From: dmg@CS.WM.EDU (Daniel German)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.mexican
Subject: Los ricos tambien lloran en la ex-URSS
Date: 14 Aug 92 05:00:29 GMT
Organization: College of William and Mary, VA

Como dir'ia Ren'e, echense este trompo a la u^na

Me encontr'e con esto en s.c.m Est'a para Ripley's (?)

A'un me sigo muriendo de la risa.


Daniel

Article 5345 of soc.culture.mexican:
#>Path: ms!darwin.sura.net!convex!bcm!rice!rene
#>From: rene@rice.edu (Rene G. Rodriguez)
#>Newsgroups: soc.culture.mexican
#>Subject: Echense este trompo a la u~a
#>Message-ID: <Bsy7LH.BIL@rice.edu>
#>Date: 14 Aug 1992 00:48:53 GMT
#>References: <russia-soapoperaU2aA1210pe@clarinet.com>
#>Sender: news@rice.edu (News)
#>Reply-To: rene@rice.edu (Rene G. Rodriguez)
#>Organization: Rice University
#>Lines: 102
#>Originator: rene@cs.rice.edu
#>
#>
#>	MOSCOW (UPI) -- Every weekday, television viewers across the former
#>Soviet Union set aside their day-to-day cares -- and in some cases lay
#>down tools, abandon fields and empty shops -- to watch a Mexican soap
#>opera that has become virtually a national obsession.
#>	``The Rich Also Cry,'' a daytime television drama about the intrigues
#>and heartbreaks of a wealthy Mexican family, has become one of the most
#>talked-about and widely watched programs in the Commonwealth of
#>Independent States sinced it went on the air in November.
#>	Russians and other C.I.S. viewers are engrossed by the sad and
#>twisted fate of Mariana, the wife of a wealthy construction magnate who
b>abandoned her infant son to a lottery ticket seller in a park and is
#>then reunited with him 17 years later.
#>	An estimated 100 million viewers watch it every weekday, according to
#>the sociological research center of the state-owned Ostankino television
#>network, which broadcasts to all the former Soviet republics.
#>	``It's an absolutely huge audience. It's never been so high for a
#>series,'' said Vsevolod Vilchek, director of the former Soviet Central
#>Television network's research center. ``It's fantastically popular.''
#>	Indeed, by early summer the show had become so popular that
#>collective farm managers were bombarding Ostankino with mail complaining
#>that so many workers were leaving the fields to watch it that crops were
#>in jeopardy. They begged the television company to shift the series to
#>an evening timeslot.
#>	Now each installment in the series is repeated twice a day, morning
#>and night.
#>	``It influences the productive process, distracts people from their
#>jobs,'' said Vilchek, who said the center's research had confirmed that
#>a large portion of the show's daytime audience was made up of people
#>watching it at work.
#>	Scattered reports from the Itar-Tass news agency from around the
#>Commonwealth tell of empty shops in southern Siberia and abandoned
#>fields in western Russia, confirming that workers are more interested in
#>the television show than their jobs.
#>	``I watch it so I can turn off the day's events, and escape to
#>another world,'' said Lyudmilla Ukhlovskaya, a Moscow telephone company
#>manager who is a devoted fan. ``I'm so sick of all the politics,
#>economics, finances.
#>	``I know it's stupid, but it really grips you. Sure, the plots are
#>very contrived but it doesn't pretend to be quality entertainment. It's
#>just for relaxation,'' she said.
#>	The series has generated almost a cult following. Ostankino daily
#>receives a flood of mail, phone calls and telegrams, and there are
#>reports from hospitals of an increase in the number of female infants
#>being named ``Mariana.''
#>	The popular daily Komsomolskaya Pravda is running a promotional
#>contest offering a signed photograph of the actress who plays Mariana,
#>Veronica Castro, to the first new subscriber who can bring in 99 new
#>subscritions to the paper.
#>	In at least one case, the off-screen melodrama surrounding the series
#>came close to matching the intensity of the drama onscreen.
#>	In a now-famous letter sent to a popular weekly newspaper, one
#>devoted viewer from southern Ukraine wrote: ``I am 85 years old. I'm
#>captivated by 'The Rich Also Cry.' I'm not certain I'll live to see the
#>last episode. I promise my inheritance to anyone will write to me and
#>tell me when and how it all turns out.''
#>	The following month the paper published a letter from a postman who
#>said he had tracked down the author of the letter, who turned out to be
#>an unemployed farmworker in his 40s who wrote it as a hoax.
#>	The man told the postman that in the time since his letter was
#>published the previous month he had received an avalanche of mail -- 548
#>letters, cards and telegrams, with more arriving daily -- mainly from
#>people eager to get their hands on the inheritance.
#>	Others wrote out of sympathy. One elderly woman from the Belarus
#>capital Minsk wrote: ``Don't die, grandad -- there's a happy ending in
#>the film, the details are in a letter. Hang on.''
#>	The Mexican series has beat a host of newer competitors for
#>viewership. A home-grown Russian mini-series, ``Kvartira'' (The
#>Apartment), about a group of tenants in communal apartment who scheme to
#>evict an elderly woman so they can use her room, sagged in the ratings
#>after a few episodes. Another Mexican soap opera on the local Moscow
#>channel, ``No One But You,'' is slighly behind but catching up. And an
#>American soap, ``Santa Barbara,'' has less than half the viewership of
#>``The Rich Also Cry.''
#>	Vilchek said ``Santa Barbara'' was earning poor ratings because
#>Russians don't identify with the North American culture of hard work and
#>self-sufficiency as depicted in the U.S. soap opera.
#>	He said Russians had a much greater affinity for what he called the
#>laissez-faire Latin American mentality depicted ``The Rich Also Cry.''
#>	``The message is that happiness comes to you of its own accord,''
#>said Vilchek. ``You shouldn't have to fight for it too much. That seems
#>to suit our public.''
#>	Not everyone is happy about the ``The Rich Also Cry'' phenomenon.
#>	``Already it has influenced our social and personal life too
#>strongly. And on every corner, at work, in the metro, on the train and
#>in the shops you can hear heated discussions of the latest twist in her
#>fate,'' complained the trade union daily Trud.
#>	Trud said that the negative effects of the series were not just
#>psychological. The paper said in Moscow technicians in the municipal
#>water supply network have warned that damaging pressures build up in
#>system during broadcasts of ``The Rich Also Cry'' because no one uses
#>water during that time.
#>	Some wonder how a country in the middle of economic crisis can afford
#>to import something as frivolous as entertainment.
#>	``So there isn't enough foreign currency to buy medicine, there isn't
#>enough for food, but they can afford to pay for 'weeping rich people'?''
#>a viewer from the city of Tver east of Moscow wrote to the newspaper
#>``Argumenty i Facty.''
#>	``If they had to spend money on culture, then why not buy one
#>masterpiece instead of 500 episodes of tearjerker melodrama?'' he wrote.
#>``And if, as they say, the whole country is watching it so devotedly,
#>then shed a tear for the country.''
#>
#>
#>