Hola, Sneakers! Welcome to episode 477 of the podcast that never wakes up!
This week: prelude to a Dragon; apology; obscure Canadian chocolate bar attack; shit lit; common-law; cookware consummation; milk money; celebrity farmers; way back; sobriety movies; praise for Betty Thomas; late night destruction; Leno is a weird one; 60% less bullshit; apologies go a long way; all about you; into the frying pan on fire; don’t be arbitrary; wrestling name; back-balled; ¡es futból!; the miracle mile; Columbus day; the new Mrs. Doubtfire; All Creatures Great and Small thoughts; Dark Talk; a sad ending; a happy sad ending; surprise sequel; Muppet bomb; Question of the Week – Sneakers respond; Scott Talk; Star Trek nerds; the SDU; Moonlighting mile; under heavy COVID; and, finally, Q exposed.
Thanks for listening.
Question of the Week: What’s your favourite sport? (Either to watch or to play.)
Sub-question: What is your favourite TV show spin-off?
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My favourite sport to watch is figure skating or patinage artistique as it’s called en français. It’s as much a performing art as a sport. I like to armchair-judge the costumes, music and choreography.
I don’t enjoy sobriety movies per se, but I do like movies which show how substance abuse impairs the protagonist and where you root for them to clean up their act to solve the crime or to save a relationship before it’s too late. Sea of Love with Al Pacino, for example, showed the consequences of being an alcoholic detective. It almost costs him the case and his life. In the end, he’s on the wagon and that’s what gives him a second chance with Ellen Barkin’s character. I liked TV series The Flight Attendant with Kaley Cuoco for the same reason. Clearly she needs rehab, but first she needs to solve a murder and clear her name which is really hard to do when you’re not sober.
Favourite spin-offs: Lou Grant, Trapper John M.D., Frasier, Angel, Private Practice.
I really enjoyed “Sea of Love” too, I thought Pacino and Barkin had some good chemistry in that film. I can remember being blown away with “The Basketball Diaries” with Leonardo DeCaprio. His role as a gifted student on the school basketball team who gets addicted to heroin had an indelible effect on my memory. It’s the rehab that Ernie Hudson puts DeCaprio though that sticks in my mind, a worthy performance that doesn’t glamorize drugs and truly shows what a struggle is like to win over an addiction.
Yes, as I mentioned in last week’s comment, I’m a big baseball fan. My grandfather got me started collecting baseball cards when I was about 8 or 9, and I was a pretty active kid, so I played a little. Unfortunately I had a fear of the ball coming at my face that I could never quite get over, so I never played on a team. Just casual neighborhood games and lots of playing catch with friends or against the garage door (the neighbors must have loved that… I had a good arm and I’d be out there a couple hours every day!). I’m not sure exactly what it is about baseball that appeals to me so much. The pace is very different from most sports, very slow most of the time until REALLY REALLY FAST for a bit, then slow again… but there’s a lot of suspense in the slow parts. And during the 6-month season each team plays just about every day, so it becomes very familiar and routine to turn on a game in the background. The announcers for my favorite team are really fun, too. I still think about maybe joining a local softball league, but between that stupid fear of the ball and some physical issues I have now, it probably wouldn’t work out. Oh well. There’s always catch with friends.
Does Laverne & Shirley count as a spinoff? I think they were on Happy Days a few times to start with and then got their own show, right? I started watching when I was going through my big Spinal Tap phase around 2013, for Lenny & Squiggy (fun fact: Nigel Tufnel appears on the Lenny & Squiggy live album!), but I ended up loving the whole show.
As for Chumbawamba, they really are so ridiculously much more than just Tubthumping, but I’ll restrain myself. ???? If anyone’s actually interested in a playlist of “What? Really?? These are the I Get Knocked Down folks?!”, I’d be happy to provide some links!
I was listening to Chumbawamba only days ago, so please Sarah…provide us with some some links! If they knock me down, I’ll just get up again….
Yay, we have a taker! Now comes the challenge of selecting a reasonable number of representative songs. I’ll put together a YouTube playlist of some of my favorites over the next few days and post a link when it’s ready!
