“You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain”
Though really a nice piece of foreshadowing in the new Dark Knight movie, this line uttered by future Two-Face Harvey Dent could be applied to MTV as well. Not so much in the idea of criminality but that of pop culture. MTV is a pop culture vampire, a parasite the goes unnoticed on the belly of relevancy, sucking the marrow out of it to try and further their own image.
You can’t stop them so you have two choices: You Can Turn MTV Off In Disgust, Or You Can Sit Around Long Enough For Them To Really Offend You. Recently my Commanding Officer in the Crave Online Army sent me a link and when I saw it I was, well, disgusted. I’d put the link out there but it would give them too much free traffic. Suffice it to say that MTV now has an entire section of their online division dedicated to Comic Books.
Yeah, I know, I’ve been looking for plastic explosives all day too.
The simple idea of that “place” trying to fasten their hooks into the flesh of comic book fans around the world is painful but when you’ve worked there, like I have, it becomes almost indefensible. I started at MTV back in 2000 when comic book movies were little more than ghosts on the horizon. Spider-Man was still two years away and X-Men was the only property being brought to life.
One of the first things I did when I started there was to find the other comic geeks in the vicinity. There was really only one, only one who had been into comics since he was a kid. His name was Ryan and one of the first conversations we had was about his mint copy of X-Men #1 bought for him by his dad. We instantly clicked and began to try and organize some plans to cover these coming comic book events for MTV.
When I first pitched going to the X-Men premiere or trying to cover the movie for MTV I was met with the most condescending form of apathy. I felt like the special needs kid showing the teachers a new drawing. The management said “We’ll see about that” patted me on my head and scooted me out of the office. Literally, they scooted me out. I had never been scooted before. At this point I was green to how really indifferent MTV is to anything but cash and I thought I could make some kind of difference. It would be years later after we ran a 3 minute news piece on the death of Joey Ramone and a half hour show on the passing of some recently famous R&B star or the loss that on-his-death-bed Johnny Cash suffered to Justin Timberlake at the VMAs before I knew how truly evil that place was.
I remember when Spider-Man had been announced and I tried to get them to do something on that. I was sitting across from a female producer who was more interested in her skirt and flip-flops combination than her job trying to pitch something on Spider-Man. This girl looked at me, with all seriousness, and said:
“OK I know he’s like a superhero, but what kind of powers does he have?”
She asked that about Spider-Man…..SPIDER-F***ING-MAN!! Think about it you moron, stop smacking your gum and fiddling with your hair and try and connect the dots here, it’s not that hard. It became apparent quickly that MTV thought all this comic book stuff was stupid and not nearly worth covering on their beloved channel. After all we had at least another 37 hours of Britney Spears, Limp Bizkit and Eminem footage of them doing.....something.
We did the bare minimum for Spider-Man and when I got irritated I was told: “Iann, nobody cares about this shit but you.” I tried to explain how the movie companies were really starting to check out comic books properties for new movie ideas. Ryan and I tried to explain how this might be the next big thing in entertainment: Geek Revolution. We wanted to start covering it now, done by two guys who had been steeped in it since childhood. If we did it right MTV would really seem ahead of the curve. Nobody wanted to, nobody cared.
The indignities continued at a blinding pace. Even when MTV tried to play the game they did it wrong. They had a big premiere for Attack Of The Clones (this was before we knew how bad George Lucas was going to shit in our mouths) but instead of it being about the movie it was about bringing crappy pop stars to the show. These people didn’t care about Star Wars; they just wanted to be part of the Buzz Machine. Ryan even had one producer get mad at him because he kept correcting her on little details in the film. For instance the fact that Boba Fett does not grow up to be Darth Vader and that the teenager with Ewan McGregor isn’t Luke Skywalker, tiny things like that. When Comic Con came around and I begged for us to go I was pretty much laughed at. Who was I to suggest we spend any money covering such loser geek nonsense.
“Iann.” I was told. “Nobody cares about that, you have to stop pushing it.”
So it went, time and time again. MTV did some stuff about Lord Of The Rings but only after the first one was hugely popular and then the channel pretended like they were always “Down” with Tolkien. I went to the Punisher set with Thomas Jane and the piece was cut eight times before it finally played over the weekend late at night. By 2004 when Batman Begins, Hellboy and X-men 2 had left their indelible mark on the box office and pop culture I had already been forced out of my job by a lying On Air Reporter trying to find a bargaining chip for her new contract and a chick that ran the LA office. She hated me because this douche bag who was her little pet who was not only awful but took full advantage of everybody who actually worked for a living there. I kept calling him out on it and that was not acceptable. From 2004 to 2006 the comic book movie thing grew and over the last two years it has exploded. Now, in 2008, years after trying to get some coverage, MTV is acting like everybody who works there is surrounded by piles of comic books. It’s F***ing nauseating.
