TVSquad

With a couple of Osmonds, a few Brady kids, an old Chinese detective, a dog and his mystery-solving friends, and Bill Cosby, the second Saturday Morning Revolution began in earnest in 1972. And, it was a long road to hoe to get to this point. That was thanks to the radical changes that needed to be made to the schedule during the late 60s and first few years of the 70s. Changes that were the result of mounting complaints by citizen action committees as well as nervous network executives.

To review: from 1966 until about 1969 things ran fairly smoothly for the networks when it came to Saturday morning programming. With the popularity of superheroes during that time the schedules were full of programs featuring supermen, batmen, space ghosts and super presidents. As hero worship waned during the last years of the 1960s the networks turned their attentions to an older viewing audience, focusing on shows with a number of teenagers and young adults -- many of them in animated rock-and-roll bands.

But, by 1970, all of that changed. As pressures to air more educational and less violent and vapid fare came from all sides, the networks were unsure what to do. They wanted to continue airing cartoons, but they were so watered down (or imitations of what was already airing) that they weren't as entertaining. They presented a number of live-action educational programs to the schedule as well, but very few of them lasted more than a year. By 1971 it looked like the networks had all but given up on Saturday mornings.

Like the year 1965 was before the Saturday morning cartoon explosion of 1966, the year 1971 was also the calm before another storm. After years of producing and airing show after show, the networks took a breather during the 1971-72 season to look around and see where their industry was at the time. Looking back at it from present day it wasn't looking too bright.

With pressure coming from inside the networks (thanks to the censors) and from outside activist organizations, Saturday morning television began to fracture. Out of the 14 shows to premiere in 1971 only 5 of them were brand new offerings. The rest were rehashes or revivals of older cartoons and live-action series. And out of those a majority featured an education bent...something that kids revved-up by chocolatey, sugar-coated cereal did not have the patience to watch.

The experiment would fail by 1972 as another surge of animated programs made their appearance. Until then, viewers had to deal with a lack of new programming and repeats of shows that had been repeated a few times already. So went the Saturday morning schedule in 1971-72. Let's journey back, shall we?

Welcome to Subtle Subtitles. For those of you who are uninitiated to the purpose of this feature, we're asking you to come up with your funniest quote or description for what's going on in the screen grab we choose for the week. Winners are announced in the following Friday's contest.

Last contest's winner: miller980

"Let's see how much beer we can suck out of Norm!"

This week, in honor of The X-Files week here at TV Squad, a scene from the episode titled 'Dreamland' ...

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(S02E20) I was never a regular X-Files viewer, so I can't say that I had a favorite episode, or that I really liked or disliked certain plots or narrative directions taken by the show. For the most part, all of the episodes run together in my head -- with the exception of one.

I saw it only once, when it originally aired back in 1995. I didn't remember the details of the plot. Instead, it was just the images that still randomly come to mind over a decade later. A guy hammering a nail into his face, another covered in tattoos and eating a live fish, and a fetus in fetu that made me terrified of ever having children.

Since this week is X-Files week for Retro Squad, I knew that I had to talk about Humbug. I didn't want to, but I knew it was time to re-confront my nightmares.

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For the most part The X-Files was an intense character study of two FBI agents struggling with their beliefs in the supernatural, in America and in each other. Sometimes, however, it was just a show about cool monsters. Here are some of my favorites.

Eugene Tooms ("Squeeze," "Tooms")
Tooms was so cool and creepy he had to be brought back for another appearance. What I liked best about Tooms was that he was one of the few monsters that looked totally human but was pure monster. Whether he was eating livers or squeezing through an air vent, Tooms was the first threat on the show to make me believe that monsters might actually exist.

The X-Files was a one-of-a-kind, groundbreaking show. It took the typical FBI detective show and spun it, but good. Add some aliens and government conspiracy and you've done one better than a weekly FBI caper.

And the extraterrestrial and supernatural make for some good quotes, starting with the pilot, when Scully refers to Mulder by his nickname from the academy: "Spooky Mulder."

Or how about Mulder's understatement of the millennium: " ... in most of my work, the laws of physics rarely seems to apply."

Oh, I'll be there, probably on opening weekend, but something about the new X-Files flick makes me nervous as hell.

Maybe it's the fact that it has been ten years since the last movie, and I wonder if people are still interested in it enough to make it a hit (and push another movie into production). I also worry about the plot, since nothing much has been leaked about what the film is about, other than it involves snow, mysterious happenings, and Billy Connolly bleeding from the eyes.

No, the real reason I'm worried is that the movie has a "standalone" plot and is not part of the mythology arc from the show and the first movie. I think this could be a mistake.

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(S05E11) When I heard that we were going to be doing an X-Files week for Retro Squad the first thing that came to mind was "Killswitch." It has long been my favorite episode of the series. Aside from being a great story, it also serves as a marker for where my interest in the series changed.

