More, More, I'm Still Not Satisfied
Is it me, or have encores become a moot point? I can't remember the last time I went to a show and wasn't rewarded with a couple of extra songs at the end of the set. When the band walks off the stage at the end of the show and the crowd keeps cheering, I no longer feel a sense of suspense. It seems to be understood that the group will return, play a song or two, then leave for real. Some bands don't even pretend to build up that suspense. Some only leave for a few seconds, long enough to let the audience know that what they are about to get is a little "extra." When I saw Danielson, it was clear that they weren't crazy about the (admittedly obnoxious) audience they were playing to, and their hurried return to the stage was followed by an even more hurried, and seemingly obligatory "bonus song." The band was fed up long before they retook the stage for the encore, and it was obvious they just wanted to fulfill their quota and move on with their evening.
It seems like an encore should be a reward for a particularly excited or engaging audience, an option that artists have at their side, not an obligation that has to be fulfilled to satiate the audience's expectations. I suppose my question is, are these encores now performed because they are expected? Are they a sort of built-in bonus to make the audience feel like they are getting more than they paid for? Could a band get away with walking off the stage at the end of their normal set, not to return? Or would fans take so much offense that no artist would dare?
Jym
Because you applauded and raised your lighter so nicely, A.V. Club encore expert Steven Hyden has decided to weigh in:
So, the question is whether most encores are expected, obligatory, and utterly, utterly fake. Jym, I mean this with the utmost respect: Duh! Since I'm taking a sledgehammer to your concert memories, I should also add that the time Conor Oberst or Ben Gibbard said your city rocked way harder than the previous tour stop was probably fraudulent, too. And it really wasn't "great" to be there—it likely was just okay. Look, performers lie all the time. It's their job. Otherwise, it wouldn't be performing—it would be being. The reality is, whoever you're seeing has probably done exactly the same thing every night for three weeks straight before coming to your town. You think because you clap better than other people that it entitles you to something more "genuine"? I bet your boss would love to pay you in applause the next time you get stuck working overtime.
I hope I'm not being harsh. But fake encores aren't new. The average concert—especially in a theater or an arena—has always been a two-way street paved with vanity and self-importance. In one direction, the audience is sending adoration toward the performers, pumping up their egos beyond all reason. In the other direction, the performers reassure the masses, "Yes, you are special, too." This becomes really important in bigger rooms, because individual audience members are increasingly marginalized. The canned "Hello Cleveland!" stage patter comes from the need to transcend the inherent impersonality of a lot of concerts. So do fake encores. Fans often measure how memorable a show is in encores because they assume bands only perform them for "special" audiences—really, it's the musical equivalent of a fake orgasm. ("Man, we were amazing! We made Arcade Fire play four encores!")
I think most people, deep down, realize most encores are fake, but they still would feel cheated if the practice was skipped. We have been so trained to expect an encore that nobody ever leaves when the band leaves the stage the first time—can you imagine just standing there for a few moments before the house lights went up with no encore? Kinda empty, no? So if the audience is happier with a 75-minute set and a 15-minute encore rather than just a straight 90 minutes, why not play along? The downside, of course, is that fake encores have ruined real encores, much like standing ovations have been ruined by American Idol and high-school theater productions. In a perfect world, I suppose, encores would still be special, but why can't we be satisfied with a brilliantly succinct 90 minutes? No matter how many encores, real or fake, a band plays, there's bound to be at least a few yahoos who want more. If you ask me, no band should ever play longer than an hour. But that's another question.
The Long Long Trailer Download
I am a movie-trailer fan, and even when I see a trailer I enjoy in theaters, I still want to watch it again and again online. The problem with this is that I'm frequently forced to watch them in HD, which makes the files huge. I want to watch trailers repeatedly, but I don't want to wait 10 minutes for them to load, so I try to download them. Currently, doing this requires a half-hour of Googling to find a website that will let me save to my computer. Is this because movie studios are behind the times? Are they trying to force me into going to the cinema, or just to visit their website every time I want to see a trailer? Do you find this as annoying as I do?
