I don’t remember HOW, but the other night Christina and I were talking and discussion turned to Power Rangers. Then we found out that it’s on streaming Netflix. You can probably guess how we’ve been spending the past few days.

Marrying a fellow nerd is so awesome because whenever these waves of nostalgia assault the marina that is real life, I don’t get made fun of; instead, my wife joins in and oftentimes will even OUTNERD ME.

Did you know that when Christina was a kid, she dropped out of dance class because it was scheduled for the same time that Power Rangers was on TV?

Anyway, it’s been a blast watching this show again. Honestly, it’s held up surprisingly well. Now that I’m older and I know that it’s actually TWO shows (the stuff outside of costume filmed with American actors spliced with episodes of the old Japanese series Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger ) I’m actually quite impressed with the skilled editing; the Japanese footage in the episode we just watched (Episode 7, “Big Sisters”) had a girl with pigtails, a white shirt and a red skirt… so the plot of the American footage centered around Kimberly and Trini spending time with a girl dressed exactly the same way.

Call me crazy, but it’s still a fun show to watch. The first cast was great. The characters are still immensely likeable and they all SEEM like really good friends. Sure, the plot and acting can get cheesy, but hey: this is a show adapted from the Super Sentai franchise. It’s a package deal.

As you know, I’m a fan of subtly working in aspects of nerd culture into everyday attire. In fact, I’ve been wearing an X-Men belt buckle for about six years now:

Now I’m determined to equip myself with a Power Morpher. There’s some really badass looking ones floating around:

The big decision I have to make is which coin to put in it. I could do the Dragonzord coin, because the Green Ranger looked the coolest with his badass armor. I could do the Mastadon coin, because the Black Ranger was played by TWO awesome people. I could do the Tyrannosaurus coin because hey, the Red Ranger was the leader. I could do the Triceratops coin because the Blue Ranger was my favorite as a kid. DECISIONS.

Oh yeah, my text message alert on my phone is now the same alert that the Power Rangers got on their communicators when they’d get a message from Zordon.

It’s always a shame when you go back and revisit something from your childhood that you remember was awesome, but it turns out that it’s not awesome anymore. Luckily for us Power Rangers is still rad as hell, and we’re having a blast reliving it.

I don’t understand why so many good shows are taken off the air. Every time I start watching a new show and take a liking to it, it gets canceled. Fox and NBC can both suck it.

Two shows Christina and I really liked, Fox’s Traffic Light and NBC’s Outsourced were both cancelled at the end of this season. We’re not really big TV watchers, so outside of a couple of shows there’s not much we really look forward to watching, but both of these shows were high on the list.

I’m a big fan of sitcoms. I love daytime TV because there are always several channels showing reruns of old syndicated sitcoms, and I always wind up getting stuck watching them for hours. I’m pretty sure if video games hadn’t gotten such a death grip on my interests, PK Bloggin’! would probably be a blog where I talked about situation comedies. Also, it’d be called something different.

Both shows are just so well written, and Traffic Light especially, have characters that you just always want to spend a little more time with. I tell Christina in all honesty that I would watch a show that was just people sitting and talking to each other for 22 minutes as long as the dialog was well written.

Outsourced I could tell right from the get-go wouldn’t last long, but I was hoping we’d get more than one season. When it first started people kept claiming it was racist, which I never understood because if anything, they surrounded a white actor with Indian actors and made the white guy look like the buffoon. Outsourced did a marvelous job balancing jokes for American viewers with its Indian setting, and it was never mean-spirited or derogatory. If anything, the show proved week after week that no matter what culture we come from, we all have things in common and should take care of each other.

Moving Outsourced from its slot right after The Office on Thursdays to an hour later was just a bad move. The two shows went well together, and adding it as an afterthought to The Office, Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock buried it before it was even done breathing.

It’s a shame it ended so soon… so many things were just left unresolved, and they had to rush the resolution of the whole Todd/Asha subplot to the point where it was even MORE unsatisfying than if the show had ended without them going anywhere.

But Traffic Light… UGH, it kills me that this show is over. Itself a mid-season replacement for ANOTHER canceled show, it only got 12 episodes and no real finale. We only caught it recently, because even though we saw commercials for it while watching Glee (yes we watch Glee, shut up) we just forgot to watch it. One night we left the TV on and saw an episode and immediately got hooked. Three weeks later, the show was canned. We’ve been watching the episodes we missed on Hulu Plus and it just makes it that much more painful that that’s all we get.

