logan's run

For the past few years now I've been purposely seeking out movies I saw in my teens or younger years and re-watching them. Many of these were sci-fi flicks where as a kid I had absolutely no clue what was going on in the movie, but watched it anyway. One of these flicks was Logan's Run.

Movies like this were shown back in the day where broadcast television (as in NBC, CBS and ABC) would periodically run a sci-fi movie during the summer. They were shown to fill time before the new fall season was introduced because, well, they had to kill time somehow. You have to bear in mind this was well before cable was a standard thing in most households. People back then watched broadcast TV because there was nothing else on unless you wanted to run to the video store and rent a movie on VHS.

Any feature film that was shown on broadcast television during the summer was "Edited for Television", meaning significant amounts of the movie were cut out in order to fill a standard two-hour time slot. Remember, for every 30 minutes of TV time there are 8 minutes of commercials, meaning a two-hour show had just under 90 minutes to show the whole thing. If the movie ran over that (which this movie does from its runtime of 119 minutes), huge chunks of the flick are cut out when put to television. This usually results in missing out on things important to the movie, like, y'know, plot points.

Anyway..

I watched Logan's Run as a kid on broadcast TV. Like I said above, I had absolutely no clue what was going on when watching it originally. None at all. For many years I had made a point to watch the movie again just to at least get what the hell the story was about.

Well, that time finally came. I re-watched Logan's Run.

This movie sucks.

Before I get into why it sucks, it's important to note that this sci-fi flick is pre-Star Wars era. LR was released in June 1976; Star Wars in May 1977. In other words, LR was the best you could get for sci-fi at the time.

LR is so dated it's not funny. It screams "I WAS MADE IN THE '70s" all over the place. Outfits, haircuts, super-cheesy synthesizer music and effects, crappy miniatures (it's so obvious the dome cities were models it wasn't even funny), you name it, it's total crap.

The cheesiest effect in LR are the guns that the Sandman characters use. When they shoot the gun, nothing comes out of them to hit the target. A crappy 1/2-inch butane flame comes out, then whoever is getting shot just has a small firework explosive explode. There is no ray from the gun to whoever is getting hit, nor is there any projectile. Cheeeeeeeesy.

The second cheesiest effect is that robot thing in the ice cave...

When I saw that I thought, "You have GOT to be kidding me..."

As far as the storyline is concerned, it's disjointed as hell. Yes, I could follow along with it enough to understand what was going on - but that didn't help making LR believable at all because the flow is completely off, and the flick is just plain weird.

What I mean by weird is that there is simply not enough explanation as to why people act the way they do - particularly Logan, the main character. He simply does not have a good reason to run at all.

The biggest flaws in this movie are right at the end - and I'm about to spoil the whole movie for you but I consider it spoiled anyway so nothing of value is lost:

Okay, so Logan is captured after coming back from The Outside, restrained (I think) in front of a computer and the computer interrogates him. There is no explanation who's running this computer at all or where it came from other than "it's just there".

Upon a mind interrogation by said computer, Logan doesn't give answers the computer likes, so it just, y'know, explodes for no reason.

Logan is then all of a sudden not restrained at that point, is able to defeat ALL the other Sandmen around him easily with the guns that don't shoot anything but still hit targets, and get away without a scratch.

The whole eff'ing city explodes at this point. People panicking everywhere and running around like crazy - yet in the very next scene they're just calmly walking out of the top of the city to The Outside. And guess what - none of them are hurt.

Are there any people carrying infants or smaller children which are known to exist in the dome? No. Not a one is carrying a child. Guess they all died in the fire. Bummer.

Then they all play touchy-feely with the old man's face, and...

THAT'S IT. MOVIE OVER. THE END.

This is the exact thought you'll have when you see the credits roll: "What the frig did I just watch?"

Bad movie. Bad, bad movie.

No Internet Exploder!

I think it's safe to say that Internet Explorer 8 is the last "bad" IE that will ever exist, because IE9 is pretty darned good. I've been using it off and on and it's definitely a good browser.

With that said, here's a good ol' late-90s web page still in its original state: No Internet Exploder!

The date at the bottom of the page states it was last updated April 24, 1998. That's just over 12 years ago as of this writing. It was a time a few months before Windows 98 was released, meaning everyone was using Windows 95.

