Archive for February, 2008
Flying Classrooms in the Midwest: The MPATI’s Experiment in Regional Educational Television
Allison Perlman, Penn State University - Erie — February 28th, 2008|
The Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction (MPATI) in some ways seems like an odd footnote in the history of American television. Like many educational broadcasters of the 1950s and 1960s, the founders of the MPATI imagined in television an extraordinary educational tool that could remedy a perceived crisis in education, in which there were far too few qualified teachers in classrooms and far too many pupils enrolled for educational systems to handle coupled with a profound fear of [...]
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Baseball *Is* All It’s Quacked Up To Be
Doug Battema, Assistant Professor of Communication, Western New England College — February 27th, 2008|
Inning Seven of Ken Burns’ “Baseball” argues that major socioeconomic changes in the 1950s – particularly the advent of suburbia, “car culture,” and television – caused the demise of local independent amateur, semi-pro, and minor baseball leagues throughout the U.S. Baseball fans, Burns’ narrative suggests, began to forego the communal experience of the urban ballpark in favor of the isolated consumption of major-league baseball telecasts in the living room or den.
In this li [...]
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Burgundy Histories? WEWS-TV “Catch 5!” 1970s promo
Mark Williams, Dartmouth College — February 26th, 2008|
Surfing for material related to this entry, I came across this delightfully antiquated object from local television past: a classic promo (“Catch 5!”) from the 1970s, in this instance for WEWS channel 5 in Cleveland. As suggested on the YouTube post, it seamlessly pre-figures the aesthetic of the funny and silly Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004). Clearly this is part of the allure that has drawn some 45,000 views over the past year.
The bouncy iterative tune, variety show c [...]
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Revisiting Regionalism: Place-ing the Prime Time Past
Victoria E. Johnson, University of California — Irvine — February 25th, 2008|
Through the 1970s, academic considerations of TV typically defined the medium negatively, theorizing it according to what it was not. Specifically, theories of TV that emerged from art, architecture, film, theater, and literary studies in this period conceptualized TV as not art, not public, not “masculine” or spectatorial, not interactive, not literate, and not market-transcendent. The Rockford Files (NBC, 1974-1980, Universal TV/Cherokee Productions) is one of several series airing contemp [...]
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Guts Don’t Come Cheap in the Cinématheque, Pal: Guilt, Pleasure, and America’s Funniest Home Videos
Jeremy Butler, University of Alabama — February 22nd, 2008|
As part of Film Comment’s guilty pleasures series, scriptwriter David Newman confessed, "I’m ASHAMED of [these films]. I KNOW they stink. And still I love them. Do you know what it takes to admit that in public? Guts don’t come cheap in the cinématheque, pal."
Guts are not inexpensive in the télétheque, either. And yet, when In Media Res called for confessions of guilty television pleasures I knew I had to step forward and say, "I watch America's Funniest Home Videos and I laugh unti [...]
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A Demonic Ménage à Trois: Audience Participation and Bedroom Politics in Hex
Sarah Kremen-Hicks, Independent Scholar — February 21st, 2008|
Did you feel that? The disconcerting sensation of being pulled through the fourth wall? You haven’t been invited into the scene – you’ve been abducted – and here you are, sharing drinks and sexual innuendo. Sultry vocals and BDSM set dressing complete the mood: this isn’t a place where nice boys meet nice girls to bring home to mother. This is Hex, Britain’s sexier answer to Buffy: she’s possessed and he’s a demon; what’s your excuse for hanging out in this bar, you naughty [...]
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Transgression, Confession, and Ying Yang Twins’s “Wait (The Whisper Song)”
Michael Z. Newman, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, Dept. of Journalism and Mass Communication — February 20th, 2008|
Owning up to a guilty pleasure is a performance of confession to cultural sin, but the sinner seeks benefits other than absolution. Calling the pleasure guilty validates participation in the ritual of taste; now liking something bad doesn’t indicate failure to recognize criteria of quality and social acceptability but affirms them. Advertising a guilty pleasure can be a way flaunting status, as only those already in possession of cultural capital can risk some on a guilty pleasure. And tag [...]
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Mothers and Daughters: Watching The Gilmore Girls
Barbara Selznick, School of Media Arts, University of Arizona — February 19th, 2008|
I wait until late in the semester to tell my students that I was a loyal viewer of The Gilmore Girls. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I like this show about the strong relationship between a single mother and her self-sufficient, smart, determined daughter. My feelings about The Gilmore Girls may be partly based on its genre. The program was a serialized melodrama detailing the characters’ personal lives. The Gilmore Girls, in many ways, epitomizes the often-denigrated women’s pr [...]
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Carl Sagan’s Contact
Dan Leopard, Saint Mary’s College — February 17th, 2008|
Following my initial viewing of Robert Zemeckis’s film Contact, adapted from a novel by populist Astronomer Carl Sagan, I left the theater stunned by its awfulness. The film provides a constant drip of pathos, a slew of romantic notions about science, and a terrible performance by Matthew McConaughey.
But after repeated viewings on cable, Contact has become one of my favorite films. McConaughey still sickens, but the scenes depicting Ellie’s travel through an intricate circuit of wormhol [...]
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What Role for Government TV in Community Life?
Jeffrey P. Jones, Associate Professor Department of Communication & Theatre Arts Old Dominion University — February 29th, 2008