TV Shows Watched: Bel Air: S3E10 (Peacock) with audio description, The Great North: S4E17 (Hulu) no audio description, and Universal Basic Guys (Hulu) no audio description
Podcasts: Smartless (Interview: Ted Danson)
YouTube: None
Movies Watched: I’m Thinking Of Ending Things (Netflix) with audio description
Kind of a low impact day. It’s a great opportunity to mention that Universal Basic Guys is pretty unfunny, and clearly didn’t start with its pilot episode. They had an episode that featured the guys adopting an old chimp from a Tiger king type zoo, and the chimp rips one of their faces off, which feels timed to the popular Chimp Crazy show that is #1 on MAX. The show isn’t funny, and audio description exists for anyone who cares to watch the show live, but of all the recent animated entries from FOX (Bless The Hearts, House broken, Duncanville, Grimmsburg, Krapapolis, and the Great North), I can’t think of a show I’d rather never watch again. Netflix attempted an adult animation a while back that was pretty bad, but this never hit any funny bone. Not even lightly. No chuckles. Of the six newer animated entries FOX has tried launching, this is the worst.
But, if you are a regular reader, you might have noticed that yesterday morning I mentioned that on Sunday, I watched Field Of Dreams on Netflix with audio description, and I’m really glad I did. We just lost an icon in James Earl jones. And while everyone and their mother is going to reflect on that voice, his legacy as Darth Vader or Mufasa, I watched Field of dreams, where he plays a curmudgeonly reluctant cog in this checklist that Kevin Costner seems to need to put together over the course of the film. I witnessed the scene where Jones was invited into the cornfield, and Costner is upset that he isn’t invited, but he isn’t quite putting everything together. Not even when someone says he’s not invited. Jones goes through, and we don’t have a follow-up to that. There’s no indication he ever comes back. he just gets to leave the mortal coil with baseball legends.It’s a fucking heavy moment, and then a day later, I was thinking about how the audio description made sure we got that last little wink and a wave from him before he is gone, and I had the opportunity to randomly watch a film of his and appreciate his work, not as a voice actor, but as a human being on film, without the weight of his passing. I reflect on it now, and I even re-recorded and released my Field Of Dreams review for my YouTube channel which I had no immediate plans to push out that quickly. But, things happen for a reason.
Jones will always be the man with the voice. The iconic bass that boomed when he spoke, that was transcendent enough that even when they dared to remake The Lion King, they still got Jones to come back. The only returning original voice, but how could you ever dream of replacing him?Who could ever stand up to that task?
Mufasa once told us that his sun would eventually set on his time here on earth. We weren’t ready for it then, and I still don’t think we are ready for it now.