The Sender brings to my attention the fabulous degree to which the management at the channel formerly known as SciFi have their heads up their own syffies:
“The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks, who helped launch Sci Fi Channel when he worked at USA Network.
Mr. Brooks said that when people who say they don’t like science fiction enjoy a film like “Star Wars,” they don’t think it’s science fiction; they think it’s a good movie.
“We spent a lot of time in the ’90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it’s called Sci Fi,” Mr. Brooks said. “It’s somewhat cooler and better than the name ‘Science Fiction.’ But even the name Sci Fi is limiting.”
"Food has long been associated with fat people who fart a lot. We spent a lot of time in the 90's trying to distance the Food Network from food."
"History has long been associated with painfully boring classes about dusty old shit involving people who are like, totally dead. When people enjoy a movie like
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, they don't think it's history; they think it's a good movie. By changing the name officially to The Hitler Channel, we get the best of both worlds!"
"The name USA has long been associated with overfed, overprivileged loud assholes who refuse to speak the local language when travelling and will send their overdeveloped military to interfere in areas where they have no business on the flimsiest of pretenses because they think God is both on their side and as stupid as they are. By changing the network name to Usay we can get away from the image of being particularly American, which was really holding us back, and also just incidentally, Usay can be trademarked while USA can't."
What a gigantic pack of flaming recta. Screw these guys, screw their shitty $3.95 'original' productions and Trek reruns, and screw their new Pokemon-sounding name, which I shall persist in pronouncing "Siffy". Most people with the goal of becoming bigger than Rupert Murdoch aren't thinking about doing it in the 'being an asshole' arena, but here we have a network cheerfully shitting on the heads of the market it was expressly created to exploit, in pursuit of some hypothetical audience that doesn't associate Siffy with geekery, and incidentally taking a moment to rub an extra wad of feces into the hair of every woman who has ever enjoyed a science fiction program ('cause we all know ain't no girls in the Battlestar Galactica fandom, and certainly, the one thing every female fan of science fiction needs is to be reminded that they don't really exist and/or aren't real women, who ought to be watching something more their speed like Oxygen, preferably on the TV screen built into their fridge so they can do it in the kitchen where they belong).
There's no remaining excuse for this channel to exist and I will not take seriously anyone who attempts in future to defend anything about them. They deserve nothing but to crash and burn and go down as the biggest, most embarrassing failure in television history (a tall order, but I think these protosimians can manage it quite neatly with just a little effort). Science fiction -- of which I am of course the living incarnation -- officially disowns Siffy and anyone ever associated with it including Edward James Olmos. Yes, it is true: science fiction is associated with 'dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basement'. So are the internet, the computer industry in general, every form of game that isn't played in a stadium, the sciences, and hundreds of millions of dollars in disposable income.
Good luck pursuing that fabulously large segment of the public who wouldn't want to associate with science fiction but would be perfectly happy to associate with the good name and brand identity of Siffy, there, assholes.
Oh, and here's a punchline:
But one key venture it won’t discuss is its work with Trion Worldwide to create content designed from the beginning to work on multiple platforms. Mr. Howe said the network is close to announcing a title and description of the project, which will launch as both a subscription-based, massively multiplayer online game and a television series.
Yeah, because if there's one thing that's not remotely associated with geeks and antisocial, dysfunctional boys in their basements, it's the MMORPG.
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