television

Chris Knight's avatar

I cannot begin to imagine what the Star Wars saga – and a lot of other movie and TV franchises – would have been like had it not been for Ralph McQuarrie.

He started out at Boeing, and then was hired by CBS to create animations of the Apollo program as NASA was preparing to land a man on the moon.

Some years later McQuarrie was approached by a filmmaker named George Lucas, who was planning a movie about a galaxy far, far away and needed to populate it with a unique assortment of heroes, villains, robots and spaceships. And had it not been for McQuarrie’s visual conceptions, what was at the time merely “Star Wars” might never have been picked up by any studio.

But thanks to Ralph McQuarrie, it was. And in addition to creating the looks of Darth Vader, Chewbacca and R2-D2, McQuarrie would ...

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Voting is underway until tomorrow night at midnight for The 4th Annual Shorty Awards, which is “a worldwide effort to engage hundreds of thousands of Twitter users to identify the best people and organizations on social media.”

So I’m gonna pitch the case to y’all that in my opinion, Addy Miller deserves to win a Shorty. Because she’s an incredibly talented young actress who is also immensely sweet and nice in real life, and she always takes time to interact with her growing number of fans.

In case you forgot who Addy is, here’s a reminder…

Yup, she’s the “little girl zombie” that Rick Grimes shot down in the very first scene of the very first episode of AMC’s megahit series The Walking Dead. And word is that she’s gotten involved in a bunch more great projects since then!

Here’s a pic from a few months ago, when ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

…’cuz I need to blog about something! šŸ˜›

It was an action-packed weekend for your intrepid blogger, dear readers. From the Valentine’s party at Kristen’s dance studio, then going to the Love For Life Conference at Thomas Road Baptist Church (we got to see Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, AKA the parents of those nineteen kids and counting!) and then yesterday culminating in the mid-season return of The Walking Dead on AMC, I’ve been a busy dude.

So about “Nebraska”, the first episode we got since November 27th’s chapter that ended in Barnmageddon…

“Nebraska” began moments after that hella shocker of the previous episode, and was for all intents and purposes a “cleanup operation” of its aftermath. To be honest, not much happened until the very tail end of this one, and I’m wondering if this episode would have been a better one to go into the hiatus with: ...

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Working on a few things behind the scenes, but felt like posting something tonight. And that’s when I discovered that YouTube is hosting Threads.

Sure, why not.

I first saw this movie in July of 1986 but it wasn’t until I was in college a long time later that I found out the title. We were visiting family in Florida and playing a game of Monopoly in our motel room with my cousins and we thought we’d put some TV on. It was a PBS station showing… some very dark and gritty film about nuclear war in England.

I was 12 years old. I soon lost all interest in Monopoly and became transfixed to this film. The image of the young woman chewing through her newborn baby’s umbilical cord is something that has haunted me to this day.

Threads originally aired on BBC Two in Great Britain in September ...

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It was forty years ago today, on January 14th 1972, that Sanford and Son starring Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson, premiered. In the four decades since then Sanford and Son has come to be regarded as one of the funniest – and finest – television series ever.

You know you want it: here’s the classic opening titles, with that theme composed by Quincy Jones…

But why stop there? YouTube is hosting full episodes of Sanford and Son so if you’ve never seen the show before (you big dummy!) or you haven’t caught it in awhile, here ya go!

Special thanks to Chad Austin for alerting this blog to the day’s significance. And beans and diseases to him!...

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Recent events in my personal life have kept me from watching Discovery Channel’s new hit series Moonshiners, but many have told me that it’s a most excellent reality series about those free souls who make likker in true Appalachian style!

I shall however be tuned in tonight (as well as having my DVR set to record) as I have just received word straight from Pam Sutton, the lovely and vivacious widow of moonshining legend Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton, that tonight’s episode is supposed to feature Popcorn rather heavily.

I can attest that interest in Popcorn Sutton is soaring of late, as this blog is getting slammed with visits from people Google-ing about Popcorn and his trade. But I should also note that nowhere on The Knight Shift (so far that I know of) can there be found plans to build a moonshine still of one’s own. And trust ...

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AMC has been doing multiple broadcasts of A Christmas Carol, the 1984 television movie adaptation with George C. Scott as Ebenezer Scrooge, for the past few nights. It’s easily my favorite version of Charles Dickens’ timeless potboiler (no really, he only wrote it to sell and pay some bills) although Patrick Stewart’s one-man performance runs a very close second.

But have you ever wondered what happened after Scrooge changed his ways at the end of that story?

Well wonder no more! Back in 1985 there was a short-lived show called George Burns Comedy Week. It was a comedy anthology series hosted by Burns: sorta The Twilight Zone but all about the laughs. And just before that Christmas, Burns and company produced a follow-up to A Christmas Carol.

So without further ado, here is Roddy McDowall, Ed Begley Jr., Carolyn Seymour, Paul Benedict, and the one and only ...

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The sad news is coming out this afternoon that Harry Morgan, the already prolific actor before finding eternal fame on two of television’s most classic series – as Bill Gannon on Dragnet and then Col. Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H – has passed away at the age of 96.

This guy shined in everything that he was in, during a career that stretched all the way back to 1942. The following year he appeared in The Ox-Bow Incident, quite a controversial film for its time. Morgan followed that up with roles in The Glenn Miller Story and Inherit the Wind. In 1962’s How the West Was Won he played General Ulysses Grant. And those were just a few of movies that Morgan appeared in (along with quite a few comedies).

It was a Bill Gannon, alongside Jack Webb in Dragnet, that would have most cemented Morgan’s ...

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I didn’t dare watch it until I went over to my girlfriend’s place, ‘cuz I’ve gotten her hooked onto this show and we’ve taken to enjoying it together. And since she was out of town when “Pretty Much Dead Already” – the last new episode until February – aired on Sunday night, we both held off on catching it until we could hook up again.

So now that I’ve finally seen it, let me reiterate what I’ve said all since last night about The Walking Dead‘s mid-season finale…

JEEBUS CRIPES CRISPIES WITH MILK!!!!!!

Awright, I’ll admit that I am not a routine television viewer but even so: if this episode didn’t firmly establish The Walking Dead as THE finest show currently being broadcast, then I can’t possibly imagine what could be.

The whole heapin’ episode was some of the finest television ever scripted and shot. Again, I have to ...

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