Year: 2024

Geek Punditry #87: Make Me Laugh, Make Me Laugh, Make Me Laugh

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It has been said that the whole world loves a clown, or at least, it used to be said until that odd summer a few years back where it seemed like terrifying clown encounters were turning up on the news every other day. (Kids, ask your parents.) But I think the fundamental truth behind this old chestnut is still valid: everybody likes to laugh. Whether you’re looking for a pleasant escape from the troubles of the world or you just need that endorphin rush of a good chuckle, you would be hard-pressed to find a single human on the planet who does not enjoy finding something funny. It’s the reason that classic sitcoms are in such heavy rotation – the television landscape was built on the backs of reruns of I Love Lucy, Gilligan’s Island, and The Beverly Hillbillies. It’s the reason that superfans of shows like The Office, Friends, and Bob’s Burgers can watch those shows in constant rotation without ever getting tired of them. It’s the reason why America profoundly rejected the show Whitney. Because ultimately, we all want to see things that are FUNNY.

All of the advances of western civilization can be traced back to these seven people.

And yes, I very much enjoy those classic shows I mentioned before, but as I’ve written in the past, I’m always on the search for something new. Anybody who reads this column on a regular basis knows of my deep, profound love for Abbott Elementary and Star Trek: Lower Decks, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room in my heart for a brand-new set of wacky characters to give me a tickle. The new television season is starting soon (kids, ask your parents) and there are a few shows that I’ve picked up on my radar that I’m interested in. Now I haven’t watched any of these shows yet. I don’t know any more about them than what I can read in a network-provided press release or watch in glimpses of the trailers that are out there in the wild, but today I want to talk about three upcoming shows that have caught my interest enough at least to watch the first few episodes once they start airing in a month or two.

The first two shows are coming from the NBC network, and I discovered them because the house of the Peacock showed approximately 872,000 commercials for each of them during the course of their Olympic coverage. But while Katie Ledecky was waiting at the finish line for the rest of the competitors in her swim meet to catch up, there was almost enough time to air an entire episode of the upcoming show St. Denis Medical. The show is done in the popular “mockumentary” style of shows like The Office and Abbott Elementary, only this time instead of a dysfunctional paper company or a dysfunctional public school, it’s set in a dysfunctional hospital, the optimal setting for wackiness. The show stars Allison Tolman as Alex, the recently-promoted supervising nurse in the hospital’s emergency department, at the head of an ensemble that includes David Alan Grier, Josh Lawson, Mekki Leeper, Kahyun Kim, and Kaliko Kauahi. 

It’s just like The Office! You got yer Jim, you got yer Pam…I think David Alan Grier is Todd Packer…

There are two reasons that this show got my attention. First of all, it was created by Justin Spitzer, a former Office writer who went on to create the show Superstore, which I very much enjoyed. (Kaliko Kauahi, who played Sandra on that show, is another reason I’m interested.) The other thing that gets my attention is Wendi McLendon-Covey, who’ll be playing the executive director of the hospital. You may know her from Reno 911 or The Goldbergs, where she played the over-the-top matriarch of the family. Superstore and The Goldbergs are two of the more recent comedies that I’ve really gotten into, so I’m already invested in some of the pieces in this particular jigsaw puzzle. And while the commercials definitely seem to imply that McLendon-Covey’s character is going to be the “Michael Scott” of this particular series, the energy she’s giving is more button-down and straightlaced than the chaotic mama vibe she used on Goldbergs for the past ten years, so I’m hoping to see her stretch out and do some new things. The show is scheduled to premiere on November 12, so I’ll…well, I’ll probably watch it on Peacock the next day, because who actually watches live television anymore?

The next NBC show that’s grabbed my attention is Happy’s Place, starring Reba McEntire. McEntire is, of course, a legend of country music, but I’m not going to hold that against her. Undoubtedly, history will remember her more for her role in the Tremors movies and, even more importantly, the 2001 sitcom Reba. In that show, she played a mom who was newly single after discovering that her dentist husband had an affair with his hygienist, and the weird new family that was forged as a result. She proved herself to be a good comic actress in that show, playing the sort of no-nonsense, smart-mouthed mom that we all love so darn much. In the new show, Reba’s father is recently deceased, leaving her with two legacies: ownership of his bar, and a half-sister she never knew about (played by Belissa Escobedo). Reba seems to have a track record for comedies based on infidelity.

