One would be tempted to describe the annual "Treehouse of Horror" episode of The Simpsons as one of the most revered annual Halloween specials in the history of television -- except that half of the Treehouses of Horror have failed to air in time for Halloween. This year's episode, "Treehouse of Horror XX," aired on Oct. 18, breaking a nine-year streak of post-Halloween airdates. That's because halfway through the series' run, Fox television became a broadcaster of Major League Baseball, including the MLB playoffs and World Series, which has pushed the Treehouse air dates into early November. That's just one of the quirks of this 20-year tradition from TV's most distinguished animated sitcom.
So far as the distinction goes, The Simpsons was the first animated series to win a Peabody Award, which serves as the sweet, sweet icing on the series' 25-Primetime-Emmys cake. Despite this strong record of success, the Treehouse of Horror has been a subject of regular Emmy disappointment for the Simpsons production staff.
Most years, the alternate version of the Simpsons theme created for the Treehouse of Horror special is submitted for the Outstanding Musical Performance Emmy, but to date no Treehouse tune has taken home the statuette, nor has any other Simpsons musical number. Call it the Treehouse musical curse.
In fact, despite the fact that The Simpsons has garnered over 100 individual television awards in its history, only three Treehouse of Horror episodes have won awards of any kind. "Treehouse of Horror VIII" won the Golden Reel award for sound mixing, "Treehouse of Horror X" won the CINE Golden Eagle Award, and the 3D animated sequence from "Treehouse of Horror VI" won the Ottawa International Animation Festival grand prize. Not exactly the equivalent of the Golden Globe Awards, let alone the Emmys.
While the critics remain unimpressed by the Treehouse of Horror lineup, fans love the quasi-Halloween annual. Much of this adoration is due to the creative license given to Simpsons writers when preparing Treehouse stories. Series continuity is abandoned, as is subtlety and restraint. Writers are free to openly and explicitly parody any cultural topic, film, play, novel or TV show. Moreover, excessive violence is not only possible, it's encouraged, with Simpsons producers often intentionally ratcheting up the goofball gore in early Treehouse episodes just to tweak the television censors. Former Simpsons executive producer David Mirkin often strove to make the Treehouse of Horror specials funny and scary, which leads us to a unique distinction amongst the long and legendary list of Simpsons writers.
For an early Treehouse of Horror episode, the Simpsons brought in a guest writer who appeared in the credits of only one episode in the entire series' history. This writer's work, a portion of which was featured in this Treehouse script, earned him honors from the Mystery Writers of America -- the only Simpsons writer to ever attain such an award.
Who is the only Simpsons Treehouse of Horror writer to be honored by the Mystery Writers of America?
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Setting reasonable expectations in Social Media
Tuesday night, I gave a presentation for the October Social Media Club Louisville meeting, called Setting (Reasonable) Expectations in Social Media.
Basically, I trashed the default stats attached to the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder because they include the likes of Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube, which collectively represent about ten percent of the page views on the entire Internet. Call it a classic case of outliers skewing the average. Forrester is trying to sell people on the need for dealing with social media -- which I agree with, folks should be dealing with and embracing social media -- but as a side effect they are making it sound like social media success is an inevitability. It ain't.
Here's the slideshow:
The above was basically an expanded version of a similar presentation I gave to a marketing class at the University of Louisville last month, which was designed to ground the budding marketers who will be asked to work miracles in social media once they're hired in a year or two. Surprisingly, many of the IT and social media pros in the room on Tuesday seemed a bit floored by some of the stats I threw at them. Basically, my premise is that if you want serious user interaction, you need a large audience size, because only a small percentage of any audience is going to give you the kind of user-generated content people seem to want (for free). That means you won't get decent user-submitted videos the day you launch your site, and you shouldn't launch a site on the premise of receiving user-generated videos.
Today I'm giving two more presentations to local business owners --Twitter for Businesses and Blogging for Businesses. Let's see if these topics generate as many jaw-drops and eye-pops as my last one.
Basically, I trashed the default stats attached to the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder because they include the likes of Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube, which collectively represent about ten percent of the page views on the entire Internet. Call it a classic case of outliers skewing the average. Forrester is trying to sell people on the need for dealing with social media -- which I agree with, folks should be dealing with and embracing social media -- but as a side effect they are making it sound like social media success is an inevitability. It ain't.
Here's the slideshow:
The above was basically an expanded version of a similar presentation I gave to a marketing class at the University of Louisville last month, which was designed to ground the budding marketers who will be asked to work miracles in social media once they're hired in a year or two. Surprisingly, many of the IT and social media pros in the room on Tuesday seemed a bit floored by some of the stats I threw at them. Basically, my premise is that if you want serious user interaction, you need a large audience size, because only a small percentage of any audience is going to give you the kind of user-generated content people seem to want (for free). That means you won't get decent user-submitted videos the day you launch your site, and you shouldn't launch a site on the premise of receiving user-generated videos.