Ben
Noel Murray doesn't live in a trailer park, but he's seen them on TV:
It seems like you're outlining two things that bother you here, Ben, and I'm with you on both.
First, why do studios want to swallow up your computer's memory every time you click on one of their movie's websites? That's bugged me for years. You'd think that by now, more web designers would be hip to the fact that most people land on sites looking for information, not distraction. I don't need their music or videos to start playing automatically—invariably causing my browser to come to a standstill while everything loads—nor do I need downloadable content that's going to take forever to process. (If you think movie websites are bad, try doing research for record reviews sometime, navigating some band's "artsy" website, looking for a simple bio. Do I click on the spinning flower or the dancing clown? And how do I shut that damn song-loop off?)
The second part of your question has to do with why studios are so obsessive about where and how we can view what are, essentially, commercials. Maybe I misunderstand, but isn't the idea to make sure that as many people as possible know about your movie and see its publicity? What's the deal with giving some sites "exclusive" rights to house a trailer? Sites that, in some cases (ahem, MTV, ahem) are incompatible with all browsers? Why not scatter the trailer around liberally—put it on YouTube and iFilm and Yahoo! and so on?
I could give you an answer, and talk about corporate synergy and branding and content-control and all those other ideas that sound good in boardrooms and suck in the real world. But the situation wouldn't make any more sense.
Tenpenny Opera
This seems like it would be a bit lower on the "popular" scale than most of your pop-culture questions, but Google, IMDB, and YouTube have all failed me. Around five to 10 years ago, when the PBS stations around Philadelphia needed to fill time between programs, they would sometimes run a short film about the history of opera. In the film, a deadpan female narrator would give extremely short plot summaries of a couple dozen operas as they were acted out through Monty Python-style animation. Meanwhile, a counter would keep track of how many characters had died, and at the end, the narrator tallied up the total number of deaths as the screen filled up with bodies. I think the title was something along the lines of "A History Of Opera In 10 Minutes," but I've had no luck searching for that. Does anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?
Andrew
Tasha Robinson has an idea:
You're thinking of Kim Thompson's spiffy 1992 animated short "All The Great Operas In 10 Minutes." (The name is a misnomer; it just barely tops nine minutes long.) It also aired on Bravo in the same sort of time-filler way, back when Bravo didn't believe in commercials, and it was featured in at least one animation tournee that was released to VHS back in the 1990s, since that's how I saw it. Nowadays, you can watch it on YouTube, or if you just have to have your own copy, you can buy it on DVD.
These days, Thompson writes for children's television in Canada; her personal website lists other short films she's made and provides a little of her history and a bit of context for the film, while her IMDB page offers a rundown of television shows she's worked on. Granted, if you aren't Canadian, you may never have heard of any of these shows. I haven't, personally, though I suspect if this column is still around 20 years from now, our A.V. Club descendants will be fielding "So, I think I sort of remember this wacky TV show…" questions about them.
Itching Like A Monkey In A Fuzzy Game
Okay, I used to love an old arcade game, musta been out in public from 1986-90ish. You were a beefcake-type stud until an alien from space came down and changed you into a chimp (!) and stole your sexy Amazon girlfriend. A major bummer, dude. That all took place in a stunning intro, and once you fed it a quarter, it was then a classic side-scroller about jumping on platforms and avoiding bees. So what was this game, and since I'm asking, how did it end? I've provided an illustration on how I recall it went. Thanks!
Carol
Hm. The A.V. Club suspects that you're thinking of a game called Toki, or possibly its Japanese bootleg JuJu Densetsu. Both games feature a beefy Tarzan jungle type whose blonde jungle-queen girlfriend is stolen by an evil figure who turns him into a monkey, which then jumps around on platforms, spitting at enemies to take them down. Toki came out in 1989, so the timing is right as well. And while there aren't specifically bees in the game, there are various flying insect attackers. However, your adversary in those games is a sorcerer rather than an alien, and while Wikipedia has an extensive Toki page that lists the game's many adversaries, little green saucer men are notably lacking. Either someone pirated virtually all the game's details when they made their alien-as-baddie version, or all the obsessive game sites out there left out the crucial alien detail, or you're blending two games in your memory. That aside, thanks for the cartoon rendition of the game; we may have to fault your recollection, but we can't fault your dedication or your style.
