Featuring Ivan Trembow's Self-Important, Random Rants on Mixed Martial Arts, Video Games, Pro Wrestling, Television, Politics, Sports, and High-Quality Wool Socks

 
Pro Wrestling--- With the off-camera relationship between Adam Copeland (Edge) and Amy Dumas (Lita) now being turned into an on-air storyline by WWE, it's worth taking a look at the corresponding real-life situation that caused an innocent person to be fired from his job at WWE for no good reason.

The storyline that WWE is now presenting on the air is that Lita was cheating on her storyline husband, Kane, and has now left Kane to be with Edge. Dumas and Copeland are being paired up together in on-air storylines, months after they decided to pair up together behind the scenes.

Fellow WWE wrestler Matt Hardy and Amy Dumas had been a real-life couple for years, while Adam Copeland had been a close friend of both Hardy and Dumas for years. Copeland was also just married, for the second time, last October to a woman named Lisa. By all accounts, Matt Hardy had previously remained faithful to Amy Dumas when she was off the road for 18 months with a neck injury.

With Matt Hardy out of action, off WWE TV, and off the road for several months due to surgery for a torn ACL in his knee, Amy Dumas and Adam Copeland apparently began having an affair at some point, meaning that Copeland was cheating on his new bride and Dumas was cheating on her long-time loyal boyfriend. When initially confronted by Lisa Copeland, who has never been involved in the pro wrestling business other than marrying a wrestler, Adam Copeland denied the affair, as did Amy Dumas when confronted by Matt Hardy. Nothing was admitted until Adam Copeland and Amy Dumas, aka Edge and Lita, were caught red-handed with voice-mails and messages that they had sent one another.

The previous paragraph is the basic story about the situation that leaked out on the Internet via friends of the people involved, and was later confirmed by Hardy himself in a post on his official web site. Given that Hardy is not on good terms with Copeland or Dumas for obvious reasons, the solution to this problem should have been very simple for WWE management: Move Hardy to the Smackdown roster so that he doesn't have to work with, interact with, or even see Copeland or Dumas, who are on the Raw roster.

Instead, WWE chose the option that made the least sense, not to mention being morally reprehensible. Feeling that Copeland is a bigger star than Hardy, and feeling that Hardy should not have talked about or confirmed any real life, behind-the-scenes activity on the Internet, WWE released Matt Hardy. That's right... Matt Hardy was fired for being cheated on. Hardy's release included a no-compete clause, and you can expect him to show up in TNA, Ring of Honor, and other pro wrestling promotions when his no-compete clause expires in July.

As you might imagine, the outrage within the pro wrestling community has been overwhelmingly negative towards Adam Copeland and Amy Dumas. If there's one code of honor among pro wrestlers, it's that you don't sleep with another wrestler's girlfriend, fiance, or wife. The fact that Copeland and Dumas had an affair while Hardy was off TV recovering from an injury caused the majority of the WWE locker room to be upset, and that sentiment turned to outrage when Hardy was inexplicably fired.

There have been a lot of people who have written a lot of things about the Hardy-Dumas-Copeland situation, but perhaps none were more poignant than the following letter to the editor that was published by the Wrestling Observer. The name of the letter's author was withheld by request, but it was confirmed by Observer editor Dave Meltzer to be an active wrestler, and it's believed that the wrestler works for NWA-TNA. Here's what the letter said (notes in brackets have been added by me for clarification purposes as needed)...


"I've been involved in the world of professional wrestling for almost twelve years now. I've seen things and heard stories that have made my eyes pop out of my head. Today, I was overwhelmed with disgust after reading the headline of the day - Matt Hardy released from WWE, most likely due to his personal situation with Amy Dumas and Adam Copeland, and I couldn't help but write a letter for the first time. This one topped Andrew Martin's release just after surgery [Andrew "Test" Martin was released by WWE shortly after he had major spinal surgery to correct an injury that was suffered on the job]. I have several friends that work for WWE, so I am choosing to remain anonymous.

What did Matt Hardy do for this release? Sacrifice his body for the fans' entertainment? Remain over with fans even though the "writers" buried his character most of the time? No. Matt Hardy, the human being, spoke about a personal situation going on in his life. Not unlike anything you read about in celebrity-type magazines or television shows. The love he remained faithful to when she hurt her neck didn't return the favor and she betrayed him with one of his best friends. His other true love, the wrestling business, was something he couldn't be a part of due to an injury.

One can imagine the hell he must have gone through being laid up and finding out about this betrayal. He's a HUMAN BEING. I guess when you sign a contract with WWE, you lose that right. You seem lose the right to have independent thought, even though you're an "independent contractor," wink wink. You lose the right to voice your opinion once you're on the payroll, being paid one of the smallest percentages off the gross of any form of entertainment in the country.

There are two sides to every story, or maybe three in this story. Wrestling does funny things to people. Maybe Matt wasn't nice to Lita. Maybe Edge took up an interest in stray dogs and they fell in love. Maybe she's just a slut, who knows? But if WWE is going to take action against Matt Hardy, maybe they should take a closer look at the "action" that led to his internet writings. Then again, after some of the tales of the McMahon's infamous romps, what do you expect? [Vince McMahon has admitted in the past to cheating on his wife dozens of times.]

That's just the personal side. From a business standpoint, WWE makes yet another foolish move. They released multiple quality talents over the course of a few days at a time when their weekly television shows remain boring, predictable, and repetitive. They need as many fresh faces as they can get or their problems will just get worse. No matter what WWE's "writers" chose to do with Matt Hardy, he remained popular. He just as easily could have been sent to Smackdown and work a program to get a good match out of John Cena.

It wouldn't make sense storyline-wise, but what would he have gone back to on Raw? Kane, the guy who on WWE TV has tombstoned Linda McMahon, buried his brother alive, sold for Shane-o Mac, raped Lita, and caused Matt's injury in the storyline is now a babyface hero again in the storyline. If they wanted to be creative, they could have injected Rhyno into the Lita-Kane storyline in Matt Hardy's absence. It would have given a storyline to a guy that had a chance to get over with a decent, consistent push, and the matches would have been a lot better than the Kane-Snitsky classics. I guess looking at the forty pounds of back acne and not knowing how to sell is supposed to be entertaining.

Rhyno was wasted in that company right off the bat. Stories say he's having a tough time right now, between a bitter divorce, thoughts of his young daughter moving to another country, and having a group of people that know nothing about professional wrestling ruin his career. That's enough to get to anyone, but it's multiplied in a wrestling environment. Would anyone be surprised to hear stories that someone in the same situation as Rhyno became a heavy drug addict as a result of this? He made a fool out of himself with the incident at the post-show WrestleMania party, but why not get the man some help instead of tossing him out of a job like trash?

More good talent has been released that will be replaced by cheaper, greener versions that aren't ready for the spot yet. More faceless, nameless divas will come in to pop the teenage demo. To hell with morals or employee morale. To hell with caring about human beings' real life situations.

Let the boys have no consequences for what they do on the road. Let one of our top superstars sexually harass every diva on the roster and run a few out of the company [this is a reference to Randy Orton's behavior behind the scenes]. This was a company that let ring boy molestation run wild long before Hulkamania [this is a reference to the "TitanGate" scandals of the early 90's]. Who cares about health when you can get up and get down and make the next shot? If you don't look Hollywood enough, take a "subtle" hint and get on the sauce. It's entertainment! Don't you "Get It?" Yeah, just don't talk about it on the Internet.

It's days like this when I question how I can even be involved with a business that has such little class. And to show just how odd of a business this is, I'd take a job with WWE in a second if I was offered one..."

Labels: World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 9:50 PM

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Mixed Martial Arts--- It's Saturday and there are no boxing or MMA events scheduled to be televised tonight, which is the first time that has happened in a long time. And no, I'm not counting the $40 boxing pay-per-view with Julio Cesar Chavez in the main event, which I would imagine is only going to be purchased by approximately six people other than die-hard Chavez fans. With no big boxing or MMA events this weekend, it's the perfect time for an MMA News Round-Up...

Two More Fights Added to Pride Line-Up
Pride has announced two more fights that will take place at "Pride: Critical Countdown 2005" on June 26th. The #2 heavyweight fighter in the world, Brazil's Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira, will face Poland's Pawel Natsula, who is an Olympic Gold Medalist in judo. Also, the young heavyweight star from Russia, Sergei Kharitonov, will face UFC veteran Pedro Rizzo, who is making his Pride debut.

These two heavyweight fights are in addition to the four quarter-final match-ups in the 205-pound Pride Grand Prix. Those match-ups will be Vanderlei Silva vs. Kazuhiro Nakamura, Antonio Rogerio Nogueira vs. Mauricio "Shogun" Rua, Ricardo Arona vs. Kazushi Sakuraba, and Igor Vovchanchyn vs. Alistair Overeem.

The much-anticipated Pride Heavyweight Title fight between Emelianenko Fedor and Mirko Cro Cop will not be taking place at the June 26th due to a broken bone in Fedor's hand. Also, Pride made the mistake once again of scheduling one of its events on the same day as a WWE pay-per-view, so the Critical Countdown show will not be broadcast in the United States on Sunday, June 26th. Instead, it will be broadcast on a five-day tape delay on Friday, July 1st.

K-1 Las Vegas Attendance Better Than Usual
The K-1 USA event that was recently held at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas drew a higher attendance than K-1 normally draws in the United States. The total attendance was 4,879, with a total of 3,119 paid tickets and 1,760 free "comp" tickets. The total live gate was $256,250.

This is a drastic difference from K-1's previous Las Vegas events, which have normally had 70 to 80 percent of their tickets given away as free comp tickets in order to fill the building and make it look good on TV. In the case of this particular event, it still had 35 percent of its tickets given away as comps, but that's much better than 70 or 80 percent.

For the purposes of comparison, UFC 52 in Las Vegas had 12,643 paid tickets and 1,631 comp tickets, for a total attendance of 14,274 and a total live gate of $2,575,450. (Click here for more details on the UFC 52 business figures.)

At the same time, it's all a matter of perspective. K-1 is far more successful in its home country of Japan than the UFC is in the United States, mainly because MMA and kickboxing are accepted mainstream sports in Japan. It was considered a huge success in the American cable television industry for the UFC to draw a 1.9 overall rating for its April 9th live event on Spike TV, while in Japan it's not uncommon for MMA events to draw ratings of 20.0 or even 30.0. Nothing on American television reaches that level of viewership other than the Super Bowl. Mixed martial arts still has a long way to go before it's as accepted and mainstream in the United States as it is in Japan.

Plans for The Ultimate Fighter's Middleweight Finalists
It's expected that before he fights again, Diego Sanchez will undergo the hip surgery that he has needed for quite some time, which was briefly talked about in one of The Ultimate Fighter's season one episodes. In addition, Sanchez flat-out said after winning The Ultimate Fighter's middleweight competition that he was dropping down to welterweight for his future UFC fights.

As for the other TUF middleweight finalist, Kenny Florian said in a post on the Underground Forum that he does have a contract to fight again in the UFC, but it's not the three-year, $350,000 contract that the winners got. Florian also said that his future fights in the UFC would be in the welterweight division, which is closer to his natural weight.

Final UFC 53 Line-Up
Here's the full line-up for UFC 53, which will be taking place next Saturday, June 4th. The co-main events will feature UFC Interim Heavyweight Champion Andrei Arlovski facing off with Justin Eilers, while UFC Middleweight Champion Evan Tanner defends his title against Rich Franklin. It's expected that Matt Lindland will be the #1 contender who eventually faces the winner of the Tanner-Franklin bout.

As for the heavyweight title picture, the rumored return date for UFC Heavyweight Champion Frank Mir is October. Mir is still recovering from a broken leg suffered in a motorcycle accident last year. It's expected that Mir will face whoever the Interim Heavyweight Champion is at the time of his return, which would be the winner of the Arlovski-Eilers fight.

Also on the UFC 53 card:

-The Ultimate Fighter's light-heavyweight winner Forrest Griffin will be going against Canadian heavy hitter Bill Mahood

-Another TUF contestant, middleweight Nate Quarry, will be facing the returning UFC veteran Shonie Carter

-Rising heavyweight star Paul Buentello will try to continue his winning ways against Kevin Jordan, who has a 10-3 MMA record and is making his UFC debut

-Young welterweight star Karo Parisyan will face off with Matt Serra, who is moving up from lightweight

-Another young welterweight star, Nick Diaz, will face Koji Oishi, who is being sent from Japan as a representative of the Pancrase MMA organization

-David Loiseau, fresh off a UFC victory in February, will face the debuting Charles McCarthy, who has an 8-2 MMA record and could be a future star at middleweight

Labels: Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), Pride Fighting Championships News, UFC News, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 2:42 PM

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Video Games--- I recently wrote an article about Nintendo's unveiling of its next-generation video game system, and how the company still doesn't seem to "get it." There was a time, prior to the start of the most recent generation of the console wars, when Nintendo faced many of the same issues that it faces today.

There are certain steps that Nintendo has to take if it ever wants to be a serious player in the video game industry again, and until it takes those steps, it will always be relegated to the third-place system of any hardware generation.

Looking back into the archives of my video game web site, Master Gamer, I wrote an article in May 2000 called, "How to Turn Around Nintendo." Many of the issues that I wrote about back then still apply to the company today. Please note that the "Dolphin" was the code-name for the system that would eventually come to be known as the Nintendo GameCube.

How to Turn Around Nintendo
Originally Published in May 2000 on Master Gamer

In the past decade, Nintendo has gone from the undisputed leader of the video game industry to a shell of its former self. While it's too late for the N64 to have a chance of catching up with the PlayStation's installed base, Nintendo can still come out on top in the next-generation system race if they play their cards right (and by "cards," I mean their business strategies, not the Pokemon Trading Card Game).

In order for the Dolphin to end up being more successful than the Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, and Xbox, Nintendo needs to take at least a few of the following suggestions to heart. Some of these are fairly obvious things that Nintendo might already be thinking about doing, and some of them are bolder ideas that I doubt they have the cahones to do.

Sell the Dolphin for $99
Former Nintendo of America president Howard Lincoln already hinted at this in an interview that was conducted last year before he retired. It would surprise me to see the Dolphin launch at anything more than $150, but there's a big difference between $150 and $99 in the eyes of the mainstream consumer.

Nintendo needs to take advantage of the low-cost manufacturing process it has set up with IBM and sell the Dolphin at a mass-market $99, even if it means losing money on the hardware like Sony is doing with the PlayStation 2. Nintendo can afford to do this thanks to billions of dollars in cash reserves. Nintendo's annual net profit fell from $800 million to $500 million last year, but $500 million is still nothing to sneeze at.

Reach out to Third-Party Developers
There are three ways in which Nintendo needs to reach out to third-party publishers and developers. The first is to stop being such a tight-ass with royalties and licensing fees (this one is pretty much self-explanatory). The second is to make it clear to third-party companies that Nintendo's ultimate goal is to end up back on top of the video game industry, and the company is not content to sit back twiddling its thumbs and raking in millions of dollars off the Pokemon franchise.

Finally, Nintendo needs to make the Dolphin extremely easy to develop for. This would seem to be an obvious objective in the development of any video game system, but it seems that some companies have under-estimated the importance of making a system easy for third-party developers to work with. Despite the fact that the N64 is more powerful than the PlayStation, it's a pain in the ass to make an N64 game, so the PlayStation has always had much more third-party support (and third-party support ultimately makes or breaks every video game system).

Now it seems that history is repeating itself with the Xbox being much easier to work with than the PlayStation 2, only this time the system that's easier to work with is actually much more powerful, too. Regardless of anything else that Nintendo does, the Dolphin has no chance of winning the next-generation system war if doesn't have great third-party support, and it's not going to have great third-party support if it's hard to work with. Nintendo should think twice about pulling a Sony and sacrificing ease of development for raw power. Sometime before the N64 was released, Nintendo said to itself, "To hell with third-party developers." I hope Nintendo doesn't make the same mistake twice.

Create a Separate Brand for Kids Products
It's a simple idea, but creating a separate brand called "Nintendo Kids" would increase Nintendo's standing with hardcore gamers considerably. It's one thing if Nintendo wants to continue to pump out kiddie-oriented crap like Mario Party for the sake of profit, but it's slap to the face of hardcore gamers everywhere when games like Mario Party are mixed in with the rest of a system's lineup, indistinguishable from real games like Perfect Dark from a branding standpoint.

Nintendo should encourage retailers to have two sub-sections for Dolphin products: One for games that are in the Nintendo Kids line, and one for games that aren't in the Nintendo Kids line. This would make it easy for hardcore gamers to look in one place for games that are targeted at them rather than hordes of six-year-olds, and it would also make it easier for parents to pick out "appropriate" games when they're shopping for their kids.

Give Shigeru Miyamoto Some Focus
Nintendo's famed designer Shigeru Miyamoto recently told Famistu magazine that the wait for the first Zelda game on the Dolphin will be "only one year and a little bit... recently we came up with a technique to make the game in two years." Of course, this statement doesn't mean any more than any of Miyamoto's previous statements to the same effect over the years. It has been a very long time since Miyamoto developed a game in under three years, and there's no real reason to think that this is going to change anytime soon.

If Miyamoto is to have a chance to develop a game in under three years, he needs to spend more time developing games and less time supervising the development of games. Miyamoto should develop one or maybe two games at a time rather than supervising the development of a dozen. Miyamoto himself said in an interview last year that he wants to cut back on the number of projects in which he has "creative input."

Miyamoto wants to focus on less projects, and it's in the best interests of the company for Miyamoto to focus on less projects. Somehow, these two facts have not passed through the thick skull of Nintendo's principal owner Hiroshi Yamauchi. (If you think it's brash of me to say that Yamauchi has a thick skull, consider this: Yamauchi recently told Famistu that the Game Boy Advance will have performance similar to that of the Sega Dreamcast, despite the fact that the GBA can't even handle basic polygons.)

Never, Ever Delay a Game for Market Reasons
Nintendo and Rare have enough problems with delays for the sole reason that they're two of the slowest-working companies in the world, but it makes me sick to hear about Nintendo delaying games for "market reasons." You know, like when some executive decided, "I don't want Perfect Dark to ship in 1999 because it might cut into Donkey Kong 64 sales," or "I don't want StarCraft 64 to ship in 1999 because it might cut into Command & Conquer 64 sales," or "I don't want the Game Boy Advance to ship in 2000 because it might cut into Game Boy Color sales."

If a product is ready to ship to retailers right now, then for the love of God, ship it! Every company has to draw a line somewhere between maximizing profits and serving the needs of consumers. Nintendo has made it clear that they are more interested in squeezing every last possible dollar out of all their products than they are with pleasing their loyal customers.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that this is going to change anytime soon. Nintendo of America's head honchos Minoru Arakawa and Peter Main recently said in an interview with Games Business that if the Game Boy Color continues to sell well, the Game Boy Advance might not be released until 2002.

"When It's Done"
If Nintendo can't meet their own conservative release deadlines, they should stop announcing release dates all together. Adopt Id Software's strategy and give every Nintendo and Rare game a release date of "when it's done." This would be a bold strategy that would probably face bitter opposition from the marketing department, but it would be worth it.

It would finally put an end to the seemingly never-ending cycle of every single game from Nintendo and Rare being delayed at least once, and usually two-to-four times. Granted, it would be harder for the marketing department to come up with advertising schedules, but Id Software never seems to have a problem selling their games...

Stop Lying to Consumers
This is the most important suggestion of all, and the one that Nintendo is least likely to listen to. If Nintendo isn't willing to adopt a "when it's done" release date strategy, they could at least stop lying to consumers. Whether any Nintendo employee wants to admit it or not, the fact of the matter is that Nintendo has made a habit out of blatantly lying to consumers over the years.

It must have been embarrassing for Nintendo when Rare said that the Game Boy Camera functions in Perfect Dark were "fully operational" and "removed for political reasons" less than one week after Nintendo claimed the features were being taken out of the game because "they weren't working properly." Would you guys like a napkin to wipe the egg off your face?

When Nintendo originally announced that the Nintendo 64 was going to be released in the fall of 1995, do you really think they believed that? Or do you think they wanted to convince as many gullible people as possible to hold off on buying a PlayStation or Saturn because the N64 was "just a few months away"? Do you really think there was ever the slightest chance that the Dolphin would be released in the fall of 2000 in either the US or Japan, or was Nintendo just thinking about cutting into Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 sales?

Even now, the Dolphin is officially scheduled to be released in the spring of 2001, despite the fact that a fall 2001 release date is much more likely. Rare was scheduled to release four games for the Nintendo 64 this fall: Conker's Bad Fur Day, Banjo-Tooie, Dinosaur Planet, and Mickey's Speedway USA (yes, Mickey's Speedway USA). Surprise, surprise! None of these games are going to be released this year! All four games are now scheduled to be released in January or February of 2001, and even these new release dates are very questionable. These games are much more likely to be released in mid-to-late 2001 than January or February, especially the nowhere-near-finished Dinosaur Planet.

