Throwback Thursday: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Every Throwback Thursday, I randomly pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I saved. Then I discuss the movie on the stub and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. The AFOS blog's year-long TBT series concludes its run on December 10.

That skydiving scene in 3-D was amazing.

The rest of the movie can go fuck itself.

Does Bad Boys hold up 20 years after its release?

What I said about Bad Boys as an "eye Teen Reviewer" for the San Jose Mercury News back in 1995 (April 14, a week after Bad Boys' April 7 opening, to be exact), word for word and with every single Merc style guide preference preserved, straight off a clipping I still have of my own article:

'Bad Boys' is fun — for a formula movie

EYE TEEN REVIEWER
Jim Aquino

THE cop-buddy comedy "Bad Boys" (not to be confused with the 1983 Sean Penn prison pic of the same name) is the latest flashy action movie from the Simpson-Bruckheimer assembly line, which has churned out such blockbuster hits as "Beverly Hills Cop" and "Top Gun."

Directed by Michael Bay, the genius behind the popular, Clio-winning "Aaron Burr?" milk commercial, "Bad Boys" sticks to the tried-and-true formula that made Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer big-name producers back in the '80s: gaudy visuals, extravagant action sequences, a big-time soundtrack and a script that's high on concept and low on subtlety.

After producing a low-profile film such as the dark, dialogue-driven comedy "The Ref," it appears that Simpson and Bruckheimer want to go back to making big, dumb movies again. "The Ref" worked because it fit star Denis Leary's edgy, verbose persona, and never tried to soften Leary's cynical humor. "Bad Boys" could have been as satisfying as "The Ref," if its script were as clever overall as the snappy, entertaining interplay between its two leads, sitcom stars Martin Lawrence and Will Smith.

Lawrence and Smith, playing mismatched Miami police detectives Marcus Burnett and Mike Lowery, rise above the formulaic cops-vs.-heroin thieves plot to deliver top-notch performances. "Bad Boys" runs too long at more than two hours, but it remains watchable because of these charismatic, energetic stars and their fast, funny and often improvised delivery.

"Bad Boys," originally written for Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz, is strong on visuals, thanks to first-time director Bay, who must have watched a lot of Tony Scott movies. The Miami setting is wonderful to look at, and the set pieces are well-staged.

But "Bad Boys" suffers from uninteresting bad guys and a story line that offers few surprises, aside from the amusing subplot in which neurotic family man Burnett and smooth ladies' man Lowery switch identities. Tea Leoni, who was so memorable as the sexy bohemian girlfriend on the short-lived sitcom "Flying Blind," plays a key witness.

"Bad Boys" isn't original or groundbreaking, but it's fun and entertaining, thanks to Lawrence and Smith.

What I think about Bad Boys in 2015, on the day before the date of the 20th anniversary of its release:

Of all the movie reviews I wrote for the Mercury News while in high school and then college, the mixed review of Bad Boys--at that point in his filmography, the Fresh Prince had just won over critics because of his big-screen debut in the film version of Six Degrees of Separation, but he hadn't made Independence Day yet--is one of the only two or three reviews where I still stand by every word. For instance, Michael Bay was at his best as a director of commercials like that classic "Got milk?" ad (although putting the words "Michael Bay" and "genius" in the same sentence back then makes me cringe); The Ref remains a terrific antidote to Yuletide mawkishness; and I still can't remember the name of Burnett and Lowery's boring nemesis. Like Dana Gould did when he couldn't remember the name of the villain Ben Gazzara played in Road House, I'm just going to call their boring nemesis Drago.

All the other reviews I wrote back then can go in the shredder. That was the biggest problem with being a film critic for print media. If some part of your opinion about a film would change (and my opinions sometimes do), you couldn't go back and change what you said in print like you can now easily do on a blog or in digital media.

Aside from a clunky and racist bit of attempted comedy where Shaun Toub--a.k.a. Dr. Yinsen from the first Iron Man flick--shows up as a stereotypical Middle Eastern convenience store clerk (an ominous sign of comedic things to come in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) who racially profiles Lawrence and Smith because of the visible guns in their holsters, Bad Boys remains one of Michael Bay's few tolerable movies. That's mainly due to the dialogue between Martin and Will ("Don't be alarmed, we're Negroes"), the most enduring part of the first Bad Boys, which cost only $17 million to make. I prefer smaller-scale Michael Bay over larger-scale, giant-robot-testicles-flashing Michael Bay, which is why I never bothered to watch 2003's much bigger-budgeted and longer-in-running-time Bad Boys II, even though Simon Pegg and Nick Frost were seen worshiping Bad Boys II in Hot Fuzz, an Edgar Wright film that trounces Bad Boys in all sorts of ways, simply because it's an Edgar Wright film (I hear 2013's Pain & Gain is supposed to be a return to Bay's smaller-budgeted roots, but I haven't seen that one yet either).

The Bad Boys original score by Mark Mancina still holds up too and hasn't aged poorly at all. During "AFOS Prime" and "Beat Box" on AFOS, you can hear a previously unreleased version of the film's dancehall-influenced main title theme, Mancina's "Prologue - The Car Jacking," taken from La-La Land Records' out-of-print Bad Boys score album and featured below. (The Bad Boys song album's not too shabby either. I remember practicing to get my driver's license to the sounds of Diana King's dancehall-style "Shy Guy.")



If you still find Bad Boys--or Drago--to be too generic for your tastes, perhaps reading Shield creator Shawn Ryan's mostly sardonic live-tweets of Bay's Bad Boys DVD commentary while he watched Bad Boys for the first time ever in 2012 will make the film go down easier. "Michael goes silent on commentary for a few minutes," tweeted Ryan, who actually likes the movie, during a lull in Bay's pontifi-bating. "Perhaps he took a break to write nasty email to Megan Fox."

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (11/07/2012): Transformers Prime, Tron: Uprising, Motorcity, Kaijudo and The Avengers

Farewell, the one-season wonder that is Motorcity! Screw you, Disney XD! (Photo source: Guts-N-Effort)

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

Transformers Prime concludes its second season with a tense cliffhanger that raises the stakes and shakes up the show's premise of aliens getting comfy with their new home on Earth because now, thanks to an attack by Megatron's floating fortress, there's no longer a base for Team Prime to call home. At the end of "Darkest Hour," the Autobots and their young human cohorts are forced to split up to avoid getting captured by the Decepticons and are now on the run, which hints that season 3 will be more like The Hub's other '80s toy-based Hasbro Studios action cartoon, the now-defunct G.I. Joe: Renegades, which turned the Joes into A-Team-style fugitives.

