Saturday Grab Bag A-Go-Go

Not least among the great things about the Yankees returning to the post-season is that, during the playoffs, there's no such thing as out-of-market games. So I've been able to watch the last two games and they've been great. Obviously I love that they were both New York wins, but I think I would have recognized the greatness, especially last night's extra innings bout, regardless of outcome. Overall the playoffs are making me happy so far. Yankees are poised for a sweep and at the very least have damn near scientifically proven that the Twins cannot win in the Bronx. Red Sox are poised to get swept, so ... bwahahaha. And the NL series are knotted 1-1 each, which on the one hand makes for more dramatic and interesting showdowns and on the other hand means the NL teams have to play more games, increasing the chances that by the time the NL champ makes it to the World Series (hopefully against my boys), they will be exhausted. October is the best.

(EDIT: OK, wishful thinking. The Dodgers are up 2-0. My bad. My heart really doesn't want to see the Yankees face Joe Torre.)

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Hey remember when I said minor league baseball teams have the best team logos and mascots around?


Apparently the United Football League is trying to make me eat my words. This may be a little image deficient, but come on - evoking a cowcatcher with letters that look lifted off a heavy metal cover to spell out a Spanish word for crazy? And it's a Las Vegas team??? Allow me to repeat myself: COME ON. Bravo, sirs. As always, I am torn – do I wait a few seasons to see if the league is viable before investing in a Locos hoodie … or do I snag one now and hope that the league folds almost immediately, thus making my swag an instant collector’s item?

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Saw a review this week of a couple of DVD collections of Dark Shadows. I feel like Dark Shadows is a pretty standard Geek 101 reference but in case you are not familiar: it was a soap opera that aired in the late 60’s and early 70’s and which ended up centering on an immortal vampire named Barnabas Collins. So, Passions before Passions was Passions, I guess. Like I said, Dark Shadows references get thrown around a lot in the stuff I tend to read and watch, but I’ve never seen it, as it’s slightly before my time and I kind of assumed I’d never get to see it for myself because they just don’t put soap operas out on DVD. And given the decompressed and never-ending nature of soap opera storylines, that makes perfect sense. Watching a standard soap opera on DVD would involve a lot of fast-forwarding. Or a lot of wandering out of the room.

However, in a delirious silver-lining kind of way, the upside to the whole Twilight phenomenon must be that someone had the brilliant breakthrough idea of how to capture a vampire-driven soap opera on DVD: instead of presenting a “complete season” (untenable since soaps don’t really have seasons per se), they take all the scenes that relate to a single storyline, edit out a lot of the redundant recapping (originally included for the hard of thinking), and present the lean meat that remains as a movie-style narrative. GENIUS. It’s headed for the Netflix queue, which of course is about 109 movies long right now, so I’ll blog about the viewing experience sometime in 2017.

But while the idea is in my head, I have to say I’m surprised they aren’t taking this approach with more modern soaps. I’m sure there are Dark Shadows fan clubs, but the DVD still has to be aimed at a pretty niche market. Other soaps have their own really devoted fan bases, and I think there’s money waiting to be made putting together greatest hits movies from past storylines – especially for soaps that have gone off the air but still have fans who miss their daytime-melodramatic friends. But even for something like the unkillable Days of Our Lives, some of those Marlena-John Black-Stefano epics from back in the day would make for glorious movies.

(One quick round of Googling later, I see that there actually are several collections of complete Dark Shadows episodes available on DVD. I still find the idea of watching an uncut soap opera on DVD so unappealing that I had convinced myself it was not an extant possibility. Thus, I still think the movie-style Dark Shadows remixes are genius. Carry on.)