Tag: Mad Men

Great Opening Titles: Mad Men

2012-06-25, 8:44 pm
Categories: Cartoons, TV

All right, another one of these. Like the last one, it's recent, it's obvious, it's Emmy-winning, and Simpsons did it.

Mad Men -- the falling, the skyscrapers, the sexy ads. In thirty seconds we've got a picture of the glamor and the horror, the loss of control and even identity -- but, at the same time, the slickness, the class.

The black-and-white figure is presumably Draper, but it could be anybody -- he's literally faceless. Draper may have the most obvious and literal identity problems, but the entire cast grapples with them. The figures in the ads on the walls -- they're otherworldly, they're a little creepy; they're not more real than the falling figure, but they're certainly more defined.

And here it is on Simpsons.

And here it is on Daily Show three weeks ago.

And once again, Art of the Title has more.

Access

2012-06-09, 9:50 pm
Categories: Cartoons, TV

In the previous post, I mentioned two shows: Mad Men and the new Thundercats.

Mad Men is one of the most successful and critically acclaimed shows on TV, by a network that has at least two more of them and has become synonymous with drama on cable TV.

It's also availble on Netflix Streaming. Despite some missteps in the past year, I believe that Netflix represents the future of TV distribution. Eight bucks a month for access to a huge library of movies and TV shows new, old, and, in the case of the upcoming season of Arrested Development, original.

Thundercats is available online too. You can go to cartoonnetwork.com, click on Full Episodes, and get this charming little notification:

FULL EPISODES... AWESOME!

Watch the newest episodes of all your favorite shows. Get your parents to fill in their cable info and you're good to go.

That's right: you can watch Thundercats online...if you already have a cable subscription!

And there are three whole episodes available: today's, the one from three weeks ago, and the one from four weeks ago!

So all you have to do is pay seventy dollars a month, and you, too, can get access to a seemingly completely fucking random selection of episodes from all your favorite shows online! Plus you get to pay for Fox News and the Christian Broadcasting Network, whether you want them or not! AWESOME!

Cable TV as we know it will not exist in 20 years. Good fucking riddance.

Flubs

2012-06-09, 8:08 pm
Categories: Announcements, Cartoons, TV

It's interesting, the kind of small but glaring errors that take you out of something.

Mad Men has an absolutely fantastic crop of writers, editors, directors, and actors -- so it's jarring when not one of them notices that, say, "1960, I am so over you" is a phrase that no human being has ever uttered. It's one thing to use a 1963 Bob Dylan song as background music in an episode set in 1960; it's another to actually have a character use slang that would be out-of-place in a show set in 1990.

A less severe but still amusing flub: in last week's Thundercats, a character said he had worked his math out to "the thousandth decimal point". I think I can see the error in his calculation: he used more than one decimal point.

Also: I changed the name of the "toons" category to "cartoons", because this is not Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The only reason I used the shortened form of the word in the first damn place was for a set of link banners I made back in 2000 that only one guy ever actually used.