tv shows within tv shows: an ocd thread for jaymc and nabisco

The dialogue immediately after that scene was really great.

Ha...

Just had a major flash of this with a Gilmore Girls episode, where Lorelai describes someone as "sounding like a Kids in the Hall character." But then what does she make of her one coworker who's played by Bruce McCulloch?

in the Gilmoreverse, the Kids in the Hall are Seth Rogan, Michael J Fox, Evangeline Lilly, Mike Myers and Steve Nash

I think part of why that one's funny is that we talked upthread about looks, and how it's easy to suspend disbelief and imagine that characters have some independent appearance that the actor is only a vague approximation of, right? But in this case, Bruce McCulloch is totally doing a Bruce McCulloch character, and talking in that Bruce McCulloch voice, and you can't really suspend disbelief that the character you're looking at isn't acting the way the actor is acting.

I don't know where to put this so I'm putting it here.

Big Pet Peeve of mine are movies like Game Change where everybody looks like themselves except for the main characters. Seeing the real Wolf Blitzer standing in front of a big screen with Ed Harris' disguised face on it or the awkward blonde wig posing as Katie Couric interviewing Julianne Moore in character as Sarah Palin distracts too much from the story. Toward the end, when there is footage of Anderson Cooper interviewing the real Steve Schmidt edited with shots of Woody Harrelson portraying Steve Schmidt… I understand that not every movie can be American Splendor, but it's a little much in some cases.

There's this completely ridiculous scene in Nixon where Oliver Stone shows footage of the real Dwight Eisenhower with a CGI Anthony Hopkins as Nixon. How hard would it have been to find some bald guy to act like Ike for a five-second shot? I don't get it.

Bald actors cost money.

This was a lot of what squicked me out about Man On The Moon. Carrey as Kaufman reenacting Taxi scenes with the visibly aged original cast. I don't know how scenes like that can do anything but pull viewers completely out of the movie.

With Danny DeVito cast as someone else entirely….

This was a lot of what squicked me out about Man On The Moon. Carrey as Kaufman reenacting Taxi scenes with the visibly aged original cast. I don't know how scenes like that can do anything but pull viewers completely out of the movie.

― Soggy Cheeseburgers (Deric W. Haircare), Wednesday, March 14, 2012 1:06 PM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what do you mean by pull out of the movie and why is this bad

lol immersion

I mean "shatters all suspension of disbelief and makes me stop caring about the onscreen drama that I assume the filmmakers want me to keep caring about". It's bad because they made that flick 20 years after the events depicted onscreen. They should've waited, like, 50 years, so an octogenarian Tony Danza could pretend to be 30. Now that would be awesome.

lol ironic distance

so what you're saying is that you disapprove of the pull out method

I prefer for films to have a more consistent rhythm, if that makes sense? I like to feel excited and yet protected within the fertile playground of a film.

Party Down making me overthink stuff...Casey auditions for Reno 911 in one episode and has a scene in an Apatow movie in another, and Thomas Lennon has guested on PD and of course lots of PD people have been in Apatow movies.

Watched the first episode of Sherlock the other day and was momentarily weirded out by the idea of a world where Sherlock Holmes is not a famous historical literary character.

that's ridiculous even for you

someone mentioned that somewhere before, didn't they? particularly alien and terrifying about this world is that the phrase "no shit, sherlock" can't exist.

tv shows within tv shows: an ocd thread for jaymc and nabisco

Every time a character on "The Sopranos" mentioned one of the Godfather movies, I couldn't help wondering "Don't these guys realize that Uncle Junior is Johnny Ola?"

in "the pitch" episode of seinfeld there's a reasonable doubts (91-93 series w/ marlee matlin & mark harmon) poster on a wall of the nbc offices so matlin exists in that universe as herself but in a later season she shows up as laura the the lip-reading girlfriend.

Watched the first episode of Sherlock the other day and was momentarily weirded out by the idea of a world where Sherlock Holmes is not a famous historical literary character.

― Never translate Dutch (jaymc), Monday, June 4, 2012 9:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

<3

Not sure how this fits in the thread but I found it interesting that the Facebook episode of South Park showed that Kyle was born in 2001, six years after the show premiered.

I always wondered how old Michael Bluth was supposed to be in Arrested Development - his son was like 15 or 16, and you wouldn't think that he (the responsible one) would have been married w/ children at the age of 21, so wouldn't this make him 40, at least?

http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb52/The_Playlist/movies/donowitz-basterds-true-romance.png

Tarentino says the film producer in True Romance is the son of the Bear Jew from Inglorious Basterds.

So (why yes I'm quoting a Cracked.com article), all the characters of QT's world - the Red Apple cigarettes, the Vega brothers, even the implausible theory that Beatrix Kiddo might actually be Mia Wallace starring in Fox Force Five - live in a historical context where Adolf Hitler SPOILER was gunned down in a movie theater, hence ending WWII just like that.

This explains why sudden violence and pop culture seems so ubiquitous in this QT world.

Kyle was born in 2001, six years after the show premiered.

Pedant alert. The show itself actually premiered in 1997, the viral video that launched the show was from 1995. Still, yeah, that is very interesting.

also one of the things I loved about the 21 Jump Street movie is that the lead actors were clearly in their late-20s or early 30s and NOT high school students and it got pointed out all the damn time

You can bust your head trying to make sense of cartoon logic.

http://cdn.pophangover.com/wp-content/uploads/lisa-simpson.jpg

Watched the first episode of Sherlock the other day and was momentarily weirded out by the idea of a world where Sherlock Holmes is not a famous historical literary character.

