Geek Punditry #45: Lower Decks is Higher Trek

November 10, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Mike McMahan, Paramount+, Star Trek, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Writing

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it in this column before, but I’m a bit of a Star Trek fan. I know, I hide it well, but it’s the truth. I love the characters, I love the worlds, I love the alien races and the starships. If I had a holodeck like they have on the USS Enterprise, I would just use it to pretend I was a crewmember on the USS Enterprise.

“Computer, put me in the Famke Janssen episode.”

There have been many iterations of Trek over the years, of course, some that I’ve connected with more than others, but most of them have had something that draws me back and keeps me engaged. Never has there been a version of Star Trek that didn’t at LEAST make me say, “Okay, I’ll give it a shot.” But that’s not true of everyone. There are some folks out there, some alleged fans, who had that attitude when the franchise crept tentatively from the extended television hiatus that it underwent after Star Trek: Enterprise went off the air in 2005. Trek returned in 2017 with the launch of a new series, Discovery, and the promise of two more shows: Star Trek: Picard, and Star Trek: Lower Decks. Without delving too deeply into the ups and downs of the first two shows, it’s the third one that seemed to be dismissed by most fans. Lower Decks, you see, was not only an animated series, was not only a comedy, but it was created by Mike McMahan, a writer whose previous credentials included shows like Drawn Together, South Park, and Rick and Morty. And no matter what your feelings may be on those particular shows, it would be difficult to argue that someone who claimed those as his pedigree would be the right choice for a new iteration of Star Trek.

But people who said the guy who created Pickle Rick was bad for Star Trek have NEVER been so wrong. Lower Decks turned out to be a sincere love letter to the franchise, a show that was steeped in the lore and history of Trek, a show that used humor to enhance the story and characters rather than as a substitute for them. Truth be told, of all the versions of “NuTrek” that we’ve gotten since the franchise was brought back to life, it is Lower Decks that is my favorite, Lower Decks that has stolen my heart, Lower Decks that is most dedicated to the finest tradition of Star Trek, even with the bleeped-out swear words and occasional pixelated area covering an ensign’s nether regions. If you dismissed Lower Decks because it’s “just a cartoon,” then buckle up, because I’m about to tell you what you’ve been missing out on. I’ll try not to spoil every story beat from the first four seasons, but it’ll be impossible to talk about what makes the show so great without some spoilers, so from here on out, read at your own risk.

McMahan originally sold the show as being about the least-important crew on one of Starfleet’s least-important ships. The Cerritos is the sort of vessel that comes in after a flagship like Enterprise establishes first contact with an alien race, then does all the dull administrative work that would inevitably come along with such a mission. “Second Contact” is important, you see, but not sexy, and the same would seem to be true for the crew that mans the vessel. Rather than focusing on Captain Carol Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) and her senior staff, the show’s stars are four ensigns who get the crappiest jobs available: the wild and self-destructive Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome), high-strung rule-follower Bradward Boimler (Jack Quaid), science nerd cyborg Sam Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), and newly-minted and extremely eager Orion science officer D’Vana Tendi (Noel Wells). The first season introduces the characters and lets us learn a bit more about them, and in that first season there’s a lot of fun to be had. There are a lot of gags derived from classic Star Trek bits like the crew succumbing to an alien virus, parasites controlling crew members, and bizarre medical conditions happening as the result of upgrades to the ship’s transporter system. It was as if the writers had watched hundreds of hours of Trek and decided to do the funny version of some of the franchise’s most time-honored bits. There have been many, many times while watching this show that I’ve laughed so hard at a gag that my wife – who hasn’t watched nearly as much classic Trek as me – has hit pause and asked me to explain the reference.

Every time I start laughing like Kayshon, she glares at me like Mariner.

It was also great for bringing in actors from the old shows. Over the four seasons of the show we’ve seen actors from The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager all show up to reprise their characters, which is perfectly in keeping as Lower Decks takes place right after that era of Trek ended. We’ve seen William Riker and Deanna Troy (Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis) on Riker’s ship Titan, we visited with Kira Nerys and Quark (Nana Visitor and Armin Shimmerman) on Deep Space Nine, and Tom Paris (Robert Duncan MacNeill) made a stop where Boimler geeked out and tried to get him to sign one of his Voyager collector’s plates.

Oh yeah – that’s something else the show does extremely well. The characters are Star Trek fans like us. Not in a fourth wall breaking way, it doesn’t go quite that far, but they’re all as aware of the heroes and the legendary ships of Starfleet as we are. They know the stories that we’ve spent decades watching because they’ve studied the logs the stars of those respective series recorded at the beginning of each episode, and they have their favorite characters. Mariner is an Uhura fangirl, Boimler once dressed as Christopher Pike for Halloween, and Tendi – upon learning that Dr. T’Ana was recommending she train as a science officer – excitedly asked, “Like Jadzia Dax?” (Lower Decks, never missing a chance for a joke, has T’Ana say she doesn’t know who the hell Tendi is talking about, she was thinking more like Spock.)

The show was fun. Callbacks to obscure aliens or worlds was fun. Bringing in elements from the original Star Trek: The Animated Series was FUN. But somewhere in the show’s second season, it became much more than just “fun.”

Once the characters and the tone of the show were established, the stories started to get more intense and we began to see a larger tapestry build up around the stalwart crew of the Cerritos. The Pakleds – a goofy race of space scavengers from a single episode of The Next Generation – not only returned to the franchise but were upgraded to a legitimate threat without becoming any less funny. We began to see hints that the sweet, kindhearted Sam Rutherford had a darker past that even HE didn’t seem to know about. We saw Tendi struggle to get out of the shadow of her race’s reputation of piracy, while at the same time being determined to fight against the bigoted notion that ALL Orions were pirates. The show was touching on larger, deeper themes much the way that classic Trek always did. If there’s one problem with efforts of modern Trek to replicate the socially-conscious tone of the franchise it’s that they will often beat you in the face with a theme instead of weaving into the story. (Discovery in particular is bad about this.) In this regard Lower Decks is better about capturing the feel of the universe of Gene Roddenberry than any of the other shows of the modern era.

But that’s not all. The show doesn’t only bring in themes in a classic sci-fi fashion, they also started to use stories that felt like old-school Trek, not just because they’re recycling aliens or plot devices, but because they’re finding new ways to tell the stories that feel perfectly in keeping with the versions of Star Trek that I grew up with. For example, in the season two finale, the Cerritos is assisting the USS Archimedes (captained by Sonya Gomez, another short-lived TNG character redeemed by this show), when the “more important” ship is disabled by a plasma wave and is in danger of falling into the gravity well of a planet. The only way Cerritos can get through the wave to save them is to detach the outer hull and fly defenseless through an asteroid field. This is NOT the stuff of comedy, this is the kind of badass space adventure that Trek in the 90s would have done if it wouldn’t have cost too much to do it in live action. The rescue sequence is intense, thrilling, and full of magnificent moments for our crew to demonstrate their worth. Boimler risks his life on an underwater mission to help detach the last piece of hull (it’s in the long-discussed but never-before-seen Cetacean Ops section of the ship). Rutherford’s cybernetic implants nearly cause a disaster because he’s been making triple backup files of all his memories after losing his memories of his “best friend” Tendi in a previous episode. Every single beat feels like it was pulled from a season of the old-school Star Trek…and then made funny on top of being made awesome.

When a comedy series runs for a long time, one of two things tends to happen. Some shows just get progressively sillier than they already were. Take The Simpsons, for example. In the golden era of that show, Homer Simpson was a dimwitted but basically good-hearted cartoon dad. Now, three decades in, he’s become a character so ridiculously inept that the only possible explanation for his continued survival is the highly forgiving nature of cartoon physics and biology.

The other possibility is that the show grows and matures. That doesn’t mean it stops being funny, but that the characters transcend the stereotypes they were in their embryonic forms and become truly developed and compelling creatures. By the end of season four, there can be no doubt that this is what’s happening to Lower Decks.

The two sweetest characters on the show, Rutherford and Tendi, each has a darkness to overcome. Rutherford had to face his earlier self – a bitter, nasty version of himself he didn’t even remember existed – and fight to remain the man he wants to be. Tendi, on the other hand, has had to learn to embrace the darkness of her Orion heritage rather than try to pretend it doesn’t exist, reconciling with her family and using her past as a tool to help save the day in the season four finale…but not without paying a steep cost that will certainly help propel the show into season five. (Tendi and Rutherford, by the way, have a “will they/won’t they” relationship that is utterly delightful. Rather than the antagonistic form such relationships often take, their friendship is so innocent and charming that neither of them seems to entertain the notion of anything else happening, while at the same time demonstrating so clearly that both of them have deeper feelings than friendship. Watching them dance around their attraction is one of the most rewarding and, simultaneously, most frustrating parts of the show.)

Shipping is kinda dumb. Unless it’s for these two.

Bradward Boimler, as we were introduced to him in the first episode, was the overeager and terribly anxious young ensign who was desperate to do anything to move up the ranks. He was something of a sycophant, once even lying about being from Earth’s moon in an effort to ingratiate himself with the ship’s first officer, Jack Ransom (Jerry O’Connell). At the end of season four he’s gained confidence and learned to trust more in his friends than in regulations. He even gets a chance, in the season finale, to temporarily serve as CAPTAIN of the Cerritos, and he acquits himself – as any Klingon could tell you – with honor. At the end of season one Boimler is given a chance to serve on Riker’s Titan and jumps at it, something that made perfect sense for the character at the time. If that same offer were made to him at the end of season four? I don’t believe for a second he would leave the Cerritos behind again.

Brave as Kirk, wise as Picard, steadfast as Sisko…

And then there’s Beckett Mariner. From the beginning of episode one she seems to be the most stereotypical of the crew – she’s got a bad attitude, a distaste for authority, and it’s implied that she’s been around much longer than the other ensigns, constantly sabotaging her own career and getting busted down in rank. At the end of episode one we even learn that the only reason she’s even on the Cerritos is that Captain Freeman is her mother, and the only one left in the fleet who’ll give her a chance.

Holy crap, does Mariner grow.

“I promise, we won’t let them waste your character like they did Crusher and Troi.”

Over four seasons we watch as she builds bonds of loyalty with the other ensigns and restores her relationship with Freeman. Her attempts to sink her career are themselves sunk when it turns out that her superior officer, Ransom, has true faith in her and won’t allow her to ruin her life any further. And then, towards the end of season four, we actually learn why she’s been so self-destructive. She’s been suffering from years of survivor’s guilt over the death of a friend, someone who died as an ensign, and who she doesn’t want to surpass. The realization is made all the more powerful when we realize the friend in question is also OUR friend, TNG character Sito Jaxa, who only appeared in two episodes but left a powerful impact before her tragic death in the episode…wait, lemme look it up…

Aw, you clever goose, Mike McMahan. Sito died in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Lower Decks.”

You know what? I bet they did that on purpose.

With the way each of these characters has grown and evolved, even being promoted from ensigns to Junior Grade Lieutenants this season, it has become increasingly clear that Mike McMahan lied to everybody when he said that this was the show about the least-important crew members on the least-important ship in the fleet. Far from it – this show is about people able to start from nothing, find their purpose, find themselves, find each other, and become more than they ever imagined, even if nobody else in the galaxy believes they have what it takes. The least important officers? Oh no. This series is the origin story of the next legendary Star Trek crew.

And yet, in all that, the show has never stopped being funny as hell.

If you decided to not watch Lower Decks because it was a cartoon or a comedy, all I can say, my friends, is that you were wrong to do so. If you watched an episode and said it wasn’t for you, can I recommend you jump ahead to the season one finale and give it a try? Because that’s when the show really begins finding itself and starts the transformation into the sublime work of storytelling that it actually is.

Lower Decks isn’t “good for a Star Trek parody.” It’s not even “good Star Trek.”

It’s GREAT Star Trek.

And I’ll follow the heroes of the Cerritos – I BELIEVE in the heroes of the Cerritos – with all the passion and fervor that I devoted to the Enterprise or station Deep Space Nine.

McMahan caused a little bit of a stir a few weeks ago when he said on Twitter that the show’s future is not secured past the upcoming season five, and fans panicked with the belief that it was being canceled. He had to come back a few days later and clarify: he wasn’t saying he’s been told the show is on the chopping block, just that he doesn’t KNOW yet if it will be renewed beyond season five. But the best way to keep it going, in this age of streaming, is to keep watching it and keep talking about it on social media, because the guys with the checkbooks actually do pay attention to that sort of thing. So check it out and let Paramount+ know how much you love it.

It’s already prospering. Now let’s help it live long.

Geek Punditry #44: What’s Wrong With a Spider-Family?

November 3, 2023November 3, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry comic books, Jonathan Hickman, Marvel Comics, Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man

Last week in a shocking announcement, Marvel Comics revealed it will be publishing a new Spider-Man series in which Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson are (hold your horses, folks) – married.

I know, that’s probably a total stunner to you, possibly because you think it’s impossible to tell compelling stories with a married couple. Perhaps it’s even MORE shocking when you find out that they will have children, because as we all know, anybody who is married or a parent is clearly too old to be an engaging protagonist. No, these characters are now either relegated to supporting roles as their offspring take over as the primary character, or they must be made the subject of a traumatic domino chain that is the emotional equivalent of watching all 10 Saw movies in immediate succession, possibly preceding it with The Human Centipede as an aperitif. After all, the only characters capable of maintaining an interesting narrative are young and have no familial attachments, with the possible exception of an aunt whose death is a foregone conclusion that may be teased and waved in front of our hero for years as an additional piece of mental torment.

It would only be logical if that were your reaction. After all, that’s been more or less the official stance of Marvel Comics for a couple of decades now.

