It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

Would we have coffee with Madeleine L’Engle?

I have a List.  You do not want to be on this list.  Trust me.

But “SyFy” is there.   They’ve been there for quite a while.  Their sins are numerous.  I’ll spare you the run down and get to the most recent failing.

They no longer have up any Seeing Ear Theater.

I realize it’s probably been down for a couple of years now.  The last time I ventured over there was probably late 2006, but it was nice to know it was there, waiting for me with science-fiction audio goodness.   It was a poorly-advertised, but incredibly cool project that SciFi Channel started back in they days when they were still awesome (you know–the days of Farscape, The Invisible Man, and a name and logo that didn’t look like anyone flunked 4th grade spelling).  A series of science fiction/fantasy/horror related audio plays, in the tradition of the old radio shows of the 30s and 40s.  The project actually attracted some very familiar names to lend their vocal talents:  Tim Curry, Rene Auberjonois, Claudia Black, Tony Danza (???)….And the actual stories?  Wow.  From adaptations of well known works by H.G. Wells and Neil Gaiman to completely new material from the likes of J. Michael Straczynski (JMS), the quality of the stories was absolutely incredible.  It’s bordering on shameful that it was not promoted any better than it was.  In most cases, those who knew about the project were either fans of one of the individuals involved in an episode, or they were the full-blown nerds who spent way too much time on the SciFi Channel website for their own good.

In particular I had a soft spot for an episode called “Night Calls”–a part of a series of works by JMS known as the City of Dreams.  In fact, on my last successful visit to the Seeing Ear Theater, it was specifically to hear this episode.  It is the most completely surreal combination of creepy and hilarious I’ve ever encountered.  Tim Curry as the voice of both God and a fellow named Ben Joseph who received the dubious task of building an ark for the crap no one mentions in Noah (“Plague bacilli?  What’s plague bacilli?”).  Intermixed with Ben Joseph and God we get a much darker tale that made me afraid of clicking hyperlinks for a good week afterward.

With all the rain my part of the world has had lately, I was in the mood for some good Ark building humor, but alas, the Seeing Ear Theater is no more.  So far I’m not finding any legal method of getting my fix of Ben Joseph.  Used cassettes that were released early in the lifetime of the Seeing Ear Theater project are available, but I don’t have a cassette player and none that I’ve found include the episode I’m looking for.  Amazon came up nil for both meat-space and Mp3 copies.  It looks like this is just one more good thing lost to the ether.

The removal is not a shock seeing as how SciFi-turned-SyFy has been on a steady quality decline since about the time they axed Farscape and is clearly run by people who don’t actually watch, read or understand good genre material in any medium.

It would take a minor miracle to get them off my List.

Oscar time is generally a season for talking about really good movies that stick with you long after you stumbled out of the darkened theater into the light of real life.  But sometimes it’s not just the good ones that stick with you.  Unfortunately, there are some that are bad enough that they linger like a nasty taste in the back of your mouth.

Because I was an awesome older sibling–and because I wanted  to make sure I had a card to pull out when I wanted to go see a movie later on– in 2004, I agreed to go with my brother to see Chronicles of Riddick, even though I count Pitch Black as one of the worst movies I’ve ever fell asleep in the middle of (Aeryn from Farscape died like a punk….and then I fell asleep, either that or I just went numb because it gets foggy until the last few scenes).

So here’s how the movie went.

-Deceptively cool space shots/planet shots.
-Painfully bad sequence with a spacecraft so poorly designed, I laughed (okay, they had two gunners….guys hanging in harnesses outside the ship with guns….I kid you not. Granted they were in atmostphere at the time…but how the fuck did they shoot when they were out of atmosphere?)
-Fight sequence with totally unsympathetic Vin Diesel main character
-Fight sequence
-Small cute child
-Fight sequence
-Judi Dench looking see-through and wise and entirely too cool for a movie this shitty
-Fight sequence
-Karl Urban’s in this movie? With this Kai (from Lexx) wannabe look–dude, go back to being a blonde Rohirric hottie, please.
-Fight sequence
-Fight sequence
-Judi Dench
-Fight sequence
-Fight sequence
-Fight sequence (please note, none of these fights even pretended to be realistic)
-Fight sequence
-Judi Dench
-Fight sequence
-Tragic ending for a stupid female character, also demise of über bad guy
-Wide ass open ending that screams “Dude, we’re makin’ another one soon!”

I ask you, how hard is it to make a science fiction movie that doesn’t bite hairy, boil-covered ass?