I Have Surprisingly Strong Opinions About a Lot of Things. Here's One.

Parenting leads to some unexpected places. For instance, I have surprisingly strong opinions about the theme music for children's TV shows. Here is one of the best: the theme for Dragon Hunters. It's by
The Cure, so you know it's good.

I also love the quirky little tune that starts Adventure Time, a quirky little show that I am pretty sure is not actually appropriate for children.

Another song I will stop and listen to every time? The Johnny Test theme. I love this song. The boy's best friend is a talkin' dog!

I also stop and listen every time the Max & Ruby theme comes on. Mostly so I can say in disgust, "Did someone get paid to write those lyrics?" To wit: "Max and Ruby. Ruby and Max. Max and Ruby. Ruby...and her little brother Max!" Aargh!

I do think there's a correlation between the theme song and the show; if I like the theme song, I probably also like the show, though the kids might not. Nobody is watching Adventure Time around here, for instance. On the other hand, if the theme song makes me want to stab my ears with chopsticks, the show will probably make me crazy (but one of the kids might well love it). Yehva was a big fan of Max & Ruby for awhile. I endured. I will always love what stark. raving. mad. mommy. had to say about certain children's shows.

[Update: I'm checking my links, and get to the Max & Ruby one. Eric says, "Why would you even listen to this? It's terrible. But it's not as bad as the Caillou one." I say, "I don't know the Caillou one," and start a youtube search. David says, "I guess it's unmemorable," and then, as the music starts, "Oh, God, no! It's horrible! Ah!"

Well...that'll be an interesting day.

I spent the last couple of days re-watching the entire series of Firefly, Joss Whedon's love-it-or-hate-it story of outlaws eking out a living on the edges of a galactic civilization. Well, not quite the entire thing--I finally had to go to bed last night about 10 minutes into Objects in Space, the final (on the DVD, anyway) episode. It's a creepy one, so I'll wait until after the kids are asleep tonight to finish watching it.

All over the internet, people have said everything that needs to be said about Firefly, so I won't try any deep analysis. Just a few observations:

I still love it.

I was really struck on this watching by how charming I find Morena Baccarin (Inara) when she smiles.

I will go to my grave thinking Inara and Chiana would make great names for twin girls. (Hey, it's better than my other first choice: Scylla and Charybdis.) 80% of the people you met would just say, "Oh, that's pretty"; and the remaining 20% would be divided between people who would do a slow double-take and then high five you; and those who would think "You named your daughters after intergalactic space whores? You're going to the special hell."

Simon Tam's character arc really stood out for me on this watching. He goes from sheltered, arrogant, and kind of hapless to strong and a little bit ruthless (the medical-supply heist he comes up with on Ariel, for instance), yet at the same time more relaxed and easy-going; it's only in the last couple of episodes that we get to see him wearing a pullover sweater and smiling with Kaylee. And his scene with a paralyzed Jayne, after he finds out Jayne called the feds on Ariel to try to get the reward, is just masterful. Boy-to-man all the way for our Simon.

I will always love Badger, and his very fine hat.

Eric and Carl watched "Jaynestown" with me. It's like a test of developmental stages; Eric and I were rolling on the floor laughing, while poor Carl kept saying, "Why is that funny? Why is that funny?"

One of the problems I always had with Star Trek: Voyager was how quickly the Maquis crew integrated with the Federation crew; the show didn't do a good job of maintaining the tensions there. Firefly comes off pretty well by comparison, especially in maintaining the tension Jayne brings to the crew. But when you think about all the various tensions swirling among the nine people on Serenity, it goes a lot deeper than "Jayne would cut your throat for a dollar."

I love that Kaylee complains in the very first episode that they need a spare compression coil, and Mal says they can't afford it and will have to make do. "That coil busts, we're drifting," she tells him. Seven episodes later, it busts, they're drifting, and this is what sets the action of "Out of Gas" going.

