The original dialog was full of Japanese cultural references, not to mention puns galore. Sure, hardcore fans like myself wouldn't mind those left in...but that's not the audience CN is aimming for by putting the show on the air.
While not faithful to the original dialog, the English dub is pretty faithful to the original intent, tone, and to the characters themselves.
Yeah, I know the dialog's been peppered with cultural references that didn't exist when the show was originally created, but the jokes *work*, and sometimes being able to laugh in the right places is more important than a literal translation.
Besides, the DVDs are in stores now, and contain both the original Japanese language with subtitles, as well as the English dub as heard on CN.
Back in college, my roommate and I would come back from long study sessions saying "Once again, I have learned a useless fact..." after seeing Goemon in action.
Well, first off, anime is not a genre, just a medium (animation.)
For me, I've always liked animation but quickly got disappointed in that I only saw it being used as childrens' entertainment. Why couldn't you use animation to do more mature stories in genres I liked - like science fiction?
My big introduction to anime was Robotech. Here was an animated story that dealt with topics and ideas that were geared to someone older than 6!
Again, anime is not a genre. If you list out some movies and genres you enjoy, I'm sure you could find something in anime that would entertain you.
They're one of the few online Japanese stores that uses reasonably good English, and ships internationally. Their prices tend to be about the best as well (even just considering the prices in yen)
I can't give you any recent figures, though back when I was helping to run the anime club back in college circa '95 or so, we were regularly pulling in 400+ college-aged students to our monthly showings... After I graduated, the club got so prominient, it actually started receiving funding directly from the Japanese Studies department, since many of the students taking Japanese were members of the club as well.
When I started going to the club in '90, there were barely 50 members. We were amazed (and downright frightend!) by what a bit of advertising was able to do...
I've been into anime since I was a teenager, and I haven't been a teenager for long time now....
To say that anime is just for kids would be like saying movies are just for adults. There is a lot of variety within anime - some titles are for kids (Pokemon) while some titles are aimmed at adults (Cowboy Bebop) and some have universal appeal.
Re:Important note about the Japanese DVD set...
on
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Do note that this is the Japanese set - there is no English sub OR dub available.
DVDs in Japan tend to cost ~2x what they cost here, which is another reason the price seems so high.
Excel Saga dub is an example of the stupidity of ADV's dubbing director...
Excel's Japanese voice is frentic, but for some reason, the director thought that this meant the English VA had to SCREAM ALL HER LINES IN A REEEEALY SQUEEEKY VOICE!!
In Japanese, meantime, at no time does Excel SHOUT her lines, nor is her voice squeaky.
Gah. I'm surprised she survived 4 discs before having to quit lest she permanentaly damage her throat (and career.)
Re:Important note about the Japanese DVD set...
on
Giant Mecha News
·
· Score: 1
Yes, the EVA re-release is coming out in Japan, which means it's R2 and doesn't contain English subtitles.
As for getting ADV/Manga to pickup the re-release....I wouldn't count on it.
Heck, Manga didn't even do the movies right the first time. Why bother with a boxset of botched material?
Well, they're only showing a couple of episodes during their "Giant Robot Week". Why Eva was chosen at all is beyond my reasoning... The first two episodes make it *very* clear that this isn't going to be your average ordinary giant-robot-show...
That said, there are a few episodes I could see them using. The first two episodes would be one guess, though I'm not sure what they'll do about showing Shinji's "robot" bleeding...
If you watch Macross and Robotech's Macross segment, you'll see that there was actually very little removed. Of the three series that make up Robotech, the Macross segment was the least editted.
Southern Cross *bombed* in Japan. It never even finished its first airing, but got cancelled - something that rarely happens. Due to the setting of Southern Cross, it was the most modified of the three series.
Mospeada was only a moderate success in Japan, no where near the mega-hit that Macross was though. From what I've read about Mospeada, it too wasn't modified too much from its original story, other than changes to the characters' names and the whole "Protoculture" thing.
If you think about it, Macek didn't do a half bad job combining the three shows together.
