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Stuckeyville, what the series ED could have been

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      This is a special multiple "what if" this week. What if Ed was released on home video and what if they kept the original casting. Ed ran on NBC for four seasons starting in 2000. I first tuned in because it had Julie Bowen from the WB series Three (see my blog from July 13, 2024 to learn more about that.). During the first episode I also saw Justin Long who I had enjoyed in Galaxy Quest the previous year. I became a fan of the lead actor, Tom Cavanagh, because of this show. All three have done well since the series went off the air so I was surprised it was never released on video. Apparently, music rights and two different production companies making the series are the reasons for that.      The commercials for the series before it aired had Donal Logue, who I had just seen in The Tao of Steve . When I tuned in for the first night, I was surprised to see Michael Ian Black doing scenes that the commercials had Logue in. The show was originally to ...
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The Eagles - No Fun Aloud redux

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       I recently started going through my original posts and added playlists. When I got to The Eagles album No Fun Aloud I wanted to re-do the package design. The songs remain the same.      What if the Eagles kept putting out records after  The Long Run ? For this I chose "I Found Somebody", "Party Town", "All Those Lies" and "I Volunteer" from Glenn Frey's 1982 album  No Fun Aloud.  From Don Henley's 1982 album  I Can't Stand Still  I chose the title song (with harmony vocals by Timothy B. Schmit), "Long Way Home" (with backing vocals by Schmit),  "Nobody's Business"  (with Schmit   on bass) and I had to include "Dirty Laundry", not only was it huge in the charts but it has Schmit doing backing vocals and bass, as well as Joe Walsh doing a guitar solo. In place of Glenn Frey doing a cover of the oldie "Sea Cruise" I put in Timothy B. Schmit cover of "So Much in Love" from the ...
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Archie tv series 1976

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       Archie has been in comics since 1941. The character was popular enough to get a radio show starting in 1943. Cartoons of Archie and the gang ran from 1968-1978. There have been a few live-action pilots that went nowhere. Then in 1997 the CW network had a grim take with their series Riverdale that lasted seven seasons. In 1976, however, ABC put on a "special" of Archie . It featured short sketches and musical interludes. It wasn't picked up as a series but two years they tried again with The Archie Situation Comedy Musical Variety Show . It had the same cast and again did not make it to series.       Dennis Bowen, who played the title character, was also a student at Buchanan High in five episodes of Welcome Back Kotter . Deryl Maury (Jughead) was part of The Massacre at Central High . Hilarie Thompson was on the tv series of Operation Petticoat  after she was Veronica. Audrey Landers, who was Betty Cooper, had better success on the series D...
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Electric Light Orchestra - TIME (alternate version)

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       Here is another in the "what if Jeff Lynne let other members of E.L.O. have their compositions on the albums" series. This week I reconfigured the 1981 album Time. In 1981 E.L.O. bassist Kelly Groucutt was recording his debut album, Kelly, with other ELOers Richard Tandy, Bev Bevan and Louis Clark. From that album I grabbed "I'll Cry Tomorrow" and "Sea of Dreams". 1981 also saw the release of an album of "production music" called Building Tension. Half was by John Cameron and the other half by our own Louis Clark. I pulled "Unease" from there.        To make room for these I removed three songs from the original album; "Another Heart Breaks", "The Lights Go Down" and "Hold on Tight". Although that last song is a banger, it doesn't seem to fit the album. In this alternate reality it would still be released as a single, so the "coffee achievers" would still have their anthem.      I u...
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1930s matinee on an alternate earth

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       This week is a full matinee from the '30s on an alternate Earth, replete with a cartoon, a comedy short, a serial, a trailer and the main attraction.  CARTOON The video for "The Ghost of Stephen Foster" by the Squirrel Nut Zippers was made to look like an old Max and Dave Fleischer cartoon. It directly references the Betty Boop cartoon of "Minnie the Moocher" and "Bimbo's Initiation".  COMEDY SHORT In 1991 Rob Reiner introduced six episodes of a television show called "Morton and Hayes". They were supposedly lost comedy shorts of Chick Morton and Eddie Hayes (played by Kevin Pollack and Bob Amaral). The shorts were played in the style of great comedy duos like Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy and the Three Stooges. SERIAL Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was Kerry Conran's love letter to the old serials. It was originally going to have cliffhangers and chapters with title cards.  TRAILER The fake trailer for ...
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Colorful Music

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       I'm not sure how this fits the theme of this blog but I couldn't stop thinking about it. Instead of just a playlist of bands with colours in their names, I made it harder on myself by finding songs from them that also had colours in the titles. I wanted each band to be a different colour but allowed some repetition of colour in the title. I just couldn't pass on two different songs called "Black Night". A tip of the hat to my buddy Henry Desmond for suggesting the twofer "Heavy Metal: The Black and Silver ". Colorful Music - YouTube
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Wonder Woman 2011 TV series

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       In 2011 Warner Brothers Television hired David E. Kelley to write and produce a new Wonder Woman series for NBC. He was the man behind audience and critic favorites like "Ally McBeal" and "Boston Legal". In the pilot Wonder Woman was a superhero who was also publicly known as Diana Themyscira, the head of Themyscira Industries in L. A. but she was also Diana Prince, the bespectacled average woman who lived with her cat and was unlucky in love.  Adrianne Palicki played the lead role. Pedro Pascal played a police inspector, he recently played Mister Fantastic in Fantastic Four: First Steps (he also played Maxwell Lord in Wonder Woman 1984 ).       The pilot was hyped but early reviews from critics were bad and it never aired. An early cut was leaked online and bootleg copies were sold at comic conventions. Who knows what the series could have been. Above is my interpretation if it did get a full season.
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