Other extended foreshadowing, from the end of the pilot: Mal: How come you didn't turn on me, Jayne? Jayne: Money wasn't good enough. Mal: What happens when it is? Jayne: Well... that'll be an interesting day. When they get to Ariel, eight episodes later, it is indeed an interesting day.

The developing friendship between Jayne and Book is very well done in the incidental bits before and after more important business.

"River, you don't fix the Bible." [River: "It's broken! It doesn't make sense."] It's not about... making sense. It's about believing in something. And letting that belief be real enough to change your life. It's about faith. You don't fix faith, River. It fixes you."

In "Trash," when Mal calls Saffron/Bridget/Yolanda "YoSaffBridge," a mashup of the three names he's known her by, it was captioned as "speaking Chinese." Heh.

When Wash and Mal are taken by Niska, what follows is the most hilarious extended-torture scene in the history of filmed entertainment. But it's really just a riff on what got to be a pretty tired Buffy meme, the Scoobies combining doing something really mundane (arguing about their relationships, studying for the SAT) with something heroic and/or supernatural (fighting demons, sitting around the cemetery waiting for a newly-spawned vampire to emerge from the grave so Buffy can stake it). Amazing they could dust it off and make it work again.

Like every other fan, I want more Firefly. And yet I think the show did just about everything it needed to in these 14 episodes; Inara and Mal were even dangerously close to getting together (likewise Simon and Kaylee), and we all know how the life goes out of a show once the sexual tension between the bickering leads is resolved. Jayne was humanizing, too. Maybe it's better to have 14 strong episodes and a bit of longing than to have to suffer through a sub-par second season. This is how I try to comfort myself.

You should all be glad I don't have a smartphone or my Facebook page all afternoon and evening yesterday would have been an endless stream of Firefly quotes.

TV Needs More People Like Hurley

David and I have just started watching Lost, from the beginning, on DVD from the library. I like it fine. But what I like best about it is Hurley, the fat guy. Why?

Because Hurley is a smart guy. He is not portrayed as a glutton--in fact, when another character assumes he has been hoarding food and comes to him to ask for some, Hurley takes him down a peg with a kind of tired dignity that shows he's dealt with this kind of bs before and he's just not gonna get worked up about it anymore. When there's work to be done (digging somebody out of a collapsed cave, hauling heavy shit around) Hurley gets in there and does it.

He's portrayed as a decent guy who treats others well. He's the one who figures out that the stranded people need something more to bring them together than the endless round of survival and try-to-get-rescued activities.

The show treats Hurley respectfully even when others don't--when another character calls him "Lardo," it's just his selected insult for Hurley; he has a different one for anybody else who crosses his path.

Hurley is a fat guy who never once says anything denigrating about himself; when he tells Charlie he's taken in a notch on his belt, it's a statement of fact, not a "one good thing about being stranded on an island and not being able to get Ben & Jerry's, ha ha" joke of the kind we hear all too often from women with, say, a stomach bug.

I've heard Hurley called the show's comic relief. And he is. But unlike most fat characters on TV, he's not the comic relief because the show is making fun of him, or he is making fun of himself. He's the comic relief because he has a sense of humor.

This shouldn't be revolutionary. There are plenty of fat people in the world who are healthy and hard-working; who like themselves despite all the messages they get telling them they shouldn't; who have brains and compassion and decent relationships. But they don't show up on TV or in the movies. On TV, they show up on The Biggest Loser, or on NCIS as a woman whose flirtation with a main character can't be anything but a joke, or on name-your-medical-drama as patients who are psychotic or eating themselves to death.

I am happy to add Lost to my very short list of movies and TV shows with positive portrayals of fat people (even if the show otherwise makes no effort to show the diversity of body size and shapes that 40 people randomly put together on a plane would exhibit). We're maybe nine episodes in, and so far Hurley and the show's treatment of him is the highlight for me. It is so refreshing to see a member of my tribe being treated like a human being on TV.