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...so you better catch up with EXTREME (Epic X-Men TV Review Endurance Marathon Extravaganza) on A Podcast with Ross and Nick!!!
Watch X-Men on Netflix NOOOWWWW!
Join in on the fun this Tuesday when Ross and I review X-Men episode 40 and episode 41 as Jean Grey returns for the start of the animated Dark Phoenix saga!
Some of you may remember the Marvel Action Hour from back in the 90s -- a block of superhero cartoon programming featuring Iron Man and the Fantastic Four. Here's part of a terrible episode of the Iron Man show (fast-forward to 7:30 for Spider-Woman's ridiculous daughter and her awful voice acting):
See? Comedy gold. And if you live in the US, now you can stream these unbelievable cartoons on Netflix's Watch Instantly service by going to the page for Iron Man: The Complete Animated Series.
But here's the catch -- even though Netflix doesn't label the shows correctly, this so-called "Iron Man animated series" is ACTUALLY the entire Marvel Action Hour! That means hokey live-action introductions by Stan Lee for each episode, not to mention the "We'll Be Right Back" commercial intros and outros!!!
Why Netflix chose to just call it Iron Man and not the Marvel Action Hour is beyond me... but hey, the fact is that these episodes are there, so I recommend watching them while you can. As far as I know, this is the first time you've ever been able to watch the Marvel Action Hour in its entirety outside of broadcast syndication (or some sort of bootleg collection).
Recently, I started watching the Iron Man half of the show on DVD, and man did I get some good laughs. In fact, I talked about it on the AudioShocker Podcast #177. Give that podcast a listen if you want to find how just how bad the Iron Man cartoon really is (answer = really bad).
Also, this means that the infamous Johnny Storm rap song is now streaming on Netflix. I'm not sure which episode this is from, but I'm sure you can figure it out on your own pretty easily. If you're a fan of early 90s hip hop like A Tribe Called Quest, you're gonna love this:
It's hot, right? The beat's surprisingly good.
In the spirit of Nick posting Time Log many hours late yesterday, I'd like to go ahead and sneak a Culturology out, here, ten minutes before the end of the work day (having just managed to hit an important deadline in my non-Audioshocker work). So... one thing that seems worth mentioning is that It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which was America's funniest television show back during its third season, but then drooped mightily in seasons four and five, really picked it up again this year with episodes packed wall-to-wall with crack-me-ups. The show is mean-spirited enough that it laps back around to just being funny without me feeling concerned about its mean-spiritedness (like I think it did in seasons 4 and 5; had me concerned, that is).
It's nice when a TV show that used to be funny and then stopped being funny gets funny again. So it has me thinking of other times when that's happened. I'd say South Park pulled off a similar trick, since it was quite funny when it first came out, but then got pretty old pretty fast--by the middle of the second season, in terms of the whole foul-mouthed 3rd-graders things. But then, in season five, the Towelie episode came out, which was hilarious, and got me to watch South Park again for a while, until it got old again. But since the Towelie episode, the show has consistently had some great episodes every season, and plenty of chunky ones. The last great peak, though, was across seasons nine and ten, between the "Trapped in the Closet" episode and "Cartoon Wars" (the latter of which finally and ultimately won me over to the South Park cause).
Sadly, The Simpsons never had a similar surge. I realize that some people have thought that The Simpsons are funny during the past decade of seasons, but the show has never returned to the heights of its 3rd-7th Seasons. There was some talk of a resurgence a couple of years ago, but that seemed, again, more like a decision made by over-zealous fans that are over-educated and don't like it when TV points out how mindless and lazy they are as middle-class consumers, who then decided that, damn it, The Simpsons was funny again. So that they could feel better about watching The Simpsons instead of, I don't know, voting.
What I've been wishing for a while now is that somehow those direct-to-dvd American Pie spin-off movies would suddenly become hilarious. I mean, it was a long time ago that American Pie came out, but I remember it being pretty genuinely funny. And it always seems like direct-to-dvd should have the kind of culture in the States that it has in Japan (or, more correctly, that I presume that it has in Japan, based on watching, like, three direct-to-DVD movies from Japan).
