This Post May Not Be Suitable for Children

While loading up the cartoons from my recently purchased Looney Tunes Golden Collection set into my computer, I noticed text similar to the following on the back of all the cases:

“The Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 5 Is Intended for the Adult Collector and May Not Be Suitable for Children.”

What's the deal with that? Not the Capitalising Every Word in the Sentence (although that does make me scratch my head), but that it “may not be suitable for children?”

I grew up watching these cartoons. My parents grew up watching these cartoons. Some of these cartoons came out when my grandparents were in their teens. And it was always considered to be good, wholesome family entertainment. But all of a sudden, it's no longer deemed to be fit for consumption by the next generation.

Is this a sign of how sanitised and paranoid our society is becoming, where people are afraid that seeing a cartoon duck trying to drop cartoon anvils on a cartoon rabbit will turn children into serial killers or something? Or is it simply not educational enough (I beg to differ... Thanks to Looney Tunes, I know not to waste my money buying anything from the Acme Corporation)?

I guess another possibility could be that some of the older cartoons do portray racial stereotypes and prejudices that would not be considered appropriate to show young children nowadays¹. They tend to imitate things they see and hear, so I guess in that regard it might be good to keep them from seeing certain cartoons...


¹Every disc from volume 3 on even starts out with the notice, “The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in the U.S society. These depictions were wrong then and they are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today's society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming that these prejudices never existed.”

HD or Not HD?

One of my favourite TV shows, Castle, began its fourth season yesterday and today it appeared in iTunes to purchase a Season Pass. My big dilemma has been whether I should buy the Standard Definition version like the last three seasons, or buy it in High Definition this year. I now have a larger TV, so I'm sure it'll look great in HD. Also, this season it's only $12 more for HD. I don't know if the lower prices this year (last year was $45 for an SD Season Pass, and only $28 this year) are because they simply want to drum up sales, or because it's planned to be a shorter season. Hopefully, the former. It's a great show.

But there's a lot of debate out there over whether or not iTunes' HD videos should technically even be called HD. Or to quote Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” With a full 1080p HD video, you get six to seven times the number of pixels compared to 480p SD video¹. In contrast, the 720p videos you'll find in the iTunes store and many other online video services only have 2-3x pixels². That's a considerable difference. Granted, any 720p videos I've seen (such as Netflix' HD streams) still look nice, but if I'm shelling out an extra dollar or so per episode for HD video, I'd rather get full HD.

Also, even with 1080p there's still a big difference between what you might find online and what you'd get by buying a Blu-ray Disc instead. A BD has a considerable amount of space on it for storing extra data, so in addition to the high resolution the picture has an increased bit rate (meaning even more detail in the picture) plus higher quality sound. When my brother bought a BD player to replace his dead DVD player—and he doesn't have an HD TV yet so he couldn't compare image quality—his first comment was how much better the audio quality was when comparing the BD and DVD of the same movie. Someone who's downloading a video isn't going to want to wait hours (or even days) to watch it, so audio and video quality has to be sacrificed to make for a more manageable download. But since modern encoding methods can get an SD video to an acceptable file size without significantly compromising quality compared to the DVD, choosing an SD video file over the DVD doesn't have the same loss in quality compared to HD files versus Blu-ray Discs. If you want HD video, you're far better off getting a Blu-ray.

Fortunately for me, I'm used to watching SD TV shows. True, the picture isn't as sharp and detailed as with my Blu-ray movies, but I don't seem to notice as much when it's a TV show and not a movie. I'm slowly upgrading my movie collection to Blu-ray when I find good sales on them (I'm hesitant to pay more than $5-10 to re-buy a movie, unless it's one I really like and have gotten my money's worth out of the DVD already), but I'm perfectly happy having DVD-quality TV shows. Well, part of that is because I like ripping my TV shows into my computer to watch via my Apple TV, which I couldn't do with a Blu-ray because I don't have a BD reader for my Mac.

But back to Castle. Since all my TV shows (aside from some newer Anime purchases) are in SD, and as I said I haven't had any complaints with the image quality even on my new TV, I think it's safe to save the $12 and stick with the SD Season Pass. Maybe I can use part of what I'd save to instead buy Barbie: Princess Charm School! Uh, yeah, no thanks...

¹1080p video has a resolution of 1920x1280, or 2,073,600 pixels. 480p video is either 640x480 (307,200 pixels) or 720x480 (345,600 pixels). Technically, widescreen 480p video is displayed at 854x480 resolution, but it's only stored at one of the other two resolutions and is stretched horizontally when displayed.
²720p video has a resolution of 1280x720 (921,600 pixels).

