It's "Fox Is Seth MacFarlane's Bitch" Sunday!

[vovat]

Well, let's see. No new Simpsons tonight, but the American Dad episode was all right. Not one of the best, but it worked pretty well. The first Family Guy was kind of weak, and if the woman Brian was dating was supposed to be fifty, I don't think they got their math right. Alaska and Hawaii both became states in 1959, so she would have had to have been REALLY young when the picture with less stars was taken. Then again, maybe they did that just to mess with us nerds. {g} The other new FG, with the evil monkey and Miley Cyrus, was a better one, although it kind of ran out of steam. The ending was coherent, but not all that funny. Well, maybe I just thought the King Kong reversal had been done better in Terry Pratchett's Moving Pictures. I don't know. I just think it kind of ran out of steam after introducing the gag about Miley being a robot. It was pretty cool to finally see an actual story involving the evil monkey after all the years of his being in the background, though. I actually thought the partially live-action variety-type show with Seth MacFarlane and Alex Borstein was a good idea, but not really implemented that well. Some of the simple gags ran way too long, but I guess that's not atypical for MacFarlane. As for The Cleveland Show, it continues to be hit-or-miss, with more misses than hits. I liked Cleveland's rap and the satire on the hypocrisy of purity pledges, but most of it was just kind of...there.

Comments

Seth McFarlane live

[bec-87rb.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I wasn't sure it was primetime, felt kinda homemade. It might be that gags that work as cartoons don't translate into live action presentation, and there is only one way Seth knows who to write? Like the Marlie Matlin bit, it wasn't even that I was so shocked, just it wasn't very funny?

Re: Seth McFarlane live

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I think there's definitely a case of cartoon jokes not working well in live action, and I noticed that they threw in a few cartoon bits anyway.

[(Anonymous)]

As someone who is almost 50 (I turn 48 tomorrow. ick.) I can assure you the flag, trolley car, davenport, "murray hill5-2763", dial 0 and ask for Sally, were *all* pulling your leg. Those were *all* before our time (although rotary phones were still in use well through the end of my single digits).

All those things would have been common to our parents so they wouldn't be alien to us but we'd have all thought they were "old-fashioned". In a way, I remember my grandmother was insulted when I asked her if the used horse and buggy in her day (they didn't of course, they were "old fashioned" when she was a child) so I guess I'm now of the age where I'd get surprised when people ask me if Hawaii was a state "in my day". *sigh* Just you wait till your kid askes you about "the good old days" before email. You'll see what it feels like. :)

[vovat.livejournal.com]

As someone who is almost 50 (I turn 48 tomorrow. ick.) I can assure you the flag, trolley car, davenport, "murray hill5-2763", dial 0 and ask for Sally, were *all* pulling your leg.

Yeah, that's what I figured, although the evidence wasn't as easily obtained for the rest of the stuff. My parents were born in 1951, and I know they still had telephone prefixes in their youth, but I'm not sure how long they lasted.

Those were *all* before our time (although rotary phones were still in use well through the end of my single digits).

Hey, I'm only almost 32, and we had a rotary dial phone growing up. My parents tended to be late to catch up with most trends, though. It was also a while before we got color TV.

[(Anonymous)]

Me again. To give a more accurate sense of "our age" I think the things that would *actually* date us is that we would consider VCRs, ATMs, and answering machines to be, more or less "new", in that we simply didn't have them when we were growing up.
All the things mentioned on family guy (48 star flags, operater assisted calling, trolley cars, etc.) would have ssemed to us to be "old-fashioned" just as VCRs, answering machines with tapes, and LED ATMs would seem "old-fashioned" to teen-agers today.
(*grumbles* "got their math wrong" ... *phooey* ... "might as well call barbershop quartet '50s music'".... *grumble*)

[vovat.livejournal.com]

You can probably often tell about how old the writers of a particular show are by what they seem to consider old-fashioned. I know the Simpsons writers have mentioned how old-fashioned the show was when it first came out, since they were working with memories of their own childhoods. For instance, the idea of a kid's idol being a TV clown was probably much more common in Matt Groening's youth than in those of kids who grew up watching The Simpsons.