PillowRock
Regular
For my recent birthday I received Farscape DVD 3.3, Farscape DVD 3.4, and another copy of Farscape DVD 3.3 (oh, and a card saying the The Two Towers extended edition had been pre-ordered for me).
So last Saturday I took the extra copy of 3.3 and the gift receipt back to Best Buy to trade in. Had I waited a few more days or so the obvious choice would have been Farscape 3.5. However, I didn't wait so ....
I came home with Soap: The Complete First Season. I loved Soap when it was in first runs (it debuted in my junior year of high school), but had only seen a few sporadic episodes in syndication in the years since.
I still found much of it laugh-'til-you-cry funny. Any ensemble comedy where you think of Billy Crystal as one of the second tier performers did some good casting and will provide some laughs. For the record, my picks for the first tier of comedy performers in Soap would be (in no particular order): Richard Mulligan as Bert Campbell (he was great at the physical comedy, a side that he didn't get to use as much in Empty Nest), Kathrine Helmond (sp?) as Jessica Tate (perhaps the most endearing completely oblivious pseudo-lunatic in American TV history), and Robert Guillaume as Benson (doing dry sarcastic wit). I think that having all of the different characters all doing different styles of humor is probably what makes the show so funny; whatever your mood, if one thing doesn't get you then something else will. It also helps (obviously) that the cast was so good. Most of them could play the occassional dramatic scenes that suck you into caring about the characters as well as they could play the slapstick (at least, most of the ones that they ever gave those dramatic scenes to could do it).
Watchng the episodes is kinda addictive, in much the same way that eating chips is: once you have started watching, each one is so small (24 minutes, a little less if you skip most of the opening and closing credits) that it is easy to go "Oh, what the heck. One more." Starting last Saturday, I had watched all 25 episodes by the end of lunch on Wednesday (I live close enough to work to go home for lunch, and I watched the last one while eating.)
Does anyone else here remember Soap? Or seen any of it on DVD since it came out last month?
So last Saturday I took the extra copy of 3.3 and the gift receipt back to Best Buy to trade in. Had I waited a few more days or so the obvious choice would have been Farscape 3.5. However, I didn't wait so ....
I came home with Soap: The Complete First Season. I loved Soap when it was in first runs (it debuted in my junior year of high school), but had only seen a few sporadic episodes in syndication in the years since.
I still found much of it laugh-'til-you-cry funny. Any ensemble comedy where you think of Billy Crystal as one of the second tier performers did some good casting and will provide some laughs. For the record, my picks for the first tier of comedy performers in Soap would be (in no particular order): Richard Mulligan as Bert Campbell (he was great at the physical comedy, a side that he didn't get to use as much in Empty Nest), Kathrine Helmond (sp?) as Jessica Tate (perhaps the most endearing completely oblivious pseudo-lunatic in American TV history), and Robert Guillaume as Benson (doing dry sarcastic wit). I think that having all of the different characters all doing different styles of humor is probably what makes the show so funny; whatever your mood, if one thing doesn't get you then something else will. It also helps (obviously) that the cast was so good. Most of them could play the occassional dramatic scenes that suck you into caring about the characters as well as they could play the slapstick (at least, most of the ones that they ever gave those dramatic scenes to could do it).
Watchng the episodes is kinda addictive, in much the same way that eating chips is: once you have started watching, each one is so small (24 minutes, a little less if you skip most of the opening and closing credits) that it is easy to go "Oh, what the heck. One more." Starting last Saturday, I had watched all 25 episodes by the end of lunch on Wednesday (I live close enough to work to go home for lunch, and I watched the last one while eating.)
Does anyone else here remember Soap? Or seen any of it on DVD since it came out last month?
