Not to be confused with "Testing 1, 2 3," which merely confirms that the mic works, if you are using an audio system you also need to equalize the sound. This requires continuous speech so that the engineer can adjust the speakers to the room. That means whomever steps up to assist has to keep talking for more than just a few seconds. No one ever really pays attention to the babble; it just joins the normal background hum as rest of the crew keeps working. Some do a stream of consciousness thing, others pull out their phone and read the weather report or the headlines. And one guy recited, well, poetry.
He stepped to the mic and began: "Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale." He paused dramatically, then continued: "A tale of a fateful trip." It sounded eerie: I stopped what I was doing to listen. "It started from a tropic port. Aboard a tiny ship." It sounded familiar: Poe? Keats? Donne? He continued: "The mate, a mighty sailing man. The skipper. Brave. And sure." I couldn't place it, but I was close. "Five passengers set sail that day. For a three-hour tour. Yes, just a three-hour tour." I got it! It wasn't Poe or Keats or Donne. It wasn't even poetry. It was the theme song to "Gilligan's Island." I was just happy I got it before he recited "the Professor and Mary Ann."
That summation was just one of a whole catalog of mini masterpieces that neatly set up some hit shows. There was "Patty Duke," ("Meet Cathy, who's lived most everywhere"), "Brady Bunch" ("Here's the story of a lovely lady"), and "All in the Family" ("Those were the days"). Even those themes without lyrics set the mood, and when paired with images were instantly recognizable: "Mission: Impossible," "Hill Street Blues," "Mash." More recently there was the intro to "Game of Thrones," "Mad Men" and of course "The Sopranos." As Nicholas Britell, the composer of the opening theme to "Succession" said, "TV theme music is incredibly important. It's almost a show's DNA identifier. It serves as an overture to bring you in and sets the tone. I think that formal entrée is crucial." Hear just a few bars of any of them, and as the theme song from "Cheers" went, everybody would know your name.
But that was then. The simple fact is that no one watches intros on TV anymore. As much as anyone else, you can blame Netflix. That's because this March marked the fifth anniversary of the creation of the "Skip Intro" button. In that interval it has been pressed 136 million times. Add it all up, and users have gotten back 195 years in cumulative time, no small number in our ever-accelerating world.
Of course, that comes with a price. No longer do show opens become cultural touchstones. No more "Friends" and "I'll be there for you." No more "The Jeffersons" and "Movin' on up." No more "Hawaii Five-O" and, well, "Hawaii Five-O." Something is lost, which is why musical director for "Doctor Who" Murray Gold says of the "The Office," a fav of his, "I won't ever let my wife skip."
And now there is pressure on the back end. Dish TV is promoting a feature called AutoAdvance that lets you skip the credits and jump right to the next episode you are binge watching. Once this feature percolates across the streaming universe, you'll be able to skip the end, the beginning, and just run all the chapters together into one humungous program. Sit down and buckle up: you won't come up for air for 18 hours straight.
In Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange," a gang member is offered a way out of prison by agreeing to aversion therapy, whereby he is strapped to a chair, his eyes clamped open and made to watch hours of violent films in the hope that it will cure him. The idea is that certain images and sounds will become abhorrent. It might not be the same as sitting on your couch with a bag of chips and watching back to back to back episodes of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel." But if you do, and watch an entire season of Mrs M in one sitting with no intros or credits to break it up, and no longer find the line from the series "Believe me, Manischewitiz is best enjoyed in small quantities" funny, it had an effect.
-END-
Marc Wollin of Bedford likes to read the credits. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment