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rachelbethhines · 3 years

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Vintage Shows to Watch While You Wait for the Next Episode of WandaVision - The 60s

So the 60s is the era that Wandavision pulls most heavily from for it’s inspiration. So much so that one could make the argument that each of the first three episodes are all set in the 1960s. Episode one pulls from the early 60s with multiple Dick Van Dyke refences, episode two is very Bewitched inspired, and episode three is aesthetically very similar to The Brady Bunch which started in ‘69. As such it was hard to narrow down the list for this decade and I had to get creative in some ways.

1. The Andy Griffith Show (1960 - 1968)

The Andy Griffith Show gets kind of a bad rap now a days for being, supposedly, a conservative’s wet dream. People claiming it as such have apparently never actually seen the series. Oh yes, it’s very much set in white rural 60s America and will occasionally present the obliviously outdated joke, but the story of a widowed sheriff being the only sane man in a small town full of lovable lunatics, who prefers to solve his and others problems with negotiation and hair brained schemes as opposed to violence has far more in common with modern day Steven Universe than whatever genocidal fantasy fake rednecks have in their heads.

As the gif above shows Andy Griffith was very subtlety progressive for its time. Andy was a stanch pacifist, pro-gun control, treated drug addicts and prisoners with respect, and all the women he would date had careers, ect. and so on. It’s not a satire making any sort of grand political statements but the series had a moral center that was far more left than many realize.

But if it’s not a satire, then what type of comedy is it?

The Andy Griffith Show excels in what I like to call, ‘awkward comedy’. See everyone in Mayberry is far too nice to just come out and tell a character they’re making an ass of themselves, so therefore whoever is the idiot punching bag of the episode’s focus must slowly unravel as everyone looks on in helpless pity until said character realizes the folly of their ways and the townsfolk come together to make them feel happy and accepted once more. Wandavision takes this polite idyllic awkwardness and plays it up for horror instead of laughs.

2. The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961 - 1966)

The creators of Wandavision actually met with Dick Van Dyke himself to pick his brain and learn how sitcoms were made back then. Paul Bentley also took inspiration from Van Dyke in his performance of the sitcom version of Vision, while Olsen stated Mary Tylor Moore had a heavy influence on her character of Wanda. But more than just being a point of homage, The Dick Van Dyke Show was hugely influential in modernizing the family sitcom and breaking a lot of the unspoken traditions and ‘rules’ of the 50s television era. It’s also just really, really funny.

3.The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962 - 1965)

Bit of a cheat here. Alfred Hitchcock Presents actually started in 1955 as a half hour anthology show, but in ‘62 the show got a revamp and was extended into a full hour tv series. I knew I wanted The Twilight Zone to be covered in my episode one recap, but ‘The Master of Suspense’ couldn’t be forgotten. While The Twilight Zone reveled in the surreal and supernatural, Alfred Hitchcock pioneered the thriller genre and made real life seem dangerous, horrifying, and other worldly.

4. Doctor Who (1963 - present day) vs Star Trek (1966 - present day)

Just like how westerns dominated the air waves during the 50s, science fiction was the center of the cultural zeitgeist of the 60s. From Lost in Space to My Favorite Martian, space aliens and robots were everywhere. So naturally I had to name drop the two sci-fi juggernauts that still air to this today. If you thought that the rivalry between Star Wars and Star Trek was bad then you’ve never seen a chat full of Whovians and Trekkies duking it out over who is the better monster, the Borg or the Cyberman. But which one has the more influence over Wandavision?

Well Star Trek owes it’s existence to sitcoms. As with The Twilight Zone before it, Star Trek was produced by Desilu Productions and it’s co-founder and CEO, Lucille Ball, was the series biggest supporter behind the scenes, lobbying for it when it faced early cancelation. As with all things sitcomy, everything ties back to I Love Lucy in the end. However despite that little backstory, it would seem that the series has very little to do with Wandavision itself beyond being quintessentially American.

I would argue that Wandavision owes much to Doctor Who though. Arguably more so than any show mentioned in this retrospective. Time travel, alternate realities, trouble in quite suburbia, brainwashing, people coming back from the dead, ect... just about every trope you can find in Wandavision has also appeared in Doctor Who at some point. As a series that can go anywhere and do anything, Doctor Who was a pioneer of marrying genres in new and interesting ways.

