A collection of EPG fails
Dec. 10th, 2021 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spiderbraidsAnd now, a little bit of randomness...
Given how important the electronic program guide (EPG) is for trying to find something to watch, you'd think that the service providers would put as much effort as reasonable into making sure the descriptions are correct... But here are some examples, mostly captured by myself over the years, of my local pay TV provider, TrueVisions in Thailand, putting up the wrong description... (though to be fair, most of these pictures are from the early 2010's, so maybe the QC has gotten mostly better since then?)
(Note that some of these pictures will have had text added to them; was expecting to post them in the bigger social media places some time)
One reason for putting up the wrong summary is confusion with a different work of the same title... For starters, here's HBO showing the Oscar-winning Gladiator with Russell Crowe, which TrueVisions has tagged with a summary for a pre-Jerry MacGuire Cuba Gooding Jr. boxing drama of the same name:
(and on top of that, ISTR Cinemax actually did air the Cuba Gooding Jr. film; TrueVisions did put up the correct summary for the HD channel, which aired on a separate channel from SD at the time)
You'd think that they wouldn't be able to put up a wrong summary for James Cameron's Avatar (at the time, the highest grossing movie in history), much less one that wasn't for a certain much-praised animated series (M. Night Shyamalan's much-maligned live-action adaptation didn't exist yet; would that it were still the case LOL), and yet they managed just that for Star Movies' broadcast:
The website for the short film is no longer active, but a quick look through The Wayback Machine shows that the site was active all the way to 2017, which is a) not too shabby for a short film, and b) closer to 2024, when the short film takes place, than 2003, when it was made... and which also means it potentially could have gotten traffic from naive web-surfers for more than half its existence (!)
Just before Star Movies rebranded as Fox Movies Premium on New Year's Day 2012 (they'd lose the Premium some years later), they managed to get Disney's latest animated flick mixed up (or rather, Tangled up) with a 2001 B-thriller from Rachel Leigh Cook (with bonus editorializing, quite a rarity on TrueVisions):
(Also of note: This description lasted only one week before being purged as part of the rebrand)
On HBO, one of Liam Neeson's post-Taken actioners Non-Stop manages to get the blurb for the Lacey Chabert Lifetime movie:
Liam Neeson is obviously not a woman, and AFAIK he's certainly not looking for a relationship, rebound or otherwise, with all this texting going on... Incidentally, I do recall seeing the Chabert film on Lifetime Asia's schedule :-)
Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I once associated the name The Avengers with the British TV show turned much-derided Sean Connery flick (to the point where I was wondering why an animated series of The Avengers was full of comic superheroes instead of distinctively dressed spies), so I suppose it was inevitable that Cinemax would advertise the Connery flick with a blurb for the MCU epic:
![EPG: 'A superhero team of our favourite Marvel characters comes together to fight an unexpected enemy that threatens global safet[y]'... Inset image is from the Sean Connery flick](https://i.postimg.cc/pTq5Cz7c/20150422-225807-resized.jpg)
Okay, so we never had the package level that would have allowed us to watch HBO Family (except during a handful of complimentary upgrade periods, which this wasn't one of them; the inset pic is actually for an NBA game on NBA TV), but I'm almost certain that they were airing the 1995 Olsen twins vehicle It Takes Two, rather than the George Newbern rom-com of the same name from 1988:
Ah-nuld might not be amused to see one of his more successful forays into comedy, 1996's Jingle All the Way, being tagged with the description for a Hallmark Channel animated special:
(One of our in-house channels also used this synopsis, but included the correct actor listing [!])