🎵”Spider-Dad, Spider-Dad,
Don’t you tell him his jokes are bad…”🎵

Okay, at this point I imagine the regular comic book readers out there are all nodding their heads in understanding, while those of you who only know Spider-Man as Tom Holland (or possibly Andrew Garfield or Tobey Maguire) are somewhat confused, so for the sake of that latter group, let me explain. First of all, the comic in question is a new version of Ultimate Spider-Man, written by Jonathan Hickman and explicitly set in an alternate universe than the mainstream Spider-Man. That’s right, thanks to the marvels of the multiverse, we can have that book coexisting with the “normal” Spider-Man, whose adventures will continue to be chronicled in The Amazing Spider-Man, where he remains childless, spouseless, joyless, and probably has had a puppy taken away from him in the last 15 minutes just to make sure he is constantly being beaten up by the universe.

The thing is, Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson were married once, and for a long time. Their wedding took place in Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, published in 1987, and it was the status quo for my formative years. I was a child when they married. I was a teenager when I read the books voraciously. And although I never once, in all that time, thought it was difficult to relate to a character who had a wife and stable family life, apparently former Marvel Comics Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada disagreed with me. Quesada spent years after becoming Marvel’s EIC in 2000 teasing fans, talking about his distaste for the marriage and expressing his belief that it “aged” Spider-Man too much. Finally, after 20 years of having Peter and MJ as a married couple, Quesada gave us “One More Day,” a storyline in which Peter traded his marriage away to Mephisto, Marvel’s equivalent to Satan, in exchange for May Parker’s life.

You only imagined this. It’s a Mandela Effect or, like that black and blue/gold and white dress or something.

This will require a little more explanation, so buckle up: the reason Aunt May’s life was in jeopardy in the first place was because of the Civil War storyline, written by Brian Michael Bendis. This was one of those crossover storylines that involved virtually every Marvel comic being published at the time, but a lack of communication among the other writers about what was actually going on made it a garbled mess. In this story some of the Marvel Heroes began supporting a “Superhero Registration Act,” requiring superheroes to register with the government or become outlaws. Despite nearly 40 years of stories showing heroes standing up against measures such as this, many characters sided with the Pro-Registration side, led by Iron Man, as opposed to the Anti-Registration side, fronted by Captain America.

Let’s take a moment to try to parse the fact that anybody – any damned person – in the Marvel Universe would for even a split second side with Iron Man over Captain America in any question of an ethical nature, let alone a question of government overreach. Let’s parse that.

Spider-Man, for reasons, took Iron Man’s side. Then, just to prove how much he agreed with the Pro-Registration side, he revealed his secret identity to the world. This proved how great Registering was, even though several books specifically said that nobody who registered would be forced to reveal their identities to the public. Even though it said that. Spider-Man did it anyway. To support the government.

Parse that too.

And then, after 40 years of stories demonstrating that superheroes revealing their identities to the world would put their loved ones at risk, Spider-Man’s revelation shockingly put his loved ones at risk, and May Parker was shot by a bad guy.

If only someone could have predicted such an outcome.

Spider-Man being confronted by the consequences of his own actions (2007, colorized).

Finally, in order to save his aunt’s life – something that apparently was beyond medical science, the machinations of Dr. Strange, or even Disney’s in-staff physician Doc McStuffins – Peter cut a deal with Totally Not Satan: save May’s life and make everyone forget his secret identity. In exchange, Mephisto didn’t even want Pete’s soul. He just wanted to make everyone in the world forget that Peter and Mary Jane had ever been married. Even Peter and Mary Jane themselves. He wanted this for reasons.

If this whole story sounds unfathomably stupid to you there’s a good reason for it: it was. Even J. Michael Straczynski, the writer tasked writing with the story, tried to have his name taken off it. Although to be clear, he was still willing to write a story that would wipe out the marriage, he just thought this particular method of doing it was weak. I’m sure that his version would have been better, even if I personally find the planned outcome distasteful, because Straczynski is a great writer. And certain elements clearly COULD have worked, because the movies Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: No Way Home both borrowed select elements of that storyline and made great movies, disproving the old adage that you can’t polish a turd.

Anyway, fans were not happy, but Marvel has persevered with this new status quo. Over the years since then Peter and Mary Jane have been together and been apart, but the marriage has never been restored. Dan Slott, who wrote Spider-Man for a long time in this period, has said that people higher up the corporate chain than even Quesada (who is no longer with the company) don’t want Peter and Mary Jane to be married again, ever. And while that may be true, that just makes it crueler how often assorted writers have teased a reconciliation over the years. This teasing even included an earlier alternate reality series, Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows, which was good, but has been somewhat forgotten.

This, however, is totes canon. Well, somewhere in the Spider-Verse, anyway.

The most recent run of Amazing Spider-Man ended with Peter and Mary Jane together again (if not married) and it left them in a good place. Then came a new writer for the current run, which started with a six-month timeskip, everybody hating Spider-Man for reasons that went unexplained for a year, and Mary Jane having school-age children with another man. I stopped reading the book at this point, something I had only done once before: after “One More Day.” I have not returned, although I’ve read the explanation for everything we didn’t know in the timeskip, and the explanation this time is so egregiously stupid that it makes “One More Day” almost seem quaint by comparison.

I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m ranting, but this is important. Spider-Man is an iconic character, one that means a lot to a lot of people, including myself, and the way Marvel seems bound and determined to make him permanently miserable is, frankly, a source of real frustration to me. That’s why I was so excited when I heard about Hickman’s new Ultimate Spider-Man series. The fact that it’s set in a different universe is barely even significant at this point, as Multiverses now shoot out in pop culture like candy from a Pez dispenser. It’s a married Peter and MJ, something I have wanted to see return for 16 years. It would almost be hypocritical of me to not read this series.

Hickman is probably my favorite writer who has done consistent, long-running titles at Marvel in the past decade or more, but he’s never done a long run with Spider-Man before. Giving him the character, even as part of the new Ultimate Universe, is something that excites me. That doesn’t mean I expect the book to be all sunshine and rainbows – Hickman is too good a writer for that. But I am hoping for stories that use the dynamic of a family to tell compelling, interesting stories that use the family as part of the tapestry instead of viewing it as a nuisance that needs to be brushed aside.

But the existence of this book still doesn’t address the fundamental problem – this baffling notion that there are no good stories to be told with a family. DC Comics ran into a similar stumbling block with Superman and Lois Lane, who married in 1996 after nearly 60 years of courtship. (Pete and MJ had a comparatively brief 20 years before they tied the knot.) In 2011, as part of the “New 52” relaunch, the characters were made younger and the marriage was dissolved. It only took DC a few years to realize the mistake, though, as fans were vocal about preferring the Lois and Clark dynamic. DC eventually played along by not only restoring the marriage to canon, but by giving Lois and Clark a child, Jon.

Plenty of heroes have had long relationships. Barry Allen (the second Flash) and Iris West were together and married for quite some time before Iris’s death (which was later reversed). His protege Wally West, a character who had been around for about three years when Peter Parker was created, married Linda Park and they recently welcomed their third child. Both Flashes have had their relationships wax and wane and occasionally disappear via comic book-style reboots, but they’re back these days. (Well, Barry and Iris aren’t currently married, but they are together.) The first Flash, Jay Garrick, has similarly been married for decades, and DC even recently introduced his own daughter as part of a group of new characters who were previously “erased” from the timestream, opening up new avenues for storytelling. Elongated Man and Sue Dearbon-Dibney were a married couple for decades before falling into comic book limbo – and hey, DC, bring ‘em back. We love them. And of course, over in Marvel Comics we have Reed and Susan Richards, the prototypical comic book parents, with their children. They’ve been married for nearly 60 years now.

I mean, who wants to read about a married superhero anyway?

But the argument, I suppose, is that having a family makes a character seem “older,” and most of these previous characters I mentioned were already older than Spider-Man. Fair point, but my contention that new, exciting stories can still be told with them as married couples still stands. In fact, adding Jon Kent to the Superman mythos gave the characters a welcome new dynamic that produced some fantastic stories before Civil War’s Brian Michael Bendis took over the series and screwed it up. Wally West’s children are pretty much co-leads of his comic book, and his daughter Irey has even become besties with Maxine Baker, daughter of Wally’s sometime Justice League teammate Animal Man, yet another married superhero. And let’s not forget about Batman – while no one has got him down the aisle yet (he almost took that walk with Catwoman, but she bailed), he’s been a dad pretty much since he adopted the first Robin back in 1940. And in recent years, it’s been literal, with the addition of Damian Wayne to the family.

And the thing is, the Clark and Jon stories are nothing like the Bruce and Damian stories, and neither of those have anything in common with the stories about Wally and his kids Irey and Jai (or the newborn Wade). Because – here’s the shocking part – children are people. They’re not all identical. And when you put an interesting, developed individual into the mix with another interesting, developed individual, you’re going to get an interesting, developed story. This isn’t even counting the thousands of stories outside of comic books that have successfully told tales of parents with children.

But what about the other argument, that being married or a parent it makes it difficult for young readers to “relate” to Peter Parker? Let’s say that, just for a second, I actually believed that. (Spoiler: I don’t.) The thing is, there are two important factors that make that argument irrelevant.

First: the notion that an older Spider-Man might be a turnoff for young readers is dumb because there aren’t any younger readers. American comic books are in something of a crisis. Older readers have always drifted away, but in the past newer readers would come in and fill the void. That isn’t happening now, at least not in numbers significant enough to concern ourselves with. It’s absurd, because thanks to the success of Marvel Studios over the last decade and a half, Marvel characters are more popular than ever. But there has been approximately zero success at drawing in the kids watching those movies and getting them to read the comic books. Meanwhile, many of the strategies they’ve employed in an effort to get new readers (such as constant reboots or replacing classic characters with younger “legacy” versions) have only served to drive off the readers who have been around for years. It’s been a lose/lose situation, and comics have to admit that those “fixes” aren’t working before anything else they do is going to matter. This is a major problem in the industry, and it’s worth discussing, but preventing Spider-Man from growing as a character is not the solution.

Second: if the goal actually is to have a Spider-Man that younger readers can relate to, MARVEL ALREADY HAS ONE AND HIS NAME IS MILES MORALES. Miles is one of the few new “legacy” characters that has actually taken off and found mainstream popularity, being the star of two incredibly successful and extremely well-made animated movies. Hell, Miles Morales’s first movie won the Oscar for best Animated Feature. If Marvel’s argument is “we need a young Spider-Man,” congratulations! You’ve got him! Do the “young guy” stories with Miles and stop torturing Peter by trying to force him back into a box he outgrew in the 1980s!

(In the interest of total fairness, I should point out that Miles Morales was co-created by Brian Michael Bendis.)

“Heard of me, Marvel? I won a friggin’ Academy Award.”

I no longer harbor any hope for the “mainstream” Peter Parker and Mary Jane actually getting a happy ending, at least not until the next editorial overhaul at Marvel. That’s the thing about comics, everything is cyclical. The people in charge now won’t be in charge forever, so if you’re unhappy with the direction of a book, there are two things you can do. Cross your fingers and hope the next creative team is better, and – far more importantly – stop buying it. And since there seems to be a Spider-Man on the horizon that does seem a better fit for my tastes, I choose to support that book, rather than the one that leaves a sour, spidery taste in my mouth.

Help us, Jonathan Hickman. You’re our only hope.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He realizes that he may have some of the behind-the-scenes details incorrect in his dissertation on comic book history, but in his defense, he’s never pretended to be a journalist in this column. Which frankly gives him far greater integrity than anybody working – for example – at the New York Times.

Geek Punditry #43: The Halloween Special Special

October 27, 2023October 27, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Disney, Donald Duck, Garfield, Halloween, Halloween Specials, Mickey Mouse, Monster Cereals, Peanuts, Rankin and Bass, star wars

A few days ago I was watching TV with my six-year-old son and we happened to land on Disney+, where I saw something that got me excited. Something lovely. Something that was a true work of beauty, a rare creature that seems to always dance on the edge of extinction, only to be pulled back time and again. Something that I want to share with my child.

A new Halloween special.

“Mickey and Friends III: Season of the Witch”

I grew up in the 80s, the apex of holiday specials on television. Oh sure, they weren’t new when I was a kid, but I’m from that generation where the classic specials from the likes of Rankin and Bass and Mendelson-Melendez were still in perpetual rotation and original specials were premiering every year, sometimes many of them. It was simplicity itself to mix the old specials with the likes of the Smurfs, Alvin and the Chipmunks, and the other Saturday Morning heroes of my youth. Like so many things when it comes to the pop culture landscape, it’s changed. And like so many things for those of us of a certain age, it doesn’t feel like it’s gotten better. They don’t show the classic specials on TV all that much anymore, first of all. As people have drifted to the streaming world, the days of everyone needing to be in front of the TV at the same time if they’re going to watch It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown are pretty much over. And don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that I can watch the DVD any time I want, but it’s not the same as knowing that they’re watching it next door and down the street and somewhere in Cincinnati at the same time.

This is good, but somehow it’s even better if I’m watching it at the same time as someone I’ve never met in Patterson, New Jersey.

And while it’s true that specials are still being made, I don’t feel like we’re getting them with the frequency that we once did. Of course, part of that may be that they’re now all spread out amongst a thousand streaming services and you don’t even know that they’re there. And those that do exist haven’t broken into the cultural zeitgeist, again, probably because of the preponderance of sources. Even as I was typing this sentence I thought of nearly a half-dozen Halloween specials from the last few years that I’ve watched, but I haven’t re-watched most of them like I do the classics. Great Pumpkin was, and remains, essential viewing before Halloween. So was and is Garfield’s Halloween Adventure. But when I think about going back and watching, for example, LEGO Star Wars: Terrifying Tales from 2021, I know that if I skip it this year I’m not going to feel like I’ve missed anything.

One of these is a legendary piece of animation history based on a globally-beloved property and is appointment viewing every Halloween season. The other one is a *Star Wars* movie.

LEGO Star Wars, by the way, was also a Disney+ special, and I have to give them credit for turning out more things like this, especially for kids, than most of these streaming services. The new special Eddie and I watched this week was Mickey and Friends: Trick or Treat, in which Donald Duck (of COURSE it’s Donald’s fault) convinces the rest of the gang to trick or treat at a haunted house that happens to belong to a witch who doesn’t appreciate visitors. It isn’t a mind-blowing cartoon, but it’s cute and it’s new and – maybe best of all – it’s stop motion. If a new Halloween special is an endangered species, a stop motion special is a friggin’ unicorn. There was a stop motion Christmas special last year featuring Mickey and Friends as well, and while none of these are going to join the pantheon of the greats, I have to applaud their effort.

