Cool photo!

FWIW that 1989 version of the program was slightly cut to make room for more commercial time. I've never seen it to compare directly but from what I've read it has the following cuts:

A musical number was cut where Liza (the Darling family maid) and the animals of Neverland perform to an orchestral version of Never Never Land, Mary Martin's curtain speech at the end thanking NBC for making the program possible is gone, and the intertitle bearing the credit Peter Pan: Act III (although the others are left). It really makes my blood boil when historically significant programs are altered for "more commercial time"! Just put it in a longer time slot! I can *almost* come to grips with the Martin speech being removed as NBC sold(?Licensed?) the rights to Disney - BUT it's *still* a part of the program and should be presented!

Apparently the 1960, unedited, 100 minute version only aired in 1960, 1963, 1966 and 1973 (I'd have sworn it aired annually in the 60s). The earlier productions ran 90 minutes.

I've never seen the production in color as our first color set was purchased in ~1968. By '73 I was "too old" for that type stuff and probably wasn't even home the night it aired. Neither of my kids were interested during the airings in the 80s and 90s and I never picked up the VHS or DVD. I may watch that youtube copy just because I've not seen it since the 60s. Plus it counts!

You keep tempting me to open those sets I picked up before Christmas! Plus you keep reminding me I have a couple of seasons of Ancient Aliens still sitting here unopened. I'm *trying* to save the BBC nature sets for the Historical Challenge (along with some WWII stuff)...

This challenge *needs* to run 2-3 months!

Yeah it really does need to run longer than a month. I just couldn't wait for the Historical Challenge myself as documentaries are one of my favorite genres. I just like to get my learn on I guess.

In other news, I received another Super Friends set in the mail today. The All New Super Friends Hour Volume 1. I now have Challenge of the Super Friends, Super Friends Volume 2, the set that came out 2nd, not the Junior Super Friends sets that I refuse to acknowledge, Galactic Guardians, and the one that came today. I also believe Legendary Super Powers Team is on Youtube. I'm almost tempted to watch some now, but the Action Adventure Challenge is not that far off.

Thanks for posting the picture! Even before you mentioned which one was Tiger Lily, I knew it had to be her! Very cool!

Thanks, Travis! You know I do profiles for DVDProfiler, and this will really help with box set times! I always am second guessing myself if I have converted right and this will take at least a couple steps out-so less room for error!

Huh, I wonder if that deleted scene helps with why Liza is in Neverland in the first place? It's the one part of the show that just doesn't fit in for me! I totally agree, why not just put it in a longer time slot? I'd love for this to get a new release with that deleted scene (plus the speech, of course!)

You should totally watch it. I really enjoyed it last night and it went by quickly. But it is a musical-am I remembering right that those are not your favorites?

I watched the first season of The 4400 as well as part of the second season, but I guess I lost interest. At the time, I remember talking with a friend and saying that it would make a better book series due to the number of characters and the fact that actors could get shuffled around - not the best thing for a mythos-heavy show. Perhaps, I should give it another go at some point. I loved it at the time.

I finished the first season of Twin Peaks and started the second. So far, it is just magnificent, and if the premiere of the second season is any indication, it's just going to get more and more bizarre. This is the first time I'm watching it, and I'm hooked. The quirkiness and tonal shifts work for me, and I love the intensity of all the characters. I can see why the show is so beloved. Question: is it one of the first cancelled-too-early cult classics?

On a side note, I've seen the homage Psych did, and they got the tone and oddness of the show spot on. I also enjoyed that the episode poked fun at their own oddness. For example, Shawn is confused at the emotional outbursts of the other characters since in the world of Psych, no one really gets upset when someone dies.

You remember correctly. That's a lot of why I didn't like it much as a kid (plus it was a stage play, something else I've never much cared for).

I've never been a fan of "musicals" although there are a *few* I do like so go figure... I find that as I grow older I have a greater tolerance for musicals but the list of those I'll *chose* to watch is still fairly short. While I like songs from many musicals I very much dislike it when they interrupt the story (yeah... I know many songs continue/support/etc. the story but I rarely pay attention to lyrics so it's typically wasted on me). I don't like Opera either (imagine that) which is why I changed majors my second year of college (was a voice major being trained for Opera).

