Late Night Laughs

If my husband and I have one major disagreement, it's TV in the bedroom. During his years of bachelorhood, he was used to going to sleep with the TV on. Heck, I think it stayed on all night. While I can literally turn a deaf ear to the sound, the light bothers the heck out of me sometimes.

We get around that with different schedules most of the time. He's on an earlier work schedule than me and my shut down time is later than his, so by the time I head to bed either the TV timer is kicked off (he gets an hour) or I can cut it off to go to sleep.

One way we get around that is by occasionally finding something I find entertaining, or football. For some reason I can go to sleep to football.

Some people turn on the Late Show for laughs before sleep, but for me there's a plethora of laughable shows on such unlikely channels as History, Destination America and Animal Planet.

Seriously, if you've never watched Ancient Aliens, Mountain Monsters or, my favorite, Finding Bigfoot, then you don't know what you're missing.

On these shows (as well as some others, I'm sure), people essentially take a myth or legend and spend a lot of time and money "proving" it to be so. They apparently make a living and become famous doing it. They treat it like fact and discuss how what they are doing proves the "facts" about whatever myth they're discussing.

Especially Dave Mustaine on Ancient Aliens, who wraps his pseudo science in a serious atmosphere as if that gives it credibility. Frankly, that's probably one of the reasons why I find that show less entertaining, and apparently I'm not alone. When I went looking for images for the show, I found that he's become a meme in a host of languages. I was almost distracted from my original task by laughing at what had been done with his photo.

Basically, as the memes suggest, he takes a lot of historical things that are unexplained -- from construction to carved images -- and credits them to aliens. Because he wraps it up in a package that would make it appear to be real science, I find him irritating. I think that is because there are likely to be people who, because of the way it is presented and the fact that it's on the History Channel, will accept it as fact. Oh, please.

If it's true, then what did we do to piss off the aliens that they've quit helping us out? Seriously? If they could provide construction tips to ancient civilizations, why don't they back and show us some clean energy, or a cure for cancer, or impose world peace? So we don't have pyramids to carve their inexplicable images on. We'll put them on satellite TV for the whole world to see. But enough of that before I get irritated just thinking about it.

One I don't find irritating, although the fact that they apparently carry loaded firearms into the woods at night makes it a little frightening, is Mountain Monsters on Destination America.

This group of guys, who were either recruited in the back woods or grew beards to hide their true identities so they can go home without being laughed out of the community, travel around mountain regions investigating specific legends of terrifying creatures. They don't just want to find evidence it exists, they want to capture or kill whatever is out there. If something makes a noise in the wrong place, firearms are blazing and I wind up hoping everyone is on the safe side of the guns. Of course, they could be shooting blanks, depending on where these guys are really from. I sometimes think they may have recruited local talent for that particular show, in which case the bullets are live.

Then there is my favorite. If Finding Bigfoot is on the Animal Planet, it's a safe bedtime TV choice and eventually I may quit laughing enough to go to sleep.

No, there are no punch lines to share the next day, but the unlikely cast of characters, especially Bobo, are a blast. Bobo (who may actually be a bigfoot in disguise) mimics the "sound" of bigfoot, from whacking trees with limbs to unlikely calls. They talk about what bigfoot does and the habits of the species as though it were as well documented as the domestic cat. There are the sounds and foods that attract it, the places it frequents, what it eats in the wild. Their "knowledge" is extensive.

They travel around the country in search of bigfoot sightings to investigate and spend their time interviewing the locals, visiting the areas where the bigfoot was seen, and rambling around the woods at night, which I found had sparked another meme.

Unlike the Mountain Monster hunters, they don't have the goal of capturing or killing bigfoot (or sasquatch), just seeing him and recording his (or her) image on film. Yet despite all their time in the woods at night with infrared and night vision, they've done neither of those things.

