A Hot Button Question

I have no problem ignoring a lot of urban legends. I don't think the Moon landing was faked, I will never spend any time in the wilderness looking for Bigfoot and given the fact everyone working in government likes to blab to reporters I am sure aliens have never visited out planet. However, there is one urban myth which continues to hold my attention - the SAP button. If you have ever watched the beginning of a sports telecast you know what I am talking about. Right as the game is about to start one of the announcers will say the following sentence, "Where available this broadcast can be heard in Spanish simply by pressing the SAP button on your television." Apparently pressing this button will change the audio over to an alternative set of announcers. At least, that is what I think happens - for all I know it changes every channel over to Spanish. You see, I don't know what happens when you press an SAP button because ever since I was a kid I have searched high and low on every television I have ever own and I have never once seen an SAP button. I've even started looking on my remote and I still haven't seen one, so at this point I have no reason to believe they are real. For all I know the SAP button is like the Santa Claus - just something our parents started telling us about years ago and are keeping up the illusion for the younger generation.

Of course, it is not like the SAP button would do me much good seeing as how I don't speak the language, even a little. Back in 7th grade we were given the option of French or Spanish and apparently I thought I would be doing a lot more travelling to Canada when I got older because I picked French. (Obviously, had I known how many people in this country would speak Spanish I would have gone with that. There is a reason the button doesn't take you to the French audio stream.) Anyway, it is because I am not good with Spanish that I was slightly disturbed when one of my cable movie channels randomly switched over to being a Spanish language version a couple of weeks ago. My cable provider has always offered a lot of Spanish channels, but they are usually off in their own block or come after their English counterparts. This one is smack in the middle of the regular movies and I have to say it continues to throw me for a loop when I flip passed. At least they have finally started putting the titles in Spanish, because otherwise it would typically be that I would be flipping around looking for something to watch, the guide would tell me it was a movie I wouldn't mind watching for a few minutes and then when I would click on that channel it would be in Spanish. Muy agravante.

[Sidebar: A couple of weeks ago I had a post about where I explained why I think movies featuring foreign languages should always be dubbed rather than have subtitles because I find subtitles distract from the rest of the action. Well, after a couple of weeks of accidentally landing on the Spanish movie channel I have noticed a pattern. It appears the more expensive the movie the higher the likelihood it will be dubbed. It seems like every big-budget blockbuster the channel shows has voice-overs, whereas the random, straight-to-DVD movies which randomly come up in the rotation are subtitled. I can only assume this means having someone dub your movie in a foreign language is a much more expensive. Still, I think my favorite part of dubbed movies are when the actors need to replicate basic sounds, like a grunting noise when someone is jumping over a wall. That noise doesn't translate? They couldn't leave it alone? I assume they do it so as to not break up the audio file but it is not like we wouldn't know the movie was being dubbed otherwise. I mean, the lips and words aren't close to syncing up, so I think we can figure this one out. Either way, it never fails to make me laugh. I also love it because it always appears as though the voice-over artist feels the need to make even the grunts sound like they have an accent to them.]

Of course, all of these Spanish language channels make me wonder if the SAP button is even necessary anymore. The days on Univision being your only option for Spanish programming are long gone. Now there are so many foreign language channels on my cable guide (pretty much every language has at least one channel somewhere out there) that it has started to feel like you could just watch those and not worry about having to find this magic button on your TV because every channel you could ever want has a Spanish counterpart. At this point it is a little like having a CD burner on your computer. Sure, you could bring burn a bunch of CDs for your roadtrip but isn't it easier to hook up your MP3 player, create a couple of playlists and bring all your music? That is why I am starting to wonder that even if I did buy a TV with an SAP button on it would it do anything or are these announcers just reading this announcement out of habit, like when they tell you not to record the game without the expressed written consent of the league? It certainly wouldn't be the first time society kept insisting on a warning which was no longer necessary. If you don't believe me just ask yourself how many people extinguished their cigarettes the last time you were on a flight and were told the captain had turned on the "no smoking" sign. I'm pretty sure the last time that happened the Loch Ness monster was still a guppy.