HuffPo notes, “it sets you up to think you’re going to watch a teen film about dancing your way through the loss of a parent, but then it calls you a sucker and whips out some demons,” but the trailer doesn’t so much change directions as much as it adds a whole new layer. The result is a seemingly hilarious (and hilariously badly acted) genre hybrid of inspirational dance film and horror. The demons don’t interrupt the protagonist’s therapeutic dance, after all; they give it new (cosmic/spiritual) meaning.

I still don’t know why the title insists on spelling “see” with a “c”, either, though I’m wondering if they were paying whoever did the title card by the letter. Or maybe the film was pitched via text message. So gloriously bad, I’m almost inclined to watch it.

It’s really hard to know where to begin with a review of something so utterly bad. I’d been led to believe that Seinfeld would be the host, but instead he sat there at the side like a creepy guy at a public park. The actual host was about as funny as a snuff film. The crowd were laughing, but I felt for their family members, who were clearly being held under duress elsewhere on the NBC lot, with threats of them being “disappeared” if the audience didn’t laugh, damn it, laugh.

As for the other celebrities, I didn’t know whether to feel more sad for Alec Baldwin or angry at him for agreeing to do this. I hope next time he’s up for an Emmy for Best Comic Performance, they discount this against him. Say what you will about According to Jim, but at least Belushi never did something like this (did he?). I note too that nobody outside the NBC/Universal family appeared on the show; indeed, if I ran any of the other networks, I’d be begging, cajoling, and pleading with my talent to stay away.

Despite those celebs, the whole affair was low budget, not in a fun and endearing way, but in a painful, bewildering way. NBC looks so broke, so destitute with this, and not just monetarily. The couples were rude, disinteresting, and entirely unbelievable (one of them wanted a stripper pole in his room, and NBC expects us to believe he’s earnest in thinking the judges would agree with him?), living proof of why the network will need to pay for real WGA writers, not just the hacks who created these scripts. The only thing that made it compelling was seeing how much worse it could get.

So, okay, the above’s a rant. You might be reading it and wondering what made me so grumpy today. But that’s the funny part. Nothing did: Canada won gold in men’s hockey. I couldn’t be happier. I’m riding Cloud Nine. And NBC gave me the win in full HD. So if ever there was a day in which NBC might’ve convinced me that something very, very bad was actually okay, it was today. Which makes me wonder: if this is how bad it is today, how much worse will it look when it starts for real?

When longtime television shows die, they’re said to have “jumped the shark,” courtesy of Happy Days’ dark days. Franchises can now be said to have “nuked the fridge” when they turn stupid as did Indiana Jones. In years to come, we may well find ourselves explaining to students that the by-then-well-known phrase for an entire network sinking into obscurity, “becoming a marriage ref,” came from February 28, 2010, when NBC announced that they really don’t care about quality any more.

Showtime and HBO, for instance, deserve considerable praise for some of their excellent opening sequences: The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex and the City, Dexter, United States of Tara, Weeds – all had or have superb intros that introduce the style, tone, and character of their shows, giving us a good sense of the kind of world in which they’re set.

So I’m on the watch for great examples of the form on network television. This year’s newcomer on FOX, Human Target, has a beautiful sequence. The animation is an intriguing mix of Chuck, Bond, and an edgy, grown-up graphic novel, hence promising an interesting marriage of fun, humor, action, and a little bit of darkness. Turn the sound off and it’s one of the better opening sequences on television.

But if you turn the sound on, it’s not only bad, but boring. Somebody at FOX put all the money into the visuals and forgot about sound. It sounds like the cheesy music you’d hear in low-budget war movie. Thus not only does it short-circuit all the beautiful workmanship of the animation, but it creates tonal problems. Test this out – listen to it with your eyes closed and ask yourself whether you’d watch or change the channel.

So let’s go back to Showtime for some remedial lessons: United States of Tara also has an animated intro, very different style, yet suitably quirky. The pop-up book sensibility neatly suggests the character’s multiple characters while also gesturing to her “three dimensionality.” The quick movements also note how quickly things can change for Tara and for the viewer. It all encourages us to watch for changes, depth, and connections. And yet the music works with the visuals, preeminently odd, setting the tone not ruining it. FOX, please take note.

To all you who want a whole lot of answers, be careful what you wish for. Or, to reword: think of the midichlorians. Who cared why some people have The Force and others don’t? It’s not just suspension of disbelief we need, but suspension of needing to know everything. After all, our own world is hardly logical, and none of us can pretend to know why so many things happen here, so why do we need all the answers on Lost?

In short, if you’re out there Damon, it’s me Jonathan. And I’m saying, don’t tell me all the answers.

For those who want them:

I haven’t had time to the play my PS3 at all lately, but back at the beginning of the summer I was playing Metal Gear Solid 4. This game has absurdly long cut sequences (the end of the game has a series totaling about 45 minutes alone), and most of them are extremely tedious. You know how everyone thought the whole “midichlorians” thing in Star Wars Eps. 1-3 was stupid? Well, imagine a two hour lecture on them broken into fifteen minute chunks, with occasional intrusions regarding a character with bad diarrhea (I’m serious), and this is what you have. So I did what any self-respecting gamer would do – I hit the X key, skipped them, and went back to the game.

It’s the oddity of videogame cut sequences – they’re trying to create a narrative around what is often otherwise simply a list of “go here,” “kill this guy,” or “stay alive” missions. Yet they need to be entirely skippable – unskippable cut sequences are the devil, and the kiss of death for many a bad game. Some gamers just wanna hack, slash, swing, parkour, shoot, and/or chat their way through the different levels.

We should also be honest that many cut sequences are simply bad. Videogame producers often hire their cast and writers on the cheap, leading to facile premises acted out by hack, fourth-rate “talent.” They’ve also been bad at trying to videogame-ize genres, and set pieces within genres, that seem to require the semblance of real humans. For instance, I just can’t take seriously a pixilated couple smoochying, for instance, nor is sexual tension between avatars anything other than sad and silly. Cut sequences are often fond of melodrama, but can’t deliver it.

Anyways, as a result, the cut sequences, though seemingly part of the narrative, and part of the “primary text,” actually take on the same function as bonus materials on a DVD of a film or television show. The latter exist, but don’t need to exist, and they can add layers of meaning, but needn’t. And so too with the former. In short, they’re extratextuals.

Why does this matter? Well, amidst all the excited discussion of convergent, transmedia storytelling, the focus has usually been on examining ways in which a narrative and/or text can “overflow” from one platform to another. The interest, in other words, has been on expansion. But perhaps what cut sequences remind us of is a fact just as important to understanding transmedia – namely that many elements of the “primary text” (and of secondary texts or transmedia extensions too) simply don’t matter, and won’t even be considered part of the text. This will change from audience member to audience member – some gamers, for instance, may be heavily invested in the cut sequences (I know I am for the GTA games) – but the point is that transmedia analysis might tell us more about what’s important in a text, and what’s irrelevant. Our focus could be on reduction as well, therefore.

Everyone has an opinion on Avatar, or so a browse through my Google Reader, Facebook feed, and trips to public spaces seem to suggest. Moreover, opinions seem remarkably unified within two central camps – either it’s a great ride and a cinematic breakthrough, or it’s all hype and a piece of crap. But these positions develop before people watch. I’d pose that pretty much everyone is getting what they think they’re going to get out of Avatar: either you expect a wonderful visual feast and you get it, or you expect to find a stupid story (“Dances with Wolves on another planet”) with visuals that are either ho-hum or excessive, and you get that.

This latter camp fascinates me, as do their counterparts with most critically and/or popularly loved films or television shows. We know they won’t like the film. They know they won’t like the film. Yet they insist on watching it. Why? What are they paying for? After the fold …

One theory is that they’re paying for the right to complain louder and more vociferously: they’re invested in disliking Avatar, and their dislike – their anti-fandom – is important enough to them that they want more fuel for their fire and specific scenes or character information to throw out when they hold court on its ills. But they also want to lay claim to the authenticity of having been an “actual” audience member – they might be wary of complaining about the film when others could dismiss their complaints as coming from one who hadn’t even seen the film. Seeing the film also allows the alibi that they really were interested and open-minded, but that the movie failed them (when in truth the mind was made up before they went to see it).

Another, complementary theory is that they find pleasure in dislike. We can at times foolishly suppose that people always go to see movies that they want to like, whereas we should be honest that there is at times a pleasure in disliking. Such viewers may offer a catalogue of things they disliked about the movie after they’ve watched it, but they watch because it’s enjoyable to create that catalogue. A bad acting performance, a silly bit of dialogue, and offensive character – these all become pleasurable. I’m not talking about camp – though that is of course another way that one might enjoy the film – or about relishing badness; I’m talking about the pleasures of knowing that one can distinguish good from bad.

Certainly, just as fandom can have a pronounced performative element to it, so too is anti-fandom often heavily performative. The pleasures of fandom can often come from the communal discussions that follow, not simply from the experience of watching alone, and many fans would quickly disavow a beloved text if they weren’t allowed a community around it. So too with anti-fandom, where many of these people hating Avatar are only too keen to pronounce their hatred, and to engage in discussions with others about how crappy it is. In doing so, they aim to perform a level of sophistication, to themselves and to others, but they are also making a pitch to community – they know that there are communities that will dislike Avatar, and the anti-fandom provides the password into said communities.

Let me be clear in pointing out that I’m not saying that people should like Avatar, nor that dislike of it is only a sign of snobbishness. There are many good reasons not to like the film, its noble savage theme key amongst them. This post is not a defense of the film. But first I want to distinguish between disliking it (going to the film and being disappointed), and being someone who is invested in disliking it (i.e., being a bona fide anti-fan), especially if that investment preceded the act of watching the film (whether one is honest with oneself about whether that anti-fandom was there already or not). And second, my point is not to wag a finger at Avatar anti-fans; rather, it’s to make the case that anti-fandom is pervasive, and the pleasures of disliking are still so radically under-theorised and under-studied.

Anti-fandom will always be more visible and will always come out in stronger suit when a film enjoys the type of hype that Avatar has. As this blog has continually argued, after all, and as my new book Show Sold Separately discusses, we don’t just judge films based on the film – we judge them based on the extratextuals. So when a film such as Avatar is surrounded by hype, we all have opinions on it already, and it becomes impossible for any of us to enter the cinema without having already consumed a fair deal of the film, without already having a pretty good idea of how we’ll feel about it. And since anti-fandom’s level of investment in dislike usually requires that dislike to have preceded the film, extratextuals are key to creating a vibrant anti-fandom.

In no particular order, here are 14 of my top 20. I’m banking on having forgotten some biggies, so I’m hoping my readers will jolt my memory, and I’ll fill in the remaining 6 based on those. After the fold …

1. The Lord of the Rings Platinum Series Special Extended Edition DVDs

These are still the gold (platinum?) standard for DVDs, with an hour or more of extra footage per film, completely woven into the film with full post-production goodies, endless design stills, four commentary tracks, and so forth. They really laid down the gauntlet for what counts as a truly great DVD, and they made bonus materials de rigueur, changing the filmic text in the process.

2. The Disney Princess Line

In the 00s, Disney created its own All-Star team, not of basketball or hockey players, and not for Olympic glory, but of “princesses” for mass profit. It’s an intriguing idea: can you imagine if, for instance, Indiana Jones, John McClane, Dirty Harry, the Terminator, and Jackie Chan all teamed up in one product line? Why limit your extratextuals to one show or one character, in other words? And as anyone with a young girl, a friend or family member with a young girl, or any awareness of pop culture, for that matter, knows, the Disney Princesses have been remarkably successful, uniting from their landmark movies to have all sorts of other adventures in other platforms.

3. Where the Wild Things Are’s entire advertising campaign

Many remember the Arcade Fire song from the trailer, but the rest of the trailer was fantastic, as were the posters, all of which wonderfully captured the other-worldly character of the film. In the process, they helped send a swarm of adults to the film.

4. The Beast – The A. I. ARG

Alternate reality games hardly existed as a form before The Beast. But this wasn’t just one of the first; it was particularly impressive.

5. The Martha Stewart Empire

The post-Star Wars Eighties of host-selling televisions shows such as My Little Pony, Transformers, and GI Joe helped to destabilize notions of what the central product in a textual entourage actually was. But this was all for kids. Martha’s legion of craft and cook books, magazines, linens, utensils, and so forth has shown how lucrative an “after-market” merchandise can prove for adults, too. Transmedia is often seen as an older fanboy or younger fangirl domain, but Martha’s supreme success challenges this.

6. The Iron Man trailer

With multiple million views online, this really is a superb trailer, and is surely responsible for a significant portion of the box office draw by this film of what is otherwise a rather B grade Marvel hero played by a star with a rough past (don’t get me wrong: I really like the film, but I think the trailer played a huge role in getting many other viewers and I into the cinema). The proof is in the pudding of The Onion’s clip here.

7. Lord of the Rings’s Requiem for a Dream song (“Lux Aeterna” / “Requiem for a Tower”)

This piece of music didn’t appear in the trilogy, and its natural context was in a film about strung-out people fucking up their lives in all sorts of nasty, disturbing ways … but it became the theme song for the highest yielding trilogy of the decade, and indeed of film history. It’s also appeared in trailers for Avatar, I Am Legend, Assassin’s Creed, and Lost, and in several ads, the NHL All-Stars skill competition, Sky Sports, numerous mashups, and the Moscow State Circus, amongst many other things.

8. Lost’s transmedia

When a representative of a make-believe company in your television show appears on a talk show to respond to the accusations against said company made by a tell-all novel by a fictional character, you’ve got a pretty elaborate storyworld on your hands. When a billboard for a make-believe airline in that show appears in another show (Flash Forward), when fans can take recruiting exams to join a foundation in that show over the summer, and when your reruns appear with pop-up descriptions of past events, you’re doing even more impressive stuff. In its wake, Heroes learned a lot, as did many other fanboy shows.

9. LiveJournal

A key site for lots and lots of fandom. There’ve been complaints aplenty, power struggles, massive missteps in terms of the site’s policies and running, and its history hasn’t been a peaceful one, but so very much discussion of popular media occurs on LiveJournal.

10. Star Wars Videogames

According to the list in Wikipedia, approximately 60 Star Wars games hit the shelves in the last decade, quite a monumental achievement, and a sign of why that galaxy is never really much further away than the local Game Stop. Moreover, the games range in genre from MMORPGs to educational titles to first person shooters to flying games and so on. To understand Star Wars as a film franchise alone is to sorely underestimate the power of the trilogies’ extratextual Force.

11. Enter the Matrix

When the Wachowski Brothers decided to write their Matrix sequels across media, they created a licensed game that wasn’t simply a run-of-the-mill game with character and place names from an established franchise plastered on them. The game became an active site for the storytelling, with original scenes with the film’s cast members, and with references to the action of the game in the Matrix sequels. It was also a relatively fun game

12. The Family Guy DVDs

The successful sale of these DVDs brought the show back from the dead. Now, in the show’s eighth season, and with it regularly rating extremely well in the Nielsen rankings, it may be hard to remember that once upon a time, FOX canceled it. The heft of those DVD sales forced many to reconsider exactly what counts as meaningful sources of revenue for television, and helped in its small way to decenter ratings as the all and end all.

13. American Idol’s Deal with AT & T

How awesome a deal does AT & T have, when every person who wants to vote for American Idol does so by spending money for them. Evil genius. And while I was about to say that the text messages hardly create meaning for the show, thereby falling short of counting as true extraTEXTuals, in truth I’m sure that they help to personalize the show and one’s control over it, amplifying its pitch at being intimately related to all its fans.

14. The Miley Cyrus / Hannah Montana Best of Both Worlds Tour

There’s devious brilliance in how Disney have seemingly learned to control every aspect of their properties, even the living ones. Hannah Montana is case in point, and the concert tour of Miley Cyrus both in and out of Hannah character (though perhaps not out of Miley character? Or is there even a there there to go in and out of?) blazes a path for their future work (witness the Jonas Bros), and helped to affirm the spinoff concert tour as much more than just an oddity.