This is how you please a time-lord.

Well, PBS is fundraising again. They have been for the last three weeks. I'm wondering how many crappy talks this corporate motivational speaker has given in his life and whether we're getting to the end of them....or if there are any crappy 1950's top forty bands with names like "The <verb>-ers" or "<proper-noun> and the <adjective><plural animal name>s" that they have left to do biopics on. There's got to be a finite supply.
Anyways, I've found something better: Old Doctor Who episodes on Veoh.
I had a crush on the 4th Doctor as a child, or maybe more like hero worship. I dressed up as him for Halloween when I was like 7, complete with one of my dad's dress jackets and a "wooly muffler" my mom had borrowed from someone. No one knew who I was. Newbs.
I was a bit nervous about watching it now...was it going to be one of those things that I loved as a child that still holds its charm like The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth? Or would the shlock be overwhelming and a little embarrassing like, for example, the movie Willow, which was awesome when I was a kid, but was badly written and unbelievably crappy as an adult?
Little bit of both, actually. The old Dr. Whos are cleverly written, at least the ones I watched. I mean, there were (and are in the new series) plot holes you could drive a Crown Victoria through, and part of the fun is trying to make up events that could have happened to fill these gaps, but the dialog is a lot of fun.
I found that the acting and the dialog owned the really bad special effects (even by the low, low standards of '70s TV) and made them kind of charming. My god, that guy is getting bit (mauled) on the face by a molecule-rearranging cyber-leech that looks like a piece of tinfoil on a string. I knew the FX were bad when I was a kid. The sound effects are even more awesome. Anything electronic beeps, and rayguns and teleporters make their signature pewpewpew and weeoohweeooh sounds. A lot of other things go "pewpewpew", too. Thank you, Dr. Who for showing me once again that scientific progress does, in fact, go "Boink."The doctor is constantly alternating between strokes of genius and bumbling eccentricity, with the genius eventually winning out.
And the fourth doctor, with his wooly muffler and his ability to taunt the aliens at exactly the wrong moments still kicks a crazy amount of ass--in a quirky, clever, non-violent sort of way.
Which makes it really sad when he dies off and gets regenerated into the fifth doctor, the doctor of the eighties, who is a total square. (Thought so when I was 7, too.)
Although, watching one of his female companions explain the value of recursion to the other in a "brought to you by the number 3 and the letter R" moment completely rawked my world.
And btw: that picture is of a tinfoil leech. Apparently they're really called "Cybermats".Yeah. It's up to something naaasty. It's going to go suck some face.