One thing I either didn't see in this piece or didn't understand when I saw it: does somebody want to dumb down for me why this is happening? Like, these companies own these cartoons, right? So what do they have to lose by putting them on their streaming services?
Not exactly, parties to whom they would have to pay residuals being dead just means they would have to pay their beneficiaries. And it's more a licensing question than a residual payment one, e.g. WBD-owned Max paying their own parent company WBD for the license to stream Duck Amuck.
While Max would make direct profit on that licensing deal, it would make Max look like a less efficient and profit-maximizing asset and therefore WBD would get a marginally less favorable stock valuation. In the financialized world of the last 50 years, obtaining a (meaningless, divorced from the real world) valuation on stock indices is more valuable than actually just making a good or providing a service.
I had the same question, because usually I can talk myself into understanding (not supporting) many of these business decisions, but this one I didn't actually comprehend. It took reading the THR piece linked in the CartoonBrew piece and typing this out to understand it:
WB Discovery has a bunch of digital files on servers of these cartoons. They have a place to stream all those cartoons in Max. But at the end of 2022 they decided not to have WBD-owned Max pay WBD, aka moving money from one spreadsheet to another spreadsheet, to host the cartoons.
While theoretically the cost of hosting those cartoons would be minuscule and could be justified by the added revenue of additional streams, WBD isn't actually interested in making money on the service directly. They're interested in making the service seem as profit-maximizing and with as much growth-potential as possible in order to merit better prices on stock indices.
In order for Max to seem like it is optimizing in those ways and to convince more people that the line will continue to go up forever and ever to infinity, cutting those items is worthwhile because while the direct profit from "host cartoon, get more subscribers" doesn't outweigh the dividends that will be paid out due to a fake valuation.
So basically it's the same problem as all of US and worldwide markets in the last 50 years of deregulation and and financialization and runaway speculation: none of it is about actually selling a good or service for marginally more than it cost you to make or provide it. It's all just about keeping up appearances in a certain way so stock indices and the people who trade on them will collectively agree that your company will grow in perpetuity.
Thank you for explaining! I am an unsophisticated sort, and I feel like making money is better than not making money, but apparently these guys have another way of looking at it.
I tend to think making money is better than not making it too! Those who work at financial institutions and operate under the assumption that money is only ever going to turn into more money forever and nothing is ever going to change the existing system and they are never going to die seem less rational to me...but they get to be the ones in charge so what do I know.
Whole separate essay but I’m still incredibly frustrated that Peacock debuted with a wide selection of Universal’s classic film library then just disappeared them en masse because… profits? Who knows.
I keep telling myself it'll pass, that it's clear to anyone making an honest assessment that our current streaming environment is a bubble and not a long-term sustainable model and won't be even after we see steep price hikes over the next year. But like you say, who knows. Best to keep the physical media close at hand either way.
A very good essay, as usual. But a sad addendum to the end paragraph: Disney recently canceled Rudish’s brilliant Mickey Mouse shorts. Two steps forward, one step backward.
At one point, me wanted to show kids Bugs Bunny, and thank Keebler me decided to seach on own first, because one of those off-brand streaming services you only use as last resort — Tubi? Glorbo? Squirtle? — had old Looney Tunes shorts. Me not recognized titles, and me very quickly found out why.
Me knew there were some moderately racist Looney Tunes that not have aged well and WB has issued along with disclaimer. What me discovered is that there are also jawdroppingly racist Looney Tunes shorts that WB has rightfully buried. Me got about one minute into one where Bugs spars with character who was clearly precursor to Elmer Fudd, as he was hunter with shotgun, but can only be described as Sambo figure. At one point, Bugs distracts him by throwing pair of dice, because what black person can resist shooting dice and gambling? It was somehow even less subtle and tasteful than me making it sound; me turned it off before Bugs started measuring his skull.
Anyway, it make even stronger case for well-curated collection to preserve Bugs' legacy (and classic cartoons that remain very funny, and have magic that subsequent animators found very hard to recapture.)
I think the key here is "well-curated." I had Boomerang at some point because I wanted to show my then 3 or 4-year old these old cartoons, but they were all just in there in alphabetical order and I had a hard time finding anything. HBO had the "seasons" and that helped but it was still hard if you didn't know exactly what you were looking for.
