Wednesday, May 2, 2012

The Lingering, Languid Lick

It had been a long day for my eight-year-old son and for me, as well. School all day, then a hard forty-five minutes at the karate dojo for him. We came home to a quiet house -- my wife and other son were off at baseball practice -- and we had a nice, quiet dinner. The boy had one of his faves: cold pasta and meatballs. (I know, I know....) I had that classic combination of a phony vegetable chicken patty on wheat bread and a bowl of reheated pork-fried rice. Nothing but the finest, when daddy provides dinner...

After dinner we partook of a square of leftover birthday cake each. I made my self a nice cup of Earl Grey.

We cuddled up together on the couch for a little TV and, the gods smiling upon us, we found that Raiders of the Lost Ark was being shown on the SciFi Channel. Ahhh! We high-fived and pulled up the blanket.

The upside of Raiders being shown on SciFi: HD quality (I still have the original three dilapidated video tapes I bought years ago). The downside: commercials.

Yvonne DeCarlo; from the
good ol' days when vampiresses
left a little to the imagination.
Yes, commercials. That's when it happened.

You think, as a dad: Commercials. So what? Product ads. Ads for new shows on the channel. Maybe a public service message of some kind with some lame celebrity telling us that we need to save music in schools because music helps kids to be good at math. (Its only really useful purpose, you know.)

But what you don't expect is that, eager to market their shows to a particular (and particularly libido-driven) demographic, the station execs would completely ignore the fact that children might -- through some weird alignment of the cosmic energy channels; some fluke of fate -- be watching Indiana Jones at five o'clock on a Monday night. What you don't expect is to see a horrifying ad for a new vampire series.

But, you figure, "Meh...he didn't react to it, so I guess he wasn't scared. No harm done." Then, the rapid-fire, attention-span corroding edits slow down so that the viewer can focus on a shot -- a slow, languid shot (in glorious HD) of a young, lovely vampire vixen lovingly running her tongue up the cheek of another lovely vampire vixen.


As much as I hate to echo popular words and phrases, sometimes they are the only ones that will do:

Really?

My son's reaction to the lick: "What the..."

My reaction: "Maybe she had some ice cream on her cheek or something."

My son: "Dude...use a napkin."

Crisis averted.

But I will call for it yet again: a little common responsibility in programming and in media choices. The media powers-that-be need to stop looking through a paper towel tube at their demographic targets. Yeah, I get that the SciFi Channel watchers are mostly randy and generally under-sated, not-so-young men of the basement apartment set, but others watch, too. Like fathers with their kids. Like fathers who don't expect languid, lusty vampire-on-vampire licks during a stay at the Indy oasis in the dry desert of reality -- at five p.m. On a Monday.

2 comments:

  1. They probably think about regular commercials, but forget about promotional commercials. Or maybe their commercials are just as poorly selected. That's some excellent save on your part, though. Nice block.

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  2. I'm guessing they think more about money than kids, Heck, as long as you slap a rating box at the top left of the screen.

    Yeah, I was pretty quick on that one.

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