[…] recently the Scifi Channel changed their name to SyFy for the very same reason. They wanted to distance themselves from their traditional focus, to be […]

You’re famous, Luke!

http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2009/20090318.jpg

@Morghan: Oh, yeah – I forgot they show wrestling these days. Sigh…

You are right about the movies too. Big snakes and spiders seem to be their main inspirations. Also taking mythological animals and letting them lose in American Midwest. So far I have seen trailers for ones featuring a Hydra, a Chimera, a Wywern, the minotaur and like 50 different dragon related ones.

Who cares? I knew that it was the end for SciFi when they started airing wrestling. Maybe with this new focus they’ll stop destroying things like Sanctuary. FarScape, FireFly, Andromeda, Babylon 5 etc. That’s what I expect to see on a Sci-Fi channel, not WWE and “Who Wants to be a Superhero?” And the original movies are so bad that it takes an MST3K session with friends to actually manage to sit through them. Really, how many movies can you make about a bloody big snake?

@Marcus: They’ve been messing with BSG for a while. For example, I believe that for half a season they forced them to adopt a more traditional one-shot-episode format that would avoid major story arcs. I mean, there was still the ongoing long term story, but they wanted self contained episodes that new viewers could just jump into and watch. Ratings plummeted, and they reconsidered.

As for BSG right now – I missed the last two episodes (must watch them on Demand sometime this week) but we are essentially in the home stretch right now. So they are wrapping things up, and building up for the grand series finale I presume.

@Victoria: Yeah – it’s a branding issue. For example, they can put the word SciFi on merchandise or tie-in products, but people won’t necessarily associate them with the channel – just with science fiction in general. Even if they use that little planet logo of theirs, people may not make the association.

And it’s probably hard to enforce trademark such as SciFi.

@Mart: Or modem! People don’t believe me when I tell them that modem stands for modulator-demodulator. :P

Seems to me that some people has forgotten that SciFi is an acronym for Science Fiction.

Probably from the same demographic that screams “NO WAY!” when you tell them that “laser” is an acronym too.. :P

That rebranding sucks BIG TIME. Now, I don’t know about texting it, but considering my non-English origins it immediately looks like Sufu and that goes straight into Japanese food territory ;) and the logo itself is not even close to smth recognizable and/or remarkable.

I think I’ve read smth about ownership rights problem in the article about this rebranding, so maybe it’s not that they want to change that much but they have to. Though their name choice sucks no less.

Spot on! Even in BSG itself I started to miss the action. There is a lot of drama going on lately, but sadly not much of the stuff I, as a Robotech fan, love. I know that drama is a vital part of the space opera genre, but I do miss my epic space battles. The flashbacks in the last episode were extremely painful to watch, I started to skip them.

Yes, technically you are right. What I meant to say there was that it was off the charts considering that Farscape was a science fiction show. In most cases SF/Fantasy forums are male dominated. If you are lucky, maybe 1 in 10 of your members may happen to be a female. In most cases it’s much worse than that. And yet Farscape and BSG seem to be equally appealing to both sexes and online forums and communities have a much more even distribution.

So perhaps “off the charts” was an unfortunate expression. What I meant was that it was unexpected, and unprecedented compared to what I have seem before. I was basically trying to show that that Scifi’s assessment that the name scares away female viewers was wrong.

[quote post=”2902″]when I was really active in Scaper fandom, the ratio of male to female message board posters was off the charts. It was pretty much 50/50 and at times girls actually outnumbered guys[/quote]
If it was around 50/50, wouldn’t the ratio have been 1? That’s not exactly ‘off the charts’. The only way I can see the ratio going off the charts is as the number of females approached zero. Since you can’t have a fraction of a female (questionable surgical practices aside), the highest ratio you can achieve is 99/1 (which, for the mathematically disinclined, equals 99), after which you hit singularity. The lowest is 1/99. Presumably this ‘chart’ goes from 0 to 100 and is thus capable of representing both these extremes.

Nitpick win!