The "You know what?" thread

[minor muppetz]

If something's on long enough, it's an institution that can't be done away with without a HUGE uprising. SNL manages to pack people in on election years, so that may be a factor.

I wonder when the show got to that point where it was such an institution. As I previously said, the sixth season - the first one to have such a major, radical change from previous years - was so bad that it was almost canceled (according to TV Tropes, seasons 11 and 20 were the only other seasons to be so bad that they were almost canceled, but at least those seasons aren't considered "old shames"). If they had just replaced it with a new show (giving it a different title) it probably wouldn't have been given another chance, but it was called Saturday Night Live so they gave it another chance.

They very well could have ended it after the fifth season. Five years for a show is good, it's enough for syndication, most of the cast and crew left. I keep wondering why they kept it on the air afterwards. And if the sixth season was actually a new show, I wonder if anybody would even be aware of that show (well, if anybody in the cast became a big enough star.... If the show had been canceled, would Eddie Murphy have made it to stardom? I guess Gilbert Godfried would have still become a success either way).

 

[FraggleLover130]

Little Bunny Fufu and Itsy Bitsy Spider have the same melody

 

[minor muppetz]

Last night I watched Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation, and I must wonder, do Buster and Babs' parents know that they're gone? In the movie it seems Babs has a lot of siblings (Buster probably as well), so maybe it's hard for their parents to notice if one of their kids is missing. In fact, Shirley knew they were stranded down the river, but merely can't help them just because of her summer job. Couldn't she have maybe told their parents where they are?

I also wonder if Plucky's parents knew he was going to Happy World Land with Hampton's family. They let him join them after they've already started the trip, and I doubt any of them had any car phones or cell phones to call Plucky's parents (though they probably used a pay phone later).

One thing I didn't think about until last night: When Hampton's family picks up the hitchhiker, Plucky decides to send a letter to Shirley for help, which she ends up not being able to read at all. But if she was unable to help Buster and Babs earlier then would she help Plucky?

And I wonder if Plucky really deserved all that he went through in the movie. All he wanted was to go to Happy World Land with Hampton, and it ends up not being worth the trip. Especially when the hitchhiker shows up and the whole family is oblivious to him being dangerous. In fact it's said that he goes crazy around pork, but he focuses most of his time trying to kill Plucky (and when he shows up at school at the end, it seems like he's only interested in killing Plucky), not to mention being after Buster and Babs later (with no pigs around to make him crazier).

And here's something I've always wondered: when characters hold their breaths and make a wish when going through a tunnel, everybody who does get their wish only wishes for something that could realistically happen if they didn't get their wish. When Buster and Babs encounter a tunnel, why didn't they just wish to be home and away from their danger? Instead, Babs wished for (and got) a mall during the chase.

 

[minor muppetz]

Recently, the Tough Pigs forum has had a thread on Weird Al Yankovic, and I saw somebody mention listening to all the albums in order and noticed that Weird Al's work started getting a lot more "slicker" at Even Worse. That may just be one fans opinion, and I hadn't really noticed it before, but now I do feel like the first four albums have a raw "early works" feel compared to later (I used to think that would apply to all of the '80s albums, just because they all came out in the '80s). But I wonder if that might have been a result of Weird Al not putting out any albums in 1987, the first year since he started putting out albums where he didn't put out an album.

For awhile, I wondered if Weird Al didn't put out an album in 1987 due to poor sales of Polka Party (which could be one factor), but I wonder if Scotti Bros. decided to let Al take his time for his next album as opposed to pressuring him into getting a new album released then. Of course I've seen a video from Todd in the Shadows counting down the top ten worst #1 hits of 1987, claiming that 1987 was a bad year for good music, so maybe there weren't many hits good enough to parody at the time.

And there have been times when Weird Al talked about Scotti Bros. putting out cheesy compilation albums during the years when he didn't have a new album ready (at times he's overexaggerated on the types of albums Scotti Bros. threatened to put out). But then most of Al's compilations came out the same years as other albums. His first Greatest Hits album came out the same year as Even Worse (and Peter and the Wolf, but I think a different company released that one), The Food Album came out the same year as either Off the Deep End or Alapalooza, and two different compilations (Permanent Record and Greatest Hits Vol. 2) came out in 1994. 1995's The TV Album is his only compilation that came out the year that no other albums from Weird Al Yankovic did. In fact The Food Album and The TV Album are the only ridiculous compilations put out, the others make a bit more sense.

