There's an ocean. Presumably, the Pacific.
Waves crash upon the beach's sunlit shore.
A man runs slo-mo through your field of vision. He's in a suit and tie.
"Eye of The Tiger" fills the audio void.
The picture is now complete in all its parts.
It might as well be a bad (how would you know?) Salvadore Dali painting hanging upside down. I still don't get it.
The promo makes no sense whatsoever to me. And I still don't get Conan O'Brien.
Some things are designed to not make sense, and often enough, there is great humor in juxtaposition and conflict. Put another way, some things are so badly misaligned that they make you laugh, and whoever misaligned them knew that they would make you laugh.
I don't see that in the Conan O'Brien promo. I see nothing at all.
Maybe O'Brien is running past Carson's old Malibu place hoping for some inspiration.
Eye of The Tiger? I'm half surprised they didn't trot out the theme from Rocky for the eleven-thousandth time.
Steve Allen - Jack Paar - Johnny Carson - David Letterman. All of those I either got or get. Leno, you'll notice, is missing from the list. Sorry, I didn't get him either. However...To be sure and note well that I thought Leno was fall-down-lose-your-breath-fart-involuntarily funny as a stand-up comic. As the host of The Tonight Show, no, to me he was an ill fit from the start. Count me among the millions who will forever believe the job should have gone to Letterman.
Steve Allen started the fire known as The Tonight Show. Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, David Letterman are all keepers of that flame passed down through the course of beyond fifty years now. Paar and Carson kept the flame at NBC. Letterman had to take it to CBS, where it resides to this day.
Conan O'Brien never had the flame, and neither does Jimmy Fallon.
I'd be the first to admit that it's an age-related thing, but only if it was an age-related thing. It's my strong belief that it is not. There are a great many young, even 20s and 30s, comedians who I find hysterically funny, clever, brilliant, engaging. O'Brien and Fallon are none of the above, in my never humble opinion.
(Quick note; by their very nature, strongly expressed opinions cannot be humble, they are the epitome of self-centered.)
Is the distinguished about to become the extinguished?
As long as Letterman keeps on, the lineage continues. As to a successor: If there's one out there, they really need to step forward and not run on a beach in a suit.
