The choice of music is amazing, and watching it made something melt in my brain.

Initially the show was shot on a sound stage, with the cast on a set, and a few mildly entertaining “host segments” thrown in along the way. While it worked fairly well, and had some quality laugh-out-loud moments, it never really seemed to rise to the heights of MST3K, or even Rifftrax.

After a long period of no new content, they have shifted to releasing DVDs of their live performances, with their latest—a late seventies sci-fi reject called The Alien Factor—probably the most disappointing outing yet. If your live audience isn’t laughing along with you, it’s probably worth tuning things up before you put it up for sale.

But it’s often in failure where the problems become clear, and in the end it seems that Cinematic Titanic has simply sunk under the weight of having five clever people on-stage simultaneously. For the most part it seems like everyone is content to simply read their jokes at the right moment, and laugh a little when someone screws up, or manages a good bit of improvisation. Like an eighties super-group, it feels as if there may be too much individual brilliance to allow for real synergy, beyond a few solos that remind everyone just how well they can play their instruments when they put their mind to it.

In the early videos, the cast had supposedly been hired to participate in a top-secret research experiment (another take on the “Monitor their minds” wrapper from MST3K). Stripped of that minimal meta-context, the focus is entirely on making jokes about movies. And while most of the comments are funny (if sometimes a little too focused on obscure references to the seventies) what truly sucks the life out of the whole affair is that there’s never any of the banter and goofy running gags between the characters that I think is integral to the success of a great riff.

It’s the personal barbs, and back and forth that makes it feel like you’re hanging out with friends instead of being trapped in some kind of abstract comedic symposium on the structure of bad film The idea that the cast has desires and a point of view not only invites you in, but keeps you hanging on when the jokes start feeling a bit dry or forced, or the movie itself is dull beyond comprehension. Like all good entertainment media, it’s the narrative that saves the day.

It doesn’t help that the cast (with the notable exception of Trace Beaulieu and J. Elvis Weinstein) seems to be less enthusiastic than they were two years ago, and without their passion, it’s hard for me to have any.

I’ll keep my eye on Cinematic Titanic, if only because I’m such a huge fan of the obvious vision and talent of everyone involved, but I’m not sure how much enthusiasm I have left for the actual product.

What do you think?

The bad news is that the web site was crushed, and it still seems that you can’t actually watch the episode unless you get it from iTunes.

The good news is that it’s number one on iTunes, both for single episodes and season passes.

I should mention here that it’s absolutely fantastic. If you’re a fan of Joss Whedon you’ll love it, and it’s awesome to see him tackling songs once again. He just gets how to make the lyrics work in context, and use the music as a way to counterpoint the action. He’s also got a few tricks up his cinematic sleeve that pay off really well, like setting one number in a laundromat.

Despite the ability to use the VCR it was still mostly appointment television. If you wanted to watch something you, and everybody else, showed up to your television when it was broadcast. And then everybody talked about it the next day. If you missed it… well maybe you would catch a rerun.

Over the next two decades that kind of media hierarchy was smashed. With the rise of the DVD, Tivo, and the Internet, by the end of the 90s you could start to see the beginnings of a new way of experiencing content. These days, it’s hard to remember what it felt like to have to chase after your favorite show.

But with that freedom has come a shattering of the audience. As its become easier to get what we want when we want it, it has also become almost impossible for the corporations to drive our tastes from the top down. Combining that with the ability to easily get a constant stream of specific behind the scenes information, we’ve moved into world where not only do we no longer have to take what we’re given, but can actually band together and lobby for exactly what we want.

That’s great for the consumer, but it also means that informing your audience about the media you think they’d like has become that much more difficult. How do you get an audience to show up when you can’t just tell them where to be, or even be sure that they’ll be interested in watching television at all when there’s so many blogs to read and video games to play?

But the corpse of the good old days of big media is still warm. Anyone over thirty will still have fond memories of television as a group event shared with family and friends. They can still remember a time where “everybody” was talking about what happened on their favorite show last night.

And so, the media from that era still bask in that warm nostalgic glow of cultural awareness.  A time when kitsch was king because everybody had seen “I Dream of Genie” or “Gilligan’s Island”. Shows from the pre-Internet era have power because they come with built in cultural awareness. And that translates directly into marketing leverage.  The audience may not be intimately familiar with Battlestar Galactica, but the vague memory, along with the ability to experience the source material on a DVD, means that you’re going to have a built in audience when you turn the seventies chestnut into a gritty remake for the new millennium.

These old shows, movies, and characters, have become a cultural resource of sorts: Mineable, exploitable, and most importantly, limited. And so we get The Sarah Conner Chronicles, pushing not only the show, but the idea of a “viewing party”, where you can get your friends together and have a shared cultural experience just like they used to do back in the old days.

Over on his blog, Warren Ellis has been talking about “looking for a 21st century fiction“. And there’s definitely something coming. After all we can only mine the corpse of our past for so long.

Not only are we running out of any kind of quality “classic” shows from which to remake new media, but you can only tap a reflex so many times before it starts to become annoying. Tweaking the audience’s nostalgic memories of “simpler days” where we had to sit back and absorb whatever culture came down from our masters is nostalgia isn’t going to keep working for a generation that knows nothing of media history beyond what they can absorb from a YouTube clip.

At the time I said this:

Certainly the concept that linear media overlords can spoon feed content to a willing audience is an idea whose time has passed. DRM just becomes a way for the elite to prove how cool they really are, by crawling over each other in their efforts to crack it.  And the concept of file-sharing as a criminal lottery doesn?t seem to have stopped the phenomenon of peer to peer file sharing from growing leaps and bounds.  After all, the more people who are doing it, the less like it is that you?ll be the one who?s going to get caught.

Anime is currently screwed in the US because the licensing delays has reversed the equation. It’s the pirates who are providing the high quality content for America.  These fan-subbers, who are translating the shows within days, or even hours, of their initial airing in Japan, are creating valuable content, and giving it away.  Because, unfortunately for the Anime companies, un-translated shows have little or no value.

And this open letter from Anime News Network makes the argument with far greater depth:

As the anime industry has not given these customers what they want, these freshly empowered consumers are taking it themselves. Therefore, even if massive, expensive lawsuits were filed against fansubbers, the problem would not stop. Stopping current fansubbers would create a market vacuum. Fans would just find another way (and, as Odex recently discovered, they’d be very angry as well).

Before legal action will be effective, fansubs must be replaced. THERE HAS TO BE A LEGAL, INEXPENSIVE WAY TO WATCH NEW ANIME IN ENGLISH. Not necessarily own, but at least watch.

ADV Films and Funimation know this and have both attempted to fill this void with television networks, streaming and download services. However, neither can offer a show newer than a year old.

There are myriad ways of supporting such a venture. A low subscription price. Advertising. But it has to exist, and it has to be easier to use than bittorrent. It has to show new anime DAYS after it airs in Japan. It has to be available to most of the world. It can’t lock out Mac or Linux users. All of these are reasons people will use to justify continued piracy.

I’d recommend reading the whole piece.  It’s a well stated analysis by someone who passionately cares about seeing the content creators make money.

It also meshes perfectly with some things I’ve been told by my own “Industry insiders” as well as my early experiences putting DragonBall Z on the Internet (legally) back in 2000.

For better or worse, Anime is content’s canary in a coal mine that’s rapidly running out of air.  Seeing what, if anything, they can do about it will give us a preview of how the content providers are going to deal with our wired world.