Mertseger

Just think good and hard about what you've done. ;)

You're most welcome, though Nextiteration deserves the credit for digging up the info. I had some friends in the Industry back in the day, and I was surprised to learn that the nominated people select what material to submit (my friend was asked to pick what to submit for a writing credit on Parker Lewis Can't Lose). And so, unless things have change in the last twenty years, I expect the choreographers pick the routines to submit, and it's probably "up to three" for this category.

Nextiteration has you covered over in the SYTYCD in the Media thread:

Dammit, Lacy: your routine almost made me cry. It's so rare that a ballroom routine is the best of the evening for me, and yours definitely was. The show should do an entire episode using only the shows alums as choreographers. Tasty, an allusion to the funky chicken every time the vocalist sings the word "funky"? Really? I think it was Emily's rehearsal outfit that made me think that a choreographer really needs to create Lara Croft routine at some point. Someone get on the clearances.

Please do not mention him two more times: doing so is guaranteed to summon him.

Yay, Cat! Well deserved. Now if only they'd give her one of the things. Oh, yeah, and the lighting team and tech.

No leopards were harmed in the filming of this show. Yeah, I thought it was pretty awful. Way too many lifts and very little actual swing. I was excited when I realized we were getting a WCS but by the end I was left wondering where it was. Granted, most of my experience with WCS is in relation to country music I would think it should still look the same set to other genres of music. It's not even about Benji's choreography being too hard, but too lift-heavy and not enough true dancing together on the floor. I was so disappointed. Pirouette, pirouette, lift and pose. Pirouette, pirouette, lift and pose. ... Yes, it would have been nice to see some basic swing steps. I want more Benji on my show, but that was not a good piece for that couple (at least). I vote for Misty to permanently replace Nigel as jidge. Maybe we'd let him be part of the rotation when he has a show or something to promote (crosses fingers for a dark reboot of The Apple).

Yes, yes, he must. To be fair, being jidgmental is kinda in the job description. I will say, however, that, as far as I noticed, Mary seemed to confine herself to a single shriek near the end. She reached a bit far for that samba roll pun, but no mentioning of any conflagrated railed conveyance of Mexican food products + only 1 banshee wail = one of her best jidging nights ever in my book. I agree that the opener did not nearly come up to last year's wowser, But while the Ricky/Jessica/Sonya joint was certainly not the best routine ever in the history of the show, I cannot remember another one to match it on a first performance episode of a season (of the US version which is, sadly, all I've seen.). Great choice of difficult music matched by a surprisingly gender-balanced demonstration of strength and control. I got chills. The only bad thing is that I usually don't start saving the episodes on the DVR for repeated viewings until much later in the season, and that routine made the episode a keeper. My poor disk-space. And I must say to my shock the only other routine that gave me chills was ... Night Shift. I had no emotional associations with song, and, perhaps, that helped. Maybe I was just starved for some HH, but it landed for me.

But at least Jaime and Adam don't try to convince us that they just came up with the idea of testing explosives to clean up a cement truck on the in that moment.It's more: have you heard of this idea? Let's see if we can make that work. I don't understand why the unit producers on HoC insist on all these awkward, "Oh, we just decided to go to DorkenCon, do you want to be part of our team?" scenes with a cast that clearly can't do them when there's little if any narrative reward for including them in the first place. Heck, it might be more interesting if they charted out all the Cons they wanted to hit in a season and presented it as a campaign with goals for the team members rather than trying to create dubious story-lines like "there's a national cosplay circuit which can lead to a lucrative career in the exciting world of professional cosplay or, dare-to-dream, costume construction for media production". I do respect the few people who do manage to carve out a career in those fields, but the reverence the show has for that possibility reminds me of the old SCTV bit about the Bryman School of Philosophy, "Did you know that some philosophers make nearly as much money as some poets?" It's enough, for me at least, to see the cast's craft and love for the characters.

To be fair though, the entire cast pretty much sucks at the "let's act as if we just came up this idea to do X or go to Y" part of reality TV. I respect unreservedly their nerdish devotion to this activity, and their enthusiasm - if not always expertise - at fabrication. Yaya is a bit of what my Dad in a far-off, less-equitable time would have called an HMI, but I do enjoy her craft, and she does take the stage at the shows with an amazing amount of presence.

I understand the Mia hate, and I did not like her as a jidge for an entire season, but I have my pet tin-hat theory that the only reason SYTYCD remains on the air is that it is an Emmy machine (the following is clipped from Wikipedia); 2006: Charles Klapow, Kenny Ortega, Bonnie Story – High School Musical 2007: Mia Michaels – So You Think You Can Dance and Wade Robson – So You Think You Can Dance and Rob Marshall, John Deluca – Tony Bennett: An American Classic 2008: Wade Robson – So You Think You Can Dance 2009: Rob Ashford – 81st Annual Academy Awards - Musicals Are Back and Tyce Diorio – So You Think You Can Dance 2010: Mia Michaels – So You Think You Can Dance 2011: Mia Michaels – So You Think You Can Dance and Tabitha and Napoleon D'umo – So You Think You Can Dance 2012: Joshua Bergasse – Smash 2013: Derek Hough – Dancing with the Stars Of course, we'd all rather have Wade around, and, indeed, it's been a couple of years now for the show in general. But a self-important Mia routine that captures the attention of Emmy voters could not hurt the chances for a season 12. Furthermore, I agree with Mia philosophically. Dance is not just about the movement. Katee and Joshua simply walking forward at the beginning of their Mia routine was one of the most arresting moments of the series to date.

