Category: Culture

Peanuts holiday specials absent from broadcast TV in 2022

When it was announced in 2020 that Apple would obtain the rights to the Peanuts TV holiday specials, I was relieved to read that they agreed to allow PBS to broadcast the films over the air. Previously, A Charlie Brown Christmas had been broadcast every year by CBS (1965-2000) and ABC (2001-2019).

This year, however, it appears that that won’t be the case, based on this tweet from PBS Kids:

Regretfully, PBS does not have the rights to distribute the Peanuts specials this year. We’ll all have to watch for the Great Pumpkin in a different pumpkin patch this Halloween.

@pbskids

I suppose it’s silly of me to think that there are many people left who watch TV over the air at all anymore, or on cable. As long as you own a TV, it’s likely to be a smart TV, and likely to be able to run the Apple TV app (where the specials will air for free, even to non-subscribers, thankfully). Barring that, you likely have a smartphone, tablet, or computer where you consume all your content anyway. Practically speaking, this does not introduce a great barrier to watching the specials, even an economic one; in fact, if the specials were only available at a specific time over a legacy network, they would have a far smaller reach.

On the other hand, why am I a grown man writing about 60-year-old cartoons? Sentimentality. And aren’t the holidays largely about sentimentality and tradition to begin with? The airing of these specials at a specific time on a specific date on a specific channel at least provided the illusion that they are something we are experiencing together, simultaneously, as we have since before I was born.

What will be gone is the “eventness” of it, the specific annual televisual demarcation of the peak of Christmas season. It’s a loss.

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Ryan Broderick on War (And Everything) As Content

Hard to choose what to quote from this piece, but (all emphasis mine):

The hashtag #nuclearwar is trending on Twitter right now. If you click in on it, it shows you the top content tagged #nuclearwar. If you click on one of the posts, in giant letters, Twitter asks you to “tweet your reply.” What’s your take on nuclear annihilation, the bird site wonders thoughtlessly.

and:

What is QAnon if not just a way to always have something new to create or consume during breaking news events.

and:

There are a lot of internet users who, after a decade of exposure to viral media, have had their minds so thoroughly warped by trending content that they believe that reacting to popular internet culture is […] some kind of moral duty.

and:

The internet is at a place technologically now where connectivity is not just the default, but demanded of us all.

and:

https://twitter.com/HKesvani/status/1498285631474221065

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There is a surreal aspect to viewing the outbreak of war through the conveniences offered by social media, and I doubt we are ready to comprehend its consequences.

Nick Heer, “Social Media in New Wartime

Now seems like a really good time not to be on Twitter. When things are crazy I try to limit myself to reading the paper in the morning and watching the evening news.

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Airplane Mode

Genius title for this anti-game in the vein of Penn & Teller’s “Desert Bus” and Will Brierly’s Soda Drinker Pro.

Notably, from the screenshots it seems that the in-flight entertainment is public domain (Le Voyage dans la Lune and Merrie Melodies), including the book, À rebours, considered part of the Decadent movement, which may or may not be significant? I ain’t no fancy art feller.

Bizarrely, this is being distributed by AMC Games (yes, the AMC of “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad”), and this is their first game.

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Sacred Bones “Reissuing” the “full” “LP” from “Jeremiah Sand”

Last Spring I got a flyer included with an order from Sacred Bones advertising a “Gathering of the Children”:

Today I got an email from them with the subject line “Uncovering a maniacal cult leader’s lost psych folk gem!,” which got me really excited. But it turns out to be a full album of music from the fictional Jeremiah Sand from Mandy.

It’s even available as an 8-track!

The Children of the New Dawn have also created a website, “last updated September 21, 1999” (the autumnal equinox, I assume?)

Also check out this sweet Boris Vallejo-like painting of Jeremiah Sand from the Bandcamp page:

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