How real are these shows?? I was watching Hits once and he was annoying people in a shoe shop. The owner pleaded with him to stop. The owner said that he allowed him to film a doctumentary, but would not tolerate this behavior.
How real are these shows?
Do they have to ask everybody on the street if they want their face blurred out? This would really take away the reality of the show. Please shine any light on the rules they must follow that you can.
Thank you
but i know plenty of, um…‘friends’ that pull similar pranks. they make a lot of tapes of the dumb stuff they do, and the thoughts of the strangers involved are never considered. there are a bunch of videos for sale that are done the same way. i think most of the editing is up to mtv, they just do what they can to make it legal to air.
chris
Don’t ask if they want their faces blurred out. Instead, they ask them to sign a release form authorizing their face to be shown. Most likely, the shop owners signed before knowing what they were getting into. If the form isn’t signed, then the face is blurred out.
Or at least, that’s how it worked when we submitted a tape to America’s Funniest Videos during it’s heyday. Releases had to be signed and submitted before the tape was even considered.
Oh yes, they are certainly real.
Tom comes from right here in Ottawa. We would often see him on the streets and in our local malls.
His show would air on a local community-access channel.
But, typical of Canadian television, no station up here would give him a shot at the big time, and so he left for the states.
My friends and I do stuff like this all the time. One time we got in trouble with the police and they made us give the tape to the man that we had pranked. I think he destroyed it.
How does this relate to paparazzi(sp)? It seems as though they would need to get a release signed for any video and possibly photography involving celebrities.
Well, I’m radically over-simplifying, but here’s the gist: a celebrity, a person who has presumedly purposely thrust himself into public attention, doesn’t have the same expectations of privacy that you or I might have. So, a photo you take of a celebrity can be sold and published without the celeb’s permission so long as you didn’t break any laws in taking the picture. Not so with regular folks, who can reasonably expect that their faces won’t make the evening news.
And the law is changing every day, of course…
Sounds like Canadian television actually has a modicum of class and taste. I applaud their decision.
I hate his show but I think they’ve got a pretty smooth system in place.
A few of my friends work here in Halifax at an historic fort animating period soldiers (78th Highlanders). They basically spend their days drilling and the like for the tourists. One day this summer Tom Green showed up with a small film crew and he started doing his idiot shtick around the square wearing a kilt and waving around a pointed stick.
They asked him to leave on the grounds that the stick could be considered a weapon, at this point choosing to ignore his feigning urinating on the walls (clever boy that Tom). He did his usual stalling routine for as long as he could until it became clear that he was soon leaving one way or the other. As soon as it got the least bit physical he backed off and his handler (probably a producer, and the antithesis of Tom… a small, soft-spoken woman) walked up and was as polite as could be, apologizing for his behaviour, and acting in a “He’s really not usually like this” sort of way. They went around and most people ended up signing releases. This baffles me because a lot of the guys were fans of the show and should have known better. I think they just catch people with their guard down for a second.
Person 1: Cool. I’m going to be on Tom Green.
Person 2: Have you ever seen his show?
Person 1: Yeah… it’s hilarious.
Person 2: And why’s that now?
Person 1: Because he makes all those people look like idiots.
Person 2: Maybe you should think about that for a second.
Person 1: pause Oh no… I’m going to be on Tom Green.
Then the producer, still apologizing, sheepishly asked in a “Just one last thing” kind of way if there were any other historical sites around.
Anyway, to make a longish story short, the shows are real and the key to having people cooperate seems to be not having Tom anywhere in sight when you ask. How he doesn’t get beaten within an inch of his life on a weekly basis is beyond me. Too bad.
You know, if you take all of the “your actions are a reflection on us” lectures you and all of your friends have heard from the parents in your lives, and compress them into one giant, superdense, black-hole-like ball of embarassment and humiliation, then you’ll probably have some small idea of what Tom Green’s parents have probably felt since MTV picked up his show and made him a national name.
I know that I’m not sure I’d be able to continue living without changing my identity and moving to Europe or something.
Drew Barrymore.
Just giving credit where credit’s due.
Yes, but Drew Barrymore was also a major druggie for a very long time, demonstrating that her judgment isn’t always the best possible…
The Drew Barrymore thing reminds me of a joke…
These three guys are in a car wreck and a killed instantly. The next thing they know, they’re at the gates of Heaven. St. Peter is greeting them happily, and explaining the rules, “Welcome to heaven,” he says “You can have anything you want, just don’t step on any ducks.”
It’s then the guys notice that heaven is covered in ducks. They’re everywhere. Thousands of them. Oh well, it’s better than the alternative.
