Baeritone

Aw, jeez..... :(

When I watched this over on FB, it DID make me sad. The corps's death as an all-age competing unit still hurts in many ways, but Dent has made sure that we don't forget, that we aren't forgotten. Salunga.

*delorted*

Yay for a Love It Or Leave It attitude!

This is a serious question I have here; it is not an attack on any one corps. This you can tell by the fact that I have kept my own counsel about which corps I enjoyed the most, and will continue to do so. This question is honestly meant. In all sorts of competitions, the question is asked: "if the score doesn't matter, why is it a competition at all?" Ok, fair question. Here's mine, which is something of a reversal of the other: If the audience reaction doesn't matter....why not hold DCI as a jury instead of as a performance? (Aside from ticket revenues, of course; I wonder if there are those on staff anywhere who would prefer juries over performances...)

And your obviously emotion-based response makes any and all posts by you appear ridiculous. The evidence of loss of fans is in the stands. I have not attacked the Blue Devils at any point; you seem AWFULLY defensive.

I don't know that what you've chosen is a fair comparison. And being passionate is fine - being disrespectful, as many appear to be, is not, in my book. You see, we are NOT Kindergartners. We should be adults; the passion should be on the field and in the stands. Being passionate is one place and being measured and thoughtful in another....these are not mutually exclusive states. Hell, even be passionate in arguing here, but I would rather see people back up their opinions with something more thoughtful than "Oh yeah? Well, my corps can beat up your corps!" I marched a corps where violence was threatened against members and staff of another corps, and sometimes even between sections of the corps itself. Did passion serve us well in that case? No, because instead of respecting each other and leaving our passion on the field, we ate each other alive, and the marching corps is essentially dead. Don't think the same thing can't happen to drum corps in general.

Really? I've seen people here (and this is one of the few points I made that was intended only to apply to DCP) who are real-life friends of mine call people much worse than idiot just out of disagreement. This forum often makes me tired, because people get pointlessly angry and say things they would never say to someone in person. (Of course, the same can be said of almost any internet forum, but that's as may be. )

And indeed, this isn't solely based on DCP, but also on what I hear in the stands and from people I know personally. And I'm not saying we can't have passion; I'm saying that there's such a thing as being gracious in defeat. There's such a thing as accepting the fact that things will always change, and some of those changes will actually be for the better. There's also such a thing as realizing that there was a reason why things were done a certain way in the past. Don't think drum corps is dying? Look at the stands, my friend, for DCA and DCI alike. I'm not speaking solely of finals, but of shows in general. I've seen crowds at all types of shows where the marching members in a single corps outnumbered the audience. There's a happy medium somewhere between entertainment and the judging sheets. People think we haven't found it because it can't be found. I think we haven't found it because everyone is so ###### sure he's right that he won't even consider another viewpoint, and we end up in deadlock about how to do it. :-/

Except I'm not basing these opinions solely on what I see here.

This is why the disclaimer; I don't agree with all these viewpoints, but they represent themes I've seen on these boards and in the stands.

Hee! How so? Enthrall me with your acumen.....

I based this primarily on what I hear from actual people. I don't often read the DCI forums here, because it's enough to drive most people mad, what with the constant bickering. What I hear in the stands is a less virulent version of the same, usually from veterans who don't like the idea of change, but also from younger people who don't see value in what has gone before. I wish I COULD agree with you; it would make things seem much more optimistic for the future of drum corps. :-/

...and the Cadets were relocated to the projects?

Opinions are often baseless; however, this is allowed in any informal setting. This ain't no Forensics team....;) A review is nothing but opinion; if the OP's opinion were that the Troopers should have won, then that would be his opinion, and it need not be based in fact. It would still be his review, and the people here would lend it credence, or not, based on those opinions This is art; almost everything about it is subjective and, as such, cannot be based entirely in fact. Only the base athletics can truly be judged fairly, and even that has pitfalls. The word "good" is now and as forever been up for grabs.

