Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday So our dad is a documentary film maker And when we were growing up he worked on movies about everything from water in Florida, to education in Alaska. And I guess there is a case to be made that we followed in his footsteps by creating non-fiction video. Except I don't really think of like this as a documentary. This is more, you know, like very short podcasts featuring facial expressions. Which is a genre of non-fiction video that is far less expensive and time consuming than documentaries and also requires less talent for visual storytelling, which is great because even after more than ten years, I'm still pretty bad at editing video. But one thing I did inherit from Dad was a really deep love for documentary films. Like, Hank, as you know, my dream job has always been...you know what... I'm about to date myself, but there used to be this widely adopted technology called cable television. Basically you would pay a monthly fee in exchange for access to lots of video content. So it was sort of like Netflix, except for some reason you still had to watch advertisements.. It was a weird time...but anyways, there were these cable stations that just showed old movies all day! Like one of them was called "Turner Classic Movies," And before these movies started, there would be this person who would introduce the movie to you and talk about some of the historical context and who the stars were. Now it occurs to me in retrospect that the introducer probably existed mostly to make the movie longer... like, if you can stretch a 90 minute movie into 120 minutes of content, then you could add 8 minutes of advertising. But when I was a kid that was my dream job, to be an introducer. But not regular movies, of documentaries. These days, documentaries are a lot easier to discover than they were when I was a kid. Netflix, for instance, has an excellent and extensive library, but still, many of my favorite documentaries aren't on Netflix. Like I'm thinking of the "7UP" series, where a filmmaker has checked in every seven years with a group of people since they were kids in the 1960s. Or "Herb & Dorothy," a movie about a postal worker and a librarian living in New York City who became two of the world's leading art collectors. For the classic, "Complaints of a dutiful Daughter," a gut-wrenching and sometimes hilarious movie about a woman whose mother has Alzheimer's. Or "Slavery by Another Name," a movie about the failures of reconstruction and the post-civil war United States. There are so many great documentaries and so few of them ever find a broad audience. But as a kid, my favorite genre of documentary was the nature documentary, where you can see animals in the wild like fighting to survive. I love nature docs because they felt like a glimpse into a world without us, I mean they almost never include humans in the frame and there's something magical about that. But of course in real life humans can't be separated from nature, I mean we're currently nature's most important species, and the choices we're making affect every other species on Earth. And that's what I love so much about the movie Kedi and why I wanted us to help in its distribution. Kedi uses all the conventions of the nature documentary - you get the beautiful cinematography, the fight scenes, the plucky underdog is struggling to survive, the parents caring for babies, but it doesn't exclude humans from the story. Instead we see the connecting points between a city and its people and its cats. It is a nature documentary that acknowledges that humans are part of nature. And it shows that life for cats is sometimes tender and sometimes cold and always unpredictable, as it is for humans. Now I know that Kedi is currently only available via purchase or YouTube red and that makes it inaccessible to a lot of you. One of the big challenges with documentaries is that it's really hard to fund them on advertising revenue alone, which is why so few of them are available on free streaming services, at least legally. But regardless, if you do have a chance to see it someday, I really hope you do. It's a wonderful movie. While I'm fulfilling my dream of being an introducer, two other recommendations: if you live in the United States, PBS has some excellent documentaries that are actually available for free. Also, wherever you live, there is a free and ongoing documentary project that you might enjoy called "The road to Nerdfighteria" about how different people found this little corner of the internet and what it means to them. They're still accepting submissions and it's a really wonderful series, links in the doobly-doo below. Hank. I will see you on Friday. End Screen! Hank, I actually won't see you on Friday, that was misleading and I apologize, but I'm going to be taking like a week or possibly two weeks away from the internet to focus on some writing things. But there will be a video next Tuesday, it's just that I recorded it in advance. Okay, check out Kedi and The Road to Nerdfighteria! Bye!
Can I just say I loved that he used the flip transition immediately after talking about being bad at editing. That was a fantastic touch.
It really makes me uncomfortable how they've got this Kedi thing going on. I don't understand what motivates them to put this type of paid-for content on their channel, and to be pushing it in multiple main-videos. Several years ago John and Hank promised that they would never put pre-rolls on Vlogbrothers videos because they saw the channel as a "sacred space". Then they put up prerolls (which, to be fair, were voted into place by a Nerdfighter survey). Now they're putting Red-exclusive content up. This just feels like a slippery slope where the creators of our content continue elevating themselves above their viewers, where it's not a back-and-forth discussion, but instead a one-directional "I make content and then you absorb it" kind of thing. I'm not saying that there are large issues going on, but it feels like we're on a dangerous path. I don't want to have content on Vlogbrothers that we have to pay for. John and Hank have recommended media (including documentaries) numerous times, and that's awesome - I recommend things to my friends, and they me, all the time. But I don't see why they're hosting the content themselves. This feels like an uncomfortable advertising campaign where Hank and John are being paid to promote this movie without telling us, and integrating the advertising into their content. I would love to hear about John's childhood documentary dreams. But the segue into "And speaking of documentaries!..." feels odd.
I don't have a cohesive point to make here and I've just been rambling, but this whole Kedi thing makes me feel weird about what exactly Vlogbrothers and Nerdfighteria are, and what the relation between them is, and what other actors are involving themselves in that interaction. It feels like there's something "off" about this situation. Just leaves a strange taste in my mouth. I'm interested to see what other folks think about it.
TCM is my favorite movie channel. Robert Osbourne who used to be the prime time film introducer just died. My second favorite part about the channel is there are no commercials during the movies and there are only commercials for TCM.
Also, if I recommend 30 for 30 documentaries from ESPN. I'm not a sports person, but they are great. Another documentary that is on Netflix is Advanced Style.
The pre-movie announcer is also common with local TV. Or was, anyway.
WTTW (the larger of our two PBS affiliates in Chicago) was famous for being one of the early adopters of Doctor Who in the US. It was tentpole programming for them throughout the 1970s and 80s.
One of the things that made WTTW's presentation of Doctor Who great was the bumper voiceovers by Marty Robinson. He would always do these extemporaneous introductions before episodes, as well as Join Us Next Time For... promos over the end credits for the last episode in a serial. They were so good.
My favorite is probably this one.