Here’s comedian Garri Madera’s latest slideshow from the Detroit comedy scene. I closed the contest last night while scores were tallied. Man, it was a super awesome show. I’ve only seen three of the comics before. Lots of unique voices and Ed Beuhner did a hell of a job hosting!
Blog Archives
YouTube Channels You Should Be Watching
These are nothing new, or hard to find, but they’re some of my favorite things on the internet, and on YouTube for sure. Maybe you’ve seen them or heard of them, but maybe not.
Muppets Studio
The Muppets, some of my childhood heroes, are on the internets.
Check out Bohemian Rhapsody:
BriTANick
Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher are funny dudes. Check out their videos and sketches on their YouTube Channel.
One of my favorites, Academy Award Winning Movie:
Anybody else have any favorites?
Comedy Condos
The Cuyahoga Falls Condo.
My all time favorite condo experience was staying in Mishiwaka at the condo with Costaki Economopoulos and Tony Deyo while we played the old Funny Bone there. It was a great week. There was some sort of big football thing on and Costaki insisted on introducing me to the game via gambling. While that may seem like a sucker bet, since I know absolutely nothing about the game, he was really clear in explaining point spreads and odds and I actually won our little wager. It was something like a five dollar bet. I’m not a gambler. In fact, even though I go to Vegas every year, I always break even because I never gamble at all. I just never got bit by that bug.
What was fun about that week was, if my memory serves me correctly, that was the first time the three of us had ever met and we’re all still fairly close friends to this day. In comedy, close friend often means that we all have each other’s phone numbers and sometimes call one another for gigs or when we’re in the same town! Costaki brought me on the road with him last year for a mini-tour, which was a blast and Tony and I have had lunch while he’s been in Detroit. The funny thing about that week was that we all discovered that we were all super nerds about very different things. At the time, Tony was still doing something for high school marching bands and was laying out intricate formations and things like that. Costaki is a huge online poker nerd and would have multiple games going on at once. I, of course, was playing my PSP. My big regret from that week was that I was staying with Costaki one of the sharpest joke writers, a regular contributor to the Bob & Tim Show and I felt a strange need to beat the game Jeanne D’Arc. Granted, it was a great game!
Green Lantern Movie Toy Review
"I hope this movie doesn't suck!"
Summer movie season is fast approaching, and with it comes the inevitable movie tie-in toy lines. With typically lackluster offerings over the years (refer to the Playmates 3-¾” Star Trek line from a couple of years ago), the major toy companies have successfully lowered my expectations of what we will see for movie tie-in merchandise, particularly in the action figure department. This year’s Green Lantern movie toys from Mattel stick to the long-standing “Throw anything on the shelves, kids will buy it!” tradition.
We had all had seen pictures of the line from Toy Fair earlier this year, and I was under whelmed to say the least. The toys looked kind of cheap, and the likenesses didn’t look right. Today, however, I got to see the 3-¾” toys in person at a Toys ‘R’ Us store.
Pew! Pew!
Holy crap, what steaming piles of dog turds these are. As fake-y as the CGI characters look in the trailers and TV ads we’ve seen so far, they look even goofier in plastic form. Kilowog looks like a cartoon dog. Hal Jordan looks like a stiff-armed Jerry Seinfeld. Also, the line boasts a whopping 6 points of articulation – shoulders, hips, head and waist, at least on the figures I saw (Sinestro, Hal and Kilowog). It does appear that some of the figures have ball joints at the shoulders, which provide some range of motion, but most of the Hal Jordan figures are simple up-down swivels. So, the only action poses you can do with them are waving, pointing, and goose-stepping. At $8.99 MSRP per figure, are we really supposed to get excited about toys like that?
Wee! We're green!
