A funny thing happened on the way to the Hellmouth

A while back, I stumbled across my DVD of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I thought fayanora might like it. So I copied it to the media server.

Last week, I finally remembered to show it to her. She definitely appreciated the silliness.

Now we've been watching old episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it just so happened that the one we watched after the movie had the first appearance of Spkie.

Now there's a character in "a Funny Thing" who is incredibly self-centered, full of himself, and thinks he's the gods gift to women. The Captain who is buying the virgin slave if you've seen the movie.

So Spike pops up and we realize his character has *so* much in common with that of the Captain.

Hence the title of this post.

That out of the way, if you haven't ever seen A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, you should. It's *classic* comedy. With several masters of comedy in it.

Also, in spite of the slapstick and farce, it may come closer to daily life in Rome than most of the "Roman epic" films of the era did.

The fall lineup.

Speaking of TV, fayanoraand I went over the new lineup a few weeks back and decided which shows we'd check out.

We've had some pleasant surprises, and we've got a few that are still on probation to see if they get better/worse.

Our first casualty was Son of Zorn. It's an interesting idea, but too many of the "funny" situations are of the "character embarrasses themselves greatly due to poor info or lack of knowledge".

This is not a lot of fun for either of us due to incidents in our pasts and we found it way too triggery. Others may do better.

Alas, I'd forgotten that this was a staple of sit-coms, and was why I don't watch them anymore. Sure, it's easy laughs for many, but it's acutely painful for folks with the right (wrong) sort of empathy.

Also, while there are some interesting situations in Son of Zorn, they could be done better.

Notorious is a pleasant surprise. Much better than we expected, but at only one episode seen so far (we'll be watching the recorded episode tomorrow) it could still tank.

This is Us is still on probation. Could be good, but with only one episode so far...

Lethal Weapon is better than expected from the premise. but again. we've only watched one ep so far.

Speechless looks good, but will have to be careful to not slip into "oh how bad it is to be disabled"

Designated Survivor has an interesting premise, and they are handling it fairly well, but number of people in the show acting in ways that are more than a bit treasonous is worrisome. Not that we don't have folks in the real world acting in similar ways. Also, I have a terrible feeling that they are going to go for the "it's a conspiracy by the military".

The Good Place has its good points, but it also looks like it could go really bad, really fast. The surprise revelation at the end of the second show (actually episode 3, since they aired the first two episodes as one chunk) has saved it so far.

Pitch another looks good but could go *really* bad if they don't handle things right.

MacGyver I think I see what a number of critics have said about characterization, but we'll see. I'm also worried that they are going to use *worse* science & engineering than the original. At least one of the things they did in the first episode was described well enough to try at home. And I have serious doubts that it is at *all* safe to try (as in will generate toxic gases)