I'm currently watching the first series of Dead Like Me.

I watched that show too, Mason was pretty funny.

I'm a new 'NCIS' fan, it's pretty cool. (part of me keeps wondering how realistic it is though, as far as people like that with those kinda jobs). It'll keep me occupied til '24' starts up.
Oh and I saw the 'Legend of the Seeker' season premier and thought it was awesome, gonna try and follow that show too.

I'm warming up just a little bit to the new V. Still no Marc Singer...

Well I just finished the next episode of V. I think I liked it a bit better then the first episode.

Josh, that was about as concise a description of the episode as one is likely to find.

Yup, that was a pretty good (and amusing) description of this latest episode.

A few thoughts on the Heroes episode that aired earlier this week:

I'm rewatching season 3 of Lost on DVD. While that season has taken some justifiable criticism for being among the weakest so far, and the whole Jack/Kate/Sawyer thing, it does have its moments. The episode "Flashes Before Your Eyes" is an interesting study of what happened to Desmond after he turned the fail-safe key in the hatch (Swan Station) at the end of season 2...and will lead to some dramatic moments in the season 3 finale.

I'm rewatching season 3 of Lost on DVD. While that season has taken some justifiable criticism for being among the weakest so far, and the whole Jack/Kate/Sawyer thing, it does have its moments. The episode "Flashes Before Your Eyes" is an interesting study of what happened to Desmond after he turned the fail-safe key in the hatch (Swan Station) at the end of season 2...and will lead to some dramatic moments in the season 3 finale.

Thats funny because I think season 3(along with season 1) is the best season. I know many that think the same. Season 5 and season 2 are the ones that get the most critism.

The first few episodes of season 3 were a bit weird, and the show had a very different feel then it previously did, they were still mostly good episodes(I liked "A Tale of Two Cities, The Cost of Living, and I Do". However, after the episode "I Do", the show got back on its feet and had the best run of episodes the show has ever had, all of the way up untill the finale "Through the Looking Glass" which in my opinion is the best finale in T.V. history.

I really think season 3 had the best balance of drama, action, mystery, romance, and mythology. And I found the conflict between the survivors and the Others one of the most interesting aspects of the show. My only problems of season 3 were that some of the flashbacks didnt fit the on island story, the Glass Balerina episode, and Nikki and Paulo's introduction was forced and random (though I love the episode "Expose").

In my opinion Lost Season 3 is definitely the weakest overall but has some of the best episodes of the series.

I'm currently watching Batman: The Animated Series on DVD (from the early 90's). Ah, the nostalgia factor. There are some mediocre episodes but there are also some very good to great ones. Pretty dark and psychological for a kid's cartoon too.

I watched the first season of B:TAS on DVD awhile back. Great show, especially considering it was a cartoon. Seems like cartoons have gone down drastically in quality the last decade or so. Spongebob, I'm looking at you.

Are you in the habit of watching old cartoons Warrior 4 Jessus? I'm curious about the old G.I Joe series. I have seen the recent movie and found it okay but still ranking pretty high on the cheese scale. Therefore I would like to know where it came from and whether it they are lower or higher on the aforesaid scale in the recent movie.

Seems like cartoons have gone down drastically in quality the last decade or so. Spongebob, I'm looking at you.

Brother, I would go so far as to say that the cartoons over the last 15 to almost 20 years have been crappy by default. If they had shown the nonsense that they do today when I was in my formative years in the 70's and 80's there would have been a general revolt among kids nationwide (and probably worldwide too). If you sat me down on a Saturday morning the last thing I would have wanted to watch would have been something like Rugrats or Doug. At the same age I was watching Star Blazers, Battle of the Planets, and the immortal Thundarr the Barbarian(always one of my favorites).

Some of these cartoons were pretty deep plotwise and had far reaching story arcs which made it all but impossible for kids to stay away. The Mysterious Cities of Gold, for instance, kept you glued to the screen to see if Estaban and company would finally find El Dorado before the Conquistadors and the Olmecs do. The sci-fi element (especially the Golden Condor, a massive Incan "jetliner") was an added bonus. By the time Robotech came on the scene we were all pretty well hooked. In Robotech main characters sometimes died, and it was treated with a lot of respect and added a lot of realism to the story. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future(despite the hokey name) was a great show too, sort of like Terminator Lite for kids, and had a really good storyline with a clear delineation between good and evil. With any of these there was almost always a very visible line between the heroes and the antagonists, and kids will tend to root for the hero in every case. We didn't want to emulate the bad guys. Perhaps it's not a cartoon's job to teach morality, but it seems to me that when cartoons became wishy washy nonsense it took away considerably from the medium. If you show a kid a good example of what morally good characters do it can point them in the right general direction. Instead the critics said the programming was "too violent" and gave us...Spongebob. Oh joy.

I think the heyday, the Golden Age of Cartoons, really ended about 1990, which is when they started throwing meaningless crap at kids. I could talk about this all night long, so I'll stop short of that and just let all this sink in.