As toy collectors, we have come to expect better, even in a 3-¾” line. In a hobby where Hasbro is putting out super-articulated G.I. Joes, Jedis and Marvel Superheroes, we demand better. Mattel has really dropped the ball on this line, in my opinion. They can say it’s aimed at kids and not collectors all they want, but it’s no excuse for poor quality. Hasbro has been making beautiful figures at that scale for years, Mattel just can’t seem to get it right. They should have learned from their ill-fated DC Infinite Heroes line a couple of years ago. You need to please the kids and the collectors with a line like this to be successful, and you do that by offering a combination of cool sculpts, reasonably good articulation, and a high level of playability. You don’t achieve that by giving us cheap-looking, stiff-armed junk.
Hasbro - Doing Movie Toys Right.
To be fair, the 6” line doesn’t look terrible, but those figures are fifteen dollars each. I’m already stretched thin trying to collect toys I really want, like the great 6” DC Universe and comic-book themed Green Lantern lines Mattel is putting out, which does prove Mattel can make great toys when they try. Too bad they didn’t put in any of that effort here.
6 inch GL - not bad.
In short, I will not be buying these, not for me or my kids, not even when they inevitably end up in the clearance aisle at Wal-mart. Am I completely off-base? Does anybody want any of these? What movie toy are you looking forward to Thor? Captain America? Let me know.
Dennis Burdziak is a toy enthusiast, comic book reader, and friend to people more talented than himself. Follow him on twitter @dburdziak.
Is Bret Harrison Cursed?
Bret Harrison is one of my favorite television actors. I first became aware of Bret when he briefly guest starred on That 70’s Show when Topher Grace left the show. His part was funny, sending up the typical replacement characters sitcoms had seen over the years. Unfortunately, all of the terrific shows he has starred in since then have been short-lived. In all 3 of the shows we have seen him star in, he has basically been the charming straight man to a cast of oddball characters, trying to make sense of a situation he was thrust into. Bret is easy to identify with in each role, and manages to be funny and charming, and the underdog we root for in each series.
The Loop – In this short-lived Series, Bret played Sam Sullivan, a young airline executive, struggling to fit in at work with his older co-workers, and to satisfy his boss. He also tried to fit in a social life with his friends, who were still living the care-free life of the typical early twenty-something. The show was hysterical and charming, typically finding Sam’s personal and professional lives at odds, and him struggling to make both work. TheLoop unfortunately ran for only two abbreviated seasons on FOX from 2006 to 2007, being cancelled before episodes of season 2 ever began airing.
Reaper – Lasting three seasons, reaper focused on Bret’s Character Sam Oliver, whose parents had sold his soul to the devil, resulting in his life of servitude to the Devil, expertly played by Ray Wise. Sam, along with his friends, was tasked with capturing souls escaped from hell and returning them through a drop-off in the DMV. The best part of the show was the interaction between Sam and his friends, Sock and Ben, played by Tyler Labine and Rick Gonzalez as they chased escaped souls while working at the Work Bench, a home improvement store that inexplicably carried every item they could ever need to aid them in their task. The series also built up a pretty impressive mythology in its short run, introducing the devil’s slick son, a demon girlfriend for Ben, and Sam’s dad turned into a zombie, living in a chest freezer in the garage. Reaper ran from 2007 to 2009 on the CW network, and was dropped after the third season ended on a cliffhanger, seeing Sam lose his girlfriend’s soul to the devil.
V – Bret played a scientist drafted into the human resistance by the series’ main characters. The role was small, and the show’s ratings were already low when he joined late in the second season.
Breaking In – A new show this season on FOX, Breaking In followed Bret’s character Cameron Price, a computer expert who is recruited by a security firm that specializes in breaking in to secure locations to test their existing security systems. In its brief run, the series sawCam pine over his beautiful co-worker Melanie, played by Odette Annable. The cast also included cash, a nerdy fanboy gadget expert, who was constantly dropping references to pop culture, including re-making the entire Star Wars trilogy starring him in every role. Christian Slater played Oz, the owner of Contra Security, the eccentric boss who was constantly manipulating the staff into doing whatever he needed. The show was full of funny and nerdy moments, including an office-wide Nerf gun fight that ends with Oz firing a very real arrow through the water cooler to break it up. Or cash having to face off against a Ninja Turtle at Comicon to retrieve a copy of Goonies 2, a movie they had been hired to protect. Apparently a victim of low ratings, the show only lasted a brief 7 episodes on FOX this season.