Disney+ is also responsible for Muppets Haunted Mansion, another 2021 special in which the Great Gonzo and Pepe the King Prawn spent Halloween the night in…well…Disney’s Haunted Mansion. It had the requisite music and celebrity cameos that one expects from the Muppets, and it was decent. I actually watched that one a second time last year, but I haven’t gotten around to it in 2023, and I’m okay with that. The difficulty here was that this not only had to live up to the great Halloween specials, but also had to live up to great Muppet movies, and in both categories it’s just middling.

So the question has to be, where will the great Halloween specials of the future come from? Don’t get me wrong, I intend to watch Garfield and Charlie Brown every October for the rest of my life, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want more. (I feel like I need to get this put on a T-shirt because I seem to say it in this column at least once a month: What do fans want? MORE!) Is there anybody out there carrying the torch of Mendelson, Melendez, Rankin, or Bass?

There are some people doing Halloween content, fortunately. Movies, for example. Feature-length films are in no short supply. Prime Video this year gave us Totally Killer, a time-travel comedy about a girl who goes back to the 80s when her parents were teenagers to face off against the slasher that terrorized them then. Not a family movie, but it was original, and I liked it. Last year there was Spirit Halloween: The Movie, a film about kids who sneak into one of the ubiquitous Halloween pop-up stores overnight, unaware that this particular store is haunted for real. Disney+, again, gave us a sequel to the Halloween favorite Hocus Pocus, which is included here to prove that just because a movie is about Halloween doesn’t automatically make it good.

But that’s not what I’m looking for. I love a good Halloween movie, but a holiday “special” is, to me at least, a different sort of beast. I’m talking about the one-off films, a half-hour to an hour at length, which take characters that we already know and give them a seasonally appropriate adventure. The classics mostly fit into this category – Garfield and the Peanuts gang, for example, spring from the pages of newspaper comics, and even most of the Rankin and Bass Christmas classics were based on preexisting stories. Many of their best specials (and here I’m thinking of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Frosty the Snowman, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and Here Comes Peter Cottontail) were based on popular songs. There were a few based on Bible stories, one on a novel by Oz creator L. Frank Baum, and so forth. There are a few Rankin and Bass classics based on entirely new ideas, but the truth is, those aren’t the ones we remember.

Even their one great foray into Halloween wasn’t wholly original – 1967’s Mad Monster Party was a stop motion feature film that featured characters they couldn’t technically call the Universal Monsters, but anyone who watches it knows they’re really the Universal Monsters. It was easy for the public domain characters – Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster, a generic werewolf – but they even managed to sneak in characters obviously based on copyrighted monsters like the Creature From the Black Lagoon and (people don’t lump him in with the Universal Monsters, but they SHOULD) King Kong. Hell, it even starred Boris Karloff as Baron Frankenstein.

If you haven’t seen this movie, it counts as a character flaw.

Pulling out new specials that fit the mold of the classics depends largely on which characters you can use. Disney, as we said, is making use of the likes of Mickey and his pals, and they worked in their Star Wars and Muppets characters a couple of years ago, but there’s more that could be done. Could you imagine, for example, a Wreck-It Ralph Halloween Special in which Ralph and Vanellope have to make it through a (kid friendly) survival horror game like Silent Hill or Five Nights at Freddy’s? Or more Marvel content – last year they gave us the excellent MCU Halloween Special Werewolf By Night, based on a classic Marvel monster comic from the 70s, and I loved it. But why not an animated special featuring the Guardians of the Galaxy on a “Planet of Terror?” Have Doctor Strange fight some sort of Lovecraftian horror? Heck, tie it into the What If? brand and you could do virtually anything – there’s already a zombie universe out there in the MCMultiverse.

Then across the metaphorical street (by which I mean one row over on the apps on my Roku), we’ve got Disney’s rival, Warner Bros. Their MAX service also has a new Halloween special this year, a Sesame Street show called Oscar’s Handmade Halloween. That’s not bad. I’ll take any Sesame Street content I can get for my kid. But considering the depth of Warner Bros’s catalog, what else have we got? Admittedly, last year there was a Scooby-Doo Halloween movie, and that’s all well and good, but how about the DC Universe? They brought in the Super Sons in an animated movie earlier this year – I would love to see a half-hour cartoon about Superboy trying to convince Robin to go trick-or-treating with him, with all the chaos that would inevitably ensue. How about a new Looney Tunes Halloween special? Witch Hazel is sitting right there in the catalog, guys.

And what about other characters that aren’t necessarily tied into any huge IP farm like Warner Bros or the Walt Disney Pictures Shadow Government and Pedicure Emporium? In this year’s Halloween episode of the Totally Rad Christmas podcast (a show about Christmas in the 80s, except when it’s about things that aren’t from the 80s and/or aren’t about Christmas), the hosts talked about their love of Monster Cereals. After going after the hard questions (why is Frankenberry British?) they asked the obvious one – how is it possible that Count Chockula, Frankenberry, and Boo Berry never got their own animated special? That’s a great question. I suppose the answer is that, when those cereals were ascendant, there were laws in place that prevented children’s programming from being used as advertisements for a product, so they couldn’t make such a special. But those laws have been gone since the early 80s, since the birth and explosion of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Do you mean to tell me that, in the years since, nobody has thought to call up General Mills and get an animated special going?

Look me in the eye and tell me these guys are less deserving of a Halloween special than Raggedy Ann and Andy.

I know that I sound like an old man waxing nostalgically for things from his past that are gone and are never to return, but there’s a good reason for that. I am an old man waxing nostalgically for things from his past that are gone and are never to return. Except for that last part, actually, because I don’t think I’m ready to accept that things like this are gone forever. There are still children in the world – I’ve met at least seven of them – and those kids still watch TV and still like cartoons. And those kids have parents who would love to have new things to watch with them instead of watching that same Mickey Mouse special 17 times before Halloween.

The audience is there. All we need is for somebody to step up and give us the content.

Geek Punditry #42: Halloween — the TV Series?

October 20, 2023October 20, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Cinematic Universes, Halloween, Halloween III, John Carpenter, Michael Myers

Last week Miramax Pictures (motto: 100 percent Weinstein-Free these days) announced the news that horror fans have been waiting for with baited breath. They have acquired the rights to make a TV series based on John Carpenter’s Halloween franchise. And if that wasn’t enough, there are talks about spinning it off into (drumroll please) a new cinematic universe! Isn’t that great? Isn’t it amazing? Isn’t this the best news you’ve ever heard?

Yeah, I thought the same thing.

Look how happy he is. Like a kid on Christmas.

I’m sure the question most of you are asking is, is a universe really necessary? The answer, of course, is “No, of course not, what are you, high?” Marvel pulled the cinematic universe off, but nobody else who has tried it has come close to their level of success. Of course, this hasn’t stopped people from attempting it with everything from the works of Roald Dahl to the world of My Little Pony. I’m frankly stunned that no one has tried to link the recent movies Air, Flamin’ Hot, and Blackberry into a “Folks Coming Up With New Products” Cinematic Universe, although now that I’ve willed it into existence, no doubt someone will try.

As for making a TV show out of it…eh. I have mixed feelings. There’s nothing inherently wrong with making a TV series based on a horror franchise. It’s been done before to some acclaim (such as Bates Motel and the current Chucky series), after all. Freddy’s Nightmares cast the titular Krueger as a sort of Cryptkeeper lite, narrating anthology stories, although he occasionally took part in them as well. Then there were shows like Friday the 13th: The Series, which had nothing to do with Jason Voorhees except for a cameo appearance by a hockey mask. It could go either way. The question should be, is Halloween really the best choice for this kind of a project?

First of all, what storyline are they planning to follow? The film series has been rebooted and restarted so many times that there are no less than five different continuities spread out among the 14 movies, which most of you will recognize as being at least four too many. What’s more, each and every continuity has its own fans and its own detractors, so the idea of choosing one that will satisfy a majority of fans seems slim. The best option is probably to start from scratch and not worry about any of the previous continuities – of course, going that route will only result in a sixth iteration of the franchise. (Which is five too many.)

Realtime photo of the *Halloween* continuity.

Let’s say, just for the sake of discussion, that they go in this direction: a new continuity, unbound from any of the previous films. And let’s be generous and assume that they do it really well, in a way that all of the fans (okay, let’s be realistic here – a plurality of the fans) are satisfied with the show. That still leaves the question of how the hell you turn a single-villain slasher franchise into a cinematic UNIVERSE. I just don’t think there’s enough meat on that bone.

If you decide that you want to tie together multiple existing horror franchises, it could make sense. They did it with Freddy Vs. Jason, and the criminally underrated film Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon is implied to place in a world where ALL the classic horror movies are canon. The comic book series Hack/Slash takes this approach as well, using generic villains that “feel” like the classics most of the time, but it has also included several official crossovers with horror franchises including Chucky, Hatchet, The Crow, Army of Darkness, and Re-Animator. Of course that’s a comic book, where quick crossovers are relatively easier to negotiate. In a practical sense, with the rights to all these franchises spread out among dozens of different studios, it’s all but impossible to see such a cinematic universe materialize until the Walt Disney Corporation and Shadow Government and Tanning Salon finally gets around to buying up all the different companies, which isn’t scheduled to happen until next Tuesday.

How do you make Halloween, by itself, a universe? There’s only one antagonist, first of all. Maybe more if you count the “Curse of the Thorn” storyline that ran through a few of the films, but that’s frankly one of the weakest ideas in the franchise’s history – never adequately explained and butchering Michael Myers as a character by making him a sort of victim of supernatural forces rather than the personification of evil that makes him so iconic. What other characters could you build a world on? I could see someone planning a prequel series about the life of Dr. Loomis, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s a good idea. Prequel series are fraught with their own landmines that make them difficult to do successfully. As for the other main characters, does anyone really want to watch Laurie Strode without Michael Myers? For that matter, does anyone really want to watch Laurie Strode without Jamie Lee Curtis?

As odd as it sounds, if Miramax simply must try the cinematic universe idea, there’s really only one place I think they could look. They need the weirdest, most off-kilter installment of the entire franchise. They need Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

“Help me, Obi-Wan Tom Atkins. You’re my only hope.”

Quick history lesson, for those who don’t know how this happened: when John Carpenter was approached to do a third Halloween movie, he decided to take it in a totally different direction. Rather than bring Michael Myers back for Round Three, he tried to make the franchise into an anthology series, with the plan being to make a new horror movie every year or two centered on the holiday of Halloween but totally standing on its own. Season of the Witch is about an evil novelty company that has a bonkers scheme including Druids, Stonehenge, and rubber Halloween masks with the intent to murder millions of innocent children for reasons. It underperformed and was torn apart critically, and the franchise has not deviated from the story of a Michael Myers since.

In recent years, however, people have begun to reexamine Halloween III, calling it an underrated gem of a film, that it works as a clever deviation from the audience’s expectations, and that Tom Atkins’s mustache does not at all look like a caterpillar hoping to eat his upper lip. I…I’ll be honest, I don’t agree. I mean, the movie has a certain cheesy charm, but that’s far from calling it a good movie. That said, I agree that it may have been received better (as many argue) if it was the second film in the franchise instead of the third, or if it had just been released as a standalone film divorced from the Halloween franchise, or even if it had come out 30 years later, when anthologies were on the rise.

But the truth is, it doesn’t even matter if the movie itself was good or not – it’s still the bedrock upon which this cinematic universe should lie. I’m not saying they should ignore Michael Myers, of course. Doing a Halloween series without Michael Myers would be as ludicrous as doing, say, a Scream series and changing the mask.

But I think if they link Michael directly to the doings of the Silver Shamrock company, makers of the demonic masks, this may be the linchpin the universe needs to get started. It’s true that Michael Myers should not be a supernatural character. He’s much more frightening and interesting when he’s a murderous, unspeakably evil human being. On the other hand, that’s not the same thing as saying that the supernatural cannot exist in the same universe as him.

What I would do, were I the showrunner of this hypothetical Halloween series, is start with a sort of platonic ideal of Michael Myers. He’s a killer, he’s escaped from custody, he has terrified the town of Haddonfield, Illinois in the past. I would not marry him to any specific continuity from the previous films. I might mention Laurie Strode or Dr. Loomis, but only in passing – wouldn’t even confirm one way or another whether they’re alive or dead in this universe. The story here is that of the insidious Silver Shamrock company, whose attempt at destroying the world some years ago failed (way to go, Tom Atkins and his mustache!) but they’re ready to try again.

“A little louder for the people in the back!”

This time, their scheme hinges on Michael Myers. If they can get their hands on the real-life boogeyman, who is again unleashing havoc on a small town, they can use their magic to weaponize the pain and anguish he has caused for their own nefarious ends. How are they going to do it? They’ve got to replace his iconic mask with one of their magic ones. Our heroes, now, are a new group of characters who start out trying to stop Michael’s killing spree (like you do), but halfway through the first season discover the Silver Shamrock connection and realize that they not only have to defeat him, but they also have to save him from falling into Silver Shamrock’s hands.

So there’s the first season. But how, Blake, does this sort of thing lead into a full-on cinematic universe? Well, there’s a few ways that it could go, but here are the two I would find most interesting, and they’re ideas that compliment each other:

Silver Shamrock is a big company, with lots of different cells around the world, each of which is dedicated to wreaking havoc using the local boogeyman of that area. This would not only allow us to create new villains, but we would no longer be limited to just slashers. Bring in other monsters – vampires, werewolves, do a season set in New Orleans featuring the Loup Garou. The possibilities are endless. The important thing is, wherever the current chapter is set, it’s about trying to weaponize fear.
They’ve been doing this for a while. Who are the other heroes that have stood against them? Perhaps an entire underground society of monster-slayers has risen up, a kind of Buffy crossed with John Wick organization, dedicated to ending the threat of these menaces once and for all. Maybe Loomis was part of it, maybe not. Maybe, if they get really ambitious, they could try to recruit Laurie Strode. Or maybe not – again, if it ain’t Jamie Lee Curtis, that would be a hard sell.

