See also the end credits sequence of To Die For.

Yeah, it's kind of sad to think that in pop culture future, that will be one of those jokes that has to have an explanatory footnote in the Norton Critical Edition of The Simpsons, and students will just glance at the footnote and go, "Ah, so that's why audiences in the late 20th century found this funny."

Well, there's not much other reason to raise pigs, since pig cheese never really caught on…

I don't remember exactly, but Leo Laporte mentioned this on one of his shows a while back. I'm pretty sure he said that they started out changing advertisers somewhere around $40 cpm (that is, per thousand listeners) and as their own brand prestige increased, they were able to raise it to around $70 (which was close…

I still think of "Tag Sale" as kind of the quintessential Venture Bros. episode, even though the show has drifted further and further into its own epic mythology in the last couple of seasons and away from the juxtaposition of boy-adventurer/super-science tropes with quotidian, petty existence (which I think is the…

I love the almost mechanical line reading of "I gotta rash. It's-on-my-back-wanna-see?"

It's pretty much conceptually a copy of one of the transformations in Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves.

The thing that bothers me about "Bug" is how many people I read praising it for depicting a "descent into madness" or how insanity can be contagious. What descent? You basically go from a level of some suspicion and sympathy to a fade-to-black, and days/weeks later she's now just as crazy as he is. And I didn't find…

I was going to post this same comment. My family lasted about fifteen minutes into the commentary track for The Exorcist before just turning it off. It really was like one of those "movies for the blind" tracks. Almost pure narration of what was happening on screen. I really have to genuinelly hope that Friedkin was…

I think the terminology is a little shaky, there. It seems "dark" TV today means serial killer or drug cartel hitmen storylines. And while both of those things do exist in the real world, they really might as well be fantasy stories. If "dark" means the actual pain and anxiety of relatively ordinary life, then the…

It's nice to see someone call out the face-punching meme. For whatever reason, it in particular has started to really irritate me for some reason. It just bespeaks a willful brutishness that I find often comes across as disturbingly sincere, rather than joking hyperbole.

On the Home Movies bonus soundtrack CD, Duane's name is spelled "Duane." So perhaps the caption "Dwayne" is Brendon misspelling the name. Or maybe one or the other is a stagename spelling…

::slow clap::

Does he at least wear an ugly red hat?

I've never actually read Gaiman's American Gods, partly out of protest that it seems to so shamelessly rip off the premise of Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (which is one of my favorite Adams books). It's not the ripping off that's a problem, so much — premises get recycled all the time — it's the seemingly (to me)…

@BreakingRad:disqus  Fair enough. I suspect I'll also be one of the minority dissenters on "Shore Leave" — which I actually like a lot more than "History," but which I think is a bit too un-Home-Movies-like to really qualify as one of the show's greatest episodes, which it seems a lot of people here rate it as.

Interesting. "History" is one of my least favorite episodes. I think it's not very well balanced between the movie and the real life segments (there's way too much movie) — and the movie just seems to me to be too much rather random wackiness. It felt like an episode that was never firing on all cylinders.

So, you have a conversation with yourself in two different voices, record and layer that track over animation and you're deemed a brilliant performer. Do the same thing but on stage and with a puppet, and apparently you're mentally ill. Hmm.

Actually, a structural narrative explanation is that you want to be able to have plotlines that involve the kids during the daytime. If family life only ever starts at 5 p.m. every day when both parents get home, you've really limited your storytelling options. So either you end up with stay-at-home-spouses, or you…

This is overthinking it, but I halfway wonder… Is it ever established that Zhaan can regrow limbs? (I vaguely seem to remember her regrowing a finger or something.) If so, that may partly explain her being able to more easily take a "suck it up, Pilot" attitude, since she's from a similar background where losing a…