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With the new series of Doctor Who starting in less than two weeks now, I thought I'd revive a post I made on another forum about ages of the actors. Was talking to a friend of mine who asked me how old David Tennant was (he'll be 37 on April 18th), and it reminded me of this. I did some research as to how old all the lead actors were when they started in their role on the show, and did some comparisons.

Mostly useless information, I admit, but I tend to do things like this. Especially about Doctor Who. This post only for the hardcore nutters. :)

Here's the ages they were when their respective times in the show started. I am not breaking it down to days. That's just too stupid. I'm also not counting Colin Baker's appearance as Cmdr Maxil or Lalla Ward as Princess Astra, those are different characters. The companions are listed by which Doctor they started with, not ended with.

Doctors:
William Hartnell: 55 years, 10 months
Patrick Troughton: 46 years, 7 months
Jon Pertwee: 50 years, 5 months
Tom Baker: 40 years, 5 months
Peter Davison: 29 years, 11 months
Colin Baker: 40 years, 10 months
Sylvester McCoy: 44 years, 1 month
Paul McGann: 36 years, 7 months
Christopher Eccelston: 41 years, 1 month
David Tennant: 34 years, 2 months

Companions:

Doctor #1:
Carole Anne Ford (Susan): 23 years, 5 months
William Russell (Ian): 39 years, 1 month
Jacqueline Hill (Barbara): 33 years, 11 months, died Feb 18, 1993
Maureen O'Brien (Vicki): 22 years, 5 months
Peter Purves (Steven): 26 years, 4 months
Adrienne Hill (Katarina): Unknown birthdate, died Oct 6, 1997
Jean Marsh (Sara): 31 years, 1 month
Jackie Lane (Dodo): 18 years, 8 months
Michael Craze (Ben): 23 years, 5 months, died Dec 8, 1998
Anneke Wills (Polly): 24 years, 4 months

Doctor #2:
Frazier Hines (Jamey): 23 years, 3 months
Deborah Watling (Victoria): 19 years, 5 months
Wendy Padbury (Zoe): 20 years, 4 months

Doctor #3:
Caroline John (Liz): Unknown birthdate
Katy Manning (Jo): 21 years, 3 months
Elizabeth Sladen (Sarah): 24 years, 10 months

Doctor #4:
Ian Marter (Harry): 30 years, 2 months, died Oct 28, 1986
Louise Jameson (Leela): 25 years, 9 months
Mary Tamm (Romana I): 28 years, 5 months
Lalla Ward (Romana II): 28 years, 3 months
Matthew Waterhouse (Adric): 18 years, 11 months
Sarah Sutton (Nyssa): 19 years, 11 months
Janet Fielding (Teegan): 24 years, ?? months

Doctor #5:
Mark Strickson (Turlough): 22 years, ?? months
Nicola Bryant (Peri): 21 years, 4 months

Doctor #6:
Bonnie Langford (Mel): 22 years, 4 months

Doctor #7:
Sophie Aldred (Ace): 25 years, 3 months

Doctor #8:
Daphne Ashbrook (Grace): 33 years, 4 months
Yee Jee Tso (Chang Lee): 21 years, 2 months

Doctor #9:
Billie Piper (Rose): 22 years, 6 months
Bruno Langley (Adam): 22 years, 1 month
John Barrowman (Jack): 38 years, 2 months

Doctor #10:
Noel Clark (Mickey): 30 years, 5 months
Freema Agyeman (Martha): 28 years, ?? months
Catherine Tate (Donna): 38 years, 2 months

Others:

John Leeson (K9): 34 years, 7 months
David Brierly (K9): 43 years, ? months
Gerald Flood (Kamelion): 55 years, 11 months

Notes:

1) I counted Mickey with Doctor #10, as he wasn't a "traveling companion" until that point. It's the same reason I haven't counted characters like Jackie Tyler, or the Brigadier, as they weren't traveling companions, just support characters. It's a fine line I know. I also realize I condtradict that by the use of Grace & Change Lee from the 1996 movie, but if you didn't count them, Doc 8 would have NO companions, and that's not right, either.