Anyway, with this set-up, you’ve constructed a universe that allows for virtually any kind of horror movie story you want to tell, which is what Carpenter wanted to do with the franchise back in 1982 anyway, except this time it’s all tied together. As for the title – well, that’s simple enough. Under the rules of this shared universe, all of the evil forces we encounter are at their strongest at – drumroll please – Halloween. You can bring in Michael Myers any time you want, but you’re not beholden to him. It’s possible to build a dense mythology, with shows or movies focusing not just on Michael, but on the monster-slayers or any of the various monsters or the history of Silver Shamrock. Hell, you can even throw in the Curse of the Thorn as one of the various evil organizations our monster-slayers fight against. A set up like this would give the world room to grow.

This is what I would do, anyway. But I’m not on the payroll of Miramax (although I would be willing to discuss compensation for this obviously brilliant idea), and odds are if they’ve even gone far enough to tell people they’re planning a cinematic universe, they’ve probably also got an idea already as to how they want to do it. That’s their prerogative. What I’m here for is to suggest a way to do it that’s not just a case of retreading old ground.

And if they instead just do more of the same and it flops…well, I guess I’ll see you at Halloween Iteration Seven.

Geek Punditry #41: Playing Favorites With Horror Movies (Part Two)

October 13, 2023October 15, 2023 blakemp Playing Favorites 1408, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Alfred Hitchcock, Boris Karloff, Bride of Boogedy, Disney, Frank Darabont, frankenstein, Freaks, Get Out, Halloween, Horror Movies, It, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jordan Peele, Misery, Mr. Boogedy, New Nightmare, One Hour Photo, Peeping Tom, Poltergeist, Psycho, Robin Williams, Stephen King, The Mist, The Others, Wes Craven, Wonderful World of Disney

Horror Without a Death

Last week, in a column that has been-fast tracked for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Blog Posts about Horror Movies (probably not a real thing) I asked my friends on social media to give me suggestions for categories of horror. I would then report back on your suggestions here and talk about some of my favorites in each category. I got a lot of great suggestions – so many, in fact, that I couldn’t fit them all into a single column. So buckle in, my friends, it’s time for Week Two of Playing Favorites With Horror Movies!

Horror Without a Death

Duane Hower came at me with one of the toughest suggestions of the whole batch: what’s my favorite horror movie in which NOBODY DIES? (And a note here – just the fact that a movie can be mentioned in this category qualifies as a spoiler, so if you’re squeamish about that sort of thing, you may want to hop down to the next category.)

It was tough, guys. There aren’t that many films that meet the criteria – after all, the point of horror is to instill fear, and that inherently brings with it the fear of the void. There are plenty of horror/comedies that fall into this category, sure, but straight horror? It’s not easy to find good examples.

A few eventually came to mind. Poltergeist is about a family that moves to a new home only to discover malevolent spirits already inhabit their dwelling. The Others is about a family that moves to a new home…only to discover that malevolent spirits already inhabit…okay, there’s a pattern. But 1408! That mixes it up! That’s about a travel writer who gets a hotel room! And finds that malevolent spirits inhabit the dwelling.

“I see dead people. Not fresh ones, though.”

Still, these are solid films where nobody dies (well…depending on which cut of 1408 you watch). The thing is, they’re also all ghost stories. And ghost stories rock, don’t get me wrong, but they’re stories about somebody who has already died. Can I count them in this category, just because the deaths in question happened before the movie began?

If I rule out ghost stories, the pool gets even shallower, but there are still a few tasty fish in it. Tod Browning’s Freaks from 1932, for instance. The director of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula followed it with this movie about performers in a circus sideshow and an unscrupulous woman who plans to take advantage of them to seize an inheritance one of them is due to collect. The movie is pretty wild, and was so controversial at the time that Browning’s career was essentially destroyed. But nobody dies in the film…although by the ending, there’s someone who may wish they were dead.

I also need to give credit to One Hour Photo, a thriller starring the late, great Robin Williams. Williams plays a man who works for one of those one hour photo development labs (kids, ask your parents) and becomes dangerously obsessed with one of the families whose film he processes. Williams, of course, was a legend for his comedic roles, and often showed his dramatic chops as well in movies like Dead Poets Society and Good Morning, Vietnam, but this is the only movie I can think of that showed how outright SCARY he could be when he set his mind to it. The man was a unique and priceless talent, and I feel like this is a movie that doesn’t get talked about enough, possibly because the entire premise is centered around a piece of late 20th century culture that doesn’t really exist anymore.

Hammer Horror

My old buddy Eric LeBlanc wanted to know what my favorite movie was from the Hammer Films catalog. In the 1950s, after Universal Studios quietly put an end to their monumental run of monster movies, Britain’s Hammer Films saw an opportunity to fill the void. Not only did they start pumping out horror movies at a pace that would have made Carl Lammle Jr. pick his jaw up off the floor, but they did so by borrowing a heck of a lot of the goodwill that Universal had built up, using the same public domain creeps like Frankenstein’s monster, vampires, mummies, and werewolves.

I never got quite as deep into Hammer as I have into the Universal library, but I’ve seen a lot of their films and I definitely have my favorites, the top being 1958’s Horror of Dracula (or sometimes just Dracula). Incredibly stylish and colorful, the movie is also a bit more faithful to the original novel than the Universal version. Plus it has two of the giants of horror in some of their best parts: Christopher Lee as Count Dracula and Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. Lee is creepy and charming, and the only reason he’s not considered the definitive version of Dracula is that Bela Lugosi beat him to it. And Van Helsing? Sorry, Hugh Jackman, but Peter Cushing owns that role.

The HORROR…of a world without photoshop.

Stephen King Adaptation

Rachel Ricks played right into my hands by asking for my favorite Stephen King adaptation.

Project ALF.

As anyone who has read this blog for more than a day knows, I’m a huge fan of Stephen King’s books…but what about his movies? There have been over 200 adaptations of King’s novels and short stories (I checked IMDB), so which one is the best? Truth is the really great ones aren’t actually horror movies: The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, and Stand By Me are some of the best films ever made based on King’s work, but none of them qualify as horror. When you get into the scary content, the sad truth is that a lot of the adaptations are sub-par. (I mean…have you SEEN Maximum Overdrive? Whoever directed that movie doesn’t seem to have the slightest idea what Stephen King is all about. It’s like he was on cocaine or something.)

That said, there are SOME good horror movies based on King’s work. Many people would point immediately to The Shining, but I’m not among them. Look, it’s a good movie, but as an adaptation of King’s book it is terrible. I’d rather focus on movies that DO adapt the books more or less faithfully.

I already mentioned 1408 earlier, and I’d place it close to the top of this list. At the VERY top, though, would be Misery, the James Caan/Kathy Bates adaptation about a writer (it’s a Stephen King movie, of COURSE it’s about a writer) who gets in a terrible car accident only to be saved by his biggest fan. As he begins to heal, though, he discovers that he may have been better off in the wreck.

Some people, however, would classify Misery more as a thriller than a horror movie, so for those who like to split hairs, let’s talk about The Mist. A mysterious fog full of murderous monsters rolls over a small town, trapping dozens of people in a supermarket. The adaptation is solid, but what really elevates it is the ending. Frank Darabont, who wrote and directed this film (and Shawshank and The Green Mile, so you see his pedigree) changed the ending of the story, something that I usually find outrageous. But the ending he put on was so shocking and dark that even Stephen King himself says he prefers it to the original.

And I’ve got to give credit to It. I consider this one of King’s best novels – perhaps THE best Stephen King novel – and we’ve gotten TWO pretty good adaptations. The original miniseries from the 90s did the best it could on network television, and Tim Curry is iconic as Pennywise. But in 2017 we got a fantastic adaptation of half of the novel, with Bill Skarsgard taking Pennywise and making him his own. Admittedly, It Chapter Two from 2019 didn’t quite live up to the first part, but you can watch the first part on its own and get a solid, satisfying story. It’s darn near perfect.

The Wonderful World of Disney

Ryan Tait gave me a category I NEVER would have thought of, but absolutely love: my favorite Wonderful World of Disney Halloween movie. Back in the day, before even the Disney channel, Wonderful World was a delightful showcase for Disney content of all stripes, and some of those made-for-TV movies still hold a warm place in my heart today. My favorite for this category is going to both show my age and make a lot of people wonder what the hell I’m talking about, but I have a deep abiding fondness for the 1986 film Mr. Boogedy.

From the studio that brought you *Old Yeller.*

A novelty salesman and his family move into a new house that turns out to be haunted (SO MANY of these movies are about people who move into haunted houses, and there are some downright unscrupulous realtors out there) by both some kind ghosts who have been trapped there and by the malevolent spirit who has kept them prisoner. It’s a silly, cheesy movie, but it’s so much fun. And the cast has a great pedigree. Richard Masur of the 90s It, a pre-Buffy the Vampire Slayer Kristy Swanson, a pre-Married With Children David Faustino, and young Benji Gregory, on the cusp of superstardom for his role on the sitcom…not making it up this time…ALF.

Both Mr. Boogedy and its (perhaps even better) sequel, Bride of Boogedy, are available on Disney+…but I’m hesitant to tell you to go and watch them if you’ve never seen them before. It’s one of those things where I know my fondness for the movie comes from having watched it over and over again as a child, and I suspect that somebody watching it now, for the first time, as an adult, wouldn’t love it the way that I do. But if you HAVE seen it before and remember it warmly, go check it out. I watched it last year and I still love it.

Installments Past a Sequel

Jasper Fahrig asked what I thought were good installments of a franchise past the first sequel. It’s a truth of filmmaking that long-running series often suffer from diminishing returns. The deeper you get, the worse the franchise often becomes, so finding a good movie that’s part 3 or higher isn’t always easy. Fortunately, Wes Craven is there to hook us up with not one, but two films in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Craven wrote and directed the original Nightmare, but sat out the sequel. When Part Three (Dream Warriors) was made, he came back to help with the story. After a part two that many people admittedly enjoy, but doesn’t really fit with the rest of the franchise, part three is GREAT. Robert Englund is in top form, Heather Langenkamp returns as Nancy (the BEST final girl outside of Laurie Strode), and the crazy horror dream imagery is used to the best effect in the entire series. What’s more, the movie was directed by Chuck Russell (whose remake of The Blob I mentioned last week) and co-written by Frank Darabont. Maybe I’m NOT a horror fan, guys, maybe I’m just a fan of several very specific filmmakers.

But Craven wasn’t quite done. He stepped away from Freddy after that and three more sequels incredibly diluted the character before Wes came back to save the day one more time with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare. Langenkamp is back again, but this time she plays HERSELF, an actress who finds herself haunted by the spirit of Freddy Kruger, the killer from that old movie she made years ago. Craven also appears as himself in the movie, as does Robert Englund, playing both himself and Freddy Krueger. The movie uses the language of the Nightmare series to make a statement about the power of storytelling and belief. It was ” meta” two years before Craven would redefine “meta” with the Scream franchise, and it’s hands-down my favorite Nightmare.

A double feature to keep you up all night.

Award-Worthy Horror

Seth Pontiff wanted to know some horror movie performances that I thought were worthy of Oscar consideration. Oooh, that’s a good one. I’ve often complained about the way the Academy ignores genre movies, but there HAVE been a scarce few performances that got nods. Kathy Bates actually won best actress for Misery, and the next year both Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins would take home statues for Silence of the Lambs, but those are movies that the Academy can classify as “Thrillers” without getting their hands dirty in a straight-up horror movie.

So who should have been recognized, but wasn’t? I have to say, I think it’s an outright crime that Boris Karloff was never recognized for his work as the Frankenstein monster. He played the creature three times, twice in movies that are indisputable classics, and infused the monster with such depth and humanity that the viewer comes out the other end on his side. There was so much sadness and power in the character, interspersed with other moments like unbridled joy at those few times he thinks he’s found a kindred spirit, and Karloff sells every second of it. There’s a reason that every kid who draws a picture of the creature gives him a flattop and bolts on his neck, and it’s not because Mary Shelley described him that way.

Another performance that I think was awardworthy? Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in Halloween. Not the 1978 film…the one from 2018. This is going to be controversial, I know, because that film has become EXTREMELY divisive among horror fans. And in truth, I was highly disappointed in the final film in that trilogy. But when I look at the 2018 movie by itself I am in awe of her performance. Curtis plays Laurie Strode as a trauma survivor who has spent her entire life preparing for the other shoe to drop. It’s a performance full of anguish and pain, and she sells it every second she’s on screen. I’m glad that she got her Oscar last year for Everything Everywhere All at Once, but I really believe she should have had it sooner.

I’m actually not great at Photoshop either, so pretend I made it look like these two are holding little statues.

Psychological Horror

And finally, AJ Peden asked me about my favorite psychological horror movies. What makes this difficult is that it’s really hard to define what “psychological horror” actually is. The Wikipedia definition (yeah, I looked it up) says it’s horror “with a particular focus on mental, emotional, and psychological states to frighten, disturb, or unsettle its audience.” Well gee, that narrows it down, right? Another problem here is that so many of these movies overlap into other subgenres: ghost stories, slasher movies, found footage films, etc., have all had prime examples of what we could call “psychological horror.”

I suppose my favorites in this incredibly broad subcategory would have to go back to the great Alfred Hitchcock. Psycho is the obvious example – it’s a great movie with a brilliant twist halfway through the film and a second brilliant twist at the end of the film. It’s also one of the prototypes for the slasher. So is Peeping Tom, which is also a dandy example of psychological horror. In that film, directed by Michael Powell, Karlheinz Bohm plays a photographer making a documentary about fear by filming the deaths of his victims. I suppose a 1960 audience may have been enticed by the title or the high sexual content (by 1960s standards) of the film, but the way Bohm’s character messes with your head is really powerful.