As much as I love Psych, as a Twin Peaks fan, the "Dual Spires" episode made me geeked out so much as indicated before. All those little nods especially using Julee Cruise was phenomenal! It was a great job all around.

BTW, Ash, nice picture!

You should be able to watch TV content for most of the other challenges (there are even two episodes apiece of The Addams Family and I Love Lucy that qualify for Criterion!), though I realize this is the only one that eschews genre.

I suppose my take on this challenge is different from probably everyone else's, because ordinarily, I don't watch TV at all (except new episodes of Dallas and Reds games). In fact, excluding Reds games (of which I watched just three all of last season), almost all of my TV show viewing has been in this challenge.

"I am a river to my people."

The size of the cast didn't faze me, because I knew that Ira Steven Behr was overseeing things and managing a large cast was something he'd done quite successfully on Deep Space Nine. It did stumble some in the second and third seasons, but overall I've enjoyed it. I'm not sure I've seen any of the fourth season, so that should be fun for me when I come back to it in July for the Sci-Fi/Fantasy Challenge.

I'm pretty anti-musical. The funny thing is, though, that I've found I dig Bollywood movies - which are heavily musical. I guess there's something about following through subtitles that makes it less jarring for me when people break into choreographed singing? I dunno what it is, but for some reason it engages me very differently from the English language musicals that make me roll my eyes and become impatient.

Despite knowing for quite some time that a pilot episode was produced for Batgirl, for some reason I never actually searched YouTube for it until a little while ago after it came up in the discussion thread about the Batman series finally coming out on DVD this year. My thoughts:

YES. All kinds of yes. I love me some Batgirl, and even through the low video quality of the YouTube upload, I was still thrilled to see Yvonne Craig in the role. Unlike most pilots, they didn't need to produce a full episode to convey the idea of what a Batgirl series would be like; all they really needed was to establish that Craig held the screen well in the role, set against the same Gotham City as Batman. It's a shame they didn't go all out, not because it would have made any difference in 1967, but because then I'd have more to watch today.

Adam West was opposed to the inclusion of the character in Batman, and some of that comes through in his performance here (Burt Ward sleepwalks through the whole thing). I really enjoyed the brief phone call between Barbara and her dad, Police Commissioner James Gordon (Neil Hamilton), and I can't help but wonder how much fun it would have been to have seen their relationship develop throughout a Batgirl series. Being instead squeezed into the shortened Batman third season, there really wasn't much time to devote to such things. A shame, that.

This is one reason I've been holding off on my action cartoons and live action shows for the most part. I figure, I can always watch them during March's Action/Adventure Challenge. Then I may break out my She-Ra sets, and finally sit down and watch my Knight Rider and Super Friends DVDs.

I should try to do a better job rationing out TV viewing in the other challenges. I did enjoy gorging on Star Trek, original and animated, during last year's Sci-Fi/Fantasy and Animation Challenges - though I watched very little else during the former challenge. I generally sit out everything after the Oscar Challenge until it comes time to host Historical Appreciation in June.

LJG765 and I are going to sync up soon (tonight, maybe?) to watch Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which will complete our tour through the TOS movies. It's near and dear to me, and I'm excited to finally revisit it. It's because of the teaser poster for that movie that I ever became a Trekker in the first place. After we finish that, then all that remains are a handful of episodes from the various spin-offs, possibly Star Trek Generations and the last two movies. It'll be bittersweet to finish our tour through the Kirk/Spock era. The Undiscovered Country will mark our farewell to DeForest Kelly as Dr. McCoy and Nichelle Nichols as Uhura.

True, but I have so many movies, especially the unwatched piles, that fit other challenges I feel like I'm ignoring those if I watch TV series exclusively.
The only Bollywood film I've seen to date is Enthiran and I fast forwarded through the production numbers since they didn't seem to add anything to the plot. It's pretty good and I highly recommend it, especially for the SF/Fantasy Challenge. A co-worker is from India and gave me the low down on Bollywood films when I watched some of Enthiran at work. Essentially those musical numbers are the *main* reason people go to see the films!

I haven't finished Orange is the New Black either, but the answer is always yes to Veronica Mars, always.