The on-the-run arc looks like it'll be more engaging than the relic-hunting arc, which I found to be sometimes tedious. One thing this series is good at is conveying how dangerous it is for the kids to be involved in an intergalactic war, and the much-needed change in setting will hopefully emphasize that.

"What will [the kids] do? How will they cope? They can’t go back to school or have any semblance of a normal life; the Cons know who they are and where they live," wrote a Transformers Prime recapper on Toonzone. "Jack can’t even see his mother. Their entire world crumbled in one fell swoop and I doubt they can pick up the pieces so easily."

Optimus Prime appears to be dead after failing to escape the attack on the Autobot base. But there's no way this series is going to keep him dead permanently. His name is in the series title. Unless they replace Optimus with a new and younger Prime, they're going to have to change the series title to Transformers: Exodus or something equally portentous.

***

We know things won't end well for Tron on Tron: Uprising when this prequel show will reach its final episode because Tron: Legacy revealed that Clu (Fred Tatasciore) captured Tron and had him "repurposed" (his new evil identity after the brainwashing was Rinzler). In part 2 of "Scars," we get to see what repurposing looks like when the show flashes back to the first time Clu's forces captured Tron and threatened to repurpose him. But instead of erasing Tron's identity and memories because he finds the repurposing procedure to be "crude," Clu's henchman Dyson (John Glover) disfigured Tron's purdy face with a saw-like device (as payback for half of his own face getting sliced off by an unknown attacker's identity disc during an ISO riot that Tron was assigned to handle) and sent him away on a Recognizer ship to be executed.

Dyson doesn't know that Tron's life was saved by Cyrus (Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad), a guard on the Recognizer who secretly opposed Clu's regime and helped Tron to escape, so that's why Dyson and most of the programs in The Grid think Tron is dead. Cyrus' words of encouragement to Tron--he told him, "We can't let your revolution end before it has a chance to start, bitch!"--sound exactly like what Beck says to Tron to stop him from derezzing Dyson, and Beck's warning to Tron that killing Dyson will taint what he set out to accomplish causes Tron to change his mind and spare Dyson's life.

The flashback that introduces Cyrus lends credence to a theory I have about Beck. For a while, I thought he's actually a program created by either Kevin Flynn (Tatasciore) or Tron to take Tron's place in the revolution against Clu someday, just like how Justice League Unlimited's Amanda Waller had Bruce Wayne's DNA implanted into the father of Batman Beyond hero Terry McGinnis to ensure that Terry would grow up to succeed Bruce as Batman.

Cyrus' physical appearance closely resembles Beck's, and so does his voice, which is similar to Elijah Wood's (at first, I wasn't able to identify the actor who voiced Cyrus--for a while, I thought he was Adrian Pasdar, not Paul--because Disney XD does a wonderful job of squishing the credits so that you can't read them). Also, Cyrus' name is an extremely nerdy reference to the Cyrus-Beck line clipping algorithm. I now think Beck is a repurposed version of Cyrus. At some point in the time period between the year that "Scars" flashed back to and the first Tron: Uprising episode, someone must have used the repurposing tech to erase Cyrus' identity and memories and replace them with a different identity as the younger mechanic program Beck, perhaps to keep Cyrus safe and plant the seed for the revolution to re-emerge when the time is right. I know that's a batshit crazy theory, but the Tron franchise has come up with equally ridiculous ideas before, like the whole Rinzler/Tron thing that came out of nowhere in Tron: Legacy.

Like I said last week, "Scars" is reminiscent of Batman: The Animated Series' "Robin's Reckoning" two-parter. The differences in opinion between Beck and Tron about killing Dyson are exactly like the temporary discord between Batman and Robin over gangster Tony Zucco. Another resemblance to "Robin's Reckoning" is the fact that part 1 of "Scars" is a stronger half than part 2, just like what happened with "Robin's Reckoning," which was still a standout B:TAS story even though it sort of fell flat in part 2. Of course Tron would never derez Dyson--this is a Disney XD show, so the hero will never be allowed to do something so extreme--but I wanted Tron to remain off his rocker for a little while longer. Maybe it's because I've lately been watching a shitload of TNT's nonstop marathons of The Mentalist, where the revenge-driven title character gets to be crazy--all the time.

***

The trailer house that puts together AMC's "next week on Mad Men" promos came up with a brilliant strategy for its promo editors: if you're going to cull dialogue from next week's episode, pick out only the least interesting lines or edit those lines down so much--like down to just three or four words (and if it's just Don in the clip, even less than that)--that they make very little sense out of context. These cryptic, mostly announcer-less and unrevealing Mad Men promos have been known to annoy many viewers who are dying to know what will happen next week, but it's not surprising that they're so cryptic and so devoid of spoilers. Famously guarded and secretive Mad Men showrunner Matthew Weiner wouldn't want it any other way.

I wish more cable channel promo departments followed the AMC Mad Men promo model because otherwise, you wind up with mishaps like Disney XD carelessly spoiling the ending of Motorcity's "Like Father, Like Daughter" episode in its promos. It didn't ruin the enjoyment of the episode, but it took a lot of the surprise out of the ending.

The high-octane action sequences are what first drew me to Motorcity (before I found out that the show involved writers and animators from the Cartoon Network cult favorite Megas XLR, and then that's when I really became invested in the show). Like I said last week while discussing Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters' Locomotivator scenes, I'm a sucker for set pieces that involve speeding trains, and "Like Father, Like Daughter" contains a couple of enjoyable bits of caper action as the Burners attempt to steal a trove of vintage cars from a floating KaneCo freight train that the corporation refers to as a "Deluxitram."

Abraham Kane has been destroying cars as a way to deprive the people of both Detroit Deluxe and the underground Motorcity of their freedom, so to foil Kane's upcoming car-burning ceremony, the Burners formulate a plan to take as many cars as possible from KaneCo storage and give them back to the people, an idea Julie came up with. "They can't fight [Kane], they can't run from his bots, all because they don't have cars," says Julie to Mike.