5. Bewitched (1964 - 1972) and I Dream of Jeannie (1965 - 1970)

It’s hard to pick one series over another because they’re essentially the same show. A mortal man falls in love with a magical girl who upends their lives with magic filled hijinks as they try their best not to have their secret discovered by the rest of the world. And both have their fingerprints all over the DNA of Wandavision.

There’s only two core differences; Samantha and Jeannie have completely different personalities, with Sam being confident and knowledgeable and Jeannie being naïve and oblivious, along with their relationships with their respective men, Sam and Darrin being married and in love at the start of the series and Jeannie chasing after Tony in the beginning in a will they/won’t they affair, finally only getting together in the last season.

6. The Munsters (1964 - 1966) vs The Adams Family (1964 - 1966)

Fans of these two shows are forever sadden that there never was a crossover between them. Because they’d fit perfectly together. Both shows are about a surreal and macabre family living in American suburbia and disrupting the lives of their neighbors with their otherworldly hijinks. Sound familiar?

The main difference between the two shows is the way the characters viewed their placement in the world they inhabit.

The Munsters were always oblivious to the fact that didn’t fit in. They just automatically assumed everyone had the same personal tastes as them. Whenever they encountered anyone who behaved strangely around them they would write that person off as being the odd one rather than questioning themselves. As such the main cast was structured like a stereotypical sitcom family who just happened to be classic movie monsters.

The Addams were well aware that they were abnormal and they loved it! They lived life with in their own little world and didn’t care what anyone thought of them. As such the characters were far more colorful and quirky as individuals but there was little in the way of refences to other horror franchises beyond just a general love of the twisted and strange.

7. Green Acres (1965 - 1971) and the Rual-verse (1962 - 1971)

So the MCU is not the first franchise to bring viewers an interconnected universe to the small screen. Far from it, as sitcoms had been doing this for decades, starting with the ‘rualverse’. Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres were all produced by the same company and were treated as spinoffs of each other, complete with crossovers and shared characters and sets.

Of the three, the last show, Green Acres, has the most in common with Wandavision. A well to do businessman and his lovely socialite wife settle down in small town America on a farm in order to get away from the stresses of city life, only to find new stresses in the country. Eva Gabor, herself a natural Hungarian, plays the character of Lisa as Hungarian making her one of the few non-native born Americans on tv screens during the cold war. Despite her posh nature and original protests to the move, Lisa assimilates to the rural life far easier than her husband, Oliver. Who, as the main comedic thread, can’t comprehend his new quirky neighbors’ odd and often illogical behavior.

8. Hogan’s Heroes (1965 - 1971) and Get Smart (1965 - 1969)

So as comic fans have been quick to point out, it’s looking like both A.I.M. (Hydra) and Sword (Shield) will be players in the story of Wandavision. To commemorate that here’s two shows to represent those opposing sides. Although in truth, neither series has anything else in common with each other but I need to condense things down someway.

In Hydra’s corner we got Hogan’s Heroes. A show all about taking down Nazis from within.

I love, love, love, ‘robin hood’ comedies where a group of con artists try week after to week to pull one over the establishment. The Phil Silvers Show, Mchale's Navy, and Top Cat, just to name a few examples are all childhood favorites of mine. However while those shows had a lot of morally ambiguous characters, Hogan’s Heroes has very clear cut good guys and bad guys, cause the bad guys are Nazis and the show relentless makes fun of the third reich as should we all. In fact I was watching Hogan’s Heroes while waiting for the GA run off election results. Fortunately my home state decided to kick out our own brand of Nazis this year.

For Shield, we got the ultimate spy spoof, Get Smart. Starring, Inspector Gadget himself, Don Adams, as the bumbling Maxwell Smart. Get Smart, is a hilarious send up of Cold War espionage but the real selling point of the show, imho, is Max and his co-worker 99′s relationship. You can cut the sexual tension in the air with a knife all while laughing your ass off.

9. Batman (1966 - 1968)

First was Superman and then came Batman. Yet while Superman was a serious action show, Batman was a straight up comedy. Showcasing that superheroes could indeed be funny.

