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I don't remember if I mentioned this back when Old School Sesame Street Volume 1 came out, but I remember being shocked by it and am glad other people were, too: The DVD has a disclaimer saying that it is meant for adults and might not be suitable for "the needs of today's preschool child." So all the kids that grew up watching Sesame Street between 1969 and 1979 (the years covered by the two available sets) have been horribly mind-warped? Whew! Glad I just missed the cutoff. I'm sure volume three will be totally acceptable. After all, Elmo arrived in 1984. He'll make everything alright.

The five most perfect things created or performed by Jim Henson, in no particular order:

1. The Muppet Frog Prince. A lot of people may never have seen this, and it has yet to get a DVD release. I had the album...in fact, I think we had TWO copies of the album, for some reason. It is one of three "Tales from Muppetland" that Henson did in the late '60s-early '70s, and it is perfectly wonderful and terrible entertaining through to the very end. (Although the prince that Robin turns into is disappointingly un-hot.)

2. The Harry Belafonte episode of the Muppet Show. I have raved about this on here before, so I will simply say that it is funny, uplifting, and completely beautiful -- the puppets created for the final number were the first puppets Henson did (or, actually, Faz Fazakas did, probably) that pushed the boundaries, as far as puppets-as-art, or puppets-as-cultural-commentary. And watching Fozzie almost crack Harry Belafonte up singing the Banana Boat song makes me happy.

3. The Dark Crystal. The Dark Crystal. The Dark Crystal. I just ordered the anniversary edition of this (which will be the third DVD iteration I have purchased -- damn them with their all-new interviews with Brian Froud and Kathryn Mullen and Brian Henson!), and I'm prepared to cry like a baby, as I do every time. "Heal the crystal."

4. "Dance Myself to Sleep", on Sesame Street. The rhythms of this song and sketch (including Frank Oz-as-Bert improving various staccato bursts of woe as sheep carry him out of his apartment) are permanently lodged in my brain. Runners up for Sesame Street sketches would be "Be My Echo" (Grover and Madeline Kahn) and "The Rhyming Game" (More Ernie and Burt, culminating in the brilliant line "Hey there lamp, that's a nice shade!...you.")

5. The Minstrel song on Fraggle Rock. Beautiful. (Fraggle Rock runners up are Red and Boober, trapped in a rock collapse, singing "The Friendship Song", and "Come and Follow Me" which was in the first episode and has beautiful harmonies by the two most underrated muppeteers -- Jerry Nelson and Dave Goelz.)

Things I have learned from watching the Larry Sanders Show today:

1) Both Garry Shandling and Janeane Garofalo have either had bad face-lifts or just MASSIVE amounts of botox. Janeane's forehead makes the baby Jesus cry.
2) Garry Shandling and Sharon Stone were apparently an item in the early 80s. Dear God, the interview section between the two of them in the extras is so raw and intimate I felt dirty watching it.
3) Jon Stewart and David Duchovny were at maximum peak hotness in 1995, and were kind enough to show it off in the same episode with one another. Good lord, I remember now why I had such crushes on both of them!
4) Garry Shandling is, I think, a deeply unhappy man.

WKRP in Cincinnatti is coming out on DVD. I have never once watched this show, but word on the street was that it would be impossible to put it out because of all the music clearances. So they can put out this, but MTV can't get its act together with Daria and The State? Bogus. Both Daria and The State would sell better than WKRP, I'd betcha.

I went to Mondo today after work on my way to eat a lonely dinner at Banjara by myself. I briefly browsed through their used DVDs and came across my personal holy grail of used DVD box sets: The Complete Goofy, still in its collectible tin! For $19.99!

I spent $45 on a copy of this damn thing that WASN'T even still in the tin. I just put it up on eBay for a starting price of $35 and a buy-it-now of $65, and I don't doubt I'll get some good bids.

You'd think for all the touting of Kim's clerks as these DVD buffs, the DVD buyers would know what things are out of print and what aren't. (Apparently they need a TV-and-Animation-DVD geek like me around after all...) And the poor sap who sold it to the store for less than $10! Damn shame.

Also, the uptown store doesn't have a rental copy of it, so they should have actually sent it there. But that's just me being picky. All I know is, I found a cheap copy of an out-of-print DVD box set at a store that should know better. And that makes me happy.

