Drum Corps on TV

[KeithHall]

YES!!! That was it!!!

Hey Keith - a light bulb just went off.

I remember seeing a show like what you described..It was on PBS by way of WGBH in Boston. I believe it was the Blue Stars and Madison doing a feature from the '73 CYO Championships. I remember the field was NOT in a stadium, but in a park of some kind, and part of a sidewalk or path cust across part of the far right side of the field, making the yardlines look 'outa whack'.

Could that be what you saw?

Pat

[KeithHall]

This is what I was thinking! Anyone have an "in" with Simon Cowell? Create a new drum corps. Auditions.....hit a few prospective members as they prepare to audition. Audition process, winter camps, move in, tour and culminating with DCI World Championships. Televise the finals in three nights. Four corps each night and then on the 4th night show the winners for World Class and Open Class. Heck, add DCA in there too!

Or do that to fill up spots in a created corps (the Marching Simon Cowell's), and follow the format until you have your hornline, drumline, front ensemble, and guard.

[Tim K]

My comments are somewhat long, but I’m reposnding in general to quite a few posts.

DCI was on both PBS and ESPN for a few years. It was first produced by WGBH in Boston when New England had a plethora of marching units, so there was already a good sized audience in this area and it was often rebroadcast during the Christmas season as part of PBS fundraisers. It probably would have continued if PBS could have broadcast from Canada in 1980 and 81. ESPN would show highlights from the corps that placed 7-12 and the entire show of 1-6. It was glitzy , but the camera work was superior to PBS, through this may have been due to better technology. My guess is that ESPN stopped airing drum corps due to ratings. A major problem is going from live show to television. Since I follow the corps, I know what to expect, but some shows will never make the transition from field to small screen. Some don’t even make the transition from field to movie theater screen all that well. I just got the Blu-Ray from DCI 2011. Crown, Boston Crusaders, Blue Devils, the parts of Madison that were not blocked, and Phantom were great. The Cadets performance, which was supposedly their strongest performance of the year, lost a great deal on DVD. There are also some live show experiences you can’t capture on TV. Being in the audience, hearing the old school/new school debates, being reunited with former marching mates, how can TV capture these things? It happens to some degree when DCI broadcast portions of the prelims live in movie theaters, at least audience wise, but you need to see the show live, using an entire field, to truly experience it.

The reality series concept has potential. In the mid 70’s, I believe 1976, WGBH aired a documentary on the 27^th Lancers. It was based on the previous season. DCI aired about a week later. I remember some non-drum corps people who watched the show also watched DCI and began attending shows. Yes, I’m sure some referred to them as marching bands, but they attended and supported the corps. The kids in drum corps make drum corps what it is, and I think following a few then seeing the show would hook audiences.

Also, we may need to be careful about looking at “marching bands” in an inferior light. There are very few feeder corps today, and most drum corps participants come from bands. Also, in the days of some of the great Boston area corps: 27^th, Crusaders, North Star: many of the members had their start in CYO bands that were judged competitively using the same “tick” sheets and categories as the drum corps. Friends who joined the Crusaders claimed they wanted band members because they could be retrained and could read music. Perhaps it was a slam on the smaller drum corp. The rivalries were great back then, even if the critiques were not always accurate.

[Peel Paint]

My guess is that ESPN stopped airing drum corps due to ratings. A major problem is going from live show to television. Since I follow the corps, I know what to expect, but some shows will never make the transition from field to small screen...

The reality series concept has potential.

You made some good points (particularly football fields as stages, and how it's so hard to translate live shows on a field to other media with screens of various sizes), but I have to correct the suggestion that ESPN may have pulled the plug due to ratings.

DCI pulled back the plug because of money. I don't agree with a lot of what danielray posts about managing drum corps as a business, but in this point on this thread, he's absolutely right: the last foray into TV with ESPN was a financial fiasco for DCI. The return on the investment--the bang for the DCI buck--was very poor, and that's why DCI killed it.

The ESPN shows brought hardly anyone new into the activity that wouldn't have gotten there anyway and cost DCI a fortune. The only people that watched were people like us. People who still dream of top 12 live on PBS à la 1970s are trying to return to an era that is gone with the wind.

