I still remember when Discovery Channel was that place where there were underwater photography documentaries and other nature shows on all day every day. :chomsky-yes-honey:
I remember when I watched Walking with Cavemen on Discovery and that most of their content was education oriented. I also remember the endless Mythbusters reruns and the gradual shift of Mythbusters from wacky experiments to more and more explosives. I also remember how they released doctored documentaries cashing in their legitimacy as "educational" to sell conspiracy theories about the government covering up the existence of mermaids being a link in human evolution as part of the debunked aquatic ape theory or giving Youtube content farms their bread and butter through reigniting the public interest in believing that the Megalodon is still alive. Discovery and their subsidiaries have almost always portrayed a boys club mentality in the content they produce like monster hunting shows where some dudes bumble in the woods looking for Bigfoot.
In the US animation is considered for children and as a result gets barely any respect despite the fact that it's grueling and requires so much from creators. Either you're a weird adult that watches "childish cartoons" or you're considered mature and you watch the same looking live action shit for the rest of your life.
Similarly, History Channel gradually became the WW2 channel then specifically the Hitler channel then became Bible code woo and discrediting non-white ancient architects with alien woo channel, then it became somehow even chuddier after that.
It's been an interesting, but somehow natural, evolution given the audience
Even as a kid I was annoyed about Mythbusters shift towards more and more explosions. I liked the occasional explosion but I was far more interested in the weird specific experiments, like hangover cures, or “can you bury a body under concrete,” or when they buried one of them alive. That shit ruled.
Number must always go up. If well-produced documentarian can't make number go up anymore, they get axed.
Filming 2 dudes in the woods is cheaper, thus bigger dividends for the shareholders. Number go up, world more gooder.
National Geographic magazine went through this exact process, but the transition was much faster. Very soon after they were bought by a Murdoch owned org it became cover stories about the bible. Over and over and over.
I cancelled my subscription within like a year :deeper-sadness:
Next time you're at a grocery store checkout line look for it. There's a 90% chance the cover is about Christianity or other type of schlock. It used to be high quality photo journalism :'(
One of the editions before the sale was about evolution with the title "Was Darwin wrong?" And it was bait! The first word in the article was NO. They'd never do that now.
Adam Savage is still creating content on YT and it is quite good for me sometimes, probably the only :lmayo: that I genuinuely believe to be a "nice guy" lib. He still captures that building portion of Mythbusters.
But you are right, I was a huge mythbusters fan when I was younger too and the decline in quality you talk about is something they were all aware, remember the RFID controversy too, Adam admitted quite early on that certain topics were off limits.
Wait, aquatic ape is debunked? I thought it was a decent explanation for the lack of hair and prune-y waterlogged-fingers...
There's no real evidence that points us towards believing we had any sort of aquatic heritage. The lack of fur is more because thermoregulation and the need for sweat to evaporate from the body. Can't exactly sweat a bunch with a lot of fur and see the cooling effects.
Back in 2005 it was pretty much no longer a consideration for professional anthropologists. Are the adaptations beneficial for going into the water? Sure. But are they the driving factor for human evolution? I don't think so and the rest of the scientific community seems to think that as well based off the evidence that we are aware of.
All of the IP law, corporate ownership bullshit is so stupid. There is no reason for "lost" albums, shows, episodes, seasons, etc. It's so lame that artists make all sorts of things but they aren't the ones in control of how it's its released or distributed. A "lost" project is almost always some behind the scenes nonsesnse with the studio rather than the artist/producers not wanting to release something. It's even more lame that MEGACORPS can just throw entire projects in the dumpster but still seat on the "rights" until "market conditions" make it favorable for them to something with them. So many of thse shows are going to be thrown into the digital shadow realm, where you won't find any record of them on any "offical" channels.
They purge almost all reference to these shows just kinda cuz they can. Digital Piracy is the closest thing we have to digital preservation of media, and that's yet another reason as to why Piracy is almost a must in the current age.
It's just so lame that producers of things have zero ownership of things. Animation is also super labor intensive and requires a lot of special skills and developed talents, and these studios just want to copy-paste derivatives of Rick and Morty or Family Guy art-style. Art/Media under capitalism sucks so much.
