X-Message-Number: 28916
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2007 15:54:13 -0500 (EST)
From: Charles Platt <>
Subject: awful videos
References: <>

So, Chrissie Rivas, whom I much admire, has mentioned the
embarrassing fact that Emperor Unperson has no clothes.

Personally I think unperson gets points for initiative (after
all, most people never do anything to promote cryonics) but
the end product is--how can I put this? Not very
sophisticated?

In fact after I watched it for a few minutes I just started
laughing. That relentless two-note music track just hammering
away incessantly, like a kid playing a toy drum, and the
voiceover sounding like a drill sergeant or maybe a stage
hypnotist trying to plant suggestions, and the cheesey stock
art (all presumably ripped off, from one net source or
another)--the total effect was like someone banging my head
with a hammer over and over and over again. Utterly
relentless.

And yes this video will FIT RIGHT IN at Frozen Dead Guy Days,
it will definitely add to the "fun" component that KW is
looking forward to, because the people who wander into her
booth (or whatever it is she has there) will think it is all
part of the freak show. As indeed it will be.

In case anyone feels the above comments are overly harsh I
should add that I have seen many cryonics promotional videos,
and almost all of them are horribly embarrassing--unless you
happen to be a True Believer already, in which case any
pro-cryonics presentation seems to excite a kind of reverie
caused by sympathetic resonance in the viewer.

The most recent DVD from Alcor had this effect, even though
it looked like exactly what it was: An infomercial created by
a second-rate provincial PR company that almost (not quite)
understood its subject matter. Awful synth music (cheap),
awful cliche pictures of families walking on beaches and men
and women holding hands (the video equivalent of clip art),
and then the endless talking heads, including then-CEO
Waynick looking like a Disney animatron reading lines from a
teleprompter in a desperate effort to avoid making elementary
blunders such as using the word "freeze" instead of the word
"cryopreserve." I could almost hear the director off-camera
saying, "Okay Joe, we very nearly got it the last time,
except where you had trouble pronouncing the word
'vitrification.' So--stand by, take 276, we're rolling!"

Not Joe's fault, he's neither a scientist nor an actor. The
fault lay entirely with the people who made this abomination.
The writer, the producer, the director (if indeed separate
people were used in these functions). But once again the
preindoctrinated faithful thought it was just great, and
didn't seem to care that it looked like an infomercial
selling a fitness machine that you might find on an obscure
cable channel at 4AM.

Even Bruce Klein's Immortality Institute video had a big
problem--talking heads for more than a whole hour. I like
Bruce a lot and admired the effort he put into that video,
but really, no one is going to sit through something like
this unless he or she is predisposed toward the subject
matter to an abnornal degree.

The very best piece on cryonics I ever saw was made by the
CBS news affiliate in Los Angeles, which suddenly decided to
do a four-minute piece on Alcor. They brought with them a
cameraman who had won half-a-dozen Emmy awards for his work.
He gave the whole thing a slightly mysterious, underlit look,
but very serious, no pseudoscience, and the voiceover was
absolutely straightforward, setting out the pros and cons. I
liked this so much I ordered a tape (for which I had to pay
$100 out of my own pocket) but I'll bet if I digitized it and
put it online, no one in cryonics would like it. I came to
the conclusion long ago that most people in cryonics have so
little skepticism toward the concept, they have great
difficulty viewing any presentation from an outsider's
viewpoint.

Unfortunately, if you lose sight of how your potential
customers think, you are not in a very good position to sell
to them.

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