The Air We Breathe

Oxygen, it's a gas! The newsletter has tried to avoid controversial issues in our two year existence but this week we will go out on a limb. We do support the values of air. We even encourage everyone to inhale. Breathe in... Breath out...

Some might prefer something flashier like nitrogen or hydrogen, helium, or even lithium. We'll stick with the familiar. Oxygen is so common after all, it's everywhere you go. Most of us take it for granted, but where would we be without it? It's been around for a long time, everywhere from Bedrock to current days in air-conditioned movie theaters. By its very dependability, oxygen will always (hopefully) have a place in our hearts. You can't see it, you can't always smell it, but you have to have faith that it is there. Its existence is one of those things to ponder, one of those mysteries that can keep one up at night. Even the living dead.

We all share air. We have to. No one has bottled it up and sold it as a commodity as of yet. So it can be a comforting thought that long lost, as well as potential loved ones, breathe just the same as you, me, Barney, Fred and even Dino. But even air can go stale, and it is clear that the smoggy winds that blow over Hollywood are in need of some freshening up.

When television was introduced as a mass medium, it was criticized for its content, a wasteland as one dubbed it. Compared to its big screen brother, television took a lot of flack for the mindless fare it offered to its viewers. Often it was guilty of recycling old ideas. Yet it used to be television got some of its better shows from the movies: M*A*S*H, The Paper Chase, Breaking Away, Heat of the Night, Fame, Alien Nation, Bosom Buddies (a relative of Some Like It Hot); although TV diluted the originals into something more accessible, those remakes maintained a quality often lacking in other shows.

Now days, there has been a reversal in the pipeline. Movies more and more are being based on old TV shows to the detriment of all. Through the miracle of syndication and cable, our popular culture has become saturated with old TV shows causing a wave of nostalgia, of people fondly, for some reason, recalling the shows they used to watch as they were growing up.

It began with either Star Trek or The Muppet Movie and has grown into an epidemic in the following years: The Fugitive, Beverly Hillbillies, The Addams Family, Dragnet, The Twilight Zone, Maverick, The Coneheads, Wayne's World, The Blues Brothers, Batman, The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the upcoming Mission Impossible as well as TV movies reuniting the Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island. Too much of a good thing, even oxygen will kill you. Watching this trend continue, like watching many of these movies, is like holding your breath for a head rush; momentarily pleasurable but in the long run, hard on the brain. In twenty years will there be major motion picture recreating Home Improvement or The Nanny? (Maybe that already has been done- The Hand that Rocks the Cradle...)

You might be able to infer or decipher from all this, that last week I went to see the Flintstones. I have to admit, I enjoyed it much more than I should have. It was fun even though it represented something that's wrong with this world. So why exactly did I enjoy it? I enjoyed the lack of pretension, the love that the makers of the movie had for the original TV show. The show itself never strived to mean anything. The movie certainly lived up to that standard. The spirit of the movie was to make real what used to be a cartoon- everything from a painstaking effort to recreate the theme, to Fred's twinkle toes bowling style to the dinosaur/lizard garbage eating disposal. My favorite moment was Fred's toes wiggling, dancing on air. Dancing just as enjoyable as another Fred from a far away time. The movie seemed strangely subdued, the usual Hollywood comedic energy missing, yet the visuals were constantly creative and thus the effort made in creating this tribute was admirable. OK I became another victim to mass culture. I'll be the first to admit I'm a dweeb. And on this Independence Day I salute any of you who are truly free. Yabba dabba doo to you all. Breathe in, breathe out.