Cable Killed the Local Video Star

                In some cities, there are over 500 cable channels.

                I’m not too certain about Satellite, but I’ve got to imagine it’s about the same. Channels upon channels. ESPN 8. Disney Channel for Kids 2. ABC Family. Home and Garden TV; the Revenge. And god bless it, in some places, we even have G4 and the Anime Network. But with all this flowing data, something’s been lost. And that’s the second and third-rung channels.

                When I was growing up in Raleigh (man, it sounds like it was so long ago), my family had basic cable. Not a big deal. But this was back when public access and other channels were still available on cable. You’d get channels from local cities to flesh out the spectrum. For example, we got a bunch of channels from Fayetteville. And the Fayetteville channels were usually pretty bad. They showed television shows that had been cancelled ten, fifteen years prior. I remember seeing all sorts of ads for ‘Stairway to Heaven’ because that was pretty much the network’s flagship. Never mind it was cancelled in the mid-80s.

                But for all the awful things about that channel, there were some great benefits as well. Like they still showed Captain N, BotsMaster, Legend of Zelda, or maybe even Jayce and the Wheel Warriors if we were lucky. Because the shows were touch and go, there was often a Russian Rolette approach to what might be on when you came home from school. And even though the cartoons were often dated, they were also often cartoons I had never encountered before; cartoons that’s airing had been cancelled before they had even hit the big time (for example, how many of you knew that there was a third show to go along with Thundercats and Silverhawks? It was called Tigersharks and it never got to even take off).

                But there was still more. At 12 pm on Friday nights in Raleigh on the third-rung television station (just a step up from public access and just a step down from the imported channels from other towns) was Saturday Night Anime. Now, this stuff was raw. Movies like Devil City, The Professional, Demon City Shinjuku and even the occasional Lupin the Third. It was usually the dubbed version, but this was back when Streamline was still operating, so dubbing was actually really good. And the shows weren’t edited. Oh, they were censored with some pretty lazy blurring over the nudity. But if two characters were getting it on, we just got a mass of pixels over the parts in question.

When you’re 12 years old, that’s the greatest thing in the world.

With all the new cable channels out there now, and the homogeneity that’s spreading across this country, we should take a moment to step back and think about what’s been lost. To give another example, when I was growing up and I’d go on a trip to visit relatives in another city, there was great deal of excitement to see what they showed in their town. What cartoons did they have? What did they have that we didn’t? Now, the cartoons are pretty much the same across the nation.

I’m not saying that I yearn for those days like it was ‘better’ television. But it should be noted that as cable has spread across the country and syndication takes over everywhere, we have lost the potential to have home-grown variety. What is shown from one city to the next used to be as unique as the shops down main street. Now, like the local mall, everything’s pretty much the same.

There is some hope. With all these cable networks, they’ve got to find shows somewhere. Which means sooner or later, if it was broadcast on television somewhere in the US, it’ll probably find it’s way onto some of these channels (god bless the up-and-coming all Sentai channel; and yes, I said Sentai, you perverts). And if not, the boom of DVD box sets will pick up any slack.

                But while you’re watching the newest anime on Adult Swim, if you’re old enough, take a moment to reflect on what it was like to have to scour the nether regions of the channel guide in order to find anime. And what it was like when you knew it was just you and maybe fifteen other people in the whole city staying up late to watch it in all its grainy, fourth-generation goodness.