Yep. It was always fun trying to figure out where the act title would fit in the dialogue.
Quinn Martin pioneered episode title listings in US TV. He also divided the show into four acts and and epilogue.
The Untouchables was doing it in 1959 (Martin was a producer, before he created his own production company; the Acts didn’t seem to be used in this)
He also did it in The New Breed in 1961 (Get a look at that cast!), before UNCLE went on the air.
The old TV Guide and related TV section in the newspapers often did as well although not always consistently.
8:00 The Jophiel Show
“The Cafe Society” (R) Things get crazy when Jophiel has to answer a ranty question on a web forum
Oh great, I wrote my earlier response when this was in the Pit. Now that it’s in CS, it’s quite inappropriate for the forum
One of my favorite '90s shows, NYPD Blue, never displayed episode titles. The first i knew that each episode even had a title was when i began buying the DVDs. I checked IMDB, and sure enough, a title for each episode.
And after seeing the titles, i was glad that they never displayed them when the show was on the air, because some of them are embarrassingly stupid or corny.
I’m lucky if I keep the names of the shows I’m currently watching straight, much less individual episode names. Sure, if I’m discussing a specific episode online, the episode name should be used. That’s what IMDB and Wiki are for.
There are trivial peeves, and then there are peeves so trivial as to be really nonsense. They don’t put the episode name in the video for each episode because nobody cares. They won’t remember it anyway and will still just refer to Wiki and IMDB as needed.
*Last Exit to Brooklyn *was a controversial 1964 novel and the controversial "title"of a 1965 Gene Pitney song, which you’d know if you were a member of the terminally-cool Boomer audience that most Simpsons references are aimed at. It’s entirely your fault for getting yourself born 30 years too late.
No kidding. Places that list episode titles:
[ul]
[li]the TV Guide online[/li][li]IMDB[/li][li]Wikipedia[/li][li]Amazon, Netflix, and Hulu[/li][li]TV.com and other tv-oriented websites[/li][li]episode descriptions from your cable company[/li][li]fan pages for the series[/li][/ul]
My God, that one again? It’s like it’s the same show every week!
Back when TV Guide listings were localized, episode titles in listings were few and far-between.
The only 60s/70s sitcom I can think of that had every episode’s title on screen was F Troop. There were exceptions - One Day at a Time would announce episode titles for multi-part storylines after the first episode - but titles didn’t really become “public information” until they appeared on VHS sets.)
It is not insane, in fact its a perfectly sane thing to say. While watching a random episode of a show, if I don’t know what the basic plot is or what season, especially if I’m unfamiliar with the show, its difficult to figure out the exact episode. For instance, i don’t watch Friends that often, but I’ve seen an episode here and there that I found interesting. Or take something like Law and Order with like 20 years and 4 series, describing the episode becomes a chore. How many times can Joey hook up with a girl or they find a murderer who turns out to be former best friends with the victim? Again, the title is just a simple, 1 second flash of text, infinitely easy for any unpaid intern to stick on in between gophering coffee for people, and its maddening that they don’t do that seemingly as a rule. Its a senseless, stupid rule that nobody of any sanity should pay attention to!
So they have no reason not to do it by proving they do it, but for some reason we’re not allowed to know “Deep Space Homer” is the name of the episode?? Its more of a bastard thing to do when they DO put names in some but not all of them!
You’re wrong, my level of rage is EXACTLY proportionate to the crime. In fact, the working title of this thread was “Proper proportionate perturbation pertaining pecadillos” but I didn’t want this rant to sound like a joke because it is most definitely not a joke.
Yes! See? You get it! That’s so odd that this seems to be a secret they expect you to not know! What’s the name of that famous episode with the inbred redneck haunted mansion people? I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA?! If someone held a gun to my head and asked me the name of that Ed Asner ghost episode talking about masturbation, I would pull the trigger for him because there’s no way in hell I’d ever recall that!
These problems arose before most of those things existed so this rant is a long simmering one. ** The point isn’t that I can find it now, the point is that it never should have needed to be searched for in the first place**.
Its like if you’re meeting someone for the first time and they don’t tell you their name and instead give you a card with their website on it. Now you cannot claim that looking up a website is hard or especially strenuous, yet if all you wanted to know was the person’s name, there’s an easy fix that could alleviate you from this admittedly trivial task: they can simply tell you their name. Yet if you ranted about this, I would be sympathetic because the point isn’t that you can find their name by doing some mundane task, but that you never should have needed to do it in the first place especially if there’s an even easier fix to the problem!
For TV, the easier fix is to DISPLAY THE FUCKING NAME of the episode! How hard is that? Its asininely simple! Why don’t they do that then?? Because somebody somewhere is a shit sucking -------…look, I was going to call them that weird worm with the teeth that latches on to people and sucks their blood and looks really creepy, and I CAN’T because I don’t know its god damn name! Its starts with “L” or maybe “M” or something, and I’ve seen pictures but I don’t know what its called! I even googled “worm with teeth” and “leech with teeth” but apparently those are its own separate categories! This is what comes from a world where names are hidden, where a guy can’t properly rant about shit. Do you want to live in that world?? Because you already do and its not a nice world!
Pleased to meet you. I’m the tall guy with the beard.
:mad: You’re on the list!
They also gave names to the acts, although they were usually quite surreal, such as Act II: Geshundheit or Act II: Lieber.
The Halloween episodes are another unusual case. The first one was titled “Treehouse of Horror” because it was structured around the Simpson children telling scary stories in Bart’s treehouse. Since then, they’ve dropped that framing device but still titled all the Halloween episodes “Treehouse of Horror [roman numeral].” Then, in 2002, “Treehouse of Horror XIII” was the first one to show the title onscreen. I suspect this was because the producers figured out that viewers had discovered The Simpsons Archive and learned what the episodes were actually called.
Do you not know the difference between “asinine” and “insane?”
I’d suggest you look it up, but you might have an aneurysm.
Dude, you hit the “Info” (or equivalent) button on your remote and it will give you the episode title. You can do that at any point during the show. It’s actually easier to get the episode title than it would be if they just put it at the beginning of the episode. WTF?
It is neither asinine nor insane! Don’t make me put you on the list! :mad:
I don’t have a remote that does that, nor can I do it if I happen to see the episode at a restaurant or in a doctor’s office or somewhere else. Granted, that doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen and my objection is to the groin grabbingly easy way for them to flash that one second of text on the screen
Then I’d suggest you invest in a new-ish (from, like, any time in the past 20 years) universal remote that will work with your TV and save yourself some unnecessary anguish. Or just try typing plots into Google. It’s really not the issue you’re making of it.
It bothers me and I won’t stop until it bothers everyone else