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Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 12:28 pm
by Dalty
We used to have a thread like this round here somewhere, where I asked for clarification on American things that baffled me and I was either too Ipsy to Google or preferred your descriptions. However I am too Ipsy to find it.

Last time you all helped clear up my confusion around the mythical 'Draft' in US sports and what the fuck Sweeps week was in TV.

So here we go again.....

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 12:28 pm
by Dalty
What the hell is a 'Sloppy Joe' ??

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 12:29 pm
by Dalty
What is 'Carls Jr' and why does it have mythic qualities?

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 12:44 pm
by Mal Shot First
Image

A Sloppy Joe is sort of like a hamburger, except it's made with loose ground beef instead of a patty. It often also contains peppers as well as spices, and the whole mixture is in a type of tomato/pepper-based sauce (which makes it sloppy).

Edit: According to Wikipedia, Sloppy Joes consist of "ground beef, onions, tomato sauce or ketchup and other seasonings, served on a hamburger bun." I'm sure there are variations on the basic recipe.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 12:47 pm
by Mal Shot First
Carl's Jr. is a fast food franchise that's marketed as Hardee's in most of the United States outside of California. They're most famous for their Big Burgers, so-called because they're usually made with 1/3-lb. patties instead of the traditional 1/4-lb. patties.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 1:07 pm
by Jubbers
Sloppy Joe may also be called "Manwich." (a brand of canned sloppy joe mixture)


http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki/Manwich

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 2:06 pm
by Dalty
What is syndication and why was it important to Baywatch?

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 2:08 pm
by The Swollen Goiter of God
I'll see your Daltipsy and raise it a Goitipsy. Don't trust anything I'm about to say to be the gospel truth. No research went into it. Now that that's out of the way:

I'm going to expand on what Mal said about Carl's Jr. It's less a California-specific thing and more a U.S. Southwest thing. I think it started out in California and is probably headquartered out there, but I used to see it all the time on drives out to the Grand Canyon. I'd start seeing Carl's Jr. locations in Texas and continue seeing them all the way into Arizona.

My grandfather refused to stop at them, since he only really likes to go with known entities. We never stopped there, and we never stopped at Whataburger. What a shame. It was always McDonald's. I'm a man who loves McDonald's, so I guess this was all right, but I also love Whataburger, and I was always curious as fuck concerning Carl's Jr. It used to really annoy me that he would never go anywhere but McDonald's. He also wouldn't let me go anywhere without him. Fucker.

The only exception: Hardee's. We would sometimes stop at Hardee's locations instead of McDonald's on our way out to the Canyon. We'd run out of Hardee's the farther west we went, though. Hardee's locations could be found all over Alabama. It was weird to me that I never saw them out west. They didn't seem like mom-and-pop grills or anything. On the surface, they were as organized and chain-y as any big chain. They had kid's meals, and the kids meals had tie-ins with internationally known entities. Hardee's had a California Raisins toy promotion at one point, for example, and they also had NFL-licensed stuff and mini Pound Puppies.

Turns out that Hardee's was more or less a regional thing, despite these toy licenses. It was big in the Southeast and Midwest, but it wasn't really big (or even present) outside of those regions.

It was a quirky little chain. It had burgers, but it also specialized in fried chicken and roast beef. It was like a Burger King/KFC/Arby's hybrid. It also did specialty shakes (my favorite was peach, which you could pretty much only get at Hardee's), which made it seem a little like Dairy Queen, too. If I'm not mistaken, the fried chicken and roast beef were added to the menu after Hardee's either acquired or licensed from other chains. I'm pretty sure the chicken, for example, came from the same supplier who supplied the chicken for Roy Rogers Chicken. (Does Roy Rogers Chicken still exist? I'm not sure.)

In the late nineties--I'm going to say '96 or '97--Hardee's switched its menu over completely and retooled its look. Why? It was acquired by Carl's Jr. I'm not sure if Hardee's went bankrupt or if they just sold out to Carl's Jr. I just know that Hardee's was one thing one month and something else the next. It wasn't until my grandfather took me to the Grand Canyon after my high school graduation that I noticed that the new Hardee's star logo was identical to the Carl's Jr. logo.

