Family Feud at 50

Family Feud set from 1976-1981.
Art by "wheelgenius" on Deviant Art

The classic game show, Family Feud premiered on July 12, 1976 on ABC. While it's run since then has not been entirely uninterrupted, it's been on the air far more often than it's been off of it. There are so many episodes now in existence that there are two distinct 24/7 streaming channels, each devoted to a different era. Family Feud is so deeply embedded in our culture that it's fair to say that the phrase "Survey Says!" immediately brings the show to mind for the vast majority of people, and that if one mentions "three strikes," there's nearly as much of a chance that one will think of this show as that they'll think of baseball.

Titans Return Scourge (2016)

When Megatron was transformed by Unicron into Galvatron in The Transformers: The Movie, he was not the only character given an upgrade. Thundercracker, one the original Decepticon jets, was reformatted into Scourge, although unlike Galvatron having been Megatron, Scourge is almost always considered a new character entirely, and no one seems to care about his having previously been Thundercracker except as a strictly academic exercise. The usual explanation for this is that Thundercracker was dead when his corpse was used to create Scourge, but since Thundercracker was clearly still alive when tossed out of Astrotrain, I really don't see why we should assume he simply "fell offline" while floating in space when Megatron didn't.^* Such are the thoughts of the obsessive Transformers fan....

Studio Series Wreck-Gar (2021)

When discussing the Quintesson Trooper a few months ago, we showcased a character from The Transformers: The Movie that was technically neither Autobot nor Decepticon. The movie featured several such characters, in several different contexts. Wreck-Gar is another example. Although he has traditionally been sold as an Autobot, and is typically seen aligned with them in his fictional appearances, Wreck-Gar is in fact the leader of an independent group of Transformers called "Junkions."

30th Anniversary of the Fox Television Movie Version of "Doctor Who"

So many words to describe a simple, one-off event! Even so, the television movie that introduced the world to Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor in Doctor Who premiered in the US 35 years ago today (technically, the movie aired a couple of days earlier in the UK, which is only fair, but since the movie was made for American audiences, I'll consider today the anniversary).

I'll leave it to others to add commentary. Here, I just want to do my small part to commemorate the event by posting my all-too-quick attempt to emulate the publicity photo above. The Eighth Doctor here is cosplayed by Ezekiel Huerta, who goes by the name "Lethargic Action Hero" online. He's worth a follow if you're interested in someone with real cosplay skills. I've so far limited myself to different incarnations of the Doctor, and the Gallifrey One this past February was my first attempt at a "movie Seventh Doctor."

Fun fact, Paul McGann is actually not demonstrably taller than Sylvester McCoy. In fact, it is reported that they made McGann stand on a box for the publicity photos with McCoy. Since I am pretty tall, I attempted to squat below Ezekiel for the picture here, but in retrospect, it messed up the shot. Sometimes you can only capture the moment you have, but if I could, I admit that I'd do that moment differently.

Buzzworthy Bumblebee Studio Series 86 Kup (2022)

Although the Transformers are nominally robots, they have typically been written more as though they are simply human beings, or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say they were written as "generic (but organic) aliens." The point being that Transformers characters are often seen with traits that don't really make a lot of sense on robotic beings (even "living" ones), but which nonetheless help to make the characters relatable to (human) readers. Thus, when The Transformers: The Movie introduced the character of Kup, his main defining character trait was that he was an old guy. An aged veteran with a lot of stories to tell. When your characters are already millions of years old to start with, just how much "older" should they be acting? Best just to move on....

Generations Selects Galvatron (2021)

For Transformers fans, especially those from the original era, the assertion that Galvatron was a new character introduced in The Transformers: The Movie has to come with a caveat. After all, Galvatron is merely an upgraded body and new identity for Megatron, who had been the leader of the evil Decepticons since the franchise began. That said, it has always been convenient to discuss Galvatron somewhat separately from Megatron, and even the TFWiki gives them separate entries (both of which are considerably longer, and require separate sub-pages, compared to entries for many characters without such ambiguity!), so I feel pretty safe including a Galvatron toy in this series.

Missing Link Arcee (2025)

As I said last month, most of the new characters introduced in The Transformers: The Movie had corresponding toys that came out in 1986 (even if, as I suggested earlier, these will likely not be the versions of these characters I'll be featuring this year on the blog). Such was not the case for Arcee, although for rather different reasons than was the case for the Quintesson Trooper. Arcee was not the first female Autobot to appear in the franchise (there were several introduced in a season two episode of the cartoon^*), but she was arguably the most important. Despite the character's prominence throughout the remainder of the era, the prevailing wisdom was that boys didn't want to buy toys of girl characters, and so fans would have to wait many years before official toys of Arcee were finally made available.