If you think there's enough Apple hate going around right now, it was nothing compared to the mudslinging people threw at Microsoft left and right back in the day. You see all the standard childish "words", like M$, Microshaft, Windoze, etc. Funny stuff. Mac and Linux zealots still use these childish "words" to this day (and look unbelievably stupid every time they do). I guess some things never change.

The primary font used on the web page is Verdana, which is, of course, a standard Windows font. Oh, the irony.

There's also the standard boycott-everything-this-company-makes message there as well. Whenever anything becomes popular on the Internet, someone will throw out "boycott [insert popular thing here]". Happens every time.

Oh, and let's not forget the "International Anti-Microsoft Webring". That's linked there too. Clicking on it brings you to the original webring or force-redirects you to some dopey Nintendo fanboy website. Don't ask me why that happens because I have no idea. Webring is just totally screwed up and has been for years.

When you read that web page now, sure, it looks stupid as hell. But the original author was REALLY REALLY SERIOUS about getting people to stop using "MSIE". Did he? Of course not, because nobody cares.

headbangers ball

In the '80s and '90s I was all about metal, although I never really dressed nor acted the part. Unofficially, it's par for the course that if you work in IT, you're a metalhead. I have no idea why this is, but it's pretty much guaranteed that in any IT dept. there's at least one guy who is.

Headbangers Ball was an MTV show that ran from 1987 to 1995. It was brought back in 2003 on MTV2, and to the best of my knowledge is still running, but I've never seen the MTV2 version. The one I'm going to concentrate on here is the first run of the show.

The only reason to watch HBB was because of the music, obviously. It was only on that show where you could see stuff that was never played in regular MTV video rotation.

All this show had going for it were music videos and crappy interviews. When I say crappy, I mean crappy. They were bad. Most rock musicians simply didn't know how to conduct interviews correctly.

The show operated using the lowest possible budget because MTV absolutely didn't care about it at all. And why would they? They shoved the show into a late Saturday night time slot where no business would want to advertise, so the show didn't make any money at all. HBB was the definition of "cheap cable program" during its entire run.

Only the truly dedicated tuned into HBB. The core audience were metal fans. This got skewed in the '90s by the fact MTV tried (and failed) to say "alternative rock" and "hard rock" were the same thing and put them on the same show. That obviously didn't work.

The end of HBB was one that didn't surprise me. It just simply vanished. No warning. No farewell show. Nothing. Just gone. MTV didn't even notify the host of the show it was going to happen. They just called the guy up and said he didn't have to come to work anymore.

Nobody has ever received a straight answer as to why HBB was canceled the way it did, but I can take a really good guess. The show wasn't making any money and at that point was costing the network just to run it. Being the budget was so low to begin with, there was absolutely no cash to spare to even put together a farewell show because they were probably already too deep in the hole at that point. The only choice was to give it the axe and do it unapologetically. No decent advertisers were interested, no money was coming in, the show was costing too much to keep running, so... that was that. Buh-bye.

Dropping HBB was one of many things MTV did in order to reinvent itself to be profitable. Remember, MTV invented the reality show format with The Real World that first came about in 1992. That show is to the best of my knowledge the first MTV-original program that was actually successful, wildly popular and wildly profitable. After seeing what original programming could do, dropping HBB was an easy decision as far as the suits at MTV were concerned.

HBB was awful and weird. The fact of the matter is that anybody today could recreate HBB on the Internet if they wanted to. All it takes is a crew of two people (host and camera guy), interview a bunch of local unsigned bands and go from there. It's not rocket science. The "set" could simply be some dude's living room, Wayne's World style, because the HBB set truly wasn't that much better.

I'm sure there will be another HBB, although it won't be called that. It's sure to exist only on the Internet because no network would touch it, and MTV obviously doesn't go anywhere near rock music these days. Maybe a metal fan will be able to bring back HBB in a new Internet flavor.

Hey, it could happen.

Until then, just relive the glory days and get a shirt.

network

Network is a movie from the late 1970s which, shockingly, I hadn't seen until very recently. It's shocking because it's the type of film that's right up my alley especially considering my college degree is in Video & Radio Communications. Come to think of it, I'm puzzled none of my professors ever mentioned Network, as it is a damned good movie that shows a lot of what happens in a live television news production studio.

The famous scene from Network that people refer to (for those that know the film) is the "Mad as Hell" rant by the character Howard Beale. When taken out of context and seen as only the scene without the storyline of the film, it can be lost in translation easily. It is fortunate however that even if you had seen that clip prior (as I had before watching it), nothing is spoiled. If anything, watching the flick fills in all the missing pieces as to why Beale ranted like he did in the first place.