I think you are underestimating how many brutal thankless jobs there are in the world.
I spend 12 hours a day in the cartoon mines. Every day I go down there and risk my life to draw hands on your precious hentai characters. If you want to play PARADISE CLEANING - pregnant ogre - or Orc Massage or even Crypto Girls [18+] - SEXCoin, you thank the fucking cartoon miner who drew those cartoons with tears in your eyes. We built all the hentai around you with our blood.
Right but that is still nothing to the completely inhumane conditions a lot of workers are forced to work in around the world. I don't disagree that it is labour intensive but it is still nowhere near the level of the most brutal and thankless jobs in the world.
While it is right to highlight the working conditions in mines, the 12-16 hour shifts of hand drawn cartoons on up to 6 days per week (plus sometimes crunch times) in the outsourced animation industry are body breaking. Luckily the situations do shift for most locations to slightly better conditions.
However we don't have to leave South Korea, Singapore or Japan to see a differentiation in working conditions which might be labeled "better"; but that "better" is working on your bed with tools for digital drawing which cost multiple hundred dollars which still fuck up your wrist and body and also leave you cut off from workers in similar conditions. Someone I know went from SK to Germany to escape the 70+ hour weeks in a small shared apartment room doing that to wait tables and maybe have her wrist regenerate enough that she might be able to draw again (for fun this time).
it's a well worn bit, but i remember TLC before it was acquired by Discovery Channel in the 1990s, when it was called The Learning Channel in the 1980s and focused almost exclusively on educational/instructional content.
The channel mostly featured documentary content pertaining to nature, science, history, current events, medicine, technology, cooking, home improvement, and other information-based topics. These are often agreed to have been more focused, more technical, and of a more academic nature than the content that was being broadcast at the time on its eventual rival, The Discovery Channel, which launched in 1985. The Learning Channel was geared toward an inquisitive and narrow audience during this time, and had modest ratings. An exception to this viewership commonality was Captain's Log (produced and hosted by Mark Graves, a.k.a. Captain Mark Gray), a weekly primetime boating safety series that aired from 1987 to 1990.
it's even more depressing to go back further and see that the channel was literally started with federal funding through the Appalachian Regional Commission...
TLC's history traces to the 1972 formation of the Appalachian Educational Satellite Project (AESP), a distance education project formed by the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), in participation with the Education Satellite Communication Demonstration (ESCD), a partnership with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and NASA intended to transmit instructional, career and health programming via satellite to provide televised educational material to public schools and universities in the Appalachian region. ARC submitted a proposal to participate in the ESCD and use the ATS-6 communications satellite (launched into orbit in 1974) to disseminate "career education" programming to teachers at no cost; the consortium set up 15 earth station receiver sites across eight states in conjunction with local education service agencies.
it's during the 80s when it was, as many things ARC funded and controlled, cheaply turned over to a private for-profit corporation that could dress it up as an asset for its major competitor to buyout and turn into a giant piece of shit, which would go on to make Honey Boo Boo and Mama June household names.
from the lofty goals of improving the lives of underserved communities to profiting from those same communities immiseration, this is the story arc of every ARC project.
It's staggering and painful to realize just how much we've lost due to neoliberalism and Reaganomics. This country has always sucked but it used to actually be a country that did good things sometimes. It's been so ruthlessly hollowed out over the last 30 or 40 years, and if you weren't there to watch it happen things in the past just seem unreal. It's like when people say that if you tried to propose libraries today people would think you're insane. Can you imagine non-commercial government funded educational programming in 2022?
Oh god please don't let this fuck the Venture Bros movie
Listen, I've been watching the Venture Bros for seven seasons across thirty years. I know how this goes
It's messed up to think an entire industry has been made out of turning actual, living people into spectacle (albeit with some scripting), especially with the presented subject matter. And not just TLC. Cops weirded me out even when I was a dumb kid hopped up on Copaganda.
think it needs to be a :sicko-wistful: pirating, because this is still a bummer
yeah, but it's a bummer when companies try and destroy art, even when they fail
On one hand, they are going to wrap up Venture Bros, Metalacolypse, and Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
On the other hand, I am salty af they cancelled Close Enough.
