Cheers reboot

 

I love Cheers, 

I like Simon Nye - I still enjoy watching Men Behaving Badly. Nye also wrote one of the best Dr Who stories of the revival. Amy's Choice

I am unsurprised to discover plans exist to reboot Cheers. I can understand why people, and by people I mean shareholders and executives  want to reboot it. Cheers is a classic still broadcast on Channel 4,  -The podcast draws an audience Cheers is also cheap- A studio set, and a few cameras. It is almost Theatre 

In fact there was a Mexican remake in the 00s 

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/cheers-sitcom-british-remake-b2622008.html

That said, why not just make a funny pub sitcom. 

“The attitudes of Cheers in the ‘80s are very different to the attitudes of today, so there’s a massive amount of work to be done around taking inspiration from the original characters but creating something fresh.”

Firstly people were forgetting the series. Cheers is gay friendly from it's first episodes- Norm has to physically restrain his boss from attacking Diane. This in the same season where a WW1 realises he is the last man standing of his band of brothers. If you look at the first episode- Sam is dressed more or less as John travolta   Sam's story is actually one of someone who falls head over heels in love with an educated woman. Sam and Diane are a battle of the sexes comedy writ large.

Sam almost got paired with Captain Janeway 

 They are also toxic. Sam and Diane nearly come close to physical violence a few times - Equally how do you show that two people are poison when mixed together 

Sam is happy to use his sexual magnetism to impress the ladies  it also equally true in the canon in Cheers that Karla is spit roasted in the 1990s sense 

 Sam is not presented uncritically - Firstly Sam was actually supposed to have a child with Rebecca, but the late Kirsty Allie's miscarriage ended that story.   Indeed the series goes on - Sam tries to get a therapist for his sex addiction.  Woody is introduced as a rival to Sam, this path is not really explored. To be honest I think Sam is a less interesting character as the series goes on, and is suplanted by Woody, and Frasier and Lillith 

 Most of the sexism is actually later in the series directed at Rebecca- Rebecca is harassed by Frasier's mentor -who denies it, and tries to gas light her. Equally Sam is trying to manipulate rebecca, by trying to get her to fall asleep in an episode

Beyond that- We have the story of Norm, and his wife never having a child and Cliff's struggle with lonliness. 

There is more here than you remembered 

Anyway- it is actually really easy to reboot Cheers and put it in the Frasier-Cheers Universe

Frasier was a Rhodes Scholar, and Lillian Huxley and her daughter worked at Cheers

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

 

I think this is the first time I have been in the cinema since Peru

They should have killed off Winnona Ryder, she really is a limited actress. Stranger things has flattered her. It is easy to play the inguene when you are young and pretty. It would have been better to have Ortega or O Hara face of Beetlejuice

1- The Jenna Ortega romance plot is great. She has a kiss and her lover changes. I liked the fact that her father had died horribly in the amazon -it is an accursed place 

2- Catherine 0'Hara is great. She rescues a lot of the scenes with Winnona and her awful vocal fry.

It is brave choice to acknowledge the existence of Jeffery Jones. As his past will be looked up online Beetlejuice  Beetlejuice does this. I did wonder why Geena Davis was written out though 

The Dune/ Sand snakes are weird. Were they a late addition- The use of animation was a surprise

3- I liked the flashback with Michael Keaton talking italian and remiscing about the plague.. Keaton when we do see him is great  I did not care for the Monica Belluci plot

Danny Devito, Burn Gorman, and Dafoe had a lot of fun- Dafoe in particular looked like he was enjoying himself. Burn Gorman seems to have been the only person to escape Torchwood

Birththing rooms having windows is odd

Why release this now and not at Halloween I don;t know. It was alright. It was tied up neatly 

100 days

Dad's 80th birthday

 

Many happy returns to my father who is 80 years old today 

Yesterday we celebrated his birthday A lovely meal organized by sister

Karoke night at the Shanakee

My brother regaling the crowd with his performance of ``The Who's My Generation''

 

President Woodrow Tiberius Boyd

I was watching Cheers, season 11. One of the nice ways the series rounds out. Is by having Woody enter politcs. This is due to Frasier and Sam having an argument over a local politican who has ducked into Cheers to lobby for votes.

BTW I am sure you will noticed the Star Trek reference there: Interestingly Captain Janeway is also involved in Boston Politics at this time. 

A nice touch for the Frasier spin off -would be to reference that Woody is running for senate

Woody orders the nuclear strike. This is interesting as  though Woody is a Hayseed he is shrewd in his own way. He is charming enough to win the heart of a beautiful woman and out manouvere his dad

                                               Here is a face with a cfuture

Magnum P.I The Jororo kill

This is an episode that has become infamous on YouTube and social media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfFIkOgyf9o

The episode starts with three minutes of dialogue in French. A nun, asks a French gendarme to assist her to change a flat tire. The gendarme is distracted for a few moments from his job supervising the entrance to an embassy 

The Nun, is a trained killer. The antagonist is possibly what we would understand as trans.

The ``Nun''  has been hired by the Popular Front of Jororo-( Jororo is a small but plausible sounding island in the South Pacific ) The Popular Front want to kill the PM. The Cold War is rattling on

Tyne Daley- ( Cagney and Lacey) has a guest star role- as an old friend of Magnum's Daley was a journalist embedded in Magnum's team during the Vietnam era. This is a bit awkward in retrospect as Magnum worked for the Phoenix Project which was charged with the assassination of VC and Viet Minh

Daley was wounded  in Vietnam  and is wounded now Having moved back stateside has a chip on her shoulder. It is interesting as the grizzled veteran - TC and Rick have both moved on. While the Officer and the journalist seem stuck 

 We see archive footage of Daley in Vietnam in tigers stripes talking into the camera standing with one hand in her pocket. Daley's character is really well done. This episode could have been about the attraction that war has for many people. Which even Magnum notes at times. 

Instead we get the Nun with the gun. 

Speaking of dirty wars - Higgins was in Northern Ireland with Mi6. 

There is a great scene where Rick (-who gets less and less to do as the series goes on) bribing Mac with food and beer. As Magnum does 

 

Two other scenes of the Pacific world that Magnum lives in. The PM of Jororo is visiting Hawaii to sign a trade agreement. Now PM implies a commonwealth country?  The PM of Jororo is a devout Catholic. So he is attending mass On the other side of the equation Magnum is trying to get information out of a Bell Boy- and is offered girls and a 2000 dollar entry poker game 

Two final bits of trivia:

A decent bottle of wine -French imported as 37.50 in American dollars. 

The hotel has a front desk computer- Magnum does not comment on this so it must be SOP for Hawaii in the early 80s