Even though I was terrific shape as a youth, I was never much of a “sporty” kid growing up. I could run, swim and cycle but it was all because I wanted to do it myself, not on a team. I played tennis and golf in high school and college but just as a class, not on a team. I enjoyed both sports with friends and even though I golf badly, I still have fun with it. Dad was a HUGE baseball enthusiast and to this day always has a baseball biography near his chair that he’s reading. Dad raised me watching baseball and being originally from Chicago, we were a Cubs family (White Sox too, depending on if they were in Dallas to play the Texas Rangers). The Cubs were National League, so they didn’t travel down here like they do now, instead Dad and I watched them for years on WGN from Chicago. Whenever we’d go back to visit Chicago in the Summer, we’d try and secure tickets and see the Cubs at Wrigley Field which was truly an experience. You can imagine how happy I was a little over four years ago when the Cubs made it to The World Series and narrowly beat Cleveland in game seven, that was a night I’ll never forget. I was glued to the TV that night and it was glorious as the Cubs finally won their first World Series championship in 108 years. I don’t ever think I was so happy and relieved at the same time, I was crying tears of joy that night my Cubs ended their losing drought.
I also enjoy The Olympics when they’re on, it’s fun to get caught up in all the competitions, both Summer and Winter. Some years are better than others depending on the politics of the teams and athletes going on in the background. I do enjoy seeing the skill that these athletes have spent most of their lives preparing for and I know it’s not an easy life, so I feel like I’m watching an enormous payoff when Olympic athletes are competing.
I’m going to run with something Sarah wrote about above me. I was a “Happy Days” fan as a kid, just like everyone else at school. We’d talk about it first thing in class every Wednesday morning since the show was in the Tuesday evening time slot for years. But did you know “Happy Days” was a spinoff? In 1972, Garry Marshall wrote “Love and The Happy Days” for the anthology series, “Love American Style.” That segment gave birth to the Cunningham Family which along with the popularity of George Lucas’ “American Graffiti” a year later, helped launch “Happy Days.” Technically, maybe Marshall’s segment he wrote for “love American Style” was more of a pseudo pilot but I’ve heard it referred to as the original television show that “Happy Days” was spun-off from, only to produce almost a half dozen more spin-offs in the following years.
All of Dave’s “Dark Shadows” talk has led to me asking my Mom if she watched the show when it was on back during it’s run. She didn’t follow “Dark Shadows” faithfully but watched it for some time before jumping over to another soap opera. Mom was stunned to hear that it was on Tubi and available for free all these years later. I vaguely remember the show myself but being very young at the time I may have seen it while my Mom watched it. My recollection for “Dark Shadows” is mainly from a Milton Bradley game my folks bought me when I was a kid, I could never forget that. I played this game with friends for years, the cover has Barnabas on the box and the game is played by spinning a spinner that lands on a part of a skeleton. Each player has a minature standee in which to hang the skeleton on, the first player to complete an entire skeleton piece by piece wins. All the parts of the game are collected and stored in a plastic coffin too.
The bonus item was a pair of glow-in-the-dark plastic fangs, just like Barnabas! I remember putting them under my pillow to see if the Tooth Fairy would take them…which didn’t happen obviously. Then I distinctly remember wearing the fangs while trying to eat a baloney and mustard sandwich, thinking they would help me eat the sandwich faster. It just made a huge mess and the mustard permanently stained the fangs yellow for as long as I had them. Here’s a link to the game and what it all looked like:
https://doyouremember.com/134088/barnabas-collins-dark-shadows-board-game
My eldest son, Hamish, is a big football fan. That’s PROPER football, you understand – the one you guys call ‘soccer’ (ugh) for some perverse reason. We had some fantastic times going to Dundee United matches together when he was in his teens. There’s something compelling about following a team, getting to know the different personalities and riding the ups and downs through the arc of a season with them. Also, a great game delivers dramatic tension and emotional payoffs that can put many movies to shame.
What I really have no time for is nationalism in sport. I enjoy the World Cup, but purely for the quality of the matches, and have no interest in which country any particular team or player comes from. I guess that could change if Scotland ever wins a major trophy, although when that happens I’ll probably be too distracted by all the flying pigs…
I’m with Louise on best spin-offs – Frasier and Lou Grant were the first that came to mind. Rhoda was pretty good too, for a while. Of course, some folk reckon The Prisoner was a sequel to Danger Man / Secret Agent, but I say phooey to that!
Allow me to suggest a “Question of the Week” for the next podcast. Having discussed the dawn of electronic games like Merlin and Simon recently, what traditional do you remember playing before the electronic games became popular? Did you grow up playing board games or cards with your family or friends? Which ones were your favorites or least favorite? Which board games are considered classics, like chess which is making a big comeback. I thought of this after researching the “Dark Shadows” game I posted about earlier. I thought most everyone here is old enough to remember playing traditional board games before the arrival of electronic/digital games and I was wondering what memories my fellow Sneakers had of those.