You want new eyeballs? Put up new content on YouTube for free. Make it so entertaining in two to five minutes that links are forwarded and people want to learn more. That's the key today. And it's relatively very cheap to do very well. Just yesterday I bought seven mp3 tracks on amazon recorded by Straight No Chaser. I did that right after watching their 12 Days of Christmas video on YouTube for free. What a hoot. That's the way to bring in new people and new money.

The reality show idea being proposed in this thread? Be careful what you wish for. Everyone on DCP dancing with reality TV would absolutely hate how it turned out and what it turned any corps participating in it into. "Reality" TV is no longer anything close to a PBS documentary.

Do you think competitive ballroom dancing participants and their die-hard fans have any respect for Dancing With the Stars or think DWTS reflects well on what they do?

The documentaries that have been done on drum corps life took hundreds of hours of tape and distilled them down to the two most interesting hours in the set because quite frankly (have we forgotten??) so much of routine corps life is kind of dull. Reality show production crews don't have the luxury of taping hundreds of hours for a two-hour show. They have to find a way to create drama quickly.

What does "reality" TV have to do with anything other than fake, staged drama, corruption of ideals, and distortion of reality? All it's about is creating fake sensation and selling ads for cars.

Edited December 8, 2011 by Peel Paint

[mobrien]

The reality show idea being proposed in this thread? Be careful what you wish for. Everyone on DCP dancing with reality TV would absolutely hate how it turned out and what it turned any corps participating in it into. "Reality" TV is no longer anything close to a PBS documentary.

Do you think competitive ballroom dancing participants and their die-hard fans have any respect for Dancing With the Stars, or think DWTS reflects well on what they do?

The documentaries that have been done on drum corps life took hundreds of hours of tape and distilled it down to the two most interesting hours in the set, because quite frankly (have we forgotten??), so much of routine corps life is kind of dull. Reality show production crews don't have the luxury of taping hundreds of hours for a two-hour show. They have to find a way to create drama quickly.

What does "reality" TV have to do with anything other than fake, staged drama, corruption of ideals, and distortion of reality? All it's about is creating fake sensation and selling ads for cars.

Thanks for weighing in, Representative Bachman.

The point of a reality show would NOT be to appeal to those who are already into drum corps. It would be to appeal to people who find the personalities and situations of the subjects interesting to watch. Out of THAT group, you would increase the visibility of the activity, and from there, it's up to the activity and shows themselves to turn the viewers of said show into fans.

Anyone who thinks that simply putting Finals back on broadcast tv would increase the visibility and participation is deluded. Note that there were fewer corps at the end of 1980 (last year of the live cast in that period) than there were in 1975, when the 'GBH broadcast started. And given how badly drum corps people burned the PBS affiliates who used the show as pledge drive programming, there was very little enthusiasm on the part of the affiliates to show it by the end of the run.

Edited December 8, 2011 by mobrien

[Tom Brace]

Thanks for weighing in, Representative Bachman.

The point of a reality show would NOT be to appeal to those who are already into drum corps. It would be to appeal to people who find the personalities and situations of the subjects interesting to watch. Out of THAT group, you would increase the visibility of the activity, and from there, it's up to the activity and shows themselves to turn the viewers of said show into fans.

Anyone who thinks that simply putting Finals back on broadcast tv would increase the visibility and participation is deluded. Note that there were fewer corps at the end of 1980 (last year of the live cast in that period) than there were in 1975, when the 'GBH broadcast started. And given how badly drum corps people burned the PBS affiliates who used the show as pledge drive programming, there was very little enthusiasm on the part of the affiliates to show it by the end of the run.

Sorry...I agree with Peel on this. Too much light can destroy, lead to bad publicity. Take the series' "Sister Wives" and some of the "Housewives of..." shows. They are destructive without caring one bit for the subject matter other than it makes good teevee. Another example of the teevee destruction on an entire family would be that motorcycle show which has more throwing chairs and breaking doors than about building a freakin' motorcycle.

Once again, people on here...in the off season...looking for solutions which do not exist. TV is not the answer. TV is yesterday. TV is dying the way radio has died. TV needs money and the viewership for drum corps isn't there and has not been there since the 1990s when PBS dumped the broadcast and then later when the ESPN2 experiment proved unsucessful. TV just isn't the answer.

And we are one 20 year old sharing a sleeping bag with one 16 year old captured on a night vision camera away from further destruction of drum corps all captured and played over and over again on the teevee. That's the reality you all are asking for.

[Peel Paint]

Thanks for weighing in, Representative Bachman.

