Gephyrophillia | Watch This Space #62

Originally Posted on 04/17/2003 by Jeff Harris

April is halfway over (already?) and so far, nothing has happened. After a couple of months of announcements and acquisitions, Cartoon Network is laying back a bit, waiting for the next moment to shock the world, which should be around a week or two.

Meanwhile, up in the commune, Viacom is changing The National Network into a lad's channel. Okay, we're in America, and I'm not saying lads anymore. It's a men's channel, and you know what that means?

Not much. They're still going to be showing endless reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the same old rodeo, wrestling and fishing shows. Still, they're going to change one thing, the name. Say goodbye to The New TNN and say hello to Spike TV.

Spike TV? What kind of name is Spike TV? To quote Adam Sandler, who are the ad geniuses who came up with this one? Spike TV? What's next, renaming Nickelodeon as Tyke TV? Talk about a network with an identity problem. It began life as The Nashville Network. When CBS took it over, they were still The Nashville Network. When Viacom bought CBS, they began to tinker with it a bit adding wrestling in its programming. When they snagged WWF, um, WWE programming, they remained TNN. When they bought rights to Star Trek: The Next Generation and dropped most of the "redneck" programming except for rodeo, fishing, and auto repair shows, they became The National Network, The New TNN. They hardly used the former name in the promos, just calling themselves The New TNN (in short, they called themselves The New The National Network) to differentiate themselves from The Old TNN. Identity crisis aside, the audience didn't grow and the people weren't coming in, so, they're going to shift their focus to the massive male audiences that already watch the network and renaming themselves Spike TV in June. Couldn't they come up with a better name than Spike TV? Probably not, especially since Spike TV is the best they came up with.

On a note somewhat related to Toonami, Sailor Moon Season One is about to come out uncut courtesy of the good folks of ADV Films. Eight DVDs collected in two four-disc cases, the original American run of 46 episodes will be collected in Japanese, uncut, with English subtitles for a retail price of $149.98 on Tuesday July 15 (hey, they didn't say the complete Sailor Moon, just Season One). Buy it if you got the change.

Until we are one, later.
Jeff Harris
CNX Creator/Webmaster
April 17, 2003