I just reached a double milestone with one item. Not only did I hit 100 items watched, but I also finished another season set with Ancient Aliens Season 2. I have seasons 3 and 4 still to watch. Not sure if I will get to 4 this month or not.

Whoo hoo! I remembered right! I guess I've always loved the song and dance part-I'm a horrible singer, but I love any music I can sing to, so maybe that's part of it. I've been a Disney fan since I can remember (the first movie I remember seeing was "Snow White" that they had brought back to the theaters) and music was always a big part of the story. As I got older, I moved onto Broadway style musicals as well. I love them and try to see as many as I can, which, granted, is not a whole lot recently, but I try!

A voice major who doesn't like musicals is even odder, though! I think it was a wise move to move away from Opera then! I have to admit, Opera is not my favorite music style...

Well, we didn't get to it last night, but maybe tonight or tomorrow! We only have a short time left!

I've always wanted to watch a few Bollywood movies but it's hard to know what is watchable and what isn't and they'd mainly have to be things I've bought as locally, they really aren't available. The only one that I've really watched is the one Disney released, "Once Upon a Warrior" which I blind bought from the DMC. I did really enjoy it, including the dance scenes, though!

Just read from EW that "Peter Pan" is going to be the next musical put on by the guys who did "The Sound of Music." I'm half hoping this will mean that they will re-release the Mary Martin one to get people in the mood for it...

I tend to prefer choral music from the Medieval (before 1450), Renaissance (1450 - 1600), Baroque (1600 - 1750), and Classical (1750 - 1820) eras with a smattering of material from the Romantic (1810 - 1910). Some of the numbers from "modern" musicals *can* be fun to sing and is often written for my range (Tenor 1) but I prefer the earlier material, especially the liturgical and "Madrigal" type works. There's nothing like a good Latin piece sung in a facility with the right amount of echo.
I'll try to remember to ask my coworker for some recommendations. I don't know if he likes the style but he *does* know the more popular artists in the genre.
That would be a good thing. A re-release of the 1960 version that is - done right with no edits and restored as much as possible considering the 1960 video tape source.

Considering Disney appears to be the current rights holder I wonder if the NBC production is being somewhat surpressed because Disney doesn't want to "dilute" their animated offering or cause confusion with the live action release.

I have so much unwatched TV, and seasons take so long to watch, that I really could do the challenge all year long. I work some shows into many other challenges, and if I were clever, I'd only watch shows in January that don't count for other genres. But I watch what I want to watch. It's just awesome that I can watch an NFL playoff game for "credit."

I've never warmed up to opera, but I love musicals and see almost all the major stage shows here in town. There are tons of others too if I had the time....

Awesome thread derailment! I'm not trained like you, but I'm a choral singer with a fondness for classical. Generally I prefer earlier than later, but contemporary composers (Whitacre, Lauridesen, etc.) are producing some really great stuff.

Regarding Bollywood, two years ago, I checked out Lagaan: Once upon a Time in India, which was a Best Foreign Language nominee in the 2001 Oscars. I loved it. I actually felt by the time I finished watching it that I had learned the basics of cricket well enough to follow along with a match, so that was cool. The lead actor looked a lot like former Reds third baseman Aaron Boone, which was bemusing and a bit distracting.

One of my friends has been doing some belly dancing stuff for awhile now and she's been studying Bollywood-style dance lately. Monday night, I was hanging out with her and she showed me several different clips of performances from different things. They all looked like a lot of fun, but the movie that really caught my eye was Ram-Leela, which just opened in November. It has a decidedly "Tarantino" vibe and looks completely insane. I'm eager to get hold of it!

Just to bring this line of thought vaguely back on-topic, I adored Psych's Bollywood episode. It wasn't quite as brilliant as the Mexican soap opera episode, but it's up there in the echelon of their thematic episodes.

As somebody who watches telenovelas, I didn't find the Mexican soap opera episode as funny as the Bollywood one. Shawn and Gus reaction to the Indian food was "epic" while Shawn's girlfriend Abby, calmly eats her dinner.

I loved the Chinese triad episode too. I thought it was almost as good as the Bollywood one.