The team's heist gets disrupted by Kane's new employee Red (Eric Ladin, a.k.a. Betty's brother William on Mad Men), a masked assassin who's returned for a rematch with Mike after first tussling with him in "Vendetta." But for the first time in the show's run, I was less interested in the action-y stuff in the A-story and more interested in the non-action-y material in the B-story, which has Julie spending a day with her dad Kane. It sounds like a dull B-story (or is this the A-story and not the B-story?), but Titmouse comes up with ways to keep us engaged in what could have been really talky and lifeless scenes, like the gorgeous Blade Runner Tyrell pyramid-style lighting during a scene inside a high-rise Detroit Deluxe restaurant.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (09/26/2012): Transformers Prime, Kaijudo, The Avengers, Randy Cunningham and Dragons: Riders of Berk

"I rocked a ginormous beard before everybody in Williamsburg started doing it. Whatever," says Alvin the Treacherous, the first hipster.

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

On Transformers Prime, the Frank Welker-voiced Megatron's latest obsession is the Star Saber, an Excalibur-like sword from Cybertron that's stuck in a giant rock on Earth and can only be removed by Optimus Prime or any Cybertronian who's a Prime. While Megatron tries to get his dibs on the relic before Optimus can, Smokescreen has gotten into hot water with the Autobots for revealing his robot mode to scare the shit out of a human he argued with when the driver experienced road rage over Smokescreen's reckless driving. Too bad Google's driverless cars can't lash out at hostile and psychotic drivers and transform into intimidating robots to scare them away like Smokescreen does in "Legacy."

(Photo source: Comics Online)

The Autobots assign Jack to teach the callow Smokescreen how to blend in better with humans, obey traffic laws and not blow his cover, but in a nice acknowledgment that Jack is a 16-year-old, he shirks the assignment and is tempted by Smokescreen into staging pranks on bullies at school and other guys who have wronged him. Unfortunately, "Legacy" goes overboard in taking the sanctimonious Optimus' "Power must be used wisely" side and never shows any of Jack and Smokescreen's pranks, perhaps to prevent the littlest viewers from getting any ideas about how to punk others, like how Burn Notice skips a step or two in its fact-based spy tips to prevent deranged fans from hurting others.

The decision to keep the duo's pranks off-screen robs "Legacy" of some much-needed fun. It also keeps the show from making a grown-up and complex point about pranks, like how some pranks can be harmful and not worth staging, while other pranks can be beneficial and cathartic for the wronged prankster. A cop-out like that is why Transformers Prime is merely an okay cartoon, while Gravity Falls, which took a subversive "Revenge is underrated--that felt awesome!" stance in "Irrational Treasure" while also conveying how revenge can go too far in "Fight Fighters," and Regular Show, which did both those things in "Prankless," are great cartoons.

***

Speaking of bullies, Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters has distinguished itself for addressing the timely issue of bullying and the difficulties of having to put up with racist classmates (it's ironic how Kaijudo airs on a channel that recently indulged in a little racism at Comic-Con) and somehow seamlessly incorporating those problems into an escapist saga for kids that's mainly about monster battles. The show revisits bullying in "Night Moves," but this time, it focuses on girls who do the bullying--in this case, mean girls from Allie's circle of rich middle school friends who mistreat Lucy (Alanna Ubach, a.k.a. the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia crack whore who memorably exclaimed, "Shut up, baby dick!"), an overalls-clad classmate from the impoverished side of town.

There's an interesting moment early on in "Night Moves" where Allie laughs along with her classmates at the insults directed at Lucy from mean girl Portia (also Ubach), while an upset Ray and Gabe, who are no strangers to being pushed around for being different, see no humor in Portia's remarks. Allie realizes her mistake, so in an attempt to get Portia and Lucy to make peace with each other, she invites Lucy to a sleepover with Portia and another friend, Maribel (Grey DeLisle), at her and her wealthy dad's beachside house. But the sleepover doesn't go smoothly, and the night gets worse when a ghost-story prank Ray and Gabe attempt to subject the four girls to--with the help of a creature from the Darkness Civilization--attracts the attention of evil Duelist Alakshmi Verma (also DeLisle) and her latest monstrous sidekick.

Written by Ross Berger, "Night Moves" makes some dead-on observations about the cruelty of kids at a certain age where they're not quite teens yet. Because Ray and Gabe are middle-schoolers and their hormones haven't gone crazy yet, their way of relating to girls is to scare them instead of getting them to make out with them. Another nice touch is the way that the mean girls' treatment of Lucy is more class-related than race-related (although it's implied that Portia despises immigrants as well). The fact that Maribel is a rich Latina who's mistreating a poorer Latina brings class into this story of bullying and shows that wealth can sometimes be more complicated than race. A lesser cartoon would have made the mean girls all-white or ended the episode with Allie lecturing them about their cruelty. Because Kaijudo is a bit smarter than that, "Night Moves" ends with Allie wordlessly ditching the mean girls and dressing like Lucy as a show of solidarity. And because the dialogue on Kaijudo is remarkably never overwritten (aside from the occasional bit of exposition about kaiju), the John DiMaggio-voiced skater dude who compliments Allie and her new friend on their less ritzy threads dismisses Portia and Maribel with a great episode-closing line: "Pshaw."

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (09/12/2012): Transformers Prime, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Avengers, Gumball and Dragons: Riders of Berk

"Let me tell you the story of Right Hand, Left Hand. It's a tale of good and evil. Hate: it was with this hand that Cain iced his brother. Love..."

Every Wednesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

On Transformers Prime, Team Prime gets a new member: Smokescreen (Nolan North), who crash-landed on Earth in a Decepticon escape pod and is as reckless as Autobot soldier Wheeljack, but he's less experienced in combat and more deferential to Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen). Most of Team Prime is as skeptical of the new guy as the Baltimore homicide detectives were about wet-behind-the-ears Bayliss, the new transfer from the mayor's security team, in the first few episodes of Homicide: Life on the Street.

The only Autobots who don't give Smokescreen a hard time are Optimus (who trusts Smokescreen because the Autobot rookie says that before he fled to Earth, he served as a guard for one of Optimus' old Cybertronian mentors--shades of pre-homicide squad Bayliss) and the mute, communicates-only-in-chirps Bumblebee. The yellow guy's opinions are unknown because he doesn't express them in pop song samples and movie soundbites like he did in the live-action Transformers movies and because Transformers Prime isn't able to afford the clearance fees for those songs.

Arcee is annoyed by Smokescreen's lack of field experience. The stuffy Autobot medic Ratchet (Jeffrey Combs in anal-retentive Anthony Heald mode) doesn't like Smokescreen's ignorance of protocol. Bulkhead, who can barely walk due to his injuries and is far from combat-ready, feels like he's being replaced by Smokescreen. (Even the viewers at the Toonzone forums are suspicious of Smokescreen. One viewer theorized that he's a well-disguised Shockwave, who appeared in his one-eyed original form in Arcee's flashbacks last week.) But the jaded and pissy Autobots have no choice but to accept the newbie into the fold because they have to worry about stopping Starscream from getting his hands on a meteorite of Red Energon, which, when refined into fuel, is capable of making any Cybertronian faster and stronger.

