Fuse (formerly MuchMusic USA) sucks ass!

The BBQ Pit
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When I first got digital cable, I was rather happy to be getting a music video channel that actually played music videos. I’d heard good things about MuchMusic and was disappointed that we weren’t getting the real thing. I really thought that maybe the watered-down U.S. version wouldn’t suck. I should stop being so optimistic.

Of course they played the same crappy videos over and over. There was a lot of that formulatic breed of rock where the lead singers scream, rap, growl, and just generally hurt my ears, rather than actually singing.

As bad as that was, I kind of expected it and it’s not my main complaint. EVERY SINGLE VIDEO they played was squished! Yes, squished. There were big black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. Yes, I know some videos are shot in 16:9 (DVD-style) and are supposed to have the black bars. MMUSA, however, put the bars on EVERY video, including videos I know I’ve seen on MTV (between 3 and 4 AM only, of course) in a regular 4:3 DAR (i.e. no bars, takes up the full screen)!

There were no messages or promos of any kind in the MMUSA black bars. They simply took up space.

Well MMUSA decided to change its name a month or two ago. Now they’re called Fuse. I guess they have a new, hip, edgier attitude or some other such mumbo jumbo cooked up by execs with focus groups composed primarily of cheap monkeys that all the research labs rejected due to their abnormally low intelligence.

So, did the hip, new Fuse loose the senseless black bars? Uh, sort of. They lost one of them! Now there’s just a pointless black bar on the bottom of the screen, but not the top! They apparently realized that everyone hated the bars, but decided to make a compromise to appease the discount monkeys or something.

Of course, they also have an ever-present Fuse logo on the screen at all times. It’s in the top-right corner. In case you get distracted and start trying to watch the actual video, the logo flashes and changes to a different Fuse logo every few seconds. NEVER let the viewers forget that they’re watching the hip, edgy Fuse! To give those who are lucky enough not to have this channel, I took this screenshot. Note that the bar on the bottom is green. That’s because it’s the SPRITE Remix Countdown. Any other time, it’s black. Also, I swear the bar gets bigger and smaller sometimes, but maybe I’m just going crazy. Then again, knowing Fuse, probably not.

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That’s so cutting edge and fresh!

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What the hell is that supposed to be-a guy using a guitar as a penis?

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Man, and a kewl Sprite Remix logo! Those guys are SOOOO COOL.

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For the record, neither MuchMusic nor MuchMoreMusic have black bars all the time. This is not to say that they don’t play the same crappy videos over and over again, however.

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So, for the record, MTV sucks, VH1 sucks, MTV2 sucks unholy amounts of pure crack, and MM/FUSE sucks.

Are there any music TV networks that don’t suck?

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Want videos? Download them and play them whenever you want.

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Well, yeah, Parental Advisory, that’s what I do. I have about 90 gigs of music videos. Unfortunately, most of them have the logos of the channels they were capped from still on them. The only ones that don’t are those ripped from DVDs. If a collection of music videos from an artist I like comes out on DVD, I’ll happily pony up the bucks for it. Just in the past couple of weeks I bought Queen’s Greatest Flix I & II DVDs, Rush - Chronicles on DVD, and two Pogues laserdiscs that cost me $60 each because they’re so damn rare.

Unfortunately, most artists don’t release their videos on DVD. Many popular artists released collections of videos on VHS years ago that were never reissued on DVD, and are out-of-print in VHS (I’m looking in your direction, Tori Amos).
On an unrelated TV rant that I originally meant to include in the OP (I also meant to preview the OP, but as you can see, I didn’t do that either), the SciFi channel pissed me off big time on July 4th. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve watched July 4th and New Years Eve Twilight Zone marathons. I used to watch them on WPIX New York and was happy that SciFi continued the marathon tradition after they bought up all the episodes.

I watched about four hours of the marathon. During every single commercial break, the first ad was for a really terrible looking B-movie called “Shark Attack 3: Megalodon.” Two days later, I can still hear the beginning of the commercial in my head: “They said the chances of a shark attack were one in five million. They were wrong.” Ugh.

Not only was it shown during every break, but when they came back from the breaks, they flashed up some text in the bottom left corner of the screen reminding you again to watch SHARK ATTACK 3 (boy that title sounds dumber and dumber every time I type it). The text reminder is apparently for people who forgot the bad commercial they saw three minutes ago.

Still, the commercials and text reminders just weren’t enough for SciFi. They shrank the credits of every episode down to literally a quarter of the screen. I could barely read them at all. The other 3/4, of course, was the same damn commercial for SHARK ATTACK 3!

FUCK! Whatever happened to target advertising? Twilight Zone episodes actually used big words that I read in books, but would never hear on TV. Do they really think that people who enjoy forty-year old TV shows with intelligent writing are the same people who watch awful movies like Shark Attack 3?!

In a similar vein, my wife and I were watching the Discovery Health channel. Apparently July is National Eye Safety Month (we had a good, long, laugh over this) and Discovery Health wanted to remind people. So they made a little PSA with some woman talking about eye safety and reminding people of ridiculously obvious things like using goggles when operating power tools.

Do they really think that anyone dumb enough not to know you need goggles when sawdust is spraying in your face would actually be watching Discovery Health?!

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Whoops. My post did not make clear the fact that Shark Attack 3 is not a movie out in theaters now, but rather a movie that was out in theaters (probably for about two days), and is now being played on the SciFi channel.