Syfy Channel? Y o Y?
My television pretty much stays dark during the week, so it took until the weekend for me to twig to it.
The Sci Fi channel has vanished.
The same shows were there, but the name wasn't.
In its place is something called the Syfy channel.
Whose dopey, dumbed-down idea was this, anyway?
Do the network honchos think this is the next, hip iteration of the texting-literate generation? Or that we R 2 dum 2 no betr?
Sci fi. the venerable shorthand for science fiction -- a noble genre of literature and art and entertainment in its own right, with giants like Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin -- has been reduced by this phonetic and simple-minded un-word to something that looks like it's traded on the stock market.
I read that the execs who thought of this say it will allow them a ''broader range of content'' in programming. Terrifying words, those. Don't think for a minute that they mean more original programming, or more film classics like ''2001: A Space Odyssey'' and ``Blade Runner'' and even ''Barbarella.'' More likely infomercials. The slick thinking must go that spelling it ''Syfy'' absolves them of any responsibility to the spirit of ''sci fi.''
The Syfy channel exhorts me to ''imagine greater.''
All right, I will:
I am imagining Rod Serling siccing the Kanamits on whoever thought this was a great idea. ``Let's do lunch,'' they'll say. ``You be lunch.''
You are spot on..sorry I just ran into your article. This whole scene has gotten bizarre.
I ran across a link with Victor Kubicek of Halcyon and the Terminator Salvation People ringing the opening bell at Nasdaq this last may 19, 2009. I think that captures the spirit of this thing. They also bought up all Philipl Dicks rights to his works. as .JJ abramson did Lovecrafts Cuthulu , I recall the Scifi and History channel 2008 wars over trademark of UFO hunters..oddly Mufon had a Trademark application in too..Odder that the first two principles were somehow in like an investors interlocking directorate....some food fight between all three.
All for the real estate between our ears..our eyes and minds and
yes of course..not too far down further from those pocketbooks.
I've always seen gratuitous advertising on since Waynes World and ET pointed it out with those reeses pieces..and Coca Cola..
thats not new..but when the marketing teams can create virtual hoaxes..and stage happenings from theaters to restrooms like ammo marketing and Sony has..well. that smacks of tampering with certain core beliefs that many people have with respect to scifi and ufology and the paranormal.... sci fi..you know its fiction..SYFY..well ..is that sci fi on steroids? no..just the opposite..you can get away with passing fiction as real in any community, not just the ones I mentioned....no line of demarcation..no leaving of imagination to develop naturally.....they hope perhaps to get a hybrid seed out of this..a super bumper crop for the investors..
I thnk..that also blurs the ethics and signals the collapse of scifi as we have come to know it..They should be ashamed of themselves..
I don't think ..like farenheit 451..that a small secluded group..will be somewhere hiding from the authorities.. preserving all the books..by memory for posterity....this time around.
Turn the SYFY Channel off, Go to the Library while you still can read a real book and classic Scifi ...and not a digitized..and who knows , commercialized llilliputiian version of a classic..
Posted by: Manny | August 25, 2009 at 09:27 AM
The change to "Syfy" is utterly irrelevant to content, but is sadly indicative of a management that is ignorant of traditions in the genre, just plain clueless about how such goofy-ness negatively reverberates with their audience, and most damningly, is simply not that bright. What a sad state of affairs for a channel that what was expected to step forward as a preimier showcase for classic sci-fi and a launching pad for new talent. I guess the crack twenty-something MBA brain trust at NBC came up with this one, subordinating venerable tradition to pseudo-hip "branding." Perhaps we can hope that the vacuous Syfy trademark will spontaneously decay into the quantum mechanical mediocrity foam from which it appeared, unstable in our universe because of its major silliness and dorkitude. How lame--and, lame-brained.
Posted by: Dave | July 25, 2009 at 02:44 PM
Hmmm..... Shoulda named it Sigh Fie...
Posted by: JohnLloydScharf | July 14, 2009 at 09:59 PM
Why the big surprise? This is no different from the recent "transformation" of Headline News into its hip, new, all form/no function, hey baby I'm so busy I've got to abbreviate everything-moniker, "HLN".
After the 1992 Rodney King riots, the LA City Council decreed that South Central L.A. (where it started and a high-crime area anyway) would henceforth be called "South LA" to make all that bad stuff go away. Presumably, they expected gang members would scratch their heads in geographic confusion and go elsewhere to have their gunfights. Of course it failed, but did prove that no one produces more, or achieves less, than a creative idiot.
Posted by: Randy | July 13, 2009 at 06:41 AM
They gave some lame excuse about how they could not trademark "scifi". Of course they also have said the did it because they were not going to stick to science fiction entirely as well. I agree with you that this switch was moronic at best. "Imagine greater"? How about imagine someone there has a brain!
Posted by: JKA | July 13, 2009 at 04:19 AM
I am imagining...Syfy
character unwelcome
Posted by: Dan Wickerd | July 12, 2009 at 11:16 PM