Concrete TV

**Revoltor** · 07 Feb 2005, 03:34 AM

Boobs, car crashes, kung-fu, Godzilla, fist fights, explosions and more all set to all kinds of music.

This show has been on Manhattan public access ever since I was in junior high and it still rocks. It's extremely abstract and extremely frantic.

I really don't know how else to sell it but check it out anyway:

http://www.concretetv.com

There are about 6 sample episodes each with about 6 parts. Let me know what you think.

**Clash!** · 07 Feb 2005, 03:50 AM

I really like this. I easily could watch something like this all day, because you never know whats going to be shown.

The more I watch it the more I love it. I just watched a montage of kicks to the groins from various action films, it was awesome. And you've never lived until you see choreographed muscle men dancing to Dr. Dre.

**Revoltor** · 07 Feb 2005, 05:00 AM

Awesome. FYI, to access the older eps just screw around with the episode numbers in the urls.

This guy's apartment must be packed to the gills with tapes.

**Clash!** · 07 Feb 2005, 05:05 AM

Yeah thats what I was wondering. Like how often is this show made, seems like its monthly. I guess that makes sense considering how many movies, tv shows, comercials, music videos, pron that he must sift through to find all this stuff.

**Revoltor** · 07 Feb 2005, 05:23 AM

Probably the only decent article ever put to print on the show:

Originally Posted by NYpress

...If you’ve been in enough bars on Thursday nights, chances are you’ve seen Concrete TV, the monumental cable access show that consists of car crashes, motorcycle chases, gunfights, hardcore porn, Chippendale’s stage footage and blips of dialogue cut together in half-hour action-movie montages. The show is favored by bartenders, because you can leave the sound off and it’s just as mesmerizing for drunks.

Concrete TV has been around since 1994, when creator Ron Rocheleau’s cable access sitcom ("It was bad because I was on drugs") began evolving into a "music video show." "I thought, what would it be like to make a movie with all cliches? So I started pasting cliches together, with background music, and that’s what became Concrete TV," says Ron.

Rolling Stone cited the show as a "Hot Pick" in 1996, and MTV came on the scene. But things didn’t work out. "They offered me this shitty gig to do Concrete TV with all footage from the MTV archive. You know how they are. They wanted ‘Behind the Scenes on the Making of Behind the Scenes.’ I told them: this isn’t interesting. This is bad."

MTV stopped calling, but Ron soldiered on, producing–to date–17 episodes of Concrete TV that he constantly edits and rotates, so you literally never see the same show twice.

Unfortunately, some cheap imitators have cropped up. Public Sex Acts, Liebography and Media Shower are three local cable shows that crib heavily from the Concrete TV formula. Public Sex Acts is the worst, with no continuity, shaky camerawork and a total lack of public sex. Liebography is story-oriented, with each show devoted to a figure like Calvin Klein, but it’s made by a Concrete TV devotee who recycles the same clip format. And Media Shower, which features "odd, rare, or unsettling video," is the yuppie Concrete TV for people who have not yet discovered the real thing.

"There are many imitators," Ron says. "But when I’ve seen the shows, they’re not very good... I can spend four-five hours on a few seconds of [Concrete TV]. I come from a fine arts background. So I have the patience to put it together slowly, and if I mess up, I start again. They don’t have that patience.

"It’s like, you know if you have a phat beat, people are going to steal it. All you can try to do is make it so good that you outshine all the imitators."

Don’t be fooled. The real Concrete TV airs Thursdays at 1 a.m. on MNN (channel 67, in Manhattan only).

http://www.nypress.com/print.cfm?content_id=3819

I've actually seen all 3 of the imitators mentioned in the article. Liebography wasn't bad but the other 2 tried way too hard.