Tuesday, December 5, 2006

Case Studies

Everyone says the TV show Heroes (which I have yet to watch) is a great show. It may be...but think how much better it could be if the entire cast was comprised of Deal or No Deal models.

• Posted at 7:31 PM · LINK

Daffy Deal

Your bargain-hunting friend Mark wishes to inform you that the first three volumes of Looney Tunes on DVD have been drastically marked down...like to around 50% of list price. That's not quite as big a bargain as it sounds because you're never dumb enough to pay list but it is a bargain. You can now order Volume 1, Volume 2 or Volume 3 for $32.00 each and if you get them shipped by Amazon's "free super saver shipping," which arrives pretty swiftly for me, that gives you something like 180 of the best cartoons ever made (plus a ton of extras) for under a hundred bucks.

People tell me that buy.com and deepdiscountdvd.com are the two best places to get DVDs for cheap on the Internet...but buy.com still has them for $51 to $57 each and deepdiscountdvd wants $44.74 apiece or $130.61 for all three. So it pays to not assume that and to shop about. (The website shop.com has them at $81.15 per volume. Do people really not know how to browse a few stores so they don't wind up paying $81 for the same thing someone else is selling for $32?)

• Posted at 6:59 PM · LINK

Something Else You Oughta Buy

Gene Deitch was one of the great animation directors and my favorite work of his was the Tom Terrific cartoons which ran for years on the Captain Kangaroo show. Tom and his sidekick, Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog, stumbled through simple stories with simple drawing and simple premises and a simplicity of production that was hard to resist. (One guy did all the voices and one musician played all the music.) Whoever owns the rights oughta stop cockin' around and put out some Tom Terrific episodes on DVD.

In the meantime, Fantagraphics Books has favored us with a collection of a short-lived newspaper strip that Deitch created. Terr'ble Thompson only ran for about a year and I have to admit I'd never heard of it before. But it's enormous fun, and not just because it was an antecedent of the Tom Terrific shorts that debuted a few years later. Deitch was just as creative in one medium as he was in another.

I hereby suggest you click this link and order yourself a copy of Terr'ble Thompson. And if you're in a clicking mood, Fantagraphics has a nice freebee you can listen to right now. That's right: I said listen. The folks at Golden Records produced a 12-minute kids' record of Terr'ble Thompson starring none other than Art Carney. The record was never released but Deitch came across a copy of the tape in his files and it's been turned into an MP3. It's available for your listening pleasure on this page and so is a brief introduction that Deitch recently recorded, telling the tale of how the record came to be.

In his intro, Deitch says that the songs were written by two important Broadway composers, Marshall Barer and Alec Wilder. That's a bit of an exaggeration. At the time, Barer had only done one show that had reached Broadway. He was one of several composers who contributed to Once Over Lightly, a translation/parody of The Barber of Seville that ran a big six performances in 1942. That was the sum of his Broadway credentials in '55 when he penned the lyrics for Terr'ble Thompson. He later contributed to a couple of revues but his only real hit came when he wrote the lyrics for Once Upon a Mattress, which hit New York in 1959. Wilder's credits were even spottier. He also contributed to Once Over Lightly and then wrote incidental tunes for two non-musical plays which ran a total of 26 performances between them. But the two men did a nice job on the kids' record and it's well worth twelve minutes of your time. If you buy the book, read it while you listen.

• Posted at 2:38 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

We have here another (another!) sixteen minutes of old cereal commercials. It opens with a dandy Rice Krispies spot, followed by Buffalo Bee (voiced by Mae "Olive Oyl" Questel) selling Wheat Honeys and Rice Honeys. A pre-Batman Adam West eats Kellogg's Sugar Frosted Flakes, with narration by Paul Frees. The Cheerios Kid tries to launch himself into space and his spot is followed by the Trix Rabbit and the Lucky Charms leprechaun. There are some promos for Clackers and Frosty-Os, an Andy Griffith Show in-show commercial with Don Knotts, and one for Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice that I think features the voice of Kenny Delmar. Mr. Delmar played the infamous Senator Claghorn on the Fred Allen radio show and later was the voice of The Hunter and Commander McBragg for animation. You'll see an early Tony the Tiger commercial with Thurl Ravenscroft's magnificent baritone, a Maypo spot and...oh, there's too much in this to list it all. Just watch.

