The Television Career of Young Indiana Jones
With the May 2008 release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, America’s fascination with the iconic fictional character will know doubt be again resurrected. The original adventure, Raiders of the Lost Ark, earned $209 million in 1981, and the subsequent prequel (Indiana Jones and Temple of Doom) and sequel (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade) likewise ruled the domestic box office, respectively scoring $179 and $197 million each. Conceived by Star Wars guru George Lucas and born from his love of 1940s serials, the movie franchise features Steven Spielberg as director and Harrison Ford in the role of Indiana Jones, the famed archaeologist who continuously finds himself in pursuit of lost relics and ancient treasures.
Old time movies, however, are just one of the many passions Lucas has had through the course of his life, and in the early 1990s he decided to wed one of his greatest characters with an equal love for history by creating The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, a television drama that ran on ABC for two seasons, from 1992 to 1993. “I have an educational foundation working with interactive projects, and I got this idea to get kids involved in history through the Young Indiana Jones character,” TheRaider.net quotes Lucas as saying at the time. “The turn of the century is my favorite part of history because it has so much to do with the emergence of the modern age we live in today. It seemed like such a great idea and such an interesting adventure that I just got lured into it by the creative potential.”
Dunder Mifflin Embraces the Technology of Podcasting
Michael Scott (Steve Carell), general manager of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company on the Emmy Award-winning The Office, is not a fan of technology. In the Season Four episode “Dunder Mifflin Infinity,” for example, former temp-turned-regional-manager Ryan Howard (B.J. Novak) launches a new company website in order to give customers easier online ordering ability. “New ideas are fine, but they are also illegal,” Scott said at the time. He later tried to embrace technology by following his GPS map system, but misinterpreted a direction and ended up driving his car into a lake. “In the end, life and business are about human connections,” he commented afterwards. “And computers are about trying to murder you in a lake. And to me the choice is easy.”
Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager Webseries Review
Madison, Wisconsin, does not sound like the kind of town that could potentially rival Hollywood. Although the Wisconsin capital is the birth-place of the alternative rock band Garbage as well as the satirical news journal The Onion, and even served as the temporary home of musicians Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs while they attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, it hardly measures up as a major creative mecca. But then along came the World Wide Web and YouTube, and suddenly tiny Madison found itself being mentioned in the arts sections of The New York Times, Washington Post, and Chicago Sun-Times. The reason? The online webseries Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager.
Weekly Podcast on the ABC Drama Lost
Episode Eleven: The Shape of Things to Come Review (April 30, 2008)
Tony, Erin and Kathleen discuss the sixth episode of the current season of Lost, “The Shape of Things to Come,” including:
--Ben’s appearance in the Sahara Desert.
--The Vile Vortices Theory of Lost.
--Ben’s recruitment of Sayid.
--Ben’s with Charles Widmore.
--The “dead” body of the freighter doctor.
Join Tony, Erin and Kathleen as they reflect on these and other topics while exploring the Mysteries of the Island.
Is Pittsburgh the next Hollywood?
Variety reported on Sunday that former MTV VJ and current NBC late night talk show host Carson Daly will team up with Madison Road Entertainment to produce a daily five-minute webcast, The Really Big Internet Show, starting in July that will spotlight the most original online videos of the day. This is Daly’s second venture onto the World Wide Web, having previously developed an online video pilot, It’s Your Show, for NBC. “We spent many hours trying to convince the people at NBC that content online was rich material, a force to be reckoned with,” Daly told Variety. “It’s Your Show was our attempt to focus on user-generated content by offering money. But our timing was off. But I’m such a believer in that space.”
As well as a believer in the practitioners of Internet video, apparently, as many of the more popular online celebrities will be involved with The Really Big Internet Show. While Madison Road has yet to line up a primary advertiser to sponsor the series, the firm believes that—with some video clips getting two million views a month—having such “stars” involved will help in the endeavor. “We were looking at the numbers that some of these Web celebrities produce,” Jak Severson of Madison Road said. “If you’re an advertiser looking at those numbers, you can’t ignore two million people staring at anything."
Of particular interest is the Internet video celebrity who has been tapped to host the show: Justine Ezarik, aka iJustine, of Pittsburgh. iJustine has been producing her own online shorts for some time now, and was one of five finalists in 2006 for the Yahoo! Talent Show competition. In August 2007, she filmed “300-Page iPhone Bill,” a comic take on the initial billing problems the much-hyped iPhone experienced; the clip was subsequently viewed more than three million times in ten days, garnering the attention of the mass media and making iJustine an “instant” Internet star. Another Pittsburgher, meanwhile—Justin Kownacki—recently had his webseries, Something to Be Desired, named a finalist in the 2008 Yahoo! Video Awards. Forget Hollywood, it’s cities like Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that are the real online hotbeds.
—Anthony Letizia (May 13, 2008)
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Main articles are updated every Monday.