2) Some of the companions have ?? as months, as their birth month was not given, just a year, and a couple have totally unknown birthdates. I listed 'em anyway, but with as much info as I could get.

3) I debated what to do about using "Others" are they were merely voiceovers, and weren't on screen. But I put the info in there for the heck of it. The actor who voiced Kamelion would be the oldest "companion", but since these characters were robots, I'm not sure if that should count.

Oldest/Youngest:

The youngest overall companion was Jackie Lane, Doctor #1's Dodo Chaplet at 18 years 8 months. The second youngest, and youngest male companion was Matthew Waterhouse; Adric. He was 18 years, 11 months. The oldest was William Russell, one of the original companions (Ian) at 39 years 1 month.

Older than the Doctor:

1) There's only one companion (discounting Kamelion) who was older than their Doctor at the time of their taking the role. That was Catherine Tate. She was 38 years 2 months old when she appeared in "Doomsday", and David Tennant was 35 years, 3 months at the time of "Doomsday"'s airing.

2) John Barrowman was 38 years 2 months when he first appeared in the Doctor 9 story "The Empty Child". At that point he was younger than Christopher Eccelston. However, when he reappeared in Utopia with David Tennant's Doctor, that changed. At the time of the airing of Utopia, Barrowman was 40 years, 3 months. Tennant was at that time 36 years, 2 months.

I'm such a dork.

The official launch of the new season of Doctor Who in the UK has been formally announced as April 5th. I've known about that for a couple of weeks now due to a source I'd rather not name, but it's nice to see it pubicly out there now.

UPDATE: The official Series 4 trailer has been released in high quality by the BBC, on their official Youtube Channel.

The BBC are calling this "Series 4", but that's the fourth series of the revived Doctor Who. Since the history of the modern show includes the old show, I believe it shouldn't be "Series 4", but "Series 30".

You have now concluded reading this blog entry by Mr. Pedantic.

The new season of Battlestar Galactica starts on April 4th. The entire cast showed up on the David Letterman show last night and delivered the Top 10 list. Was quite funny.

This is an interesting post. As a sci-fi fan, I'm excited about it, but I'm more excited about my daughter reading. So here goes an odd one.

As I posted about back in May of 2006, Samantha seems to have inherited the sci-fi gene from Daddy. Now we don't actually show her full episodes of things, as most of it is too advanced for her, but she has seen a few minutes here and there. Enough that she can recognize "The Doctor" when I pause the TiVo and ask. David Tennant is "her Doctor", a term Dr Who fans will recognize. Anyway, as per the old blog entry, Samantha has always danced to the title sequence of (modern) Doctor Who. If I put it on, she gets all excited, and starts dancing around the floor. She seems to love it. I had it on tonight, and she started dancing around, only this time she shouted "DOCTOR WHO! IT'S DOCTOR WHO MOMMY!", which got both of us laughing. So she danced around a few more times, only in the middle of the title sequence, she said "Tardis!". For those who don't know, the Tardis is the blue box that is the Doctor's ship. Samantha recognized it, and pointed it out to us.

So we repeated the theme song a few times, and then stopped it on the logo in the titles, which I'm showing here.

She's 2 years 5 months, so we've been working on letters, alphabet, and rudimentary reading. She pretty much knows every letter of the alphabet, although she doesn't get it right 100% of the time yet. So when I paused it on the logo, I asked her "What are those letters?". She walked up to the TV, and read them in order.. D-O-C-T-O-R-W-H-O. That part was cool enough, but I took a step and asked "What does that spell?" I think we had to repeat the question a second time like "What do those letters say?", She said "Doctor Who!", which was a really cool moment. Lynn and I both laughed. Now, you could make the point that we were talking about Doctor Who anyway, and she just remembered it, but it seemed like she was reading it, which was cool to me on two levels - one as a parent, and two as a Doctor Who fan. So we repeated it again, and once she realized we were all happy, she got all excited about it, and started saying "Doctor Who!" several more times. BTW, she can also recognize a Dalek on screen too.

