Hello, couch potatoes and HDTV gurus, and welcome to beautiful downtown Burbank! With a local population of around 100,000 The L.A. suburb is named after Dr. David Burbank, a local dentist and rancher who had the good fortitude to have an entire town named after himself. (He must've promised the townsfolk free dentures and/or steaks if they went along with his naming scheme...)

As you probably know from watching years of TV, Burbank is the West Coast home of many of your favorite movie and TV studios, including the National Broadcasting Company. It's here at the Burbank studios that NBC films one of America's favorite "daytime dramas", Days of Our Lives. While the frijoles would never publicly admit to spending their afternoons watching soaps, they'll begrudgingly tell you through a tear-stained label that things haven't been the same since Patch and Kayla rode off into the sunset... Sniff.

If you're visiting from out of town and want to be an active part in the Hollywood scene (without having to stand on Sunset Blvd at 3:00 A.M.), you can come here to the NBC Studios and take in a tour, or if you have a lot of time to kill and you can repeatedly laugh on command, you can always attend a taping of one of your favorite TV shows. (Trust me, it's not as exciting as it sounds. We did this once; the half-hour sitcom took 5 hours to film, and they told us it was a rare "fast night". I was missing my TiVo remote something fierce that evening...) You can even take in a taping of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, if that's your bag (the beans prefer Letterman - sorry, Jay.)

Regardless, the frijoles had a wonderful time touring NBC, and were able to pick up a unique souvenir, courtesy of the Tonight Show set. (Don't worry - if Jay really needs his desk back, he'll need to call us, okay?)

But of course, NBC in Burbank is probably still best known for this guy, the one and only Johnny Carson. The frijoles have been by Johnny's boyhood home in Norfolk, Nebraska and his current hometown of Malibu before in the hope for a chance encounter with their late-night TV idol, but so far they haven't ran into him. But if you can't meet the real thing, then you can always take the fork in the road and end up here, at Johnny Carson Park.

The beans thought the park was pretty cool - they especially liked the Carnac the Magnificent Slide and the Merry-Go-Round-Aunt-Blabby. But that water coming out of the Ed McMahon Fountain? If we didn't know better, we'd say it tastes an awful lot like Budweiser. Hey-oooo!

Down the road a ways you'll also find Warner Brothers studio, home to Clint Eastwood's Westerns, Batman, and of course Bugs, Daffy, and their gaggle of animated friends. The Warners Burbank lot is only 100 acres in size, but a lot of film history has been made here since the Warners took up residency in 1929. Six Academy Award winning Best Pictures have been filmed here, as well as some of the greatest stories ever put on celluloid, including Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, My Fair Lady, The Music Man, and the bean's favorite deep thought trip-out movie of the past few years, The Matrix. Warner Brother's TV unit also works out of here, filming shows such as The Drew Carey Show, E.R., The West Wing, and that classic example of questionable pop culture taste, The Dukes of Hazzard.

The beans were hoping to literally "break" into the movies, but alas - the not-so-happy-looking security guards at the gate didn't think it would be their day for instant stardom. Bummer.

Like a lot of the Hollywood studios, Warners is known for their landmark water tower, which also served as the fictional home to Yakko, Wakko, and Dot Warner from the Animaniacs. (Fantastic show, by the way. We've always thought that there should be an episode of "Pinky and the Beans", though.)

If you've got $32 laying around and want to see how a *real* movie studio works (no plastic sharks here, I assure you...), you can come have a guided 2 1/4 hour tour of the Warner Brothers lot. The beans had a blast doing this, and were pleasantly surprised at the number of autographs they picked up along the way from stars who didn't seem to mind having their filming interrupted one bit. Now, can anyone tell us who "Dropp Deadd" and "GoawaybeforeI Callsecurity" are? The beans can't recall seeing any movies they've starred in offhand...