Sunday, April 8, 2007

april 8, 2007, ion schedule

Ion has finally begun publishing its weekly TV schedule again. I don't care for the hourly grid format but it's better than nothing.
Believe me, I am planning to watch Battlestar Galactica on Ion on Sunday nights. I just hope that the network continues to show the episodes. I started watching The Monkees and The Partridge Family last fall on Friday evenings when it was still the I/Pax channel, and was very disappointed when the network discontinued the episodes after just a month. Their replacement programming for those two shows has been terrible and I haven't watched the channel since.
http://www.ionline.tv/schedule.php

1 comment:

skippercollector said...

I started watching Saga at 6 p.m. Over the next 15 minutes, I believe that I saw 7 minutes of the show, which was broken up twice by at least 4 minutes of commercials each time.
At 6:15, I started watching my clock. At its best, which was 6:15 to 6:25, there were 10 minutes of the show before the commercials started again. After that, it seemed to be about 7 minutes of show with about 2 minutes of commercial each time.
At 7 p.m. I gave up watching.
I believe that what we were seeing was the syndicated TV 80s version of the movie. There were two shorter versions of the pilot floating around in the 80s and 90s. The original 1978 pilot, without commercials, is 2 hours and 40 minutes long, approximately. The theatrical/VHS/DVD version is 2 hours 20 minutes. But there was also a TV version that appeared sporadically in syndication in the 80s that was also 20 hours 20 minutes, and it was NOT the same as the theatrical version. Both the theatrical and syndicated versions have scenes that were deleted in one version but included with the other version.
And the commercials themselves on ION were SOOOOO irritating. The national corporate ads on network TV can be annoying, but those get-rich-quick, lose-the-fat-overnight, shylock lawyers and overpriced life insurance ads on ION were like fingernails on the blackboard.
I went back and watched part of the first half of Lost Planet of the Gods. The picture was much cleaner and there were fewer cuts for commercials, although the episode wasn't show in its entirety. But the picture was much cleaner.
The closing credits of the episodes was odd.
I am glad to see Galactica on national TV again. And I imagine if by chance there were younger people watching who had never seen the series, they might never know all that was missing. But the commercials, not necessarily the editing of BG (I'm used to that), were making my hair stand on end.