I'm going to get into this a little, and then work up some steam when
I get home.
What sells to bonehead middle America? Demo Derbys. Ya know, sort
of a merger of equals. :^) Consider this is the best of what was
sent in. I haven't seen the show, so I really can't be a "creep"
about it (more on that soon). I have spoken to the guy who produced
it. He's a good guy. He understands what is right and wrong about
showing an autorace on TV. The show originally was to be a hour in
length. There was so little usable material, it was cut to a half. He
struggled to make it "entertaining" (my term, not his). FWIW, this
contest languished for about a year, and was dumped into his lap.
Hard to make lemonade out of bricks. :^)
That's not to say Alan should not have been the winner. We all know
*how* exciting Solo is on TV (had I really known they were finishing
the contest, I would have mentioned a few thousand times how good that
video was to the producer [sorry , Alan] ).
Okay, so I worked up steam now. Jim, don't watch Speedvision any more.
That includes F1 and Legends of Motorsport. :^) I won't either.
Matt Murray
I may or may not forward your message to him. It depends how he feels
about the show now that it is completed. Just to show you he does care,
he reposted it because he wasn't happy with the music's relationship
to the voice-over.
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Jimmy Crider wrote: Is it just me, or were the vast majority of the
people doing exceptionally, dangerously STUPID things on SV's Viewer Videos
doing so on motorcycles? LOTS of bike stupidity on public roads, for
example.
I did immediately pick up on the bits of what I thought were Goeke-Cam
footage -- and there were literally bits of it on the show -- but then on
the
closing credits, I saw it was Alan Dahl's Son of Goeke-Cam. Saw a couple of
other familiar names up there, too, but I really needed to tape the credits
and slow-mo the contributor names.
SV ran a sober disclaimer before the show -- the standard "Don't Try This
At Home" stuff, but then, unfortunately, devoted a disproportionate amount
of airtime to stuff that would be better on a "Stupid People Crash & Burn"
VHS cassette ( "Only $9.99!! PLUS IF YOU ACT NOW... WE'LL INCLUDE THIS
**FREE** COPY OF 'UNHELMETED MOTORCYCLE IDIOTS' WITH YOUR PAID CREDIT CARD
ORDER!!!"). Even the winner's video, which had lots of desert bikers, also
had those bikers using ditches for ramps to jump across public streets,
irrigation canals, and the like.
I had such high hopes for this when they announced the contest -- Goeke,
Alan Dahl, and a lot of other on-board camera folks from Solo would have a
shot at showing what we do, we'd see some good club-racing footage, etc.
What we got was a lot of demolition-derby -- including what looked like a
couple guys out in the holler' somewhere staging their own demo derby just
for the camcorder and staging their own monster truck car crush show, but
with a Pinto(!) instead of Bigfoot -- and boneheads doing motorcycle
burnouts in the middle of public roads, carrying wheelies down the highway,
videotaping the speedometer -- at night -- displaying the far side of 150
mph while on a public road, etc.
I'm not some old stick-in-the-mud, and I've been known to treat the speed
limit as an advisory, not an absolute, but c'mon folks, let's encourage
*responsible* high-performance driving and cycling among the great
unwashed. I'd hoped SpeedVision would be the one media outlet that
understood that. I suppose I was wrong.
Matt M -- can you maybe pass this on to someone in SV's programming
department? I don't have the comment address handy here at work.
Jim Crider
autojim@att.net
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