A few more videos. Not a lot of context for some of these, so I can’t tell if they’re from Sendai or someplace else.
This provides a scary, up-close demonstration of how fast the tsunami came in:
Japanese office workers run as bits of building start falling around them:
There’s a reason they call it the Ring of Fire: The quake has activated several regional volcanos:
It’s almost like playing Sim City, where you inflict all the disasters (earthquake, flood, volcano, monster) on the city at once…
The current news, as near as I can gather:
A grocery store during the quake. Don’t know us this is Sendai, Tokyo or somewhere else:
The Ichihara oil refinery on fire:
The tsunami coming in:
More tsunami flood footage:
Still more:
The quake hit at 2:46 p.m local time about 230 miles off the coast of northern Japan near Sendai. A Wikipedia entry is already up, and they’re calling it the largest earthquake to hit Japan in recorded history. It looks pretty bad, although thankfully not “sink into the sea” bad.
But it looks bad enough:
This CNN story also has embedded footage of the tsunami coming inland carrying debris, boats and burning houses with it.
This NNK report is saying the tsunami waves were 10 meters high.
Compilation of live quake footage:
Here’s footage of the tsunami inundating a Japanese airport:
If there’s one comfort in this, Japan is very good at earthquake and tsunami preparation. If something this big hit, say, Haiti, just about everything on the island would be gone.
If you’re of a certain age, you probably remember the Rankin Bass production of A Year Without a Santa Claus. Like all the other warhorse Christmas specials of my youth, it got trotted out pretty much every year.
All the works of Rankin Bass are hard to evaluate separate from the nostalgia factor they invoked. On a level of technical proficiency, they weren’t particularly proficient. At it’s very best, their animation was of the quality of Hanna-Barbera, which is to say it sucked, and their stop motion work was more stop than motion. (I have not seen their animated film version of Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn, which I am given to understand is better.)
For an example of both good and bad, take a look at the classic “Snow Miser/Heat Miser” songs from A Year Without a Santa Claus:
I don’t think the lyrics of that songs are going to be taught in songwriting classes (it takes a special type of lyricist to rhyme “degrees” with “degrees”), but damned if that song doesn’t stick in your head. Go up to just about anyone from my generation and sing “He’s Mr. Heat Miser,” and you’re virtually guaranteed to have them sing back “He’s Mr. Sun.” (Who was it that said “Memory is a crazy beggar woman that hordes bright bits of tinfoil and throws away food”?)
Whatever their flaws, Rankin Bass productions usually had a few bits of cleverness and interest scattered throughout.
The same can not necessarily be said of the cheap spinoffs done of their work. Did you know that they did a live action remake of A Year Without a Santa Claus? If you think to yourself, “Wow, that sounds like a really, really bad idea,” you’re not the only one.
As proof, take a look at this:
Well, Snow Miser can certainly sing, and Heat Miser…uh, goes a long way toward making Snow Miser’s singing sound that much better.
And this…this is Just. Freaking. WRONG:
It’s like if Ralphie from A Christmas Story came back at age 35 to do an infomercial for winterizing your home. Yes, it’s from the sequel to the original A Year Without a Santa Claus, A Miser Brothers Christmas, and, if this clip is any indication, it looks to be as fondly remembered as The Christmas That Totally Ruled and KISS Saves Santa.
Stop. Just stop.
I leave you with one other Rankin Bass piece of music, the high point of their otherwise-not-even-remotely-fondly-remembered version of The Return of the King:
Back in my ill-spent youth, before we had any video games other than Pong, I watched a lot of TV. Along with the classics (I Love Lucy, Star Trek), I watched a good bit of the same primetime fare everyone else watched back in the days of three broadcast networks and no cable. In particular, I would watch pretty much any prime time science fiction show in the 1970s, no matter how bad. Some, like Kolchak: The Night Stalker, hold up much better than I would expect them to.
I’m pretty sure The Fantastic Journey does not, mainly because I remember thinking that it sucked even while I was watching it. I even remember thinking it sucked more than The Man From Atlantis, which, I assure you, sucked pretty hard. (After all, that was a show with an episode that had Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as an alien on another planet panning for gold in invisible water. And no, it didn’t make any more sense in context.)