The now-defunct Diva presents Esquire TV's cooking competition Knife Fight, but TrueVisions has given it a write-up from Rob Lowe's political satire:
Michael Bay actioner The Island (clones! subterfuge! product placement!) getting a description about Michael Caine getting kidnapped by pirates (this was one of the in-house channels, so you'd hope that they'd take more care for descriptions on their own channels)
![EPG: 'A journalist goes in search of a band of modern-day pirates in the Caribbean, but ends up kidnapped and forced to join the crew [...] Cast: Michael Caine, David Warn[er]' Inset: Ewan McGregor and Steve Buscemi having a casual chat and drinking some beer in the Michael Bay film](https://i.postimg.cc/mgCcq0JH/20171126-155102-resized.jpg)
(It was either this photo, or one with the late Michael Clarke Duncan being dragged back to the organ harvesting room... and also, a different in-house channel did put up a correct blurb and actor listing)
Also related is when one movie of a series gets a description from a different entry, such as this entry for the first SpongeBob movie getting the summary for the second one (it's Plankton who steals the Krabby Patty formula in the first one... it doesn't help matters that both movies have plots revolving around the theft of said formula; also, another gaffe from the in-house film channel)
![EPG shows the second movie's plot: 'When a diabolical pirate steals a secret formula it is up to SpongeBob [&] Plankton to work together'... Inset image is Spongebob and Patrick on their way to Shell City, from the first movie](https://i.postimg.cc/MKcf0cYt/20170707-074021-resized.jpg)
Not originally discovered by myself, but worth mentioning: Here, a user wonders why Cinemax was showing a film about police chasing a gold thief instead of a film about a shark attack (and the user went even further by including a screencap of the TrueVisions website advertising the shark attack flick, complete with image from that version)
Source: https://pantip.com/topic/32961544/
And here's my cap of the English version of the summary:
Other examples I have memories of rather than photos, plus a few adjacent:
- The Chris O'Donnell comedy The Bachelor being advertised with a blurb mentioning offering the final rose; no guesses what that's supposed to belong to (the kicker is that this was HBO, so you'd think that a low-brow reality show's summary would be quickly flagged as wrong, then again, also see a James Cameron mega-hit getting the description of an obscure short film above)
- The 2006 Dane Cook comedy Employee of the Month being advertised with a summary mentioning the main character getting involved in a bank robbery... which is actually the Matt Dillon dramedy from 2004
- The WWE actioner Countdown (starring Dolph Ziggler as a cop on the trail of a kidnapped child) got a blurb on Fox Action Movies advertising it as an action-packed drama about astronauts in training (sounds like the Robert Altman movie from 1967, which looks a bit too ancient for the Fox movie networks)
- Discovery Channel aired the post-apocalyptic reality show The Colony, but the description was for a different reality show about settling in 19th-century colonial Australia
- Adam Sandler's Mr. Deeds was advertised with a blurb about someone needing to do something called the Dirty Deeds, capitalized because that's the name of the movie that blurb was for... Looks like these descriptions were done dirt cheap :-)
- The Mark Wahlberg 2006 drama Invincible (true story about a bartender-turned-American football player... starring a rapper-turned-prestige movie star ;-)) being advertised with a description mentioning medieval knights (which I'd assumed to be for a different film with the same name, but looking around now, neither of the other films of the same name involves knights, but there is one with Billy Zane and martial arts warriors)
There's even been a few cases where TrueVisions has just flat out put up the summary for a completely different work... A DTV sequel to Honey I Shrunk the Kids gets a blurb for the decidedly not family-friendly (in more ways than one) The Hand that Rocks the Cradle:
while TrueVisions managed to tag Limitless on the post-rebrand Fox Movies Premium with a write-up for Season of the Witch (as a bonus, this was during the brief period where Fox would put a brief logline for the film under the title bug):
Another example I remember (and go figure that despite being around until just a few months ago, I don't have a photo of this): Despite being one of Disney Channel Asia's higher-profile animated series, the 2017 revival of Ducktales was advertised right up to the end with a description mentioning Chance, Bailey and Uncle Dusty pulling pranks, which actually belonged to their lesser-regarded sitcom/prank show Walk the Prank (which AFAIK, stopped airing in Asia after the demise of Disney XD)
Here's a real rarity (Rarity? ;-)): TrueVisions outright showing the wrong show in the EPG, and to add minor insult to injury, this was during when I was into the new My Little Pony and was hoping to be able to watch it on a proper TV, so imagine how surprised/disappointed I was to see a different kind of pastel animal appearing on Cartoon Network's screens (was hoping to record some local dubbed audio, and even got up early for this purpose :-\ As a bonus, the poorly-written summary either just stops mid-sentence or is missing a word somewhere) And AFAIK, CN Asia never did actually air ponies :-\ (Well, I think they did air Pony Life at some point, but that's not the same now is it?)
