Memorabilia

Props to Mr. D. Perkins for providing a bit of inspiration for today's post.

So, when an episode of Coach started they would play the theme song over the opening credits, which was kind of unique in that the theme song was played by what sounded like a college marching band and the credits were just a bunch of different shots of football memorabilia. I'm not sure if that song was just the theme song for the show, or if it was supposed to be the fight song for Minnesota state. It would have made a terrible fight song probably. It was a little too sit-commy.

I can't really remember much about the football memorabilia. I think it was just a random assortment of like, footballs and trophies and old black and white photos and maybe some olde-timey football helmets. I suppose this was designed to make the viewer appreciate and revere the great football tradition at Minnesota State, but I'm also fairly sure that there wasn't anything in the piles of memorabilia that, directly, had anything to do with Minnesota State. Well, maybe there was like, a pennant or something that said Minnesota State and had been faded to look all old, but I don't think the producers of Coach would have gone to the trouble to take a bunch of black and white photos of people in old football uniforms that said "Minnesota State" or make a bunch of fake trophies or anything like that. Probably what they did was just find a bunch of old football memorabilia where it's impossible to tell what team that piece of memorabilia is associated with. Then they piled it all up in some old dusty wooden room, slapped on a Minnesota State pennant and filmed it up-close with a bunch of sweeping shots.

I can't decide if this was brilliant or stupid.

International Appeal

Today's post comes from an Internet café in Cuzco, Peru, so if all of the apostrophes end up looking like some sort of Turkish money denomination, blame the Peruvian government and their insistence on using keyboards that favor their own language to mine.

I bet that Coach was one of the least successful shows ever ported to an international audience. The whole premise of the show revolves around the admittedly limited sport of American Football; specifically college football at an invented university in a relatively obscure state.

I can imagine your typical Argentine or Hungarian man, unable to sleep one night and flipping through the channels on his small, non-Japanese television, when what should he see, but a poorly dubbed comedic show featuring a bunch of tall Americans talking about things he has never heard of. Seriously, how would you translate jokes about defensive backs and quarterback sneaks in to Hungarian?

More than anything, this man would be completely confused. "What the hell is this?" he would probably say, but he would say it in whatever language he actually spoke, not English as implied above.

However, I bet all of his confusion would be put to rest when Luther came in wearing some sort of outlandish suit, or maybe those cellophane glasses the eye doctor gives you after he dialates your pupils. Then, my friends, our poor sleepless man would laugh himself back to a peaceful slumber.

Ah Luther, the great international equilizer.