Here's something funny: in later years, the retooled, Carl's Jr.-like Hardee's became my grandfather's favorite eatin' place. All those years, he could have been enjoying delicious Carl's Jr. hamburgers instead of limiting us to McDonald's.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 2:15 pm
by Mal Shot First
Syndication is the term used to describe the process by which one TV network sells broadcasting rights for a TV program to another TV network. The network buying the rights is then allowed to broadcast the program even though it may still be running on the original network. This happens a lot to successful shows like Friends or Baywatch.

I imagine it's important because it can help boost viewership. If I'm not mistaken, the original network usually waits until the show has a few seasons under its belt already (there might be some kind of rule about how many episodes a show has to reach before it is eligible for syndication). Once the show is allowed to be broadcast on another network, that network will usually try to push it pretty hard in its programming, which in turn has the effect that people watching that network can potentially catch up on a show they hadn't been following previously, thus potentially leading them to start watching newly released episodes of the show once they're caught up. Syndication may be less important now than it used to be, since so many shows are now available at the push of a button and you can watch an entire season in a couple of days, if you want.

TBS was really pushing Seinfeld, Everybody Loves Raymond, Friends, and Family Guy when they got the rights to them.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 3:33 pm
by The Swollen Goiter of God
Here's a conversation we had about syndication on Corona 2.0 one year and five weeks ago:

Mal said:
Even as a kid, I was sometimes disappointed by the discrepancy between the high animation quality of the intro to the TMNT cartoon and the often crappy animation of the actual show.

Goiter said:
You already know this, but a big part of that has to do with their third-season switch to a faster production rate (i.e., lots of shortcuts, lots of recycled animation, less care taken to keep colors consistent from one cut to the next) to be able to make it to sixty-five episodes. At sixty-five episodes, you get instant syndication. They already had nineteen episodes from the "second season," which was really the first, since what they count as the "first season" was really just a five-part movie aired over the course of a week.

The fourth season was a lot shorter, but they'd already reached syndication and hit a low animation standard, so they didn't really work too hard to make it look any better than the third-season material.

You can see the discrepancy between high animation quality of intros and low quality in the actual show in other shows that strove for early syndication. ThunderCats comes to mind.

Dalty said:
Wow. I never made the connection!

I learned something today.

Goiter said:
Also, the intro animation works something like a pitch for the money men. The more exciting and fluid it looks, the better it bodes for selling the show.

I always appreciated how honestly the He-Man intro animation represented the show's animation. Of course, they were famous for shooting for syndication right out of the gate. Scheimer/Filmation had had success with animated shows already (the biggest success came with Fat Albert), and he had already gone through the frustration of having to try to reach the magic syndication number to assure his show's longevity. It was a pretty innovative business gamble on his part to gun for the sixty-five episodes before even bothering to try to sell the show.

Sword & sorcery-type fantasy was incredibly popular at the time (Conan, etc.), and so was space age tech (Star Wars, etc.). They figured a blend of the two would sell, and they were right. They also figured the "educational"/PSA aspect would sell. It was pretty shrewd business.

Rankin/Bass and Marvel/Sunbow both learned from the Filmation business model. The kids of the day weren't looking for mind-blowing animation.

World Events Productions really learned from the Filmation business model. They simply bought full runs of already-produced Japanese anime series and Americanized them. It was a big financial gain for the amount of work put in it--though I don't want to undersell the amount of work put in it. Adaptation comes with its own challenges. It's not as financially or temporally draining as paying people to create a show from scratch, but there's still a lot of work involved.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 6:43 pm
by omicron
IIRC, after 100 shows, it can be syndicated. This means other channels can show it. Basically, it allows older shows to be shown on other networks.

Why is it important? It means more money for the actors and production company.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 6:56 pm
by The Swollen Goiter of God
It's typically one-hundred for live-action/prime time/adult shows. I think it's technically supposed to be four full U.S. show seasons--which can be a number as small as eighty-eight, since I think the minimum for a full season is twenty-two episodes--but most networks prefer a full one-hundred.

It's different for cartoons and shows meant for kids. That number is just sixty-five. I think it has to do with the number of weekdays in a year. There are fifty-two weeks in a year, and there are 260 weekdays. If you have at least sixty-five episodes ready, that means you can cycle through so that you only have individual episodes repeat four times a year.