I'm still hoping there's more examples of shows that went from good to bad and then back to good again (maybe SNL counts, when one of its cast gets funny for a couple shows before sucking again?), but I'm guessing they're mostly going to come from the ranks of basic cable networks, since mostly, once I think gets old, it gets put out to pasture. On the DVD commentary track to the Simpsons episode where Sideshow Bob follows the Simpson/Thompson family to Cape Fear (or whatever it was called, is that what it was called?), the commentators point out that in that joke where Bob steps on the rakes for such a long time, there's this balance where the gag is funny for a couple takes, then stops being funny, but then, once it goes on for way too long, becomes extremely hilarious. And so maybe that's really the phenomenon here: these shows are still just hitting the same beats, and have managed to stick around long enough that the repetition of the same shit over and over again has gotten funny again.
Not interested in having Neal jump my slot again, Culturology is back with what Vanilla Ice might have called a "brand new adventure," but I'll call "more complaints about stuff that most people think is just fine." Namely: the zombie TV show that was just on and so popular, The Walking Dead.
Is it just me, or was this show popular because people like Mad Men and Breaking Bad so much? Like, people want so badly for there to be good programming on cable television, that they just will themselves into believing that a show which is mediocre at best is one of the great achievements of contemporary televised entertainment. Now, I like zombies as much as the next person, and I think there are probably are interesting things to be said about the current trend of putting the "geist" back into "zeitgeist," but, having gone ahead and jumped on this bandwagon, and watched all six episodes of The Walking Dead, I'm mostly left scratching my head about what people see in this.
The biggest thing that I see is what South Park figured out years ago: the conservative powers that run our censorship boards don't mind grotesque violence. There's a massive double standard between censorship of violence and censorship of sex or speech acts. So zombies are pretty much the safest vehicle for cutting edge cable-TV violence, since they don't have sex and don't talk. In a lot of ways, The Walking Dead is about little more than acts of "Look what we can show on cable TV nowadays! Amazing!" It does nothing new for the zombie genre, nor for the TV drama genre, or anything else, other than there's lots and lots of rotting flesh and gun shots to human skulls. I haven't read the comic book, but I presume a lot of the flat-ness of the zombie mythology is they fault of the book, and not the TV show.
Again, there are probably interesting questions to ask about zombies, so maybe this show was an excuse for zombie nerds to talk about zombies? I'm not really a zombie nerd. I don't really want to talk about it.
I got back to America in time for two things:
1) The mid-term elections.
2) Conan O'Brien's new show on TBS.
And boy did they both suck!
I've written before about late night television, and tuning back into Conan's new show confirmed the conclusion I came to back in Culturology #55:
One thing I don't feel bad about is Conan O'Brien losing his job. I think I stopped really caring about late night TV just in time for that whole hullabaloo (despite my one hemi-post trying to speak of the issues there-involved).
There's obviously something spurious in my continued need to state that I don't care about something anymore, since clearly I continue to care just enough to keep bringing it up (and, Norm MacDonald should still have his own talk show, and I would watch that). So maybe this is the last time that I bother with Conan, since he's just getting more and more boring. In a way, basic cable is safer for him, since there can't really be any ratings demand.
Speaking of the mid-term elections, I don't think there's a better insult available in my repetoire right now then "You are a Republican!" So, now that Conan isn't funny anymore (now that I'm not 17 anymore), I feel like he must be a Republican. Jon Stewart stopped being funny, what, five years ago? Republican. Does your television show involve sitting at a desk? Republican.
I think Teabaggers probably hate and distrust most not-totally-obviously-insane-and-bigoted television personalities, but I think, basically, if you're on television, than you're a Republican. Even if you're a Democrat, or "liberal," or whatever, if you're on TV then you're basically a Republican. There was some thing on the internet the other day about some Republican-minded survey group releasing a list of what shows Democrats watch versus what shows Republicans watch. But, sorry kids, all TV is right-wing TV.
I was in class this morning, and I turned to the woman sitting next to me to ask her what day it was. I had decided in the previous moment that even though it kind of felt like Friday, it must actually only be Thursday. Boy was I wrong. It's Friday! And since I've already let two Fridays slip by without posting anything, and I'm always trying to improve my number (number of blog posts written), so here I am with your once-upon-a-time regularly occurring feast of cultural-analytical acumen!
Which brings up the usual problem of my really pretty thoroughly having checked out of following much pop culture at all. And I'm not quite up to the task today of giving a truly personal account of coming unplugged from mainstream culture. Except that, for instance, now I know that the American tv show The Office takes place in Scranton, PA, which I learned yesterday while doing some important research about Scranton. So that's where I'm at, culturally, dabbling here and there, but mostly wondering what's going on in Scranton. A kind of metaphorical Scranton of the heart, but Scranton nonetheless.
