Making the Monkees
I missed the January 10 premiere of “Making the Monkees” on the Smithsonian Channel, but it’s being repeated this Tuesday at 8 PM ET.
6 comments January 25th, 2009
Archive for January 25th, 2009
Charlie Brown’s All-Stars
When I was a kid I really enjoyed playing baseball, despite the fact I wasn’t very good at it. I lost the love of the game in my teens, but I still love “Charlie Brown’s All-Stars.”
1 comment January 25th, 2009
CD+G Face-off: Chris Isaak vs. Lou Reed
Eric has become a collector of defunct game consoles, and he spent some of his Christmas money on a used Sega Saturn. It’s in very good condition, with excellent construction quality, and considering it was introduced in 1995, I’m impressed by the technology.
The Sega Saturn was one of the first game consoles with optical media instead of a ROM cartridge. Nintendo continued to use a cartridge in the N64, which introduced after the Saturn, with noticeably inferior graphics. I recorded the video intro of a Saturn game called “Panzer Dragoon II Zwei,” along with a few minutes of Eric playing the game, which was tough to do with only the tiny video capture preview window to watch.
A nifty feature of the Saturn is it supports CD+G. Today, CD graphics are found only on Karaoke discs, but originally CD+G was envisioned as a multimedia format for music. Among the very few titles that have CD graphics are Lou Reed’s New York, and Chris Isaak’s Silvertone. I own the Isaak disc, and my friend SamJay lent me his copy of Reed’s CD.
There’s no comparison. Silvertone totally blows away the graphics on the Lou Reed CD. Every song on “New York” follows the format that’s seen here in “Dirty Blvd”…
… while each song on Silvertone has unique and creative graphics that push the limit of what can be done within the very limited CD+G format. This song is “The Lonely Ones”.
I’m even more impressed, considering the graphics were done by John Dennis nearly 25 years ago, in 1985. I might post a couple more of these Isaak tracks.
Add comment January 25th, 2009