THE GOOD - Last night was the Opening Ceremonies of the Summer Olympics - I have seen probably every Olympics Opening Ceremony since I was a kid in the late 60s/early 70s and they seem to get more lavish every time - all I can say about China's ceremony last night is WOW - - it was stunningly spectacular, in a brand new amazing arena they call "The Bird's Nest". Two-thousand and eight performers creating this gigantic perfect set of moving circles, not to mention the entertaining opening where over two-thousand fast-paced drummers performed on lit drums in amazing synchronization - must have been a lot of practice to get the precision so perfectly in time. The ceremony included so much more including a full audience all waving different colored lights (looked real pretty), lots of brightly colored Chinese costumes, a huge LCD screen on the floor of the arena, and greenish-lit men creating Busby Berkeley style images on the arena floor while just one young girl floated high above - photographed from above they were just beginning to show some formations when NBC cut in the middle of it to go to a commercial - and that leads me to:
THE BAD. NBC's coverage was pretty horrible - really shameful. Not "Live", yet still cut! Couldn't they show the ceremony live in the morning for those who have the opportunity to see it at the Live time? (or if they just won't - what about pay-per-view coverage with no commercials and optional commentary?). Since NBC had it on tape - why not just insert the commercials into the tape without removing any of the ceremony. It's like they taped it as if it were being broadcast LIVE and - okay, what seemed like about every five to seven minutes of show they cut away to more commercials. When they came back from the commercials, the ceremony was "in progress" - so the viewer never gets to see what was shown during the ads. Oh brother.
The Parade of Nations marching in took about two hours, but was still entertaining - the whole march-in area surrounded by cute Chinese "cheerleaders" in matching red sashed, white mini-dresses and go-go boots as they danced and clapped alongside all the athletes as they went by (yes, the girls appeared to be getting pretty tired as this moved into the later parts of the parade). One more note: since the Chinese have no alphabet the order that the nations walked in wasn't alphabetical but based on the number of strokes in the Chinese character, the NBC announcers said not to worry - if you need to know the next three nations to come into the arena just look at their graphic at the bottom of the screen. Um, dumb NBC - orange-ish writing on almost the exact same shade of orange - or was it just my TV? This was impossible to read, even with my face right up to the screen! I did enjoy watching this ceremony a lot, it was an amazing spectacle put on by China - I just wish NBC would treat a large international event like this with a lot more respect to the viewer by giving us a whole lot better coverage than they did.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
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