Category: Television

When Endings Are a Good Thing

Posted on Posted in Television

As you’ve probably heard, Lost has an end date (see articles here, here, and here). There was some back-and-forth about whether Battlestar Galactica would be announcing something similar or continuing as “an open-ended adventure,” but it’s apparently been confirmed that it’s going to end next season.

I find it fascinating that fans would want shows to end, considering how vocal fans are about making sure their favorite shows stay on the air. In the last link above, a statement from the producers of Battlestar notes that “we know our fans will be saddened to know the end is coming,” but I actually doubt that this is the case, for the most part.

TV shows are often made to just continue on as long as they are profitable. While fans have often rallied to prevent their premature cancellation, a really story-driven serial like Battlestar or Lost can get pretty dull when it deviates from actually progressing the narrative. Lost is designed to be a narrative with secrets that get revealed. Having an end makes us feel more like we’re watching a story and less like we’re strung along like customers/dupes. It’s impressive to see shows ending when it’s time for them to end, without (too much) regard for that usual economic model.

I wonder if another reason people want to see these kinds of shows end is that the longer shows like Lost or Battlestar continue, the less people are able to speculate and fill in the blanks (or take it where they like with fan fic, for that matter). Keeping it contained gives people more freedom to work with it, perhaps, though I wonder how able fans will be to expand upon it once it’s all tied up in a bow. The creators of Lost say that you’ll eventually understand why spin-offs and sequels aren’t really an option, so does that preclude fan fic as well?

Too Many Links

Posted on Posted in Books, Comics, Games, Miscellanea, Television3 Comments

Please pardon me while I get a little more rambling than usual: I have a window full of open tabs waiting to be blogged about, but I don’t really have the time or inclination to blog about them right now. (I haven’t even finished my write-up on the ICA conference from last weekend!) So, here’s a mish-mash of interesting links worth taking a look at sometime, with a minimum of commentary.

Continue reading “Too Many Links” →

The Star Wars/Conan Crossover You’ve Been Waiting For

Posted on Posted in Movies, Television

In these YouTube clips, Conan O’Brien visits Lucasfilm. Go ahead and just watch part 1 and part 2 yourself, but if you miss them before the network orders them offline, here are some notes (which, I’ll admit, are mostly for my future reference in the chapter about science-fiction).

In part 1, he brings around a Star Wars geek to criticize the Lucasfilm employee giving them a tour (“Well I just noticed that John had said it’s an original, and I also notice that the chest plate doesn’t have the Hebrew lettering in these three areas which the original has, which led me to believe that maybe it’s actually a replica”). In part 2, Conan is led into a room with a couple guys who do visual FX, one of whom says, “This is our nerd corner here,” to which the reply is, “‘Nerd corner’ … you said it, I didn’t!” Then Conan asks what the fan in the room is for and jokes, “This is so you never have to go outside, simulates a cool breeze.” Then he asks another fellow about his collection of wrestling figures, which the fellow admits his folks just wanted out of the house. Then they get a whole group of people to participate in a joke about the “800 to 1” male to female ratio. It ends with Conan leading the two earlier fellows outside to frolick to action-packed Star Wars music. (Also worth watching for Conan’s drunken C-3PO impersonation, with the aid of motion capture.)

There’s plenty of nerd stereotype humor here, and yet it doesn’t come across like your standard police drama about nerds gone bad. Why not? I think it basically comes back to self-identification as opposed to labeling from outsiders. The ILM guys unapologetically identify themselves as nerds and happily participate in the lighthearted and intentionally exaggerated nerd humor. That’s a far cry from the other example linked above, an episode of Raines where the only people who can read comics or play games without looking like total losers are the elementary school student and the comic book artist who gets killed in a drug-induced hallucination about himself as a superhero (though he’s not exactly a “winner” either).

Participatory Fan Marketing, Minus the Fans

Posted on Posted in Movies, Music, Television

Not necessarily about geeks, but it still seemed relevant: the Wall Street Journal has an article online about music fans getting irked that professionals are winning their favorite bands’ fan-made video competitions. (Link via The Morning News.)

Some fans bristle at contestants who don’t appear to love the artists as much as they do. Eric Perry said he wished more die-hard fans had won the Incubus contest. He said he spent about 30 hours editing his own “Dig” video. “Half of me wants to say, ‘Get out! You aren’t welcomed!’ The other half knows that this was a contest,” said the 21-year-old in Shelby, Mich., who has seen the band perform three times and has his cellphone ringtone set to the Incubus song “Favorite Things.”

I imagine this must present something of a complicated dilemma to the people behind these contests. On the one hand, you want to engage your fans, make them feel more connected to the artist; on the other hand, you want to make sure you don’t end up with a lousy video, and contests of this kind typically produce pretty lousy results unless your reward is great enough to lure in pros.

I would think that the best bet of the people running such contests would be to either disallow professional entries or to do their own video alongside the contest and avoid a single “winner,” giving smaller prizes to a more diverse pool of fans. That way you get around the issue of the promo being co-opted for something it never openly claimed to be: a pitch process for spec work, which some professional communities consider unethical for anything less than multimillion dollar contracts.

Of course, the problem with both of these options is that it’s quite possible that the people running the contests do want them to be a pitch process for spec work under the flimsy guise of fan community outreach. In this case, perhaps fans are quite justified in feeling irate, and may have better luck screening fan-made films on their own terms, as various geeky fan communities (Star Wars fan films, anime music videos, etc.) have been doing for a while.