When you have a cast that talented and writing that snappy, you do NOT take it off the air. If it’s in a crappy timeslot (which it was… 9:30 on Tuesdays, after Glee and Raising Hope), you move it and promote it better to build an audience. Fox’s Tuesday lineup was kind of a mess… the kinds of people who watch Glee (my wife and I notwithstanding) are not the kind to stick around afterwards and watch a show like Raising Hope, much less wait another half hour for Traffic Light.

I love characters, and knowing that characters that I enjoy so much just kind of cease to exist… I know it’s stupid, but it’s depressing.

When Outsourced and Traffic Light wind up on DVD, even though I can watch them on Hulu whenever, I’ll be buying the retail releases. It’s the least I can do as a last show of support for television shows that didn’t really get the chance to realize their potential.

I try to be a positive person. I try to find a little bit of enjoyment in everything and the things I can’t I just leave alone. Last night, though, I met my match as an optimist.

The “leaving things you don’t like alone” trait is something I’ve tried to rub off on Christina, and it has, so last night when we were channel surfing she had the bright idea to watch Jersey Shore. She knows some people who like to watch it so she felt like she needed to give it a fair shake before she made fun of it.

Sometimes I wish I would keep my mouth shut.

I have NEVER seen any piece of entertainment that is so offensively stupid and devoid of any merit than Jersey Shore. I can’t really say anything that hasn’t already been said elsewhere on the internet, but I was trying not to pay attention and focus on working on my Living Pokédex and the sheer amount of blowout hairstyles and spray-on tans emanating from my television and permeating the room made it impossible for me to focus.

I can’t believe this show exists, let alone people watch it! I mean, I guess if people have a stronger constitution than I do they can watch it just to see how stupid it gets. But really, these people… ugh. You’d think that putting that many ignorant, uneducated, hateful people into one house would cause some kind of black hole to form, but no. It somehow becomes a cash cow for MTV.

(Speaking of MTV, which I haven’t turned on in literally about 12 years, they put a little ticker on the bottom of the screen that lists the song title and artist for any song they insert into their shows, which is neat. Nice to know they’re at least TRYING to work the “M” into “MTV.”)

In my opinion you don’t get a nickname unless you’re posting on a forum, using an online gaming service, or are a rap star. You don’t get to just make one up. “Snooki” just sounds retarded, but I guess it fits since Snooki herself seems to have the IQ of a frozen waffle. “The Situation” is probably one of the most annoying “personalities” (and I use that term loosely) I’ve ever seen. Not only is his name dumb, but he has to work it into every damn thing he says. “Are you getting situated in your current situation?” If I ever meet him (which I hope I never do because I like being smart) I just want to Dragon Punch him and tell him to shut the fuck up. Your name is MIKE goddammit.

This is all I’m ever going to say about this show because I like being positive and not ripping into things, but good lord I couldn’t keep this contained. This makes three negative posts I’ve written, which I guess over the course of a year isn’t too bad.

Maybe my next post will be about pizza. I LOVE pizza.

Man, I love The Simpsons. It’s always been one of my favorite shows, and until recently I had kinda fallen out of watching it for whatever reason. Lately though, Christina and I have been going back through my old DVDs and I’ve fallen back in love.

The Simpsons is such a great show because it’s STILL funny. The episodes we’re watching are 15 years old at LEAST, and even though I’ve seen them dozens of times I still crack up. Listening to the DVD commentary, they set out to make a show that would age well and they’ve succeeded by leaps and bounds.

On the flip side, we have Family Guy, which is really only funny the first time you watch an episode. Go back and watch season 3 of Family Guy and season 3 of The Simpsons and tell me which one has aged better. If you said Family Guy, you’re a liar and/or have poor taste. Either way, we can’t be friends.

I mean, I like Family Guy okay. I’m just kinda tired of the random cutaways every episode. It was funny at first but it’s just rather stale now. Every episode just feels the same to me. We get it, everyone hates Meg. Every episode of The Simpsons feels unique because, well, it is. It has an actual plot! How about that?

