My work on the McCorry's Memoirs section of my Website has been stalled for more than a year now after the completion of Era 5 (1987-92). I have not found the incentive to continue with Eras 6 and 7, mainly because neither are particularly inspiring, all in all, nor all that gratifying to reflect upon. A few noteworthy experiences aside, these are quite unexciting, unappealing eras. Times of slow development in my job situation. Elusive lasting social fulfillment. And a first, positive impression of the Internet that turned out to be something of a mirage. One of these days, perhaps this coming summer during a vacation from work, I will finally complete Eras 6 and 7 and move on to Era 8. But for now, the ending of Era 5 at 1992 will need to stand as the stopping point of my life chronicle.

2007 has so far been a dire year. The weather has been lousy, lousy, lousy. All the hullabaloo about global warming seems somehow unconvincing after a near constant stretch of bitterly cold temperatures through mid-January to mid-March- and spring has yet to arrive. It has been snowstorm after snowstorm in April, with below normal temperatures forecast until the end of the month. Oh, the refrain I hear is that global warming does not apply this year to Atlantic Canada, that this year for my neck of the woods is atypical of the present trend. Oh, whatever. Additionally, there have been some setbacks at work, stalling associations with some valued colleagues, persisting equipment problems, and so forth. And I found a second rotted DVD in my collection recently, said DVD being Vertigo, purchased in 1999 at a cost of more than thirty dollars. The disc lost its reflectivity, I guess, and stutters and jams, if it will play at all. Hardly a promising outlook for the hefty investment that is my DVD collection. I re-purchased Vertigo this past weekend, rather grudgingly, I might add. The re-purchase was almost as expensive as the original one. This time, however, I am permanently keeping the DVD store receipt on file.

In terms of DVD releases, 2007 promises to be the weakest year yet. The Doctor Who DVD range, though recently upped to nearly double the annual rate of release, is a very drab schedule for 2007 thus far, consisting of late 1980s serials (which did not inspire me, in either style or substance) and the embarrassing first story for Tom Baker's Doctor (the one with the King Kong wannabe giant robot), and rumors are that the remainder of the year will be nothing about which to be excited. A "double-dip" of an extant-in-North-America box set. A pair of lesser Peter Davison stories. And maybe a middling Jon Pertwee tale set in the Middle Ages. And no doubt more late 1980s material. There was an eyebrow raised when I learned that the 1981 Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde starring David Hemmings, a version I only saw once on its Mystery! telecast on PBS in the early 1980s, was on the upcoming list for 2007, but its release in March was delayed. It figures. A DVD of Ant and Aardvark DePatie-Freleng cartoons in early April has been welcome, of course, but I would have preferred a DVD collection of Inspector cartoons. Despite speculation on the Internet that such a collection may be forthcoming, I am pessimistic. Why would such a collection not come before an Ant and Aardvark one, rather than after? Especially as the Inspector cartoon series was produced before the Ant and Aardvark one. There is no major DVD release slated for the fourth quarter of the year. No huge Superman or Star Wars movies box set or some such thing. And though I am not at liberty to divulge specific titles or spotlighted characters, I do expect the LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION planned for this autumn, the fifth volume in that glacial range, to be the weakest yet, from where I am standing, of course. Not from where the 1950s-cartoons-hating legions of many an Internet message board and Amazon.com product review are concerned, though. They will be singing the highest praises of LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION 5. Though I nowadays eschew the Internet message boards as much as possible, such prospects still do not instill optimism or merriment in my middle-aged soul. I am also unhopeful of a Region 2 deluxe DVD treatment of Space: 1999- Season 2. It looks like the Region 1 A & E DVDs are the best for which the tiny minority (if even that) of beleaguered second season loyalists can hope. And on further glance at the oddly soft image of the remastered Region 2 Network DVD first season episodes, I am beginning to wonder of maybe this is indeed for the best. Season 2, after all, has little else going for it but its vivid images, or so the oh, so factual majority opinion attests.

Some solace has been found of late on the marvel that is YouTube, along with AOL.com's offering of vintage episodes of The Edge of Night. YouTube has much to enjoy, for as long as a contribution can remain accessible. There are many television jingles and introductions to television shows unseen by me in twenty-five years or more. And the folks at AOL have afforded to us the opportunity to once again experience The Edge of Night of mid-to-late 1979, storylines that I followed during the summer I first met my friend, Joey, and during the autumn when The Edge of Night at 5 P.M. on the ABC U.S. television network was followed on WVII-TV Bangor, Maine, by the Star Blazers animated cartoon television space adventure series. I did not watch The Edge of Night with much enthusiasm in the summer of 1979 as I recall, as the storylines then were concentrated mainly on the stalking of young Paige Madison by members of the Tobias group of thugs. But with the start in autumn of the "Mansion of the Damned" movie production storyline and the wreaking of havoc in Monticello by the unhinged Nola Madison actress character (who started drugging detective Deborah Saxon and Dr. Miles Cavanaugh and eventually "framed" hero attorney Draper Scott for the murder of wealthy socialite Margo Huntington), my interest rebounded. This was one of the times I remember The Edge of Night as being most addictive. There is nothing like a calamity-causing, "scenery-chewing" villainess on a daytime serial to raise the watch-ability quotient of an already "hard-hitting" suspense serial. And it is amazing how easily I can watch these Edge of Night episodes with the same mindset as my then-thirteen-year-old self. The Edge of Night can be found at http://video.aol.com/video-category/edge-of-night/1917.

That is all for today, Monday, April 16, 2007.

Yet another day in the year of the interminable winter. Snow is falling again, with northeasterly winds buffeting the house. The forecast for the remainder of the week is for cold rain or snow. Below seasonal temperatures are still expected to persist to the end of April- and probably beyond.

I awoke this morning with thoughts on my ultimate plans for this Website, before my disillusionment with the Internet and after such. To be sure, my intentions have fluctuated over the past ten years. At first, my motivation was solely to provide a bounty of television series information, remembrances, and impressions- from my personal point of view. I believed this to be of value to surfers of the Internet, whether they be kindred spirits or no. Around 2001, I began opting for a more academic approach to the subject matter, analyzing it under an overarching theme of what I then called Human Imagination at Extremes, the rationale being that many of my long-cherished works of imagination were extended to places, times, situations most removed from humdrum everyday experience- and that people in general rejected these works because of their unrestricted scope of depiction and concept. While I believe this approach still has merit, I have gone back somewhat to a personal dimension as regards all of the entertainment I hold dear, while retaining an intent to have a wide-ranging theme or hypothesis. Why do these works persistently fall upon the wrong side of acclaim, and why do I invite derision, rejection, isolation if ever I am seen to regard them with an intellectual reverence? For this Website's ultimate form, I envision a systematic study of all of the entertainments discovered and beloved in my life, with Spotlight Articles for every television show that has its own Web page, each such article pontificating on the importance of that television show and validating (or attempting to validate) my long allegiance to the particular television program. And under an overall umbrella, as it were, alluding often to Jungian psychology, which does offer salient explanations for much of the artistic observations and hypotheses to which I tend to arrive. And I would include also the story of my life, as it has progressed through its many stages, me being introduced to and influenced by these productions. That is if I ever fully recover my urge to write.

This is all for April 17, 2007.

The past week has been one of sadness and life outlook re-evaluation, following the passing away of a cousin at age 44 of a brain aneurysm, the first death of a member of my generation in my extended family. It is the same condition that my mother now has, though of a less severe nature, I am told.

In view of this loss, and of increased awareness of mortality, somehow the oftentimes bitter laments that I have about contrary prevailing opinions on the Internet seem of much lesser consequence, and needlessly poisonous to one's emotional health, to which physical health is often viewed as being inexorably connected. To be sure, becoming agitated about anything is not the best course of action for one with a family history of neurovascular disorder.

This year, I have already decided against participating on Internet message boards and in other means of Internet discussion, a wise, stress-and-negativity-avoiding decision even before news of the death of my cousin. An improvement in outlook is in order, too- difficult though it is, in view of all that has happened on the Internet in the past several years.

Blessings are to be counted, for a start. Atlantic Canada weather has done a 180-degree turnaround and is now very warm- summer-like, in fact- and sunny, the snow of the past winter is almost completely melted. There are signs of improvement on some work concerns. And although 2007 is a disappointing year for DVD, there is always 2008. Provided I stay in good health, and avoiding hostility is essential to that, there is every reason to expect that I will live to see the DVD release of the balance of my desired works of the imagination. The arrogant invalidations of my favorites by younger, un-humble people on Internet forums of various kinds, should be put in the miniscule context that they deserve. Life is too short and too precious to waste time fretting about such. And it is time for me to continue on with the writing that I have been long intent on completing.

All for Tuesday, April 24, 2007.

Could 2007 be verging on a turnaround for DVDs of interest to myself? There is a very encouraging indication to this effect in my discovery that a DVD collection of Inspector cartoons is planned for July 24 release. From the total 119-minute run time of the DVD, given on the Amazon.com Website, it would appear that only half of the 34 Inspector cartoons will be on the single-disc DVD release. I am hopeful that they are the first 17 cartoons, with the remainder to achieve representation on shiny digital videodisc sometime later this year.

If only The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour would come to commercial DVD, I could then fully retire my small assemblage of DVD+R for which archival shelf life is widely reported to be dubious. But, alas, Bugs and the Road Runner constitute part of one televised lifelong fondness of mine not to have an appreciable following in its own right, and the component cartoon shorts thereon are unlikely to appear on DVD in anything other than their original theatrical release print format, if they all are so fortunate to reach DVD in any form.

Beautiful May weather has arrived, and I strive daily for sufficient occasion to bask in and enjoy it. I'm also planning an excursion to the Douglastown-Newcastle Miramichi area this coming summer after a long 7 years since my last such visit. Scheduling my days away from work at the optimum time for best weather will be a key concern in this regard. With the death of my cousin and a heightened more than ever awareness of mortality among my generation, I feel a need now to once again be in my childhood environs again and to possibly be with some of my same-age peers of yesteryear. At the very least, I want to be on that hallowed ground where I was once a carefree youngster, however much the buildings and vegetation upon that ground may have been changed. Sunny, mild weather would maximize the positive sensations in such a "homecoming".

All for today, May 3, 2007.

Friday, May 4 set a record for my Website. More than 200 "hits", mainly for my Spiderman Web page, which is understandably benefitting from the current public attention toward the web-swinging super-hero in the hoopla surrounding the third of the Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man movies. I have not as yet seen Spider-Man 3 and plan to do so within the next week to ten days. I am trying to find some work colleagues with whom to see the movie at Fredericton's Empire Theatres, but scheduling and quest for shared interest in Spidey are so far proving problematic.

Cooler than normal temperatures persist in Atlantic Canada. There is snow in the forecast, daytime high temperatures are still below ten degrees Celsius, and on one of my walks yesterday, I saw some piles of snow in shaded places. 2007 is already rivaling 1982 for having one of the most interminable winters.

And latest indications are that my misgivings about 2007 as a year for Doctor Who and Warner Brothers cartoons on DVD, are about to be confirmed. Two less than stellar vehicles for Peter Davison as the Doctor have been announced for August release, and rumors are of yet more representation for late-1980s Doctors Sylvester McCoy and Colin Baker. And there are reports of audio commentaries being recorded for two Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1930s. An omen of a LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION that skimps on the post-1948 cartoons and focuses on the earliest, black-and-white or bizarrely-paced color cartoons with characters not in their ultimate forms? I expect lively applause for such a DVD collection from the people on the Internet message boards, people who would rather see little or no post-1948 cartoons on DVD.

As for myself, I would rather that the earlier cartoons be reserved for a separate DVD set for the aficionados of those, and the full post-1948 cartoon catalog see release in GOLDEN COLLECTION format. But such is a "pipe dream", and if family medical history is any indication, I expect to be facing preoccupying health problems, if I am not already dead, by the time the GOLDEN COLLECTION range reaches its last volume.

Still, I persist in my more health-conscious intent at present. I have quit drinking carbonated beverages of all kinds, have added grape juice to my daily intake, am looking at levels of sodium on all food products, and plan, despite the weather, to augment my outdoor physical activity, walking ever more with each day this spring, summer, autumn. If I am doomed to suffer the fate of my cousin, I will "go down fighting".

All for today, May 5, 2007.

On May 16, 2007, it snowed in my area of New Brunswick. A 15-centimeter accumulation was forecast, and although such did not come to pass, because most of the snow melted as soon as it hit ground, the frozen precipitation event is a further noteworthy instance of a year of little or no spring in Atlantic Canada. And now, just ten days later, it is summer, with daytime high temperatures of 32 degrees. From winter to summer in less than a dozen rotations of the Earth.

