And of course Lost borrowed it from VH1’s Pop-Up Video.
Cartoon Network is hoping to attract some new viewers to its much hyped Star Wars: The Clone Wars series by replaying the first season with some Pop-Up Video-esque enhancements.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Decoded will feature 22 episodes from season one “enhanced” with text windows to provide trivia, background and insight from the series to viewers. The goal is to drive repeat viewing and to help provide context to new viewers, who it hopes will tune in for season two in the Fall.
Just what I need when I’m trying to watch a show: trivia in text windows.
Who thinks this stuff up? Chimpanzees in cages for free bananas? They can’t afford to hire real writers?
Mentioning Lost and it’s pop=-ups, when is ABC going to bring it back? I enjoyed two episodes of lost than 10 minutes of Scrubs or Better Dead.
Seriously Richard? If a bar of text distracts you from watching a show, then I don’t understand how you can make it through an episode of anything, much less a 30 minute animated show.
Sounds like a good idea to me.
Um, if these were new episodes, I’d have a problem with it. But otherwise, I really can’t think of a better way to drum up interest in repeats, so long as it’s unobtrusive. I don’t follow Lost, but I did happen upon the episode where they did that text on the bottom, and that did feel lazy to me.
Vader, I’ve never even seen it. What I don’t understand is the point of cluttering up the screen with a distraction from the VIDEO. The point of television production is to produce TV that compels viewing. Presumably the director and the director of photography use the PHOTOGRAPHY to accomplish that task. Adding a distracting banner somewhere on the screen is just pointless. It says you don’t know how to produce a show that keeps its viewers on top of things by dialog and visuals.
This is not CNN where a news banner makes some sense.
And I’d like to see some focus studies, statistical evidence, ANY evidence that such a trick “attracts more viewers”. I’d expect the opposite.
If a show wants to keep people up to date with some sort of “previously on X”, that’s fine, as long as it’s done intelligently (which it usually isn’t, just brief flashes of clips that explain little.) But having to guide the viewer along with text is lame.
Now if it was INTERACTIVE – you could click on your remote and get a question answered like “who is this character?”, I might not mind.