raspberryhunter

I got the chance to muck around with a D+ account for a bit and although I struggled with the UI, I can't tell if it's because I'm so used to Netflix and youtube, or if it really is as finnicky as it seems to be. That aside, some actual disappointments about the service for me:

I put on the 1989 The Little Mermaid movie because I wanted to see which version they had up, because there's been multiple restorations over the years. Good news: the picture is clean, with none of those uneven lines and truncated transitions, so I assume it's from the latest Blu-Ray release about... six years ago? Definitely not the one before that. Bad news: the audio mix is terrible!

This is a movie I know SO well, so I could tell pretty quick there's something very strange going on with the audio balance between dialogue, music and sounds effects (eg. water sounds, background noises). Some noises are too loud, some are too soft, and the worst is when the music is not on the same level as the singing. It's almost a Christopher Nolan movie here! I wanted to double-check that it's not my device or speakers, so I put on my personal DVD of the movie, and that sounds perfectly fine on my PC speakers. I poked around a bit online and it's not really clear what the problem is. One possibility is that the version on D+ is optimized for TV with surround sound, so it sounds weird on a PC. I can't double-check this, though.

Then I checked out the Little Mermaid TV series and, oh boy. Some episodes are in the wrong order, despite the platform listing each episode's original release date right there. The video has been cropped from the original 4:3 to 16:9, losing that extra detail (and making it feel squished, as this is also media I know very well). Best yet, the pilot episode is missing entirely, and the only thing I could find about it is some speculation that it's too scary for children, as it does open with a group of whalers attacking an orca pod. (Which is totally something they would do, considering the edits that D+ has done to other movies like A Parent Trap and Splash.)

I guess all of this just serves to remind that streaming is not owning, and to keep your own copies before they become lost media. :/

It's interesting to read a book that is, topic-wise, so of interest to me, but I have to battle the writing almost every step of the way. Murray Pittock's writing for an audience that already knows Scotland somewhat, and knows various terms related to Scottish life and/or politics without explanation (this is fine, I can look them up), but he has a tendency for putting too much info into sentences that are grammatically correct but perhaps could have been simplified, eg.:

Colonel Andrew Hamilton (d.1703), governor of East and West New Jersey in 1692-97 was (though later reinstated) deposed from office under an English act (c.22) of William III and II (r.1688-1702 in England, from 1689 in Scotland and 1691 in Ireland) which declared that 'no public post of trust or profit in the colonies could be held by any other than a natural born subject of England'.

The information is there, but it's presented in such a way it takes me a moment to have to parse the point of the sentence. And having to pause often through the book instead of letting the words flow over me, makes it a harder read, if only for that.

( Cut for length. )

It's also funny that towards the end Pittock mentions that the younger generation is getting hungrier to learn about their own country (as opposed to overall British history) and that has only recently been gaining traction with the relatively new availability of exclusively Scottish history books. And that's why it was so hard to find Scottish history books when I was looking for them a while back!

It does feel weird to look back and see that H2O: Just Add Water was influential to modern mermaid media. Not as much as Splash, of course, but a decent amount. Do not cite the deep magic to me etc., I was there when the show premiered and a gajillion (I exaggerate) people told me about it and although I did check it out then, I only followed along into a third of the first season. TV shows were very different in 2008, and by then I'd lost interest (or outgrown) these kinds of stories.

Now, however, it is a delight! I paced myself through watching the whole first season, and despite only being ~25 mins per episode, 26 episodes a season is an embarrassment of riches. So much content! So many little stories where the girls are Put In Different Situations, and thanks to the past near-two-decades of media trends, I do love it when characters are Put In Different Situations instead of it being One Long Situation Where the Major Catharsis Only Happens At the End of the Season! The theme song is also so great, I've been letting it play out every time and eventually started singing along, both for the opening and longer ending.



The first few episodes have the girls getting used to their powers (I love that Cleo is the one who decides to not let it limit her options), but then it settles into a status quo and although the quality is uneven, a lot of the episodes are SO much fun, and I haven't laughed that hard for a while as I did for the Siren Effect episode, when Cleo gains siren powers and enchants all the boys in the neighbourhood into being idiots. Then there's The Big Chill where Emma straight up almost accidentally MURDERS the popular girl with her freeze powers, and that's not an euphemism, but the show took care to talk around the stakes instead of using words like "corpse", "kill" or "dead", which was so, SO funny. A+, 'tis delightful, only capable when everyone's committed to the light-hearted tone and are decent comic actors. You really appreciate good comic acting after you've watched so much bad comic acting.

So much so that my stomach dropped at the last few episodes of the season when the tension ramped up as the girls' secret is about to be uncovered. I don't need that! I just want bite-sized fun romps! And unfortunately I accidentally read an overview of season 2 and I have never enjoyed the trope where a TV show introduces an interloper who has the abilities/skills of the main characters but are "better" at it, but hopefully the execution is better than it sounds. A team of three evil mermaids to rival the main trio WOULD have been fun, though, since that's more equal opportunity competitiveness instead of usurpation.

Random observation: the first season came out in 2008, and Lewis uses the word "googling". I think that was more a sign of his nerdery than normalized lingo, but interesting in terms of looking at the show as a time capsule.

( More, cut for length. )

The energy of season one as a whole is so charming and fluffy, so I might take a break and continue into season 2 later.