So I was thinking about the way I encountered these growing up in the 80s/90s. It would be like 30 or 60 minute blocks (with commercials of course) of however many cartoons fit into that time frame. You didn't cue up a cartoon on demand (nothing was on demand, really), you just watched whichever ones came on. Maybe there was a theme, maybe there wasn't. (MeTV has programming like this now as part of their kids block.)
I think there's something to that, and streamers haven't quite figured it out. Yes, it's great to be able to pull up a specific cartoon because you want to see it or it's relevant or it's Duck Amuck and it's in a class of its own. But sometimes I just want to watch cartoons, damnit, and I don't want to scroll through "season 12" (whatever that means) every 6 minutes to pull up another cartoon.
One other thing: Streamers like Pluto have "channels" that are just always showing stuff, like old TV shows or music videos or game shows. We need THAT: a streaming channel that's always showing cartoons and you can dip in and out whenever you have that itch or your kid wants to watch 30 minutes of Bugs Bunny. You get what you get and you're happy about it.
There, I figured it out for you, Zaslav. Go ahead and send me a bonus check in the mail. You're welcome.
That was one secret to basic cable: head of Comedy Central once said they deliberately put on mediocre movies because they new network not was appointment television, but people would flip through channels, and stop to watch 20 minutes in middle of "Not Another Teen Movie" because it not kind of thing you feel you need to make time to watch from start to finish.
With cartoons, that logic apply for different reason. It very unlikely me would make individual 3-minute Foghorn Leghorn appointment television. But me would happily watch 45 minute block of cartoons in which Foghorn pop up occasionally alongside Daffy, Bugs, etc.
I was pleased a couple years ago to see some of my favorite Donald Duck shorts back on my Disney+ free trial, which were fun to revisit with my family. I was surprised one of our absolute favorites—the snowball fight between Donald and Huey, Dewey, and Louie—was missing. We pulled out the VHS and were even more surprised until the very end, where HD&L do one of those little “Indian war dances” to celebrate.
As a kid I don’t think I ever repeated the behavior or anything, and think I saw it more as kids my dad’s age playing (it was the 90s, no one did cowboys-and-Indians anymore) than anything else. Still, though, it wasn’t a nice surprise.
That kind of thing was so casual back then. Me remember one old Bugs cartoon where Elmer Fudd finally corner him, and he breaks down and says "don't me get last wish?" Elmer grants that, and Bugs says "Me......... wish me was in Dixie! Hooray! Hooray!" and is magically whisked away to Georgia. Which is solid gag, except visual is cotton field on plantation, and depiction of farmhands working there was shocking to me even as fairly sheltered, very young monster. No one ever questioned that kind of thing when these cartoons were made.
That's not always a safe assumption. Karina Longworth's series on SONG OF THE SOUTH gets into how protested the film was at the time.
For Looney Tunes there aren't as many truly awful ones as you might imagine, but there are definitely some. The Wikipedia article on the "Censored Eleven" is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censored_Eleven
And there are certainly plenty with casual gags like the one you reference above and the World War II cartoons are, of course, not great about depictions of Japanese characters.
Big picture: I'm of two minds on the matter. On the one hand I think everything should be freely available because to do otherwise is to sanitize the past while removing items of historic and artistic interest. (Some of the Censored Eleven are technically brilliant however indefensible the content.) Surrounding offensive material with context is my preferred solution. But I waffle on that when it comes to entertainment for kids. We never showed our daughter PETER PAN when she was little because I didn't want to deal with the Native American depictions. I love DUMBO and we showed her that but there's one element to that film that makes me grit my teeth.
The Looney Tunes characters are beloved kids' characters, even if the cartoons weren't originally aimed only at kids. I can see wanting to keep any items that would cloud that off the market. It might make sense to make the offensive stuff available to adults who want to watch them with an adult's understanding and at one point Warner Bros. had plans to do that. But would that have meant releasing something like LOONEY TUNES: THE RACIST COLLECTION? If there's an answer for how to address this that makes everyone happy I've never thought of it.
Me have no idea how Warners should address this, but me do think you have right method as parent. We not really need to expose kids to every single thing we experienced as kids, and that goes double for stuff too racist or sexist to watch comfortably now. At same time, adults should be able to watch that with context provided. And me big believer in providing context to kids. Both in terms of, "many people knew this was wrong back then, but it was more acceptable to put in movie," and when it comes to think like, "they not have CGI back then, they had guy who look like Roger Moore ski off of that cliff." Context virtually always important.
