How Random Stuff Is Made

[beige_alert]

I was watching "How It's Made" on the Discovery Channel and was struck by the utter randomness of the topics. Do they organize the show after consuming large doses of LSD? Suits of armor, streetlight poles, bent hardwood, and membrane switches. Golf balls and parking meters. There is, naturally, a somewhat obsessive Wikipedia entry about the show that lists the topics of each episode. Episode 48, for example, was car engines, flour, recliners, and envelopes.

It is a reasonably interesting show, notable primarily, I think, for all the video taken in the factories. It does suffer from the usual issues for this sort of thing. It tends to zip through things in a big hurry, and suffers using roughly the same amount of time for every topic no matter how many or how few steps there are to show. If you didn't know better, you'd also be left with the impression that everything in the world is made by highly skilled workers taking the greatest care, rather than by poorly-paid people who already have lead poisoning.

Comments

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

I always kind of thought this was where the contributors of those videos to Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood wound up, though without Fred's guidance and warmth, it didn't quite measure up.

The apparent randomness of topics seems to me to be a deliberate choice; rather than organize their stuff into sets of interests, they're shotgunning in hopes that someone might see one of the topics and stick around. (Both approaches work; one way, you tend to get more folks for less time per week; the other, you get people who see all of one show and skip others where they have not interest in the stuff at all.)