Ok, I was watching Animal Planet tonight and they had a promo for tomorrow’s episode of The Crocodile Hunter (which I love to watch, and not JUST because I drool over Steve Irwin) which they called his “most death defying” yet… an “encounter” with a Komodo Dragon. Ok, obviously he doesn’t die, but the words “death defying” got my thinking about hypotheticals…
If I’m watching the show, I can rest assured that no matter how scary the situation looks, he is gonna come out of it… right? I mean… if he DID die, we’d hear about it on the news… and they wouldn’t air the episode…
Would they? I mean obviously they wouldn’t air his actual death… but it got me wondering… would they release the footage in any way? This doesn’t matter at all, but it’s 6:30am and I’ve been up all night and I was just thinking about it and thought what-the-hey, the SDMB needs another asinine thread about irrelevant crap!
Although writing this is admitting I watch the shows, Fox shows a great deal of action programs titled something like “Police Chases Gone Bad” and “When Animals Attack”.
In both of those a man died. The car crash that took the one was horrifying.
There are three kinds of people: Those who can count and those who can’t.
I think that it would be based on the show’s intended audience. What are the odds that Animal Planet wants its sponsors asking why they just received 3 tons of hate mail from the parents of traumatized children? “Daddy? Did that man just get eat up?”
On the other hand, I’d be willing to bet that all the “reality” cop shows are praying to get their hands on a video of a multiple death shootout, someday.
well, when brandon lee was shot on camera (making “The Crow”) they distroyed the footage right there, to keep it from being published in the tabloids. i would imagine the animal planet people would do the same, i know i would want it distroyed if it were me on the tape.
Filter’s song, Hey Man, Nice Shot, was about a politician who committed suicide with a pistol at a press conference about 10 years ago. The guy had just been indicted, but I don’t remember the particulars, nor do I remember his name. I think it happened in Pennsylvania, or somewhere back east. Anyway, some tv newscasts actually showed him firing the gun and the scene immediately afterward, while others cut the film right after the guy put the gun to his head.
In the documentary movie Roger & Me, a guy holding a rifle and wearing a cape was shot to death in the street by the city police. So far as I know, this movie was only shown on PBS, so it may not be what you’re looking for.
During the Vietnam war, the most memorable televised deaths were when the South Vietnamese general executed the Viet Cong suspect by shooting him in the head, and when the Buddhist monk set himself on fire in protest. Again, I’ve only seen these after the fact on PBS, so I can’t say whether they were shown on network newscasts at the time.
I don’t think they would release it. The feel I get from the show is very tight-knit, his wife, and maybe a couple other guys camera man, etc. etc. I think, regardless of owning the footage and realizing capital gain, out of respect it would be destroyed or never aired,
so you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts. what’s so amazing about really deep thoughts? Tori Amos
Eggo?
I’d like some proof on that one, if you please. As a camera operator of lo these many years, I can tell you that I’ve handed over both useless ( UNexposed ) film footage, AND Unused Videotape stock…all to make someone GO away.
It may be comforting to think that his death shot was destroyed at the set, but it is very likely that it was one moment of film, amongst many- either on a 400 foot roll of film ( roughly 3.75 minutes in 35mm values ) or a 1,000 foot roll ( roughly 11 minutes in 35mm values ).
In short? My guess is that it was developed, and exists somewhere, in a negative vault. In addition to the negative, either the image was transferred to a computer hard-drive, so that the film could be cut on a Non-Linear Editing machine ( Avid, Lightworks, etc ), or a work print was struck, so that the images could be cut the old fashioned way, on a film editing machine. ( Moviola, Steenbeck, etc).
Very sad, but most likely true. Do you have true proof that THAT roll was destroyed?? Remember all of the angles on the “Twilight Zone” helicopter tragedy. There were many cameras rolling, and some of them had remarkably awful close-ups of the decapitations. We know that footage wasn’t destroyed- it was shown in court. Sometimes terrible things happen while the camera is rolling. Usually, it’s magic, and the best job in the world.
Cartooniverse
"If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel. "
I read of a newscaster committing suicide live on-air; since it was live, the footage did go out. I don’t remember the exact specifics, but Harlan Ellison gave the details in the introduction to his short story collection, “Strange Wine.”
About 5 years ago, I was watching the local LA station. They were reporting on some young woman who waved a gun at police, and they ended up shooting her. The news made a big point of cutting the part where the girl got shot. But, I guess one time someone screwed up, because they showed her falling, dropping like a stone. I saw it - the newscasters were really shook up that it happened, and apologized profusely afterwards. Something simular happened about a year ago, with a man comitting suicide on an LA freeway. Some the news helicopters were zoomed in on the man when he blew his head off. (They didn’t expect him to do it right then, obviously.) It causes a furor afterwards and the newscasters apologized profusely afterwards.
Maybe I’m mistaken, but I had thought, my impression was, that the Faces of Death series of videos was “Fakes of Death”…it was camp… a hoax. Sure there were a couple of footages of mundane disasters, everyday 11 o’clock news video tripe stuff, but the rest? It was so bad it had to have been camp. Please correct me if I’m mistaken and people actually die in such silly fashion.
The Autopsy and Holocaust scenes were real enough. Among the skydiving community it’s widely believed that the scene involving a jumper landing in an alligator farm was staged with a side of beef and an old parachute. Never seen any documentation on it either way,
Larry
Sunday’s San Antonio paper had a special 20th Century retrospective section. One of the news items from 1963 read, “Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, is shot and killed by Jack Ruby in front of millions watching live reports on television.”
Redd Foxx died while taping a tv show some time in the early '90s. I don’t remember the name of the show, but I think it co-starred Della Reese. No word on whether the tape was destroyed, or if it made the evening news somewhere. While I’ve no desire to see the death scene, I’d like to know if Redd’s last words were, “It’s The Big One, Elizabeth!”
I have an MPEG of Bud Dwyer’s suicide. The first 20 seconds is him shushing the crowd after he reveals his gun. He then quickly shoots himself in the mouth, with the bullet exiting out the top of his head. The last half is him slumped behind some desks bleeding out of his nose heavily. Pretty gross.
I also have an AVI of a girl being hit by a train. She and a male pedestrian are trotting across a railroad crossing. There’s a train whistle, and he looks up in time to see a fast-moving train approaching from behind and to the left of a stopped locomotive. He stops, but unfortunately she keeps going and gets clipped by the locomotive, which was going about 40-50 mph (65-80 kph). Her body gets thrown down and it rolls to the right of the camera. Going frame by frame, I couldn’t see any specifics, but did see splashes of red indicating that she didn’t fare well.
I don’t remember the URLs of these, but I think someone here posted them originally.
Judges 14:9 - So [Samson] scraped the honey into his hands and went on, eating as he went. When he came to his father and mother, he gave some to them and they ate it; but he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey out of the body of the lion.
Mjollnir-
She was performing in the musical “Pippin”. It was at the old Majestic Theatre, off of Times Square.
I was in Jr. High School. Incredibly, I was there that day. Intermission went FOREVER, then the Stage Manager walked out, and announced it. Her understudy finished the show. Very sad.
Cartooniverse
If you want to kiss the sky, you’d better learn how to kneel.
Sorry.