I'm not saying that Nintendo should announce a release date for a game and then stick to it no matter what. As much as I am annoyed and angered by Nintendo's constant delays, I still prefer delays over games that are released in unfinished form.

What I am proposing is that if a particular product is, realistically, not going to be released until the fall of 2001, the release date that Nintendo should announce is "the fall of 2001." It's not rocket science. It's simply telling consumers the truth, something that appears to be a foreign concept to Nintendo.

Labels: Video Games

posted by Ivan Trembow at 3:39 PM

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Mixed Martial Arts--- Chuck Liddell Signs Huge Endorsement Deal; Pride Goes After UFC Heavyweight Fighter

by Ivan Trembow for MMAWeekly.com

The Observer Newsletter is reporting that Chuck Liddell has signed a new endorsement deal with the supplement company Xyience with "money figures that have people stunned." Though the Observer article did not say exactly how much money Liddell will make under the new deal, it did refer to the deal as "a giant breakthrough for MMA athletes."

Other news items courtesy of the Observer Newsletter...

Pride is close to signing heavyweight fighter Mike Kyle away from the UFC. To give you an idea of what Pride considers an attractive offer to a heavyweight free agent who they are trying to take away from their biggest competitor, Kyle was offered a three-fight contract with the following financial terms. The first fight on the deal is for $15,000 to fight and $15,000 more to win. A win would raise Kyle's pay to $25,000 for fighting and $25,000 for winning, while a second win in Pride would raise his pay to $75,000 for fighting and $75,000 for winning. Kyle is 2-1 in the UFC, with knockout wins over Wes Sims and James Irvin, along with a knockout loss to Justin Eilers. Kyle is currently recovering from a broken hand suffered in his victory over James Irvin.

Tito Ortiz is out of the Abu Dhabi submission grappling tournament. The Observer reports that Ortiz' people "asked for a spot and were offered a spot, but he never got back to the promotion." This is news that first broke on MMAWeekly Radio and was later picked up by the Observer.

Finally, the Observer also reports that K-1 has tentatively scheduled a match in Hiroshima, Japan on June 14 between former pro wrestler Sean O'Haire (who is 0-2 in K-1) and the 7-foot-6-inch South Korean giant, Hong-Man Choi.

Labels: Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), UFC News, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 5:14 PM

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Assorted Topics--- Today, we've got word on the continuation of the "Semi-Annual Sopranos Renewal Con-Game," the creator of Alias letting it slip that Jennifer Garner is indeed pregnant, Jimmy Kimmel's portrayal of Jay Leno in the "E Presentation of the Michael Jackson Trial," and Shannen Doherty already getting herself fired from her new sitcom before it even hits the air.

Media Pretends to be Surprised about Another Season of The Sopranos
It is always nice to watch the entertainment media hilariously try to pretend that they're surprised when the con-game of The Sopranos getting renewed indefinitely continues season after season. I could understand someone not noticing a pattern until it happened a few times, but at this point it's just ridiculous. To catch you up if you're new to the "Semi-Annual Sopranos Renewal Con-Game," The Sopranos' sixth and "final" season is currently in production, and will start airing on HBO sometime in 2006. However, to the shock of absolutely no one, Sopranos creator David Chase has now said that "maybe, just maybe," he could be convinced to bring the show back for a seventh season. The media is now acting like this is news, when in fact it was already a foregone conclusion.

You see, back when The Sopranos was producing its third season, that was supposedly going to be the end of it. There was a small chance that there would be a fourth season if the public demanded it, or if HBO increased the amount it pays the show's producers in rights fees, but it was unlikely. Lo and behold, it was soon announced that there would be a fourth and final season. Later, when it came time to produce the fourth and supposedly final season, the same exact scenario played out with the announcement of a fifth season, which aired in early 2004. That was supposed to be the final season, but surprise, surprise! A sixth season was eventually announced, although by the time it hits the airwaves in 2006, a whopping two years will have passed since the premiere of the previous season, thus stretching the process out even further.

So now with the "sixth and final season" in production, why on earth would anyone be surprised to hear that it won't really be the final season, and that a seventh season will also be coming eventually? I love the actual show of The Sopranos as much as anyone, but this insincere "final season" nonsense has been going on since the second freakin' season and can no longer be considered anything more than an embarrassment to anyone associated with the show. At this rate, The Sopranos' actual final season will be its 15th season, which will air in 2026...

Alias Creator Lets it Slip that Jennifer Garner is Indeed Pregnant
In the, "Oops, I didn't know we were still supposed to be lying about that to the media" department, Alias creator J.J. Abrams has let it slip that Alias star Jennifer Garner is pregnant. When discussing the next season of Alias, Abrams said that Garner's "pregnancy will affect" the filming of the next season, and he jokingly added that every spy Garner portrays "will just be a pregnant person," and, "I'm sure kickboxing scenes are probably out." Abrams said that he would find a way to incorporate Garner's pregnancy into the the show.

There's just one problem. Neither Jennifer Garner, nor her fiance Ben Affleck, have officially confirmed to any media outlet anywhere that she is indeed pregnant. The official PR position is supposed to be that it's still "just a rumor." By confirming Garner's pregnancy in interviews, J.J. Abrams has made himself the first person to acknowledge on-the-record that she is indeed pregnant. Oops!

In any case, Jennifer Garner's pregnancy is probably the least of the Alias producers' worries. Even with mega-hit Lost as its lead-in, Alias' ratings tanked in its most recent season, dropping from the strong 10.0 season premiere rating to as low as 6.3 over the course of the season. And in a move that could end up being suicidal, the show is being moved this fall to Thursdays at 8:00 PM, which will easily be the most competitive timeslot on television with Alias having to compete with Survivor, Joey, Will & Grace, Smallville, and the new Chris Rock sitcom.

Jimmy Kimmel Does Jay Leno Doing Michael Jackson
I think the E News headline says it all. Not only did Jay Leno testify yesterday at Michael Jackson's child molestation trial, but he helped lighten the mood of the trial a little bit by injecting some humor into his testimony. When both sides said, "No further questions" and the judge said, "You may step down," Leno actually leaned into the court microphone and said, "We've got Renee Zellweger on the show tonight!" (By the way, I can't be the only one to have noticed that Zellweger is now completely unable to open her eyes without squinting, thanks to her latest over-the-top cheek implant surgery.)

To top it all off, The E Network had to get someone to portray Leno in its daily Michael Jackson Trial Re-Enactments, and who better to portray Leno than fellow latenight talk show host Jimmy Kimmel? You'd expect the production team to make Kimmel look like Leno, which they did, but the surprising thing is that Kimmel actually did an excellent impersonation of Leno. Kimmel had the Leno impersonation down pat, from the lisp to the changing voice pitch to the bobbing head, in a way that was realistic and not over-the-top.

Shannen Doherty Gets Fired Yet Again
On the final day of the 2004-2005 television season, with such high-profile face-offs as the two-hour season finale of American Idol going head-to-head with the two-hour season finale of Lost, the news came out today that one of this fall's highest-profile new comedies has lost its lead star. Just last week at the annual upfront presentations, one of the comedies with the most hype thrown behind it was UPN's Love, Inc., in which Doherty would play a matchmaker. Now, Doherty has been fired for being "difficult to work with" for what seems like the 354th time.

It's not known if any specific incident sparked Doherty's firing, but it must have been bad for UPN to abruptly terminate her just one week after trotting her out at the upfront presentations and making a big deal out of her new fall series. It has been well documented over the years that Doherty has been notoriously moody and difficult to work with on just about everything she has ever done in Hollywood, including her infamous behavior on the set of "Charmed" that ultimately got her fired from that job as well. So, the news that Doherty has been fired from her new show isn't particularly shocking, but that won't make it any easier for UPN as the network scrambles to find a last-minute replacement to be the star of the series.

Labels: Television (Non-MMA)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 6:03 PM

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Convicted murderer Lionel Tate, who viciously stomped and beat a six-year-old girl to death in 1999, is back in prison after allegedly pulling a gun on a pizza delivery man and threatening to shoot if the delivery man didn't hand over the pizza boxes. Tate is also alleged to have assaulted a 13-year-old boy shortly before the armed robbery took place. As you may already be thinking, the biggest question in a case like this is: "Why on earth would a convicted murderer be out on the street in the first place?"

The sick, but true answer is that if you're under 18 years old here in the United States and also in much of the world, you can get away with just about anything. If you want to brutally beat a little girl until she dies from a wide variety of internal injuries, the message that the justice system has sent is: Go right ahead! If you're tried and found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, "human rights activists" ranging from the ACLU to the United Nations to even the Vatican will cry about how you shouldn't be punished, and how surely nobody under 18 is conscious of or responsible for what they're doing. Never mind about the rights of the six-year-old girl who Tate beat to death; what's important in the eyes of these activists are the rights of the murderer. Eventually, you'll be set free and you will have gotten away with murder.

That's what happened to convicted murderer Lionel Tate after serving three years (three years!) for the murder of Tiffany Eunick, and he has now been arrested for the second time since being let go from prison. Prior to being arrested for armed robbery this week, Tate had also been arrested in late 2004 for carrying a knife late at night on the streets of his neighborhood after he had gotten into an argument with someone, which was a weapons-related violation of his probation that still didn't result in a prison sentence. Now Tate has been charged with armed robbery, as well as assaulting a 13-year-old boy.

Tate is now 18 years old and legally an adult. If Tate had committed armed robbery and assault a few months ago when he was still 17, there would be people crying right now that he's a "victim," and that he should not have to face any kind of significant punishment for armed robbery or any other crime that he commits.

Even now, bleeding-heart fools like Katherine Federle of the "Justice for Children Project" (that's apparently justice for children who commit murder, not children who are murdered) are wailing about "saving Lionel" and "rescuing Lionel." In fact, Federle took it a step further and said that the only reason Tate can't be "rescued" now is because the justice system was too hard on him previously (you know, for making him serve three years in prison instead of no prison time for murdering Tiffany Eunick). I'm all for counseling and psychological treatment in cases like this, but only in the context of the murderer still being behind bars--- not out on the street where he or she could do who-knows-what to anyone at any time.

It's not known what defense Tate's lawyers will use this time around, but it probably won't be, "Pro wrestling made me do it!" Despite the fact that it was only the position of Tate's lawyers for a few months, and it never amounted to anything other than a desperate defense tactic in court, and it was later acknowledged as a fabricated claim, to this day many in the mainstream media still use the term "the pro wrestling murder" whenever Lionel Tate's name is in the news.

You see, the first ridiculously flimsy defense offered by Tate's lawyers after he murdered six-year-old Tiffany Eunick was that he was just imitating pro wrestling. They even wanted to turn the case into a full-fledged circus by calling Hulk Hogan and The Rock to testify (about what, who knows?). After that didn't pass the muster in court, the "pro wrestling defense" was retracted, but not before the murder was forever branded by the media as "the pro wrestling murder."

World Wrestling Entertainment would later sue the fraudulent Parents Television Council (PTC) for, among other things, using the Lionel Tate case as the centerpiece of its anti-WWE campaign, even after Tate's new lawyers admitted that the "pro wrestling defense" had been a fabrication, according to a public apology issued by the PTC. (Click here to read the PTC's full "retraction" statement.)

The second ridiculously flimsy defense offered by Tate's lawyers, and the one that they ultimately stuck with, was that he leaped from a staircase and accidentally landed on Tiffany Eunick, causing her to hit her head, but he didn't mean to hurt her. That defense had no validity and was proven in court to be false by the fact that an autopsy showed Eunick didn't just have head injuries (a fractured skull and a severely swollen brain, to be exact)... she also had a punctured lung, severely bruised kidneys, a broken rib, internal bleeding, cuts and deep bruises all over her body, and a liver area that was beaten so extensively that a piece of her liver had actually become detached during the beating.

Forensic experts testified that Tate may have had to beat on Eunick for over fifteen continuous minutes in order to produce the huge variety and severity of injuries that she suffered. After the jury convicted Tate of first-degree murder, the judge ruled during the trial's sentencing phase that the murder of Tiffany Eunick was particularly "cold, callous, and indescribably cruel."

Tate was sentenced to life in prison, but later set free and put on ten years of probation when it was ruled that because he was under 18 years old, he "couldn't understand" the gravity of the charges against him during his trial. Keep in mind, this is not someone who is mentally handicapped or has a learning disorder or anything like that, nor have his lawyers ever tried to claim anything of the sort... he simply "couldn't understand" the gravity of the charges because he was under 18 years old.

We live in a world now where gangs regularly go out of their way to use juvenile gang members when there's a murder that the gang wants to be carried out, because they know full well that the worst-case scenario is that the under-age murderer might have to go away for a few years. Is that a surprise to anyone, given the example set by cases like the brutal beating death of Tiffany Eunick? If you can get away with maliciously beating a little girl to death just because you're under 18, what can't you get away with?

According to the terms of his probation, which he has now violated for a second time, Lionel Tate is technically supposed to be returned to his former status as someone who is serving a life sentence in prison. That's what should happen according to the rules of his probation and the rules of common sense, but I can't honestly say I expect that to happen. After all, Tate's case is now in the hands of the same system that failed to serve justice for the murder of Tiffany Eunick in the first place.

Labels: Politics / Current Events Commentary

posted by Ivan Trembow at 9:48 PM

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Mixed Martial Arts--- UFC Signs a Huge Deal with Spike TV

by Ivan Trembow for MMAWeekly.com

I recently wrote an article called The Future of the UFC on Cable Television, and now that future has been realized. Recently, the announcement came that MMA fans have been waiting years to hear: The UFC has signed a long-term deal to air live fight events on cable television on a regular basis. Not all of the details on the UFC's new deal with Spike TV were included in the press release, so here is the rest of the information that we've been able to obtain. This is essentially a three-component deal, with three different parts that are all complement each other but are still separate.

Component #1: The Reality Series
The first component of the deal is that the hit reality series "The Ultimate Fighter" has not only been renewed for a second season, but also for a third season. The second season's filming is scheduled to begin in June, and the season premiere will be on Monday, August 22nd at 11:05 PM after WWE Raw. That much information was already known. What wasn't known was how WWE's exit from Spike TV would affect UFC programming.

When WWE programming leaves Spike TV and heads back to USA Network in late September, original episodes of The Ultimate Fighter will no longer air on Monday nights and will instead begin to air on Saturday nights. Though the replay schedules for each week's new episode of The Ultimate Fighter have not yet been disclosed, the debut airing of the first five episodes will be on Monday night at 11:05 PM. The next seven episodes of the series will debut in a new Saturday night timeslot that has not been decided, but will likely be 9:00 PM. The 13th and final episode of the second season will air as a live fight special on a Saturday night, just as the first season finale did.

The third season of The Ultimate Fighter will hit the airwaves sometimes in 2006, and it will also have 12 pre-taped episodes and a live season finale with live fights. It is expected to have the same Saturday night timeslot that the second season will eventually settle into, although there remains a small chance that the show could be moved to a different night for its third season.

Component #2: Live Fight Specials on Spike TV
In addition to the reality series and its live season finales, the UFC will also produce live fight specials that will air on Spike TV with original UFC fights. Two live fight specials are scheduled to air on Spike TV before the end of 2005, one of which is expected to be the live season finale of The Ultimate Fighter's second season in early December. The other live fight special of 2005 is tentatively scheduled to be on Saturday, August 20th, in order to promote the season premiere of The Ultimate Fighter two days later.

Four additional live fight specials are scheduled to air on Spike TV in 2006. All of these live fight specials are scheduled to air on Saturday night, although no exact timeslot has been announced.

Component #3: Pre-Taped "Best of UFC" Shows on Spike TV
The deal also calls for the UFC to produce 26 different "Best of UFC" shows, with twelve years of fights dating back to UFC 1 that the UFC can use as material to fill these shows. The wording of the press release left the possibility open that some of the content on these shows might be highlights of past fights, in addition to showing complete fights from the past. A final name for the shows has not yet been decided.

The tentative plan for the Saturday timeslot is to have one of the "Best of UFC" shows air at 8:00 PM, then a new episode of The Ultimate Fighter at 9:00 PM, and then another one of the "Best of UFC" shows at 10:00 PM.

On any given week, one of those two "Best of UFC" shows would be a repeat of a previously aired "Best of UFC" special, while the other one would be a "Best of UFC" special that has not aired before. It has not yet been decided which would air at 8:00 PM and which would air at 10:00 PM, but in any case, each new episode of The Ultimate Fighter would be surrounded by a pair of "Best of UFC" shows.

In addition to all of the UFC programming that will air on Spike TV, Fox Sports Net will continue to air pre-taped "Best of UFC" shows, which have been among the most-watched shows on all of FSN in recent months.

The Saturday Night Factor, and a Look Ahead
Other than the first five episodes of The Ultimate Fighter's second season, all of the programming that the UFC is producing for Spike TV will debut on Saturday night. This has its advantages and its disadvantages. The advantage is that Saturday night is already established in much of the American public's mind as "fight night," with UFC and boxing pay-per-views almost always airing on Saturday nights.

The obvious disadvantage is that on the whole, Saturday night is the least-watched night of television by far every single week. However, the first season finale of The Ultimate Fighter on April 9th was still able to draw a strong 2.6 million viewers, despite this disadvantage, and it was the most-watched show on any channel (broadcast or cable) in the key demographic of 18 to 34 year old males.

It's also interesting to note that Spike TV wanted to have a Forrest Griffin vs. Stephan Bonnar rematch live on Spike TV on June 4th right before the UFC 53 pay-per-view went on the air, but the UFC didn't want to give away the Griffin-Bonnar rematch on free television due to the belief that Griffin vs. Bonnar II has the potential to draw pay-per-view buys when it happens.

All three components of the deal between the UFC and Spike TV run from now until the end of 2006, at which point the UFC will either A) Get renewed with a huge increase in rights fees in the best-case scenario, B) Get cancelled in the worst-case scenario, or C) Possibly have other cable networks bid on UFC programming if it proves to be successful on Spike TV over the next year and a half. In any case, the sport of mixed martial arts will receive more mainstream exposure in 2005 and 2006 than it has received in every year of the past decade combined.

Labels: Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), UFC News, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 4:51 PM

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Mixed Martial Arts--- In a previous article, I wrote that due to his 3-5 record in the UFC, Phil Baroni did not deserve to be signed to a new contract in Pride without proving himself on smaller shows like anyone else would be required to do. I also wrote that it showed a lack of class for Baroni to refer to an Asian fighter as "Pork Fried Rice" while doing color commentary on a recent Pride event. In response to my article, the always full-of-class Baroni made a post on the Underground Forum (a popular MMA message board) that simply said, "Yo Ivan Trembow--- You're a [expletive]."

Numerous members of the message board responded to Baroni's post before I saw it, most of them saying that I didn't write anything about Baroni that wasn't true. A few people disagreed with my point that Baroni didn't deserve his new Pride contract, and InsideFighting editor Michael DiSanto disagreed with my assertion that it was wrong for Baroni to refer to an Asian fighter as "Pork Fried Rice." I responded to all of the posts on the topic with the following message:

"I stand by every word I wrote about Phil Baroni. I didn't say anything outlandish or outrageous in the article, and I'm not going to get into a name-calling session. The fact of the matter is that Phil Baroni has lost his last four UFC fights, and his UFC record is 3-5, which I think is a worse win percentage than Tank Abbott. Based on that, even with his promo-cutting ability, I didn't believe and still don't believe all of that warrants a new contract in Pride. I have nothing against him personally, but I certainly don't believe Pride should be in the business of signing up fighters with losing UFC records. If Baroni beats Minowa and that ends up being the beginning of when Baroni got his MMA career back on track, then hey, more power to him.

Also, I respect Michael DiSanto as a journalist but I disagree with him in this particular case. Michael wrote, 'Pride is a Japanese organization and Yoon Dong Sik is Korean, not Japanese. They're not the same nationality, and it wasn't on the Japanese broadcast. It's like Lee Murray (England) insulting a guy from Ireland and claiming all Europeans would be offended. You can't group them together as European. Americans may group all Asians together, but I'm quite sure all countries in Asia don't see themselves as one group.'

In response to what Michael wrote: Some Americans may group all Asians together... really, you think? Do you think that might be how an American fighter on a Japanese fighting event would end up using the name of a Chinese food dish to refer to a Korean fighter? I think you just made my point for me. Everyone is going to have a different reaction to someone making a comment like that, as far as whether they're offended or not. I don't think Baroni is racist and he seemed to legitimately be having trouble pronouncing Yoon Dong Sik's name and just ad-libbed. Nonetheless, the fact remains that it was the complete opposite of showing class, which is what I wrote in the article. Again, I stand by everything I wrote."

After I made that post, one of a vocal and ignorant minority of MMA message board visitors asked the question they always ask, which was, "Would you stand by your article to Phil Baroni's face?" In response to that all-too-common question, I made my final post on the subject with the following message:

"First of all, the answer is yes, and second of all, that is a ridiculous question and I always find it funny when I see people saying things like that on MMA message boards. As a journalist, it's my job to ask the tough questions and to criticize people where I feel criticism is due. If I didn't do that, I wouldn't be doing my job.