So once one realizes that they're in such a place--this figurative Scranton--one must then take the adjoining metaphorical coal mine tour, to really see what one has going on in the deepest recesses of one's supposed cultural vacuum. And then you realize that it's inescapable. Only with years of practice, for instance, would I be able to expunge all the Simpsons references from my worldview. I was just talking last night, in my still-far-from-fluent German about creative choice and one's mother tongue. Like, it wasn't up to me that I speak English. And my parents could have raised me multi-lingually, but they didn't. So here I am, more or less stuck with English, and sometimes bored by it, so always trying to make it interested again (or learning other languages, which can then inform back onto my mother tongue).
And in the same way, I guess once upon a time I started watching, say, The Simpsons (though I had pretty much stopped keeping up with new episodes by the time I got to college, back in 2000), but I don't really remember why. Except I thought it was funny, I guess, but I can't actually recall the day when suddenly my brothers and I became the thorough devotees that we were (though I do know that it was extremely aided by syndication, with the massive number of repeats being the ingraining force behind the total reference-making ability that I have through the first 6-7 seasons of the show). So, even if I made the choice to watch the show, I was definitely massively influenced just by syndication alone. And that hardly seems like my choice.
So there's all this cultural stuff, then, constantly replaying itself in syndication in my personal version of the zeitgeist. So then, is it ever really possible to actually fall out of touch? What if I move to Scranton?
One of the nice things about being 6 hours ahead of the East Coast (I'm in Berlin doing location scouting for the Time Log Web Comic) is that my "oh shit it's Friday and I forgot to write a culturology report!" moment, even as it happened at 6pm, really only happened at noon, and now I've still got a few hours to sneak in a post within some fine modicum of ontimeliness. So how about that. Now, of course, the problem is that, as per usual, I don't have all that much to write about, it still being 2010, one of the worst years for movies ever.
But I do want to mention, I suppose to Nick & Neal, that I can take a hint, guys. How, now on the side bar, under "Current Features" I'm no longer listed on my own, but instead lumped in with "and books." Now, certainly, most of the (non-comic) book-related material on the blog comes from Culturology. But not all of it. But is there really enough stuff about books on Audioshocker that it deserves to have it's on little link there like an annoying shadow cast by the awesome obelisk of Culturology?
And well, I guess I'm not really gonna add any content other than that little snippet of griping, 'cause I don't have a whole lot else to say for myself, except that Hesse's Siddhartha, in the original German, is great reading. And South Park, dubbed into German, is a fun way to bone up on one's language skills.
I'm a little late to this party, but I'd like to throw in my 2 cents. Earlier in March, a classmate (Trey Trenchard) and I wrote a paper on digital strategy for Prof. Sam Craig's Entertainment/Media/Technology class at Stern. The following two passages are excerpts from the final paper. Our goal was to analyze the challenges, advantages, future landscape, and potential recommendations for Netflix to succeed over the next several years. Though we wrote the paper about Netflix & video content, I think it's also applicable to other industries including publishing and music.
What Channel is This?
Video content distribution is converging to an all-internet accessed world. Signs point to platform agnostic websites distributing video content through personal computers (i.e. Hulu), mobile devices, and most importantly, internet connected TVs. IPTVs are already on the market, and within five years, early adopters and roughly half of the early majority will have started the exodus away from traditional TV watching behavior.
IPTV’s ability to disintermediate parties between the producer and consumer, along with the FCC’s forward-looking agenda of universal access, will hasten its acceptance as well (Ed Note: my partner Trey is a lot more optimistic about Net Neutrality than I am). It is important to recognize that the opportunity to access all video content from a website, on your television, on demand, makes traditional simulcast/broadcast TV completely obsolete. Broadcast and traditional cable TV will not disappear in the near future; however, their cachet will drop substantially.
As we move toward this world, the importance of distributor (TV channel and networks) and producer brands decreases. Today, most consumers do not associate video content with its producer. They do however associate video content with certain TV channels. As this disintermediation occurs, physical channels on a cable box will no longer exist and channel ‘brands’ will slowly die as antiquated groupings of content. Over the past decade, digital video recorders, EPGs, and syndication have already begun to loosen the association between channel and content. There are several key ways that networks create value. In this new world, all of these benefits, with the exception of advertising, will be provided by a subscription video content aggregator. Ad-based distribution will likely be taken over by a market leader such as Hulu, contributing to the complete demise network loyalty and identity.
Creating Value Through Curation
As the online library of content continues to grow (professional & amateur), we can no longer see/read/hear everything. We simply don't have the time or resources to sort through everything ourselves to find what we want, or what we may like. As a result, the ability to curate content is paramount -- and users will be willing to pay for such this service.
