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"Daniel Frank is a very funny guy with a funny weblog." --- Mark Evanier.

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Thursday, August 31, 2006

Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:48 PM

Jeff Lange at Jim Hill Media attended the 2006 Licensing Show and saw The Baby Stooges.

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Sunday, August 27, 2006

Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:53 PM

Mark Evanier has a long clip (divided into two YouTubes clips) of a 1985 Night of 100 Stars salute to television with a a verse for every show on then:

Lets send in the clowns
For comedy's sake
You say you want laughter
Then Give Me a Break

And so forth. You can see David Hasselhoff do some comic acting in the second clip as the Knight Rider verse insults him and then takes it back.

If I were teaching some sort of writing-for-TV class, I'd run the clip and the assignment would be to write verses for the Fall 2006 season with bonus points if the verse ends in the name of the show:

She catches the crooks
And puts them behind bars.
It's that spunky gal
Named Veronica Mars.

They're in Hollywood
Living it large
It's Vincent Chase
And his Entourage.

If action and no flying
Give you a thrill
Then don't miss a minute
Of the show called Smallville.

You'll love this next show
It's quite a pip.
It's Studio 60
On The Sunset Strip

The clues are obscure.
They might as well be in Spanish.
The mystery deepens
On each episode of Vanished.

To add to the realism, after the assignments are turned in, I'd say "OK, Kristen Bell can't make it but we have Enrico Colantoni. Also the only guy we could get from Entourage is the guy who plays Turtle. We need new verses in five minutes or the musicians get overtime."

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Sunday, August 20, 2006

Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:08 AM

I saw the Snakes on the Plane. It has everything one would want: a plane, snakes and Samuel L. Jackson doing that thing where he asks a question and then, when the guy answering tries to evade it, yells the question again. The only way my inner-12-year-old would have been happier is if a) Spider-man had been on the plane, b) it took place on the U.S.S. Enterprise or c) the plane had crashed on the Planet of the Apes.

A couple of minor thoughts (Spoiler alert):

The movie ends with the surfer witness teaching Jackson's character how to surf. If that's your ending, you should just go ahead and have the entire cast surf.
A regular reader of this blog will be happy to learn that Keenan "Could you kindly point us in the direction of the little girls' room?" Thompson contributes to the saving-of-the-day.

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Friday, August 18, 2006

Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:51 PM

Tina Fey learns that a disadvantage of having Aaron Sorkin do a show with the same premise as yours is that the network apparently has no problem telling you to recast your friend's role with a standard Hollywood blonde.

Yesterday, it was announced that Rachel Dratch had been demoted from co-star of 30 Rock to variety of wacky characters. Today it's announced that Jane Krakowski is taking her part.

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Sunday, August 06, 2006

Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:12 PM

I may be reading too much into this but a partial joke in today's Dilbert is that the boss messes up the punchline. It's "$10 for the tap and $90 for knowing where to tap"; you say the expected part first and the unexpected part second.

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Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:37 AM

Via Evanier, Chris Elliott parodies Shatner's rendition of Rocketman (You can watch Shatner's original here).

When I first saw it, I hadn't seen the Shatner rendition (it was pre-video-on-the-Net and I didn't have access to bootleg videos) so I just thought Chris Elliott was being silly. The other thing I vividly remember from that appearance was that Elliott gave Letterman a Malcolm X hat (popular with the kids at the time) calling it a "kiss" hat. Letterman puts on the hat and you have Chris Elliott in a tuxedo and bad toupee sitting next to Letterman wearing a Malcolm X hat. Letterman makes some joke about what the viewer just tuning in is thinking.

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