[li]Network television airing truncated Hollywood films - If you have to heavily edit it or create entirely new story lines because you think that audience is too stupid to understand the plot (looking at you Two Minute Warning) why bother showing it??[/LIST][/li][/QUOTE]
I believe in the case of Two Minute Warning the heist subplot was added by NBC because they thought the movie’s original story about a crazed sniper randomly gunning people down in a crowded football stadium was too disturbing for network TV and would inspire copycats. Point taken though.
For my example, I have another horror story about a Hollywood film recklessly edited for television. When I was seven, one of the local UHF stations aired the original King Kong. Since this happened during the 1970s, this meant I had to put up with a scratchy crappy print and frequent commercial interruptions in order to watch a classic film. So, we get to the climax. Kong has climbed to the top of the Empire State Building with Fay Wray, the airplanes are moving in, Kong is about to take swipe at one of them when … the station suddenly cuts to a commercial for an RV dealership. The RV commercial runs for a seemingly endless minute before we cut back to the movie and see Kong lying dead on the pavement and hear the closing line “Tis beauty killed the beast.”
Yeah. And they were all marginally employed, and living in Malibu, so they had to be crowded into a tiny apartment. That was probably the only realistic thing about that show.
My most infurating was when we were trying to watch shows like Charlies Angels, Starsky and Hutch, Happy Days and the President came on to make his speech, in those days
the president was on all regular tv channels, unlike today he would be on a channel like
cnn or cnbc.
president interupting tv shows, I was a kid at that time.
does anybody rember the Heidy game when the New York Jets were playing the Oakland Raiders. it was in the 4th quarter , I believe the Jets were leading big time the Raiders came back, back and forth leads would change , I think with about 3 minutes or so to play they changed the game to that program? I was 3 at the time , I only know about because over the course of the years they talk about at the end of some games. anybody rember this?
Along with truncated feature films, I abhor full-screen pan-and-scan presentations of any movie. I was watching The Big Country for the first time on PBS last week, and whoever was operating the joystick or trackball did a terrible job of framing the action; he (or she) repeatedly focused on something in the middle of the screen, cropping out the actors entirely—you could hear them talking, but you couldn’t see them!
Show wide-screen movies in letterbox format or not at all, goddammit! :mad:
Hear, hear! Every time The Big Country turns up on TCM or some other cable channel, it’s letterboxed so why can’t the PBS affiliates do the same? It’s our pledge and tax dollars, dammit!
There was a show that in the first 2 seasons I really was into and wanted to know the big secret of what the island was.
In the last 2-3 seasons though were just junk and the ultimate ending was lame with no real questions answered. People now watching it tell them to quit after about season 3.
Battlestar Galactica - relaunch
The ending was dumb with somehow Starbuck being an angel of sorts. Plus I seriously doubt the humans would have totally abandoned all their technology and their space travel to live as primitives and restart everything.
I think they should have made it explicitly clear that with the exception of Hera somehow passing on her unique genes to the locals, that the colonists were going to finish their lives there and then die out, possibly because of having no natural resistance to native diseases. That this was the end of Homo Kobalus, and that whoever/whatever “God”/“The Gods” were, they were rebooting their experiment with sentience, with only Hera to pass on the divine spark of consciousness. That there was going to be a human race, but it wouldn’t be them.
“You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace. You will lead them all to their end”
Watching Channel 17 as a kid and they kept interrupting the cartoons to ask for pledge money. I can still picture Goldie asking kids to go wake up their parents and get them to come to the TV because it’s very important! Yeah I’ll get right on that, lol.
It was the one where a young model died as a result of an infection she got after being raped. The L&O half ended with the with the cops suspecting the father.
Oh was that it? never could quite figure all the Gods stuff. But then I never like when the mix science fiction with fantasy and religion like Star Wars does.
I still doubt they would have totally abandoned space travel.
Way back in the early 1980s the NBA playoff games were shown on tape-delay. I was following the Larry Bird Celtics vs. Julius Erving 76ers best of 7 NBA semi-finals. The 76ers were up 3 games to 1 heading into game 5, which was broadcast on a Friday night. Of course, if the 76ers won the game, the Celtics would be eliminated and the 76ers would advance to the next round. I went out of my way to avoid news shows and settled in at 11:30 pm to watch the game on tape delay. Brent Musberger, then of CBS said during the introduction, “Be sure to tune in Sunday for game 6 of this exciting series.”
That idiot Musberger blew it for me. Now that I knew who won that game - the Celtics - watching the game had been spoiled. I still hate Brent Musberger.
Actually, it was only on for one season. I was infuriated by the fact that it was retconned to the point where Amy Steel’s character pretty much never existed. (I assume they wrote her out because Steel had started making For Love and Honor.)
I do, but I live out west, where they aired the entire game (because Heidi didn’t start until three hours later).
First of all, they did give notice; second, the WKC Dog Show is always in mid-February; third, how did you feel about the pre-emptions for the U.S. Open tennis tournament?
Here are some of mine:
Syndication cuts that leave out something important to the plot. Case in point: in the Gilligan’s Island episode where a missile is launched at the island, the scene where the General in charge receives a phone call telling him that the warhead has a problem, but he says to go ahead with the launch anyway (to test the guidance system), was cut where I lived.
Stations pre-empting network shows for sporting events, then airing the shows at midnight without any advance warning that they would be moved. (Nowadays, the stations will have agreements with another station to air the shows, at least when the overlap is known in advance, as opposed to something like a baseball game running 14 innings.)
On the other hand, what was then the NBC affiliate at the time postponed coverage of a USA Olympic Track & Field Trials until midnight so it could air a local baseball game.
One station I remember used to air an extra commercial during its daytime reruns of old sitcoms, so part of the end of the episode would be removed. This especially infuriated me when they cut the last song out of the The Dick Van Dyke Show Christmas episode.
Fox airing a repeat of a show unannounced because the planned new episode had been pre-empted in the east because NFL coverage ran long. (People out east had a worse problem; if a Fox NFL doubleheader ran past 7:30, the 7:30 program was “joined in progress,” even if it meant that only the last five minutes of it aired in the eastern half of the country. Eventually, Fox figured out that this was a problem, and scheduled its NFL postgame show to run until 8:00.)
I believe it was a Saturday morning and we were up waiting for Mr. Magoo. It was interrupted by the election of the new pope (JP 2). If I recall correctly, the smoke looked grey so they couldn’t quite tell if it was meant to be white (new one elected) or black (no decision yet).
Another reason I don’t like the Catholic Church and left as soon as I could.