Jul 7, 2007

Live Earth, or "If I Ran The Soaps..."


...So I'm not doing my final Y&R and GL posts like I should be right now, because I'm watching Live Earth all day. Just like with Live 8, I love to watch the more obscure foreign concerts in Tokyo, Brazil, Shanghai, Hamburg, etc. with acts I've never heard of that are so exotic and interesting. Toni Collette and her band were amazing in Sydney. And frankly, it beats Madonna embarrassing herself and the entire venture with her gypsy act at Wembley. Oh my God. Did you see that? It was like Inland Empire.

But the reason I bring this up here is because I needed to rehash my tired old rant that anyone who knows me knows by heart: If I ran a soap, you wouldn't need a lame prefab teen scene story this summer. Why? Because I'd just take it to Live Earth. In the story, have the kids go to Live Earth. Didn't DOOL do this in a retarded way with the Stones a couple years ago? Well, nevermind. I'm just saying. Don't spend all that fucking money on musical numbers and guest acts and choreography and songwriters. Just take a few light and easy to move with cameras to several different venues, take the young actors necessary, split the kids up at different venues, including the more obscure ones, say, one at Hamburg and Tokyo or Brazil along with two at New York and London, structure a very loose series of plot beats around the concerts, and have them communicate by their phones, showing each other - and through them, the audience - what is going on around the world at these different concerts. Run a promotional tie-in on the network website with Live Earth and a phone provider; "follow Starr and Matthew (or whoever) and the gang on their phones as they travel the globe with Live Earth." And then, in the local area, so as not to disrupt the concert, pretape most of the story material with the kids in a block, like they did with the Hawaii remote on OLTL a few years ago. Break the scenes up and string it out throughout the concert footage.

Yeah, Live Earth or any other similar global concert would probably never allow it, and they'd probably be right not to. But honestly I think it would work and be - relatively, of course I probably have no idea what I'm talking about - cheap. A few cameras, a few kids, mostly pretaped footage, and just let the concerts guide it. So you get a fun teen story, but more importantly, you can teach The Kids At Home something by watching this stuff, as well as exposing them to all sorts of music around the world they've never heard. I don't understand why TPTB spend such stuff trying to "stay on the pulse of youth" and don't think of something so simple.

...So anyway, I have been gone. Long week. I am making up for it with an extra-big Y&R post that covers most of this week, as well as an extended GL one. l8rs. Phil Collins is trying to be hardcore in London, I gotta watch that.

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