Hacker Cinema
So You Think You Can Dance
2005 · TV series · 43 min episodes · 18 seasons
Created by Simon Fuller, Nigel Lythgoe
Dancers selected in open auditions across America take part in a rigorous competition designed to best display their talents, training and personalities to a panel of judges and viewers as they strive to win votes and avoid elimination.
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7 comments on Hacker News
Neat; but I feel an average episode of So you think you can dance, or any of the myriad x factor / America got talent have equivalent coreographies :)
That's impressive...I submitted this clip from So You Think You Can Dance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLtSfYX8tJk
The results:
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~gyglim/work_public/autogif/gif.fcgi/gif/TLtSfYX8tJk
...and while it's debatable which of the segments are most interesting (the performance has a lot of highlights), at least all of the extracts are of actual dancing action, and none consist of cheering-crowd-announcer shots.
edit: Just tried it with the Game of Thrones Season 6 trailer:
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~gyglim/work_public/autogif/gif.fcgi/gif/EI0ib1NErqg
The first 2 GIFs have decent action...the other 4 are relative duds in terms of action...but I do like the shot of Tyrion simply holding a torch in the darkness.
I haven't watched So You Think You Can Dance for a few years now, but at least when I was watching on a regular basis (seasons 3-6 or so), they did exactly what you're proposing they do, e.g. select highly skilled dancers. There were no "This person is bad at dancing but it's funny to watch them be terrible" getting past more than a round or two at the tryouts, and all of the top 20 contenders each season were legitimately talented and hard working professional-quality dancers. SYTYCD gets their quality (or at least did; again, I haven't watched it for a while) by taking very skilled dancers and pushing them out of their comfort zone; you can be skilled at classical ballet, but can you adjust and pull off a hard-hitting hip hop routine? You can breakdance at BOTY, but can you learn to waltz?
That's a very different type of challenge from "You can't dance, and we want to see if you can learn to dance before you explode", and that's part of why SYTYCD is a good show. Obviously it's a reality show and SYTYCD is going to have some compromises (for example, you might argue that the judge selection is suspect, or that the styles and choreographer choices are limited) but it was honestly pretty close to ideologically pure as you could get; the people who succeeded were the people who were good at dancing, not the people who were good at ballet or contemporary or hip hop or ballroom.
"I believe this particular usage of queue is correct english. You can see it on the TV show "So You Think You Can Dance" where Nigel will often say "queue music" meaning "start the music."
In the way that you used it, I believe it was wrong.
"Cue whatever ..." comes from movie and other media production, as in "Cue the Gimp!" It's a notice that the actor playing the Gimp should assume his next physical location in the production and be ready to act. See scythe's explanation.
This kind of mistake is very common, and comes from having heard phrases without having seen them in print. We then fit whatever written word we're most familiar with, or assume, on to the phrase. I'm guessing that's what happened here.
The analogue is reading an unfamiliar name or word and then, never having heard it in speech, not knowing how to pronounce it. This happens to me enough to notice.
I believe this particular usage of queue is correct english. You can see it on the TV show "So You Think You Can Dance" where Nigel will often say "queue music" meaning "start the music."
'Queue' is not quite a direct replacement for 'see', there is an additional nuance that what follows it is obvious or inevitable, which is why I used it.
I also understand that many HN readers are not native English speakers, and have varying levels of mastery of the language. I would also agree that obscure usage of high falutin' words for the purpose of peacocking is annoying.
But using them to add color and nuance is appropriate.
I can never read articles such as these and shake the author's holier than thou attitude toward tv and tv watchers.
To say you don't watch TV now is not the same as saying it twenty years ago. I mean, how different really is it to watch an episode of so you think you can dance and read half the crap that makes it to the front of reddit nowadays? how different is it to watch people trying to dance than it is to watch a cat do something "funny" or some stupid fffuuu cartoon?
In the past, when people said they didn't watch TV it meant they were living a certain lifestyle. With the advent of the internet, that just doesn't apply anymore.
Perhaps it is a personal failure, but these articles always reek of, look at me, yet another thing I use to make myself feel better than other people.
And no, this isn't me lashing out because I watch hours and hours of TV.
It always intrigues me to read someone's account of how they have given up TV. More often than not, they are just watching some TV show (in this case 24) via some other distribution channel. They are still watching TV just not on TV. Also more often than not, they will degrade some other show as evidence of the disaster that TV is all the time missing the point that what TV programs you watch are a matter of taste and choice.
Ridiculing So You Think You Can Dance for being shallow and pointless while lauding 24 which is filled with completely fake scenes and violence is odd. While the "reality" part of SYTYCD is a little silly, the people on the show are actually doing something amazingly hard in front of quite a few people with no props or fake explosions to manipulate your emotions. And I say this with no real affinity to either show.
In the end, fine, say you've given up TV. But really you've only given up the distribution channel and you have chosen to watch things you like when you like them. But calling one show rubbish and using it as an example of why TV in toto is bad starts to sound like a matter of taste to me. Just because you don't like something does not mean it sucks.