Hello gentlemen, long time lurker first time poster.
I don't know if this has been mentioned prior, WHAT THE HECK HAS HAPPENED TO THE MILITARY CHANNEL!?!?
All these fact vs fiction shows, alien shenanigans and even worse was a couple of weeks ago they played the movie The Fugitive!
What next a movie starring Hanoi Jane?
Same thing happened to the History Channel. "Ice Road Truckers" anyone?
Downside of the free market unfortunately. When the majority of the population consists of mouth-breathing idiots, media markets to that demographic.
http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/4-signs-that-educational-tv-totally-dead/ (http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/4-signs-that-educational-tv-totally-dead/)
http://www.cracked.com/funny-5720-the-history-channel/ (http://www.cracked.com/funny-5720-the-history-channel/)
Great, now you are going to make me cry. Again.
History as a product does not sell well.
There is some excellent writing talent here at GH if I do say so myself. We could probably make a decent living writing about Xbox games.
We don't. We write about wargames, amongst others. It's a niche market.
The temptation for all of these channels' management is to increase revenue. If people wanted to watch tons of reruns of WWII footage then that's what we'd see instead of Dancing With the Stars.
The problem with these military/history channels is that you can only recycle the same footage of German tanks so many times.
Michael
^Yes but as a wargamer and amateur historian recycling German tank footage over and over again never gets old. Except of course when the topic of the documentary is Operation Barbarossa and they show Fallschirmjaegers assaulting Eben Emael. That's just wrong.
I can't agree with the OP more.
You know, you don't even realize how awesome the History Channel was until you come across some of the old shows they used to play on Youtube. You had shows like Wings, Dogfights, and all sorts of Battlefield shows. I remember a few weeks ago spending hours watching old History Channel shows on Youtube.
My son watches a lot of these channels now to watch Swamp People, bunches of survival and Alaska shows, and who knows what. He doesn't even know all of the cool documentaries that used to be on the war channels we watched when we were younger.
It is, indeed, sad. I just don't watch TV anymore; that makes it feel much better.