This is my blog to talk about my views on pop culture. This will cover television shows, movies, video games, music, and other general pop culture topics. However, with me there is always a twist. I'm not really a fan of popular culture, no, my idea of pop culture isn't what's really popular in those areas, it's what I feel is really good in those areas. It's not necessarily counterculture either, as I have my issues with that as well. It's a very strange grey area that I will be covering, but one that anyone with an open mind will hopefully be able to enjoy.
To start this off, I will talk about my favorite movie, band, video game, and television show. These are not popular choices in any circle really, but they're all the ones that I really enjoy the most.
To start things off, I'll go with my favorite movie of all time. This is one that has a light blend with music as well. The movie is UHF. When I was young I was a huge fan of Weird Al Yankovic. So hearing that he had written and performed in a movie was very exciting to me. UHF was described as Weird Al as a reason for him and his friends to pretty much just goof off, and to be honest, the results were pretty good.
You have your stupid movies. Some of them are funny, but some of them go to that point of where they're so stupid that they're not even funny. In fact, a lot of them go to that point. It's a fine line that many comedies have a tough time trying to toe. With UHF they certainly went to that line. However, it was almost like they knew they had gone into that territory and totally indulged in it. It went to the point of being so beyond stupid that it was funny again. Very few movies have gone to that point of being funny again. One big one that comes to me right away is Airplane. The Naked Gun series goes there as well.
However, there was a certain level of intelligence to it that made it very funny as well. The level of intelligence wasn't in a conventional sense, it was more in that if you understood the references that were made, you'd be able to laugh at how stupid it all actually was.
The movie starts with a great Indiana Jones parody (of course there's parodies, it's Weird Al), and then of course there's a lot of original material, along with a lot of other parodies of not only movies, but television shows (game shows in particular), and commercials. One of the best things about it is that a lot of it stands up to today's ridiculousness of what is going on.
It's not a long movie at all, but the pacing is very good, and it hits on many different genres. It's almost exactly what you would expect out of Weird Al, but just in movie form. Despite being almost 25 years old, like I said before, a lot of it is still relevant, and until society gets a little bit smarter, it will continue to be true.
Next up is my favorite television show of all time. It was a show run on ESPN Classic that featured two of my favorite comedians of all time, Randy Sklar and Jason Sklar. The show was Cheap Seats Without Ron Parker.
The idea of the show was pretty much a blatant ripoff of Mystery Science Theater 3000. One thing I will say is that the Sklar brothers made no secret about it. They openly admitted it in interviews and even had the guys from MS3K on the show at one point. The biggest difference was in the subject matter. In Cheap Seats the subject wasn't horrible science fiction, but instead was mostly old sporting events. I only say mostly, because there was some that was fairly recent.
Either way, the show was filled with a lot of great references. At times they would mention Borat (the Sacha Baron Cohen character), well before the movie came out. They brought up obscure sports names like Earl Boykins and Brian Gorman at times. They would also mention guys like Blair Thomas and how his career was a complete failure. While most football sports fans who remember Thomas in college will remember this, they were bringing this up 15 years later. This was likely lost on a lot of viewers, but to those that realized what they were talking about, it was very funny at times.
They never failed to point out ridiculous things in what they were watching. Rather it being a people losing their minds over what is now a simple skateboarding trick (back in the 60's), or Paul Pierce staring down a towel boy in a high school dunk contest. They hit every detail in hilarious fashion.
My favorite band of all time is Faith No More. There really wasn't a good way to bring that in, but there just wasn't a great way to build that up. Faith No More was just such a great band in every way, with every twist and turn, and now that they've reunited, while I don't expect a new album, I still have hope of going to finally see them live.
I started to get into them around the time they broke up. It was late 8th grade for me. They had just released Album of the Year, an album that most fans did not think of too highly at the time (but has since been seen in a bit of a better light). Anyway, at that time I was just starting to really get into some of the stuff they put out on their most commercially successful album, The Real Thing. The songs that I was getting into were songs like "Epic", "From Out of Nowhere", and "Falling to Pieces". Those were the most commercially successful songs off of that album, especially Epic.