The first guy steps through the gates and doesn’t get 15 feet before he steps on a mallard. St. Peter runs up, apologizes and handcuffs him to a hideously ugly woman. “For all eternity,” he says.
The next guy is a little more careful. He goes almost 10 minutes before he’s distracted, and BAM, feathers on the Reeboks. Here comes St. Peter with a woman who looks like Ernest Borgnine, only hit a few more times with the ol’ ugly stick. Wham, handcuffed together.
Well, the third guy decides this isn’t going to happen to him. He’s obsessive about avoiding the ducks. He’s painstaking about every step he takes.
Suddenly, about six months after he arrives in heaven, St. Peter rushes up dragging the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. WHAP! He handcuffs them together.
“DAMN!” she says “I stepped on a duck!”
Tom Green. Now there is a show to be proud of. :rolleyes:
I think it sux big time. I think MTV has fallen ever since it started not only putting on about only rap music but took off those great, weird late night cartoons, along with Daria.
I’ve always found these TV things a bit confusing what with the blurred out faces and all. I’ve not figured out how it is that the news can go through and photograph everyone and show everything on screen without getting waivers, but shows like Tom Green, Cops, Americas Funniest Home Videos and others can’t.
Now with AFHV, I’ve wondered about the mentality of those older folks who signed the waivers to show themselves loosing their paints, slips, or dresses in most undignified ways before millions.
As for the show Jackass, well the name fits and identifies the producers along with those who chose to pay to carry the show quite well. It simply proves that idiots exist and flourish in America and are not confined to Japan.
Then again, what should you expect in a nation that considers professional wrestling as high entertainment, :rolleyes: gives millions to fake psychics, has a multibillion dollar a year TV minister scam rolling along and actually believes that Area 51, the secret military base known around the world, actually contains any great secret stuff.
Honorable mention needs to go to the gross kids cartoon, Ren and Stimpy, which seems to have started a rash of drooling, disgusting things like Cow and Chicken and don’t forget how two brain dead, total idiots, Beavis and Butthead were raised to the level of icon.
I’m Canadian and am very glad that he left the country. Now I wish he’s leave the planet. 
Now I’m hardly a fountain of MTV fandom, but my guess is that the reason MTV is showing more rap videos than ever before is because Americans in general are listening to more rap than ever before. Rap and R&B are outselling rock albums. And the most popular rock acts include rap. Personally I think it’s an improvement over a time when urban music was confined to sporadic episodes of “Yo! MTV Raps”
Talk about left field. Idiots flourish everywhere on the planet. Why single out Japan?
This would be because anyone who watched the show beyond a superficial level found that the show was intelligently written and had some brilliant moments of satire. Mike Judge ain’t no slump.
Aaaarrgghhh!!! Alphagene, get outta my head! You said what I was gonna say almost verbatim. Well, except for the Beavis and Butthead part. Although I loathe that show, I loved Office Space.
Brillance. Sheer Brillance.
The comment concerning Japan was mainly aimed at their love of dangerous and wacky programs like Jackass. Like they have guys in underwear sitting outside in the cold on blocks of ice to see who can do it the longest, or guys drinking large amounts of fluid, standing in cold water and seeing who cannot pee the longest.
Don’t forget, this is the land where they like to pile about 100 guys on this massive, multi ton log to ride it down a steep hill as part of a ceremony, with many falling off all the way, risking being run over and turned into Japanese jam.
Americans have rap enough on other channels. MTV used to be cool, with pop, a little rap and a great place to catch some over the top cartoons or student films. Now they’re just another crappy rap channel and they stopped showing those cool toons. Buncha sellouts!
Rap sucks. Down with rap.
Radio stations started the demise of disco by saying down with Disco and refusing to play it, so they need to do the same with rap. Get back to some good rock n roll! Give us some good pop music!
So as long as they kept rap ‘in it’s place’, MTV was cool? :rolleyes: You want pop? Go to VH1. MTV is not a rap channel. Yeah, they’ve sold out, to N’Sync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and their ilk.
So in your little world, once they get rid of rap should Hip Hop and R&B be next on the list?
Bubble-gum pop sucks. Down with Bubble-gum pop.
[Indian accent]Back your ass up with the resurrection…[/Indian accent]
“Other channels?” BET is the only other channel I can think of that shows any appeciable amount of rap videos. Oh wait I forgot, there was a DMX video block shown on C-SPAN the other day. <snort>
Seriously though, this is more Pit material than GQ. We’ve had threads about both MTV and rap before. I suggest if you need to rant about either one, you either contibute to the extant Pit threads or start a new one. Don’t clog up GQ with it.
This thread has strayed further than a multi-ton Japanese log.