Today I'm giving two more presentations to local business owners --Twitter for Businesses and Blogging for Businesses. Let's see if these topics generate as many jaw-drops and eye-pops as my last one.
Nerd Word of the Week: Monomyth
Monomyth (n.) - A term for the common structure of heroic stories, particularly in mythology. Also known as the hero's journey, the term monomyth was popularized by Joseph Campbell in his seminal comparative mythology treatise The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Campbell broke down dozens of epic tales from major mythological traditions and identified 17 common stages of any hero's story -- effectively writing the outline of seemingly every successful adventure story subsequently published.
George Lucas openly consulted with Campbell in writing the first Star Wars scripts, and thus the original Star Wars movie is held up as a paramount example of the cinematic monomyth in action. Naturally, this has led to some backlash. Novelist David Brin has cited the monomyth as a tool of despots used to justify their favored status. John Scalzi argues that Lucas's obsession with the monomyth contributed to the failure of the Star Wars prequels.
I bring it up because: Joseph Campbell killed genre fiction, or so some have argued. This is not news, as there have been several YouTube videos mocking the monomyth parallels between sci-fi franchises, but the subject got goosed last week when Ron Moore explained how Star Trek: The Next Generation writers incorporated science into their scripts. (To quote sci-fi editor John Joseph Adams's response to the interview: "Every time Ron Moore speaks about writing an angel kills itself.")
The geek blogosphere was ablaze after Moore's comments, hitting apogee when Charles Stross explained why he hates Star Trek -- because it sublimates ideas to story, effectively using the structure of the monomyth and dressing it up in technobabble drag. Thus we re-open up the can of worms as to why TV genre fiction seems so formulaic and facile when compared to prose genre fiction. Because, ultimately, we're a prisoner of the monomyth and use Joseph Campbell shorthand as the basis, rather than the framework, of the story. There are worse guides, but its hard to be taken seriously when everything looks and reads and sounds the same. Who says cloning is a future technology?
George Lucas openly consulted with Campbell in writing the first Star Wars scripts, and thus the original Star Wars movie is held up as a paramount example of the cinematic monomyth in action. Naturally, this has led to some backlash. Novelist David Brin has cited the monomyth as a tool of despots used to justify their favored status. John Scalzi argues that Lucas's obsession with the monomyth contributed to the failure of the Star Wars prequels.
I bring it up because: Joseph Campbell killed genre fiction, or so some have argued. This is not news, as there have been several YouTube videos mocking the monomyth parallels between sci-fi franchises, but the subject got goosed last week when Ron Moore explained how Star Trek: The Next Generation writers incorporated science into their scripts. (To quote sci-fi editor John Joseph Adams's response to the interview: "Every time Ron Moore speaks about writing an angel kills itself.")
The geek blogosphere was ablaze after Moore's comments, hitting apogee when Charles Stross explained why he hates Star Trek -- because it sublimates ideas to story, effectively using the structure of the monomyth and dressing it up in technobabble drag. Thus we re-open up the can of worms as to why TV genre fiction seems so formulaic and facile when compared to prose genre fiction. Because, ultimately, we're a prisoner of the monomyth and use Joseph Campbell shorthand as the basis, rather than the framework, of the story. There are worse guides, but its hard to be taken seriously when everything looks and reads and sounds the same. Who says cloning is a future technology?
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Truly Trivial: How did Wernher von Braun try to jumpstart a US space program a decade before NASA?
If one were to construct a Mt. Rushmore of rocket scientists, almost any quartet of visionaries enshrined there would have to include Wernher von Braun, architect of the early American manned spaceflight program. (For this geek's money, von Braun would be joined by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, and Hermann Oberth, though you could also make a good case for Sergei Korolev as first alternate.) Fifty-one years ago tomorrow, President Eisenhower transferred von Braun and his team of engineers from the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) -- where he built the famous Redstone rockets -- to the newly formed NASA, where von Braun would create the launch vehicles for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.
All of that, however, very nearly never came to be.
Wernher von Braun was the leader of a handful of German scientists that developed the infamous V-2 rockets that the Nazis used to bombard London during World War II. As Germany began to fall at the end of the war, various factions were vying to capture von Braun and his compatriots in order to secure the German rocket expertise for themselves. Moreover, von Braun rightfully suspected that the German SS had orders to execute the rocket scientists should it become likely that they would fall into enemy hands. Thus, von Braun and his team decided they should actively surrender to Allied forces before they could be killed; the only question was to which Allied nation?
Von Braun's group surrendered to the Americans, with von Braun's brother Magnus literally flagging down a U.S. infantryman riding a bicycle and shouting: "My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender." Von Braun noted that they chose the Americans in part from fear of how they would be treated as POWs by the Soviets, who were also advancing on the position where the German rocketeers surrendered. Still, had von Braun's team been sequestered elsewhere (as nearly happened) or been forced to abandon their research and take up arms in defense of Germany (as other scientists were forced to do), he may never had made his way to NASA.
