Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

I bought a book at a used book store a little while ago about the silent movie era and read part of it during my vacation; afterwards, a few new thoughts in my mind, I found the time to return to a documentary series I'd recorded off Turner Classic Movies a few years ago, and by the time it was getting to the changeover from silence to sound I was thinking of all the movies I've recorded off that channel and stored away on home-made DVDs with the thought that one day, maybe, I'll squeeze out some time not spent watching anime (or doing anything else) and broaden what I take in. A few titles from the silent movie era have seemed notable enough for me to have added them to my considerable pile, but I suppose that as I was doing that I was still remembering the day back in elementary school we were assembled in the gym to watch a silent movie without context-setting or musical accompaniment and it didn't go that well. Not that long after that my family did record some Charlie Chaplin shorts off the educational channel that did have musical accompaniment, but I never seemed quite able to really get around to them.

However, just a few years ago I'd happened to see in a museum exhibition on video games a comparison between Buster Keaton's short comedy Seven Days and the action of the Super Mario Brothers games; much more recently, I happened on a different comparison between that movie's grand finale and one particular bit of slapstick in the Star Wars movies. Just to get started, I found and watched Keaton's even shorter "two-reeler" One Week, which I could remember some very approving comments about from the documentary, and was quite able to get through it. Now, I considered myself ready to move on to something only a bit longer.
( Moving on )

Quite a while ago now, when I'd been posting to this journal for just a few months, I mentioned the start of the second new season of Doctor Who, and after that I didn't say much about the show. I suppose I could think of enough other things to post about in between saying something about every episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, but thoughts that "sometimes it might be better to not have to pin everything down and present it; you might even enjoy something more when you're not so serious about it that way" might have come to mind once in a while too.
( Timely recollections )

I had been keeping a close eye on when Battlestar Galactica would return to the Space channel, but in the process I was perhaps almost surprised (but pleasantly) to see that a new season of Doctor Who would begin just days later on CBC. Beyond, of course, that they're the two live-action science fiction television shows I'm watching these days, there's a sort of special connection between them for me.

I was perhaps just a little too young to become really interested in the original Battlestar Galactica; the late-1970s Star Wars "ripoff" I was more interested in was Disney's The Black Hole movie (if mostly for its robots and other mechanical designs). When I heard the show was being remade and reimagined, I was simply curious, but when I heard its miniseries beginning was being expanded into a series, I perhaps felt almost compelled to start in on it from the beginning. With too many other science fiction television shows, from Babylon 5 to Farscape to Firefly (cruelly, in that case I bothered to watch the first few minutes of the first televised episode, thought, "Huh, space western," and then decided I didn't have the time to follow it), I found myself in retrospect with the odd sense that I had missed out. This time, things would be different... and while my overwhelmed sense of "This is the greatest thing ever!" I was left with by the first series episode of Battlestar Galactica did fade to a more measured appreciation of the series, I was still glad I'd made the effort this time around. Then, though, when the talk of a revival of Doctor Who materialised into a broadcast on CBC, I was able to start watching it, and that was that.
( Battlestar Galactica )( Doctor Who )