Seen on the street in Kyiv.

Words of Advice:

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

“The Mob takes the Fifth. If you’re innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” -- The TOFF *

"Foreign Relations Boil Down to Two Things: Talking With People or Killing Them." -- Unknown

“Speed is a poor substitute for accuracy.” -- Real, no-shit, fortune from a fortune cookie

"If you believe that you are talking to G-d, you can justify anything.” — my Dad

"Colt .45s; putting bad guys in the ground since 1873." -- Unknown

"Stay Strapped or Get Clapped." -- probably not Mr. Rogers

"The Dildo of Karma rarely comes lubed." -- Unknown

"Eck!" -- George the Cat

* "TOFF" = Treasonous Orange Fat Fuck, A/K/A Dolt-45,
A/K/A Commandante (or Cadet) Bone Spurs,
A/K/A El Caudillo de Mar-a-Lago, A/K/A the Asset., A/K/A P01135809

Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Then and Now; Vast Wasteland Edition

This link will take you to one of the original Star Trek episodes.

The curious thing is that the episode, without commercials, is fifty minutes long.

Go up a few decades. TNG and DS9 ran 46 minutes. This episode of Star Trek: Enterprise is 41 minutes long. If you pick up an "on demand" or Hulu episode of almost anything, where they haven't added commercials or promos, they seem to be about 43 minutes long.

I'm not exactly sure when the time began to get crunched. The Rockford Files ran fifty minutes per episode. McGyver and Quantum Leap were just under 48 minutes.

These days, it's just more crap to fast-forward through on the DVR/VCR.

3 comments:

The New York Crank said...

As the time available ti air commercials increased, the length of commercials actually decreased more or less inversely. In the 1950s and early 1960s, most TV spots were 60 seconds long. By the 1970s, most were 30 seconds long. Now many are 10 seconds long. So you get bombarded by more and more commercials in those nineteen or so minutes of TV spots.

Next the media gurus scratch their heads and start to wonder why they're losing audiences. Or why young audiences are attracted to their cell phones.

Yours very crankily,
The New York Crank.

Leo Knight said...

With TNG and DS9, the producers deliberately made the episodes shorter to entice independent TV stations to carry their syndicated shows. Shorter episodes + more commercials = more ad revenue. Others quickly followed suit.

Nangleator said...

I'm surprised at how slowly the time has been eroded.

What drives me nuts is the lower third ads that run DURING THE SHOW. That trend will likely continue. Lots of extraneous noise and motion from the bottom of the screen, growing upwards, until TV is just an ad for the pay version of the (relatively) unscathed programming that will cost you big bucks.