Hazardous Material

Where could you get a cat eating alien, a modern wizard, a talking car with a guy in tight pants, a sideways driving car with a guy in tight pants, and a man and a boy traveling through time together and it NOT be creepy? ( The man and boy together not the wizard) All them were on my television set in the 1980's. Such a plentiful landscape of characters and creativity! If the late sixties and seventies brought outside the box drug addled classic kids tv then the eighties gave us superheros and alien life forms galore. Some of my favorites were, "Mr. Merlin" with Barnard Hughes (whom I shared the film screen with in "Sister Act 2" a genuine man) The show follows Merlin as he trains a young man as an apprentice to take over the wizardry when he moves on. Another fav was "Voyagers" where we follow a muscular guy in a vest without a shirt through time as he tries to get a young boy back to his time period and they "give history a push" when it ne...

If you're looking for a great documentary style peek into the obsessions of comedians and the "comic lifestyle". Be sure to check out "Comedian" which follows Jerry Seinfeld after he's retired from his television show and re-entering the stand up comedy clubs to write all new material. The normal process for developing successful stand up comedy set starts off with about 3-5 minutes of written jokes or stories with act outs. Of this amount of time only a handful of jokes will get a solid amount of laughter. These are "keepers" and the rest needs work. You slowly sharpen the good jokes and expand upon them to stretch out the amount of funny material. Each performance helps the comedian adjust the material according to the audience response. Soon the handful of material increases to an armful of material. Then from an armful to a bagful and so on until the whole 5 minute set is 90% to 100% predictably funny. Jerry Seinfeld, over the years in comedy c...