My problem with MTV’s comic page isn’t that they have one, everybody is trying to cash in on the comic book craze. Comic book fans like myself and my friends are waiting for this to all die down so the backwards baseball cap date rapists will stop filling up the comic stores asking for “Some shit about The Joker. He’s bad ass!!” The issue I have with MTV is their slimy and parasitic approach to everything. This used car salesmen vibe of “Hey we were into this all along”. The MTV comic site is called “Splash Page” which somebody there heard during a Frank Miller interview I’m sure and thought was “edgy”, a term they throw around like confetti. The tagline under the site reads as follows:
“When comic and movies collide, we pick up the pieces.”
Yeah, y’know what MTV, F*** You, seriously F*** you. Stop trying to act like you have any real insight into all of this, stop trying to pretend that any more than 1% of the people who work in that department have ever read a comic book much less collected. It cheapens the people who have had this as part of their lives since they were children. The worst part is that MTV has the positive cash flow to eclipse everybody else and actually be a site filled with massive amounts of exclusive content. This furthers the façade that they are in the know. Those bloodless cunts aren’t in the know they just have deep pockets. Here’s how it works or at least how I saw it work.
The comic book companies know they have to strike while the iron is hot, they know they have to push their product to get sales up and make money. This whole Geek Love In is not going to last forever so they need to make their bones now. To do that they need the most massive exposure and nobody gets more exposure than MTV. So the comic companies give MTV whatever they want to make sure they are part of the MTV Advertising Machine. The channel then uses that to make themselves look like they get all this content because they have their ear to the street, which isn’t true. They bought it their way in, plain and simple. MTV is the biggest unfunny comedian in the world out buying jokes and trying to pass them off as original material.
Like I said, I don’t begrudge MTV their need to jump on the bandwagon because that’s all they can do. MTV creates nothing and adds nothing; they simply regurgitate what they are told by focus groups to put out as content. I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire MTV Upper Management Team were really androids built by the super computer in the center of 1515. Perhaps Tom Freston was the last real human there and that’s why he was forced out.
Whatever the reason is MTV is almost always behind the curve but they toss out the bucks and make promises and soon BAM they look like the forerunners. It’s true of everything from music to film to social issues. MTV just sits and waits for a focus group to red flag something and then they jump into action and pretend like they were always on top of it. That’s the part that makes me so F***ing angry, the hypocrisy.
MTV Management used to walk in and dictate news content and then turn around and tell me that my expressing an opinion will compromise the “Integrity Of MTV News”, is that an oxymoron or what? Having worked their 3 years I think it should be called HTV (Hypocrisy Television) or the “M” should be changed from music to Marketing. Most of MTV’s problems in the eyes of the young would vanish if they’d come clean about the fact that they don’t know shit and are doing the best they can to keep up.
Right now MTV has their comic book page on their site and they keep putting out all of this information on comics and comic movies. In 5 years Crave Online, Ain't It Cool News, Topless Robot, Superhero Hype, Geeks Of Doom, Obsessed With Film, What Would Tyler Durden Do and all the sites of that ilk will still be around, covering comics, film, video games and the whole world of Geek Culture which by then will have sunk back into the underground. MTV will have long left the party by this time.
Once hot Hollywood actresses stop wearing hip fitted retro Batman T-shirts, studio executives stop coming to Comic Con and major stars aren’t battling it out to play superheroes and the whole fervor dies down check the MTV comic site then. I’ll bet money it’s dedicated to some new trend that MTV is pointing to and saying “Yep we were always all about this, uh, whatever it is.” I also promise that MTV execs will be scoffing at how lame the comic movie thing is now, trust me I know what I’m talking about here.
There really is nothing I can do about it and I know that. Usually I just turn my head but sometimes, sometimes I have to say something. Nobody will listen and most will use this as a great way to attack me for working there or being a poser or whatever. It’s funny how many people still rage against me after 5 years of being off the air. Anyway, whatever the fallout I had to vomit on MTV’s prom dress, even if they do have more in the back room.
