“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 2013-18 by Jay Phillippi. All Rights Reserved. You like what you see and hear? Drop me a line and we can talk.
Programs from the week of December 30, 2018
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.
New Year Reminder
Here we go into a New Year, and that’s a good time to remind ourselves about staying safe on the internet. That may seem like old news, but the reality is that the scammers keep running their nefarious plots because people keep falling into them.
One of the things that always sets off my warning bells and buzzers is when I get an e-mail notice telling me that it’s time to fix, change or update one of my accounts. More often than not, there is a legitimate reason for it and the notice is coming from the service itself. But all it takes is one slip and I could be struggling with some or all of my personal information being exposed. So my rule of thumb is simple, I NEVER click on the link in the e-mail. In the last two weeks, I have gotten notices from Apple, Google, and E-Bay with various issues that they wanted me to correct. I went directly to my accounts and dealt with them there. Two of them were routine, my Apple ID was locked for some reason and I dealt with that as well. Nice and safe and secure. It’s not paranoia if they are really out to get you. And in the interwebs, there are people out to get us all.
It is important to keep an eye out for the latest attempts as well. The Federal Trade Commission released a warning last week about a new phishing scam that pretends it’s from Netflix. The e-mail claims that there’s an issue with your payment information and that your account is on hold until your correct the issue. All you have to do is click that link, and all can be made well.
Uh, uh, uh!
The folks at the FTC remind us that most phishing scams are easy to spot if you know what you’re looking for. Are the grammar and spelling bad? Do they not use your name, or is it wrong? Beware of international phone numbers for U.S. companies, or word choices that aren’t right either. In the Netflix scam, the bad guys used U.K. spellings for some words rather than the U.S.
The internet can be a grim and gritty place. Curiously, one of the best ways to make sure you enjoy the best of the web is to carry a little bit of healthy suspicion with you at all times.
The Public Domain
You’ve probably heard several stories recently about 1923 and the Public Domain. That’s not a 60’s pop-rock group but an interesting piece of the media puzzle.
It begins with copyright, which are the laws that protect the work of creators. The laws vary from country to country. In the United States any original works of authorship, which are in some tangible form, ranging through music, literature, drama, art or any other intellectual form, published or not, has protection. You need to have permission and might have to pay for the right, to use someone else’s copywritten work. U.S. law on the subject dates back to 1790, based on English law from 1710.
But copyright protection only lasts for so long. Exactly how long that protection lasts is a complicated issue, because Congress has changed the rules several times in the last 50 years. It may be as little as 70 years after the death of the creator, or could stretch as long as 120 years after the creation of “works for hire”. However long the protection lasts, the work eventually moves into the “public domain”. That means that anyone can use it, without permission or fee.
So why doesn’t the creator and/or their heirs retain the rights forever? Because in the end, our culture and our economy benefit from general access to these works.
Let’s take an example. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. (Yes, I’m aware it’s from before the first copyright law, but let’s use it for the sake of the discussion). If this remained in the estate of William Shakespeare in perpetuity, all the works inspired by the story, the ballets, the movies, the books, the songs, et cetera, might not have been created. If the estate decided not to license the use or placed an exorbitant price on the license, those works disappear. Instead, we have an enormous number of works that grew from the original. When I googled the phrase “works based on Romeo and Juliet” it returned 105 pages of titles in plays, films, and ballets.
Beyond that, there is the historical value of being able to copy materials without cost. Because we can’t find the copyright owner of many films from the 1910s and ‘20s we lost most of these “orphan films”. The law prohibited curators and historians from restoring them. Now the original film has disintegrated.
In the end, we all benefit from works moving into the public domain. So we should greet the news that things are leaving copyright again with open arms.
Ranting In Color
Let’s get 2019 off to a proper start! And that means we will kick off the year a proper rant!
My father and I shared a great many things. I look and sound a lot like him. There was a shared love of travel and cooking and the movies. That last category was also the source of one of our most persistent disagreements. I got my love of the movies from the old man. And I love the old movies every bit as much as I do today’s. Of course, many of those “old movies” were the ones that he had grown up watching. And he had watched most of them in black and white.
And that is where the disagreement arose. In the early days of cable television and video recording, some bright young mind discovered the ability to bring color to the black and white world. Now that wasn’t a new concept. Hand tinting photos and even movies went back a century before this wave. But many of the early efforts in the modern day were catastrophes. Colors bled around people or objects, creating “halos”. Plus there were the more famous mistakes, like making Frank Sinatra’s famous blue eyes brown.
And so the question of colorization divided father and son. It may surprise you that he was all in favor of the idea, and I rejected it utterly. I still do.
So I was outraged to discover that the folks at CBS have been colorizing classic television series from their catalog. That includes annual Christmas episodes of “I Love Lucy”. This year they also offered up two episodes of “The Dick Van Dyke Show”. And I am beside myself with anger.
First, because it’s a dumb idea. Here’s something a lot of people don’t know. When shooting in black and white under studio lights, sometimes the colors of the set or costume are altered so that they show up “properly” on film or tape. The original producers paid people to make the show look right, in black and white. So it’s not like you’re going to see the “real” colors of Laura Petri’s capri pants. You’re going to get a guess by the colorizer.
But the most important refutation is put forward by media columnist Adam Buckman, who asks “Is comedy funnier in color?” I can not imagine anyone saying that it is. These shows are all about funny. If it doesn’t improve the show in that manner, then why mess around with them? Whatever flaws they have will not be corrected by adding color.
Call that the View From the Phlipside
Copyright Jay Phillippi, 2018
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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