> >Louis,
> >
> >Glad to see there are others here who share my Buffymania - most people
> >can't seem to get past the "silly" name, and look at me funny when I say
> >its the best show on TV.
>
> I love this show. The reason I gave it a chance was cause I noticed that
> the actress that plays Buffy used to play Erica's newly discovered, evil
> illegitimate daughter on All My Children.
I caught up with it midway thru the first season. Just heard a few appreciative noises about "someone finally realized you could do something interesting with this genre," and behold, they were right!
> Did anyone ever catch Dinosaurs.
Oh yeah!
> Fabulous. I loved the baby that called
> the father "not-the-mama". And the episode when the guys and gals evolved
> into cross-gender roles, when the guys went out on a guy-weekend in the
> woods.
Hyserical!
> And who can forget when the teen-guy dinosaur discovered that
> groovy herb that made everybody quit working and start listening to Jimi
> Hendrix.
Not to mention it was the ONLY program I ever saw on American TV that criticized the Gulf War. It was totally AWESOME. I kept pinching myself to see if I would wake up. I walked arouind stoned for 2 days afterwards.
There seems to be a very consistent pattern here: by far the most socially insightful, critical programming on TV tends to come wrapped in forms that create safe distance via surface appearance. Rod Sterling realized this quite consciously with *The Twilight Zone.* (Alas, they used to do *Twilight Zone* marathons on Thanksgiving here in LA, but no more.) And, of course, there was all that hysterical mockery of conventional Cold War narratives in *Rocky and Bullwinkle*. Jay Ward, what a wonderful subversive influence on my childhood!
In the same vein, *Dinosaurs* did all kinds of stuff that no live character TV show could have done. You still might find it in reruns, passing as a kids show on Saturday mornings.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"