But what lamenting I may have been inclined to do for lack of comfortable springtime weather and for what 2007 looked like for DVD, has been superseded by jumps for joy at a three-fold good news revelation, for Inspector cartoons will indeed arrive on DVD (either in two separate disc volumes or as a full, 2-disc release; it is undetermined as yet which of these the cartoon Inspector's coming to DVD will be), with a July 24 release date stated at Amazon.com. Then, in September, after 2 years of waiting, Granada/Network in the U.K. will compliment its fully restored and remastered Space: 1999 Season 1 DVD set released in 2005 with a second season collection of DVDs of similar film-to-digital-video transfers and a parallel amount of bonus material on a seventh disc. And later this year, the Doctor Who "Planet of Evil" serial will be on DVD with some intriguing supplemental content, including a documentary on the making of the 1975 Tom Baker vehicle, an audio commentary, and something called "Hidden Hinchcliffe". Highly edifying news, especially as I was doubtful of any "bells and whistles" on a "Planet of Evil" Doctor Who DVD when the BBC-contract company, 2|entertain, deigned to give the serial the DVD treatment. Summer and autumn this year bodes quite gratifyingly for me in terms of DVD after a rather disappointing first third of the year.

Now, then, for 2008, please do bring on "The Seeds of Doom" and some more of Jon Pertwee's time as the heroic Time Lord.

As regards Space: 1999- Season 2, I expect to be dazzled by the visual element of the episodes, totally clear of film grime, dirty optical effects, hairs, and color timing errors. A & E's Season 2 DVDs, though looking very vivid, colorful, and eye-catching, are from 16-milimeter film prints of a somewhat less than pristine extraction from the original 35-milimeter film negatives. The upcoming Granada/Network DVDs will be from high-definition digital video transfers as the first season Space: 1999 Granada/Network DVDs are, coming directly from the film negatives. Of course, a showcasing of Space: 1999's discredited season must be heralded with matter-of-fact scorn. I do not expect anything but a negative message in the bonus content not as yet specified.

All for today, May 26, 2007.

Two Saturdays ago, I went to Fredericton's Empire Theatres to view Spider-Man 3. What follows is my assessment of the opus that had my attention for close to two and a half hours, punctuated by needing to pull insufficiently popped popcorn from my teeth.

I have rarely been one to hew slavishly to the mark of negative critical opinion, especially if a movie or television show is imaginative and involves outer space phenomena. Critics since the mid-1980s do seem disposed to deplore any meshing of our humdrum present-day world, or even Earthman of the near future, with the extraterrestrial. And I knew that Spider-Man 3 was to feature as one of its villains the black gooey alien Symbiote that would become Spidey's fearsome opposite number, Venom. Plus an advanced Computer Graphic Image rendition of the Sandman character known to me from Spiderman (1967-70).

As a caveat, however, there were aspects to the first two Spidey movies about which I had had distinct misgivings. Apart from some moments in the first Spider-Man where I had glimpses of the confident and appealing super-hero to whom I thrilled in my younger days, I was uncertain of Tobey Maguire's gravitas as a leading man outside of the Spidey suit. I wanted to see Spidey fully costumed as much as possible, not an unmasked Maguire. Next, I felt the emphasis on a love interest was excessive and detracted substantially from the action quotient of the movies and also from the portrayal of Spidey as an altruistic crime-fighter (it was his girl-friend being in trouble in Spider-Man 2 that restored Peter's latent Spidey abilities, not his desire to be a force for good in New York City). And I did not think it necessary for every villain to have a "back story" and to be made sympathetic. Spider-Man 3 continued these troubling movie-writing processes to exceedingly unpalatable proportions while fumbling a coherent and cogent portrayal of conflict between Spiderman and his antagonists and failing to "take advantage" of material in the first two movies to "set up" the storylines in this one, particularly the name-dropping in Spider-Man of a Daily Bugle photographer named Eddie, the introduction in Spider-Man 2 of astronaut John Jameson (who would be the logical means for bringing the Symbiote to Earth), and what one would expect to be an antagonism in J. Jonah Jameson for Peter after Mary Jane left Jameson's son at the altar to instead be with Peter. All of these were ignored, and a series of too convenient contrivances were "cooked up", or rather "half-baked", to bring the Symbiote to Peter and to generate rivalry between Peter and Eddie Brock, who we are now told never was at the Daily Bugle before this third installment in the Spidey movie franchise. An unnecessary "back story" for the Sandman consumed much time in Spider-Man 3, and Sandy's motivations for villainy in the movie are disjointed at best, anyway. And in the main, we are subjected to heaps of relationship melodrama, much of which is contrived to give Peter cause to be angry so that the Symbiote can bond with him for a time, resulting in a, by Maguire, wince-inducing, unconvincing "turn to the wild side".

I would have envisioned John Jameson encountering the Symbiote in space or on the Moon, and a spectacular crash-landing of Jameson's space vehicle on Earth, Spidey assisting in rescuing John Jameson from the wreckage and thereby having his suit accidentally smeared with the black gooey Symbiote. Spidey soon has his new black skin and finds that he likes his improved abilities. Sandman, a villain by dint of simply being a maladjusted sociopath, his origin already having occurred sometime prior to start of the movie, would enact some fantastic and destructive crimes that black-suited Spidey would be in the process of foiling when Green Goblin Jr. Harry Osborn intrudes upon the scene and obstructs Spidey's effort to stop the Sandman, and then refuses to listen to Spidey's angry assertions that he did not kill Harry's father. Peter becomes frustrated and ever angrier with his inability to convince Harry of the truth. Following an inconclusive battle with Harry, preempted when Spidey must rescue some New York City citizens endangered in the destruction caused in the Spidey-Goblin Jr. conflict, young Osborn in addition to Sandman are still at liberty as a threat to Manhattan. Peter, driven by (1) his quest for Sandman and for Harry who is now lurking somewhere in the city and plotting a new angle of assault upon Peter/Spiderman, (2) the irritating presence of Eddie, whose work at the Daily Bugle is now praised by Jameson who resents Peter- until Peter humiliates Eddie over a fraud photograph, and (3) by an obsessiveness born of the Symbiote, can then have his relationship with Mary Jane start to sour somewhat like it does in the movie, with Harry's meddling complicating matters. Harry, becoming increasingly unbalanced in his exposure to the performance enhancer fluid, threatens Mary Jane's life at the church where Peter and she were going to marry, and Peter nearly kills him before realizing that the Symbiote is exerting undesirable influence. Peter determines that the Symbiote must be purged from him and the ringing church bell enables this. Brock, being at the church in an effort to redeem himself with photographs of the Spidey-Harry battle, is then exposed to the residue of the Symbiote, and Venom wreaks havoc for the remainder of the movie. Peter himself could eventually persuade Harry to believe that Harry's unbalanced father was killed by his own glider blades, and gain Harry's help with Mary Jane's life in danger by Venom. No need for Gwen Stacy. No need for overlapping love triangles. No need for a return by the Sandman until a further movie. It would still be a sizeable amount of story with which to contend, but it would flow much better than the bloated mess of improbable coincidences that is Spider-Man 3.

What we have is a Spider-Man 3 that looks like it became a victim of the dubious practices of the first two Spider-Man movies put into overdrive, and of director Sam Raimi's apparent dislike for the Symbiote from space that producer Avi Arad insisted be incorporated into the movie. Another overblown misfire by Hollywood.

Give me instead the Spiderman (1967-70) episodes produced by Ralph Bakshi which though delving into Peter Parker's personal life did not allow it to dominate or overtake Spiderman's super-heroism.

All for today, May 27, 2007.

On Saturday this past weekend, a mostly sunny, breezy summer Saturday, I opted for a different walking route than those which I have tended to chart over the past several years. And thus did I go by car to Fredericton's southside mall district, park the car at the Smythe Street Burger King, and stroll by where the old Plaza Cinemas once sat and then along Prospect Street, on which I had walked on many a day when I was in high school, to and from fast food restaurants and mall stores. The three years, 1981-2, 1982-3, and 1983-4, in which I was a student at Fredericton High School were, so far as my classroom and school corridor experiences were concerned, not very noteworthy, but I do vividly remember the routines as I passed through my last three years in the public school system, and how good my life was, all in all, away from school, back at home and around home. How pleased I always was, particularly in the warmer weather months, to be boarding the bus for home in the afternoons, and how often I thought of my friends around home and the fun to be had!

Yes, life was good then. Not so much when I was in Grade 10, but certainly in those years after summer of 1982 after Era 4 of my life had begun. Grade 12 (1983-4) was a very pleasant time for me. This past Saturday, as I walked the same route along Prospect Street that had brought me in 1981, 1982, and 1983 to the Wendy's restaurant from Fredericton High School and back again to the school from Wendy's, and as I crossed the soccer and football fields on the path I in 1983 and 1984 walked from Fredericton High to the then K-Mart Plaza and Burger King, and as I traversed the crosswalk at the traffic lights separating the southern grounds of Fredericton High from the Fredericton Mall, I was mentally travelling back in time, recalling the way of things in my life when I was putting one foot before the other in the same walking directions to same destinations more than 23 years previous.

How profoundly powerful is that longing to be again back there, in those bygone years in that era of my life! When I could depend, upon returning home, on seeing my friends, when my best friend Joey was just around a corner and up the street from me, when baseball games with Linden Crescent street-mate Craig and his company were an everyday occurrence, baseball games which on the whole were pleasureful and exhilarating, when my neighborhood was alive with activity, fun, and frolic and I was part of that, and when I could show movies and television series episodes newly acquired, to friends. What glorious days those were! They were not altogether perfect, to be sure. Era 4 was not perfect. But then, what in life ever is? But those days, the memories of which alive with nostalgia aplenty, were possibly the closest to fulfilling perfection that I would ever experience in Fredericton, or indeed anywhere, including Douglastown. I pitched in and won most of the baseball games I played, favorite entertainments were filling my videocassette storage drawers, and I had willing co-watchers of those, something that in today's age of DVD and far superior picture quality, consistently eludes me.

The world made sense then. Life made sense. There was no evidence of any hostility or rancor on the part of a sizeable, unified portion of the population, toward my favorite, elaborately imaginative television shows, cartoons, or movies. Casual, dismissive disinterest, perhaps, on the part of some random individuals. Disparaging remarks from typically abrasive early-teenaged peers at school. But not hostility or rancor in a unified movement of persons. Death had not touched my life beyond the loss of a few pets somewhat early in childhood (i.e. before age 10). My grandparents were alive. My long-lived third cat, Frosty, was alive at 7, 8, 9 years of age. I had experienced the divergence of a best friend, Michael from Douglastown, but I had other friends in Fredericton to compensate for that. I had known some very lonely times early in my Fredericton existence, but by 1982, those dismal days were seemingly behind me. Even if I did on an odd day have a less than edifying encounter with a friend of friends near to my Fredericton home, I could intuit fairly confidently that a new day's dawning would reset the relationship(s) to a positive aspect, that my friend(s) would be there for me again, and he or they were precisely that. Plus, there was no really jaded oulook upon anything I enjoyed watching. I was just starting to collect videotaped record of my beloved Space: 1999, and the episodes, despite less than top-quality picture, sparkled dazzlingly to depict a future that still seemed not only fantastic but within the bounds of imaginative possibility.

I miss everything that had been a part of those years. All of my friends and acquaintances. I miss some more than others, of course. But everyone had a place in my life back then, and we were all young, all of us unmarried, years away from the prospect of such commitment separating us from each other, responsibility beyond school studies was light, unfettered fun could be had day by day in the summer, arguably the best time of year, and I could come home from school on the final days of a school year, with the most exalted zeal for life. Of the 1983-4 school year, I fondly recalled, as I this past Saturday stood in front of Fredericton High School's western C-wing where the school bus loading zone was, the many sunny afternoons in autumn of 1983 on which I came out of the school, met my friend Tony (he was in Grade 10 when I was in Grade 12) who was in the process of boarding our bus (Bus 93) to Fredericton North, and talked with him about the Star Trek episode expected to air on WVII-TV that day at 6 P.M.. As I crossed Prospect Street to the Fredericton Mall, I remembered the Monday noon hours during which I, joined sometimes by Tony, would scurry to Beegie's Bookstore in the mall to look at TV Guide magazine's Maritime Canada edition with the next Sunday's television listings for CBHT in Nova Scotia and what Space: 1999 episode was going to air next down in Halifax/Dartmouth where someone was videotaping the television show for me. I remember coming home on the school bus, hoping to find, on the kitchen counter-table, videotape-recordings of Space: 1999 episodes telecast in Nova Scotia, and usually doing so, to my extreme delight! I remembered that in winter and early spring of 1984, I would spend time with Joey on Thursday evenings at his house on his invitation, and each Thursday at school, I would look forward to that. It was a very sweet year, 1983-4.

