The big breaking news in science fiction fandom yesterday was the announcement from the Sci-Fi Channel. They are changing their name unless you say it out loud. After 16 years, Sci-Fi is tossing out their brand identity in favor of a phonics-friendly name that looks like it belongs on a feminine hygiene product or worse still an information slug for sexually transmitted diseases.

According to various online resources this change is part of a re-branding campaign that has been in the works for more than a year. It includes a new logo and a new tagline… “Imagine Greater.”

According to network president Dave Howe, “We love being sci-fi, and we’re still embracing that. But we’re more than just space and aliens and the future -- the three things most people think of when they think of ’sci fi.”’

Gee a sci-fi channel that is more than just space, aliens and the future. Over the past few years we’ve had a first-hand glimpse at what being more than that implies with wrestling, fake ghost busters, reality shows and now a video game contest. Sounds more like they want to be Spike and G4.

It’s always been a given that when watching a network that calls itself Sci-Fi that you would see films like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter along side of Trek films and classics like When Worlds Collide. That is a no-brainer. But the channel seems to be missing the mark on real sci-fi programming. The studios have giant catalogs of sci-fi series sitting in their vaults but Sci-Fi seems to believe if it wasn’t produced in the last ten years it’s not worth repeating. So we get 8 hour marathons everyday of Star Trek: Enterprise or The X-Files or on Saturday and Sunday’s we are subjected to movie marathons of crap featuring such horrendously bad titles like Mansquito or Crocodile Lake with below par stories and even worse SFX.

These 8 hour marathons of recent productions are nothing more than the result of extremely lazy programming bosses who apparently use a dart-board to determine program schedules. In my memory it’s been roughly ten years since Sci-Fi has run any classic sci-fi (excluding Trek and Twilight Zone).

No UFO or Space: 1999…

No Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea or Land of the Giants…

No Starlost or The Prisoner…

No Ark II or Jason of Star Command…

No Godzilla movie marathons…

It seems that the people in charge have no idea what viewers want unless you want to credit them with insightful thinking with the new Battlestar Galactica or Eureka.

But that’s not even the worst of it… in an interview on TV Week, Tim Brooks had this to say about the channels fans. Mr Brooks was one of the people who helped launch the original channel 16 years ago. “The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular.”

WOW! Insulting and rude in the space of two sentences, you can’t buy that kind of positive reinforcement anywhere in the marketing world.

According to TV Week, “In terms of television, the new brand better reflects that the channel has programs that are not about the typical sci-fi themes of space, aliens and the future.”

“We really do want to own the imagination space,” Mr. Howe said. “We want to get the credit for the range of content that we already have on our air and that we’ll be doing more of in the future.”

·         Like wrestling

·         8 hours of infomercials every night

·         Ghostbuster fakes

·         Scare tactics

·         Who Wants to Be A Superhero

People must be beating down the doors to get to this kind of programming.

Mr. Howe said Sci Fi looks at its branding every couple of years. He added that when new executives join the network, they usually ask if it has ever thought about changing the name.

To that last statement I have to say… Why? IT’S A SCI-FI CHANNEL! WHY WOULD YOU CHANGE THE GOD DAMN NAME?

The network worked with the branding consultancy Landor Associates and went through about 300 possibilities before selecting Syfy.

“When we tested this new name, the thing that we got back from our 18-to-34 techno-savvy crowd, which is quite a lot of our audience, is actually this is how you’d text it,” Mr. Howe said. “It made us feel much cooler, much more cutting-edge, much more hip, which was kind of bang-on what we wanted to achieve communication-wise.”

So the fact that a bunch of test subjects that are tech-savvy decided that because you’d text it this way that was cool enough to warrant a name change. I can’t think of the missed opportunities I had to text a message to someone and use SYFY instead of SFC (SciFi Channel).

I could on about this for hours but I think you know how I feel about this. Thank goodness the final episode of Battlestar Galactica is this Friday. I won’t have to be haunted by this channel ever again.

If you want a real good laugh, to go wikipedia and search for syfy and see what it means in Polish.

Dave

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