One of the frustrating things is that in many cases of this stuff is less than five seconds long but simultaneously hard to cut out given the (artistic) economy of these shorts.
Not exactly the same as kids playing "Cowboys and Indians," but also not exactly not the same as kids playing "Cowboys and Indians," and that's 2020.
I think the "war dance," also showed up briefly in My Neighbor Totoro, by the older sister, right after they arrive at the new house. So, an example of the US exporting its... issues to other countries. (Something, something, the kid in Parasite).
Looks like they should've made that left turn at Albuquerque. 😞
It is very sad that such amazing works of art aren't available. To me it's like somebody decided that the Mona Lisa shouldn't be viewable publicly... And that's that.
The Rabbit of Seville, What's Opera, Doc?, and A Corny Concerto were my introductions to classical music. ❤️ I bet I'm not alone.
A major problem is that, while we as film fans largely know better than to assume that modern super-conglomerates should be trusted to handle their live-action back catalogs unsupervised, animation often doesn't seem to enter into the same consideration. TCM only regularly shows cartoons as part of its Saturday morning matinee, and while Criterion has occasionally showcased them on its streaming service (the Hubley retrospective was a pleasant surprise in particular), neither it nor other cinephile home-video outlets have consistently done the same in its physical media.
It's sort of a vicious cycle in that regard. If the medium was dealt a material blow with the end of block booking and double-feature theater programs (arguably the sole negative outcome of the Paramount Decree) and the subsequent migration to high-volume, low-budget television, it was dealt a blow in standing by Disney's postwar move into theme parks, family-friendly TV, and the synergy between them - which, together with the largely kid-targeted scheduling of other animated cartoons (theatrical and TV-native), helped firmly fix it as both explicitly a children's medium and implicitly an irreducibly corporate one. It's been a very long and only intermittently successful climb out of those forced niches, and it's still affecting how it's thought of and dealt with to this day.
"It’s among the 256 shorts removed from the service in a purge of every such short released between 1950 and 2004. Also pulled: “Duck Amuck,” “One Froggy Evening,” “What’s Opera, Doc?,” and a bunch of others even casual fans know by name."
I had not heard this until now, and it is both offensive and nonsensical. Why in the world wouldn't these be a selling point for subscribing to Max?
"It’s a curious situation: Much of Disney and Warner Bros.’s identities are built atop the iconic characters who starred in shorts that most people don’t watch anymore, often because they can’t watch them."
I've had this thought cross my mind before: Mickey and Minnie et al are still the faces of Disney, but how many kids have actually seen them as characters in stories at this point?
In some ways it seems like we've gone backwards. When I was a kid in the 80s, my parents could rent old cartoons to show us. I saw a ton of old Disney and Looney Tunes that way. But now you can't rent or even BUY a lot of that stuff.
Weirdly, when I was a kid I think it’s possible that I consumed more of those classic Disney characters in the form of comic books and storybooks than I did in the form of cartoons. I have strong memories of reading big “Treasuries” of collected Disney comics.
Yeah, I actually don't have much of a personal connection to the Disney characters simply because they never had after school show blocks on UHF stations (shoutout to Channels 56 and 38 in Boston) like Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry and just about everything else did.
Until reading this piece I had never really thought about the fact that kids no longer spend their afternoons watching curated blocks of cartoons and old sit com re-runs until dinner time. Then again, the 100s of hours I spent watching Three's Company and the Brady Brunch could definitely have been better spent.
I started watching Buster Keaton shorts on Criterion before bed and was so excited to do the same with Looney Tunes before I remembered they all got yanked off MAX and was so mad
The world would be a better place if copyrights could expire. Sure you'd get Bugs Bunny porn and exploitative garbage like Blood and Honey but you'd also have people who genuinely care about curating these classics be able to just do it. People who love a work of art will go far above and beyond anyone with a profit motive (for a great example, check out fan translations of games).
Also maybe people would make new IPs once in a while?
One thing I either didn't see in this piece or didn't understand when I saw it: does somebody want to dumb down for me why this is happening? Like, these companies own these cartoons, right? So what do they have to lose by putting them on their streaming services?
