I apologize to everyone I’ve not yet had a chance to visit in my few weeks back in the States.  Truth is, I’ve been spending far too much time with my new friend, Hulu, who is unfairly not available in Australia.  Hulu’s been showing me not only what I’ve missed in my year abroad, but introducing all sorts of new oddities.  As an experiment that can only be derived from summer boredom, I subjected myself to the pilot episodes of three programs I’d never heard of. Sure they’re bound to be awful, but at least they’re free and so is my time.
 
‘The Crow: Stairway to Heaven’
Goths everywhere are probably still crying mascara-blackened tears about how this ruined their favourite non Tim Burton movie.  It’s similar enough to the first half hour of the film, except the acting is the only creepy thing about it, Eric Draven lands in Mexico for some reason instead of crawling out of his grave dramatically, and everything is PG-ified.  The menacing Tin Tin now looks like David Cross in a bad Jew-fro wig and Funboy appears to be a Midwest gym teacher.  A lot of the mystique is taken out of it when the undead rock star we all know as The Crow screaming in pain at his beloved Shelly’s unfair death is interrupted by a thirty second yogurt commercial.  I’ll admit that I skipped forward several minutes after Eric’s signature makeup grew on his face (WTF?!) because I couldn’t stand the dialogue straight from an unrequited, angst-filled Aiden fan’s poetry Livejournal.  Naturally, the end was not a bad-ass action sequence where justice is served with loads of martial arts and shattered glass.  The baddy is left spazzing on the floor not full of bullets, but ‘all the painful memories you caused those you hurt and their loved ones,’ mumbling “Do you want fries with that?”  LAME!  Although, this marks yet another unintentionally hilarious and food related demise for the record books.
 
‘Camp Woodward’
At first I thought this would be some Disney Channel tween ‘Twilight Guy and Miley Cyrus Visit Prague on Summer Vay-Kay and Totally Fall in Love!’ type crap, but was gladly wrong.  Instead, ‘Camp Woodward’ is a reality show about those mini Lords of Dogtown who always breeze by whenever I go snowboarding and make me feel super old.  I knew I loved this show as soon as one camper, Tyler, shared the sage wisdom that “You can’t be Johnny Depp one day and Spongebob the next!  Just be yourself!”  I want to adopt all these little skate punks, or as they say in boarder lingo, ‘cheesy tots.’  If I can’t do that, then I’ll be fine if their parents (all of whom are awesome) adopt me then.  I love you Mom and Dad, but they have huge professional quality ramps in their yards and give their kids rad nicknames like Taco.  Dibs on being called Pony Girl.  My inner 14-year-old especially digs Cody, the rebellious skater with fabulous hair who says things like “Dude, I forgot a helmet, but I brought ‘101 Dalmatian’ elbow pads.”  Future heart-breaker alert!  I know I said I’d watch just the first episode, but I was hooked and ended up seeing the rest of this unfortunately short series.  Does anyone know if Camp Woodward accepts 21-year-olds who love to watch extreme sports but fall down pitifully every three minutes when actually attempting them?
‘Simon & Simon’
Yet another show proving all men in the early ’80s had porn ‘staches and few women of the time bothered to wear bras, it’s things like this which make me feel fortunate I hardly remember that particular decade.  My parents (my real ones, not my Camp Woodward ones) assure me this was a very popular show, but the only actor in it I recognize is the pilot from ‘Airplane!’  The basic premise is the Simon brothers, a quintessential Felix & Oscar pairing, are private detectives in San Diego who for some unexplained reason are located directly across the street from another detective agency run by their sexy law student secretary’s Daddy.  Hey, if the dozens of salons that seem to make up my well-coifed town all manage to stay in business, I guess they can.  The Simons bumble about ‘solving’ a missing person case that naturally calls for them to take several trips down to Mexico.  Young Simon whines about his car every other line, while Older Simon (who has a Southern accent when he’s supposedly from California and the rest of his family talks normally) makes bad puns and says, “Galdarnit!” a lot.  Eventually, their secretary solves everything and the Simons take the credit, arresting henchmen in a college library after much careless pushing over of bookshelves.  This particular scene struck a chord with me because my heart went out to the poor librarian tasked with picking up and reorganizing that mess.  Detective shows never think about those kinds of victims.  Maybe it’s because this was only the first episode, but I have no idea how ‘Simon and Simon’ stayed on air for so many seasons.  Did anyone actually like this show?  I mean, Scooby Doo solved mysteries more effectively than these two.

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