TESB

Just randomly googled this poem and came right here to DCP. Hadn't seen a good translation on here. It's bonkers. Before there was dada, there was dada (german wordplay where "da" means "there" and german grammar makes the sentence is mirrored) Dada is an ancient (or antique) four-legged crossbow walking a doggy. Dada has swing (or vibes or something) more powerful than a hundred primeval forests. Sometimes dada looks like a person made of turf with eyes made of worm-holed apples. Yet dada is every day more beautiful than the previous. Dada is a rose with a rose in its buttonhole. *sighs* remember when narration was a hot topic? And it was cheating to not wear a jacket and hat for half the show?

I don't know what it's about either, I definitely noticed how much worse every corps, even the corps that won, looked in 2015

Yeah, but when Cadets do grand finale fireworks for closer drill, it almost always looks pretty good. The thing is with corps like Crown and Cadets who make it a point that their show is hard, it usually looks really hard. It looks like a bunch of kids struggling to hang on to the show. I also sometimes watch that sort of drill (BD does or doesn't use drill? I don't know for sure) and it looks like some guy on pyware thinks something looks cool on the computer, but there is such a disconnect. For example, when Crown's drill this year (and previous years) wants to do a pinwheel pattern in a block or something, every member follows that pattern except two or three groups, like the drill writer wanted to do this cool thing on pyware but "oh crap, there are like, six guys leftover that I don't know what to do with". Or the drill writer wants to do his really cool 3D drill, but especially this year, it was just so ugly and...well...thrown in there? It takes me out of it. Sometimes I think there are mistakes in the drill that they just left in there, like kids switched dots and no one noticed.

Zing! Ha Yeah giving the soloists their best night on whatever they release has always bothered me. On field electronics wouldn't be a rewardable risk if there's the possibility of a negative outcome. On that note (heyo!) DCI really ought to consider at least regulating or limiting electronics and prop use, even frequent/mid-season uniform changes, more strictly. You know that's coming out of the kids' fees.

Whoa whoa hang on...let's not kid ourselves, this is the dirtiest Crown has been since I can remember, maybe since pre horse show. But also shows are more difficult than before, more pieces to throw together, which is its own problem. I think DCI may have dodged a bullet having this show first on the dvd.

Dang DCI is never going back online with that shtuff.

Kudos to that player who picked up the helmet and hid it behind him, one handing his horn. Super pro

Is the on field mic singing a new rule this year? Or have people done it before? Or have people not done it this much before? I'm lost

idk mang, like I said, probably every TOC show I've observed is heavily skewed, both up and down in placements as well as broad and narrow in spreads. TOC numbers are always always wacky compared to the regionals and regular ordered shows (when these shows take place immediately around the date of a TOC show) where most of the big boys show up. Performance order as an excuse is lame if we're talking about going on last or second to last, but just the evidence shows TOC shows basically don't count. It's not a stretch to think, for example, BD going on first and Cadets going on last with Madison or Phantom somewhere in between does produce a recap sheet inconsistent with the rest of the season, consistently.

Why do they even bother with the TOC performance order? Every year, every TOC show just has bunk recaps because of the jumbled performance order.

The more valid comparisons might be last Saturday to this Saturday. TOC shows are notoriously inconsistent score-wise.

I think it's a combination of Copland fatigue and hammy/predictable design, which in ways go hand in hand. The comparisons to 09 crown and vanguard are totally valid considering there are nearly identical builds and moments going on. Maybe people don't like the narration not because it is lecture-like but because it's delivered with a hefty side of cheese and appears to be lip-synched, and the jazz is square. There's also an unusual amount of false hype coming from Hop and the organization about changes and whatnot and now the tarps seem to be borderline tasteless. The sound bytes are really mundane and formulaic ("and now here's the stock market crash part"..."happy days are here again"..."a day that will live in infamy") and the whole production, while executed very well, feels so hackneyed even for Cadets.

Eh, Allentown was tight last year and then the next night's TOC it opened up, last year's SA regional and subsequent Round Rock TOC did something similar. 12's Minneapolis regional had tightish spreads which were all bent out of shape the next night at Rockford and bent back pretty faithfully at normal shows. Charlotte TOC is always messed up, don't even want to get into the 2011 TOC wackiness. It's hard for judges to call it like they see it, as much as we'd like to think they could, when relevant competition is spread out in an evening.

Yeah but the TOC scores the last few years have been so consistently wacky and unreliable relative to the scores that come from normal shows and Saturday nights throughout the season. Shame that the first night everyone meets up competitors perform hours apart.

Someone should make this list for 2009, 2010, and 2012

Your caveat is wise, comparing shows isn't very useful, especially when you consider that they're not using full panels for one of the shows. Also a three point jump from nearly everyone from the first show only two nights before tells me everyone's (among judges) first reads of shows in this part of the season can be so low scoring and wishy-washy.

Do people realize how wide that gap would have to be in order to place Crown ahead of Cadets with the mere addition of a brass judge?

Watched the performance earlier this evening, and it's fairly justified to say they're rehashing old ideas and the new ones aren't quite fleshed out yet. These props everyone's hoohahing about barely get touched or interacted with by the corps or the drill, they may as well not even be there. I saw some peeps on the field percussion so I guess that's something to see/feel in person, but it is a rehash...I did like the gimmicks, though, the frisbees were pretty sweet and the trampolines looked interesting with the side fabric flopping in and out with the jumper like a jellyfish. But it all just reminds me of a high school in a zip code with a high average income with a band booster club who can afford things to sit there for points points points. I'm not money-shaming them or anything, but if the Cadets or BD prop comparison conversation is going to be brought up, those corps do a heckuva lot more with chairs, mirrors, towers, doors, horses, uniforms, and poles than let them sit there on the peripheries while the band kicks up dirt in the middle. Brass was pretty on par as is expected, but the drill they march and choreography they do is just so...done before. And not just done before, but done by them, like last year, in that other space show, and the five years before that.

They're not dumb and they'll put out a good product in the end, but there really is a point when "formula" becomes "the same thing" year to year and I think this is just another year where that's the case. This has been the case btw for the past several years with Crown.

I can just picture your arms folding and sitting back in a chair saying "failure to sell me"

I'm actually not very familiar at all with Blue Stars history, what years were those Kevin Ford prop use years? Are those the bicycle, factory, houdini years? A couple years ago I remember a ramp I think?

That's actually an interesting question. Doing different things with the same basic drum corps formula is inherently innovative, but whether they're changing the activity for it who knows. I'd say that the GE rule changes and the allowance of all brass are BOA-like gimmicky things that are probably pushing the activity in Crown, Cadets, and Phantom's direction. Like I can already see the year down the road where phantom fields 16 french horns or crown marches a section or two of trombones. If it's done well, awesome, that would be the point of change and innovation. If anything BD could just be an anomaly and eventually the reign will end and we'll all come out the other side looking and sounding more like Crown and Phantom. BD has been doing the prop thing for years now and no one else is really even trying. Academy had some chairs I guess, some people have a platform or something here and there, I think Spirit's saloon show last year had something like that. Cadets dabbled in it last year, and that I think is the closest anyone's ever gotten to doing a BD-like prop show. But like I said, it's not maybe so much the BD is so game changing, it's that others do a lot of rehash stuff from themselves and others. BD is guilty of this as well for sure, doing props year after year is a version of this, but it's not like they have a single shape or pattern or show structure or genre or theme they repeat year after year. It's not like Crown, who does what it does and it works for them, where it's okay to year after year have a preshow-theme-show-up-later structured show, and it's okay to do the similar 3D drill in the same spot in the show with really similar transition drill and music around it, have the percussion stuff around the field, use that ribbon company front every year in multiple parts of the show. Not just them, plenty of corps play the same chords in the same forms in the same parts of shows year to year. There's nothing inherently wrong about this and it's just one case from one corps. and it's a weird to say it's wrong for that to happen in DCI, which has a history of corps repeating themselves and programs year to year, think of BD's channel one's and ya gotta trys, Vanguards phantom of the operas, phantom's spartacus shows, I know there is more. But stack that up against a corps which consistently puts out original, clever, thoughtful stuff every year and at least maybe one could understand why some people consider BD a breath of fresh air.

No one has ever done the prop integration they have. Chairs, poles, mirrors, houses, whether you dig them or not, they're the only one doing them really really well. Other corps like Blue Stars and Cadets have props Crown 2007 too, but nothing like what BD is able to pull off every year. The drill is always really thoughtful, deliberate, and well balanced and the shapes move with each other and push and pull on each other, the shows are typically very dense. Everything just seemed designed and purposeful whereas when I watch comparable corps, I feel like the drill writer is just churned it out on a pyware in March and left the other visual ideas to someone else's interpretation. People always write off BD's drill as staging and I've never really been too sure what this means. Is good staging like apt places for instrumentation to be heard or how and where performers are organized on the field aesthetically. Either way BD does it really well and (my opinion) other corps are either ignoring that aspect or are just behind. Their shows also seem to me, especially when they're really good years, like they were written by one person with a unified intention, everything fits, nothing seems like a bad fix or band-aid, often movements bleed into each other, transitions are seamless as they should be and jarring if they need to be. That's barely even to mention the music, they play chords and dissonance that no one else does. And it's not so much that they do these things that no one else does, but everyone else just does something so similar to each other in comparison I feel.

Well, the typo could be because they're still acquiring certain rights, but that's a stretch. And of course we get a BD show thread on dcp with one vague hint at a movie and it's decided to make a list of all the foreign movies which are better than that one which was posted on BD's page And while "inevermarched" could have been less harsh, could have grammar-checked and maybe could have used not such a broadly used word as "esoteric" to say BD shows tend to be interpreted as "disliked", he's probably more correct than wrong, just super bold. There is (maybe a minor but) vocal group of people here and on any social media outlet who tend to take stands against BD's successes since 2008 in the name of not digging the shows, not being "emotionally connected" to a bunch of 16-21 year old kids on a football field. People routinely choose not to enjoy devs' show for no better reasons than they claim to like other corps and shows. Since it's all subjective, shouldn't silly things like how well a show is liked by how many people be irrelevant? Or at least viewed relatively, next to how the corps sounds and marches. I have here made the case before that this is probably just people's lame biases, and I'm guilty of them too, but darn it there's probably nothing that corps could do to reverse that because it seems to me BD has never stopped dabbling in the major chords and the get happy music, the Lauras, Los Suertes, I've got rhythm, all that Bacharach, I will wait for you (which I thought was deliberately sappy to an absurd extreme), Apollo 13, the Artist, sweeny todd. These people aren't nearly devoid of recognizable melody and Bb major chords. I'm sure BD will be fine, and honestly I'm curious if the trope about BD coming out hot when they have a chip on their collective shoulders will hold up this summer or not.

Well I think you're really making the case for that not to be how one judges a corps.