Bleeding Fiction

Erik and I went into the City yesterday to meet up with Eric and Stefanie, whom we hadn't seen in over a year - which is far too long a time. Mostly we all just wanted to play catch-up and spend some time enjoying each other's company, and we figured the City was a good place to do that, equidistant from both of our houses. Also, the City has cool museums.

First we went to the Museum of Television and Radio. They are, as we were told when we walked in, not your typical museum. They don't (for the most part) have pictures on the walls or sculpture on the floor. What they have instead is an archive of over one hundred and twenty thousand television shows and radio broadcasts that a museum patron can select to watch or listen to. Which makes them more library than museum, I think

Currently, the museum has an exhibit on Superheroes. We got to see some animation cells from superhero cartoons, see an old underroos comercial and learn a bit about the way those shows were made. (Super Friends, for example, was rotoscoped - animation traced over film of live actors - which is less expensive and faster than regular animation, and therefore allowed the show to be made in the United States rather than Japan or Korea.) The exhibit was small, though, and left out a lot (in cartoons: Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Captain America and X-Men; in live-action: Spider-Man, Batman, three different Superman shows, Wonder Woman, the Flash and the Hulk. And that's only the big-name types.)

For our viewing, we skipped the scheduled superhero exhibits and picked four shows of our own: Earthworm Jim, WKRP, Jim Henson's Storyteller and Police Squad. Earthworm Jim was on the schedule, but we missed it due to lunch and we wanted to catch up. Eric said it wasn't as zany as he remembered; Erik said he hoped we were happy. I loved it. How can you not love a show that contains characters with names like "Professor Monkey for a Head" (or is it "Monkey Professor for a Head?"), "The Evil Queen Plusating, Bloated, Festering, Sweaty, Pus-Filled, Malformed, Slug-For-A-Butt" and "Princess What's-Her-Name?"

WKRP in Cincinatti must have some significance somewhere - I know it was an answer to some question on some test some friends of mine took when they went to Newhouse. We picked it because Stefanie's co-workers were always talking about "the turkey episode" and she hadn't seen it. It started slow but was funny at the end.

I'd never heard of Jim Henson's the Storyteller until I met Eric. I missed it when it was on in the eighties, which is a pity. The show retells some old fables and fairy-tales, with a more serious, darker edge than Muppets or Fraggles. This was the first time I'd ever seen it, and I loved the style. I'm thrilled that it's out on DVD.

Last was the final episode of Police Squad, the show that would eventually become the Naked Gun movies. I like the show, but I've also always thought it was a little uneven. This was a good episode, but nothing about it suggested "series finale." Oh well.

Whew. After all of that, we went to Queens to see another museum - the Museum of the Moving Image. They had an exhibit on the art of Tim Burton. The museum is mostly a series of exhibits on how movies get made and how film cameras work. Cool, I suppose, but when you already know most of that stuff the exhibits lose a lot of their impact. (Or, as Erik said on the third floor "oh look, an editing bay. This isn't entertainment for me; this is work.") What I will say is that the museum had a lot of video and audio displays and, unlike in other museums, theirs worked. The Tim Burton drawings were cool and creepy, as you would expect, but there were too few of them. Also, I would have loved to buy prints of some of them in the museum store, but they were sadly not available.

That done, and it now around six, we headed back into Manhattan for dinner and parted ways with promises to meet again soon. All in all, a very good day.