“The View From the Phlipside” is a media commentary program airing on WRFA-LP, Jamestown NY. It can be heard Monday through Friday around 7:30 AM. The following are scripts which may not exactly match the aired version of the program. Mostly because the host may suddenly choose to add or subtract words at a moment’s notice. WRFA-LP is not responsible for any such silliness or the opinions expressed. You can listen to a live stream of WRFA or find a podcast of this program at wrfalp.com. Copyright 2013-17 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of January 16, 2017
This Week’s Podcast:
My name is Jay Phillippi and I’ve spent my life in and around the media. TV, radio, the movies and more. I love them, and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View from the Phlipside.
No Beans!
Advertising is a great American art form in my opinion. And at the very pinnacle of that art form is the commercial jingle. A well-crafted jingle can embed itself in your consciousness for years to come. As I’ve noted here before, I’m a little bit of a commercial fanboy. Among the audio recordings I collected over the years was an old audio cassette filled with jingles from the ’50s and ’60s. For reasons that I cannot explain, my child, known affectionately as simply “The Kid”, was fascinated by it. Two decades later, she can still remember the jingles, even though she isn’t even familiar with some of the products!
Those jingles are still lurking in your brain. For example, (I will spare you my singing the jingles), can you hear the tune when I say “Gimme a break, gimme a break, break me off a piece of that…? Kit Kat bar, of course. How about “I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a…” Toys R Us kid. Yep. There’s even a commercial jingle that became a hit song. “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” began life as a Coca-Cola jingle, then had the product mentions pulled out. It became a top ten hit for two different singing groups and sold over a million copies.
So what’s the connection to today’s program? Well, in this case, a jingle got an advertiser in Great Britain in trouble.
Heinz is an international company, and while we may think of baked beans as a classic American food stuff, they are extremely popular over there as well. Last fall, Heinz debuted a new ad, featuring something called “The Can Song”. The song itself is unimportant, except that in the ad it inspires people to do a little freelance drumming on the empty bean can, in time with the music. The cans being so used were empty and that is what caused the problem. In the UK there is an organization called the Advertising Standards Authority, or ASA. They are an independent agency that regulates all advertising, print, broadcast, even Internet ads. Their issue was simple. Children might see the ad, and when they heard the jingle, might try the drumming themselves. Being children they might cut themselves on the edge of the opened bean can. Heinz responded that only the safe surfaces were used in the drumming, but that wasn’t good enough for the ASA. They ordered the ad off the airwaves until it was made safe.
I’ll give them this – the jingle is very catchy.
I guess some people just don’t appreciate art.
(Below is the ad in question)
New Life For Pay Phones
Once upon a time, they were everywhere. They showed up as critical parts of movies and television shows. In fact, where would Superman be without one? I’m talking about public telephones. If you’re more than ten years younger than I am, pay phones are probably something of a dim memory. If you’re twenty years younger than me, then they border on the mythological. Today it’s easier for most of us to find a cell phone in our pocket than it is to find a quarter to call someone who cares.
But once upon a time, they were virtually everywhere. In New York City, as of about year ago, there were still some seven thousand pay phones in various places of the five boroughs. They weren’t being used very often and a lot of them were something of an eyesore. The Big Apple was faced with the challenge of how to bring a concept that dates back to 1889 into the Twenty-First Century.
Thier solution is to turn them into WiFi hotspots. As of December there were free hotspots up and running in all five boroughs of the city. They started coming online last summer, offering free WiFi, phone calls, Internet browsing, even USB ports so you could grab a quick charge if your battery was running down. All for free.
The system is called “LinkNYC”, and generally, it’s been a success so far. The browser function had to be eliminated when people began setting up camp at the kiosks to surf the ‘Net for, um, whatever. The rest of the network has been very popular. Setting the system up was a partnership of companies who did it at no cost to the city. Costs are covered by advertising, and the city has been promised a half a billion dollars in revenue between now and 2026.
As with any public network, there are questions about security. The LinkNYC folks insist that they are watching the security issues very carefully, and no personal information is ever shared.
Assuming that all the potholes in the system get filled, it offers the city the largest public, high-speed network in the world. It’s also a great assist for those moments when you end up in a dead spot for your phone network.
As we move ever deeper into an information-based social and economic model, something like this is probably in the future for most major urban areas. If it can be made economically feasible it offers some interesting possibilities.
Clark Kent is still on his own, however.
Bleeping Movies
Would you use a movie service whose slogan is “Movies for One Bleeping Dollar?”. The answer, I suspect, is that some folks would because the price sounds right and some would not because they find the slogan to be at least a little offensive.
The slogan belongs to a company called VidAngel and, curiously enough, their goal is to make your movie viewing less offensive. Which offends some people. Let’s try to unravel all this.
VidAngel gives you the ability to stream a major motion picture but select which objectionable stuff in the movie they want “sanitized”. Drugs, bad language, naked people, all can be made to disappear. And all for a dollar. I will admit that there are some movies that even step over my rather liberal boundaries. For example, I’ve never heard the level of obscenity passing for dialogue that you’ll hear in the movie “Boondock Saints”. Plenty of people have thresholds of offense much lower than mine, so there is certainly a market for such a service.
The question is – is this legal? According to the folks at Disney, Warner Bros., Twentieth Century Fox, and Lucasfilm say no. And at the moment at least one court is on their side. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers the westernmost part of the nation, has denied a request for a temporary stay of a decision ordering VidAngel to stop. The decision revolves around the interpretation of the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005.
But let’s take a step out and look at the broader picture. Do you really have the right to chop up someone else’s work, just to make it more to your liking? I feel for folks who are looking for movies that don’t carry the seemingly obligatory nude scenes or the dialogue that is peppered with bad words. It can be tough. But the creators, writers, directors and actors, have made specific decisions to tell the story a specific way. Eliminating some of these “objectionable bits” can change the movie, removing powerful pieces of understanding the characters or the plot. At that point, if you don’t enjoy or understand the movie, who do you have to blame?
As an author myself, I would be outraged if someone were making money on versions of my writing that they had chosen to change for their own reasons. The practice isn’t new sadly. It even has a name, “bowdlerizing”, named after an English doctor who decided to clean up Shakespeare back in the 1800’s.
The decision of what is acceptable should always be a personal one. But it should also be one of to see or not to see. VidAngels business plan of making money by altering the works of someone else is just fundamentally wrong.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2017
Theme music for “The View From the Phlipside” and “TVFTP – Podcast” is “Hustle”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0
Stories Are My Life 
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