Category Highly Opinionated

Can A Looney Tunes Movie Not Bomb? Part 1

goldstar 2 Comments

There’s a new Looney Tunes theatrical film in the works. One that will reportedly combine CGI animation with live action. When this news was posted on the Big Cartoon Database, it was met not with “Ooohs” and “Aaahs”, but with moans and groans. Fans still have bad memories of Looney Tunes: Back In Action reeling in their heads. It’s a question that has baffled the greatest minds on the planet for years: Why can’t someone make a good Looney Tunes movie? It’s ironic that Looney Tunes, which is among the greatest animated franchises of all time, seems completely incapable of making a commercially successful feature length film, but why is that? What’s the formula for making a Looney Tunes animated feature that would score box office gold? Does such a formula even exist?

One issue as I see it is that the Looney Tunes characters were never intended to be used in features. They were created for animated shorts. Shorts and features are 2 completely different beasts each with their own set of rules. The average short typically tells a very simple story and is packed with gags. Features, by contrast, have much more complex plots and cannot be so intensely packed with gags. Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, Robert McKimson and Arthur Davis never tried to get more than 10 minutes out of any of the Looney Tunes stars, and they were all great directors who produced the studios most memorable shorts. Even the features like Friz Freleng’s Looney, Looney, Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, 1001 Rabbit Tales and Daffy Duck’s Fantastic Island were actually collections of the theatrical shorts with new linking material rather than being original, feature length stories. One reason why Back In Action failed was for the same reason why Tom & Jerry: The Movie failed; the characters simply don’t have deep enough personalities to sustain an audiences’ attention for over an hour. In order for a feature length story to work, the protagonists must learn something from their experience and be forever changed, but no one wants to see Bugs, Daffy and company change, because then they wouldn’t be the Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny that we know and love. We want Bugs and Daffy to remain Bugs and Daffy forever. And sure, you could conceivably bring in some live action human characters and give them the story arc instead, but the problem with that is the audience doesn’t go to a LT movie to see the live actors, so they’re not going care one whit what happens to them.

Another issue is plot. The Looney Tunes movies typically have a story line which involved the totality of LT characters appearing together as a group, and the shorts were never like that. The LT shorts typically only involve a couple of characters: Bugs and Daffy, Bugs and Elmer, Bugs, Elmer and Daffy, Daffy and Porky, Daffy & Sam, etc. It’s no easy task coming with a decent formula which can bring all of the LT characters together, save for them putting on a show or participating in some sort of competition (i.e., a sport). And then when one brings real life celebrities into the mix, it’s gets even more complicated, because then you have to have the Looney Tunes characters, and the celebrities, and a reason for why they’re brought together, and some kind of conflict for them to resolve. Finding a workable formula that combines all of these elements is no easy task.

My personal feeling is that the Looney Tunes don’t need to be in a 90 minute movie. The characters work best in shorts. That’s the medium in which the characters perform best. Instead of trying to use the LT characters for something that they were never suited for, Warner Brothers should instead focus on making new theatrical shorts featuring Bugs, Daffy and company, and more TV projects such as The Looney Tunes Show.

So, bearing all the above in mind, I think that the question that needs to be raised here isn’t “Can a feature film built around the Looney Tunes be made?”, but “Should such a thing be done at all?”

And the magic 8-Ball says “Signs point to ‘No'”.

Action Overload!

goldstar 1 Comment

This morning, I came across a thread/discussion on Toon Zone (a forum that I have a love/hate relationship with) about what shows some fans would want to see on the syndicated children’s program block Qubo. One member posted this statement:

I’d like to see Qubo expand into more a more older-skewing boy’s action oriented programming. Add Batman the Animated Series and TMNT 1987 to the lineup.

Now, I’m not in the business of crushing peoples’ dreams, but this is something that I really, really hope doesn’t happen. There are already plenty of boy-skewing action cartoon blocks on TV. Toonzai, and HuBoom are perhaps the 2 most notable examples. Action basically took over Toon Disney after the Mouse House added Jetix to TD’s lineup and then shortly afterward the entire channel was re-christened as Disney X-D. Same deal with Nicktoons. Nicktoons TV started out as Viacom’s equivalent to Boomerang, and now almost all of Nicktoons’ programming is action oriented. I’m not delusional; I understand that kick-butt actiony super hero stuff is hot and action puts butts in seats, but I honestly don’t understand the yearning for such a program block when boys’ action blocks are all over TV. Saturday morning TV needs more boy-centric action like Flava Flav needs another gold tooth.

