What Game of Thrones needs more than dragonglass is Henry Louis Gates Jr., so that he could stop Jon from banging his Auntie Dany

This is the 10th of 13 or 14 all-new blog posts that are being posted until this blog's final post in December 2017.

Game of Thrones, the most popular TV show in the world right now, is a show I've been ride-or-die for since the eerie White Walker attack that opened its 2011 pilot episode. It's a rare small-screen soap opera in which the action filmmaking on display during certain set pieces--marshaled by directors like Miguel Sapochnik and Breaking Bad veteran Michelle MacLaren, a.k.a. the original director of Wonder Woman before she quit over creative differences with Warner Bros.--is intriguingly on a par with the work of master craftsmen in the action genre like the "Johns": the late John Frankenheimer, John Woo and Johnnie To, Woo's much more grounded (as in there are no fucking doves in his movies) but similarly skilled Hong Kong compatriot.

No Soup for us: The disappointment over E! never archiving The Soup for the show's fans

This is the third of 12 or 13 blog posts that are being posted on a monthly basis until this blog's final post in December 2017.

The longest I laughed over one of Joel McHale's quips on E!'s now-defunct pop culture clip show The Soup ("a sort of national archives of idiocy" was how TV Insider astutely described the show, a few months before its cancellation in 2015) was the moment when The Soup played a Today Show clip of Richard Simmons--this was way before he went "missing"--being Richard Simmons while sitting on a couch with a miniskirted Lisa Rinna. The former Days of Our Lives star, who looks a lot different from her pre-Botox days in Salem, covered her crotch when Simmons lifted up her legs because she thought the viewers at home were getting a glimpse of her Salem's Lot (actually, the viewers at home couldn't see shit).

Neither the accidental quasi-upskirt clip nor McHale's scripted response to the clip were what made me laugh for two or three minutes. The muttered aside that the Soup host clearly ad-libbed right after his scripted response was what caused my sides to hurt from laughing for two minutes: "Her lips are full of collagen."

The Soup studio audience laughed over the ad-lib for longer than half a minute as well. On a broadcast network, Standards and Practices would lamely bleep out "lips" and ruin McHale's joke, but because this was basic cable, E! let the randy ad-lib go. It was a rare wise decision by a cable channel known for a million dumb programming decisions that were made fun of by McHale and his fellow joke writers on the regular during The Soup's 11-year run.

I wish I could revisit that improvised Soup moment and a bunch of other lines that were ad-libbed by McHale (in addition to wishing I could revisit the memes that originated from The Soup, like Spaghetti Cat and "Stay out of it, Nick Lachey!"), just like how I can easily stream an entire episode of The Daily Show from any point of history during the Dubya Administration or how I can easily stream the classic 2007 Colbert Report interview segment where Jane Fonda took Stephen Colbert by surprise (by sitting on his lap and kissing him to persuade his fake Republican alter ego, also named Stephen Colbert, to remove her name from his "On Notice" board). (Also, a search for almost every discriminatory thing that has come out of Steve King's mouth isn't so difficult, thanks to the Colbert archive.)

Unfortunately, I can't revisit as much Soup content as I'd like to because E!'s online staff never bothered to put up an archive of full Soup episodes like how Comedy Central built exhaustive online archives of full Daily Show episodes and lengthy Colbert Report clips. And that lack of a Soup archive--meanwhile, all 12 interminable seasons of Keeping Up with the Kardashians are up on Hulu--is an even dumber move on E!'s part than building an unwatchable reality show around a tanning salon.

March Madness March of the Day: "Stripes March" by Elmer Bernstein

There are two fantastic pieces of music that director Ivan Reitman's 1981 military comedy Stripes introduced to me. One is "Do Wah Diddy Diddy," a song from way before my time that soldiers adopted as a marching cadence after watching Bill Murray and Harold Ramis choose it as their cadence in Stripes ("The first time we screened this for a real movie audience, people started applauding as soon as they started singing 'Do Wah Diddy,'" recalled Reitman during the Stripes DVD commentary). The other is the spirited "Stripes March" by Elmer Bernstein, whose iconic Great Escape score Reitman utilized to temp-track Stripes before Bernstein recorded the Stripes score.



