“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 and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from week of August 27, 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.
Grail Quest
In literature, it would be a “grail quest”. The search for that elusive and legendary object, that will take its protagonist beyond their understanding of their own of their own limitations. It is the ultimate test and requires the ultimate goal. While there is a religious foundation for the phrase, the concept has extended well beyond theology. In the media, a “grail quest” would include things like the search for unpublished stories by J.D. Salinger, or the Beach Boys album “Smile” or Jerry Lewis’s movie “The Day the Clown Cried”.
In the gaming world, you find “Half Life 3”. The long awaited final episode of the legendary first person shooter was announced back in 2007. Fans of the series are still waiting.
The game was an enormous step forward for this kind of video game, offering a much more immersive style of storytelling with greater depth to the story. Over the years, the various versions of the games have sold tens of millions of copies. There are folks in the gaming community who consider the sequel, “Half Life 2” to be the greatest video game ever revered.
But there was always supposed to be a third and final installment. There have been tantalizing teasers over the last decade, including some concept art. But as the years have gone by the folks at Valve, the creators of the game, have said less and less about this elusive final chapter.
Then last week Marc Laidlaw, the lead writer for the Half Life series, published a story called “Epistle Three” on his blog. The story is a thinly veiled telling of the final episode of the video game. He had to be careful of not violating the copyright of Valve while making it clear just what this story was really about. The post showed up right around the time that a non-disclosure agreement apparently expired.
The reaction has been bittersweet. The story outlined was what the fandom had hoped for, but they realize it likely means that the game itself will never be made.
It should be noted that not all grail quests end well. Fans of Harper Lee’s classic American novel “To Kill A Mockingbird” yearned for another book, only to get an unsatisfying result in “Go Set A Watchman”. And hedge fund financier Martin Shkreli managed to fall even further in many people’s opinion when he grasped the holy grail in the form of the Wu Tang Clan’s legendary double album “Once Upon A Time In Shaolin”, only to keep it for himself.
Grail quests can be dangerous undertakings.
A Movie A Day
Between my topics here on the radio program and the hundreds of movie reviews on the ViewFromThePhlipside.com web site, it should be evident to all that I love the movies. From the silents to this summer’s blockbusters I love movies of all ages and styles. Which makes me feel like I have a kindred spirit in Mitch Lowe. Lowe helped found both Netflix and Redbox and now he is the man behind a company called MoviePass.
MoviePass is basically Netflix but for movies in theaters. You join the club and then you can attend a movie every day. When it first launched in 2011 the cost was between thirty and fifty dollars, depending on what market you were in. With average movie ticket prices nationwide running about nine dollars it was a deal. But a week ago or so, they announced they were cutting the membership fee to under ten bucks a month. You can still watch a movie a day, for the price of a single ticket! Your favorite theater needs to be able to deal with e-ticketing, but that’s not a problem in most larger population centers.
That idea, a movie every day, made me all “Homer Simpson thinking of donuts” (SFX). It should come as no surprise that MoviePass’s membership numbers took off. Within the first week, they saw numbers grow by more than one hundred fifty thousand members. New financial backers have jumped in and a stock IPO is being considered.
But it has not been an all Hollywood happy ending kind of story so far. With the huge increase in users, the app has run into some glitches, which the company is trying to fix as fast as possible. Meanwhile, on the business front, AMC, the largest theater chain in the U.S., has pushed back. They have doubts how the company will stay in business. AMC fears that if movie viewers get used to the low price and then MoviePass goes belly up, they may abandon movie theaters altogether.
Which raises the question – how do they make any money in this model? The honest answer is that at the moment, they probably aren’t. The goal is to get a couple million people signed up and then sell the data on what movies are seen and by whom. With a big enough database, that could be decidedly profitable.
AMC is still huddling with their lawyers to see what if anything they can do. They may want to figure this detail in their discussions. MoviePass users are buying concessions at about one hundred twenty-five percent of the average movie goer.
Hey, now I can afford the jumbo popcorn.
Teapot Typhoon
There are plenty of reasons to be annoyed with the Worldwide Sports Leader, ESPN. Beyond the belief by fans of every team in every sport that the network hates their team, you can be upset with the issues concerning sexism and inappropriate behavior by some of the top male stars. You can be upset with the “MTV-ification” of the network, where they seem to be branching out from actually covering sports. What we get instead is program after program of people yelling at each other about the same stories all day long. Since Disney became the corporate overlord at the sports giant, we seem to spend a lot of time with entertainers on plugging whatever they are doing, while adding nothing of substance to a discussion of sports.
Or you can decide to jump on the typhoon in a teapot that erupted last week. ESPN decided to move one of their announcers from one game to another. That’s really what happened here. And it really does fall into the “Move along, nothing to see” category. The reason why it got as much attention as it did was because the announcer’s name is Robert Lee and the game in question was being held in Charlottesville, Virginia. That’s the home of the University of Virginia and where the recent demonstration by neo-Nazis and White Supremacists took place. The demonstrations revolved around a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee.
While the story has largely faded from the national news I can tell you, living down here, there’s still some stuff bubbling around the story. The network decided to talk with their announcer, who is a part-timer who works about a dozen broadcasts a year, about the potential for internet sniping because of the coincidence of the name and the location. After discussion with Lee, it was mutually decided to play it safe and move him to the Youngstown State-Pitt game. End of story, right? Announcers get moved all the time, it was done with his input. No Big Deal.
Until somebody decided to make it one and too many of us, the media consuming public, decided to hop on board for a ride on the outrage train. There is literally no story here. But there are people who would not believe ESPN if they told them that the turf at Boise State was blue. This had to be some horrible plot, it was “political correctness” gone wild, it was politics in sports, it was…I don’t even know.
Here’s what it was. Nothing. But until more of the users of the internet decide to do a little more research and a little less riding on the outrage train, we’ll no doubt suffer through yet another empty tea pot tempest.
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
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