So, looking back, about twelve years ago I posted a couple of highly negative reviews of ‘X-Play’ during after it paired Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb together for the first time. I admit I was kind of harsh on both of them, yet I don’t take fault with my review. I was right then and I remain right all these years later.
They had gone over the top with silliness. That’s not always a bad thing, I mean come on, I was writing silly cartoon strips about a dying cable network back then so I knew about silly, but the approach simply wasn’t working for the show I viewed that day. The show was meant to inform about video games and give a coherent review to the products they mentioned. They failed in that respect as it was over the top with zaniness. Their performances weren’t bad, per say, but the material they had to work with was stupid.
In fact, the material they had actually spawned a genre on YouTube. In a lot of ways the later TechTV days were prototypes for the YouTube shows we love these days. You can see their influence in things like the Angry Joe Show, the Angry Video Game Nerd and even the (angry) Nostalgia Critic. These shows all do zany reviews on the level of X-play (though Critic mainly does movies), and perhaps even inspired by what they were doing on X-play, but all have one key difference… they put the breaks on and actually get their reviews across. At some point they stop with the comedy and launch into an actual review or summation to get that point out there before jumping back into the comedy. X-play didn’t and by the end, it felt like a Japanese game show rather than a video game review show.
Also looking back, I had a lot negative things to say about TechTV’s later stars (and even on-going stars) in those days. I was very opinionated. I didn’t hate the station. One of my (then) best friends in the world was laid off by them in the first wave of layoffs and did have a big influence on my opinions back then, but the choice to air those opinions was mine and mine alone. I didn’t give a lot of the newbies chances to shine or fail and I saw them as negative from the beginning. For that I apologize.
Some did fire back, if you want to search for yourself. I didn’t like Sarah Lane at all. Still not a fan of her work. She was there and she was sort of shoved down our throats without establishing her talent or presence. I’m sure she has a ton of fans out there, but I wasn’t one of them. She just came off as negative (and every video capture of her was just evil looking), so I went with it as a character in the strip. It resulted in her ripping me a new rear end on Digg after she sent me hate mail once and I responded negatively to it. Her Digg rant is still up there, I think she called me an a-hole and told them to avoid my site. Oh well, I probably deserved it and I apologize for acting badly at the time.
Her e-mail did shape my policy when it comes to using real people. In all of my strips since then I’ve had a real problem with portraying evil or negative when it’s a character based on someone who has given me the rights to use their face. When the Media Elite took a dark twist, I abused it, I must say, based on personal feelings at the time (and boy was I angry!), but it’s not something I repeated and why I’ve been hesitant about featuring the comic again without modification (and why I’ve been obsessed with failed attempts at redoing that series). I’ll eventually put everything up warts and all and let time decide.
That’s all I can ask for, isn’t it?
Jim