And I also have pleasant recall of 1982-3, too, of Spiderman being on CHSJ-TV each weekday afternoon at 4:30, and of watching some of the episodes, either on live broadcast or on my videotape-recordings, with Joey before going outdoors to play a winning game of baseball. Wonderful times, those were.

I shall be going back again to the Fredericton mall district this summer. The memories of the fourth era of my life are refreshed, reinvigorated whenever I indulge them from a location not revisited in years. And reminiscing about that era tends to bring tremendously pleasant feelings. I can channel my younger self and his much more idealistic, less defeated, less beleaguered frame of mind as regards favorite entertainment and the world and life in general.

But oh, how I wish I could go back and be in those times again!

All for today, Monday, June 25, 2007.

LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION DVD Volume 5 has been the subject of discussion of late on message boards on the Internet. Yes, I have broken my New Year's resolution to lurk on those in recent weeks. My curiosity as to DVD releases later this year was too powerful to resist a few glances at the cartoon discussion forums, among others. A preview trailer for Volume 5 in the LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION range has appeared on Popeye DVDs released recently. While I have had scant use for the gratingly voiced, non-intellectual, singing sailor of dubious tastes in women and foodstuff, it is certainly pleasing, as always, to have advance knowledge of specific cartoon selections for the fifth box set of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, in as much as the images from the preview are representative of cartoons to be included in Volume 5 LTGC (abbreviation for LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION). It would appear that the first disc is to be an amalgam of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, consisting of a mix of pre- and post-1948 cartoon shorts, while Disc 2 would be dedicated to director Bob Clampett (yes, still more Clampett adulation, as if there was not enough of that in LTGC Volumes 2 and 3) with a number of black-and-white Porky Pig cartoons. Disc 3 is evidently going to be a cartoon fairy tales compilation, and Disc 4 looks like it is going to be filled with 1930s cartoons. A dire prospect for anyone desiring a sizeable number of cartoons made after the 11 major Warner Brothers cartoon characters came into their definitive personas, i.e. Bugs the hero who retaliates when provoked, Daffy the hungry, vainglorious, excitable, and sometimes simply annoying promoter of self and various items, Tweety the innocent but spunky canary, etc... Only the fairy tale disc seems likely to be significantly satisfying to a Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies aficionado of my post-1948 leaning, and even that is likely to contain more than a few cartoons produced before 1948, and even before 1945. Several of the expected post-1948 cartoons do not appear to be most desirable, either. 24 cartoons have been identified as appearing in the preview trailer, and they are:

"Senorella and the Glass Huarache" (the final cartoon released to theatres before the 1964 closure of the Warner Brothers cartoon studio), "The Abominable Snow-Rabbit", "Paying the Piper", "Scrap Happy Daffy" (Daffy fighting Nazis during World War II) , "A Pest in the House", "Goldimouse and the Three Cats", "The Turn-Tale Wolf", "Buccaneer Bunny", "A Star is Bored", "Little Red Rodent Hood", "The Super Snooper", "The Stupor Salesman", "Hollywood Daffy", "The Old Grey Hare", "Red Riding Hoodwinked", "The Wacky Wabbit", "Bacall to Arms", "Little Red Walking Hood", "Prehistoric Porky", "Patient Porky", "The Daffy Doc", "Porky's Preview", "Milk and Money", "Bugs Bonnets".

While the list above may appear to be generous as regards post-1948 cartoons, of the cartoon selections not listed, many (including all on the expected Clampett disc) will be pre-1948, and outside of perhaps "Beanstalk Bunny", "Tweety and the Beanstalk", "A Lad in His Lamp", and "Yankee Dood It", the fairy tale disc is probably going to be weighted down with a plethora of pre-1948 cartoons such as "The Trial of Mister Wolf", "Foney Fables", "Cinderella Meets Fella", "Jack-Wabbit and the Beanstalk", and "Pied Piper Porky", in addition to those already mentioned.

Image from "The Foghorn Leghorn", one of the very few Foghorn Leghorn cartoon shorts available as yet on LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION DVDs.

We are five volumes into the LTGC range, and Foghorn Leghorn has been more or less sidelined since two cartoons in Volume 1. There have been no Tasmanian Devil or Marvin Martian cartoons since Volume 1. Road Runner cartoons have been sparse since Volume 2. Likewise, the cartoons pitting Tweety against Sylvester. Pepe Le Pew has been underrepresented, and there has as yet been no Hippety Hooper cartoons. "Ali Baba Bunny" is a possibility for Volume 5, though it being absent from the preview trailer is not a promising sign. "Often an Orphan", "Curtain Razor", "Tree For Two", "High Note", "A Mouse Divided", "Hyde and Go Tweet", and many other cartoons that received very early attention in the VHS videocassette and laser videodisc ranges, are still unaccounted-for, to say nothing of ever so many Foghorn Leghorn cartoons, and dedicating a whole disc to 1930s cartoons before releasing these, is questionable marketing practice. Doubtless, the preeminent denizens of the Internet message boards who are contemptuous of the corpus of cartoons aired on network television via The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show and its Saturday morning television predecssors, will rejoice in heaps of pre-1948, pre-1940s cartoons "making the cut" this time. But will the general public who, I am assured by direct-contact correspondents, still favor the cartoon characters in their post-1948 modes of conduct and colorful, diverse and abstract milieux?

Oh, and the box set cover is hideous. The artwork, if that is what it could be called, looks of the children's-drawing calibre visualizations which adorned the jackets of public domain videotapes of the pre-1948 cartoons. I note the black-and-white film reels that entangle Daffy, indicating, I think, that this is indeed going to be heavy with black-and-white early cartoons. Unless the extra features are especially enticing, this may be the first time that I opt to forego the LTGC box set and instead buy the economical Spotlight Collection containing half of the cartoon shorts and none of the bonus material in the LTGC.

At the end of the day, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour will be the only television show of my favor, to exist in my DVD collection solely as a set of non-commercial, i.e. "burned", DVDs made from inferior VHS videocassette recordings constructed to replicate as much as possible the television series as it once was. I even expect Rocket Robin Hood to eventually reach DVD and not The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour with its constituent cartoons and interstitial and wrap-around segments.

All for today, July 8, 2007. Expect more regular Weblog entries, and possibly Website updates, through July while I am on vacation from work.

One of the DVD releases that I was eagerly anticipating to counteract the doldrums so far of 2007 has been delayed until next year. Could the other intently awaited two DVD releases suffer the same fate?

Yes, the folks at MGM have decided to put the Inspector cartoon DVD release into limbo until at least January 15, 2008. Lack of cover art on Amazon.com had me perplexed and worried for some weeks, and now the reason is depressingly obvious. Delayed release.

Alarm bells are sounding in my head at the total lack of information surrounding the planned September 10 release in the U.K. of Space: 1999 Season 2, and moreover the Doctor Who- "Planet of Evil" DVD still has not been officially announced.

The poor year that is 2007 could indeed persist for the full duration of its twelve months.

To be certain, as more news of LTGC Volume 5 comes forth, my expectations of its heavy slant toward pre-1948 cartoons appear verified. However, Disc 2 will now be the fairy tales one, and Disc 3 the Clampett tribute, and Disc 4 the compilation of early Porky Pig and other black-and-white cartoons. The choice, then, would be to buy the LTGC and discard Discs 3 and 4 or to go for the Spotlight Collection, if it consists of the cartoons on Discs 1 and 2. Some choice. And it looks tilted in favor of the latter option if as is being reported the one noteworthy extra feature in the LTGC will be a documentary already available on DVD, namely Chuck Jones- Extremes and in-Betweens, a Life in Animation.

Is it 2008 yet? Sigh!

All for today, a depressing Friday, July 13, 2007.

Woe for the Inspector this day. No DVD for you.

It is July 24, and THE PINK PANTHER CLASSIC CARTOON COLLECTION: INSPECTOR CARTOONS DVD is nowhere to be found on the Internet or in the shops. Amazon.com has removed any mention of a release date from its product information Web page for the item, and all other Internet DVD vendors have the digital videodisc listed as "backorder only". There is zilch in information why this DVD release was essentially cancelled, though I do suspect that lack of consumer interest was a factor. I have rarely seen so scant an amount of pre-release reviews of a DVD on Amazon.com. The Inspector cartoons are the Rodney Dangerfields of the DePatie-Freleng/United Artists/Mirisch Corporation cartoon catalog; they have never received the recognition and respect that they truly deserve. It is always the Pink Panther and the Ant and the Aardvark that are cited when The Pink Panther Show is mentioned or discussed.

Could dashed hopes for Space: 1999- Season Two also be en route for DVD in 2007?

This does not bode for the remainder of 2007 and the DVDs which I have been anticipating. The planned U.K. DVD release of Space: 1999- Season 2 for September 10 is following the same pattern as THE PINK PANTHER CLASSIC CARTOON COLLECTION: INSPECTOR CARTOONS. No images of its cover anywhere to be seen. No Internet news about it. Paucity of pre-release attention. One should, I suppose, be grateful for small mercies on this last score, in that whatever attention the second season of Space: 1999 ever receives tends to be of the mindless "dissing" variety that has become the only legitimate reception to anything involving Space: 1999's latter 24 episodes.

Believing that I am desperately in need of a proper vacation to alleviate the low morale associated with an abysmal 2007, I am planning a few days' visit to the Miramichi region of New Brunswick for sometime next week, July 30-August 2.

This Weblog rarely receives readers according to my Geocities statistics records, and I am considering discontinuing it. I shall see how I feel about this and other matters when I have returned from my travel to the Miramichi area.

Word on the Internet is now that (surprise, surprise!) the U.K. Region 2 Network DVD box set of Space: 1999- Season 2 has been delayed from its initially expected release date of September 10, 2007, completely off of the 2007 schedule and with only a vague reference to sometime in 2008 as the new time for which the box set can be expected to be ready for sale. That is now two for three, of the DVD releases that would have made 2007 a good year for me in terms of digital videodisc acquisition, that have gone down the proverbial drain, the first of which being the DVD of Inspector cartoons that was supposed to "street" on July 24. All 2|Entertain/BBC Enterprises need to do is to delay the Doctor Who- "Planet of Evil" DVD into 2008, and I will have a "hat trick" for the fizzling of anticipated DVDs for 2007. It certainly will be difficult to put together a 10-best list of 2007 DVDs at the end of the year.

I still have no news to report about the Inspector cartoons DVD. It has completely "fallen through the cracks" in DVD release schedules, leading me to believe that MGM Home Entertainment had scant faith in the product (scarcely surprising given the near total lack of outcry at the cancellation of the DVD) and opted not to proceed with it. A possibility of it being held back to be released to coincide with the theatrical premiere of a second unneccessary Pink Panther movie with Steve Martin as Clouseau, is little comfort as such a movie is unlikely to reach cinemas until first quarter of 2009, at the earliest.

Is it just me, or are projected DVD releases for years like 2009 or 2010 or later distinctly uninspiring? The more aware that one becomes of one's mortality, the more it seems to be folly to plan purchases of DVDs that much in advance, even if I am still alive and healthy and financial circumstances and priorities for me then are still conducive to collecting audio-visual media.

August 16, 2007.

I have not been updating my Weblog often in recent weeks, the two reasons for this being a much-needed holiday in my early-childhood area of New Brunswick and the other being yet another foray (in sorry contravention of my 2007 New Year's resolution) into discussion on an Internet message board. The first of these was a rather expensive but essential and quite overdue, pleasurable experience in a milieu of quite cherished significance, commencing Monday, July 30 and finishing Wednesday, August 1.

On the morning of July 30, I stepped aboard a bus of the former S.M.T. company (now called Acadian) for transportation 100 miles north to the Newcastle-Douglastown-Chatham Miramichi region of my Canadian home province of the past 38 years. It was a drizzly morning, but the precipitation stopped part of the way on my bus journey, and the weather was mostly overcast and rather humid on my arrival in Newcastle at around 2 P.M. While on the bus as it was readying to leave Fredericton at 11:30 that morning and as it was en route to Miramichi City, and as I was looking through the bus window, I had vivid flashbacks to being on S.M.T. busses in the 1970s, mostly during the years that I lived in Douglastown but also following a stay in Douglastown with my friend Michael on Remembrance Day weekend in 1977, some months after I had moved to Fredericton. My mother and I traveled by bus from Newcastle to Fredericton several times in 1972-7 to visit my grandparents whilst my father needed our car to go to his workplace in Chatham; he would often join us later during a weekend at my grandparents' house in Fredericton and car-drive my mother and myself back to Douglastown with him. A particularly memorable weekend for such a procedure was that of May 16-19 in 1974. My mother and I were bussed to Fredericton on the Friday morning and met at the Fredericton bus depot by my grandfather, and my father did not come to Fredericton until the Sunday; he audiotaped for me in Douglastown on television station CKCD the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour episode (installment 10 containing "A Pizza Tweety Pie", "The Unmentionables", etc.) that Saturday and brought the audiocassette with the desired recording for me to listen to (I had seen it at my grandparents' house on CHSJ-TV on the same Saturday), when he came to Fredericton.

