It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's A...Flaming Puck?
Today watching sports on TV is great. Everything is High Definition and crystal clear. I watch the Caps play on TV and I have no trouble seeing the puck. We are totally spoiled.
Have you tried to watch hockey (or any sport for that matter) on a non HD tv or a non HD feed? It's terrible. It may as well be black and white. There are still some bars out there that have old bubble TVs, and some that don't know that they are supposed to turn on the HD channel. I tried watching a game like that the other night. Not only could I not see the puck, but following the action made me nauseous.
The standard definition hockey game was unwatchable, which got me thinking, "How did people watch hockey before HD?" Since this is my first year watching hockey in a while, I had to think all the way back to the 90's to remember a time where I watched hockey on a regular TV. That sparked a memory that I should have remembered on Day 1 of this blog. I was pretty sure that back then the hockey puck was less of a black dot and more of a giant fireball on the ice!
After some brief research I realized that I was correct. Somewhere around 1996 Fox broadcast NHL games and added "FoxTrax" which was a glowing orb around the hockey puck so that you could tell where it was on TV.
Can you imagine the cartoonization of a game happening in any other sport. A flaming football? A rocket basketball? A comet baseball? It would ruin the entire experience. Apparently it did ruin hockey as well.
If hockey and Fox wanted more fans to watch, they should have made the hockey puck look like a football. They could have at least done "big head mode".
But after watching that Standard Def game the other night I kind of missed FoxTrax. I couldn't see the damn puck. On HD at my house I have no problems, but I need a standard def aid in case I want to "get krunk" at a terrible dive bar. Can hockey please add FoxTrax to SD channels?
Maybe instead of adding FoxTrax they could just broadcast a message across the bottom of all SD hockey games for bars that says "It's 2011, toss away this crappy bubble TV and GET AN HD TV!"
1 comment:
The trick back in the day was to not necessarily always look for the puck. Instead, you had to pay attention to where the players on the ice were looking if you ever lost track of where the puck was.
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