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Hm. Sleaze, your post touches on two interesting dichotomies...
I think there is a difference that is not easily described between recorded Vs the broadcast show - not interms of content but in how we interface and digest recorded media and broadcast media...
I would amend those categorizations slightly, to make the distinction between recorded media and real-time media (which would include live performance and cinema, as well as broadcast radio and TV).
With recorded media, the viewer has an enormous amount of control over hir exerience: s/he can repeat key lines, confirming or dispelling any he-said-what speculations, prolong or foreshorten the total duration of the piece, skip certain segments entirely, experience them out of sequence... in short, split, slice, and/or shuffle the experience however s/he desires.
With real-time media, you must receive the piece on its own terms or not at all: you can either dig it as it presents itself to you, or walk out of the cinema / turn off the TV / radio. It requires a surrender of control, a willingness to be surprised... a sort of trust. And when that trust is betrayed (as Blue Jam does so often, setting up what seems like a normal situation only to twist it horribly), the effect is that much more powerful.
As to the video vs. audio question (the second dichotomy)—I haven't seen Jam, but frankly I can't imagine it being a patch on the radio show. Some of the more conventional sketches might translate adequately (the doctor's-office bits f'rinstance), but the ones with the surreal / fantastical elements? Cameron's opinion notwithstanding, I can't imagine that any SFX could render the Gush as horrifically as I see it in my mind's eye.
Stephen King, in his nonfiction book Danse Macabre, talks about horror on radio (relevant here, because I'd consider Blue Jam to fall into the horror genre, actually)—specifically, about the moment in any horror story when, after building the tension with a terrible scratching at the door, you have to throw the door open and show us what's out there. In the movies, you throw the door open, and there's a ten-foot bug: the audience flinches—"Holy shit! A ten-foot bug! That's pretty horrible! But it could've been worse: it could've been a hundred-foot bug."
Even if the filmmaker shows us that hundred-foot bug, the audience is quick to recover: "Holy shit! A hundred-foot bug! That's awful! But it could've been worse: it could've been a thousand-foot bug."
On the radio, though, you don't have to give a specific figure: you just tell the audience there's an enormous bug out there, and they'll do the rest... with their imaginations.
If I can use another example: the TV version of Hitchhiker's Guide, as funny and charming as it was, provided a very different kind of funny than the radio show—where the audience's imagination supplied the visuals, and there was no budget cap on that imagination. It was funny in a "Let's do a Doctor Who piss-take" kind of way —compensating for its low budget by making the shoddiness part of the joke—which was a radically different tone from the radio version, which was a thing of wonder and, yes, grandeur. |
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