Just being on an S.M.T. (Acadian) bus again after not having been on one for many, many years was bound to have nostalgic effect. And I was going "home", to Newcastle, to Douglastown, the area where I had more or less come into being in terms of personality, sensibility, tastes. I had a comforting feeling within my soul that I had not experienced in a substantial number of years. I had not been back to New Brunswick's Miramichi region since 2000 and was uncertain of what I might find in my 1972-7 childhood community. But nonetheless, as the bus neared Newcastle and when I stepped off of the bus onto Newcastle pavement outside of the new Acadian bus depot situated at the Miramichi train station in Newcastle, I felt very mellow! I opted to travel as "light" as I could because I anticipated a lengthy walk from the bus depot to my hotel (the Lakeside Inn and Suites) on King George Highway in Newcastle near to the Dairy Queen fast-food restaurant and thence from the hotel to a rental car business many blocks distant, past the fork in the road where the Old King George Highway splits away from King George Highway main. The humid weather had me sweating as I walked the distance, stopping at Dairy Queen for a late lunch of my traditional Dairy Queen Newcastle favorite, a chili dog and French fries, cooked exactly as it had always been. And once I had the rental car, onward I went to Douglastown.

I was pleased to find the wood, brick, mortar, and pavement of "upper Douglastown" where I once lived, to be mostly the same as when I last saw it in 2000. The old McCorry homestead was still there, with a single change to the garage structure (windows replacing the rear-side doors facing the church hall behind it) and one modification to the windows in the house's back porch. The row of evergreens along the edge of the very back of the yard had been removed, but somehow their removal made the backyard look more like it had appeared in the early 1970s.

Two houses from my former Douglastown residence, I saw the grandparents of my childhood friends John and Rob. I then visited with my sitter on Kearney Street a couple of blocks past the old Douglastown Elementary School. Next, I surveyed the mall area of Douglastown before having Pizza Delight dinner in Newcastle. Then, a walkabout in downtown Newcastle, with the discovery that Gallivan's Bookstore, one of my most frequent purchasing stops in the 1970s, had ceased operations since my last Miramichi City visit in 2000. And following that, it was back to Douglastown and to the home of Sandy, mutual friend to a schoolmate and pal of mine, David F., and in the late 1980s himself a cohort in conversation on imaginative works of entertainment and real-life matters. Sandy and I talked until sunset about his school custodian work and some of the Hollywood opuses of cinema of the past 8 or 9 years. On the following day, Tuesday, three visits, one with my friend Michael's older brother and father in Michael's house which holds many memories, and the other two with the surviving parents, mother and father respectively, of my friends Kevin MacD. and Ev. Michael and Kevin MacD. are, I was told, successful in career and living happily with girl-friends in respective cities of Toronto and Calgary. Ev still lives in Miramichi City, in Newcastle on the Old King George Highway quite close to the trailer park where I resided in my pre-school years. He is married with a child and works both as radio announcer and educator. I knocked at Ev's door three times but was not there at a time when he was at home.

The remainder of my stay in the Miramichi area was spent driving my rental car about Newcastle, Douglastown, and Chatham and sightseeing, looking at many of the places known in my childhood, as possible. I spent a sizeable amount of time in and around the former Douglastown Elementary School , now the Rankin House museum and Miramichi tourism office, remembering many a school day in Grades 1 to 5. I also stepped out of the rental car and walked around the exterior of the Croft Elementary School in Newcastle where I would have attended school in Grade 6 had I not moved to Fredericton in 1977.

It is always gratifying to learn of my friends' lives and of their success. Still, in regards to my closest friends of my Douglastown years, 1972-7, I remain unable to meet with them, mend fences- if need be- in some cases, and bond with the people with whom I was boys- a powerful urge in my life lately in view of my cousin's death and my increased awareness of my own mortality and a need for contact with others of my age group. Most particularly with persons of that age group who were friends with me early in life, persons who could relate to how I was feeling under the circumstances, being of the same age- or nearly the same age. Such was a major reason for my wanting this year to go to Douglastown again after not visiting there for nearly 7 years. Not being able to see and talk with my old friends, Michael, Ev, Kevin MacD., John, Rob, and others, is, of course, quite naturally disappointing. However, I was pleased by the reaction by Kevin's mother to my bringing with me some Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour DVDs (my reconstructions of the episodes) to give to Kevin for viewing, and her comment that Kevin would very much enjoy those. Being able to bring to those friends something of our shared past and of my enduring, though beleagured, favor, compensates somewhat for not being able to re-meet them on my return to our past shared habitat. Channeling their potential enjoyment of the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour episodes gives to me something of a morale boost, as too did being in the places of my early childhood for a few days.

I am determined that I shall someday see those old friends again. Granted, my resolve, supported by hope, does sometimes waver with an incoming and outgoing tide of pessimism and despondency which I have been experiencing over the past twenty years. As I have not seen or spoken with those childhood friends in 15, 19, 27, or 30 years, the reality of such a time span can sometimes be quite taxing on optimistic expectation, even though I can, and do, dream about being with those friends again, still fairly frequently. One must never lose hope, as has been said in many an enjoyed entertainment, in many a statement on the power of positive thinking.

A day or two after my return to Fredericton from my Miramichi excursion, my mother referred me to a newspaper article about members of Generation X realizing that friends of one's youth are proving more and more to be the only real friends possible, that friendships formed and cultivated in adult life tend to be rather shallow, fraught with frequent misunderstanding, and short-lived. Such has been true for me, I am afraid to say. The newspaper item said that older friendships tend to survive while the newer ones "burn themselves out" within just a couple of years. And that this is because of a spiritual bond, a deeply rooted connection shared by friends in the process of "growing up", side-by-side. I did note that the newspaper article concentrated on high school friendships, mentioning practically nothing about the relationships between friends as juveniles or as pre-high-school teenagers. Perhaps my fate is sealed in as much as I did not have peer friends in high school in Fredericton? Might high school peers be the only possible source of lifelong friendship? No. I will not, will not, relent to such depressing thoughts. Not even while I experience further tribulation as a participant of, it seems, solitary persuasion on the Internet discussion forum.

So, yet again I ventured to offer comment on entertainments of nostalgic and aesthetic interest. Entertainments which are currently not in favor by the majority of Internet forum participants. On the Zeta-Minor Roobarb's DVD Forum, I joined a couple of discussions as regards Doctor Who. Specifically, the 1963-89 Doctor Who television program in terms of DVD releases of serials that I would like to see on shiny digital videodisc, serials of which my fidelity is seldom matched or appreciated, and the 2005- iteration of the eccentric Edwardian alien space-time-traveler concept, the aspects thereof that one finds to be not to one's liking. I put forward single postings in contribution to these two discussions and departed. I later discovered the standard retorts and the usual accusations of inconsistent or contradictory posturing and of being insufficiently considered. I did this time resist the impulse to defend my viewpoint. One of the challenges to me invoked a comparing of 2005- Doctor Who to Season 2 Space: 1999 and saying that if I like the latter for light-hearted characterization (which is a very simplistic, generalized assessment in any case), I ought to enjoy current Who and its lead character's pixyish demeanor. Oh, yes, the predicament of human wanderers through space needing some respite, some relaxation, from a protracted, hazardous transstellar odyssey should be regarded same as an alien Time Lord having lived for many hundreds of years and nearing the inevitable end of his regenerative cycle and life span. As though the circumstances of one are totally analogous to those of the other. When in fact the latter almost cries out for sombre characterization. But I did make my initial contribution to the discussion "threads" and "left it at that".

As regards Home Theater Forum's annual discussion of Warner Home Entertainment's upcoming LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION volume and the list of cartoon shorts to be included therein (that list has now been revealed in full), I lamented there being a mere nineteen post-1948 cartoons in this year's volume compared to forty-one pre-1948 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, a configuration of DVD box set content cheered, as usual, by the legions of pundits of Bob Clampett and other directors exclusively pre-1948 in work for Warner Brothers, as being ideal- and perhaps the way of things for all subsequent volumes if the Internet "right-think" "gestalt" community is to be the guiding force in cartoon selection for the LTGCs.

Where this "gestalt" came from and how it gained momentum is perplexing. A decade ago, Chuck Jones' cartoons of the late 1940s and the 1950s were considered the outstanding and essential creations of the cartoon output of Warner Brothers' studios, by most all respected writers on the subject of the animated cartoon. But today, one is unlikely to find even a sizeable minority of people on the Internet who believe the Chuck Jones cartoons of the 1950s and also those of Jones' cartoon-director colleagues, Friz Freleng and Robert McKimson, are worthy of much positive attention. They are not worthy as art, say today's experts, and in most instances not even as quality entertainment.

Yet, in deference to the work that had been done in studying and gleaning cogent interpretation from the works of Jones, Freleng, and McKimson of the 1948-64 time frame, in consideration of the very real statistic of there being some 11 to 13 "leading" characters of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies stable, some of whom sparsely represented thus far in the LTGC range after 5 of the 10 planned volumes therein, and in expressing a feeling of slighting in the fact that directors of exclusively pre-1948 are having dedicated DVDs centred on cartoons of their helming while Jones, Freleng, and McKimson have yet to receive that honor, I thought it necessary to state my objection to the way that the upcoming volume of LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION is oriented.

In reaction, I received the usual statistics report on cartoons released on the GOLDEN COLLECTIONs thus far per director and per decade of production, lectures from people young enough to be my sons (why has age distinction become taboo on the Internet, when everywhere else it is emphasized very much indeed?) on how "ridiculous" my complaining is, and quite soon after I replied to some of those retorts, there came the inevitable condescending call for me to put a stop to my "craziness", along with an assertion that the cartoons that I admire are not "as good" as the better ones of earlier years of cartoon output and a comment about me being obsessed and therefore, I presume, of zero credibility or worth as a writer on the particular subject. The same sort of tactic so decisively utilized against me regarding another opus of the imagination, Space: 1999.

What now always happens on this particular subject is, quite similar to what I experienced in Space: 1999 fan circles, that the people favoring the earlier "half" of the body of work, dominate the dedicated fan community. And anyone else bar myself who happens to think highly of the latter portion of the oeuvre, stays silent or "puts himself or herself down" if he or she ever feels so brash as to state a liking or fondness for the material being disdained, disapproved of, or downplayed by the prevailing "group-think". I bemoan the process by which the "group-think" dominates and by which it proclaims a "consensus" among all people of consequence. And I protest the preference of the members of that "camp" (to whom the deciders at Warner Brothers seem very much attentive) for LTGCs to be constantly constructed as 2/3rds pre-1948 cartoons. And so does it become me versus combined challenges to my position on the matter. My most vocal detractor(s) soon brand me a hypocrite for advocating less esteem, less representation on DVD for the "half" of the body of work that I do not rate highest.

Yes, I do admit to feeling some impulse to resent, frown on, or at least downplay, the earlier cartoons. But this is the effect- not the cause- of prevailing opinion on the Internet becoming contrarily locked-tight against the body of cartoons that I fancy and by which I am inspired. And also the effect of this opposing mode of thought becoming "right-think" while I was uploading articles about 1948-64 cartoon symbologies, etc., onto the Internet. I was actually willing to regard the pre-1948 cartoons (I shall call them pre-1948s henceforth in this Weblog, and their successors, post-1948s) as essential links in the Warner Brothers cartoon development chain and to be open-minded and receptive to a study of their possibly signifying or aesthetically interesting aspects, if articles in regards to subtle meanings and such, were forthcoming.

But I simply thought (and I have seen scant rational basis for rejecting such thought) that the cartoons with the many "star" cartoon characters in the personas and forms that are Warner Brothers studio signatures now and for decades prior to now, including the most celebrated cartoons of all time ("The Rabbit of Seville", "Duck Amuck", "What's Opera, Doc?", "High Diving Hare", "Birds Anonymous", "Hillbilly Hare", "Beanstalk Bunny", "Betwitched Bunny", "Lovelorn Leghorn ", "Little Boy Boo", "Claws For Alarm", "Ali Baba Bunny", etc., etc.)- along with other "second-tier" characters (Ralph Wolf, Sam Sheepdog, Goofy Gophers, Hubie and Bertie, Claude Cat, Frisky Puppy, Hippety Hopper, Sylvester Junior, Charlie Dog, the Three Bears) and their cartoons plus "one-shot wonders" (such as Michigan J. Frog in "One Froggy Evening")- are not only unassailable but the ultimate creations of the cartoon department at Warner Brothers. This was what authors of books were saying for many years. Further, relatively unheralded 1950s cartoons that I have been lauding with copious examples of nuance and meaning, that also came out of the post-1948 Warner Brothers cartoon "factory", ought also to be receiving favorable evaluation.

