I have a few DVDs of this show in my collection. I could watch them all day. Groucho Marx was awesome in them, and I almost want to get a Netflix subscription just to watch more.

Still, there is a story behind how the show didn’t get destroyed, and Groucho’s grandson tells the tale. A warehouse in NJ — not a half hour from where I live, I imagine — shipped the reels to Groucho rather than destroying them. Groucho didn’t realize quite how many reels there were:

I rushed over to my grandfather’s house and sure enough, there were five UPS trucks parked in front. Each driver was wheeling dozens of boxes of film into the house.

“Where would you like us to put all of this?” one of the drivers asked me. “There are over 500 boxes and each box contains ten reels of film.”

5,000 reels of film, I thought to myself, as I watched the small army of UPS drivers putting boxes in any empty space they could find, including a now-vacated bedroom that once belonged to Groucho’s last wife from whom he was now divorced. I couldn’t help thinking this was beginning to resemble a scene from a Marx Brothers film, as boxes of film were stacked to the ceiling, literally taking up entire rooms. I also thought back to the man from NBC, who told me there were “a few boxes of film,” an understatement if ever there was one.

By the time the UPS drivers left later that day, my grandfather’s house – which was quite large – was filled from end to end with boxes of “You Bet Your Life” reels. And even though I knew my grandfather was angry, I was grateful that we had managed to save “You Bet Your Life” from extinction by NBC.

The following is not surprising. All it does is help to confirm everything we’ve known for the last twenty years: That Paramount committed theft in the creation of Deep Space 9. Obviously, this is the internet and the source needs to be questioned, but he did include a full name, so there’s some believability there.

More at the link. This is excerpted from a comment by Steven Hopstaken:

Paramount and Warner Bros. both agreed that Deepspace 9 would be the show that would launch the new network and there wouldn’t be room for two “space” shows on the network. I was told they purposely took what they liked from the B5 script and put it in the DS9 script. In fact, there was talk of leaving the B5 script in tact and just setting it the Star Trek universe. I had to keep rewriting press release drafts while they were trying to make the final decision.

• io9. “The Strange, Secret Evolution of Babylon 5“

This here is your MUST READ article of the day. Every word of it is true, and it IS a shame that Disney so easily dismisses DuckTales and its cohorts from the Disney Afternoon days. Shameful, really.

DuckTales, the most successful show of Disney’s short-lived television-animation renaissance—and a show that kicked off a brief interest in syndicated afternoon animation from a host of media companies—has mostly disappeared from the limelight, to the degree that the company released around three-quarters of its episodes on DVD, then simply stopped. What’s fascinating about this is that DuckTales is a vastly entertaining show, with quality traits that go beyond its catchy theme song, and it’s incredibly easy to gobble up episode after episode of the thing. Plenty of cartoons from the ’80s and ’90s fail the nostalgia test, simply falling apart when re-examined through the lens of adulthood. DuckTales isn’t one, and returning to it as an adult reveals that there are hidden pleasures there that go beyond memories of what it was like to watch as a kid. For a show so breathless and action-packed, DuckTales takes its time, and that makes all the difference.

• via DuckTales invented a new animated wonderland—that quickly disappeared | TV | 100 Episodes | The A.V. Club.

Watched a classic episode of “The Smurfs” a couple weekends ago with my daughter. The episode centers on Jokey Smurf betting that every other Smurf that they could NOT perform the action they’re best known for for a day. If they could do that, he wouldn’t play a joke on them for a full year. Vanity had to not look at himself in the mirror. Grouchy couldn’t frown. etc. etc.

And, one by one, they all fall. (To be fair, one gets caught by Gargamel, who is ultimately defeated by his own inability NOT to open an early birthday present from his mother that was actually a Trojan Horse sent by Papa Smurf, proving that a little willpower isn’t such a bad thing.)

I couldn’t help think that this show laid the groundwork for the classic Seinfeld episode, “The Contest.” The Smurfs were a good decade or decade and a half ahead of their time. If only Vanity Smurf had walked into Jokey’s mushroom house, smacked his money down on the table and said, “I’M OUT!” as he looked into his mirror…

Apple CEO Tim Cook did two interviews that showed up today. The first appeared this morning via Bloomberg Businessweek. It was heavily linked across the internet. It was presented in question and answer format, and rambled on for many screens. There’s a lot of material to read through with that interview, and it’s worth it. It’s an exciting, interesting, informative piece.

