When you need to rant...

[Drtooth]

I'll take that over characters being incredibly mean to each other for laughs. I'm getting sick of unsympathetic protagonists, myself.

 

[Drtooth]

I promised myself I wouldn't do this...but...

The greedy, cheapskate, cowardly, "my dad own the network" daytime network heads that killed Saturday Mornings in Cold Blood. But what really gets me is the whole "there's nothing we can do, goodbye" defeatism it's meeting with. Yeah, I understand the myriad of reasons why all 4 broadcast networks have cheap, crappy, lipservice programming. The reasons this ticks me off:

• The shows are all exactly the same 3 shows with no variation. Dull nature show, dry wilderness adventure show, tedious health show.
• The intended demographic for these shows wouldn't be caught dead watching, not that it matters.
• The "competition" from cable and satellite is essentially 3 networks that kids actually watch showing the same exact things they run during the rest of the week. The additional networks aren't exactly doing that hot (mostly do to spotty coverage and only being in premium package parcels), which is why we're losing The Hub (among other things).
• The options for kid's programming are shockingly limited. By comparison, there's more sports networks that show nothing but sports wrap up shows and ancient game footage than kid's programming.
• You can tell these networks desperately want to run infomercials in their place. DESPERATELY. The programming quality seems to be a stealth revolt.
• The legislation that would eventually turn into a series of cheap loopholes was tacked on so they could pass epic network deregulation. Less companies can own more networks. Two bad pieces of legislation in one!
• How freaking expensive are reruns of old cartoons anyway? There's plenty of stuff that could fit in with the "only to keep our FCC license" TV/EI stuff. Are Dreamworks and Bill Cosby charging that much for Fat Albert reruns that they can't use them?
  
• It's obvious the only ones bothering to watch cartoons anymore are well into their 20's. But guess what? They have money. Advertise to them. Replace the freaking Lucky Charms commercials for Kakashi. Still the same amount of money there.
• Above all, this wasn't just about a bunch of programming blocks. This is a tradition. And just like the oh so hip yet completely out of touch that want to replace Daytime Soaps with talk shows no one actually watches or likes, they don't give two craps about the rich history of the medium they're working in. It's like the effectively hate television for not being Facebook or something.

 

[D'Snowth]

I've noticed that a lot of people lately (and by, "A lot," I mean, "Practically every person in the world who uses the internet") has been dumping Blogger like a bad habit right and left all of the sudden.

Please tell me I'm not going to have to move Scarblog again.

I hate to seem like I keep complaining about this, but frankly, I get so sick and tired of always having to migrate from one service to another on the internet just to keep up with the masses. Kind of like five years ago when Myspace was suddenly "dead" because Facebook was the new toy everybody wanted to play with, yeah, and now nobody even uses or even likes Myspace anymore. Then, everybody dumped IM services like Y!M in favor of Skype... which doesn't even work properply half the time, isn't even an American-based program, and people I know don't even hardly use it anyway.

This keeps happening all the time, and even though people are now dumping Blogger and migrating over to WordPress it seems... I don't want to have to move all of the content I've written on Scarblog to a whole other service, just because nobody used Blogger anymore; it was one thing when I used to use Myspace as my blog, but when I migrated all of the content from there to Scarblog on Blogger, that was a hassle that required a lot of time, energy, and effort - at that time, I really only had a year or two's worth of content to migrate... now, I've got maybe five or six year's worth of content I would have to migrate, and I just don't want to have to go through all that trouble. And what would I gain from it? I don't even really think people read Scarblog much anyway unless I post something about the Muppets, or anything that's not my original work, anyway. I mean, yeah, since nobody uses Blogger anymore and everybody's migrated to WordPress now, I guess that's why nobody really reads Scarblog anyway... but I just get so sick of always having to migrate on the internet because something, "Isn't relevant anymore," or something "newer" or "better" has come along so that automatically means we have to move on to it now.

Uggghhhh...

 

[D'Snowth]

I hate to do another rant about how I'm not a fan of so-called "HD" and such, but it's really just getting out of hand lately; it's really annoying how so many older shows keep getting cropped, matted, squished, stretched, letterboxed, pillarboxed, yada-yada-yada when they should be left the Elmo alone. WGN's reruns of AFV are terrible: they've replaced the main and end titles with custom-made ones, cropped Tom Bergeron's hosting segments, then stretched the home video clips... it's really disorienting. Older episodes of ARTHUR have had the end titles completely replaced with "HD" remakes (complete with Arthur or Buster's on-screen plug for the PBS site, like they've been doing the last couple of seasons). I've lost count how many times SEINFELD alone has been cropped and recropped.

I mean come on, back when color was coming into vogue in the 60s, they didn't suddenly go back and start coloring black-and-white shows, there's no need to go back and eff up 4:3 shows.

 

[Drtooth]

Anyone else wanna punch the TV every time some idiot says something about the Ebola "outbreak?" Freaking thing has been around for almost 2 months now, and if it was spreading as fast as the complete d-bags on cable news (all of them, left and right) said it is, we would have all gotten it by now instead of like 1 out of a billion people in this country. What's worse, the tin foil hat morons and their crazy conspiracy theories about the New World Order and how it's the presidents fault for not acting super duper quickly over everything when level headed experts say there's nothing to worry about.

Seriously! Are we a nation of grandmothers who get crap forwarded to them in their e-mail?

OH! And watch... just you wait. The same people freaking the beak out about ebola will refuse a flu shot and go to work sick, spreading an easy to contract virus that spreads very quickly, like nothing.

