Sunday, October 15, 2006

No Deal

The folks behind Deal or No Deal have a new show with some of the same spirit. It's called 1 Vs. 100 and the first episode debuted last Friday night. Four more have been taped and they run the next four Fridays.

I haven't set the TiVo for a Season Pass to grab them because I didn't particularly enjoy the first broadcast. First of all, I'm getting a little tired of the unrelenting sameness of Deal or No Deal so the last thing I need in my week is another show with a similar look 'n' feel.

Second, one of the reasons that Deal or No Deal can be a frustrating thing to watch is that so many contestants fall so far short of the million dollar prize, some of them very early on in games that continue for 40 minutes after the top prizes are eliminated. 1 Vs. 100 has a million buck top cash award but it's hard to believe anyone will get near it. After each question, you have to risk everything to go on, which is not how these shows usually work — and for a good reason. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? is configured so you can see the next question, decide not to answer it and then walk away richer than when you arrived...and even if you get one of the top money questions wrong, you don't leave with zero. Some of the other shows that materialized in the wake of Millionaire's success let you know the category of the next question before you had to decide if you were going to risk everything and go for it. Even on Deal or No Deal, deciding to gamble is usually to chance that, if you pick wrong, your next bank offer might drop from six figures to five.

This all encourages risk-taking. But on 1 Vs. 100, one wrong answer and you go home with bupkis. They probably don't even have a copy of a home game to give you as a lovely parting gift. So let's say you're doing great and you crank it up to half a million dollars. Are you going to risk it all to hope that the next question won't be about a movie that you didn't see or a sport you've never followed? Remember that in order to win the million, you not only have to get every question right but everyone else in the "mob" of 100 has to get one wrong. To further drive home how unlikely this is, they keep showing shots of Ken Jennings, who's one of those hundred, and reminding you how much money he won on Jeopardy!

So all that's the second of my reasons why the show didn't grab me. The third would involve the lighting effects and all the little "suspenseful" music stings, which are becoming a real cliché on shows like this. The ones on 1 Vs. 100 sounded to me like the ones on every other show of this kind. It's like the producers of The Weakest Link had a big yard sale and the people behind this new show stopped off and picked up their audio tracks real cheap, plus some pieces for their set.

Lastly, Bob Saget is a very funny comedian, especially if you like filth. Really, he is. But he did the first episode with that "I'm too hip to be doing a show like this" attitude that has killed almost every Dennis Miller TV venture for me. He didn't seem to care about the game and if he doesn't, I certainly don't. Someone let me know if it gets any better in succeeding weeks...but I have a hunch it won't.

• Posted at 10:18 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Congressman John Murtha writes a piece of Democratic campaign propaganda — but in doing so, he also sort of lays out his party's argument against the Iraq War. A couple of my Republican friends cite Murtha's opposition to the war as the moment they knew it was lost, at least in terms of support from the U.S. citizenry. Personally, I think the attempts to smear Murtha as a treasonous, pro-terrorist coward did a lot to make that happen. You can use that kind of attack on some people and get results...but use it against the wrong guy and it backfires.

• Posted at 5:13 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Here's a short but nice article about Neil Simon, who's about to receive the Mark Twain Award for humor. The piece makes the usual mistake of thinking Woody Allen wrote for Your Show of Shows and Mr. Simon seems incapable of being interviewed without telling everyone that he made a bad financial deal on The Odd Couple, like we're supposed to feel sorry for him. I was especially struck by this sentence...

After some recent health problems — which included the transplant of a kidney donated to him by his former publicist, Bill Evans — Simon and Joyce sold their Bel Air, Calif., home and now live in Manhattan year-round.

Former publicist? Former publicist? The man gave you one of his kidneys, Neil, and now he's your former publicist? What did your current publicist promise you? A leg?

• Posted at 4:54 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Winsor McCay, as you'll see in today's video, used to bill himself as "The World's Greatest Cartoonist." In 1914, that wasn't as outrageous a claim as it might now seem. In fact, almost everyone who could have challenged him for the title then is also in this clip.

This is the 12 minute version of Gertie the Dinosaur, the film that contains the five minutes he animated for what many would later call — erroneously but with only the best of intentions — the first animated cartoon ever. It wasn't, not by a longshot. It wasn't even McCay's first animated film. But this one got enough attention that it probably seemed like the first to some, and it certainly inspired just about everyone who got into animation for an entire era or two. Its makers (McCay had help but not a lot) also invented a number of techniques that are still, in some fashion, in use today.

Cartoonists back then worked night and day to produce their comic strips. For some reason — fame and money, one supposes — some of them still made time to tour in vaudeville or the lecture circuit with acts that sometimes (not always) involved drawing. McCay started such extracirricular activities around 1906, sketching on stages and incorporating his early animated efforts into the presentation. In February of 1914, he debuted Gertie at the Palace Theater in Chicago and then took her to New York and elsewhere. He had the five minutes of animation and he'd stand on stage as it was shown and interact with it. Later that year, the remainder of the film you're about to see was shot so that Gertie the Dinosaur could be shown in movie houses without McCay or any human participating...and also so that the story of its exhausting production could be immortalized. All the live-action footage was done months after the animation so everything you see of McCay slaving away at the drawing board is a re-creation. In truth, the amount of labor involved was probably not exaggerated except, as is obvious, for comic effect.

Tomorrow, I'll link us to the other Gertie film that McCay made. This one, he started but never finished. Thanks to Jeff Trexler for the suggestion.

• Posted at 11:13 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

The New York Times runs this editorial about the Bush administration entitled, "Science Ignored, Again." The title is almost all you need to know about what it says.

• Posted at 11:10 AM · LINK