Consistency is key. Or is it?

I like consistency, especially when it comes to having things that match. In particular, DVD cases. It always really annoyed me that, of all six Star Wars DVDs, only Episode 3 has a bilingual cover and as such, the logo/title on the spine don't match the other cases (fortunately, that should no longer be an issue once I receive the Star Wars Blu-ray box set I've preordered). I've even gone as far as not buying the fourth Shrek movie because I want to buy it on Blu-ray now that I have a Blu-ray player, but I own the first three on DVD. I'm holding out for a sale on the Blu-ray box set so I can get the fourth movie and upgrade the others for cheap at the same time.

But what really has me scratching my head about how to proceed are TV shows. While I do really value consistency, I also value cost-effectiveness. My choice of whether I should buy a show on DVD or online through the iTunes Store is mainly based on cost. While some shows end up being more expensive through iTunes, many are cheaper, assuming I don't find a great sale on the DVDs somewhere.

And therein lies the problem. There are a few shows I've started watching over the past year that I checked out because I found season one on sale for a great price and it looked like an interesting show. Now that I'm getting closer to finishing those seasons, what do I do about season two? It's cheaper to buy the next season on iTunes, even compared to the current sales that are on at the moment. But if I hold on for a few more months, it's possible that an even better sale will come up on the DVDs that's as good as when I bought the first season. Or maybe I'll just end up waiting and waiting for a price point that never appears. So I may as well just buy it from iTunes instead. However, the old “consistency” argument rears its head—it doesn't seem right to own both seasons and not have two boxes on the shelf! It needs to be either all on DVD, or all as digital downloads.

But then again, does it really matter? It's not like those cases on the shelf are anything more than decoration anyway. I simply load all the episodes into my computer and watch them using my AppleTV, and the DVDs just sit there looking pretty unless someone wants to borrow them from me or I find a need to re-rip it for any reason. And when I think about it, there's no real reason for me to even be worrying about such things yet anyway. I still have seven episodes each remaining of both shows in question, and since I've been taking my time watching them I probably won't even be needing the next seasons for a few months anyway... Maybe I'll luck out and stumble across a great sale price in the meantime after all.

So, You Think You Can Vote?

The other day, I saw a vehicle with lettering on the back window saying, “Vote for so-and-so from Abbotsford on So You Think You Can Dance.” I've also seen a similar sign hanging on a telephone pole (except it said something like, “Vote so-and-so SYCYC Dance”—it took me seeing it a dozen times before I finally clued in as to what that stood for). Maybe it's just a concept I don't understand because I don't watch any of those televised singing/dancing/talent shows, but would someone seriously be enticed to vote for someone just because they saw a sign somewhere telling them to? Or because they happened to be from the same city?

If I were voting on any of those shows, I would vote for people based on their actual talent, not where they reside. Their physical proximity to me does not affect their ability in any way. Actually, that's also how I view the results of events like the Olympics. Why should I care that a specific person won an award just because they reside in the same country as me? I couldn't care less who won what award, unless they happened to be someone I knew personally. But then again, I really don't even care about the Olympics period, not even when they were being hosted locally last year, so maybe that might not be the best example.

And thinking about signs about voting, it's the same deal with elections for government positions. Whenever an election is coming around, you'd think the rule was, “He who has the most signs wins.” I would never vote for someone just because he had 10 signs out on the same corner. I realize getting your name out there is important. However, if someone didn't know anything about the candidates and votes for someone simply because they recognized the name from all those signs, that person has no business voting.

Netflix Revisited

Yes, I still stand by my previous assessment that Netflix' Canadian selection has, shall we say, plenty of room for improvement. I recently took a look at my Canflix rental history and did a search on Netflix for all the movies I've watched via Canflix. Only about 10% of the movies I've watched over the past year are currently available for streaming on Netflix. But, when trying to see what Netflix had available, I eventually looked at it from a different angle, that of TV shows, rather than movies. And I actually found that they had several TV shows I was interested in watching, that Canflix didn't have. So I took a little closer look and did some more math to see if it was worth it after all for me to give them a try.

1:00PM - 2:00PM

I recently started watching the show 24. The series just recently ended after airing for eight years, but I had never watched it until just a few weeks ago. I've been renting the discs as part of my Canflix subscription and watching an episode every couple nights or so. But I am not writing about the show, but its episode titles.