"The phrase 'Not S&P Approved' has been approved by S&P"

June 17, 2022 9:55 PM

As part of celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the show, Gravity Falls creator Alex Hirsch revealed several of the revision notes he got from Disney Broadcast Standards and Practices. (SLTwitter)

The title is the response to a particularly odd note Hirsch recieved.

posted by NoxAeternum (24 comments total)

Strangely enough, I (why yes, I AM a full-grown man, what's it to ya??) have finally decided to look into this series that I've known only through countless popular memes, and just this very evening watched the first two episodes. I'll be keeping those ludicrously timid S&P notes delightedly in mind as I continue to view the rest of the series.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:13 PM on June 17, 2022 [8 favorites]

We still cut Jack-o'-melons every halloween.
posted by signal at 10:26 PM on June 17, 2022 [3 favorites]

Greg_Ace, you'll have to let us know how long it takes to develop the inevitable crush on Wendy Corduroy.
posted by bartleby at 11:31 PM on June 17, 2022 [7 favorites]

I hope you like codes and secrets! Gravity Falls, midway through the last season, has SOMETHING AMAZING in store for you. Try not to get spoiled ahead of time!
posted by JHarris at 11:49 PM on June 17, 2022 [1 favorite]

Jeeeeez (considered an abbreviation of Jeeeeeesus). I'm a hundred percent sure these creeps call their wives "mother".
posted by starfishprime at 12:28 AM on June 18, 2022

It's not surprising S&P could take time to nitpick. They've got a playbook for responding to people trying to get a new X-Mutants movie series into the Marvel franchises, where the playbook has standard text including "are they single-X-chromosome nonbinary people (which will cause offence) or X-Men (also offensive)?" and "please revise setting: significant [authoritarian] marketplaces/employers won't accept stories sympathetic to 'other' characters who don't fit into normal approved space in society."
posted by k3ninho at 2:22 AM on June 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I also finally got around to watching the show this year (we're nearly at the end of the second season now), and I guess I can claim I was waiting to celebrate the ten-year anniversary, rather than my usual excuse of being a decade late to pretty much every pop culture property, even the ones I'm actively interested in.

let us know how long it takes to develop the inevitable crush on Wendy Corduroy

Like, instantly? I saw Wendy in the titles and spent the first few episodes wondering when there was gonna be more about this Wendy character. Team Wendy!
posted by terretu at 3:53 AM on June 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

All I can think of now is this.
posted by Ickster at 4:49 AM on June 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

What is the advantage of presenting a series of text only slides as a video?
posted by Mitheral at 5:40 AM on June 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

"What is the advantage of presenting a series of text only slides as a video?"

There's audio (which is turned off by default).
posted by jonathanhughes at 5:48 AM on June 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is amusing, and it has to be incredibly frustrating dealing with this level of nitpicking. And, I'm positive that if someone picked out a few of the specific things in question and posted a clip on Metafilter, there would be numerous people who would be offended by them, and there would be lengthy discussion as to why it's offensive, and then a thread ten times longer on metatalk about the thread with numerous more people chiming in about why one of these things is or isn't offensive. Eventually, several people would delete their accounts, and the thread would be closed.

So, I wonder if Standards and Practices is really worried that anyone would be offended, or if they just don't want to have to deal with it.
posted by jonathanhughes at 5:56 AM on June 18, 2022 [9 favorites]

So, I wonder if Standards and Practices is really worried that anyone would be offended, or if they just don't want to have to deal with it.

I think that's largely it. The pissiness of people who write in with complaints is absolutely unbound. I remember being told by somebody who did commercial illustrations for children that he wasn't allowed to put in a unicorn, even as set dressing, because those were magical and if you showed magic the fundamentalists complained. That was even before social media, when something that absolutely nobody anticipated can blow up from one fool's TikTok or Facebook rumor. Imagine being the copywriter at Wayfair who decided to give girls' names to furniture. Who would have thought twice about it?

For that reason, I don't think that S&P is necessarily "creeps who call their wives 'mother.'" I think they're probably normal if non-creative people who have a whole database of complaint-generating topics that they have to consult. It's a crap job, but ... actually, you know what, I don't think anyone does have to do it. But for shareholder reasons, they do.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:57 AM on June 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

let us know how long it takes to develop the inevitable crush on Wendy Corduroy.