Richard Simmons welcomes everyone into his Slimmons Studio, including plus-size robots. (Photo source: Transformers Wiki)

As usual, the action sequences on this show are well-animated, but the most interesting moment in "New Recruit" has nothing to do with combat. The moment is a nifty little scene I've never seen in either the '80s Transformers cartoon or the Michael Bay movies: together, Autobots sidekick Jack Darby (Josh Keaton) and Smokescreen look at trucks and cars passing through an underpopulated highway to decide which vehicular mode Smokescreen should use for his permanent disguise on Earth ("This is Jasper," grouses Jack about his sleepy Nevada hometown's lack of snazzy rides for Smokescreen to choose from). In Marvel's Transformers comics, the Autobots' Earth-based vehicular forms were chosen for them by their spacecraft computer, which scanned the shapes of present-day vehicles, but here, a human takes Smokescreen out to pick his disguise as if he's Mr. Witwicky helping his son Sam shop for his first car at the start of the first Bayformers movie.

When a slow and rickety pick-up truck appears on the highway, Smokescreen cracks to Jack, "Eh, it's more Ratchet's speed." If I were Smokescreen, I would have added, "Plus I don't wanna look like the hillbilly truck from that ponderous family film you humans love for some goddamn reason."

***

The A.V. Club's "TV Club" section recently stopped recapping Ultimate Spider-Man. Inessential and lamely scripted episodes like "Home Sick Hulk" must be a reason why the site quit covering the show (it's too bad they dumped USM because I want to know what their reviewer would say about USM's Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark-inspired high school musical episode later this month).

In "Home Sick Hulk," Hulk (Fred Tatasciore) winds up physically sick after a silver alien gadget with a blinking light attaches itself to his skin. Peter hides the green giant in his bedroom from both Aunt May (Misty Lee) and Nick Fury (Spidey's afraid of placing Hulk in the cold-blooded Fury's custody) while trying to treat his infection. Disney Channel sitcom-style chaos ensues as Peter tries to pretend to Aunt May that the tremors caused by Hulk's footsteps are a rare New York earthquake while making sure his aunt doesn't see the Spidey costume underneath his bathrobe. Peter must also deal with having an uncooperative and clumsy patient/temporary roommate in the form of Hulk, who's as graceful as a bull in a china shop. The episode is like one of Dexter's Laboratory's "Justice Friends" superhero roommates shorts, but without any good jokes (okay, maybe there's one chuckleworthy running gag: Hulk's bizarre and unexplained fixation on Peter's tighty-whities, which Hulk wears as a hat at one point).

My biggest beef with the '90s Spidey cartoon was how, as Manhattan's favorite web-slinger, Christopher Daniel Barnes, a.k.a. Greg Brady, wouldn't stop narrating. Spidey's habit of over-explaining the uncomplicated action is equally bad on USM. He sounds like a melodramatic character in a sci-fi radio drama describing out loud that "Oh no, a laser gun just blasted a hole into the wall behind me, and now I'm running down this corridor!," so if you watch USM with your eyes turned away from the screen or with your eyes closed, you'll never be lost, thanks to Spidey's descriptive video service. His habit is at its worst during "Home Sick Hulk," as he feels the need to explain to the audience that the alien gadget is stuck in Hulk's back and Aunt May mustn't know Hulk's in our house, in case we missed it the first three times.

Is the Man of Action collective, which co-wrote "Home Sick Hulk," under the impression that having Peter think out loud to the younger viewers like that is a great way of achieving storytelling clarity? I've caught a couple of episodes of Man of Action's earlier Ben 10 cartoons, which were made for the same younger target audience, and the quartet's writing was never as anvillicious as it frequently is on USM. I'm wondering if maybe Marvel Animation studio head Jeph Loeb is responsible for USM's anvillicious writing, not Man of Action. If so, Loeb needs a few lessons from Cartoon Network's Dragons: Riders of Berk on how to executive-produce a cartoon for the TV-Y7 crowd because that show--just like the movie it's based on--proves you don't need an overly talky script and wall-to-wall narration to advance the story for the littlest viewers. More on Dragons' visuals-driven approach to storytelling in a few grafs...

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (09/05/2012): Transformers Prime, Adventure Time, Regular Show, Gumball and Dragons: Riders of Berk

And then Jake floated an air biscuit right into Finn's mouth, which ruined Finn's date with Flame Princess later that night. (Photo source: The Adventure Time Wiki)

Every week in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. Beginning this week, "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner" is posted on Wednesdays instead of Tuesdays. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

Dwayne Johnson is too busy rescuing troubled action movie franchises these days to reprise his one-episode Transformers Prime role as the easygoing Autobot Cliffjumper. So Billy Brown--who played the only cop character during season 6 of Dexter whose scenes didn't put me to sleep because the show didn't saddle his character with a soapy and tedious storyline about his personal life--takes over for Johnson as the voice of the deceased Autobot in flashbacks during "Out of the Past," the latest Transformers Prime episode.

Brown does an adequate job subbing for The Arsekicker Formerly Known as The Rock when the Autobot warrior Arcee (Sumalee Montano) flashes back to her first encounter with Cliffjumper. She recalls her fallen comrade (and flunks the Bechdel Test) while trying to comfort her Earthling friend Miko, who's been feeling depressed over the slow recovery of her currently disabled partner Bulkhead (Kevin Michael Richardson).

(Photo source: Draqua's pad)

The no-nonsense Arcee, who first encountered Cliffjumper when they were prisoners held captive by Starscream (Steve Blum) and Shockwave (David Sobolov) on a Decepticon ship, found Cliffjumper to be overly talkative and annoying but also helpful in both getting her off the ship and pulling her out of a funk similar to the funk Miko's currently experiencing. At the time of her imprisonment, Arcee was still bitter over the death of her partner Tailgate and had closed herself off from having another partner. But Cliffjumper's heroism during their prison breakout and his optimistic attitude restored her faith in humanity robotkind.

