Program scripts from week of April 2, 2012
My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
Boot The Reboot
I walked into the living room at my house a couple days ago and my wife was watching the latest Star Trek movie. As always I was struck by how wonderfully the cast generally catches the feel of the characters. Chris Pine as Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock and especially Karl Urban as the younger Bones McCoy. I’ve always thought they did a wonderful job stepping into some iconic roles. Then I remember what they did at the ending of the movie. The movie rejects the established universe and it’s story line. And it makes me crazy.
There are a lot of concepts floating around. In music there’s the cover version. Today you can add in the concept of the re-mix. Both are artists bringing a new vision to the source material. And I don’t have a problem with that. In movies you can have a sequel, you can have a re-make and I don’t really have too much trouble with either of those concepts either. In writing there are fan fics and what are called slash fiction. I don’t even want to go there. There is a real challenge in trying to do any of these especially if the original material is iconic. You just knew that Scarlett the sequel to Gone With the Wind had virtually no chance of succeeding.
And that may be why folks go for the re-boot. The re-boot takes the original and dumps whatever portions of it you just don’t want to do any more. For me that’s an artistic cop out. Worse I think it’s actually a kind of artistic vandalism. If the artist really thought they had a new vision of the story then you do a re-make. You’ll need to make sure that you can take the story to a new level if you go that road. Or you can take the easy way out and simply say “We’re going to re-boot the story”. We’ll keep the characters but dump the rest. The James Bond franchise has done it for years. Keep the title and the character names and do you own thing.
For me it is massively disrespectful to the artists who broke the trail and created the world you want to play in. It strikes me as arrogant to pick up someone else’s work, and simply start saying “Nope, nope, nope, not gonna do any of this. I want the story to go this way”. Then maybe you ought to try and create your own stuff.
We live in an age when re-booting various franchises is an accepted practice. I think that’s sad and disturbing. There may be no new ideas in the world. The least we ought to be able to do is be respectful of how those ideas have been handled in the past.
Statistical Dream Killing
Usually I comment on a story directly. In this case I want to comment on how a story was covered. And no doubt how it will be covered again the next time. I’ll also admit right up front this is a fairly nit picky kind of point. But what’s the point of being a talking head if you can’t stamp your feet occasionally about a pet peeve?
In this case the story was last week’s Mega Millions jackpot which reached over a half a billion dollars. That was B as Boy Isn’t That a Lot of Money Billion dollars. It’s simply an absurd amount. In fact one expert who had helped set up the lottery noted that they NEVER expected a jackpot to get that high. It was a once every 200 years kind of event. And it happened in the first decade or so of the lottery.
Those are the kind of stories I enjoy hearing when one of the lotteries heads for the stratosphere. Give me stories of what people would do if they win the big one. For the record I will be retiring in very short order if I ever win a really big lottery. You can drop the Protestant Work Ethic right into the dumpster as far as this boy is concerned. I will be a man of leisure. Extremely leisurely leisure.
But guaranteed, every time you get one of this big jackpots you are going to get lots of tedious killjoy statisticians and mathematicians blathering on. If you want to note that my chance of being hit by lightning is better than winning (and that seems to be the favored image) then fine. Add it as a tag line and be done. Instead what we get are long tedious discourses on how buying lottery tickets are a bad gamble, they’re a poor investment. They go on in great details about how the numbers clearly indicated that playing the numbers (which is what a lottery is) is just a really bad financial decision.
Hello McFly we know that. Apparently statisticians are humorless, whimsey free, never dreamed a dream buzzkills. I have an investment advisor to help with my investments. I drop a fiver down on the possibility of a dream. Yes, my individual chance of winning is microscopically small. But SOMEONE has to win and it just might be me. It’s fun, it’s a dream, it’s “Hey, you never know”.
But the odds that we’ll be dragged to this same no fun, fantasy free zone the next time we pass triple digits on a jackpot are a lot better than you chance of getting by lightning.
Show Me the Money
I’m a little puzzled by this next story. In fact I’m not sure I can offer any kind of an answer for the problem at all. It’s the problem of local coverage of sports. And the fact that it seems to be on the decline even while America remains absolutely sports crazy.
I’m not talking specifically of the Jamestown area or even western New York. In fact there is an increasing trend toward diminishing local sports coverage in a lot of media markets nationwide. Many newspapers have cut back on the numbers of reporters who are sent on the road to cover local teams. Even baseball coverage in some markets has seen the beat writer staying home while the team is on the road and relying on news service coverage. There are rumors even in Buffalo that the local TV stations may be looking at decreasing the amount of sports coverage on the newscasts. As I noted before this is a sports crazy country and the media usually jumps on the bandwagon of where the people are there also you will find the bucks. So if you had asked me which was more likely to get cut news coverage or sports coverage I just might have said news. News divisions, especially in TV, are notorious for their high cost versus income ratios.
The rationale is that with more and more network and internet coverage the local sports reporting isn’t needed. The problem I see with that argument is that if your team isn’t one of the top maybe 10 teams in that sports or in a major sport the coverage falls off dramatically. If you’re a Yankees or Red Sox fan, a Patriots or Cowboys fan, or a Heat or Lakers fan you’ll have no trouble finding coverage. If you’re say a Buffalo Bills fan or a fan of Major League Lacrosse well you just might be in a world of hurt for serious in-depth coverage. The same goes for local colleges. If you’re rooting for THE Ohio State University you’ll have no trouble following the team. If the local media isn’t following the University at Buffalo how are you going to follow the team? Even ESPN isn’t stepping in the void. While they opened several city specific channels online they stopped after New York, Chicago, LA, Dallas and Boston.
As I said I’m not sure what the answer is here. But it sure seems like there’s an enormous market hole developing that somebody needs to step into. The catch phrase from the movie Jerry Maguire is “Show me the money”. I would think that if you’re in the media looking for a market segment with major opportunities for growth there might just be some money shouting your name.
Call that the View From the Phlipside.
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