There’s a lot of talk lately about how uncanny Tina Fey’s impression of VP hopeful Sarah Palin really is, and with the next season of her Emmy-award winning TV show, 30 Rock, getting ready to launch at the end of the month, I thought the timing was right to post a consideration about this very… Continue reading 30 Rock Popularizes the Uncanny Valley
Tag: television
Pop Song as Product Placement: Doublemint “Forever”
If you watch the latest Doublemint gum TV commercial — featuring Chris Brown dancing in the dark with the product’s new “slim” package — you might be wondering: gee, that song and dance is nice but what happened to the infamously kitschy jingle and the wholesome set of twins? The ad itself is a twin: … Continue reading Pop Song as Product Placement: Doublemint “Forever”
Weirdness Isolation and Sunnydale Syndrome
The TV Tropes Wiki is a useful community-built resource of common plot elements on television shows, which illustrates the high degree of scholarship and close reading that fan culture is capable of producing. It reads like a folklorist’s taxonomy. The majority of the site’s “tropes” — which they define as “devices and conventions that a… Continue reading Weirdness Isolation and Sunnydale Syndrome