If anything, I’d like to see more alternatives to this kind of programming. Why doesn’t someone launch a comedy animation block? No action at all. Heck, even a girls’ cartoon block along the lines of the now defunct KOL Secret Slumber Party or KEWLopolis would be preferable to more boys’ action oriented programs (although I generally would prefer that shows be aimed at a more general audience and not be gender specific, but since there are so many TV shows and program blocks aimed at boys already, I don’t think that the world would spin off of it’s axis if there were at least one block designed for girls).

I don’t like to sound like one of the ‘nostalgia people’, but I remember a time when action wasn’t a requirement for a cartoon to be enjoyable or regarded highly. There were shows on the air like Looney Tunes, The Disney Afternoon, Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs!. Those shows were all about FUN. None of them were action oriented, nor did they need to be. Nickelodeon had shows like Doug, Rugrats (although I feel that this was and still is one the most overrated animated series of all time), Ren & Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life. This was a time when cartoons didn’t have to be action oriented in order to be good, and this was a time when any cartoon that didn’t fall into this category wasn’t immediately written off as being “kid stuff”. I’d like to see a return to this mentality. Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate action as much as anyone else. I loved Justice League/Unlimited. I enjoy both DC Nation and Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, but I don’t want action all of the time. I’d prefer a variety. Thank goodness for SpongeBob Squarepants, Regular Show, The Looney Tunes Show, The Amazing World of Gumball and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Not all of these shows are perfect, but at least those shows are trying to keep the self-contained comedy tradition alive.

The All New Something, Something Whatever Show

goldstar 5 Comments

Following from Damon’s entry on Warner Brothers’ latest revamped Tom & Jerry animated series, I got to thinking about what other former Hanna Barbera franchises could WB bring back from the abyss, if they cared enough about any H-B properties besides T&J and Scooby Doo, that is.

A new take on Hong Kong Phooey might be entertaining. I read a few years ago that there are or were plans to make a HKP live action movie, but that news was at least 2 years ago, and I’ve since heard no follow up to it. The movie would likely have Penry Pooch (Hong Kong) as a “real” dog who somehow becomes anthropomorphic and gains mad Kung-Fu skills. I know that after the major bomb-a-saurus that was the Underdog movie, a lot of people would (understandably) not like this idea, but at least that would make a tad more sense than Phooey being the only anthro in a world full of humans and yet no one was smart enough to make the connection that Penry and Phooey were one and the same!

Someone suggested that WB revive The Jetsons, but frankly, the idea of a new Jetsons series wouldn’t excite me. As much as I like the idea of a Utopian future as a setting, I find the characters themselves to be rather dull and generic. The Jetsons was basically the Blondie movies set in the future, and the series as a whole might have been better if it had made better use of it’s fantastic setting. Compare to the far better Futurama.

When talking about potentially reviving old H-B properties, I guess I’d pretty much have to mention the grand daddy of them all, The Flintstones. Now, The Flintstones celebrated it’s 50th anniversary last year, and  Cartoon Network did nothing to commemorate the occasion. All that happened was a 24 hour Flintstones marathon on Boomerang and Post released a specially made Pebbles cereal, Cupcake Pebbles, and a single commercial advertising the product, with no mention of the occasion that sparked it.

