"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "Maybe No Go"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



"Maybe No Go" catches up with Venture Bros. side characters Billy Quizboy and Pete White--the former, by the way, was last seen constantly being annoyed by the company of Rose, who's both the hydrocephalic super-scientist's mom and a retired superheroine formerly known as Triple Threat, while he was dragged along with Rose and her current boyfriend Action Man to the Gargantua-2 space casino's opening gala--and pretends the ongoing rivalry between the trailer park roommates and Augustus St. Cloud is the subject of a Billy/Pete spinoff. I've said before that so many different shows could be spun off from The Venture Bros.' fully realized (and crowded) universe--I'm not holding out hope for a spinoff about the Order of the Triad because the not-exactly-prolific Jackson Publick isn't really all about that franchising life, but an Order of the Triad series would rock the most out of all possible Venture Bros. spinoffs--and the Doc Hammer-scripted "Maybe No Go" briefly runs with that idea many Venture Bros. viewers like myself have had in our heads about various spinoffs.

The episode presents snippets of the off-screen battles between Dr. Venture's college buddies and their roly-poly arch-frenemy--the snobby heir of the St. Cloud plastics fortune and a sore loser who never got over Billy beating him on the game show Quizboys--via a fake opening title sequence for the Riptide-esque action show Billy Quizboy and the Pink Pilgrim. Back when the late Stephen J. Cannell was the Shonda Rhimes of mid-'80s network TV and Cannell was able to dominate a whole night of programming with his independently made output, Riptide was a Cannell joint that aired back-to-back with the Cannell/Universal hit The A-Team on NBC's '80s Tuesday night schedule. The Magnum, P.I.-esque Riptide was such a disposable piece of Reagan-era fluff that all I can remember about it was that it featured boat chases and a constantly malfunctioning robot buddy. Billy Quizboy and the Pink Pilgrim also features beachside action sequences and a robot buddy. In this case, the robot sidekick is Robo-Bo, who was programmed by Billy and Pete to speak in the PlainTalk Fred-style voice of Jonas Venture Jr.'s J-Bots--I love how Fred is the only kind of robot voice the scientists on this show can get to work--and weirdly bear the face of Bo, as in Bo from The Dukes of Hazzard.

(Photo source: Uproxx)

And like Riptide (which was the type of '80s fantasy that would constantly make an earlier and much more grounded Cannell character like Jim Rockford roll his eyes), Billy and Pete's spinoff is on the bland side, although I'm tantalized by the clips of Augustus cosplaying as the Marvel supervillain Galactus and Billy appearing in the form of a giant lizard like in the old video game Rampage. The big joke about the fake Billy/Pete show is that those clips of Billy, Pete and Robo-Bo tangling with monsters all over the world and scoring babes are misleading, and if their fake show were an actual one, it would largely be just the three of them parked in front of their terminals and speed-typing inside the "Quizcave" (as seen while Augustus sics a Robosaurus on their trailer), which doesn't exactly scream out sexy times. Pete's instruction to "Set the ground at Z-pulse through the electrical, then run diagnostics on the echo. Configure the kickback waves to resonate at that frequency" is the type of hackneyed techno-gibberish I hope Bryan Fuller stays away from when he works on that upcoming CBS All Access Star Trek project I'm now excited about simply because it will be spearheaded by Fuller, the Trek alum who went on to make intriguing cult shows like Wonderfalls and Hannibal and has always dreamed of casting Angela Bassett as a captain and Rosario Dawson as her first officer, a pairing that, in Fuller's hands, would be like the greatest (non-DS9) Trek spinoff of all time.

Billy, Pete and Augustus (the pageboy-wigged billionaire is every single rich asshole you never liked when you were a kid and was forced by either your teacher, your mom or the kid's mom to hang out with) are basically grown men having pathetic-looking play dates that are arranged not by their parents but by themselves. Their battle over possessing the red ball prop from Duran Duran's classic 1983 video for "Is There Something I Should Know?," the song that provided this episode with its title, is amusingly low-stakes in comparison to Wide Wale's threats against Dr. Venture's new business empire and the Monarch nearly getting his ass shrunk by the laser eyes of a villainess named Redusa (Kate McKinnon) while he searches behind his wife's back for the Guild of Calamitous Intent member who secretly talked her into signing away to him the Monarch's arching rights to Dr. Venture (the Monarch doesn't know yet that the Guild member is Wide Wale). The Monarch wants to forever play a game of supervillain-vs.-super-scientist with Dr. Venture, but he's so far up his own ass that he's unaware that he's not very good at arching (he's so lousy at it that he didn't know his parents kept a gigantic supervillain's lair under his childhood home in Newark this whole time) and is nothing without his powerful Guild council chairwoman wife or his sometimes exasperated but eternally loyal henchman Gary.

The Venture Bros. follows in the footsteps of The Simpsons, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and Bob's Burgers and becomes the latest animated show to parody Trainspotting's withdrawal sequence. (Photo source: Uproxx)

Like the tranquilizer-addicted Pirate Captain reminds Dr. Venture at one point in "Maybe No Go," you got to live in reality--a bit of advice that's ignored on this show by anybody who's not a pragmatic type like Brock or Dr. Mrs. the Monarch--and the tug-of-war between reality and fantasy is an old Venture Bros. theme "Maybe No Go" revisits in the Monarch's refusal to let go of arching Dr. Venture and Augustus' inability to move past the fact that dirt-poor Billy is smarter than him. Augustus let that disappointment consume him so much that he had the Quizboys set rebuilt in his mansion for a rematch with Billy in "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?" (and he got beaten again).

