Friday, January 23, 2015

Comparing Past Januarys

Beyond the holiday season and in the dead of winter, I have less nostalgia for January than I do most of the months we've already reviewed but there were a few really good ones and I'll press forward with my reviews until May when I've completed the series....

January 1984 vs. January 1994 vs. January 2004

Winner: 1984--Easy victory here as this was the first year I really got into TV, going so far as studying the local TV listings printed in the paper and reviewing which shows were on which channel, broadcast and cable.  I didn't have cable growing up, but my grandparents and other friends and family did, so I was intrigued when I visited their place and explored their selection of channels.  Of course, the transition to 1984 was right at the epicenter of the mid-80s action show trend, where every nonaction show that was removed from the schedule seemed to be replaced by an action show and they dominated the airwaves for the next 2 1/2 years.  January 1984 was also the first month with our new Irish setter Luke, who we picked up on New Year's Eve.

January 1985 vs. January 1995 vs. January 2005

Winner: 1995--Eleven years earlier, my family picked up the aforementioned Irish setter Luke but it was January 1995 when the legendary German shorthair Pokey joined the Hagen household.  He was a nine-month-old hellraiser who brought some spunk to a lethargic residence.  Beyond that, January 1995 was the final month of my junior year "fall semester" in high school, the semester I remember the most fondly of my high school years.  Unfortunately, it was January 1995 when the angst of pending graduation more than a year away began to fill my heart with the early stages of dread.  Without question, it was the last hurrah of my carefree youth years.

January 1986 vs. January 1996 vs. January 2006

Winner: 2006--Certainly in my adult life, few months have been as consequential as January 2006, the month I started my new life in central Iowa with a plum state job.  I had been unemployed for several months and ran out of unemployment checks when I drove down to Des Moines for a job interview that I assumed was for a session-only position.  Imagine my surprise when I found out it was a permanent, full-time job.  I had to start the job ASAP given their timeline which meant the need to find a place and be moved in just five days after getting the job offer.  It was a very manic couple of weeks but exciting to move to a new town and get a solid new job that felt like a good fit for me.  I knew immediately that I had found my place.  While my peak weeks of "Monsters books"-mania in January 1986 was noteworthy, they're light years beyond January 2006 in terms of overall impact on my life.

January 1987 vs. January 1997 vs. January 2007

Winner: 1987--No clear winners here but between my first Cub Scout Pinewood Derby win, the peak weeks of my Saturday night "Wonderful World of Disney, "Sidekicks", and "Sledge Hammer!" trifecta on KAAL, and my blossoming elementary romance, 1987 tops its rivals.

January 1988 vs. January 1998 vs. January 2008

Winner:  1988--Here's a classic win by default.  There was little to get too excited about in January 1988, aside from the very earliest stages of my Nickelodeon obsession that would come to full fruition the following month.  Beyond that, I won another Pinewood Derby and was excited about the reconfigured network TV schedule that began the new year.  Not a ton to get behind but still better than its rivals.

January 1989 vs. January 1999 vs. January 2009

Winner: 1989--Tougher call on this one as January 1999 was pretty good as well, but I was finding my groove in January 1989 at school, improving my grades and getting in less mischief.  It was also the peak period of my recess computer games on the old Apple IIe, particularly Word Munchers and Oregon Trail.  "MacGyver" was right in the middle of its best season and all was generally well in the world.

January 1990 vs. January 2000 vs. January 2010

Winner: 2000--My college had a one-class January semester called J-Term, where students could take a single class for three weeks in January and get three credits.  This was my best J-Term, a Paideia II class that got into debates on race and illegal immigration where I was far more engaged than usual during my college classes.  I was also fairly active in creative writing this month, beginning a nightly fix of "A-Team" reruns on TV Land, and had the excitement of the 2000 primaries and caucuses to keep me amused.  I had a little bit of trepidation about my pending college graduation but nothing like my angst about the end of high school four years earlier.