Ah, those names bring back a few memories, Shadowlander! I recall watching Thundarr back in the 80s - though I was 'old' by then - not to mention others like The Herculoids and Space Ghost back in the 60s.

I agree with much of what you've said regarding current offerings and the impact "The Show Which Must Not Be Named" (our nickname for Spongebob) has had these days.

Still, I would be remiss if I didn't rise to the defense of Gargoyles, which aired in the mid-1990s. Though it was Disney, it was darker, more realistic, than their usual fare (once you accept its premise of mythical gargoyles coming to life, anyway), offering complex plot and character development with attention to continuity (repercussions of the characters' actions in one episode continue on in the next ones, and so on). It had strong historical and legendary backgrounds, and even references to Shakespeare. These same factors, however, probably figured in its demise after only 2 seasons. Check out the opening theme, with Keith David's awesome voiceover, here.

(It doesn't hurt that about 2 dozen actors from various Trek franchises did voice work for this show, including Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis in 2 of the leading roles).

And though it aired on the "Network of Spongebob" (TM), the recently-ended Avatar: The Last Airbender had a lot of those same things: plot arcs and character development, and even better, an overarching storyline. Its animation is generally excellent, better than Gargoyles on average, probably thanks to advancements made in the decade since Gargs aired.

I've found that most of the old shows are a lot better than the shows they have nowadays. (Regular shows not cartoons) I like MacGyver, Airwolf, Dukes of Hazzard and Five Mile Creek. I don't watch any of the shows nowadays (talking about regular fictional shows. Not shows like Dancing with the Stars or Celebrity Apprentice or So You Think You can Dance that use real peopl rather than made up characters) except Disney Channel once in awhile.

I think the majority of quality cartoons finished about the mid-90's (but maybe that's just because I'm an 80's kid).
Doug was blah but Rugrats was good, just very different in style and feel to the other cartoons you've mentioned.
The nostalgia factor of some cartoons is strong. Captain Planet is nowhere near as good as when I was a kid but the premise and theme song still rock.
I should check out the Animaniacs and Gargoyles again, I never got to see all that many episodes of them, but those I did, I enjoyed a lot.

Watziznehm, am I in the habit of watching old cartoons?
I don't know. I'm revisiting some of my favourites, but only the good ones.
I never saw G.I. Joe (I don't know if it was screened in Australia) but I know the cartoon series was generally well received (and a darn sight better than the movie but that wouldn't be difficult).

narnian_at_heart, no doubt there are many good old TV series (Get Smart, The Twilight Zone, Doctor Who, Fawlty Towers, Gumby, Mission Impossible, The Prisoner and Some Mothers Do Ave 'Em to name but a few) but I think there are some great TV series on today. Behind all the crime dramas and hospital dramas and Two and a Half Men (ugh, how annoying is that show?!!!) there are some quality shows like Lost, 24, Heroes (it fluctuates), The Wire, Firefly, Six Feet Under, Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies etc. You have to look but the level of creativity on some TV series well surpasses that of current cinema.

I think LOST is the best thing ever filmed. Period.

24 is also amazing.

I never saw G.I. Joe (I don't know if it was screened in Australia) but I know the cartoon series was generally well received (and a darn sight better than the movie but that wouldn't be difficult).

GI Joe was a pretty good cartoon and I watched it regularly. My understanding is that they changed the name of the unit around a bit for the Canadian version to something that wasn't so blatantly American. This might be the version you want to watch out for.

As for the storyline most of the episodes were largely stand alone types, where one episode rarely (if ever) had anything to do with the next, beyond there being the same antagonists and protaganists. The storytelling angle of the episodes was generally decent, which surprises me as the makers were trying to market the toys rather than make a gripping story. But every now and then they would put out a really good episode which would have been good for any cartoon, let alone GI Joe. My favorite was a two-parter in which the Joes are defending some train carrying some experimental scientific object (each episode seemed to have some sort of McGuffin) and when it detonates the Joes are blasted into a parallel universe where Cobra is in power and the Joes, what precious few there are left, are fugitives. It was a surprisingly powerful episode.

Of course they really hit their zenith with the introduction of Serpentor, an individual cloned using the DNA of all the worlds' greatest generals, and he was a real task for GI Joe. The only story arc element I can recall was the budding romance between GI Joe computer specialist Mainframe, who inadvertantly fell in love with Zartan's sister Zarana, and she likewise. The two would occasionally be seen slipping away from battles and spending a few minutes of precious alone time.

GI Joe does have some odd quirks though too. No one ever really dies and whenever a Cobra aircraft or tank is about to be hit by Joe gunfire you'd typically see the Cobra pilot bailing out moments before his plane is obliterated. Tons of lasers and no one ever gets hit? Yeah. That was a bit hard to swallow when I was a pre-teen and it's almost hiliarious now....Cobra should have been manufacturing parachutes, not trying to take over the world.

I think Transformers had a much better storyline and presentation and several story arcs that were very interesting.