In "Maybe No Go," Augustus has another old set pointlessly rebuilt as part of his feud with Billy, and this time it's the set from the "Is There Something I Should Know?" video, whose graphics and scene transitions are perfectly recreated by the Titmouse animators during what has to be the visual and comedic highlight of this episode. The sequence is also the show's first Duran Duran-related sight gag since the enjoyable montage where Dr. Venture relived the racist "Hungry Like the Wolf" video while having a meltdown and running away from his responsibilities in the second-season premiere. Racist video aside, Duran Duran is a band that's impossible to dislike, and "Maybe No Go" will make you want to go YouTube or Spotify a bunch of their best songs afterward. "A View to a Kill" is my favorite Bond song. "Save a Prayer" is the type of stylish and non-cheesy slow jam that should have opened Spectre instead of the underwhelming "Writing's on the Wall," but only if Daniel Craig's Bond had been written as a tormented Catholic like Matt Murdock instead of as a tormented atheist. The Nile Rodgers era of Duran Duran is solid, but I'm more partial to the sounds of "Planet Earth" and "Girls on Film." I even like that single Duran Duran recorded with Justin Timberlake nearly a decade ago. Man, Augustus, get your disgusting sausage fingers off the Duran Duran memorabilia right now.

Augustus' maturity level is akin to the time when Hank thought he was Batman (currently, Hank thinks he's Steve McQueen). He takes the actual Henrietta Pussycat puppet from the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, one of many priceless collectibles he's been able to procure, and uses it as a shower mitt, just to piss off Billy. Augustus has always been obnoxious, but during that shower scene involving a beloved piece of our Mister Rogers-watching childhood, he crosses the line into "This motherfucker needs an ass-whupping from Brock."

Speaking of Brock, the OSI agent finds out in "Maybe No Go" about both Wide Wale's first plan of attack on Ventech and the gangster's connection to Dr. Doug Ong, a mad scientist who worked on finding "a cure for cancer in cuttlefish DNA" in the '80s and fused his DNA with that of a marine mammal known as a dugong (that's actually a Tagalog word, by the way, for "lady of the sea") to become Dr. Dugong. The mad scientist was killed by the Monarch when the Guild forced a disappointed Monarch to arch him a few seasons ago. Wide Wale is revealed to be Dugong's brother Chester, which could mean that he took over as Dr. Venture's arch just to get his revenge on the Monarch (and if Wide Wale wants the Monarch dead, will that lead to the Monarch having to turn to Team Venture for help?), but I was more surprised by the episode's revelation that Wide Wale has the Crusaders Action League in his pocket and is running the Crusaders' protection racket. So in Team Venture's New York, the Avengers work for the Kingpin, which is some depressing shit, but it's perfect for this show's skeptical, almost Iñarritu-esque view of superheroes. On this show, they're either corrupt, sexually dysfunctional or pedophilic.

With the help of Sgt. Hatred, who quit the OSI because of his unhappiness with being removed from Venture security detail and has taken a job as a Ventech Tower tour guide, Brock is able to foil a break-in by Wide Wale's henchmen. Dr. Venture is, of course, totally unaware of how much danger he's now in, especially after he refused to fork over protection money to the Crusaders, and he's now probably doing every night that old Louie De Palma ritual of stripping down to his underwear and rolling around for hours in piles of money that used to belong to his brother. But he does one good thing in "Maybe No Go," and that would have to be the moment when he agrees to follow a suggestion from Dean about forming a team to work on speculative engineering instead of rejecting Dean's suggestion and saying, "I'm the fucking boss of Ven-whatever. Only my ideas matter." It reminds me a bit of the interesting "bonding over super-science" moment shared by Dr. Venture and Dean while they attempted to fix the space station shield in "All This and Gargantua-2." These moments also illustrate how Dean is the kind of brilliant thinker Dr. Venture could be if he stopped coasting on his fame as both a scientist/adventurer's son and the inspiration for The Rusty Venture Show ("Brought to you by smoking!").

I don't know where this new, eight-episode season is headed as far as Wide Wale's scheming goes, but I'm enjoying what "Hostile Makeover" and "Maybe No Go" have done with the season so far. I hate Augustus, but his acquisition of Billy and Pete's company turns out to benefit Billy and Pete when he sells their company to Dr. Venture, who summons them to New York to have them work alongside him, presumably in the speculative engineering department, and that frees Billy and Pete from the boredom they were clearly experiencing while having to humor Augustus. When Jackson Publick discussed the character of Hank with The Mary Sue, he said that "he possesses a childlike wonder about everything, you know? He kinda thinks everything is cool, he has a can-do attitude, he's got a decent amount of confidence, but he doesn't express it in that asshole way that Dr. Venture or the Monarch do." In "Maybe No Go," Billy and Pete represent that kind of optimism as well--after they lose their company to Augustus, there's an unexpectedly moving moment where a despondent Pete questions the magic of Duran Duran's red ball, and Billy, who hasn't lost all hope, says, "Why would you doubt that?" (Doc Hammer's terrific delivery of this line is key to why the moment's unexpectedly moving)--but they're, of course, a bit more mature about that optimism than Hank. I'm curious about what big, bad New York will be like through Billy and Pete's eyes and how the duo will react to the changes that come with their new home. And as they try to make their way to this ordinary world, will they learn to survive?

