Experimental music on kids’ TV
This Tumblr is collecting instances of experimental music on children’s television shows. Some personal favorites are Al Jarnow’s Cosmic Clock and Philip Glass on Sesame Street. (via @youngna)
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kottke.org posts about TV
Silicon Valley by Mike Judge
Mike Judge has a new series coming to HBO in April. It’s called Silicon Valley and is about startup culture. Here’s a preview:
Snack dick.
Fire the negative photon torpedoes!
Now this is some top notch investigative journalism. In Star Trek: Voyager, a Starfleet ship is stranded on the other side of the galaxy and the estimated travel time back to Federation space is 75 years. Early on in the show, it’s revealed the ship has only 38 photon torpedoes and “no way to replace them after they’re gone”. But they used many more than that throughout the run of the show:
This is a particularly nerdy and slow-burning example of the Bottomless Magazines trope.
“It’s toasted”
Looks like Don Draper may have contributed to Lucky Strike’s recent sales increase.
While the claim that Mad Men could have driven a nearly 50% (representing an additional 10 billion cigarettes) increase in Lucky Strike sounds like typical advertising puffery, it’s hard to pin down another driver. Lucky Strike did launch new flavors, update packaging and launch “capsule” cigarettes in the five years since Mad Men premiered, but so too did its competitors. The only new country the brand entered was Turkey — and that wasn’t until 2011. Even if one excluded all capsule (2010- ) and “All Natural” (2011-) cigarette sales (which would have been predominantly cannibalized, rather than net new), Lucky Strike would still have grown 12% between 2007 and 2012, five times faster than the industry overall and eight times British American Tobacco (the owner of Lucky Strike). Could it really have been Don Draper?
Sales of Canadian Club whiskey have turned around since Mad Men started as well. (via nextdraft)
Eyes on the Prize
The landmark civil rights TV series Eyes on the Prize is available on YouTube. Here’s the first part:
I watched it a few years ago and cannot recommend it more highly.
Using nothing more than archival film footage, on-camera interviews, period music, and a narrator’s voiceover, the stories of Emmitt Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the desegregation of southern schools riveted me to the couch like few viewing experiences have. As compelling as the history of the civil rights movement in America is, the production of the film deserves some of the credit for its power. To hear the stories of these momentous events told by the participants themselves, without embellishment, is quite extraordinary.
That YT link likely won’t last, so check it out on DVD or at Amazon Instant Video. (via @tcarmody)
Games of Thrones season four trailer
Like Twitter, HBO’s Game of Thrones started out with 140 characters but now most of them are dead so I have no idea what this season is going to be about. But dragons!
Jerry Seinfeld will give you an answer
Jerry Seinfeld did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) at Reddit yesterday. His answers are real, and they’re spectacular.
Q: Where did the idea of, in Seinfeld, your character being a comedian for a profession, but be the straight man for your friends, come from? I always thought that juxtapositioning for the show was genius.
A: Very good observation and analysis on your part, Baxter. You are truly exhibiting a good comedic eye. The reason I would play straight was it was funnier for the scene. And very few people have ever remarked on this, because it was a conscious choice of mine, only because I knew it would make the show better, and I didn’t care who was funny as long as somebody was funny and that the show was funny. So you have hit upon one of the great secret weapons of the Seinfeld series, was that I had no issue with that.
I have seen every episode of the show at least twice and never realized this. Gold, Jerry! Gold!
ps. Favorite episode of Seinfeld? Aside from the nearly perfect The Contest, I’ll go with The Marine Biologist. If I ever decide to be an actor, my audition tape will be me telling George’s whale rescue story:
(via @gavinpurcell)
The best and worst NFL announcers
Aaron Gordon of Sports on Earth watched 32 NFL games to determine the best and worst NFL announcers.
In general, there are three types of announcer comments: good, neutral and bad. Good statements offer some type of insight into the game. This is inherently subjective, since different people know different things. Neutral statements constitute the bulk of their utterances: neither offensive nor insightful. As a result, I decided to measure the bad statements.
I divided announcers’ verbal infractions into six categories that are not simply pet peeves, but likely to be annoyances for a majority of NFL viewers.