Now, my initial thought was “This is wrong. Warner Brothers and Turner should do something to commorate The Flintstones‘ 50th anniversary besides just this. Why not make a new series or at least some new animated shorts (Seth MacFarlane was going to produce a remake of The Flintstones that was to air on FOX in 2013, but Seth already has too much on his plate and so production on this reboot series is on hiatus until ???)?” But then I thought :What could do they do?” What could WB and Cartoon Network studios possibly do with the The Flintstones that hasn’t already been done? It seems like the series has been around longer than Europe, and in at least the 42 years and 5 months that I’ve been alive, we’ve already seen the Flintstones and the Rubbles become parents. We’ve seen the Flintstones contend with not 1, but 2 sets of monster neighbors (first the Gruesomes and then later the Frankenstones). We’ve seen Fred and Barney meet up with a magical alien with the voice of Harvey Korman. We’ve seen Fred do the James Bond spy shtick in a theatrical film. We’ve seen the families travel to the Old West on numerous occasions. We’ve seen Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm as teenagers (who not only got together, but were in a band at one point). We’ve seen Fred and Barney as cops. We’ve seen Wilma and Betty doing double Lois Lane duty opposite Captain Caveman. We’ve seen Dino doing the Tom & Jerry thing with an obnoxious cave mouse. We’ve seen Fred, Wima, Barney and Betty as preteen kids. We’ve seen Pebbles, Bamm-Bamm and Dino solving mysteries a la Scooby Doo, and through made-for-TV movies, we’ve seen Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm get married and then subsequently move to Hollyrock and become the parents of fraternal twins. About the only Flintstones related things that we haven’t yet seen are Fred, Wilma, Barney and Betty as unmarried twentysomethings or the Flintstones and the Rubbles as grandparents, and I personally have zero desire to see either of those things.

But, it’s not as though the Flintstones’ characters have been completely forgotten. Recently, there have been a new revamped set of Post Pebbles cereal commercials which feature the characters rendered in a new animation style (stop motion puppettoons) and after 3 decades, they’e finally moved on from the “Watch me trick Fred out of his Pebbles!” shtick. These new ads aren’t the worst thing that I’ve ever seen. The different animation style is interesting and the guys doing Fred and Barney’s voices at least sound enough like the oriignals for it to not be an issue. The main thing that I find somewhat odd about these current commercials is how unbelievably calm and laid back Fred is in them. At no point does Fred look even remotely as if he’s about to lose his temper. I guess that he’s mellowed with age.

The REAL Reason Why Boomerang Sucks

silverstar 3 Comments

Boomerang is in a bad place right now. There’s no denying that. The channel is badly in need of some TLC (and I don’t mean that crappy cable channel that shows reality shows about little people, toddler beauty show contestants made up like hos and women who treat their vagina like it’s a clown car.)

There are differing opinions as to what should be done with Boom: some feel the whole channel should be scrapped and re-integrated back into being a block on its’ big brother Cartoon Network where it began. Some feel it should become an ad-supported channel so they can earn some money and gain more 3rd party acquisitions like shows from the DiC and Filmation libraries like Boom’s neighbor to the North, Teletoon Retro. Some feel Turner should start taking greater advantage of the shows which they have available to them in the Turner and WBA vaults and designate certain hours and days to certain decades and eras (I’m in this camp, BTW). And of course, the retro-snobs just want all of the newer (post 1989) shows to go away and for Boom to go back to being the way it was in 2003 or 2004, when all it did was Hanna-Barbera reruns and the occasional MGM and Looney Tunes shorts.

Well, here’s your wake-up call, folks: NONE of those things are ever going to happen. Boomerang is going to stay exactly as it is now unless Turner decides to kill the channel outright or transform it into something profitable. Failing one of those scenarios, Boom will never get any better.

Hey, didn’t mean to bum you out, but that’s the truth. Boomerang is not going to improve any (unless someone at Turner gets dollar signs in their eyes), nor is it ever going to go back to being 90% H-B Rerun Boomerang. Why? I’ll tell you. No homespun crapola. No sugar coating. I’m going to share with you the reason why Boomerang is never likely to improve, and its’ certainly never going to regress. Here’s why:

1. Flat-out, Turner doesn’t care about Boomerang. Why should they? It doesn’t live off of ratings. It makes Turner no money outside of subscription fees. They just don’t care about the channel. Turner regards Boom as a dumping ground for all the shows that they don’t care about any more. It’s basically CN’s recycle bin, and that’s all they use it for.

But there’s another reason why Boom isn’t ever going to back to being early ‘all classic’ Boomerang. It’s a chilling and eerie reason, but it’s there nonetheless. There’s a HUGE elephant in the room that everyone (including myself) would rather ignore, but it’s the other reason why Boom isn’t going to change back. It’s time to turn and face that pachyderm. Ready? Sit down, take a deep breath, have a glass of water. Here it is………………….

