Pop Culture Petri Dish

Rita and I spent this Friday night watching All the President's Men , the excellent 1976 drama detailing the efforts of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to uncover the Watergate scandal. Woodward and Bernstein were bottom-rung reporters at the Washington Post who started out covering a simple burglary at a Washington D.C. hotel, and ended up unpeeling layer upon layer of a conspiracy that eventually brought down President Richard Nixon. The movie's a riveting view--crackling Hollywood filmmaking seamlessly working hand-in-hand with a profound sense of social conscience--and, ironically enough, exactly what I was watching when news came through the wire that respected news anchor Walter Cronkite passed away at age 92 . Cronkite exhibited the purity of journalism exhibited by Woodward and Bernstein, but on a much more sustained level. He started out as a World War II correspondent, vaulting into the middle of action in the North Atlantic. By the time he retired from the ...

How strange and ironic that two of the pop culture firmament's most massive figures should pass away within 24 hours of one another. Farrah Fawcett (who died at age 62 after a long battle with cancer) wasn't just a TV star: She became one of the most enduring physical archetypes of the 20th Century, her decade's equivalent of Betty Grable , Marilyn Monroe, or Madonna; someone whose distinctive look continues to have ripple effects on fashion and beauty perception well into the new-ish millenium. I don't think it'd be difficult to convey the impact she's had to a kid of this generation: Hell, just open up any magazine or turn on a TV set. Some variation of Farrah will surely emerge from the page/screen--that California-girl smile, that trim and tan figure, and most importantly that exquisite mass of feathered blonde hair have all found replication amongst too many of today's actresses and models. When I was nine years old and just beginning to recognize the s...

You were completely and totally into me, and I into you. I know that now. And that thought, that fleeting instant of magical chemistry, consoles me as I think of your voice being silenced forever. We met a decade ago, but the night reverberates in me with the heady urgency of the last breath that just escaped my lips. I waited for you jadedly, with no more expectation than mere entertainment--just the amiable passage of an hour or two passively listening to you. But you elegantly strode out and bewitched me and everyone else in that dimly-lit little class-A joint. Cheekbones so haughtily elegant and defined that they could cut diamonds; gams too perfect to have any right gracing the body of a 35-year old, never mind that of a septuagenarian; hourglass figure poured into a gold lamé dress by God in one of his most continental moods...That utterly unique and enchanting package alone was enough to have the whole lot of us eating out of your hand that night. Then you opened your mouth and ...

For decades, Robert Goulet was Mr. Perfect. With his old-showbiz helmet of pompadored black hair, bright blue eyes, chiseled jawline, and bell-clear baritone speaking/singing voice, Goulet (who died on October 30 at age 73 ) was less a traditional leading man than a larger-than-life cartoon of that leading man, and to his eternal credit he always seemed as keenly aware of it as anybody. He rose to prominence as the stage's first (and I'd argue, definitive) Sir Lancelot in Lerner and Lowe's monster hit musical Camelot in 1959. That voice and those features--both strong and distinctive enough to clearly communicate to the back rows of the most packed houses on Broadway--ensured him frequent employ on the musical stage, most recently in 2005 for a revival of La Cage aux Folles . But Robert Goulet became celebrity comfort food of the most welcome variety for me (and many of my generation) on TV in the seventies and eighties, logging in scores of talk-show appearances and gues...

Just thought I'd offer a quick shout-out about Reaper , the newest horror-comedy alloy hitting the television airwaves. Reaper follows the adventures of Sam (Bret Oliver), a directionless high-school grad who's blown off college in favor of a dead-end job at a Home Depot knockoff store, The Work Bench. He gets one helluva surprise for his 21st birthday, though, when his parents reveal that they sold his soul to the Devil before he was born. Rather than pack up Sam and haul him to the Nether Reaches, Mephistopheles (Ray Wise) consigns the kid to spend the rest of his days hunting down--and sending back--souls that've escaped from Hell. So the show's central schtick consists of each of these renegade souls manifesting themselves in especially potent demonic tangible form on earth, and Sam being given a Vessel of Soul Collection (in the pilot, it was a Dust Buster) that he's gotta use to collect the Demon of the Week. Then the reluctant reaper drops said freshly-acqui...

It'll come as no surprise to regular Dish visitors that the mighty Tom Jones can do no wrong in these parts. So the arrival on region 1 DVD of This is Tom Jones: Rock 'n' Roll Legends , a three disc set of episodes of Jones' 1969-1971 variety show, is like a spike of pure China white for anyone with a Jones jones. The series came at a key point in the God of Pump's career. He'd already established himself as a proven hitmaker with three worldwide chart-toppers ("It's Not Unusual", "What's New, Pussycat?", and "Delilah") by the time the show debuted, and it remained to be seen if he'd be accepted into American and British living rooms as a TV star. Both sides of the pond responded enthusiastically in the affirmative, and it's easy to see why from the evidence at hand. This is Tom Jones skewed closely to the traditional variety-show format of the day, giving the TV audience what it wanted (musical acts and comics as...

I was getting ready to go to work this grey Saturday morning and did some channel surfing in the hopes of finding some good old-fashioned cheesy kid's programming. After flitting through the obligatory infomercials and Pokemon cartoons, I settled on the Trinity Broadcasting Network for said fix. And (bad pun alert!) thank God I did. I'd known about Bibleman , the children's series starring former Eight is Enough/Charles in Charge star Willie Aames, for a few years, but finally got to watch an episode today. The show's a dual knockoff of the '60's Batman series, and The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers . Aames plays the title character, a former millionaire who finds Jesus and decides to become a superhero. Bibleman runs around in plastic body armor and tights (extremely reminiscent of Shaquille O'Neil's superhero garb in that action classic, Steel ), waves a lightsaber, and quotes the bible with monotonous regularity. His sidekicks, Biblegirl and Cypher, ...