Then, tonight, Brian Williams had the first television interview with Tim Cook. At least, that’s their claim. I didn’t see much of an interview in there. The piece spread out across two segments of the show, but Tim Cook talked for about a minute and a half of it. Most of the piece was a monologue by Brian Williams describing Apple’s successes and challenges, often accompanied by a 5 seconds response from the CEO before quickly cutting away to the next thing before he had a chance to really answer anything or discuss a single topic in any depth. It was the most frustrating waste of twenty minutes I’ve felt from watching TV in a long time.

When Brian Williams tries to get Tim Cook to spill the beans on how Apple would transform the TV industry, I was hoping Cook would say, “By obsoleting you, Brian.” No such luck.

Maybe next year.

By the way, the big news out of the two interviews is that Apple is planning to produce one of the existing Mac lines in America. I’m laying my money down on it being the next Mac Pro. Why? Because that machine is so damned expensive that its buyers won’t notice the extra few hundred they’ll have to spend to have it built here. You can’t make a $999 laptop on an assembly line in America, but a $3000 desktop machine? Sure, that’s a possibility.

This is a question Williams put to Cook during the interview. He asked Cook how much more an iPhone would cost if it were built in America. And just as Cook was starting to explain why the problem isn’t so much the cost as it is the manufacturing talent, the tightly-edited piece quickly whip-panned onto the next segment.

Somehow, Williams was getting together with Josh Topolsky from The Verge for a special live chat about the interview tonight. I don’t know what they plan to talk about, since there was barely any interview shown on my television screen…

The one thing YouTube is missing is a simple feature that most audio players/podcast players have today: a fast-forward and rewind button. Yes, you can scrub through, but it’s inexact and tricky. Give me a 10 second rewind button and a 30 second fast-forward button and I’d be happy.

While you’re over there, check out these recent videos:

• Dave Brubeck improvises on a well-known Russian ditty. And then a violinist joins him out of nowhere and the whole thing gets cooler. Many years later, that violinist talks about it in the YouTube comments thread.

• Alicia Keys sings the Gummi Bears them song. With a straight face. She almost breaks at the 2:30 mark, but she holds it together. Awesome.

• Kottke finds the mesmerizing 13 minute video of Russian cars crashing. Then he goes a step further and discovers why Russians have dashboard cameras so often.

The creation of Lost defies nearly everything we know about how successful television shows — or great ones — are made. The idea for Lost came not from a writer, but a network executive. The first writer on the project got fired. The replacement creative team had a fraction of the usual time to write, cast, and produce a pilot episode. The executive who had championed the show was himself fired before it ever aired. One of the two creators all but quit the moment the pilot was finished. Nearly every creative decision at the start of the show was made under the assumption that it would never succeed. Everyone believed it was too weird, too dense, too unusual to work. And it may have been. But it worked, anyway.

• An excerpt from Alan Sepinwall’s new book, The Revolution Was Televised

On NBC

Pentatonix is going to win. It’s easy to see that right now. Barring a pair of horribly out-of-sync and out of tune performances in the same night, they’re your winners. Let’s break this down:

Afro-Blue: Confused group. Great at doing jazzy reimaginings, but often overthink it or get too complicated. They’re up and then they’re down over and over again. Some of this is the judges’ fault. In true Idol fashion, one week they tell the group to cut back on the jazz stuff, then the next they complain they’ve lost their jazz identity. Afro-Blue is confused.

Vocal Point: Some minor pitch issues, too distracted by school, not quite strong enough. What is their sound? They don’t have the lead man everyone will identify with. Nice guys, but not different enough from the pack to stand out as something that will win.

Urban Method: There’s still a problem with the women in the group. Even when the judges praise them — see the country song this week — they still sound a little insecure to me. And that weakness has plagued them throughout. They can’t rely on the rapper to carry them, but he’s their strongest part. He’s energetic, comfident, comfortable on stage, and one of those rare things — a rapper who can smile. I hate rap, but I enjoy watching him work.

Dartmouth Aires: Traditional college group. Will probably make it to Top 2 or 3. But they’re just too big, and their sound often gets lost in a chorus of voices. They have a couple of amazing leads to give them a character to hook onto and an identity (which is what doomed other groups like the Yellow Jackets), but the rest of the group is just sorta there. If you dropped four people, you probably wouldn’t hear the difference.

And, realistically, in setting up a tour in support of an album,bnobody wants to fund 15 band members for a road trip. Brian Setzer can only do it with his orchestra by going to Japan.