By the time they made it to "Killswitch," X-Files had started to lose me with the mythology episodes. In the beginning it was almost annoying when there would be a standalone episode. I was so engrossed in the bigger picture story that it was like being forced to take a week off from that which I was really interested in. By season five, though, that interest had waned. Not that the show had gotten bad, just that it was pretty clear that those big answers weren't coming any time soon, so I started looking forward to these episodes more and more. And for me, "Killswitch" is the pinnacle of The X-Files in that form.

Do not adjust your web browser. You are now entering the Retro Squad, where we are reviewing past episodes of classic TV shows.

The original version of Star Trek has been a show with two faces. On the one face, it was a serious show that dramatized the good and glorious future we humans could have after we screwed everything up (though, with so many wars going on around the galaxy, how good and glorious could it be?). On the other face, at least to some, it was a campy science fiction show that featured poor special effects, bad acting, and tunics that really didn't hold up to space travel too well.

Since the show left the airwaves in 1969, that second face is the one that television shows throughout the decades have parodied. Whether it be the original series itself, or the subsequent movies, or the conventions that sprung up from this show that lasted only 79 episodes. Shows both animated and live-action have found ways to skewer the show's, and its fans', good intentions. After the jump you'll find a few examples of those parodies either to laugh with or be angry at.

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Ever since I was allowed to make my own decisions, I have tried to emulate Jim Kirk. Whenever I have a tough choice to make I ask myself WWJTKD? When I became a father, I continued that practice and it's helped out immeasurably.

You Can't Make Everybody Happy
During his career, Captain Kirk has been forced to make unpopular decisions. Even though the decision is always the right one, there are always people (sometimes a lot of people) who end up wanting him court-martialed or worse. As I became responsible for people other than myself, I had to realize that like Kirk, I have to make the decision that I know is right even if it makes my kids hate me.

The legacy of Star Trek includes many memorable guest stars, Joan Collins as Edith Keeler in "City on the Edge of Forever," Ricardo Montalban as Khan on "Space Seed," Jane Wyatt as Spock's mother on "Journey to Babel." And those are just the ones that come first to mind.

But what about the less celebrated stars who appeared on ST? There were many who made a great impression because of the larger than life character they were given to play, and the ability to seize the spotlight.

Here are five of my favorite, and most memorable, though less celebrated, Trek stars...

Having grown up in a Star Trek household from way back, I'm fairly familiar with a lot of the catch phrases from the original series, which ran from 1966 to 1969. Here are six that still make their way into conversation around here:

1. "Beam me up, Scotty." Gracing bumper stickers and coffee mugs everywhere, and often followed by "There's no intelligent life down here," this is likely the most recognizable phrase from the series. Here's the thing, though. According to Wikipedia, the exact phrase was never actually spoken in any Star Trek television episode or film. Capt. Kirk comes closest to saying the phrase in the episode, "The Gamesters of Triskelion" ("Scotty, beam us up"); in the animated episodes "The Lorelei Signal" and "The Infinite Vulcan" ("Beam us up, Scotty"); in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home ("Scotty, beam me up"); and in Star Trek Generations ("Beam them out of there, Scotty.")

This article could easily have been called "James T. Kirk's Top Five Loves", one of which would undoubtedly be the Enterprise, or "James T. Kirk's Top Five Seductions", but those titles didn't quite convey the connotation I was looking for. As everybody who ever watched Trek Classic knows, the good captain had his fair share of women, getting involved with a different one once every three episodes or so.

The man oozed excess testosterone, which might have explained his hair loss later on. You'd think the 23rd century would learn to regrow it better. Then came the 24th century look when baldness was "in". But I digress. It was also his self-confidence that made him without question a chick magnet. This aspect of the character undoubtedly appealed to the uber-nerds who watched Star Trek then and now.

It's Star Trek: TOS Week here at Retro Squad and I came across this gallery of photos from a photographer named Steve Schofield. His site says that he is "concerned with exploring the fascination that the British public has with American popular culture and the sub-cultural world of fandom."

The photos on his site show science fiction (and other pop culture genres) fans in natural settings, mostly sitting or standing around the house. The contrast is rather interesting. The guy on the right looks like he just beamed down to a present-day home in one of Star Trek's many time travel episodes.

We swear we had nothing to do with this, though the timing is perfect for our Cheers Week.

CBS Studios is suing a bar in Rockford, Illinois for using the Cheers name. TMZ has the documents. The court papers say that the bar is not only using the same name as the famous Boston bar from the TV show (which has spawned several other bars and many collectibles), they're also using a similar logo. They're accusing the bar of trademark infringement, false designation of origin, and unfair competition. The name of the bar in question is Cheers of Rockford (here's their web site).

The court documents are really interesting (if long). They really get into the history of the show, what has happened to the show since it ended in 1993, and what trademarks CBS owns. You can also see a comparison of the original Cheers logo and the one used by the Rockford bar.