― Never translate Dutch (jaymc), Monday, June 4, 2012 8:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

had this exact thought

Watched the first episode of Sherlock the other day and was momentarily weirded out by the idea of a world where Sherlock Holmes is not a famous historical literary character.

In one of the second season episodes someone mentions that a particular Sherlock case was "straight out of a Conan Doyle novella". So presumably in the Sherlock universe Doyle still was a famous mystery writer, only he wrote about some other character(s) than Sherlock. Kinda like in the movie-universe the kid in The Last Action Hero enters, the Terminator was played by Stallone and not Arnie.

The South Park example is a completely different phenomenon called floating timeline, or comic book time.

some prime fodder for this thread here
http://www.avclub.com/articles/scenes-from-the-munchiverse-21-links-between-unexp,83368/

Awesome. I wonder if Heisler Gold ale was one of the two fictional beers I noticed on S4 of Damages -- mostly drunk by John Goodman and Dylan Baker. Couldn't make out the label. I was watching S2 of Breaking Bad around the same time, and it was kind of jolting to hear Walt enter a bar and order a Fat Tire, since you hardly ever hear anyone mention a specific real-life brand on TV.

(And esp. not a New Belgium!)

Todd VanDerWerff @tvoti
Brad Paisley exists in the Nashville universe, yet his real-life wife plays Teddy's girlfriend. So who is Alt-Brad Paisley's wife?!

Also, re Heisler beer (which I mentioned a couple of posts up): One of the things I really like about New Girl is that it makes no attempt at all to hide the fact that its beers are TV-brand. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, a recent episode actually mentioned Heisler by name.

not the first time iirc

Watched the first episode of Sherlock the other day and was momentarily weirded out by the idea of a world where Sherlock Holmes is not a famous historical literary character.

― Never translate Dutch (jaymc), Monday, June 4, 2012 8:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

had this exact thought

― goole, Tuesday, June 5, 2012 10:37 AM (11 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dunno, somehow the fact that it's all british makes it seem essentially sherlockish - a different version, myth- or comic-book style.

whereas on 'elementary' they pull the trick of displacing sherlock to new york (even though he keeps referring back to his time in london assisting scotland yard) and changing watson to lucy liu as 'joan' so that whenever someone refers to sherlock, or especially when he introduces himself, the fact that it's kind of weird to us that there's a modern-type person saying that he is a legendary fictional character just gets taken up into the general weirdness of the screen character, as whatsisname acts him.

I thought of this thread the other day when we were watching House Hunters, a show Liz Lemon mentions a few times ("why can't people look past paint color?"), and the person looking for a house was Keith Powell, who plays Toofer.

Thanks to this thread Sherlock just became difficult for me to watch

taylor swift makes a cameo in season 2 of new girl as a character named elaine but earlier that season zooey deschanel is heard listening to "22" and specifically says something like "i just want to listen to taylor swift" and this bothers me and i spent like a half hour searching for this thread to post about it ok thanks

We recently rewatched all the seasons of The Nanny, and it has an overload of "celebrity paradox". First of all, it has more than one case of a celebrity (Whoopi Goldberg, Rosie O'Donnell, etc) appearing both as himself and as a fictional person without anyone noticing they look alike. With Fran's grandmother, there are recurring jokes how she reminds people of Millie from Dick van Dyke Show (she's played by Ann Morgan Guilbert, who also played Milly), and so on...

But the whole thing is taken to ridiculous extremes with Fran Descher herself. In one episode she appears as Bobbi Flekman, the character she played in This Is Spinal Tap. In this case, the resemblance between Fran Fine (the character she plays in The Nanny) and Bobbi Flekman is noticed, and Fran is able to succesfully impersonate her. Still, no one finds it a bit odd that the two woman look exactly alike.

Then, in the penultimate episode of the series, Fran Fine, the fictional character, runs into Fran Drescher, the famous actor, by chance. They have a brief discussion, and it turns out that within the universe of The Nanny Drescher is doing a series that's quite similar to The Nanny, and Fine is a fan of it! And apparently that show-within-a-show is about have its series finale (just like The Nanny was in real life), and Drescher even urges Fine to "tune in and watch it next week!". Yet no one seems to notice that Drescher looks exactly like Fine (and Flekman!), and that the events of Frescher's fictional series weirdly mirror the events of Fine's real life...

rewatched all the seasons of The Nanny?

^^Big in Finland, iirc.

It seriously was a pretty good show for the first two or three seasons! The quality drops during the second half (when the Fran/Max will-they-or-won't-they arc takes over the whole show), and the final season is pretty bad, but we needed some mindless Sunday night entertainment, and it's all on Netflix, so...

Tell us when you start rewatching "Coach". We can help you with the American football references.

Never heard of that one, is on Netflix? (Though I don't really care about sports-related shows or movies.)

I kinda teasing you (it's another cheesy sitcom from the 90s), but it does have a Dick Van Dyke connection, I'll give you that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xkp7wsJc8MI

ha @ "where do you keep your Oscar?"

Obligatory jokes:

1. Tuomas spent several seasons thinking her last name was "Finn" rather than "Fine" and was feeling patriotic.
2. Show airs in Finland under the title, Hey! We're Babysitting!

Exit, pursued by Frans.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/taylorsimone/oh-mr-sheffield i'd never even heard of the nanny so i have no reaction to this besides 'too much time on ilx'.