Indeed, if the people dominating the Internet in this "new age" of glory for the pre-1948s- and of eclipse of the post-1948s- were willing to give the cartoons of the latter "half" of Looney Tune and Merrie Melodie cartoon production their due appreciation, I would be inclined to look more kindly upon the previously made cartoons that did not inspire me in my upbringing and first decades of adulthood. Provided that compelling contemplation of them beyond praises of lively, extravagant animation, was put forward. But such Internet people are not so-willing. And so, I chafe at the idea that I must accept theirs as the definitive viewpoint, that I must "shut up" as I have been told to do in those precise words, and retire to my "cubby-hole" keeping my affection and appreciation of the cartoons unto only myself, with no hope for communing with other people in my particular range and extent of interest, now or in future, while LTGCs from now onward, are dominated by pre-1948 cartoons, and littered with unfavorable commentary at times on the post-1948s. Why cannot people comprehend my vociferous objection to this?

I am also lectured that not everybody was weaned exclusively on the cartoons aired on television within The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show. No, but how many people experienced in their upbringing only the post-1948 cartoons on television with no knowledge of the pre-1948s? And in comparison, how many people "came of age" solely on a diet of black-and-white Bosko, Buddy, or Porky Pig cartoons? Surely not as many in the latter case. And therefore, pandering equally to them, or more to them, as/than to the multitudes of my and preceding generations (casual though interest in the cartoons may be on the part of most such people) to whom the post-1948s were shown on television in compilations produced and logoed by Warner Brothers, does not seem sensible. I say again that there are very few persons who grew to adulthood with no awareness and liking of the Warner Brothers cartoons of 1948-64 or 1948-69, but there are, conversely, many, many people who "grew up" exclusively with the post-1948s, to which most of the pre-1948s are exceedingly dissimilar. I know that most of the contributors to Internet discussion of Warner Brothers cartoons favor the pre-1948s, but the general public at the present time and for the most part do not prefer those. Someday, maybe this will change, due mainly to the fact that post-1948s are not televised while the pre-1948s are aired on television specialty channels of expanding viewership- and I find that alarming.

Even now, despite The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show and its predecessors (every cartoon short therein post-1948) being touted as the most popular Saturday A.M. television shows of all time, nobody ever seems to join me on my crusade of sorts against the currently fashionable (amongst the "serious" cartoon buffs) movement away from the post-1948s. It may be because such people feel intimidated by the sheer number of the pre-1948s pundits and by the glib and cocky way that those pundits speak or write. Or it could be that they do not care anymore.

Whatever the reason, the dominant cartoon "fans" of the Internet are quite zealously confident that the "true" cartoon buffs who care to contribute to discussion on the Internet are all like themselves. It is only the general public, they say, who are insufficiently discerning to see that the "true" cartoon aficionados' favorites, the pre-1948s, are the ultimate, definitive, important Warner Brothers cartoons. Someone such as me, writing articles about the post-1948s, is an invalid entity to be generalized out of existence, more or less. Within another generation, the post-1948s will be marginalized so much on television and on commercial audio-visual media, that the pendulum will swing to the pre-1948s among by the then so much better learned general populace. So the cartoon buffs would have it, anyway.

Somebody needs to call a halt to this. Are the people of my generation who grew to adulthood with The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show to have no successors in generations to come? Are people with a more in-depth interest than most in the post-1948s really deserving of inconsequential minority branding? Now and even more so in future?

No. The post-1948s are the definitive, more important cartoons, and it is not only because I spent more than three decades of life being cognitively imprinted by them, that I think so.

I am not interested in the pre- and post-1948 equality of representation on DVD argument that keeps being thrown in my face. The post-1948s should be the dominant selections in number. Why? Because those are what feature major characters in their most famous, definitive, imaginative conflicts with their most noted foes in vividly visualized locales or historical times or literary situations, said characters' series of cartoons being mostly, near totally, or totally, of the post-1948 production time period. Those are the cartoons with the most variety of setting or situation and with the most vividly abstract and impressionistic depictions. Not that there are not some interesting locations or whatever in the pre-1948s, but there was a long development time through the 1930s that need not be completely brought to shiny digital videodisc (at least not in the main GC range) while so many of the 1950s cartoons are left in limbo. And as to the un-subtle wartime cartoons with ethno-racial stereotyping and humor based on the stereotyping paramount in the stories, if there were stories at all in the cartoons (instead of a sequence of sporadic wartime gags strung together or characters singing as they zanily act destructively), I note the historical significance of those though not necessarily their allegorical, symbological, or aesthetic contribution to the overall body of work.

It really was not until after World War II and where the triumvirate of Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Robert McKimson settled (with few exceptions) on character depictions and character definitions and character motivations and the directors and writers began to fully explore space and time as milieu for character interaction and conflict and moved away from the woodland Bugs-and-Fudd hunting cartoons, cat-and-bird-in-a-generic-house situations, and so forth, that the cartoons of Warner Brothers reached their ultimate successful format that would see television broadcast in intriguing compilations on a network basis for four decades. Not that some of these sorts of less imaginative cartoon prospectus stopped completely, but the incidence of them was less.

Such is my contention, and I have elucidated my bases for thinking thus. I do not advocate excluding the pre-1948s from DVDs (although I wish I had the option to do that like I was able to do with VHS videotape or laser videodisc in the days when MGM/UA Home Entertainment, not Warner Home Entertainment, held the videocassette and laser videodisc distribution rights to the pre-1948 color cartoon catalog). However, I would be in favor of limiting them, not the post-1948s, to 1/3 of the total of cartoon shorts in each volume. With regard to relative quality or significance of cartoons on either side of the 1948 "demarcation", I have presented quite, if I must say so myself, sophisticated articles in favor of suggestion and of correspondence of themes or images in post-1948s. These are insights that by right ought not to rest on par with mere opinions that cartoon A "sucks" or cartoon B is "lazy farce" or cartoon C is not as fluidly or abundantly funded and animated. A pre-1948 cartoon or indeed a feature-length movie today may have heaps of money spent in its production and be technically very energetic, and yet signify nothing for all of its sound and fury. At least, nobody to my knowledge has attested to there being symbolisms, foreshadowing, or subtly meaningful imagery or characterization in the pre-1948s. Only that the technical animation is of high standard. I do not dispute that. But surely that is not what cartoons as art form are only about, or even mainly about.

At the risk of appearing obsessed and having allowed myself to become agitated, I have commented at some length on this matter and propose now to put it aside and to concentrate on other subjects for awhile on this Weblog.

August 18, 2007.

Hot summer weather appears to be finished as the last few days have seen temperatures at or slightly below 20 degrees. Celsius, of course.

I have in recent days finally made a start on writing my Era 6 (1992-7) memoirs. I am fairly confident that I can stay motivated enough to bring that section of my autobiography to a finish before this year is done. Goodness knows, there is a paucity of very appealing (to me, personally) DVD releases to pull my attention away from writing. I am, in fact, feeling my usual very retrospective self this time of year, and even though Era 6 contains not much to reminisce about, I do have an urge to revisit the past, an urge that I believe I can channel into some substantial amount of progress toward an up-to-date degree of autobiography completion.

In the past week, I have found myself flashbacking to 1984. To August thereof, to be precise. To the days of a calendar that, from March onward, exactly matches, in terms of days of week in relation to month dates, that of this year. I have had vivid remembrance of the days of August 18, 19, 20, and 21, 1984 whereon I was playing outdoors around my house with Joey and other denizens of the Linden Crescent and Longwood Drive area of Fredericton North, spending a Sunday afternoon, August 19, 1984, with Joey closest by my side as people of our friendship or acquaintance were with us, watching television in my room with Joey on the rainy afternoon of Monday, August 20, and on Tuesday, August 21 beginning a series of days upon which I worked as a golf caddy at the Fredericton Golf and Curling Club and after work came home at around 3 P.M. to play baseball with Craig and company, and with Joey joining us for a number of those baseball games. What splendid times those were! How deeply do I long to be back in the way of things of summer, 1984, when Joey was with me for hours at a time and before I started to slump at baseball later in the year!

I am also very much aware that 2007 marks a 20-year time passage since the collapse of Era 4 (1982-7), the end of day-by-day companionship and communication between Joey and I and the near end of many of my other social connections in the Fulton Heights neighborhood of Nashwaaksis. It is a solemn thought, for sure. 20 years since so much came to an end. An unfavorable change of which many of the disagreeably new conditions still are felt in my life. It does not seem like that long ago. Nor do the many excellent times in the years before 1987. Indeed, if I could transport my consciousness today into my body of, say, 23 years ago, I could very easily slip back into living in the social structure and ways of my neighborhood of those days. I would naturally miss DVD, the one twenty-first century technological boon that I would miss (yes, I would gladly forsake the Internet), but I believe that I could cope with that. Indeed, in a very real sense, I never really left my pre-1987 world. Certainly not of my own accord and not without a tremendous amount of anguish, detrimentally protracted bitterness, and regret. Yes, quite a few seas have passed under bridges since the end of my best life era in Fredericton, and my perspective on that end and of its causes is, I think, far more accurate than it had been, but, oh, how I still miss how things were back before 1987, and my best friend and everyone else with whom I was socially a part, the pre-1987 youth group of Linden Crescent, Woodmount Drive, and Longwood Drive, and the immediate surrounding area!

While in Douglastown a few weeks ago, I was browsing through CD-Plus in the Northumberland Square (Douglastown Mall) when I discovered two box sets of The Forest Rangers- Season 1. Yes, that vintage, filmed-in-color CBC television series produced before I was born and airing in reruns weekday afternoons on CBC in the mid-1970s and reappearing on YTV in the late 1980s and on Showcase and on TV Land Canada in still later years, has been released to shiny digital videodisc by a Canadian company of DVD distributor. And earlier this year, so did the CTV family viewing television staple, Swiss Family Robinson. While I quite like to occasionally watch a Forest Rangers episode, I am not quite so dedicated as to buy Forest Rangers DVDs, at least not yet. Though who knows? If the relegating of pre-1990s television programs to more and more "fringy" specialty cable television channels, if not burying them altogether, continues, DVD may be the only hope of retaining them for one to watch and enjoy. The Forest Rangers is a prime example of a yesteryear television show that aired on a national broadcast network (CBC) then on quite widely accessible specialty television (YTV)- at least on a broadcaster that can be found within the Channel 2-to-20 range in most basic cable television packages, and then on an "upper-tier" cable television channel, and then on digital cable television (in Fredericton, on Channel 293), before disappearing from telecast. Swiss Family Robinson has been in oblivion, where airing on television is concerned, for many years now. Though I did watch it fairly often as a young lad (I seem to recall running home in Douglastown to watch it on a Friday night in 1974 or 1975, but that must be my memory tricking me, as Swiss Family Robinson was not made for airing on CTV until 1976), I am rather less inclined to want to revisit it, in that when I last had occasion to view it, on ATV/CTV in the mid-1980s on Saturday mornings, many of the episodes seemed to feature the little girl menaced by wild animals and screaming to extraordinarily high pitch. Still, Chris Wiggins was watchable, and listenable, as ever, and I seem to recall appreciating the family "spirit" of that television program about people of the 1700s marooned on an island- and with a moral to most episodes, too. I am glad that it, also, has reached DVD. I just hope that for these two television series, their time in the "DVD sun", as it were, is not short-lived like has been the case with television shows of the past having Canadian talent or production facilities involved in their making, Spiderman (1967-70), whose 2004 DVD box set from Buena Vista Home Entertainment has quietly gone out of print, being the most glaring example of late of this tendency.

The question arising is, what about another DVD release of a television program of the past which had some substantial contribution by Canadians? Rocket Robin Hood. Even a very ephemeral DVD box set, available commercially long enough for me to purchase a couple of them, comprising the totality of the Space Age exploits and excursions of Rocket Robin and the Merry Men, would be sweet indeed. And the whole of the 52-episode run of the television series could fit onto 4 DVDs, if the character descriptions were only used once as a bonus on the final DVD in the box set instead of within every episode.

If The Forest Rangers and Swiss Family Robinson can be put onto commercial DVD, even if just in Canada (as seems to be the case now for those), then why not Rocket Robin Hood, too? Second and third seasons, at least, for their wildly impressionistic visualizations and the extremely imaginative stories.

August 22, 2007.

A peculiar mix of weather this past week. First windy and very cool with morning frost warnings, and then later in the week so hot as to require activation of air conditioner.