A little setup for the second part of this. I work for a game company, and as such, it allows me to continue to act like a kid myself into my 40's. I have quite a few toys on my desk at work, including a decent collection of Doctor Who toys. This past Friday I got two more things in, one was a fairly large (about a foot tall) replica of the Tardis. It's the current "hot toy" in Doctor Who fandom (it's really a Flight Control Tardis for any Who fans reading this). I had brought it home to show Lynn, and brought home a couple of the relevant figures to stand with it. When Lynn called the stuff "Daddy's toys", Samantha immediately wanted to play with them, saying things like "Daddy share his toys with Samantha!". I was a little leery of that, as I had visions of the Tardis exploded on our living room floor. I stuck the Tardis and the figures in our entertainment center for the weekend, and Samantha would point at them saying "Those are Daddy's toys!". Well, after the stuff I described above with the reading of the Doctor Who logo, I decided to let her hold the Tardis for a bit. I grabbed the camera (mostly because a friend Jake would love seeing the pics), so I snapped a few of her with the Tardis toy. It was quite cute actually, as the prop looks even larger with a two year old holding it. So after she held that for a bit (and figured out how to open the doors on her own), I took it back and let her play with the action figures a bit. When she was sitting there, I decided to push my luck and grab some of the Doctor Who DVD's off the shelf from previous Doctors and ask her who they were. She recognized David Tennant easily enough on TV, but the concept of other guys being "The Doctor" probably is foreign to her. I picked up a DVD from the original Doctor from 1963, an older fellow named William Hartnell. Asked her who that was, and she said "The Doctor". Showed her one from the sixth actor in the role during the 80's, Colin Baker. She also said he was "The Doctor". I just smirked at that, and decided it was time to end the Doctor WHo stuff, as she needed to get ready for bed.

While this is mostly a Doctor Who-centric post, I do have to admit to thinking it was very cool that my two year old daughter was able to read "Doctor Who" off the television. But the inner geek in me was loving the fact that my daughter also exclaimed "I love Doctor Who!" tonight.

Somewhere I see Jake & Lina smiling over reading this, too. :)

The season finale of the current series of Doctor Who just aired in England over the weekend. I rather liked it, but then again I'm a Who nut, and will like most anything they do. :)

Anyway, the finale did seem to borrow a lot of "elements" from other things that have already happened. In reading the forums over at the Outpost Gallifrey website this weekend, I saw this thread where someone had posted the plot of the finale by using screen grabs from other movies and TV and similar stuff. I can not take credit for this, the idea was not mine, but I thought it was darned funny. I did add on to the original, though. The last picture and the fourth in my sequence were not in the original.

If you have NOT seen the finale of the current series (the third of the revival, the 29th overall) then do not look at the extended version of this message.

This will probably amuse the guy who made the image, and perhaps one other person in the world, but I don't care. It made me laugh. If you don't get it, don't worry about it. :)

This is some research I did on the 10 actors who have played The Doctor on the TV show "Doctor Who" in regards to 'length of service'. I needed a place to put this, so my blog is it.

Note: Since David Tennant is the current doctor, these stats cover the 2007 series that is scheduled to air between March and June this summer.

I was then asked if I would do the same information for the companions, so I whipped up the following chart. The companions are a trickier lot, several exceptions had to be made due to the oddities of cameos, story issues, etc. Here's some notes on my companions chart.

