Search This Blog

Translate

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Talking Over Credits

It's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time:

You listen to the radio and the moron hosting the "show" keeps talking over the intro to the song.  And you sit in the car yelling , "Shut up!" to the radio moron.  Of course, they don't. They keep talking right up until the lyrics start.

Is the first part of the song not really part of the song!?   I would hate to see what they would do if they hosted a classical music hour!

Then, TV adopted something similar for rerun, syndated shows:

You're watching the show and as it ends, it is shrunk to 1/2 the screen size, OR LESS, and the new show is shown on the other 1/2 of the screen...OR MORE.

SERIOUSLY!?  Is this Bloomberg TV!?

Then there's the 10x speed PLUS shrinking of the credits for movies.

How can a person read those?!

I've never particularly enjoyed watching the credits, but sometimes you do want to know where something was filmed or what the name of a song was, or you think you recognize the actress but don't remember her name...

SO YOU WAIT FOR THE CREDITS.

Only you can't READ them.

Netflix has recently adopted something similar, so, while I'm watching every episode of Frasier, I have to keep my hand near the remote to re-expand the shrunk credits to watch the rest of the show. (If you've never seen Frasier, you are really missing something. Watch it.  They've got outtakes or vignettes during the credits).  In fact, Netflix has gotten so bad about it, that if you're watching a series, they have this autoplay feature which will start the next show AS THE CREDITS FINISH FOR THE OLD ONE.  So, if you don't re-expand the window, you can't watch the finish the show you're on, because Netflix has already started spooling up the next one in queue.

Honestly, I don't know how they get away with it.  I tried looking up the rules for displaying the credits for shows and movies, but I couldn't find them online.  It just seems that if there is a rule that they need to show the credits at the end of the show, like it seems there IS, then it seems that they're not really honoring the spirit of the law by minimizing them to less than 4 pt font, or speeding them by like tail banner on a supersonic jet...or by cutting them off just to queue up the next episode.



No comments:

Post a Comment