Category: Television & Radio

The Benefits of Bozo

From Slate, Proof that TV doesn’t harm kids. It’s a brief article worth reading but here’s the key finding:

They looked for evidence that greater exposure to television lowered test scores. They found none. After controlling for socioeconomic status, there were no significant test-score differences between kids who lived in cities that got TV earlier as opposed to later, or between kids of pre- and post-TV-age cohorts. Nor did the kids differ significantly in the amount of homework they did, dropout rates, or the wages they eventually made. If anything, the data revealed a small positive uptick in test scores for kids who got to watch more television when they were young.

Thanks to Veronica for the link.

The ‘Public Intellectual’

From AP via Yahoo! News, a report on Jon Stewart’s prep for Oscar night. He’s very busy.

“What we’re hoping is, in my daughter’s first two weeks, she’s not going to remember a whole lot of this,” he says. “So instead of me being there, I just take my deodorant and jam it in her crib. She’ll have the faint smell of me but won’t really know I haven’t been an influence.”
…

But if he’s nervous, he’s not showing it.

“If I had to go out there and surf, that would be a problem,” Stewart says. “But you know, it’s just comedy.”

The Daily Show

The Daily Show covered the Cheney shooting story as only it could, including this:

Rob Corddry: “Jon, tonight the vice president is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. According to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Whittington’s face.”

Crooks and Liars has more quotes and the video from the show.

Chappelle Show

Virginia Heffernan reviews Chappelle’s appearance with James Lipton (Sunday on Bravo). She begins:

Dave Chappelle’s comeback tour has so far included two enigmatic television interviews. The first was that awkward and poetic interview Feb. 3 on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in which he told Ms. Winfrey that the creepy laugh of a white person contributed to his decision to quit “Chappelle’s Show,” walk away from his $50 million television deal and flee to Africa in May 2005.

The second performance comes Sunday on Bravo. It’s a more calculated, more antic but ultimately more satisfying interview with James Lipton on “Inside the Actors Studio.” The special is two hours long, and you may wish it were four. These simple showdowns — minimalist two-person plays, really — have become high art on television lately, and watching Mr. Chappelle square off with the wonderful prig-buffoon Mr. Lipton, it’s possible to conclude (as Mr. Chappelle himself does, half in earnest) that the two men should take their show on the road.

Mr. Chappelle tells a student on the program tonight that an early influence on him was Bugs Bunny, and you can see what he means. At every second, he seems to have available to him a much wider range of physical choices even than most slapstick comedians. He lurches, leaps, glares, crumples, slumps, mopes, gloats, blurts, retreats, beams.

NewMexiKen isn’t getting cable for the time being. Someone please TiVo this for me.

Disney Loses a Voice, Pulls Rabbit Out of NBC’s Hat

OswaldIn the first known swap of a primo sportscaster for a geriatric cartoon critter, Walt Disney Co. is trading ABC’s Al Michaels to NBC for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

Oswald who?

It turns out the big-eared bunny was one of Walt Disney’s first animated characters, a star in his own right before Mickey Mouse was even a gleam in his creator’s eye. But Disney lost the rabbit after he found out that Universal Studios, now part of NBC Universal, owned the rights to develop the character.

Now Oswald will be returning to Disney, it was announced Thursday. In exchange for the rabbit and other concessions, ABC parent Disney agreed to let Michaels, the longtime voice of Monday Night Football, jump to NBC Universal’s NBC network, where he will remain teamed with partner John Madden.

Los Angeles Times

A billion people watching

Not on this planet. Oscarbeat by Steve Pond takes a serious look at the numbers. Two excerpts:

In the current issue of Sports Illustrated, columnist Steve Rushin nicely dismantles the billion figure as it applies to the Super Bowl. It turns out a media research firm measured the worldwide audience for last year’s game and came up with a figure of 93 million, only about 2 million of them from outside North America.

The U.S. audience for the Oscars was 42.1 million last year, though it’s been significantly higher in years past. In the rest of the world, the telecast begins at inconvenient hours (5:00 p.m. in Los Angeles is 1:00 a.m. in England) or tape-delayed and presented in an edited form after the winners are already known.

The Lone Ranger rides again

The radio program The Lone Ranger debuted on WXYZ radio, Detroit, on this date in 1933. The show became so popular it was one of the reasons why several stations linked together to share programming on what became the Mutual Broadcasting System.

Several characteristics were unique and central to the premise of this western, and the initial episode which explained the legend was occasionally repeated so young viewers would under-stand how the hero gained his name and why he wore a mask. The Lone Ranger was one of six Texas Rangers who were ambushed while chasing a gang of outlaws led by Butch Cavendish. After the battle, one “lone ranger” survived, and was discovered by Tonto, a Native American who recognized the survivor as John Reid, the man who had saved his life earlier. Tonto thereafter referred to the ranger as “kemo sabe,” which is translated as “trusty scout.” After Tonto helped him regain his strength, the ranger vowed to hide his identity from Cavendish and to dedicate his life to “making the West a decent place to live.” He and Tonto dug an extra grave to fool Cavendish into believing all six rangers had died, and the ranger donned a mask to protect his identity as the single surviving ranger. Only Tonto knows who he is … the Lone Ranger. After he and Tonto saved a silver-white stallion from being gored by a buffalo, they nursed the horse back to health and set him free. The horse followed them and the Lone Ranger decided to adopt him and give him the name Silver. Shortly thereafter, the Lone Ranger and Tonto encountered a man who, it turns out, has been set up to take the blame for murders committed by Cavendish. They established him as caretaker in an abandoned silver mine, where he produced silver bullets for the Lone Ranger. Even after the Cavendish gang was captured, the Lone Ranger decided to keep his identity a secret. Near the end of this and many future episodes, someone asks about the identity of the masked man. The typical response: “I don’t rightly know his real name, but I’ve heard him called… the Lone Ranger.”
— From the Encylopedia of Television

The show remained on radio for 23 years.

