TVSquad

While the Republicans are gathering in St. Paul for their national convention to confirm the candidacy of Senator John McCain as presiden,t and Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate, Turner Classic Movies is presenting a night of alternative politics.

The cable channel going to present five movies about politics, and if you want to see how the world of running for public office has changed in the 20th century, these films are a fantastic reflection of the times.

On Wednesday, September 3, starting at 8 PM ET, the night begins with The Last Hurrah, and includes The Candidate (10:15 PM), The Best Man (12:15 AM), Nashville (2 AM) and The Dark Horse (1932).

Like I said, these pictures are all really interesting choices. The Candidate, released in 1972, for instance, is not so different from today's campaign pitting Senator Barack Obama versus Senator John McCain.

It's a young candidate espousing change, up against an experienced, wizened establishment candidate. Robert Redford plays Bill McKay, the up and comer, while Don Porter is the popular, long-time incumbent senator. Check out these photos, because Porter even looks like McCain!

To use a well-worn phrase...Good News, Everyone! Your friends over here at TV Squad are heading on out to San Diego during the last week in July to cover one of the bigger, if not biggest, comic book and science fiction conventions on mainland America and the world. I speak, of course, of ComicCon.

From July 24th through July 27th you'll see us with our TV Squad T-Shirts (and underwear -- viewings of those by appointment) as we join the rest of the throngs attending the convention. At some point we may even be doing a bit of Twittering to find out where you are at the convention so you can find us in order to shake our hands (or, in the case of some of our commenters, punch and kick us) and potentially get some free stuff as well.

(Continued from Part One...)

After checking in (and eating my own weight in free press-room pizza), I went down to see what there was worth seeing...

(It should be noted that from this point forward I will only be referring to the actors on The Office by their character names and not their real names. You could make the argument that this is disrespectful, but I think that it's actually a testimony to how good the actors on this show are. Even when you're in the same room as them, you're not thinking, wow, look, I'm standing in the same room as Leslie David Baker, you're thinking: hey look, it's Stanley!)

(S02E10) I'm going to go out on a limb here and argue that Bill has essentially not changed since the beginning of the show. Oh, sure, he is still acting and behaving-- but I don't think there is anything inherently different about the way he is behaving. He is still ambitious, still thinks he is right, and he is a salesman: He thinks he can talk his way into or out of any situation. However, I bet that was cold comfort at the end of tonight's episode, considering who he ended up in bed with...

(S10E14) After relentlessly satirizing current events for several episodes, the minds behind South Park took a nice departure with this episode, offering up a hysterical take on mainstream movie conventions, complete with a voiceover and musical score provided by a man who follows Stan around to clue everyone in on what's happening while he plays music on a portable record player.

Following the old comedy standby that pain is always funny, this episode sees Stan trying to become responsible, but having more pressure put on him from the town's adults than he can handle. First his bike is towed (that's right, I said "towed"), so he can't do his paper route, and if he can't make money from the paper route, he can't get his bicycle back. He ends up enlisted to coach the pee-wee hockey team, a group of toddlers who can barely skate and never score a single goal.

Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi is one of those people I would love to sit in a room with and listen to his rants. Since I'm still working on my John K. Kidnapping Machine, I have to settle for his blog (Warning: NSFW), which he's been using to provide sage advice to people interested in becoming animators and cartoonists, and to slam the conventions of modern day animation, most notably on shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park. On this post, he talks about how characters in old cartoons evolved at a much faster rate than characters on any of the aforementioned shows. As ideas grew and changed, so did characters. He writes: "You have to be raised in an uncreative environment in order to blindly accept how bland and crappy everything is today." Later in the post he adds: "No one should accept professional work that looks like they could do it themselves."

In the comments section of the same post, he further asserts that "the very concept of animated sitcoms is faulty in the first place." His argument is that no character in an animated sitcom has ever been able to emulate the best actors in the best sitcoms. And as pure animation, they don't exactly hold up, either.