(BP)

It's going to be a huge bummer when he wins the senate race anyway.

I thought Hunter's comment about never getting to see Flair/Hogan in their prime was weird. Traveling champion Ric and peak Rock n' Wrestling Hogan would have probably had pretty much the same matches that they had in 94 in the 80s. Like Hulk said, he could never go an hour, and Ric would always have given most of the match to him. None of their matches are that fondly remembered anyway, outside of maybe the WWF house show loop stuff that made tape or the surprisingly good cage match in 99. The chemistry just wasn't there and Flair doesn't seem to think much of it other than probably being pleased with the payoffs.

Photo from Morgan's election speech.

Regardless of the coattail riding, Hunter does always come off as a really good friend. He was still loyal to Shawn when he hit rock bottom too. I don't quite agree with the idea that Flair's love for wrestling ruined him. He's portrayed as directionless, impulsive, and desperate for attention before finding wrestling. There are plenty of stories of success warping someone and destroying them, but this is the story of someone with issues discovering they're really good at something and channeling their energy into it. Wrestling also gave him a lot of avenues to lead a wild lifestyle, but Richard Fliehr dock worker or car salesman would probably have led a similarly troubled life, just less ostentatiously in obscurity.

The line HBK has in the trailer about Richard Fliehr being the real man and Ric Flair being the myth felt completely hollow and false. It's very clear that he's had a symbiotic relationship with his wrestling character to deal with personal issues his entire career.

Dexter only truly had a couple of great seasons, and it definitely went to shit after the Trinity Killer stuff. To be fair, I didn't even finish the last season. I often think about what a superb single season miniseries Californication would be remembered as if the rest of the series hadn't largely sucked. As the most character driven Law & Order, I was really disappointed when USA brought Criminal Intent back with D'Onofrio and Herbe and still didn't wrap it up well. Conversely, I thought The Office was still good (with some rough patches) after Carrell left until it concluded.

I feel like the shooter on Vice Principals has to be I'm kind of happy they intentionally made the show only two seasons. It's very British and something that's slowly being embraced here. I'm sure everyone has a show they love that was ruined by it refusing to conclude sensibly.

Disney already needs to be broken up into several smaller companies. You don't have to look any further for the ramifications of their monopoly than this week when they refused advanced screenings of their movies to LA Times reviewers because the paper did a piece on Disneyland's business relationship with Anaheim.

We watched Freddy vs Jason the other night, and the Scary Terry parody from Rick and Morty actually undersells how often Freddy calls someone a bitch. I hadn't seen it since it was in theaters, but I honestly still liked it a lot with the exception of poor Kelly Rowland given some awful dialogue involving Columbine and a gay slur that even 15 years ago was ill-advised.

Say what you will about M. Night, his Halloween party looks pretty lit.

A lot of Randy's matches from that period were based around selling the knee, so they're pretty uniform. Of course, he was spectacular at selling it, especially when he'd almost crash and burn on the top rope to sell the peril of attempting the elbow drop. They would have had better matches if their paths had crossed a few years later. Randy was one of the few A-listers in WCW still working his ass off, so I think he would have been motivated to do something special with Shawn.

Warner was the photographer? I've seen all of the Omens and remake once and they've all homogenized in my brain. He was in Time Bandits?! Okay, I looked it up and I feel a little better that he's almost unrecognizable as Evil Genius.

I'm watching From Beyond the Grave. I love Amicus portmanteau horror and I haven't seen this one yet. I've never seen David Warner in anything pre-90s. It's weird to see him look just as pompous and academic in the 70s but with a mod hairdo and sideburns. He's being compelled to sacrifice women to a Haunted Mansion style ghoul in an antique mirror. Was Peter Cushing really short or is Warner 7 feet tall? The framing device is sort of weird. All of the characters meet their fate because they screw Peter Cushing's antique shop owner out of money. Two of the stories are directly related to the items purchased and the other two aren't. So I guess it's not a Friday the 13th the Series/Needful Things scenario as much as it's that Cushing is a malevolent wizard hiding in plain sight doling out paranormal justice. Anyway, I'm glad I caught it. TCM is bringing it this Halloween.

Just finished No-End House. One of the hardest things to do as a storyteller when creating a new monster or supernatural entity is crafting a set of rules for how it works and following them to their inevitable conclusion. They did a good job creating an inherent logic within the universe without sacrificing a sense of mystery about what exactly was happening. There are some aspects that make me like the first season a bit more, but one thing this has going for it is that there isn't a single bad performance. John Carroll Lynch is always dependable, but all of the younger actors are tasked with way more dialogue and emotional nuance than most horror projects, and they're note-perfect. I could see any one of them (or all of them) having very bright futures. I think Channel Zero works really well because it starts with a simple conceit of powerful evocative imagery from the Creepypasta stories and then has powerful writing build a world around it.

I caught Diary of a Madman on TCM tonight. Not too remarkable other than Price being really great as always and Nancy Kovak being delightful. I had to look up her credits to see where I knew her from; among a lot of TV credits, she's Darren's ex-fiancé and Sam's foil in season one of Bewitched. I'd never really thought about it, but watching this made me realize that for decades most horror movies ended with a bunch of old men sitting around and basically going, "so...that happened."

I liked the escalation from Just Happy to Be Here Kurt to Veteran Who Bit Off More Than He Could Chew Kurt to Pissed Off Wrestling Machine Kurt. The hype video was better than it had any right to be for having no TV build to showcase. The collective groaning whenever Elias was announced killed me.

Cannot stop watching this boomerang.

Hopefully there's another two years between seasons for the heat on the gross fandom to die down.

It's weird that one of his biggest beefs would be that it's pushing back the production of the next Fast movie. It must be exhausting making one of them a year.

Petty has a tremendous body of work with the Heartbreakers and The Traveling Wilburys, but the balls it took to bankrupt himself recording Damn the Torpedoes to fight his record company is something else. There's nothing like artists betting on themselves and winning.

The issue with this current season seemed to be more about the animation than the writing. The animators at Starburns just unionized and threatened a strike. Their demands were very reasonable and were met, but I don't know how that'll affect things going forward. I'm sure Harmon and Roiland are anxious to get a faster turnaround going. The season four deal sounds like it's the one that's going to finally make them serious money from the show, and I'm sure their counting on having enough episodes to make a major syndication deal in the near future.

I'd forgotten that. That was one of those weird things where they tried to fan the flames on it by acting like they were just working the boys backstage to create controversy.

I think the Cena promo after the Brock match was about Cena wanting to take time off that Vince wouldn't approve and Cena trying to go into business for himself to get it. If I'm not mistaken they immediately followed this up with throwing him into an of out of nowhere feud with Laurenitis just to give him something to do, so they probably planned for him to take time and then panicked about ratings. Or he thought he had an injury from the match that turned out not to be too bad. Or his brains were just scrambled from letting Brock stiff him.

I have a vivid memory of a trailer for the Corman Fantastic Four playing on the televisions in Blockbuster at that time, so there was some sort of release strategy that didn't work out.

I was just thinking about I'm From Hollywood recently. It's really wild that it's essentially a Memphis comp strung together with the comedian interviews. It must've been on Comedy Central a couple times a week for years. I wonder what the story was there. Someone just bought the tapes and hustled the participants into thinking it was a straightforward doc about Andy?