It’s been a while since I’ve posted a random video for Passover.
This year, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology made a 2-minute video about…
Moses breakdancing, I guess?
I seriously have no idea what I just watched. But tonight’s Pesach so why not.
Someone on YouTube (courtesy of r/Survivor) made a piano cover of Russ Landau’s Survivor theme song (also known as Ancient Voices).
It’s barely a minute long, but it’s fantastic.
If you’re not aware, composer Russ Landau used to make his own variations of the theme in every season. He would use local instruments and various thematic elements specific to that Survivor.
I’m using the past tense here because sadly Landau left the show after season 27.
Survivor: Palau had a militaristic theme (specifically the WW2 Pacific Theatre), which you can definitely infer from the full theme.
Survivor: All-Stars combined elements of the prior seven games to convey the return of past players.
And much like the season itself, I’m a big fan of the Survivor: Pearl Islands theme.
If you’re curious (or a fellow Survivor fan), you can listen to all 27 themes (and some fan-made versions for recent seasons) in this great playlist.
Tonight, we say goodbye to Adult Swim’s Childrens Hospital after seven seasons and over 80 episodes.
The show started out amid the writers’ strike, in 2008, as a web-series on TheWB.com.
Yes, that WB.
Post-strike, Childrens Hospital got picked up by Adult Swim, making it the first-ish web-show to jump to television. (And still kind of the only one still around.)
It had everything you could want from a live-action night-time 12-minute comedy:
Jokes, hospitals, cameos, non sequiturs, self-deprecating characters, irreverent humor, spin-offs, and Brazil…
Which is where we are right now.
(Fun fact: they actually flew to Brazil just for that running gag.)
As a commenter said over at the AV Club:
I have nothing but love for Childrens Hospital. Not only did it remain hilarious throughout its run, but it did a brilliant, ambitious job experimenting with different storytelling formats, especially given its 12-minute time slot. It got super-meta without ever becoming inaccessible or weird for the sake of weird, and it stuck to its own established continuity, with the history of the show-within-a-show (except for when it didn’t).
You can turn to BBF LaToya Ferguson (also at the AV Club) for great analysis on what made those experimental minutes of television so special.
Just this season, Childrens Hospital had an episode spoofing 1950s variety shows, a black-and-white exploration of one of their meta-characters, and their own take on plots from I Love Lucy.
If you’re a fan (or are becoming one), you’ll be excited to learn of the many interviews posted about the show this week. I highly recommend reading two specific ones:
– The oral history of Childrens, published by WIRED, featuring a bunch of the players & writers; and
– Inverse’s off-the-cuff sit-down with Rob Corddry and Rob Huebel
(How have I not realized until now that they share the same first name?)
As an avid watcher of both Childrens Hospital and Party Down, I must conclude this post by sharing an all-time favorite episode of mine (thankfully available on the interwebs)…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB6J6965WU4
Here’s to hoping they do an inevitable reunion show within the next few years.
