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For easily confused Transformers fans: Primeval

To make more than the paltry $10.6 million this title managed, Hollywood Pictures should have named it Optimus Primeval. Sure, such a title might be legally actionable, but at least it would have earned enough money to justify a lawsuit or two. Primeval is in the Anaconda/Lake Placid genre of a sea monster feasting on humans. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near as good as either of those titles, which makes me sad since it stars two people I really like in Dominic Purcell and Brooke Langton. If you like the genre BOP's Dan Krovich hilariously describes as "Animals Eating Humans = $$$", you might like it more than I did.

For poker fans unsure who in the blue hell this Gabe Kaplan guy is: Welcome Back, Kotter: The Complete First Season

Did I ever tell you about my uncle Gabe? He turned his real life experiences as a remedial teacher into a popular television show in the 1970s. Due to some excellent timing, he even captured lightning in a bottle by casting the soon-to-be famous John Travolta as one of his students, a group he nicknamed The Sweathogs. Over a period of three good seasons, and one disastrous year that included the dreaded phase of "network re-tooling", Uncle Gabe became one of the most popular sitcom stars of the 1970s as well as a killer performer in the annual Battle of the Network Stars competitions. Unfortunately for him, for the next 15 years, no one remembered his era after it was gone. Bitter and dejected, Uncle Gabe slunk off the seedy underworld of high stakes gambling, becoming a cautionary tale for other sitcom stars about what could happen to them if they fought their network and lost.

Uncle Gabe had some success in the world of poker, becoming a solid player as well as a noted analyst of the game. But it was not until the early 1990s when Nickelodeon started re-airing episodes of Uncle Gabe's show that people were reminded of why he was famous. Soon afterward, the world of poker received an unexpected boost in terms of media saturation and Uncle Gabe was suddenly semi-popular once more. Now the host of three different television poker programs (out of approximately 370), Kaplan is back in the public spotlight. So, some enterprising network bean counter has realized that there might be money to be made in re-releasing his sitcom on DVD. For his part, Uncle Gabe is content to make acerbic, cerebral jokes that soar way above the heads of his audience members while he quietly lives every day seeking redemption for unleashing John Travolta upon a world of innocent bystanders. To a certain extent, Battlefield Earth is squarely Uncle Gabe's fault.

Signed,

Epstein's Mother




For Magnum P.I. fans looking for a dis-satisfactory but readily available substitute: Jesse Stone: Death in Paradise (2006) and Jesse Stone: Night Passage (2006)


This isn't quite as depressing as watching Gabe Kaplan doing World Series of Poker commentary during the days before hole cards were shown on camera and nobody watched, but it's pretty damned close. I miss the days when Tom Selleck was a huge star.

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