It seems like a no-brainer. For most of these, anybody they might conceivably have to pay a residual to has been dead for decades.
Not exactly, parties to whom they would have to pay residuals being dead just means they would have to pay their beneficiaries. And it's more a licensing question than a residual payment one, e.g. WBD-owned Max paying their own parent company WBD for the license to stream Duck Amuck.
While Max would make direct profit on that licensing deal, it would make Max look like a less efficient and profit-maximizing asset and therefore WBD would get a marginally less favorable stock valuation. In the financialized world of the last 50 years, obtaining a (meaningless, divorced from the real world) valuation on stock indices is more valuable than actually just making a good or providing a service.
I had the same question, because usually I can talk myself into understanding (not supporting) many of these business decisions, but this one I didn't actually comprehend. It took reading the THR piece linked in the CartoonBrew piece and typing this out to understand it:
WB Discovery has a bunch of digital files on servers of these cartoons. They have a place to stream all those cartoons in Max. But at the end of 2022 they decided not to have WBD-owned Max pay WBD, aka moving money from one spreadsheet to another spreadsheet, to host the cartoons.
While theoretically the cost of hosting those cartoons would be minuscule and could be justified by the added revenue of additional streams, WBD isn't actually interested in making money on the service directly. They're interested in making the service seem as profit-maximizing and with as much growth-potential as possible in order to merit better prices on stock indices.
In order for Max to seem like it is optimizing in those ways and to convince more people that the line will continue to go up forever and ever to infinity, cutting those items is worthwhile because while the direct profit from "host cartoon, get more subscribers" doesn't outweigh the dividends that will be paid out due to a fake valuation.
So basically it's the same problem as all of US and worldwide markets in the last 50 years of deregulation and and financialization and runaway speculation: none of it is about actually selling a good or service for marginally more than it cost you to make or provide it. It's all just about keeping up appearances in a certain way so stock indices and the people who trade on them will collectively agree that your company will grow in perpetuity.
Thank you for explaining! I am an unsophisticated sort, and I feel like making money is better than not making money, but apparently these guys have another way of looking at it.
I tend to think making money is better than not making it too! Those who work at financial institutions and operate under the assumption that money is only ever going to turn into more money forever and nothing is ever going to change the existing system and they are never going to die seem less rational to me...but they get to be the ones in charge so what do I know.
Whole separate essay but I’m still incredibly frustrated that Peacock debuted with a wide selection of Universal’s classic film library then just disappeared them en masse because… profits? Who knows.
I keep telling myself it'll pass, that it's clear to anyone making an honest assessment that our current streaming environment is a bubble and not a long-term sustainable model and won't be even after we see steep price hikes over the next year. But like you say, who knows. Best to keep the physical media close at hand either way.
A very good essay, as usual. But a sad addendum to the end paragraph: Disney recently canceled Rudish’s brilliant Mickey Mouse shorts. Two steps forward, one step backward.
At one point, me wanted to show kids Bugs Bunny, and thank Keebler me decided to seach on own first, because one of those off-brand streaming services you only use as last resort — Tubi? Glorbo? Squirtle? — had old Looney Tunes shorts. Me not recognized titles, and me very quickly found out why.
Me knew there were some moderately racist Looney Tunes that not have aged well and WB has issued along with disclaimer. What me discovered is that there are also jawdroppingly racist Looney Tunes shorts that WB has rightfully buried. Me got about one minute into one where Bugs spars with character who was clearly precursor to Elmer Fudd, as he was hunter with shotgun, but can only be described as Sambo figure. At one point, Bugs distracts him by throwing pair of dice, because what black person can resist shooting dice and gambling? It was somehow even less subtle and tasteful than me making it sound; me turned it off before Bugs started measuring his skull.
Anyway, it make even stronger case for well-curated collection to preserve Bugs' legacy (and classic cartoons that remain very funny, and have magic that subsequent animators found very hard to recapture.)
I think the key here is "well-curated." I had Boomerang at some point because I wanted to show my then 3 or 4-year old these old cartoons, but they were all just in there in alphabetical order and I had a hard time finding anything. HBO had the "seasons" and that helped but it was still hard if you didn't know exactly what you were looking for.
