Tag: Television

Disney Shows Have Gotten Bad and are Poor Examples

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Disney shows have been getting worse and worse over the past decade. A while back, from around the mid-90’s to the mid 2000’s, the “mouse network” had some pretty good shows. They had a bunch of amusing cartoons and a few decent live-action shows. Unfortunately, the cartoons have become all but extinct, and the live-action shows have become really inane and are terrible shows with horrible role models for children.

Not surprisingly, the stars of the shows are the children and the adults in them are supporting cast. The problem is that the children tend to be quite rude and disrespectful towards their elders (parents, teachers, etc.) Moreover, the adults are frequently depicted as being stupid and gullible and easily fooled by the scheming, “clever” children.

In addition to stupid adults, they also have a lot of young characters who are stupid as well. This sets a terrible precedent and teaches children that intelligence is not a good thing to be strived for.

The absolute worst of all has to be Wizards of Waverly Place. Selena Gomez’s character Alex Russo is the most despicable character in television history and no parent should ever allow their children to be exposed to that garbage. In addition, Alex’s brother Max is very stupid.

Another problem with a lot of recent Disney shows is that they have a tendency to treat animals poorly. They frequently make references to animals as products like food or slave labor. There are even instances of animals being hurt or killed and their injuries or deaths being dismissed as unimportant, even laughed off. Disney characters have no qualms about using, hurting, or even killing animals, which is disgusting.

Again, Wizards takes the prize because Alex treats animals very poorly with her magic.

Disney shows are targeted towards impressionable young children. Teaching them to be rude and disrespectful of adults and animals is horrible and Disney should be ashamed. They really should be boycotted and forced to improve (boycotting isn’t a big loss because most of the shows are just awful these days anyway).

Extreme Couponing is Fake

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“Couponing” has become quite popular in the past couple of years. With sites like Groupon, RetailMeNot, and such, as well as shows like Extreme Couponing, using coupons is no longer looked down upon (as though it was such a bad thing in the past).

The problem is that shows like Extreme Couponing where you see “professional couponers” who buy a thousand dollars worth of merchandise and end up paying only a dollar or two are a complete crock and total fake. It is flat-out impossible to do that because companies are neither stupid, nor established yesterday. Pretty much every coupon specifically says that it cannot be combined with any other discount or offer. That means that you cannot get 75% off with an in-store discount, then use a 50% off coupon, and then add a $5 off coupon, and then get $3 back with a mail-in rebate to get a $100 item for $4.50. I really had stretch reality to get even that much of a discount which isn’t that impressive compared to what you see on the show.

There is absolutely no realistic way that these people can get such massive discounts and pay with just change like they do in the shows. Yes, you can occasionally get an item for less thanks to floor-model discounts and mail-in rebates, etc. but nothing like the shows. In all likelihood, the more realistic explanation is that the show’s production company calls ahead and makes arrangements with the store or at least when the store employees see the camera crew, they play along. For all we know, the people in these shows don’t even take the merchandise home and it’s all put back on the shelves after they shoot the scene. Alternately, the producers may pay the difference after they stop filming.

These shows are fake, plain and simple.

Wendy’s coupoons
Like almost all coupons, these cannot be combined, so no, you cannot get a combo meal for $4.

Everything is #1! Yeah right.

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I am so sick of every network and channel constantly calling everything The season’s #1 show, Canada’s favorite new show, The best show on television, The biggest hit on TV, The new #1 hit, and so on. These claims are b.s. for at least two reasons:

  • Don’t tell me what is a good show or not! I’ll decide for myself whether a show is any good and I hate being told by others that something is good, particularly when I already know it is not! I can’t count the number of times I have seen a commercial for a show I hate being called #1. That is incredibly aggravating.

  • How many #1/favorite shows are there‽ How can every show be #1 or the favorite? How can every new show be a hit? The claims they make are statistically and logically ridiculous and garbage.

Don’t Make Stupid Children Stupider

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(Stupider really is a word? Go figure.)

Two shows have recently had episodes that really annoyed me.

On an episode of Hannah Montana, Miley fails her driving test and can’t take it again for a while, so she decides to go back and take it again as Hannah. Did it not occur to her that even if she manages to pass it this time—assuming that the instructor that caused her to fail just hours earlier would suddenly not be there to fail her again—that she would be getting a Hannah Montana license? Did it not occur to her that she would not be able to use it as Miley, and that she could not show it off at school as she was so anxious to do (remember the whole premise of the show is that she keeps her identity as Hannah a secret, even at school). Duh! (Of course her logical failure bit her in the butt that night when a cop pulled her over for forgetting to turn off her turn signal and requested to see her license.)

Soon after, Secret Life of the American Teenager did an episode where Amy and Ben decided to elope, but being minors, had to get fake IDs to do so. Did it not occur to them that their so-called marriage is nothing more than a frace, amounting to no more than a school play? The marriage is not legal in any way since 16-year-old Amy and Ben did not get married, but rather the 40+ year-old people named in their fake IDs did (why didn’t they at least use their own names when they had the IDs created?)

Yes, you can write these episodes because most younger kids are probably not going to realize how dumb it is, but that just makes it worse. By providing little kids with these sorts of scenarios, their logic and reasoning abilities will develop badly.

Don’t make dumb kids dumber.

Why Would You Brag About Being the Worst?

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As if reality shows weren’t bad enough, there’s a couple of Canadian ones called Canada’s Worst Handy Man and Canada’s Worst Driver.

Why on Earth would they make a show to brag about the stupidest people? They are glorifying idiocy—then again, it’s not exactly a new practice: witness all the air-head starlets.