I've suggested to my husband that in fact, the shows are all about the same thing. The ancient aliens are still among us, but now they are masquerading as mountain monsters and sasquatch. And the reason no one can find any evidence that they exist?

Well, if we get too close, or if they die, they simply teleport home.

What Makes Star Trek So Special?

iThis weekend we watched "Star Trek Into Darkness" after borrowing the unopened DVD from my daughter.

A couple of points to notice. First, we watched a movie on DVD; not in a theater. The first is rare not because we don't have DVDs, but because since the arrival of "The Hopper" we've almost always got something recorded (and during football season even those aren't watched as we're watching live TV on weekends). The second option -- going to a movie -- is rarer still and may happen twice a year or so. Then the DVD was unopened, which means my daughter suffers from the same time constraints I do.

Anyway, back to Star Trek.

After the movie was finished I pointed out to my husband that I found it interesting that a arguably poorly acted television series from our childhood days with no real special effects could still be inspiring remakes and movies nearly 50 years later. I mean, stop and think about it.

In 1966 a television series debuted and ran for three seasons. There were no outstanding special effects and the acting of some of the stars has long been criticized. And yet in the years since the "original" series disappeared there have been nearly constant attempts to recreate and recapture whatever it was that made that show, which wasn't especially long running so apparently not a huge commercial success, so magical.

Even today, odds are good that people recognize James T. Kirk and Spock, the quirky heroes of those early voyages through the stars. Though they may have seen only much newer versions of the series, which most people will say are not as good, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, who played the very first version of the duo are well known and terribly typecast into those roles. Seriously, they worked that series for three years and can you think of any other roles (other than remakes) that they have played other than commercials?

There are jokes about the overacting; the fact that seatbelts were apparently a lost technology (oh, come on, in 1966 did we even care what seatbelts were for?); and Kirk's womanizing. None of those jokes are limited to those of us who watched the original series in our formative years. Instead they're spilling across Facebook and spreading to new generations.

I'm a "fan" of a Facebook page that was created by friends of George Takei (called Oh Myyy), who played Sulu, the helmsman on the original series. The page is a humor page, and occasionally that is directed at Star Trek or "trekkie" references.

Beyond the original series, of which there were only 80 episodes and the cancellation of which has been ranked in the top 5 of television bad decisions, Star Trek has lived on. There was a one year animated series and, beginning about 20 years after the original series disappeared from prime time viewing and went into syndication, there have been four more attempts at a TV series based on the original idea. Some were supposed prequels and some further voyages of starships whose staffing and mission was much like the original. There have also been 12 feature films, half of which were cast with the original crew, four from another series' cast, and more recently with actors portraying the same characters (Kirk, Spock and the gang) at an earlier point in their lives.

But enough history. Beyond it all I'm still fascinated by the fact that a TV series from my youth, which I probably actually watched in syndication since I was about E1's age when it started its run, is still such a part of our entertainment lingo. Sure, there are other shows that live on and many of them may be easier to find airing somewhere at any given time. But I think it would be difficult if not impossible to find another that still inspires the imaginations of writers, directors and viewers the way Star Trek does.

Perhaps it was the vision of its creator, Gene Roddenberry, who simply turned the then popular idea of westerns and wagon trains into its futuristic application of a journey into the unknown of the stars. That idea somehow still captures our imagination and appears to be at the heart of all of the attempts at a recreation of the original series. Perhaps, however, there was more to the series than a random scifi adventure.

After watching the latest installment with all its special effects and its much improved acting, I think what really lies at the heart of the series isn't the space journey at all -- although that gives it a twist that makes it ever changing and different. It's actually about a group of people who are racially diverse (and in some versions species diverse) who work together for the success and survival of them all and a pair of best friends who within their visions of what is right will do virtually anything for one another.

That, in essence is what really attracts us, that commitment within a small group of people and that friendship that we'd all like to have, whatever our character flaws may be. And whether or not we ever dream of going where no man has gone before.