Program scripts from week of June 25, 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.
Marketing Chains
It must be said right at the outset today the I am utterly unqualified to comment on fashion. I have never been fashionable, I am not currently fashionable and I have no interest in fashion in any way, shape or form. Anyone who knows me will verify all of the above. So I can not comment on the fashion aspects of this story. I will only note that the fashion puzzles me just as much as the marketing aspects.
And the marketing aspects puzzle me to an infinite degree.
Adidas has announced that it has discontinued any work on its JS Roundhouse Mid sneaker. The early promotional photos had been shared with its fans on the Adidas Facebook page. It’s a classic marketing move. Give the fans a little taste of what is in the pipeline, get them pumped up and excited about what will be hitting the stores in the future.
What they didn’t expect was the overwhelming negative reaction that those promo shots elicited. The shoes are your basic modern basket ball inspired sneaker with one major exception. That would be the the bright yellow plastic chain and shackle that are part of each shoe. The chain connects to just above the heel and then to a replica shackle that goes around just above the ankle with what appears to be a velcro closure. Try and picture that for just a moment. Think slave or prison shackles like you seen in the movies and imagine them made of plastic and vinyl and attached to a pair of sneakers.
Then ask yourself “Who thought this was a good idea?”. Again, I’m not competent to comment on fashion. And an awful lot of what I see in fashion makes no sense to me what so ever. But how do you pitch this product? The design is the work of someone named Jeremy Scott and supposedly the design has nothing to do with slavery. How do you look at this and not see visual references to slavery? Allowing that the fashion folks might look past the concept how did the marketing people not get up on the conference table and shout that this was a BAD idea. A Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaad idea.
Previous Scott designs for Adidas included Panda bears and Mickey Mouse. And somehow someone thought that chains and shackles was the next logical step?
At least Adidas was smart enough to bow to public response. There’s edgy fashion design and then there’s just over the edge.
Strange Movies
I honestly have no idea what to make of this latest trend in the movies. Actually I may even be jumping the gun by calling it a trend. There’s really only one movie actually up and running but there’s another even stranger one under consideration. So maybe it’s time to think a little bit about where this is all headed.
The movie that is starting me off is Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. I will admit that the 16th President is something of a boyhood hero of mine so I have some trouble wrapping my mind around the whole concept. Based on a 2010 book of the same name it tells the story of the young Abe who discovers that not only are vampires real but they caused his beloved mother’s death. He vows revenge and eventually discovers that the vamps are planning on taking over the United States. I haven’t seen the movie although I probably will just out of curiosity.
I’m not a big vampire literature fan (a point of some contention with my daughter) but it can be fun at times. We are big Buffy fans for example (to be clear TV Buffy NOT movie Buffy). I’m just not sure what the answer to the question of “Why” is. Abe Lincoln vampire hunter. Really?
Now if you think that’s out there then the next one waiting in the wings might even be more head scratching. Rob Cohen, the man who directed such high intensity action movies like XXX and The Fast and the Furious, has signed on for an action thriller movie on the life of...Sir Isaac Newton?
Yes the great English mathematician and scientist will have the last 30 years of his life turned into some kind of butt kicking science action flick. I think. I’m not sure how much rock’em sock’em the great man got into between his late fifties and mid eighties. The project is very early on. At this point it doesn’t even have a title. I would expect that a lot of its future will be based on how well old Abe does in the vampire killing movie.
In the end I just scratch my head over the whole thing. Folks younger than I have very little trouble in deciding to just re-write other people’s stories to suit their own desires. That’s always struck me as a little disrespectful.
And turning a great president or a brilliant scientist into something a silly as a vampire hunter or action hero strikes me as the height of disrespectful. Surely there are better movie ideas out there waiting to be made.
New Indecency
I want you to think about this. Over the last 9 years would you be surprised to be told that there were 1.5 million complaints filed with the Federal Communications Commission in relation to some 9,700 television broadcasts? That’s over 166,666 complaints per year. And actually that’s just the backlog at the FCC. I’ll admit that number rather stunned me when I read it.
It came up because the Supreme Court just ruled on an FCC regulation that will have an impact on that backlog. The rule under question had to do with penalties handed down over what are called “fleeting” instances of obscenity or nudity during prime time hours. The Commission had been handing down some massive fines because of things like a stray bad word or a bit too much skin being shown during those primary hours. Think of things like the unexpected F-bomb dropped by rock singer Bono at the Golden Globes award ceremony a few years back. In fact the rule in question is often called the Golden Globe rule. The justices ruled 8-0 with Justice Sotomayor recusing herself. The logic was that the FCC hadn’t given the networks enough of a warning that even fleeting instances could result in penalties. They chose to sidestep the question of whether or not the rules violated the First Amendment of the Constitution.
It’s interesting to me that both scripted and unscripted shows are treated the same by the Commission and the Court. That doesn’t seem quite logical to me. A scripted program knows whether or not the actors are going to say bad words or if someone is going to strip off in the middles of the second act. Setting up the rules for those instances should be pretty straightforward. What has always amazed me is the size of the penalties that things like Bono’s unscripted speech or the costume malfunction at the Super Bowl a couple years ago. Once upon a time you didn’t really have to worry about it because the world was a better behaved place. Of course you can solve most of these problems with the use of a simple delay. The problem has been that sometimes the events are so fast and so small (like both of the recent Super Bowl incidents) that they slip by the delay operators.
In reality I wonder how many of those million and a half complaints are things so small that most of us wouldn’t even bother with them? Which makes me wonder if both the FCC and the Supreme Court of the United States don’t have more important things to be worrying about?
Call that the View From the Phlipside.
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