Old’s Cool – Project Brief 4: Work in Progress Report #2
Adrian, Cody and I have set out to create a series of comedic satirical videos in the vein of Adult Swim content. I have just gotten over a cold which placed us behind schedule but I have just written a couple of mock advertisements which we will film within the next couple of days. The two ads I wrote centre on a time traveller coming from the year 2017 all the way to the 1980’s to tell a random citizen about the “wonders of the internet and world’s most popular social media website, Facebook”. Playing up the 80’s C-Grade late night television spots, the ad is purposely undercooked with bad editing and a half-baked idea. The premise for the skit does not hold up under much scrutiny, which will make it funnier to the viewer and satirise the 80’s aesthetic.
The centre-piece of our video are the talk show segments which will highly exaggerate motifs and premises common in the era. In aiming for funny content, the crux of these scenes hone in on nonsensical antics to highlight the evolution of the talk show and television as a whole. “Since 1951, when the first TV talk show was aired on American WJZ-TV, this cultural phenomenon has gained an astronomic number of supporters and probably an equally large number of opponents all over the globe” (Piotrowicz, 2013, pg. 609). Beginning as discussion panels focused on the debate over crucial points concerning every facet of American life, it has evolved considerable since then. The genre is so familiar to people from the Western world that the sub-genre of satiric talk shows has taken on a life of its own through programs such as The Eric Andre Show and Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, both of these particular spoof shows aired on Adult Swim. This is just a microcosm of the genre’s evolution as a programming block that only airs once Cartoon Network’s target audience of children between the ages of seven and fifteen have gone to sleep, hosts programs with dedicated audiences based on a premise which is making fun of another genre.
Audiences have evolved from the mindset established by old media principles. I explored this development during Project Brief 2 as I researched how media has narrowed its focus to examine its audience as individuals instead of a single minded mass of consumers. This is why we wanted to include a segment of our project focusing on how the past would view the concept of online social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter. One of the most intriguing elements of an interactive social media application “is the degree to which such environments allow individual user feedback to affect and be incorporated into the stream of presented information” (Southwell & Lee, 2004, pg. 645). With our final project, Adrian, Cody and I have written sketches that will explore these ideas, while also being entirely ridiculous.
Bibliography
Piotrowicz, Magdalena (2013) ‘American TV Talk Shows as Sicko Circuses of the 21st Century, International Journal of Arts & Sciences, vol. 6(3), pp. 609-625
Southwell, Brian & Lee, Mira (2004) ‘A Pitfall of New Media? User Controls Exacerbate Editing Effects on Memory’, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 81(3), pp. 643 – 656
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