In the 60s, this was scarier than asbestos.

For more modern examples, I think Jordan Peele has kind of taken the forefront of the wave. Get Out, the movie that made people realize that guy from the goofy sketch comedy show was actually a master of terror, was not only a meditation on race relations, but a terrifying film about the potential of having your body literally stolen from you and the mental state that would result from – or compel somebody to do – such a thing. There have been a lot of films since Get Out that have tried to capture that same flavor (The Barbarian comes to mind, as does X and its prequel, Pearl), but I think as far as today’s filmmakers go, Peele wears the crown.

And I think that’s going to wrap it up, guys. There are a few other suggestions I didn’t get to, but those are either in categories where I haven’t seen enough movies to really form an opinion (Patrick Slagle – sorry, I don’t have a lot of folk horror movies in my catalog) or categories where my answer is so basic that I don’t know that I have anything interesting to say about it. (Rene Gautreaux: the best religious-based horror movie is still the original The Exorcist. Tony Cirillo, my favorite puppet from the Puppet Master franchise is Blade, because blades are cool.)

I hope you enjoyed this little experiment as much as I did. I had a lot of fun letting you guys tell me what to write about, and I think we uncovered a few gems in the process. May this two-parter help you find some new stuff to watch in the remainder of this spooky season, and keep your eyes right here! I don’t think it’s going to be too long before I ask you all to help me Play Favorites again.

Geek Punditry #40: Playing Favorites With Horror Movies (Part One)

October 6, 2023October 8, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry, Playing Favorites Abbott and Costello, Alien, Best Worst Movie, Digging Up the Marrow, Event Horizon, Evil Dead, frankenstein, Ghostbusters, Horror Movies, The Blob, Troll 2

One of my favorite things, as a teacher, is when you find a class that you just click with. You enjoy their insights, you can have real conversations with them, and you look forward to seeing them walk into your room every day. Sometimes, those kids even ask you questions that get your creative juices flowing. This week, for instance, in one such class, a student asked me what my favorite horror movie was. This was a tough question for, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t really like ranking things. I feel like it can sometimes be a hotbed for division and argument, for one. Also, sometimes it’s REALLY hard. Favorite horror movie? How do you pick? There are so many different KINDS of horror. Is it really fair to compare something like I Walked With a Zombie to Saw, both technically horror movies, but so different from one another that any comparison is really inadequate?

But then a thought occurred to me. One of the things that makes it hard is that there ARE too many categories to compare…so rather than try, why not look at my favorite films in each of these respective categories? So I turned to my friends on social media for a little experiment. I asked them to suggest different categories of horror movies, and I would take to this week’s Geek Punditry column to discuss my favorites in each category suggested. If it worked, I figured, it would be a ~~cheap and easy way~~ fun and clever way to draw future topics for GP columns. And if not? Well, it’s just one week.

Some categories are obvious, of course. Only a few weeks ago I spent an entire column talking about why Scream is my favorite slasher franchise. And not quite a year ago, before I even started GP, I wrote a blog post revealing that my favorite Universal Monster series is – to the surprise of absolutely nobody – Frankenstein. But I wanted to see what categories YOU guys could come up, and there were some doozies. So without further ado, I present to you the first ever Geek Punditry Presents: Playing Favorites…with HORROR MOVIES!

HORROR/COMEDIES

Lew Beitz kicked me off with a category I have a LOT to say about: the best horror/comedies. As people who’ve been reading my stuff for a long time know, I’ve covered this category in-depth in the past. Why, way back in 2012 I spent an entire month discussing 20 of the best horror/comedies of all time.

You see, horror and comedy, I believe, co-exist on kind of a sliding scale. Both genres are absolutely dependent on an ability to build up tension and release it in a satisfying way: in comedy with laughter, in horror with screams. But the tools are largely the same, only the result is different, and it can be very easy to turn a moment from one where you laugh to one where you’re terrified with just the slightest twist to the left. Horror/comedies, as a subgenre, are also on a sliding scale. There are those that are mostly comedies, but use the tropes of horror movies as the backdrop for the fun (Bob Hope’s classic The Ghost Breakers falls into this category), whereas others are true horror movies that happen to have funny characters or funny moments (the best films in the Scream franchise go here – and this is where Freddy Krueger believes he exists, although his victims and, occasionally, his audience may beg to differ).

Most people who know me know that two of my all-time favorite movies fall into the lighter side of this spectrum: Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and Ghostbusters. Abbott and Costello jumped into the world of the Universal Monsters and delivered an absolute laugh riot, using all the elements that made those monster movies classic and combining them with their own flawless comic sensibility. And as if that wasn’t enough, they had Bela Lugosi returning as Dracula (only the second time he would play the Count, and the final time as well). Lon Chaney Jr. was on board as the Wolf Man! All they were missing was Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein Monster, although Glenn Strange did a fine job. There are two times I watch this movie: at least once every Halloween season, and any time it happens to turn up on MeTV’s Svengoolie.

Wanna Laugh? Wanna be creeped out? No need to choose.

Ghostbusters, on the other hand, is a workplace comedy where the workplace happens to be an exterminator business for the dead. Legendary performances by comedic actors at the top of their game, special effects that are astonishing for the time (and the time constraints) in which the movie was made, and a script full of the best movie quotes ever written. My love for the real Ghostbusters knows no bounds.

But if you’re the sort of person who prefers their horror/comedy to slide further to the horror side of the scale, may I recommend Evil Dead 2? Bruce Campbell, a chainsaw, and an incursion of demonic creatures from beyond the grave makes for a gory and glorious time. And it doesn’t even matter if you haven’t seen the (scarier but less funny) original film, because the first 20 minutes is basically a condensed remake of that one.

ALIENS SERIES

Sandy Brophy wants to know what I think the best movie is in the Aliens series. I assume he means Ridley Scott’s Xenomorphs, because if he just means any movie with an extraterrestrial, the scariest one is obvious: Project ALF.

But in the Ridley Scott series, we’ve got eight movies to choose from so far: the four films featuring Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, the two Alien Vs. Predator films, and the preboot films Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. But if you’re hoping for a lot of fussing and prevaricating over this one friends, I’m sorry to disappoint, but this is an easy answer. It’s the original, by far.

The tagline even makes a basic truth of physics scary.

To be clear, I haven’t seen all eight of these films. Alien³ was so bad that I just couldn’t bring myself to watch Alien: Resurrection. But with seven out of eight under my belt, I feel confident in saying the original wins the crown because it’s the only one that’s actually intended to be a horror movie. It’s a haunted house movie in space, and it hits all the tropes of that kind of story perfectly while still keeping it in a fully fleshed-out science fiction universe. A large part of what makes it scary was that you didn’t actually get a good look at the alien for most of the movie. Ridley Scott knew that what a person can imagine is far more frightening than what you can put on the screen. When James Cameron signed on for the sequel, Aliens, he wisely realized that it would be impossible to replicate that kind of suspense now that everybody knew what the aliens looked like and how they functioned, so he didn’t even try. He didn’t make it a scary movie, he made it an action movie, and he knocked it out of the park. Some may even make a convincing case for the sequel being a better movie than the original, but that’s not the question today, is it? The question is which is a better horror movie, and after the first one, the rest of the films in this franchise aren’t even competing in the same contest.

NON-XENOMORPH SCI-FI

Not to be outdone by Sandy, Jason Ritterstein asked for my favorite non-xenomorph science fiction horror movie.

Project ALF.

How many times can I get away with this?

But if that’s too scary for you, there are other options. I actually struggled with this one a little, as many of the most memorable sci-fi horror movies also fall into the “Horror/Comedy” category, like Critters, Killer Klowns From Outer Space, and Little Shop of Horrors, all of which are worth watching. But if you’re looking for something that’s not trying to be funny, or at least not trying as hard as those other ones, I like Chuck Russell’s 1988 remake of The Blob. He takes the premise of the original and updates it nicely to the 80s, although the effects are a little dated. The original is good too. And if neither of those is scary enough for you, get a change of pants and check out Event Horizon, a 1997 film about an expedition to recover a spacecraft that went missing seven years prior, and the absolutely terrifying things found on board. This came out at a time where all I really knew Sam Neill from was Jurassic Park (I would watch In the Mouth of Madness later), and holy gee willikers, it made me see him in a totally different way.

Space is scary as hell, guys. Why do we keep trying to go there?

BEST WORST MOVIE

Amber Foret asked for “the funniest unintentionally comedic horror,” while Seth Pontiff wanted to find out what I thought was “the best worst low budget horror.” I combined these two because I think they’re really asking for the same thing: what’s a terrible horror movie that’s fun to watch? And that’s tough, isn’t it friends? Because there are just SO. MANY. OF. THEM.

Part of me feels a little bad to shine a light on this, because nobody really tries to make a bad movie, but people do it every day. Back when video stores were a thing it was impossible to walk through the horror section without seeing dozens of movies that should never be attempted without the assistance of a current or former occupant of the Satellite of Love and a couple of wisecracking robots. When a horror movie fails, it can fail for so many reasons: a bad story, bad special effects, bad performances, bad scare attempts, bad takes on contemporary issues…when you look at how many things can go wrong, it’s almost a miracle that anybody ever makes a good movie at all.

But if you’re looking for the perfect storm of terrible horror movies…well, I’m sorry if you’re looking for a revelation here, friends, but there’s no awful movie that’s more fun to watch than Troll 2. A movie that has no trolls in it, that was retroactively retitled to be the sequel to a horror movie nobody remembers, Troll 2 is one of the most bafflingly stupid, inept, and poorly-made movies in human history. It’s glorious. A family goes on vacation, renting a house in a town called Nilbog (oh yeah, Nilbog) and soon find themselves the targets of a group of vegetarian goblins whose plot is to turn humans into plants so they can eat them. You can read that sentence another 17 times if you want, friends, it won’t make any more or less sense than it does now.

The movie nobody asked for, and yet we can’t live without.

This movie is so legendary that 20 years later the child star of it actually made a very good documentary about the cult following it’s garnered, Best Worst Movie, which reveals many of the reasons for film’s ineptitude. For example, writer/director Claudio Fragasso evidently wrote the script in his native Italian and then translated it, but refused to allow any of the actors to change even a word of their dialogue to make it sound more natural coming out of the mouths of 90s American teenagers. (Actual quote: “I’m the victim of a nocturnal rapture. I have to release my lowest instincts with a woman.” Ladies, if you ever have a date who says he’s a victim of nocturnal rapture, call the cops.) Budget constraints led to the goblins wearing what look like off-the-rack rubber masks that were then shat upon by a horse. The actors weren’t professionals (pretend to be shocked at that), and one of them turned out to be a patient at a local mental institution who got a role and filmed his scenes while on a day trip. The only actor in the movie who seems to be enjoying herself is Deborah Reed, who plays the villain, Creedence Leonore Gielgud (and make damn sure you use the whole name). She spends the film giving a performance so ridiculously over-the-top and hamfisted she makes Elvira look like a wallflower by comparison. This movie is a train wreck caused by a plane crash that happened on top of a Native American burial ground, and it could potentially be used to interrogate political prisoners who have proven surprisingly resistant to waterboarding and bamboo shoots under their fingernails. It’s a masterpiece.

FOUND FOOTAGE

Our last suggestion for this week comes from reader Erin Petit, who moves up to the front of the queue because she happens to be my wife. (Sleeping with the writer gives you advantages, people.) She wants to know what my favorite found footage horror movie is, because it’s becoming a favorite subgenre of hers.

We seem to be on the downward slope of found footage movies at the moment. For a while there, especially after Paranormal Activity, they were booming…mostly because they’re relatively cheap to make, and there’s nothing a movie executive loves to hear more than “relatively cheap.” In fact, I’m pretty sure that exact language was used to describe them when the WGA was making their demands during the recently-concluded strike. But this boom brought with it a lot of bad movies, and finding the good ones can be rather difficult.

If I’m gonna pick one, though, I have to go with Adam Green’s Digging Up the Marrow. This may be slightly controversial, as Green himself dislikes calling the film a “found footage” movie, preferring to refer to it as a fake documentary. And he’s right, it’s not “found” the way that most such movies are, where the conceit seems to be that you, the viewer, happened to stumble upon an old VHS tape in a box and you popped it into the machine to see what’s on it. Green’s movie is filmed like a documentary, with the requisite cutaway moments, talking head interviews, and the like…but the best, most effective parts of it use the language of found footage, so I’m going to stick with my answer.

Anyway, in this movie Green plays himself, horror filmmaker Adam Green, approached by a man named William Dekker who is sending him drawings of dozens of monsters…monsters he’s trying to convince Green are real. It’s a great movie with some amazing practical monster effects, and Green and Ray Wise (as Dekker) put forth a fantastic performance. The ending is so creepy and effective that when we first watched it, Erin made me get up from the couch and lock our front door because she said heard a weird noise outside. (Sorry if you didn’t want me to tell that story, sweetheart, but you asked.)

Wow, guys. This is already almost the longest Geek Punditry column of all time, and I haven’t even gotten through half your suggestions! So you know what? NEXT WEEK WILL BE PLAYING FAVORITES PART TWO! If I didn’t get to your suggestion this week, I’ve got them all saved and I’ll tackle more next Friday. And if you didn’t give me a suggestion, there’s still time! Drop it in the comments here or hit me with it on any of the social media platforms you used to find this column. And while you’re at it, tell me your thoughts on the categories I covered THIS week! There’s PLENTY more to talk about this Spooky Season, and want to hear from you!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He did not expect this new column format to be such an abundance of riches, and now it’s going to be nigh-impossible to prevent him from running it into the ground. Way to go, guys.

Geek Punditry #39: In a Streaming World, Does Size Matter?

