Friday, January 22, 2010
my name is buck, and i like to _____
Quick! What's the absolute best way you can spend fifteen dollars right now today in the bullshit decade of bullshit? Don't strain your thinking thing because the only right answer is picking up the Buck Rogers complete series on dvd (I got it on sale at Wal-Mart, and I hate to endorse the beast but if you're already there buying shotgun shells and whiskey you might as well pick it up)! Five double-sided dvds might not be all collector's edition but it's a god-damn treasure trove of space disco swagger and Erin Grey in clingy spacesuits and space ninjas with electric boomerangs and robofunk and every guest star you can think of and awesome slo-mo shots of explosions and gorgeous stop-motion space stations and nubile alien slave girls tarted up to the nines and it's everything that the future should have been but isn't. Total id-focused harebrained idiot glee and miles of glittery detail in every single episode makes it the perfect viewing for these long cold depressing days of winter when you'd normally just listen to your Mayhem albums and cry in your corpsepaint, but no! It's cosmic freakout neon jive time! There's so much goodness here you'll even be able to stomach the otherwise awful robotic Amos and Andy catastrophe that is TWIKI (Mel Blanc, I love you and I do not hold you in any way responsible for this abomination against robotkind which is the real reason the Nexus series had to kill like crazy into the night -- REVENGE! REVENGE!) and yeah I'm a little jacked up on sugar and cold medicine but seriously, you're not going to make better use of fifteen bucks than picking up the Buck Rogers collection and working on your disco moves today. THE FUTURE IS NOW, MOTHERFUCKERS!
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Back when I was working nights, one of my (2) "morning" routines was to stagger out of bed sometime between noon and 2, repair to my dude room, turn on the SciFi channel and dick around on the computer until I was capable of my other morning routine: find some pants and go to the coffee shop.
ReplyDeleteAt that point, SciFi would basically run 5 or 6 episodes of something different every day, a programming block I like to call the "minithon". While the most satisfying such minithon for me was always and ever the Incredible Hulk, I have vivid memories of looking up one day and saying "holy SHIT who is this Erin Grey person!?". A solid second-tierer, no threat to the young Diane Lane or anything, but yeah. Cheekbones, jumpsuits and just the right mix of exasperation and affection.
I also swear I remember a Buck Rogers *movie* getting played at my dad's drivein, with some Christopher Cross (esque) gorgeousness as the theme song with a refrain "where am I who am I why am I here", but nobody I know buys that.
2ndbest thing about the show? Guest. Stars. Guest stars for *yards*.
You're totally right about the movie, which was the pilot for the show and actually played in theaters, and it totally has the extended vocal version of the theme at the end! The evil space vixen in the pilot quite possibly has one of the most amazing outfits of the whole series, and that's really saying something.
ReplyDeleteAs a moody adolescent I couldn't pass by a piano without hunting and pecking the Incredible Hulk theme, then putting on my backpack and hitching a ride to the next town where maybe, just maybe, this time things would be different.