Oh, how does the game end? That depended on whether you won. One of Toki's interesting features was that when you died, you could keep pumping quarters in to continue the game (which, incidentally, your hot virtual girlfriend kept begging you to do), but only up to the last level, where your ability to buy replays against your ultimate nemesis was limited. If you couldn't beat him before your replays ran out, you died, and your girlfriend was toast. If you did send him down in flames, you got the girl and your former beefy human form back.
STUMPED!
Here are a few of the other obscure video games we've been asked about recently. Unfortunately, we don't have answers for any of these questioners. Do you? If so, send us your answers at the e-mail address below.
Back at the beginning of the Internet (okay, not that far back, but at the beginning of my knowledge of the Internet), my older brother (the only person I knew with a computer) downloaded some kind of silly game that I used to spend hours playing. I'm thinking 1994, plus or minus two years. It was a Windows 3.1 system, and the game had the graphics to match: 2-D, simple colors, white screen, nothing fancy. The gameplay involved using your arrow keys to drive a car into tiny little men on the screen. When you did this, a cross/grave marker would show up where they died. You continued on like this until the screen was filled with crosses (or until you had unwittingly blockaded yourself), and your car couldn't go anywhere anymore. I also remember the game either being freeware or shareware.
I am writing you because, rather inconveniently, my brother doesn't remember even playing the game, let alone the name of it. I would love to play again, but unfortunately, Googling "driving a car into little men who turn into crosses" does not yield the results for which I am looking. Surely someone besides me remembers this game?
Annie
Maybe my fellow A.V. Club readers can help me identify the Apple IIe game that I played once, when I was in… mmm… 5th grade? 6th grade? Around 1992 or so (not that that eliminates much Apple II software). It was a vaguely educational game that involved wandering through a toy store or maybe just department store in general, but the cool thing about it was that it had kind of pseudo-3D; when you walked forward, it would show three or four frames of pre-drawn vector-style graphics showing a progression across the room. What is that frickin' game?!
Peter Smith
I've been trying to remember the title of an old NES game for quite some time now. I've been through countless ROMs (legal or not, this is driving me insane) trying to find it, and my friends (and foes alike) have been no help. The only proof I have that I'm not imagining it is that my sisters vaguely remember it. What I remember is that it was a side-scrolling game with graphics that were a step above Game Boy quality (it had that black-and-yellow/green color to it). The first (maybe second) level was a large area with the boss in the top left corner. The boss swallowed you and you had to fight in his stomach. (I'm not confusing this with Yoshi's Island.) The final thing is that when the timer ran out, the game sent out a little devil/imp with wings that came at you until you either finished the level, or it killed you. This probably isn't much, since it's only the first level (I was never good at games when I was 6) but I hope you can find something.
Matt
There was a game I remember playing as a child that I can't find a ROM of, or even the most basic information about. Admittedly, I'm not a particularly skilled Internet bloodhound. The game consisted of a guy who was sleepwalking, an older gentleman in constant danger of being crushed by red and blue pipes or columns, which you had to navigate him through. Even if you don't print this, an answer would put me at ease.
cAS
I'm not sure if this is an answerable question, but it's tearing my mind apart, and I hoped you might help. There was this old Apple II game called Runaway or Escape or something like that, and the point of it was that you were a slave trying to escape to the North. The game starts with you at a plantation, and you can choose to talk to different members of your family who will give you advice, and then night falls and you have to try to escape. It was also, at least from the standpoint of a 10-year-old, incredibly difficult. I think it's possible you weren't even supposed to beat it, and the whole point of the exercise was to make you appreciate how much being a slave sucked. Please help.
Daniel
Next week: The musical diversity of the '80s, the many iterations of a classic creepy story, and more. Send your questions to [email protected].