Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

If you enjoyed the wisecracking space cowboy thrills of the original Star Wars Han Solo, then you must check out Firefly TV Series DVD. Captain Mal Reynolds has the right headstrong stuff. The Firefly TV series opener is a fantastic film length origination story of this vagabond space crew 500 years in the future. I’m going through the Firefly series before I check out the more recent Serenity, The Movie.

The writing is excellent, by Joss Whedon, a co-writer of Toy Story, Pixar’s first 3D computer animated feature. Joss has a very interesting background, being the third of his family’s generation to write for television. His grandpa wrote for The Donna Reed Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Describing the inspiration for writing Firefly, the Production Notes on the Serenity web site explains…

Whedon conceived of the television series Firefly after reading Michael Shaara’s Civil War novel, “The Killer Angels.” The appeal of post-war survivors scraping by on the outskirts of society—in a science-fiction context—struck a chord with Whedon. “I was taken with the idea of a civil war and rebuilding from the point of view of people who had lost the war,” he says. “There were people after the war who internalized it so terribly that it completely destroyed them.”

The western flavor of the show feels sort of Australian, possessing a desperate, patched-together Mad Max Road Warrior tone to it. The soundtrack is cool, and varies between spooky, ambient mechanical noise to a yearning country fiddle echoing across the cosmos like an enchanted Celtic country music song.

I wonder what The Beverley Hillbillies In Space would look like… picture it, The Galaxy Spacebillies! Probably not much of a stretch for the mind of Whedon who wrote for Roseanne, Roseanne Barr’s TV show in 1988. Anyway… be sure to take a look at the Serenity movie web site.

The current maneuvering by CNN to outfox Fox News by hiring nationally syndicated conservative radio host Glenn Beck is an especially bad omen for messy cafeteria food fights to come between Fox and CNN. Here is an interesting blog keeping watch on CNN vs. FOX.

CNN Headline News categorizes Glenn Beck under “ENTERTAINMENT” in their Jan. 17, 2006 coverage of his hiring.

Beck’s hiring has fired up criticism from web-based media monitoring groups such as Media Matters for America in this Jan. 17, 2006 article.

Here is an audio clip of Glenn Beck on his recent notoriety and his opinion of Cindy Sheehan.

Television and radio are a far cry from the U.S. government’s Radio Act of 1927 which was a first attempt at establishing licensing regulations so that radio stations served the public interest. These days we are better off getting our news from the Internet, which is exactly what the new generation is doing, and is exactly why television and radio are resorting to serving up superficial commercial pap.