mice at about 3:40 through.
Later on in the video, another talent of the Bagpuss writers emerges - unintentionally writing incredibly creepy songs. I remember two episodes of this programme giving me nightmares, one that had something about the four seasons and another about ears (set to Dvorák's famous Humoresque). This one has a song about a ragdoll. A ragdoll with stitched-up eyes that dances about in a possessed stop-motion voodoo manner that makes it look like it's from a rejected episode of The Twilight Zone. This is all set to the programme's signature haunting sitar/banjo/detuned piano music (I can't decide which it is).
Overall I wasted just about two entire weekends watching all of the above, and I felt rather good for it. With torrents and sites like these springing up, I can genuinely see television as we know it becoming obsolete before too long - why stick to broadcasting something at a set date and time when you can have downloadable content available for viewing at any time? Of course, if it was to be adopted they'd have to put some sort of amazingly intrusive DRM in it that would render it unable to be viewed by anyone, and that's a fairly major obstacle.