 

[mr3urious]

Anyone else wanna punch the TV every time some idiot says something about the Ebola "outbreak?" Freaking thing has been around for almost 2 months now, and if it was spreading as fast as the complete d-bags on cable news (all of them, left and right) said it is, we would have all gotten it by now instead of like 1 out of a billion people in this country. What's worse, the tin foil hat morons and their crazy conspiracy theories about the New World Order and how it's the presidents fault for not acting super duper quickly over everything when level headed experts say there's nothing to worry about.

Hear hear!

I can say the same for the Enterovirus (really just another word for the flu) that has killed, like, 5 kids, who most likely had underlying illnesses that were worsened by it.

 

[dwayne1115]

I promised myself I wouldn't do this...but...

The greedy, cheapskate, cowardly, "my dad own the network" daytime network heads that killed Saturday Mornings in Cold Blood. But what really gets me is the whole "there's nothing we can do, goodbye" defeatism it's meeting with. Yeah, I understand the myriad of reasons why all 4 broadcast networks have cheap, crappy, lipservice programming. The reasons this ticks me off:

• The shows are all exactly the same 3 shows with no variation. Dull nature show, dry wilderness adventure show, tedious health show.
• The intended demographic for these shows wouldn't be caught dead watching, not that it matters.
• The "competition" from cable and satellite is essentially 3 networks that kids actually watch showing the same exact things they run during the rest of the week. The additional networks aren't exactly doing that hot (mostly do to spotty coverage and only being in premium package parcels), which is why we're losing The Hub (among other things).
• The options for kid's programming are shockingly limited. By comparison, there's more sports networks that show nothing but sports wrap up shows and ancient game footage than kid's programming.
• You can tell these networks desperately want to run infomercials in their place. DESPERATELY. The programming quality seems to be a stealth revolt.
• The legislation that would eventually turn into a series of cheap loopholes was tacked on so they could pass epic network deregulation. Less companies can own more networks. Two bad pieces of legislation in one!
• How freaking expensive are reruns of old cartoons anyway? There's plenty of stuff that could fit in with the "only to keep our FCC license" TV/EI stuff. Are Dreamworks and Bill Cosby charging that much for Fat Albert reruns that they can't use them?
  
• It's obvious the only ones bothering to watch cartoons anymore are well into their 20's. But guess what? They have money. Advertise to them. Replace the freaking Lucky Charms commercials for Kakashi. Still the same amount of money there.
• Above all, this wasn't just about a bunch of programming blocks. This is a tradition. And just like the oh so hip yet completely out of touch that want to replace Daytime Soaps with talk shows no one actually watches or likes, they don't give two craps about the rich history of the medium they're working in. It's like the effectively hate television for not being Facebook or something.

When you put it like that it's almost like we are back in the early 1960's. Where kids programing was just poor at best. Then Sesame Street came along and revolutionized children's TV.

 

[Drtooth]

When you put it like that it's almost like we are back in the early 1960's. Where kids programing was just poor at best. Then Sesame Street came along and revolutionized children's TV.

The early 60's was when Saturday Mornings started. And frankly, we had some awesome stuff back then. We had competing shows that just showed Looney Tunes. Then the super hero action shows of the late sixties caused Action for Irate Grownups to happen, leaving us with (shudder) the cartoons of the 70's. Yeah, Hong Kong Phooey and Fat Albert were awesome, but the awful shows about bubblegum pop bands. There's a whole rant there. But the problem is cheapness and somehow kid's programming is completely unprofitable now. That is, unless it's toddler programming, then you have yourself a gold mine... I'm sick of the "too much competition from cable networks" excuse. There's three of them. And they pretty much run the same things Saturday Morning as they do every single day. Even the secondary children's programming channels are struggling. Worst part? We finally got out of the 2005-2009 "kids only watch live action tweencoms" phase that was keeping cartoons down. You know, when CN had a long parade of bad live action shows no one like, wanted, or even watched?

Meanwhile, the big broadcast networks, except for Fox's refreshingly honest all infomercial line up, run the same 3 shows about nature and health for that quantum singularity of a demographic of teenagers that wake up early Saturdays to watch dull programming. Read: no one and they're just airing these shows to barely comply with something that let them own as many networks as they wanted anyway.

 

[dwayne1115]

oh your talking about Saturday morning cartoons, I'm sorry I didn't realize that. Then I have to agree with you Saturday mornings are just not the same any more. Do you remember when ABC would take out there whole TGIF line up to showcase all the new cartoons that would premier that season. That's how much they cared about Saturday mornings back then.

 

[Drtooth]

Saturday Mornings are what I'm complaining about. The small amount of cartoons we are seeing right now are actually quite high quality, contrary to what nostalgia fans would have you believe. Continuity, more grown up themes (not adult themes, but more mature, heavy things)... stuff like that. Even preschool entertainment is thankfully moving away from that horrible Dora influence. We need more things like Peg + Cat, Sophia the First and The 7D.

It's just that one programming block died a merciless death. Even Saban's Vortexx line up only lasted a couple years. And they had some great stuff. They gave the first non-cable showing of Season 2 of Spectacular Spider-Man, and they reran the rare Tiny Toons Night Ghoulery. They were supposed to be different, and the savior of network SatAm's... but I swear that CBS's stake in The CW was internally sabotaging their children's line up to get more money. Hence, why they sold it to 4Kids before they went under. Now it's just all the same lame nature shows and healthy cooking for teens crap that no one finds enjoyable. They totally want to run infomercials (my comment about Fox being outright about it) as it's easy, effort free money.

Still, I also have a gripe with the cable line ups. Nick, I give credit to. At least it manages to have Sanjay and Craig, Breadwinners, Rabbids and Power Rangers in addition to even more Spongebob. But CN's SatAm is exactly the same as the 5 shows they already show (with the exception of early morning Lego and Pokemon programming), and I think Disney is either preschool programming or the lousy sitcoms they run ad nauseum.