I’m going to show my age here, but does anyone else remember being excited about entertainment?
I kind of do, but man, it’s been a long time.
Harken back with me to the old days, children. Days when vague rumors from that weird kid (me) who read sci-fi magazines and old comics would see something in an article about a new movie that was in production and have Mrs. Torkelson’s entire 3rd period talking about the next Star Wars movie instead of algebra.
Or when some kid would get dragged to the movie theater by his mother to see the rerelease of a Disney movie and see a poster for the next Star Trek movie. He’d come back to school all abubbling about how great it looked, and it even had that dude from Fantasy Island in it!
There are a lot of other examples, such as two big lines wrapped around theaters, one for the rerelease of Star Wars and the other for Titanic, but I don’t see that kind of enthusiasm. Heck, I don’t think we’ve seen any sort of mass excitement about a movie or TV show in about ten years.
Today, it seems that whoever owns Star Trek has pulled its spindled, mangled, and mutilated corpse out of cold storage, hooked it up to a couple marine batteries, then filmed while it twitched. Seriously, at this point, it should be shot on 8mm, sold out the back of a scuzzy gas station in a bad neighborhood, then watched in a dark basement while smoking. When the watcher dies, the older kids know to get to the house and just burn all that before the grandkids find it.
Star Wars is some poor child that was ripped out of its village, starved in the dark for a few months, then forced to dance for strangers in weird clothes for pennies. Maybe if it’s lucky, it’ll be given some nice nourishing soup for dinner, but mostly it’s fed on old, dessicated slop that was found at the bottom of a freezer and reheated in an underpowered microwave.
Kids movies aren’t safe, either. I just heard there’s going to be a fifth Toy Story movie, we have more Shrek than we can ever handle, and every classic animated film is getting a schlocky, half-baked live action remake. I guess in a world where little Timmy can call up every second of children’s entertainment ever made on the tablet that’s substituting for his parents, the thrill of “They’re putting Snow White back in the theaters this Christmas!” or “Disney’s opening the vaults and putting Peter Pan on DVD!” just doesn’t bring in the dollars anymore.
Instead, in between making commercialized propagandic schlock that bombs, the studios that used to ask themselves “Is this a good story for 7 year olds?” are either ‘reminagining’ classic stories or continuing stories that were complete decades ago.
TV is even worse. The kids who were slightly too young to watch the Simpsons when it premiered are now watching new episodes with their grandkids. South Park is now older than its creators were when they started taking pictures of cut out craft paper to make fart jokes. Family Guy has risen from the dead at least once, allowing its writers and voice actors to phone in whatever ‘irreverent’ thing crosses their minds every week.
Law and Order, in one form or another, is old enough that it can finally retire the minivan and car seats now that the kids are in middle school. The spin-off, SVU, has highlighted so many crimes against children and young women in New York that I’m surprised anyone still has the audacity to procreate in the Big Apple.
The Sopronos and Breaking Bad definitely had their day, and they were definitely well-written and acted pieces of art. Eventually, though, we have to realize that we were rooting for murderers, human traffickers, and drug pushers who brought nothing but misery to everyone they knew and everyone they touched.
In between all these, there are some bright spots.
Yellowstone and its spinoffs, love them or hate them, have brought back the western genre. Now that I think about it, Landman and Tulsa King are westerns, just with a little twist on them to make them a little more relevant to folks who can’t afford thousands of acres of real estate in Montana or Texas. Hey, if you can make being a roughneck or running a cannabis dispensary entertaining and sexy, more power to you.
Game of Thrones, for all its faults, brought at least some interest in high fantasy to the masses again, just with more incest, rape, and torture. Thank goodness Peter Jackson completed his Lord of the Rings trilogy before that came out. I shudder to think of what HBO would have done to poor Frodo if they’d gotten their meathooks on him. Of course, that also brought us the Witcher and Rings of Power series, so maybe that’s not a good example.
The Chosen and most of the offerings from Angel Studios are quite good, but of limited appeal to mass audiences. Yes, they’re interesting and enjoyable, and I wish more folks would check them out, but folks aren’t queuing up to watch them.
Indie films and television, as always, are hit and miss. I guess that’s kind of the point. If you’re making a movie or TV show (what’s the correct term for something that’s never going to be on TV, but would have been 30 years ago?) with a small cast, a smaller budget, but a really good idea, sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don’t. For every “Godzilla Minus One” or The Menu, you get a few hundred “Cube Root of King Kong at a Furry Convention in Des Moines”.
But, if you sift through all the schlock, you find some real gems that are original and entertaining. Of course, once one of them does well enough, the big fish will scoop them up, stripmine them for their premise, and publicly flog them until there’s nothing but a grease spot on the cobblestones. Best to enjoy the first generation from small studios while you can, because the next few generations get awfully tiresome awfully quick.
Long story short, I really can’t remember when something original, in whatever media form you choose, came out that caught on across a broad spectrum of the populace. The closest thing would, I guess, be the original Avatar, but that movie is old enough to drive now. My youngest son probably has no memory of any movie or show that had his entire school atwitter for days after its premiere.
And for some reason, that makes me a little sad.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to break out my DVD’s of Looney Tunes and watch them again before the bits rot out from under the Coyote.
DaddyBear’s Den 