2. We’re getting old.

Sorry, I had to say it. No one wants to face this (I sure as hell don’t), but that is why Boomerang is never going to go back to being early Boomerang, and why the newer post 1990 shows aren’t going to be leaving the channel. Face it campers, we’re all getting older.

Boomerang is never going to return to being early Boomerang, just like MTV is never going to go back to showing music videos 24/7 and Nick@Nite is never going to go back to being the Donna Reed/My Three Sons/Dobie Gillis Nick@Nite. ‘Cause we’re getting older and we’re not the primary target anymore.

Yes, as the channel’s name implies, when Boomerang was first launched it was supposed to be a haven for baby boomers to relive the cartoons of their youth, but here’s the thing: as of this writing the Gen Xers are in the same place in their lives that the boomers were in when Boomerang was first launched as its’ own channel back in 2000.

The problem with marketing a so-called “classic TV” channel of any kind is that time never stops moving forward. What’s considered “old” or “classic” changes from generation to generation, from decade to decade, and in some cases, from year to year. We’re experiencing with stations like Boomerang and Nick@Nite what our parents and grandparents experienced when the elevator music stations that they used to listen to got replaced with soft rock.

The 18 to 20-year-old demographic is usually the audience most coveted by TV networks because they attract the most advertising dollars, and people who are old enough to have grown up watching 50’s, 60’s and 70’s shows firsthand are currently outside of that demographic. The kids who grew up watching 50’s and 60’s TV (including my generation, who grew up watching these shows secondhand in syndicated reruns) are either dying off, moving on to other venues (like the internet and home video) or simply are reaching an age where they can’t be persuaded to buy useless junk they don’t need by advertisers, so The Powers That Be aren’t zeroing in on us anymore; they’re focusing the attention on the Gen X-ers, Gen Y-ers and all of the other On Beyond Zebra letters who are coming after us. The 90’s kids are in their 20’s now and the 80’s kids are in their 30’s now. They want to relive the experience of watching the shows that they grew up with too. But these kids didn’t grow up watching Leave it to Beaver,  Yogi Bear, Dennis the Menace and Rocky & Bullwinkle, they grew up watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, The Adventures of Pete and Pete, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Sonic the Hedgehog. These kids don’t have fond memories of Snagglepuss and the Brady Bunch, they have fond memories of Stick Stickly and Kenan & Kel. Unfortunately for us (well, the retro-snobs, anyway), many of the folks in this generation don’t have a burning desire to watch shows from before they were born (keep in mind that they didn’t grow up with the local and syndicated venues that we did) and a great deal of them are automatically turned off by black-and-white. That’s why Nick@Nite is currently rotating The Nanny and George Lopez instead of Bewitched and Car 54, Where Are You?.

The 90’s and 00’s cartoons aren’t going off of Boomerang anytime soon, and in all likelihood their presence is going to increase before it decreases, so we Boomers are just going to have to learn to share. Boomerang isn’t a baby boomer’s channel anymore, deal with it. Be thankful you’re still at least getting a portion of that Old School Cool instead of the vintage stuff getting tossed by the wayside altogether. Yes, Boom is bad now. But It could be much, much worse.

mtv-logo
I’m looking at you.

The Leftovers: Disney Channel, Nickelodeon and The Hub

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As those of you who regularly follow this blog already know, Goldstar and I discuss Cartoon Network and its’ shows a lot here. Some of you may be wondering why there isn’t much discussion about the shows on the other kids’ entertainment/animation channels Nick and Disney on Astral City. The answer is simple: we really don’t watch anything on either of those channels.

I probably only watch about 40% of CN’s schedule, but that’s more than I watch on Nick and Disney Channel put together.

But in the interest of diversification and playing to all sides, I’ll give a brief run-through on my opinions on the other channels.

