channel2

I mean, '90s nostalgia is big right now... If there are Chiefs or Niners logo fonts they're probably proprietary. That sans and ITC Cheltenham aren't it.

They named Fred after him, which always struck me as odd, because Hanna-Barbera already had a Fred (Flintstone). He also told them to do a series of shorts starring Moby Dick, the crime-fighting whale. Who had a sidekick, a seal named Scooby...who was also voiced by Don Messick.

I love me some Cyrus Highsmith fonts, so...

Disney owns the show outright. It's distributed by Disney-ABC Home Entertainment and Television Distribution.

Spanish Broadcasting System has, IIRC, been having debt problems, so it figures they would sell off KTBU.

Network-owned stations do strike me as playing it safer than affiliates tend to...

KMGH isn’t high energy though. It was lethargic even before Scripps took over.

I'm not sure why Scripps would ditch the Virginia stations anyway...

I mean, CBS had the chance to get back into Hampton Roads...

6? Wasn't it less than three years ago that they canceled all their Critically-Acclaimed Originals ahead of the Sinclair takeover that wasn't? I can't imagine Nexstar has any interest in prestige television...

Most major media outlets seem to have given up on that beat ages ago. It's noticeably harder to find reliable ratings info than it used to be.

With regards to Sears and Kmart, is there an Eddie Lampert type waiting to bleed local TV dry if they miss a few steps?

Doesn't Nexstar have multiple packages they standardize around? Plus, the Hearst group isn't as big as Scripps...plus don't they have pretty strong proprietary tech? Scripps doesn't seem to want to either let stations do their own thing again or create multiple packs to standardize around.

The programming's so cheap that they must.

And apparently they don't have the budget to tap an outside firm either.

It does feel like the pool of V/O artists skews pretty old, honestly. Like there is no one to take the reins from the mainstays as they decline or leave the profession.

Disney doesn't own the searchlights anyway! Fox Media owns the 20th Century Fox trademarks, and Disney is licensing them on a perpetual, royalty-free basis.

The existing Fox wordmark is iconic? At any rate, Rupert kept the 20th Century Fox trademarks, so they don’t need to pay to license the searchlights.

Are any of the megachains really friends?

I think one of the reasons MLB wanted to buy the Fox Sports Nets was to reclaim a bunch of teams' rights and move away from regionalization, towards a centralized rights deal. I think that's a better idea than sticking people with the local team based on geography.

I mean, the quality of CGI that TV shows can afford isn't exactly on the level of Avatar...

Oh, definitely not. But it's kept the big media crap machine floating along for years, and now Netflix and Amazon are scaring them into actually trying again.

Hasn't that extortion money done a great deal to keep broadcast TV afloat the last 20 years or so? Well, the outlets that don't have an ESPN or a Fox News kind of cash cow.

Is Weigel having beef with them?

I'm not even talking '90s so much as the days when Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, and Rocky & Bullwinkle got to flog Kellogg's and General Mills products during their shows! Even Bugs Bunny said "drink Tang, gang" during reruns of LT/MM shorts! Europe is not an ideal source of content, sadly. A lot of their shows are bland and scrubbed-down so that they have a prayer of working all over the world, since for them the real money is in international sales. Every now and then you get a breakout like Code Lyoko or a show that was actually quite ambitious like Miraculous (which I believe bombed on Nick here before KidsClick picked it up) that nonetheless was run through the blanderizer something fierce. Of course, the pipeline of anime is quite rich. But developing an overreliance on imported properties that the network/affiliates don't own is risky.