TV Memories 07 | Zach RicksGUEST BLOG POST

Download the .mp3

I'll admit up front this may be a bit of a cheat, but I'm going to defend it because it is about TV. Just… Foreign TV. That I may have watched over the internet. Which brings up an interesting question. What is TV anymore? Does netflix count? How about Hulu? iTunes downloads? DVR? Huh. Anyway...

I grew up watching Saturday Morning Cartoons, which meant that on any given Saturday I would wake up before 6:00 AM to catch Super Friends or Alvin and the Chipmunks. It was a perfect time of day - the sun wasn't up yet, no one else in the family was up, it was just me, maybe a bowl of cereal, and our giant old Zenith console television that I'd cracked my head on doing flips into a bean bag chair. We lived in a very small farming community in rural Idaho, USA, and we didn't have cable. We didn't even have FOX. (But I did have an uncle who lived in Alaska who would tape the Simpsons and mail us the tapes a season at a time because he felt bad that we couldn't get it where we were at. That's how I grew up.) And Saturday morning cartoons were fine… but I kept getting hints - little hints - that there was something really interesting out there.

I saw a little bit one time when my Dad got a satellite dish on a trial basis. (It came on a trailer and sat in our driveway for a few days. I saw First Blood SO MANY TIMES that week…). But I caught this crazy thing on some network that was a cartoon, that was… rescue… and had crazy vehicles… Thunderbirds 2086. So I watched as much as I could, and eventually the dish went away.

And then this one time we were on vacation in California - went to Disneyland. I'd tripped the night before getting into the RV. I had a straw in my mouth, and it cut the roof of my mouth - just peeled a layer of skin off it. Hurt like heck. So I was laying in the back of the RV, trying to tune this tiny little television into something we could watch while we were driving around.. and I found something about people living underground because the Earth had been destroyed by radiation, and they were worried about whether they could survive or not, and this crazy scene where they were trying to launch a starship but there was a meteor that was going to hit them, so they had to fire their main cannon, which killed their engines and they fell back down to Earth… It was crazy! It was wonderful! I had never seen anything like it. And I had no way of seeing what happened next because we went home to Idaho and I just couldn't get my hands on it. I just knew the name: Star Blazers.

But it wasn't until I went to college that I really started to find stuff. Because that's when I was able to get things like the SciFi channel's Saturday Anime, and Cartoon Network started running anime on Toonami. And that was pretty good. I saw all kinds of interesting shows. Cowboy Bebop.

Eventually I got married - and my wife Did Not Get It. She saw me watching my crazy shows, and thought "It's all kid stuff."

Then, one night, she sat down with me and watched a very early episode of Gundam Wing. And suddenly she was hooked. This was different! It was interesting! And it definitely was not kid stuff. It was moral choices about war, and who you can trust, and what you do in hard times, and though we still joke about some of the crazy lines to this day, it's something we shared and loved together.

But the best memory I have of "TV" isn't really TV. At least it wasn't for us at the time.

We had just moved to Portland, OR, where I was attending law school. It was me, my wife, and our (at the time) three-year-old daughter, the Queso Kid. I worked part-time for the law school and I had a little office in one of the buildings - a dark little bunker. One day, I had a little time on my hands and I found a site where you could read fan-translated manga. (At the time, fan subs were something of a gray area, because the instant something became licensed in the States, the translation stopped, the files came down, and everyone waited for the official release.) The site isn't there anymore, but I remember sitting there and reading the first chapter of Naruto. Something about the story was really interesting to me. Here was a kid who was a bit of a screwup, but had big dreams. People didn't treat him very well. But there was one guy who believed in him, and because of that belief, this kid stood up and did something incredible. Loved it. So I immediately started looking to see if there was an anime.

And there was. Barely. Maybe three or four episodes out at the time. So we got into a routine. We would download the latest fan-translated episode every week, and drag the couch over in front of the computer. We'd pop some popcorn, and my wife and my daughter and I would sit down and watch this silly little show about kid ninjas. Queso couldn't read, of course, so we'd take turns reading the subtitles for her. I look back on that now as some of my favorite times ever, sitting on the couch watching and reading this show to my little girl. And while I still claim that Trigun episode 5 - Hard Puncher - is the single greatest episode of anime ever, there are a couple of Naruto episodes that are very close. In particular, there's a pretty insane three-episode run from about episode 60-62 that's a single fight, but it becomes this riff on destiny and fate vs. free-will and the ability to succeed no matter the obstacle. The end of that fight is something that occasionally just pops up in my head again and again - it had a big impact on me.

We still watch quite a bit of anime in the house. I fell away from watching Naruto when they started in with all the filler episodes, though the wife and kiddo have been keeping up with it. Queso and I have started watching Bleach, Ouran Host Club, and some others, but nothing beats those Sunday nights, pulling the couch over to watch a silly Japanese show about ninja kids.

I'm Zach Ricks. I'm an attorney, a writer, and an editor - currently the managing editor of FlagShip at flyingislandpress.com. You can find my own writing at madpoetfiles.com, and some other things I'm working on with Scott Roche at AethelianAge.com.

