Cynical Cinema

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing an impressive box set on November 4th. It is a set that impressed me when I first saw it, and I’m certain it will impress my dad when I re-gift him with it at Christmas time. The Wild Wild West Complete Series is massive. There were four seasons of this show, which are packaged together on 27 DVDs in a huge, appropriately western-looking box. Once the box is opened, the inside is less impressive, with some weird cardboard cases full of DVDs and not much else. But then, I assume my dad won’t actually look inside this box for several years, and so he will be impressed on Christmas morning, and that alone is what counts.

Actually, I hope my dad does open this box set. Because The Wild Wild West was a really cool show. A really cool show with which most of us are familiar solely because of that Will Smith - Kevin Kline movie from 1999 that might be the worst pile of garbage ever put onto the silver screen under the guise of being a “western”. That film was so memorably bad that…well…I still remember it. That in itself is a knock against it. And it made me think that there was a good chance that the TV series upon which it was based could not be much better. But it is. It is much better. In fact, the TV series is so much better than the movie, that the TV series could actually be considered good. It’s that much better.

The Wild Wild West is, in fact, a western series. It is also a science fiction series, a spy series, a cops-and-robbers series, and has a real sense of James Bond-style slickness to it. James West (Robert Conrad) is the slick, Bond-like agent who has gadgets in his shoes and guns in his hats and exploding snooker balls and knives in his canes. All of which is very cool, but not as cool as Artemis Gordon (Ross Martin) who is the genius who makes gadgets and creates masterful disguises. The combination of the two is one of the great screen pairings in TV history. Appearing throughout the four-year run of the series is the delightfully-named Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless, who serves as a nemesis to West and Gordon. He appears first in the third episode of the first season, The Night The Wizard Shook The Earth. You know he’s evil because his name starts with Dr. Also because he’s a dwarf. As Murdoc was to MacGyver, so is Dr. Loveless to this clever duo.

The Complete Series contains some cool extra features - introductions to the episodes by Robert Conrad are particularly neat, if not always interesting. But the best extras in the box set are on the 28th, bonus disc. Two made-for-TV Wild Wild West movies are included. The Wild Wild West Revisited, from 1979, is a movie that features Paul Williams as Miguelito Loveless Jr., the son of the pair’s former nemesis. And More Wild Wild West, from 1980, sees a villain planning world domination through some kind of invisibility formula. The TV movies are terrifically campy, and while the series itself can be taken either straight or with a small wink and dose of camp, the TV movies are camp, straight-up. Mostly a relic for the people who were alive in the era where they would have been fans of the show, The Wild Wild West: Complete Series is worthwhile for all fans of campy science fiction western action espionage. And I know those people are out there.

Last year, at about this time, Alliance Films released a box set called the Original Christmas Classics. It contained Christmas shows and movies with which we are all, I’m sure, familiar. The claymation stuff - Rudolph, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, the Frosty movies. It was a really nice nostalgic set. This year, Alliance is releasing The New Christmas Classics on a similar box set on November 4th. This time, the content of the box is decidedly less familiar. George of the Jungle, Casper The Friendly Ghost, Gumby, and Fat Albert are not generally thought of as Christmas Classics. At least, not that I’m aware.

The first series in the box is Gumby. This is the first time I have ever seen Gumby, a show from the 1960s about a weird little dude made out of clay with a pointy head who travels into books with his weird little clay horse friend. In this manner, the two manage to travel through history, observing the events as they take place and in some cases affecting the outcome. The books they enter are sometimes classics, like A Christmas Carol, and other times they are books that have never existed. Like The Big Snow Hill. The first episode appears to have nothing to do with Christmas at all, it is about Thanksgiving and the Mayflower. The second episode sees the pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock. This episode features some 1960s-style questionable history and attitudes toward Indians, and the theft of a bunch of corn.