Other memorable quotes:
* Dr. Mrs. the Monarch: "On the books, y-you're a Six. But that was when you had over 100 henchmen and a flying cocoon. So if I were to reassess, I'd go with Three, maybe Four."
Monarch: "Three or Four?! C'mon, Tantrum Rex is a Level Four! Tantrum Rex! He looks like the 'Not the mama, not the mama' baby dinosaur puppet."

http://gothdean.tumblr.com/post/138925169832

"Mousse? I didn't even know they made hair mousse anymore."

"Hey hey hey, check it out, I'm in Flock of Seagulls."

"Hey, look, look, I'm in the Exploited."

"Billy, remember Tool Academy?"

* "Without this ball, the New Romantics could never have happened. Duran Duran would be a jock-rock band."

* "Imagine: no Spandau Ballet to write 'If You Leave.'" Augustus, who thought the 1986 cult favorite Highlander came out in 1983 in "What Color Is Your Cleansuit?," makes another mistake and gets away with it. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to remember that OMD wrote and performed "If You Leave," not Spandau Ballet. Even though he gets dates, facts and lyrics wrong (he says, "Reflex is a lonely child," when it's actually "The reflex is an only child"), I love how Augustus appears to be obsessed with the works of Russell Mulcahy, who directed both the "Is There Something I Should Know?" video and Highlander.

* "If there's no New Romantics, stuff like nu rock would have happened way earlier. I mean, Linkin Park and System of a Down would have formed in the '80s. And that would have ruined future hip-hop, and with no good hip-hop, there's no RZA. And I lost my virginity to side A of Wu-Tang Forever. We had to do it! Just think of what your hair would look like."



* Manolo (Hal Lublin), the handyman Gary spoke Spanish to last week (and whose van is still badly dented from Warriana's chariot accident in a funny little bit of continuity): "Your wife no home, so I wait for you. You're not going to believe this!"
Monarch: "I knew you spoke fucking English!"

* Brock: "Buy you a beer?"
Sgt. Hatred: "Uh, still an alcoholic, but, uh… Aw, heck, I'll just go to an extra meeting."

Hawkeye: L.A. Woman makes any attempt at a Rockford Files remake, including Vince Vaughn's planned Rockford movie, pointless

(Photo source: Entropy)

I think beaches are overrated, and so are swimming pools and waterslide parks. Look, I'm no neckbeard who hates to go outside, but at around college, I outgrew the beaches, pools and waterslide parks I used to spend time in as a kid during some summers and just completely lost interest in the concept of them as enjoyable places to be.

That South Park episode where Cartman gets frustrated about first-graders continually pissing in the pool triggered my latent germophobia about pool water, and then decades later, an episode of Ben Schwartz's Disney/Titmouse cartoon Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja that used kids' leftover snot from waterslide parks as a plot device (don't ask) confirmed my growing suspicions about the grubbiness of waterslide parks. When you're a kid, you're unconcerned about such things. When you're an adult, splashing around in water for hours to keep the heat from killing you loses all its appeal after you discover better and cleanlier ways to keep the heat from murdering you, like a cold beer or an iced tea. Even California-loving Best Coast frontwoman Bethany Cosentino has said she gets creeped out by the idea of swimming in the ocean. I believe I have a clip of her thinking about having to do that.

Hello there, Dubsmash. And so long, Dubsmash. Whenever The Today Show starts acknowledging the existence of an app or meme, its 15 minutes of coolness are immediately over.

So I may not care anymore for beaches and pools, but I'm always running into escapist literature that's ideal for beachside or poolside reading. One of my favorite recent trade paperback collections of a comic book storyline is especially ideal for beachside or poolside reading--or summertime reading anywhere--because of its summertime setting. I highly recommend it also because it's simply an entertaining arc from a superhero comic that's special for not being a typical superhero comic and for being tailor-made for comics readers like myself who find most superhero comics to be either puerile or unreadable due to overly complicated backstories or convoluted and clumsily written tie-ins to unwieldy crossover events.

(Photo source: Errant Critic)

You don't need to have read prior TPB collections of issues of writer Matt Fraction's excellent (and recently concluded) Marvel Now! title Hawkeye to get into Hawkeye: L.A. Woman, although the prior issues are all worth reading, especially Hawkeye #11, an inventively told detective story written from the point of view of a dog and cleverly illustrated by David Aja (with minimal and mostly garbled dialogue by Fraction). The 2014 TPB, the third collection of Fraction's Hawkeye comics, collects Hawkeye Annual #1 (the only issue in the collection illustrated by Javier Pulido, whose minimalist artwork I enjoyed during the Vertigo title Human Target) and issues 14, 16, 18 and 20. All you need to know about Fraction's incarnation of Hawkeye prior to L.A. Woman is that there are two non-superpowered archers who share the mantle of Hawkeye: one of them is recently divorced Avengers member Clint Barton (who, in the Avengers movies, is happily married to a civilian played by Linda Cardellini and raising kids with her out in the Midwest), and the other is the much younger Kate Bishop, a Young Avengers member who may be much better at this hero thing than her mentor Clint. The series alternates between Clint and Kate as the protagonist and follows what both of them are up to when they're not Avengers, and those adventures range from espionage-related peril to slightly more mundane matters like Clint trying to get his apartment building's broken satellite dish to work during a holiday season that's disrupted by tracksuited Russian thugs whose every other word is "bro."

