Just an observation on the serial discussion...you're talking apples
and oranges. You can't compare a film serial from the 30s or 40s with
TV; they're not the same thing. Yes, serial stories were done then; but
in American TV, they haven't been done in this fashion (I'm exempting
soap operas which sorta redefine themselves moment by moment).

As an aside...serials in the early days of movies didn't start out
for the purpose of telling one story as its expressed goal. (And, in
fact, if you watch some of them straight through, what you find is a VERY
simple story/structure, along the lines of "Stop them from stealing the
very famous Star of Rhodesia Diamond" which is broken up into barely
connected individual pieces. Very often, the studio would have a vague
idea about where it would end, and just filled in the middle with car
crashes and fist fights and dynamite explosions.

The reason for that continuing structure lay with 1) the fact that
at that time, and in the years before, most of the magazines of the time
serialized books a chapter at a time, a technique that goes straight back
to Charles Dickens. So that was the template at the time. And 2) most
or all movies in those early days consisted of one-reelers, or at most
two-reelers, since it was felt then that audiences probably wouldn't sit
still for two hours for a movie.

Consequently, you'd go down to the local Rialto, and you'd get a
traveling tab show...local live performers, a singer, some piano, a short
animated cartoon, a Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy one-reeler, then work
your way up to maybe a half-hour movie, or a two-reeler. Gradually, as
movies got longer, the serials also got longer, in many cases ending up
as full-length features themselves. Or they were phased out.

So it wasn't that the studios were looking to tell a story over five
years; it was that they felt the market couldn't sustain more than bite
sized stories.

Proving again that a little knowledge of history is a dangerous
thing....

jms

Just an observation on the serial discussion...you're talking apples
and oranges. You can't compare a film serial from the 30s or 40s with
TV; they're not the same thing. Yes, serial stories were done then; but
in American TV, they haven't been done in this fashion (I'm exempting
soap operas which sorta redefine themselves moment by moment).

As an aside...serials in the early days of movies didn't start out
for the purpose of telling one story as its expressed goal. (And, in
fact, if you watch some of them straight through, what you find is a VERY
simple story/structure, along the lines of "Stop them from stealing the
very famous Star of Rhodesia Diamond" which is broken up into barely
connected individual pieces. Very often, the studio would have a vague
idea about where it would end, and just filled in the middle with car
crashes and fist fights and dynamite explosions.

The reason for that continuing structure lay with 1) the fact that
at that time, and in the years before, most of the magazines of the time
serialized books a chapter at a time, a technique that goes straight back
to Charles Dickens. So that was the template at the time. And 2) most
or all movies in those early days consisted of one-reelers, or at most
two-reelers, since it was felt then that audiences probably wouldn't sit
still for two hours for a movie.

Consequently, you'd go down to the local Rialto, and you'd get a
traveling tab show...local live performers, a singer, some piano, a short
animated cartoon, a Chaplin or Laurel and Hardy one-reeler, then work
your way up to maybe a half-hour movie, or a two-reeler. Gradually, as
movies got longer, the serials also got longer, in many cases ending up
as full-length features themselves. Or they were phased out.

So it wasn't that the studios were looking to tell a story over five
years; it was that they felt the market couldn't sustain more than bite
sized stories.

Proving again that a little knowledge of history is a dangerous
thing....

jms

{original post unavailable}

Thanks, I appreciate all of that.

jms