Doctor Who: 50 years of Ineffectual Heroism

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ProperGander
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Re: Doctor Who: 50 years of Ineffectual Heroism

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The Network Process: Television Show Design: The Pilot
The TV Upfronts
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Television network executives work very closely with the television show creators to design as perfect a product as possible. Television product is always in development, most of it the public never sees. One could make a nice living producing pilot scripts that never see the light of day. High level talent might be involved at this stage and not at any later stage. The network executives are always involved in one way or another. Here is how the various memes that the social engineers or military, seek to promote, can be built into the fabric of the show. During pilot development the 'show bible' is written. The subsequent show runners and production staff need not "be in on it." They will simply follow the show bible and construct scripts within those parameters. The show runner need not know anything more than the average viewer. An example of this would be the CBS series "The Good Wife", and its executive producer, Sir Riddley Scott.

Every June the advertisers and network executives, sales people and stars, meet in New York City for a week or so of what is known in the industry as the "Upfronts". This is when the advertisers are literally wined and dined and get to meet and greet the celebrity television stars. Here is when the pilots for the upcoming fall season are premiered to the industry insiders. The network executives are known for renaming the shows themselves up until the eve of the events. That is how important every detail is to them. If one works in the print department, one has to work quite late into the evenings during this period as the executives like to name and rename and then go back to the other name over and over. So one would prepare art for printing, or video display with one show name, only to have to go back and change it again at a later time, knowing you might end up going back to the prior name anyway.

Science fiction itself is an example of how memes are built into the foundation of a specific genre. The basic science fiction concept promoted is the heliocentric universe. Life on other planets is another common meme. The public is so conditioned by these parameters they do not usually see beyond them. Thus the significance of the word 'church,' as in 'circle', (referenced in a prior Doctor Who post). And if someone does write a piece of fiction about a geocentric world, how many backers do you think they will have knocking at their door, with buckets of cash at the ready to finance a film version? Even unknowing financiers will not finance a film or print run, when there is no demographic basis to assume one will make a profit. But come up with a Star Wars rip off and you are good to go.

source:
http://io9.com/why-do-so-many-tv-shows- ... 1681405688
http://www.eonline.com/news/654494/tv-u ... -new-shows
http://www.bang2write.com/2009/07/how-t ... ibles.html

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Last edited by ProperGander on Tue Oct 13, 2015 7:57 pm, edited 6 times in total.
ProperGander
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Re: Doctor Who: 50 years of Ineffectual Heroism

Unread post by ProperGander »

It occurs to me that like with the case of military and the military contractors, and most elected officials, the television and film industry might be subject to more propaganda than the public is. Few then, would be in 'the know'.
ProperGander
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Re: Doctor Who: 50 years of Ineffectual Heroism

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Doctor Who: Invasion of The Dinosaurs
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Of course, a science fiction staple, the "big monster". Here the Doctor faces off against the mythic dinosaur. Please note the 'conspiracy' theme.

"The Doctor and Sarah arrive in 1970s London to find that the city has been evacuated, due to the mysterious appearance of dinosaurs. The monsters are being brought to the present by a disaffected scientist, using a time machine nicknamed the Timescoop, as part of a plan to revert London to a utopian pre-technological age. The plan calls for Central London to be depopulated prior to being moved back through time, so that only an elite group (who will re-found the human race in the remote past, along more ethical lines) will make the trip. This plan, known as Operation Golden Age, is secretly being supported by key personnel within the British Government - and even within the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, which is ostensibly combatting the menace."

The special effects are described below, from a Radio Times article:
""The dinosaurs are all visibly models, and friendly-faced ones at that, but the production team can't be held to account for this entirely...
"A freelance effects man had convinced them that he could give them realistic-looking model dinosaurs, and thus was the story commissioned. But despite being set in some impressive urban dioramas, the mini-beasts look eactly like what they are. Dawdling camerawork and liberal use of CSO merely compound the problem.""


