TIL Thread: Today I learned...
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- Perrydotto
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
France has a serious problem with legit language snobbery and you can imagine this hits immigrants the hardest, which is one of the many reasons why ghettoization and all that garbage is an especially big issue in France
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
I took two years of French in high school as a prerequisite for college, and one of my teachers told us that French people are such snobs about their language that if your pronunciation is even slightly off, they will just straight up ignore you when you try to speak to them.
He contrasted them with Germans, who he said love it when foreigners try to speak German, and will happily attempt to help you with pronunciation and grammar.
He contrasted them with Germans, who he said love it when foreigners try to speak German, and will happily attempt to help you with pronunciation and grammar.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
Plus there's the whole deal with Quebec French, and how both sides are really disdainful of the other.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
This happened to my sister, who is nearly fluent in French, while she was in France. She asked a question in French and the lady responded in poor English, "WHY ARE YOU SPEAKING IN FRENCH?"W.T. Fits wrote: ↑Thu May 23, 2019 10:35 amI took two years of French in high school as a prerequisite for college, and one of my teachers told us that French people are such snobs about their language that if your pronunciation is even slightly off, they will just straight up ignore you when you try to speak to them.
Uhhh because this is France?
Meanwhile, I went to Scandinavia and all the locals were super excited about getting to practice their English on native speakers, while also teaching us some phrases in Swedish.
- Fizzbuzz
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
I went to Germany last year and was amazed at how many ads and signs were written in at least some amount of English (admittedly, this was in the biggest cities like Munich and Berlin). One of the locals said that "Denglish" has gotten more common lately, especially with things targeted at younger people.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
English is usually the first foreign language a child learns in school in Germany. When I went to the Elementary School it was taught in the third year and it is a main class until the final graduation. In my school French and Latin were the second foreign languages one could learn, with the option to swap later or to drop it or learn Italian instead. Because they are taught so late they aren't so prevalent in the general public.
Also I think the aftermath of WWII has something to do that Americans and the British were perceived in a better light and thus their culture rubbed off.
Now news, technology, and entertainment is heavily English-centered and there is no escape.
I wake up with English (youtube, news), I work writing in English (programming), I spend my leisure time with English (movies, tv....), and I go to sleep with English (youtube, listening to a podcast in bed).
Even in my backwater city (200k+ citizens) I can watch the biggest blockbuster films in English in the cinema.
English versions of films and TV series can be simply accessed on Netflix and Amazon Prime.
Also I think the aftermath of WWII has something to do that Americans and the British were perceived in a better light and thus their culture rubbed off.
Now news, technology, and entertainment is heavily English-centered and there is no escape.
I wake up with English (youtube, news), I work writing in English (programming), I spend my leisure time with English (movies, tv....), and I go to sleep with English (youtube, listening to a podcast in bed).
Even in my backwater city (200k+ citizens) I can watch the biggest blockbuster films in English in the cinema.
English versions of films and TV series can be simply accessed on Netflix and Amazon Prime.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
Uhh I dunno, this sounds like a bit of a generalization to me, this hasn't been my experience in France at all and my French is horrible.W.T. Fits wrote: ↑Thu May 23, 2019 10:35 amI took two years of French in high school as a prerequisite for college, and one of my teachers told us that French people are such snobs about their language that if your pronunciation is even slightly off, they will just straight up ignore you when you try to speak to them.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
Yeah, now that I think about it a bit more, if I recall correctly, I think he was referring specifically to people from Paris.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
It's also possible that attitudes have changed greatly since then, given that this was back in the late 90's.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
I hate perscriptivists so much, gonna sneak around france, whispering seditious words like "mariachi" into peoples' ears until I start a fucking revolutionMr. Big wrote: ↑Thu May 23, 2019 1:46 amTIL about Académie française, a literal language police where their mission is to prevent foreign words from creeping into the French language.
I first read about it in a webcomic. At first I thought the cartoonist made it up to poke fun at how French people can be snooty, but NOPE. It's a real thing
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
there are vacancies among its members, could I join to destroy it from within or would I become tainted and sullied and lose my spirit
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
I majored in English, so you know my opinion holds less than zero weight in this discussion. I’m anti-prescriptivist because languages are a living thing. watching meanings and slang changing over time is fascinating and exciting.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
The saddest thing about Disco Demolition Night and the disco backlash later that year is how the reaction from the mainstream feels like modern right-wing reactionary action. Wikipedia cites this Rolling Stone piece, looking back at music trends in 1979:
I guarantee that if disco were new and sweeping the nation now, this is the sort of rhetoric we'd get from Fox News.The antidisco movement, which has been publicized by such FM personalities as notorious Chicago DJ Steve Dahl, is simply another programming device. White males, eighteen to thirty-four, are the most likely to see disco as the product of homosexuals, blacks and Latins, and therefore they’re most likely to respond to appeals to wipe out such threats to their security. It goes almost without saying that such appeals are racist and sexist, but broadcasting has never been an especially civil-libertarian medium.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
TIL that James L. Brooks, one of the "The Simpsons" developers, is 79 years old.
