Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 11th, 2008
The show’s most basic premise remains intact. Melinda Gordon is a newlywed and owns the antique shop in a quaint
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 11th, 2008
“You wanna be where everybody knows your name”
And who wouldn’t want that? In its landmark 10th year Cheers kept on delivering pretty much the same. It’s remarkable that this cast remained almost untouched since the first year a decade ago. Coach passed and Diane left, but the patrons just kept coming back week after week providing that friendly ambiance that Billy Joel likely understood when he wrote Piano Man. Cheers was a simple show with very little fluff.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 11th, 2008
“Hey Hey Hey, It’s Fat Albert!”
That’s right, it’s Fat Albert. Bill Cosby invented the portly young Albert for his stand-up and album releases in the 1960’s. The character, like many of Cosby’s stories, is based on elements of his own youth. My parents were huge Cosby fans, so I had heard all about these Cosby Kids long before they hit television in 1972. Fat Albert And The Cosby Kids was an almost instant hit on the Saturday Morning cartoon menu.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 5th, 2008
There has to be something wrong with anyone who doesn’t have at least a small soft spot in their hearts for Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas. The film will assuredly earn its rightful place as a classic as more years roll by. The film just works on so many levels. Danny Elfman deserves as much credit as
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 5th, 2008
NCIS is a spin-off, of sorts, from the popular military lawyer show JAG. You could say that NCIS is the Order to JAG’s Law. The NCIS is a real government agency that deals with criminal activity inside or involving the US Navy or Marine Corps. The series has an incredibly global feel and honestly looks damn good for television. Production values are high, and the location stuff is out of this world, or at least all over it.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 5th, 2008
Chris Rock has been one of those comedians that either hits a home run or strikes completely out. I’ve seen quite a bit of his stand-up and found I loved it or hated it. He’s not afraid to play the race card. Hell, Chris plays the whole dang deck at times, and Everybody Hates Chris is no different. The comedy is based, loosely I’m sure, on the young adolescent life of Chris Rock. It’s a black comedy that will bring back memories of those 1970’s shows we all watched as kids. Like Good Times and even Sanford And Son,
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on September 5th, 2008
<>“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
To Date 42 men have taken that oath to become President Of The United States. While our current president is #43, Grover Cleveland’s terms did not run consecutively and so he often is counted twice.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
Man, has television come a long way in just over 50 years. There was once a pretty strict code that applied to television programs. Men and women, even when married, couldn’t be seen to have shared the same bed. Anything stronger than a “golly gee” was strictly forbidden. You couldn’t even show a woman’s belly button. And the good guys always had to win, while the bad guys got their comeuppance in the end. Alfred Hitchcock was one of the first to push those boundaries by telling mystery stories where the bad guys often appeared to get away with their evil deeds.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
I remember the first time I saw a Herschell Gordon Lewis film. It was Blood Feast, and it was sometime back in the early 1970’s. Lewis was ahead of his time and was doing extreme slasher before even mainstream slasher films were cool. It was shortly after that bloody experience that I saw the original Wizard Of Gore. Perhaps those experiences didn’t prepare me as much as I thought they would for the remake of Wizard Of Gore. I have to honestly say that I don’t really see the connection between these two films. Certainly the main idea of the magician remains, but little else of the original material survives.
Posted in: Disc Reviews by Gino Sassani on August 26th, 2008
Animal Planet has created their own new genre of television show over the last few years. Nature shows have been around forever. I remember spending time with my family as a kid watching Animal Kingdom. Since then very little about that type of program has changed. With Discovery Channel the nature show certainly became more sophisticated. Everything changed with Shark Week. Now we have an entire cable network dedicated to animals, so it stands to reason the nature show, like the animals themselves, had to evolve.
