Several of my friends get quite nostalgic about the song Shaving Cream … it was a great way to sing and almost cuss while skating safely on the edge of the profanities we weren’t supposed to know as kids. I’m indoctrinating the next generation, but there’s enough real cussing out there (especially now that it’s being proven good for you!) that Shaving Cream hasn’t got the bite it did in my time. And when I have to explain to them what shaving cream is, well, it violates the third rule of good joke telling.
“Bleeping” is more common now on television than it was in my youth; even more common are alternate angle shots and redubbed dialogue which have improved somewhat; with the editing taking place on a hit-or-miss level in captioning.
Some shows have even taken it to parody level, such as South Park and Arrested Development, but it turns out they have nothing on Netflix. One of my favorite new toys is the Roku (still needs work but is a basic entertainment tool) and the newly-expanded selection available from Netflix through our DSL connection.
The Roku simple in it’s execution – select something from your viewing list (built in a web browser on their site), click a button, and view it. Most of the recordings are of good enough quality that a few moments of queuing has us watching entire movies in short order. A few are bad – images and sound blurred or out of sync enough to cause discomfort, or never load at all.
But one kid’s movie takes the cake. It downloads easily, but the sound track is corrupted. Not enough for the kids to care, but enough to annoy us adults a bit. The words aren’t slurred or out of sync, but completely missing. The effect on the dialogue is devastatingly funny for the adults in the room – you get the impression that this is one bad-[bleeping] bunch of [bleeping] [bleepers] causing all [bleeping] kinds of [bleep].
I could use Netflix’s website to report the audio problem with the movie, but then how would we get our [bleeping] fun? Now if only they’d do it with Sponge Bob, since it’s his tenth anniversary and all ….
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