It makes MMA look so bad when you've got all these other professions with their own specialized press and nobody ever asks, 'I wonder if he'd say that to the Yahoo CEO's face, or if he would be afraid that he'd get punched out!' and yet people constantly say, 'I wonder if he'd say that to the MMA fighter's face, or if he would be afraid that he'd get punched out!' Sure, mixed martial artists fight for a living, but I think MMA fighters are professional enough that they're not savages who start swinging if you ask a question they don't like.

Some people on message boards need to get past the elementary-school logic of, 'Person A could beat up Person B, therefore Person B's opinions are invalid.' I think it's insulting to the sport of MMA for people to have that attitude."

Moving on from the Phil Baroni topic, tonight is the HBO replay of Winky Wright vs. Felix Trinidad, otherwise known as, "Wright Imposes His Will and Dominates for Twelve Rounds." Also on tonight's broadcast will be a live fight between Andrew Golota and Lamon Brewster. Hopefully Golota and Brewster will deliver an exciting fight, which the heavyweight division desperately needs after recent events. The most boring fighter in the world, John Ruiz, finally lost his WBA Heavyweight Title and decided to retire... but then the fighter who beat him, James Toney, tested positive for steroids, prompting Ruiz to decide to come out of retirement and re-claim his belt.

Labels: Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), Pride Fighting Championships News

posted by Ivan Trembow at 7:38 PM

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Television--- With all of the TV network's fall schedules having been officially unveiled, the top questions have now become, "Which of the cancelled series have episodes that never aired, which shows are going to be burned off this summer, which shows are never going to see the light of the day again, and which shows are returning this summer?" This post will answer all of those questions on a network-by-network basis.

ABC
-The Bachelorette is one of the few series whose status has legitimately not been decided yet. ABC said at its upfront presentation earlier this week that it believes the reason for The Bachelor's slipping ratings is that the show is over-exposed with three cycles of the show in any given TV season. In an attempt to revitalize the struggling franchise, ABC will be cutting back to a "one or two cycles per year" format. ABC's decision on The Bachelorette's future will likely depend on how The Bachelor fares in the ratings when it returns to the schedule in January 2006.

If The Bachelor's ratings go back up to where they used to be, ABC could order new seasons of both The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. If The Bachelor still draws low ratings even with the "freshness" of only one cycle per year, it's likely that ABC would cancel both The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. It hasn't helped the long-term viewership of either show that 90% of the couples who "end up together" at the end of each season actually break up shortly thereafter.

-It was considered so likely that the little-watched sitcom Jake in Progress would be cancelled by ABC that the series' star, John Stamos, was already in negotiations to join the cast of NBC's ER next season as a doctor. Those plans are off now that Jake in Progress has gotten a surprising renewal.

-Blind Justice was cancelled with eleven of its thirteen episodes having aired, and ABC does plan to air the remaining two episodes. Those episodes will air in the Tuesdays at 10:00 PM timeslot on May 31 and June 7, before the show leaves the airwaves for good.

-The non-home edition of Extreme Makeover has one previously unaired episode, which ABC plans to air on Thursday, June 30 at 9:00 PM. ABC would not rule out the possibility of bringing the show back from time to time as a special, but it definitely won't be airing as a regular series anymore.

-Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: How'd They Do That? is scheduled to air the final episode of its fifteen-episode order this coming Monday, May 23. The American public seems to be very interested in seeing home makeovers, as evidenced by the monster ratings for Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, but the public did not seem to be interested in seeing the answer to the question, "How'd They Do That?"

-Four episodes of the cancelled ABC comedy Complete Savages have never aired, and ABC plans to air those episodes in the Fridays at 8:30 PM timeslot starting next Friday, May 27.

-The freshman drama Eyes was put on hiatus before May sweeps began, with only five of the show's thirteen episodes ever having aired. ABC may or may not burn off the series' eight remaining episodes over the summer.

-ABC's failed teen drama Life As We Know was put on hiatus way back in January, with two of its episodes having never aired. Those two episodes are unlikely to ever air on ABC, but the complete series will be released in DVD form on August 23 for the approximately four people who were fans of the show...

-ABC only aired five of the six episodes that were produced for Life of Luxury's second season, and there are no plans to broadcast the remaining episode.

NBC
-A second season of The Biggest Loser is listed on the NBC fall schedule that was released this week, but the show is actually scheduled as a summer series that runs into the fall. The season premiere is scheduled for August 9, and the season finale is scheduled for late September or early October. The Biggest Loser will be airing in the Tuesdays at 8:00 PM timeslot, and it's rumored that once the show's season is over in that timeslot, Fear Factor could take its place on the schedule. As of right now, there is no officially scheduled return date for Fear Factor; it is simply listed as a "midseason replacement show" on NBC's schedule.

-The reality series Average Joe is returning to NBC's line-up, but only as a summer series and only with a six-episode season. The season premiere is scheduled for Tuesday, June 28 at 8:00 PM.

-Thirteen episodes of Law & Order: Trial by Jury were produced, but NBC decided to make the 12th episode the season finale. This decision was apparently made because the 13th episode had a cliffhanger ending that would make viewers want to tune in next season, and since there isn't going to be a next season for this series, NBC decided not to air the episode at all.

-Revelations was planned as a six-part mini-series on NBC, not a regular series. All six episodes of the show aired, and NBC has no plans to turn it into a regular series.

-The failed Heather Locklear drama LAX has been cancelled by NBC, but the show did air all thirteen of its episodes before it was pulled from the schedule.

-NBC pulled the freshman drama Hawaii from the schedule last October with seven of the series' eight episodes having aired. There are no plans to air the last remaining episode.

-NBC aired eleven original episodes of the animated comedy Father of the Pride before pulling the show from the schedule last December due to very poor ratings. The remaining two unaired episodes of the series are very unlikely to ever see the light of day.

Fox
-After ordering a dozen new series in each of the last several summers, Fox is only going to be debuting four new series this summer, as it places more of an emphasis on a traditional fall line-up instead of a "year-round schedule." The Inside is a new drama that will be airing in the Wednesdays at 9:00 PM timeslot starting on June 8, and the other three debuting series for Fox this summer are all reality series. To briefly run down those shows, Hell's Kitchen will air in the Mondays at 9:00 PM timeslot starting on May 30, So You Think You Can Dance will air in the Wednesdays at 8:00 PM timeslot starting on July 20, and the Princes of Malibu (which only has a six-episode order) will be airing in the Sundays at 8:30 PM timeslot starting on July 10. Fox has scheduled all of its new reality series for the summer and has zero new reality series on its fall schedule.

-Renovate My Family will be returning to the Fox line-up as a summer series in the Thursdays at 9:00 PM timeslot starting on June 30.

-Five episodes of the Fox flop Jonny Zero remain unaired, but it was considered shocking that Fox kept airing the series for as long as it did (eight weeks), so the five unaired episodes are unlikely to ever see the light of day.

-Only eight of Point Pleasant's thirteen episodes ever aired, but it's considered unlikely that the other five episodes will ever air.

-Fox pulled Tru Calling from the schedule just one week before its scheduled series finale, leaving that final episode just floating out there in space. That could very well have been done intentionally to drum up DVD sales for the second season of the show. There is no scheduled release date at this point for the second season on DVD, but you better believe it's coming at some point.

-The controversial Fox reality series, "Who's Your Daddy?" was actually a regular series with six episodes produced, not a one-time special. It was just turned into a special and quickly cancelled because of the outrage over how tasteless it was, and also the fact that the one episode that did air wasn't able to draw a decent rating. With Fox pushing at the upfront presentations that all of its reality shows are going to be "advertiser-friendly," this is exactly the kind of trashy reality show that Fox is trying to avoid in the future. As a result, the chances are almost zero that the five remaining episodes of "Who's Your Daddy?" will ever air.

-Kelsey Grammer's The Sketch Show got a six-episode order from Fox, but only four episodes aired before Fox cancelled the show. The remaining two episodes are unlikely to ever be aired.

-Only five of Life on a Stick's thirteen episodes ever aired. The plan as recently as a few weeks ago was for the eight remaining episodes to be burned off in the Wednesdays at 8:30 PM timeslot starting on June 1, but now it appears that Fox has decided to simply air an extra half-hour of That 70's Show repeats in that timeslot over the summer. There are currently no plans to air the eight remaining episodes of Life on a Stick, but that could change between now and the end of the summer.

-Sixteen episodes of the failed reality show My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss were ordered and produced, but only eleven of them aired. The other five episodes will never be aired, but Fox did make those episodes available for download on its web site.

UPN and The WB
-All of UPN's cancelled series had all of their episodes aired before they were pulled from the schedule.

-Five episodes of the cancelled WB series Summerland remain unaired, and The WB plans to air those episodes in the Tuesdays at 9:00 PM timeslot starting on June 7.

-Drew Carey's first foray into network television since the cancellation of ABC's The Drew Carey Show did not go well. The WB ordered thirteen episodes of his new series, Drew Carey's Green Screen, but only five episodes aired before the show was pulled from the schedule. There are currently no plans to air the remaining eight episodes, but The WB could certainly burn them off over the summer if they wanted to fill some space.

CBS
-Seven episodes of the reality show The Will were produced for CBS, each of them one hour long, but the network decided at the last minute to have the first two episodes re-edited into a 90-minute season premiere. That 90-minute season premiere did so horribly in the ratings that CBS amazingly cancelled the series after just one episode. There are no plans to air the other five hours of the show.

-Center of the Universe, the freshman comedy starring John Goodman, was pulled ten episodes into its fifteen-episode run and was later officially cancelled, despite the fact that it was drawing decent ratings. There are currently no plans to air the remaining five episodes.

-One of the biggest flops of the season was the CBS drama Clubhouse. After getting hyped up by CBS at last year's upfront presentation, the show ended up getting pulled from the airwaves after only five episodes, and there are no plans to air the other six episodes that were produced. This fall's version of Clubhouse could very well be Ghost Whisperers starring Jennifer Love Hewitt.

-Another flop for CBS was the Rob Lowe drama Dr. Vegas, which was also pulled after five episodes. There is very little chance that the show's five unaired episodes will ever be broadcast.

-Another Viacom-owned network, Comedy Central, recently placed the "post-South Park timeslot" show Con on hiatus after six of its eight original episodes had aired. There is no word on when or if the remaining two episodes will air, but repeats of the show are continuing to air in latenight timeslots. This past week, Comedy Central plugged a repeat of Drawn Together into the Wednesdays at 10:30 PM timeslot where Con would normally air.

-The 2004-2005 TV season officially ends this coming Wednesday (May 25), so at some point after that I will have a "Season in Review and Look Ahead to Next Season" for each of the six broadcast networks.

Labels: Television (Non-MMA)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 11:19 PM

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Television--- The television industry's annual "Upfront Week" came to a close earlier today with Fox and UPN unveiling their fall schedules. Ivan's Blog has been covering the network's upfront presentations all week, with coverage of the presentations from CBS, ABC, NBC, and The WB on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

Fox
-With less than a week to go in the 2004-2005 television season, Fox is on the verge of picking up its first ever #1 finish in the advertiser-coveted 18-to-49 year-old demographic. As a result, Fox announced a more traditional line-up at its upfront presentation earlier today, with a lot of comedies and dramas on the line-up and not a single new reality series on the fall schedule.

-Fox will not be waiting until after the baseball season to launch its new fall line-up, as it has done in past years. Instead, many shows will have their premieres in late August or early September. The baseball playoffs will then dominate the Fox schedule as always in October, and then the schedule will pick up right where it left off in November.

-Fox has officially cancelled Quintuplets, The Sketch Show, Life on a Stick, North Shore, Point Pleasant, Tru Calling, The Swan, The World's Craziest Videos, and Totally Outrageous Behavior.

-What's more surprising than the list of cancelled shows is the list of shows that were not cancelled, most notably The Bernie Mac Show. Bernie Mac has been renewed despite horrible ratings and will continue to air Friday nights at 8:00 PM. Part of Fox's decision to renew Bernie Mac may be rooted in the fact that the show was a favorite of former network president Gail Berman, who left the company two months ago. New president Peter Liguori, who was just brought over from FX, may not have wanted to shake things up too much or alienate employees who were close to Berman.

-As recently as a week ago, the rumors about Arrested Development were that even if Fox did renew the show, it would only order 13 episodes or it would bring the show back with a reduced cast. As it turns out, Fox has renewed the show for a full season of 22 episodes and will be keeping the same big cast, but it will be moving the show to the Mondays at 8:00 PM timeslot, where it will serve as the lead-in for the new comedy Kitchen Confidential. Kitchen Confidential is not to be confused with another Fox series, Hell's Kitchen, which is a new reality series that will be airing on Fox over the summer.

-Family Guy and American Dad have both been renewed for an additional season beyond the ones that they just started airing on May 1. So, Family Guy will finish its current season of 22 episodes over the summer and then return in the fall as a regular series, while American Dad will finish its current season of 19 episodes over the summer and then return in the fall as a regular series.

-The critically acclaimed drama 24 has been renewed for two new seasons after a brief dispute over licensing fees between Fox and the show's producers was resolved (but not before NBC tried to take advantage of the situation and sign the show away from Fox). Fox will continue with the strategy that worked so well for 24 this year, as it will hold off the season premiere until January so that the show can air its entire season with no pre-emptions or repeats from January through May.

-The old stand-bys of Fox's schedule will not be changing, as Cops and America's Most Wanted will continue to air on Saturday nights, and American Idol will still air on Tuesday nights at 8:00 PM and Wednesday nights at 9:00 PM starting in January.

-The highly coveted post-American Idol timeslot, which made a star out of House this past season, will be going to the new drama Bones this season. Bones will actually start airing in the fall in the Tuesdays at 8:00 PM timeslot, but once American Idol takes over that timeslot again in January 2006, Bones will be moved back an hour to 9:00 PM on Tuesdays.

-House has been renewed for a full season and will air on Tuesdays at 9:00 PM this fall, but then in January 2006 it will move to Mondays at 8:00 PM.

-Malcolm in the Middle was renewed for another season despite bad ratings this past season, thanks largely to all of its critical acclaim. However, the show is getting moved to the not-so-friendly timeslot of Fridays at 8:30 PM. Given that it has been many, many years since Fox has had a hit show on Friday night, this could end up being Malcolm's final season.

-A rotation of various animated show repeats will air in the Sundays at 7:00 PM timeslot. King of the Hill drew horrible ratings in that timeslot this past season, but was renewed anyway and will now be moved to Sundays at 7:30 PM. Due to King of the Hill's struggling ratings, it is considered very likely that this will be the show's last season.

-The post-Simpsons timeslot of Sundays at 8:30 PM, which has not really produced a ratings hit in several years, will be going to the new live-action (as in not animated) comedy, The War at Home.

-The OC will continue to air on Thursday nights at 8:00 PM in what will soon be the most competitive timeslot on all of television. Fox has failed horribly with three different shows in the post-OC timeslot, mainly because CSI airs from 9:00 PM to 10:00 PM and crushes everything in the ratings. Fox will try again this fall in the post-OC timeslot with the ambitious new drama Reunion, which chronicles the lives of six friends over a 20-year period, with each episode covering one year of their lives.

-That 70's Show has been renewed despite the fact that it no longer draws good ratings. It will continue to air on Wednesday nights at 8:00 PM this fall in what is officially scheduled to be the show's final season.

-The Pamela Anderson comedy Stacked was renewed despite mediocre ratings and horrible reviews. It will air on Wednesday nights at 8:30 PM, without the benefit of American Idol as a lead-in.

-Reality shows Nanny 911 and Trading Spouses have both been renewed, but are not on the fall schedule. Instead, both shows will be used as midseason replacement shows when some of the new fall series inevitably fail.

-Fox announced that The Simple Life will be returning for a fourth season despite the fact that ratings were down significantly in its third season. However, the show is not on the fall schedule and it's not known exactly when it will return. What is known is that Nicole Richie will not be back for the fourth season due to a personal falling out between Richie and her co-star Paris Hilton (the most specific thing Hilton has said about the reason for the falling out is, "Nicole knows what she did"). Fox has not officially announced a replacement for Richie on the show, but it's rumored to be Rod Stewart's daughter, Kimberly, who meets the description of "physically attractive and mentally dense" that is required for the role.

UPN
-In addition to the previously announced cancellation of Star Trek Enterprise, UPN has also cancelled Kevin Hill, Second Time Around, and The Road to Stardom.

-Veronica Mars and Kevin Hill both had a decent amount of critical acclaim, and both also had very low ratings. As part of its new female-focused strategy, UPN chose to renew Veronica Mars while cancelling Kevin Hill.

-UPN is going after the female audience and is willing to risk alienating male viewers as a result, with the new slogan for this fall, "Where the Girls Are."

-In a move that caught everyone by surprising (including WWE), UPN is demoting WWE Smackdown from Thursdays to Fridays. For many years, Smackdown was the #1 show on UPN, and its high ratings actually kept UPN in business at a time when it was on the verge of being shut down by Viacom. Smackdown is currently the #2 highest-rated show on UPN, second only to America's Next Top Model, which is what makes it so shocking that UPN would move the show to the wasteland of Friday night, which has traditionally been a throwaway movie night for the network. Smackdown is expected to continue airing on Thursday nights until the new season starts this fall, at which point it will move to Fridays.

-UPN spent a large percentage of its upfront presentation hyping up Everybody Hates Chris, a new comedy produced and narrated by Chris Rock, which will air on Thursday nights at 8:00 PM. UPN made a lot of bold statements about the show, saying that it will be a break-out hit for UPN like The Simpsons was for Fox and Survivor was for CBS, and saying that it will be this generation's Cosby Show. The president of UPN even took a verbal shot at NBC's Joey by saying that hopefully Everybody Hates Chris will fill TV's comedy void in the Thursdays at 8:00 PM timeslot.

-Everybody Hates Chris will be the start of a four-show comedy block on UPN's Thursday night line-up. Following the 8:00 PM timeslot of Everybody Hates Chris will be Eve at 8:30 PM (which is moving over from Tuesday nights), Cuts at 9:00 PM (which is moving over from Monday nights), and Love, Inc. at 9:30 PM (which is a new comedy starring Shannen Doherty as a matchmaker, and we all know how well matchmaker comedies do).

-America's Next Top Model will actually be broadcast two nights per week, with new episodes premiering on Wednesday nights at 8:00 PM and then replaying the following Tuesday at 8:00 PM.

-UPN will try to use America's Next Top Model to create two new hits. The Top Model repeats on Tuesday nights will lead into the new drama Sex, Lies, and Secrets starring Denise Richards. The new episodes of Top Model on Wednesday nights will lead into Veronica Mars on its new night and time. The timeslot right after Top Model is considered the best timeslot on UPN, so the ratings expectations will be much higher for Veronica Mars next season. Unfortunately for UPN, putting Veronica Mars in the Wednesdays at 9:00 PM timeslot means that it will be going head-to-head with ABC's smash hit Lost.

-UPN's all-comedy Monday line-up will stay largely intact with One on One at 8:00 PM, Girlfriends an hour later at 9:00 PM, and Half & Half at 9:30 PM. To fill the Mondays at 8:30 PM timeslot, All of Us will be moving over from Tuesday nights. All of Us was expected to be cancelled as recently as yesterday, but it got a last-minute renewal from UPN.

-I'll be back tomorrow evening with a rundown of which shows are scheduled to return this summer, which cancelled shows are scheduled to be burned off this summer, and which cancelled shows have unaired episodes that will probably never see the light of day.

Labels: Television (Non-MMA)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 11:35 PM

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Television--- It was CBS' turn earlier today to make its annual upfront presentation to advertisers, as dozens of TV shows were either renewed or cancelled. NBC, ABC, and The WB have already made their upfront presentations, as detailed in my coverage of the events on Monday and Tuesday.

-CBS had one of its best TV seasons in recent memory, and unlike ABC with its massive schedule changes for this fall, CBS is not going to try to fix something that isn't broken. There were plenty of changes to the schedule announced, but not the kind of drastic changes announced by the resurgent ABC or the struggling NBC. As the TV network with the highest ratings on all of television, CBS has less areas that it needs to change or improve, but it also has a lower tolerance for low ratings and will not hesitate to cancel a show if it's not meeting the network's expectations.

-The biggest news from CBS is that after six and a half years on the air, 60 Minutes Wednesday has been cancelled, not coincidentally in its first renewal cycle after the Dan Rather "Memo-Gate" scandal during last year's election season. CBS president Les Moonves said that it was a ratings decision and not a content decision to cancel the show, but that's ignoring the fact that the show's ratings started to fall off after the Memo-Gate scandal. New episodes of 60 Minutes Wednesday are expected to continue airing through the end of the summer. Dan Rather will get to save face by appearing as a correspondent on 60 Minutes Sunday, although Moonves did say that Rather will not be given "co-editor" status, as other 60 Minutes correspondents are given. Rather's contract with CBS expires in 2006, at which point he will either renew his contract or leave the network entirely.

