Back to the Future No More

While I think a TV show where a time traveler goes back in time and smacks around Mao for all the crap he did apparently the TV sensors in China aren't quite on board. They recently banned TV shows with themes about time travel because it's somehow disrespectful to the past. I mean come on, in China only the government is allowed to rewrite history. This is one of those great 1984 moments in China where it's just so obvious that they want to control how people in China not only act but think. Recently the communists have also been hard at work altering the past, but in a good change books way, not a bad time travel way, so that the origins of the communist party now extend back into the mid 1800's. Pretty soon the communist party will be older than Marx himself, though I guess that's something for next weeks revisions.

Besides the incredibly creepy mind control aspect of these pronouncements, and the fact there the so incredibly tone def to what people will think about this, there's also the sad fact that it's just another in a long line of decisions that makes sure Chinese television is terrible. All that's on most days are the endless historical soap operas, and boring variety shows of the type that haven't been on American TV in decades. When all art has to serve the state, or at very least not offend anymore, all art becomes terrible. There are essentially no good, or even passable, movies made in China, the big ones your thinking of were made by American or Hong Kong directors and staring actors that did a vast majority of there work outside of China. But it's OK there always more billiards they can show on TV.