Once captured, the U.S. military had to "bleach" von Braun's record in order to clear him for service, as President Truman stipulated that no German war criminals could work for the United States. Wernher von Braun was an SS officer, and his V-2 rocket program employed slave labor, though von Braun himself claimed both actions were forced on him the Nazi power structure. After he was "cleared" to design rockets for the U.S., the military assigned him to build missiles, rather than space vehicles -- despite the fact the von Braun actively campaigned for a manned spaceflight program.
Thus, von Braun resorted to a rather unusual public relations maneuver in an attempt to "jumpstart" public demand for manned spaceflight in 1949 -- nine years before NASA existed.
How did Wernher von Braun try to jumpstart a US space program a decade before NASA?
All of that, however, very nearly never came to be.
Wernher von Braun was the leader of a handful of German scientists that developed the infamous V-2 rockets that the Nazis used to bombard London during World War II. As Germany began to fall at the end of the war, various factions were vying to capture von Braun and his compatriots in order to secure the German rocket expertise for themselves. Moreover, von Braun rightfully suspected that the German SS had orders to execute the rocket scientists should it become likely that they would fall into enemy hands. Thus, von Braun and his team decided they should actively surrender to Allied forces before they could be killed; the only question was to which Allied nation?
Von Braun's group surrendered to the Americans, with von Braun's brother Magnus literally flagging down a U.S. infantryman riding a bicycle and shouting: "My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender." Von Braun noted that they chose the Americans in part from fear of how they would be treated as POWs by the Soviets, who were also advancing on the position where the German rocketeers surrendered. Still, had von Braun's team been sequestered elsewhere (as nearly happened) or been forced to abandon their research and take up arms in defense of Germany (as other scientists were forced to do), he may never had made his way to NASA.
Once captured, the U.S. military had to "bleach" von Braun's record in order to clear him for service, as President Truman stipulated that no German war criminals could work for the United States. Wernher von Braun was an SS officer, and his V-2 rocket program employed slave labor, though von Braun himself claimed both actions were forced on him the Nazi power structure. After he was "cleared" to design rockets for the U.S., the military assigned him to build missiles, rather than space vehicles -- despite the fact the von Braun actively campaigned for a manned spaceflight program.
Thus, von Braun resorted to a rather unusual public relations maneuver in an attempt to "jumpstart" public demand for manned spaceflight in 1949 -- nine years before NASA existed.
How did Wernher von Braun try to jumpstart a US space program a decade before NASA?
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Nerd Word of the Week: Hoopy frood
Hoopy frood (n.) - A particularly capable and impressive individual. Specifically, a savvy and successful interstellar hitchhiker. The phrase originates from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy radio series, wherein Zaphod Beeblebrox remarks: "Hey you, sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is!" The shortened form hoopy frood is used by sci-fi fans, and H2G2 fans especially, to describe persons with similar abilities as Ford Prefect, who somehow survives the destruction of planets and the ire of villainous aliens with surprising aplomb.
The phrase knows where his towel is is roughly equivalent to hoopy frood, but the towel reference is far more well known and commonly used. Thus, hoopy frood is also a loaded slang term for Hitchhikers Guide devotees. The regular geeks -- even the ones that haven't read the entire Hitchhikers Guide series -- know the towel reference, but only hoopy froods know and use the phrase hoopy frood.
I bring it up because: This week And Another Thing..., the final Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy novel, went on sale. While it may be the last chapter of H2G2 universe, And Another Thing... is also the first Hitchhiker's Guide novel not authored by the late Douglas Adams. Thus, all the hoopy froods are trying to sass the new author, Artemis Fowl creator Eoin Colfer, to see if he really knows where his towel is, prose-wise. Here's hoping he can bring the funny, and that And Another Thing... isn't the prose equivalent of Vogon poetry.
The phrase knows where his towel is is roughly equivalent to hoopy frood, but the towel reference is far more well known and commonly used. Thus, hoopy frood is also a loaded slang term for Hitchhikers Guide devotees. The regular geeks -- even the ones that haven't read the entire Hitchhikers Guide series -- know the towel reference, but only hoopy froods know and use the phrase hoopy frood.
I bring it up because: This week And Another Thing..., the final Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy novel, went on sale. While it may be the last chapter of H2G2 universe, And Another Thing... is also the first Hitchhiker's Guide novel not authored by the late Douglas Adams. Thus, all the hoopy froods are trying to sass the new author, Artemis Fowl creator Eoin Colfer, to see if he really knows where his towel is, prose-wise. Here's hoping he can bring the funny, and that And Another Thing... isn't the prose equivalent of Vogon poetry.
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