Pentatonix: The future of a capella. Small group makes them financially feasible to produce. They have a cohesive sound. They’re not a band slapped together for this show that hasn’t gelled. These guys are for real. Every person is strong and can handle the spotlight. They have the most charismatic, energetic, and creative vocal percussionist on the show. Their creativity is wild, and even when they pull it back – see country week, again – they make it a better song.

Pentatonix will win. They’re the group this show was created for, and the group Sony would be most happy to have.

At this point, if I had to guess, I’d say the eliminations will go in this order: Afro-Blue, Vocal Point, Urban Method, Dartmouth Aires. There’s lot of wiggle room in there, though. The judges are just looking for a reason to bounce groups at this point. They’re all great groups, but if they give the judges a reason to kick them off the show at the end of an episode, the judges will jump all over it. So, one bad performance each week will doom a group.

And it’ll be a lot of fun to watch, because it’s some of the most creative singing television has ever seen, week after week.

When it’s all done, I plan on buying the first season of the show (which I’ve never seen) just to see more of Delilah’s Amy Lynn Whitcomb. She had a very poor choice of hairdo back then, but it’ll still be worth it. Please note that the safest Delilah ever was on this show were the weeks Whitcomb held the lead vocal. The second they let her sink into the background, the group had immediate issues.

When Christina Perri’s debut album came out a couple months back, I wrote up a song-by-song review. For some inexplicable reason, I never posted it. Here’s one song’s review:

“The Lonely” is a dark song, and the most likely to be used on “So You Think You Can Dance” this season. I haven’t checked her tour schedule for the summer, but I’d bet anything there’s a hole in it sometime in June or July for Perri to be there for a victory lap to perform a song from this album. The blatant reference to “Dancing slowly in an empty room” in this song makes it an easy choreographer target. (Though “Bang Bang Bang” would make a kick-butt Quick Step. ;-) I love the piano progressions in this song. It acts as both piano and percussion in the song, which is a nifty trick.

Guess what song they used on “So You Think You Can Dance?” this week? Perri is out on tour and not available to perform on the show, but I almost nailed that prediction…

I DVRed the whole thing and fast-forwarded through the first half, with a smattering of stuff from the second.  Some initial impressions:

• Cute, Motorola.  He’s reading “1984″ in an ad for the XOOM tablet, featuring the masses looking like Apple Zombies.  Cute.  Congrats on being the first Android 3 tablet, due out just in time for the second generation of Apple’s tablet.  Good luck with that  OK, so it’s actually looking like it wil be out a couple months sooner — but what about that $800 price tag?!?  Yikes!

• Very subtle of “Cowboys Vs. Aliens” to mention that it’s by “The Director of Iron Man” just before the shot of the energy cannon thing in the guy’s hand.

• I loved loved loved the “Captain America” trailer on just about every conceivable level.

• The Darth Vader commercial was as cute as all the pre-SuperBowl hype had it being.

• I’m glad I wasn’t watching the halftime show with my parents.  It would have been tough explaining how The Black-Eyed Peas qualify as music. But, hey, at least we know that it wasn’t all lip-synched for a change.  Who in their right mind would lay down a track that awful-sounding to lip-sync to?

• The half-time show is about spectacle, though, so good for them on that.  You can’t beat a “Tron” half-time show for that, can you?

• Congrats to Usher on not pulling a groin muscle with that last jump over Will.I.Am.

• GoDaddy isn’t even trying anymore, is it?  Their commercials are just teases for their website, which I have no interest in visiting afterwards.

• The SuperBowl is like the “Ed Sullivan Show,” isn’t it?  Who’s the big name guest star in the audience tonight, kids?

• Did that just make me sound 30 years older than I actually am?  Yes, I guess it does. I’ll shut up now.

• OK, one last one: Heard the Groupon ad was insensitive, horrible, and pure evil.  So I watched them on-line. I laughed out loud, mostly because I knew they were the kinds of ads that would piss off a certain type of people.  I am evil, and that’s OK with me.

The new Drew Carey-hosted improv show is going to be five days a week on the Game Show Network and feature most of the same gang that you’ll remember from his sit-com and the American edition of “Whose Line Is It Anyway?”

Includes Kathy Kinney, Colin Mochrie, Greg Proops, Brad Sherwood, Ryan Stiles, all familiar from previous Carey improvs; Heather Anne Campbell, Chip Esten, Jonathan Mangum, Sean Masterson.