I think part of the appeal of Family Guy was that it wasn’t around long and then got cancelled. It was an underground thing, kind of like when kids these days only like a band because no one else knows about them. Then it came back and proclaimed “WE ARE EDGY. ISN’T THAT GREAT?” and proceeded to do the same episode 20 times a season.

The Simpsons has been going for 20 years now, and I think they’re under contract to go all the way through season 25. That’s amazing. How many other TV shows have lasted that long? Not many. I was thinking, though, even though I don’t catch every new episode when it airs, it’s going to be really depressing when (or if, I guess) The Simpsons ever goes off the air. It’s just… a staple of American television. It’s always been there.

I’m going to go back and start collecting the DVD sets I skipped, even though I hate the stupid boxes they come in shaped like the character’s faces. The Simpsons is the television equivalent of a security blanket; it’s familiar, it’s comfortable, and it’s always there when you need it. I’ll be rewatching these episodes for many, many years. It’ll be a lot of fun to see how funny they’ll still be in another 15 years.

I love video games. You should know this by now. What you may not know by now, however, is that I also love sitcoms. No matter what you’re looking for in a sitcom, there’s probably a comedic situation on television for you! Except doofy, inattentive fathers. They haven’t done that yet.

ANYWAY. One of my favorite shows on TV right now is The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom about four nerds and their hot blond neighbor. It’s got phenomenal writing and an absolutely stellar cast, but one of the best things about it is their attention to nerd detail.

The majority of the show takes place in the apartment of physicists Leonard Hofstadter and Sheldon Cooper, who happen to be huge nerds. Sci-fi and comic book memorabilia are wantonly scattered about, which is cool, but what really impresses me is the video game stuff. As I write this, we have an episode on pause. I can see in the background, without even really squinting, the Master Chief helmet from the Halo 3 Legendary Edition, the Xbox Best Of Platinum Hits version of Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge, and the collector’s edition of City of Villains for the PC. This is one shot. The background stuff in their apartment seems to change every episode.

The four main characters (Leonard, Sheldon and their friends Howard and Raj) have “Halo Night” every Wednesday, and it’s not used as a one-off gag. They refer to it, and even show it, in several episodes. The thing is, though, they’re actually playing Halo! The sound effects are from Halo. The in-game terms they use are from Halo. They even use the controllers like they’re actually playing Halo!

You know how whenever they show someone playing a video game on TV, generic bleeps and bloops fill the air as the actor flails about in a humiliating attempt to push every button on the controller as fast as possible? Not here! They hold the triggers and have one thumb on each analog stick. It seems like such a small thing, but on a show where they literally have a science consultant to make sure that the things they talk about and the white boards the characters use to use equations are accurate, it’s just that much more impressive the way they try to get these things right.

(The only other time I’ve seen an actor play a video game correctly on TV was once on an episode of Glee, Finn was seen playing Halo and he was using the controller the right way. Then he ruined it by saying he “got vaporized on level 2.”

There was an episode where Sheldon’s mom mailed him his Nintendo 64, and he was excited to play Super Mario 64 (referred to by name) with Leonard, who had a date over. So Sheldon took his laptop and sat outside the apartment to play Super Mario 64 on an emulator (he actually says it’s an emulator when their neighbor Penny asks what he’s doing). When she interrupts him, he pauses the game. You know what you hear? The pause sound from Super Mario 64. When he’s playing, you hear the music from the Bowser levels. You hear Mario yell “Yah! Wahoo!” as he jumps. We can’t see the laptop screen, but we know for a fact that Sheldon is indeed playing Super Mario 64.

Another episode had Penny getting addicted to the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Age of Conan. Again, referenced by name, but we see the game itself this time. They throw out a lot of terminology I didn’t know since I haven’t played the game, but the way Penny behaves isn’t just stereotypical “addicted gamer”; she’s on a Ventrilo line, talking to her party, concerned with things like who was going to tank their next encounter.

The Big Bang Theory is one of my favorite shows because THESE ARE MY PEOPLE. I can relate to them. I’m not a scientist, but I’ve spent many a Saturday night playing video games with friends instead of going out. I’ve been ridiculed for having a collection of toys still in the packaging. I’ve been nervous talking to girls. If you’ve got any nerd in you at all, you’ll be just as impressed with the show as I am.