September 29, 2023September 29, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry netflix, Roald Dahl, Stephen King, streaming, The Orville, Wes Anderson, Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

Two years ago, in a move that made pundits across the world scratch their heads and say, “Well how the hell did that happen?”, Netflix purchased the Roald Dahl Story Company. This trust, of course, is responsible for the works of the creator of such things as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and that one short story about the snake. At the time, Netflix announced that this acquisition would lead to the development of their own shared universe, copying the Marvel Method just like everybody else has been trying to do for the last decade. So far, though, we haven’t seen a ton of stuff that feels like it’s part of that world. We’ve gotten a film version of the theatrical Matilda: The Musical, and later this year they’re going to release Wonka, an origin story for a character that Tim Burton definitively proved in his film version has absolutely no need for an origin story, but not much else.

Earlier this week, though, Netflix surprised us all by dropping The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, a film based on one of Dahl’s short stories. The movie is directed by Wes Anderson (who also directed the Dahl adaptation The Fantastic Mr. Fox back in 2009) and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as a compulsive gambler who finds a secret to a mysterious power that could potentially make him the wealthiest man in the world. Despite a premise that could easily go very, very dark, the film (and the story it is based on) is remarkably sweet and optimistic, lacking the cynicism that so often creeps in when modern filmmakers attempt to adapt a classic piece of literature that didn’t have a lot of cynicism in the first place. It’s very much a Wes Anderson film, carrying on an odd obsession with films mimicking stage plays that we also saw in his recent feature Asteroid City. The sets of the film are flown in and out in full view of the cameras, the majority of dialogue is spoken directly to the viewer as if the actors were narrating a play, and even visual effects are done in a dime-and-nickel fashion, such as making a character “levitate” by having the actor sit on a box painted to match the set behind him. It’s weird and bizarre and utterly delightful.

It’s also only 39 minutes long.

Although originally presumed to be a feature film when announced, Anderson quickly corrected people, saying that it’s actually the first of four shorts he is making adapting various Dahl stories for Netflix. True, 39 minutes is longer than most of us think of as a “short” film (the classic Looney Tunes shorts were usually in the seven-minute range, and even the Three Stooges rarely broke 20), but it’s certainly not long enough to qualify as a feature film, which has to hit at least 80 minutes to be worthy of consideration. We’ve all seen poorly-made films that pad out their running time to hit that mark, in some extreme cases even running the credits at an excruciatingly slow pace just to cross that 80-minute finish line. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences officially defines a short film as running no longer than 40 minutes, including credits, so Anderson got in just under the wire if he’s looking for Oscar consideration, which I’m sure Netflix would LOVE.

“That’s 43 minutes, Wes. Ya gotta chop four more if you’re gonna party with this guy.”

The odd thing is, as recently as 10 years ago, a film of this nature would have struggled to find a home. Since the end of the era of true theatrical shorts (an era I long for, an era I would dearly love to see return), a lot of theaters never would have run one as long as Henry Sugar. The only way such a film would get any theatrical showing would be in a showcase of short films, which wouldn’t be in wide release, or as part of an anthology of shorts, which historically have not performed all that well. As far as a TV release, it could possibly be aired as a “special,” but would certainly be cut up to add commercial breaks, and possibly even cut down to make room for more commercials. At any rate, stopping a film of this nature to show an ad for Tide Pods would be absolutely gutting to the flow and pace, and make for a far less enjoyable experience than watching it all in one go, like a stage play, as Anderson intended.

Netflix is honestly the perfect home for a film of this nature, and it’s not just this one. Although I have many issues and concerns with the streaming culture that we all live in nowadays, one of the main advantages I think it has given us is the freedom to make a film as long or as short as necessary to tell the story.

Many people get twitchy at the prospect of watching a movie that’s “too long” (these people usually define that as anything north of 90 minutes). I don’t know if it’s a short attention span or a bladder that just can’t wait, but once they see that runtime creep towards 130, 140 or higher, there are lots of people who would rather skip the whole experience. I have no problem with a long movie – most of my favorites would fall into this category, in fact – so long as the story justifies the length. I hear people complain about the length of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings films, for example, but I’ve never been given a satisfactory answer when I ask them what they think could be cut for time without damaging the story. This is why miniseries became so popular in the 80s and 90s, giving more time to adapt a novel that couldn’t fit into a two-hour theatrical experience. It’s why full television series are now being based on books, things like Game of Thrones or Outlander, stories that just flat-out couldn’t squeeze into a movie. And this is, for the most part, a positive thing.

The opposite is also true, however. If stretching out a movie longer than it should be is dull, padding a short movie to make it feature length is deadly. As an avid and enthusiastic moviegoer, I’ve probably seen hundreds of films in theaters over the course of my life, and one of the few times I can remember ever actually falling asleep was in the 2001 film Imposter. (Side note: pound for pound, boring movies are even worse than bad movies. A boring action movie is simply unforgivable.) The film was about an alien race using androids as hidden human bombs trying to attack Earth, and Gary Sinese’s desperate attempt to prove he was not one of these living bombs. It’s a good concept, and Sinese is a great actor, so it’s almost criminal how unbearably dull that film is. I was baffled as to how such an excruciatingly boring movie could be made…until I found out that it was originally made as a short film, part of an anthology of science fiction stories, and it was then expanded out to feature length. If you carved out the parts of the movie that were part of the original short, you may have had a good, taut sci-fi thriller, but by adding additional unnecessary scenes to essentially triple the length of the film, it’s as entertaining as watching Hollywood accountants try to lie about how much money a movie made.

This movie, for instance, made at least twelve bucks while I took a nap.

Telling a short story is an art that requires different skills than longform stories. The tools are the same, but you wield them differently. A long story can spend time developing plot AND character AND setting AND mood AND theme, whereas shorter works often have to settle for focusing on just one or two of the elements. When it’s done well, it can be a masterpiece. But even those masterpieces can be damaged if you go back and start adding things that don’t belong. It’s like taking a VW Beetle, cutting it in half, and inserting a segment from a stretch limousine. You’ve taken two perfectly good automobiles and turned them into an abomination that doesn’t belong on the road.

It’s hard to make a feature film out of a short story, because by definition, those stories are intended to be short. It CAN be done very well, of course. Several of Stephen King’s short stories have been made into solid features – 1408, the original Children of the Corn, and by all accounts the new adaptation of The Boogeyman (I haven’t seen it yet but I hear very good things about it) each took a brief story and expanded it into features that are engaging and entertaining. On the other hand, sometimes the filmmakers can’t quite build a feature out of a short story, giving us lesser offerings like The Mangler. And sometimes they just try to trade on the name and make no effort at adapting the story at all, and here I of course am referring to Lawnmower Man.

Children’s books are frequent victims of this problem. Books for kids – especially picture books for young children – may only have enough story to last 20 minutes or so. But if you want a theatrical release, that just ain’t long enough, and you have to start inventing stuff out of whole cloth. Sometimes it works. Dreamworks took two short children’s books – Shrek and How to Train Your Dragon – and turned them into flourishing franchises by using the book more as inspiration than a blueprint. On the other hand, look at the awful efforts that the late Dr. Seuss has been subjected to. There have been two separate feature films based on How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and both of them suffer from inflation and unnecessary backstory. What Chuck Jones nailed in 26 minutes, Ron Howard and Jim Carrey puffed out to a painful 104.

The less said about The Cat in the Hat, the better.

Scientific proof that bigger isn’t always better.

The streaming world has changed this paradigm, though. Previously, there were only two “acceptable” outlets for a film: television or theatrical release. Sure, direct-to-video was a thing, but those usually tried to emulate theatrical movies in form, either to fool people or to maintain an air of respectability. But whether you were making a project for theaters or TV, either way you were chained by scheduling in one way or another. In traditional ad-supported television, almost anything you make has to fit perfectly into a strict schedule of 30 or 60-minute blocks, minus an exact amount of time for commercials. Deviation is not tolerated, because we have to fit in a very specific amount of advertising time. Even premium cable channels, which are not beholden to advertisers, often use that 30-minute grid for scheduling, then pad out the remaining time with promos for their own networks so they can start the next movie or TV show on the hour.

Theatrical movies have a little more wiggle room – there isn’t a hard and fast rule that a movie has to be EXACTLY 90 minutes – but there are still parameters that have to be adhered to. If a movie is less than 80 minutes, theater chains usually won’t run it, as filmgoers will be disappointed at spending $127 on tickets, candy, and soda to take their family out to see something that’s over in under an hour and a half. On the other hand, the longer a movie is, the fewer times a day it can be shown, meaning fewer tickets sold, which again makes theater owners hesitate unless it’s a film they feel is a guaranteed blockbuster. Marvel movies can get away with a longer runtime because they historically bring big box office. Oscar bait dramas can do so as well, particularly if they come from a major studio. But if you’ve got a no-name director, no big stars, and aren’t tied to a recognizable IP, showing up at AMC with your 3-hour long epic about the Battle of New Orleans probably isn’t going to fly.

But on Netflix, Prime Video, or any of the other bajillion streaming services, neither of these factors need to be considered. A viewer doesn’t have to be in front of their TV at 8 o’clock because that’s when their favorite show airs anymore. They don’t have to show up at the theater at 6:45 to get settled in before the previews roll at 7, and they don’t have to worry about running out in the middle of the film to feed the parking meter because Kumquat Warriors 7: The Kumquatening is a longer movie than the previous three combined. In a streaming world there is no reason to make a movie or TV show any longer or shorter than is necessary to effectively tell the story.

By the time Avatar 4 comes out, you’re gonna need to get a hotel room for the night to finish it.

Streaming series have been running with this a lot. Although they still kinda aim for the old TV paradigm of half-hour comedies and one-hour dramas, they aren’t strict about it. If an episode takes 37 minutes instead of 30, no big deal. If it only reaches 48 minutes instead of 60, we can let it slide. The series The Orville, for its most recent season, jumped from the Fox broadcast network to the Hulu streaming service, and once they were no longer locked in to 42 minutes of show plus 18 for commercials, they delivered an entire season of episodes that went well over an hour. Several of them are long enough that they could have been released as theatrical films. And for the most part, they were very entertaining and compelling, using the freedom of the format to great effect.

And while movies can have the freedom to get longer, things like Henry Sugar are demonstrating that the real freedom is to get shorter. In 2020, in the midst of the Covid lockdowns, Rob Savage made a horror film called Host. The film used the lockdown to great effect, telling a story of a group of friends on a zoom meeting that accidentally summon a dangerous spirit. Shudder picked the movie up and it became a cult hit, despite the fact that the running time is only 57 minutes. This is a film that never could have found a theatrical release without adding a half-hour of fluff, but the streaming world allowed Savage to just tell his story as he saw fit, and that gave it wings that it wouldn’t have had with any traditional distribution model.

To be fair, though, most of us feel this way if we need to attend a Zoom meeting for work.

There are a lot of things about the streaming world that concern me – I’ve mentioned many of them before. But if there’s one thing that is definitely positive about it, it’s the fact that time constraints are largely a thing of the past. The freedom to tell a story in the most effective way without trying to adhere to largely arbitrary rules of running time has already produced some really great content. The important thing is that a filmmaker is allowed to include whatever is necessary but not forced to add things that don’t matter, and that path (in the hands of a skilled crew) will make better movies. If there’s nothing else we can learn, it’s that when it comes to telling a good story, size isn’t what matters at all.

Geek Punditry #38: Whence Elseworlds?

September 22, 2023September 23, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Batman, comic books, DC Comics, Elseworlds, Flash, Kingdom Come, superman

Multiverses are big these days. What was once a relatively niche science fiction concept has become popularized by things like the Spider-Verse movies, Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once, and about seven thousand fanfics where the guy from the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon meets and beats up his counterpart from the live action movie. So it’s odd to think that one of the first fictional worlds to use the multiverse as a major concept once attempted to do away with it because it was deemed too confusing. DC Comics introduced its multiverse in 1961 with Flash #123, in which writer Gardner Fox had the Flash of that time period (Barry Allen) meet the Flash of the 1940s (Jay Garrick). The problem was it had been established earlier that, in Barry’s world, Jay Garrick was considered a fictional character that Barry had read about as a child. The fix was to declare Jay’s world an alternate universe, an “Earth-2,” even though he had been around first. Fox was even slick enough to write himself into the story, claiming that the writer “Gardner Fox” had some sort of telepathic link to the other world and didn’t realize the stories he was conjuring that he believed to be pure fiction were, in fact, reporting on actual events from Earth-2. It was a wild, crazy concept for the time, and it started an avalanche.

In the 90s, DC Comics gave us Elseworlds, a series of books set outside of the "real" DC Universe that fans quickly latched on to. This week in Geek Punditry, I take a brief look at the origins of the imprint, the history of DC'S multiverse, and explain how Elseworlds is back -- even if DC doesn't want to admit it. — “How long do you think we can keep this up?”
“Oh, I’d say at least 60 years.”

It wasn’t too long before the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, met his own Earth-2 counterpart, Alan Scott. Heroes who had been continuously published since the Golden Age and were not replaced by other characters (predominantly Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) discovered that they had almost identical doppelgangers on Earth-2, and eventually the Earth-1 Justice League of America met the Earth-2 Justice Society for an annual get-together.

And once there are two universes. why not more? Earth-3 had villainous versions of the heroes: Superman became the evil Ultraman, Batman the crafty Owlman, Green Lantern the kinda lame and poorly-named Power Ring, and so forth. Then DC started adding worlds that included the characters they’d purchased from other defunct publishers: the heroes of Charlton Comics inhabited Earth-4, the Shazam! Family of Fawcett Comics fame was from Earth-S, and the heroes of Quality Comics were shifted off into Earth-X – a world where the Nazis won World War II!

“Not gonna lie to you, Sam, this is kind of awkward.”

By the 80s, though, DC felt that things had gotten unwieldy, so writer Marv Wolfman gave us Crisis on Infinite Earths, their first mega-crossover event, in which all but one Earth was destroyed and the surviving heroes of many different worlds came to reside there. Both Green Lanterns and Flashes, otherworldly heroes like Plastic Man, the Blue Beetle, and Captain Marvel, and many more populated this “new” DC Universe. For the most part, I think this has worked to DC’s benefit over the years – it’s easier to build a cohesive world if all your main characters inhabit the same universe. Were it not for this, we never would have had the Blue Beetle/Booster Gold friendship, the Flash family wouldn’t have developed into the legacy it currently is, and people would have forgotten about Peacemaker long before John Cena showed up to actually make him interesting for a change. Despite that, though, I have always disagreed with the fundamental thesis that led to the writing of Crisis in the first place – that a multiverse storyline was too complicated for the casual reader. And if anything, the proliferation of multiverse stories in recent years, I think, has proven me to be correct.