Dude, you're about 10 years too old to be a rugrat.
Yeah, there's a bunch of junior high and high schoolers around Nickel City as well, but when I say rugrats, I *mean* rugrats. Kids who seem to be as young as 4 or 5 who are too short to even see the buttons they're hitting. And since most machines are on free-play, their game never ends...theorhetically... Oh, and you do not want to try to pry a rugrat away from his machine. He'll scream and cry making you look like an oversized bully.
The place has degenerated into an off-hours daycare center for neglected children.
I dunno about you, but I've gone to my friend's house, where there was alcohol, food, and multiplayer video game fun for all - and it cost a heckuva lot less than going to Dave & Busters.
And don't forget that even consoles are now going online, so this isn't something unique to arcades.
Yeah, D&B is fun once in awhile, until you realize that most of the arcade machines aren't maintained well, and $10 on a D&B card just doesn't go very far. Your best bet at D&B is to play the token games and earn enough to win a gaming console or something.
Haven't played Shenmue, so I don't know about Lucky Hit...
Plinko is sort of similar to pachinko though...
A pachinko board is vertical and will have a number of nails in it, similar to the plinko board. There will be a number chutes, targets, etc. on the board. If you get you ball into these chutes/targets/etc. you win more balls.
There's a lever or a wheel with which you can controll the speed of the balls you launch.
Offically, you can only trade balls back in for prizes, ranging from a packet of tissues, to home appliances, etc.
However, if you know what you're doing, you can indirectly convert your winnings back into cash...
Yeah, and you won't see those expensive machines in the arcades either...
At least around here, the only arcades that are left are:
* Dave & Busters - if you convert your credits back into $$$, you'll find you're paying $.50+ for most of their mis-maintained games.
* Nickel City - Cheap old arcade games! Yay. Overrun by rugrats! Boo.
* Putt Putt/go-kart places - A few newer machines, most $.50/game.
* Sony Metereon - $2 to play DDR. No. No thank you.
Arcades as I knew them from the 80s and 90s are dead. I used to pump $10, even $20 into machines, but why do that now? $20 will *buy* you some pretty good games, regardless of what machine you've got at home. And now with online play, there's even less reason to go to the arcades where you could play an online game for $3-7/session...
Newspapers are killing comics. Nothing but non-threatening bland PC-ism jokes run over and over and over again. How many times can you read about Garfield being lazy, or about Cathy panicking about her diet/clothes/schedule/etc.?
True, there *ARE* American comics that are worth reading...but good luck finding them. I also utterly detest the fact that for most of them you're stuck buying comics in 20 page "books" that cost $3-5 each that take me - maybe - 5 minutes to read. At that rate, comics are among the most expensive entertainment on the market.
Give me the graphic novel or collected version. At least I won't blow through it in 5 minutes, and storage is easier.
Webcomics, meanwhile, are also a rapidly growing phenomenon. Freed from iron-clad rules of the newspaper syndicators, and even the rules of paper comics, I think webcomics are how the US comic industry will survive.
Japan has a higher literacy rate than the US - despite their writing system.
Hiragana is taught to kids first, and doesn't contain that many more unique characters than our own 26 letter alphabet. Katakana is simply an alternative phonetic set. Yeah, you're learning more unique characters than you'll need for English or most of the European languages, but big deal.
You can write anything in Japanese with hiragana or katakana. Kanji are borrowed characters from Chinese, and have a few difficulties. First off, most kanji have multiple readings, so even if you know what the character means, you may still "say" it wrong. This means that you're basically stuck just memorizing the character and its readings. Obviously, this becomes easier once you see them in use.
High school seniors are expected to know the basic set of 1500 characters. This is what you will need to be able to read a newspaper as well (as compared to the US where our newspapers are geared towards 8th graders...)
College undergraduates are expected to learn an additional 500-1000 characters, based on their area of study. If you're going for an advanced degree, you can expect another 1 or 2 thousand more characters - again, based on your area of study. I've met Japanese who have studied medicine and know over 5000 characters.