The Russians' addiction to "bro" and the reduction of dialogue in issue 11 so that it's down to only a few words the one-eyed, pizza-loving dog known as Pizza Dog understands (like "collar" and "ex-wife") are hallmarks of the offbeat sense of humor of Fraction, who envisioned Clint as "the Marvel Universe's Jim Rockford" in his update of Hawkeye (the decision to alternate Clint's stories with Kate's is reminiscent of the two-or-more-stars-sharing-the-same-title-role format of another James Garner show, Maverick). Like The Rockford Files, Hawkeye is distinguished by both tongue-in-cheek humor and a bemused hero who'd rather be enjoying a rooftop barbecue with his neighbors (or a show on his DVR he's been itching to catch up on) than stopping trouble, but he always winds up helping out the downtrodden anyway. The Fraction series' parallels to The Rockford Files are particularly visible during the L.A. arc, in which Kate tires of Clint's uncaring attitude and self-destructive streak, packs up everything that belongs to her, like that purple Emma Peeler catsuit made famous by the non-Marvel Avengers (as well as one thing that doesn't belong to her, Pizza Dog), and escapes from New York to L.A., where she starts a private investigation business from her laptop and housesits for the summer a beachside trailer that looks exactly like the Malibu trailer Rockford called home on the show.

That's not all that's borrowed from The Rockford Files. Fraction takes two of Rockfish's occasional sidekicks--Gandolph "Gandy" Fitch, an ex-con who was played on the show by Isaac Hayes, and Marcus "Gabby" Hayes, a private eye who was played by a toupeed Louis Gossett Jr. (and was also a precursor to Tom Selleck's Lance White, a sharp-dressed rival of Rockford's)--and turns them into a newly married gay couple who lives near Kate and tags along with her on her cases. Gandy is renamed Finch, while Marcus gets to keep his name but loses the rug. Finch and Marcus help out Kate as she makes mistakes as a detective along the way but eventually blossoms into both this weird cross between Katniss and Rockfish and a self-sufficient person with a life away from the two father figures who have alienated her (Clint and her actual father, an oily businessman named Derek). Kate's youth and inexperience as a gumshoe might remind Rockford Files fans of another occasional sidekick of Jim's: Richie Brockelman, played by Dennis Dugan, who went on to direct all those terrible Adam Sandler movies that sound like fake Hollywood turkeys David Chase would have made up in one of his Rockford Files scripts that poked fun at SoCal living or how much SoCal pizza sucks ("This ain't a pizza. It's a grilled cheese sandwich").

L.A. Woman also reminds me of the high-quality writing of both Veronica Mars and Terriers, two SoCal P.I. shows that are worthier successors to The Rockford Files than any past or even future attempts to revive Rockford without Garner, whether it's David Shore's unseen and rumored-to-have-been-terrible Rockford reboot pilot with Dermot Mulroney, which failed to get picked up by NBC a few years ago, or the Rockford movie project Vince Vaughn wants to star in and produce. The late Garner's classic show was a once-in-a-lifetime, lightning-in-a-bottle thing that was so infused with Garner's distinctive personality and the late Stephen J. Cannell's equally distinctive creative voice, which is why I'm always skeptical of Universal's attempts to recapture that lightning. When not even the creator of House can get it to work, that's how difficult it is to revive Rockford.

Initially, I was mildly skeptical of the idea of Vaughn playing one of my favorite TV characters. But now I'm way more skeptical. I just can't buy Vaughn anymore as the everyman that Garner was (it would be like getting The Hard Way/The Specialist-era James Woods to play Rockford). Also, ever since Vaughn has become more upfront about his political views, I've been concerned about a Republican who worships guns and has equally strange and bothersome views about race playing a far-from-conservative hero who didn't care for guns (but wasn't afraid to use one) and whose attitudes towards race mirrored those of Garner's in real life, because he's likely going to alter the reluctant-about-guns aspect of the character so that it would be more aligned with his politics. If he does that, then the character's not Rockford anymore. He might as well be Mike Hammer. Now if Vaughn were playing Mike Hammer, that would be a more interesting and perhaps more worthwhile movie.

So now that True Detective's second season has emerged as an unwatchable disaster and is far from the career boost Vaughn must have expected, this Rockford movie project--which, when we last heard about it, was being given a rewrite by 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi screenwriter Chuck Hogan--is threatening to become more of a reality. If this fucking reboot ever gets made, I wouldn't be surprised if L.A. Woman turns out to be--just like Veronica Mars and Terriers before it--the better Rockford update. Kate may be female and extraordinary with a bow and arrow, but she's already more convincing in the role of an everyman detective than Vaughn will ever be, due to the relatability and humanity both Fraction and a terrific guest artist, Annie Wu, a Venture Bros. storyboarder and the current artist on DC's reimagining of Black Canary as a goth-y rock musician, bring to the character of Kate.

L.A. Woman is such a loving ode to the '70s SoCal P.I. genre that even Elliott Gould's Philip Marlowe from another great '70s SoCal P.I. genre piece, the Robert Altman version of The Long Goodbye, shows up in the form of a new mentor for Kate, an obscure '70s Marvel reporter character named Harold H. Harold. Like Gould in that classic movie, Harold, reimagined by Fraction and Wu as a rumpled P.I. who resembles Gould, is seen shopping for cat food in the supermarket. L.A. Woman is essentially a regular P.I. story about both the alluring and corrupt sides of L.A. that happens to have a masked supervillain as one of the bad guys: Kate's nemesis Whitney Frost, a criminal mastermind who goes by the name of Madame Masque.

