MST3K 106: The Crawling Hand

In my continued yet almost-complete quest to watch all the episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I started into the DVDs I received in the mail a few days ago, watching an episode I hadn't got around to ordering until now. My reflections on it are, as before, protected from those who may not be interested in them.
( Experiment #106: The Crawling Hand )

Just three unseen episodes left!

AotC on CBC, and Commercial Breaks

I was glancing through my newspaper's TV guide for the upcoming week yesterday, and noticed on the movies page a blurb (with picture of Yoda) that CBC was going to be showing Attack of the Clones that day. Remembering recent lamentations for how much was edited out of AotC when it was shown on Fox a little while ago, I managed to check in on the broadcast a few times out of simple curiosity. As it turns out, all of the meadow picnic scene was there, and all of the fireplace scene, presented in a format about halfway between "pan and scan" and letterbox with thin black bars above and below the picture... but so this doesn't come across just like gloating, I had to say that there seemed to be a lot of commercial breaks. Fitting a movie that's two and a quarter hours long (without end credits; they were crammed into a strip at the bottom of the screen and run at high speed while promos played) into three hours would leave forty-five minutes for commercials, but somehow it seemed like more from what little I saw.

That did set me thinking, though, about people whose early enduring memories of the Star Wars movies would have been of TV broadcasts, and where the commercial breaks would have been in them. I remember that the tape of Star Wars itself that my family had had a commercial break just as the Rebels begin launching to take on the Death Star, and I may perhaps still subconsciously expect that even with a widescreen DVD to watch...