Tower Records recently filed for bankruptcy, again, and this time their stores are actually going out of business. I have a real soft spot for Tower Records. Unlike many music nerds, I did not learn about indie rock by going to some tiny store, flipping through vinyl and having some grungy clerk tell me about Television or XTC. I learned about music through a combination of a friend with a very hip older sister, subscriptions to Sassy and Spin, and a dad who would go with me to Tower and buy me a handful of CDs that I'd never heard before every time we went to Chicago. So the Tower Records on Clark is where I bulked up my knowledge along with my collection. Tower Records was also where I first bought a Sandman book. (There was also a comic book store downstairs where I bought my first Cerebus book, but that's neither here nor there.) When I lived in Chicago, trips outside of Hyde Park often revolved around going to Tower. I very specifically remember buying double albums by Tori and Trent on their first day of release my second year -- that took a bite out of my wallet! The last batch of CDs I ever bought at the Chicago Tower included an album by Mandalay that was in one of their listening stations, saying it was Madonna's new favorite album. It's a great, great record.

I never had the same connections with either of the Tower Records stores in New York, but in my first couple of years here the Tower by Lincoln Center was a fairly regular destination on my Upper West Side outings. So today, we decided to go down there and scout out their "Blowout Sale" to see if there were any remaining Battlestar Galactica DVDs to be had for cheap. MAN, was that place ever torn to shit. It was the dregs of popular culture to be had at that store today, though if you're looking for a copy of the Spielberg/Cruise War of the Worlds, you'd be in luck. And the prices weren't even that great! A blowout sale where almost everything is only 20% off? You could buy this stuff for cheaper any given day on Amazon!

But I realized, when Tower closes, and when Kim's inevitably closes (and it will soon, have no doubt), there will be hardly anywhere to buy DVDs in the city -- certainly nowhere with any decent selection. There are the Virgin megastores -- I haven't heard how they're doing. According to rumors floating around the Kim's staff, Blockbuster will soon be closing, so their paltry retail selection won't be available. Barnes and Noble sells DVDs at some of their stores, but their selection is small and expensive.

I buy the vast majority of my DVDs and books on Amazon. Their prices are the cheapest, and if you spend over $25, the shipping is free. (The free shipping may not work so well for people in more isolated areas, but in New York, it's actually faster than UPS.) So I realize I have personally contributed to the downfall of brick and mortar stores. I suddenly regret it. I will miss the ability to wander through a store, leisurely considering items and making impulse buys. Sure, I can (and often do -- beware late-night Ambien induced Amazon shopping, folks) accomplish the same thing online. But the depersonalization of it is suddenly very unsettling. As a matter of fact, I do almost all of my shopping online -- I hate trying on clothes in stores and would rather do it at home and then take back the things I don't like to the physical stores. I bought my new phone online. When I buy a new computer, I will likely do it online. I buy furniture and gadgets online. But I always did it with the understanding that if I wanted to go to a store and do it, I could. And soon, I won't be able to. I love shopping on the internet. I've never been a great window shopper. But I always reserved the right to window shop if I so desired. That's ending.

I've recently become interested in the history of American animation, so I've been downloading clips off of YouTube of some of the more famously racist or otherwise inflammatory cartoons made by Disney, Warners, and MGM. I've only just started watching the Tex Avery shorts from MGM, and the first one I pulled up was called "Half-Pint Pygmy". Not only does the pygmy speak with a caricatured voice and have that lovely blackface visage so common to all these cartoons, it has a nice bit where the protagonists try to lure the pygmy out of a hole by dangling a WATERMELON in front of him. Jesus. I feel a little dirtier for having watched that.

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A lot of the earlier Warner Brothers cartoons, and some of the Walter Lantz ones (he did Woody Woodpecker -- as well as a lovely short called, I shit you not, "Little Black Sambo"), are in the public domain now, so they can be released on DVD or distributed in general by pretty much anyone who feels like it. John Kricfalusi, the animator of Ren and Stimpy, was posting YouTube clips of Tex Avery and Bob Clampett cartoons, some of which were in the public domain, on his blog as an ongoing educational feature for his readers. Then, Warners put the smack down on YouTube, and YouTube went through and pulled all the WB clips it could find -- even ones in the public domain. So Kricfalusi raised a stink about fair use and copyright protections, all of which is pretty interesting. Then he went back to posting stupid promotional material for his new Ren and Stimpy DVDs, featuring the hypersexualized shorts he made for SpikeTV. So, not as interesting. Kricfalusi was infamously tossed off of Ren and Stimpy while it was still on Nickelodeon for basically wanting to push the envelope too far in terms of sex and general grossness. But he's made a comeback as an animation commentator, even doing commentary for the Warner Brothers Golden Collection DVDs that he's so critical of for their general whitewashing of the studio's history.