What’s more, I think even many of the writers at DC Comics felt the same way, because it wasn’t too long before they started to branch out again and tell stories that didn’t fall into the canon of the one and only DC Universe. Just three years after Crisis ended, DC published Gotham By Gaslight, a one-shot story by Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola, which featured a Victorian Batman doing battle with Jack the Ripper. The book was a hit, and the idea of telling stories of DC heroes in different worlds came back. Batman: Holy Terror by Alan Brennert and Norm Breyfogle, showed an alternate history in which the British Empire never fell out of favor and the colonies in North America are run by an oppressive government. In this version, Batman becomes a sort of Guy Fawkes-esque character, rebelling against British rule. This book was labeled an “Elseworlds” title, and the name became the brand under which DC stories from outside the continuity took place for the next decade and a half.

Original slogan:” Elseworlds-Because there *can’t* be too many different versions of Batman.”

Over the years we got some magnificent books, each casting the heroes of the DC Universe in different scenarios. In Superman: Speeding Bullets, Kal-El of Krypton crashed not in Kansas, but in Gotham City, where he was raised by Thomas and Martha Wayne. Batman: In Darkest Night showed us a world where Abin Sur crashed in Gotham City instead of Coast City (a LOT of alien spacecraft touch ground in Gotham in Elseworlds) and thus Bruce Wayne became Earth’s Green Lantern instead of Hal Jordan. Justice Riders casts the Justice League in a western yarn and The Golden Age tells a bittersweet ending to the saga of the Justice Society. Even crossovers with other companies occasionally bore the Elseworlds brand – Batman met both Marvel’s Captain America and Tarzan (published, at the time, through Dark Horse Comics) in Elseworlds stories.

Perhaps the high point of the imprint came in 1996, when Mark Waid and Alex Ross published their four-issue masterwork Kingdom Come. Set a few decades in the future, this is a DC Universe that has been disintegrating ever since Superman left humanity behind following the tragic death of his wife, Lois Lane, and the brutal murder of her killer, the Joker, before he could face justice. In his absence, the world has been overrun by a new breed of metahuman, heroes in name only, more interested in fighting each other than protecting the human race. In this story the Spectre takes a minister named Norman McCay on an Ebenezer Scrooge-type tour of this world as Superman is called back to action following a catastrophic event that pushes the entire Earth to the edge of annihilation. The story is largely a response to the sort of over-muscled, over-gunned, over-pouched heroes that were so popular in the 90s, and despite having a distinct dystopian flavor, it is ultimately one of the most beautiful and powerfully optimistic stories comics have ever produced.

You’re probably expecting some kind of joke here, but this is just straight-up one of the greatest comic book series ever made.

DC quietly pushed the Elseworlds brand aside in 2003, the argument being that it had become overused and was starting to grow stale. It’s hard to argue with that, too, especially when you start counting the number of Elseworlds that basically boiled down to “Kal-El landed somewhere other than Smallville, Kansas.” (Off the top of my head, we’ve got Superman: Red Son, Superman: The Dark Side, Superman: True Brit, JLA: The Nail, The Superman Monster, and even another Dark Horse collaboration, Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle, all of which hinge on that same basic point.) As the multiverse was slowly creeping back into the “real” DC Comics, Elseworlds was placed…well…elsewhere. It came back briefly in 2010 for a three-issue Superman miniseries, Last Family of Krypton (this time little Kal-El’s parents escaped Krypton with him), and the name was used for an Arrowverse crossover event on TV, but other than that, it’s been gone for a long time.

“Okay, so you’re kind of over Batman Elseworlds. How about 37 Superman Elseworlds that all have the same starting point?”

Or has it?

DC is not using the name anymore, no, but they certainly are using the same basic concept. There are a lot of DC books being published that feature versions of the DC heroes in different worlds. Sean Phillips’s Batman: White Knight and its various sequels and spinoffs are set in a world where the Joker goes sane. Since that series premiered in 2017, it’s built a small universe of its own. There’s also the world of DCEased, a universe in which Darkseid succeeds in gaining the Anti-Life Equation, unleashing a memetic virus that transforms its victims into a sort of techno-undead creature, but don’t you dare call them zombies. Jurassic League was a miniseries that re-cast the Justice League as anthropomorphic dinosaurs, because why the hell not? Dark Knights of Steel features a medieval world where Jor-El, Lara, and Kal-El came to Earth together and live in a sort of fantasy setting surrounded by analogues of the other DC heroes and villains. And then there’s the cleverly-named DC Versus Vampires, which is about the signing of the Magna Carta.

Pictured: Pope Innocent III and King John.

Kidding. No, it’s exactly what it says on the wrapper.

The thing about these books is that none of them are self-contained. Most Elseworlds, back in the day, ran anywhere from one to four issues, but that was typically where it ended. White Knight and DCEased both had multiple series and one-shots. Vampires and Steel each ran for 12 issues plus spin-offs. And each of these worlds has been designated a number in the new, current, DC Multiverse. They are Elseworlds in all but name – in fact, in a more literal sense than many of the older (forgotten) Elseworlds books, as they are actually other worlds in the DC Multiverse. Many of the other Elseworlds of the past have been “imported” into the new DC Multiverse as well, especially the much-loved and highly-inspirational Kingdom Come, which has crossed over and interacted with the “Main” DC Universe on many occasions, including in Waid’s current run on Batman/Superman: World’s Finest.

Since DC has once again embraced the concept, what I (and, I suspect, many of the fans who were reading comics in the 90s) would like is for them to once again embrace the brand. Bring back Elseworlds. When these books are reprinted, give them the label. When the inevitable sequels come out, give them the label. If anything, the label will only help. While it may be clear that Jurassic League isn’t the “real” DC Universe, a casual fan picking up DC Versus Vampires might be concerned about why Hal Jordan is doing his best Dracula impression in this series but it doesn’t seem to be affecting the regular monthly Green Lantern title. Having a specific brand would alleviate that problem.

The only difference between these and an Elseworlds is the label.

And since the current philosophy at DC seems to be “every story happened SOMEWHERE in the Multiverse,” I say they should run with it. Don’t just put the Elseworlds LABEL on the book, plop a NUMBER in it as well. When they print the Dark Knights of Steel omnibus, give it an Elseworlds logo with a little mark signifying that this is Earth-118. Instead of reprinting Kingdom Come under the “mature readers” Black Label imprint (where it is woefully misplaced), give it back the Elseworlds mark and label it as Earth-22. There are two more miniseries coming out this year set on Earth-789, the world shared by the Christopher Reeve Superman and Michael Keaton Batman movies – give THOSE the Elseworlds labels too!

It exists, it has fans, and it has a clear purpose now that’s more than just a grab bag of weird. It’s true that the label was overused in the 90s, but the solution to that isn’t to never use it again, it’s just to use it sparingly. There’s no fan of the books that currently exist that would be turned off by an Elseworlds label, and there are many fans who may be more inclined to pick them up if they saw that familiar, beloved brand again. If nothing else, I think, it’s worth the try. Nothing in comics ever really dies – Superman can come back from Doomsday, Barry Allen can come back from the Speed Force…let’s let the Elseworlds brand have its time back from the dead.

Geek Punditry #37: What’s Your Favorite Scary Franchise?

September 15, 2023September 16, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Halloween, Horror, Scream, Slashers

I’ve said it before and it’s worth repeating: what true fans want, above all else, is more. And this is especially true of horror movie fans. The concept of a “horror franchise” goes back at LEAST to 1935, when Bride of Frankenstein was the first sequel to one of the classic Universal Monster movies. (One could even argue that it goes back to the Golem films of the silent era, but only one of those has survived.) Frankie’s creature would go on to appear in eight official films, with his pals Dracula, the Wolfman, the Invisible Man, and the Creature From the Black Lagoon each appearing several times. In the 70s and 80s, the horror franchise became a cinematic staple, with the likes of The Exorcist and The Amityville Horror paving the way for the slasher icons of Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, among a sea of others. I love horror movies, and I appreciate many of the great franchises throughout history. But when I look at the vast sea of horror available, I’m surprised to see which franchise – besides the Universal classics, of course – holds the trophy as my personal favorite…the bloody good adventures of Ghostface in the Scream series.

Having recently watched the sixth and most recent film, I’ve been thinking about why I enjoy them so much. I’m not going to start a debate over which series is the best – there’s no way that you’re going to convince anybody that their personal favorite isn’t the best and it’s useless to try – I’m just saying that it’s the one that means the most to me. There are a few reasons for it. First off, there’s nostalgia. Believe it or not, Scream was the first horror franchise I ever got into. Growing up in the 80s, I already knew the characters and tropes of slasher films via cultural osmosis, but my parents weren’t into horror movies and I was never really exposed to them until college, when my friend Jason showed me the first Scream. (Jason was the manager of a video store at the time, then later the owner of the video store, then later employed in an entirely different line of work because video stores ceased to be a thing.) We watched Scream because Jason wanted to see the newly-released Scream 2 and I HAD to see the original first, and he was right. I was hooked. I loved the meta comedy, I loved the characters, and I was impressed at the structure of the mystery. Even before I considered myself a horror fan, I was a fan of Ghostface.

Over the next few years I branched out and slowly acquainted myself with the films of Freddy, Jason, Michael, and the rest, but I kept coming back to Scream. There are great films in every horror franchise, but to this day this is the only franchise where I haven’t seen anything I would classify as a “bad” movie. Even the worst Scream film (that would be Scream 3, for those of you keeping score) is watchable, with funny moments and good twists, and I would never skip over it when doing a rewatch of the series the way I would, say, Halloween: Resurrection.

Even in the early years I felt somewhat protective of the franchise. While 3 was not my favorite, I accepted it as the end of the story, capping off the trilogy in a way that tied things up and left the characters I cared about in a satisfying place. When word came of the fourth installment 11 years later, I was somewhat disturbed, thinking that it would break the ending of a supposedly-completed story the way other franchises have (lookin’ at YOU, Toy Story 4), but with both director Wes Craven and original writer Kevin Williamson returning, I decided to give it a chance. To my shock, I thought it was the best film since the first and eagerly awaited part 5. I did not expect it to take another 11 years, the death of Craven, and a quasi-relaunch to get it going again…but the relaunches have worked for me as well, in ways that many other remakes, reboots, and “requels” have not.

There’s something unique about the way the franchise has been crafted. One of the strengths, I think, is Ghostface himself. Unlike most other horror franchises, the “face” doesn’t belong to a singular villain that comes back from the dead time and again. Ghostface is merely a mask, picked up by a different character (or more than one) each time to wreak havoc all over again. This allows the franchise to maintain the mystery of who the killer is each time (something that Friday the 13th had to abandon after the first installment). It also doesn’t have to worry about how to resurrect the villain time and again, with increasingly complicated supernatural rules that can get confusing and run the risk of being contradicted by future installments (such as what happened to A Nightmare on Elm Street). And unlike most other long-running horror franchises, it has never been rebooted (just TRY to explain the Halloween timeline to someone who isn’t already a fan). That really means something to people like me.

“So in the FIRST continuity Michael had a niece named Jamie and in the SECOND continuity he had a nephew named John and in the FOURTH continuity he wasn’t related to Laurie Strode at all and in the ROB ZOMBIE continuity — hey! Why aren’t you taking notes?”

I think this also makes it easier to accept changes in the franchise, the fact that there’s a singular figure, but not a singular character propelling the plot along. Replacing the actor behind a horror icon is tricky. If you ask most fans, Robert Englund IS Freddy Krueger, Doug Bradley IS Pinhead, and efforts to recast them have at most been grudgingly tolerated, and at worst, outright rejected. Even icons who wear masks and have been portrayed by multiple actors still spark a heated debate. Ask any group of fans who the best Jason Voorhees was and you’ll find the room sharply divided between those who believe it’s Kane Hodder and those who are certifiably insane.

The closest thing Ghostface has to an icon performer is Roger L. Jackson, who has provided the voice of the killer in every movie. He would be difficult to replace, because he’s so damned good at delivering a voice that can shift between charming, snarky, and terrifying at the snap of a finger, but when the time comes that he’s unwilling or unable to keep going, it wouldn’t be a death knell for the series.

There’s no point in arguing who the “best” Ghostface is because every Ghostface is different and brings something different to the table, and that’s by design. It would be bonkers to argue whether Billy Loomis was a “better” Ghostface than Mickey Altieri, because they’re not the same character. Sure, one could (and will) argue about which performance or story or motivation or one-liners they enjoy more, but there’s no room for arguing that one of them goes against the “spirit” of the character the way one could do with Michael Myers. (Is he supernatural? Is he not? Is it Tuesday? What was with that guy with the black boots?)

I know it seems like I’m picking on the *Halloween* franchise a lot. That’s because for every masterpiece of horror in that line, there are two movies full of crap like this.

It’s this versatility in the main villain that allows the franchise to be malleable and re-started every so often without the kind of pushback you had against Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger. It also allows the tone of the series to shift slightly as sensibilities change. The original Scream was a slasher movie about people who had watched too many slasher movies. As the franchise continued, it got deeper into the metafictional aspect of the concept. Scream 2 was a sequel about horror movie sequels, and introduced the “film-within-a-film” Stab, which was based on the events of the first movie and proved to provide fuel for the rest of the franchise going forward. In Scream 3, we saw the conclusion of a trilogy about trilogies. Scream 4 was a movie about remakes (but not really). The 2022 Scream was about “requels” and included a joke at its own expense about dropping the number even though everybody knew it wasn’t an actual continuity reboot. With Scream VI they’ve finally embraced the idea of the rules of franchises, as opposed to specific installments. Where they go after this, I’m honestly not sure, but I’m along for the ride.

