Jacob Thomson Official Website

Turner Classic Movies:  This may very well be the best cable movie channel of them all. Being an old geezer myself, I love old movies. A lot of what's running on this channel I saw when I was growing up and sneaking off to the movies, which the rebbeim in the Yeshiva all insisted we should never see. I went anyway.

With TCM, not only do you get to see these old films, but you get to see them pretty much the way they were intended to be seen. There are no commercials, and the movies themselves are uncut and, Ted Turner presumably having been sufficiently beaten over the head by the preservationists, uncolorized. The number of wide screen films produced in the primary period covered by this channel is small, but when they are shown they're likely to be shown in their proper aspect ratio.

This channel is, today, what AMC was back when it first started, but hasn't been for a long time. It's a place to see the evolution of cinema, a lot of it in the Production Code (pre ratings sytem) period. They even run silent features, mostly fairly late at night, which is fine for an old goat like me, who doesn't sleep that much to begin with, though younger, working people may need to tape these.

Forever Knight:  This was a show I used to tape and watch quite faithfully. (I taped it because, where I lived, it came on at 1:00 am on Saturday morning and, even if I stayed up that late, I don't watch television on Shabbos.) Besides having vampires, the show also featured two of my favorite actors, Nigel Bennett and John Kapelos. I've never seen a bad performance from either of them. Kapelos was the only carry-over from the original pilot, which had Rick Springfield playing Nick (Geraint Wyn Davies in the series) and Michael Nader in the role taken over by Bennett.

Forever Knight Trilogy: Part 1

Forever Knight Trilogy: Part 2

Nick Knight Original Pilot

Star Trek: Enterprise:  I know not everyone is going to agree with me on this one, but I like it. Back closer to the beginning was the one direction Star Trek could go if they wanted to come up with really new stories. Certainly there are constraints. You can't make alien races act differently in the past than they do in the future unless you also explain just why they're doing it. The most recent storyline depicted an evolutionary phase in Vulcan society, as well as a brief first glimpse of the Romulans. Brent Spiner's appearance as Dr. Soong—possibly Data's creator, or, perhaps, his creator's father—worked nicely, and the presence of Augments added a tie-in to the Khan storyline in the original series and the movies.

I also think Scott Bacula's Captain Archer fits nicely into the early Star Fleet period depicted on the show. There's more Kirk than Picard in his character, certainly, and the Prime Directive hasn't come along yet to complicate the storyline, though you can see it evolving as Enterprise's crew starts to recognize the need.

The only real problem with this show is that, with the time slot change this season, it becomes another that I have to tape and watch after Shabbos is over. On the other hand, it isn't on at the same time as Smallville now, so there's always some good in the bad.

(Enterprise isn't out on DVD just yet, but we'll add it here once it is.)

Smallville  I still have the first issue of "Action Comics," which introduced Superman to the world. (No, it's not the valuable one—like so many kids, I did the coloring contest and mailed it in, which is why an intact copy is worth so much.) I still read comics after I was grown, having developed a taste for things that were simply entertaining. Superman himself, after all, was derived from the Jewish "golem" stories.

I had mixed feelings when Smallville hit the small screen. It really did seem that the writers were playing a bit too loose with an established mythos. Lana Lang with black hair? Clark Kent with 20/20 vision and superpowers slowly appearing instead of present from his first appearance on earth? And who was this Chloe person? His parents seemed a bit young, too, and his mother looked more like Lana than Lana (not entirely surprising, since Annette O'Toole played Lana in "Superman III"). Still, despite these obvious differences from the comics, the whole thing worked. Tom Welling makes a good Clark, and Michael Rosenbaum, who I first noticed in a small but important part in Clint Eastwood's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," is an evolving Lex Luthor. Given the right movie part, you'll see an Oscar on his mantel one of these days.

Smallville: The Complete First Season

Smallville: The Complete Second Season

Smallville: The Complete Third Season

The Lone Ranger  Back in the 1950s, everyone watched westerns. The Lone Ranger started on radio years earlier, and there were also a couple of movie serials featuring the Ranger and Tonto. The TV version was created in 1949, teaming popular serial actor Clayton Moore with Jay Silverheels. One of the conceits of the show was that no one ever saw Moore's face when he wasn't either wearing his mask, or hiding behind a false beard and disguise makeup. It wasn't that no one knew what he looked like, of course, since he'd been acting for years before getting this part. Another gimmick was that the Lone Ranger always shot to wound, never to kill, giving birth to one of the more common myths among those who know nothing about firearms (the myth being that this is actually possible).

In addition to the TV show, there were also a couple of theatrical movies. As I recall, these movies were either stripped together multi-episode TV shows or, doing it in reverse, movies made with an eye toward splitting them into episodes. They're a lot of fun, whichever way it worked, and far more entertaining than the rather pretentious big-budget 1981 "The Legend of the Lone Ranger."

Lone Ranger	Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold