Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men

HAWK TALK – The Voyage of the Mimi

This would usually be a skip week, but thanks to some generous donors to Equality Florida, Hawk Talk is back! This week’s topic was chosen by Chuck Reynolds.

13 comments

  1. Sorry for a non-X-Men-related post, but Miles, I don’t know where else to post this. What would it take to get you and Elisabeth Allie to give us a new episode of “The Lightning and the Storm” to review the new Thor movie next month? Pretty, pretty please…?

  2. I was in junior high in 1984 and would have loved a show like this. PBS should have aired it in a block with “321 Contact”. I feel like I missed out on a grand adventure.

  3. Your question about whether Ben Affleck would be old enough to play the grandfather made me curious, so I looked it up. Apparently, he turns 50 this year, so the answer is no; he’d have to be a dad instead.

    1. Fifty is more than old enough to be a grandfather. If he had a kid at 18, and his kid had a grandkid at 18, the grandkid would be 14 when grandpa turns 50.

      1. I’m actually a living example of that very scenario. My mom was 18 when she had me and i was 18 when my first son was born.

  4. If it makes you guys feel better, I had absolutely no idea about The Voyage of the Mimi until today. I think I just assumed that was the name of the piece of music, not a TV series the music was the theme for.

    I was sort of reminded of the clips shown over the end of the first season of Seaquest DSV, where they outlined some interesting marine trivia with Dr Bob Ballard and/or the cast. A watered down approach perhaps (pun intended) but the same sort of idea.

    It certainly sounds like the real boat had quite the career, which is fun.

    1. Yes, I also had never heard of The Voyage of the Mimi, and I therefore think of that music as being Peter Corbeau’s theme.

      It’s a little interesting to me that I’ve never heard of TVotM, because I’ve lived in America for a long time, and I’m used to hearing about things that are Iconic Parts of American Childhood That Everyone Knows (that I personally don’t know at all). The Affleck connection makes it especially surprising that I am fairly certain that TVotM has absolutely never come up in anything that I’ve heard or read, or been referenced in passing in that “common cultural allusion” sort of way.

      1. I know we had days when we watched things in school, but for the life of me I can remember exactly one specific thing, when in Irish class we watched a documentary about the last generation of people who had lived on the Blasket Islands as their native inhabitants. It was called Oileán Eile (“Another Island”) which in hindsight strikes me as an odd name, because there is more than one Blasket island.

  5. I can remember the Spider-Man theme song from Electric Company but I somehow missed this show. But at least I know where Peter Corbeau’s theme song came from now.

  6. (“Boaty McBoatface” was a drone UAV built for polar research by the UK government. To raise interest, they let the public summit potential names and then vote on them over the internet

    Because Internet, people submitted silly names, but the fact that a *wholesome* silly name won… is kind of cool)

    1. Sort of, the poll was for the name of the actual research ship itself, a 200 million sterling, polar exploratory ship run by the British Antarctic Survey group, belonging to the Natural Environment Research Council.

      Despite “Boaty McBoatface” winning the popular vote by a landslide, the officials ended up going for the “RRS Sir David Attenborough” (which had come fourth in the vote).

      Giving the “Boaty McBoatface” name of the submersible was a sort of compromise so that the name would be represented on board the ship without making the poor crew have to respond to it officially for the rest of their careers.

  7. I know I watched this in school when I was in, I dunno, 4th grade, maybe 6th? The only thing I remember about the story was the captain getting hypothermia (or pneumonia?) from staying at the helm during a big storm, but I liked it better than a lot of the other stuff they had us watch.

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