20 August 2006

Brisco!

So, I started watching the DVD set of the Complete Brisco County Jr. series I picked up a few weeks ago. For those of you not in the know, Brisco County was a show on Fox that started back in 1993, starring the talents of one Bruce Campbell, one of my acting heroes.

This show started the same year as the X-Files, and was in fact the lead in for the X-Files, starting at 8pm on Friday nights, while X-Files came on at 9pm. It was a great night of television for nerds, as Brisco County was a western with a twist. It incorporated elements of science fiction into the plot line, with futuristic orbs, odd happenings, and glimpses of the "future," from a world set in 1893.

The show, as Bruce Campbell says in the liner notes, was just "one notch below over the top." The second episode of the series has one of my favorite moments in it from television ever. One of the bad guys on the show has appropriated a futuristic scuba device, and is diving in a lake to retrieve some sunken booty. The female guest star of the show, hiding in the bushes with Brisco watching all this, says to him, "Aren't you going to do something?" Brisco replies, "What, you want me to dive in the water, engage in a life or death struggle while gasping for air, while he's safe in a pure oyxgen environment, smiling safely behind his glass helmet? No thanks, I'll wait here on dry land for them to come back."

Of course, through some plot devices, Brisco finds himself wrestling with the baddy underwater, while the baddy laughs at Brisco, airless and drowning. Brilliant stuff...

I'm glad the show is as fun as I remember it.

In other news, we're about 3 days into the RA Training here at Saint Peter's. I was concerned about today, because I was presenting 3 hour long sessions in a row, and I might get sick of hearing myself for that long, let alone a room full of 25 college students on a nice day. However, we got through it, and it appears to be a productive day. The staff is responding well to the presentations by myself and the other staff here.

Tomorrow (Monday), I have another 3 presentations to do, but they're not in a row, so I'm not as worried about the staff getting bored with me as I was for today. I believe I was doing 18 hour long sessions/presentations during this training, and by the end of the day tomorrow, I will be done with 10 of them. Thursday will be busy again, but after the day tomorrow, I think I'll only have 2 presentations per day, instead of 3. What a country!

I'll give more updates about Training as we get deeper into it. Overall, I have to say it's going well...

NP: Frank Zappa - A Pound for a Brown (1982 Summer)

2 comments:

cabinboy said...

Such nerdly-good Friday nights those were... Remember the Friday night dream crossover? Where one (or maybe all three) of those prickly spheres causes them Brisco to jump to the future, or Mulder and Scully to influence the past? Thus becoming the first ever "Men In Black?"

Was Fox responsible for the end of that show as well? Were they killing good things that early on? Bleah.

It took a couple years, but "Brisco" DID finally make it onto an X-FILE. And a pretty low-key fun one, from what I can remember. Not sure if you were still "with" the show when it happened? He got to be a horny devil.

zorknapp said...

I specifically watched that X-Files with Bruce Campbell on it. He was quite good in the episode, from what I remember.

And I meant to write about our fascination with the X-Files/Brisco cross over idea. I also should have mentioned our belief that John Astin was never actually cast in the show, he just showed up as a crazy old man, and they filmed what happened...

I don't know if Fox was really responsible for the end of the show, I'm sure it was expensive to make, but as the guy who plays Socrates Poole states in the documentary on the bonus materials, he thought that Brisco/X-Files was a great night of television. I agree, as did nerds everywhere...