• This does not take into effect situations during the first two doctor's runs where actors were away on vacation, and the character did not appear on screen. If the story happened during their "run", then I counted it. Having the actors away on vacation was fairly common during the first six years of the series, as they made on average between 44-46 episodes a year then.
• I'm not counting 1993's Dimensions in Time, as it's canonicity is in doubt.
• I am not counting the UNIT folks as companions. I've seen some lists of companions list them as such, but UNIT characters while important to Doctor #3's run, were never formally listed as show companions.
• I am not counting the official repeat of Evil of the Daleks inside the show's own storyline.
• I am counting the Five Doctors as one episode, as that is how it was originally made, despite being broadcast mostly since in four 25 minute parts. Also, I do not count Romana II's appearance in the Five Doctors as a story, as it was recycled Shada material, and I already counted that appearance in her episode count as Shada. Likewise I am counting cameos in this story as an appearance.
• I am counting 1986's Trial of a Time Lord as 4 stories, not one, as they were made in four production blocks and then sequenced together into "one story". Officially it's classified as one 14 part story, but that's a production thing, almost everyone else classifies it as four stories (4-4-4-2)
• For 25 of the 26 years of the classic series, episodes were 25 minutes in length. During the 1985 (22nd overall) plus the 2005 series onwards, episodes are 45 minutes in length. I have not compensated for that in the episode count, although it made me think about doing a third column, "adjusted episodes", or "screen time", but that might be too complicated.
• K9 was also left out of several stories during his run due to technical problems with the actual K9 machine. I feel it would be too much work to go back and look at the plots of all the stories he appeared in to figure out which ones he was not included in, so if it happened during K9's original companion run, I counted it. I also did not make a distiction between the four different K9 models that have appeared in the series.
• I did not count K9 & Company, as that was officially a spinoff.
• While Shada was not formally transmitted, bits of it were made, and as such I counted it.
• I am not counting "A Fix with Sontarans", as that is officially an episode of another series ("Jim'll Fix it").
• Resurrection of the Daleks was made as a four episode story, and then edited into two longer episodes due to the Olympics at the time. I am counting it as four episodes.
• Paul McGann's lone story was one 90 minute movie, so I'm counting it as one episode.
• The Children in Need mini episode inbetween Series 27 & 28 I counted as an episode.
• Three episodes in the series run had no companions at all, and as such were not counted: Mission to the Unknown (1966), The Deadly Assassain (1976), & Attack of the Graske (2006)

Doc 1: 10 companions (3 male, 7 female)
Doc 2: 5 companions (2 male, 3 female)
Doc 3: 3 companions (all female)
Doc 4: 8 companions (2 male, 5 female, 1 robot)
Doc 5: 6 companions (2 male, 4 female, 1 robot)
Doc 6: 2 companions (both female)
Doc 7: 2 companions (both female)
Doc 8: 2 companions (1 male, 1 female)
Doc 9: 1 companion (female)
Doc 10: 2 companions (both female)

The overlapping companions were counted more than once, so this won't match up exactly with the number of companions listed above. I'm still torn on what to do with the 2005/2006 extra characters like Mickey, Jackie, Capt Jack, etc... For now I'm not listing them, since most places do not refer to 'em as companions, but I've included ones from the past with more spurious connections. Arrgh!

The popularity of YouTube has given rise to collections like this. This video is taken from an article called "The 50 Greatest TV Commercials of the 80's". Given the 80's happened when I was 15-25, I remember just about all of this stuff. A huge trip down memory lane for someone who grew up in that decade. :)

I wonder if I could still order Freedom Rock - the ordering info is at the end of the commercial.

There's actually a Part 2 to this - "50 More Commercials from the 80's. This stuff is like gold, but the funniest thing is probably the Jerry Springer for Governor commercial that's in Part 1. :)

As the season has just started, I wanted to bump this back up the top again. Also, if you are a Google Spreadsheets user, and wish to view that version, you can do so here. Google just implemented a feature where I can allow anyone to view it now, you don't need a specific invite like before. The regular downloadable version is still available, it's in the main story below.

Since I live in Dallas, and have the hell of living in Cowboy land, one majorly huge lifeline for me is the NFL Sunday Ticket package on DirecTV. It allows me to watch pretty much whatever game I want, so I get to see all the Eagles games (I'm from Philly), and Steeler games (wife's from Pittsburgh) without having to sit through the agony of all the Dallas Cowboy games every week.