Um...I'm 61, so I'll pass on that.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:44 AM on June 18, 2022

I would looove to hear from someone who works in this part of S&P.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:40 AM on June 18, 2022

I work in marketing and communications in the healthcare/pharma field and everything I do has to be run through medical, legal, and regulatory review. It’s a similar vibe, except that if I want to use the line “There once was a man from Kentucky,” they’ll just require that I provide a peer-reviewed and journal-published paper finding that there actually once was a man from Kentucky, and include several bullet points of data and a paragraph describing the study design including both P and kappa values.
posted by ejs at 10:49 AM on June 18, 2022 [4 favorites]

Did anybody notice that all of these (with the possible exception of the primate slam dunk) are things that social and political conservatives would object to?
posted by AlSweigart at 11:14 AM on June 18, 2022 [5 favorites]

Did anybody notice that all of these (with the possible exception of the primate slam dunk) are things that social and political conservatives would object to?

The Parents Television Council is a real thing, and can make the lives of showrunners miserable.

I think there was an assessment of FCC complaints that showed that 90+% of them were PTC related.
posted by NoxAeternum at 11:28 AM on June 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

When I was doing ads at the newspaper, I would sometimes get absolutely asinine change requests in email. Some of them were so stupid that I’d have to try to find a way to not do them. There were times that I’d leave something in after taking something else out just to fuck with whoever had enough time to make that particular request. Or I’d make the change but replace it with something that I knew they’d email back and tell me to take out. Basically walking a line between sarcasm and getting written up. This video had me howling because oh god I can relate to this.
posted by azpenguin at 1:12 PM on June 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I want to be able to find this solely funny, and it is funny, but I watched it at an emotionally vulnerable time (the middle of the night/2022) and I can't help but see this on a direct spectrum with banning books and attacking drag shows. In a followup video Hirsch writes "how could someone complain about something that's only in their heads?" But of course there's a thriving subset of American conservatism that's consumed with waging ideological war against "filth" and "grooming" that they're projecting from their own sick minds. How could someone complain about something that's only in their heads? Ask the people who think children are being "sexualized" because an ice cream store slogan mentions licking.
posted by babelfish at 4:30 PM on June 18, 2022 [2 favorites]

Sorta reminds me of Reboot and all of the jabs they put in about the BS&P (Bureau of Standards and Practices). They almost used it as a cuss-word. On the slow basket trip to Hell of Orwellian Newspeak daily broadcasts of which words are approved or not.
posted by zengargoyle at 12:11 AM on June 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

So, I wonder if Standards and Practices is really worried that anyone would be offended,

Like mods on a forum site to a certain approximation...
posted by sammyo at 8:44 AM on June 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Mad Dad Hour:

tricktster:

I ever tell you guys about my ethically dubious radio show back in college? The Mad Dad Hour?

tricktster:

it was an entire radio show built around perpetuating a very simple joke, but it was uniquely powerful in its capacity to prompt the reaction I was looking for.

so my slot was at the tail end of rush hour, and i got a fair number of listeners/callers who were on the way home from the office. And like, I had a lot of callers, who almost all wanted to request songs that really didn’t fit with the aesthetic. I had pitched a power pop show when i got my slot, but the callers were not having it; they invariably wanted classic rock.

this made sense in a way. if you think about the demographics of the people who listened to the radio for music in 2010 instead of their ipods or cds or whatever, you’d expect them to skew older right? accordingly, i quickly realized that almost all of the people who called to request songs were Dads of a Certain Age. It was honestly annoying at first - I’m all for most classic rock, but that wasn’t what the show was supposed to be.

And so one day, when i was feeling particularly annoyed with requests that just didn’t fit thematically, i came up with the joke that rapidly became the only reason I kept the show going. Per station rules, I had to play a certain number of pre-recorded PSAs during my show, and before I cut to one I was supposed to read out the song titles and artists for all the music i had played before the break. So this one day when i had to inform the world before the break that the song they just heard was, per a listener’s request, Hey Jude by the Beatles, I decided to do a goof. I said:

“and finally, that last song you heard was Hey Jude, which was of course written and performed by the Rolling Stones.”

I barely had time to get the ads going before the phone started ringing.

cont.

posted by sebastienbailard at 2:11 AM on June 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

Related Gravity Falls aniversary tweet: Happy birthday, brother!
posted by Pendragon at 5:48 AM on June 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

About 10 years ago, I got to see the Spinal Tap guys in an acoustic concert. They were fantastic. At one point between songs, they read from an actual letter from 1985 or so from the Standards & Practices department of NBC or some other network, going through everything in the movie that would have to be changed or cut in order for them to broadcast the movie on TV at 11:30 pm. It was easily one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

Looks like it's available online from a different performance, although it's a bit difficult to hear.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 1:15 PM on June 23, 2022