-As reported yesterday on Ivan's Blog, it was looking more and more likely that Listen Up, Judging Amy, and Joan of Arcadia would all get cancelled, and that's exactly what happened. The most surprising of these cancellations has to be Judging Amy, because nobody in the TV industry would have believed you a few months ago if you told them that Judging Amy would get cancelled. In its sixth season, the show was drawing very good ratings even by CBS' high standards, but its ratings weren't as impressive in the advertiser-coveted 18-to-49 year-old demographic, and that is very likely what led to the show's demise.

-Joan of Arcadia's cancellation was expected, and the term "from buzz to bust" has been used to describe the show a lot in recent days. The show did well in its first season, but fell off dramatically in its second season and will not be returning for a third.

-Listen Up, a comedy based on the life of Pardon the Interruption co-host and Washington Post columnist Tony Kornheiser, was also cancelled in a close call that could have gone either way. The show's ratings started off as a moderate hit by CBS ratings standards before eventually slipping to being a mild disappointment by CBS ratings standards, and CBS doesn't have to tolerate mild disappointments with as many hit shows as it has. It's worth noting that the "mildly disappointing" ratings in the 6.5 range that Listen Up was drawing towards the end of its run would be considered a hit on any other network on television, but not on CBS.

-Wickedly Perfect will not be brought back for a second season, and it was considered merciful and highly unusual for CBS to let the show play out its entire ten-episode first season given its horrible ratings. It was demoted to Saturday nights, but normally if a show draws ratings this bad, it gets yanked immediately. As an example, the reality show The Will produced extremely low ratings for CBS on a Saturday night ONE TIME earlier this season and was never seen or heard from again.

-Center of the Universe, the freshman comedy starring John Goodman, will not be returning for a second season. The show was put on hiatus way back in January and has now been officially cancelled, despite the fact that it was drawing decent ratings. Five episodes of the series remain unaired, and it remains possible that CBS could air those five episodes sometime this summer.

-The newsmagazine 48 Hours Mystery has been renewed by CBS despite fairly low ratings, but it airs on Saturday night and it has much lower ratings standards to meet as a result. Also, with the cancellation of 60 Minutes Wednesday, CBS didn't want to cancel two of its three newsmagazines in one fell swoop. Starting this fall, CBS, ABC, and NBC will all have two hours of newsmagazines on the schedule per week (CBS with 60 Minutes Sunday and 48 Hours Mystery, ABC with Primetime Live and 20/20, and NBC with Dateline Friday and Dateline Sunday).

-CSI New York could have easily been moved to a less competitive, but CBS is not backing down an inch from going after the original Law & Order franchise in the Wednesdays at 10:00 PM timeslot. CSI New York is the only CSI franchise that doesn't automatically crush everything in its path in the ratings, but it's still a huge step for it to challenge Law & Order in the ratings the way it has in just its first season. Repeats of CSI New York will start airing on Spike TV in September.

-CBS is also not backing down from the new threat it has faced in the Sundays at 8:00 PM timeslot from ABC's breakout hit Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, as CBS' own hit show Cold Case will continue to air in that timeslot rather than being moved to a different night or time.

-As previously reported, the huge hit comedy Two and a Half Men will indeed inherit the Mondays at 9:00 PM timeslot left behind by Everybody Loves Raymond.

-King of Queens and Still Standing have both been renewed and will be swapping nights. After two years on Wednesday nights with mixed results in the ratings, King of Queens will be returning to its old Mondays at 8:00 PM timeslot. Still Standing, which has been in the Mondays at 8:00 PM timeslot for the past two seasons, will be moved to Wednesdays at 8:00 PM.

-Yes Dear was relegated to being "just a midseason replacement show" this past season and was considered likely to be cancelled, but its ratings upon returning to the schedule were higher than CBS expected, thus earning the show a renewal for another season. Yes Dear will air this fall on Wednesday nights at 8:30 PM, thus reuniting the show with its old lead-in, Still Standing.

-NCIS and The Amazing Race have both been renewed and will continue to air on Tuesday nights at 8:00 PM and 9:00 PM, respectively. The NCIS renewal is mildly surprising given the fact that while the show draws strong overall ratings, it has never done well in the 18-to-49 year old demographic, which is what got Judging Amy cancelled.

-The highest-profile new series on CBS' fall schedule is Ghost Whisperers, which will air on Friday nights at 8:00 PM. The show is very similar to NBC's Medium in concept, only with Jennifer Love Hewitt as the star. So the show is basically being pitched by CBS as, "Jennifer Love Hewitt's breast implants communicate with the dead..."

-The freshman drama Numbers has been renewed, despite a big drop-off from its initial ratings to where its ratings ended up, and it will stay in the Fridays at 10:00 PM timeslot.

-The ridiculous over-exposure of Survivor will continue this fall in the Thursdays at 8:00 PM timeslot with Survivor: Guatemala, which seems like the 751st season of show.

-The highest-rated two-hour block of programming from any single TV network will remain intact, as CSI and Without a Trace will continue to air on Thursday nights from 9:00 PM to 11:00 PM.

-Big Brother is returning for another season, but only as a summer series at this point. The new season of the show will premiere on July 7, and CBS will then decide whether or not to pick up the series for any additional seasons based on its ratings performance this summer.

-I'll be back with a report tomorrow evening from the final day of upfront presentations, with Fox and UPN set to unveil their fall schedules.

Labels: Television (Non-MMA)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 11:47 PM

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Video Games--- At the official unveiling of the Nintendo Revolution video game console earlier today in Los Angeles, Nintendo confirmed what most industry insiders have known for the past five years: Nintendo is not interested in competing on the same level as Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo is simply interested in releasing new systems that appeal to its core demographic (eight-to-thirteen year-old males), and that it can sell cheaply as the "budget brand" while still making the company a tidy profit.

Before I get into what Nintendo did reveal at E3 regarding its next game console, let's get into what the company didn't reveal. There is no release date window other than "2006," which is believed to be Nintendo's way of saying "mid-to-late 2006." There is no price other than "cheaper than the other two systems," which is a given for reasons explained later in this article. There was no controller shown, no technical specs, no games other than tech demos. The Revolution is clearly nowhere near as far along in development as the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3, as Nintendo is operating in its own little world. Nintendo spent more time at its press conference talking about yet another re-release of the Game Boy Advance (another new look on the outside, same exact technology on the inside) than it did talking about the Revolution.

Hardware Power
In many ways, it's still the case that Nintendo simply doesn't get it, and never was this more evident than at the company's E3 press conference earlier today. The most glaring example of this fact is how remarkably underpowered the Revolution will be. As I wrote yesterday when comparing the Xbox 360 with the PlayStation 3, if you're going to release a video game console six months or a year after your competitors, you'd better make damn sure that it's significantly more powerful than the previously released systems.

In its own little world, detached from marketplace realities, Nintendo is simply thumbing its nose at this accepted reality of the video game industry. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 will be anywhere from ten to thirty-five times more powerful than their predecessors--- it's hard to pinpoint an exact figure, but it's clear they will both be giant leaps over the original Xbox and PS2.

On the other hand, Nintendo has come right out and said that the Revolution will only be "two or three" times more powerful than the GameCube, which was an underpowered system in its own right With its nose in the air, Nintendo actually said at the press conference, "It's not all about having the turbo power, it's what you do with it." While that statement is true, it also completely misses the common-sense point, which is that your competitors are going to be able to do a heck of a lot more with their systems if they're in a completely different (and higher) technological ballpark.

DVD Movie Playback
So, on the proverbial list of ways in which Nintendo simply doesn't get it, number one is the fact that the Nintendo Revolution will be ridiculously under-powered. Number two is not a huge deal in and of itself, but it serves an example of how out of touch with reality Nintendo is. The Revolution will be able to play DVD movies... if and only if you buy an optional add-on that Nintendo described as "an internal attachment." That's right, the Revolution will be released SIX years after the PlayStation 2 hit the market and offered DVD movie playback right out of the box, but it still won't offer DVD movie playback out of the box. There's no justification for that. In 2006, that's just silly.

Hardware and Controller Design
Another disappointment is the hardware design of the Nintendo Revolution. Again, not a huge deal in and of itself, but it's just another example of how Nintendo simply doesn't get it. The Revolution system (picture available here) is literally the size of three DVD movie cases stacked together, and the person's hand in the picture is almost as big as the system. The Nintendo Revolution looks more like a cable modem or a carrying case than a video game system.

The system's controller was not shown at E3, but it's heavily rumored to use the same kind of touch-screen as the Nintendo DS handheld system. Having a touch-screen is a gimmick that's amusing for about five minutes on a handheld system... it's not something you want on your next-generation video game console.

Third-Party Support
Nintendo was keen to point out at its press conference that it will be easy for developers to make Revolution games, and I would certainly hope so given that it's almost a current-generation system being released in the next-generation marketplace. While Nintendo announced that every first-party franchise you'd expect will eventually be released on the Revolution (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Super Smash Bros), E3 is also an occasion where you're supposed to show up with a boat-load of third-party support and say, "Look at the huge amount of developers who are making games for our system!" Sony and Microsoft did that yesterday, but there was no specific third-party support for the Revolution mentioned in Nintendo's press conference. That doesn't mean that the Revolution won't have third-party support, but it does likely mean that it won't have as much third-party support as its competition, which was also the case with the GameCube and Nintendo 64.

On the (Sort of) Bright Side
On the bright side, the feature that sounds the coolest on the surface is the ability to download old NES and SNES games to play on the Revolution for an undisclosed fee. That's a great feature, but do you really want your new system's most impressive feature to be the fact that it lets you download games from your company's "glory days," before the company became an industry joke? The Nintendo Revolution will also be backwards-compatible with the Nintendo GameCube software library (such as it is...), and it will finally support online gameplay in some form, though Nintendo has still offered no specifics when it comes to a centralized online gaming service for the Revolution.

Nintendo is even further behind than Sony when it comes to a centralized online gameplay network, and if you want to know what Nintendo's core beliefs are when it comes to online gameplay, you can look at years' worth of quotes just like this one. This quote is from Nintendo head Satoru Iwata at the Japan Economic Foundation just last year: "Connection procedures to the Internet are still not easy... customers do not want online games." Iwata then said he could "prove his point" by comparing the sales of an online golf game for the PlayStation 2 to the sales of an offline golf game.

That kind of thinking serves as yet another example of the fact that Nintendo is years behind both Sony and Microsoft when it comes to understanding the video game industry that it once dominated. So far, there has been no indication that the Nintendo Revolution will be a departure from this trend.

Labels: Video Games

posted by Ivan Trembow at 7:42 PM

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Television--- As detailed in yesterday's live updates from the television industry's annual upfront presentations, this is the week of the year in which all of the TV networks reveal their fall line-ups and drop the axe on numerous cancelled shows.

Yesterday, the NBC line-up was officially revealed, along with some surprising cancellations, and today it's time for ABC and The WB to give their upfront presenations. CBS is scheduled to make its presentation tomorrow, followed by Fox and UPN on Thursday.

First Post at 5:04 PM:
-As previously reported on Ivan's Blog, ABC has indeed cancelled Eight Simple Rules and My Wife & Kids, making it official that the two veteran comedies will not be returning despite still delivering decent ratings...

-Less Than Perfect has been renewed by ABC despite fairly low ratings, but it will serve as a midseason replacement show and is not on the fall schedule...

-The Bachelor has been renewed by ABC despite slipping ratings, and it will air on Monday nights starting in January 2006 after Monday Night Football's season is over...

-The status of The Bachelorette is still very much up the air after the most recent season failed to peak in the ratings as it normally does, and the series may or may not return at some point as a midseason replacement show...

-As previously announced, this upcoming season of Monday Night Football will be the last season for the show on ABC, as starting in the fall of 2006, the series will air on ESPN... despite high ratings, the series was a big money-loser for ABC due to high rights fees and advertising rates that are lower than what you'd expect...

UPDATE at 5:25 PM:
-ABC officially confirms that it is renewing the little-watched comedy Jake in Progress, some of the show's stars had actually starting the casting process for the next season of pilot series, which is normally an indication that a show is a sure goner... the show will air on Mondays at 9:30 PM starting in January 2006 when the Monday Night Football season ends...

-ABC renews its smash hit Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and keeps it in the same Sundays at 8:00 PM timeslot, but cancels the show's two poorly-rated cousins... Extreme Makeover: Home Edition: How'd They Do That? has been given the axe because the American public apparently wasn't all that interested in seeing "how they did that," while the original Extreme Makeover is also cancelled, as for whatever reason the public has been far more receptive to seeing homes get makeovers than seeing people get makeovers...

-The previously rumored cancellations of Eyes, Complete Savages, and Blind Justice have been officially confirmed by ABC...

-The WB will have to find a new co-star for its midseason comedy Modern Men, as Wendie Malick of Just Shoot Me fame had been cast in the lead female role with the expectation that Jake in Progress was dead in the water... with Jake in Progress renewed and Malick still obligated to appear in her role on that show, WB is now scrambling to find a last-minute replacement to play Malick's role in Modern Men...

UPDATE at 5:41 PM:
-Much of the talk of the TV industry has been Fox's announcement that it has renewed Arrested Development for a full third season of 22 episodes, as the new president of Fox TV is getting major kudos for sticking with a critically acclaimed show despite its low ratings, what's not known is whether the series will keep its Sunday night timeslot or get bumped to a different night...

-The hot rumor about Fox's Thursday presentation is that the network will announce that it has reached a renewal agreement for not one, but two new seasons of the crtitically acclaimed series 24, this comes amid talk that NBC had been trying to steal 24 from Fox during a licensing dispute between Fox and 24's producers...

-Word is finally starting to leak out from CBS about what will and won't be renewed, as it appears likely that Still Standing, Yes Dear, and Numbers will be renewed...

-Listen Up and Judging Amy are on the bubble and may or may not be renewed despite the fact that both shows draw fairly high ratings...

-It's looking more and more likely that Joan of Arcadia will get the axe from CBS, as the show's ratings have tanked in the past year and CBS does not normally tolerate sharp ratings decreases...

UPDATE at 5:59 PM:
-The big news from ABC is that almost every show in the line-up is getting a new night or time, including Lost, Alias, Boston Legal, George Lopez, Super Nanny, Wife Swap, The Bachelor, and According to Jim... many of the changes seem nice individually, but the question remains whether viewers will be confused by the fact that the vast majority of shows on the network have a new night or time, with Sunday being the only unchanged night...

-Other than the Sunday night line-up and newsmagazines 20/20 and Primetime Live, there is only one show on the entire ABC line-up that will be back next year on the same exact night and time, and that is Hope & Faith in the Fridays at 9:00 PM timeslot...

-Lost will stay on Wednesdays but will be moved from 8:00 PM to 9:00 PM, which ABC hopes will push the show's already huge ratings over the top even more, but it's also a very big risk because the second half of the season will be going head to head with the Wednesday American Idol shows...

-Alias is being moved to Thursdays at 8:00 PM with new episodes starting this fall in a move that appears on the surface to be "taking on the big powerhouses of NBC and CBS on Thursdays," but is in fact a concession of defeat from ABC after Alias' ratings tanked over the course of the past season...

-Boston Legal, which had been airing on Sundays at 10:00 PM after Desperate Housewives until Grey's Anatomy debuted, will not be getting its old timeslot back, as it's being moved to Tuesdays at 10:00 PM...

-The George Lopez Show has been officially renewed, despite the fact that its ratings were no better than its timeslot neighbor My Wife & Kids, which got cancelled... Lopez will be moving from its current Tuesday timeslot to the old Lost timeslot on Wednesdays at 8:00 PM...

-ABC officially renews Wife Swap and will air the show during the football season at 8:00 PM before Monday Night Football on the East Coast, and at 10:00 PM after Monday Night Football on the West Coast, this is the same timeslot in which Mark Cuban's The Benefactor failed so miserably last season...

-Super Nanny gets renewed by ABC and given the new timeslot of Fridays at 8:00 PM, this marks the second time ABC has re-launched and then abandoned its "TGIF" all-comedy line-up on Fridays...

-Even According to Jim is getting a new timeslot, as it moves from Tuesdays at 9:00 PM to Tuesdays at 8:00 PM, while Rodney has been officially renewed and will follow According to Jim on Tuesday nights at 8:30 PM... ABC is throwing Jim and Rodney under the bus with the belief that they will manage to hold up in the ratings despite the fact that they will be going head to head with the American Idol juggernaut starting in early 2006...

UPDATE at 6:23 PM:
-The big announcement from The WB's upfront presentation is that the network is going against the big networks head-on by moving Smallville and Everwood to Thursday nights... while Everwood's ratings will surely be crushed in the Thursdays at 9:00 PM timeslot, Smallville won't necessarily see drastic ratings decreases in the Thursdays at 8:00 PM timeslot because of the overrated and relatively weak competition it will have in that timeslot (Joey, Will & Grace, Alias)...

-The WB has officially cancelled Jack & Bobby, Steve Harvey's Big Time Challenge, Grounded for Life, The Mountain, and Drew Carey's Green Screen... Jack & Bobby and Steve Harvey were both considered borderline shows, and neither of them made the cut...

-One Tree Hill and Charmed have both been renewed despite mediocre ratings... Charmed will stay in the Sundays at 8:00 PM timeslot, while One Tree Hill will be moved to Wednesdays at 8:00 PM...

-7th Heaven is staying on Mondays at 8:00 PM and Gilmore Girls is staying on Tuesdays at 8:00 PM, both shows will used as strong lead-ins to launch new dramas in the 9:00 PM timeslot on Mondays and Tuesdays...

-What I Like About You, whose status was unknown as recently as yesterday, has been officially renewed by The WB and will be in the Fridays at 8:00 PM timeslot...

-As detailed yesterday on Ivan's Blog, WB executives settled a huge dispute with the producers of Reba at the last minute and were able to renew the series, which will continue to air Friday nights at 9:00 PM...

UPDATE at 6:40 PM:
-The WB has officially renewed Blue Collar TV, which has been a hit based on The WB's ratings standards, but the nework is throwing Blue Collar TV under the bus by moving it to the Sundays at 9:00 PM timeslot, where it will be head-to-head with the Desperate Housewives juggernaut...

-One might think that there's not much of a connection between Desperate Housewives viewership and a male-oriented show on The WB, but the now-cancelled Steve Harvey's ratings fell off dramatically as soon as the show starting going head-to-head with Desperate Housewives...

-A cancellation from The WB that was not mentioned before was The Starlet, which has also been officially cancelled...

-The status of Trading Spouses on Fox was still up the air as of yesterday, but now it is believed that Fox will announce on Thursday that it is renewing the series...

UPDATE at 7:06 PM:
-Summerland has also been cancelled by The WB and will burn off its five still-unaired episodes, ironically enough, this summer...

-Regarding Fear Factor, which has been renewed by NBC but is being held off from the fall schedule and is instead going to be used as a midseason replacement show, word is that when the show returns it will be moving from its current Monday night timeslot to Tuesdays at 9:00 PM after The Biggest Loser finishes its season in that timeslot, this would put the show head-to-head with American Idol...

-Life As We Know It has also been officially cancelled by ABC, although that has been long assumed, it's interesting because Life As We Know It was a drama in the Thursdays at 8:00 PM timeslot, and it failed miserably, so what does ABC do? It puts Alias in that timeslot starting this fall...

-Even though ABC has cancelled Extreme Makeover (non-Home Edition) as a regular series, it still reserves the right to air occasional Extreme Makeover specials in which people gets makeovers... the only version of the series that is a big hit is Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, which will continue to air on Sundays at 8:00 PM...

-Regarding The Bachelor and its decreasing ratings, ABC said during its upfront presentation that it feels the show has aired too many seasons in too short of a time period (you think?), and that the network hopes to breathe new life into The Bachelor by only airing one or two cycles of the series per season...

UPDATE at 7:35 PM:
-The talk of the TV industry right now is that ABC has tinkered far too much with something that was not broken... the network just had its best season of ratings in many, many years, and it have responded by rolling out a 2005-2006 schedule that will see ONE non-Sunday TV show keep its same day and time... the network has literally changed almost its entire schedule, which could come back to bite it in the ass...

-With My Wife & Kids having been cancelled by ABC, tonight's season finale of the show will also be the series finale...

-More info leaking out of CBS prior to tomorrow's upfront presentation... It is looking more and more likely that Listen Up, Joan of Arcadia, and Judging Amy will all be cancelled at CBS' presentation tomorrow... Joan is considered almost a sure goner, and Listen Up and Judging Amy each probably have about a 40% chance of being renewed at this point...

-There is surprising talk that CBS might cancel 60 Minutes Wednesday due to its low ratings compared to 60 Minutes Sunday, and the credibility problems that last year's election-season report from Dan Rather gave the network...

-On-the-bubble drama NCIS (not to be confused with the CSI franchise, which it has nothing to do with) looks like it will be renewed, the show always draws strong overall ratings, but very poor ratings in the key 18-to-49 year-old demographic

-King of Queens appears to be safe and headed for a renewal, although it might be moved back to Monday nights because it has not performed well on Wednesday nights head-to-head with American Idol...

