Tag Archives: AMC

I feel animated, even a little mad

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I’ve received many compliments on my new Twitter avatar.

Me, Mad-Menned

Me, sorta

These compliments are nice, and yet I feel like I’m cheating in accepting them because the avatar took no creativity on my part whatsoever. In fact, you can have a very similar avatar (or iPhone background or Facebook picture or desktop background) in a few minutes.

Use this: Mad Men Yourself.

This fine gadget is part of the promotion for the third season of AMC’s Mad Men — one of my favorite television programs. (UPDATE: For more about the pervasiveness of this promotion, see this from the New Yorker: “Poster girls.”)

I particularly like this gadget because it uses the artwork of Dyna Moe, a performer and artist in NYC who started drawing scenes from Mad Men season 2, just on a whim, and posting them to her Flickr account and her blog.

What’s nice about this story is that AMC didn’t send her a cease and desist letter. It seemed that the people on Mad Men, and in particular the show’s creator, Matt Weiner, really loved her artwork. They invited her to meet them and other important AMC folks, and to come along when Jon Hamm was guest hosting Saturday Night Live, and so on and so on.

It may have helped that she’s a performer in the Upright Citizen’s Brigade and knew some of the actors via that. But mostly I believe it’s because her art is clever and awesome, and because she wasn’t afraid to put things out for people to see and enjoy. Carpe diem and all that.

You can read all about this and more on Dyna Moe’s blog, I Let My Fists Do the Talking.

I made another Mad Men me, which I’ll start using next week when the new season premieres. Swanky, eh?

Here's me being Mad

Here's me being Mad

Be seeing you

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I’ve just learned that AMC is remaking The Prisoner, the rather spooky and incomprehensible but wildly engrossing Cold War series that the BBC made in the late 60s.

The original version of The Prisoner starts out like a James Bond story, but then gets very weird. The hero, played by Patrick McGoohan with a constant smirk and raised eyebrow, is a man known only as Number Six. The titles show us that he has resigned from some spy agency, then was kidnapped. He awakens in an isolated seashore community called the Village, from which he can’t escape. Why is he there? Who are these other people in the Village? Why can’t he leave? Who is Number One? It’s all mysterious, and it’s also surreal — the colors, the images, the giant white bubble that captures and returns anyone who tries to escape.

“Be seeing you” is the main catchphrase from the show. It’s how the characters say “goodbye”; there’s no escape, so of course they’ll be seeing you, but also the community is full of spies and security cameras, so at any time someone is seeing you.

The uneasy sensibility of The Prisoner fit the Cold War period perfectly. It also suits our current day, with the erosion of personal liberties by government as well as the loss of privacy via our lives on the Web and the constant sharing of personal data. (Giant Eagle Advantage Card, anyone?)

AMC is already my new favorite cable network, what with the classic movies and novel programming like Mad Men. Soon I won’t need any other channels. Be seeing you, indeed.