Then there are episodes with no dialogue, that just see Gumby running around and falling into toasters and cement mixers and then putting himself back together. He and Pokey the horse visit fairy tales involving poor kings and princes and the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is an episode called In a Fix that involves a bunch of strange bird-like clay creatures that hop around. It is a genuinely bizarre collection of Gumby episodes, and of the 12 that are featured on this set, only three are even tangentially related to Christmas. The main theme of the Christmas episodes is Ebeneezer Scrooge, who keeps escaping from A Christmas Carol to wreak havoc on Christmas. Apparently the Grinch wasn’t yet the anti-Christmas villain yet in 1967, so Scrooge became the bad guy. He keeps trying to kidnap Santa, or at the very least discredit him. In one particularly memorable episode, Scrooge uses the word “humbug” as a verb, a noun, a preposition, an adverb, an adjective, and an epithet. Sometimes within the same sentence. Another great one involves a couple of little clay building blocks who drive a tank that shoots lasers. And then there are nine other bizarre episodes of Gumby that may appeal to stoners in some way.

The next series in the set is Fat Albert. And because every single cartoon, ever, does a Christmas episode that rips off A Christmas Carol, this one is no exception. The boys are trying to put together a Christmas pageant at their clubhouse, a shack in the junkyard. The mean old Scroogey owner of the junkyard wants to bulldoze the shack, and hates the kids, and is miserly with money, and is generally a nuisance. A young couple with no job and no money end up in the shack to have their new baby, because there is nowhere else for them to go. There is a Tiny Tim character named Marshall, the son of the downtrodden couple, and there are some standard Fat Albert style cheesy lines. “You remind me of school at vacation time - no class!” Of course, in the end, the old Scrooge sees the error of his ways, and all is mended. There are two other Fat Albert episodes on the DVD, neither of which has anything to do with Christmas. One is about a girl who is embarrassed about her poverty and her rundown house, and the other is about Fat Albert’s friends helping him with his chores so he can go to the zoo and feed an elephant.

Then there is George of the Jungle. This show is reasonably funny, for a kids’ cartoon, and the six episodes here are pretty good. But again, only two of them have anything to do with Christmas. Again, we get the Christmas Carol cartoon cop-out, as George is visited by three goats. Get it? Goats? The Goat of Christmas Presents? You see, he has tried to make Christmas happen for some irritating city girl who lives in the jungle. Not being familiar with Christmas, he gets overwhelmed by the Christmas spirit, and makes every day a Christmas celebration, much to the chagrin of his friends. He is visited by three ghosts. Three ghost goats. Who show him the error of his ways, blah blah blah, and everything turns out fine.

The other George of the Jungle episodes involve a crazy rash George can’t scratch, and a weird baboon who hogs George’s heroism for himself. Although he calls himself a marmoset, he’s clearly a mandril. He has the coloured nose and all. There’s one about a magical bathroom that gets stolen, and all the apes begin disappearing from the jungle. And then there is the George’s Birthday Present episode where George has his first birthday ever. A premise which is virtually identical to the one in the episode where he tries to provide Ursula, the annoying city girl, with her Christmas.

And that brings us to the final series in the box set, Casper. Not the TV series, but a made-for-TV movie called Casper’s Haunted Christmas. This is an 80-minute movie with the computer-generated Casper and his computer-generated uncles taking up residence in Kriss, Massachusetts. Get it? Kriss, Mass? Anyway, after a Randy Travis theme song and the appearance of a ghost who is clearly Slimer from Ghostbusters, we get into the movie. Apparently, some giant green ghost god will revoke the ghost licenses of the uncles if Casper doesn’t scare someone by Christmas. You see, ghosts have to scare people, and blah blah blah. At the very least, in this movie they make the point - Casper does, indeed, scare people all the time when they discover he’s a ghost. But in this case, it is scaring people on purpose that matters. He has until Christmas to do so, or the four of them will be banished to some dark-space purgatory for eternity.

This set-up takes about seven minutes. Which means that the next 73 minutes need to be filled with something. And that something is cheesy, awful jokes. Like the kind I used to see on Hallowe’en cards when we were forced to exchange them with our classmates in the second grade. See if these phrases make you laugh - smellular phone! Shocking days until Christmas! No? Yeah, me either. There is an incredibly painful few minutes of dialogue about “scare mail”, the “ghost office”, and the dead letter department. Basically, it is the same show that Casper used to be when it was a cartoon, years ago, only much worse. And with slightly better animation.

Overall, with a total of 22 episodes of various series in this box set, only 7 of them actually have anything to do with Christmas. Of the seven Christmas episodes, five of them are takes on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. If you count the Casper movie, six of the seven involve three ghosts. And very few are worthwhile. But the box set could, conceivably, keep your kids entertained from December 1st all the way until Christmas.

