saturday evening with mr. t...

this week i'm going to post something he wrote in an e-mail last year , concerning one of his favorite subjects , "voyage to the bottom of the sea"...

"Well I've watched all the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea black and white
first year episodes (lots of spy versus spy cold war stuff, mixed with deep sea
monsters -really TUFF STUFF). They're issuing the first wave (sorry, bad pun
from the sea) of the 2nd season Oct. 7. Can't wait to see those, especially the
phoney effects like the giant whale two guys go inside of - looks like an
inflatible "moon walk" jump around thing kids would play in (the kind you see at
carnivals etc.). Oh Boy! I love nostalgic fantasy escapes from every day boredom
and work bullcrap.

Yes everything in life is bullcrap, truckloads, so why not? (I can see
us two with a beer in our hand each and a bowl of pop corn watching this show
together and making constant wisecracks about the effects, how gullible we were
as kids, how much overacting there is, and hiding behind the couch acreaming
[after 6 beers] when the glowing blob comes into the picture, or the spouse
yells from upstairs "What the hell are you watching?! Turn that down!" Also not
being able to distinguish between the glowing blob and the spouse at that
point).

Phoney effects? All special effects, of course, are phoney,
computerized or not. Even the computers are phoney in the show of course and you
see old reel to reel tape recorders, no cassettes except once (boy, aren't we
getting fancy and up to date in that episode). But of course no one except our
generation would understand the perspective of the times that that there were no
microchip computers, hardware-software crap, cell phones, ipods, downloads
(except in the toilet), CD's, DVD's (all film and video tape back then), and
Colr TV's were very expensive. We finally got a color TV around 1969 I think,
and had that sucker until 1978! It finally crapped out after ten years. Now, you
buy a TV and it craps out after 5 - o'clock. All you can get at night on TV is
crap anyway, and it's not much better during the day (JUDGE JUDY mud wrestles
Maury Povich or something............)"