PopSyndicate.com

The most crack-tastic show on television happens to be on… the Discovery Channel?  We find out why the manufacture of everything from cooked ham to curling stones is so darn entertaining.

For my first blog post at PopSyndicate… I have a confession to make.  I have a very geeky television obsession.

Some people geek out over Smallville.  Others, Galactica, still others get off on American Idol, or Dancing With the Stars, Project Runway, or one of the 500 Real Housewives of xxx series.

Myself – I geek out on How It’s Made.

You’ve probably seen this show.  It’s on the Science Channel and Discovery Channel, and chances are, if you’re flipping around, it’s on one or the other.  They’ve made, like, 8215 episodes of it.

There are no on-air personalities, no swooshy special effects, no eliminations, and no confessionals.  It’s simply a series of 5-minute vignettes showing how everyday objects are made, voiced over by a guy with a penchant for puns.

I use the term “everyday objects” rather loosely; some of the objects are decidedly not “everyday”.  Things like:

• Suits of armor
• Wooden ducks
• Bamboo fishing rods
• Carbon fiber cellos
• British police helmets
• Ductile iron pipe
• Wooden airplane propellers
• Kevlar canoes
• Javelins
• Alpine horns (which, apparently, use wood harvested on a specific day of the lunar calendar because it’s “more resonant”)

… and yet – it’s fascinating and compelling television.  It’s like an information train wreck – you can’t stop watching it because it’s so gosh darn interesting.  Extruders… plastic injection molds… worm screws… all spinning away at all hours of the day.  It’s like that hypnosis you get on long road trips – although, obviously, this is induced by heavy machinery.

The show is produced in Canada, which explains the multiple segments on hockey paraphernalia (hockey masks, hockey pucks, hockey sticks, Zamboni machines, etc.).  According to Wiki, when the show was first exported to the U.S., the show used metric measurements – then put converted measurements on screen along with it.  Because Americans are stupid and can’t figure out meters and kilograms.  We will rebel against the metric system!  Be off with you, standardization!

As for the voice-overs themselves… somebody give narrator Brooks Moore an Emmy.  Not only does he deliver groaningly bad puns (referring to a segment on jeans as “denim-stration”, for example)… and not only does he look exactly the way he sounds… but he was able to successfully deliver the line “thank goodness for chicken processing plants” – and make me believe it!  YES!  I AM thankful for chicken processing plants!

And speaking of chicks, this show is responsible for the most disturbing (yet somewhat funny) moment I’ve seen on TV in a long time (at approximately 2:30 in):

I mean, really, you ain’t gonna get that anywhere else.  (I would assume that no animals were physically harmed in the making of that episode, but wow, who knew that baby chicks would be so durable?)

So, there you have it.  My first post at PopSyndicate, and my secret TV fascination.  If you’ll excuse me, I need to figure out how to have a plastic injection mold machine installed in my living room.