-The likely heir to the Everybody Loves Raymond throne in the Mondays at 9:00 PM timeslot is Two and a Half Men, which drew excellent ratings this past season that were almost as good as Raymond's ratings...

-More updates from the upfront presentations to come tomorrow...

Labels: Television (Non-MMA)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 5:04 PM

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Video Games--- The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 have both been officially revealed to the public. I have put together a comparative breakdown of the information that has been revealed about both systems, everything from the hardware to the controllers to the online gaming networks to the games.

-PlayStation 3 Launch Date: Sony has announced a release date of "Spring 2006" for the PlayStation 3. When video game companies announce release dates, "spring" normally means that they're planning on a March, April, or May launch. In the case of the PlayStation 3, Sony would not be specific about which market or markets will get the system in "Spring 2006." Until Sony says otherwise (which hasn't happened yet), the widely held belief is that the Spring 2006 release date only refers to the Japanese launch of the PS3. A release date in the summer of 2006 is much more likely for the North American and European markets.

-Xbox 360 Launch Date: The officially announced launch date for the Xbox 360 is Fall 2005 (most likely November) not only in North America, but also in Japan and Europe.

-PlayStation 3 Price: Mum's the word from both companies at this point. The expectation for any new system is that it will be no less than $300 and no more than $400, and there's no reason to believe that the PS3 and Xbox 360 will be exceptions. Previous reports were that a souped-up "multimedia version" of the PlayStation 3 with all kinds of extra functions would be released for over $500, but none of that has been confirmed or denied by Sony at this point.

-Xbox 360 Price: Again, mum's the word, but the expectation is somewhere between $300 and $400.

-PlayStation 3 Hard Drive: Sony announced at its press conference today that the PS3 will have a hard drive, but the company never specified whether the hard drive would be bundled with the system. Given how vague Sony was about its hard drive plans, it has to be considered a legitimate possibility that the PlayStation 3 hard drive will be sold separately, which would cut down on the number of games that are developed to take advantage of the hard drive's capabilities.

-Xbox 360 Hard Drive: Microsoft has announced that every Xbox 360 system will come with a 20 GB hard drive, so third-party developer support for the hard drive will not be an issue.

-PlayStation 3 Backwards Compatibility: It was expected that the PlayStation 3 would be backwards compatible with the PlayStation 2, and Sony didn't disappoint. Sony announced that not only will the PS3 be capable of playing PS2 games, but it will also be capable of playing PlayStation One games.

-Xbox 360 Backwards Compatibility: The big question for Microsoft going into E3 was whether or not the Xbox 360 would be backwards compatible and able to play games from the original Xbox. It was considered unlikely as recently as a few weeks ago, but Microsoft surprised everyone (including Sony) by announcing today that the Xbox 360 will indeed have backwards compatibility... but only to a point. The Xbox 360 will be able to play most, but not all, Xbox games, in much the same way that the PlayStation 2 can play most, but not all, PlayStation One games.

-PlayStation 3 DVD Movie Playback: You'll be able to play DVD movies right out of the box, just as with the PlayStation 2.

-Xbox 360 DVD Movie Playback: You'll be able to play DVD movies right out of the box. You will not be required to buy a "remote control add-on" in order to watch DVD movies, as was required with the original Xbox. There will be a DVD remote control made by Microsoft for the Xbox 360, and it might even be bundled with the system, but it will not be required to watch or control DVD movies on the system.

-PlayStation 3 Hardware Design: To be perfectly honest, the PlayStation 3 console (picture available here) looks like a copy machine or a desktop computer printer. It's bigger than the Xbox 360 in terms of its physical dimensions, and it just doesn't look like a video game system. It's not hideous in a "My GameCube looks like a damn lunch-box!" kind of way, but it's far from pretty.

-Xbox 360 Hardware Design: The Xbox 360 console (picture available here) has a slimmed down and very sleek-looking design, and it has the "Ring of Light" that will be a consistent theme on the system and the controller, and it has a side opening for the hard drive to seamlessly slide in or out of the system so that you can take your game saves and Xbox Live identity to a friend's house. Like the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 will be able to stand vertically or horizontally.

-PlayStation 3 Appearance Customization: Sony picked up on the "customization" theme that consumers are now demanding with multiple color choices for the PlayStation 3 (gray, white, and black).

-Xbox 360 Appearance Customization: Microsoft really nailed this on the head with the whole "removable face-plate" concept. This allows you to completely change the look and feel of your Xbox 360 console simply by removing the default system face-plate with the press of a button and replacing it with your choice of hundreds of custom face-plates that will be available. The whole "Pimp My Ride" culture that is increasingly prevalent with cars and cell phones is already going nuts over the Xbox 360's removable face-plates.

-PlayStation 3 Controller Design: To be brutally honest, if there's any area where the comparison is not even close, it's this one. The PlayStation 3's controller (picture available here) has a downright putrid "boomerang" shape, which might have looked good on an artist's sketch pad somewhere, but it looks like it would be very uncomfortable to hold in your hands. It's not like the boomerang shape is some kind of new, revolutionary idea... it has been tried many times before by many different third-party controller manufacturers, and it has always failed because it's simply not comfortable. If the original Xbox was hurt by its original controller design, the PS3 will be hurt far more by its awful controller design. On the positive side, both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 controllers will be wireless, so there's no more worrying about cords.

-Xbox 360 Controller Design: The Xbox 360's controller (picture available here) is pretty much what you'd expect--- wireless, looks nice, nothing revolutionary. All Microsoft had to do in order to top Sony in this category was do better than "putrid," and they've done that.

-PlayStation 3 Technical Specs: This has been the most surprising thing to me so far. If you're releasing a video game console six to nine months after your competitor's console, you better make damn well sure that it's far more powerful than the system that is already on the market. That's why it was so ridiculous when the GameCube was released in 2001, a full year after the PlayStation 2, and was in some areas actually slightly less powerful than the PS2. There's no doubt that the PlayStation 3 will be more powerful than the Xbox 360, but again, it better be if it's launching 6-9 months after the Xbox 360.

-Xbox 360 Technical Specs: What's surprising is that the PS3 is not really leaps and bounds above the Xbox 360 in the technical specs department, as we were led to believe it would be in recent months (the number floated had been "about three times as powerful as the Xbox 360"). In some areas, the PS3 is only slightly more powerful, and in one particular way, the Xbox 360 actually has an advantage. Having 512 MB of unified RAM will make it easier and more efficient for developers to make games for the Xbox 360, as compared to the PS3 with its 256 MB of RAM dedicated to the CPU and 256 MB of RAM dedicated to the graphics processor. Again, there's no doubt that the PlayStation 3 is the more powerful system, but that's not a surprise given the launch dates.

-PlayStation 3 Online Gaming Network: Sony has never had a centralized online gaming service and was very vague during the press conference about its plans for the PS3's online network. The phrase "PlayStation World" was used once, but it was not clear if that will be the actual name for the online gaming network. What Sony did say is that the network "will be fundamentally focused on community, communication, commerce, and content." Believe me, if Sony had specifics to show off, they would be all over the place right now. The lack of any specifics could mean that Sony is well behind Microsoft when it comes to developing and nurturing a centralized online gaming community, which would not be surprising given that Sony is about four years late to that particular party.

-Xbox 360 Online Gaming Network: The Xbox 360 will feature the next generation of Xbox Live, which will be backwards compatible with Xbox Live for the original Xbox and will allow members to seamlessly transfer their accounts from one system to the other. The big points for Microsoft are the "GamerCards" that will give you a complete online identity, as well as a host of other community-building features. There will also be a two-tiered service plan. What we now know as "Xbox Live" will be "Xbox Live Gold," and now there will also be "Xbox Live Silver," which is free and will still allow people to have unlimited voice-chat with friends, transfer files, and play games for free on certain weekends. Every Xbox 360 system will come with one free month of Xbox Live Gold so that hopefully more people will stick with its added features and seven-days-per-week online gameplay.

-GAMES: The most important thing, as always, is the game line-up for each system. In this area, both companies (Microsoft and Sony) have shown off a huge number of games for their respective systems. Sony has not been specific about the number of games it expects to launch alongside the PlayStation 3, while Microsoft has said that it expects somewhere from 25 to 40 games to be released in the Xbox 360 "launch window," which Microsoft characterizes as being released at launch or shortly after launch.

Both Microsoft and Sony announced and/or displayed a number of new installments in existing franchises, some or most of which could end up being released for both systems companies instead of just one or the other. The only exception to this is first-party games, meaning that a Microsoft-published game is never going to be released for the PlayStation 3, and a Sony-published game is never going to be released for the Xbox 360.

In the case of the Xbox 360, the third-party franchise games on display include brand new installments of Quake (not Doom), Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Dead or Alive, Call of Duty, Madden NFL, Tiger Woods Golf, Need for Speed, Tony Hawk, Battlefield 1942, Burnout, Test Drive, NBA Live, NBA 2K, Top Spin Tennis, and Amped (Top Spin and Amped are now going to be published by 2K Games instead of Microsoft). First-party franchise games that have been announced, which will definitely be Xbox 360 exclusives, include brand new installments of Halo, Perfect Dark, Fable, and Project Gotham Racing.

In the case of the PlayStation 3, the third-party franchise games on display include brand new installments of Metal Gear Solid, Devil May Cry, Tekken, Fight Night, Unreal Tournament, Red Dead Revolver, Spider-Man, Formula One, and Mobile Suit Gundam. First-party franchise games that have been announced, which will definitely be PlayStation 3 exclusives, include brand new installments of Gran Turismo, Warhawk, Killzone, and The Getaway.

So, both systems have a lot of games in the pipeline that are new additions to existing franchises. The most startling thing about the game line-ups so far is that the Xbox 360 appears to have an advantage in the number of new franchises being created on the system, at least in terms of what is being shown at E3.

The PlayStation 3 has MotorStorm and Heavenly Sword from Sony, a new first-person shooter from the creators of Ratchet & Clank, Killing Day from Ubi Soft, and Fifth Phantom Saga from Sega, but the list of new franchises being displayed for the Xbox 360 blows away the number of new franchises currently being shown for the PlayStation 3.

On the Xbox 360, the list of first-party "new franchise" games, all of which will be published by Microsoft exclusively for the Xbox 360, includes: Two new RPG franchises from the original creator of Final Fantasy (called Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey), Kameo: Elements of Power from Rare, and Gears of War from Epic Games, the creators of Unreal and Unreal Tournament.

The list of third-party "new franchise" games for the Xbox 360 is staggering. Despite being shown as Xbox 360 games at and before E3, many of these games will also be released for the PlayStation 3 eventually, but many of them won't be. These games include a new horror game from the original creator of Resident Evil, Ninety-Nine Nights from the original creator of Space Channel 5, two excellent-looking games from Sega called Full Auto and Condemned, The Outfit from the creators of Homeworld and Sigma, Saint's Row from the creators of Red Faction, Alan Wake from the creators of Max Payne, Dark Sector from the creators of Unreal Championship, Frame City Killer from Namco, and Dead Rising from Capcom.

Two franchises to keep an eye on in the future will be Grand Theft Auto and Final Fantasy. Grand Theft Auto has been hinted at for both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but Rockstar is keeping its cards very close to its vest and is not going to reveal anything until the next-generation Grand Theft Auto game is much closer to completion. The game could be released for one system and not the other, or it could be released for both systems at the same time, or it could be released for one system and then be released for the other system six months later (which has been the set-up with the PS2 and original Xbox).

As for Final Fantasy and other games from Square Enix, it appears that the company is no longer in bed strictly with Sony. After completely shunning the original Xbox, Square Enix has announced that the massively multi-player online RPG Final Fantasy 11 is coming to the Xbox 360 with full Xbox Live support, and it will be cross-compatible with the PC version. Square Enix also showed video footage of a currently untitled new game for the Xbox 360. As for the single-player RPG Final Fantasy 12, Square Enix has announced that the game will not be released until 2006, and it is apparently still scheduled to be for the PlayStation 2, not the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.

So far, I'm more excited about the Xbox 360 than I am about the PlayStation 3, but there's plenty to be excited about on both fronts. I'm not someone who is going to put all my eggs in one basket and say, "System A rocks and System B sucks!" Why anyone would have that kind of attitude in today's day and age is beyond me. Right now, both systems are looking like must-haves for any hardcore video game fan.

Labels: Video Games

posted by Ivan Trembow at 11:56 PM

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Television and Video Games--- Other than mixed martial arts, the two industries that I cover closely are the video game industry and the television industry, and it just so happens that this is a very big week for both of them.

The biggest video game trade show of the year, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), is taking place this week in Los Angeles, while the TV industry has its annual upfront presentations spaced out from Monday to Thursday of this week. The upfront presentations are where the TV networks reveal their fall line-ups and also drop the axe on numerous shows.

The schedule for the upfront presentations is that NBC is presenting today, ABC and The WB are presenting tomorrow, CBS is presenting on Wednesday, and Fox and UPN are presenting on Thursday.

Status as of first post at 4:02 PM:
-So far there's nothing new on the E3 front that hasn't already been reported on Ivan's Blog, as the show doesn't actually start until Wednesday. However, Sony is expected to hold a press conference before the end of the day today (Monday), and the scheduled topic of discussion is the PlayStation 3, which isn't expected to be released in the United States until mid-to-late 2006. With the huge splash already made by the Xbox 360 and the fact that Microsoft is launching the system this year, you can expect Sony to come out swinging and do whatever it can to muffle the impact of the Xbox 360. More updates from E3 and the upfront presentations as events unfold...

UPDATE at 4:48 PM:
-Huge news as NBC officially cancels the newest Law & Order spin-off, Law & Order: Trial by Jury, after just a few months on the air, Law & Order creator Dick Wolf is extremely unhappy with NBC's decision...

-NBC officially cancels poorly-rated shows The Contender, Committed, American Dreams, and Medical Investigation...

-NBC renews the critically acclaimed but poorly-rated The Office and has it on the fall schedule in the Tuesdays at 9:30 PM timeslot...

-NBC renews West Wing despite ratings collapse in the past two years, will move the show to Sundays at 8:00 PM...

-Moderately rated Scrubs and Fear Factor are both renewed by NBC, but are not on the fall schedule and will instead be used as midseason replacement shows in early 2006...

UPDATE at 5:20 PM:
-Remember, these are pretty much just the headlines, more details on all of this news will be forthcoming on Ivan's Blog in the coming days...

-Fox officially RENEWS Arrested Development for a full third season of 22 episodes, this comes amid low ratings but tons of critical acclaim, Fox made this announcement today despite the fact that its upfront presentation isn't until Thursday...

-NBC renews Joey and Will & Grace despite only moderately successful ratings and will keep both shows in the same timeslots, Joey was considered a question mark for renewal after one season...

-NBC has The Apprentice on the schedule for this fall instead of holding off until 2006, showing that they learned nothing from the overexposure that was caused by scheduling the second and third seasons too close together...

-Speaking of overexposure, the "Martha Stewart" version of The Apprentice from series creator Mark Burnett will air on Wednesdays at 8:00 PM...

-The Biggest Loser, the reality show about weight loss, will return for a second season this fall in the Tuesdays at 8:00 PM timeslot...

UPDATE at 5:46 PM:
-News leaking out of Fox like a faucet despite the fact that the network's upfront presentation isn't until Thursday...

-Fox set to cancel lots of low-rated shows, including Quintuplets, Life on a Stick, and a trio of failed Thursday night shows (Tru Calling, Point Pleasant, and North Shore)

-Fox rumored to be renewing The Bernie Mac Show despite very low ratings and very little critical acclaim, the show was considered as good as dead a week ago...

-Fox also said to be renewing the very low rated King of the Hill...

-Fox apparently renewing That 70's Show and Stacked despite moderately low ratings, while status of Trading Spouses is still unknown...

UPDATE at 6:17 PM:
-Numerous ABC rumors making the rounds, including the network renewing The George Lopez Show but NOT renewing My Wife & Kids, which was a breakout hit just two years ago...

-ABC mercifully cancels new series Eyes and Blind Justice, but is rumored to be renewing Jake in Progress for some reason that mankind will never truly understand...

-ABC rumored to be cancelling Eight Simple Rules and Complete Savages on the Friday night line-up while surprisingly renewing Less Than Perfect, whose ratings have been less than perfect, the cancellation of Eight Simple Rules is very surprising...

-Reality shows Wife Swap and Super Nanny rumored to be getting season renewals from ABC, as is freshman comedy Rodney...

UPDATE at 6:44 PM:
-The WB and the producers of Reba got in a huge dispute over licensing rights fees, WB was almost forced to cancel one of its highest-rated shows, but the dispute has apparently been resolved at the last minute and a renewal of the series is expected to be announced at tomorrow's WB upfront presentation...

-WB set to give season renewal orders to One Tree Hill and Blue Collar TV...

-Status unknown for WB shows What I Like About You and Steve Harvey's Big Time Challenge...

-WB rumored to be cancelling Jack & Bobby, The Starlet, and Summerland...

-The only networks that are not willing to leak out info at this time are CBS and UPN, which just happen to be the two networks owned by Viacom...

-More updates from the upfront presentations to come tomorrow...

-In the meantime, check out this hilariously over-the-top and intentionally cheesy commercial for the cable channel G4's coverage of E3. Just click here and then click where it says "Watch the Video." Since E3 isn't open to the public, it would be exciting for the average gamer to be able to go to E3 or even "watch E3," but these guys take it way over the top, and that's the joy of the commercial. You may have seen the 30-second commercial if you've been watching G4 in recent days, but the link above takes you to the full-length three-minute version. Be prepared to have the theme song implant itself in your brain and not let go...

Labels: Television (Non-MMA), Video Games

posted by Ivan Trembow at 4:02 PM

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Boxing--- It wasn't as exciting as last week's fight between Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo, but Saturday's fight between Ronald "Winky" Wright and Felix "Tito" Trinidad was one of the more remarkable things you'll ever see in boxing, as Winky pitched a complete shut-out. It was Trinidad's second comeback fight , with the first being a spectacular KO win over Ricardo Mayorga, and it could very well be his last fight.

ESPN.com's Dan Rafael compared it to the 49ers crushing the Broncos in the Super Bowl years ago by the score of 55 to 10, but it would be hard to think of how Trinidad figuratively scored 10 points in this fight. Trinidad only landed 58 punches in the entire fight (compared to Wright's 262 punches landed), and you could count on one hand the number of those Trinidad punches that landed cleanly without being at least partially blocked.

Call me old fashioned, but I tend to prefer substance over style in sports, and it doesn't get much better than Winky Wright when it comes to substance. Just as when he fought Shane Mosley last year, Wright went into this fight as the betting underdog, against a much flashier and bigger-name opponent. And just as he did against Mosley in two different fights last year, Wright completely dominated his opponent. As the HBO announcers pointed out during the fight, Wright's style is focused on throwing shorter, quicker punches that leave him in a better position to defend. Trinidad was never able to get past Wright's stiff jab, his incredible defense, and his superior poise in the ring.

Wright stayed calm and consistent throughout the entire fight, just as he always does, as he constantly and repeatedly imposed his will on Trinidad by punching him right in the face. Trinidad could see most of the punches coming and simply couldn't do anything about it, while about two dozen punches during the fight caught Trinidad by surprise and caused his head to buckle backwards.

While Wright had a solid gameplan that he stuck to and executed to perfection, Trinidad was like a deer in the headlights. It was clear from the beginning of the fight that Trinidad figured he would just plow over Wright and overwhelm him with power. When Trinidad couldn't even reach Wright's head, much less hurt it, there was no Plan B. Trinidad simply tried in vain for the rest of the fight to land a one-punch knockout that never came. I'd be willing to bet that Wright had a "Plan B" that he could have gone to if Plan A hadn't worked out so well.

At this point, Trinidad has a rematch clause that he can activate if he so chooses, but as HBO's Larry Merchant asked, "Why would he want to?" Even if Trinidad came into a potential rematch with a less arrogant gameplan, you'll find very few boxing experts who think that a second Wright-Trinidad fight would play out any differently.

The same was true with Shane Mosley after his first fight with Winky Wright, and he eventually took a rematch only because there was no other fight for him to take. The same might happen in Trinidad's case (with the same result as Wright vs. Mosley II), or he might call it a career and retire again. In any case, it's about damn time that Winky Wright gets the respect that he deserves as one of the best boxers in the world. Wright had already earned that distinction over the course of his career, and he earned it all over again with his domination of Felix Trinidad.

Labels: Boxing

posted by Ivan Trembow at 10:29 AM

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Assorted Topics--- Today, we've got word on the unveiling of the Xbox 360, Jane Fonda making better use of her time, and the second-round match-ups in the Pride Grand Prix.

Video Games: Xbox 360 Unveiled
Microsoft's next-generation video game console, the Xbox 360, has finally been unveiled with a sleek hardware design, some revolutionary upgrades to the Xbox Live online gaming service, and a huge list of games in development (including exclusive new franchises from the original creators of Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, and Space Channel 5).