With the massive amount of TV series on DVD, I can’t imagine people being able to pick up all of their favourite shows. And so I find it hard to believe that people are willing to take a chance on a show they haven’t seen and pick up a season’s worth on a big box set, unless that series is Brotherhood, or Californication, or Dexter. Something new they might not get on their regular channels. And then, every now and then, I see a TV series where I think to myself - no one, ever, would pick this up. For example, J.A.G. The seventh season comes out on November 4th, and I just can’t see anyone grabbing this off a store shelf. Then again, it has been around for seven seasons, and I certainly can’t understand that either.

I remember David James Elliott from that bastion of Canadiana, Street Legal, in the early nineties. I wasn’t terribly impressed with him then either. Catherine Bell is terrific, but you can see the best of her talent on the Doc and Woody Fun Page every couple of weeks. And as far as the writing and the premise, does anyone really want to watch a second-rate legal military drama? The legal thing has been done to death. The military thing has been done much better. And yet this series lasted ten seasons. It finished 77th in the ratings in it’s first year, and yet it was brought back. The seventh season is a reminder of the reason it finished 77th. It does not illuminate the reason it lasted ten years.

I picked up The 4400, The Complete Series, out Tuesday the 28th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  And I started watching it.  And then I kept watching.  I stopped taking notes because it was interfering with my viewing of this show.  And I started to pay really, really close attention.  I got through Season One, and went to bed.  The next morning, as soon as I got up, I started Season Two.  By the time I went to bed that night, I had begun Season Three.  I woke up early the following day to complete Season Three.  And then, a couple of days later, I had watched the Fourth and Final season.  This was actually the second time I had watched Season Four of The 4400.  I watched it alone in May, when that season came out on DVD, and I gave it four stars out of ten.  I stand by that review.  As a stand-alone DVD set, Season Four merits four stars.

But now I was addicted.  I was desperate to find out what happened.  I had to know how this series ended.  And I watched all four seasons of this show.  I should have known.  After all, I had already watched the fourth season.  The fourth, and final, season.  And I remember how that one ended.  In that, it didn’t.  It didn’t end at all.  It didn’t answer any questions at all.  It just got cancelled and taken off the air.  I just watched thirty-three hours of this show.  Thirty-three.  Hours.  And at the end…nothing.  I was a little peeved.  But that was nothing compared to the fury of my girlfriend, who had watched all thirty-three hours with me.  She was incensed.  She had just wasted an entire weekend, and 33 hours of her life.

Here’s the basic premise:  Over the past 50 years, people have been abducted from all over the world.  All of a sudden, 4400 people are returned to Earth, all at once, all in one place, without having aged a day.  Each of the 4400 has a special ability - telekinesis, the ability to heal others, pre-cognition, and so forth.  The government gets involved, and tries to suppress these abilities.  We find out pretty quickly that these are not alien abductions, but rather these people are being taken by humans in the future, who are sending them back to hopefully change the course of history and save all of humanity.  And after a while, it looks like a war is brewing.

Then it ends.  It’s over.  If you’re the creator of The 4400, and you want to sell your “complete series” DVD, it seems like it would have been a fairly easy thing to do to film maybe five or six more episodes in order to wrap it up and give the viewers some closure.  The people who had invested in this series and who would purchase a 15-disc set to find out how it actually ends.  In fact, you could well market it to people who had never seen this show before as well.  Because this show was good.  It was VERY good.  Incredibly compelling, like the beginning of Lost.  And watching the first season made me absolutely rabid to find out the secrets and the stories and the result of the whole process.  In fact, you could maybe have created a satisfactory conclusion by filming TWO more episodes.  So why not?

Instead, this is what we get - a fifteenth disc that is full of special features, once the fourth season ends.  One of those special features is an introduction by Scott Peters, the creator of the show.  He talks about creating the show, and how pleased he is with the ardent fans who posted on the internet message boards and discussed the show and so forth.  Which is fine.  By all means, thank the fans!  But…then what?  You must have had some idea how the series was going to end - just tell us what the plan was!  It’s too late to do it now, just tell us the end.  It is no longer a spoiler, it is now the only catharsis available to us, the audience.  Help us out here.