January 1991 vs. January 2001 vs. January 2011

Winner: 2001--A couple of good choices here as January 1991, the dawn of Operation Desert Storm, was also a very pivotal and interesting month, but January 2001 was my first January ever that I had off and it was kind of cool to be chilling every day in the dead of winter with no schedule.  I was hitting it off with a couple of girls at the time and it was exciting to chat with them at my convenience....and in a long, cold, and snowy winter, I had plenty of opportunities to put on some boots and trek the snowy fields surrounding my parents' place that January.  I would say that I got in on the full Minnesota winter experience more in 2001 than any other January, ironically at age 23.

January 1992 vs. January 2002 vs. January 2012

Winner: 1992--Meh.  No great choices by any means but definitely was the best was the lead-up to the 1992 Presidential primaries and caucuses, my first year of actively tracking the primaries and the most exciting as I was fully invested in Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's candidacy, waiting for his campaign to catch fire at any given moment even though it never did.  While this was exciting, it was hard to get over "MacGyver" being pulled from the airwaves in December 1991 and having nothing to watch at the sacred 7:00 hour on Monday nights anymore.

January 1993 vs. January 2003 vs. January 2013

Winner: 2013--Oh sweet Jesus!  They're all terrible!  Nothing good to say about January 2013...it just wins by default against two months that are even worse.

Overall I've had a few decent Januarys over the years.  We'll see if I can say the same next month about Februarys past.

Tuesday, January 06, 2015

"The MacGyver Project" My Favorite New Place On The Web

For years now, I have semiregularly done random Internet searches for anything "MacGyver"-related.  Even 22 years since the series went off the air, I maintain my Mama Grizzly connection to that series just as I did as a teenager, beaming with pride when the series gets a positive plug and scratching and hissing like a cornered cat when the series gets dissed.  I'm not sure why I have such a personal attachment to this series but I certainly do, and at some point early last fall I had a "why didn't I think of that?" moment upon stumbling into a fellow Blogspot website called "The MacGyver Project", where the blogrunner counts down "MacGyver" episodes from his least favorite to his favorite with in-depth reviews and color commentary.

I didn't think there was anyone else alive who ranked the series' episodes in such a methodical pecking order, which I have been doing with substantial revisions dating back to 1993 when I completed recording all of the early episodes on VHS.  Usually every time I view the episodes again, which in recent years has been once every three or four years, I reconfigure my lists as the passage of time has improved my thoughts on some episodes and diminished my thoughts on others.  The author of "The MacGyver Project" has apparently not viewed these episodes in quite some time before making his reviews and has acknowledged he's walked away with different impressions of some episodes than he went in with, which will hopefully lead him to reconfigure his list at the project's end.  Either way, it's a fun and ambitious project, and I've learned a few bits of trivia from his reviews, and some plot holes and other assorted goofs have been brought to my attention as well.

So do his list and mine overlap smoothly?  Somewhat.  When I first got into comparing favorite and least favorite episodes with "MacGyver" fans back in college in the now-defunct MacGyver Homepage Chatroom, I was shocked to discover that--gasp!--not every MacGyver fan had the same impressions about various episodes as I did.  Many episodes I held up in the highest esteem were not necessarily fan favorites and episodes I didn't care for had legions of devoted followers.  One regular on the MacGyver Homepage Chatroom who generally had great contributions and insights about the show proudly proclaimed to the board that her favorite episode was "MacGyver's Women", my least favorite episode.  Wow!  Since then, having compared notes with dozens of fans, I've found that there's no general consensus about too many episodes and the best you can hope for is that your thoughts are generally compatible with other fans on two-thirds of the episodes.  That's roughly been the case with me and the "MacGyver Project" blogrunner, and I guess a series with the range of stories that "MacGyver" took on can expect to have a diverse audience with varied thoughts on favorite episodes.

Disagreements aside, "The MacGyver Project" is well worth a visit for any true "MacGyver" fan, and there's a comments section to sound off if you agree or disagree with the author's review.  I highly recommend you give it a look. 
http://themacgyverproject.blogspot.com/