Remembering Outerscope II

Kids who were born in early-to-mid 1970s probably remember a show called Vegetable Soup. The show, which started in 1975, was produced by the Bureau of Mass Communications of the New York State Education Department for PBS (although it also, somewhat unusually, ran concurrently on NBC), with the stated goal of helping children "counter the negative, destructive effects of racial prejudice and racial isolation and to reinforce and dramatize the positive, life-enhancing value of human diversity."¹ Now, more than 50 years later, when there seems to be a concerted effort to deny the value of such diversity, it seems to me that the message of Vegetable Soup is more important than ever, but if I were to talk about the series as a whole, I'd need to write a full research paper (as, indeed, has already been done elsewhere). So I need to narrow my focus a bit....

High Q

Most people who know me know that I love game shows. Besides celebrating the occasional game show anniversary, I've shared board games, videos of games that I've hosted, and the occasional studio taping or audition that I've gone to. Whenever I've discussed the topic, I've fairly consistently said that I've never actually been a contestant on a game show.

Well, that's not technically true....

Let me tell you about High Q.

Game Show Board Games: Hollywood Squares (1986 edition)

In honor of the 60th anniversary of the premiere of The Hollywood Squares (its first episode aired on NBC on October 17th, 1966), I'm doing something I haven't had occasion to do for a while: feature the board game version of a classic game show.

"Thrilling 30" Springer (2013)

It has often been said that The Transformers: The Movie cribbed liberally from concepts used in Star Wars. Although it's not the case that everything can be connected one-to-one between the two movies, it's really not a huge stretch. For some examples, Unicron is the Death Star, Hot Rod is Luke Skywalker, and Arcee is Princess Leia. By this analogy, Springer is pretty obviously Han Solo. At the very least, scriptwriter Ron Friedman had one of actor Harrison Ford's roles explicitly in mind. A draft of the movie script actually calls Springer "a very muscular and bantering 'Indiana Jones' type" (go to page 14, bottom of the page, to see the quote).