Also shout out for Batman being the only show on this list to have an actual crossover with it’s competitor, The Green Hornet.

10. Julia (1968 - 1971)

Since episode two features the first appearances of Herb and Monica, let’s highlight the first black led sitcom since the cancelation of Amos ‘n Andy over a decade earlier. The show focuses on single mother and military nurse, Julia, as she tries to live her life without her recently decease husband, who was killed in Vietnam, as she tries to raise their six year old son on her own.

The series is cute. It’s more of a throw back to earlier family sitcoms where there’s no fantasy and life lessons are the name of the game. It’s the fact that the main character is a single black woman is what made the show so subversive and important at the time.

Runner Ups

There’s much good stuff in the 60s, so here’s some others that didn’t make the cut but I would recommend anyways.

Car 54, Where Are You? (1961 - 1963)

I call this the Brooklynn 99 of the 1960s. Bumbling but well meaning Officer Toody longs to do good in the world and help anyone in need, but often screws things up with his ill thought out schemes. He often drags his best friend and partner, the competent but anxiety riddled, Muldoon into his escapades.

Mr. Ed (1961 - 1966)

The grandfather of the sarcastic talking pet trope.

The Jetsons (1962 - 1963 and 1985 - 1987)

Hanna-Barbera often took popular sitcoms and just repackaged them as cartoons with a fantasy theme to them. The Jetsons has no singular show that it rips-off but is rather more a grab bag of sitcom tropes that feature, robots, computers, and flying cars.

The Outer Limits (1963 - 1965)

The Outer Limits was The Twilight Zone’s biggest competitor in terms of being a sic-fi/horror anthology series.

Gillian’s Island (1964 - 1967)

The only comparison to WandaVision I could think of was that this is a sitcom about people being trapped in one place. But by that point I was running out of room on the list. Still it’s one of the funniest shows on here.

So yeah, this took longer than expected cause there’s a lot, here. Hopefully the 70s will be easier. Which I’ll post on Friday.

#wandavision #sitcoms #1960s #dick van dyke #bewitched

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actutrends · 4 years

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The DeanBeat: My favorite games of 2019

Games grew to a $148.8 billion market in 2019, up 9.6% from 2018 and reaching over 2.5 billion people across the globe. Console games, the lion’s share of the industry a decade earlier, were smaller than mobile games in 2019, a continuation of a multi-year trend, according to research firm Newzoo.

We watched the further growth of esports and game watching expand this year, and we saw the introduction of subscription gaming for Apple Arcade, Google Play, and Google Stadia’s cloud gaming service. Hyper-casual mobile games that last 30 seconds emerged, but big mobile titles like Call of Duty: Mobile emerged to hold their own against the nanosecond attention spans.

I didn’t think we could match last year’s brilliant titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2, God of War, and Marvel’s Spider-Man. For me, last year was the triumph of traditional narrative triple-A games that blended open worlds with deep narratives.

But the highest end of the industry didn’t rest on its laurels in 2019. As usual, I didn’t have enough time to play it all. But I enjoyed everything across the board, from Sandbox VR’s Star Trek: Discovery — Away Mission virtual reality experience to episodic games like Life is Strange 2 to mobile titles like Call of Duty: Mobile and Apple Arcade’s Where Cards Fall. I re-engaged with favorite maps from years past in Call of Duty: Mobile and plunged into battle royale maps with squadmates in the multiplayer action of Apex Legends. And I was scared out of my wits playing titles like The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan.

It felt like I had less time to explore indie experiences that my peers played, so I wasn’t the first to stumble on titles like Untitled Goose Game. But I enjoyed delving into my own passions, such as the World War II real-time strategy game Steel Battalion 2 from Eugen Systems, where I could zoom in on a single tank in a battle or pan out to see an entire division marching across the Russian landscapes. Toward the end of the year, I rushed to finish titles such as Remedy’s Control and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

For the sake of comparison, here are my favorites from 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, and 2011. In each story below, the links go to our full reviews or major stories about the games. And be sure to check out the GamesBeat staff’s own votes for Game of the Year and the best individual favorites of the staff soon.

Check out our Reviews Vault for past game reviews.

10) Sayonara Wild Hearts

Above: Sayonara Wild Hearts takes you on an impossibly fast ride.

Image Credit: Annapurna

Developer: Simogo Publisher: Annapuana Interactive, iam8bit Platforms: Apple Arcade/iOS, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Windows, MacOS, tvOS

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this dream-like game, as music games don’t usually get me dancing. But Sayonara Wild Hearts has an artsy combination of dance-fighting, pop music, and high-speed motorcycle chases that clicked for me. I played it on an iPhone with Apple Arcade‘s $5 a month subscription platform, and I used a Rotor Riot wired game controller to play it rather than brave the untrustworthy touchscreen. You can also play it on an iPad or Apple TV.

It’s a high-adrenaline game where you tap, jump, and maneuver to collect little hearts in a beautiful neon-and-black landscape. And it isn’t that long with 23 levels. The neon-on-black art is beautiful. It’s hard to believe a small game studio put it together, because the art is so well-crafted. There isn’t much of a story, but the developers tell you what you need to know.

In Sayonara Wild Hearts, you play as a young woman who suffers a heartbreak. A tarot card pops up and dubs her The Fool, transporting her into an alternate universe. She sets out to restore the harmony of the universe hidden away in the hearts of her enemies. As you take control of The Fool, you speed along on a motorcycle within a tunnel-like view of the horizon.

The fusion of music and gameplay reminds me of music games like Rez from 2001 or that wacky and artistic “Take On Me” music video by A-Ha in 1985. The gameplay in Sayonara Wild Hearts seems impossible, and it takes a lot of skill to avoid crashing. But it’s whimsical and forgiving at the same time, as you can start up right where you crashed to try again. I thought songs like Begin Again were catchy and hard to get out of my head. I’m not going to say that this was far better than many of the triple-A games that debuted this year, but this is my nod in the direction of creativity, fun, and the indie spirit on mobile devices.

9) Rage 2

Above: Rage 2 couldn’t fight the dying of the light.

Image Credit: Bethesda

Developer: Avalanche Studios and id Software Publisher: Bethesda Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows

When id Software’s Tim Willits visited Avalanche Studios in Stockholm, he told his new compadres to ignore constraints. “When I met with the team in Stockholm on the whiteboard, “More crazy than Rage” That was the first pillar of this game,” Willits said.

And he got what he asked for. Rage 2 didn’t get the best reviews, but I thought it was underrated, as I played it through the end of the single-player campaign and played a lot of silly side missions as well. Rage 2 had a lot of environments, ranging from the Mad Max-style desert to jungles and cities. The script was a bit weak, but the enemies were tough and the weapons were glorious. The “nanotrite” capabilities that you discovered along the way are critical to defeating the biggest bosses. The art style was absolutely wild, with plenty of bright pink and yellow colors splashed across the punk habitats. And I enjoyed reuniting with my old friend, the Wingstick, which is like a boomerang that could slice an enemy’s head off.

If it had flaws, it was that it wasn’t Red Dead Redemption 2. It often littered the landscape with side missions and enemies to kill, to no purpose. You could get damaged on your way to an important mission, and then have to figure out a way to recover. It’s good if you stayed on track, built your capabilities up, and stuck to the good stuff.

The final part of the game lasted a lot longer for me because I had trouble taking down General Cross, the bad guy, and his pet monster. But to me, it was a thrill when I finally succeeded.

8) Days Gone

Above: A horde of Freakers chases Deacon St. John in Days Gone.

Image Credit: Sony

Developer: Sony Bend Studio Publisher: Sony Platforms: PlayStation 4

The amazing success of its first Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) hampered this game, as did a couple of years of delays. By the time it came out, many were sick of it, and it suffered from having some of the worst bugs I’ve ever seen in a triple-A game. Others wrong wrote it off as a copycat of The Walking Dead, World War Z, and The Last of Us.

But I admired Sony’s guts in standing by Bend Studio, and I stuck by it too as my colleagues ragged on it. I played it for perhaps 50 hours over several weeks, and I was quite possibly the last critic to review the game. I rated it only as a 75, because of the bugs. But without them, it would have been more like a 90, based on the quality of its story and the thrill of fighting the hordes of zombies, or Freakers.

