Discovery Channel

Vid
Title:	Discovery Channel
Creator:	Flamingo
Date:	2000
Format:
Length:
Music:	"The Bad Touch" by Bloodhound Gang
Genre:	slash, humor
Fandom:	Starsky & Hutch
Footage:	mix of original source and external footage
URL:	offline
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

"Discovery Channel" is a Starsky & Hutch vid by Flamingo. It is a humorous slash vid with the pairing of Starsky/Hutch and was first shown at the Connexions 2000 vid show.

Flamingo's Comments: 2000

It took me over 6 weeks to assemble enough animal footage off the Animal Planet and The Learning Channel. Weirdly enough, I couldn't get anything appropriate off the Discovery Channel at all, which is too bad. I would've loved to have the DC "bug" in the corner of the clips. ;-) Good vp buddy Cindy (cl4) ran all over the University of Maryland borrowing nature tapes for me. You should've seen us conferring over the titles of these tapes, trying to figure out which ones would give us the most mileage:

Continuing the line? Living with Others? Courting? I ended up getting a fair amount of footage from the "fighting" tape! Also, the Planet's Funniest Animals, and some little kid's program with hamsters and guinea pigs in it. (Don't ask!) I also had to make a major pilgrimage to a friend's house in Baltimore to get a 3 second clip from the X Files Bloopers for another line in the song. So you can imagine my frustration when on Thursday at 2:30 AM I was still assembling this vid and had to listen to my partner chide me for "waiting to the last minute to do it.

Hey, if it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would get done! But I did finish the vid. And the response was good. So it was worth it. And everyone here on VP deserves a pat on the back, too, since so many people sent me suggestions about "grope" footage and as I assembled the vid I sat there with all your suggestions and used many of them. Kath Moonshine gave me invaluable advice about the beginning for which I'm eternally grateful. (She helped with La Vida Loca, too.)

For the record, and I still find this kind of weirdly ironic, I never did get a single second of footage from the Discovery Channel, much to my dismay. In the 2 months I worked on the vid, they simply didn't show any animal documentaries. Which was too bad since I would have loved to have had the DC bug in the corner for the grin value. Most of my footage actually came from a David Attenborough series, and Animal Planet (which is a subsidiary of DC, but really geared for kids). DC-type footage wasn't the only complication in that vid. There's a reference to XFiles (and fortunately I found someone who had critical blooper footage within an hour's drive) and also references to The Artist Formerly and Currently Known As Prince. It was very weird mixing all that animal footage, with a 25 year old show, clips of Prince *and* XFiles...! Just keeping track of the different tapes was a nightmare! ;-) So, it's no wonder that after mixing up all that weird stuff, it would never occur to me to not use whatever I needed, regardless of its source.

Flamingo's Comments: 2013

And then Discovery Channel came out, and when I heard "Discovery Channel" I thought, "Okay, this has got to be the guys." And it took me something like twelve weeks to get the footage, the animal footage for it. And some of it that I wanted I couldn't get. There was a movie called, Creature from the Black Lagoon, black and white film, it's one of my childhood films. And at this point it was available on videotape but they had macrocopy on it. And there's a clip where the monster, who is a bipedal monster, is holding this unconscious woman, and carrying her through this cave with stalagmites. And I wanted to put that clip in with Hutch carrying Starsky from "Shootout." I thought that would be hilarious! I couldn't break the copyright on it. I couldn't copy it.... I spent, I must have spent a week trying to break that. I figured if I copied it multiple times; I couldn't get rid of it, and I had to abandon that clip. I've always wanted to go back and reshoot that. I probably will someday. But I did Discovery Channel; I didn't have any idea if it would work. Most of the stuff I found was accidental, because, at the time Discovery Channel was doing Egypt that month, and they had no animal footage, so I couldn't get anything with the great little Discovery Channel bug in the corner. I was so mad.

I was getting everything off Animal Planet. Animal Planet was very cavalier about their scheduling. So they'd tell you that they were going to have a program on polar bears, and I'd think, polar bears spend most of their time in the water, and Starsky and Hutch are forever falling in pools [laughter] and I thought, ok, there's gonna be some polar-bear-swimming thing I can do with them falling into the pool and stuff. And I'd come home after setting up the VCR to record this stuff at high quality, and it would be some kid's show with hamsters. I'm like, "What?" This went on, and finally I'm like, "Wait a minute, those hamsters, they're in a red car, maybe I can use those.... Most of the footage I got was completely accidental because it was what I was supposed to be taping because they'd changed the schedule. And, uh, the beginning of that vid, with the lecturing part, are clips that were used in an advertising campaign that TNT did that I had, which I'd gotten from another fan. So, you know, I was trying to get it together for Connexions; it took me six weeks to pull that together because of all the excess footage with the animals, and watching hundreds of hours of Richard Attenborough documentaries about zebras, and people breeding, and all this stuff. And it was not easy; you couldn't get that stuff. A friend of mine worked for the college library and she was able to get me copies of it; it was hard to get kind of that material.

So, anyways, I put that together and it worked and Stacey was running the Connexions vid show and she looked at it and said, "I think I'll close the show with this," and I was, "Ok, whatever." And when we showed it, I had a Starsky and Hutch party before the main vid show, where I used to premiere the vids. We had a pretty good crowd, too. And I showed that vid, and Gloria, who was vidding Sentinel at the time, thought I'd filmed the hamster stuff in my back yard. She's like, "Did you videotape that in your yard? With little cars and stuff?" And I'm like, "No!" But it was a huge hit at the party; we ended up playing it like six times. Every time somebody new would come in they'd make us play it again. They'd yell at the new people; "Don't put anything in your mouth! Don't put anything in your mouth!" And when we played it at the Con itself it got a standing ovation. I'd never seen that happen before."... And that's when I should have quit. If I were smart I would have quit right then.... … because I've never done anything one tenth as good as those two vids. I got really lucky with the material on that, I got really lucky with the songs, and after that I've done a bunch of fairly standard kind of ho-hum kind of vids; they're ok, but -

Reactions/Reviews

• Discovery Channel got a standing ovation at the Connexions 2000 vid show and was replayed a second time by popular request. The audience in the back of the room broke out in a line dance during the second playing. It is often cited as an example of a con vid.
• Shoshanna posted her review of the vid in her Connexions 2000 con report to Virgule-L: “Flamingo's S&H vid to the mammal song (don't ask me the title; it's the one with the chorus "You and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals, so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel") did an excellent job of pairing DC footage with S&H footage. I cracked up at the clip of the circling cars followed by the circling turtles, and the plumage-displaying bird paired with the butt-wiggling Hutch; the vid, which ended the show, got a standing ovation.”
• Rachel Sabotini posted her review in 2000 to Virgule-L: “Okay, for me, the best thing about this vid was the hamster in the remote controlled car. I admit I was part of the bad girls in the back of the room, and I was unable to keep myself from shouting 'Darth Mr. Fluffy!' when he appeared.”
• In 2002, the vid was selected to be part of the Experimental Vid Show at Vividcon. From Sandy Herrold’s vid show report posted to the vidder mailing: “Discovery Channel (SH) Flamingo This vid is underrated, I think - it's not just funny scenes of animals, it's the closeness of many of the animal scenes to what Starsky and Hutch were doing in the clip right before that really makes it.”
• Diana Williams credits the vid as one of the vids that sucked her into vidding.
• LilyK says: "This vid is priceless. It doesn't matter how many times I've seen this vid, it makes me laugh every single time, I find it hilarious. I think the way Flamingo mirrored the external animal footage with the Starsky & Hutch clips is well done. It's darned entertaining."