The amount of media being wiped from the internet is worrying for viewers, and industry workers who need the exposure, says journalist and critic Zach Schonfeld
Last June, fans of Comedy Central – the long-running channel behind beloved programmes such as The Daily Show and South Park – received an unwelcome surprise. Paramount Global, Comedy Central’s parent company, unceremoniously purged the vast repository of video content on the channel’s website, which dated back to the late 1990s.
Here's a random paranoid tangent before lunch! I was reading recently
about the evolution of theater in England over a hundred years from
~1550-1650. Elizabeth ruled during the first part of that interval,
and Shakespeare wrote. His plays included perspectives from wide
slices of society and were performed for royalty and commoners
alike. Elizabeth died and private theatrical commissions began to
outgrow public theater, which according to wikipedia "sustained
themselves on the accumulated works of the previous decades".
Starting in 1642 theaters were closed entirely by act of a Puritanical
Parliament. That ban lasted 18 years and once the audience was Quite
Thirsty, the English Restoration restored theater abstractly and
filled it with bawdy raunch.
Yada yada, Disney then hired a crew of weepy Christian writers in the
20th century to repackage folk tales into Little Mermaid and Iron Man,
which seems parallel enough to Shakespeare retelling Ovid. Film
flourished, and in the early days of broadcast TV anybody could star
in their own very own program. The Writers were on the brink of
delivering us Heroes, but they up and left before they could save the
cheerleader.
Now this age of regurgitated, computer animated-and-written,
crowdsource produced art seems familiar, too. We're filling the gaps
with what we know, and the Appalachians wielding the pen are finding
gaps they didn't know were there. It's odd being here, but my point is that if we
are stuck in a loop then there's the potential that on the horizon is
a period of Hollywood producing a bunch of light hearted Boob
Comedies.
I think I need a rewatch with this new perspective. I saw Enlightenment to Romanticism through a lens of British stuffiness that gave the veneer of "light hearted", but Ow My Balls makes a little more sense with a layer of mid-Atlantic mud. I already got Boob Comedies from Ren and Stimpy through Family Guy. What I want is hero stories to save Atlas, but the scornful judgment in the movie's framing is a force of Christian conservatism trapping him between two worlds.