Frost's recently announced first appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as an adversary in the upcoming second season of Agent Carter makes L.A. Woman worth picking up for Agent Carter fans who have never read Fraction's Hawkeye and may want to familiarize themselves with Madame Masque, who will be reimagined as a '40s Hollywood actress on the Marvel Studios show. Just like how Agent Carter is a spy show that pits its non-superpowered protagonists against larger-than-life villains straight out of a superhero show and is extremely accessible for people who don't like the superhero genre, Hawkeye, especially during Kate's L.A. arc, is a crime comic where the only superhero comic-ish things about it are the presence of Madame Masque (at one point in the arc, Kate wonders, "What if Madame Masque is the reason why everything in L.A. sucks?") and the occasional cameos by Spider-Man and Wolverine.

With Hawkeye, Fraction wanted to reinvent the superhero comic--and largely succeeded by not approaching it as one. Hawkeye arose from Fraction's frustrations with the inaccessible storylines of most present-day superhero comics. "I think we as an industry fell into this pattern of not caring about new readers anymore," said the Casanova and Sex Criminals creator to the L.A. Times in 2013. "There's a way that you can do it that isn't the clumsy, awkward way that it used to be done where characters refer to themselves in the third person, thinking back on who they are and how they came to be. You don't have to write every comic as if it's the first comic someone's ever read, but you do have to write as though you would like new people to read your comic--which is kind of what Hawkeye is all about."

Artwork by Annie Wu (Photo source: Wu)

The series also arose from Fraction's changing views on heroism and his boredom with dourness in superhero comics, which made him long for what he's described as "the Stephen J. Cannell-ness of it all." Fraction was interested in presenting a counterpoint to Batman. "The older you get, the more you live in the world, it's impossible not to look at Batman through class and race," said Fraction to Paste last year. "Batman is a rich white billionaire who beats up poor brown people and the mentally ill. That's weird, right? Kinda weird. A billionaire, punching poor people. But the idea of a guy who came from nothing and stayed just a couple steps away from it, but can't not help you move a couch, that's interesting."

L.A. Woman is a great example of the down-to-earth hero who "can't not help you move a couch," embodied by Kate in this particular arc. She's also a hero whose adventures benefit from a killer soundtrack that's not of the typical John Williams kind. In the letters section of Hawkeye, series artist David Aja would provide a soundtrack for readers to listen to while reading Hawkeye. For example, two of the musical selections Aja listed for Hawkeye's Christmas issue were cues from Sergei Prokofiev's rousing score to the 1938 Sergei Eisenstein epic Alexander Nevsky. For the arc where Clint's ex-wife Mockingbird, Spider-Woman, Black Widow and Kate have to pull Clint out of trouble when he gets himself entangled in the latest predicament of his current girlfriend, a hot, Bridget Regan-ish thief named Cherry, Aja curated a mix of Frank Zappa, surf-rock and fusion tunes like Lalo Schifrin's 1976 disco instrumental "Black Widow" (intended to accompany Black Widow's Grand Central Terminal pursuit of Cherry), Schifrin and Dizzy Gillespie's 1977 collabo "Unicorn" (intended for Kate's badass fight with a pair of Russian thugs) and Herbie Hancock's 1976 jam "Spider" (chosen for the pages where Clint gets slapped around by a plainclothes Jessica Drew, a.k.a. Spider-Woman). As for the classic Pizza Dog issue, Aja's soundtrack consists mainly of jazz to enhance the detective story vibe for Pizza Dog's hunt for a murderer.

Disappointingly, the TPB editions of Hawkeye omit the playlist info. I have no idea what sort of tunes were intended as the soundtrack for the L.A. arc, but I discovered that re-reading the L.A. Woman TPB with tons of La Luz tracks in my headphones works like gangbusters. Or maybe it should be La Luz tracks together with one of Best Coast's love letters to California needle-dropped for the moment when Kate adjusts to SoCal life. There's a propulsiveness to the all-female Seattle band's surf-rock sound that makes their tunes the perfect soundtrack for Kate's arrow-slinging adventures in L.A. and the vibrant visuals of both Wu, who cites Edgar Wright and Nicolas Winding Refn as among her storytelling influences, and colorist Matt Hollingsworth, who brings a consistency to the palette of the arc, despite the many differences in penciling styles between Wu and the more minimalist Javier Pulido.

One of the few complaints from readers about Fraction's Hawkeye was that the wait between issues would frequently take too long for them. The advantage of reading comics in TPB form, which is how I mainly read comics these days, is that TPB readers like myself don't have to worry about waiting. I don't know what it was like for Hawkeye readers to sit and wait for months for the L.A. Woman issues to come out when they were first released. But that would have definitely messed around with the momentum of the arc and prevented me from enjoying the arc in the manner I got to first enjoy it and the manner I recommend to anyone: as light summertime reading, like so many other well-crafted crime novels I've read in the past, whether they're graphic novels or prose novels. The craftiness of L.A. Woman and other equally satisfying crime novels just like it outdoes wading in snot and chlorine any day of the week.

Jack Sheldon's rendition of "The Long Goodbye" from the Altman film of the same name, a film L.A. Woman pays tribute to, is in rotation during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Awesomes, "Euro-Awesomes"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

If The Tick was the Seinfeld of the superhero comedy genre (as was the hangout sitcom No Heroics during its brief run in the U.K.), then The Awesomes is the Get Smart of the genre: each week, the bumbling lead character manages to save the day despite his ineptitude, and often due to the help of his work family. But while Maxwell Smart's bumbling ways stemmed from his arrogance and ego, the physically frail Professor Dr. Jeremy Awesome's bumbling ways (as a combatant and an actual superhero, that is, not as a leader/strategist, which he's far better at doing) are due to a low self-esteem instilled by an unsupportive and distant father. If Prock had taught himself to be more assertive towards the currently absent-from-Earth and retired Mr. Awesome (Steve Higgins), who spent much of his time as a dad supporting his protégé Perfect Man (Josh Meyers) and belittling Prock (either due to Prock not being as perfect as Perfect Man or Prock not listening to his doctors' warnings to not use his secret time-freezing superpower because it gives him nosebleeds within seconds), you can damn well bet that Prock would be frequently Zack Morrising the world to move frozen people and objects around (like he did on Earth 4 during "It's a Mad Mad Mad Parallel World") instead of using that power only to talk to himself.

