Tuesday, January 10, 2006

More HIMYM hijinks

While we're on the subject of "How I Met Your Mother," a couple of other thoughts:

1)Whoever's responsible for Barney's Blog over on the CBS website is having an awful lot of fun with it. In the latest entry, he details his method of getting unpsyched by watching "classic films in reverse-adrenaline order," starting with "Top Gun" and ending with "Days of Thunder," and he includes his drinking game rules for "Top Gun," including "Each time a Mig (a Soviet fighter jet) appears on the screen, everyone yells "Screw the Russians" and drinks a sip." As someone whose first brush with media celebrity came as the result of a drinking game, I can appreciate that.

2)My friend Phil points out yet another reason that Future Ted must go far, far away as soon as possible: How creepy is it going to be when he starts telling his kids about the first time he scored with their mom? To quote Phil, "I think that would be their Armin Tanzarian moment, the one where they just have to say, 'Let us never speak of this again,'" and forget that Future Ted ever existed.

3 comments:

Tosy And Cosh said...

What *I* want to know is if they filmed all of the kid scenes at once, or if those two actors playing Future Ted's kids have to come in every week just to put down 30 seconds or so of film.

Alan Sepinwall said...

The realities of TV production would make it impossible for them to shoot more than two episodes, at most, worth of Future Ted's kids scenes in one bunch. Scripts just aren't written that far enough in advance for it to work.

At the press tour session for HIMYM back in July, someone asked how they would handle the kid actors aging if the show is around for a while.

Craig Thomas, one of the creators, said, "Come that time, we might not
be seeing the kids every single episode. It might be more like "Seinfeld" with the stand-up device, where we'll use it up to the point where we don't feel like we need to use it anymore. I agree, it would weird if he's telling the story and they're like, 'Dad, I'm in college. Wrap it up.'"

So there's hope yet for the death (or at least disappearance) of Future Ted.

Alan Sepinwall said...

I wasn't quite right: A friend who works on the show explained that they have enough production lead time that they'll film several episodes' worth of Future Ted and Future Kids at once -- after they've already shot the rest of the material for those episodes.