Cosmos Reboot on Fox and National Geographic Channel

Posted on February 3, 2014 at 8:00 am

Carl Sagan’s stunning “Cosmos” series is being updated for a return to television, hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. It will premiere on Fox March 9 and be rebroadcast on the National Geographic Channel. Bill Moyers writes:

deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist with a gift of explaining complicated ideas simply, says the newCosmos will continue Sagan’s “epic exploration of our place in the universe,” and examine new discoveries of the past four decades.

“We have other stories to tell beyond the ones that went on back then … At the time of the original series, there were no known planets outside of those orbiting the sun. Right now, we’re rising through 1,000 planets happily orbiting stars that are not the sun. So that’s not simply new science. It’s new vistas of thought and imagination,” deGrasse Tyson told Bill Moyers in an interview.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBTd9–9VMI

In the meantime, take a look at the original series and the extraordinary online archive of Sagan materials at the Library of Congress.

Ted

Posted on June 28, 2012 at 6:17 pm

It’s so wrong. But it is very funny.

Fans of Seth MacFarlane are familiar with the politically incorrect humor that has made him the world’s highest-paid television writer (“The Family Guy,” “American Dad,” “The Cleveland Show”) and a popular emcee at the raunchy Friar’s Club roasts. They should strap on their seat belts for his first movie, which takes full benefit of the R rating to include outrageous and offensive humor in every category plus a lot of pop culture references. Nothing is sacred here, except the need to make jokes about anything anyone has ever thought sacred. The “oh, no, he didn’t” factor may have them falling out of their seats. Or maybe just the laughter.

Mark Wahlberg, who deserves acting and good sportsmanship awards for this film, plays 35-year-old John, a guy who spends his life smoking weed with his talking teddy bear, Ted (voice of co-screenwriter MacFarlane). This is not a pull-the-string-hear-the-recording talking teddy bear. This is a teddy bear that talks because when John was a bullied, friendless eight-year-old, he made a Christmas wish that came true and promised Ted that they would be best friends for life.

John and Ted are very adult — as in “for adults only,” not as in “mature” when it comes to their pleasures and vocabulary but perpetually juvenile when it comes to things like responsibility and downright childish when it comes to thunderstorms. John’s one brush with actual adulthood is his relationship with Lori (Mila Kunis). He loves her dearly. She loves him, too, and does not mind that he has no education or ambition. But living with the bear is getting on her nerves, especially when she comes home to find him surrounded by hookers.

Most of the movie is repeated jokes about the incongruity of a cute teddy bear with a foul mouth and an flurry of pop culture references and surprise cameos. But some of them are truly hilarious, especially two people named Jones. If there was an Oscar for being a good sport, they’d both win.
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Comedy

A New “Flintstones” from “Family Guy’s” Seth McFarlane?

Posted on March 12, 2012 at 3:48 pm

At the SXSW festival, “Family Guy” creator Seth McFarlane told the crowd he is working on a television reboot of “The Flintstones,” a beloved 1960’s cartoon series that led to a couple of not-beloved feature films. McFarlane told the audience that the very first thing he ever drew as a child was a picture of the Flintstones and it feels good to be coming full circle. He promised it would be updated but not as edgy as “The Family Guy.”

There’s really not a lot about that show — other than the references to 1960s America, which really come through in the writing more than the visual — that needs to be changed visually and stylistically. They invented the template that we’re using in animation. We kinda want to keep it, more or less, the same.

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Animation Remake Television