Remem­ber the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure series?

Books that would allow you as the reader to basi­cally choose the path of the char­ac­ter — writ­ten in either a first or third per­son perspective.

For exam­ple, let’s say your char­ac­ter came to a point in the story wherein he or she had to choose whether or not they would tip a cow in the mid­dle of Farmer Tim’s Field. Imme­di­at­edly fol­low­ing the text would be some­thing along the lines of:

Will you either:

A) Tip the cow.
(please turn to page 23)

or

B) Decide not to tip the cow.
(please turn to page 99)

The fun in these books was re-reading them after reach­ing the end or if the char­ac­ter died as a result of your deci­sion. Par­tic­u­lary if you were will­ing to go through it again and see an alter­nate end­ing to the story.

See­ing that we live in a dig­i­tal age some peo­ple have cre­ated sim­i­lar con­cepts such as Nick Piekos’ (of Blam­bot) Dead Ends.

Dead Ends “is an inter­ac­tive story. At times you will have to decide the best course of action for the char­ac­ters. Make a good choice and you’ll live to read some more.“
(more…)

One of my favorite tele­vi­sion sit­coms dur­ing the 80s was the wildly pop­u­lar show ALF (1986−1990). The series starred an Alien Life Form whose space­ship crash landed into the garage of the Tan­ner Fam­ily in Los Ange­les. Due to the fact his space­ship could not be repaired he was stuck on Earth with­out any hope of return­ing to his home­planet, Melmac.

The Tan­ner Fam­ily agreed to hide ALF from the alien task force and learns of his planet’s favorite meal; cats. Although the Tanner’s cat Lucky is con­sid­ered a del­i­cacy on Mel­mac, ALF tried his best to not eat him even though his attempted to sev­eral times dur­ing the series.

The show as men­tioned amassed such pop­u­lar­ity that it pro­duced a fever of ALF mer­chan­dis­ing includ­ing fig­urines, stuffed dolls, books, posters and even bed sheets (of which I owned I one time or another).

The his­tory of ALF’s con­cep­tion is a unique one. “The char­ac­ter ALF was orig­i­nally cre­ated by Paul Fusco in 1984. He already offered his con­cept of a sit­com about an alien to the Dis­ney Stu­dios and to the Muppet-creator Jim Hen­son, but they rejected it, when finally he had a meet­ing with NBC’s Bran­don Tartikoff.”

A pop­u­lar mis­con­cep­tion dur­ing the time was that ALF was per­formed by “90 cm (around 3 feet) tall Michu Mezaros. But he just por­trayed ALF in the first sea­son and part of the sec­ond sea­son only when he needed to be seen walk­ing. In nor­mal scenes and in the third and fourth sea­son the pro­duc­ers of the shows used other meth­ods that did not require a cos­tume.” (tvshows​.de)

In other news …

An arti­cle on Yahoo News states that “the 7,385 sign­ers of the “Bring Back ALF” online peti­tion let­ter have finally got­ten their wish.” ALF will return to the boob tube with his very own show enti­tled Alf’s Hit Talk Show, cur­rently in devel­op­ment with Nick­elodeon and cre­ator Paul Fusco.

In the arti­cle “Why I hate The Lord of the Rings” Larry Terenzi, con­tribut­ing author, states his opin­ion in regards to the Tolkein tril­ogy. He basi­cally describes his dis­plea­sure and monot­ony while watch­ing the films as well as the lack of story (in the movies, not nec­es­sar­ily in the books).

The best part of the arti­cle in my opin­ion is when Ter­nenzi calls the char­ac­ters ‘Merry and Pip­pin’ the ‘Cheech and Chong’ of Mid­dle Earth.