NOTE: This is a slightly revised (added "Courtship of Eddie's Father") re-post of a very early column I wrote back in 1998, bemoaning the lack of Asian faces on TV shows. Like a zillion other people across the country, I tuned in to the final episode of "Seinfeld," and I gotta say, I was only mildly impressed. Oh, I liked the...
My wife Erin and I love junk-food TV. From “Black List” and “Blindspot” to “Grimm” and “Castle,” we turn into small-screen zombies at night, depending on our DVR to serve up our shows. But there’s one junk-food TV brand that we’ve decided to strike from out diet, and delete from our DVR. After years of devouring the medical soap series “Grey’s...
Yeah, it's three minutes long, but why can't more TV commercials be this inspirational? Brilliant...
I happened to catch a terrific documentary the other night, "I Am Bruce Lee," which combines a well-researched biography of the late great martial arts star Bruce Lee with interviews with everyone from his wife Linda Lee Caldwell, to LA Lakers star (and martial artist) Kobe Bryant who discuss Lee's legacy and enormous influence on American pop culture. Much of the...
Is it just me, or is it irritating to have some white guy co-opting Asian iconography for a TV commercial and combining two different cultures? Sure, it's a cool idea, and certainly well-executed production-wise. But this stop-action video made to pimp Google's new Nexus One "super-phone" (their description, not mine) bugs me. The animated miniature ninjas -- of non-specific, though...
You've seen her on TV commercials for Microsoft (and one for Sony Vaio). She is Windows. If she or her family ever used a Mac at home, I bet they now have a stack of PCs to last all their lives. Anyway, five-year-old Kylie Kim was interviewed on Ellen Degeneres' show, and she's just as cute and lovable live in...
Astro Boy," the new American computer-animated version of the Japanese comic and cartoon that launched the revolution we now call anime, opens today.
I'm more than a little nervous about seeing the movie, since it may not resemble the Japanese cartoon I grew up with, and because Hollywood really screwed up "Speed Racer" when they decided to turn that classic anime into a big live-action spectacle.
(The following text is a re-worked version of a pre-blog Nikkei View column I wrote back in 2003.)
Astro Boy, called "Tetsuwan Atomu" in Japan, was originally introduced in 1952, as a manga, or comic book character, and later turned into an animated television series. Created by the pioneering Japanese comic and anime (animation) artist Osamu Tezuka, his name stands for "The Mighty Atom," an image still vivid in the minds of millions of Japanese who had lived through the end of World War II just seven years before, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The cartoon character is best-known in the US for the English-dubbed versions of the "Astro Boy" series that first aired in 1963 and then was re-launched with a new series in 1982 and resurrected in a computer-animated film opening today, featuring the voices of Freddie Highmore, Nicolas Cage, Kristen Bell, Bill Nighy and Samuel L. Jackson.
The story line is a spin on Pinocchio and superhero comics, mixed with a dose of Steven Spielberg's film "A.I." (actually "A.I." borrows more than a dose from Astro Boy). When the kindhearted Dr. Boynton's (Professor Tenna in the Japanese original) son is killed in a car accident, he invents an atomic-powered robotic replacement only to discover that there's no way that the android can truly be human. The mechanical boy was born on April 7, 2003 -- the far future -- in the original manga.
When I first found out Jon Gosselin is Asian American, I thought, "Cool!" His kids were an adorable hapa brood, and Kate was a somewhat... shall we say ... difficult partner. A mixed-race family is nothing unfamiliar to many AAPIs (and especially Japanese Americans, who have had the highest out-marriage rate of all AAPI ethnicities for decades).
Erin called it almost the first time she happened to tune in to the show. She pointed out all the ways that Kate showed little emotional intelligence (barking, "What planet are you from, Jon?" in one show), and the ways Jon seemed to be distancing himself from Kate in his body language and expressions.
That's what the first look at "Jon and Kate Plus 8" was like for us.
Now, Jon Gosselin just looks like a fool, not cool. He's being sued by TLC for breach of contract. And his antics may have also cost Kate, soon to be his ex, a chance at her own show with the kids, "Kate Plus 8." He tried preventing crews from filming their kids, so TLC has apparently postponed the new show's Nov. 2 launch, according to TV Guide. Other reports have said the show has been canceled altogether.
What's ironic is that Kate's been coached and appears to be a different person from the hard and harsh wife from the start of the series in 2007. She's been reinventing her brand to a sympathetic character and a warm-hearted mom. Meanwhile Jon's devolved his brand from long-suffering husband and kinda bumbling dad to dumbass playboy twerphead. She might deserve another 15 minutes of fame, but his clock's run out.