(And a minor digression: way back in the mid-to-late aughts, I remember CN Asia running promos for Naruto for about a week advertising its debut, but when I tuned in at the advertised time, they ended up airing Courage the Cowardly Dog instead; unlike with ponies, CN Asia did end up airing it eventually)
In other countries, one might complain about the EPG only showing generic descriptions for TV series instead of specific episodes, or showing the wrong episode's summary... but on TrueVisions, you'd better hope that they'd put up a generic description, because they've had a bit of a habit of just plastering the first episode summary they receive to represent the whole series :-\ Okay, to be fair, TrueVisions mostly managed to avoid that with the now-defunct Disney networks (despite the Ducktales gaffe above), but now that they've been replaced by Dreamworks and Nick Jr, this particular sloppiness appears to be rearing its ugly head again, as seen in these examples for Dreamworks airings of Dennis and Gnasher: Unleashed, where instead of something like "Dennis and his canine companion Gnasher bring their crazy antics to your TV screens in the animated adaptation of the British comic" (pretty sure someone could write a better one given enough time) they're saddled with this (I've picked three random airings to show they're not dynamically adjusting the summary on an episodic basis):
I remember when Diva aired various seasons of Top Chef, they'd frequently show the summary for a single episode from the given season (which often even listed exactly how many contestants were left, along the lines of "15 contestants remain to do so-and-so challenge") But one of the more egregious examples of this I remember was from when Cartoon Network aired The Garfield Show (the newer CG one), where the summary went something like "In the deepest reaches of the galaxy, a race of lasagna-shaped aliens plot to take over the earth", which is a description for the first episode (and the first half at that), without any mention of the orange Monday-hating cat (!) Ironically, when it aired as part of a strand called "New Mondays", it got a proper summary, since it got a different EPG entry along the lines of "New Mondays: The Garfield Show", which managed to warrant getting a new description :-) I have seen a few shows manage to get their previously episode-specific blurbs changed to general, so there might be some hope, but then again, most of the time, badly-written blurbs only tend to go away when the show does, so make of that as you will, as I leave you with this mostly-correct description for The Zhu-Zhus:
(They got the main character's name wrong, but that's only because they changed it to Frankie mid-development)
Given how important the electronic program guide (EPG) is for trying to find something to watch, you'd think that the service providers would put as much effort as reasonable into making sure the descriptions are correct... But here are some examples, mostly captured by myself over the years, of my local pay TV provider, TrueVisions in Thailand, putting up the wrong description... (though to be fair, most of these pictures are from the early 2010's, so maybe the QC has gotten mostly better since then?)
(Note that some of these pictures will have had text added to them; was expecting to post them in the bigger social media places some time)
One reason for putting up the wrong summary is confusion with a different work of the same title... For starters, here's HBO showing the Oscar-winning Gladiator with Russell Crowe, which TrueVisions has tagged with a summary for a pre-Jerry MacGuire Cuba Gooding Jr. boxing drama of the same name:
(and on top of that, ISTR Cinemax actually did air the Cuba Gooding Jr. film; TrueVisions did put up the correct summary for the HD channel, which aired on a separate channel from SD at the time)
You'd think that they wouldn't be able to put up a wrong summary for James Cameron's Avatar (at the time, the highest grossing movie in history), much less one that wasn't for a certain much-praised animated series (M. Night Shyamalan's much-maligned live-action adaptation didn't exist yet; would that it were still the case LOL), and yet they managed just that for Star Movies' broadcast:
The website for the short film is no longer active, but a quick look through The Wayback Machine shows that the site was active all the way to 2017, which is a) not too shabby for a short film, and b) closer to 2024, when the short film takes place, than 2003, when it was made... and which also means it potentially could have gotten traffic from naive web-surfers for more than half its existence (!)
