User talk:Tbrittreid/Archive/2007/November

Mel Blanc/Happy Rabbit Investigation: Re-opened
Greetings! User:Baseball Bugs and I have been following your proposal concerning "Happy Rabbit" with great interest, and I am currently undertaking an "investigation" of sorts in order to figure out the truth concerning the character. You are welcome to go to my talk page and participate in the discussion. —  Cinemaniac 20:23, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

The Prisoner
Thanks for your heads up on Mr Moor-Larkin. Perhaps the "Booby Kennedy" made me reach for my vandal button a bit quickly, especially in its context, and there's no way to undo that now except by oversight, which is a bit of a sledge-hammer to crack a nut. But I did take some time going through his prior edits, in fact quite a long time. I've no doubt now that he's good-faith, but it's clear that he hasn't yet grasped some of the basics. I've reverted a lot of his edits to Danger Man, quite simply because they were either OR, POV or fancruft, which made the article read like a fanzine. I don't apologise for that, because this is meant to be an encyclopedia, & Mr Moor-Larkin seems to have been around for long enough such that he should have understood this by now. I also took a look at Sheffield Repertory Theatre, which he has largely created, but needs major work. If you can point him to the Five Pillars, that would be good, but he needs to understand the difference between "encyclopedic" and "editorial"! Best of luck. I will apologise to him for the "vandalism" tag if he raises it. -- Rodhullandemu  (please reply here - contribs) 22:58, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

MST3K to Mystery Science Hour
''First, let me say that I did indeed see your notice of real-world matters reducing your Wiki activity. I noticed on the Talk page for Mystery Science Theater 3000 that you are responsible for the section on the "Mystery Science Hour" version. I have to ask where your claimed run of these episodes from "November 1993 to July 1994" occurred. Your text (I haven't checked to see if someone has changed your original version, come to think of it) correctly admits that broadcast syndication was in the 1995-96 season, and I can assure you from first hand observation that then only 11 shows halved into 22 hour-long segments were seen. It makes no sense to me that Comedy Central would run these re-edits (I had no access to that channel until 2005, too late for MST3K, obviously) as they were home for the originals. So where? And if 60-from-30 were prepared, why were only 22-from-11 released to broadcast syndication? Ted Watson (talk) 22:38, 17 November 2007 (UTC)''


 * Drats, this must have been before I started getting serious about proper sourcing. Apparently, I got this from TV.com's page on MST3K Hour. Here's a full citation for the episode guide, which includes first-aired dates for all 60 hour-long episodes, from 29 November 1993 to 18 July 1994:




 * A simple list of titles and dates can be found from their parallel episode list:




 * Some other useful sources for MST3K60m are:




 * I don't know why IMDb and TV.com disagree. ACEG talks only of the making, not the airing, of the shows. I myself only saw a few episodes of these, not even the 11/22 that others mention. But although IMDb says both "1995-1996" and 22 episodes, Satellite News's "Syndication" suggests the earlier dates are accurate. (It doesn't include airdates, but it does agree with ACEG that the shows were made in 1993 [Summer '93, according to ACEG] under pressure from Comedy Central, which hardly would have sat on them for 2 years if so, and it says the shows were cancelled by 1995. That year would make sense if they ran the first-airings through July 1994, with re-runs thereafter.)


 * We could use some better sources on this. Our personal recollections are irrelevant ("verifiability, not truth"), as are deductions like mine ("no original research"). TV.com is much more detailed and specific than the quick blurb in IMDb, but both have been known to err. Frankly, after fixing so much junk in IMDb, I'm inclined to trust an exhaustive, dated episode list from TV.com more than a simple paragraph from IMDb, especially since the errors I've seen thus far in the former are from the trivial stuff (like quotes and trivia), not the basic data.


 * I recommend you edit this discussion to copy the templated references if you'd like to paste any of them into ref tags for relevant articles. Hope this helps. ~ Jeff Q (talk) 01:36, 18 November 2007 (UTC)


 * A confession--the IMDb paragraph is my work; it had said otherwise before me. But I absolutely guarantee that "11 cut from 22" aired in effective first run syndication during the 1995-96 season. I moved to Dallas, TX, in April of the year, and saw them on WFAA-TV, channel 8, the ABC affiliate there, beginning that fall and ending the next fall; I watched every single one of them, several twice. By definition, it could not have happened earlier. I can tell you exactly which movies were shown, if not quite in their order (the first was Pod People, and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians was around Thanksgiving--segments already run were seen throughout December). They were also shown on a station in the Waco/Temple, TX, market then--caught one while visiting relatives, and it proved to be the same one shown in Dallas that very weekend--two-parters, remember; I caught half of one out of Waco, its other half in Dallas. TV Guide magazine and newspaper back issues will confirm the dates, though probably not identify specific episodes. Neither the years nor the quantity of this release is open to debate, as far as I'm concerned. It is just a matter of determining if those 22 and 38 others previously aired on some venue that I had no access to and whose schedules did not routinely come my way. That's it. Ted Watson (talk) 23:36, 18 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm afraid that this is the reason why Verifiability boldly states in its very first sentence that "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth" (emphasis in the original). I can tell you for sure that I saw only a few episodes on A&E, so it's clear to me that Comedy Central was not the network that aired MST3K60m. Except that the truth is probably that it did indeed air originally on CC as TV.com describes, but was later syndicated to other cable channels (like A&E) and local stations (like WFAA-TV). After all, to quote "Syndication" above:
 * Both CC and BBI had good reasons for wanting to create The Hour. CC programmers claimed it was easier to find slots in its schedule for a one-hour show. And it gave BBI's syndicator an alternative product to sell to stations who did not want the two-hour series. (emphasis mine)
 * It seems rather likely that your local station did not pay to air the full run of episodes. Anyone watching syndicated runs of any TV series should know that it is rather unusual for a station to make the effort to air even immensely popular shows like M*A*S*H or Friends in their entire sequential runs. (I don't know this for sure, but I believe typical pricing schemes for syndicated episodes tend to favor limited sets of episodes with options to show them multiple times, making single, ordered runs rather more expensive than the usual "whatever we can get" effort.)
 * Anyway, the details of our experiences are not important here. Neither you nor I are considered a reliable source. In fact, if Mike Nelson or Kevin Murphy (not Joel Hodgson, as he was already gone by then) were to call Jimbo Wales and say "this is the way it was", it wouldn't make a bit of difference. We must provide published sources for our claims, however obvious they may seem to us, especially if they contradict other published sources. The fact that you edited IMDb (as have I in the past) merely calls into question the reliability of the source. It's IMDb's failures to catch problems in user submissions that make it somewhat suspect. As with TV.com, IMDb is typically more accurate with basic data like its formal airing schedules (i.e., the ones listed under "episode list" for TV shows), but even those have considerable problems for many shows. (Hardly a week goes by that I don't see some basic data like regular cast appearances or air dates missing from IMDb. Perhaps the most relevant example of this is its failure to list the correct episode numbers for MST3K — they call them seasons 1-11 instead of 0-10 or K-10. And it doesn't appear to be a problem with their software; they list the first episode of The Prisoner as "Episode 0".)
 * In short, we need solid, published sources for any information in Wikipedia that is not inherently obvious to any reader. Although this is a perpetual problem with many WP articles, it remains the goal for each, and any editor may challenge and ultimately remove claims that are not backed up by proper sources. (Of course, they should say why they're doing it in their edit summaries, because the ultimate goal is accuracy through cooperative editing.) ~ Jeff Q (talk) 00:58, 19 November 2007 (UTC)