Nothing beats nostagia.

If you visited my last web site, you would notice a marked difference in this one and that one.  First, I'm no longer wearing my opinions and hatreds on my sleeve (I prefer my forum, thank you).  Second, the focus has changed for what I hate to what I love.  My hobbies and such.  But for the kick of having this page up for a solid year, I decided to revamp this one and take a look at the other one.

I still crack myself up over that 'Star Trek' rant.  God, I'm pathetic.

But today we're going to bend the rules of my site and review something so goofy I couldn't resist it.  You see, I hate "The Waltons" because it's nostagia personified, the reason why we should never go home again.  A few years back, it seems like the entire world had this giant hard-on for the 1970s culture.  Clothing, repeats of various programs on TV, styles, pointless uber-liberal idealstic-to-the-point-of-fascist mentalities, there was nothing too tacky that good taste couldn't refine into a glamorized version of a time that is best left forgotten.  Hell, even I watched stuff from this time due to the fact that it made a lot of rare stuff available that wouldn't have been made available if the craze had never occurred.  Anybody remember "Gemini Man?"

But this thread wasn't a fluke.  It seems like every generation from the 1950s on has had this hard-on for the past and seeing it as a 'simpler' time full of innocence and stuff.  Of course, they don't bother to think that this is because they were younger!!  Thus, every so often, you can watch a TV show and get glimpses of this delusional fact.  The '90s had "Dazed and Confused" and "That's '70s Show."  The 1970s had "The Waltons."

As you would expect, nothing about "Waltons" is even remotely real.  You can tell because they never go into great detail about real life, only glorified lessons about life which are so simple and idealistic I look at these in my liberal mindset and vomit because of the saccharine overdose.  Oh, look, John Boy wants to be a writer!  Oh, look, Dad and Gramps are independent businessmen!!  Oh, look, I'm going to be sick in my Sunday best.  And everyone on this show acts like their characters are constantly happy as well, adding insult to injury and making the whole thing look so fucking unbelievable that it would makeMontel Williams wish that they weren't so preachy.

So, why the hell am I reviewing this?  Simply put, I'm not.  I'm going to mock it.  Or, rather, going to mock a part of it which is so silly that upon waking up to it one day on TNN I burst out laughing.  And it's so damn surreal.

The plot of this sugar-coated piece of unreality is that John Boy wins a trip because his backwater shittown's paper is so great.  And guess what it is!  A trip to see the Hindenburg land after it's cross-Atlantic trip.  So, after getting really geared up and acting like a complete dork, he goes to see it.  And here is where the hilarity starts.

I'm not sure of how much actual film from the Hindenburg explosion exists, but I doubt any of it really exists in color (the crash happening because color film was invented....we're talking 1930s and sepia tones and such).  In this episode, some of the footage does exist in color and I guess the episode should be given credit for that.  But how it uses the footage is quite silly.  Obviously, when the writers were writing this episode, they wanted a shot of John Boy AND the Hindenburg to really give the impression that an actor was watching the Hindenburg and not a blue screen or pretending to see it.  This is understandable: obviously, you want as much realism as you can fit into a show as you can.  It really brings the point of the piece home.

However, due to the limits of the budget, the makers of this show could not build a model the size of the Hindenburg then burn it down.  So, they had to rely on blue-screen technology by fusing scenes with an actor on the set and the footage from the Hindenburg to complete the shot.  But they forgot one thing:  most of the existing footage from the Hindenburg crash is from a camera looking up at a 45 degree angle.   Blue Screen Technology, even now, can only deal with the background being LEVEL with the actor itself.  So, if you put the footage of an actor and this 45 degree angle footage, it looks like the actor is standing on a very steep hill looking up at a 45-55 degree angle of this ship, defying all the laws of gravity.

I know this sounds pissy, but it creates a very funny effect.  It's like watching one of various bad '50 schlock sci-fi flicks where the action in the foreground doesn't match the background at all.  And since this is the '70s, it's nearly unforgiveable.  The makers of this episode should have known that this would have not have worked and it comes off as looking REALLY bad.  Does John Boy have a special power to stand straight up at a 55 degree angle and defy gravity?  God no.  What the makers of this sequence should have done is alternate between footage of the Hindenburg in flight, cut to John Boy at the hangar (a real hangar), back to the Hindenburg, then have found some footage that would have worked for a blue screen shot and put it in briefly as to suspend disbelief and accomplish the 'reality' of him being there.  Instead, it looks like John Boy is standing five feet away from a Drive-In movie screen which the Hindenburg footage is being played and pretending it is real.

It sucks.  It sucks HARD.  What makes it worse is that the makers didn't even bother to film this sequence at a real hangar but instead, used another blue screen to act as THE HANGAR ITSELF.  No location shooting, all done on a set.  They couldn't even bother to make a cheap hangar set on as soundstage.  It's cheap and it shows.  How hard is it to make a hangar?  A few pieces of sheet metal and you're done.  What the hell was the reasoning behind this??

And as the Hindenburg crashes--sorry to ruin the surprise for you--John Boy reacts like this hurts him.  Despite the fact that in the reality of the scene he's fifteen feet away from the inferno itself and isn't even coughing from the smoke.  And it's the horror of the situation that makes this even more humorous.  If it's affecting you so much, John Boy, just turn off the projector!

I won't even go into the morality of using the footage, anyway.  Since it was actually the Hindenburg burning and people were dying, I don't see how this show has the right to use it as a half-assed tearjerker.  So it goes.

I didn't see the rest of the episode, through I'm sure there was some hackeyed lesson behind it that somebody will find morally uplifting.  Yeah, right, whatever.   And to add insult to injury again, the show was produced by Universal Studios who prides themselves on making quality programming.  And they also created the special effects for the original 1933 Invisible Man movie, as well as the 1975 show of the same name which had excellent special effects.  Why they dropped the ball so horribly in this episode either shows a contempt for the show (which I can see) or just pure laziness on behalf of everyone involved.  Either way, it's an embarassment but since I doubt anybody watches this show at all I think it'll go unnoticed for the rest of time.

Enough sugar for one day; I can feel my teeth rotting.

RATING:  Yeah, right.  A perfect example of the naivety of nostagia and ruby-lensed glasses.