First the Muppets, then Jason, and now Ghostface takes Manhattan.

Some people will ask how I can stack Scream up against other horror franchises, many of which I enjoy very much, but this is without a doubt the series that I’ve rewatched more than any other. It helps that there are (for now, at least) fewer of them than most of the other really iconic series. There are currently six Screams, and until January of last year, there were only four to throw into a quick binge. When you put together every iteration of the franchise A Nightmare on Elm Street has given us nine films, Friday the 13th is at 12, and Halloween has churned out a weekend-slaughtering 14. The less said about how the Amityville name has been pimped out, the better.

The fact that it’s never been rebooted makes it feel a bit more – and I hesitate to use this word, but I can’t think of another one – a bit more real. Freddy’s seventh film went into an entirely different continuity, although it did so brilliantly. The Friday movies never technically had a reboot until the remake came out, but it also plays fast and loose with what actually “counts,” especially the later films. The last three of them make virtually no attempt to directly follow the earlier movies at all. Get somebody who doesn’t watch horror to watch the first Friday the 13th and then Jason X and see if they can figure out how the dots connect. The upcoming Crystal Lake prequel TV series will probably not make things any clearer, for that matter.

And then there’s Michael. You know the rest.

But every installment of Scream (save for the in-name-only TV series from a few years back) is part of the same continuity, despite playing with the rules of remakes and requels. Every film not only counts, but is recounted in the later films. There are scenes in the most recent film that are full of what film nerds like me call “continuity porn,” full of elements and items that not only recall all of the previous films, but are ripped straight from them, but it’s done in a justifiable way. I’m anxious to find the website where someone (inevitably) has cataloged all of the Easter Eggs that can be spotted by going through that scene one frame at a time, because I’m sure there’s a lot that I missed.

In a surprise crossover, Ghostface takes decorating advice from Tony Stark.

Speaking of the most recent film, the one that came out earlier this year, it’s an interesting anomaly. Without getting into spoiler territory, it’s the one where the “rules” seem to matter least, but it pulls it off without sacrificing the love of movies that is at the core of the story. Ghostface is behaving differently this time around, and the film pulls off some great red herrings that work because it plays with the expectations of horror movie fans, but at the core it still has Scream in its DNA. And this is where I think they’ve got to start figuring out how to keep the franchise going, if that is indeed the intention. (Seeing as how they’ve already done preproduction for Scream VII, it seems clear that it is.) They’ve touched on pretty much everything they can on horror movies of the last few decades. If they don’t want to wait another 10 years or so for horror to evolve again, they’ve got to find different ways to make the story work. They’ve built a solid and likable core group of characters that is sufficiently different from the original trio of Sidney, Dewey, and Gale to not just feel like a remake. At the same time, they’ve also kept the window open to bring back the legacy characters, which this film does in a mostly satisfying way. This film – being the second story with these characters – also has some echoes of Scream 2 in terms of setting and motivation, without just being a copy. And that leaves the question about the next one…eh, More on that in a minute.

Wherever they go, I will be there to watch, and anxious to see who the next people are to don the Ghostface mask and cause a little terror and a lot of laughs. Whereas once I was satisfied to let it lie, I now feel optimistic for the future of this story, and happy to note that there is, indeed, life after Wes.

If you’ve already watched every Scream movie to date, including VI, skip below my standard plug for a little bonus – I pontificate about the identity of the killer in Scream VII. By necessity, my theory will have spoilers.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Roger L. Jackson has got to have one of the sweetest gigs in Hollywood, right? Every few years he comes in, spends a few hours recording lines off-camera, and is one of the most recognizable horror icons of all time.

You back? Great. Okay, so I think I’ve already figured out the killer of Scream VII, and it’s before they’ve even filmed a frame of it. Actually, I have two theories, and it really depends entirely on how dark they’re willing to get. The new series is, in essence, “requeling” the original trilogy. Scream (2022) is the requel of the original: a girl (Neve Cambpell/Melissa Barrera) is stalked by a killer indulging ties to her past (Sidney’s mother/Sam’s father). In the end the killer – or one of them, at least – turns out to be her boyfriend (Skeet Ulrich/Jack Quaid).

I made it through this whole column without a *Star Trek* reference, so let me just quickly say how awesome Quaid is on *Lower Decks*.

Scream VI requels Scream 2: the characters are now in college, and the main killer turns out to be a side character (Laurie Metcalf/Dermot Mulroney) who was secretly the parent of the previous killer and is seeking revenge for his death.

Laurie Metcalf murders considerably fewer people on *The Big Bang Theory.*

If they continue following the pattern, Scream VII would logically requel Scream 3. This was the only film in which the killer went solo (which is called out in VI), and it turned out to be Sidney’s long-lost half-brother Roman Bridger (Scott Foley). So for Scream VII, are they going to go the long-lost half-sibling route again?

Nah. I think they’re going to go for the half-sibling that’s right in front of our face. I think it’s going to be Jenna Ortega’s Tara. She’s the half-sister of the main character, so she would fit the pattern. There’s even a bit of dialogue in VI that points out how logical it would have been if, at some point, Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers had snapped from her repeated trauma and become a Ghostface herself. That could easily be seen as teeing up the ball for it to be Tara in the next go-around.

Let’s call that Theory A. The biggest question mark is if the series would REALLY go that dark, allowing us to grow attached to a character for two movies before pulling the twist and making her the villain. They MIGHT…but if they don’t, I still think the killer would have to have a family connection. In that case, Theory B: the killer will turn out to be Tara and Sam’s absent mother. She’s never appeared on screen. Sam rejected her for lying about who her father really was, and when the truth came out it ended her marriage to Tara’s father. When Tara learned the truth in her first film, she cut off ties to her mother as well. She could be coming after Sam for “stealing” her family from her. Still dark – a mom wanting to murder her daughter – but not QUITE as dark as making Tara the killer.

Of course, these are theories and – with the Hollywood strikes continuing – who knows what’s going to happen with anything? Whatever is currently planned might wind up on the scrap heap of history. But as of right now, I’m calling it. That’s what I think is likely to happen in Scream VII, Theory A and Theory B.

Then again…A+B=C? In most Scream movies, after all, there have been two killers…

Geek Punditry #36: On a Gridiron Far, Far Away

September 8, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry audiobooks, books, Galactic Football League, podcasts, Scott Sigler

I haven’t listened to the radio in years. I know this is no longer a novel position. Most people in this digital age ignore the radio in favor of populating their own playlists on Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Music, Heimdall’s Jockstrap, or whatever app is en vogue at the moment. But even before the rise of such services, podcasts had long since become my entertainment of choice while driving. One such podcast I discovered years ago helped turn me on to “podiobooks” (audiobooks delivered in podcast form, in case you couldn’t decode the term), and that in turn directed me to the new pantheon of writers that were riding the wave that came at the time that medium was burgeoning: people like Mur Lafferty and J.C. Hutchins and, most pertinent to our discussion today, the Future Dark Overlord himself, Scott Sigler.

So as not to bury the lede, the reason I’m writing about Sigler this week is because a new podcast series is launching that presents his most popular series of stories starting over from the beginning. So right now I want you to open your chosen podcasting app (yes, that includes Spotify) and subscribe to “Scott Sigler’s Galactic Football League Series.” Then, while the first three episodes are downloading, I’m going to tell you why this series is awesome and you should be giving Sigler your attention.

Sigler, as you could probably guess from the inclusion of the word “Galactic,” is a science fiction writer. He has developed a complex and fascinating universe with intriguing characters, wild and bizarre alien species, and a degree of worldbuilding that could make Tolkien and Rowling take notice. Sigler has laid out thousands of years of history (both before and after the present day) that he feeds his audience a little bit at a time. The individual novels or series stand on their own, but when read together you get a rich and textured science fiction tapestry that plays out over 2000 years.

Let’s start with the Galactic Football League stories, since that’s what the podcast is going to cover. The stories in the GFL era take place about 700 years in the future, in a universe where humanity has spread out to the stars, encountered several sentient species of alien, and bifurcated into many different worlds and governments. Football – American-style football, also known as “Gridiron” – has been adopted as a sort of de facto peacekeeping event in a galaxy in turmoil. Football, you see, is no longer played only by humans, but by the massive and powerful Ki, the swift and agile Sklorno, and the brutal Quyth, among others. By forcing these different races to work together on the field, conflicts between them have been mitigated, even as most of them are under the rule of an alien empire of small, batlike creatures that rule through sheer force of numbers. The story focuses on Quentin Barnes, a young quarterback raised in the xenophobic Purist Nation, who has to learn how to cooperate with these bizarre alien species if he wants to achieve his goal of winning a Galaxy Bowl.

So right off the bat, the GFL series has aliens and sports, which are both a lot of fun. But that’s not all. In the time of the GFL, Gridiron Football has largely come under the control of massive organized crime syndicates, with teams owned by actual criminals, illegal substances smuggled on the team transport ships, and players doubling as strongarm enforcers for their leaders. That’s right: it’s also a gangster series. (In fact, that’s the title of the sixth book: The Gangster.) And as the story goes on, although football never leaves, it becomes increasingly clear that the story is about more than just football, that Quentin is more than just a quarterback, and that the stakes they’re really playing for are much, much higher than a championship ring. Sigler has developed an intricate and fully fleshed-out universe that is completely engrossing on multiple levels.

One of the most impressive things about it, for me, is the degree of work he has put into crafting his various alien species. There are none of the “rubber forehead” aliens that we see in Star Trek or most TV and movie sci-fi franchises, a fact that’s made easier because these are novels and Sigler doesn’t have to worry about budgetary concerns. Every alien species in Sigler’s universe is imagined from the ground-up with their biology, life cycle, and culture carefully crafted, many of them in ways very unlike what we’re used to. The species that is most like humans, the Quyth, are really only like us in that they are bipedal and experience a similar emotional range. Unlike humans, the Quyth have a biological caste system that divides the species, which is covered in either fur or chitin depending on which caste they belong to. They also have a pair of dexterous pedipalp arms protruding under their head and their one massive eye, which changes color to indicate their mood. Quyth leaders gain their dominance by castrating their siblings while still in the womb. Quyth females are never seen by outsiders at all. This is the CLOSEST alien species to humanity in this universe, and it’s a species that in real life would be virtually unthinkable, except perhaps in southern California.

But I digress – the GFL is probably Sigler’s most popular work amongst his fans. It’s certainly the era that is discussed the most and for which we are most eager to see new installments. But it’s not the ONLY era. 200 years before the GFL comes The Crypt, a military drama about a crew assigned to a ship with the reputation of being a deathtrap for anybody who is put on the duty roster – usually as a sentence for some crime. Then there are the modern stories, such as Ancestor, Earthcore, and the Infected trilogy. While the GFL stories are suitable for young readers, these other books are (even) more violent and brutal, and definitely not intended for kids. They are, however, part of the same universe, something that becomes clear in the second Infected book when the characters are given a glimpse of an alien race that is terrifying to them, but that readers of Sigler’s other work will quickly recognize as a familiar species in the GFL era. And then he does it again with the Generations trilogy, a series set a millennia after the GFL about a group of teenagers who wake up on a distant spacecraft with no memories of their past. I don’t want to get too spoilery, but I will reveal that eventually the series, again, starts to share familiar species with the reader.

Rated TV-KSD: Not approved for people with Kitchen Scissors or the city of Detroit.

The point I’m getting at is that Sigler has a universe that is complete, complex, intricate, and really entertaining, and is so in various time periods, which is a trick that very few writers have managed to pull off. So I respect and admire Sigler for that as much as I am a fan of the writing itself.

But that’s not all. There are lots of writers whose work I admire and respect. What sets Sigler apart, why I’m writing about him today, is the way he has masterfully crafted a community around himself. From the early days when he branded himself the Future Dark Overlord of the world to the way he has cultivated relationships with the many “Sigler Junkies” that populate the internet, I am in awe of the way he’s built out his fan base. Sure, there are highly devoted fans of Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Twilight, and plenty of other book series, but most of those have been built over many years or were done with the help of a major publishing empire or movie studio to enhance the brand. Sigler has done it without those things. Oh, he’s had some mainstream success: he’s published books through Crown, hit the New York Times list, and he’s even contributed licensed novels and short stories to the Alien and Predator franchises…but for the most part, his community and his fervent, devoted fanbase was cultivated by himself and his small support staff.

You know you’ve arrived when there’s a Geiger monster holding a bloody helmet on your resume.

When I look at what he’s done and how effectively he’s done it, I know that Scott Sigler is who I want to be when I grow up. He’s the reason I did audiobook versions of Other People’s Heroes and A Long November back in the day when podcasting was still young and easy to get into if you didn’t have any resources. (Most people don’t know this, but the name “Blake” is actually from an obscure Peloponisian dialect and translates roughly to “lacks both resources and the wisdom to use them correctly.”) While the new media landscape has changed dramatically since the days when he was starting, and I don’t know if his techniques could work today, that doesn’t matter. It already worked for him, and he’s allowed to enjoy the fruits of his incredible amount of hard work and talent.

Plus, in every interaction I’ve had with the guy online, he’s seemed to be a really cool and stand-up dude.

So I’m saying all this to give back to him just a little bit for the hours of audio entertainment he’s provided me over the years. If anything I’ve said sounds interesting to you – if you’re into sci-fi or sports, if you’re looking for your next audiobook, if you’ve got a middle-grade kid in your life that you’re trying to get into reading, check out the GFL saga. The first three episodes dropped this week, and there literally years worth of content coming down the line. Hopefully enough that the podcast won’t wrap up before the FDO finishes writing the series.

Don’t worry. I’ve got faith that he’s not going to George R.R. Martin us. If there’s one thing that I believe is true about Scott Sigler, it’s that he doesn’t know how to stop working.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Hopefully, before you get too far into the GFL series, you’ll understand why Blake is constantly looking at some fool doing something foolish and muttering, “This kid needs a Ma Tweedy in his life.”

Blake M. Petit

Author, Teacher, Geek Pundit

Year: 2023