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From the Bourbons to Viacom - How Louis XIV created Nickelodeon
- Thread starter AndyC
- Start date
Great image finds Andy!
- Location
- NYC (né Falkirk)
- Pronouns
- he/him
Not a connection I had made before, the origins of Odeon and one of it's end results in Nickelodeon. These articles are really getting to the stage of making me wonder why I had never connected things before.
The image of the Odéon is funny because I've never seen it that way, but I realize this might because I'm used to seeing festooned with whichever large posters of the current plays are going on.
Great article overall, @Thande! I could wax lyrical about the privilege system that Louis XIV created for the theatres, which died during the revolution (nice find about Chénier!), got revived by Napoléon and was finally abolished under Napoléon III. In fact, I have often done so unprompted as my guests can attest to. Getting rid of the system was one of the major battles of liberalism in the nineteenth century, a fact that's often forgotten by the now-seeming bigger aspects of economic liberalism. From Le Cid to Hernani to Le Roi s'amuse and their international musical adaptations, there are many literary-political fights in the past, and some could make for good PODs, such as what if Victor Hugo had not insisted on being his own lawyer in Le Roi s'amuse case against the July monarchy. It's also interesting to note that technical limitations often gave rise to new genres or new aspects: much as laws forbidding more than three singers on stage forced Hervé and then Offenbach to create the opérette rather than go for traditional vaudevilles, the creation by Louis XIV of closed theatres made acts limited in time to no more than twenty minutes, for that's how long the candles would last before needing changing where English open-air theatres (and latter illegal but somewhat tolerated Parisian fairs) would not labour under the same. Hence the creation of the intermission and the idea of short acts that still exist in commercial TVs, only now the intermissions serve for ads.
One thing your mention of odéon slipping into the American culture sphere in the 1860s reminded me of the near-contemporeanous Crédit Mobilier scandal. For the longest time, I assumed it was a French company doing shady business, before it became clear that was only the impression the founders of that entreprise had wanted in the first place, giving an air of respectability to their con.
EDIT: oh, I just realised what was truly missing from the picture! There are usually tables and people lunching or dining on the square at the theatre's restaurant. Very good if pricy, try the fish.
Great article overall, @Thande! I could wax lyrical about the privilege system that Louis XIV created for the theatres, which died during the revolution (nice find about Chénier!), got revived by Napoléon and was finally abolished under Napoléon III. In fact, I have often done so unprompted as my guests can attest to. Getting rid of the system was one of the major battles of liberalism in the nineteenth century, a fact that's often forgotten by the now-seeming bigger aspects of economic liberalism. From Le Cid to Hernani to Le Roi s'amuse and their international musical adaptations, there are many literary-political fights in the past, and some could make for good PODs, such as what if Victor Hugo had not insisted on being his own lawyer in Le Roi s'amuse case against the July monarchy. It's also interesting to note that technical limitations often gave rise to new genres or new aspects: much as laws forbidding more than three singers on stage forced Hervé and then Offenbach to create the opérette rather than go for traditional vaudevilles, the creation by Louis XIV of closed theatres made acts limited in time to no more than twenty minutes, for that's how long the candles would last before needing changing where English open-air theatres (and latter illegal but somewhat tolerated Parisian fairs) would not labour under the same. Hence the creation of the intermission and the idea of short acts that still exist in commercial TVs, only now the intermissions serve for ads.
One thing your mention of odéon slipping into the American culture sphere in the 1860s reminded me of the near-contemporeanous Crédit Mobilier scandal. For the longest time, I assumed it was a French company doing shady business, before it became clear that was only the impression the founders of that entreprise had wanted in the first place, giving an air of respectability to their con.
EDIT: oh, I just realised what was truly missing from the picture! There are usually tables and people lunching or dining on the square at the theatre's restaurant. Very good if pricy, try the fish.
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That's almost what I'm trying to achieve with them - making people realise why, even if you ignore the strict butterfly effect and just look at direct consequences, you can't poke one thing in a POD without affecting all sorts of other things you didn't expect.
Also thanks for the additional info @Redolegna . The scandal you mention at the end also relates to the background to the "Harry Potter and the Panic of 1837" article I did, where part of the origin of that panic was nefarious Lancastrians inventing basically fictitious banks that loaned to Americans who, thanks to Jackson, had no banking infrastructure of their own to protect them from these schemes.
And of course, you can go back further.
The French only called their theatre that because they were going for the mass Philhellenism craze of the eighteenth century (i.e. before anyone got to visit modern Greece and hate how it did not conform to their idea of it, hello Lord Byron. See also Egypt). It was for the original Greek plays which involve singing from the chorus and has the same root as aiodos, the people singing the epics. Which is quite close to some of the productions Nickelodeon does.
- Location
- Derbyshire
Modern television time formats being determined by how long candles could burn for in the 17th Century is up there with 'Roman carriage widths defining how far apart train tracks are' in terms of connections.
- Location
- Derbyshire
Also, just talking about this to a colleague, and as soon as I soon as I got to the bit of 'which he called his Nickel Odeon' I could just see his face have a sudden 'wait. No way.' expression.
So yeah, perfectly done Thande.
So yeah, perfectly done Thande.
which in turn shaped tunnels width... and the Space Shuttle boosters max diameter of 156 inch because they needed rail transportation between Utah and The Cape, Florida.
Of course, they don't, exactly. Because the usual length for an American TV show is half that of a five-act classical play, so those lengths are cut in half as well (would you want to pass up on all those precious sellable seconds?), but the idea of short arcs within the stories are definitely there.
Hmm, that does sound like an interesting one to do.
Glad to hear it.
Should be Pennsylvania, yeah. I think there's also an 'irrelevant' instead of 'irrelevance' at one point. I did type these up pretty quickly at the time.