Manipulating time is a power anyone, including myself, would want to have, which is why Prock's inability to appreciate his ability and figure out how to make proper use of it (or how to work around the pain chronokinesis gives him) is both amusing and infuriating. So when Prock's mentor-turned-nemesis Dr. Terfenpeltz (Bobby Moynihan) points out to Prock that he's not using his time-freezing power to its fullest potential in "Euro-Awesomes," I thought to myself, "Word." The evil scientist is basically voicing the frustrations of Awesomes viewers like myself who can think of a million things to do with time-freezing if it were possible and also wish that Prock would be a little less intimidated by his own chronokinetic power, even though it does turn his nose into a Ragú ad.

Prock finally figures out how to use that power to defeat somebody: in this case, Dr. Terfenpeltz, who wants to collect superheroes' powers to conquer the world (Prock tricks Dr. Terfenpeltz by allowing him to absorb his chronokinetic power and then withholding from him the caveat that chronokinesis is painful). While it's nice to see some progress in Prock's struggles with time-freezing, it'd be wise for The Awesomes to continue having Prock learn something new about his powers every once in a while (his other power is the ability to block Dr. Malocchio's mind control) because Prock wouldn't be as interesting anymore if he became more like Perfect Man, who, by the way, has been far from perfect lately (both having to hide at Awesome Mountain from the law and being unable to do superhero things out in the streets like he used to do are driving Perfect Man crazy and causing him to talk to basketballs as if they were Wilson the volleyball from Cast Away). Much of what made The Greatest American Hero unique--as well as, frankly, more enjoyable than the character of Superman, whom a rather deluded-at-the-time DC Comics thought The Greatest American Hero was ripping off--was Ralph Hinkley's often klutzy attempts to be a hero without the supersuit instruction manual he kept losing. As we see during DVD or Hulu rewatches of that old Stephen J. Cannell show and now the storylines for both Prock and the disheveled Perfect Man in "Euro-Awesomes," a hero who's imperfect or always learning makes for better storytelling than a super-perfect man who's always got it together.

There's also some progress in Prock's love life during "Euro-Awesomes," as he realizes his current girlfriend Jaclyn Stone (Amy Poehler) is no Hotwire (Rashida Jones), and both he and Hotwire, who developed feelings for Prock during her time as a mole working for her evil dad Malocchio, finally get the guts to kiss each other. While it's good that The Awesomes doesn't have to prolong Hotwire's Metal Fella arc anymore now that everyone on the team finally knows she's alive and has been pretending to be Metal Fella because of her guilt over betraying them, I'll miss her terrible impression of a male superhero because it gave Jones more to play than just the sexy mole/love interest.

Even though The Awesomes is a comedy, it takes its action scenes seriously, just like the original Get Smart did (despite Max's klutziness and what has to be the whitest white-guy walk in TV history, Don Adams--or his occasional stunt double--did an awful lot of hitting and running and jumping and clinging to the tops of cars). The climactic battle where Dr. Terfenpeltz's giant mecha absorbs the powers of both the Awesomes and their European counterparts is nicely visualized and reminiscent of the Super-Skrulls from various Marvel titles and The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

Another treat in "Euro-Awesomes," which was written by DC Comics veteran and Awesomes staff writer Judd Winick, is its gags about Euro superteams like Justice League Europe and Excalibur (a British offshoot of the X-Men), which are the most Judd Winick-y part of the episode. The cleverest creation out of all the Euro counterparts Winick and the other writers came up with has to be Mademoiselle Hunchback, an icy French beauty who transforms into Quasimodo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame when she Hulks out and plays hard to get in front of a smitten Impresario when she's in her more conventionally feminine form. You got to love how of all the superhuman forms she could have taken, like maybe a She-Hulk physique, a crystalline-armored body or a wolf, she prefers to change into Charles Laughton.

Mr. Awesome let Prock down as a parent, and now Dr. Terfenpeltz, the father figure who, unlike Mr. Awesome, could have helped Prock to become the genuine superhero he'd prefer to be instead of a mere lawyer/doctor/thinker/delegator, has let him down too. "Euro-Awesomes" doesn't brood over these father figures who keep disappointing Prock, but this history of underwhelming father figures is kind of depressing when you think about it, and it's where The Awesomes gets unexpectedly sad (and maybe even tragic) in a way that Get Smart couldn't because '60s sitcoms were incapable of depth and dark humor (aside from that one time when KAOS murdered a secretary by drowning her in a phone booth, which struck me as really dark back when I was a kid discovering Get Smart reruns in the '80s). My advice to Prock?: Stop looking for a father figure. That "Ask Dad, He Knows" cigarette ad sign young George Bailey saw in It's a Wonderful Life got it half-wrong. Dad doesn't always fucking know. Maybe the newly reformed Hotwire will be that long-sought-after figure who boosts Prock's self-esteem about his abilities and won't let him down like Mr. Awesome and Dr. Terfenpeltz did. A smart guy is nothing without a 99 by his side.

