EDITORIAL: They're Just Listings, Dammit (3/20/98)
Today, my fickle finger of wrath finds itself pointing at the people in marketing and advertising. I believe it was Bill Hicks that suggested all people in those fields kill themselves now. I'm not that extreme (and this particular wording will seem infinitely clever in about 15 seconds), but let's face it, a bunch of 35-40 year old middle class white guys deciding what they think we'll want to hear to make us buy things is probably not such a good idea.And now, the same people that brought us Snap, Crackle and Pop rapping and the thrice-damned dubba song continue to try to shove "extreme" down our throats until we can't stand any more. Well stand back, 'cause I'm ready to spew.
Forget the traditional targets, Mountain Dew, Surge, Sega, etc. You want to know how I know it's gone too far? The Prevue Channel. The Prevue Channel, for goodness' sake, is telling -me- that I might not be able to handle their new makeover. (You all know what the Prevue Channel is, right? It's the channel with the TV listings that scroll just slowly enough to annoy the living crud out of anyone above a third grade reading level.)
TV's are exploding, people are snapping, climbing clock towers with guns, all because the new Prevue Channel is just too intense, too EXTREEEEEEEME for them. Right. And four days of computer generated TV listings just flew out of my ass.
Being a fairly frequent peruser of the Prevue Channel, I hastened over to Paragon Cable Channel 36 to see what the ruckus was about. A new typeface, perhaps? Perhaps the staid black background has been replaced by animated backgrounds? How extreme could it be? Could I handle it? Turns out I could. Sort of.
Normally, the Prevue Channel shows 5-6 lines of scrolling listings on the bottom, and commercials on the top. About once every ten minutes, the human or machine running the thing screws up, and shows two commercials on the top with no sound, instead of one commercial on half of the top, text on the other half of the top, and sound.
Now, with the NEW Prevue Channel, every fifteen minutes the 6 lines of useful information becomes three lines, and we're "treated" to a few minutes of "news", the likes of which hasn't been seen since those sad pap-filled video feeds that went into the TV's at grocery store registers.
That's it. They still screw up the commercials at least three times an hour. That's the big change. That's what they marketed like it was a cross between the Second Coming and a bad episode of the X-Files. Nevermind that all they did was, in effect, double your chances of just missing the channel you wanted to find out about. They're selling it. And some people are actually going to buy it.