The point of a reality show would NOT be to appeal to those who are already into drum corps. It would be to appeal to people who find the personalities and situations of the subjects interesting to watch. Out of THAT group, you would increase the visibility of the activity, and from there, it's up to the activity and shows themselves to turn the viewers of said show into fans.

Anyone who thinks that simply putting Finals back on broadcast tv would increase the visibility and participation is deluded. Note that there were fewer corps at the end of 1980 (last year of the live cast in that period) than there were in 1975, when the 'GBH broadcast started. And given how badly drum corps people burned the PBS affiliates who used the show as pledge drive programming, there was very little enthusiasm on the part of the affiliates to show it by the end of the run.

Smile or not, paragraph one is uncalled for.

I agree with paragraph three.

In paragraph two, you overlook the cost of what the "reality" TV experience does to the participants. DCI is in part an educational activity for college and high school students. The staged drama of reality TV, which may be akin to running a job interview by setting the wastebasket on fire to see how the applicant reacts under stress, is a corrupting experience for participants. And you would HATE how a DCI reality show turned out on ABC.

[BozzlyB]

It's just too much of a niche activity to ever be relevant for TV. Sucks but it's true.

[glory]

I think a lot of folks are missing the point when it comes to Glee and the notion that if high school chorus can be a hit on TV, drum corps can too.

The point is Glee isn't a hit because it's about chorus. The chorus is incidental. Glee is a hit because it's about interesting people in interesting dramatic/comical situations. In that regard it is no different from any other successful TV show.

The good news is drum corps need not be any different. The creators of Glee might just as easily have selected the high school marching band as the counterpoint to cheerleaders/athletes and their coaches, applying the very same plots to sustain the drama and comedy. Some might argue that chorus is a more appealing - or at least less polarizing - medium for the plot than marching band would have been. On the other hand, some future producer might recognize that some of the negative marching band stereotypes might lend themselves very well to an even richer character/story palette.

HH

[BozzlyB]

My comments are somewhat long, but I’m reposnding in general to quite a few posts.

DCI was on both PBS and ESPN for a few years. It was first produced by WGBH in Boston when New England had a plethora of marching units, so there was already a good sized audience in this area and it was often rebroadcast during the Christmas season as part of PBS fundraisers. It probably would have continued if PBS could have broadcast from Canada in 1980 and 81. ESPN would show highlights from the corps that placed 7-12 and the entire show of 1-6. It was glitzy , but the camera work was superior to PBS, through this may have been due to better technology. My guess is that ESPN stopped airing drum corps due to ratings. A major problem is going from live show to television. Since I follow the corps, I know what to expect, but some shows will never make the transition from field to small screen. Some don’t even make the transition from field to movie theater screen all that well. I just got the Blu-Ray from DCI 2011. Crown, Boston Crusaders, Blue Devils, the parts of Madison that were not blocked, and Phantom were great. The Cadets performance, which was supposedly their strongest performance of the year, lost a great deal on DVD. There are also some live show experiences you can’t capture on TV. Being in the audience, hearing the old school/new school debates, being reunited with former marching mates, how can TV capture these things? It happens to some degree when DCI broadcast portions of the prelims live in movie theaters, at least audience wise, but you need to see the show live, using an entire field, to truly experience it.

The reality series concept has potential. In the mid 70’s, I believe 1976, WGBH aired a documentary on the 27^th Lancers. It was based on the previous season. DCI aired about a week later. I remember some non-drum corps people who watched the show also watched DCI and began attending shows. Yes, I’m sure some referred to them as marching bands, but they attended and supported the corps. The kids in drum corps make drum corps what it is, and I think following a few then seeing the show would hook audiences.

Also, we may need to be careful about looking at “marching bands” in an inferior light. There are very few feeder corps today, and most drum corps participants come from bands. Also, in the days of some of the great Boston area corps: 27^th, Crusaders, North Star: many of the members had their start in CYO bands that were judged competitively using the same “tick” sheets and categories as the drum corps. Friends who joined the Crusaders claimed they wanted band members because they could be retrained and could read music. Perhaps it was a slam on the smaller drum corp. The rivalries were great back then, even if the critiques were not always accurate.

This is something that is only relevant to current participants of DC and MB. To anyone outside the activity it's all MB, and all equally inferior to just about everything else including a good match of horseshoes.

Edited December 8, 2011 by BozzlyB