The fact is, I felt incredibly ripped off after 33 hours of watching this with no resolution whatsoever.  Why bother with this, I thought.  In fact, thanks to the wrath of my girlfriend, I was ready to give this show a one-star rating.  After all, I was sour too because she woke me up in the middle of the night to express her anger - she had stayed up four hours later than normal to get to the end, because she too was addicted.  But I reconsidered, because if this show was compelling enough to make us that passionate about seeing an ending, it must have been doing something right.  And the show itself deserves at least nine stars.  But I will not give it nine, because it is false advertising.  The 4400 Complete Series is some great television, but there is nothing “complete” about this series.

Paramount Home Entertainment just sent me all five DVD seasons of The L Word. Five seasons. Of hot lesbians having hot lesbian sex. And something else too. Plot maybe? Dialogue? I don’t really remember. I remember Mia Kirshner, and Jennifer Beals, and Katherine Moennig, Leisha Hailey, Karina Lombard, Marlee Matlin, Annabella Sciorra and Kristanna Loken. And all the other gorgeous women who get naked and have sex with each other. The actual story arc of the first five seasons escapes me. And I get it. This series was created to appeal to the largest possible audience. Lesbian women who like lesbians, straight women who like soap opera drama and girl talk, gay men who like TV about gay culture, and straight men who like watching naked lesbians. But I feel as though a substantial amount of potential for the series is sacrificed in favour of showing incredibly hot naked women sleeping together.

The story arcs I would have liked to see a little more developed are those that deal with the discrimination faced by gay people. In the fifth season, which is being released October 28th by Paramount, there are a few moments that deal with this. There is a character, Tasha, who is being outed as a lesbian and being kicked out of the military. There is another character who reacts to homophobic statements made by a basketball player by outing him as a homosexual. But there is not enough of this stuff, which I find compelling. The rest of the series, and the season, involves lesbian women living in their own, seemingly exclusive, lesbian world, where there are no ugly lesbians, very few butch ones, and virtually no straight people at all. Now, I know a lot of lesbians, and they are, proportionately, about the same as the rest of the world. In that ten percent of them are hot, twenty percent are ugly, and seventy percent are somewhere in the middle.

So to create a world of lesbians in which only the hottest of the hot is one of two things. Either it’s pandering to the heterosexual males who enjoy watching lesbian sex, or it’s just television, where only hot people get roles. Breaking this mold, at least a little, are Cybill Shepherd and Pam Grier, who are not exactly ugly, but they are in their late fifties.

The fifth season is similar to the other four, in that there are soap opera-style relationship troubles, and a lot of hot naked women having sex. In this imaginary lesbian world, it seems that everyone is willing to have sex with just about anyone else. Which means that if you have watched the entire five seasons, you are have seen almost every character on the show hook up with almost every other character, at one point or another. Just about every fantasy men have about two women together is played out, including VIP room threesomes, “promiscuous, debauched lesbians” (in the words of Cybill Shepherd) and even prison sex. Mia Kirschner (Jenny) is still the hottest girl on the show, but now she is also the most irritating. She has written a book, and it’s being made into a movie, and Jenny is the director. She becomes self-involved, and cartoonish with her Hollywood giant ego. Every time she’s on the screen in this season, she isn’t acting so much as purposely setting out to irritate the viewers.

And so, it all comes back to the hot chicks who get naked and sleep with each other. In this season, there are some new ones joining the cast. Elizabeth Keener, as the owner of a new lesbian bar in town, and Alicia Leigh Willis, a gorgeous actress who plays Keener’s lover. The best scenes are between Kirschner and Kate French, who plays the star actress in Jenny’s movie, including a truly bonkers oil wrestling match. There is a heated rivalry between Pam Grier’s bar and the one owned by Keener. The movie becomes a big central part of the season as well. Other than that, I can’t remember if anything else happened. There was too much lesbian sex going on.

Paramount Home Entertainment releases the fifth season of Girlfriends on October 28th. As I said about the fourth season, the four stars in this sit-com are all terrible people. They are obnoxious, and irritating, and gold-digging and crazy and self-centred and stupid and lazy and conniving and backstabbing. Watching an entire season’s worth of women trying to one-up each other and screaming about their own needs could take a toll on one’s nerves. And mine are shot right now, as I write this review. The “girl” part of Girlfriends I understand. After all, the show is about four girls. The “friends” part confuses me. How these women can remain friends while being so LOUDLY into themselves is beyond me.