I've been watching S1 of The Real McCoys (1957), a program I've barely seen since the original airings. It's one I watched as a kid but always thought it had too much "drama" and not enough comedy in lots of episodes. I'm about half way through the season and so far I've only seen a few episodes that bordered on dramedy with most being good family comedy. Maybe it was those last couple of years when it got more "serious" in tone. No matter... I've really been enjoying revisiting the series after all those years. Even though I grew up during the earlier years of TV I'm still amazed at the number of episodes in a season for many programs in the late 50s - 60s. This one has 39! And the episodes are all high quality with good production values and a surprisingly small number of "clunkers" which aren't truly "bad" but simply not quite as good as the rest. Those "clunkers" would make superior episodes on many series I've watched during the past 20 or so years.

Very cool! I admit about the only thing I've listened to much in that age range has been some chanting.

I'd appreciate some rec's. It's just hard to make that leap when you don't know anything about a movie.

Hmm, I've thought about whether or not Disney had a hand in it, but there's so much other Pan stuff out there, a stage play version from the '60s shouldn't be that much competition for them, you'd think.

And to be back on topic: I asked for a PBS series for Christmas, "Frontier House" and did not get it, so I bought it for myself and have been watching it. For those that haven't heard of it, PBS did several specials in the "House" line. Basically, they picked an era, had a bunch of people to live in it and taped them doing it. They wore the clothes, ate the food, used the tools. Most of them have the people separated enough that you don't see the modern world. There is at least one that have the people live in their era, while everyone around them is modern which is stretching it for me. My other favorite of the series is "Colonial House."

It's the 2nd watch for me. I enjoy it (obviously since I asked for it after watching it) but I do feel this second time through that PBS should had focused more on the families working than them bickering. While that is important, it feels a bit more like a reality TV show where it's all about the conflict and not about the actual goal.

Needing a quick workout watch, and inspired by this discussion, I watched the two-part Alex-Ellen meetup. Such great writing and chemistry--guess the way they looked at each other wasn't all acting. The whole ensemble cast was great too.

Decided to take a short break from the documentaries I've been watching to watch some Super Friends. So I broke out my Challenge of the Super Friends set and continued where I left off on that set. It's cool seeing the Super Friends fight comic book super villains in that show.

Like others, I have high hopes that when NBC's next 'live' musical comes on next year, this will get re-released as a tie-in.

Do Disney hold any rights to Peter Pan in musical form...? Surely their only claim on Pan is based on the American rights to the character being in the public domain...

The what, please..?




I realised the other day that Amazon had Ancient Aliens streaming free, so I watched the first episode. Good grief! It was really just a string of crazy theories, half-baked opinions and insane leaps of logic... Interesting, to a point, but when the programme opens with the rhetorical question about Aliens visiting and giving the technology to build things and then answers that rhetorical question with this statement:

...the double-degree of prevarication and equivocating made me laugh - and not for the only time! The answer to any question "could be 'Yes'," adding the "potential" really underlined - and undermined - how unlikely the programme makers thought the arguments were.

I know that remits and content have changed, but this was on the HISTORY Channel... and yet the small handful of talking heads were talking nonsense! They made vague postulations about possibilities, acknowledged the "accepted truth" in passing, dismissed it without cause or reason, and moved straight on to a random alternative theory they just made up.

For instance:

Casual ignoring of potential - occam's razor - solutions.

FACT: The pyramids are big and difficult to build.
NOTE: For humans to build them unaided would have been time-consuming and difficult.
THOUGHT: That degree of difficulty makes such a project awkward.
LEAP OF ILLOGIC: Alien technology!

...

What about slave labour? No mention that such an effort was being expended in a project honouring their Gods?

For instance #2:

Hyperbolic extrapolation.

POSTULATION: "If we assume that this work of fiction was true, and the allegorical flying machine was real, and then that it was widely used and then that other civilizations used it too..."
CONCLUSION: "...maybe every unexplained building was an airport, and every odd ground formation a runway!"

Well, yes. Maybe. IF we work from an unlikely starting point, then possibly the unlikely finish point suddenly seems 'more' likely!



One of the people even pooh-poohed the suggestion that people would believe aliens built these things (laughable!), and then segued straight into suggesting that the more logical point of view was that aliens gave the technology to humans, so humans could build them. The latter being such a more plausible assumption because.... [something].


It was entertaining, I suppose!