How To Grow Your Geek: Parenting and More!

Hey Guys,
Got a quick one for you this time around, more will be coming this weekend. Maybe even something I have never done before. Hmmmmmm, maybe.

Some of you may know Rowan Atkinson from the Black Adder series, which is wicked funny. But is geared more towards teens and adults due to the humor. But he also did a tv series where it was just him playing the main character, who seldom talked; but always got into some type of trouble. I am of course talking about Mr Bean. Here are a couple clips you might like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS1ePEZZCDY&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=717G-A0N4Zo&feature=channel

Funny huh? This reminds me of all those old silent film stars I love like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. He takes the simplest things and makes them funny. The TV series is clean and everyone in the family can sit down to enjoy it together. Oh! When you do watch the show, be on the lookout for a little blue car, it shows up time after time and something always happens to it. The best one I saw was the one where he went down to the store to buy a new lounge chair. The car he has is so tiny the chair would never fit into it. (He drive a tiny mini cooper.) Wait until you see how he was able to dive home with the chair, you will be rolling, hehe.

Roland Atkinson also did a stand up video, where he made fun of everything from people winding up in Hell to Schoolboys. (The schoolboys one had some words in it, so parents if you find the live dvd keep that in mind. It’s not TOO bad, but still.)

Here are a couple ones from that as well. The first one he plays the devil, welcoming people to hell. Remember, make sure you go to the bathroom before you take any trip, just a FYI.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UbqZ_oN5do

This one you just have to see. It’s Mr. Bean discovering an invisible drum set.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sf_pogZ8jE&feature=related

In this last bit of a video clip I found, Mr Atkinson does a interview where he talks about Mr. Bean and how popular it is around the world, and also talks about the Back Adder series.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gr0Fa_QPNU&feature=related

Darcy fun facts:

Rowland Atkinson got his start on radio, doing a show for the BBC where he played a reporter interviewing famous people from history, he would play both sides.

From Wiki: “After university, Atkinson toured with Angus Deayton as his funny man in an act that was eventually filmed for a television show. After the success of the show, he did a one-off pilot for ITV in 1979 called Canned Laughter. Atkinson then went on to do Not the Nine O’Clock News, produced by his friend John Lloyd. He starred on the show along with Pamela Stephenson, Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith, and was one of the main sketch writers.

The success of Not the Nine O’Clock News led to his starring in the medieval sitcom The Black Adder, which he also co-wrote with Richard Curtis, in 1983. After a three-year gap, in part due to budgetary concerns, a second series was written, this time by Curtis and Ben Elton, and first screened in 1986. Blackadder II followed the fortunes of one of the descendants of Atkinson’s original character, this time in the Elizabethan era. The same pattern was repeated in the two sequels Blackadder the Third (1987) (set in the Regency era), and Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) (set in World War I). The Blackadder series went on to become one of the most successful BBC situation comedies of all time, spawning television specials including Blackadder’s Christmas Carol (1988) and Blackadder: The Cavalier Years (1988).

Atkinson’s other famous creation, the hapless Mr. Bean, first appeared on New Years Day in 1990 in a half-hour special for Thames Television. The character of Mr. Bean has been likened somewhat to a modern-day Buster Keaton.[10] During this time, Atkinson appeared at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal in 1987 and 1989. Several sequels to Mr. Bean appeared on television in the 1990s, and it eventually made into a major motion picture in 1997. Entitled Bean, it was directed by Mel Smith, his former co-star from Not the Nine O’Clock News. A second movie was released in 2007 entitled Mr. Bean’s Holiday, the last of the Mr. Bean films.”

Along with his TV work, he did two Mr Bean films, but was seen in the movies for the first time in a small role in the James Bond film, “Never say never again.” He stared as Nigel Small-Fawcett: A bumbling MI6 operative working in the Bahamas who clumsily meets Bond in Nassau. He later did his own comedy take on the Bond films in a funny movie called Johnny English.

All of these I have listed are available on DVD’s. So check them out guys, Mr Atkinson is one of the best slap stick and comic geniuses we have left. He is really funny and you never know what he will come up with next.

Darcy

Oh, just don’t ask him to cook you Thanksgiving dinner. Trust me on this.