Season five of this show sees one of the girls trying to get back together with her husband, because she is pregnant. Why this man would even consider taking her back is beyond me. This woman is awful. Another woman struggles with the fact that she is in love with a man who confessed his love to her, but now he’s with another woman…straight out of Friends, I suppose. Another woman is publishing a book, and fighting with everyone around her because she is so powerfully self-centred and stupid. In fact, she appears to be much too stupid to write a book at all. I would suggest that most of the people in this show are too dumb and self-aggrandizing to accomplish most of the things that they do on the show.

Then there’s the laugh track. The reason sit-coms have a laugh track is that they need to tell you when things are funny, and it’s time to laugh. If you find yourself hearing the background laughter, and you didn’t laugh, and you’re not sure why, then you can know the people who made the show think that moment was funny. But you don’t. And you didn’t laugh, which means it actually wasn’t funny. In the first episode of Season Five of Girlfriends, there is a recurring joke about a lesbian chasing one of the main characters. And she keeps stopping the chase to take off her shoes. And the laugh track rolls. But then, you can tell that even the laugh track is half-hearted. Like, it’s a slow, quiet, rumbling of half-chuckle laughter in the background. One that gets quieter and quieter each time the gag is repeated. And deservedly so.

Girlfriends was cancelled after five seasons, so this was going to be the last one. But apparently it has, mystifyingly, just been renewed for several more seasons. At noon on Tuesdays somewhere in the states. Half-assed laugh tracks, self-centred, awful characters, and few compelling stories make this series one to skip. So skip it.

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing the First Season of Sister Sister on October 28th. It’s a sit-com about twin 14-year-old girls who are reunited after being separated at birth. This separation is conveniently explained with the line “stupid adoption agency”, and then dropped. So…they have lived in the same city their whole lives, no one has ever commented on the resemblance, until they run into each other while shopping. They are trying on the exact same clothes, which leads to a trying day for a put-upon sales person. And of course, also leads to the inevitable first-ever meeting of the twins, which is an unnecessarily long and simple and unfunny scene reminiscent of ninth-rate Marx Brothers.

Then the scene is set, after one episode - the girls have met, and they have bonded instantly. Tia’s father and Tamara’s mother hate each other. But they have to move in together, through some incredibly contrived circumstance. One can only assume that the reason this first episode is handled so quickly and sets up the story so fast is that the rest of Season One has much more important and funny episodes to share, and the set-up episode was simply an administrative thing that needed to get out of the way early. But then…the rest of the First Season contains two jokes. Like Marmaduke. Marmaduke either thinks he’s people, or he eats a lot. Sister Sister is the Marmaduke of sit-coms. Their parents hate each other. And the twins are…surprisingly similar! These are the two jokes of Sister Sister.

The pilot episode speeds at a million miles an hour through things that not only seem important, but also seem like they could be funny. But no time is given to these things. It’s right into standard sit-com stuff. Why not spread this stuff out over the entire season? There is enough material there to make this show both funny and interesting! But instead it isn’t. It’s Marmaduke.

As a child, I found My Little Pony to be very perplexing. I could not understand why girls in my class had these little plastic horses, and combed their hair at recess, and played at tea parties with Sparklestar and Twinkletush and all the other bizarrely named creatures. Dolls I got. Sort of. They’re like little people, and you can pretend like they are actually talking, and you can live out your fantasies through the world of dolls. Like we boys did with army men and transformers. I suppose I knew, deep down, that My Little Pony fed into every little girl’s desire to own a horse (or, a pony, as most would say), much the same way transformers fed into a little boy’s desires to own a robot. And that the little dinosaur figures I played with were a manifestation of my own latent desire to own a Dimetredon. God, how I wanted a Dimetredon! He could have fetched my slippers, and store solar energy in his fin to keep me warm after those long hockey games where my feet froze, and he could have bitten my sister and eaten some neighbourhood cats…anyway.