I used to think that the gaps between new releases from Weird Al Yankovic since I became a fan (when Bad Hair Day came out) were really long, but looking back, the gaps between albums were usually just three years (the gap between the last two was just two years, while before that was the longest gap between albums). In the Behind the Music special on Weird Al, somebody mentioned that after UHF failed there was a three-year-gap between albums, but that's been the case since 1996 (though that special came out in 1999, so it wasn't really common at the time).

 

[minor muppetz]

All of the movies based on Dr. Seuss books are generally hated by the general public (well, The Grinch and Horton seem to be liked a little more). All of those movies had already been adapted into television specials. This makes me wonder: if they made a movie based on a Dr. Seuss book that didn't get made into a television special, would the majority of fans still dislike the films?

 

[minor muppetz]

"Fancy" seems to be Iggy Azalea's biggest hit, or at least her only song I know of. And yet the best-known parts of the song, the only lyrics I can really remember off-hand, are the parts sung by guest singer Charli XCX. Which is also ironic (I think this counts as irony), as I read on Wikipedia that Charli XCX's biggest hits are songs she was a guest singer on.

At the end of Back to the Future Part III, it's shown that Marty's automobile accident that would have happened if he hadn't decided he no longer cared about being called a chicken was caused because the car drove past a stop sign without stopping. And it's said in part II that they pressed charges... I wonder how they got away with it, considering there was a stop sign in the location of the accident. I'm guessing it's a case of Amoral Attorney. I feel that trope should be on the TV Tropes page, but we never see the actual trial so we don't really know.

 

[mr3urious]

The ridiculous TVGuardian set-top box, which mutes foul language that happens to pass through your TV speakers into your kids' fragile little minds, is still around. I remember hearing of this thing back in the '90s, and I also remember about a version that bowdlerizes the language instead.

http://www.tvguardian.com/

And guess what? It doesn't work on non-delayed live broadcasts nor does it censor visual scenes like nudity or violence. If you family values types are going to shield your kids, why not go all the way?

 

[Drtooth]

So... Hello Kitty isn't a Cat. And then she's not not a cat.

Yeah....

that's a thing that happened! I say, heck with Hello Kitty, the Japanese Cat that's king is Doraemon.

 

[minor muppetz]

So when The Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed Desert (or Dessert?) Bus, he talked about how so many people had played that game despite it being so bad, and thought that he'd failed because people were playing bad games that he reviewed, even though he told them not to play it. But in the case of DB, many had played it before the Nerd reviewed it.

 

[Drtooth]

And guess what? It doesn't work on non-delayed live broadcasts nor does it censor visual scenes like nudity or violence. If you family values types are going to shield your kids, why not go all the way?

Considering that a certain live broadcast thing was what lit a real fire under their bellies, it proves that it's pretty useless... but, if we're going to have prudish types that think shielding kids from real life, I'd much rather it be something they inflict only on their own family than have a huge crusade that ruins it for everyone. So I'm mixed about that.

So when The Angry Video Game Nerd reviewed Desert (or Dessert?) Bus, he talked about how so many people had played that game despite it being so bad, and thought that he'd failed because people were playing bad games that he reviewed, even though he told them not to play it. But in the case of DB, many had played it before the Nerd reviewed it.

Considering the Nerd is just a character and that the real James also plays the horrible games to "you gotta be kidding me" laughter, it was obvious his choice of Desert Bus was a joke. A joke in a promotional video that served as a trailer for the movie. The game itself was a joke, and he was well in on it, yet factually mentioned that the rest of the game was one as well. Then again, most who have played it did so on emulators, something he refuses to do. So it probably took a while to actually get one of the few physical test copies of the game there is. Not to mention the fact that knowing there were a lot of those who played the game was an important plot point.