The official word: GSN (Game Show Network) and Drew Carey introduced today the line-up of talented actors and comedians who will join Carey in DREW CAREY’S IMPROV-A-GANZA, his new original, primetime daily strip show for GSN. Carey and his fellow cast members will create a lively, unpredictable and hilarious half-hour of improvised sketch comedy, complete with audience participation. DREW CAREY’S IMPROV-A-GANZA will premiere March 28, 2011 on GSN.

I read up on concert photography prior to going to the show. (IShootShows.com has some awesome information. Start there.) I knew I didn’t have the equipment for it, but was prepared to give it a shot, anyway. All the concert photographers will tell you to have a relatively new camera with great high-ISO performance, and lenses that are at least f/2.8, if not wider. Even better: Shoot prime lenses.

Me, I had a nearly-five year old model Canon XTi camera, one 50mm f/1.8 prime lens, and a 70-300mm f/4-5.6 zoom lens.

Uh oh.

But two things work in my favor with that: First, I had a great seat. We were off to the right side of the stage, eight rows off the floor, just about even with the front of the stage. So, basically, we were just over eye level with the Wiggles, and not that terribly far away. My 50mm lens would just squeeze in the entire stage. My 70-300mm lens would give me portraits of people close up, and full body images of performers at the far end of the stage.

Second, Lightroom has good noise reduction features. LR3 is amazing, from what I’ve seen, but I don’t have it yet. (Won’t work on my ancient PowerPC-chipped Mac.) But LR2 does the job just swell, thanks. Plus, I don’t plan on blowing any of these images up that large, so I don’t need them to be so clean.

I had to shoot the entire concert at ISOs 800 and 1600 (mostly the latter) but I got images that were surprisingly usable. Plus, it’s the Wiggles: They light up the whole stage. And I’m not trying to get pictures of the people in their seats where it’s dark. I’m happy to have them disappear.

Still, shutter speeds weren’t always super fast, so I had to do two things to compensate:

First, I shot in burst mode. For every picture I wanted, I’d take three, figuring one of them would come out sharp enough.

Second, I chose my moments. Having watched the Wiggles concerts before, I knew some of what I was in for. I knew the poses that specific Wiggles would hold. I knew where in the song the most movement would be and so should avoid those spots. So choosing more pictures of people closer to me (more open f/stop at closer distances on my telephoto zoom) at times when they’d strike a pose was a big help.

But I still had one LARGE lesson to learn, and it’s the one that hurt the most. I’ll discuss that on Monday. (CLIFFHANGER!)

The Wiggles ride in on their Big Red Car

Do not watch their television show.   It’s that simple.  From the conversations I’ve had with people who don’t like the Wiggles, the one thing I notice about them is that they had to sit through endless loops of the TV series, which is a cheap green screen affair that’s soul-crushing to adults.  Kids eat it up, but adults want to grind their teeth.   Here’s the trick: Ignore the TV show and buy the two concert movies.  Just enjoy them for the music and the theatrics of the live stage.   Yeah, that’s right: The Wiggles are a Live Band, not an Album Band.   Coming soon: Lots of photography lessons learned from photographing a Wiggles concert.

Wiggles Big Big Show Concert DVD

• My first DVD player (03 July 1998) was a graphics card and drive for my IBM Aptiva computer. I watched movies on a 15 inch CRT screen and loved the heck out of it. I remember how impressive was it to see movies like “The Rock” for the first time in widescreen in the middle of a computer monitor. Even at such a tiny size, you still knew the picture quality was much greater than VHS.

So damned primitive, it was. Now, my 46″ widescreen television is too small for me, but I know there comes a point where one has to make a choice between art and finance. You can only afford so much. . .

• My Commodore 64 monitor was used at one point as a TV, also. I had an older VCR hooked into it. I remember pausing through “Tiny Toons” learning to draw from that.

• That first DVD player didn’t last long. Bought a standalone DVD player that Christmas for $199, I think. Maybe $299? Tough to recall. Looked much better on the 27 inch TV screen in the living room, complete with surround sound system that was a repurposed Cambridge Soundworks system sold normally for computer games, I guess. It wasn’t until 2001 that I bought a new Sony Trinitron TV that did anamorphic widescreen on a 4:3 CRT, and looked stunning. “Stunning” was by the standards of the time. Widescreen TVs were available at that point, but not yet practical. There wasn’t much at all on TV in 16:9 format, and HD was still years away.

