Welcome to the Ape Hive

Welcome! If you’ve come here as a former reader of Spunkybean, I’m glad to have you back. I worked on that site for fourteen years and the reasons for shuttering it and starting something new are both myriad and boring. But I can assure you that although the archive is kind of bare bones now, I’m in the process of restoring most of that old content. That’s actually slightly more interesting, so let’s get into that.

Basically, it’s become a cool thing for people to troll the Internet, looking for an unauthorized use of a copyrighted image, and then sue them. And while I know better than to use a watermarked AP asset, it’s been a long time and stuff happens. Also, people who aren’t me posted things and now that I own a site, I’m not in the position to just assume everybody has done everything correctly since 2007. So I’m basically going to be going and checking the images and replacing everything I can’t source. This will be a gradual process and I’m definitely going to prioritize. Like, I’m not taking a vacation day to get a bunch of Dancing with the Stars recaps back up. And, you know, maybe all those positive reviews I wrote of Louis C.K. projects can stay in the draft folder.

Starting a new site is exciting. I can count on my fingers the number of things I wrote over the last year or so. And a lot of that was quarantine depression. Some of it was just getting older and not having the ability to write a new thing every day and then feeling like such a failure that I can’t write anything. But this is a fresh start and I think I can set reasonable goals. It’s not going to be daily content but that’s a young man’s game. I don’t know that I’ll be doing weekly recaps anymore – that’s a format that seems to have fallen by the wayside in the last few years. Unless somebody revives Venture Bros. because I will recap that to the bitter end. Either its end or mine.

If I’m going to be honest, somebody else came up with the Spunkybean name and I never knew for sure what it meant. I loved that site, don’t get me wrong, but I have wanted to do something with the name The Ape Hive for years. My friend Summer, who is an incredibly talented artist, made an amazing logo that you can actually buy as a t-shirt right here, and I have been so happy wearing my Ape Hive shirt. I love this big furry gorilla so much and that’s a big part of the reason I’m so psyched to get back into writing nonsense on the Internet. Somebody who means a lot to me made something awesome and it’s always going to make me happy to log on and see that ape.  And his chimp friend – I love that the Ape Hive Ape has is own Diddy Kong.

At this point, I haven’t written about TV in months, so I’m going to close out with some quick thoughts that may or may not be full articles down the line. Right now I just want to talk about stuff, you know?

-The DuckTales series finale was straight up one of the best finales I, an adult man, have ever seen. Just a perfect summation of the themes of the show and so many callbacks and the resolution of every loose end. I mean, it’s up there with The Americans as perfect finales go.

-I somehow managed to never watch Superstore despite it being a popular and well-reviewed comedy that ran for six years. But the aforementioned Summer said it was good and now I’ve watched more than one hundred episodes in a little over three weeks. I’m almost out of Superstore episodes and I don’t know what happens next. But it is a thoroughly delightful show and I’m enjoying it immensely. The final season, set during the pandemic, is the first piece of entertainment I’ve seen that really deals with 2020 and I’m astonished at how effective and sometimes moving it is.

-I similarly missed out on Perpetual Grace, Ltd. because it was on Epix and I’m still not clear on whether that’s a premium channel or a streaming service. But it’s maybe the best TV show I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to compare to anything else and the way it accomplishes the weird things it sets out to do is so surprising and satisfying. This is something I’ll write more about later because I think about it all the time, but trust me on this one. There’s an amazing episode that pairs up Luis Guzman with Sir Ben Kingsley and their characters almost don’t belong on the same show and at one point, it seems like it might be setting up a musical number and Kingsley just absolutely denies it and I know it doesn’t make sense but it’s incredible. Yeah, I’m back to being super enthused about shows that nobody else watches.

-This is the least surprising thing I could possibly say, but I really enjoyed WandaVision and Falcon and the Winter Solider.  And I don’t think it’s just because it’s been such a Marvel drought since theaters shut down. This will be another full article down the line, but one thing I really enjoy is how the Marvel shows are dealing with the aftermath of half the world disappearing and then coming back five years later. There’s not a lot of room to touch on, say, how that affected the housing market in a movie, but the TV shows so far have really made something out of this weird element in the shared universe.

-There are few things more satisfying than when a modern Simpsons episode lands a real laugh out loud joke and I keep thinking about the bit in the season premiere where an astonished Mr. Burns says “They can burn effigies?!”

-Other shows I’ve enjoyed recently and haven’t written about yet:  Mr. Mayor, Girls5Eva, Rutherford Falls, Ted Lasso, Clarice, Search Party, and I still can’t decide if Invincible is good or not.

Thanks for sticking around. I promise, I’m going to figure this thing out.