From Matthew: Why No Closed Captioning?

[Joe Hass]

I have been stymied by a question from my seven-year-old regarding closed captioning.

While watching The Simpsons episode "Simpson Tide", he noticed that in the scene where they play The Village People singing "YMCA", the captioning did not include the lyrics to the song. He asked me why that was, and I took a stab at some sort of rights issue. But he then noticed that in the next episode, "The Trouble With Trillions", Smithers sings a couple lines from "Everything's Coming Up Roses", and those lines do appear. And I remember seeing the lyrics from "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" at the end of "Dumbbell Indemnity"

Could anyone help explain this further?

A slightly confused father.

[Jon Delfin]

Perhaps there's a difference between original recordings and snatches of songs performed by characters? 

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to tvornottv+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CABru7%2BeUyrc4LPedCuVCgyXDjc42oK7oeuCthwHzaRx7j3EhDQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jim Ellwanger]

Lyrics should always be there - as far as I know, there’s no kind of rights issue that would prevent the lyrics from appearing in the captions if the song is played on the show.

That said, back when I worked as a captioner and was captioning shows for their first broadcast, we were sent tapes during the post-production process that often didn’t have the final sound mix… and I remember that one production company specifically told us not to caption any song lyrics, because they sometimes went down to the wire on getting music rights for their shows.

Obviously, something like that shouldn’t be the case for “Simpsons” reruns (or anything in its second broadcast or beyond). I suspect it was just a weird oversight during the captioning process for that particular episode.

[Jon Delfin]

Does anyone ever pay for tweaks to captioning after the initial broadcast? 

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/299E116F-45C4-488A-848E-73D358702A5E%40ellwanger.tv.

[Jim Ellwanger]

Shows almost always have to have the captions tweaked when they’re rerun in syndication, because the timing changes when they make cuts and/or electronically speed the shows up. (The company I worked for referred to this “reformatting,” and it was maybe one-half or one-third the price of captioning a show from scratch.)

I would assume there are also changes that have to be made to the captioning if a show reruns on a streaming service, but that wasn’t a thing back in my captioning days.

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/CABCcf4dqbWsTMvW9RepVEkGrdQK-ef%2B51Je-Lk_OnnYgtDWV3A%40mail.gmail.com.