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing a special holiday treat for those girls out there who have not outgrown My Little Pony. And I’m sure they exist. After all, My Little Pony couldn’t still be around if there weren’t still some freaky members of the sparkly-pink-pony brigade still kicking. Much like the comeback of Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, there are 30-year-old nerds of both genders who won’t let some of this old school crap die. And so we get A Very Minty Christmas. It is a Christmas story, starring Minty the Pony. Yes, the pony’s name is Minty. The characters of My Little Pony, you see, are either named as though they were the long-lost children of Frank Zappa, or like strippers. I am certain, although I didn’t see her in this episode, that there is a My Little Pony horse named Vanilla, and one named Candi, and one named Diamond, and several more named Sun Station and Moon Unit and Paisley Horseradish. Unfortunately, those characters do not appear in A Very Minty Christmas. Instead we have to deal with characters with even more irritating names, like Thistle Whistle, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, and Sparkleworks.

I am a firm believer that no child playing with toys named things like “Sparkleworks” can grow up to lead a normal, adult life. Being exposed to this kind of stuff in childhood will lead to an adult lifetime of dotting your i’s with hearts and happy faces, an obsession with cutesy emoticons, the purchase of Anne Geddes paraphernalia, and a collection of CDs by the Olsen twins. And that’s a best-case scenario. At worst, a career as a stripper, dancing enthusiastically to songs by Aqua, ABBA, Air Supply and the Starland Vocal Band, saving one dollar bill from each customer to be pasted into your scrapbook with shiny star stickers and glitter, next to your magazine cutouts of a shirtless Ryan Seacrest. And that path can only lead, inevitably, to your being murdered in a back alley somewhere in a glitter-for-oral-sex deal gone awry.

Anyway, A Very Minty Christmas is a far-too-early Christmas release that opens with the most irritating theme song this side of the new Dr. Phil theme. I rewound the theme song about nine times, because I was convinced that I had heard the word “darkies” used in the song. I am still not convinced that I didn’t hear that word, but then I was drinking a little at the time. I could swear they sang “there’s a twinkle in the darkies”. I don’t want to add racism to my litany of complaints against the My Little Pony cartoon, but it certainly didn’t start things off on a good note for me. The show stars Minty the pony, who accidentally shatters the candy cane that will summon Santa Claus, and must go on a quest in an inexplicable hot air balloon to replace it. The rest of the ponies, who are all apparently sorority girls at a slumber party, must set off after her to rescue her from the perils of single-person hot air balloon piloting. Before they go, however, they make a few important decisions. Like, pink glitter? Blue glitter? Silver glitter? They settle on pink and mint. And then they set off on their rescue mission.

The most fascinating character in the show is Rainbow Dash, who is either British or Southern, with a completely undecipherable accent. If she is British, then she must be the matronly mother of this bizarre sorority house. If she is Southern, she seems to be the matron of this bizarre brothel. There is also a pony reminiscent of Starchild Ace Frehley in Kiss And The Phantoms Of The Amusement Park, called I believe Starcatcher. Throughout the episode, the ponies are continuously giving each other medals. My girlfriend (a reformed My Little Pony enthusiast), watching this with me, explained this to me - “they’re show horses - whaddya expect?” I thought this was a prescient statement, a window into the culture that is My Little Pony, one from which I will be forever excluded.  I should have let my girlfriend review this one too.

There is another episode on this DVD too, a bonus episode called “Dancing In The Clouds”. It’s just as irritating. Oh - the box set comes with a little plastic horse, Minty, wearing a Santa hat. So you may want to pick it up after all. Good luck with the rest of your life.

Until the advent of Sarah Palin, with her striking resemblance to Tina Fey and her amazing inability to answer easy questions coherently, the easiest public figure to lampoon was George W. Bush. After all, the man has not only been dangerously inept, historically unpopular, and frighteningly zealous, he has also been incredibly bad at using words to create sentences, which makes him come off as hilariously stupid. Mixed metaphors, mispronounced words, questionable grammar, and a rather poor handle on facts have made the current American President an easy target for comedians and satirists alike. Now Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing an anthology of these humourous looks at a dangerously unqualified man. Comedy Central Salutes George W. Bush hits DVD on October 21st. It’s a collection of George W. Bush related moments from Comedy Central over the past eight years. The past eight long, painful years.