Getting back to comics... There are comics for all different age and interest groups. Comics aimmed at younger readers will include small hiragana characters next to more advanced kanji to help the reader (this writing is called furigana.) However, comics aimmed at older readers, say college-aged or older, will contain *no* furigana unless it's a really rare reading or word.
While it does take some getting used to, I find that I can read much faster in Japanese than I can in English. This is partially due to the use of kanji, which condenses many words down into 1-4 characters.
And, yes, there have been studies conducted on this. People who are fluent in multiple languages were found to be able to read material faster in Japanese or Chinese, than English. One reason is the sheer number of characters each language uses in its writing.
Creative was mostly a waste of time. Since you had a choice of which tech to research (unless you took uncreative - which I would, just to make things interesting again) you could pick the same old tech over and over again...
Sure, there were a few sucky choices, and sometimes I'd have to forego my normal choice in favor of something I needed *right now* (eg. better weapons because I got into a war)
But overall, I'd plow the points I would have put into creative and chose +'s to production and farming.
Offensive spying never worked for me - even when playing with all the +'s, so I just take the maximum penalty, and build a large number of defensive spies.
Problem is, this same old same old strategy got boring... At least in Moo1, the choices would be randomized, with each race having various advantages in certain areas, like the Psilons would tend to get more engine choices, and a larger overall tree. The randomness made things more interesting... I once played a game where no one got anything faster than warp-2 engines. And in a huge galaxy, that meant it took years to get anywhere. I managed to take Orion, and was given warp-4 engines, which allowed me to more quickly decimate my opponents.
The guide data you get from Tivo is more detailed than what you usually get from your local cable provider. In addition to what show is on when, you also get informed of whether the show is a rerun, episode title, summary, etc. With movies you also get major actor/actress and director listings.
While some TV providers' guides are this detailed, most are not - and don't forget that some people don't have cable or satellite so they won't have any guide information to draw from whatsoever.
Furthermore, Tivo has no control over the local providers. I don't know about you, but the TV Guide channel I get is a joke, and crashes regularly. (well, at least the listings don't cycle, but the ad garbage keeps running at the top 3/4ths of the screen...)
If you're only interested in recording a few shows each week, then a PVR is probably overkill. It's easy enough to keep track of one or two shows in the TV Guide and program the VCR accordingly.
However if you're watching more than 10 hours of TV a week then a PVR begins to make more sense.
Since Tivo knows when your shows are on, you don't need to do any scheduling yourself. You simply tell Tivo what you want to watch, and it'll put together a schedule automatically. If a show changes its timeslot, Tivo will detect this, and will rework its schedule of recordings. This really comes in handy when you have multiple shows you wish to watch that are on at conflicting timeslots. Since many shows on cable rerun at a later time or date, you still have a good chance of catching your shows, even if one was recorded at 3am or something.
The point is, you don't care when shows are broadcast. Yes, you could do this with a stack of VCRs and a TV Guide but personally I'd rather not be hassled.
As for why aren't cable companies distributing PVRs, I don't know. All the satellite comapnies offer some sort of PVR solution.
I didn't mean that Tivo-folk and/.-folk have different or incompatible TV habits, only that to the big corporations such data would just confuse them.
If one nielsen house is supposed to represent 100,000 people, what do you think would happen if the studios tried basing their decisions off what Tivo or/. folks watched?
We're not the LCD.
We're not their market.
I once had a survery taker call my house and ask me which network I prefered: ABC, NBC, CBS. When I replied that I hadn't watched anything on those networks for over 10 years, she didn't even bother continuing the survey, but just hung up.
Pity. I was hoping to be able to tell ABC, NBC, and CBS why I wasn't watching their stations...
It aired Friday nights during that awkward summer/fall transition when everyone's either on vacation, or getting re-integrated into school life (eg. parties.)
Fox didn't air the pilot movie which explained who everyone was and what was going on, but instead aired that horrendous episode about the train robbery, which was easily the *worst* episode of the season. I'd heard the pilot movie was supposed to have aired back in December around Christmas (which would have been another brilliant move by Fox...)