Happy to see Chris Collinsworth near the top of the heap…he’s my favorite and, while a bit goofy sometimes, offers the best post-Madden analysis in the game. Siragusa and Gruden are like nails on the chalkboard, surprised they didn’t rank much worse.
Iron Chef
An epic post on MetaFilter about the original Iron Chef, the cooking show that aired in Japan from 1993-1999. YouTube links to every show are included, so there’s your holiday viewing all sorted. Iron Chef is my all-time favorite food show. I learned a lot about cooking watching it.
The secretive inventor of the laugh track machine
Working for CBS and later on his own in the 40s and 50s, sound engineer Charley Douglass perfected the laugh track technique, which was then called sweetening. His secret weapon was the laff box, a machine that you could use like a typewriter to produce the type and sequence of laughter you needed for a particular situation. Here’s how the machine worked:
The one-of-a-kind device — affectionately known in the industry as the “laff box” — was tightly secured with padlocks, stood more than two feet tall, and operated like an organ. Only immediate members of the family knew what the inside actually looked like (at one time, the “laff box” was called “the most sought after but well-concealed box in the world”). Since more than one member of the Douglass family was involved in the editing process, it was natural for one member to react differently to a joke than another. Charley himself was the most conservative of all, so producers would put in bids for other editors who were more liberal in their choice of laughter. Douglass used a keyboard to select the style, gender and age of the laugh as well as a foot pedal to time the length of the reaction. Inside the machine was a wide array of recorded chuckles, yocks, and belly laughs; exactly 320 laughs on 32 tape loops, 10 to a loop. Each loop contained 10 individual audience laughs spliced end-to-end, whirling around simultaneously waiting to be cued up. Since the tapes were looped, laughs were played in the same order repeatedly. Sound engineers would watch sitcoms and knew exactly which recurrent guffaws were next, even if they were viewing an episode for the first time. Frequently, Douglass would combine different laughs, either long or short in length. Attentive viewers could spot when he decided to mix chuckles together to give the effect of a more diverse audience.
I found out about the laff box from Kevin Slavin & Kenyatta Cheese’s talk about how, with the Internet, the audience now has an audience.
Girls, Girls, Girls
Girls. Trailer. Third season. HBO. January 12. Lena Dunham. Watch:
I am so excited for this show to return. I don’t think I can hide it. It’s like I’m about to lose control. Maybe I like that feeling?
Cool interactive Bob Dylan music video
This is great fun…the people on every channel of this TV are singing Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. Including Bob Dylan himself on VH1. (via @faketv)
How to win at The Price is Right
It turns out that for many of the games on The Price is Right, a simple application of game theory is all you need to greatly increase your chances of winning. You don’t even need to know any of the prices.
In one instance, when Margie was the last contestant to bid, she guessed the retail price of an oven was $1,150. There had already been one bid for $1,200 and another for $1,050. She therefore could only win if the actual price was between $1,150 and $1,200. Since she was the last to bid, she could have guessed $1051, expanding her range by almost $100 (any price from $1051 to $1199 would have made her a winner), with no downside. What she really should have done, however, is bid $1,201. Game theory says that when you are last to bid, you should bid one dollar more than the highest bidder. You obviously won’t win every time, but in the last 1,500 Contestants’ Rows to have aired, had final bidders committed to this strategy, they would have won 54 percent of the time.
See also how a man named Terry Kniess solved The Price is Right.
Long-lost episodes of Doctor Who found
Nine Doctor Who episodes from the 60s featuring Patrick Troughton as the Doctor have been discovered at a TV station in Nigeria.
The BBC destroyed many of the sci-fi drama’s original transmission tapes in the 1960s and 1970s.
However, many episodes were transferred on to film for sale to foreign broadcasters. It is often these prints found in other countries that are the source of retrieved episodes.
In this case, 11 Doctor Who episodes were discovered, nine of which were missing, in the Nigerian city of Jos.
The episodes are already available for watching on iTunes: The Web of Fear and The Enemy of the World.
League of Denial
League of Denial, the Frontline documentary on the NFL and concussions, is available online for anyone to watch for free.
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