Just before Star Movies rebranded as Fox Movies Premium on New Year's Day 2012 (they'd lose the Premium some years later), they managed to get Disney's latest animated flick mixed up (or rather, Tangled up) with a 2001 B-thriller from Rachel Leigh Cook (with bonus editorializing, quite a rarity on TrueVisions):
(Also of note: This description lasted only one week before being purged as part of the rebrand)
On HBO, one of Liam Neeson's post-Taken actioners Non-Stop manages to get the blurb for the Lacey Chabert Lifetime movie:
Liam Neeson is obviously not a woman, and AFAIK he's certainly not looking for a relationship, rebound or otherwise, with all this texting going on... Incidentally, I do recall seeing the Chabert film on Lifetime Asia's schedule :-)
Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I once associated the name The Avengers with the British TV show turned much-derided Sean Connery flick (to the point where I was wondering why an animated series of The Avengers was full of comic superheroes instead of distinctively dressed spies), so I suppose it was inevitable that Cinemax would advertise the Connery flick with a blurb for the MCU epic:
Okay, so we never had the package level that would have allowed us to watch HBO Family (except during a handful of complimentary upgrade periods, which this wasn't one of them; the inset pic is actually for an NBA game on NBA TV), but I'm almost certain that they were airing the 1995 Olsen twins vehicle It Takes Two, rather than the George Newbern rom-com of the same name from 1988:
Ah-nuld might not be amused to see one of his more successful forays into comedy, 1996's Jingle All the Way, being tagged with the description for a Hallmark Channel animated special:
(One of our in-house channels also used this synopsis, but included the correct actor listing [!])
The now-defunct Diva presents Esquire TV's cooking competition Knife Fight, but TrueVisions has given it a write-up from Rob Lowe's political satire:
Michael Bay actioner The Island (clones! subterfuge! product placement!) getting a description about Michael Caine getting kidnapped by pirates (this was one of the in-house channels, so you'd hope that they'd take more care for descriptions on their own channels)
(It was either this photo, or one with the late Michael Clarke Duncan being dragged back to the organ harvesting room... and also, a different in-house channel did put up a correct blurb and actor listing)
Also related is when one movie of a series gets a description from a different entry, such as this entry for the first SpongeBob movie getting the summary for the second one (it's Plankton who steals the Krabby Patty formula in the first one... it doesn't help matters that both movies have plots revolving around the theft of said formula; also, another gaffe from the in-house film channel)
Not originally discovered by myself, but worth mentioning: Here, a user wonders why Cinemax was showing a film about police chasing a gold thief instead of a film about a shark attack (and the user went even further by including a screencap of the TrueVisions website advertising the shark attack flick, complete with image from that version)
Source: https://pantip.com/topic/32961544/
And here's my cap of the English version of the summary:
Other examples I have memories of rather than photos, plus a few adjacent:
- The Chris O'Donnell comedy The Bachelor being advertised with a blurb mentioning offering the final rose; no guesses what that's supposed to belong to (the kicker is that this was HBO, so you'd think that a low-brow reality show's summary would be quickly flagged as wrong, then again, also see a James Cameron mega-hit getting the description of an obscure short film above)
- The 2006 Dane Cook comedy Employee of the Month being advertised with a summary mentioning the main character getting involved in a bank robbery... which is actually the Matt Dillon dramedy from 2004
- The WWE actioner Countdown (starring Dolph Ziggler as a cop on the trail of a kidnapped child) got a blurb on Fox Action Movies advertising it as an action-packed drama about astronauts in training (sounds like the Robert Altman movie from 1967, which looks a bit too ancient for the Fox movie networks)
- Discovery Channel aired the post-apocalyptic reality show The Colony, but the description was for a different reality show about settling in 19th-century colonial Australia
- Adam Sandler's Mr. Deeds was advertised with a blurb about someone needing to do something called the Dirty Deeds, capitalized because that's the name of the movie that blurb was for... Looks like these descriptions were done dirt cheap :-)