Netflix’s curation features need improvement. Its effectiveness in generating accurate recommendations pales in comparison to systems at sites such as Pandora, Last FM, and iTunes (Genius). Being a gateway to online content presents few barriers to entry, however, it is possible to dominate and even create a winner-take-all scenario in this business, like Google has accomplished with its search engine. What allows Google to command a 65% market share is a marginally better search algorithm. The same is true for Pandora. Even though Last.fm offers a multitude of innovative features, Pandora’s ability to classify sound and automate its curation via an algorithm is responsible for its market leading position.
If Netflix can improve this feature, it will command significant leverage, and can establish itself as the premier destination for online video content. With a sizable lead in this technology, a producer who does not distribute through Netflix risks losing potential viewers. Additionally, Netflix’s curation tool can effectively market the content better than a network or studio can with their small marketing spend, making it more profitable for producers to forgo selling their work to a network or studio, instead retaining the rights and get paid by Netflix per view. (Ed. Note, we are assuming that Netflix continues to expand and invest in the Watch Instantly streaming service / library)
To speed up the process of improving the curation function as quickly as possible, we recommend either creating partnerships with Pandora and/or Google. Partnering with Pandora would give Netflix access to pieces of their curation algorithm and the engineers who have been building this best-of-industry platform. In addition, we recommend Neflix copy the Last.fm “scrobbler” function. The scrobbler methodology archives every piece of musical content one has played on their computer or mobile device and sends this info to Last.fm’s servers. Employing a similar methodology, Netflix could more accurately curate video content by not only recognizing what someone enjoys by telling the program as it does now (active selection), but also recognizing tastes by simply consuming content (passive selection).
--
Perhaps we knew this was coming all along, but instead of Netflix we should have find/replaced with Google. Or, perhaps we aren't nearly as prescient as we thought and everyone already knew all of this. Either way, we believe that producer/consumer disintermediation and an increasing demand for curation are important considerations when determining a digital strategy.
Google TV is certainly not the first attempt at 'IPTV', but it is likely to be the most well regarded. The last thing I need is another set-top box, but I excited about IPTV and what is coming next.
Last Saturday I stayed in, drank a couple Bud Light tallboys and fell asleep around midnight. As such, I did not catch this terminal abomination of a live performance by Ke$ha. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of waking up and watching it. Nothing can undo what has been done here:
Really, where to begin? The American flag cape. Dancers + band in spacesuits. Overdone sing-songy vocals (plus autotune) that try to make her sound younger/ditzier than she really is. Did I mention the half-assed robot-arm swing in there too (these guys totally trumped Bieber's shitty road crew, which is impressive)? A total inability to sing/dance at the same time. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Oh, and the lyrics are basically a string of urban dictionary entries. Why is this girl popular? Not mention, the single came out during the summer, what is she doing on SNL NOW?
The laser light thing -- that actually had the potential to be cool. But instead of using a theremin, which would have been 400% gangster, we got a lame party laser. That was the last straw. I mean really, how on earth is autotune more gangster than a theremin?!
I did a little wiki-research and it looks like this Ke$ha girl's initial 'breakout' was doing the hook on a Flo-Rida's even crappier cover of You Spin Me Round? There was a big long page of credits and history, but the main references that hit me were: Paris Hilton, Katy Perry, and Pitbull --- hardly musical relationships that I would consider worthwhile.
So, excuse me while I don my hater hat and pass judgement here: Ke$ha, this was a bad performance, a bad song, and bad in general. To quote a recent meme from b-school: you need to GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER!
And How! From the bizarre opening to the equally puzzling conclusion, Vince Gilligan and his crew make it clear that this is going to be another season of twists, laughs, and WTF moments. The cartel angle will be interesting, since we know how gangster Walt got with Tucco. Personally, I'm hoping that Jesse steps his game up and stops being so mopey and introspective all the time. I want more Captain Cook.
In case you are totally unhip, here is the story so far: Walt teaches chemistry in New Mexico. Walt gets cancer. Walt wants to provide for his family, hooks up with a former student and, starts manufacturing and dealing meth. Oh wait - Walt err 'Heisenberg's' brother in law is a DEA agent, and Bob Odenkirk is their crooked lawyer/fixer. Hijinks (and plenty of drama) ensue between our extremely unlikely drug kingpins.
This show is all sorts of entertaining, so get familiar! Sundays. 10pm, AMC.
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