Anyway, for the last several seasons (06 is my fifth doing this I believe), I've put together a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet containing the entire NFL Season Schedule for all the NFL Sunday Ticket channels. You can download it, print it, and have the entire schedule on one page. This originally started out as a project for some people on the TiVo community forums, but I've moved to my own blog as my primary distribution point. Still, I wanted to say hi to the folks over there. :)

The first year I did this I did just the NFLST games. But since then I include everything else. Which in 2006 is a lot more confusing. I also have the ESPN MNF games, the Sunday night NBC games, various Thurdsay NFL Network games, and the other oddities like Thanksgiving day, things like that. They're all here. Here's a few notes about the spreadsheet and the NFL schedule this season:

• For the last two years, DirecTV did not publish the HD schedule until generally the week of, so that makes it impossible to schedule. If DirecTV ever would publish their full season HD schedule ahead of time, I'd add that, but it's been this way for the last couple of seasons. If it changes for 2006, I'll update, but I'm not holding my breath.
• Monday Night Football moved from ABC to ESPN this season.
• The Sunday night games that were on ESPN now have moved to NBC. ABC is out, they have no games at all now.
• Weeks 10-15 & 17 are now part of the new "Flex Scheduling". Being tired of getting stuck with dud games on TV at the end of the season, the NFL now has a rather large number of games listed as early games these weeks. The NFL will move one game from the schedule to the Sunday night slot no closer than 12 days from gameday. Lots of details on the new flex scheduling are available on the NFL.com website here. I suggest reading it.
• I've been doing this spreadsheet for about 5 seasons now, and the more stuff they add like flex scheduling, Thursday games, etc, the more cluttered my spreadsheet goes. If it gets worse next season, I may have to revisit how I lay this out.
• Last year someone had a great idea - to color code the boxes for an individual team's games with their team colors. I think it's a great idea, but that's 32 extra spreadsheets for me to do. Great idea, but I don't have the time to make that many spreadsheets. :)
• I also have this available as a spreadsheet in Google Spreadsheets. If you would like to have access to my online version, send me an email to joe@siegler.net with your Google account name, and I'll get you hooked up. Google Spreadsheets doesn't have a "let everyone see" option, otherwise THAT would be my primary distribution method. Scratch that. They do now. You can reach it online here.

If you use this, send me an email and let me know. I don't want anything, I just like to know that people actually use the thing. Feel free to pass this to whomever you want, just please don't change the credits; distribute it as I sent it. That's all I ask.

Thank you, and enjoy!

A couple of updates since I originally posted this:

• Update Jul 25: Week 3 had an incorrect opponent for the Rams. It said Panters, should ahve been Cardinals. Fixed. Thanks BrianT.
• Update Jul 31: Two NYJ/NYG mixups. Week 7's MNF game and Week 11's Ch 714 game. Thanks to gruxx.
• Update Sep 4: Another NYJ/NYG mixup. Week 11's MNF football game. Fixed. Thanks to Kevin in FL.
• Update Sep 4 #2: I finally found the time to go through the spreadsheet and remove all the hyperlinks in the games. For example, DAL@PHI was being translated into an email link. These are all gone now.

If you find any errors, please let me know.

A few days back I reported (not really reported, just posted other's news) on an update to the original Star Trek's special effects. Since then, several things have been posted which are updates to the original story. Here's a summary of some further developments:

• Aint It Cool News has a short video comparing the old version vs the new HD version.
• Second Article from startrek.com - Includes a Q&A with the people doing the work, including some specifics as to ships, and scenes.

My personal preference would be for these episodes to be in 90 minute time slots with MORE commercials so we could get the ful 51 minute episode, but they're being shoehorned into 60 minute slots, which means about 8-9 minutes per episode is being excised. Not thrilled with that, but at least we'll get to see 'em.

Also, it's mostly going to be on SD channels, as apparently, most channels that show HD material can handle live HD, but not recorded HD (something about capacity of stations). This is replacing Star Trek Enterprise in syndication, as ENT is going to HDNet and Sci-Fi this fall. So if your TV station has been showing Enterprise reruns, you'll get the new Star Trek. In the Dallas area here, it has shown up on my TiVo, so I've already gotten a season pass for it.