Oh yeah, and don't forget about the baseball playoffs, which knocked out a few episodes, depending on where you happen to live.
Officially, Fox says the show is on hiatus until they find a new timeslot for it, but I don't think anyone here would be surprised if Firefly never came back.
If cancelling one of their best rated shows is Sci-Fi's idea of "publicity" they deserve to die.
When Sci-Fi announced they weren't going to pick up Farscape for a 5th season, they not only got a lot of letters (yes, snail mail) from fans, but they also took a lot of flack from the industry who thought that Sci-Fi was essentially telling a large part of its audience to 'just go away.'
If this is some sort of publicity stunt, it's just going to backfire on them. Horribly.
Most of my friends think Farscape has already ended, not realizing that season 4 was only half completed. They've already stopped watching Sci-Fi, and probably won't bother with the new episodes later this month.
In fact, most of the hype about Farscape has come from the fans - not Sci-Fi itself.
Personally I urge folks to stop watching Sci-Fi altogether - and that includes the new Farscape episodes. Sci-Fi has come out and publically stated that they do not care what the fans think. It's also apparent from their upcoming schedules that they care even less about science fiction. In place of Farscape will be yet more "Crossing Over" as well as other shows about audience members dreams and supernatural experiences. Big whoop.
At this rate, the Sci-Fi channel will become the next MTV - a channel that has betrayed its original purpose.
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Well, the cartoon originally aired in Japan in the late 60s/early 70s... This is why the animation seems so "dated."
Even as newer Lupin comics, movies and TV shows were produced, the artist kept the same style.
Why is this offtopic?
The footage from Cliff Hanger is actually from the movie "Lupin III: Cagliostro Castle" available now at your local video hut.
The original dialog was full of Japanese cultural references, not to mention puns galore. Sure, hardcore fans like myself wouldn't mind those left in...but that's not the audience CN is aimming for by putting the show on the air.
While not faithful to the original dialog, the English dub is pretty faithful to the original intent, tone, and to the characters themselves.
Yeah, I know the dialog's been peppered with cultural references that didn't exist when the show was originally created, but the jokes *work*, and sometimes being able to laugh in the right places is more important than a literal translation.
Besides, the DVDs are in stores now, and contain both the original Japanese language with subtitles, as well as the English dub as heard on CN.
Jim Carrey would make a better Zenigata - as long as his comic hijinks are kept in tight check.
As Lupin himself...I dunno. Lupin is a mixture of James Bond and a hopeless letch (like Ataru Moroboshi from Urusei Yatsura.)
I can't see Jim Carrey playing Lupin because he just can't carry "Smooth" and "Suave" off without overdoing it.
Back in college, my roommate and I would come back from long study sessions saying "Once again, I have learned a useless fact..." after seeing Goemon in action.
Well, first off, anime is not a genre, just a medium (animation.)
For me, I've always liked animation but quickly got disappointed in that I only saw it being used as childrens' entertainment. Why couldn't you use animation to do more mature stories in genres I liked - like science fiction?
My big introduction to anime was Robotech. Here was an animated story that dealt with topics and ideas that were geared to someone older than 6!
Again, anime is not a genre. If you list out some movies and genres you enjoy, I'm sure you could find something in anime that would entertain you.
Go to www.cdjapan.co.jp
They're one of the few online Japanese stores that uses reasonably good English, and ships internationally. Their prices tend to be about the best as well (even just considering the prices in yen)
How many people?
I can't give you any recent figures, though back when I was helping to run the anime club back in college circa '95 or so, we were regularly pulling in 400+ college-aged students to our monthly showings... After I graduated, the club got so prominient, it actually started receiving funding directly from the Japanese Studies department, since many of the students taking Japanese were members of the club as well.
When I started going to the club in '90, there were barely 50 members. We were amazed (and downright frightend!) by what a bit of advertising was able to do...
I've been into anime since I was a teenager, and I haven't been a teenager for long time now....
