Schweinhund posted:

what's it about you dumbass

SRQ posted:

lmao it didn't embed

It's about him tracking the source of the Disney Channel 4 tone theme and using it to tell a heartbreaking tail of the forgotten men and women of creative arts. He also uses it as a venue to be critical of those that minimize others artistic creations for the medium they are presented on. Essentially the antithesis of "the medium is the message".

Deep Glove Bruno posted:

I just watched/listened to this thing while walking around. Writing my long winded reaction because I think it's an interesting artifact of youtube documentary and I've got the time. This is not to poo poo on you if you like this kind of stuff BTW, it's just I do work on documentaries sometimes and it's an interesting attempt at an alternative way to make them that I think falls short. It's a sort of reverse-engineering thing for me - why do we make films the way we do and not the way this one was made?

I was gonna be a lot more negative, and I don't think it was worth the running time, though it does end with a nice tribute to a behind the scenes person who deserves a tribute. But I'm walking back the criticisms I had a little because at the end it did make me think about the value of art in a world where to be an artist and live, most people have to navigate some kind of awful commercial hell, and tailor their work to that world. That stuff, and the final 20 minutes are so, are nice and should probably have been the entire project. All the same, there's a reason I don't think it was worth the time and I wouldn't agree it's "revolutionizing investigative documentary film".

There's this knowing joke-undercurrent of this guy feeling undervalued as a documentarian because he's on youtube and he (I guess?) does Disney related content only or something. My reaction to this was, this is correct. Media criticism videos on youtube are great, I've watched plenty that had value. But I think this film underserves its topic. There's like an hour of, basically, "fandom" stuff about this TV channel - history, branding changes, promos, nostalgia hits that the audience might recognize. Stuff that is largely irrelevant to the mystery and the solution to the mystery. I had to keep listening basically out of fascination that fan content this granular finds an audience. It has to be based on an assumption that the only people viewing are hardcore Disney Channel nostalgics who will just love seeing the stuff without much added.

The guy keeps mentioning history, and historical study, as if that's what he's doing, and sure, you could say that. He's finding stuff out. But what's missing that makes it not history, and not "documentary" as he would like it to be, is context and analysis. There's very little critical thought in most of the descriptive stuff - it's just describing a big TV channel and its branding. Branding can be an interesting topic in context but he doesn't look at it critically. He just kinda talks about this channel, and these business forces, that made these artists make these little clips and pieces of music, like God or some inexplicable force of history created it all. That, to me, is what makes most of the runtime of the video "fandom" stuff and not investigation or documentary.

It gets touched on near the end with the woman whose job was re-branding TV channels talking about seeding Disney's commercial interests throughout the interstitial content to manipulate kids. There's a film in that topic alone! At the very least if you're making this story I think you have to position it in history - what's going on in culture at what time that influences these things. You can't just talk about logo redesigns as the main meal. Maybe logo redesigns are interesting positioned in the context of 90s-2000s kids TV programming as a whole or something but a lot of this video was like "check this out" and that's it. If you're so fascinated with TV channel grammar, I'd expect you to have more to say about it analytically. You can't just keep repeating how significant and important this jingle is because it's been on TV for 20 years (especially when you started your film with one that has been going for 90 years?!).

Also the detective work was all just internet stuff, which is puzzling to me. This is poo poo that real people, who are mostly still around and working, did. You can call them up. I grant that he does by the end, but those conversations are the interesting stuff. For the first 2/3rds I was constantly wondering why he hadn't just rung up some communications person at Disney and found out who to talk to. Maybe you can't, I don't know, but the research that he did do was like watching somebody do the pre-production research for a proper documentary where you will actually base the story on the interviews with the people who did it rather than base it on replaying and describing clips you and everyone else has access to on youtube.

So I guess it's a couple things: consumption-side media criticism needs more context or it's not criticism, documentary process is more interesting if it involves more than reading a script over screen recordings and instead finds its story through the actual characters, and it's shallow and icky to make a feature length film about corporate branding changes without giving any historical value to them other than an assumed inbuilt nostalgia from the audience. That assumed inbuilt nostalgia thing is where I check out. That's fandom, and that's why to me this guy isn't really a documentarian, if that's something he does aspire to be.

But I did like the end where real people talk about stuff they did. The rest just didn't need to be in the video.

Last Chance posted:

Reminds me of this recent deep dive into tommy tallaricos taking credit for engineering sounds for vidya that he didn't really do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0twDETh6QaI

super sweet best pal posted:

Tallarico sucks. When he had a show on G4 he'd give bad reviews to games I liked.

Hector Delgado posted:

All I can remember is the other host always upset over "invisible walls"

Last Chance posted:

Reminds me of this recent deep dive into tommy tallaricos taking credit for engineering sounds for vidya that he didn't really do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0twDETh6QaI

Last Chance posted:

Reminds me of this recent deep dive into tommy tallaricos taking credit for engineering sounds for vidya that he didn't really do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0twDETh6QaI

Toxic Mental posted:

Devils Affricate posted:

Video could have been cut down to 20 minutes and would have been better for it. Dude needs an editor.

Duck and Cover posted:

I think it's important that we devalue artists

SalTheBard posted:

It's Hbomberguy, long videos are sort of his thing.

Last Chance posted:

Reminds me of this recent deep dive into tommy tallaricos taking credit for engineering sounds for vidya that he didn't really do

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0twDETh6QaI

sigher posted:

I sat through it during a work out and it was actually pretty interesting and really well done. I've seen this guys other videos but this was really on another level. It was gross when that old marketing exec was talking about how they came up with a whole bunch of random shows and things about fish before Finding Nemo was out so by the time that the film was announced kids would go "I love fish!" and get hyped up and the exec goes, "No you weren't, we just told you that you were." and says it laid back as hell.

drat.