Here's a couple of significantly larger versions of the new CGI NCC-1701 ship:

Finally, there's this story from the DVD site The Digital Bits on all of this:

Well... we've got some more information for you today on CBS/Paramount's effort to upgrade Star Trek: The Original Series in high-definition with new digital effects. This comes from a phone Q&A session with producers John Nogawski, Dave Rossi, and Michael Okuda, held earlier this morning:

http://www.scifi.com/battlestar

The new season of Galactica starts on Oct 6th, but between now and then, they're running new 4 or 5 minute "Webisodes" on their website which is supposed to fill in the blanks between the finale some months ago, and the finale in a couple of weeks.

DON'T watch this stuff unless you're current with where the season ended a few months back. Otherwise you're gonna spoil a really good cliffhanger for yourself that they left off with.

But if you have - new stuff! Check it out.

If you need to be brought up to speed, here's three links to catch you up with all the existing episodes.

Season 1 Box set

Season 2.0 Box Set

Season 2.5 Box Set

That will bring you up to these Webisodes, but you absolutely need to watch them in order. Including the mini series, which is on the Season 1 box set.

I've been a fan of Star Trek for a long long time. My family legend goes that my father used to put me in the playpen once a week when he watched Star Trek & Wild Wild West when Trek was new in 1966. Subconciously I attribute my love of Sci-Fi to that. :) I grew up in the 70's with just those episodes of Star Trek (no TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT or movies). So I know them very well. As much as I've loved the original Star Trek, the one thing it's lacked is good special effects. It's not like the stuff in there is horrible. It's certainly more than acceptable, but it's in terms of general sfx quality, it's nothing like what you can get today. Heck, I bought all three season series of TOS, so I'm not adverse to them.

So when I heard recently that Paramount was planning on redoing all the special effects for all 79 episodes of the Original Star Trek, I had a bit of trepidation. A lot of Sci-Fi fans have been burned by the changes that George Lucas has made to Star Wars, and while I'm not really one of them, the story changes that Lucas made (not so much the sfx) I'm sure weigh heavily on people's minds. But after reading a bit about this upgrade, here's a few bullet points I've found:

• This is to start airing on September 16th, one episode a week, although they're being shown out of order (no idea why they're doing that).
• This is an sfx only upgrade, no changes to stories, or characters, so no "Spock Shoots First" here.
• This is for all 79 episodes of the original series.
• It's being handled apparently by the Okudas at Paramount. Mike & Denise Okuda have been with Star Trek since it's relaunch in 1987, and if there's anyone I'd trust to mess with the original, it's them.
• For now, this is only for broadcast, not for DVD release. I get the impression that once the HD DVD format war is settled, we'll see it re-released there.
• The titles and theme will get an upgrade too with new stereo mix. Same song, just a new recording.
• The sfx upgrades aren't limited to just exterior ship shots. Apparently anything that is of an sfx nature has been changed. Phaser blasts, things like that. Also static flat backgrounds on planets will be "livened up".

Something I can not get a handle on is whether these episodes will only be available for broadcast viewing on High Def channels, or if it will be available as well on standard def TV stations, too. I've read some remarks about it being available to a bunch of channels that currently syndicate, but I'm unclear as to whether it will only be on their HD alternate channels or not. If it's HD only, then I won't be able to see it, as I don't have HD yet.

I'm actually looking forward to it, and it will defintely make me rewatch all 79 episodes to see what they've done with it. This particular quote by Mike Okuda makes me feel good about this.. "We're taking great pains to respect the integrity and style of the original. Our goal is to always ask ourselves: What would Roddenberry have done with today's technology?"

One thing that's impressive about all this is the secrecy around the project. You don't do that amount of work (79 episodes at 51 minutes an episode) in a month. It has to have been worked on for some time now. The fact that this news is just breaking this week, about two or so weeks before it starts to air is quite impressive in this age of Internet news. Guess all that work that the Star Trek folks did on the Enterprise episodes In A Mirror Darkly wasn't just for those two episodes, eh?

Makes me wonder what two of my favorite TOS series episodes will look like. These two are The Doomsday Machine & The Immunity Syndrome. Both feature tons of external ship shots, with Doomsday having another Constitution Class ship, and Immunity with a giant living amoeba - this oughta be cool.

