The first episode of Survivor: Panama: Exile Island aired last night. This season the gimmick is they've split the 16 contestants into four tribes to start out: older women, older men, younger women, and younger men (more on this later). After each reward challenge, the losing team has to leave one member behind to spend the night alone on Exile Island. The upside to this is that supposedly there is an immunity idol hidden on the island. Anyhoo, after five years and a dozen locations, Survivor is still your best destination for reality television. Oh I'm sure a lot of production-y stuff goes on behind the scenes, but toward the end of those 39 days, the contestants are beat-up, weathered and hungry. Some look downright emaciated. That's real. But you know what would be even more real than Survivor? Survivor in HD. Since I picked up my first HDTV last summer, I've been gratified to find more and more HD programming available. Surely Survivor would be jumping on th...
And yet there's something in He-Man that transcends criticism. Despite the show's crass badness, I enjoyed rewatching it on many levels. The deep magical connection I felt as a child was still there, and the show was also a powerful shot of a cultural innocence that doesn't seem to exist anymore. As I watched, He-Man kept reminding me—in temperament, bearing, and even tone of voice—of Ronald Reagan, and of the cheerful, rule-bound pop-cultural naiveté that seemed to reach its term limit around the same time as the Gipper. In the era of South Park, Adult Swim, and TV Funhouse (whose "Ambiguously Gay Duo" picks up on the sexual comedy of He-Man perfectly), cartoons have become carriers of adult attitudes and ideas. Even today's kids' programming is self-conscious and ironic. SpongeBob would have mocked He-Man until he cried. It's a very long way from here to Eternia.
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The next time the family visits Target and the kids say, "Mom, can we buy that SpongeBob water sprinkler?!" If the Mom has been watching, and enjoying herself...the more likely she is to buy it...
I always thought Skeletor needed to be more of a badass in that cartoon. That cartoon, and Voltron, were huge disappointments to me.
But this guy does pick p on something I noticed when I bought a Transformers DVD. These cartoon are nowhere near as good as we remember them being.