Why I, a latecomer to The Rockford Files, became a fan of the classic P.I. show and the late James Garner

The legendary James Garner died yesterday at the age of 86. The following is a repost of "Watch The Rockford Files and call to see if Paul can score some weed," from January 16, 2009. In the '09 piece, I mentioned my goal to watch every episode of Garner's classic show, which I became a fan of several decades after it was cancelled.

I still haven't completed that goal, and I should really get my ass to Netflix Instant and marathon the hell out of Rockford again because Netflix has every single episode of Rockford (including the ones where Garner's knees were clearly wrecked, yet he didn't lose a beat and remained a trooper through it all). And also because Garner was truly one of the greatest.

(Photo source: Soref.TV)

Your friends do it and you've probably done it too: catch up on a show your lazy ass has put off watching by setting aside an entire weekend to view the DVD box set in one marathon sitting. Back when 24 first hit the DVD market, various writers who missed the first season chose to catch up with the show on DVD and recapped in real time what it was like to watch the first-season discs in one sitting, while a writer I used to work with picked the '80s version of The Twilight Zone for his weekend DVD marathon. A couple of years ago, those writers inspired me to do a similar marathon thing with the box sets of another cult show: The Rockford Files, Stephen J. Cannell's clever reinvention of the private eye genre, which starred James Garner in his signature role as rugged everyman gumshoe Jim Rockford.

Alright, so it's not quite a marathon. I haven't even viewed all 123 episodes yet, but my goal is to eventually see them all on DVD or via Netflix's media player for PC users. As of this writing, I haven't reached season five yet.

I picked Rockford because I was a fan of Veronica Mars (which starred Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Kristen Bell, a Star Wars geek who should have Jedi mind-tricked the CW assclowns into bringing back her show). Before I started renting the Rockford DVDs from Netflix, I had only caught Veronica's spiritual granddaddy once or twice on cable, so I wanted to better acquaint myself with Rockford on DVD, where it's uncut and commercial-free (on Hulu, it's not commercial-free). The older the series, the more it gets chopped up by syndicators to accommodate commercial breaks, which grow annoyingly longer with each passing year. So that must mean Adventures of Superman reruns will eventually be edited down to 10 minutes, and George Reeves' flying sequences will be sped up so badly it'll look like the Metropolis underworld slipped some crank into the Daily Planet watercooler.

Rockford still draws a cult that's pretty rabid, though not quite as huge as Veronica's online fanbase. Slackers like the main character's pal in Ben Folds Five's "Battle of Who Could Care Less" dig Rockford reruns because Jim is one of them. They identify with a hero who'd rather go fishing with his father Rocky (Noah Beery) than do his job. The fans who still visit the alt.tv.rockford-files newsgroup continue to exchange favorite Garner wisecracks, and a couple of fan sites list every wacky message Jim received on his answering machine during the opening credits.





On disc, Rockford has aged better than most '70s shows, thanks to quirky, sharp and timeless scripts penned by staff writers like Cannell, future Sopranos creator David Chase and Juanita Bartlett. Seventies TV comes in three modes: schlocky (the Krofft variety shows, anything with Glen A. Larson's name on it), sanctimonious (M*A*S*H, Norman Lear's shrill shoutcoms) or a hideous mash-up of both (Hawaii Five-0, the "Fonzie gets a library card" era of Happy Days). Rockford is one of the few '70s shows I've seen that's neither of the above, and whenever the series did address a serious issue--like the flaws of the grand jury system in its most celebrated ep, the Bartlett-scripted "So Help Me God"--it did it with class and zero preachiness.

And now, something interesting someone else wrote about a work that's represented in my "Ask for Babs" mix: The Rockford Files

This is an illustration of The Rockford Files that I did for a compilation of my blog posts that I was planning on self-publishing last year, but I decided to pull the plug on the book. I didn't realize until after completing all the artwork for the book that you can't put out a book if there isn't anybody out there who's going to buy it. Well, nobody out there is going to buy it, so for now, the book is dead (like that version of Rockford with Dermot Mulroney as Jim and Beau Bridges as Rocky, perhaps the only role in that unseen pilot that was perfectly re-cast).

When she guest-edited an issue of Magnet, Juliana Hatfield had a few things to say about a certain '70s show that she rediscovered on cable, much like how I rediscovered it on DVD after watching it only once or twice on A&E as a kid.

I think Rockford Files is cool for many of the same reasons Hatfield does, and I assume Universal does too. That's why, despite getting sued by understandably disgruntled Rockford Files star James Garner and feuding with him in court for more than a century, the studio brought the show back in the '90s as a series of TV-movies with Garner and the surviving cast and then tried to remake the show on TV with different stars twice (and ended up failing both times--the second attempt couldn't even find anyone to play Rockford). And now, Universal, perhaps spurred by the comedic film version of deceased Rockford Files creator Stephen J. Cannell's 21 Jump Street, announced the other day that it plans to attempt to reopen The Rockford Files again, but this time as a feature film with Vince Vaughn as star and producer.

Vince Vaughn? Yeah, I can see him as Rockford. Fast-talking con men are Vaughn's forte, and the taco breakfast-craving P.I. could be a fast-talking con man when he needed to be, like in the "Jimmy Joe Meeker" episodes.

But Rockfish got his ass whupped a lot, and he had knuckles made out of Kleenex. If the screenplay retains Rockfish's discomfort with fighting, I'm going to have a helluva hard time buying that Vaughn--who's taller than Garner and whose signature characters are in-your-face and physically intimidating grifter types (the kiss he plants on the shocked priest played by Henry Gibson in Wedding Crashers always comes to mind)--can be overpowered in a fight.