Three times now, (four if you count V) I have been burned by shows starring Bret Harrison, but I will keep tuning in whenever I see him in the cast of a new program. I hope the next one sticks, and America sees just how brilliant and funny a comedic actor Bret is.
I checked, all episodes of Reaper are available on Netflix instant watch, and the Loop is available on DVD from them as well. Do yourself a favor and check them both out.
Nate Fridson: My Nemesis?
Nate Fridson is a guy who I’ve always been both amazed by and a bit jealous of on stage. It seems like right from the beginning, her had a clear and distinct voice and point of view. If the notion of cliques in the comedy world of outcasts is possible, it seemed like Nate was the head of the clique of the cool kids being Nate, Matt McClowery and Adam Sokol.
Recently it came to light that Nate is gearing up to head to New York to continue his growth in comedy. It was important for me to have my Marc Maron-esque interview with Nate before he left. For a long time, and more so in the past couple of years, I’ve felt like there was some sort of bad blood between the two of us. I don’t know where that stemmed from. I felt like he didn’t respect what I did on stage and maybe didn’t respect me as a person at all. I mentioned a few times to him that I really wanted to catch up before he moved. Well, we finally got the chance while standing in the alley behind Club Bart, the club where we first met.
Read the rest of this entry
Re-watch it With Your Kids: The Littles
As a parent, if you’re like me, you want to share things from your own childhood with your kids. As a child of the 80’s, I naturally wanted to share some of my favorite Saturday morning and after school cartoons with my boys. Unfortunately, many of the shows I remember fondly do not hold up well at all. My most glaring example of this was Voltron, which now I realize is terribly cheesy and badly written.
Imagine my surprise, then, when one of the shows I remember as pretty cheesy turned out to be much better than I remember. My wife started the boys watching the Littles, a show about a group of mouse-sized people who live in the walls of regular-sized people’s homes.
The Littles ran for three seasons on ABC on Saturday Mornings from 1983 – 1985, and had a movie, Titles Here Come the Littles in 1985. The main characters are a family of Littles, Including the young Tom and Lucy, their parents Frank and Helen, their older cousin Dinky and their Grandpa, imaginatively named Grandpa Little. They all live in the walls of the house of Henry Bigg, a human who accidentally discovered their existence, and has come to be a friend to them.
The show follows the Littles as they get into and out of all sorts of trouble. The real surprise to me, though, is the mature themes the series deals with fairly regularly. The Littles are often in danger of capture by a scientist named Dr. Hunter who is obsessed with proving their existence to the world. In one episode, the Littles help a little girl whose mother has a problem with prescription drugs by tricking her into thinking she’s hallucinating. In another, they are run out of their homes by giant evil-looking rats. They also deal with drinking, and in a later episode, a couple of guys who would be called terrorists today, who try to gas an entire art museum full of people. Later episodes see the Littles following the Bigg family (Henry’s parents are archeologists) on trips around the world.
The show is still aimed at children, of course, and more often deals with lighter themes, but it is refreshing to watch a show that doesn’t write for children as if they are all stupid, as so many of its contemporary shows did. Yes, it’s almost thirty years old, but I you have kids and want to share a bit of the 80s with them, check out the Littles on Netflix, the movie and all 29 episodes of the show are available to view instantly. My 3 and 5 year old boys can’t get enough of it.
More Misadventures – Funny Stop and Going Green
I was in Cuyahoga Falls this past week performing at the Funny Stop. This was a blast for many reasons. The biggest one is that all week I got to hang out with my buddies Dave Merheje and Jeff Ford. The three of us started around the same time in Detroit. Dave since moved to Toronto, so I only see him once every year or so. Although, he and I were the two final comedians to work at Chaplin’s!