The biggest piece of information that wasn't previously leaked out is that it appears as though every Xbox 360 system will come with a 20 GB hard drive (which will be removable and highly portable), thus putting to rest the theories of "one bundle with a hard drive, one bundle without a hard drive." The launch date has been revealed to be "Fall 2005" worldwide, not the previously expected scenario of, "Fall 2005 in the United States and much later everywhere else." The price is still unknown and is believed to be somewhere between $300 and $400, which is the normal range for a new game console. More specifics on the launch date and price are expected to be announced next week at E3.

GameSpot wrote two excellent articles covering the Xbox 360 unveiling, one of them with all of the pertinent details about the system, and the other with an inside look at the creation of the system and Microsoft's vision for it.

And yes, that is the Xbox 360 on the cover of Time Magazine this week, along with the following tantalizing quote in Time's article from none other than Bill Gates himself: "The day Sony launches the new PlayStation, they will walk right into Halo 3." This would seem to confirm the persistent rumors that Microsoft is planning to counter the launch of the PlayStation 3 by releasing Halo 3 for the Xbox 360 on the very same day (the PlayStation 3 is expected to launch in the United States in mid-to-late 2006). Given that Halo 2 has already sold nearly seven million copies worldwide, and has driven Xbox hardware sales worldwide, and has literally doubled the subscriber base for Xbox Live, it seems like a brilliant strategy to launch Halo 3 on the same day as the PS3.

This is not an underhanded tactic on Microsoft's part. Not only would Sony do the same thing, but they already have. You may recall that Sony timed the release of Final Fantasy 8 for the original PlayStation to fall on September 9, 1999 in the United States, which just happened to be the US launch date of the Sega Dreamcast (may it rest in peace).

Movies: Jane Fonda Takes Time out of Busy Schedule to Make Critically Panned Movie
Jane Fonda was kind enough to take time out of her busy schedule of giving aid and comfort to countries at war with the United States to make a stereotypical mother-in-law comedy with Jennifer Lopez, whose career is equally stagnant at this point. The movie is currently averaging a score of 32 out of 100 from movie critics, according to MetaCritic.

Mixed Martial Arts: Pride Announces Second-Round Grand Prix Match-Ups
I previously wrote about The Bracketology of the Pride Grand Prix and all of the possible match-ups that Pride could make in the second round. Now Pride has officially announced the second-round match-ups. Defending champion Vanderlei Silva will face Kazuhiro Nakamura, the Brazilian Top Team's Antonio Rogerio Nogueira will face Chute Boxe Academy's Mauricio "Shogun" Rua in a Brazil vs. Brazil match-up, Igor Vovchanchyn will face Alistair Overeem, and Ricardo Arona will face Kazushi Sakuraba.

This scenario is very similar to the "Brazil vs. Brazil" scenario laid out in my previous article, except Pride only made one all-Brazil match, and they refrained from making the obvious Japan vs. Japan match-up of Nakamura vs. Sakuraba. Purely from a business standpoint, I think Pride is going to regret the way they have made the brackets for the second round, because they left open the possibility of having three Brazilians in the final four, and they have almost assured their "nightmare scenario" of having zero Japanese fighters in the final four. Nakamura will be a huge underdog against Silva, and Sakuraba will be a huge underdog against Arona.

As for the other two match-ups, Vovchanchyn vs. Overeem is a fight that Vovchanchyn will be favored to win, but Overeem should not be underestimated by anyone (as Vitor Belfort found out). Pride has put the tallest fighter in the tournament up against the shortest, as Overeem will have an eight-inch height advantage in this fight.

In my previous article on this subject, Nogueira vs. Shogun is the one match-up that was in all three of the "top three scenarios that make the most sense from a business standpoint." This match simply had to happen, and the style match-up has "Potential Fight of the Year" written all over it. Nogueira is a master of the ground game with his Jiu-Jitsu skills, but is also very good at stand-up striking. Shogun is a master at striking with his Muay Thai skills, but also knows what he is doing on the ground. One could easily envision Nogueira winning this fight by submission, or Shogun winning by knockout, or either fighter winning a very close judge's decision.

Labels: Video Games

posted by Ivan Trembow at 7:20 PM

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Television--- If you tuned into last night's episode of The Apprentice expecting to see the season finale, you were undoubtedly disappointed to find that NBC pulled the ultimate bait and switch. The network advertised all week long that this episode would feature "the final showdown" between the final two contestants, Kendra and Tana. Right up until the end, it seemed as though that would be the case.

The entire final task played out, the final two contestants had their say in the boardroom, the choice of who should be the winner was painfully obvious to the youngest children in the viewing audience, and it appeared that it was just a matter of moments before the "boardroom" would fall back as it did in the first season finale, revealing that the final boardroom was actually in front of a live studio audience and not in Trump Tower, and Trump would utter the words, "You're hired."

Then something strange happened. After the contestants were asked to leave so that Trump could get the "opinions" of the go-along-to-get-along George and Carolyn, the "Executive Producer" credits appeared on the screen, along with dramatic music and a fade to black. It was 9:54 PM, and the show was over. A commercial aired that said, "Stay tuned for scenes from next week's episode!" The Apprentice-related programming on next week's schedule at 9:00 PM is not an Apprentice reunion show of any kind, it's the real "season finale" that was advertised for this week. Talk about a bait and switch.

Besides the obvious factor of hurting the goodwill you've built up with the audience, next week's episode of The Apprentice may very well be the most anti-climactic season finale in the history of reality television. The way Kendra and Tana performed on the final task, the way the show's editors put a spotlight on Tana's numerous screw-ups, and the way everyone involved seemed to take notice of Tana's many screw-ups all combine to make it extremely obvious that Kendra is going to win. Much like the final three of this season where everyone knew Craig was getting fired, the right thing to do in this case was to make the final elimination itself similarly brief and to the point, not stretch it out to an entire hour.

There is going to be an hour-long boardroom next week where everyone knows damn well going into it who the winner is going to be. Trump & Co. are going to go through the motions, pretending that they don't know who they have chosen, just as they did in the first and second season finales, only in the first two seasons it wasn't this obvious. That's not just bait and switch, that's bad television. Mark Burnett himself is no genius, as his record includes two hit shows (Survivor and The Apprentice) and two absolute flops (The Restaurant and The Contender). Whoever decided at NBC or Mark Burnett Productions to format the final few episodes of this season in this manner should be fired.

As for what did air in this week's episode, it was clear that Tana couldn't handle the pressure while Kendra was more than prepared for it. Kendra inherited a bad sponsorship situation, where EA Sports was contractually set to be the only video game company with advertising on the main floor, and yet you also had Sony as a sponsor that had to be pleased. Kendra made sure that the basement was transformed overnight from a grungy wasteland to a spiffy-looking PlayStation destination, making the Sony representative's attitude go from annoyed and snippy to jubilant and pleasantly surprised.

On the other hand, Tana bungled just about everything from beginning to end in her "New York City 2012 Olympics Promotion" event. She was given three teammates of "questionable skill," just as Kendra was, but instead of embracing them and trying to get the most out of them as Kendra did, Tana immediately wanted to distance herself from the task, establishing from the get-go that any screw-ups were certainly not her fault.

It's one thing to think that in your mind, it's another thing to be as openly disrespectful of your employees in the way that Tana was. To actually refer to your employees as "The Three Stooges" to Carolyn shows not only a lack of professionalism, but a complete obliviousness of what professionalism is. It only got worse as Tana repeatedly made statements to sponsors, event coordinators, and executives on the floor of the event as it was taking place like, "Oh, that's a bad idea, I bet that came from Chris" and "Did you see how she's trying to tell the boss what to do? I just want to punch somebody in the face!"

In the case of Chris and clearing the track so the athletes could warm up, Chris actually got it right and Tana got it wrong, as Tana found out moments after openly disparaging Chris. But let's say it was a case where an employee screws something up and the boss has to come in and fix it, in front of key corporate partners or customers. You would ideally want to portray your employees in the best light possible, to give the appearance that you're running a smooth-sailing ship even if you're not, to make others look better in front of key partners so that your operation as a whole looks better.

It was clear from the very beginning that none of those things mattered to Tana. The most important thing to her was that whenever there was a screw-up, she made sure that everyone within a half-mile radius knew that it was not her fault, that she had nothing to do with it, that she was stuck with incompetent employees. She later said in the boardroom, "I didn't get to pick my employees, you know!" as if any new president of a company gets to choose whether they inherit great employees or whether they inherit incompetent employees.

Tana's three employees weren't the best you could get, but neither were Kendra's, and Kendra got the most out of them and actually bonded with them throughout the course of the task. While Kendra was hugging her teammates after the task was over and telling everyone how proud she was of them as several of them got teary-eyed , Tana actually said to the camera something to the effect of, "I'm going to let them go ahead and leave first because that's what a boss should do. They need to leave first so that they can feel like the little employees and I can feel like the boss." Apparently she wasn't kidding, as she actually crept up like a stalker to the exit door and made sure that she didn't start to approach her limo until her employees had pulled away in their own vehicles.

The nature of the relationship between Tana and her teammates was established very clearly on the morning of the event, when Tana tried to get everyone up early and went about it the wrong way. There's a way to do something like that without making people feel like they're smaller than you or inferior, but Tana said things like, "If you're not out of your room in five minutes and ready to go, the boss is going to be very grumpy all day long!" That's something you say to a five-year-old child who is on pace to be late for school; it's not something you say to employees who you want to work for you and have good morale.

One of the biggest screw-ups of the day for Tana's task was the horrible brochures that were printed up by Kristen and were almost handed out to all of the athletes. If you'll recall, Kristen tried to approach Tana to ask something about the brochures after she was put in charge of them, and Tana interrupted her with the response, "I don't want to hear about that, I'm doing bigger things here!" Kristen left the room feeling insulted and dejected, and after she left Tana actually whispered to the camera, "Get out, get out, I want her out of the room!"

The most hilarious screw-ups in Apprentice history involved Tana's handling of New York Governor George Pataki. As with any event where you've got a big-time VIP coming, especially a politician, you need to have it printed out line-by-line what that VIP is supposed to do during the day. One of Governor Pataki's assistants tried to explain this nicely to Tana, at which point she again deflected blame, saying that the printing department hadn't printed out the Governor's itinerary yet and it would "be done when it's ready."

Later, when Governor Pataki's assistant told Tana that the governor had arrived and needed to know what the event coordinators wanted him to be doing, Tana again said that the print-out with that information wasn't ready yet and it would be ready when it's ready. When the increasingly frustrated assistant said that the governor needs to know what he should be doing in the meantime, jaws across the country dropped when Tana actually said (I kid you not), "Oh, do you want me to have some coffee or doughnuts sent to him?" That's the kind of comment that could get you fired if you are the current president of a real company, much less a reality show contestant trying to become the president of a company.

Even more time passed with Governor Pataki just wandering around, without any word from Tana of what the event coordinators wanted him to be doing or where they wanted him to be going. When the governor's assistant approached Tana again and this said in a panicked voice, "The governor's just wandering around because he hasn't been told what he's supposed to be doing," Tana's response was, "That's okay!" When the exasperated assistant said, "No it's not," Tana again deflected blame and sarcastically snapped at him, "Oh, I'm sorry, what exactly can I do about that right now?"

I couldn't believe what I was seeing, and you better believe that Donald Trump would run off to Las Vegas and elope with Mark Cuban before he would ever hire someone with that kind of behavior to run one of his companies. With Tana turning in the worst performance in the history of Apprentice final tasks, all Kendra had to do in order to emerge as the clear winner was put in a semi-competent performance, and she did much more than that.

It was amazing to see Tana reveal all of her character flaws and crack under pressure because she performed so well for so many weeks during the course of the season... but all of those performances were with Kendra as a teammate. It wasn't clear for most of the season who the driving force was behind the successful duo of Kendra and Tana.

Sometimes it takes a successful duo being separated to reveal that one of them is largely incompetent when left to run the ship by themselves. It was definitely a Vince Russo and Vince McMahon situation, as Russo was the lead writer of WWE Raw during some of the best years in WWE's history with McMahon overseeing and editing his work, and then Russo failed spectacularly in everything he ever tried to do without McMahon in his years as a writer in WCW and TNA. The same scenario played out on this season of The Apprentice, as Kendra stepped up as even more of a star after being separated from Tana, while Tana fell apart in every way imaginable.

Labels: Television (Non-MMA)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 6:09 PM

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Video Games and Television--- There are two big events on television tonight, and it just so happens that they are both airing at the same time. The next-generation Xbox system will be unveiled on MTV in a half-hour special from 9:30 PM to 10:00 PM Eastern Time, while the season finale of The Apprentice airs on NBC from 9:00 PM to 10:00 PM Eastern Time. If you have a TIVO, you already know that there is a way around this (and if you don't have a TIVO, shame on you!). The Xbox special re-airs on MTV at 1:30 AM Eastern Time, so if you want to watch both shows you can just watch The Apprentice live and watch (or tape) the replay of the Xbox unveiling.

I have previously written about who I think will be the winner on The Apprentice (in a word: Kendra). After the three-hour death march of a season finale that The Apprentice offered in its second season and the ensuing backlash about it being too long, NBC has over-reacted this year by making the season finale only one hour. I agree that three hours was too long, but I believe just as strongly that one hour is too short.

There is a logical reason for this happening, though. NBC wants to have the heavily-watched season finale of The Apprentice lead into the season finale of ER because ER needs all the help it can get at this point. After being untouchable in the ratings for almost ten years in the 10:00 PM timeslot, the mighty has finally fallen this year as CBS' Without a Trace has consistently beaten ER in the ratings. Last week, for example, Without a Trace drew a 12.3 rating compared to the 10.5 rating drawn by ER, something that was just unthinkable as recently as one year ago. Giving ER a strong lead-in like The Apprentice season finale is simply NBC's response to this problem on this particular week, and I don't think they're all that concerned about whether ot not it will hurt the quality of The Apprentice season finale

As for the next-generation Xbox unveiling, Microsoft should make a mental note that goes something like this: "Do not invite dozens of celebrities to your gaming system's premiere party and expect them to honor the non-disclosure agreements that they sign." Pictures from the unveiling have already leaked out on numerous web sites, along with the fact that the official name for the system is "Xbox 360" and the official launch date is November of this year. The mysterious grass-roots marketing web site, OurColony.net, has been counting down for weeks to 9:30 PM Eastern Time tonight. What will happen when the countdown reaches zero? I don't know, but it will likely involve a continuation of the "Colony" posters being plastered all over major metropolitan areas throughout America.

Labels: Television (Non-MMA), Video Games

posted by Ivan Trembow at 4:09 PM

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Assorted Topics--- Sometimes there are lots of small articles to write on any given day instead of one big article, which leads us to the newest feature on Ivan's Blog--- The "Assorted Topics" posts, which will be recurring whenever it's warranted. These posts aren't about any single topic and are instead a collection of smaller articles about whatever is relevant or newsworthy at the time.

Television: Chappelle Checks Into Mental Hospital
As a follow-up to my previous post about the status of Dave Chappelle, Entertainment Weekly and the Associated Press are now reporting that Chappelle has checked himself into a psychiatric hospital in South Africa. Entertainment Weekly went so far as to say that it was "unlikely" that Chappelle's Show would ever return for a third season on Comedy Central. Following the publication of the Entertainment Weekly and AP stories, other news outlets have picked up the story and added details along the way.

After months of problems on the set, Chappelle reportedly flew from Florida to South Africa on Thursday, April 28 to check himself into a mental hospital in the city of Cape Cod, and he has not been seen or heard from since then. Comedy Central spokesperson Tony Fox told the Associated Press, "We don't know where he is. We've heard about South Africa. We don't know... we haven't talked to Dave." At this point, about four episodes' worth of sketches for the third season have been filmed, but none of the "introducing the sketches to a live audience" segments with Chappelle have been filmed.

Also, one of Chappelle's friends was quoted in Newsweek saying, "Everyone knows Dave likes to have fun. I wouldn't say it's out of control... but at some point that has to affect you if you've got a regular gig." It should be noted that there's a big difference between going to drug rehab and going to a mental hospital. Sad as it is, Hollywood stars go in and out of drug rehab all the time, but it's not every day that you see someone checking themselves into a mental hospital.

Television: Suspicions about American Idol's Carrie and Anthony Semi-Confirmed
First of all, I am fully aware that writing about American Idol has the affect of instantly making one considerably less cool, but I can't help myself in this case. I didn't want to say anything before now because I thought I was just imagining things, but it has appeared to me for several weeks that American Idol's country-singing beauty Carrie Underwood was more "friendly" with fellow contestant Anthony Federov than the normal level of "friendliness" between Idol contestants. There were lots of little things on the show that would indicate anything from a mutual crush to a full-blown fling between the two of them, such as the way Carrie would embrace Anthony with tears of joy running down her face when he would barely escape elimination as part of the bottom two on multiple occasions. I wouldn't think anything of it if their relationwhip were out in the open, but it seemed like I was the only person in America to notice, as I didn't see it written anywhere else.

However, last night's results show (which drew a whopping 14.9 rating) stands as pretty strong evidence of something going on between the two of them. The two held hands briefly while sitting on the couch, they glanced at each other uncomfortably when it was announced that the final three would be returning to their hometown for the next week (meaning they would be separated for the next week), and Carrie was flat-out sobbing when Anthony got eliminated. She has never reacted so strongly to any other contestant being eliminated, and at one point she actually mouthed the words "I love you" to Anthony as he was singing his horribly over-done farewell song. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to come to the conclusion that there is something going on between the two of them. Still, maybe I'm just paranoid and making too much of things... you know, like the Ivan's Blog "How Drunk and/or High is Paula Abdul Meter"...

Mixed Martial Arts: First Word on Coaches for Ultimate Fighter Season Two
MMAWeekly has broken the news that Matt Hughes is being strongly considered as one of the two coaches on the second season of The Ultimate Figther on Spike TV. According to UFC president Dana White on today's edition of MMAWeekly Radio, the only thing potentially stopping Hughes from being one of the coaches is family commitments, as being on the show would require being away from home for about two months straight. As for the other team's coach, MMAWeekly is reporting that it is likely to be either Frank Trigg, Evan Tanner, or Rich Franklin.

It's possible that Matt Hughes is planning to move up to middleweight to fight the winner of the June 4th Tanner vs. Franklin bout, but that's not necessarily the case. I think a lot of people have had the mindset that you have to be building up to a UFC fight between the two coaches on pay-per-view shortly after the season finale (as with Couture vs. Liddell in season one), but that's simply not true. You don't necessarily have to promote, "Coach A and Coach B are going to be fighting each other in the UFC after this season is over." You could just as easily promote, "Coach A is going to be fighting someone in the UFC after this season, and Coach B is going to be fighting someone in the UFC after this season."

For example, let's say the two coaches are Matt Hughes, and the winner of the upcoming Tanner-Franklin fight. You could run commercials throughout the entire season hyping the Tanner-Franklin winner going against number one contender Matt Lindland, and don't tell me that the words "Olympic Silver Medalist" constantly running in commercials wouldn't give the UFC a big boost in mainstream credibility. In the same commercials, you could hype Hughes' next title defense against whoever his next opponent would be. Logic would dictate that it could be Karo Parisyan if he wins his bout at UFC 53, or Nick Diaz if he wins his bout at UFC 53. This scenario makes just as much sense from a marketing standpoint, without having to artificially make sure that the coaches on every season of The Ultimate Fighter have a fight scheduled between the two of them.

Labels: Television (Non-MMA)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 3:56 PM

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In-House Notes--- It has taken a while, but I have finally completed the assortment of site tweaks and upgrades that I have been working on. This post contains a full summary of all the changes, many of which were just made in the past day or so.

Changes Made in the Past Week:

-Ivan's Blog is now accessible at two different URLs. MasterGamer.com will continue to take you to the main page of Ivan's Blog, but now IvansBlog.com will also work. This should make the site's URL easier to remember for newer visitors who weren't around when "Master Gamer" existed as a video game web site. All of the old Master Gamer content from before 2002 will continue to be available at www.mastergamer.com/index2.html.

-The e-mail address ivan@ivansblog.com has been activated, and the old e-mail address (ivan@mastergamer.com) still works, too.

-Each individual post on Ivan's Blog now has its own permanent page, which you can access at any time by clicking where it says "Single Page for This Post" at the bottom of every post. This is very convenient for people who want to send links to friends, or bookmark one particular post in their web browser.

-On the old Master Gamer site, the navigational bar now directs you to the main page of Master Gamer when you click "Main Page." Previously, it would direct you to the main page of Ivan's Blog instead.

Changes Made in the Past Day:

-Ads from Google have been integrated into both Ivan's Blog and Master Gamer.

-At the bottom of every post on Ivan's Blog, there is now a link that lets you e-mail any article to a friend.

-Ivan's Blog now has an XML feed that makes the site viewable on a huge assortment of portable devices like PDAs, cell phones, and just about anything else that can connect to the Internet. Also, if you choose to sign up for the XML feed, you will be notified every time Ivan's Blog is updated. If you'd like to sign up for the Ivan's Blog XML Site Feed, just use the link that is now found at the bottom of every page (or click here).

