Tag Archives: Battlestar Galactica

Fudge you and frak her too

Okay, maybe it says something about the kind of day I’ve had, but tonight my thoughts turned to cursing.

Specifically, the kind of cursing people do in movies, suitable-for-radio songs and (especially) TV shows.

A recent example of what I’m talking about: The Cee Lo Green song “Forget You,” which isn’t really called “Forget You.” But thanks to the censored version — which probably gets more play than the uncensored version, except in strip bars — Cee Lo is a household name and star of a TV competition show.

In a time when bleeped expletives on TV are commonplace — and don’t take much effort to figure out — the made-up variety of cussing is a lot more entertaining.

So here’s a sampling of imaginative, imaginary cursing.

“Rassin-frassin-rassin …” Once-popular cartoon favorite Yosemite Sam, who appeared in 45 Warner Brothers shorts beginning in the 1940s, popularized this garbled style of cussing. Sam was kind of a daring character, really. Daffy Duck was a bitter little mallard but he didn’t swear. Just the fact that Sam muttered expletives in cartoons was testimony to how the Warner Brothers classics were made for adults as well as kids.

“Frak” and “Felgercarb.” In the original 1970s “Battlestar Galactica” series, characters routinely cursed by uttering “Frak.” We knew what what they meant. The 2000s revival of “Battlestar Galactica” brought “Frak” to a wider, hipper audience. Really, how cool was it when characters on other shows, including “Veronica Mars,” started exclaiming “Frak!”

“Felgercarb” — a euphemism for crap, according to the Battlestar Wiki — however, never caught on. Which makes sense, I guess. People could say crap on TV. They didn’t need a euphemism.

“Motherless goat of all motherless goats.” Don’t recognize it? That’s because it was uttered, in the original Chinese, on the much-missed Joss Whedon 2002 series “Firefly.” The series was set in a future in which China had a huge influence on human culture so, ideally, some of the best curses would be uttered in Chinese.

@%$#@! Okay, anyone who’s read comic strips and comic books recognizes what’s sometimes referred to as “cartoon cursing” or “comic strip cursing.” The fun part is that you can apply almost any string of curse words to it. And any random combination of top-row symbols.

“Oh, fudge!” One of my favorites. It’s from “A Christmas Story,” the 1984 classic that’s become a holiday season TV fixture. Fans remember that Ralphie blurts out “Oh fudge” when he drops a hubcap full of lug nuts. Except he doesn’t say fudge, of course.

Soapy mouth-washing-out ensues.

 

 

Fall’s not the same without TV Guide

I usually operate under the assumption that nobody who reads this blog grew up geekier than I did. Or at least you’re not willing to admit it.

But it took a special kind of geek to salivate over the TV Guide fall preview issue quite as much as I did.

Now when I was a kid and a teenager, I was a movie, sci-fi, book and TV geek. Unlike now. Ha.

The highlight of my week, at least many weeks, was Tuesday, when the new TV Guide came out.

My friend Jim and I went over each issue, inch by inch, increment of the day by increment of the day, checking out what was airing on the four or five channels we could see with our primitive TV antennas.

Sammy Terry’s “Nightmare Theater” was a highlight of each Friday night and the listings of Sammy’s two features that night was likewise a highlight of TV Guide. So was the listing for “American Bandstand” on Saturday. So were the Saturday morning cartoon listings.

We mapped out our entire week’s viewing well before the week began.

The best TV Guide of the year, of course, was the fall preview season. Besides the program listings that we scoured religiously were the articles and previews of new shows. “Battlestar Galactica?” Don’t know what it is, but I’ll give it a try. “Man from Atlantis?” Why not?

The TV Guide fall preview, with its colorful photos, snappy articles and — best of all, really — unsubtle ads was the social event of the year for geeks. If you considered a social event a digest-sized magazine that prompted you to spend hours on end sitting alone in front of a TV, that is.

I haven’t read TV Guide in years. I’m not sure a print version of the magazine is still published. I mostly know it now as a cable channel with low-rent programs and an annoying “crawl” of  listings. The online version of those listings is just as bad, maybe worse.

Somebody mentioned the other day that the fall TV season had begun, and I guess it has. But how can anyone tell without the fall preview issue of TV Guide on the coffee table?