fine whine

Sometime along the posting forward and posting backward this last week or so I was able to free up some prime DVD watching time. I spent most of watching television shows, so it was prime time indeed, ha ha ha. This time I focused (inadvertently, really) on the end of two series, Fox's Family guy and the BBC's Black Adder. Though both are comedies, the similarities pretty much end there.

Family guy is both hilarious and misguided. It's misguided in that almost every single episode (perhaps all of them, I cannot be sure without watching them again) included at least one musical number. I'm okay with the occasional musical number, but so many in such a short span of time (I watched the entire third season in under a week) started to wear on me, and eventually even grate. The writing's great and the animation's fantastic, but I'm not so much a fan of showtoons or Busby Berkeley or whoever to really need to see that sort of thing every time I hit fast-forward on the remote.

Yes, fast-forward. The damn theme song's not all that great, and I'm really not a fan of Lois's singing. Moreover, as I have been tired lately, the song's been bouncing around in my head more than I'd like. I could complain about this sort of thing much longer but for the fact that there is an incredibly simple fix -- all the DVD producers needed to do was put a chapter stop in right after the opening titles. They almost always put one in just before the end credits, damnit. I'd wager more people want to skip through the same thirty seconds of tripe than want to find out who did the celebrity voices or key grip or whatnot.

I for one, despite having watched several hundred DVDs and laserdiscs in my life, cannot recall a single time wherein I skipped right to the end credits, TV show or otherwise.

Maybe I'm just being picky. Or a snob. I know the M*A*S*H discs I've watched let me skip "Suicide is painless" every time, though there they didn't let me watch all of the episodes in sequence without two or three button presses between each episodes. What is it going to take to get simple navigation on every DVD? Don't people want people to be able to watch these things?

But watch them I did, and Family guy was friggin' hilarious. The high point, I think, was a couple second throwaway gag taken from Monty Python's Meaning of life, namely the "modern art" tuxedo-ed guy asking about the fish. You'd know it if you saw it, I'd think. This, after all, is a show that takes parody to ludicrous extremes with several minutes to nearly entire episodes devoted to Logan's run or Dukes of Hazzard.

Less laugh-out-loud funny but not much less of a farce is the classic BBC series of Black Adder, with Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Tim McInnery, Brian Blessed, Tony Robinson and more. The humo(u)r's a lot more focused on this show, with each of the four series done in a different era of Britain's past, from the days of Richard III to the trenches of WWI.

Alas, in this case also the titles were not quite skippable. That said, since this was a BBC series I only sat through the theme music six times, not twenty-some. And it's much catchier, too, and more interesting as well to listen to the differences between the seasons.

They're all at your library, check 'em out. And if you happen to be a DVD producer, put in some better chapter stops. Please.