- The Mark Wahlberg 2006 drama Invincible (true story about a bartender-turned-American football player... starring a rapper-turned-prestige movie star ;-)) being advertised with a description mentioning medieval knights (which I'd assumed to be for a different film with the same name, but looking around now, neither of the other films of the same name involves knights, but there is one with Billy Zane and martial arts warriors)
There's even been a few cases where TrueVisions has just flat out put up the summary for a completely different work... A DTV sequel to Honey I Shrunk the Kids gets a blurb for the decidedly not family-friendly (in more ways than one) The Hand that Rocks the Cradle:
while TrueVisions managed to tag Limitless on the post-rebrand Fox Movies Premium with a write-up for Season of the Witch (as a bonus, this was during the brief period where Fox would put a brief logline for the film under the title bug):
Another example I remember (and go figure that despite being around until just a few months ago, I don't have a photo of this): Despite being one of Disney Channel Asia's higher-profile animated series, the 2017 revival of Ducktales was advertised right up to the end with a description mentioning Chance, Bailey and Uncle Dusty pulling pranks, which actually belonged to their lesser-regarded sitcom/prank show Walk the Prank (which AFAIK, stopped airing in Asia after the demise of Disney XD)
Here's a real rarity (Rarity? ;-)): TrueVisions outright showing the wrong show in the EPG, and to add minor insult to injury, this was during when I was into the new My Little Pony and was hoping to be able to watch it on a proper TV, so imagine how surprised/disappointed I was to see a different kind of pastel animal appearing on Cartoon Network's screens (was hoping to record some local dubbed audio, and even got up early for this purpose :-\ As a bonus, the poorly-written summary either just stops mid-sentence or is missing a word somewhere) And AFAIK, CN Asia never did actually air ponies :-\ (Well, I think they did air Pony Life at some point, but that's not the same now is it?)
(And a minor digression: way back in the mid-to-late aughts, I remember CN Asia running promos for Naruto for about a week advertising its debut, but when I tuned in at the advertised time, they ended up airing Courage the Cowardly Dog instead; unlike with ponies, CN Asia did end up airing it eventually)
In other countries, one might complain about the EPG only showing generic descriptions for TV series instead of specific episodes, or showing the wrong episode's summary... but on TrueVisions, you'd better hope that they'd put up a generic description, because they've had a bit of a habit of just plastering the first episode summary they receive to represent the whole series :-\ Okay, to be fair, TrueVisions mostly managed to avoid that with the now-defunct Disney networks (despite the Ducktales gaffe above), but now that they've been replaced by Dreamworks and Nick Jr, this particular sloppiness appears to be rearing its ugly head again, as seen in these examples for Dreamworks airings of Dennis and Gnasher: Unleashed, where instead of something like "Dennis and his canine companion Gnasher bring their crazy antics to your TV screens in the animated adaptation of the British comic" (pretty sure someone could write a better one given enough time) they're saddled with this (I've picked three random airings to show they're not dynamically adjusting the summary on an episodic basis):
I remember when Diva aired various seasons of Top Chef, they'd frequently show the summary for a single episode from the given season (which often even listed exactly how many contestants were left, along the lines of "15 contestants remain to do so-and-so challenge") But one of the more egregious examples of this I remember was from when Cartoon Network aired The Garfield Show (the newer CG one), where the summary went something like "In the deepest reaches of the galaxy, a race of lasagna-shaped aliens plot to take over the earth", which is a description for the first episode (and the first half at that), without any mention of the orange Monday-hating cat (!) Ironically, when it aired as part of a strand called "New Mondays", it got a proper summary, since it got a different EPG entry along the lines of "New Mondays: The Garfield Show", which managed to warrant getting a new description :-) I have seen a few shows manage to get their previously episode-specific blurbs changed to general, so there might be some hope, but then again, most of the time, badly-written blurbs only tend to go away when the show does, so make of that as you will, as I leave you with this mostly-correct description for The Zhu-Zhus:
(They got the main character's name wrong, but that's only because they changed it to Frankie mid-development)