To say that anime is just for kids would be like saying movies are just for adults. There is a lot of variety within anime - some titles are for kids (Pokemon) while some titles are aimmed at adults (Cowboy Bebop) and some have universal appeal.
Do note that this is the Japanese set - there is no English sub OR dub available.
DVDs in Japan tend to cost ~2x what they cost here, which is another reason the price seems so high.
Excel Saga dub is an example of the stupidity of ADV's dubbing director...
Excel's Japanese voice is frentic, but for some reason, the director thought that this meant the English VA had to SCREAM ALL HER LINES IN A REEEEALY SQUEEEKY VOICE!!
In Japanese, meantime, at no time does Excel SHOUT her lines, nor is her voice squeaky.
Gah. I'm surprised she survived 4 discs before having to quit lest she permanentaly damage her throat (and career.)
Yes, the EVA re-release is coming out in Japan, which means it's R2 and doesn't contain English subtitles.
As for getting ADV/Manga to pickup the re-release....I wouldn't count on it.
Heck, Manga didn't even do the movies right the first time. Why bother with a boxset of botched material?
Well, they're only showing a couple of episodes during their "Giant Robot Week". Why Eva was chosen at all is beyond my reasoning... The first two episodes make it *very* clear that this isn't going to be your average ordinary giant-robot-show...
That said, there are a few episodes I could see them using. The first two episodes would be one guess, though I'm not sure what they'll do about showing Shinji's "robot" bleeding...
"removed all the good bits"?
If you watch Macross and Robotech's Macross segment, you'll see that there was actually very little removed. Of the three series that make up Robotech, the Macross segment was the least editted.
Southern Cross *bombed* in Japan. It never even finished its first airing, but got cancelled - something that rarely happens. Due to the setting of Southern Cross, it was the most modified of the three series.
Mospeada was only a moderate success in Japan, no where near the mega-hit that Macross was though. From what I've read about Mospeada, it too wasn't modified too much from its original story, other than changes to the characters' names and the whole "Protoculture" thing.
If you think about it, Macek didn't do a half bad job combining the three shows together.
Dude, you're about 10 years too old to be a rugrat.
Yeah, there's a bunch of junior high and high schoolers around Nickel City as well, but when I say rugrats, I *mean* rugrats. Kids who seem to be as young as 4 or 5 who are too short to even see the buttons they're hitting. And since most machines are on free-play, their game never ends...theorhetically... Oh, and you do not want to try to pry a rugrat away from his machine. He'll scream and cry making you look like an oversized bully.
The place has degenerated into an off-hours daycare center for neglected children.
I liked Grandia. Yes the voices were pretty bad (though, Sue's was good...)
I didn't notice any paralells between Lunar and Grandia, other than both use many of the same cliches...but then again so do most RPGs.
As for going to the PS2, do it. The PS2 is backward compatible to the PS1 and there are a small, but growing, number of PS2 RPGs including:
* Shadow Hearts
* Kingdom Hearts (more of an action-RPG)
* Okage
* Grandia 2 (though the Dreamcast version looks better)
Then there's also Xenosaga, Star Ocean and a new Breath Of Fire title all of which are due out soon or later this year...
I dunno about you, but I've gone to my friend's house, where there was alcohol, food, and multiplayer video game fun for all - and it cost a heckuva lot less than going to Dave & Busters.
And don't forget that even consoles are now going online, so this isn't something unique to arcades.
Yeah, D&B is fun once in awhile, until you realize that most of the arcade machines aren't maintained well, and $10 on a D&B card just doesn't go very far. Your best bet at D&B is to play the token games and earn enough to win a gaming console or something.
Haven't played Shenmue, so I don't know about Lucky Hit...
Plinko is sort of similar to pachinko though...
A pachinko board is vertical and will have a number of nails in it, similar to the plinko board. There will be a number chutes, targets, etc. on the board. If you get you ball into these chutes/targets/etc. you win more balls.
There's a lever or a wheel with which you can controll the speed of the balls you launch.
Offically, you can only trade balls back in for prizes, ranging from a packet of tissues, to home appliances, etc.