Network holds a special place for me because it is set in the pre-cable era. Wide availability of Cable TV did not exist until the 1980s. For example, MTV did not exist until 1981.

Imagine for a moment that your only choice for television entertainment was over-the-air. Your choices were 12 channels on VHF, of which only 9 or 10 channels had broadcasting affiliate stations, or UHF which were non-affiliated local-yokels that gave you maybe 4 or 5 more. The combined total was around 15 channels. That was it. Of those 15, less than half of those had decent reception. What that means is that in reality you only had 7 channels, most if not all of which were in the 12-channel range of VHF.

And for those of you saying, "There were 13 channels on VHF!", no there weren't, because there wasn't a channel 1. Only 2 through 13, remember?

It's also important to note that home movie rentals on VHS and Betamax videocassette also didn't gain mass popularity until the 80s. In the 70s it was all about network affiliate broadcast television and literally nothing else when talking about the tube.

By the mid-70s, there were only three major affiliate broadcast television networks: ABC, CBS and NBC - all of which were media powerhouses, and as such all had gobs and gobs of cash. We're talking so much cash it was just plain obscene. Each network produced everything in-house, well before the days of freelance videographers. They had their own complete staff, studios, talent, you name it, they had it.

Today's national over-the-air networks are nothing but a shadow of what they used to be. Instead of The Big Three, it's now The Big Five. ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and Ion. "The CW" is a joint venture between CBS, UPN and WB. In fact, "CW" literally means "CBS and Warner Bros". MyNetworkTV/MyTV/MyNet/MNTV, which you also may have heard about, is owned by Fox. Ion is what you used to know as PAX when it was formerly Paxson Communications, then Independent Television and finally Ion Television. And yes, they have the least viewers.

And, of course, there's still PBS. They're not commercial - but they do have the most viewers. PBS viewership is roughly 2 million more than NBC, its closest competitor. You'd never think they'd hold the top spot for the most viewers, but they do year after year.

What Network tries to do is let you know how evil major broadcast television can be. Evil in the respect that you will believe anything the glowing box tells you. Evil in the way parents raise their kids on it. Evil in the way that few if any people actually question what they see on said glowing box - or in this day and age, glowing slab. I think the movie pulls it off fairly well, however it's very obvious the movie is dated.

The dated nature of the flick comes into play for the fact cable television isn't in it at all because it didn't exist as we know it back then. And it goes without saying that nobody had Internet back in the 70s.

As crazy as this sounds, however, the message during several of Beale's rants do touch a nerve or two. He goes on about how the dollar is worthless and our country runs on oil. Sound familiar?

I do recommend watching the flick if for anything to see that history always repeats itself.

And for the fact seeing a 35-year-old Faye Dunaway is one of the hottest things you'll ever see in your life. When you see her, remember: No Photoshopping, no "enhancements", all woman. Knockout gorgeous.

Home is where it's hotter than...

I'm not a tattoo person, but these two are pretty frickin' awesome.

The first one is easy enough to figure out. Florida is hot. Very hot. In fact as I write this it's 90° F at 6:18pm. Yes, it's hot here.

The second one will take a bit to explain the significance. It says "FL DRIVERS NO SURVIVORS" with a shield for Interstate 4 in the middle.

I-4 is the lowest-numbered interstate in the USA and is a Florida-only east/west highway. When you see 4, that's Florida and nowhere else.

Interstate 4 has, put mildly, a tumultuous history to it.

Yes, I have driven I-4. It's the fastest and easiest way to get to Orlando from Tampa. However getting on I-4 in Tampa requires you to connect to it via what's known as Malfunction Junction where I-275 hooks up to I-4. Why is it called that? Because there are traffic jams there every day in all directions during any rush hour. Outside of rush hours it's actually quite civil, but during them, well.. you're gonna wait. A long time.

I'm pretty sure the reason the guy has the I-4 tattoo is due to the 70-car pileup that happened in January 2008. That's not an exaggeration by the way. How did it happen? It was from an approved burn by the Florida Wildlife Commission. The smoke mixed in with morning fog and made it so thick that it was near-zero visibility conditions, morning rush hour happened and all hell broke loose. Four people killed, 38 injured. Fifteen miles of I-4 were closed down almost the entire day.

The I-4 pileup certainly wasn't the worst (although this might be), but yeah I suppose it does warrant a tattoo if you're into that sort of thing.