Year: 2019

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Advertising

Maybe it’s just me, but one thing that really gets my goat is advertising. It seems to be taking over the world.

I know that the time per hour allowed for adverts on tv has increased over the years, to something like 20 minutes per hour. If you just zap through the channels, it does seem like it’s all adverts. It isn’t, of course, but it seems that way.

I used to play Words With Friends (= on-line Scrabble). It was quite fun, but got to the point where every move generated a full minute’s advert. You either sat through it all, or quit the app and started again. I gave up and stopped playing.

Facebook got worse. The adverts seemed to be covering the screen and were not relevant to me. Had they been, I would particularly avoid the companies advertising. Twitter is going down the same road.

I remember when you could get movies on tape or dvd and there was 5 or 10 minutes of advertising at the start. Disney were particularly bad. You could wind through tape, but the dvd menu system could be disabled to you were stuck with it (more or less). This seemed to have gone away, but is definitely coming back now.

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Richard Williams

The death was announced last week of one of my cinema heroes, Richard Williams.

Williams was born in Canada but lived and worked nearly all his life in the UK. He used to have his headquarters in Soho Square in London. Am not sure if it is still there.

You will know Mr Williams’ work. He has produced some very famous animation over the years, including Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and credits for many feature films, including some Pink Panthers and The Charge of the Light Brigade.

I have seen Mr W several times at the NFT in conversation about his work. The last time wa maybe a year or so ago. He was there to show his big project, an animated full length film variously called The Thief, The Thief and the Cobbler, The Princess and the Cobbler…

This is/was a kind of Arabian Nights type story, and has one of the most longwinded and troubled production histories of any film. You can read all about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thief_and_the_Cobbler

The chances of a final, definitive version appearing seem slight.