Apparently, there's a whole circuit of competition dance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competition_dance) which seems to encourage the incorporation of gymnastic elements. And SYTYCD has featured many people from that world over the years, though, strangely, it has never particularly acknowledged its existence in the way that it has mentioned competitive ballroom occasionally.

Yes, it's fairly common knowledge around here, and, I believe, its mentioned again up-thread as well. (Nothing wrong restating it though: at least half of the fun of these threads is people sharing what they know about the show and dance in general). I think the purpose of the big show of "we're putting you through to choreography" is two-fold. First, they wish to reserve jidgment on the last 5-9 dancers going through in a given city to adjust the mix of styles and make some final decisions of this one over that one in a given style. Second, for the dancers who are focused on and good in a single style, showing the choreo footage allows the audience to see that such individuals might not partner well-enough or learn new choreography quickly enough. Thus, the show can highlight great dancers who would not otherwise work well in the post-Not Vegas episodes.

The lesser Whedons do seem to get their shows off the blocks unbearably slowly. I know we're supposed to be in the belly of the beast in this hero's journey dramatic arc, but is ANYONE at Cardiff remotely competent at their purported jobs? We get hints, but nothing so far demonstrates that Starbuck, Pie-man or Droopy Dog can accomplish basic human tasks like taking care of or feeding themselves let alone accomplishing some revolutionary tech change.

Just caught up with the series after hearing about it last week. The lights were at least upside down since the lights for the first byte showed 1101 ("E") which he calls out as "B" (1011). But it did not make sense that he'd rig the lights anyway since he could have much easily used a digital LED to show the bytes. We had such a rig in my Physics lab at Cal in 1982 for programming a Z80. It just took a chip and an LED for each byte. But all that's moot anyway since, as previous poster said, they would have passed the the IO test of the BIOS to another board, and printed it directly.

And these contrived set-pieces are also miles better than the "let's exploit the deluded for larfs" segments which occupied a third of the audition episodes in many earlier seasons. There has been some progress over the years. At least the cute kid COULD dance. Though it did make me sad that no one said, "We'll see you in nine years." which they might well have when SYTYCD was in its prime ratings-wise. And I will give a rare kudo to Nigel for finally not insisting that all three judges need to comment on every single dance. Nigel does some perfectly acceptable hosting and traffic control, and I occasionally even enjoy his comments, but it's nice that he can now let people through with two, one or zero comments from the judges. My reaction to Stanley's audition was, "We haven't had a male contemporary winner for a while, have we?" (Checks wikipedia: no male contempo winners? Nick was Jazz? Josh was Hip Hop? There's obviously some classification issues here.) But Mark did not win his season, and so I shouldn't get my hopes up. You brought a marching band to the audition, and then did not dance to their music? To be fair that was probably a production issue of not having the enough or the right mics rented, or, perhaps, a music clearance issue. But still.

Contemposexuals? I guess I'm one. Jessica was definitely a step beyond some of the female stripper routines we've seen in the past. She had it least one moment that evidenced skills beyond, "look at me: I'm pretty!" Floor work is a perfectly legitimate part of dance, and, in fact, Jessica's skill there might transfer a bit to the break-dance side of HH? Maybe? Ish? Those of us who watched S2 shudder at the thought. We'd routinely trash Cat's style at that point (even as we loved her). But, you're right: her styling is great now, and Mary would be better served by trending a bit more in the direction of Cat's style. I think there's a fair point to be made here, and, perhaps, Nigel and Christina did not make it clearly enough, but Dani's bonebreaking was used in her routine to denote her "brokenness". It's a bit literal, but the point is that the trick served the theme of the work rather than being the entire point of the dance which is the case with most (but not all) of the bonebreakers we have seen to this point on the show which often end up being: look at this trick I can do over and over and over again in a variety of positions and some proximate relation to the music. Dani does have other arrows in her quiver, and at least her choreo was more than "show my entire repertoire in 30 secs" and was trying to (and I'd say, succeeding) in being about something. (And I must say, my favorite moments in the audition episodes is the "Oh, shit, they're letting me go beyond the allotted time that I prepared for this routine, what do I do now?" and the dancers who step up to that to produce something great.)

Here's Jasmine's commercial if anyone is interested: http://www.ispot.tv/ad/7p4I/degree-motionsense-antiperspirant-featuring-jasmine-harper.

Don't get me wrong: I was the first to shout "More margaritas for Mary! Woo!" when she began to separate herself from the other choreographers as a jidge. When she's actually critiquing the dancers, she's right up there with Ben Folds as one of the best in the business of competitive reality jidging (though it's still a loss that we do not get to see her work as a choreographer any more which was quite good). I just wish she'd cease the scream and terminate the train. She does not need the gimmicks any more than this episode's Megan needs a sob story.

Uncle Pervy and Auntie Scream were certainly in fine fettle this episode. Sigh. Can we #SYTYCDNoMoreScream or #SYTYCDNoMoreLeer to vote for some new schtick? Or maybe Bieber can share some tiny fraction of his weed with the jidges before the cameras start rolling? The one edit that bothered me was Caleb's second partner just disappearing from the shot when his group gets waved through to Burbank. Sorry unnamed young dancer, you kind of demonstrated that Caleb can almost partner when he concentrates, and we have no more room for you in his narrative. You might consider bringing your own tragedy next time.