11/22/63 by Stephen King | Book Review

Oh man! This book has heart man, it has heart! I loved it! There was one spot where it slowed down a little more than my liking, but for the tone and style of the book, it did a surprising job of pulling me through most of it. It's told in first person, which is pretty rare these days - and I thought it worked brilliantly. It has such a personal feel because the protagonist is the narrator. I bet first person is going to come back. Don't believe me? Ever heard of a novel called The Hunger Games? Yeah I thought so :) I really cared about these characters. I think King's biggest strength is writing good characters. I didn't know how he was going to end this huge story leaving me satisfied, but he did - and he did it in a way I wasn't expecting. I liked this book so much, I know it is one that will join the few books I will most certainly go back and read again someday. If you've never read King because you're not a horror fan like me - you owe it to yourself to give this one a try. I think you'll find that there's a reason Stephen is the King when it comes to speculative fiction. I read this book via audio book and I wasn't too sure about the narrator Craig Wasson at first. As the story came alive through his voice, however, it grew on me to the point where I can't imagine another voice telling this story. He has the perfect voice for the main character, and his accents were great too! I really enjoyed his read of this amazing novel.

Check it out on Amazon

Check out the cool website for the book.

TV Memories 06 | Scott RocheGUEST BLOG POST


Download the .mp3

I watched a metric butt ton of TV as a kid. I could have given Mike Teavee a run for his money. As a “latchkey” kid who had cable TV when that was something of a rarity, I watched quite the variety of shows. Possibly the best TV memory I have though, from a life full of them, would be weekday afternoon TV from my Elementary School days. I’d get home, sling my books onto the couch, fire up the snack foods, and get my watching on.

Far and away, the biggest standout had to be the one-two punch of G-Force/Star Blazers. I know, I know, the anime purists out there are cringing. These where the chopped up, re-mixed, over dubbed versions of Science Ninja Team Gatchaman and Space Battleship Yamato respectively. I cared not a whit then, blissful ignorance my only excuse. All I knew was, the cartoons were awesome, and my classmates and I zipped around the playground pretending to be Jason or Derek Wildstar. As much of a science fiction geek as I was then, and am now, the optimism and butt-kicking heroics are what shine brightest in my minds eye.

As I got older, the offerings changed. Fast forwarding to my Middle School and High School years, I would have to say that Nickelodeon dominated the idiot box. Two real super stars ate up most of my time. The first was a Canadian live action kids show called You Can’t Do That On Television. This really was like “Saturday Night Live” for kids. The hilarious skits usually included a bunch of gross out humor (they were the source of the green slime that became synonymous with the network), and it even had some eye candy in the form of Christine “Moose” McGlade. I had a crush on her anyway,

The other Nickelodeon offering was Danger Mouse. James Bond done as a large white mouse, essentially. He had everything from a stuffy boss to a cat petting uber villain. Well, okay the pet was a caterpillar, but close enough. Explosions, silly situations, and heroics were the rule of the day. The catchy opening credits had me singing along, and I never missed an episode. It’s funny, so far all of my memorable shows were from other countries. We did have Looney Tunes and the Saturday morning shows of my youth were mostly American in origin, but not so for the afternoons.

This was rectified in college. Yeah, I still watched afternoon cartoons well into my twenties, where I could. Again, there are two vying for the top spot. Animaniacs is clearly number one. The adventures of Wako, Yakko, and Dot as well as Pinkie and the Brain were consistently hilarious. The animation was crisp and the writing was smart. Much of the humor was aimed squarely at adults, or so it seemed to me at the time, but they never left the younger set out. The other entry has to be Batman: The Animated Series. It’s the comic book cartoon that proves those things can be just as adult as live action. The style was perfect and the voice actors nailed their performances.

These days I don’t really get to watch cartoons or afternoon TV of any kind. I know that there are shows that my kids will treasure as much as I do these. I’ll admit to knowing the names of a few. I catch Phineas and Ferb whenever I can. The boys are hilarious and the amount of imagination it takes to put out that show is tremendous. I also watched my fair share of The Wonder Pets and The Wiggles when my kids were younger. What strikes me is these days there seem to be more live action offerings. Kid’s sitcoms and even soap operas, of a sort, dominate the air. Who knows which will resonate in the memories of my three? Regardless of the answer, I make sure, as did my folks, that they get more fresh air, sunshine, and good books than they do TV time. That makes picking their favorites even more special.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a tree to climb.

A military brat, fan of horror and occult fiction at an embarrassingly (for his parents anyway) young age, and a seeker of the true reality beyond that which we see every day, Scott tries to include as much life experience in his writing as he can. Every story he writes combines these elements into something that he hopes you will not only enjoy, but tell all of your friends about. He is active in the podcast fiction sphere and is a contributing editor at Flying Island Press. You can also find Scott's work on his website http://www.scottroche.com/ and many of your favorite online hard copy and eBook retailers. Also look for Scott’s new series Invasion From the Hidden Planet, dropping serially in audio and eBook formats at www.ActionPackPodcast.com.