However, if you know what you're doing, you can indirectly convert your winnings back into cash...
Yeah, and you won't see those expensive machines in the arcades either...
At least around here, the only arcades that are left are:
* Dave & Busters - if you convert your credits back into $$$, you'll find you're paying $.50+ for most of their mis-maintained games.
* Nickel City - Cheap old arcade games! Yay. Overrun by rugrats! Boo.
* Putt Putt/go-kart places - A few newer machines, most $.50/game.
* Sony Metereon - $2 to play DDR. No. No thank you.
Arcades as I knew them from the 80s and 90s are dead. I used to pump $10, even $20 into machines, but why do that now? $20 will *buy* you some pretty good games, regardless of what machine you've got at home. And now with online play, there's even less reason to go to the arcades where you could play an online game for $3-7/session...
Newspapers are killing comics. Nothing but non-threatening bland PC-ism jokes run over and over and over again. How many times can you read about Garfield being lazy, or about Cathy panicking about her diet/clothes/schedule/etc.?
True, there *ARE* American comics that are worth reading...but good luck finding them. I also utterly detest the fact that for most of them you're stuck buying comics in 20 page "books" that cost $3-5 each that take me - maybe - 5 minutes to read. At that rate, comics are among the most expensive entertainment on the market.
Give me the graphic novel or collected version. At least I won't blow through it in 5 minutes, and storage is easier.
Webcomics, meanwhile, are also a rapidly growing phenomenon. Freed from iron-clad rules of the newspaper syndicators, and even the rules of paper comics, I think webcomics are how the US comic industry will survive.
Japan has a higher literacy rate than the US - despite their writing system.
Hiragana is taught to kids first, and doesn't contain that many more unique characters than our own 26 letter alphabet. Katakana is simply an alternative phonetic set. Yeah, you're learning more unique characters than you'll need for English or most of the European languages, but big deal.
You can write anything in Japanese with hiragana or katakana. Kanji are borrowed characters from Chinese, and have a few difficulties. First off, most kanji have multiple readings, so even if you know what the character means, you may still "say" it wrong. This means that you're basically stuck just memorizing the character and its readings. Obviously, this becomes easier once you see them in use.
High school seniors are expected to know the basic set of 1500 characters. This is what you will need to be able to read a newspaper as well (as compared to the US where our newspapers are geared towards 8th graders...)
College undergraduates are expected to learn an additional 500-1000 characters, based on their area of study. If you're going for an advanced degree, you can expect another 1 or 2 thousand more characters - again, based on your area of study. I've met Japanese who have studied medicine and know over 5000 characters.
Getting back to comics... There are comics for all different age and interest groups. Comics aimmed at younger readers will include small hiragana characters next to more advanced kanji to help the reader (this writing is called furigana.) However, comics aimmed at older readers, say college-aged or older, will contain *no* furigana unless it's a really rare reading or word.
While it does take some getting used to, I find that I can read much faster in Japanese than I can in English. This is partially due to the use of kanji, which condenses many words down into 1-4 characters.
And, yes, there have been studies conducted on this. People who are fluent in multiple languages were found to be able to read material faster in Japanese or Chinese, than English. One reason is the sheer number of characters each language uses in its writing.
Creative was mostly a waste of time. Since you had a choice of which tech to research (unless you took uncreative - which I would, just to make things interesting again) you could pick the same old tech over and over again...
Sure, there were a few sucky choices, and sometimes I'd have to forego my normal choice in favor of something I needed *right now* (eg. better weapons because I got into a war)
But overall, I'd plow the points I would have put into creative and chose +'s to production and farming.
Offensive spying never worked for me - even when playing with all the +'s, so I just take the maximum penalty, and build a large number of defensive spies.
Problem is, this same old same old strategy got boring... At least in Moo1, the choices would be randomized, with each race having various advantages in certain areas, like the Psilons would tend to get more engine choices, and a larger overall tree. The randomness made things more interesting... I once played a game where no one got anything faster than warp-2 engines. And in a huge galaxy, that meant it took years to get anywhere. I managed to take Orion, and was given warp-4 engines, which allowed me to more quickly decimate my opponents.
