comedy

Chris Knight's avatar

Last week, around the time that we were in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I started hearing about something called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly creator Joss Whedon wrote, directed and even composed the music for this three-act comic opera about Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris), a down-on-his-luck mad scientist trying to gain both respect as a supervillain and the girl of his dreams (played by Felicia Day). I couldn’t get to its website in time to catch the streaming video of the three chapters as they were being released, but based on the good buzz and the positive word of several friends (including Phillip Arthur) I went to iTunes two nights ago and checked it out.

People, if you haven’t already, you owe it to yourself to watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog: it’s one of the funniest, most clever and even thought-provoking things that ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

This is the way the world begins: not with a whimper but with a bang!

Yesterday was the final performance of the Theatre Guild of Rockingham County‘s production of Children of Eden. After the amazing reaction that the show got on Saturday night, could Sunday afternoon possibly be any better? Judging by the approval of the packed auditorium at Rockingham Community College – the biggest audience of the entire run – the answer to that is an emphatic “yes”!

The show went great! One funny thing that happened came during the scene where Father (Neil Shepherd) is banishing Adam (Stephen Hale) and Eve (Rose Cutuli Wray) from the Garden: when Father smites the Tree of Knowledge, the special effects crew had the tree rigged so that there was a very loud flash of light and smoke,as the tree splits in two. Well, they must have put some extra ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Yesterday this blog reported the passing of Kermit Love, longtime Muppet designer and operator. His work on commercials led me to look around YouTube for any other examples of Muppets used in advertising.

That’s what led me to re-discover the spots that Jim Henson made in the late 1950s for Wilkins Coffee.

Over fifty years ago, Henson was hired by Wilkins Coffee to create some commercials for their product. The result was a series of clips starring Wilkins and Wontkins. These are not only some of the earliest examples of the Muppets on television, they are also the longest-running campaign to feature the Muppets and certainly the most violent! Poor Wontkins dies by cannon, by point-blank shot from a pistol, run over by a bandwagon, not to mention threatened with a guillotine! In one of the commercials he’s also shown smoking a cigarette (try doing that nowadays!). ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

This evening a lot of the cast and crew of Children of Eden got together at the Carousel Grande in Greensboro to catch Get Smart, the new movie starring Steve Carell, Anne Hathaway, Dwayne (“The Rock”) Johnson and Alan Arkin based on the classic 1960s television comedy.

I must say, Get Smart the movie was a very pleasant surprise! From the very beginning, we were laughing like crazy. Carell plays Maxwell Smart (played by Don Adams in the television show), an analyst with the U.S. Government agency CONTROL. After an incident at CONTROL Headquarters, Smart is given his first field assignment alongside the beautiful and dangerous Agent 99 (Hathaway). The two are soon thrust into action in the heart of Moscow, where they must stop an agent of KAOS (played by Terrance Stamp) from unleashing nuclear terror on the unsuspecting world.

Plotwise it sounds like your standard Robert Ludlum ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

Two nights from now will be the two-hour finale for Season Four of Lost. We can’t wait to see what happens! For last year’s finale we had a Lost party at our place, which included these DHARMA Initiative food products made with various graphics I found on the web…

Ever since then a lot of people have been writing to me, asking if I could send them the DHARMA labels too for their own Lost parties. Until now I’ve been able to e-mail the zipped-up file containing the labels, but there’s such a barrage of requests coming in right now and I’m going to be so busy the next few days, that responding to each e-mail is going to be downright difficult.

So thanks to file-hosting service MediaFire, I’ve uploaded the zip file containing those labels – in addition to several others that I’ve found since – and am ...

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In a commercial now running in Great Britain for BT Business. In addition to the psychotic beasties from Gremlins (including what looks like Mohawk leading them) it also stars Peter Jones of Dragon’s Den…

Man, I loved the Gremlins movies! Mom and Dad took my sister and I to see Gremlins in 1984, and it totally freaked Mom out! Around the holidays, I’ll often joke that it’s “my favorite Christmas movie!” especially if it happens to be on television. I also caught Gremlins 2: The New Batch when it ran in theaters. And some may disagree, but I thought in many ways that it was one of the few sequels that was actually better than the original.

Wouldn’t it be great if Joe Dante and Steven Spielberg were to make a third Gremlins movie? Even if that never happens, it’s good to see them in in fine form again ...

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