"Out of the Past" is basically filler, but it's decently written and surprisingly profound filler, with a nice little twist (for a kids' show, that is) in the mismatched partnership between Arcee and Cliffjumper. Here, it's the male who's the more frivolous half of the duo, while the female is the more sober-minded warrior type. The presence of Arcee (who's been part of the franchise since 1986's The Transformers: The Movie), the substantial writing for her character and the creative input of female staff writers like the ubiquitous Nicole Dubuc (although a man wrote this episode) are among the reasons why this show is superior to the craptastic live-action Transformers movies. The trilogy didn't feature Arcee and wasn't co-written by women, so just like how according to that line in The First Wives Club, the only ages for women in Hollywood are babe, district attorney and Driving Miss Daisy, the only kinds of roles for women in those Transformers movies (particularly the first two) were either "eye candy" or "Mom."

***

(Photo source: The Adventure Time Wiki)

If I were a world-famous actor, I'd want to be a guest voice on Adventure Time (or Regular Show or better yet, The Venture Bros.) just to see how really strange my role would be. Adventure Time had George Takei lending his baritone to an evil disembodied heart, it cast Donald Faison as a cookie and now, in "Who Would Win," it features Matthew Broderick as a long-haired, blue-skinned creature who speaks to Finn and Jake in their dreams and takes the form of a car salesman.

Through his Twin Peaks-esque dream-speak ("I have cheap cars. My cars are che-e-e-ap. But they drive bad when I turn out the lights!"), Broderick's Dream Warrior provides Finn and Jake with pointers on how to defeat The Farm (Tom Gammill), "the legendary fighter of the Shiny Isles" and a giant monster who wears a barn as a shirt and knocks his enemies unconscious by dumping farm animals on their heads. The Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Election star's vocal cameo is amusing (and I didn't realize it was Broderick until the end credits pointed it out), but the centerpiece of this episode isn't Finn and Jake's encounter with The Dream Warrior. It's actually an earlier scene: the epic fight that erupts between Finn and Jake while they train together to prepare for fighting The Farm.

(Photo source: The Adventure Time Wiki)

Jake becomes lazy during training (the jerky and apathetic delivery of Futurama's Bender, John DiMaggio's signature character, seeps into DiMaggio's not-so-jerky voice for Jake) and focuses his attention on a handheld video game he secretly brought with him, which pisses off Finn. He slaps away Jake's video game and damages it, and the upset dog and his human pal proceed to pummel each other for what feels like an eternity, much like Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live--except David didn't have the ability to assume the form of a giant, multiple-legged caterpillar and repeatedly kick Piper in the face with his endless legs in one of my favorite sight gags during "Who Would Win." That crazy visual is the episode's biggest reminder of how much of an influence the rubbery and surreal animation in '30s and '40s Fleischer Brothers cartoons has had on the Adventure Time animators.

The '30s and '40s East Coast street patois of the Fleischer cartoons may not have seeped into Adventure Time like the Fleischer studio's rubbery animation style has, but Finn and Jake's dialogue--despite the post-apocalyptic setting--is as contemporary-slangy as much of the dialogue in the Fleischer cartoons was when those shorts first dropped in movie theaters. When The Dream Warrior gives Finn and Jake a cryptic clue about the other name for sweatpants, Jake explains his disdain for what he calls "give-up-on-life pants" in that unmistakable Adventure Time delivery that's loaded with present-day slang and is sometimes peppered with post-apocalyptic Ooo-ese euphemisms like "Oh my Glob!"

"Peeps need to respect themselves when they leave the house," says Jake about the wackness of sweatpants in public, "even if it's just for ice cream or T.P. or whatevs." It's nice to know that Jake's opinions about fashion are similar to some of my own. I wonder if he's also as critical as I've always been about give-up-on-life shoes, or as some people call them, mandals.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (08/28/2012): Transformers Prime, Gravity Falls, Kaijudo, Adventure Time and Regular Show

I'm looking forward to seeing Gravity Falls' other Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squadron agents, Clean, Jaude, Dan and Vamme.

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

After a couple of months of repeats, The Hub's Transformers Prime resumes its second season with "Hurt," an episode that's largely downbeat, aside from a silly reference to David Bowie's "TVC 15" that will sail over the kid viewers' heads and a comedic feud between the Insecticons and Knock Out (Daran Norris), a vain Decepticon reminiscent of Kevin Spacey's celebrity cop character in L.A. Confidential. In "Hurt," the Autobots and their human sidekicks keep vigil over the gruff Autobot soldier Bulkhead when he winds up comatose after the events of "Toxicity."

Bulkhead's two best friends, human tomboy Miko (Tania Gunadi) and wartime comrade Wheeljack (James Horan), aren't exactly fond of authority, and they defy the team's orders to stay put and not take revenge on Hardshell (David Kaye), the Insecticon who shot Bulkhead in the back while he transported back to the Autobot base. The shooting worsened an already-injured Bulkhead's condition after he was poisoned by the "Tox-En" inside the Iacon relic he was attempting to retrieve.

"Hurt" proves how a bit sophisticated this show's writing is in comparison to the writing on other Transformers incarnations. In the last few episodes, we've seen the show play around with time in a manner reminiscent of the Bad Robot projects that Transformers Prime co-executive producers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman cut their teeth on. And now, we see once again--after the very first episode killed off the Dwayne Johnson-voiced Cliffjumper (who's actually reappearing in next week's episode)--that when Transformers Prime leaves an Autobot badly injured, he doesn't bounce back '80s G.I. Joe-style at the end of the story as if nothing happened. Transformers Prime really puts its protagonists through the wringer.

There's one great visual touch in the middle of "Hurt" where the camera follows Miko around a cavern as the tiny human runs for cover and nearly gets squashed by both Wheeljack and Hardshell as the giant warriors beat the crap out of each other. The sequence captures well both the thrills of a first-person shooter and the danger the reckless Miko has put herself into, and yet, it somehow manages to avoid becoming visually incoherent and confusing like Michael Bay's live-action Transformers movies, where you can hardly tell if you're looking at a close-up of a Transformer's elbow or--gaaah!--testicle.

***

A cartoon with even more sophisticated writing than Transformers Prime is Gravity Falls, which, in its latest episode "The Time Traveler's Pig," references in its title a popular novel that only the adult viewers are sure to be familiar with (The Time Traveler's Wife). In "The Time Traveler's Pig," Dipper once again takes advantage of a futuristic device to try to get Wendy to like him as more than just a friend. This time, it's a time machine in the form of a tape measure that, with the help of Mystery Shack employee Soos, he steals from a goggles-wearing figure we've briefly seen before in earlier episodes, Blendin Blandin (Justin Roiland, a.k.a. the Earl of Lemongrab from Adventure Time), a time traveler from the year 207̃012 (pronounced "20-snyevendy-12," and yes, that is indeed a tilde above the 7).