So I was thinking about the way I encountered these growing up in the 80s/90s. It would be like 30 or 60 minute blocks (with commercials of course) of however many cartoons fit into that time frame. You didn't cue up a cartoon on demand (nothing was on demand, really), you just watched whichever ones came on. Maybe there was a theme, maybe there wasn't. (MeTV has programming like this now as part of their kids block.)
I think there's something to that, and streamers haven't quite figured it out. Yes, it's great to be able to pull up a specific cartoon because you want to see it or it's relevant or it's Duck Amuck and it's in a class of its own. But sometimes I just want to watch cartoons, damnit, and I don't want to scroll through "season 12" (whatever that means) every 6 minutes to pull up another cartoon.
One other thing: Streamers like Pluto have "channels" that are just always showing stuff, like old TV shows or music videos or game shows. We need THAT: a streaming channel that's always showing cartoons and you can dip in and out whenever you have that itch or your kid wants to watch 30 minutes of Bugs Bunny. You get what you get and you're happy about it.
There, I figured it out for you, Zaslav. Go ahead and send me a bonus check in the mail. You're welcome.
That was one secret to basic cable: head of Comedy Central once said they deliberately put on mediocre movies because they new network not was appointment television, but people would flip through channels, and stop to watch 20 minutes in middle of "Not Another Teen Movie" because it not kind of thing you feel you need to make time to watch from start to finish.
With cartoons, that logic apply for different reason. It very unlikely me would make individual 3-minute Foghorn Leghorn appointment television. But me would happily watch 45 minute block of cartoons in which Foghorn pop up occasionally alongside Daffy, Bugs, etc.
I was pleased a couple years ago to see some of my favorite Donald Duck shorts back on my Disney+ free trial, which were fun to revisit with my family. I was surprised one of our absolute favorites—the snowball fight between Donald and Huey, Dewey, and Louie—was missing. We pulled out the VHS and were even more surprised until the very end, where HD&L do one of those little “Indian war dances” to celebrate.
As a kid I don’t think I ever repeated the behavior or anything, and think I saw it more as kids my dad’s age playing (it was the 90s, no one did cowboys-and-Indians anymore) than anything else. Still, though, it wasn’t a nice surprise.
That kind of thing was so casual back then. Me remember one old Bugs cartoon where Elmer Fudd finally corner him, and he breaks down and says "don't me get last wish?" Elmer grants that, and Bugs says "Me......... wish me was in Dixie! Hooray! Hooray!" and is magically whisked away to Georgia. Which is solid gag, except visual is cotton field on plantation, and depiction of farmhands working there was shocking to me even as fairly sheltered, very young monster. No one ever questioned that kind of thing when these cartoons were made.
That's not always a safe assumption. Karina Longworth's series on SONG OF THE SOUTH gets into how protested the film was at the time.
For Looney Tunes there aren't as many truly awful ones as you might imagine, but there are definitely some. The Wikipedia article on the "Censored Eleven" is pretty good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censored_Eleven
And there are certainly plenty with casual gags like the one you reference above and the World War II cartoons are, of course, not great about depictions of Japanese characters.
Big picture: I'm of two minds on the matter. On the one hand I think everything should be freely available because to do otherwise is to sanitize the past while removing items of historic and artistic interest. (Some of the Censored Eleven are technically brilliant however indefensible the content.) Surrounding offensive material with context is my preferred solution. But I waffle on that when it comes to entertainment for kids. We never showed our daughter PETER PAN when she was little because I didn't want to deal with the Native American depictions. I love DUMBO and we showed her that but there's one element to that film that makes me grit my teeth.
The Looney Tunes characters are beloved kids' characters, even if the cartoons weren't originally aimed only at kids. I can see wanting to keep any items that would cloud that off the market. It might make sense to make the offensive stuff available to adults who want to watch them with an adult's understanding and at one point Warner Bros. had plans to do that. But would that have meant releasing something like LOONEY TUNES: THE RACIST COLLECTION? If there's an answer for how to address this that makes everyone happy I've never thought of it.
Me have no idea how Warners should address this, but me do think you have right method as parent. We not really need to expose kids to every single thing we experienced as kids, and that goes double for stuff too racist or sexist to watch comfortably now. At same time, adults should be able to watch that with context provided. And me big believer in providing context to kids. Both in terms of, "many people knew this was wrong back then, but it was more acceptable to put in movie," and when it comes to think like, "they not have CGI back then, they had guy who look like Roger Moore ski off of that cliff." Context virtually always important.
