Goodnight Seattle! We Love You!

A year ago, a trip to the DVD store was a treasure hunt. What would I find? How cool would it be? Would it be?

Last night's trip to the DVD store was fraught with the opposite peril... How do I decide? Do I really need to pay rent?

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, as running the Pop Culture Institute out of a shopping cart simply isn't feasible. One good thing - at least these days it's not possible to make a bad choice. There's so much good out there even the bad stuff's at least obscure.

To whit: I decided to return to an old favourite, "Frasier", and the first season at that. The thing about a long-running series is that the early seasons don't linger in syndication, so I haven't seen some of these episodes in many years. Even more shocking, some of them I've never seen at all. Bad dilettante! Bad!

What a pleasure it is to see those old familiar characters before network focus grous got to them and softened all their edges off. Frasier and Niles gayer than gay, Daphne kookier than kook, Roz... Well, you get the point. It's also a treat to see Moose, who plays Eddie, all spry and emotive. In the last few seasons of "Frasier" - to give you an idea how long the show was on - Eddie was played by Moose in closeups and Moose's son in the action sequences.

Moose died on June 22nd, 2006, but will live forever in our hearts, or at least in our DVD players.