Klasky Csupo brings its fourth ugly cartoon to Nickelodeon, Regis Philbin is out to ruin prime time, the world (and John Hughes) falls in love with Macaulay Culkin, Saved By the Bell kills cartoons, Michael J Fox gets serious, Tarantino kills Hitler, Hugh Grant goes gangster, and one of Robin Williams greatest movies. All that and more this week on Thirty Twenty Ten, your weekly look back on the week that was 30, 20, and 10 years ago.
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Mickey Blue Eyes had one* Kids in the Hall member in it!
Scott Thompson was on eof the two federal agents (who’d later go under cover as a florist)
Let It Ride is about a degenerate gambler who keeps winning. Has anyone here ever been to a race horse track? I’ve seen them in movies all my life but have never actually been to one. I did however go to a casino in the Philippines once that had a little fake mechanical race track. Having ABSOLUTELY no clue about how track gambling worked, I bet on various win conditions with terms I was utterly unfamiliar with and … I won. And I then I made wild guesses about the next race. And I won again. And then I did this “wild ass guess = winning”-thing a couple more times and then my Filipino traveling buddy came up to me, took a look at how I was doing and was flabbergasted. He asked me to tell him my secrets and I said I didn’t even know what the terms I was betting on meant. This displeased him and he then starting telling me what the terms meant and what the smart betting was. I tried to take in this knowledge and use it at which point I then lost half of what I had won so I then decided to call it quits. That was the second, and last, time in my life I recall beginner’s luck being like what I saw in the movies.
Saved by the Bell is an odd beast in that I recall watching it all the time when I was young, and I can recall the characters and locations but when it comes to specific episodes … ERROR! 404 NOT FOUND! Nothing. I can’t remember a single plot or line of dialogue or anything about the show and that holds true even when I watch, as all people should, “Zach Morris is Trash.” I’ll laugh along at the descriptions of what Zach does but nothing in it jogs my memory. Given how often the show was in re-runs I must have seen episodes multiple times but they all failed to leave and impression on me that made them stick. By contrasts, I was watching early season Simpsons at around the same time and despite not re-watching them in over 20 years I still recall a lot about them. My question for the group: Do have a good recall of bad TV shows? For example, I thought He-Man was great, but I can’t remember a thing about those episodes. By contrast, I was watching Gummy Bears at around the same time and I have a few niggling memories of them. So does the mind just have a “goodness” filter for its memory banks?
In regards to Mario Lopez, I have never been able to think of him except through the filter of four Cracked articles published about the man from 2010 to 2011.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/extra21-mario-lopez-has-no-soul21/
https://www.cracked.com/blog/the-monster-inside-mario-lopez-warning/
https://www.cracked.com/blog/trying-to-stop-worlds-greatest-monster-mario-lopez/
Looking back it’s hard to believe how big “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”-fever was. I can recall one convention I went to where some guy, who like me flew hundreds of miles to attend the convention, bowed out of a big event to go back to his room and watch the show because, in his words, “How often do you get to watch someone win a million bucks?” and I honestly think that’s the sole reason it was so big. The format really wasn’t that engaging, they dragged out the show on and one and on, and other than the novelty of choosing to get help on the answers via audience or individual or computer elimination, the format of the show was straight out of 1950’s “Quiz Show.” You were asked questions, you answered them, and the more you answered the more money you got up to the grand prize of a million bucks. And that grand prize is 99% of the reason why I think people turned into the such in such huge numbers and if I recall correctly, the ratings dropped pretty fast once someone actually won it.
The Lot. The TV show about a struggling Hollywood studio in the 1930’s seems to be easily available on YouTube for those who want it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqSs8GuSVEA and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0ho14hqkn0
Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. Is not available to stream on HBO. Why? I’ve encountered this a couple of times with old HBO movies and it kind of baffles me why they didn’t just put their entire film library on their streaming service.
World’s Greatest Dad. I can’t think of the plot of this film without thinking about the Kids in the Hall sketch where one of the Kids tries and fails to commit suicide and the other Kids never read his suicide note because it was super long and boring but can’t stop raving about the suicide note of a different kid who did successfully kill himself.
Good show as always. Thanks for the shout out. I get the concerns about the patreon and the comment show so I was wondering if you’d mind if I put together a fan comment show? Lots of good stuff from the LT community out there but I don’t want to step on any toes.
My friend and I were 12 in 89, and big Weird Al fans, so we were very excited to go see UHF. For some reason it was rated PG13, so his mom wouldn’t let him see it, being only 12 years old it would certainly warp his mind. She did let us go see Uncle Buck instead, which I think has more problematic material to the church going types they were. I guess UHF took some time to roll out to our town, since it came out before Uncle Buck, but I’m sure we tried to go as soon as UHF arrived in town, and settled for Uncle Buck. I saw UHF later by myself, and of course there’s no reason a 12 year old shouldn’t see it.
I know you didn’t talk about it in this episode but MyTV was a channel that popped up as a result of the UPN/WB channel merger. MyTV comes from being bought by FOX which had also bought MySpace. They were trying to turn the brand into a TV channel.
Uncle Buck had _two_ TV shows. There was a revival a couple of summers ago on ABC.
I always like to pretend that the miss bliss universe was Zack and Screetch’s middle school years, in Indiana, and Jessie went to like, private school. Then their dad’s company sent them to California, and Belding’s wife also worked for the company. That’s how they all wound up in CA and left those other kids and met Kelly and Jessie , Lisa and Slater.