I'm not sure why it's not the same for adult programming. Maybe it's because they sometimes like to do blocks and have two episodes of a show back-to-back. Being sure would require the tiniest bit of research, so I'm not going to do it.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 8:37 pm
by neglet
Mal Shot First wrote:Image

A Sloppy Joe is sort of like a hamburger, except it's made with loose ground beef instead of a patty. It often also contains peppers as well as spices, and the whole mixture is in a type of tomato/pepper-based sauce (which makes it sloppy).

Edit: According to Wikipedia, Sloppy Joes consist of "ground beef, onions, tomato sauce or ketchup and other seasonings, served on a hamburger bun." I'm sure there are variations on the basic recipe.
Sloppy Joes are basically hamburgers for people too lazy to bother chewing a lot. Our family variation is 1-1.5 lb ground turkey, two cans of chicken gumbo soup, and ketchup.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 20th, 2014, 10:06 pm
by The Swollen Goiter of God
I keep expecting someone to post the Sandler/Farley sketch. I'm glad no one has. I was never big on it.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 22nd, 2014, 8:39 am
by Adam54
Aaaaaaand now I want sloppy joes, dammit Dalty!

I'm trying to remember though, did Baywatch ever actually run on a network? I thought that was always just syndicated?

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 22nd, 2014, 10:53 am
by The Swollen Goiter of God
Seems like it was on NBC its first season. It was offered up for first-run syndication after that. I can't remember how many seasons it had after that. Seems like they were doing new shows for at least a decade. I can't remember if Baywatch Nights was considered an entirely other series or if it was just a renaming and refocusing of the original show. I feel like it came on a few years after Baywatch had finished its run, though, so I think it's considered a completely different series.

It should be noted that there are different shades of syndication. Baywatch didn't need to have one-hundred episodes in the bag, because it wasn't aiming for daily syndication at first. When it went into syndication, it was aiming for the one-night-a-week standard like any other first-run show on broadcast networks.

There can be shows that are syndicated right out of the gate. The Muppet Show is a good example of this. Henson & Co. didn't have to build a huge library of shows beforehand, because they were aiming for a the one-night-a-week standard. They essentially just did their show independently and sold it. I think people in the U.S. associate it exclusively with CBS, even though it wasn't owned by CBS. CBS was more like a distributor that paid both for first-airing privileges in the U.S. There was another U.S. distributor attached to the show, too, but I can't remember its name. I don't know that the other one had its own network/channel. I think it was more involved in making sure Henson had a production budget.

Anyway, the type of syndication The Muppet Show had allowed it some freedom from network supervision. It wasn't technically a CBS show, so it didn't have CBS breathing down its neck. The Henson Company had already proved itself to be a producer of clean, reliable, quality programming with Sesame Street, so it had some breathing room. Henson knew what he could and couldn't get away with on prime time television, so he worked within that framework, but he didn't have to deal with constant notes from studio brass.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 22nd, 2014, 6:50 pm
by neglet
Star Trek: TNG also a big syndication success story, from the ancient days if of only a few networks.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 23rd, 2014, 11:44 am
by Dalty
In America, do the trains really not stop after hitting something? Or is that just the movies?

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 23rd, 2014, 12:03 pm
by Mal Shot First
Depends on the mass of the object they hit.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 23rd, 2014, 12:16 pm
by The Swollen Goiter of God
Ol' Beau Watkins could stop a train. He might bounce it backwards.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: June 23rd, 2014, 12:58 pm
by Dalty
Mal Shot First wrote:Depends on the mass of the object they hit.
A light attack helicopter (Blue Thunder) or a time traveling DeLorean.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: July 3rd, 2014, 2:09 pm
by Dalty
Is it true that Americans can have a drunken 'ol time on just one of those packs of six beers in a cardboard carry box..... even when there's four Americans involved? The movies say 'yes!'

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: July 3rd, 2014, 2:51 pm
by The Swollen Goiter of God
All four were drinking whisky from personal flasks before they met up to share the six pack. The 1.5 beers they had after meeting up was just enough to get them past tipsy.

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: July 4th, 2014, 6:44 am
by Dalty
Nah, they're just lightweights!

Re: Teach Dalty American!

Posted: July 9th, 2014, 10:47 pm
by Space Tycoon
Maybe they were drinking Canadian beer.

Or that strong Polish brew that made me puke my guts out some years back.


Or whiskey. Like that other guy said above me just then.