Locations from our favorite TV shows can seem as familiar as our own neighborhoods. That should explain the shock of recognition you’ll feel as you scroll through this selection of pieces from Tim Doyle‘s Unreal Estate show, which finds the illustrator and print-maker revisiting some unforgettable small-screen sets in a series of prints. See Arrested Development‘s infamous banana stand, the diner where Seinfeld‘s characters were regulars, and Moe’s bar from The Simpsons in a brand-new way after the jump. If you’re in the Bay Area, be sure to check out the exhibition in person, at San Francisco’s Spoke Art, between February 2nd and 23rd.
This morning in random but delightful TV pairings,Bill Clinton and Mindy Kaling discuss their favorite holiday books on Today. After a brief aside to assure viewers that his wife and Barack Obama are doing everything they can to help stabilize North Korea, Clinton mused that books are ”a wonderful way to get away from the helter-skelter of your life and throw yourself into something else” and the duo launched into their selections.
Kaling’s picks were pretty populist, including Stephen King, the photo book LADY GAGA x TERRY RICHARDSON, and even that book Gwyneth Paltrow wrote. Her top choice, to no one’s surprise, was Tina Fey’s Bossypants – and Clinton approved: ”I love Tina Fey!” he said. “I think she is so funny.” The former president’s recommendations were stately and largely highbrow, including Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which he reads every year. Watch the thoroughly enjoyable segment after the jump, and make sure to stick around till the end, when poor Ann Curry tries to pronounce the name of Irish poet Seamus Heaney and says “semen” instead. Read More »
Thanks to green screen technology, virtually anyone can produce a film or video creating wizard-worthy special effects. We’ve all seen the TV weather guy/girl standing in front of a green screen. A computer taps into the screen in order to replace every green pixel it sees with one from another image. It’s the same technology when it comes to movies and television, which this video past the break demonstrates. Sometimes the green screen seems like a ridiculously simplistic concept, until you’re reminded what amazing visual effects it helps produce. Click through for a detailed look at Hollywood’s green screen magic. Read More »
The men of Serenity never looked better in this set of awesome and attractive Firefly art prints. If you miss the Joss Whedon show as much as we do and want to keep a little galactic mojo close by, Quantum Mechanix’s new five-poster set designed by artist Megan Lara is beautiful and should make any Browncoat happy. Mal, Wash, Jayne, Simon, and Book are all featured in the Firefly Les Hommes series, looking totally dreamy. Next up: Art Nouveau space cowboys on tees? Yes please. (Someone make that happen.) There’s also a Les Femmes poster set — all of which we’ve shared past the break. Visit Quantum Mechanix’s site for details on how to preorder. Read More »
Ever fantasize about sleeping in the bed Jersey Shore’s Ronnie threw out onto the deck that one night? Or cooking in the kitchen that the girls can never be bothered to clean? Perhaps you’d like to use the toilet that was so famously clogged by a wifebeater? Well, friend, The Daily is here to tell you that dreams really do come true: You, too, can live like a guido if you’re ready to throw down $2,500 to spend a night at the notorious six-bedroom, three-bathroom Seaside Heights house. Apparently, MTV rents the place out in the off season.
Call us ungrateful, but we probably wouldn’t be tempted to stay at the shore house even if it were free. The duck phone is cute and all, but we can’t imagine that the novelty of it all would outweigh the squickiness of laying our head in a place where so much hair gel-and-Bacardi-lubricated sex has taken place. Besides, although unscripted series have featured more than their share of tacky homes, there are plenty of gorgeous reality TV dwellings that we’d be thrilled to rent out (if only we had the money). Check out eight such houses after the jump.
Hollywood has a way of telling us who we are and who we should be, and there’s no one more amenable to its requests than its own biggest commodities — actors. The handful of molds are generally unchanging: the blonde bimbo, the unmarriageable brunette, the debonair gentleman, the dopey, dorky friend. Any number of people can fill these steadfast forms — Jean Harlows are replaced by Grace Kellys are replaced by Marilyn Monroes are replaced by Madonnas. But once an actor has been molded into an archetype, it’s often difficult for them to be anything else. Still, even those who get caught in the quicksand of typecasting can sometimes eventually make it out, like these pigeonholed actors, who, for better or for worse, finally played a kind of different role.
Let’s try a mental exercise: Picture some of your favorite TV shows of the ’70s and ’80s — maybe Three’s Company or the original Hawaii Five-0. How do the characters look in your imagination? Crisp and bright, or somewhat blurry and washed out? For us, it’s always been the latter, either because our memories of them are dim or simply due to the desaturated look of decades-old TV. So it’s remarkable to see how closely San Francisco-based artist Kelly Falzone Inouye’s watercolor portraits of sitcoms from that era our own recollections. “For me, the medium of watercolor is extremely nostalgic and sentimental,” writes Inouye. “In using this medium in its loosest, most watery form to depict fictional characters, my intent is to examine issues of portrayal vs. portraiture.” Check out Sitcoms Series after the jump, and then visit Inouye’s website to see more of her work.
Today marks the 60th anniversary of the color television. CBS is credited with making the first color broadcast on five East Coast stations in 1951, and on this day the company started selling their CBS-Columbia color television model. The product was discontinued just a few months later, but RCA picked up the slack a few years later in 1954. Today, it seems strange that companies had trouble selling color models, but back then buying a TV was as important of a choice as was buying a car (they were expensive!). Before we were warning about the dangers of too much TV, the color television represented a kind of sophistication and style. It was the best connection families had to the world around them and the new technology represented the dreamy possibilities of the future. We thought we’d take a peek back at some of the best color television print advertisements, which represented a time when the TV repairman was actually a lucrative career choice.
As much as we love SNL digital shorts and all the vulgar laughs and Justin Timberlake cameos they may bring, let’s take a break before this weekend’s season premiere to acknowledge another variety of Saturday Night Live music videos, shall we? Y’know, the ones that weren’t produced by Lorne Michaels. Every now and then, a current or former “Not Ready For Prime Time Player” will lend a hand as the protagonist of a real music video for an actual musician, and some of these guest appearances are pretty great. Check out ten of our favorites after the jump.
In case we haven’t made enough noise about it already, we’d like to restate our enthusiasm for Sarah Michelle Gellar’s return to television with the CW’s new series Ringer. We already used the show’s twins-in-trouble element as a springboard to look at our favorite twins in popular culture, but the dualism got us thinking about something else, too — specifically, how many other actors have been able to successfully star in more than one show during their career, shrugging off typecasting to embody a whole new, equally welcome persona. As Gellar takes on this feat in 2011, here’s a look back at some of the others who have done it, and done it well. Don’t see your favorite? We know we left some out, so feel free to add more in the comments.