I stayed in the comedy condo with my buddies and it was just crazy. It’s a two bedroom condo, so Jeff and Dave ended up sleeping in the same room…actually the same bed. Okay, I come from a small family and am just not used to that. Dave apparently does that all the time and it was no big deal. Jeff is just the easiest going guy in the world, so who knows how he really felt about his sleeping arrangement. I will say, by the second night, Jeff apparently built a barrier of blankets and pillows to separate himself from Dave. I guess all the talk about “finger blasting” during the day maybe freaked him out at night!
The Lonely Island: Turtleneck & Chain Review
From We’re Back! the opening track, to the No Homo Outro, Turtleneck & Chain is both an amazing hip hop album and an amazing satire of hip hop albums. Pulling off either one is a tall order on its own; that Lonely Island manages to do both is proof that they’re not just a great comedy group, they’re a great hip hop group too.
Quick Question…Do you have any ghost stories?
Ooh! It’s Friday the 13th! This week I asked my comedian friends: Have you ever experienced anything paranormal in your comedy adventures?
Quick plug to my friend comedian Mike Brody. He is the “Official Comedian of Beyond Reality Events”. In fact, if Deadpan takes off and we get to do a second season, it’ll involve hopefully either Mike Brody or a character based largely on Mike Brody. Maybe we’ll call him Brody Michaels. Hm.
To kick things off, here’s my spooky story. I was at the notoriously haunted and historic Holly Hotel doing a Christmas party a few years back. Normally the comedy shows are in the basement, but this private party was on the top floor, which is supposed to be where the “stuff” happens. I was delighted and making jokes about the ghost, when a large painting fell off the wall and freaked everyone out. So I changed topics and went back to my normal nerdery. It made me jump though!
Jeff Dwoskin: I once was doing a show at Holly and it started out great and then everyone stopped laughing. To this day I swear it was because of a super-natural intervention of some sort. I swear this stuff usually kills!
Andy Pitz: I’ve never experienced paranormal activity at a show or in lodging. I have been creeped out by several club owners though.
I feel like I worked with Tony Deyo shortly after this great story happened to him. It’s one of my favorite comedian stories: I was performing at a college in Albion, MI. They had me staying on campus at a 150 year old place called Belmont Manor. First of all, any place with “manor” in the name is haunted. I joked about staying in their haunted Scooby Doo mansion at the show. Afterwards, the opener asked me if he could come over and check out the place b/c he had been into studying the paranormal for about 10 years. When I had checked in at the mansion, I thought other people were staying there too, but when we got there after the show, no other cars were in the parking lot. I realized I was going to be alone that night in the creepy mansion. We walked around the place, and he told me that his fingers were getting a little numb in one room, which probably meant that someone had died of a heart attack in there. As we wandered upstairs via the giant spiral staircase, he told me that that’s where I might see a ghost in the middle of the night. At this point, I was still under the impression that I might actually spend the night. All the doors upstairs were locked except for mine, so as I was walking back downstairs with him, he noticed a door that went to the basement. He couldn’t find a light switch, so he went down with just his penlight on a keychain. I did not follow. He came back and told me that a lot of people had died down there… and that they were killed. That’s when I told him that he was staying with me for 5 minutes while I packed up my stuff and left. I never knew if there was a ghost there for sure, but I wasn’t about to find out.
Hey Kids…Twitter! All-Nerd Edition
So, a while back Kobe posted his favorite funny Tweeters, today I’m going to share my favorite nerdy ones.
@DeathStarPR is on a mission to give all the negative publicity the Galactic Empire has received to a more favorable and humorous spin.
Sample tweet: “If a tree falls on an Ewok in a forest and nobody was around to see TK-827 chop it down, did it ever really happen?”
@grantimahara I’m sure you all know Grant Imahara from Mythbusters.
I follow his tweets because he’s clever, funny, and often posts cool behind-the -scenes pics from the set.
Sample tweet: “This is Murray. He’s a hawk. #fromset #Mythbustershttp://twitpic.com/4twyzm“
@TheNerdyBird Jill Pantozzi is a comics journalist who writes for MTV Splashpage and Newsarama.
Her profile says, “Has Boobs, Reads Comics. Need I say more?”
Her feed is a great place to view the comics industry from the perspective of a self-proclaimed geek girl.