Disney Channel/Disney XD/Disney Junior

I put these channels together because it’s easier to discuss them all at once. To say that Disney Channel has become stagnant nowadays is like pointing out that cotton candy has sugar in it. The biggest problem with Disney Channel right now is that they’ve become too complacent. Animation-wise, they’ve put all of their eggs in one basket, relying entirely on Phineas and Ferb (I don’t count Fish Hooks, no one does). Sure, Disney has some new animated series coming down the pike, most of them on Disney Junior, which I don’t get since I’m a DirecTV subscriber and even if I did receive DJ, I probably wouldn’t watch it much because it’s a preschool channel; not being a preschooler nor having any preschoolers in my house, I don’t have much use for Disney Junior, though it’s good that some of the older Disney cartoons are airing somewhere. It would be nice if the Mouse House would put their classic characters in some new shows which aren’t specifically designed to appeal to wee tots, as well as some new decent, clever and creative animated shows which don’t have the names Phineas or Ferb in the title.

I’ll bet you thought I was going to say that the worst things about the Disney channels are their live-action teen/tweencoms. No, I don’t bemoan the fact they exist, nor that they’re popular. Disney has been catering to teens since the studio first hit television (Annette Funicello and Spin & Marty were nothing but the Hanna Montanas or Zack & Codys of their day), so I don’t mind that their 2 main channels, Big Disney and X-D, are saturated with these shows; though I’d mind even less if there were more animated shows to compliment them and if they’re live-action comedies were, you know, funny. I know it’s wrong of me to pass judgment on these shows since I’m far from being in the target age group for these shows coupled with the fact that I was never really into tween shows even when I was a tween, but what I’ve seen of Disney’s LA shows, they look really, really stupid and not funny at all. All involved try way too hard to be zany. The kids on these shows all mug so much they all should have little handles on the sides of their heads. Their LA shows are so formulaic that Disney has enacted a requirement that each of them have 6 to 7 regulars. I kid you not. What’s sad about it is that some of them actually have potentially interesting premises, but then they whiz that potential right down the drain; Hanna Montana could’ve been a scathing satire of the pop star industry (think a kid-friendly Larry Sanders Show), but instead they made it into another dull-as-dishwater school-centric tweencom with one of THE stupidest gimmicks imaginable (a secret identity? Really?? Like no one would recognize the same person in a blond wig), Pair of Kings could’ve been an enchanting little froth island show with a touch of fan service, but they made the 2 stars a couple of goony guys instead of cute girls and made the characters so stupid that they’re almost brain-dead (I swear you’d have to have had a partial lobotomy to be entertained by this or Kickin’ It), Wizards of Waverly Place actually made wizardry boring, not to mention all of that malarkey about the competition to see who gets to keep their powers (they never bothered with that crap on Bewitched) and Lab Rats could have been a cool sci-fi comedy about super-beings and quirky science, but they ruined it by making it yet another show about surviving high-school (this is why I’ve always been turned off by tweencoms: too many of them center around school. I hated school as a kid, so why would I want to spend my non-school hours watching people attending school??), plus, while I don’t want to be that guy, it bothers me how all of the super teens with the cool powers are white and the 1 normal kid is black; as a non-white myself, that just doesn’t sit right with me. Whenever I catch a glimpse of these Disney ‘comedies’, I have to wonder: just how the heck did Out of Jimmy’s Head get canceled?

Finally, though I hate to have to side with the retro-snobs and nostalgia-tards, I have to say that it is a shame that the Disney Afternoon/1 Saturday Morning era shows aren’t airing on any of the Disney channels right now. (Disney should also be doing something with the Fox Kids shows that they currently own rather than just letting them collect dust in the vaults, but that rant’s for another day.) At this point, it’s clear that a Retro Disney channel is out of the question; Disney clearly doesn’t have the desire nor the money to launch a 5th channel, but I don’t think that a Vault Disney program block running on either of the 2 main Disney channels–most likely Big Disney, since X-D is all about boy-centric action shows–would be out of the question.

Nickelodeon/Nick At Nite/Nicktoons/TeeNick


Again, it’s just easier to talk about all of these channels at once. TeeNick I neither watch nor care about, period. So let’s move on. I used to watch Nicktoons periodically before it went all action-y, so now I don’t bother with with it. (I prefer comedy over action overall, so aside from the DC and Marvel superhero shows and the occasional shonen anime, I really don’t bother with action cartoons much.)