This isn't the first time that upgraded SFX have happened for the original Star Trek, but it is the first time they've received a complete CGI replacement and upgrade. About 7 or 8 years ago (I forget exactly when at the moment), the Sci-Fi channel ran the original Star Trek in a 90 minute timeslot and had introductions by William Shatner & Leonard Nimoy. Those versions had cleanup done to them. Nothing new/changed, just cleanup, like some grain removal from the film, the square boxes around some of the ship sfx were removed. These cleaned up versions were also released on DVD within the last year or so, if I'm not mistaken. Then on the Internet a few fan produced attempts at showing what could be done with updated special effects were done. The first one was here. The second one was here. The second one had some seriously good upgrades, and is definitely worth watching. However, both of these updates are unrelated to this new official sfx upgrade. But damn. The second one is very impressive for a fan production. If the official stuff is integrated as well as this was, it's going to look great.

Here's a few news stories I've been reading about all this at. Check 'em out for further detail.

• TV Guide News Story
• Star Trek.com Story
• Aintitcool.com Story
• Trekmovie.com story

A final note.. My wife has never liked the original Star Trek. Her usual stated reason is because of the crappy sfx. I wonder if this will get her to watch the original now. :)

UPDATE: Something else I thought of. These episodes are 51 minutes long. If it's syndicated, and it's in an hour time slot, here we go with the choppy episodes again, as current TV shows are about 41-42 minutes. I know G4 is running them in a timeslot that's 1:10, and has the uncut versions. I would HOPE that the remastering work done on these thigns is for the full 51 minute episodes, not some syndicated 42 minute version. Anyone in the know know anything about this issue?

UPDATE #2: It appears that these syndicated versions are edited. According to this link which I was shown, they are 43:48, although the 51 minute original is mentioned. That gives me hope that this sfx cleanup was done on the full version, and not just a 43 minute syndicated version. Hope to find out more on that.

UPDATE #3 @ 12:30AM 8/1: There's more info online at this link which has plenty of detail, as well as some answers to things I posed above. This link shows some potential speed bumps in the overall project, but I'm going to wait and see what these look like before criticizing them.

Still am excited.

Anyone who knows me knows I can't stand TV shows like American Idol & Survivor (shudder) - waste of airspace, and I get dumber by even writing about them.

Unfortunately, the captain on my bowling team loves American Idol. While ragging on it yet again, I was asked what it would take to get me to watch the show.

My response was "Let me vote the show off the air". I'd watch that episode, for sure. Same goes for Survivor.

Please - let each show vote the other off the air.

Last night I couldn't sleep. I had finished reading a book, and wasn't ready to hit the pillow yet, so I flipped on the TV. I was't expecting to be up long, so I didn't watch any of the recorded things on my TiVo. So I flipped. I landed on the History Channel. There's lots of good stuff on that channel.

As usual, they had a documentary on either Hitler or the Nazi party. There's a lot of them on that channel, and over the years I've watched quite a lot of them. As usual, I got sucked in with this one, too. It was specifically about the Nazi party's attempt to "validate" their claims on the superiority of the Aryan race. They sent a bunch of scientists to Tibet to the 'Roof of the World', to try and prove that the Aryan race which they believed was from the lost city of Atlantis had descendants of survivors spread out across the world.

I really have no idea why I watch so many of these. For awhile I used to theorize that it was because I have German blood in my ancestry. Over time I've come to discount that, because I never really pay much attention to my heritage in that regard. So I'm back to square one. Is it a train wreck kind of thing? I watch these because I know the outcome, and I know Hitler gets his ass kicked (eventually)? I've watched so many of these that it's hard to find one that doesn't have some angle on Germany, Hitler, the Nazi's, Hitler's Death, etc.. which I haven't seen before. The most recent "new angle" one I watched was one that traced the lineage of Hitler's family to modern day. That was pretty entertaining, as while Hitler isn't known to have children of his own, he did have some company in the sibling department, so there's a family tree from there.

Is there anyone else who seems to be sucked into watching these like I am?