That march is so tied to the misfit likes of John Winger (Murray), Russell Ziskey (Ramis), Ox (John Candy), Cruiser (John Diehl) and Elmo (Judge Reinhold) that when it wound up as trailer music for another military comedy, 1994's Renaissance Man, I thought, "Hey, that belongs to Stripes, man! Don't be claiming that. That's like if the Beetlejuice TV ads copped Ray Parker Jr.'s 'Ghostbusters.' Get your own soundalike shit!"

The cinema blog Radiator Heaven posted a really good overview of Stripes a few years ago. It pointed out how superb all the major players in the film's cast were, from the perfectly cast Warren Oates as drill instructor Sergeant Hulka to Murray. His Second City training was put to great effect, like in the film's first few minutes, in which a cab-driving Winger has to put up with a snooty old socialite (Fran Ryan) who's his fare, or the improvised scene where Hulka (who, as we realize in this scene, isn't the film's villain--that would be John Larroquette as incompetent Captain Stillman) has Winger and the other recruits introduce themselves ("Chicks dig me because I rarely wear underwear, and when I do, it's usually something unusual").

The Radiator Heaven post doesn't mention Bernstein's catchy Stripes march, but it does acknowledge how effective Bernstein's score is during an early scene that straddles the line between comedy and drama ("Bernstein’s first musical cue appears and it is a slightly sad, whimsical tune"). Winger--whom Community(*) creator Dan Harmon named Joel McHale's study group leader character Jeff Winger after as a shout-out to both Murray and a film that must have influenced how Harmon sometimes has Community bravely and effectively straddle the line between comedy and drama--is dumped by his girlfriend (Roberta Leighton) right after quitting his cabbie job. He's then forced to deal with the fact that the lack of purpose in his life has driven away his girlfriend and is the reason for the rut he's in. "Interestingly," noted Radiator Heaven's J.D., "no music plays during this scene so that the gravitas of the scene, if you will, is not undermined by manipulative music. Bernstein’s whimsical score only returns when Russell arrives and the two banter back and forth."

J.D. also noted that Stripes' anti-authoritarian-misfits-in-an-authoritarian-setting template "would prove to be so successful that it was exploited in films like Police Academy." Sure, Michael Winslow's beatboxing and sound effects gags always elicit a chuckle, but everything else the Police Academy movies did, Stripes did it better. And that includes the soundtrack.

(*) Hell yeah, Community's back on the air tonight!

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Matt & Kim, "Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare"

Song: "Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare" by the Brooklyn duo Matt & Kim
Released: 2009
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in Community's pilot episode. I wonder if the choice of "Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare" is a swipe at the pants Joel McHale is wearing all through the pilot (see above). If so, that's awesome.
Which moment in the Community pilot does it appear?: The scene when Jeff (McHale) tries to ditch the study group--a rambunctious bunch of folks he'll grow to tolerate over the course of the season--and is caught by Britta (Gillian Jacobs) while she's having a smoke break. The song also turns up when Jeff takes the Spanish test answers out of the envelope Professor Duncan (John Oliver) gave him and discovers his friend tricked him and slipped him nothing but blank paper.

My favorite non-cable show Community is back tonight with its first new episode since the ambitious stop-motion-animated Christmas ep, so here's "Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare," which was also featured in the trailers and promos for the pilot before it premiered.

That ear-catching chune from the Community pilot and promos has a title

After catching the Community series premiere (a promising new show, by the way, with awesome Soup host Joel McHale, Danny Pudi, Mad Men's Alison Brie and recurring guest star John Oliver of The Daily Show as the standouts so far, and it's nice to see Chevy Chase make an effort to portray an actual character for a change instead of portraying Chevy Chase), I immediately Googled the unidentified ear-catching tune that's featured prominently in the episode and NBC's Community promos. It's "Good Ol' Fashion Nightmare" by the Brooklyn duo Matt and Kim. Drink up me hearties, yo ho.