-A link to the "Ivan's Blog Main Page" has been added to the left-hand column of every single page on Ivan's Blog. Previously, there were no direct links to the main page on Ivan's Blog, so the only way to return to the main page was to manually click your web browser's "Back" button one or more times.

-All of the archive links are now 100% reliable for individual posts, individual months, and everything in between. Previously, a few of the archive links were temporarily offline.

-I will continue to make new posts on the blog about a variety of topics, in addition to all of the MMA-related content that I write in the future for MMAWeekly, which will also be published on Ivan's Blog.

If you have any feedback that you'd like to share about any of the recent changes on Ivan's Blog, please feel free to send me an e-mail. posted by Ivan Trembow at 12:11 PM

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Television--- And the award for the least surprising reality show elimination in the history of television goes to... Craig getting fired on last week's episode of The Apprentice so that the final two could be Kendra and Tana. To use a phrase coined by HBO's Mr. Show, it would have been a "trava-shamockery" if anything else had happened.

As for Kendra vs. Tana, I think Kendra is the clear winner and have thought that for several weeks. There is no "huge strike" against Kendra, whereas Tana will have to overcome the fact that she couldn't even stay up for one full night to complete the Pontiac brochure task, leaving Kendra to do all the work for the team. Kendra did so and single-handedly won that task for her team, on the same episode in which Donald Trump said that if you don't have the mental endurance to work for 24 or 48 hours at a time, you could never run one of his companies.

Plus, ever since the successful duo of Kendra and Tana were separated and put on separate teams, it has been Tana who has fallen apart and shown serious leadership issues while Kendra has remained strong. In any case, if the second season finale taught us anything, it's that no matter what they say on this Thursday's live season finale about "trying to decide right there on the spot who the winner is," the winner was already decided by Trump & Co. sometime between the end of filming and the live season finale date.

Labels: Television (Non-MMA)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 11:08 AM

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Mixed Martial Arts--- Pride's Announcers Have a Bad Night, and Phil Baroni Gets Yet Another Chance

by Ivan Trembow for MMAWeekly.com

Was I the only one scratching my head at the thought that Pride saw fit to sign Phil Baroni to a contract? Even if it's just to fight on the smaller Pride Bushido shows, the fact is that Baroni's MMA record is not much better than Tank Abbott's. And while Tank Abbott was once a PPV draw, Baroni has never shown himself to be a PPV draw. The UFC's pay-per-view buy-rates have always been comparatively weak on the East Coast of the United States, and the UFC's attempts to change that trend using Baroni and his New York roots were never successful.

Of all the former UFC fighters who are no longer in the UFC, this is who Pride decides to sign? Baroni's record in the UFC was three wins and five losses. The man hasn't won a fight in the UFC in almost three years. Looking at Baroni's last four UFC fights, he lost a one-sided decision to Matt Lindland. Then he got grounded-and-pounded into oblivion by Evan Tanner, and decided immediately afterwards that it would be a good idea to start throwing punches at the referee. Then he lost another one-sided fight to Evan Tanner. To cap it all off, Baroni was ultimately choked out by a kid named Pete Sell who has fought a grand total of one fighter with a winning record in his short MMA career. Yup, that seems like someone I'd want to sign if I were in Pride's shoes.

To top it all off, after inexplicably being given a second chance to make it on the big stage, Baroni showed his deep appreciation for and understanding of Asian culture by referring to an Asian fighter as "Pork Fried Rice" during color commentary on the latest Pride broadcast. So not only is he a winning fighter, but he's all class...

Pride's Announcers Have a Bad Night
Pride announcers Mauro Ranallo and Bas Rutten were very critical of many fights during the recent Total Elimination 2005 event, and they have since been surrounded by a firestorm of criticism. I agree with the basic statement of the people who have been saying that Ranallo and Rutten were way too hard on the fighters during the event, but as is often the case, the criticism has gone way overboard.

First off, I should state for the record that I believe Mauro Ranallo and Bas Rutten are normally very good at what they do, and I wouldn't say that they "ruined the event" by any means. But in general, they were way too critical of fights being "boring" and fighters "not bringing it." In some cases, the comments were warranted, like when Kevin Randleman spent the vast majority of his fight gasping for air and doing nothing after he gassed out. In other cases, their comments were downright ridiculous, such as criticizing Igor Vovchanchyn as he was putting on a grappling clinic, dominating Yuki Kondo, and showing the world that he is a now a versatile fighter with a good ground game and not just a one-dimensional stand-up fighter.

In general, I think many of the things that the announcers said were boring were not, in fact, boring. It just seemed like if a fight was going to a judge's decision, that automatically meant it was "a boring fight" to the announcers. I would expect that kind of thinking from a casual MMA fan who doesn't understand the sport, not from two seasoned MMA announcers like Ranallo and Rutten.

There were two comments in particular that I thought were particularly egregious. The first was when Mauro Ranallo said at the end of the Arona-Lister fight, "Let's go to the footage... I won't call them highlights." That is just plain disrespectful to the fighters, and is something that I would expect someone to say if they've never seen an MMA fight before. The fact is that Arona and Lister put on a grappling showcase that was far from the best fight in recent Pride history, but also far from the worst. The fight did indeed have plenty of highlights, it just had its fair share of inactivity as well. It's your job as announcer to draw the viewers' attention away from the inactivity and towards the highlights.

The other comment that I found particularly glaring was Bas Rutten's statement that he's sure Igor Vovchanchyn is going to look at the tape of his fight with Yuki Kondo and be disappointed with his performance. Really? If your criteria is just, "Win by KO or it's disappointing," then I suppose Vovchanchyn would be disappointed, but that's not how MMA works. I'm pretty sure I saw Vovchanchyn dominate the fight, dictate his will on a great ground fighter, show the world how good he is on the ground, and land a good amount of hard ground-and-pound. Despite Rutten saying during the fight that Igor's punches had no power, many of them landed with an audible thud and caused Kondo's head to bounce off the mat. I thought Rutten was way too critical of a fighter who was actually putting on his most impressive performance in a while Again, the fact that the fight went to decision doesn't automatically make it an "un-impressive" victory.

It's very challenging to be an announcer for a sport where a significant percentage of the audience is watching it for the first time and has not yet determined if they like the sport. As an announcer, one has to strike a delicate balance. One side of that balance is saying things like, "The mandate here in Pride is action" in order to point out to new viewers that the fights are normally much more exciting than what they are watching at that moment. The other side of that balance is that if you go too far in criticizing the efforts of the fighters, you're simply undermining the product and making it come off worse to viewers than it otherwise would. Mike Goldberg and Joe Rogan always seem to do an excellent job of finding this delicate balance, and normally Ranallo and Rutten do as well.

Regardless of what was or wasn't "boring," the fact of the matter is that Ranallo and Rutten were not doing their jobs. The job of an announcer is to "sell" the action that is taking place. That doesn't mean being a shameless shill and referring to a lackluster match as an all-time classic, as I would be criticizing that just as much.

The announcers in any sport are supposed to make everything come off better to the viewers than it otherwise would. Announcers can make decent fights come off like good fights, good fights come off like great fights, and great fights come off like all-time classics. They can make a bad fight more bearable and can point out the things in the fight that are good, or try to talk to newer viewers about the technical aspects of what they're seeing. The last thing an announcer should EVER do is make a good fight come off like a bad fight, or disrespect a decent fight as if it's a waste of everyone's time. On this night, Ranallo and Rutten simply failed to do their jobs as they spent far too much time complaining about the fights and not enough time actually calling the fights.

However, as much as I was disappointed in the performances of Ranallo and Rutten at Total Elimination 2005, the criticism of their performances has been taken to an extreme on MMA message boards. Ranallo and Rutten normally do a very good job, and people shouldn't over-react to one bad night. The MMA community has never been accused of running short on hyperbole or overstatement. If someone has one bad night, it seems that a large segment of the MMA population is ready and eager to jump on them and treat them as though they're worthless.

According to this atmosphere of hyperbole, when Chuck Liddell had a very bad night against Randy Couture at UFC 43, Liddell suddenly became a one-dimensional fighter who was "exposed" and was certainly not among the elite fighters in the sport. When Couture had a very bad night against Liddell at UFC 52, suddenly Couture was "done" and had "been exposed." When Matt Lindland had a very bad night against David Terrell, suddenly Lindland was a loser who we shouldn't see in the UFC anymore. When Terrell had a very bad night against Evan Tanner, suddenly Terrell was a loser who we shouldn't see in the UFC anymore.

The list could go on and on for pages. If you make a career out of having bad nights, like Tank Abbott or Phil Baroni, then there's a legitimate problem. But the fact of the matter is that one bad night in MMA is just that--- one bad night, no matter how many people over-react to it.

It's no different for Mauro Ranallo and Bas Rutten at Total Elimination 2005. I feel strongly that they had a very bad night, but having one very bad night does not mean that you should be fired or that you're incompetent. Just as Ranallo and Rutten should have cut the fighters more slack during Total Elimination 2005, the MMA community should cut Ranallo and Rutten more slack.

Labels: Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), Pride Fighting Championships News

posted by Ivan Trembow at 11:32 AM

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Boxing--- If you don't think boxing is all that exciting and typically greet any mention of boxing by saying something like, "Boxing? Why do you watch boxing?" then I have a simple answer for you: Watch the replay of the just-completed match between Diego Corrales and Jose Luis Castillo. It was a thrilling, action-packed fight that was filled with more real human drama than you will see on an entire season of highly-edited, movie-like, crowd-shot-happy "boxing" on NBC's The Contender.

Not only did it beat out the great fight between Erik Morales and Manny Pacquiao earlier this year, but Corrales vs. Castillo was also the best boxing match thus far in 2005 by a wide margin. It was a back-and-forth fight with a lot of changes in momentum, along with a good mixture of strategy (should Corrales box from the outside or take big risks on the inside?) and all-out action. Both men fought through major adversity starting in the fifth round... Castillo with a cut over his left eye and Corrales with a giant hematoma directly under his left eye.

Through nine rounds of action, it was an extremely close fight. Both fighters were in excellent shape from a cardio standpoint and were ready to go three more rounds, but Corrales' eye in particular was swelling badly. Through nine rounds, I had the bout scored 5 rounds to 4 in favor of Castillo. Two of the three judges had Corrales ahead by a small margin, as did two of the three journalists on Showtime's Press Row. With no knockdowns having been scored yet, it was a very close fight that looked like it could easily swing in either direction in the last three rounds.

I don't think anyone, least of all the two fighters, could have expected what would happen next, as the tenth round was one of the most dramatic rounds of boxing you will ever see. Less than 30 seconds into the round, Castillo caught Corrales with a clean hook to the jaw that knocked Corrales down. The swelling around Corrales' left eye seemed to be getting worse, but he wasn't dazed by the knockdown and made it up before the ten-count.

Maybe 30 seconds after the action resumed, Corrales went down again when another punch landed cleanly on his face. He still didn't appear to be particularly dazed and made it up at the count of nine, but he had just gone down twice in a short period of time, and by this point his left eye was swollen almost completely shut. When the action resumed, the referee was watching very closely and was ready to stop the bout if needed, as everyone held their collective breath and waited for what appeared to be the inevitable. Jose Luis Castillo was going to knock out Diego Corrales, and Corrales' only chance was to somehow make it out of the round and hope to recover between rounds.

Instead, Corrales started trading punches with Castillo, and they were exchanging punches just about evenly. Corrales was holding his own and even wobbled Castillo briefly--- not something you'd expect from a fighter who had just been knocked down twice. Just when one started to think, "I can't believe Diego Corrales is still fighting," Corrales landed a huge right hand on Castillo, and Castillo was never the same after that. Castillo was dazed but still throwing punches with his back up against the ropes, until Corrales landed a sensational flurry of punches that reduced Castillo to essentially being out on his feet. Castillo was no longer defending himself and was taking unprotected blows to the head, so referee Tony Weeks had no choice but to jump in and stop the fight, giving Corrales the TKO victory.

As I said, it was one of the most dramatic rounds of boxing you will ever see. Both fighters showed nothing but class after the fight with their mutual respect for one another. The willingness of both fighters to take punishment in order to dish out punishment throughout the fight is the main factor that made this such a great fight, but a big part of the credit also has to go to referee Tony Weeks, who has also been the referee for some K-1 and MMA bouts.

Weeks showed great discretion and seemed to make the right decision on a lot of tough issues, especially in the climactic final rounds of the fight. When Castillo landed two consecutive low blows, Weeks did the right thing in giving Castillo a firm "final warning" before he would take a point away, and he also did the right thing in not taking a point away prematurely. When Corrales spit out his mouth-piece to buy a few precious seconds of time, Weeks did the right thing in warning Corrales the first time and taking a point away from Corrales the second time.

The most important decisions that Tony Weeks got right were the big ones for any ref--- when to stop the fight and when not to stop the fight. When Corrales was knocked down on two separate occasions, Weeks did the right thing by not stopping the fight prematurely, as he instead looked into Corrales' eyes, and accurately determined that he was not particularly dazed and was still able to continue fighting. When Castillo first looked dazed up against the ropes in the tenth round, Weeks did the right thing by staying back, letting the situation develop to see what would happen, and giving Castillo a chance to keep himself in the fight.

When Corrales landed an unanswered barrage of punches to Castillo's head, and it was clear that Castillo was out on his feet with his back up against the ropes, Weeks did the right thing and stopped the fight. I don't want to hear from even the most die-hard fan of Castillo that the fight was stopped too soon, because Corrales landed a half-dozen uncontested punches on Castillo's face at a point when Castillo was no longer defending himself and had his eyes rolled back in his head. Anyone who thinks that a fight should be allowed to continue under those circumstances--- with a fighter against the ropes, out on his feet, not defending himself, and taking uncontested blows to the head--- needs to watch the documentary "Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story" and then let me know if you still feel the same way.

Boxing is boxing, and MMA is MMA. In general, I find MMA to be a far more exciting sport than boxing. But it would be a big mistake for anyone to take that to mean that boxing doesn't also have its fair share of extremely exciting, dramatic, and memorable fights. Corrales vs. Castillo stands as proof of that.

Labels: Boxing

posted by Ivan Trembow at 1:09 AM

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Boxing--- Friday night's "ShoBox: The New Generation" card on Showtime was another case study in why ShoBox often produces some of the best boxing matches of any particular month. ShoBox is billed as the place where young prospects get matched up with the toughest opponents of their careers, and it lives up to that billing almost every single time. Look at the card that just took place. Where else are you going to see four legitimate, undefeated junior welterweights putting their perfect records on the line against each other?

The explosiveness of the main event included a double knockdown with simultaneous right hooks to the jaw, which is the first time I can remember seeing that in boxing... ever. Sechew Powell clearly got the better of the double knockdown and proceeded to knock out his opponent just seconds after they got back to their feet.

Just as impressive as Powell's main event victory was the opening match victory by Yuri Foreman, who showed incredible poise and accuracy en route to a perfect shut-out decision win (which is when every single judge gives every single round to one particular fighter, and deservedly so).

Tonight is the highly anticipated pay-per-view showdown between Jose Luis Castillo and Diego Corrales, which is free if you have a subscription to Showtime. Castillo seemed like a just plain dirty fighter in his March bout with Julio Diaz, relying on punches behind the head and other dirty tactics even when he didn't really need to. I rooted for Corrales in his fights with Joel Casamayor and Acelino Freitas due to his smooth, smart in-ring style and his understated, humble personality, and I'll certainly be rooting for him against Castillo.

Labels: Boxing

posted by Ivan Trembow at 11:02 AM

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Television--- After previously being delayed on two separate occasions, the third season of Chappelle's Show has been delayed indefinitely and had its production halted by Comedy Central. It has now been over a year since a new episode of Chappelle's Show aired on Comedy Central. The drop-off in productivity from Chappelle seems to be directly or indirectly tied to Chappelle getting his gigantic new contract from Comedy Central last year, with a huge raise to continue the series and a huge raise in DVD royalties (the contract's total value was estimated at $50 million).

The date of the show's third season premiere was originally scheduled for late 2004, and the first official reason given for its delay was that Chappelle and the other writers simply got a late start on writing the third season. The season premiere was re-scheduled for February 2005 and then delayed again, this time because Chappelle had supposedly fallen ill with "the flu." Around that same time, a deal for Chappelle to author (or co-author) an autobiography also fell apart, as he became harder and harder to reach.

The latest scheduled season premiere date for one of the funniest shows on television was May 31, and now that has been delayed indefinitely with no reason given by Comedy Central. However, sources have told the TV industry trade publication Variety that the decision was prompted by "the need for Dave Chappelle to seek treatment for unspecified medical issues." Make no mistake about it: That is Hollywood-speak for "the need for Dave Chappelle to go to drug rehab."

While filming for several episodes of the third season has already been completed, E Online reports that Chappelle had a tendency during production of the third season to go missing for days or even weeks at a time, with no explanation for his long absences. Other entertainment news web sites have recounted even more alarming stories of Chappelle's behavior being extremely erratic, with the consistent theme that he is badly in need of drug rehab. I am not going to go into detail, but the stories have been very alarming for anyone who cares about Chappelle's well-being.

Comedy Central's decision to indefinitely pull the plug on the second season would seem to be the network's way of saying to Chappelle, "Go to rehab or there's no more show," and given the huge success of the show, that is not a decision Comedy Central would make unless the network felt it had absolutely no other alternative.

The DVD release of "Chappelle's Show: Season Two" had previously been delayed from February until May 24 in order to help promote the new season of Chappelle's Show that was scheduled to start airing a week later. With no season premiere date in sight, DVD distributor Paramount has decided to stop waiting for the third season premiere and will release the second season DVD as scheduled on May 24.

Success and money change everyone in different ways. We should all hope that whatever Dave Chappelle is going through right now in battling his personal demons, hopefully Chappelle's Show will come out of it alive and well. More importantly, we should all hope that Dave Chappelle himself will come of this alive and well.

Labels: Television (Non-MMA)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 5:35 PM

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Video Games--- As a new feature on Ivan's Blog that will be recurring once every week or two, I'm going to re-posting some old gems from Master Gamer on the new site. For any new visitors to this site who don't already know, Master Gamer was a video game web site that I ran from 1997 to 2002. In addition to praising the games that deserved praise, I was never shy about brutally ripping into the games that deserved to be brutally ripped into.

One example of this would be Carmageddon 64 for the Nintendo 64, which may very well be among the top five worst games of all time. It's worth pointing out in retrospect that Titus' reputation for releasing horrible, buggy, unfinished games would continue to plague the company until consumers simply stopped buying its games and the company finally went out of business in 2004. Carmageddon 64 may have been the low point in Titus' history, and that's really saying something.

Carmadeddon 64 Review
Originally Published in December 1999 on Master Gamer

The kings of crap at Titus have struck again. Titus, Interplay, and several other companies that want to spread the blame as thinly as possible have turned a great PC game into one of the worst Nintendo 64 games ever created. I can't begin to imagine the mental pain that the developers of this game must feel when they wake up in the morning and look themselves in the mirror knowing that they dedicated over three years of their lives to creating Carmageddon 64.

There are three modes of gameplay in Carmageddon 64, none of which are the slightest bit of fun. You can partake in your basic "kill all of the other cars" scenario, you can race to reach a bunch of checkpoints (which the instruction manual actually refers to as "Boring!"), and you can kill all of the zombies in a level. The original Carmageddon was a very gory game with humans and red blood, not the zombies and green blood of Carmageddon 64. The zombies in this game run in slow motion and sometimes get stuck in walls, making them impossible to hit.

The graphics resemble a first-generation Super Nintendo game, and a bad one at that. Actually, no SNES game ever looked this blurry and all-around ugly. Red cars look just like bombs from a distance, and there's no way to tell what it is that you're approaching until you're just about ready to collide with it. The draw-in that takes place in the backgrounds is absolutely ridiculous. You can easily find specific spots on the levels where it happens, causing background objects to appear and disappear at your will. One of these background objects is a billboard with a clown's face on it that says, "FUN." Is that supposed to be funny?

You've just got to love the creative character names and designs, such as "Batmad" (instead of Batman) with his neon pink, checkered car. It also seems that the developers added a little mini-game to the character select screen, which sometimes requires you to press the A button up to four times before the game finally realizes that you're trying to select a character.

The inconsistency of the entire game can be summarized by the damage model. In theory, you have to worry about your health bar running out if you take too much damage. In execution, you don't have to worry about that because you can replenish your health at any time with the money you earn from crashing into other cars and zombies. Repairing your car costs a couple hundred dollars, and it's not uncommon to have $50,000 or even $100,000 in your pocket. This begs the question: Why have a health meter at all if you can infinitely replenish it?

The water is also very inconsitent. Sometimes crashing into the water does nothing; you just press the L button to "recover" and go merrily on your way. Sometimes crashing into the water will cause you to eventually drown to death if you're out of "recover credits," but not until you've spent several minutes trying to move around in the darkness, occasionally trying to go towards the light of what appears to be land in the distance. And of course, sometimes water will inexplicably make your car explode.