Dipper uses the tape measure to alter history so that the carnival game he plays to impress Wendy doesn't end with a baseball giving her a black eye, which causes her to wind up in the arms of douchey, skinny-jeaned Robbie. The kid's Groundhog Day-style attempts to change the game's outcome amusingly lead to one disastrous result after another (at one point, a bunch of baseballs land on Wendy's face). But when a particularly successful attempt to keep Wendy away from Robbie interferes with his twin sister Mabel's day of fun with Waddles, the carnival pig she won (the same pig Mabel cuddles with in the show's opening titles each week), so that Mabel's rival Pacifica ends up winning Waddles instead, Dipper must choose between what his heart wants and what Mabel's heart wants.

(Photo source: Gravity Falls Wiki)

I love the attention to detail in each different era the tape measure whisks Dipper and Mabel off to as they try to find their way back home to the present. My favorite "Time Traveler's Pig" sight gag is the little bandage on the face of a frontierswoman's baby when the twins are sent back to the Oregon Trail. Speaking of tough-ass babies, the twins' brief visit to a post-apocalyptic future introduces the Time Baby, the "enormous, evil, time-devouring baby from another dimension" that was mentioned in the text of a top-secret government document Dipper skimmed through in "Irrational Treasure." The Time Baby attacks future Oregon with laser rays from his eyes and reappears in the end credits, where he orders Blandin to travel to the past to fix the time anomalies caused by Dipper and Mabel, hence Blandin's cameos in the first few episodes (by the way, this week's end-credits cryptogram--"mlg s.t. dvooh zkkilevw"--is "Not H.G. Wells approved").

The inspired time travel humor and the clever connections to past episodes aren't the only remarkable elements of "The Time Traveler's Pig." The conflict over Blandin's time machine that episode writers Aury Wallington and Alex Hirsch bring into Dipper and Mabel's friendship--these two siblings who always look out for each other have never been seen fighting with each other until now--adds some dimension and heart to the timey-wimey hijinks. One thing Gravity Falls pulls off well in addition to absurdist humor is its melancholy side, and there are a couple of passage-of-time montages in "The Time Traveler's Pig"--one of them takes place while Dipper is heartbroken over Wendy agreeing to go out with Robbie--that are as beautifully drawn and animated as the Koyannisqatsi-esque fast-motion images in the opening titles. Gravity Falls just can't stop continuing to be impressive each week.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (05/29/2012): Green Lantern, Young Justice, Transformers Prime, Adventure Time and Regular Show

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I review five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone and are on kids' networks that make you look like a child molester if you watch them for too long. Even though I'm older than the target audience for these shows, I watch a few of them because of my fondness for the past works of these shows' writers and animators (for instance, Ultimate Spider-Man is co-produced by Paul Dini, who wrote several of my favorite Batman: The Animated Series episodes, and Motorcity is made by writers and animators from the late '90s MTV cartoon Downtown and Megas XLR ).

Topless Robot recently posted a very funny one-hour-and-20-minute table read of the first Star Wars film's screenplay by cartoon voice actors at Seattle's Emerald City Comicon from a couple of months ago. Several of the actors at this read have worked on one or two of the shows I'm covering for "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner." Jess Harnell, the voice actor/musician at the read who looks like Rob Zombie, is the voice of Texas the reckless mechanic on Motorcity, while Futurama's John DiMaggio has voiced Thor's hammer forger Eitri on The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes and is currently roaming the Land of Ooo as Jake the shape-shifting yellow dog on Adventure Time. Tara Strong can be heard on Young Justice, Green Lantern: The Animated Series and Ultimate Spider-Man (she's voicing Mary Jane). She's also reprising both her B:TAS role as Batgirl and her Teen Titans role as Raven in the "DC Nation Superhero Shorts" that air between Green Lantern and Young Justice.

Because these performers are cartoon voice actors, this read is no straightforward performance of the Star Wars script. Except for former B:TAS star Kevin Conroy, whose baritone is recruited for only narrative and non-comedic purposes, the voiceover artists shift back and forth between their most signature characters (I'm not familiar with several of these characters--I actually had to Google "Twilight Sparkle") or celebrity impressions.

Yeah, this read is basically an hour and 20 minutes of that old '80s stand-up trope "If Jack Nicholson were a flight attendant, it would go something like this," but it's much funnier because the voice actors frequently go off-script, and some of them pull dead-on impressions out of their asses that I never knew they were capable of. I didn't know Strong does the best Rosie Perez impression ever. DiMaggio's Tracy Morgan gives Jay Mohr's Tracy Morgan a run for its money. I wish the Emerald City Comicon moderator had DiMaggio do his funniest celebrity impression, blue-eyed soul artist Michael McDonald, which he busted out while sitting in the audience at Bar Lubitsch during the "McDonalds" episode of Greg Proops' Smartest Man in the World podcast (it led to DiMaggio and Proops hilariously doing dueling McDonalds).

Here are my favorite moments during the read:

34:45 to 39:31: Harnell doing double duty as Drawn Together's Captain Hero as Luke and Albert Brooks as Marlin from Finding Nemo as R2D2, Maurice LaMarche as Dudley Moore as Arthur as C3PO and DiMaggio as Tracy Morgan as Obi-Wan.

40:24 to 44:57: Harnell as Cartman as Obi-Wan, Billy West as the Professor from Futurama as Luke, DiMaggio as Obi-Wan's lightsaber and Strong as Rosie Perez as Princess Leia (42:44 to 43:29).

52:53 to 54:00: West as Porky Pig as Obi-Wan and DiMaggio as Bender as a Stormtrooper during Obi-Wan's Jedi mind-trick scene.

55:58 to 56:42: DiMaggio as Paul Lynde as Doctor Death (the alien in the cantina who says to Luke, "He doesn't like you") and Harnell as Rodney Dangerfield as Luke.

59:54 to 1:02:00: West as Tony Soprano as Greedo, Strong as My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic's Twilight Sparkle as Han--I love her expressions while Twilight Sparkle Han is unfazed by Tony Sogreedo's foul-mouthed threats--and DiMaggio as Paulie Walnuts during the Han/Greedo scene.

1:15:44 to 1:20:05: LaMarche as William Shatner as Luke, Rob Paulsen as Christopher Walken as Han, DiMaggio as Tracy Morgan as Obi-Wan and Harnell as Chewbacca during the "That's no moon, that's a space station!" scene.

