The Wallflower Report

Right, so Lexy’s apparently been having server problems off and on again. I wonder why she doesn’t go to a different restaurant. She gave me the okay to update again, though, so I don’t really care. I’ve got lots of important stuff to tell you about.

Like today I’m going to talk about the live-action Swamp Thing show that was out in like the early 90s on USA, because I just got it on Dee Vee Dee.

They used to show it and this show that would have been like a cheesy X-Files rip-off except I think it actually came first, where the investigators taught paranormal studies at some kind of school. Both of these shows were only a half hour long because they kind of came just before hour long supernatural dramas were “in vogue”, which is English for “en vogue“, which is French for “as seen in the pages of Vogue and other popular magazines”.

It means something’s trendy.

Anyway, I remember the Swamp Thing show as being pretty good, but then, I also remember it as being 16 years ago. The half-hour format really hurts it because of course that only gives them like 22 minutes of actual show and of course Swamp Thing moves and talks so slowly that it’s more like 11 minutes. This doesn’t give them a lot of time to develop a plot.

Like one episode called “Falco” is about a peregrine falcon that the evil Dr. Arcane turned into a man with a bearskin rug for an arm (so you’d know he used to be a falcon). The whole episode is he tries to shoot Dr. Arcane at a funeral because the bearskin rug keeps him from flying, and Swamp Thing tells him (very slowly) that killing is wrong, and Swamp Thing’s annoying kid sidekick falls into the water and drowns and Falco resus… resec… revives him and learns A Valuable Lesson about how not killing people is pretty much the same thing as flying.

Even though not much happens in the entire episode, you’re still kind of going Double You Tee Eff at the end, because it’s like, isn’t Dr. Arcane even concerned that his Bird-Bear-Man is on the loose? They even waste some time with some stock footage of a peregrine falcon at the end of the episode. They could have cut that and had some stock footage of explosions in the middle of the episode just to liven things up.

Also the beginning of the episode is kind of jarring because the previous episode which was The Pilot ended with the annoying kid sidekick’s mother going Back North because her job was important and she couldn’t leave it, which left the annoying sidekick living with his grandmother in Louisiana. Then the second episode starts with the grandmother’s funeral and the kid sidekick’s mother decides to live in Louisiana anyway. Apparently the grandmother died of complications from not testing well.

I’m pretty sure that’s hereditary because the kid sidekick succumbs to it later in the series, because if I remember right he’s eventually replaced with his previously unseen step-brother or cousin or something, the frequently shirtless teenage sidekick.

~Ariella Rasputin Wallflower

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 6:43 am and is filed under Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.