• Posted at 12:18 PM · LINK

Slow News Days

The next presidential election is 704 days away. Isn't it a little early to be talking about frontrunners and saying things like, "It's Obama's to lose" and "Nobody can stop Hillary"? Unless Dick Cheney does something crazy like running or quitting, we won't even have an incumbent on the ticket in 2008...and some people think the nominees are all but certain?

Incumbents aside, when was the last time someone had a near-lock on the nomination 700 days before it was time to vote? More important, when was the first time that someone's frontrunner status that far in advance was even relevant once the primaries started? (Bill Clinton, let's remember, lost his early primary contests.) Candidates like this kind of talk because it's never too early to start raising funds. Reporters like it because it gives them something to write about and they can make predictions that no one will remember when things turn out otherwise. But the rest of us don't have to fall for it.

If you stuck a gun in my ribs and made me predict who'll be the Democratic ticket in 2008, I'd say it will be Al Gore. His slogan will be, "Re-elect Al Gore" and his running mate will be either Barack Obama or Howard Dean. On what do I base this? Same thing as everyone who's making predictions these days: Almost nothing.

• Posted at 12:16 PM · LINK

Copy Boys

Those of us with TiVo Series 2 know that one of its many delights is the "TiVo to Go" feature via which you can record something on one TiVo and, assuming you're properly networked, transfer it to another TiVo or to your computer. This is more than a convenience of being able to watch a recording where you want to watch it. If two shows I want to view are on at the same time, I can record one on my office TiVo (where I watch most programs) and the other on the TiVo in my TV room downstairs. Then I can transfer the show from the downstairs TiVo upstairs. Neat. Tidy. Handy.

One snag in all this has been that if you transfer a TiVo recording to your computer, it's there in an encoded proprietary format — a filename that instead of ending in ".avi" or ".mpeg" or some other common format, ends in ".tivo" — which means you can't easily edit it or burn it to a DVD (without special software they sell) or upload it to the 'net. TiVo instituted this because they were afraid of lawsuits from networks and movie producers even though there are plenty of ways to configure a computer to record shows off the air without this kind of encoding.

There have been a couple of different methods to get around this restriction, the easiest of which was a piece of free software called DirectShow Dump. It works decently with most recordings but occasionally encounters something it cannot parse or process. Now, someone has made things simpler. The Digital Rights Management (DRM) feature of .tivo files has been cracked and the software to do it is widely available for no cost. That version, by the way, is rather clumsy to use but it does "decode" the structure of the .tivo files for all to see, so we'll probably see a handier utility program any day now.

I think this matters beyond the fact that some of us will now have an easier time doing whatever we want to do with shows we record on our Series 2 TiVo machines. Many years ago, when the Betamax was the format of choice for almost everyone practicing home video (largely because VHS and DVD hadn't been invented), there was a lawsuit. A group of major studios headed by Disney and Universal sued Sony — this was before Sony was a major studio — demanding that the Betamax be redesigned to prevent people from taping copyrighted shows off the air. It seems silly now but in the early days of home video, no one quite knew where it would or could all lead...no one but the judge who presided in that case. He said, and this is a paraphrase but it's close, "It's silly to insist they invent a way to jam the process because two days later, someone else will invent a way to unjam the jam." That's pretty much the way it's gone.

Those who traffic in intellectual property — books, TV shows, movies, music, etc. — have sometimes harbored fantasies that technology could restrict the copying and circulation of their wares, enabling them to set up a lucrative per-use (or per-user) licensing fee. If it ever works that way, it doesn't work for long. Not as long as there's a widespread desire to unjam the jam.

I'm not saying this is good or bad because for me, it's both. I'd love it if shows I've written could not be copied or illegally downloaded or otherwise obtained without each consumer coughing up a fee. That would translate to more cash for Mark. On the other hand, I like the idea that if I buy a DVD, I can copy it so I can have one copy in my downstairs library, another in my upstairs DVD carousel and maybe another stashed away as a backup. When I buy a CD, I often dub off the cuts I like to CD compilations I can play in my car. It's all legal and I think it's ethical...but there's no way I can have both my wishes at the same time. If I have the power to copy a DVD or CD for myself, I have the power to copy it for someone else. Like I said, it's not good or bad. It's just the way it is. Copy protection is like those speed bumps they're putting on my street. They slow people down but they don't stop anyone...and I doubt they ever will for long.

• Posted at 11:47 AM · LINK

December 4, 2006 • Current • December 6, 2006