…To SyFy. No, seriously! It’s in The New York Times and everything!
One big advantage of the name change, the executives say, is that Sci Fi is vague — so generic, in fact, that it could not be trademarked. Syfy, with its unusual spelling, can be, which is also why diapers are called Luvs, an online video Web site is called Joost and a toothpaste is called Gleem.
“We couldn’t own Sci Fi; it’s a genre,” said Bonnie Hammer, the former president of Sci Fi who became the president of NBC Universal Cable Entertainment and Universal Cable Productions. “But we can own Syfy.”
Another benefit of the new name is that it is not “throwing the baby away with the bath water,” she added, because it is similar enough to the Sci Fi brand to convey continuity to “the fan-boys and -girls who love the genre.”
Oh honey: No. Just no. This is not the rebooting of Battlestar Galactica: This is taking what’s already perceived as a dumbed-down term for the genre (if only among the kind of people who tend to think that Star Wars Destroyed Science Fiction With Fun) and making it even more stupid. Which, I suppose, is more or less what we’ve come to expect from the people who have found crap like Seabeast and Mansquito viable programming choices.