For a table read that features quite a few characters of color, it's very lacking in actual actors of color. I would have loved this read even more if DiMaggio and West's Futurama co-star Phil LaMarr or one of animation's other busiest black voice actors--for example, Kevin Michael Richardson or Cree Summer--had been involved. It's also missing a certain legendary voice actor who got his big break from the first Star Wars. Where's Conroy's old B:TAS co-star Mark Hamill? I'm sure the former Luke Skywalker would have wanted to voice a character who's not Luke, and I'm sure it would have rocked the house.

***

Speaking of intergalactic warfare, "Homecoming," the Green Lantern: The Animated Series season finale, packs an hour's worth of it into a mere 20-something minutes. Red Lantern leader Atrocitus has been slaughtering Green Lantern Corps members throughout the season and is now summoning battleships to Guardian space--all in retaliation for earlier attacks by the Guardians' malfunctioned Manhunter robot army on his sector of space, which the Guardians labeled the Forgotten Zone to help bury a shameful early part of Guardian history before they founded the Green Lantern Corps. Hacked into by Atrocitus' technical genius accomplice Drusa (Juliet Landau) and forced to carry out Atrocitus' commands, Aya navigates her hijacked Interceptor ship to the Guardians' homeworld of Oa and sheds a tear while tricking Green Lantern Corps protocol officer Salaak (Tom Kenny) and the Guardians to their doom (the AI is developing emotions!).

Armed with a power ring that's fully recharged by the power battery he was lucky to take along with him before Atrocitus stole the Interceptor from him and Hal, Kilowog is fighting the fleet of battleships from the Forgotten Zone all by himself at the Maelstrom asteroid belt that Atrocitus blew apart with planet-killing Liberator bombs to bring the Red Armada into Guardian space. Meanwhile, in the middle of all this, Hal is back on Earth, enjoying a romantic lunch with his aircraft company exec girlfriend Carol Ferris (Jennifer Hale) at an outdoor bistro on a strangely underpopulated Coast City street--and with no memory of his duty as a Green Lantern and the events that led him back to Coast City.

I admire the work of Bruce Timm, but what is it with Timm projects and their occasional scenes on city streets with no people? The deserted street reminds me of the nighttime New York fight scene in Timm and Lauren Montgomery's 2009 Wonder Woman animated feature. The most unbelievable thing about that Wonder Woman scene? The city that never sleeps was empty while Diana Prince and her adversary Deimos were fighting each other.

You know right away that this is a fantasy movie because New York is devoid of people at this time of night. (Photo source: Lauren Montgomery)

The mystery surrounding Hal's sudden reunion with Carol briefly revisits Hal's conflict between his life with Carol and his duty as a space cop, a theme in both the series' "Beware My Power" premiere episode and "...In Love and War," the episode that introduced the Star Sapphire Corps. That mystery is the niftiest part of "Homecoming," but it's also way too rushed. It would have been more effective in an hour-long (or two-part) format.

The lack of people in Coast City (other than a moving car or two in the background) isn't because Hal is unconscious and trapped in some Matrix-like simulation of his hometown by an alien enemy, which is what I originally thought. It turns out that Hal and Razer asked the Star Sapphires to use their powers of teleportation to send the power battery-less Hal back to Earth so that he can get access to his battery and fully recharge his power ring for Atrocitus' attack on Oa. The Star Sapphires warned Hal that travel through their portal can result in side effects, so Hal is afflicted with amnesia after teleporting from the Star Sapphires' homeworld of Zamaron to Earth. With Carol's help, Hal regains his memory and powers and flies back to Oa just in time to save the Guardians from Atrocitus, as well as propose reparations to the Red Lanterns for the genocide that was committed on the planets of the Forgotten Zone by the malfunctioned creations of the now-remorseful Guardians.

Speaking of exquisite timing, new Blue Lantern Saint Walker and Mogo, the Green Lantern Corps member who's an actual planet, arrive in time to aid Kilowog in fending off the Red Armada. Though Saint Walker's last-minute emergence isn't much of a surprise, it's still exhilarating, thanks in part to the majestic score music of series composer Frederik Wiedmann. The epic showdown that ensues between the trio and the armada is a stunning achievement in small-screen CG animation. Between this battle and the equally gargantuan wildfire explosion that tore apart Davos Seaworth's ship on Game of Thrones the following day, Saturday and Sunday made for one really dull Memorial Day Weekend of TV-watching.

The style guide for A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog

(Photo source: BACKYard Woods Explorer)

• Titles of songs, album tracks, short stories, TV series episodes, DVD or Blu-ray featurettes and cable channel or radio station programming blocks are always contained within quotation marks. Example from July 29, 2011: The "Rome, Italian Style" block on A Fistful of Soundtracks airs Mondays through Thursdays from 11am to noon. (However, even though Adult Swim is still technically a Cartoon Network programming block, the name isn't contained within quotes because Adult Swim evolved from a single-night block to a larger entity that Nielsen officially recognized as distinct from Cartoon Network in 2005, much like what happened to Nickelodeon's Nick at Nite.)

• Occupations or descriptive adjectives and nouns that appear before people's names are never capitalized. Example: constant self-recycler James Horner.

• Terms like "Filipino American," "Asian American" or "African American," which some writers prefer to hyphenate, are not hyphenated.

• The interpunct that used to be part of the Frito-Lay product name "Chee·tos" is absent whenever Cheetos is mentioned because of Frito-Lay's current official spelling, which removed the interpunct. Example: Why the hell does John Malkovich look like a human Cheeto during Transformers: Dark of the Moon?

• Numbers from one to nine are spelled out. Numbers above nine are written as figures (10, 11, 12, etc.) but are spelled out whenever they're the first words in sentences.

• The movie title Se7en and the procedural title Numb3rs maintain their unique spelling even though it looks stup1d.

• If a person is a Jr. or Sr., there is no comma between the name and Jr. or Sr. Example from January 13, 2009: Downey Jr. never drops character until the commentary is over.

• An ellipsis indicates a hammy pause. Example: "Dammit, Bones... this girdle you gave me for... my birthday... is too... constricting."

• Titles of movies, TV series, radio programs, podcasts, books, comic book series, magazines and newspapers are always italicized.

• Cardassians are whores for fascism. Kardashians are whores for attention.

(Photo source: Overthinking It)

• Names of online magazines like Salon and Slate are italicized. Names of blogs like DISGRASIAN, Burnt Lumpia and MovieMorlocks are not italicized.

