Highest/Lowest Form of Entertainment

[Sora Takenouchi]

How would you rank the following forms of enterainment:

Television - Live Action
Television - Animation
Movies - Live Action
Movies - Animation
Broadway/Theater
Books
Video Games
Music

and, uh, any other medium out there if I happened to forget one. You could answer this on a personal scale or society's scale, it doesn't matter.

[Mynd Hed]

Let's try a really bad analogy here. An artistic medium is like a spiritual medium. If a spiritual medium channels a demon, you're going to get a lot of vulgarity and hatred and not much that's of any use to anyone (ever see "The Exorcist"?). But if it's a kindly spirit that's channeled, you'll get a good experience that everyone benefits from. Likewise, any artistic medium can be used to create great art, low-brow entertainment, or crap that can't even pass as entertaining, let alone artistic.

Although, out of all the mediums, I'd say that television, animated movies, and video games have been the most underused in terms of true artistic content. With animated movies it's mostly because so few come out each year when compared to live action movies, and also because of the perception that animation has to be suitable for children. With video games, I think it's mostly because it's such a new medium, and also because until very recently it was, again, mostly only for children. I really don't know why television is so underused as an artistic medium-- it's been around for long enough, but though you can point to plenty of examples of very entertaining television shows, there aren't too many that can match the classic artistic status of, say, "Casablanca" or Orwell's "1984."

[Enrique]

first i gotta say that i don't think video games should be included here, because they're a whole different medium on their own, as they require player participation. all other mediums mention have no interaction with the audience.

that said... i agree, animation and television are unused, but that's because of their own nature of production. animated movies takes years to make ("toy story" took 5 years), and although production is slowly becoming streamlined, it's still taking well over 2 years to put out a feature length animation. and that's not including voice recording and writing the script.

TV on the other hand has the opposite problem, not enough time. series like ER, NYPD blue, drew carey, friends, etc., they gotta crank out one episode every 2-3 weeks to fit into the season schedule. therefore, script writers are cranking out dozens of pages a week, often with 2-3 rewrites already included. soaps crank out a new episode every week (hence their pathetic, formulaic "plots"). even made-for-TV movies (but not made-for-cable) are pumped out fast. you'll also notice cartoons tend to look cheaper/cruder than their feature length counterparts, and have lately started going CG (south park and like 1/2 of disney's cartoons are completely or mostly CG). this is why 1) comedies/sitcoms stay on the longest and 2) cable series tend to be better quality. with less episodes per season (and the enormous backing of a cable company), they can take more time to pay attention to detail.

[Failure]

you'll also notice cartoons tend to look cheaper/cruder than their feature length counterparts, and have lately started going CG (south park and like 1/2 of disney's cartoons are completely or mostly CG).

South Park is mostly CG?? Dang, and I thought they were still using construction cutouts. When did that change?