Sample Tweet: “I also asked my BF if he would dress up as Thor for me and he said no. : ( He has the beard AND blonde hair. #meanboyfriend“
@GailSimone is the current writer of Birds of Prey and Secret Six at DC Comics.
Her twitter isn’t really about her comics, though. She’s funny and a bit odd, often times starting strange and funny trending topics like #kingshark or teasing fellow comics creators, especially ones from Marvel.
Sample Tweet: “If I wrote an Avengers movie, I would put the JLA in it instead.”
@CobraCommander is, as if you didn’t know, the leader of a terrorist organization determined to rule the world.
Sample tweet: “When you realize you have a guy named Road Pig on your payroll it seriously makes you rethink your career choices.”
Who are your favorite nerdy twitter users? Let us know in the comments!
Mike Lebovitz is a Comedian You Should Know
More often than not when a comedian stays in a condo as opposed to a hotel, it can be a nightmare. At least that’s what I’ve heard. I’ve stayed in condos a handful of times and with the exception of one experience, it’s always been a blast.
Most recently I was in Appleton, Wisconsin and staying with Chicago comedian Mike Lebovitz. We found out that we had a mutual connection in my sister-in-law. Mike is fantastic and we’ve stayed friends since that blizzardy week in America’s Dairyland. He’s also a part of the Chicago comedy scene’s super group Comedians You Should Know who had the number one comedy album on iTunes recently.
Mike came to town a couple weeks back to get is foot in the door of some of our clubs and afterward I decided to pick his brain about comedy and specifically his take on the Detroit scene. Enjoy.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 trailer
OK, I know I’m a few weeks late on this one, but give me a break. I’m new to this site and blogging in general.
The trailer for the final installment in the Harry Potter Octology (is that a word?) was released, and has Potter-heads everywhere all atwitter, myself included. I’m a late comer to the Harry Potter world, having waited until my wife made me watch the first 6 movies before I ever cracked one of the books, but I am a full-on Potter nerd now. The trailer is beautiful, and gives us glimpses of some of the coolest parts of the book brought to life. I’ll try to stay spoiler-free, but I make no promises, especially if you haven’t seen the previous movies.
In this final chapter, it’s a race for Harry and friends to complete their mission begun in part one, the destruction of Voldemort’s remaining Horcruxes, the items that he has imbued with a piece of his soul in an effort to live forever, and to then vanquish him once and for all. Right away, the familiar theme music brings us back into the magical world. The Voldemort voice-over sets the tone, reminding us this is no longer a kids’ movie series, these characters are grown up now and are dealing with some dark, life-or-death situations. The trailer then gives us glimpses of the roller-coaster ride into the Gringott’s vault, a dragon, Death-eaters galore, wizards flinging spells all over, and a whole bunch of stuff on fire. Only one thing bugs me, I don’t remember the scene with Harry and Voldemort falling off a bridge in the book, so that may be a movie add-on, please correct me if I’m wrong. Everything leads up to the battle of Hogwarts, which we see bits of, not enough to spoil anything, but enough to give those of us who already know what happens glimpses of all the things we are hoping to see.
This movie should shut up anyone who called the last one slow or boring. Everything that I can remember that is left of the story is non-stop excitement and action, which is what the trailer seems to show. There will be battles, there will be death, and there will be fire and explosions. Characters will meet their fates and fulfill their destinies. In the end only one can survive – the Chosen One or the Dark Lord.
Yes, many of us have read the books, but seeing it alive on screen is something completely different. Between this and Captain America, July can’t come soon enough for this nerd. I’m excited, are you?
Dennis Burdziak is a married father of two, a total nerd, and wannabe member of Dumbledore’s Army. Follow him on twitter @dburdziak
Thor Review
The summer movie season is finally underway and Thor is a worthy jumpoff. It’s an entertaining popcorn flick, bookended by some absolutely fantastic action sequences in Asgard and weighed down regrettably by a “Thor loses his powers and then gets them back” storyline in the middle. It’s not enough to ruin the film though, as the situation is played for laughs pretty well.
Off the Mike 