I think the cartoon Cookie discussed is one of the "Censored Eleven"
One of the frustrating things is that in many cases of this stuff is less than five seconds long but simultaneously hard to cut out given the (artistic) economy of these shorts.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/apr/05/american-summer-camps-rethinking-indigenous-names-rituals
Not exactly the same as kids playing "Cowboys and Indians," but also not exactly not the same as kids playing "Cowboys and Indians," and that's 2020.
I think the "war dance," also showed up briefly in My Neighbor Totoro, by the older sister, right after they arrive at the new house. So, an example of the US exporting its... issues to other countries. (Something, something, the kid in Parasite).
Looks like they should've made that left turn at Albuquerque. 😞
It is very sad that such amazing works of art aren't available. To me it's like somebody decided that the Mona Lisa shouldn't be viewable publicly... And that's that.
The Rabbit of Seville, What's Opera, Doc?, and A Corny Concerto were my introductions to classical music. ❤️ I bet I'm not alone.
A major problem is that, while we as film fans largely know better than to assume that modern super-conglomerates should be trusted to handle their live-action back catalogs unsupervised, animation often doesn't seem to enter into the same consideration. TCM only regularly shows cartoons as part of its Saturday morning matinee, and while Criterion has occasionally showcased them on its streaming service (the Hubley retrospective was a pleasant surprise in particular), neither it nor other cinephile home-video outlets have consistently done the same in its physical media.
It's sort of a vicious cycle in that regard. If the medium was dealt a material blow with the end of block booking and double-feature theater programs (arguably the sole negative outcome of the Paramount Decree) and the subsequent migration to high-volume, low-budget television, it was dealt a blow in standing by Disney's postwar move into theme parks, family-friendly TV, and the synergy between them - which, together with the largely kid-targeted scheduling of other animated cartoons (theatrical and TV-native), helped firmly fix it as both explicitly a children's medium and implicitly an irreducibly corporate one. It's been a very long and only intermittently successful climb out of those forced niches, and it's still affecting how it's thought of and dealt with to this day.
"It’s among the 256 shorts removed from the service in a purge of every such short released between 1950 and 2004. Also pulled: “Duck Amuck,” “One Froggy Evening,” “What’s Opera, Doc?,” and a bunch of others even casual fans know by name."
I had not heard this until now, and it is both offensive and nonsensical. Why in the world wouldn't these be a selling point for subscribing to Max?
"It’s a curious situation: Much of Disney and Warner Bros.’s identities are built atop the iconic characters who starred in shorts that most people don’t watch anymore, often because they can’t watch them."
I've had this thought cross my mind before: Mickey and Minnie et al are still the faces of Disney, but how many kids have actually seen them as characters in stories at this point?
In some ways it seems like we've gone backwards. When I was a kid in the 80s, my parents could rent old cartoons to show us. I saw a ton of old Disney and Looney Tunes that way. But now you can't rent or even BUY a lot of that stuff.
Weirdly, when I was a kid I think it’s possible that I consumed more of those classic Disney characters in the form of comic books and storybooks than I did in the form of cartoons. I have strong memories of reading big “Treasuries” of collected Disney comics.
Yeah, I actually don't have much of a personal connection to the Disney characters simply because they never had after school show blocks on UHF stations (shoutout to Channels 56 and 38 in Boston) like Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry and just about everything else did.
Until reading this piece I had never really thought about the fact that kids no longer spend their afternoons watching curated blocks of cartoons and old sit com re-runs until dinner time. Then again, the 100s of hours I spent watching Three's Company and the Brady Brunch could definitely have been better spent.
I started watching Buster Keaton shorts on Criterion before bed and was so excited to do the same with Looney Tunes before I remembered they all got yanked off MAX and was so mad
The world would be a better place if copyrights could expire. Sure you'd get Bugs Bunny porn and exploitative garbage like Blood and Honey but you'd also have people who genuinely care about curating these classics be able to just do it. People who love a work of art will go far above and beyond anyone with a profit motive (for a great example, check out fan translations of games).
Also maybe people would make new IPs once in a while?