Big Nick, like Disney Channel, has become too reliant on a few shows: they literally hinge everything onto SpongeBob Squarepants, Dora the Explorer and iCarly, figuring as long as these 3 shows continue to earn ratings and put butts into seats, why should they bother to try to make anything else of note? If I were CEO of Nick, I’d consider enacting a 65 or 72 episode limit to the channel’s original productions, so they wouldn’t risk outstaying their welcome. And sorry, but Nick’s live-action efforts are just…boring. Disney Channel’s LA shows are bad, but some of them at least sound interesting on paper. Nick’s current LA show ideas are so bland, dull and generic that I wonder if they weren’t conceived for heart patients. A show about 2 polar opposites who are aspiring songwriters and a show about a girl who’s the only female in a house full of guys, namely her single dad and her brothers? This is comedy to these people?? You know what I miss? The goofy ‘green slime’ era of Nickelodeon. The time when Nick wasn’t preoccupied with trying to out-Pop Disney Channel and just said “We’re goofy as hell and we don’t care!” When their shows were actually creator-driven and not just based on some successful movie or game franchise. Don’t get me wrong, some property-based shows can be entertaining too, but when that’s all your network airs, it comes off like the soulless by-product of committee thinking. I don’t need for Nick’s older shows to come back, but I would like to see a return to that old spirit. Maybe then there’d actually be something on that channel I’d go out of my way to watch.

As for Nick At Nite, some have suggested doing away with Nick’s nighttime block altogether. Admittedly, the sitcom reruns doesn’t serve much purpose now that Viacom has an entire channel for that (TV Land), but at this point Viacom can’t just sign off at 8PM or run the kids’ programming all night long, not even the classic Nick shows. Presently, they’re locked in a competition for the 18-34 year old demographic and competing with the likes of Adult Swim, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Conan for that age demo, and they’re not going to win them over with reruns of AAAAHHH! Real Monsters.

I personally don’t think N@N needs to go away, but I would revamp it. Here’s what I would put in its’ place:

I’d keep the Nick @ Nite name; the nighttime block doesn’t have to go away just because the programming would change. I’d have N@N start at 9PM and switch back to Nick proper at 7AM, except on weekends when Nick proper would be expanded to end at 10PM when kids wouldn’t have to get up early the next morning. As for what this “new” N@N would play, if anybody remembers the former N@N shows On the Television, Mad Movies with the LA Connection and Turkey Television, I would fill N@N with alternative comedies similar to those and possibly mix that with animated shows akin to Liquid Television and Daria and unconventional sitcoms like The New Adventures of Beans Baxter, the FOX live-action version of The Tick and Parker Lewis Can’t Lose (heck, while we’re at it Viacom could revive their former young adult-skewing game shows like Remote Control and Beat the Geeks on this block as well) as sort of a Comedy Central/Adult Swim lite, and on Friday and/or Saturday nights I’d toss in a Nick Rewind style block of former Nick shows, both live-action and animated during N@N’s first 1 or 2 hours. Just rotate the lineup every couple of months to keep viewers interested since there wouldn’t be any new episodes coming down the pike. But that’s just what I’d do.

The Hub

Finally, we come to The Hub, aka, The Little Channel That Could…or Hopes to One Day. Hasbro has made no bones about how they wish to be thought of in the same breath as the Big Three kids’ and general family entertainment channels CN, Nick and Disney, thereby making this trio a quartet, and while The Hub’s ratings could stand to climb a little, I think they could actually pull this off, if they stay alive long enough. Shows like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dan VS and The Aquabats! Super Show! are creating substantial internet buzz, though that doesn’t always equal ratings. Hub’s nighttime schedule, however, is a joke., at least to me it is. Aside from Dan VS, I don’t watch anything on The Hub at night, as nothing on there interests me. Those 30-year-old sitcom reruns are flatter than day-old soda. the only ones I cold see myself peering in on occasionally are the Adam West Batman show and maybe Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. I’d personally go with the quirky comedy block like I mentioned above with Nick@Nite, but I just plain love quirky unconventional comedies and miss them on TV. I understand Hasbro doesn’t want to run anything too edgy as that would taint their “where kids and families come together” image, but I’m really hoping The Hub will stick around long enough to find its’ voice and offer some nighttime shows which aren’t as dull as drywall. I personally think Mystery Science Theater 3000 would be a great fit for The Hub, but again, that could just be me wanting to see the show somewhere other than YouTube again.