I always watched a lot more Disney than Warner Brothers, and my exposure to MGM and Lantz cartoons were limited to a couple of videos we rented when I was a kid and then copied onto Beta cassettes (talk about copyright infringement -- ah, Betamax). The extent of Disney's controversial content includes the WWII propaganda films that included some lovely Japanese stereotypes and a number of racist undertones in characters like the crows in Dumbo (I just watched that the other day, and it was the reason I went looking for the Tex Avery cartoons in the first place), the edited-out-of-future-relases black servant centaur in Fantasia, a bunch of nasty Native American stereotypes in some of the shorts and Peter Pan (though I love the song "What Makes the Red Man Red" in spite of myself), and, of course, the never-released-to-video Song of the South. Kim's had a bootleg videocassette of Song of the South, so I rented it. I think I had a record with Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah and a couple of the Brer Rabbit/Fox/Bear sections on it as a kid, and I definitely remember them showing a clip from the movie at the Disney Store when I was in there once in the early '90s, so I didn't have any recollection of the more-offensive frame story. The complaint is less that the movie is full of stereotypes, which is true (although not as ridiculously hit-you-over-the-head offensive as in these other shorts that I've been watching) than that the movie portrays this antibellum plantation as this totally happy place where the slaves have all stayed on because they love the family so much and they sit around and sing happy songs all night long and everything is just WONDERFUL. My complaint, on the other hand, is that the live-action parts of the story, apart from the historical whitewashing and the racial stereotyping, are just plain boring. Of course, I don't know if it picks up towards the end, because the Kim's videotape was a piece of crap and the picture totally cuts out about halfway through, right after the little rich white boy and his little black not-a-slave-anymore-my-life-is-so-much-fun-YAY friend meet up with a little poor white girl whose brothers want to kill her dog. It's a downer in so many ways. But see the races and classes all coming together in youthful innocence! Sure. I won't really get into the racism or non-racism of Walt Disney himself, because, well, the man was probably an anti-semite, which was also tied up in him being strongly anti-labor, and it's all been pretty well hashed-out, and that's all I have to say about that.

I'm rambling. This post has no real point. Suffice it to say, I find the history of all these animation studios to be really interesting from the point of view of someone who's obsessed with DVD releases. The amount of stuff that's being covered up is pretty crazy, and it ties in to my interest in copyright protections, given that Disney's the impetus for all the changes in the law, anyway.

we can now embed video in our LJ. apparently there is quite the hue and cry about how this marks the myspacification of livejournal, but i actually like the idea. they don't autoplay, after all. so i'm not sure what the big uproar is -- whether it's on principle or maybe because some people on dial-up think it'll make their page load slower...

also in the news today is word that the state is FINALLY coming to DVD. no, this time, they're serious. they just had to re-score the whole series to get around the music rights issues. unfortuantely, that means you won't be able to hear the breeders' "cannonball" playing while michael ian black buys pants.

in honor of both of these things, here's the original-scored version of the sketch, embedded, much to everyone's chagrin, in my journal.

i wish laff-a-lympics was on DVD. it's so much better than wacky races...

i got earth*star voyager off of ebay on DVD. earth*star voyager was this awesomely cheesy space movie that they aired (in two parts) on wonderful world of disney in the mid-to-late eighties. i have recently managed to procure not only that, but also the alice in wonderland special and fresno, completing my troika of mid '80s tv guilty pleasures.

earth*star voyager is the only one that came complete with the commercials from the original airing. now, most of the time that would annoy me. but as i was flipping through the chapters to make sure both parts were on the disk, one commercial, or rather, public service announcement, caught my eye.

dude.

"I LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU!"

that's even better than the egg in the frying pan, man.

i remember about a year ago, i referenced "i learned it from watching you," and most everybody knew exactly what i was talking about. except destinee, because she was too young to have seen it. and then i felt really old.

i wonder if she would get "i'm so excited! i'm so excited! i'm so...scared!" anyone who gets that one gets a cookie.