The guide data you get from Tivo is more detailed than what you usually get from your local cable provider. In addition to what show is on when, you also get informed of whether the show is a rerun, episode title, summary, etc. With movies you also get major actor/actress and director listings.
While some TV providers' guides are this detailed, most are not - and don't forget that some people don't have cable or satellite so they won't have any guide information to draw from whatsoever.
Furthermore, Tivo has no control over the local providers. I don't know about you, but the TV Guide channel I get is a joke, and crashes regularly. (well, at least the listings don't cycle, but the ad garbage keeps running at the top 3/4ths of the screen...)
If you're only interested in recording a few shows each week, then a PVR is probably overkill. It's easy enough to keep track of one or two shows in the TV Guide and program the VCR accordingly.
However if you're watching more than 10 hours of TV a week then a PVR begins to make more sense.
Since Tivo knows when your shows are on, you don't need to do any scheduling yourself. You simply tell Tivo what you want to watch, and it'll put together a schedule automatically. If a show changes its timeslot, Tivo will detect this, and will rework its schedule of recordings. This really comes in handy when you have multiple shows you wish to watch that are on at conflicting timeslots. Since many shows on cable rerun at a later time or date, you still have a good chance of catching your shows, even if one was recorded at 3am or something.
The point is, you don't care when shows are broadcast. Yes, you could do this with a stack of VCRs and a TV Guide but personally I'd rather not be hassled.
As for why aren't cable companies distributing PVRs, I don't know. All the satellite comapnies offer some sort of PVR solution.
I didn't mean that Tivo-folk and /.-folk have different or incompatible TV habits, only that to the big corporations such data would just confuse them.
/. folks watched?
If one nielsen house is supposed to represent 100,000 people, what do you think would happen if the studios tried basing their decisions off what Tivo or
We're not the LCD.
We're not their market.
I once had a survery taker call my house and ask me which network I prefered: ABC, NBC, CBS. When I replied that I hadn't watched anything on those networks for over 10 years, she didn't even bother continuing the survey, but just hung up.
Pity. I was hoping to be able to tell ABC, NBC, and CBS why I wasn't watching their stations...
Firefly was doomed from the start.
It aired Friday nights during that awkward summer/fall transition when everyone's either on vacation, or getting re-integrated into school life (eg. parties.)
Fox didn't air the pilot movie which explained who everyone was and what was going on, but instead aired that horrendous episode about the train robbery, which was easily the *worst* episode of the season. I'd heard the pilot movie was supposed to have aired back in December around Christmas (which would have been another brilliant move by Fox...)
Oh yeah, and don't forget about the baseball playoffs, which knocked out a few episodes, depending on where you happen to live.
Officially, Fox says the show is on hiatus until they find a new timeslot for it, but I don't think anyone here would be surprised if Firefly never came back.
If cancelling one of their best rated shows is Sci-Fi's idea of "publicity" they deserve to die.
When Sci-Fi announced they weren't going to pick up Farscape for a 5th season, they not only got a lot of letters (yes, snail mail) from fans, but they also took a lot of flack from the industry who thought that Sci-Fi was essentially telling a large part of its audience to 'just go away.'
If this is some sort of publicity stunt, it's just going to backfire on them. Horribly.
Most of my friends think Farscape has already ended, not realizing that season 4 was only half completed. They've already stopped watching Sci-Fi, and probably won't bother with the new episodes later this month.
In fact, most of the hype about Farscape has come from the fans - not Sci-Fi itself.
Personally I urge folks to stop watching Sci-Fi altogether - and that includes the new Farscape episodes. Sci-Fi has come out and publically stated that they do not care what the fans think. It's also apparent from their upcoming schedules that they care even less about science fiction. In place of Farscape will be yet more "Crossing Over" as well as other shows about audience members dreams and supernatural experiences. Big whoop.
At this rate, the Sci-Fi channel will become the next MTV - a channel that has betrayed its original purpose.