So, recently, as I’m sure you’ve heard, Paramount launched it’s brand new streaming service known as Paramount+, and while I know it’s hard to contain your excitement at the idea of being able to watch as much ‘Young Sheldon’ as your heart desires for only $5.99 a month, this had me thinking of sorta how this all started.

Back when I was a drooling toddler, with a dent in my head, my family used to go to a lil’ place called Block Buster, where you could rent a DVD of ‘Paul Blart: Mall Cop’ once a week, whenever you wanted to see a movie without having to go through the hassle of going to a theatre (or a theater, one of the two).

But now, in the Year of the Ox, 2021, the moviegoing industry is just a little different now that cinemas are considered boiling soups of disease and sickness.

Originally, people would’ve turned to Netflix in this specific scenario, where you could watch all the movies you want in the comfort of your own lil’ hut, for only a given price per month. But now, there’s like 30 different variants of Netflix, all with different shows which are all exclusive to each, so you gotta collect them all now like some Yugioh cards or whatever.

So now, the experience seems to go a little something like this:

Man, I really like the movie ‘Caddyshack’, but Netflix only has ‘Caddyshack 2’, so now if I wanna see the entire Caddyshack cinematic franchise I need to pay for both Netflix and Big Burrito+, but I can only get both if I get the SpaghettiTV+ package which includes ‘Two Broke Girls Express’, which is the streaming service that only has 1 show, and that’s ‘Two Broke Girls’, which is the worst show of all time, but at least I can listen to Donald Glover’s new album which is exclusive to Disney+ because Donald Glover himself is apparently a Disney property now and so is ‘King Of The Hill‘.

So, I dunno, maybe it’s just me being cynical, and it probably wasn’t any better during the days when you had to deal with all those cable packages and stuff, but honestly, I just wanted to mention how interesting it is to me that ‘King Of The Hill’ is actually a Disney property now.

But, nonetheless, companies are now realizing that that if anybody is going to watch anything, you need to make it in a “binge watching” format, so people can feel like they’re in control to watch whatever they want, whenever they want. Even though the selection of shows/movies are only based on algorithms designed purposefully to announce the removal of a given show they know is popular, so that people’ll rewatch it as much as they can, out of the hope they can catch the fleeting availability of ‘Friends’ before they pull the rug out from under you, and Ross, Joey, and whatever Jennifer Anniston’s character’s name was, are gone from your life forever. 

And aside from already established shows being stuck on to these services as exclusive items to collect, more and more “original” shows are starting to pop up all over these places. But what’s wrong with having original stuff? Nothing, but there is one show, in particular, me and a buncha other people are sorta upset about.

So, there’s this show called ‘Kamp Koral’, and it’s all about the “infant years” of SpongeBob, which only particularly makes me lose my big ol’ Cheshire Cat smile cause the creator the original SpongeBob, Stephen Hillenburg, sorta was known for always talking about how he never wanted any SpongeBob spinoff shows, like a ‘Muppet Babies’ or a ‘Patrick Show’, to be made under his watch, as he didn’t wanna over commercialize it and sacrifice quality for profitability whatnot.

So, the executives in charge of Paramount/Nickelodeon conveniently waited until about 7 months after he passed away, to announce 2 separate ‘Cleveland Show’esque SpongeBob spinoffs; one being exclusively about Patrick, and one about SpongeBob as a toddler (Kamp Koral), which is just peachy… 

Honestly, people in general are sort of expecting this sort of thing from the overall “industry” in general, because it’s nothing new that corporate higher ups would be disregarding this guy’s wishes like this in such a blatantly disrespectful way, and I mean you can always just pirate your shows anyway if you don’t wanna contribute to 0.000001% of these guy’s overall revenue.

Which, I mean, is a really cynical way of looking at things, but, I mean, if you think about it, what if people just don’t wanna pirate stuff, and are happy to pay for networks which host shows they have fondness for? And what if these shows carry memories which might seem silly to some people, but could be meaningful to other people? What if people actually enjoy the exclusive content, and remember it with happiness like I remember watching SpongeBob as a lil’ kid?

I mean, yeah, these shows could probably be made without these services so easily, and the conscious of all the ‘Kamp Koral’ stuff still is scummy on a moral level, but in a time where people just naturally want entertainment to distract them from all this wacky stuff around them, maybe I should just let people enjoy their ability to watch as much ‘Young Sheldon’ in peace as they want, because at the end of the day, it’s just entertainment and what matters more in an American’s life than their TV?