Sunday, March 30, 2008

Titularly Parasitical

“The Taming of the Shrew.” By Christopher Lloyd. Perf. Tim Daly, Steven Weber, and Crystal Bernard. Dir. Andy Ackerman. Wings. Season 3, episode 3. NBC. 10 October 1991. DVD. Paramount, 2006.
So many Shakespeare and Film disappointments have taken place because of the merely titularly parasitical . . . that is, the simply eponymously leech-like . . . er . . . what one might call the superficially allusional . . .

All right. It’s when they give something a title that has a reference to Shakespeare but they don’t back up that title with any Shakespearean matter.

That’s true of the episode of Wings listed above. It’s called “The Taming of the Shrew,” but it’s basically about the character above who had a bad breakup and was sort of angry. But then she got over it.

Ah, well. It indicates that Shakespeare is still a financial draw . . . or that he was in 1991.

The same disappointment accompanied my viewing of an Animaniacs’ episode entitled “The Taming of the Screwy.”

But that one was, at least, much, much funnier!

No comments:

Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest