2008 Olympics (Opening Ceremony + Other Discussion)

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I must be culturally challenged. Because although it was impressive, after a while I just got bored and wished they'd finally let the athletes in. They constant level of one-upsmanship in opening ceremonies means Vancouver and London will be in tough spots -- what do you do after China just spent $300M on an opening ceremony?

I do enjoy the parade of nations, oddly. I find it interesting to compare the disparity in nation size and number of athletes (African nation: 10M people, 2 athletes; Luxembourg, 486,000 people, 86 athletes), and to see what sport the athlete carrying the flag plays. Having a land-locked country whose sailing competitor was carrying the flag was probably best of all.

 

[drothgery]

Am I the only one who's been scouring sports web sites trying find someplace that makes standings reasonably easy to find? Yahoo sports seems to do a lot better than ESPN or CNN/SI or NBCOlympics.com on that point.

And while a lot of sites have handy explainers on how the various sports are played, explaining the tournament formats seems to have been left out. I mean, they're mostly either pure tournaments or some variant on a pool play/knockout round system, but no one's saying what's what.

Also annoying -- even on the rare times NBC will show something live in the Eastern time zone, they seem to think it's okay to run it three hours later in California with the live icon on the screen.

 

[Arnwyn]

Not watching this year due to reasons that can't be discussed here.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

Haven't watched much. I missed opening ceremonies because Friday is D&D night. Not watching much since and into the near future because of Gen Con prep work and then Gen Con. Hopefully I can catch some of the final stuff. Maybe next time it won't be scheduled durring Gen Con. Maybe we can get a petition going to the Olympics Committee to fix that in the future.

 

[Krug]

Frankly I thought the '84 LA Olympics opening was pretty impressive as well:
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vg9Lh1WxlA[/ame]

As for the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, turns out that all too cute little girl with ponytails singing during the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony had her voice dubbed over: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/sports/olympics/13beijing.html?hp

 

[Padril]

As for the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony, turns out that all too cute little girl with ponytails singing during the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony had her voice dubbed over: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/sports/olympics/13beijing.html?hp

Some of the fireworks were apparently prerecorded as well, the footprints marching across Beijing. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7556058.stm see the bottom of the article.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

The opening ceremony is pure spectacle, I don't really care much about the "authenticity" of it.

 

[Tonguez]

The opening ceremony is pure spectacle, I don't really care much about the "authenticity" of it.

I agree - the Olympics Opening cermony is a fully scripted and managed presentation and really in this age of digital media authenticity should'nt even be a consideration.

China showed that it had the capacity to put on an amazing spectacle that show cased the best and prettiest of what China can rightly claim as its own 'heritage' and contribution to the World. Accept it as a Spectacle and move on

Despite any political differences China firmly underscored the point that it is a superpower and London and Vancouver shouldn't even be thinkling of competing with that

 

[Orius]

I've heard about both of these.

The simulated fireworks doesn't really bother me. That's because the fireworks were actually set off, they just used computer generated shots because trying to film them from a helicopter was deemed to be too dangerous. That's reasonable.

The girls switch though does deserve criticism.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Argh, i'll never stop getting annoyed at the total and utter focus on the U.S. team, to the ridiculous exclusion of all other countries on NBC. I thought in the internet age, someone somewhere would be able to load up a danged video of events, but alas it's basically only nbcolympics.com, and that means little chance of seeing other countries compete unless you're on at the exact right time and you hit the lucky ~2% chance nbc deigned to stream the event live. I've been lucky with badminton and gotten to see some chinese, japanese, british, taipei, korean, and other teams, but other sports...not so much. Now here it is I REALLY want to see the china vs. china beach volleyball match (man would it be awesome if the upstart young team won and got to take their amazing serving skills into the final against may/walsh), and...nope. Not worth airing online or prime time/live. I've discovered that it will be on USA network in my area, sometime between the hours of of 2 a.m. and 9 a.m. That's just great, seeing as how I have to go to work in the morning... Is it so much to at least say when each event in the block's going to air if it's freaking taped anyway?

Seriously, can we just give the camcorders over to a bunch of teenagers to post on youtube next olympics?

/angry rant