I'm out of touch

When I was a kid, I kept up with new movies by reading the parodies of them in Mad Magazine. I knew about all kinds of movies I had never seen. I could turn on the TV, see the middle of movie, and recognize it because I read it in Mad. Later, I watched Siskel & Ebert just to save myself the trouble of ever going out to a movie.

I don't read Mad anymore and I don't know if they've changed their format anyway. Gene Siskel died and Roger Ebert has had terrible health problems. They really didn't like each other, at least at first. Roger Ebert said that, when he was offered the chance to do the show, he was acquainted with Siskel and would rather have worked with anyone but him.

What critic you'll watch has little to do with whether you agree with them. Siskel and Ebert gave rave reviews to Dan Ackroyd's terrible, terrible movie, Dragnet. Just awful. Rex Reed and Dixie Whatley panned it but I still liked Siskel and Ebert better. I don't know why. Did they just have better voices?

And while I'm thinking of it, do you remember that Liquid Plumber commercial? Real plumbers hate that stuff---they refuse to work on drains where people have used that stuff because when they open the drain, they get all the horrible chemicals on them. But the ad had two plumbers sitting there talking about Liquid Plumber. And they vaguely resembled Siskel and Ebert. I thought it was an obvious attempt to tap in on their popularity.