Like, I knew he's old, having been working in television since the 1960s, but it never occurred to me that one of the Simpsons creators is nearly 80
Like, I knew he's old, having been working in television since the 1960s, but it never occurred to me that one of the Simpsons creators is nearly 80
- Highbrow Dash
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
I'm watching this one and I'm just sitting here in disbelief.Octavia wrote: ↑Mon May 27, 2019 2:36 pmThere's a YouTube channel with a video series called "What the Fuck, France?"
- Highbrow Dash
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
like so:
- Mr. Big
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
TIL that Nicolas Cage's real last name is Coppola, and that he's a nephew of Francis Ford Coppola.
He chose "Cage" for his stage name after Luke Cage because he wanted to avoid nepotism and not take advantage of his famous uncle's name value.
Cage is also a huge comic book geek (considering where he got "Cage") and lobbied hard to play Superman in a movie; he ultimately got to voice him in "Teen Titans Go! To the Movies".
He chose "Cage" for his stage name after Luke Cage because he wanted to avoid nepotism and not take advantage of his famous uncle's name value.
Cage is also a huge comic book geek (considering where he got "Cage") and lobbied hard to play Superman in a movie; he ultimately got to voice him in "Teen Titans Go! To the Movies".
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
Don't forget that he was the Ghost Rider!
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
Isn't Nic Cage's son named Kal-El too?
- Perrydotto
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
That movie with Nic Cage Superman is a whole fascinating can of worms and I recommend you read about it!
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
TIL that Charles Schulz attempted to create another strip featuring adult characters working in a stock room. They never got published, although samples are online
That boss is pretty much Lucy as a middle-aged woman.
That boss is pretty much Lucy as a middle-aged woman.
Pfft, oh wowPerrydotto wrote: ↑Thu May 30, 2019 6:56 pmThat movie with Nic Cage Superman is a whole fascinating can of worms and I recommend you read about it!
- Mr. Big
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
Also, reading deep into that Twitter thread I linked above, TIL that Schulz largely based Lucy on his first wife (I kinda already knew this, but not to what extent).
...he had a miserable marriage with his first wife Notably, after he divorced her and married his second wife (whom he remained with until he died), Lucy's crabby personality was gradually toned down.
...he had a miserable marriage with his first wife Notably, after he divorced her and married his second wife (whom he remained with until he died), Lucy's crabby personality was gradually toned down.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
TIL Disney planned to make an animated series based on the Magic Kingdom in the early days of the Disney Afternoon. It got as far as having a pilot completed by a Korean subsidiary of Tokyo Movie Shinsha (the same studio as all of Disney's shows at the time) before it was canned. Capcom had apparently already been commissioned to make a tie-in video game, which did get released as Adventures in the Magic Kingdom. (source)
Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of...
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
TIL that the original "Jonny Quest" cartoon from 1964 had episode-specific end credits, as opposed to "group credits" that most TV cartoons back then had.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason when the show went into reruns they took end credits from one episode and attached it to all of them (specifically, credits for episode "Pursuit of the Po-Ho". However, episode "Double Danger" used end credits from "The Curse of Anubis" in reruns. CONFUSED YET??? ). However, somebody took the time to find 16mm prints for every episode and posted the correct credits this site.
Also, "Jonny Quest" was created by comic book artist Doug Wildey, but Hanna-Barbera refused to give him a "created by" credit. Early episodes had him credited as a "supervising art director" (except "Po-Ho", where Wildey didn't get screen credit at all). Wildey raised a big stink about it.
Eventually, Wildey and H-B reached a compromise: beginning with episode 8, "The Robot Spy", Wildey got a "based upon an idea created by" credit.
(While I'm on the tangent with the credits for Hanna-Barbera cartoons, I always noticed that they had credit for "story direction". Turns out, "story director" did storyboards)
(Also, they seemed to use "written by" and "teleplay by" interchangeably in the credits. Man, they were kinda loose about it back then)
Unfortunately, for whatever reason when the show went into reruns they took end credits from one episode and attached it to all of them (specifically, credits for episode "Pursuit of the Po-Ho". However, episode "Double Danger" used end credits from "The Curse of Anubis" in reruns. CONFUSED YET??? ). However, somebody took the time to find 16mm prints for every episode and posted the correct credits this site.
Also, "Jonny Quest" was created by comic book artist Doug Wildey, but Hanna-Barbera refused to give him a "created by" credit. Early episodes had him credited as a "supervising art director" (except "Po-Ho", where Wildey didn't get screen credit at all). Wildey raised a big stink about it.
Eventually, Wildey and H-B reached a compromise: beginning with episode 8, "The Robot Spy", Wildey got a "based upon an idea created by" credit.
(While I'm on the tangent with the credits for Hanna-Barbera cartoons, I always noticed that they had credit for "story direction". Turns out, "story director" did storyboards)
(Also, they seemed to use "written by" and "teleplay by" interchangeably in the credits. Man, they were kinda loose about it back then)
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
The JQ theme song, imo, is one of the better TV theme songs ever made.