“A fiery horse with the speed of light! A cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Hi-Yo, Silver!’ The Lone Ranger!”

Some thoughts while watching Seattle win

Hurrah for the Seahawks for not pouring Gatorade on their winning coach. It’s a tradition that is old and tired and trite.

Baseball or football, sportscaster Joe Buck never knew a stat or piece of trivia his mouth couldn’t use,

Coaches chewing gum with their mouth open deserve to lose.

The Peyton Manning commercial is one of the best ads ever.

The War That Made America

Virginia Heffernan reviews the PBS four-part edutainment series on the French and Indian War that debuts this evening. An excerpt:

She [co-executive producer Laura Fisher] has set out to render in lavish particulars the story of the strange war between the French and British empires for control of the Ohio River Valley in the 1750’s and 60’s. The war was triangulated: American Indians, for whom the valley was a homeland, played the empires against each other, eventually tipping the balance of power in favor of the British. The Indians’ strategy, diplomacy and unorthodox military tactics are the chief focus of this program, which attends closely to their considerable role in the war. (Graham Greene, the actor and Oneida Indian whose ancestors fought in the war, serves as narrator.)

Update: The first two hours (of four) were shown January 18th (remainder January 25th). NewMexiKen watched and it was good, though somewhat slow-paced. Greene’s narration explains most of what is happening in a useful but not burdensome way. The Indian role and agenda is demonstrated more thoroughly than ever before in a production of this type.

NewMexiKen assumes (but has no documentation) that I may well have had ancestors fighting for both the English and French sides.

One advantage

… of living so close to the mountains is that I can see all the Albuquerque radio/TV transmission towers from my living room. This past weekend, with just an old 99¢ indoor bow-tie antenna, I was able to program my HDTV to get all the network stations. And in Albuquerque Comcast doesn’t even have HD feeds for CBS, WB or UPN.

I’m now thinking all I really need are the networks (for the NFL playoffs) and the several PBS feeds (for when I want to veg but still feel good about my intellectual interests). I can cut the cord (and the cable bill) — even if I will have to pay more for Internet.

Until, that is, The Sopranos return to HBO on March 12.

Whoa, Nellie!

Since I firmly believe Marv Albert should do every big NBA game, Pat Summerall every big NFL game and Keith Jackson every big college football game, no matter how old they are, and only because it feels like a bigger game when any of them is involved, I feel totally comfortable saying this: Listening to Jackson is like driving with my mother at night. In other words, maybe he can’t really see anymore, and he might drive over a few curbs, and maybe he’ll even send a pedestrian diving behind a parking meter … but it’s always exciting, and you always get home safely in the end.

Bill Simmons at ESPN.com, in a live-blogging the Rose Bowl column with multiple laugh-out-loud lines.

If you like our football team, you’ll love our chem labs full of Asian students

A fascinating and amusing report on Those Weird College Ads from Mike DeBonis at Slate. He begins:

The 56 universities represented in this year’s bowlapalooza also have the chance to sell themselves to a national audience.

And no, they don’t let their football teams speak for themselves. America’s colleges and universities try to make an impression with “institutional spots”—trade parlance for the promotional television commercials they use to sell themselves. The ads typically run for 30 seconds during halftime. As state-school spokespersons are quick to point out, colleges don’t pay for the airtime—the slots are provided at no cost under most college-football television contracts.

The standard mise-en-scène of the institutional spot will be familiar to any dedicated college-sports watcher: campus greenery, one-on-one pedagogy, chemistry labs, black gowns and mortarboards, and laughing/hugging students of as many colors as possible.

And the award for hard-to-beat:

The season’s most memorable institutional spot won’t be playing during a bowl game. Notre Dame will introduce a new ad for the Fiesta Bowl, but the school will have a tough time encapsulating the smug Golden Domer attitude any better than it does in “Candle.” A girl lights candles at her church, ostensibly for many years, until a thick letter arrives from the Notre Dame admissions office. A glance to the skies confirms just who’s responsible for her shot at a “higher education.” Prayer for personal triumph: It’s not just for end zone celebrations anymore.

It’s show time

An interesting report on bowl games and television ratings from Sam Walker at WSJ.com . It begins:

As college football’s bowl season begins in earnest, it’s time to have a look at the latest rankings. The nation’s top team isn’t USC, it’s the Oregon Ducks. Notre Dame isn’t as strong as it seems, Texas is a big disappointment and West Virginia is a doormat.

We aren’t talking about their performances on the football field, of course. This ranking is a measure of something that’s much less obvious to the public but just as significant to these schools in the long run: how many people watch their bowl games on television.

Link via The Sports Economist.

Edge of America

The subject of modern Native American life is largely untapped, and any number of interesting films might have been made about it, especially now that casinos have brought new revenue and competing ideologies to some reservations. It is a shame that the producers instead chose to make a film concluding with the wisdom, “The basketball is round, like Mother Earth.”

From Ginia Bellafante in a The New York Times review of the Showtime movie Edge of America. The film is about an African-American coach and an American Indian girls high school basketball team.