However, what REALLY got me into them was the next album, Angeldust. To this day it is my favorite album ever released. It features the quirky nature that they were going into at the time, but the songs were all very well done, although in many different genres. "Land of Sunshine" was a bizarre opening with a melodic, but circus like feel to it, featuring lyrics from fortune cookies and Scientology surveys. "Caffeine" was much more metal influenced. Then "Midlife Crisis" was much more of an alternative rock song that fit in well for that time. As it went on you got a lot of very catchy songs in a number of varieties.
They didn't stop there though, the next album, King For a Day...Fool For a Lifetime was almost as good as Angeldust. It's still among what are probably my 10 favorite albums ever. It's in the same vein of Angeldust, but it has a little something extra to it. It has a little more of an aggressive bizarre feel to it. However, the songs on it are still very catchy throughout and it enters many different genres, just as Angeldust did.
Album of the Year was another step down, but it still features some great songs. "Stripsearch", "Last Cup of Sorrow", "Ashes to Ashes", and "She Loves Me Not" are all among my favorite songs that the band has ever done. The album as a whole is still a very solid album that fans of the band have really come around on after being very down on it around the time it was released. After that they also did a great cover of the Bee Gee's song "I Started a Joke".
Now, my favorite video game of all time. Suddenly there is a very popular choice by me. My favorite video game of all time is "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time". This is not only a popular choice, but it's really a consensus choice. There are a lot of people who consider this to be the greatest game ever. In fact, until very recently, it was ranked as the best game ever on gamerankings.com. It wasn't until a few late reviews came in for it (as in 15 years late, after it had already been remade), that it was bumped from it's spot by Super Mario Galaxy.
I should also say that I like the remake even more. There's a lot of argument over if it is a remake or a port. Personally I feel like it's a remake. According to Nintendo themselves (which knows more over the matter than anyone else), the game was remade from the ground up. Sure, the music was ported, but the graphics were completely remade (there's some easter eggs in there and a couple of new features as well), and the interface was totally remade. I understand that it didn't have as many new things as people wanted, and I think a lot of the people calling it a port are people who are upset over it not having enough new features for them, but the bottom line is that the game wasn't ported over. The only thing ported over was the music. Enhanced port is nothing more than a term that's used by people who are bitter over a remake not doing enough, rather they're justified or not.
Anyway, the bottom line is that this game does everything I like in a game. It keeps the mechanics pretty simple. You learn how to do everything early in the game. Any additions are held within the mechanics you learn very early on, such as getting new items. They're still equipped and used the same exact way, just that you have new ones. Also, at the time, the graphics blew everyone away. Not only that, but the open field you had with Hyrule Field was amazing. When you're considering the best game of all-time, there is a small degree of understanding when it came out that has to be considered, otherwise all of the best games ever would be from the current generation.
The most important thing, and what in my opinion should make up 99% of what makes a game the best ever though is how much fun you have playing it. Of every game I play these days, I still have the most fun playing Ocarina of Time, even if the remake is my favorite version now (largely due to a greatly improved interface), the game is just an outstanding game, and while you can notice that it's a game that is a bit old, it still can stand up to any game today.
I'm sure I've already offended some people, and when you have things that are totally opinionated, you're always going to offend people. The best way to make people more angry is to have a sound argument, so if I've made people even more angry, I guess it's even better. Either way, these are my opinions. These are the things that in each of these mediums are the most enjoyable to me. I'm not saying that they have to be everyone's favorites, in fact, another tidbit is that I'm not a Quentin Tarantino fan at all. I like Pulp Fiction, and that's really it. I understand why a lot of people love a lot of things he does, but it just doesn't do it for me (especially the Kill Bill movies). It's all just opinion.
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