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
That’s true, but you can’t say that and not link it!
- Mr. Big
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
Also, I think I knew this, but Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna switched orders of their names in the credits every other episode:
(Why, yes, I am going into details about the nuances of the cartoon screen credits. Because I'm a dork )
And yes, Jonny Quest theme song kicks ass.
(Why, yes, I am going into details about the nuances of the cartoon screen credits. Because I'm a dork )
And yes, Jonny Quest theme song kicks ass.
- Perrydotto
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
the pettiness of people refusing to give the creator of the source material proper credit will forever baffle me
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- Mr. Big
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
It really was rare to see proper creators' credits for cartoons until the early 1990s, it's baffling. Hanna-Barbera wern't the only ones not giving creators proper credits.Perrydotto wrote: ↑Mon Jun 10, 2019 5:21 pmthe pettiness of people refusing to give the creator of the source material proper credit will forever baffle me
Part of this was because a lot of those cartoons were developed through a committee of writers and artists pitching different ideas. But then there are examples like "The Flintstones" (created by Dan Gordon), "Scooby-Doo" (created by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears) and "Space Ghost" (created by Alex Toth), whose creators never got proper acknowledgement; their names were listed, but only as regular staff (Gordon for "story sketches", Ruby and Spears for "story by", and Toth for "character design"). Only reason those names are known as creators was because people who grew up watching those shows began working in animation themselves and they got inside info on who did what, which they later spread around.
Doug Wildey was lucky that he got some form of acknowledgement on-screen on later episodes, even if he had to fight for it.
EDIT: I find it funny that, on the first episode, Wildey's name appears three times: for writing (along with Joe Barbera, Bill Hanna, and Alex Lovy), art directing, and layouts.
They gave him credit for everything BUT creating the goddamn show
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
They probably wanted to maintain the fiction that everything that came out of the studio was their idea, so people wouldn’t demand more credits and therefore more money.
- Mr. Big
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
Yeah, sounds like that was the case, unfortunately.
On a lighter note, there's a "Jonny Quest" blu-ray set coming out this month. Supposedly they're gonna restore the proper end credits for all the episodes, so there's that, at least!
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
Wasn't this how Atari basically ran things, and was one of the main reasons why a bunch of their former programmers founded Activision?
- minty
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
Who'd want to take credit for the ET game though?
- Mr. Big
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
TIL that Olivia de Havilland is still alive. She will be 103 years old next month.
I learned this because I was watching the first Bugs Bunny cartoon "A Wild Hare" during an art stream and her name was mentioned in one scene (along with other popular celebrities of the era), prompting somebody to point out she's still around.
I also learned that she was born in Tokyo.
I learned this because I was watching the first Bugs Bunny cartoon "A Wild Hare" during an art stream and her name was mentioned in one scene (along with other popular celebrities of the era), prompting somebody to point out she's still around.
I also learned that she was born in Tokyo.
- Mr. Big
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Re: TIL Thread: Today I learned...
Evidently I'm on "Jonny Quest" kick.
Anyone remember the 1990s revival "The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest" that aired on Cartoon Network's Toonami block? Yeah, the making of that show was...not easy, turned out.
The biggest problem was that the people originally in charge of it disliked the original show and intentionally tried to make the new version completely different from it as a result. That didn't go well, as you'd expect. Millions of dollars were spent before they realized the scraps of scripts they churned out was unusable (one of the people involved said they barely made sense).
They were eventually fired and new showrunners were hired (among them former Terrytoons/Ralph Bakshi animator Cosmo Anzilotti) to basically salvage what they could from what the original producers did.
While this was going on, a separate unit was set up to create an entirely different "Jonny Quest" show, this time much closer to the 1960s series (and helmed by people who actually liked the old show). This was meant to be separate from "Real Adventures", but for whatever reason they decided to make this "season 2" of that show, even though there's little connection to it.
The whole show was a big, expensive clusterfuck, in the end
Anyone remember the 1990s revival "The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest" that aired on Cartoon Network's Toonami block? Yeah, the making of that show was...not easy, turned out.
The biggest problem was that the people originally in charge of it disliked the original show and intentionally tried to make the new version completely different from it as a result. That didn't go well, as you'd expect. Millions of dollars were spent before they realized the scraps of scripts they churned out was unusable (one of the people involved said they barely made sense).
They were eventually fired and new showrunners were hired (among them former Terrytoons/Ralph Bakshi animator Cosmo Anzilotti) to basically salvage what they could from what the original producers did.
While this was going on, a separate unit was set up to create an entirely different "Jonny Quest" show, this time much closer to the 1960s series (and helmed by people who actually liked the old show). This was meant to be separate from "Real Adventures", but for whatever reason they decided to make this "season 2" of that show, even though there's little connection to it.
The whole show was a big, expensive clusterfuck, in the end