Videology

Some random observations about stuff I watched on the tube:

Because he performed so strongly on Fox's "The Great American Celebrity Spelling Bee," I newly admire Alan Thicke. Before, I had been decidedly Thicke-neutral, mostly because I knew him primarily for his work on the not-bad, not-great sitcom "Growing Pains." But on "Spelling Bee," he spelled with confidence, with aplomb, with �lan. Good spelling is important to me.

Over the last few weeks I watched "The Beatles Anthology," the 10-hour documentary miniseries about the Fab Four. I was familiar with a lot of the Beatles' story already, but "Anthology" has much terrific, vintage material I had never heard or seen. More than that, the 1990s interviews with George Harrison, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are wonderful--sometimes revelatory, always engaging. But I'm left feeling sad about Harrison, who in 2001 died at 58 of lung and brain cancer. I found myself cringing as I watched one of the many interviews in "Anthology" in which the Beatles are seen smoking like chimneys.

This weekend Ereck and I watched a couple of episodes of "Land of the Lost," the 1970s kids' series. A recent New York Times article hyped the show and its creators, Sid and Marty Krofft, and I vividly remembered--well, if not the show, then at least my enjoying the show. So we got a tape from the library, and here are my impressions: the Earl-Scruggs-meets-Robert-Moog theme song is the best part, and the incidental music and end-title song also are very fine. I love the sets, and seeing them again was like visiting one of my childhood homes. And the special effects are enjoyable, a vivid if low-budget mix of stop-action photography, painting, puppetry and blue-screen work. But the acting is just terrible, and despite the fact that prominent sci-fi writers like Ben Bova and Larry Niven worked on the series, the writing in the episodes we saw was pretty wretched. Oh well. Perhaps some memories are better left on the library shelf.