Doctor Who had a small budget and they were stuck with using video effects which were very crude by comparison with computer technology of today. With video one cannot use any dark room photographic techniques. Video keying mistakes, for example, cannot be fixed with matte artists. Film speed cannot be used to make small objects appear to move in a realistic manner. That would require a larger budget as they would have had to use film and then transfer it to video. The first Jon Pertwee episode was shot on film, by the way, and on location alone, as there was some kind of strike at the time the BBC was producing that series of episodes.

source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_of_the_Dinosaurs
http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2012-09- ... -encounter
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/R ... eDinosaurs
http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Spearhead_ ... (TV_story)
ProperGander
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Re: Doctor Who: 50 years of Ineffectual Heroism

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Network Programming: The Presidential Election Cycle
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Much ado about nothing? How much money will be spent on advertising and other 'media buys' over the next year or so? The media hype now has Trump as the next President, much like in 2003 and early 2004, when Howard Dean was the next big thing in politics. Of course the media only has short term memory, so despite the internet and search engines, the media wants to pretend that this narrative is something new.

Here in the States we have what is legally termed, the Electoral College. I would like to point out how the general vote does not directly elect the President at all and the Electors themselves, are not obligated to vote for anyone specifically. This is called 'the faithless elector' a term bandied about by the press back during the Y2K election of President Al Gore. I mean George W. Bush, his friend and ally. ;) They do have more in common, than not.

Reading up on faithless electors, one sees that the elector's vote can only be altered after it is cast in a couple of states and that if they desired to, these electors could pick anyone to be President. Instead of the public in each state asking their representatives to fix this obvious problem, as was done in a couple of states, the public gets enthralled by the literal side show. Does it really matter anyway? Reading the U.S. Constitution and the very first treaty, we get a different picture. For those interested in that subject, there are some links below.

from our friendly world wide web encyclopedia:
"In United States presidential elections, a faithless elector is a member of the United States Electoral College who does not vote for the presidential or vice presidential candidate for whom he or she had pledged to vote. They may vote for another candidate or not vote at all. Faithless electors are pledged electors and thus different from unpledged electors.

Electors are typically chosen and nominated by a political party or the party's presidential nominee. Electors usually are party members with a reputation for high loyalty to the party and its candidate. A faithless elector runs the risk of party censure and political retaliation from their party as well as, in some states, potential criminal penalties. Candidates for elector are nominated by state political parties in the months prior to Election Day. In some states, the electors are nominated in primaries, the same way that other candidates are nominated. In some states, such as Oklahoma, Virginia and North Carolina, electors are nominated in party conventions. In Pennsylvania, the campaign committee of each candidate names their candidates for elector (an attempt to discourage faithless electors). The parties have generally been successful in keeping their electors faithful, leaving out the cases in which a candidate died before the elector was able to cast a vote.

Although there have been 157 cases of faithlessness as of 2015, faithless electors have not yet changed the outcome of any presidential election"

"Twenty-one states do not have laws that compel their electors to vote for a pledged candidate. Twenty-nine states plus the District of Columbia have laws to penalize faithless electors, although these have never been enforced. In place of penalizing a faithless elector, some states, like Michigan and Minnesota, specify that the faithless elector's vote is void.

Until 2008, Minnesota's electors cast secret ballots, so that it was not possible to tell if a particular elector was faithless. When in 2004 an unknown elector was faithless, Minnesota law was amended to provide for public balloting of the electors' votes and invalidation of a vote cast for someone other than the candidate to whom the elector is pledged.

The constitutionality of state pledge laws was confirmed by the Supreme Court in 1952 in Ray v. Blair. The court ruled in favor of the state's right to require electors to pledge to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged, as well as to remove electors who refuse to pledge. Once the elector has voted, his or her vote can be changed only in states such as Michigan and Minnesota, where votes other than those pledged are rendered invalid. In the twenty-nine states that have laws against faithless electors, a faithless elector may only be punished after he or she votes. The Supreme Court has ruled that, as electors are chosen via state elections, they act as a function of the state, not the federal government. Therefore states have the right to govern electors. The constitutionality of state laws punishing electors for actually casting a faithless vote—rather than merely refusing to pledge—has never been decided by the Supreme Court."