Worse than that they are making being stupid look like a good thing is that the show is based on a faulty premise. It’s illegal for competitors to throw matches and competitions for a reason: because the outcome is not dependent on skill and it is completely predictable. These shows are the same as throwing a game; they have people do bad jobs. It’s pretty much always easier to be bad at something than to be good at it, so how can the viewers have any confidence in the shows at all? How do you know that they really are that bad and not just pretending (which would make the show pretty lame)?

I can suck at carpentry and driving too. Oops, I didn’t mean to saw your arm off or run that kid over, I just suck at it a lot and therefore am the best… so as Stephen Colbert would say, fame and fortune please!

Apple Doesn’t Know When to Quit

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Apple’s use of indie music in their television spots has been quite successful. They present their products (iPods and Macs) as being young, hip, and trendy, while giving some artist (usually a relatively unheard of one) some much needed exposure and thus a “big break”. Most of the indie artists whose songs have been featured in an Apple commercial have done pretty well, particularly that song, getting very high sales, especially on Apple’s own iTunes.

Unfortunately what Apple does not seem to understand is that familiarity breeds contempt. This is especially true with music. While the more you hear a new song, the more you start to like it (voluntarily or not), there comes a point when the more you hear it, the more you hate it. Apple does not get that and has played many of their commercials so many times that you blow past liking the song and get quite sick of hearing it because the novelty wears way off.

Feist got a lot of attention from the Nano video that her song “1,2,3,4” was featured in, but seriously, how many people were sick and tired of hearing it by the time it was finally done? Yael Naim “New Soul” is currently getting the Apple treatment in the new MacBook campaign and like the others is already getting quite irritating.

As a fan of the Fratelli’s album Costello Music, I was quite upset that I was actually getting sick of hearing “Flathead” over and over and over and over and over again.

Apple needs to learn that too much of anything is bad, especially music. They need to make sure to cut the commercial before the song gets annoying and replace it either with a new commercial if possible, or if they don’t have a new product, then at least a new song.

Don’t Beg the Poor To Be Sponsers

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I can’t stand that commercial for the Christian Children’s fund with that old guy with the beard. I despise his accusatory tone that implies that we are bad people unless we sponsor a kid. Worse still, I despise that the commercial runs on basic cable. Why don’t they air it on a premium channel like ShowTime, HBO, or PlayBoy instead? It is like a bum hanging around the unemployment line begging for money. Get lost! If I had money, I wouldn’t be here; go beg at the Mercedes dealership.

Don’t Spit On My Show and Call It New Frosting

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I really hate it when a network advertises “all new episode”s. It would be acceptable if they did it after a break like the Christmas/New Year break, or something, but to do it for each and every episode, or even worse to do it at the beginning of the season is just riddiculus. Those damned promos make it sound as though they are doing us a favor by airing a new episode instead of a rerun or some other crap when actually they must run a new episode, it’s the freaking beginning of the stupid season; airing a new episode isn’t noteworthy, airing a rerun would be! If anything, it displays a picture of the network’s mindset, that they air so much crap and so many reruns, they have to make a big to-do about any new episodes that manage to slip through the cracks.

Then What Do We Need You For?

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Here’s something that you won’t find American networks—or any network run by people with brains—doing.

It’s no secret that Canada is behind many countries in many shows. We get a lot of shows the same time that America gets them, but there are plenty of shows that we get much later, after even non-North American countries (no we’re not still stuck in the 80’s—unfortunately.)

A couple of years ago I was watching an early season two episode of The Shield on Global. After the first act the first commercial break began and I was shocked by the first commercial. It was an advertisement for the DVD box set of season two of The Shield. I could not wrap my mind around it. Why on Earth would they advertise DVDs of the season of the show that they just began airing? Don’t they realize that if the commercial works and their viewer go out and buy them, then they no longer need to watch the show on the network? Unless the money per capita from the ads for the DVD were at least as much as the cumulative revenue of ALL of the ads per capita from that point on to end of the season, then they would be LOSING money. Duh!

Later on Space did the same thing, except worse. In this case it was with Stargate Atlantis. We get most Sci-Fi shows between six months and two years after they air in America. With Stargate Atlantis we got it more than 1½ years later, so imagine my surprise when Space began advertising the season one DVDs (which were just released in America at the time). This was even worse than Global’s blunder. Did they really expect us to watch Atlantis on Space if we get the DVDs? Did they really expect to make any advertising money from the commercials of Atlantis when they finally aired two years later?

[Canadian] networks are quite good at screwing up, but this was a particularly amusing idiotic behavior.

Jeopardy Questions Not Hard, Obscure

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I don’t watch Jeopardy anymore; I got tired of it a year or two ago. This was partly because after Ken left, the excitement was gone, sort of like playing a game where you spend a lot of time building up, then lose and have to start all over again; it’s just not fun anymore.

The main reason however is that I noticed something about the questions. A lot of them are too easy, and the “hard” ones are actually just obscure. Most of the questions that I don’t get aren’t important questions that I should know but don’t, but rather questions that are irrelevant and only a few people in the world would know anyway. For example here’s an admittedly exaggerated, but similar example of such a question:

This woman was my sixth grade teacher.

Who the Hell would know that? I do, my teacher might remember me, and perhaps a classmate or two. Or a closer one:

This was the only animal that Elvis visited the first time he went to the zoo.

Unless that was somehow a noteworthy event like being the trigger for his musical career (I don’t believe it was) or had some other significance that would justify public knowledge, only a few people would know that—assuming they can remember it.

Why on Earth would questions like this be on Jeopardy? Sure they’re “hard” and the contestants will probably not get them, but there’s no purpose to having them. They aren’t knowledge, they are trivia. Trivia isn’t usually appropriate for a show like Jeopardy, it’s more suited to quotes-of-the-day.