Great Moments in Nerdglee, 2009 edition

[paulpogue]

Hello, all! Time once again to list our Great Moments in Nerdglee for the year. Any genre, any medium, so long as it's nerdy.

Nerdglee goes to the Potter Stewart definition: You know it when you see it. Is it nerdy? Is it gleeful? Is it, to the point, COMPLETELY FUCKING AWESOME? Then it is nerdglee. It is most particularly nerdglee if there is a better-than-good chance that people will still be talking about it five, ten, twenty years from now, though obviously time is the only thing that will tell.

We can politely disagree over how actually gleeful a particular nerd thing is, but let's not rain on each others' parades, either. This is a thread to celebrate all the awesome things about being a nerd, the things that make us happy to do what we do. Go!

[paulpogue]

My first nominations:

A whole metric frakton from "Battlestar Galactica." Yes, they didn't exactly stick the landing, but even so, this series hit us with some of the most awesomely memorable bits ever. (And as we'll see in another thread, has a very good claim on Greatest Nerdglee of the Century.) Here's my nominations:

BSG, "Someone to Watch Over Me": Kara's tinkling away at the keys, along with Ghost Dad. Tigh: "What .. the ... FRAK?" Pound away! DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-duh-duh-DUN-DUN-DUN. Watchtower, motherfuckers! Ron Moore and company may have been blundering around the plotting, but godDAMN they completely sold the All Along the Watchtower stuff almost to the very end. And Kara's piano solo is pretty much the zenith of the entire use of that theme. Only paralleled by ...

BSG: "Daybreak." "There's gotta be some kind of way out of here ..." You could write a book about everything wrong with "Daybreak." The utterly pointless flashbacks, the incredibly self-indulgent directing, the fact someone should have shaken Ron Moore and made him cut a full hour from the damn thing. But there is an equal amount that is AWESOME. The entire assault on the Cylon Colony is one of the most nailbiting goddamn things I have ever seen. Baltar getting his act together in a way that actually kind of makes sense with his character. The speech that wraps up the religion stuff actually pretty much coming down to 'Yeah, maybe God's just a dick after all.' "Can we NOT tell her the entire plan, please?" "You can SEE them?" The entire way Michael Hogan had become the heart and soul of the show for two years running. "Yeah, yeah, you're absolved of all your darrrk secrets." And at the center of it all is the leadup to finding Earth. The sequence in question is incredibly self-indulgent and takes two minutes, an eternity in film time, to impart information that really only needs five seconds. But I DON'T CARE. From "Starbuck, get us OUT of here!" to "JUUUMMMP!!!", I DID NOT BREATHE.

"Star Trek": For a guy who actually doesn't much like continuity, JJ Abrams sure gave it tons of loving. "Star Trek" earned plenty of nerdglee points all along the way, but my favorites: "Fire EVERYTHING!", which was clearly penned to be a long-remembered line and might actually succeed, and "I have been, and always shall be, your friend."

Musical nerdglee: There is nothing, nothing, NOTHING good to be said about "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." Except for the fact they hired Cheap Trick to write the theme song. And Cheap Trick proceeded to liberally crib from Stan Bush's 1986 film lyrics. And used their own backbeat from "Surrender" as the chief timing beat for their take on Transformers. The song is actually not very good, but it makes me smile every goddamn time.

"Yo Gabba Gabba": The nerdiest kid's show ever. Previous great nerdglee moments included Jack McBrayer's knock-knock jokes, Paul Williams performing "Rainbow Connection," and every single time the motherfucker primarily known for the phrase "You must whip it, whip it good" shows up to teach kids how to draw. This year's big winner has to be pretty much the entire Jack Black episode.

Mister T. World of Warcraft.

"Phineas and Ferb." I can't actually name a specific moment, but seriously, this show is nerdgleeful to an extent rarely seen. If there was a scale from 1 to 100 to describe the extent to which a kid's show includes elements to entertain the parents, in which 1 is Barney the Dinosaur and 100 is Rocky and Bullwinkle, surely 100,000 would be defined as "casting half the fucking Rocky Horror Picture Show in your Disney series." Possibly the big winner of the year, though: Perfectly nailing the David Caruso CSI sunglasses gag. "Yes. Yes we ..." sunglasses on -- "... are." YYEAAAHHHHHHHHH

OUR NERDY PRESIDENT:

[michaelpaciocco]

Comics:

Carl Sagan guest starring (and saving the day) in Atomic Robo: The Shadow Beyond Time #4.

[michaelpaciocco]

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