And as it turns out, even with this incredibly easy-to-mock subject matter, the DVD itself manages to be long and painful! It begins well, with an episode of South Park where Cartman blames Kyle for 9/11. Eventually, the boys meet up with Bush and some intriguing yet bonkers conspiracy theories are revealed. A funny episode from a funny show, featuring some genuinely creepy moments involving the Hardy Boys, for some reason. What follows is a sub-par episode from a sub-par show. Lil’ Bush is just not that good. Obviously this disc was going to contain an episode, and in fact it contains two. But there are some episodes of this show that are better than others, and they have chosen two of the worst. For example, why not pick an episode that genuinely lampoons Bush, like the one involving Lil’ Karl Rove? Instead they have chosen an episode that centres around Lil’ Cheney having sex with Barbara Bush and ending up stuck in her womb. Which is just disgusting, not funny at all, and really has little to do with George W.

After sitting through two episodes of Lil’ Bush, one boring and one unpleasant, we get to a truly bizarre show I never knew existed. That’s My Bush is a really strange show lampooning the Bush family in a sit-com style. It’s basically a scenario that asks “what if George W. Bush starred in a sit-com?” It doesn’t really satirize the president, because it doesn’t touch on his policies at all, or his views or his outlook as president. It goes through the motions of a sit-com. Only it stars George Bush and Laura Bush. Get it? I don’t. It’s a satire of sit-coms, not of Bush. In this particular episode, Bush is trying to hold a meeting to unite the leaders of the pro-life movement with the leaders of the anti-abortion movement, all the while attending a nice, sit-down, romantic dinner that he has promised Laura. So he constantly runs back and forth from the dinner to the meeting, and hijinks ensue. Not once do we get any satire on his own personal views on Roe vs. Wade, we just get the sit-com spoof of him switching dinner jackets a bunch of times.

Then there is some respite from the terrible, with an episode of Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil, one that pits Paris Hilton against Dick Cheney. A very funny episode, but one that deals only tangentially with Bush himself. Then The Last Laugh Squad, a cartoon featuring Black again, along with some other comics, as they shrink themselves, get into a spaceship, and fly up Bush’s ass. Considering the talent in the episode, this is a pretty poor comedic vehicle. Finally, we get to some stand-up clips from Greg Giraldo, Patton Oswalt, Lewis Black again, and Frank Caliendo doing his Bush impression. Some of this is quite funny, but it’s all too brief, and Carlos Mencia’s bit about Bush being the president of Iraq in 2026 is absolutely awful, and not funny at all. Considering all the fodder Bush has provided Comedy Central over the past eight years, I am sad that this DVD is the best they could manage. They would have done much, much better cobbling together a couple of hours of moments from The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, and ignoring most of this stuff altogether.

There may be no better television series in history for aspiring film industry people than Dynasty. It is great because you can grab Season Three, out on DVD October 21st from Paramount Home Entertainment, and keep it lying around your house. Because life is tough for people trying to break into the film and television industry. We’re always hearing about starving actors and writers, people who make their living dressing up as Wonder Woman on Hollywood Boulevard, having their pictures taken by tourists for cash while they continually struggle to break into the business while barely making ends meet at home. It can be depressing and sad and a lonely existence. You need a pick-me up every now and then. And Dynasty IS that pick-me-up.

You can’t watch four minutes of this show without thinking “oh my God! I could do that! I can act better than that! I could write that scene on the toilet at McDonalds! I could have filmed that with my mom’s old home video camera!” There is nothing quite like watching terrible actors deliver terrible dialogue in staggeringly ridiculous scenarios to give you hope that you, too, could make it in Hollywood. What’s truly amazing about Dynasty is that so many of the actors and actresses have made it in Hollywood. A very young Heather Locklear looks gorgeous but is clearly struggling with the whole acting thing. Joan Collins was, at the time, one of the best known “actresses” in the world. Linda Evans, following her time on Dynasty, pursued a successful career as the star of a series of infomercials. It was a star-maker series!

The plot of Dynasty is standard soap-opera fare. Betrayals, sexual liasons, love triangles, jealousy, murder, power struggles, conspiracies and cliffhangers abound. It is all so gloriously cheesy and campy and staggeringly stupid that one can’t help laughing while watching, and enjoying every minute. And it makes you feel good. Because yes you, whoever “you” are, could do that. And you could do it better.