The episodes of The Edge of Night at AOL.com have reached January, 1980 in sequence of presentation at the AOL.com Website. Storylines are now at where Dr. Miles Cavanaugh has repeatedly and unwittingly drunk drugged H20 from his office water cooler and is having paranoid delusions of his wife having extra-marital relations with Police Chief Derek Mallory. Meanwhile, Draper Scott is about to learn the truth about his mother-in-law Margo Huntington's negative interference in his being considered for a New York law firm job, and Margo's refusal to divorce her gold-digging, philandering husband, Elliot Dorn, is setting into motion her eventual murder by the increasingly unhinged has-been actress, Nola Madison (who drugged Miles' water after Miles discovered her barbiturates-laced fruit cake given by her to Deborah Saxon, with whom Nola's estranged husband was in love). Nola's latest love interest is Elliot Dorn, whom she wants Margo to divorce. Draper will be blamed for and found guilty of Margo's murder and sent to jail, escaping police custody during a train wreck (a la The Fugitive) and losing his memory, to be brought into the household of the Gault family. On watching the episodes again, I can discern how intricately the story strands were developed and knitted together. Again, The Edge of Night can be viewed at AOL.com at http://video.aol.com/video-category/edge-of-night/1917.

This past week, I attended the Fredericton Exhibition for the first time in twelve years. Although I am much too old for any of the amusement park rides and felt rather too self-conscious about playing any of the games, I did enjoy the stroll through the Exhibition grounds and buildings, and the taste of popcorn after a few swallowings of cotton candy along with the accompanying smell of candied apples and the noise of the rides and the young people on them was a pleasant and tender reminder of yesteryear, when I was a wide-eyed child at the Miramichi Exhibition and an older though still fun-loving person on the earlier side of twenty years-old in Fredericton. When I could come home from the Exhibition in either Chatham or Fredericton and be assured of a visit quite soon from a friend or friends. Ah, the memories. Sigh.

It looks like the Doctor Who- "Planet of Evil" DVD release is coming on schedule in October. I feel confident that it shall redeem the otherwise unsatisfying and sometimes frustrating year that has so far been 2007.

September 9, 2007.

Space: 1999 paperback novels acquired by me in September, 2007. My review of book shown here on left, The Forsaken, is rather mixed.

This month, I decided, finally, to buy some of Powys Books' Space: 1999 paperback novels. The price of them at $15 in American greenbacks had been something of a deterrent. As too had been the intention in the books to try to bridge Seasons 1 and 2 of the television series and expand upon both of the seasons with original storylines spun from each. While in principle I should welcome such a project (Season 1 expansion excepted as I do not think there to be room, chronologically, for further stories), I was dubious as to how an expansion of the cosmic peregrinations of Space: 1999's Moonbase Alpha would be handled, especially in a bridging of Seasons 1 and 2, knowing as I do how the fans tend to allow their be-all-and-end-all anti-Season 2 bias to jaundice, or maybe I should just say, shape, their conception of what would be acceptable in additional storytelling, i.e. downplaying or disparaging style, situations, places of Season 2 and emphasizing those of Season 1. However, I learned that the paperback novels that have been available for the past few years are soon to go out of print, and I therefore thought that I had better plop down my money and buy them now if I was ever to read them at their current cost.

And so, I did precisely this, ordering The Forsaken and Survival from Amazon.com at a combined price of thirty U.S. dollars, plus postage fee. Actually, early in 2006, I spent upwards of one hundred U.S. dollars to buy the hard-covered Space: 1999 Year 2 Omnibus directly from Powys Books, having not been able to resist temptation to see Michael Butterworth rewrite his Space: 1999 second season episode novelizations to adhere them to the sequence of episodes delineated by Dr. Helena Russell's Moonbase Alpha status reports. I discovered that further work had been done by the editors at Powys Books to tie the Space: 1999 Year 2 Omnibus (I have come to loathe the designation of the second season of Space: 1999 as "Year 2", but reasons for that are best left for my memoirs still in process of assembling) to story arcs established in the paperback original novels. I found the Space: 1999 Year 2 Omnibus to all in all be an admirable and satisfying effort. I did think many of the so-called fixes to alleged "plot holes" to be unnecessary and by times arguably not in accordance with the dates given by Dr. Russell in the television series' episodes or certain other story developments. And I found Michael Butterworth's preface to the book rather less than pleasing, to pit it mildly, its message being to the effect that the story material is of no artistic value and ought to be way beneath a really mature, intelligent person's sensibility, but that the author condescends to write the Space: 1999 Year 2 Omnibus manuscript, not because Space: 1999 is intrinsically "any good" but only out of regard for the legions of kind, productive people to whom it appealed when they were unsophisticated teenagers.

So typical this is of the way of things of the past 20 years. Space: 1999- Season 2 must first be derided utterly before it can be presented to a consumer. I seem to recall being told that the BBC in the United Kingdom scorned Season 2 of Space: 1999 in its "coming next" promotional advertisements of its broadcasts of same in the late 1990s. No doubt the fans who hate Season 2 are delighted to see or hear this negative branding of the unloved, by them, second Space: 1999 production block, in an officially sanctioned product, yet, by Granada International- and never does anybody see or care how blinkered, and guiding and encouraging to be blinkered, that the branding is. Needless to say, Mr. Butterworth's preface put a sour note straight-away upon my experience of reading the Space: 1999 Year 2 Omnibus. If only he could have simply said that it was his pleasure to rework his episode novelizations for the splendid folks who supported the initial product, and refrained from the unfavorable designation of Space: 1999 as insufficiently kitschy kitsch, among other things, I would have been deeply grateful and appreciative. However, as I have been frequently told, I, being a keen aficionado of the content of Season 2, am of miniscule significance, am deluded, and ought never to count. Oh, yes, of course.

But as regards Powys' other Space: 1999 efforts, including the Space: 1999 Year 1 Omnibus which has been expected to be released for sale sometime these last couple of years, I was prepared to suspend misgivings about the potential portrayal of the differences between the two Space: 1999 seasons and about the all too probable miscarry of an attempt to explain the differences, and to give to The Forsaken and Survival an open- and fair-minded reading.

Having digested nearly all of The Forsaken, into which I chose first to delve as it was said to occur before Survival in Moonbase Alphan timeline, I was pleasantly surprised by many of the concepts and by the story structure and by the very intricate and quite poetic way that writer John Kenneth Muir crafts and tells his opus. The essential elements to the novel's premise are plausible within the context of transition between Seasons 1 and 2, the retooling of Alphan outlook on the Moon's odyssey and on the possible purpose of the Alphans' plight, plus the departure from Alpha of the Paul Morrow character and the rise to prominence of Tony Verdeschi. It is a tale of tragedy for the indigenous and nobly intelligent populace of a planet ravaged by a catastrophe brought about by the runaway Moon's passage through and killing of a space brain in a late Season 1 episode of the television series, and of the sense of responsibility that the Alphans have for the cataclysm on the planet. There is contention over whether Alpha ought to colonize the planet whose ecosystem despite becoming inhospitable to the native life form, has evidently stabilized and is indeed quite fit for settlement by Alphans. Divided opinion on Commander Koenig's decision not to proceed with an Exodus leads to Paul Morrow and some other Alphans defying their Commander and going in their own, ahem, breakaway group to establish their new world on the alien planet.

I must say that I am impressed by how seamlessly this storyline leads into the apparent abandoning of belief in- or reverence for- a beneficent, guiding force in Alpha's destiny (Season 1's underlying theme), and into a sense of foreboding on Koenig's part that the universe is soon to become quite considerably less favorable, less ordered (mind, I do have issues with the high incidence of death in the first season as regards the contradiction of such with this concept, but anyway...). The result being a move of operations control and other key Moonbase sections to underground level, installation of defensive laser batteries, and so forth. While I do not hold with the notion that these changes need only be started, put into effect, this late for the wandering Moonbase (I prefer to think that these projects were already in progress long before the purported time of The Forsaken), I cannot snipe at the thought that went into explaining how the decision by Koenig to go that route, came to be made, and how such a decision is portrayed in the book.

But where it does propose a very compelling, effective, in many ways apropos segue into Season 2, The Forsaken creates different and unnecessary new complications where conjoining Seasons 1 and 2 is concerned. Which leads me to my outstanding caveats concerning Muir's Space: 1999 novel. Which I propose now to list.

First, I quibble with the coarse language spoken on occasion by Alphans in the book. The Alphans of the Space: 1999 that was endeared to me in my youth, I had always regarded as being further ahead in human development than to resort to uttering crude slang even as interjections at times of pique or frustration. Damns and hells, maybe, but nothing referring to body parts or their emissions. I looked to the Alphans as role models while I was subjected to so much, shall I say, undistinguished vernacular in junior high school. Alan Carter declaring a word that the hosts and guests of television shows that I have produced are forbidden by government guidelines from using, is an unsettling discovery, for sure, especially in an otherwise gracefully penned work of published future space fiction. I cannot say that it does not surprise me, what with the proliferation of profanity-laced television in the past twenty years and in the mired, dystopic template of futurism made exceedingly popular by way of the Alien movies, etc.. But I still would wish the ethos of Moonbase Alpha in the Space: 1999 television series and any "spin-off" works, to aspire to a superior level of conduct in a somewhat immaculate envisioning of the future.

And this brings me into my second complaint. I wince, nay, cringe, at the sexual situations presented in the book, situations that code the Alphans as a sexually promiscuous people on their technological base, promiscuous enough at least to indulge in fornication followed by attempted contraception. Again, as noted above, I hold the characters of my favorite space-fiction future to a higher standard than I would, say, James Bond. Indeed, it is Mr. Bond's sexual behavior that I find to be the least appealing aspect of him as a heroic character (but I digress). The imposition of the idea of Alphans having sexual liaisons at various stages of the Moon's flight through the cosmos, during Season 1, before Season 2, or within Season 2, I find to be objectionable. I especially rail against such indulgence between the Commander and Dr. Russell in The Forsaken, alluded-to by Helena with some very Pierce-Brosnan-James-Bondian innuendo. It is the same gripe that I have against the new, 2005- Doctor Who television series, this supposed requisite today of all entertainments, in whatever the medium or genre, to put the consummation of sexual attraction, or even mention of such attraction, into stories, on the basis that the beholder cannot accept anything other than a sexual relationship between characters, even characters existing in a different reality to that of "post-modern" Western society. Different-reality characters with perhaps a higher, better purpose to life than gratifying urges to have sex, mate, and perpetuate the ancestral gene. Higher purpose like survival in previously uncharted territory, or the expansion of knowledge, or existing in an environment in which abstaining from sexual intercourse has become essential and custom. Or in which sexual behavior, if it is occurring, is not the motivating force in the lives of the characters and is not mentioned unequivocally. I mourn very much the loss of the wholesome, imaginative television program or whatever, that leaves sordid details of character relationships to the viewer's imagination- if that is what his imagination fixates upon. At no place in either Season 1 or 2 of Space: 1999 is it incontrovertibly said that the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha are engaging in sexual relations. There is some flirtation, some kissing, statements of love between characters (love which could be interpreted platonically), but no actual references to characters "doing the deed", not even the married couples. Some Alphans say that they yearn for an Exodus to a planet on which they may settle and raise a family, but it is not an empirical fact from the television series that "hanky-panky" is occurring on Alpha Moonbase as it drifts through space- and I prefer things that way. Koenig and Russell have separate living quarters, as do Verdeschi and Maya or Morrow and Benes. My parents' generation had no need to resort to portraying sexual relationships in genres like science fiction, to gain viewership; this generation to which I belong cannot conceive of a group of heroes who transcend those impulses that I would say tend to preoccupy and prevent man from expanding his species' horizons. I find that sad. Very sad. Generation X- and younger generations- cannot accept a depiction of some future community without some gratuitous sex within that community- and I do indeed think the sexual situations in The Forsaken to be gratuitous, like the utterances of coarse language. They could be removed from the book's narrative without altering the direction or the import of the story. Even a character's pregnancy is not absolutely necessary to further the book's story plotting; some other contrivance could serve as vitally, and, in my view certainly, more tastefully.

Next, and I have a hunch that I will have this same problem with Survival, I must bicker with the author's decision to divest Alpha of an additional sizeable amount of its population. With all of the losses of personnel already tallied through the course of Season 1, too many as it is, if the population count of 297 in Season 2's "The Metamorph" can be at all reconciled, albeit with "doctoring", with the 311 men-and-women-on-Moonbase-Alpha stated near the end of first episode "Breakaway", there can be no more copious mortalities or multiple numbers of desertions. I also find it that much more difficult to assimilate the relaxed, light mood in less stressful times in many Season 2 episodes with what has ostensibly happened earlier in the Alphans' errant journey, when authors of appended encounters for Moonbase before Season 2 are adding to the crew loss sum. I do not think it necessary to "kill off" the "Alpha Child", Jackie Crawford, which is how Muir chooses to commence the book. Alphan trepidation about child-rearing on the Moon could as easily be established in recalling what had happened to the newborn Jackie in the "Alpha Child" episode itself, i.e. his possession by an alien. No need to terminate Jackie's life to inaugurate the storyline of The Forsaken. And mention of a medical condition making conception necessary in a short time if Tanya is to successfully bear a child would be sufficient to give her motivation for wishing to leave Alpha for planet Pyxidiea; no need to have her already pregnant. Further, the number of Alphan migrants, eight, I believe, to the planet in The Forsaken could be reduced by half- or even more than by half. Just how does Muir and the other authors of Powys Books intend to find the extra Alphans to bring Moonbase population to a level that is at all compatible with 297 stated in "The Metamorph" and with the mood after awhile in Season 2? Even some contrived occurrence like additional people located after "Breakaway" or Helena resurrecting previously dead Alphans when she performs her restorative miracle in "Matter of Life and Death" can only be stretched so far. Fitting Seasons 1 and 2 together is a difficult task under the best of conditions. Why complicate it unnecessarily?