There are three things that you would have to accomplish in order to have any fun with Carmageddon 64, and you should consider yourself very lucky if you're able to do any two of these things at once.

1. See where you're going
2. Control where you're going
3. Know where you're going

You can't see where you're going because the developers of this game decided to put a giant status bar on the worst possible spot on the screen. The only way to get past this is to switch to first-person mode, which is very disorienting in its own right. Also, you're pretty much screwed if you're Player 2 in a two-player game. If Player 1 changes his or her camera angle, yours will sometimes change against your will, but only after a delayed reaction.

You can't control where you're going because any attempt to move left or right at a high speed will cause your car to skid out of control. Therefore, the only way to smash into another car is to face off with it head-on, then back up and smash into it again, and repeat this process until you eventually lunge for the power button.

Finally, you can't know where you're going in the level because all of the textures and level designs are as generic as can be, making it hard to distinguish one area from another. And if you happen to be on one of the darker levels, you can just forget about knowing where you're going right from the get-go. Some of the levels are so dark that your car will be completely surrounded by blackness at times. Somebody give those artists a raise!

Imagine for a moment that you're in your house walking towards your dog to give it a dog biscuit. In one hand you've got the dog biscuit and in the other hand you have a Twizzler that you're planning to eat. Somehow as you're walking along, you're not paying attention to which object is in which hand, and you accidentally take a bite of the dog biscuit. This would be horribly unpleasant, but still would cause you more pleasure than Carmageddon 64 at its best. Both experiences will leave a bad taste in your mouth for days to come.

Carmageddon 64's inhuman sucktitude is made all the more inexcusible by the fact that the PC version of Carmageddon is actually a very good game. You might want to laugh at Carmageddon 64 and mock it with your friends for a while, but it won't be long until one of them asks, "Can we play something else?"

Labels: Video Games

posted by Ivan Trembow at 3:50 PM

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Mixed Martial Arts--- Fighter Salaries for UFC 52 and UFC Ultimate Finale
by Ivan Trembow
Originally Published on MMAWeekly

The UFC held two events in a seven-day span from April 9th to April 16th, and paid out nearly $900,000 to fighters for the two events. In general, pay was up slightly across the board and there was less disparity between the top of the pay scale and the bottom. More fighters than ever made five-figure salaries, and that doesn't even count the three winners of "The Ultimate Fighter" and their new six-figure contracts.

The following is a full listing of the salaries for the two events, followed by my analysis of the salaries.

UFC Ultimate Finale Fighter Salaries

-Ken Shamrock: $230,000 ($230,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $0)

-Rich Franklin: $14,000 ($7,000 for fighting; $7,000 win bonus)

-Forrest Griffin: $10,000 ($5,000 for fighting; $5,000 win bonus)

-Diego Sanchez: $10,000 ($5,000 for fighting; $5,000 win bonus)

-Nate Quarry: $10,000 ($5,000 for fighting; $5,000 win bonus)

-Josh Koscheck: $10,000 ($5,000 for fighting; $5,000 win bonus)

-Chris Leben: $10,000 ($5,000 for fighting; $5,000 win bonus)

-Mike Swick: $10,000 ($5,000 for fighting; $5,000 win bonus)

-Sam Hoger: $10,000 ($5,000 for fighting; $5,000 win bonus)

-Alex Karalexis: $10,000 ($5,000 for fighting; $5,000 win bonus)

-Stephan Bonnar: $5,000 ($5,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $5,000)

-Kenny Florian: $5,000 ($5,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $5,000)

-Lodune Sincaid: $5,000 ($5,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $5,000)

-Alex Schoenauer: $5,000 ($5,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $5,000)

-Josh Rafferty: $5,000 ($5,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $5,000)

-Bobby Southworth: $5,000 ($5,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $5,000)

-Chris Sanford: $5,000 ($5,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $5,000)

-Jason Thacker: $5,000 ($5,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $5,000)

Total Fighter Payroll: $364,000

My Commentary & Analysis:

-Ken Shamrock's paycheck of $230,000 was the single biggest paycheck in UFC history, narrowly beating out the $225,000 paycheck that Randy Couture received for his fight at UFC 49. There's no doubt that Shamrock deserves to be in the top tier of the UFC pay scale, given that he is one of the top three most recognizable names and biggest draws in the UFC (along with Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell).

As for why Shamrock's pay was increased from the amount of $170,000 that he received for beating Kimo at UFC 48 to the new amount of $230,000, it likely had something to do with his fight being on free television instead of pay-per-view. A very select few UFC fighters have it built into their contracts that they get a certain amount of bonus money if they main-event a pay-per-view that surpasses a certain number of PPV buys. With Shamrock's fight being on free television, that eliminated the possibility of a PPV bonus and thus warranted a pay increase. Unfortunately for Shamrock, losing as decisively as Shamrock lost to Rich Franklin does hurt a fighter's future earnings potential, so it's a safe bet that Shamrock won't be making anywhere near $230,000 for his next UFC fight (assuming he has one).

For anyone who looks at the lack of a win bonus as evidence that the Franklin-Shamrock fight must have been worked, you should know that a small or non-existent win bonus is not all that unusual in the UFC and certainly doesn't mean that a fight was worked. Though the norm is for fighters to have the same amount of "win money" as they do "show money" for any particular fight, there are plenty of fighters who have previously fight in the UFC with "win money" that was a fraction of their "show money," or in some cases with no "win money" at all in their contracts. Some of these fighters have included Ken Shamrock in previous fights, Carlos Newton, Kimo, Frank Mir, Pedro Rizzo, Tank Abbott, and Vitor Belfort.

People who want to believe that Shamrock-Franklin was worked are always going to believe it was worked in the face of all logic and evidence. In addition to what I previously wrote on the subject, the Wrestling Observer's Dave Meltzer has also chimed in on the subject. Meltzer is usually the first to know when there are suspicious circumstances surrounding a fight, as he was with Ogawa vs. Leko last year in Pride. When asked if he personally believes or has heard anything to suggest that Shamrock-Franklin was a work, Meltzer wrote on his web site, "Nobody has given me any evidence to suggest it, and there was nothing in the match that makes me believe it."

-If Rich Franklin's salary for the finale of The Ultimate Fighter seems low, it's because Franklin is still honoring his previous UFC contract. The fight with Shamrock was the second fight on a three-fight contract that Franklin signed with the UFC before his fight with Jorge Rivera last October. There is still one more fight on that contract, and Franklin now has an additional five-fight contract that goes into effect after that. In total, Franklin is under contract for six more UFC fights, and in those fights he is definitely going to be making more than $7,000 to fight and $7,000 more to win. Franklin's next fight will be at UFC 53 against UFC Middleweight Champion Evan Tanner, who Franklin previously defeated in his UFC debut back in 2003.

-For all of the other fighters on the April 9th card, the UFC chose to go with a flat-rate contract for all of them. All 16 of the fighters from the reality show were signed to one-fight contracts that paid them $5,000 to fight and $5,000 more to win. For a fighter making his UFC debut, that is significantly more than the normal amount of $2,000 or $3,000 to fight and an additional $2,000 or $3,000 to win. It's likely that this was done as a way of saying "thank you" to the reality show contestants for making the show such a big success, and to make sure that all of them made at least $5,000.

During the filming of the reality show last October and November, fighters were only paid if they won a fight by KO, TKO, or submission, in which case they would be paid $5,000. So, the only fighters that earned money in the filming of the reality show itself were Diego Sanchez ($10,000); Forrest Griffin ($10,000); Stephan Bonnar ($5,000); Kenny Florian ($5,000); and Bobby Southworth ($5,000).

For their participation in the April 9th card, the following fighters were victorious and thus earned $10,000: Forrest Griffin, Diego Sanchez, Nate Quarry, Josh Koscheck, Chris Leben, Mike Swick, Sam Hoger, and Alex Karalexis. The following fighters lost on April 9th and thus earned $5,000: Stephan Bonnar, Kenny Florian, Lodune Sincaid, Alex Schoenauer, Josh Rafferty, Bobby Southworth, Chris Sanford, and Jason Thacker.

As previously detailed on MMAWeekly, each of the three big winners from the reality show (Diego Sanchez, Forrest Griffin, and Stephan Bonnar) have been given UFC contracts that will pay each fighter $350,000 over three years. That's not $350,000 per fight or even $350,000 per year; it's $350,000 spread out over the life-span of the three-year contract. The fights on the season finale of The Ultimate Fighter were in addition to those three-year contracts.


UFC 52 Fighter Salaries

-Randy Couture: $150,000 ($150,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $75,000)

-Chuck Liddell: $140,000 ($70,000 for fighting; $70,000 win bonus)

-Matt Hughes: $110,000 ($55,000 for fighting; $55,000 win bonus)

-Matt Lindland: $20,000 ($10,000 for fighting; $10,000 win bonus)

-Renato "Babalu" Sobral: $20,000 ($10,000 for fighting; $10,000 win bonus)

-Georges St. Pierre: $18,000 ($9,000 for fighting; $9,000 win bonus)

-Frank Trigg: $14,000 ($14,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $14,000)

-Patrick Cote: $10,000 ($10,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $10,000)

-Mike Van Arsdale: $10,000 ($5,000 for fighting; $5,000 win bonus)

-Ivan Salaverry: $8,000 ($4,000 for fighting; $4,000 win bonus)

-Joe Riggs: $4,000 ($4,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $4,000)

-Travis Lutter: $4,000 ($4,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $4,000)

-Joe Doerksen: $4,000 ($2,000 for fighting; $2,000 win bonus)

-Travis Wiuff: $3,000 ($3,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $3,000)

-John Marsh: $2,500 ($2,500 for fighting; win bonus would have been $2,500)

-Jason Miller: $2,000 ($2,000 for fighting; win bonus would have been $2,000)

Total Fighter Payroll: $519,500

My Commentary and Analysis:

-This was the second fight on Randy Couture's contract that paid him $150,000 to fight and $75,000 more to win. The difference is that last time Couture won the fight and collected the win bonus, while this time Couture got knocked out for the first time in his MMA career. With the mainstream recognition that Couture gained from The Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV, he will undoubtedly continue to be one of the highest-paid fighters in the UFC. A rubber match with Chuck Liddell to complete the trilogy would appear to be looming in the future for Couture, whose UFC record fell to 10-4 with the loss.

-One of the reasons that Chuck Liddell is so popular with fans is because he's an honest, no-BS kind of guy. He'll fight anybody and he's a man of his word, and the fans know that. Never has this been more evident than in looking at Liddell's contract status. Liddell is one of the highest-paid fighters in the UFC, but would still appear to be under-paid. Randy Couture can now be added to the list of Chuck Liddell's KO victims, and nothing is better at demonstrating what kind of person Liddell is than comparing him to one of his previous KO victims: Tito Ortiz.

When Chuck Liddell was the clear-cut #1 contender for Ortiz' Light-Heavyweight Title back in 2003, Ortiz refused to take the fight unless he got a huge raise. Ortiz was the highest-paid fighter in the UFC at the time in terms of show money plus win money. In addition, Ortiz was only two fights into a six-fight contract that paid him $80,000 for every fight and an additional $80,000 for every win. Nonetheless, Ortiz refused to honor his contract, held out, and ended up strong-arming his way to a new salary of $125,000 for every fight and $50,000 more for every win.

Now, contrast that to Chuck Liddell and how important he clearly thinks it is to be a man of his word and honor his contracts. Under the terms of a multi-fight contract that pays him slightly more with each passing fight, Liddell earned a comparatively small amount of $50,000 to fight and $50,000 more to win at UFC 47, where he knocked out Ortiz. No hold-out. Then, Liddell made $60,000 to fight and $60,000 more to win at UFC 49, where he knocked out Vernon "Tiger" White. Still no hold-out. Most recently, Liddell made $70,000 to fight and $70,000 more to win at UFC 52, where he knocked out Randy Couture.

With a UFC record of 10-2 and the star power that comes from being on a smash hit television show, Chuck Liddell deserves to be getting paid more than his current salary. But unlike Ortiz, Liddell would prefer to be a man of his word and honor his contract, as opposed to holding the company hostage for more money. There's something admirable about that. This only reinforces the fact that Liddell is a straight-forward, stand-up kind of guy, and that's a big part of the reason why the fans like him as much as they do.

-Matt Hughes has had the same UFC contract for a very long time: $55,000 to fight and $55,000 more to win. Hughes is not a PPV draw anywhere near the level of Shamrock, Couture, or Liddell. However, it's hard to argue with paying him such a large amount of money given the fact that his UFC record is an amazing 11-2, and many of those wins have come against some of the top fighters in the sport. With the possible exception of Randy Couture, no one in UFC history has been a more dominant champion over a period of years than Matt Hughes. Paying him anything less than his current salary would be an insult to his standing in the sport, but at the same time, paying him anything more than his current salary might be too much given his lack of proven PPV drawing power. Hughes' across-the-ring slam of Frank Trigg got the biggest pop of the night from the live crowd at UFC 52, and in general the crowd's strong reaction to Hughes at UFC 52 might indicate that mainstream fans are starting to take more of a liking to Hughes.

-If Matt Lindland has an axe to grind with the UFC, it's not just because he's not fighting for the Middleweight Title at UFC 52. Lindland is also being paid arguably less than he's worth, and certainly a lot less than he used to make in the UFC. Lindland's previous UFC salary was $20,000 to fight and $20,000 more to win, but after his KO loss against David Terrell at UFC 49, his pay was cut to the new amount of $10,000 to fight and $10,000 more to win. Lindland has one of the best records in the UFC at 8-3, and he proved at UFC 52 that he is not a one-dimensional fighter when he tapped out a fighter who specializes in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I would expect to see Lindland make more money for his future UFC fights than he made at UFC 52, although it might not be as much as his old salary.

-After getting knocked out by Chuck Liddell at UFC 40, Renato "Babalu" Sobral has spent his time earning himself not only a return to the UFC, but a return to the UFC at a hefty salary. While it might not seem like much, Sobral's salary of $10,000 to fight and $10,000 more to win places him in the top one-third of UFC salaries. Sobral earned that kind of contract by racking up eight consecutive MMA wins after the loss to Liddell, including a one-night tournament in which he defeated Mauricio "Shogun" Rua, Jeremy Horn, and Trevor Prangley. In addition, with Randy Couture not getting any younger and with Tito Ortiz out of the picture entirely, there is a premium on quality light-heavyweights. Sobral fits that bill and has the potential for a strong future in the UFC.

-Georges St. Pierre emerged from UFC 52 not only as one of the UFC's hottest welterweight prospects, but also as one of the highest-paid welterweights. St. Pierre is an example of a policy that pays you more money as you gain more UFC experience and rewards you for taking risky fights. St. Pierre made $3,000 to fight and $3,000 more to win for his UFC debut at UFC 46, where he won. St. Pierre then made $4,000 to fight and $4,000 more to win for his fight at UFC 48, which he also won. Despite the fact that he's only 23 years old and has his whole career ahead of him, St. Pierre then stepped up to the plate and took a very risky fight against the dominant Matt Hughes. St. Pierre lost that fight, but didn't come out of it looking any worse than he did going in, so he was rewarded with a new contract for UFC 52 that paid him $9,000 to fight and $9,000 more to win. St. Pierre is now 3-1 in the UFC and is at the top of a list of young, talented, versatile welterweights in the UFC (a list that also includes Karo Parisyan and Nick Diaz).

-Frank Trigg's contract for UFC 52 called for him to make $14,000 to fight and $14,000 more to win, which places him in the top one-third of UFC salaries. Trigg's UFC career now consists of two impressive wins over Renato Verissimo and Dennis Hallman, and two submission losses to Matt Hughes. It's unusual for a fighter whose UFC record is 2-1 going into a fight to be making as much money as Trigg made at UFC 52, but I would chalk that up to the fact that he's one of the most marketable fighters in the sport. No one is going to deny that Trigg can be very obnoxious at times, but the fact is that he has been in arguably the best fight on the card in each of his first four UFC fights. Also, Trigg is one of the best talkers in the sport in an intelligent, articulate kind of way (like Frank Mir), as opposed to a bush-league, pro wrestling character kind of way (like Phil Baroni).

-Patrick Cote fits the same description as Georges St. Pierre, in that he was contractually rewarded for taking a very tough, risky fight. When Guy Mezger had to pull out of his scheduled fight with Tito Ortiz shortly before UFC 50 last fall, Cote stepped up to take the fight with Ortiz on short notice despite being just 24 years old at the time and relatively inexperienced. Just as with Hughes vs. St. Pierre, Cote lost the fight but didn't come out of it looking any worse than he looked going in. As a result, he was rewarded with a new contract for UFC 52 that paid him $10,000 to fight and $10,000 more to win. Now Cote faces the harsh reality of being 0-2 in the UFC. Even though one of those losses was against Tito Ortiz on short notice, and the other was in a fantastic fight that was close all the way through, the fact remains that he's now 0-2 in the UFC. He's going to have to either prove himself once again on smaller shows, or keep fighting in the UFC at a drastically reduced salary. Despite his record, Cote could still have a bright UFC career ahead of him, as evidenced by the fact that Andrei Arlovski lost his first two fights in the Zuffa-era UFC and would later become one of the top heavyweights in the sport.

-Mike Van Arsdale got a slightly higher-than-expected salary of $5,000 to fight and $5,000 more to win at UFC 52, in great part because of the fact that there is a premium on quality heavyweights. Though most new UFC fans have never heard of him, this was not Van Arsdale's UFC debut. Van Arsdale won a fight at UFC 17 way back in 1998, only to be knocked out by Wanderlei Silva in his next fight and leave the sport of MMA for over four years. With his win at UFC 52, Van Arsdale is now 4-0 in his comeback, but there are a few big mitigating factors: A) Only two of those four opponents have winning records in mixed martial arts, B) He has fought infrequently at the rate of about once per year during his comeback, and C) He turns 40 years old in June. On the other hand, Van Arsdale weighed in at 215 pounds for his fight at UFC 52, and it would seemingly be easy for him to cut down to 205 pounds and potentially be a force to be reckoned with in the light-heavyweight division.

-Ivan Salaverry is on a roll, having defeated Tony Fryklund by first-round submission and Joe Riggs by first-round submission in back-to-back UFC fights. Salaverry is now 3-1 in the UFC, with his only loss coming at the hands of Matt Lindland at UFC 39. Salaverry earned a modest salary of $4,000 to fight and $4,000 more to win at UFC 52, but he could see that salary increase drastically with one or two more wins.

-Salaverry's opponent, Joe Riggs, fought for the same salary, as did fellow middleweight Travis Lutter. Both Riggs and Lutter had UFC records of 1-0 coming into this event, and both fighters lost at UFC 52.

-Joe Doerksen lost in his UFC debut at UFC 49 for the entry-level salary of $2,000 to fight and $2,000 more to win, and was given a second chance at UFC 52 for the same salary. Doerksen didn't disappoint, as he was victorious over Patrick Cote in a thrilling bout at UFC 52.

-Travis Wiuff was given a slightly higher than entry-level salary for his fight at UFC 52 because it wasn't actually his UFC debut. Wiuff made his UFC debut back in 2002 in the heavyweight division, losing to Vladimir Matyushenko. Wiuff's UFC 52 contract called for him to make $3,000 to fight and $3,000 more to win. Though light-heavyweights are always in high demand, the UFC may or may not be interested in bringing Wiuff back after a relatively one-sided loss to Renato "Babalu" Sobral in which Sobral was in control for the vast majority of the fight.

-Two fighters made their UFC debuts and lost at UFC 52: John Marsh and Jason Miller. Marsh fought for $2,500 to fight and $2,500 more to win, while Miller's contract called for him to be paid $2,000 to fight and $2,000 more to win. Despite starting out their UFC careers with records of 0-1, both fighters have a decent chance of being brought back in the future, Marsh because he's a heavyweight and Miller because of the huge amount of heart that he showed in his decision loss to Georges St. Pierre.

Labels: Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), UFC News, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)

posted by Ivan Trembow at 3:02 PM

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In-House Notes--- One of the great features of the stats engine for Ivan's Blog is that it compiles anonymous user statistics and tells me things like which web sites are directing visitors to my web site, and which countries people are in when they're loading Ivan's Blog.

A new feature on Ivan's Blog will be that once per month, I will list the ten countries that have provided Ivan's Blog with the most page views in the previous month, starting off with the info for April 2005.

Top Ten Countries for April 2005 Based on Anonymous Visitor Statistics

(Ivan's Blog page views from in each country in parenthesis)

1. United States (18,533)
2. Great Britain (1,285)
3. Canada (1,232)
4. Australia (1,050)
5. China (884)
6. Germany (698)
7. Netherlands (629)
8. Mexico (259)
9. Japan (238)
10. Brazil (236)

Countries with the smallest amount of page views: Malta, Slovenia, Macau, Venezuela, Latvia, Fiji, Senegal, Moldova, Vietnam, Uruguay posted by Ivan Trembow at 1:52 PM

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