Jan. 31st, 2016
Last meme entry! It has been fun (again). Will do it next year, too.
So, let's see. For the purposes of a reply, I shall have to indulge in some over the top generalizations, for which I apologize in Advance, US Americans.
A North American origin is easy to spot if:
- a tv show or movie employs only thin, beautiful actresses who are made up to look like they could be on a magazine page (not just kidding: I remember the (welcome) shock when I started to watch more British origin tv shows and movies, and while many of the women there were at least pretty, it wasn't usually of the glossy magazine type, and there could be female main characters who looked over forty, or fifty, with imperfect figures and non ideal faces)
- people lying in bed who have to get up suddenly for some reason do so while wrapping the sheet of their bed around themselves (may be an out of date criteria in the age of HBO, but I suspect it still applies for cable network); I noticed this sheet wrapping weirdness first in ye olde 1980s when Dallas was airing)
- characters in books or in movies and tv employ baseball metaphors (whether or not there is also baseball on screen) and love baseball, even if they happen to be in a sci fi work and their planet of origin never heard of the wretched game
- DADDY ISSUES are rampant (which isn't to say that European works don't use daddy issues as a trope, but not as much, and they use them somewhat differently;![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jesuswasbatman once joked that if Blake's 7 had been an American show instead of a British one, Avon wouldn't have met the brother of his supposedly dead girlfriend in s2 but his previously unknown son. You could add that if Doctor Who was an American show, the Doctor's issue with Gallifrey and the reason why he left the planet would be because his father didn't give him enough attention. And if the German movie The Lives of Others ever had been given an US remake treatment as was intended for a while, you can bet that one of the three main characters (or several) would have clashed with their dear or not so dear old dad, and that was really at the heart of their issues with the state
- the special effects are generally better (there are exceptions, like Sanctuary, which could have been made in Europe in that regard) than they are in contemporary European productions
- not true for pay tv: the episodes are structured in a way that has the emotional beats match with advertisement breaks (this was v.v. odd to notice back in the 80s when we didn't have ad breaks on German tv, and then later when we did get them, we still didn't have that many compared with US tv, plus our broadcasters placed them at different points, so you had the scenes with dramatic close ups and swelling music sometimes followed by a repeat close up because the ad break didn't happen)
- sympathetic characters are fighting "for freedom" no matter which era their narrative is placed in, and even if they're busy invading someone else's country/planet
- there is an evil German or Brit around somewhere, and if there can't be due to the setting of the story, and it's a movie/tv series, said person is at least played by a British or German language actor
- characters get congratulated for their command of German/French/Spanish/Japanese/Whatever foreign language by "native" characters after the US actors mangled the language in question
- non US geography is somewhat questionable (golden example: Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves with Robin landing on the beaches after returning from a crusade and being in Sherwood Forest a short walk later; though I'm also fond of Hamburg, sea harbor city right next to the Atlantic, in An American Tail).
There are more, but these are the ones which come most immediately to my mind. :)
The other days
So, let's see. For the purposes of a reply, I shall have to indulge in some over the top generalizations, for which I apologize in Advance, US Americans.
A North American origin is easy to spot if:
- a tv show or movie employs only thin, beautiful actresses who are made up to look like they could be on a magazine page (not just kidding: I remember the (welcome) shock when I started to watch more British origin tv shows and movies, and while many of the women there were at least pretty, it wasn't usually of the glossy magazine type, and there could be female main characters who looked over forty, or fifty, with imperfect figures and non ideal faces)
- people lying in bed who have to get up suddenly for some reason do so while wrapping the sheet of their bed around themselves (may be an out of date criteria in the age of HBO, but I suspect it still applies for cable network); I noticed this sheet wrapping weirdness first in ye olde 1980s when Dallas was airing)
- characters in books or in movies and tv employ baseball metaphors (whether or not there is also baseball on screen) and love baseball, even if they happen to be in a sci fi work and their planet of origin never heard of the wretched game
- DADDY ISSUES are rampant (which isn't to say that European works don't use daddy issues as a trope, but not as much, and they use them somewhat differently;
jesuswasbatman once joked that if Blake's 7 had been an American show instead of a British one, Avon wouldn't have met the brother of his supposedly dead girlfriend in s2 but his previously unknown son. You could add that if Doctor Who was an American show, the Doctor's issue with Gallifrey and the reason why he left the planet would be because his father didn't give him enough attention. And if the German movie The Lives of Others ever had been given an US remake treatment as was intended for a while, you can bet that one of the three main characters (or several) would have clashed with their dear or not so dear old dad, and that was really at the heart of their issues with the state- the special effects are generally better (there are exceptions, like Sanctuary, which could have been made in Europe in that regard) than they are in contemporary European productions
- not true for pay tv: the episodes are structured in a way that has the emotional beats match with advertisement breaks (this was v.v. odd to notice back in the 80s when we didn't have ad breaks on German tv, and then later when we did get them, we still didn't have that many compared with US tv, plus our broadcasters placed them at different points, so you had the scenes with dramatic close ups and swelling music sometimes followed by a repeat close up because the ad break didn't happen)
- sympathetic characters are fighting "for freedom" no matter which era their narrative is placed in, and even if they're busy invading someone else's country/planet
- there is an evil German or Brit around somewhere, and if there can't be due to the setting of the story, and it's a movie/tv series, said person is at least played by a British or German language actor
- characters get congratulated for their command of German/French/Spanish/Japanese/Whatever foreign language by "native" characters after the US actors mangled the language in question
- non US geography is somewhat questionable (golden example: Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves with Robin landing on the beaches after returning from a crusade and being in Sherwood Forest a short walk later; though I'm also fond of Hamburg, sea harbor city right next to the Atlantic, in An American Tail).
There are more, but these are the ones which come most immediately to my mind. :)
The other days
