If you own a Roku and haven’t poked around the channel store since you loaded up Netflix and the usual five or six options, you owe yourself an evening’s entertainment of just browsing the listings. It’s evident that the bar to creating a Roku channel, financially and technically, ranks somewhere below YouTube.
Just the names and descriptions are good enough - any of the 300+ religious channels, say, which are all variations on minor evangelical or “nondenominational” interpretatiosn of the Bible.
Or the right wingnut channels, all of which seem to have the same five or six rant episodes about the usual three or four topics.
Or the UFO/occult/I’m Just So Weird You Can’t Believe It, Dude channels.
All of these are… inexplicably bizarre. As if you gave a tired old cliche idea to a 13 year old, who then did his 10% genius/90% clueless nebbish thing with it. It’s not just that they’re lame. It’s not just that they’re so shopworn as to have things spilling out of the edges. It’s… like people who listen to AM radio all day trying to explain why their stuff is Really Really Important… to a six year old.
And then there’s “Chucky Talks to God.” It makes the others look like HBO programming. The guy sounds like an adult. He doesn’t sound particularly stupid. But he has absolutely no clue about the video, the audio, the animation, pacing, humor or much of anything else. To say his approach is lame is to glorify lameness. What makes it work, for certain very small values of “work,” is his intense earnestness about it all. There are only about ten episodes; just go pull up the channel (use search) and watch as many as you can stand. I promise it’s worthwhile.
Such as when God plays air guitar for about a minute. (God is invisible and off-screen.)
Or when things spin on the screen for a while for no reason, then the author sings gibberish over the image… for just a few seconds at the end.
Or Chucky and God talk about how wonderful “hydrogen power” will make earth, and how when Chucky figures out how to do it he’s going to give it away to the children, you know.
Or the visit from the NPR anchor that labors extremely hard to insult everything about NPR at something below kindergarten potty-talk level.
It’s not just the actual content. It’s the complete lack of timing or making more than one thing happen at a time or keeping several things from happening at once that makes it so astounding.
Just go watch for a few minutes. I’ll wait.