• We went through a few VCRs in my family from the time we got our first (I’m guessing 1985). What amazes me, in retrospect, was the different ways those VCRs marked time. Most of them measured time in what we called “blocks.” Our first had a physical counter — three scroll wheels that spun in time with the VHS tape. You could push a button to reset the counter to 0. So you knew the next episode of “Tiny Toons” started 100 blocks later.

Problem is, the next VCR had a new measuring scheme, and so your “blocks” were useless.

• Perhaps the greatest limitation of the VCR was that you couldn’t watching something back from the beginning while you were taping it. Today, that’s the cornerstone of my DVR habit, which has prevented me from watching TV commercials for the past decade.

• I got my first TiVo as a Christmas present in 2000, I believe it was. I quickly paid for the lifetime subscription. My parents are still using that unit. It’s made that $300 back and then some. I later upgraded to the Humax TiVo that included a DVD burner. Didn’t get as much use out of that DVD burner as I thought I might, but it came in handy a few times. Thankfully, I paid month to month on it, so I didn’t lose money on the deal.

• The TV I grew up watching was on the floor, built into a piece of wooden furniture, on top of which sat the living room’s main lamp light and, of course, the cable box. We had several cable boxes, from ones that had thirteen switches across to ones that you slid a pointer along the line of channels to change stations. We were years away from a remote.

And the TV had a physical issue in it where the screen would suddenly and randomly get very dark. The brightness just dropped right off the scale. A simple slap to the side of the TV (often during “Cheers,” it seemed) did the trick to brighten it back up.

• I remember MTV when it still had music, Nickelodeon when it ran black and white sit-comes in the middle of the afternoon (“My Three Sons,” “Mr. Ed,” et. al.), and HBO when it had “Fraggle Rock.” A cornerstone of my Sunday mornings was watching Hanna Barbera cartoons of the 70s on USA Network. Remember when cable TV didn’t really go past channel 27? Or 36?

Sorry, just had to write that all down. I was feeling old today.

I love the first season of reality TV series. It’s after that where the good ones start their decline.

I can give you countless example of what happens, but here’s the formula:

Season One: Your introduction to a person or people in an unusual circumstance doing cool things that you wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to. These episodes are very documentary in style. They stand back and let you view the action from a relatively close proximity. Their characters come out through normal actions. It’s fun.

Season Two: The producers realize that they have a hit, and that’s why they have a season two. So everything must be BIGGER and BETTER. So the producers stop the documentary nature of the series and start forcing the “stars” of the show into fish-out-of-water situations. Their reactions — whether of fright or of excitement — are captured and teased at every commercial break.

Suddenly, the situations are no longer real. The reactions are, but the people in the reality show would never be there without the reality show.

Season Three: Everything falls apart completely, as the “stars” of the reality show start to think of themselves as “stars.” They’ve seen their press. They’ve watched their episodes. They know the drill. Now, they overact and overemote. Everything is life-and-death. The once documentary nature of the show has drifted into complete dramedy, only missing a script by the barest of Hollywood technicalities.

See “Jon and Kate” for the prime example. We went from being amazed at their grocery gbills to watching them appear on Oprah to watching the paparazzi stalk them as Kate discusses her life as a celebrity to the camera. See “Cake Boss,” which went from making cakes for local people and small organizations to making cakes for the Army AND VISITING THE BASE TO FIRE WEAPONS along the way. See “The Real World,” which hasn’t been the same since the cast grew to expect to have jobs or to have their one big vacation or to wonder who they should kick out of the house for maximum drama. See “Survivor,” where players learned to play the game from previous seasons and now play the game more than the people. (This is almost forgivable. It is, ultimately, a game show. But, still, you can see the producers working harder and harder to come up with outrageous stunts, crazier personalities, and new twists in the game play.) See “Big Brother,” while you’re at it.

The competitive shows suffer from this to a slightly lesser degree, but it still holds. Look at “Dancing With The Stars” or even “So You Think You Can Dance.” SYTYCD has ditched its old stage for an overlarge glitzy neon-fest, while the judges rip the dancers apart whenever they fail to deliver a five star performance. It’s almost like nothing is good enough for them. Look at “DWTS” where they add bigger casts (still fitting in the same molds — football star? Old man? Olympic athlete? etc.) and push them even harder to the point where a new one is injured every week. They’re not just doing one dance every week now. They often do two, or an extra group number, or a faster Quick Step, etc.

Here’s what the second season of “Cake Boss” has taught me: Enjoy the first season of these reality shows. Then move on, because they’ll never be the same again