Do not tell me. I know. They will say that one should just ignore what is said by Dr. Russell in "The Metamorph" and disregard anything else in Season 2 that does not accord with the large number of casualties and deserters postulated by Season 1 and writers of adjunctive stories? Because, of course, it is Season 1 that has the inviolable integrity and Season 2 that has not. Right...

Ultimately, I find much to enjoy and admire about The Forsaken, and I can accept its premise as canon, though not the full execution of the premise as written by Muir. I prefer to regard The Forsaken, like I do the reworked episode novelizations in the Space: 1999 Year 2 Omnibus, as an alternative telling, with an author's embellishments, of the odyssey of Moonbase Alpha. The Alphans do come upon Pyxidiea and its inhabitants, and the outcome is the same, with just some of the specifics of the encounter and the outcome happening differently.

Now, then, I move onward to reading Survival. I have a hunch I will depart much the same way with the writer, Brian Ball, of that as I do with The Forsaken and Muir. I am not looking forward to Victor Bergman's demise (my old friend Tony, as he was in the late 1970s, would have issue with me for feeling this way). I dislike the idea of any major character meeting death, and I do not think Bergman dying is really necessary, when him being lost somewhere in space and still alive would serve much better in segueing into Season 2. But this for another time.

September 15, 2007.

Do I have powers of incredulous prescience, or just some occasionally validated unconscious intuition as regards seemingly unlikely events? In above entries in this Weblog, I muse about a potential though ostensibly very doubtful DVD release of Rocket Robin Hood in Canada. And news has today come of a Rocket Robin Hood DVD release one month from now. My Rocket Robin Hood Page has all of the details currently extant. Fourteen DVDs for 52 episodes seems to be quite an excessive expense of media for content, especially considering that all 52 episodes of Spiderman (1967-70) fit on six DVDs. However, it is still "early days" yet. More information will be forthcoming- that is of course assuming that I am not dreaming this. It is admittedly difficult to believe that Rocket Robin Hood DVDs commercially distributed by Warner Brothers Home Entertainment could be true, in fact.

If it is true, then I cannot help but remark at how ironic, how very ironic, it is that Rocket Robin Hood will fully reach DVD before The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour or all of the constituent cartoon shorts thereof.

This weekend, I have pulled my Space: 1999 Season 1 DVDs from shelves and given to each of them a spin in my computer's DVD player. For some reason that I cannot fathom, the Space: 1999 episodes look better on my computer monitor when I watch them in the daytime than after dark. This might possibly be due to a quirk of my computer screen, or possibly my eyes focus better when I am closer to having awoken from a night's sleep.

I listened to some of Gerry Anderson's commentary on episodes "Breakaway" and "Dragon's Domain" and endured about a half-hour of him on each of the two episodes. Good grief! The man is such a broken vinyl record! Always the same stories about telephoning Sir Lew Grade in London from the Beverly Hills Hotel to negotiate for Martin Landau and Barbara Bain's salaries, and about Abe Mandell of ITC Entertainment's New York City office coming to Pinewood Studios and insisting on use of monsters and then reversing by 180 degrees (something that Season 2 producer Fred Freiberger did not remember happening- although this may have been memory loss on the part of the elderly Freiberger when I interviewed him in 1999) and wanting monsters gone. Accompanied by the usual lament about monsters in corridors as though those items in combination are somehow especially reprehensible. Would a monster in a spacious field be somehow less objectionable? Always the same old propping-up of himself as the supreme creative force behind Space: 1999, UFO, etc. while ignoring his ex-wife Sylvia's contributions and blaming everybody but himself for the alleged wretchedness of everything in Season 2. It is very old indeed by this juncture, though the legions of fans who worship him as God II cling to his every re-re-reiterated word.

The Gerry Anderson interviewed in an issue of Starlog magazine in the late 1970s appears to be a far humbler, more likable man than the Gerry Anderson of today. I refer particularly to his comment back then that while he would tend to think that the more serious science fiction buff would prefer Season 1 of Space: 1999, the larger proportion of letters that he had received seemed to prefer the second season. Such has a truer, more balanced, more diplomatic "ring" to it than latter-day Anderson's statement (on the Fanderson Space: 1999 Documentary) that virtually nobody whom he has encountered has any liking, let alone preference, for Season 2. Historical revisionism at work, folks. I think back, way back to the day in 1978 when I reacted to my friend Eric who, quite the provocateur with a zest for the "winding up" of Kevin McCorry, wrote a letter to Gerry Anderson that started with, "Dear Gerry Anderson, I hate your guts." I feel tempted to revise my action, or at least my recall of it, on that day which was to indignantly tear Eric's letter to shreds, and instead encourage him to mail the letter. Freedom of speech and so forth- as people of contrary persuasion frequently affirm to me. Not that he would have sent it. Like I say, he was just "winding me up". But anyways....

I certainly hope that he (Gerry Anderson, not Eric- though Eric would be a more agreeable speaker, no doubt, on the topic) is not interviewed for the Granada/Network Space: 1999 Season 2 DVDs should that still theoretical DVD box set come to reality, but my hopes where attitudes as regards Space: 1999 go, are typically dashed.

September 23, 2007. My father's seventy-ninth birthday is tomorrow. I will buy his birthday card today on my afternoon walk.

Autumn has manifested itself quite abruptly this week as the leaves of trees in the Linden Crescent area changed color and then fell to the more and more yellowy-grassy ground within a matter of a few days during which I was working in the cellar (I call it "the dungeon") of the New Brunswick Legislature building.

I have not had time this weekend to do much else but search for all of the necessary elements for reconstituting four of my articles on the Warner Brothers cartoons ("Hyde and Hare": An Overlooked Masterpiece, "Deconstructing" Bugs: The Bugs Bunny Cartoons of 1955, Nuance and Suggestion in the Tweety and Sylvester Series, and Taz) after their sudden, mysterious disappearance from the Webspace at Golden Age Cartoons. I needed to go to the Internet Archive Website and from that procure the most recent cached version of each of the four aforementioned articles, then find all of the pictures, save all of these to my computer, and upload them to my Geocities Webspace, once my capability to login to manage files was itself restored after an inexplicable day-long lapse in the Geocities Pro login option. Spooked by these untoward events, I also labored to save everything on my Website, plus all that is written by me at Golden Age Cartoons (and the pictures on those Web pages), onto DVD+R. My weekend computer time has been almost entirely spent in these tasks. As of this juncture, my Website, except for the Eras 6 and 7 sections of my autobiography on which I still have work to do, is available. Whew!

September 30, 2007.

Last evening, I was in quite the nostalgically pensive mood as I did my after-dinner walkabout in Nashwaaksis. I have found myself lately to be drawn to the location of what used to be the baseball diamond at Park Street School field. So many memories there are of baseball games played. And even with the baseball diamond some years ago bulldozed and replaced by a soccer field (soccer seems to be the "in thing" nowadays in Fredericton, for some unfathomable reason), as I strolled around and stood in the approximate place where the batter's box used to be and looked out onto the grassland into which I used to hit singles, doubles, triples, and home runs, I could imagine myself 20-plus years ago playing baseball with friends, as though it were yesterday. And as usual, I become misty with longing to be back in those days. As I persistently try and fail to reconnect with old friends, the more sentimental that I become for the days when we were quite readily together. Not all baseball games played on that field were pleasant ones, it is true. But I do remember the good ones. And this September, I have been especially inclined to recall of the ritual, several calendar dates consecutive, of evening baseball played at Park Street School field in mid-September, 1983. Some of the very best baseball games that I ever experienced as key participant were in September, 1983. Truly a superlative time in my life that was, with Space: 1999 episodes coming to me from videotape-recordings from Halifax, Nova Scotia CBHT broadcasts, my Spiderman collection on videotape having reached completion, my best friend Joey favoring me first and foremost that summer, and my playing of baseball at a pinnacle of success that it would never again attain. Ah, to be team captain and have people actually want to be on my team- and to win, as I did, on the pitcher's mound! Oh, how I wish I could have friends with me today if for nothing else than to walk with me on that field and remember!

As I proceeded forth past Park Street School to MacDonald Avenue, Maple Street, Fulton Avenue, and the location of the former Pic N' Puff store (now a disused empty space in the York Plaza), thoughts expanded to contemplating my persisting affiliation to works of entertainment of 30 or more years ago which are fading further and further into the past so far as popular culture is concerned, aired on ever more obscure television channels, if at all, and in most cases scarcely available in local stores even when released on DVD. More and more, I find myself watching the television shows and movies of my past and everlasting fancy not mainly out of admiration for those for themselves. Giving them a spin in my computer's DVD drive is less and less for the intrinsic artistic or entertainment value of those works than it is for my personal history in which they were integral, and for the memories of being close to my friends, or with my friends, as those television shows were run and rerun, as I acquired them on videotape either by way my own videocassette recorder or that of someone hundreds of miles away. That marvelous conjunction of euphoria felt at incorporating those into my videotape collection with the pleasure of being with friends, watching them with friends who would indeed sit with me and watch them, and playing outdoors with those friends before or after the viewing of those items.

It is certainly true that what it was about those productions that appealed to me 25, 30, 35 years ago that caused me to want them in my life at the time then, still is of some substantial interest to me yet. Yes, that special something (or those special somethings) about them that impressed me, that "spoke" to an interest of mine or to something about me, so as for me to want to own them and share my enjoyment of them with friends decades ago, will continue to be compelling. However, I find my urge to watch, to listen to them, to stir my soul with them to be much, much more to do now- and probably more and more in future- with the tender memories associated with them, with how connected I feel through time to my old friends, than it does with some purely intellectual or academic appreciation of them for their value unto themselves as productions. I watch them more for emotional reasons now than for cogitative purposes, than for high-minded consideration about meanings in the subject matter, than for the imaginative portrayal in many of them of life in the future, life in space, on other planets, etc.. It certainly helps for the viewing experience now to be unencumbered by audio-visual flaws, faded film prints, poor quality multiple-generation videotape copy, or whatever. DVD has freed one from the gripes about such matters that could detract from becoming immersed in the memory of seeing the entertainment item for the first time or first half-dozen times. My connection to these works is deeply personal, rooted in past experiences cherished, experiences contributing to defining of myself and to my humanity and my fondness for old friends. It follows that I can become livid with anger when ignorant, arrogant people for whom nostalgia, sentimentality, and such mean nothing, subject them to scathing reprovals, full of gratuitous criticism concentrated on alleged, perceived, damnable flaws, and using comparisons of them to dross, heedless of their beauty as already highlighted by myself and others. And denouncing those qualities to them that did impress me when I was on the younger side of twenty (and I do not concede that one's tastes during one's upbringing are patently unsophisticated and worthless). "Mindless dissing", someone once coined the terminology, belched by people who accuse the works and by extension those persons to who they have appeal as being mentally inferior. Though I am endeavoring to maintain an unperturbed, unexcitable approach to living after my cousin's death this year, it becomes rather a trial when I must continually be subjected to attitudes such as the aforementioned.

But returning to the notion that a television program or theatrical motion picture or such, retains my fidelity as its sensitive viewer and appreciator in no small part because of the history that I have with the entertainment item as regards connection through it with old friends and old times in which I was with those friends, I would note that I have in recent years had occasion to watch many 1959-64 Twilight Zone episodes and the whole of Season 2 of The Wild, Wild West. Excellent television shows from a time period in entertainment when imaginative scope was certainly quite broad, and in the late 1960s in The Wild, Wild West's case, there was much color, much action, much larger-than-life heroism. I had little past experience with The Twilight Zone and had never seen The Wild, Wild West before the late 1990s. And when I did finally watch them to an appreciable extent or for the first time, I saw and admired the fancy, the speculative wonderment, in their conception and writing, and as television productions they are fairly impeccable. Yet, I could not put myself into the world of their stories. I was detached and impassive to their charms. I felt no hankering to retain them on DVD or yearning to share them with friends (if such were possible, that is). Lack of association with them in those times in my life when I was very happy in the company of friends, meant that they bounced off of me rather than be absorbed. This could account a bit at least for my lack of favor for post-1990 entertainment. Just a bit, as it is still the aesthetics or willful lack of it, the ridding of costumes of color, the emphasis likewise on "toning down" color in story settings, the reduction in musical tempo to little more than a hum or a dirge or to graceless, characterless stock instrumental action music, in television and cinema post-1990 that tends to repel me.

