Sunday, March 23, 2008

ZONKS IN THE KEY OF "R"

Originally I was just going to use a standard picture of a Baldwin piano to illustrate this post. But instead I decided to go with the actual Toobworld screengrab I have in my files. However, the picture does contain something of a graphic display of male sexuality. Personally, I think it's somewhat mild, no more than an an old "R" rating, or in TV terms today: "TV-14 DSL". (But you should have seen what I could have used from one minute later!)

So I'm going to slap this blog-post with a "TV-M" rating. If you're offended by such depictions, you might as well go surf the web and come back later. You know how it is at Inner Toob..... I have no life, so there'll be a new blog-post before you know it!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm watching the gay gothic soap opera 'Dante's Cove' via Netflix. (It airs on the here! channel.) So far, there's one sub-plot about the magic known as Tresum which may prove useful for Toobworld. (Van uses one of the spells of that witchcraft to make her girl-friend forget about Van's use of Tresum. Instead, she overdoes it and Michelle forgets about Van entirely.)

This could come in handy when dealing with the Chuck Cunningham question from 'Happy Days'. I still like the idea that crazy-eyed Joanie killed her older brother because his incessant basketball dribbling pushed her over the edge and then she disposed of the body. But now I can add that she used her novice skills in Tresum to make the rest of her family forget that Chuck ever existed in the first place. (This would splain why Howard Cunningham once mentioned that he only had two children while saying grace at the dinner table: Joanie caused him to forget about Chuck.)

Like all TV shows, there are mistakes made during production which go unnoticed by the continuity watchdogs. In this particular case from 'Dante's Cove', the production team didn't do their historical homework about their props:

"There's a nice close-up of the Baldwin piano and its clearly printed name during the 1840 scenes at the beginning of the first episode. However, the company didn't exist at that time. The Baldwin Company didn't make its first pianos for another 50 years."
(from the IMDb.com)

This one has an easy splainin. We just have to keep it in mind that Toobworld is NOT the real world. Different countries, cities, fictional characters.... And those things which do exist in the real world may be different from what they are in the TV Universe.

The late Lloyd Bridges was a cross-dressing kleptomaniac neo-Nazi ('Ned & Stacey'). Wilton Parmenter's sneeze ended the Battle of Five Forks during the Civil War ('F Troop'). The 'Torchwood' Institute is located under the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. There are three Rome, Wisconsins ('Picket Fences'). And Tim Russert of 'Meet The Press' has a cousin who worked as a cop in Baltimore ('Homicide: Life On The Street').

So in this case, it just happens that the televersion of the Baldwin company began producing that style of piano fifty years or more before they did here in the real world.

No biggie.

BCnU!
Toby OB

PS:
I'm probably going to Robot Hell for posting this on Easter Sunday.......

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