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The Encyclopedia Shatnerica by Diane Werts Really and truly, the last thing William Shatner needs is more attention. TV, movies, books, video games, commercials, self-serving web site -- the man is more all over the place than James T. Kirk. But if you're wondering what the T stands for -- and shouldn't we all know by now? -- you'll find it in The Encyclopedia Shatnerica, an old fave by Robert Schnakenberg just revised and updated in a paperback Millennium Edition. The first edition came out in 1998, and the Shat-man has done oh-so-much since we wrote him off back then -- Boston Legal, Emmy wins, Priceline ads, that gonzo Has Been CD. (Is or is not his delivery of Common People worth incessant "repeat" play?) I hadn't even realized he'd auctioned off his own kidney stone online (for charity). But, hey, that's what we pay Schnakenberg the (semi-) big bucks to fill a book with. He's even included photos and scattered info boxes collecting oddities like "Shatner's World of Pain," listing the ways the Shat's characters have been offed on-screen. My fave: "Crucified by Ernest Borgnine in The Devil's Rain." (Although that Kingdom of the Spiders stomp was pretty cool, too.) I'm not crazy about the book's jumbo sans-serif type and wide-spaced lines -- that seems like the kind of pretty-for-its-own-sake layout that design "consultants" get paid to concoct, lest they concern themselves with, oh, readability. But Schnakenberg's info/quotes/trivia work is first rate. He endures everything Shatner does, to report back to us, so we don't have to. Would you wanna research an entry titled "Horse Semen"? |
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Truth and Rumors: The Reality Behind TV's Most Famous Myths Veteran TV critic Bill Brioux has written a book that's heavily reported, immensely informative, and almost embarrassingly entertaining. The premise of Truth and Rumors is as original as it is ambitious: The idea is to collect, in one book, al the persistent rumors surrounding television shows, stars and events, and separate the facts from the fictions. If the rumors don't make you drop you jaw, or laugh out loud, the answers will. Brioux employs a writing style that is both breezy and authoritative, as evidenced by this very quick setup to one unusual rumor. "RUMOR: Joanie Loves Chachi was the biggest TV hit ever in South Korea because 'Chachi' is Korean for 'penis.' "FALSE: Let's get one thing straight. Joanie Loves Chachi was never a hit, in Korea or anywhere else." That's gold right there, but Brioux keeps going. He informs readers that yes, "jaw-jee" is a Korean slang term for the male genitalia, and no, the Scott Baio sitcom never aired on regular South Korean TV. So much ground is covered here - and not just covered, but dug up. Did LBJ really call Walter Cronkite to complain about his CBS newscast while Cronkite was in the middle of that very show? Did a local newswoman in Florida commit suicide on live TV, after announcing to viewers she would do so? And did Michael Jackson provide the voice of a character on The Simpsons? Through direct reporting, Brioux provides the answers: yes, yes, and yes. And answers to a lot more, in delightful chapters with such titles as "The Naked Truth" and "Ward, I'm Worried about the Beaver." (Full disclosure: This is a new entry in The Praeger Television Collection, of which I serve as series editor. My duties, for the most part, are little more than "book pimp," steering worthy authors with good ideas to the publisher. The uniqueness of Brioux's concept, and his journalistic flair, are the reasons for my rave here.) |
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Not Just Cartoons: Nicktoons! This book is an animation lover's dream book, especially if your dreams are populated by the likes of Ren & Stimpy (the first Nicktoon, created by John Kricfalusi in 1991), Rugrats, Jimmy Neutron and SpongeBob SquarePants. The book is pure Nickelodeon: heavy on bright greens and brighter oranges, loaded with amazing visuals, and even housed in a hard-plastic book cover that contains - you guessed it - Nickelodeon's trademark green slime. Creators of each series are interviewed, along with network animation andf development executives and others. The illustrations include not only animation cels from the shows, but storyboards, rough drawings, ancillary illustrations, and just about anything else that seems cool enough to include. It's like a DVD loaded with extras - except it's a book loaded with them instead. Personal favorites: the SpongeBob SquarePants horror-movie-poster-style calendar drawings, and the hand-painted title cards from five seasons of The Fairly OddParents. But there's something here for everyone, in a very big, very bright, very playful and colorful book. All that, and slime, too. |
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Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television (Second Edition) The second edition of this book has been out for a few years, but it's still the best one-shop-stopping detailed overview of TV, season by season, ever published. It has season-by-season schedules, a running timeline, and annual summaries of TV events and trends that are written clearly, with more insight and scope than you usually find in such wide-ranging overviews. Watching TV isn't absolutely complete - its coverage of the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike covers exactly one sentence, in the timeline - almost every essay, introducing each TV season, will reward the reader with some fresh insight or obscure but illuminating fact. Schedules begin way back with the 1944 wartime schedule, when CBS had only a handful of shows, including Missus Goes A'Shopping - and that was one of the week's highlights. The last schedule analyzed in the book is from the fall of 2002. In between is - well, just about everything you really wanted to know about television, but were afraid, or ashamed, to ask. Watching TV works as a textbook, a reference book, and a bathroom book: Flip to any page, and you'll find something really interesting. Let's try it: a random flip to page 377, for example, yields the stunning statistic that in 1995, broadcast TV's evening newscasts all devoted double-digit percentages of their respective programs to the O.J. Simpson trial. NBC gave up 17 percent of its flagship newscast to Simpson trial coverage, CBS 14 percent, and ABC 10 percent. That's just one page, and one fact. Watching TV is full of them. |
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Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War The subtitle to Washington Post media reporter and CNN Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz's book is pessimistic if not prescient, but is guaranteed to turn out to be one or the other. What we're witnessing these days as viewers of the network evening newscasts - or, increasingly, as non-viewers - is indeed the biggest sea change in more than 20 years. Whether those seas are drying up, in the changing-media equivalent of global warming, is something only time will tell. In the meantime, what Kurtz does so well here, by having conducted more than 150 interviews that helped shape Reality Show, is pull off the informative illusion of being in several places at once. There are several times, in his narrative of the competition among the newscasts of Katie Couric of CBS, Brian Williams of NBC and Charles Gibson of ABC, where Kurtz captures all three newsrooms and control rooms simultaneously. We get some, but blessedly little, of what the anchors ate and wore as they went about their business. Kurtz clearly is more concerned with what distinguishes the network newscasts, and how journalistic decisions are made. And by placing the evening news war on a bigger battlefield, where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and Fox News and YouTube, all play major parts, Kurtz is asking all the right questions. Most impressive, overall, is how seriously Kurtz takes the comedy shows - how he feels, and gives examples to buttress his opinion, that Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report often deconstruct media, and political news stories and cycles, better than their "serious" TV counterparts. He's right. And his opinions, along with his impressively well-informed snapshots of TV news at a time of frenetic transition, make Reality Show a valuable new addition to the broadcast history bookshelf. |
