What happened to the Discovery and Learning Channels?

Sure, but Vanna is…nice. Plus she’s got tenure.

That freaky Barbie/Frankenstien hybrid thing on Lingo is just…scary.

-Joe

I still have trouble with the idea that My Bodyguard, or Pretty in Pink as classic movies. :smack:

I keep hoping for another Cary Grant-a-thon.

Yeah, but pretty much all the ones we grew up with have gone over to Boomerang. Sort of like MTV2 & videos. The only classic cartoons I see on CN these days are Tom & Jerry and Scooby Doo.

Oh my. May I please take that as a sig?

The worst part is you wouldn’t even ride the motorcycles. Well anyone with a brain wouldn’t want to anyway. Give me a real motorcycle show anyday. Of course I don’t have the high cable channels anymore, they cost too much for me. Though the Discovery building is right up the street if anyone wants me to egg them, or take a nasty letter over.

Lately, I’ve been watching “Wing Nuts” on Discovery Channel. It’s interesting because it shows the cash flow issues that are faced by many small businesses. But the show is actually about a small company in Southern California that turns bits and pieces of old airplanes into desks, tables and other furniture.

As long as they still have Mail Call, I’ll tune in.

If you aren’t already watching, “Two Wheel Tuesday” shows on Speed TV are pretty decent.

Except we don’t get Speed TV around me. Which really sucks becuase I have seen some of those shows and they are at least ok.

Might as well take a swipe at the Sci-Fi Channel.

They lost all credibility with John Edwards and the unending UFO-thons.

Game Show Network: I really liked this one when it was added to Dish Network. When they ditched all the 70’s shows (who couldn’t get a laugh watching someone jump up and down in ecstacy at the thought of winning a 1976 Vega), I stopped watching. I have started recording “What’s My Line”. I’m amazed it’s still entertaining after 50 years. Of course, they’ll probably stop showing it, too.

A few months ago Discovery showed a really cool nature program called Lion Battleground. It was the first true nature show I’d seen on Discovery in years. Mythbusters is still good, although those stupid “Mythterns” are trying my patience.

TLC might as well change its name to the “While You Were Out”/“Surprise By Design” Channel at this point. Similarly, Discovery Life & Times is more accurately “The Terrorism Channel” now.

Discovery Kids was never a great channel, but at least they used to show “Outward Bound” twice a day. Not anymore, though. :frowning:

One channel that hasn’t changed its format (knock on wood): VH1 Classic.

That’s because it was already spun off of VH1. Not much they can do other than start playing 90s videos.

Good Og, I loved that show. Does anyone know if any channel is showing reruns?

AMC, TLC, DC, & HC were the only TV I used to watch. Now I rarely even bother to check the listings. Thank Og for my DVD player!

So has anyone at TLC or DC commented upon the dummyfication / interior designification of the entire channels? I’d like to know what they have to say for themselves, if they’re not walking around with paper bags on their heads. Gagh… Those two channels were my only reason for turning on the tube, with the History channel as a backup.

Now we don’t even bother. I tape 2 CSIs a week, and the rest of what little watching we do is either an ep from the entire Babylon 5 collection, or a mythbuster DVD / taped show.

It’s enough to drive one to despair. I mean you expect things like *battle of the bikini interior decorator bike builders * on Fox, but on the LEARNING channel, fercryingoutloud? :mad:

It is to weep… :frowning:

But my recorder playing is improving dramatically.
Thanks Spoons!

Recently, they’ve begun to show a commercial or two.

MTV2 was showing videos exclusively and is now a full blown commercial venture. They seem to show a lot of old MTV toons.

The best channel for this kind of thing is The Science Channel (“formerly Discovery Science”). No UFOs. No psychics. No makeovers. Just science.

A couple of weekends ago, they did a “science classics” marathon. They played a bunch of “Mr. Wizard,” a few “The Secret Life of…” where that potty English nerd takes stuff apart and shows how it works, and “James Burke’s ‘The Day the Universe Changed,’” which I thought was fucking amazing.

The best was four episodes of “Twenty First Century,” which was a news documentary series hosted by Walter Cronkite back in the mid-1960s. One was about space travel; one was about “industries of the future”; and so on. The staggering thing about the show is not how wrong they were, but how close they were in the broad strokes, even though the details are off. For example, we chuckle when we see Cronkite in “the home of the future” going over to the “computer room” where there’s a row of screens, one for the weather, one for the stocks, and so on. We snicker at the “computer terminal” installed in the kitchen, which has an old punch-style keyboard and a chattering paper-roll output. We grin at the “businessman’s briefcase,” which has a giant CRT in one side, a clunky keyboard in the other, and a TV camera the size of a loaf of bread you take out and set on a little tripod next to the briefcase so you can videoconference.

But if you think about it: These predictions are almost perfectly on the money. It’s just the revolutions in microprocessing that made the manifestation of the technology look totally different. This was brought home when Cronkite wandered into the mockup of the den and pointed to the huge wall-sized TV screen, on which the set designers were rear-projecting a still image of a football game as a rough suggestion of what this might look like. And in seeing it, I paused, my mouth slightly open, reflecting on the fact that I was watching the broadcast of Cronkite’s demonstration on a wall-sized screen generated by my InFocus digital projector.

Sometimes the predictions were fairly wide of the mark, like the thing about plastic dishes being hot-molded on demand and then melted back into a pool when you’re done with them; it’s still good in concept, but we haven’t gotten over our attachment to traditional forms, and we’re also still willing to throw away an amazing amount of stuff. So this prediction is still waiting to come true, as is the one about space hotels, which they figured would be in orbit by the end of the 1990s. And the one architect guy was totally off about how tolerant people are willing to be about living in essentially mass-produced tract houses in suburban developments. He said we would hate them, and not live in them. Turns out we hate them but live in them anyway. So even though he was wrong, it was still a very interesting point.

Anyway, this was a great program, and The Science Channel was the only place you could find it. Most of my adhoc TiVo requests, in fact, are for Science Channel documentaries that look interesting. There are a couple of drawbacks about it I’ll acknowledge: First, it’s kind of obscure, so you’ve got to get Digital Extended Bonus Platinum or whatever your cable or dish provider calls it in order to have the channel in your lineup; and second, they repeat a lot of programming. There’s something called “Rockets into Space” which goes back and forth between Discovery Wings and The Science Channel, where it’s basically twenty episodes or so that run once a week and start over again after the last one, so once you’ve seen them all, you don’t need to watch it any more.

I could watch The Science Channel pretty much nonstop, and sometimes I do.

Tech TV used to be pretty good – “The Screen Savers” was one of my favorite shows. Then they were bought out by G4, and now virutally their entire lineup is devoted to computer gaming, a subject which interests me not at all. They fired all of the grownups from Screen Savers, and now it all sucks.

Mr. Blue Sky neglected to mention that the Sci-Fi Channel (when I last saw it) has become the “When Giant Mutant Animals Attack” Channel.

All Disney has going for them is ‘Kim Possible’.

Three of the best cable stations are HBO (they can do a whole station dedicatedto their own productions!), the Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon.

I had expected this. When those “Where the music’s at!” promos started, I was like, “How long until MTV3?”