Looking up Donald Trump's last name, we find this:

"A trump is a playing card which is elevated above its normal rank in trick-taking games. Typically an entire suit is nominated as a trump suit - these cards then outrank all cards of plain (non-trump) suits. In other contexts, the term trump card can refer to any sort of action, authority, or policy which automatically prevails over all others."

( a side note: Arnold did get elected and so did Ronald Reagan, so any of these actors might be deemed fit to get the gig. As much as I doubt a Trump Presidency, anything is possible, and the guy is just another tele-pormpter reading actor, employed to appear on a screen, anyway.)
sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faithless_elector
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictiona ... thstanding
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articlevi
http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=6
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/constitution
ProperGander
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Re: Doctor Who: 50 years of Ineffectual Heroism

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The Made For Television Presidency: NIXON
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Before the 2000 election hanging chad miniseries, the world was subject to the first televised debate. Here one of the contestants is literally blowing it on live T.V. Years later he would get in trouble for taking selfies, I mean taping his own conversations. He was a groovy guy having appeared on a hip 1960's T.V. show.


full link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qRZvlZZ0DY

Funny guy, so why would anyone write this?

"Though Richard Nixon does not have the dictatorial power of Adolf Hitler–at least, not yet–he has shown in Vietnam that he has the awesome means, unrestrained by any hand, and the disposition to be just as savage in his determination to massacre and destroy the innocent people of any small nation which refuses to bow to his dictates and which is powerless to retaliate.

And apparently the majority of the American people, like the Germans under Hitler, couldn’t care less. While Nixon was celebrating the festivities of the Prince of Peace by his reckless, bloody, paranoiac bombing of Hanoi, our God-fearing citizens were preoccupied with the Washington Redskins and the Miami Dolphins fighting their way to the Super Bowl, and seemed unmoved by the barbarism of their President and its horrible consequences for his victims."

Well Nixon claimed 'the silent majority' was behind him. Something kind of hard to check into, no? Did Hitler ever say he represented the German people? :)

How did Hitler win anyway? Well with a plurality not a majority of the vote, and it was the party that won the vote, not the man.
"In the 1932 elections, the Nazis won 33 percent of the votes, more than any other party. In January 1933 Hitler was appointed chancellor, the head of the German government, and many Germans believed that they had found a savior for their nation" The party would need to have won over 50% of the vote to qualify as winning a 'majority' of votes. 67% percent of the votes were for anyone but the Nazi Party,the latter 67% represent a sane choice, by the way. I would focus on the majority who did not vote for the Nazi party myself, were I writing the article, but that's me. And it's not like the public counted each ballot themselves. The public can never verify the count of any election anyway, despite the media hype from 2000. And in that recount saga, the campaigns had to ask for the recount from the election board, it was not the public's doing. We in the public believe what our trusted news sources tell us to believe. Notice the "Masonic 33' references, left like a calling card of some unseen and unnamed illusionist or script writer. Also please note the use of trauma based marketing or rather the result, the "preoccupation with the SuperBowl", something those of us in the United States know is a real phenomena.

This relates to the Doctor Who episode of "The Deadly Assassin" as the Doctor wins the Presidency of the Time Lords as a result of being accused of assassinating the Lord President. That's how things work out, as the Doctor runs for office, siting some obscure law, in order to avoid execution. A common conspiracy meme is that L.B.J. 'killed Kennedy'. Another one is that Nixon knew something about the assassination. Maybe he knew which set it was filmed on. L.B.J. or the former two-term Vice President, Richard Nixon, would have had a motive, means and opportunity, I suppose,to get involved with a conspiracy to kill the young handsome Arthurian character. But a glance at the film evidence, even with one eye, would have shown Columbo that the whole thing was a Hollywood production.

source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_%26 ... s_Laugh-In
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Nixon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality_(voting)
http://www.thenation.com/article/hubris-president/
https://books.google.com/books?id=nJzoY ... le&f=false
http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/articl ... d=10007671
http://www.ontheissues.org/AskMe/plurality.htm
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