The STAR WARS Holiday Special Gets Dissected Live

Last night, I went to the Parkside Lounge where the podcasters behind THE STAR WARS MINUTE, Alex Robinson and Pete The Retailer, took on the bastard stepchild of the SW franchise; the infamous STAR WARS HOLIDAY SPECIAL. Their 2-hour live podcast took apart the "special" which was essentially a variety program that aired on CBS just before Thanksgiving in 1978 (pre-empting THE HULK and WONDER WOMAN!) and was considered a critical disaster even though it got a respectable audience of about 13 million people...which is not too shabby for a Saturday night in the pre-cable era.

If you haven't seen it, you can watch the entire special online at Daily Motion. But be warned... it is extremely slow going and very bizarre. During the live podcast last night, Alex Robinson referred to the opening 20 minutes as a sort of "weird performance art piece" where only Wookie is spoken. The episode centers around Chewbacca's family on their home planet as they wait for Chewie to return for something called Life Day. When humanoids appear, it's in the form of short cameos by the SW gang; Luke (looking heavily made up post-car accident), Leia, Han, and even Darth Vader (in a clip swiped from the first movie and repurposed for the show).

But the true strangeness is the special guest stars--Harvey Korman in multiple "comic" roles, Art Carney as a local trader and Bea Arthur as a sassy barkeep at the alien cantina from STAR WARS. But wait there's more--Diahann Carroll and Jefferson Starship do a couple strange songs too. The one element the bloggers agreed was actually good was an animated short about halfway through that introduces Boba Fett. And it is pretty cool looking filled with trippy, 70s style animation of the familiar characters and some snappy dialogue as well. The rest, however, is pretty embarrassing and had little involvement by George Lucas, who basically licensed the characters for this one time outing which never aired again and still remains commercially unavailable. But thanks to the Internets, it lives on to baffle and amuse people to this day. Merry Christmas!

Sitcom Master Directs Michael Urie in PARTNERS

Tonight on CBS, the new sitcom PARTNERS debuts. It's from the creators of WILL AND GRACE and stars Michael Urie, who was in my second feature WTC VIEW (which he did right after graduating from Juilliard). It's about two best friends, one gay and one straight, who run an architecture firm and it's inspired by the real life friend between creators Max Mutchnick and David Kohan.

I found an interesting story on NPR today about the director of tonight's pilot episode, James Burrows. He's directed more than 50 TV pilots over the last 20 some years, starting with TAXI and including other hits like CHEERS, FRIENDS and THE BIG BANG THEORY.  He has an interesting theory about directing sitcoms too--he often does it with his eyes closed. Literally. He says it's more important to hear the show, like radio. Which I guess why NPR did a feature on him :)

Was The Summer of '82 The Best Summer Ever For Movies?

There was a piece online this week from CBS This Morning where film critic David Edelstein of New York magazine called the summer of '82 Hollywood's Best Summer Ever for movies.  If you look at the lineup, you just might agree; E.T., POLTERGEIST, STAR TREK II: WRATH OF KAHN, CONAN THE BARBARIAN, ROCKY III and even TRON.  He says it was the last summer of big movies with personal themes before the marketeers took over. He is not alone in his assessment.

In fact, down in Texas at one of my favorite local movie houses The Alamo (where I've had a few films play myself!), they are doing a summer retrospective of the summer of '82.  They have these movies playing on their original release dates even.  What a fun idea!  Anyway, you can watch the segment below and post your comments about whether you agree with Edelstein.

MTA Closes A Subway Line For FastTrack

This week began an unusual MTA experiment as service was shutdown on the 4 and 6 trains from 10pm to 5am between Grand Central Station and Atlantic Avenue.  It's part of an extraordinary new approach to line maintenance that is being tested called FastTrack.  Usually, this sort of work would be spread out over a month or longer as track workers dodged regular trains and passengers suffered slow overnight service.  Now they are hoping for quicker more efficient repairs in a much shorter amount of time by shutting down an entire section of a line.

Tonight is the last night of this first FastTrack experiment and the reviews from the MTA have been positive.  The amount of work accomplished in those four nights by more than 700 workers has been staggering.  However, straphangers were not happy about having to take 3 trains instead of 1, as reported on CBS-2. Still it seems this sort of repair makes so much more sense in saving time and money while completing the necessary repairs on what is usually a 24/7 system.

Flight Numbers From 9/11 Are Officially Retired

I was watching a piece on the CBS Evening News last night about Flight 93.  Due to that plane being the only one on 9/11 where data and sound recorders were recovered, there is a lot of information about that fateful flight and the passengers who fought back, possibly saving the US Capitol from a direct hit.

Curious about whether the airlines still use these flight numbers, I found out that the numbers of all four planes involved in the terrorist attacks had been officially retired by American and United Airlines in 2001.  However, in May of this year there was a system error at United in which the numbers 93 and 175 showed up in the system and were quickly removed.

Here's the CBS report from last night in it's entirety with Scott Pelly introducing it from the new Flight 93 Memorial in Shanksville, PA, opening this weekend.

We Interrupt This Program...

It was 47 years ago today that a live broadcast of the soap opera "As The World Turns" on CBS was interrupted at 1:40pm.  What followed was the first audio report out of Dallas, Texas about an assassination attempt on President Kennedy.  It is riveting stuff and truly, as they say, the first draft of history.

The announcer is not Walter Cronkite and his voice is uncertain.... he even stumbles a couple times as he clearly reads copy that he just ripped off the wire.  The soap was interrupted twice more during it's half-hour broadcast as more details came in, like the number of shots, the fact that the Texas governor was wounded, and a report of assassins on the infamous grassy knoll.  What is most striking about these early reports is how clear it is that the president's wounds are grave. There is even the inclusion in the third bulletin of a Secret Service agent reportedly saying, "he's dead."

While we're all familiar with Uncle Walter's official video pronunciation of Kennedy's death roughly an hour later, I had never seen/heard these live bulletins before. A friend posted them on FB and they are worth watching today as, once again, we remember a president who was shot down in his prime.