I was drawn to the story of Deacon St. John, a bounty hunter in the Oregon woods and a broken man in a fallen world. He had a death wish and could ride a motorcycle through a horde of zombies just to get them to chase him. But Bend Studio delivered on the big scene where a few hundred zombies chased the biker through an abandoned lumber mill. It was a thrill to figure out how to beat that challenge, and I was hooked on the story of how Deacon was haunted by the memory of his lost love Sarah.

The adventure took me across the beautiful Oregon landscape into horrifying creature battles, motorcycle chases, infected crows, memorable horde battles, stealth missions tracking the secretive government agency, and just plain-old surviving in the wilderness. It was kind of an art to orchestrate your escape from several hundred Freakers. And it was good to see Deacon change and become the person that Sarah would have wanted him to be.

7) Steel Division 2

Above: Your forces appear as icons when you zoom out in Steel Division 2.

Image Credit: Eugen Systems

Developer: Eugen Systems Publisher: Eugen Systems Platforms: Windows

There are no Metacritic reviews for Steel Battalion 2. I may have been the only one who played it. But I saw the game being played on YouTube by some dedicated influencers with tiny audiences. And I was fascinated. I’ve been playing the Total War series of real-time strategy games since they first debuted more than 15 years ago, and I played Total War: Attila for hundreds of hours in 2015.

And I was glad to pour scores of hours into it this summer into Eugen Systems’ real-time strategy World War II games, which are a niche within a niche. It dwells on a bit of war history I didn’t know much about, Operation Bagration. It was the Soviet Union’s huge summer offensive in Belarus to take back big chunks of Eastern Europe from the Nazis, as the Allied invasion of Normandy was gathering steam in 1944. It was a massive set of tank, infantry, and air battles that left the German Wehrmacht in full retreat on the Eastern Front.

It has a steep learning curve. The game has more than 600 historically accurate units, 18 divisions, and an astounding level of detail in its graphics. You can focus in on an individual scene, such as above, or zoom out to get a birds’ eye view of an entire battle with thousands of soldiers. Your job as general is to constantly feed the right kind of troops into the fray to make the enemy’s forces melt away from you. This is easier said than done, as you can dislodge well-trained enemy squads from a forest trench, even if you’ve got superior armor. The enemy AI is smart, taking out your anti-tank guns on a hill with artillery or air power.

I lost dozens of skirmish matches against the AI before I figured out how to win. On top of the tactical battles, I also got hooked on the Army General mode, where you moved around divisions like chess pieces on a map. But you can still choose to play those huge campaigns, one tactical battle at a time. That’s what is amazing about the title.

6) Gears of War 5

Above: Kait gets here close-up.

Image Credit: Microsoft

Developer: The Coalition Publisher: Microsoft Platforms: Windows, Xbox One

Coalition head Rod Fergusson humbly said that Gears 5 was the best entry yet in the Gears saga. And he wasn’t making that up. I was gratified to see the developer get the balance right when it came to creating a wild action game with an emotional story with strong characters such as the hero, Kait Diaz.

Gears 4 got pretty goofy at certain points in its narrative about the human race losing its battle for survival against the Swarm in a world gone mad. But this story balanced that goofiness that brought us chainsaw bayonets with the moments where you mourn the death of a lost friend. These are tough moments because the cast of characters has survived some very tough times, and they’re a close-knit group. When you rip a character out of that group, it leaves deep wounds.

The campaign’s longer than usual, and it features cool features such as a skiff that sails across both the desert and ice. shoot out the ice under the feet of the Scions, the heavy tank bosses that carry a heavy weapon and are often shielded from attack by flying drones. This was very different from past Gears games. I remember spending an hour battling a blind boss, slowly figuring out a kind of choreography to stay out of its way, replenish my ammo, grab new weapons, and spray it with the frosty freeze guns. The title also had some cool additions to multiplayer and co-op play.

Gears 5 delivers a sense that you’re losing a big war at the same time it delivers the blow of a personal loss. And it generates a resolve to hit back. I like how this team outgrew its urges to be goofy and shocking and instead opted for something closer to fine art.

The post The DeanBeat: My favorite games of 2019 appeared first on Actu Trends.

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