Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I enjoyed this well-written book - with some reservations. Some of the entries seem more like philosophical disagreements with certain TV trends (e.g., the corporate-sponsorship craze and the numerous attempts to create TV series from famous and not-so-famous movie franchises) than specific moments in time that one can point to and intone, "Now THAT's dumb!" More troublesome to me were the large number of errors that I spotted in the entries where I had some background knowledge of my own about the series. Case in point: the entry on the Lost in Space episode "The Great Vegetable Rebellion." The retelling of the ep's plot isn't the problem. The first two paragraphs of the entry, however, contain multiple errors about the background and fundamental details of the series. For the record: The Robinson family lifted off in 1997, not 1977; they were traveling to Alpha Centauri, not Alpha "Centurai"; and the comic title Space Family Robinson was not produced by Disney (though Carl Barks did suggest an idea like it long before the actual comic book made its debut). I can only wonder how many other major-league boners -- ones which I lack the expertise to discern -- are sprinkled betwixt the humorous anecdotes and bemused descriptions in which Hofstede specializes. It's still a fun read, but caveat emptor and all that.
Click Here to see more reviews about: What Were They Thinking: The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History
Ranking the top 100 most memorable mishaps in a countdown format, this book begins with #100 and proceeds all the way to the single most indelible TV blunder. Organizing the material in this manner invites readers to discuss and debate whether Cop Rock was really a bigger fiasco than The New Monkees, or whether the presentation of Elvis Presley only from the waist up on The Ed Sullivan Show was a sillier bit of censorship than the coverage of Barbara Eden's belly button on I Dream of Jeannie. The blunders in this compendium take many forms-good and bad, inexplicable network decisions, casting catastrophes, and TV "events" that weren't. Each entry is covered in a detailed individual essay that answers such questions as "Why did this happen?" and "What were they thinking?"
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