Anyway, I thought I’d do this post on The Fantastic Journey not because it was good, but because once every six months or so I found myself discussing the TV shows of the 1970s and being unable to recall the name of the show. It could also be seen as some sort of weird precursor to Lost, but with a smaller cast and a refreshing lack of tedious flashbacks. So this page is more or less something for people to find on the Internet searching for the same half-remembered plot elements just so they can prove to their friends that no, they didn’t imagine it. (Keywords: The Fantastic Journey, island, Bermuda Triangle, zone, portal, TV show, 1970s, bad, suck)
The setup, as I remember it, was some modern Americans (including an annoying kid, which was the style at the time) being marooned on an uncharted island somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, and every week they’d go through some sort of zone or barrier that would transport them to another time period where they ran into pirates, aliens, future civilizations, or any other thing 70s TV writers on deadline could think of to keep them in cocaine for another month. According to this far more informative writeup on the show, they were stranded there by some weird green cloud enveloping their boat. And it went downhill from there.
Here’s the opening credits, which I seem to have mercifully forgotten:
Wow, that cheesy disco synth theme is everything that was wrong with music in the 1970s rolled into one excruciatingly painful package. I’m sure that right now, it’s being played on an infinite loop to torments the souls of the damned at Hell’s own disco.
And here’s the opening of one episode, which makes it seem even worse than I remember:
Roddy McDowell adds that touch of class to remind you that, yes, he was in an awful lot of horrid crap. (See also: Laserblast.)
That’s pretty bad. Thanks you sir, may I have another?
What that scene really needs is the Monty Python knight to limp up and whack Mongol Riddle Guy upside the head with a rubber chicken. There also seemed to be a contractual requirement for several minutes of running in every show. (Cheap! Pointless! Eats up screen time!) And nothing says “It’s the future!” like green unitards and shiny, asymmetrical skirts.
And there’s plenty more where that came from on YouTube, for those with an unquenchable thirst for cheesy 70s science fiction TV shows. But everything about the show gives you the distinct impression people involved knew it was doomed and were only in it for the paycheck.
Here’s the IMDB link for the show.
Let’s face it: The Fantastic Journey was just a big slab of suck, and I only post this here as a warning to others and to prove that, yes, it actually existed.
Tune in next week when I channel my vague memories of John Saxon blowing up mutants with a photon bazooka (or some damn thing).
Keeping with our previous automotive theme, here’s yesterday’s look at the car of tomorrow:
Although some might find this video’s view of the fairer sex just a wee bit antiquated…
I don’t think this option was available the last time I went shopping for a new car:
Normally I don’t link to something that’s already been on the Fark tab, but this Fiddler on the Roof/You Got Served mashup is too good to pass up:
The National Film Registry has announced this year’s selection of 25 important films worthy of preservation, and there are a lot of gems on the list:
Airplane!, The Exorcist, The Empire Strikes Back and The Pink Panther are all great films, arguably among the top 100 ever made. I believe it was K. W. Jeter who said that the student version of THX 1138 was much better than the theatrical release, so I’ve always been curious to see that. Strangely enough, I’m also curious about Saturday Night Fever, despite my loathing of disco, as many critics (the late Gene Siskel among them) consider it one of the great films of the 1970s, and National Review‘s John Derbyshire says it’s one of the best films about blue collar American life ever made. I also remember Dwight being impressed with Malcolm X, despite not having seen Malcolm I–IX.
Of course, a lot of these are notable only for being early examples of the form rather than gripping cinema, such as Newark Athlete:
Or A Trip Down Market Street:
Let There Be Light is John Huston’s pioneering documentary on the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder following World War II:
And Our Lady of the Sphere is sort of like Terry Gilliam’s work on Monty Python, but not as interesting:
Then again, it was made in San Francisco in 1969, so there’s nothing about it that can’t be explained by the phrase “Dude, I was so high…”
Burglers break into a store with a forklift on Christmas Day to steal beer.
But honestly, I’m only linking to this story for two reasons: For the MST3K reference in the blog post title, and to include the pure awesomeness that is Forklift Driver Klaus. (Note: Don’t watch if you’re easily offended by completely over-the-top gore and violence. Skip the first minute if you don’t understand German; the rest is pretty much self-explanatory.)
(Hat tip: Fark.)