Episode 390: Writers' Strike
From Accct Wiki
Something I mentioned back at Thoughtnami a few weeks ago kind of affected me. The modern era of entertainment is on the cusp of ending. The end of broadcast television as many generations knew it will end in a little over a year. The rules for media practices are also being rewritten even as we speak as the vessels for our entertainment are no longer confined to radio, television, and movie theaters. The mediums of entertainment will no longer be restricted to tapes, CDs, or even DVDs. We've gotten to the point that we could carry gigabytes of storage space in our pockets and have terrabytes of storage in our homes. When I started The X Bridge a decade ago, I created it with a machine that only had a 1 GB hard drive. Now, I have a 1 GB compact flash media card smaller than my thumb in a small space in my digital minicam. The whole purpose of the Writers Strike is that the writers and producers know what's on the horizon while the rest of us are just now figuring it out. We should have known though. We've become a generation of tubeheads creating, uploading, viewing, and criticizing all sorts of video content on sites like YouTube, Google Video (by the way, am I wrong for asking why both services continue to co-exist? It's like if Coca-Cola bought Pepsi and continued to sell Tropicana and Minute Maid orange juce), MSN Video, and other video-sharing sites "cool kids" know about. We've become a generation of podheads with white cords hanging down our necks buying, ripping, stealing, listening to, and watching music and video. Strangely, this new era has been in the works for a good while, but a lot of us only paid attention to other things that seem trivial by today's standards.
The whole migration to broadband has created generations of channels that will be the basis and platforms for the medium of the new era. The first generation of channels were essentially spinoffs of brands already known to the general public. You know them, the broadband channels with the cool-sounding-but-not-really names like Overdrive, Motherload, V-Spot, Fix, and Jetstream.
The second generation of channels aren't owned by major companies and are driven by creative minds, either behind the scenes, in front of the camera, or flipping the bills. Created by familiar voices, they are the new media companies that were the first to challenge the system of the old media rule. Some succeeded. A lot failed, primarily because they try to emulate the practices of the old media. That's pretty much why The Anime Network, in its traditional linear form, failed. It had greater success in the on-demand model rather than the linear channel model, and that's why it failed.
Have you ever noticed that there are rarely new cable channels these days? Everything is either rebuilt, reformatted, or remodeled. The only company really creating cable channels is NBC Universal, but they're acquiring libraries and companies and building channels out of that.
The next generation of channels is the ones created by regular folks like us. We create our own content. We create our own voice. We learn to entertain ourselves. Some feel that this is the generation to come.
This generation is here right now. This is the generation that will likely bring down the foundations of the old media, and that's what makes them afraid. They try to entice the generation of creators with promises of glory and fame while they end up with all profits generated from it. That's why the Writers Strike is still happening as of this writing. The Strike not only exposed the greed of the old media but also the weaknesses of the industry as whole. The reprecussions of the strike are slowly being felt. There's a sense of weariness now, but that will pass. If the writers don't get what they want, well, they'll become part of the next generation themselves, creating products without the need for the old foundations of the old media, including the products that originally came from them.
Essentially, fear empowers their survival. The fear of the new era is one that allows the old media to survive, only because they know that their era is about to end. The next generation, meanwhile, sits and waits knowing its time is about to begin.
As I was watching that video I made (by the way, thanks for the mostly positive feedback), I noticed that nearly every show can still be found somewhere in this country. Aside from Sailor Moon, which Toei foolishly took off the North American market, nearly everything that has aired on Toonami is on DVD, on the air, and online legally. From ThunderCats, Voltron, and Robotech to Dragon Ball Z, ReBoot, and Gundam to the DCAU, Transformers, Zoids, to the modern era shows like Naruto, One Piece, The Batman, and others are everywhere. Some air on other networks. Some are online-exclusives. Some are in video stores. A pair of shows, however, aren't anywhere. I'm talking about The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest and The Powerpuff Girls.
I know there have been best-of compilations of the Girls, and there was a sampler pack of Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, but neither of these shows are found anywhere. They're not streaming online. They're not in your local video stores. And they're not on the air.
Yes, I know that CN airs The Powerpuff Girls Movie on a sporadic basis, aired The Fight Before Christmas during the holiday season, and uses the characters infrequently in promos, but the actual stand-alone series has disappeared from view. When I mean stand-alone, I mean, in the listings, you'll see the words Powerpuff Girls in the timeslot, not Cartoon Cartoons or Cartoon Cartoons Top 5, where they've been hiding for a number of years now. Now, granted, they'll probably end up on Boomerang, Cartoon Network City's junkyard and recycling center apparently, by year's end, but I think Powerpuff Girls, at least in the last four or five years, has been put aside, punished for some reason or something. They just never said why the show disappeared.
What exactly were the reasons? A lackluster performance at the box office for the movie? The ill-conceived remarketing of the girls as Bratz-like fashion divas? The show's creator, Craig McCracken, focusing more on Foster's than his original series? Or were they hoping that they could rejuvenate the franchise by making an anime version of the series, which was riddled with problems and not generally viewed positively by those that actually watched it?
On the flipside, while Cartoon Network at least pretends to acknowledge the Powerpuff Girls, they've seemed to completely eradicate the existance of The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. You'll see the original Jonny Quest on Boomerang, streaming online, and in video stores as well as parodies and homages everywhere, but when it comes to The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, you'll tend to get a "what's that?" from a lot of people, which is sad. The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest was one of the cornerstones of the creation of the Toonami block. Yeah, ThunderCats and Voltron back on television after a disappearance from the airwaves for almost a decade was a great thing, but even then as it is now, Toonami focused on newer, never-before-seen properties, which RAJQ was at the time. However, Cartoon Network prematurely killed the property. Hanna-Barbera wanted to continue the show without the Questworld CGI elements, which is why one of the final episodes ended with the "death" of Jerimiah Surd, the show's vectorized terrorist, which, oddly, didn't have many CGI scenes in it since they did most of the Questworld scenes in traditional animation. Cartoon Network, in its first real act of pure stupidity, wanted MORE Questworld segments, almost completely ignoring the traditional animators. So, they cancelled the show, reran the latter half of the series to death purposely causing viewer dislike for the series, and, in September 1999, unceremoniously pulling the plug on the series in one of the most memorable segments in Toonami history.
For almost a decade, the series has been languishing in limbo. Hanna-Barbera only exists as a copyright notice. The original Jonny Quest has remained fresh in pop culture, whether it's actually seeing the original on television or looking at their parodies on shows like Freakazoid or Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. The Venture Brothers is one of the sharpest homages to the original, and the upcoming Secret Saturdays is looking to be another great adventure series in the tradition of the original JQ. But The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, the last great Hanna-Barbera action series, has been largely forgotten, as if it was an embarrassment for everyone involved, which it certainly wasn't. The original series is about to be adapted into a new feature film in the light of the success of Transformers, and most likely, a new animated series, based on the film and echoing the original series, will be made. Meanwhile, the Real Adventures will continue to be forgotten by the studios and Cartoon Network. While Powerpuff Girls will likely become availiable in some form or another, the Real Adventures of Jonny Quest is likely going to be gone forever, and that's a damn shame. It's not that often that a truly great American action cartoon not based on a comic book comes along.