Rocket Robin Hood and Doctor Who- "Planet of Evil" appear to be on schedule for DVD release this month. I have been informed also of The Mighty Hercules (the cartoon television show thereof produced in the 1960s that aired prolifically in Canada in the 1980s) being due to reach DVD early next year as it has been digitally remastered alongside Rocket Robin Hood. Will wonders never cease! Even in this age of the ever-receding presence and influence of pre-1990 entertainment in mainstream media, some little-acclaimed television shows of yesteryear are making the move to shiny digital videodisc whereas commercial VHS videocassette always eluded them. Now, then, just where in Hades is the Inspector?

October 1, 2007.

A photograph of Linden Crescent, Fredericton as seen from the McCorry driveway on Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, 2007.

It is a warm and sunny Thanksgiving weekend in Fredericton and most of New Brunswick.

Toward the end of the past week, I was approached by a representative of CBC News to be interviewed for a news story on the DVD release of Rocket Robin Hood. In my e-mail correspondence with the CBC News representative, I learned that (here it comes) the Rocket Robin Hood DVDs have been delayed from their expected October 23 date of release to sometime in late November. Definitely, 2007 should, for my intents and purposes, be forever known as the Year of the Delayed DVD. Thus far, almost every by me eagerly anticipated DVD release this year has been delayed, and in one case canceled, and even the one notable exception, a Doctor Who serial coming on DVD this month, is expected to be slowed if not stalled in transit due to job walk-offs by workers at U.K. Royal Mail. And I am unable to find a vendor of DVD that offers courier as an alternative. Negative karma or just plain bad luck working on me this year? Something is amiss.

2007 has not been the worst year of my life, not by any stretch of the imagination. That dubious distinction goes to 1996. But it has been a very, very disappointing string of months, and not only with regard to digital videodisc releases. It suffers profoundly in comparison with 2006.

I have expressed interest, albeit warily, in the interview by CBC News. Never having been in front of a television camera in such capacity, and certainly not on a national basis, and scarcely being the most extroverted person to walk Canadian soil, I am uncertain of how I will perform in the interview, especially on a subject that I know has a quite large number of scornful detractors. Nonetheless, I would be foolish to not "go for it" particularly as so many other people with Websites have been interviewed about their imaginative fancies, and it would mark rather a definitive turnaround in a poor year. That is assuming the Rocket Robin Hood DVDs are not delayed right off of the 2007 calendar. I should say that I am not certain yet as to whether the interview would be part of a televised story, or of one aired on CBC Radio. But either way, it would be quite an honor, even if it is pertaining to a television show considered to be the worst animated cartoon production ever by historians of animated cartoons.

I have finished McCorry's Memoirs: Era 6 and uploaded it onto my Website. Not the happiest five years of my life and quite the chore to write about at length, but the 1992-7 part of my life story is finally completed for my Website and I can now progress to remembering the years of Era 7. Rather more upbeat. For sure more optimistic in its early years and certainly more successful in terms of employment. A pity that so much of my hope as regards the Internet proved to be unfounded. But in any case, I have a few optimistic years about which to write in weeks to come.

Another Sunday, October 7 photograph of Linden Crescent, Fredericton, this one snapshot from a position at near centre of Linden Crescent South.

All for today, October 7, 2007.

Fredericton is now in the midst of a string of rainy days.

On Tuesday this past week, I was contacted by John Klawitter, lyric writer for "It's Cartoon Gold", the song for the opening of all installments of the 1984-5 season of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show. Through correspondence with Mr. Klawitter, I have already done a substantial expansion to the part of my Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour Page concerning the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner 1984-5 season, adding an original lyric sheet of "It's Cartoon Gold", a corrected transcript of the lyrics, and information on Mr. Klawitter's process of writing the lyrics and producing the 1984-5 Bugs Bunny/Road Runner opening under the watchful eye of Steven S. Greene of Warner Brothers. There is more to come, including an interview with Mr. Klawitter and audio-visual material, i.e. demonstration sessions of the song and the reactions to it by groups of children in 1984.

Work has commenced on McCorry's Memoirs Era 7. I am confident of completion of it by year's end. I also this week upgraded "Hyde and Hare: An Overlooked Masterpiece with some added elaboration on items discussed in the paragraphs about Irv Wyner's impressionistic backgrounds and the pigeons in the park, and I moved some of the pictures around for improved effect.

My Doctor Who- "Planet of Evil" DVD is now en route via courier, avoiding the mail gridlock in the U.K. caused by rotational worker walk-outs at Royal Mail. I hope to have that DVD in my possession by late this coming week. Beyond this, I have no update on anything DVD related. Rocket Robin Hood DVDs still are expected in late November at the earliest. No information on the Inspector and U.K. Season 2 Space: 1999 DVDs. The former has evidently been indefinitely "hoosegowed", and the latter is in limbo, or Hyperspace. I have the distinct impression that the A & E Space: 1999- Season 2 DVDs are the best that are likely to ever exist, even if they are very close now to being out of print.

I called at my old friend Joey's house yesterday afternoon for a visit, but he was in bed with influenza. Knowing as I do how unpleasant that is, with or without an added onset of bronchitis, I certainly do not envy him but do wish him a speedy recovery. I have not as yet had occasion to tell him about the upcoming (barring any untoward development; 2007 being what it has been for DVD delays or cancelations, I cannot dismiss the possibility of such) Rocket Robin Hood DVDs, news that will no doubt bring a smile to his face.

I have of late been enjoying CBS television network promotional advertisements available on YouTube. Particularly those for 1979, 1981, and 1982, all of which have brief clips from The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show. The 1982 promotional advertisement is particularly outstanding. I am going to chance placing the Hyperlinks to them on this Weblog. The Hyperlinks follow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJtlNLcVK9I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDZ9LXKm-0c&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv8oKj93EIg&NR=1

All for today, October 14, 2007.

Leaves are nearly all off of the trees now in Fredericton , and raking and bagging of leaves is now the order of the days on which I am not at work. With this plus some positive developments as regards DVD- and therefore the watching of DVD, my time for writing Weblog updates is decreasing of late.

Doctor Who- "Planet of Evil" DVD, whose release in Britain in mid-October, 2007 was coincident with a labor dispute at Royal Mail, requiring me to order the DVD via courier if I was to receive it without an unusually long wait.

The aforementioned DVDs include that of Doctor Who- "Planet of Evil", which, due to a Royal Mail labor disturbance in Britain, I had sent to me by courier- and the courier was no faster, really, in conveying my parcel to my door than the regular mail would be under ordinary conditions. And it sure was expensive- and this is not including the import fees that I usually do avoid on individual Doctor Who DVDs valued at under 11 U.K. Pounds when those are dispatched to me via mail. But I dare say that the price was worth it, even if the wait had me beside myself with impatience and anxiety. I was unable to counter such with tenets of my Dale Carnegian training; I wanted this particular DVD so very much.

The Doctor Who Restoration team did an outstanding job in bringing the four-part Doctor Who serial to pristine-looking condition, and the bonus features, though rather less and shorter than on DVDs of some other more heralded and more popular Doctor Who stories, were of a commendable standard, quite informative, and indeed fun to watch. Audio commentary, too, was very much appreciated although Tom Baker did seem rather subdued compared to how he has been on other DVD commentaries. Perhaps it is the rather serious, even quite intense, premise and storyline of "Planet of Evil", that made Baker feel less ebullient than usual.

Rocket Robin Hood DVDs are now scheduled to be released in Canada on Tuesday, November 27. No change on the expected contents. Two box sets, one with the first twenty-six episodes and the other with the last twenty-six of Robin's cosmic excursions of beneficence. The new projected date of release does coincide with the opening of the New Brunswick Legislature, an event for which my services as television producer will most certainly be required on November 27, and then on subsequent days as the Throne Speech is debated on the floor of the Legislature. I doubt that I will have much, if any, time to watch the Rocket Robin Hood DVDs until the following weekend. Assuming, of course, that they are released on November 27 and there are no delays in the acquisition of them.

Another of my DVD purchases in October was of a box set of the television series, The Prisoner. It was released in the U.K. by Network DVD and has contents of very impressive quality.

I have also this week acquired the new U.K. DVD release of The Prisoner, and though I rarely like to "double-dip" on television series DVDs, this particular upgraded release so much surpasses the A & E DVD box set in terms of picture quality and bonus features, it is like Space Age coming after Stone Age. Network DVD always does seem to do a superlative job on its television show DVD releases, and The Prisoner, like Space: 1999- Season 1, is a definite feather in the Network DVD cap. Now, then, where is Season 2 of Space: 1999? Are the potential buyers, what few of us there doubtless are, to have to wait until autumn of 2008 to add it to our DVD collections?

Website updates? Work progresses on McCorry's Memoirs Era 7. I have expanded slightly on a couple of paragraphs on my Pink Panther Show Page. And an interview with John Klawitter, writer of the "It's Cartoon Gold" introduction to The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show in 1984-5, is only awaiting pictures before I open a Hyperlink to it from my main Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour Page. Mr. Klawitter has been sending to me .wmv files of "It's Cartoon Gold", and the quality is marked improvement over what I currently have on DVD-R by way of a videotape-to-DVD transfer of an off-broadcast videotape-recording. Success in playing the file without it freezing at where Porky Pig responds to the song's announcement of him, has so far been elusive.

I rather fancy the idea of expanding my Rocket Robin Hood Page in the same way that my Spiderman Page was increased, with comprehensive season guides, and hope to do so upon receiving and watching the Rocket Robin Hood DVDs. A new computer purchase is also imminent, and I do intend to have the capability with that new machine to frame-grab from DVDs, in order to put more pictures onto my Web pages.

Episodes of The Edge of Night continue to be added to AOL.com at a rate of three such per week, and the storylines have reached a resolution in Dr. Cavanaugh's unwitting drugging of himself via tainted water in his office, with paranoia- and schizophrenia-inducing amphetamines, while Draper Scott goes on trial for the murder of Margo Huntington, a murder committed by the same lady who had turned Miles' water dispenser into a "Speed" cocktail. It is going to be difficult to follow the television serial after Draper develops amnesia after the wreck of the train on which he had been en route to prison, in that I remember the amnesia lasting for months as Draper thinks he is Kirk Michaels while in the home of the annoying Gault family. I recall tiring very much indeed of that storyline as it dragged to completion late in the summer of 1980.

Hours at work do not give to me much occasion to watch the new Teletoon Retro specialty cable television channel, but I have seen a few of the Porky Pig Show installments included on the Teletoon Retro television program roster, and the installments are same as those listed in my Other Television Shows Starring the Warner Brothers Cartoon Characters Page's Porky Pig Show section, though without the opening and the closing credits provided by Hal Seegar Productions for the 1964-7 Porky Pig Show. It is a treat to see cartoons such as "Punch Trunk", "Gopher Broke", "Riff Raffy Daffy", and "A Hound For Trouble" again after a half-dozen or so years, cartoons that Warner Brothers seems to be not in a hurry to include on LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION DVDs. By the way, LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION 5 is due for release this coming Tuesday. For the first time in the history of that DVD range, I have not pre-ordered from any Internet vendor, and nor am I in a hurry to go to a Fredericton store to purchase the item.

October 27, 2007.

Image of the front cover of LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION 5, of which two DVDs were added to my collection of digital videodiscs on November 1, 2007.

On Thursday, November 1, I went to the Regent Mall up the hill in Fredericton South and bought LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION 5 from the HMV store, at cost of $59.95 in our soaring Canadian currency. Taxes extra, of course. I went first to Wal-Mart to see if the DVD box set might be on the shelves there for a somewhat reduced price, but all that Wal-Mart had was LOONEY TUNES SPOTLIGHT COLLECTION 5, and not very many of those.

There, now. Have I paid my dues with the dedicated Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies fans? The ones for whom DVD box sets of mostly pre-1948 material are the ideal treatment for Warner Brothers cartoons. The ones who insist that every individual component of the entire Warner Brothers cartoon oeuvre spanning 1930 to 1969 is all of equal candidature for selection onto DVD- but that of course the cartoons made in the first decade and a half of the Warner Brothers cartoon studio's life should be given precedence and most attention and reverence. And the ones who maintain that, whether one likes the early Warner Brothers cartoons or not, one should happily buy the pre-1948-cartoon-heavy DVD box sets, forget all about the cartoons after 1948, after 1950, after 1954, which no ser