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My first memory of reruns goes back to Channel 2 in the Bay Area sometime in the 80’s, wasn’t it, but those were the color Peels and Kings (CBS showed the New Avengers late night while I was in college, too), so I didn’t actually see Steed’s first companions until only recently over the antiquated antenna, and even then the monochrome video was trying—to me, of all people.

But what a surprise Honor Blackman as Mrs. Gale has been! Almost 40 in the role, which would be unheard of in the genre today (unless Bonds have improved since I stopped watching them when Denise Richards was cast as a nuclear physicist), she is every bit the foil for her co-star, before he and the show went on and surely invented the phrase “reduced to self-parody”, however polished and better packaged it was. Her judo is all the more convincing, as is her castigation of her partner’s ways, and sure, it’s still the silly Sixties so she’ll immediately laugh it off like a crazy person, but is this my maturity finally kicking in, twenty years later?

I didn’t notice it as a kid, but boy, is that shift in tone for the second season ever so noticeable. The gloominess of their predicament is gone, and they seem to all but forget about the day’s events after that last commercial break before the end credits—to bring myself up to current events (because of that IP issue at home), like DC movies “v” Marvel’s. That refreshed theme reminds me a lot of recent music from the BBC, and make no mistake about it, the Alphans aren’t pussies anymore, even if their weapons work on aliens only 5% of the time.

Thursday night we “took advantage” of Disneyland’s failure to scan our third and last ticket use, so we went in for another miserable wonderful few hours, most of them spent in line for annual passes for the family fan and her companion; it was finally our turn for the next window, and a Black fellow about a foot taller than me whose name tag read ERIN, Grand Marshall, demonstrated a glaring breach of queue etiquette by pulling us to continue waiting at newly-opened kiosks on the other side, behind at least four more groups of people. I held myself back from going Larry David on him for fear of getting us banned from the park for life, at least until our transaction was settled, but by then they stopped accepting customers, and I just wanted out of there.

The next night when the boy got the first of what’s sure to be a lifetime of stitches, his ER doctor was the almost too-good-to-be-true-sounding Erin Prince, M.D. And so conscious was I of this coincidence going into my slumber Sunday, I dreamed of being reunited with old 大姐 Ellen (close enough) Liao.

My sad long weekend came to a close with Yahoo! Screen’s Other Space, which I can’t tell is meant to be centered around the MST3K reunion or Milana Vayntrub’s tight uniform, but either way isn’t sustaining the programming once Community’s done, not with jokes like this, where the robot doesn’t get Karen’s name right:

My last weekend with YouTube on the AppleTV (fuck Google for ending support over ads; the Yahoo! Screen app still airs Community without them) I spent browsing some montages of battle sequences from 宇宙戦艦ヤマト and Battlestar Galactica, and I realized it was from the latter that Man of Steel borrowed its cinematography. Later that night I sat through one of the bad alien episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and noticed on a commercial for Gilligan’s Island that Dawn Wells looked quite a bit like Jenna-Louise Coleman:

I find making connections like these strangely rewarding. “The Invisibles clouds,” I call them. Maybe it’s not too strange, after all; in my declining years, it’s more comforting than to admit there’s more left that I can’t account for.

Quite possibly my last camp, though who knows, I may join my son for them in the future. (Especially if the world goes to pot and we’re forced to live on rations of Soylent Green or something.) My halcyon days of vying with scalpers for tickets to a Talking Heads show, braving the elements overnight outside Comp USA to nab a launch-day PlayStation 2, counting down windows of real time on virtual loot, these posters may serve as a memorial to them.

Still think Wonder Woman should be hella curvier, and it’s more than a little troubling that with almost a year out, the sheer amount of information about the film leaked so far doesn’t seem to leave much room for those genuinely surprising moments in The Dark Knight (not that I’m wholly innocent of staying clear of the fray myself), but I’d rather they try to tell a story about the epic impact these larger-than-life characters might sensibly have on the world than assembling them every few years and make like there’s really another threat to it.

How circuitous a journey even the most sedentary of us can partake: I was trying to teach the boy about battery life conservation when I had the novel idea of ensuring he’d never learn by racing the two of his gifted R/C vehicles, only to discover that both worked on the same 27 MHz frequency. I then remembered an old Speed Racer toy (from the マッハ ゴー ゴー ゴー branding, it must’ve been an import, with which I was wont to feed my bachelor emptiness) in an accessible box; but how to introduce this relic from my past to someone whose cars are computer-generated, driven by dogs or transform into robots, and talk? He’ll sit through anything, of course, so I looked up the series online, and there it was, without any confusion as to which service had secured its rights.

One search away was the more sentimental favorite, a pristine fan edit—though regrettably, remastering always seems to dump the original titles—whose saga of heroes and epic battles will probably never be topped, if it hasn’t by now.

If you listen to the Internet, Idris Elba deserves a better role in comicbook moviedom than being Thor’s doorman. (Alas, DC corporate looks like they opted for 80’s throwback Cyborg as the token leaguer.) And since I watched Pacific Rim on a plane with no sound, never got into The Wire, and gave up on the Office before he became a recurring character, I didn’t quite see it until now. Needless to say, this series shits all over Sherlock and SVU. DCI Luther’s no less a superhero than anyone on those shows, but I suppose he has to be one, in order to survive all his loved ones and grow out of his temper tantrums.

I’ve just seen the latest Christopher Nolan epic, but alas, even as cosmic a journey as that requires a return home, where relativity really kicks in and I am instead draped on a metal folding chair in front of all 22 episodes of SciFi’s turn-of-the-century response to Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentleman. The series apparently pioneered hi-def, though you couldn’t tell from these recordings, so I’m left to appreciate it mainly for the ass-kicking Rebecca Fogg character, who probably owes more to Emma Peel than Lara Croft, but nevertheless is deplorably left off most lists of peers. I like the theme, too. Haven’t heard one like it since.

I think “Daddy Dearest” was the only episode I actually saw during its short-lived run in 1989, because with only eight of them, it probably wasn’t ever syndicated afterward. (Then again.) And after all these years, serial killers several times a week, this first experiment in primetime profiling still came to a jarring end.

My favorite of the lot, however, was the mysteriously-titled “And They Swam Right over the Dam”, where a couple of pediatricians set out to liberate their patients from overindulgent parents. Richard Kind (Larry’s cousin Andy one DVD ago on Curb Your Enthusiasm), the all-White team’s gopher, takes them down without so much as a fight, and reminds us how much stranger things were back then.

What a great movie. I had to get this in here before I put it aside for my recent acquisition of the entire Unsub series, because yeah, my pace lately isn’t likely to keep up. It’s a Boorman, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but he did seem more focused here, even if it was Marvin’s influence, and I especially loved the dream-y quality of that moment when his character just hides while a pursuer is caught by the police. This is a perfect example of taking source material to new creative heights; I’m ashamed to remember having only been entertained by Payback.