Wednesday, February 4, 2009

It's all too much...



My kingdom-to-be is far too cluttered. Not only with the never ending pallets of junk brought over from China to be sold at Walgreen's, discarded as trash or donated to thrift stores, but with media. There are far too many movies, tv shows, songs, pod casts, blogs, and web sites (especially social networking sites) to keep track of. Thank god for the last writer's strike we had, or I would have never caught up on Lost! How the hell am I going to keep up with the rascally antics of John Locke when JJ's going on and making Fringe? It's getting to be ridiculous.

My point is that even with the extra free time that a king must enjoy, how will I be able to lead my people and keep up on what my friends are doing via Facebook, find out what Ira Glass finds interesting, see what robots are pissed off at humans and laugh at the drollery of Jon Stewart and Steve Cobert? Plus, I still want to keep playing my electronic music. It's too much!

How do you think the pyramids got built? No TV! No Web 2.0. Can you imagine getting that much work done on a long term project in today's iWorld? Impossible. I'm not saying I want a pyramid built for me, but we could clearly do with a little more focus. (note: instead of a pyramid I want my brian put into a clone body or uploaded into a massive computer network). Don't worry, we didn't develop all these industrial robots so we could have out of work auto workers with nothing to watch on TV. There will be plenty of TV and movies when I'm in charge.

However, what we need to do is consolidate things. Let's face it, did we really need the Cobert Report? The Get Smart movie? NO. It was far better when both Stevens were by Jon's side. Greedy execs figured they could spread things out and make more money, but in the end we're left with watered down crap. (note: I really love both The Daily Show and the Cobert Report) The Matrix ruled, but did we really need both those sequels? NO! Edit out a few hours of pointless fighting and Keanu staring thoughtlessly into space and you'd have one zippy little Matrix 2. Now that I think of it, we could probably take all the good parts of all the Keanu action movies and edit them into a couple of really awesome films. Viya con dios!

Not only will this save the viewer tons of time it'll be fun. Just think, what if you replaced all the slow moving boring stuff from 2001 A Space Odyssey with the cool light saber stuff from The Return of the Jedi? You'd have one amazing movie, that's what. Sorry Ewoks, you're going to get spliced into a Sunday morning religious kid's show. Imagine if you took all the good parts out of all the Hulk movies. You'd have one amazing Chevy truck commercial.

While I'm at it, I'll enact laws limiting the length of an action movie. If you can not tell a Batman story in 90 minutes you have no right to make a Batman movie. Was it my imagination that The Dark Knight actually ended yet kept on going for another hour... and then ended again and sputtered about for a while like turning off a car with crappy gas?

Same holds true for cable TV in general. Now I have 900 channels of... what? Do I really need a dedicated Korean soap opera channel? I'd force cable companies to offer ala carte service so you could pick and choose what you get. Channels (aside from my kingly protected ones) would drop like flies.

I'd also initiate tax incentives for the producers of good TV, books, etc. Get a thumbs up from the king: you're in a lower tax bracket. Make crap and you get a tax penalty. There clearly needs to be some incentive to keep New Line Cinema from making Wedding Crasher's II. This way 98% of the profit of Mamma Mia would end up in the King's coffers!

A lot of consolidation could also happen on the www. If a company comes out with a webpage that's obviously just a flushed out feature, we'd merge them with an appropriate site. I'm looking at you, Twitter. I'm sure we can also merge Fandango, IMDB and Rottentomatoes.com.

Don't be afraid. It'll seem strange at first, but after a short while you'll really start to appreciate the quality that results when people making media have some incentive to get to the point. You'll love when they stop trying to make ponderous bloated crap designed to appeal to the masses. I have really great taste, you'll see. Yes, you're going to see more movies like American Beauty take place in deep space, but once you see Kate Winslet in a silver space suit, you'll thank me. (note: thanking me will be mandatory.)

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