TVSquad

(S01E04) This series is clumped in with the reality show genre. But in the olden days of television -- you know, back when you were knee-high to a grasshopper -- The Next Great American Band would have been listed as a talent show. Or, perhaps even more appropriate would be a Battle of the Bands.

But a typical old-style Battle of the Bands has an edge over this show. The bands play their own kind of music. While I love the variety of the music genres on the show, it's that very variety in genres which I think throws things off a bit.

(S01E03) The field of bands narrowed by two tonight on The Next Great American Band. So, we're down to ten bands who specialize in various genres. I'm not sure how much I enjoyed the way they did the reveal of the two bands going home. It seemed a bit needlessly cruel, kind of like cruel and unusual punishment.

Each band sang prepared and rehearsed one of their original songs and then a song from the vast array of Elton John and Bernie Taupin numbers. The bands were called out one by one to perform. If they performed, they had made the cut for the week. The two bands who didn't make it had to go through all the rehearsals and sit foolishly and uncomfortably waiting, the camera panning them throughout the show, until the very end. When it was down to three bands, poof.

(S01E02) So there I was last night ... stuck in the crowds heading to see Bon Jovi in Newark and I said to myself, "No! I cannot succumb! I promised JJ Hawkins I'd sit in this week to review The Next Great American Band while he's on vacation!" No Bon Jovi live for me -- give me the Light of Doom! Unfortunately, a lot of the Bon Jovi fans heading to the concert looked like the Light of Doom boys albeit with shirts on. Odd.

This is going to be an interesting show to watch throughout the season. With such diversity and so many bands who excel in their own genre, I'll have to stick around to who wins in the end.

It's been almost two years since James "Scotty" Doohan passed away, but his ashes have finally been sent into orbit.

Some of the Star Trek actors' ashes were launched from the New Mexico desert today with the ashes of about two-hundred other individuals, including Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper. The rockets were launched by the wives of both men, Suzan Cooper and Wende Doohan.

Doohan was born in 1920 in Canada and fought in World War II, losing a finger as a result of injuries he suffered on D-Day. In the late '40s, he trained as an actor at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City. He's appeared in countless movie and TV roles, but of course we'll all remember him as Montgomery "Scotty" Scott.

Gene Roddenberry, the late creator of Star Trek, also had his ashes launched into space in 1997.

I thought of this show a few weeks ago when I started to see the commercials for Billy Bob Thornton's new movie, The Astronaut Farmer, about a guy who builds his own rocket in his barn so he can blast into space.

Salvage 1 was a short-lived show that starred Andy Griffith as a salvager who sells scrap that he finds and goes on various adventures with his cohorts (rescuing people, battling fires, getting involved with crooks, that sort of thing). The series co-starred Joel Higgins (Silver Spoons), Trish Stewart (whatever happened to her?), and Richard Jaeckel (Spenser: For Hire), and it was based on a TV movie of the same name in which Griffith built a rocket on his own and blasted off into space.

I can't tell you how much I loved this movie when I was a teen. If you had asked me in the late 70s what the best movie of all time was, I probably would have said this one. Sadly, the show died after only a season and a half. It couldn't quite match the charm of the pilot, but was pretty darn entertaining.

(S01E17) The final episode of The Prisoner is arguably the most controversial and confusing finale to a television series ever filmed. If you've been watching the episodes over time and think you're going to get some sort of resolution with this final portion of the story, think again. I've viewed this series a number of times over the years and, frankly, I still don't totally get what Fall Out was all about.

(S01E15) Do you ever get the feeling that when each episode of The Prisoner was being conceptualized and filmed that Patrick McGoohan knew he was playing with the audience's minds?

Seriously, after each episode, I think about what I've just seen, but then I have to replay nearly the entire story in my mind to make sure I understood what I just saw. But then later on, I'm still not quite entirely sure I got it all.