Bramble Vine Comics

I know this doesn't have anything to do with cartooning, but I just had to vent. The other night I found the movie White Christmas playing on TV, ABC Family channel. It's a great classic movie from the 50's that still holds up really well today, I think. My four year old son was entranced with the film and he liked the singing, so I let him stay up a little late to finish watching it.

It's been a while since I've watched TV without my DVR so I was surprised by what watching live TV is like these days. It is criminal what these TV networks are doing to completely ruin the experience if watching anything on them! There were so many incessant commercials during White Christmas I could hardly bare it. At one point they actually interrupted a musical number for an ad. In the middle of a song they went to commercial! Then the constant irritating animated icons at the bottom of the screen kept popping up and distracted us from the movie. Commercials DURING the shows now. Ugh! I wanted to the throw the damn thing out the window.

I read often about these TV execs complaining about their thinning audience with new competition for people's attention with cable, on demand shows, video games, the internet, and whatever else, but based on what I saw it's their own damn fault for making the experience so horrible and annoying. Who can stand to watch regular TV anymore?

The day after this happened I went out to the video store and bought a bunch of DVDs for my son, all the Christmas specials I grew up loving. I got Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Peanuts Christmas special and few others. I just couldn't stand thinking that my son's first exposure to these classics would be a similar kind of terrible experience we suffered through on TV.

Well, there you go. TV sucks.

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