Ralph Sepe, Jr. versus paranormal TV

[Strelnikov]

I found this clown (Ralph Sepe, Jr.) on YouTube; his channel/show handle is "ralphthemoviemaker" and he does make short films....but he also makes reviews of TV shows and movies, and that's why I brought him up, mainly for this:



And this:



I know he has to be playing a character, but he doesn't seem to hit the nail on the head like Red Letter Media did with why Adam Sandler's Jack and Jill "movie" seemed like it was built around product placement and wasn't an actual comedy. The real issue isn't ghosts or Bigfoot, it's the format of "reality TV."

What started as a way of presenting game shows in an "innovative" style (Big Brother, Survivor, etc.), "reality TV" has become a method of depicting the actual world through television, but it actually isn't - every one of these shows is either about creating interpersonal drama between the people being filmed, or amping the stakes if it's one person versus nature (as with the defunct Ice Road Truckers show) through editing, shot composition, special effects, music stings, etc. Everything has been goosed to make it more exciting. When it comes to the Animal Planet Hunting Bigfoot show, they have them all being filmed by "night sight" video cameras in the dark to make it look spooky, even though many witnesses have claimed to see the creature at dusk or broad daylight, and it's usually trying to get away from the witness or the witness's car because Sasquatch does not like people. It also makes it easier to pull simple hoaxes like having a grip hide out in the woods to dramatically snap branches (unless that's dubbed in post.) And that's the biggest problem with the "reality TV" format: it makes any truth-telling impossible. That isn't so much of a problem with a show about Bering Sea crab fishermen, but if you have a crew of people out there trying to find some evidence of ghosts haunting a place, or Yetis dancing on mountaintops, or UFOs buzzing a small town, this isn't the way to do it. Also I think that Ralph Sepe, Jr. is too young to understand that he is in a miasma of crap television that is undermining itself - he looks to be in his late '20s-early '30s, so he may consider this style to be the norm. What few people seem to understand is that "reality TV" is dirt-cheap to make and that TV networks are desperate to fill airtime - that was why Mystery Science Theater 3000 was a big deal on Comedy Central in the early 1990s, because it filled about two hours on the schedule, the movie licensing rights costs were low to nearly nonexistent, and the show was deliberately low-budget.

Hunting Bigfoot went off the air around the time Ralph was reviewing it, having never caught the forest ape. Proving my point that cheapness always wins in TVland, the British ghost hunting show Most Haunted is still on the air, because it's just the host, a small camera crew, and one or two psychics (fake or real, same difference) wandering around allegedly haunted buildings. Paranormal Home Investigators was on Discovery Canada in 2011 to 2012 and its reruns are haunting Netflix and Hulu to this day because capitalism killed good taste.

[ericbarbour]

Can't argue with anything you just said there. The dynamics of YouTube popularity are a really mysterious thing and apart from obvious parallels to "ordinary TV", like annoying reality shows, rumors, and cheap sensationalism, why so many people would watch Ralph's videos is beyond my understanding. His works seems to be okay but not magnificent. And christ someone needs to run sound recording for him! He's got a LOT of competition on YT for eyeballs.

This one's clever: a guy murders his girlfriend and uses pieces of her to make pasta sauce. All very matter-of-fact and casual.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GYL5TMLdGQ

But then you have idiotic rants like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JohyOqnqkus