Really Big Eyes: The True Universal Language

Posted on Posted in Anime & Manga, Television

A post up at Kotaku tells of a Powerpuff Girls Z video game, which is a game based on an anime series based on an American cartoon (somewhat stylistically) based on anime. This bit of intercultural cross-pollination is offered without comment until I figure out something more clever to say than just, “Huh, wow.”

(Maybe it does bear brief mention, at least, that even though I just banged out this post’s title as a joke, research does suggest that people all over the world react pretty similarly and positively to childlike features, such as large eyes and small noses. I don’t know if that counts as “something more clever,” but there you go.)

Play Per View

Posted on Posted in Games, Television1 Comment

Kotaku has a post up on XLeague TV, a British TV channel dedicated to showing actual video game play. Even more than the announcement of the new channel, what I found interesting were commenters’ reactions: the original writer of the post was very disparaging of the idea, calling the entire concept “pointless” and “weak.” So far, the comments that follow offer some voices of agreement, but mostly suggestions that it might not be such a bad idea.

Valee says:
In Korea, they have dedicated tv programmes for their online games like Lineage2 & Starcraft, which shows top players fighting it out. Then again, these games are wildly popular in Korea.

cyhborg says:
hey, i wouldn’t mind (i have no life…)

Cell9song says:
I thought about something like this while watching a friend play Halo 1. As stupid as it sounds it just may get a viewership. Just a hunch.

Continue reading “Play Per View” →

It’s Like “The Sixth Sense” Meets “Unbreakable,” Only More Derisive

Posted on Posted in Comics, Television1 Comment

NBC’s Raines episode 4, “Stone Cold” (viewable free online right now) leads the detective to investigate the murder of a kid who’s studying comics in college.

Raines says he didn’t know people could study comics in college, and the victim’s girlfriend explains that he was studying perceptual psychology and color theory, defensively insisting that it was hard work. She then goes on to explain that he was working on a superhero called “Payback” who eats toxic waste to live and who is getting revenge for his murdered family. She also explains that the victim’s best friend is a former comic creator who owns the local comic store, Geek Farm. At the store, Raines sees employees peevishly explaining that removing comics from the bags to read them reduces their value, and he overhears the owner relay to a phone caller, “Tell him that if he comes in it costs more because I have to look at his big fat face.” The victim’s friends include a bunch of stoners with a PSP. To get an expert opinion on comic collecting, the detective visits a guy who lives with his mother, recognizes the price guide value of a comic at first glance, and counts the number of times Raines insults him. He refers to the comic book store owner as “a jedi level nerd” who would “never go to the dark side” of selling forged comics. The vicim turns out to have been killed by fantasy weaponry sold by the comic store. The murderer instructed a friend to dump the murder weapon, but the friend kept it because “it’s a collectible, man!” We also get a bonus shot of the detective playing a collectible card game which completely baffles him. Really, the episode is mostly about how the victim is killed for his involvement with drug dealing.

Between the line about color theory and the first mention of Payback, I kind of expected this to go in a different direction—maybe something about Will Eisner, Chris Ware, Scott McCloud, or a dozen other names that come to mind when you think about the phrase “sequential art.” In the end, though, it unaffectionately reproduces a bunch of stereotypes, with a cursory nod to the “comics as art” camp with a gallery-style showing (in Geek Farm) of the victim’s drawings at the end. I have been getting the impression that such portrayals of comics fans in popular media are less common than they used to be, though I guess they haven’t disappeared entirely.

Which Blogs and Cons Should I Be Visiting?

Posted on Posted in Comics, Computers, Conventions, Games, Movies, Television3 Comments

As of now, my dissertation will probably be focusing on some of the various cultures surrounding computers, video games, comics, and sci-fi TV/film. I’ve definitely had interviews (or have them lined up) with appropriate people for these topics, but I need to stay more continually plugged in to these industries and cultures than a few interviews allow for. That means attending some conventions and following some blogs, hopefully including the best trafficked of each.

In terms of cons, I’ve already attended the Penny Arcade Expo, the San Diego Comic Con International, the Big Apple Con, the Come Out and Play Festival (where I shot a short movie), and the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (no movies or music for me.) Depending on how certain things shake down, my travel plans for this year potentially include Wizardworld Philly (June), another trip to San Diego for Comic Con (July), Defcon in Vegas (August), the Tokyo Game Show (September), and the Small Press Expo (October). If some of that falls through and I could actually afford to go to PAX again, that’s another possibility. (I’ll also be going back and forth to Boston to visit friends and family, heading to San Francisco in May for the International Communication Association 2007 Conference, and doing research with Annenberg’s Summerculture program in Lisbon, Portugal for about half of July.)

As for web sites, I regularly sift through feeds from Joystiq, Kotaku, Game Politics, The Comics Reporter, and a number of sites maintained by academics I admire, such as Henry Jenkins’s Confessions of an Aca/Fan, Nancy Baym’s Online Fandom, and Jane McGonigal’s Avant Game. More recently, I picked up the feed for Slashdot, plus subscriptions to the print editions of Wired and Geek Monthly. I occasionally visit a number of other sites, including The Escapist, Journalista, and MacUser. (And that’s all on top of the design sites, traditional news sites, and web comics, which I won’t even get into here.)

Clearly, though, I’ve been more deeply involved with the comic book and video game scenes than the others. So I turn to you: got any suggestions for cons and web sites I should visit to get a better angle on what’s geeky about TV, film, and/or computer culture and industry?