Friday Ephemera

Except for Avengers: Endgame and Thor: Ragnarok. Those were, respectively, tedious and grating.
I had an interesting experience the other day. My video game reflexes aren’t what they used to be, and I find myself playing more and more “kid’s” games to pass the time. The LEGO series of games is good silly fun, full of funny little silent sketches and a brightly coloured aesthetic. They’re a nice escape.
LEGO Marvel’s Avengers was released between LEGO Marvel Superheroes 1 & 2. It’s the same game, really, using the same engine, the same characters and some of the same levels, even. LMSH1 was some of the most fun I’ve had in a video game. Halfway through LEGO Marvel’s Avengers I quit, because it was all so damn grim. The levels are copies of scenes from the movies, all the voice work is just clips of the actors from the films, and there are no interstitial silent comedy clips (probably due to the license terms).
It was a stark[1] reminder that somewhere along the way the MCU movies forgot how to be fun.
[1] Pun intended

British banks and bankers: I’ve been watching the old BBC TV adaptations of All Creatures Great and Small. The bankers and government officials come off as excruciatingly condescending, treating people like children or like peasants who must tug their forelocks. I wonder how accurate a portrayal this is of the culture in the first half of the 20th Century–accurate, or a BBC distortion of reality?

British banks and bankers
Quite accurate.
Managers of branches, when banks had branches in every shopping street and managers had considerable discretion and freedom, were frequently pompous pillars of society.
In the days before easy credit, their job was to issue loans begrudgingly and with pursed lips.
They were pillars of respectable society- men who were capable of enduring the monotony of working in suburban bank branches, where the only excitement was failure to tally at close of business.
Bank Managers were invariably prominent in golf clubs.
Captain Mainwaring, of Dads Army, is one of the great British comedy characters: a pompous, socially insecure idiot of limited intelligence- and a bank manager.

the TV show, at least in its early years before it became the Alan Alda Self Indulgence Hour, was infinitely superior, and closer in spirit to the original books
Richard Hooker, the author of M*A*S*H, despised Alan Alda and his depiction of Hawkeye. I’m not sure what he thought of Altman’s film, although he was upset he sold the film rights for peanuts.

the TV show, at least in its early years before it became the Alan Alda Self Indulgence Hour, was infinitely superior
I have read that Korean Americans (very understandably) despise the show. I suppose that means they get an early insight into the defects of the American entertainment industry.

Odd that for something so enormously popular in its day, I haven’t seen it in syndication.
Probably a recency bias thing. Syndication isn’t what it once was and there are so many places to view content that shows often get lost in the noise.
M^*A^*S^*H was one of the most profitable shows in syndication of all time. At one point the show was running 16 times per week in some markets. When it’s production run ended, the show was already running 3 to 4 times per day as a re-run on the network. These re-runs mostly continued. So looking back the line between production run and and syndication gets a little fuzzy.
Here’s a good synopsis of M^*A^*S^*H in syndication.

There is no fun in progressivism, comrade. Revolution is a serious business.
“There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.”