Still, at least it's not Dermot Mulroney.

And now, Hatfield nails exactly why everyone from Mulroney to Vaughn wants to be Rockford:

When I hooked up my analog-to-digital TV converter box a few months ago, I found that I was able to receive a few channels that my rabbit ears had not ever accessed. One of these channels is RTV (the Retro Television Network), which airs The Rockford Files every weeknight at 10. I remember watching it some as a child in the 1970s, but I am enjoying it much more as an adult. (It's not really a show for kids; it moves kind of slowly, and the main characters are not very flashy.) My newfound love for The Rockford Files (and for RTV in general) is partly nostalgia (for my childhood, for the '70s), but part of it is the fact that Jim Rockford, the self-employed private detective ("$200 a day, plus expenses"), is such a great creation. I love that he lives in a run-down trailer in the parking lot of a restaurant by the ocean in Malibu. (How is it even possible that a person can live in a trailer in a parking lot in Malibu? Today, with real estate the way it is, that would not be believable. Today, the likes of Jim Rockford--anyone who is anything other than super-rich--would not be able to afford to live anywhere near Malibu, dilapidated trailer or not.) I love the chummy, sweet relationship Rockford has with his dad, whom he calls "Rocky," as everyone else does. I love that he keeps his gun in the cookie jar and wears polyester wash-and-wear slacks that do not flatter his chubby bum. (This was before people worked out, before TV stars had to be all fit and muscly and healthy and botoxed and facelifted and perfect and inaccessible and unrealistic and cookie-cutter boring.) Rockford smokes and eats dollar tacos and drives without a seatbelt. He's a straight shooter, taking everything as it comes. He's always getting jumped by bad guys, but he never really gets angry; mostly he sighs a lot, grumbles a bit and gets on with it. I like him.

Ask for Babs (Universal 100th Anniversary Mix) by Dj Afos on Mixcloud

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.

TV arty

Screw the overcrowded and stress-inducing San Diego Comic-Con (which begins today). Here at A Fistful of Soundtracks: The Blog is an Artists' Alley that's far less crowded or funny-smelling than the one down there. It consists of the niftiest TV show-inspired artwork I've found on the Web.


Treme by illustrator and Fistful of Soundtracks listener Owen Freeman (for a WaPo article about the show).


Phil Dunphy from Modern Family, Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation and Michael Scott from The Office by Freeman (for a WaPo critique of mockumentary sitcoms).


Dr. Girlfriend from The Venture Bros. by Darwyn Cooke. [Via Almost Darwyn Cooke's Blog]

Robert Culp (1930-2010)

Learning about the I Spy and Greatest American Hero star's death yesterday was a bit of a shock because Culp was a terrific (and Emmy-nominated) action show lead and such an underrated comic actor, even though he was also responsible for this:


That's why watching most older TV shows can be such a pain in the ass for me. I have to put up with lame bits of yellowface and brownface in everything from Bewitched to I Spy, where Culp, who was once married to half-Vietnamese actress and frequent I Spy guest star France Nuyen, played both his regular role of Kelly Robinson and a Chinese warlord in an episode he scripted (Culp also wrote frequently for TV, a little-known fact pointed out by Film Score Monthly label head Lukas Kendall in his excellent liner notes for FSM's I Spy CD).


Yellowface aside, the understated I Spy was groundbreaking TV: it envisioned itself as more like a feature film than a TV show (the title sequence even began with the rather cocky "Sheldon Leonard Presents"--Nick the Bartender wants to conquer the spy fiction business!); instead of recycled library music, it featured completely original score music every week (courtesy of the late Earle Hagen, whose I Spy theme is one of my favorite TV themes of all time); it favored location shooting in foreign countries(*) over studio backlots; it took a chance on a stand-up with no acting experience named Bill Cosby and made him the first black lead in a prime-time drama; and it gave birth to the buddy action comedy, years before Butch and Sundance. Even The Greatest American Hero--Culp's other classic buddy comedy series and the show where I and countless others from my generation first saw Culp the snarky, over-the-hill action hero--is a descendant of I Spy.


(*) I doubt any of the five major networks would allow the Culp/Cosby show--which once had to pay the Yakuza a ransom for a show crew member they kidnapped while the crew was shooting in Japan--to be filmed all over the world today like it was in the '60s, because of inflated network TV budgets and certain other obstacles. Instead, 24 tries to pass off L.A. as Washington D.C. and New York (rather miserably), and Alias (which was slightly more convincing) dressed up the Disney backlot to look like Madrid or Casablanca, among other cities. I assume the latest episode of Lost, which flashed back to Richard Alpert's original home on the Canary Islands, never even left Hawaii.

Culp had great taste in sci-fi and horror scripts. His guest shots on the original Outer Limits were among the highlights of that series ("The Architects of Fear," "Demon with a Glass Hand"), and his hard-to-find-but-YouTube-able 1973 TV-movie A Cold Night's Death--one of those thrillers where the twist ending isn't as shocking as the film thinks it is, but the journey to that ending is still entertaining--would make for a great double bill with John Carpenter's The Thing (it features an unsettling synthesizer score by Gil Melle of The Andromeda Strain fame). On a similar note, who can forget Culp's creepy performance when Bill Maxwell got possessed by an evil ghost chick in "The Beast in the Black," the Greatest American Hero ep I remember most fondly?