So I've conned through this melange of responses, here's what I gather is being said. Keep in mind that summarizing this does not mean that I agree: 1. Blue Devils won last night; most people agree that they should have done according to the judging sheets, and there is a great schism in our community of fans as to whether or not that ACTUALLY should have according to the mythical GE scoring system contrasted with audience response. 2. Virtually everyone agrees that BD executed their show design flawlessly. 3. The majority of opinions on this board, which may or may not represent a clear cross-section of the drum corps audience (there's no way to quantify it), is that the reason BD's execution was flawless was because their show was easier than the rest of the top 5 corps shows, quite aside from the mythical GE score. 4. There are few people loudly proclaiming that BD is the end-all be-all of drum corps, and those few are now or have been primarily involved with BD personally, and as such, are obviously biased. 5. There will always be people who hate the winner, and in this case those people may or may not have a regional bias. 6. It would be possible for BD to do a crowd-pleasing show as they did in the 80's and still win. (Editorial comment: SCV showed us how that can be done in 1999. When that show concept was announced people thought it would be weird and inaccessible; instead, it was a show that was so good that it made me get over my long-standing bias against SCV.) 7. There is no place for what BD is doing in drum corps. (Editorial note: I STRONGLY disagree with this one, and of all the consensus points herein, I consider this one the most dangerous.) 8. Almost everyone here thinks almost everyone else here is an idiot. Is this a fair assessment of the state of things here? Ok. Here's what I have to say about this, on a personal level: STOP IT. Like most forums, this one is a concentrated microcosm of the larger community it represents. What this means is that, though the obvious loathing of our fellow fans is more obvious here, it is likely to exist just as much, but subtler and more diffusely, in the real world. Now, if you were a new fan, and all you got from was a general miasma of "I'm right, you're wrong" from the general "veteran" audience....would it make you want to keep going to shows, or god forbid, get involved yourself? We have to stop this self-cannibalization in which we're engaged. We are not a large enough community anymore to survive it. Our activity is dying, because the few people who are able to see past the old-fashioned 8-5 style and see what corps has become are turned off by our pointless and endless negativity. STOP IT. STOP worrying so much about judging and winning. Judges do not pay to keep the activity going. Start worrying about how we're going to get new people with new ideas involved. And STOP, for the love of all that's holy, pretending that weird automatically means good just because it's new. You can be weird, and outre`, and surreal even....and still appeal to an audience, and still win, if that's what matters to you. Scores don't keep this thing going, even with the prize money; fans do. It's time to quit destroying drum corps with the blind insistence that you yourself are always right. It's time to start using this beautifully athletic AND artistic medium as something on which everyone might not always agree, but as something which anyone can get behind.

Being pedantic does not mean that you win an argument, especially when it's clear that you understood what was meant by the comment.

And for all that...it's not a given. The corps with the highest score could tie.

Dude...put down the pipe...

Dude, I'm 36....and if my corps were properly resurrected, I'd commute to friggin' Harrisburg, now that the docs have found a medication that neutralizes that lovely cracking in my fingers. You're never too old.

*sigh* I miss my corps. Where's that MegaMillions win I've been looking for, so I can help resurrect the competing corps again?

Crossmen 1997, with Crossman 1992 a close second.

97 Cavaliers. Bent over and all. But seriously, the drums were killer that year, and the design wasn't bad at all.

Does DCA as we know it work that well that it cannot withstand change? Or perhaps it's better to asak the question in the opposite direction: Would changing DCA as we know it into something else stand a decent chance to make it something better, more effective, than it is now? I don't conveniently ignore anything; to say so is to ignore a large part of what I've said, as well as being more than a little insulting. What I've said is that DCA IS the corps; in other words, for DCA to do this, the corps would have to approve it from the first. How is that a dictatorship? Anything DCA does on this level is done with prior ratification by the members. If the member corps decide to tap the Midwest market, then those corps must also commit to doing so; it's a joint decision, and the organization aspect is carried out by the organization known as DCA at the will of those corps, which are, in the end, what DCA IS. You assume a logical fallacy. The final thing I'll say on this subject is to address your point of "upsetting the apple cart". YOU conveniently ignore the fact that upsetting the apple cart, aka rocking the boat, aka promoting change is not merely a chance to fail, but a chance to succeed. Being afraid of change is natural, but to thrive, we must adapt. A mentality of stagnation will kill DCA far faster than taking a risk and changing with the chance to do the activity some good. That which does not evolve, dies. It's axiomatic. Being afraid of change is what got drum corps into this mess to begin with. I love drum corps, and change for the sake of it (amplification springs to mind) is counter-productive. Change to achieve a result, with a goal in mind, however....that's how we survive. Adaptability made the human race what it is. To avoid change out of fear is to become old and afraid of everything, and eventually, it ALWAYS kills - because things always change.

I neither misrepresent nor misunderstand what DCA DOES. I indicate what I believe that DCA ought to do. DCA does not, in my opinion, promote itself correctly. The reason I suggested a show with "headliners" is because, while it's not an instant fix to do so, the truth is simply that a fan base will never be tapped with corps who have not already had some success - unless the younger corps that perform are obscenely well financed to afford quality instrumentation and instruction. You have to put your best product forth to present it. And for the record, the distance to Reading is shorter, but the actual time is, according to my practical information, longer. It takes 1 hour and 15 minutes to get to the field from Harrisburg, PA (trust me, I've done it, driving the speed limit). It takes 7 hours to get to Harrisburg from Columbus (again, trust me, I've done it, many times; the map says it should take six, but that does not account for the state of the roads and the constant construction on the PA Turnpike. Perhaps the drive between Syracuse and Rochester is similarly difficult, but I have driven to Rochester from Columbus in 6.5 hours, normal speed. Add 1.5 hours (liberally; one need not drive to Rochester to drive to Columbus from Syracuse, so you could probably cut half an hour or so off of it), and that's 8 hours. You're looking at 8 hours - 8.5 hours to Reading from here; the 7 or so hours you indicate is impossible. So at best, the drive times are similar. Just offering practical experience vs. theory. Perhaps your experience has been different.