• A Corolla is a car I damaged while driving it when I was a teen. A Carolla is a racist douchebag whose ass will get damaged by a gang of Pinoy teens if he ever sets foot in Daly City.

• Names of races and nationalities like African, Latino and Filipino are capitalized, but racial adjectives like "black," "white" and "brown" are not.

• "Sit for Baines" is a Back to the Future prequel fanfic about teenage George McFly's bumbling attempts to get to better know his crush Lorraine Baines by babysitting her younger brothers. "Shit for brains" is Fox News whenever it refers to Common as a gangsta rapper.

• Though this is an American blog and the word "license" is always spelled with just one "c," the British spelling of the 007 movie title Licence to Kill is left unchanged.

• "Michele Bachmann" is spelled with just one glassy "i."

"Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day: Goldfrapp, "Lovely Head"

Song: "Lovely Head" by Goldfrapp
Released: 2000
Why's it part of the "Rome, Italian Style" playlist?: Trouser Press came up with a good shorthand description for "Lovely Head," the first single off the duo Goldfrapp's debut album Felt Mountain: "If Lee Van Cleef had ever romanced Shirley Bassey, 'Lovely Head,' which sounds like a score in search of a Sergio Leone film, would have been their song."

Ennio Morricone's influence on Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory, which they acknowledged in the Felt Mountain liner notes with their shout-outs to Morricone and Leone, is most evident in "Lovely Head." There's whistling, harpsichords, percussion reminiscent of Il Maestro's Sicilian Clan main title theme and a vocal effect that's as bizarre as the coyote howls in the Good, the Bad and the Ugly score, but it's more of a Goldfrapp touch than a Morricone touch. Goldfrapp, who provides the whistling during "Lovely Head," makes her voice sound remarkably like a theremin(*), with the help of a synthesizer that distorts her vocals (her theremin-like howls also turn up during another Felt Mountain cut and "Rome, Italian Style" Track of the Day, "Pilots").

(*) In his intro for the TCM Essentials Jr. broadcast of the theremin-filled Thing from Another World a couple of days ago, host Bill Hader said, "Transformers would be so much better with a theremin." True that.

"Lovely Head" also channels the grandiose sound of the secondary themes John Barry composed for either 007's love interests or the foreign destinations where 007 would shag those love interests. The Bondian strings and drums of "Lovely Head" inspired a YouTuber to replace "All Time High," one of Barry's weakest Bond ballads, with "Lovely Head" in the Octopussy opening titles.

TV Critic Grimlock gets an unexpected reply from some guy who makes TV shows

Shawn Ryan--creator of The Shield and Fox's upcoming Ride-Along The Chicago Code and producer of what has to be my favorite new fall show, the FX private eye drama Terriers--retweeted TV Critic Grimlock last night, and as a result, Grimmy's followership, which has been as tiny as his arms, experienced a wee bit of a spike. Congratulations, Grim!

TV Critic Grimlock is the new definitive voice of TV criticism, so move over, Tom Shales--that is if you can move that hefty ass of yours

In just 50 or so tweets, Grimlock the Dinobot has emerged as a new insightful voice in the often stuffy and annoyingly middlebrow field of TV criticism. Nobody--not even the witty recappers over at the Onion-owned A.V. Club or the refreshingly not-so-stuffy, comic book-loving Alan Sepinwall--has enlivened coverage of the new fall TV season quite like the belligerent tyrannosaur has:

"me grimlock liked when grace park in bikini punched out surfer on five-0. hottest entrance since julie warner skinny-dip in doc hollywood!" (Tuesday, October 05, 2010 8:06 PM)

"me grimlock not miss rick sanchez. sesame street newsflash reporter kermit frog: he more credible journalist than rick sanchez." (Tuesday, October 05, 2010 8:00 PM)

"me grimlock not into unfunny nbc sitcom outsourced. me wish that call center get torched by mumbai gangsters in final episode." (Wednesday, October 06, 2010 11:45 AM)

"me grimlock not masturbate to fox news ladies because they sound so hateful and whiny like starscream." (Wednesday, October 06, 2010 11:41 AM)

I haven't been this riveted by the thoughts of a writer who's discussing TV since the time Armond White implied he wanted to spoon with Keller from Oz.

So what if TV Critic Grimlock, who launched his Twitter page with my help last Sunday (@TVCritGrimlock), has only one follower? Some talented writers are at their most interesting when they're a best-kept secret--or before they jump the shark, to borrow a TV-related phrase that, now that I've finally thought about it, is kind of as tiresome a term as "BFF" or "bromance."

From the Autobot homebase known as the Ark, Grimlock took some time out of his busy TV-watching schedule to discuss the fall season and the animosity towards Optimus Prime (and Dinobot teammate Slag and anyone who's a Decepticon) that occasionally seeps into his tweets, which always look e.e. cummings-esque because Grimlock doesn't quite understand the purpose of the Caps Lock key. To make this Q&A less irritating to read, all of Grimlock's words have been properly cased.

Reefer Madness live-tweet recap

On 420, I live-tweeted the original 1936 version of Reefer Madness. The movie's so boring I wanted to jump out the window like that overacting pot dealer lady at the end.

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In a few minutes, I'm live-tweeting Reefer Madness. I haven't heard Nelson/Murphy/Corbett's RiffTrax of it. I bet it's hilarious.
12:01 PM Apr 20th via web

#ReeferMadnessLiveTweet starts now. This propaganda piece is apparently a classic in the drug-scare genre.
12:05 PM Apr 20th via web

The movie paved the way for such drug-scare gems as the Dragnet "Blue Boy" episode and the Quincy punk episode.
12:06 PM Apr 20th via web

The Quincy punk episode? Yeah, punk isn't a drug, but...
12:06 PM Apr 20th via web

... Jack Klugman, at his most self-indulgent and toupeed, preaches against punk as if it's a drug.
12:07 PM Apr 20th via web

MTV now reruns movies like the Star Wars prequels and The Matrix. But back when the channel was about videos...
12:07 PM Apr 20th via web

... this public-domain piece of shit was the only movie MTV could afford to broadcast.
12:08 PM Apr 20th via web

The opening credits begin. "Marihuana is that drug--a violent narcotic..." Just like cokane and hairrowhen.
12:09 PM Apr 20th via web

"Marihuana" finally leads to "acts of shocking violence"? Someone is feeding you bad intel, opening credits guy.
12:10 PM Apr 20th via web

A violent stoner is like a black Gossip Girl viewer. They don't exist.
12:10 PM Apr 20th via web