Regardless, I really do like her as an actress, and I’m glad to see that Happy’s Place will be reuniting her with Melissa Peterman, who in the previous sitcom played the hygienist who broke up her marriage and somehow turned into a weird surrogate sister. The two of them had fantastic comic chemistry in that show, and they’ve worked together several times since then. You get the sense that the two actresses are genuinely friends in real life, and that often translates to good performances, especially in comedy.

Meanwhile, the Star Trek: Voyager nerds are just hoping that Naomi Wildman makes a guest appearance.

Some people will scoff at the fact that, like Reba, Happy Place’s is a traditional multi-camera sitcom. It’s become popular in the last decade or so to turn your nose up at shows that have a studio audience and a laugh track. My rebuttal to this is: Cheers, Fraiser, The Honeymooners, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Night Court, Good Times, Sanford and Son, Home Improvement, Everybody Loves Raymond, Mama’s Family, Newhart. Many, if not the majority, of great television comedies were in this format. A format is a format, and whether a show is good or bad has nothing to do with the format and everything to do with the writing and performances. It’s never going to be an obstacle to me giving a show a chance, and I’ll be tuning in on or around its premiere date of Oct. 18.

The last show I’m looking forward to is coming from the FX network and streaming on Hulu, English Teacher. I’m a little wary of this one, but I’ve heard enough to at least want to give it a shot. The show is about a high school teacher, played by Brian Jordan Alvarez, who – and here I am quoting – “finds himself at the intersection of professional, political, and personal aspects of working at a high school.” This is perhaps the most bland description of a television show in the entirety of the universe, and in and of itself would not be of particular interest to anybody. What’s more, I’m always a bit apprehensive about shows set in a school, since historically speaking, most shows set in schools have had little to no idea what a school is actually like.

I have to be honest, this is exactly what happens in my classroom every morning.

Then I watched the trailer, and I have to admit, the writers seem to have at least an idea of what they’re talking about. In the trailer, Alvarez’s character approaches the principal (played by Enrico Colantoni) about an essay that a student turned in that was clearly written by ChatGPT. Colantoni’s character replies that he doesn’t see the problem, as AI is “the future,” which makes it quite clear that he is the villain of the piece.

Okay, maybe “villain” is too strong a word, but he’s obviously playing the usual sitcom trope of the inept authority figure. It’s not flattering, but anyone who has taught for any period of time has had a period where they’ve had to deal with an administrator who has no business being an administrator. (I am lucky in that I do not currently have that problem, thank goodness, but I’ve definitely felt it in the past.) The trailer was starting to win me over, and it got a little better as we watched him deal with a student who claims that it’s cultural appropriation for her friend to try to learn to speak Mandarin because “you’re not Japanese.” The joke, of course, is that the student is espousing a self-righteous opinion that is itself based on totally inaccurate information, and boy-HOWDY, have I dealt with THAT in my time as a teacher.

Now I’ve only seen about 90 seconds of the show, so it’s entirely possible that the rest of it will be a train wreck, but the point of a trailer is to get you interested enough to give the show a chance, and this one has succeeded. I don’t know if I’ll ever watch a second episode after the show premieres on Sept. 2, but I know enough to watch at least the FIRST one and hope for the best.

Ultimately, I don’t know if any of these shows will be any good. And if they ARE, I don’t know if I’m the only one who thinks they are. They may stink. Or worse, they may be tossed on that far-too-large pile of shows that had potential but never made it past a first season. But maybe, just MAYBE, at least ONE of them will be a new show to make me chuckle and keep those endorphins flowing.

And that’s all I’m really looking for anyway.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. If one of these shows DOES turn out to be great but winds up getting canceled anyway, he apologizes. The universe seems to like letting him get attached to something and then yanking it away. It’s like that Coke with Coffee they had for a year or two and then discontinued, leaving his mornings bleak and full of despair. Not that he’s bitter or anything.

Geek Punditry #86: This is How We Do It Presents…Absolute Power

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Hello, everybody, and welcome to This is How We Do It, the latest Geek Punditry feature-within-a-feature. In This is How We Do It, which I intend to be a recurring segment here, I’m just going to showcase a piece of storytelling that I think is being done exceptionally well and talk about why I think it’s so great. It is the antidote to Internet negativity. And the subject of the inaugural This is How We Do It is going to be the currently-ongoing DC Comics crossover event, Absolute Power. Fair warning, it’s not going to be possible to talk about why this is so great without spoiling some things, so this will be a spoilerful discussion. If you’re not up to date on reading this fantastic series, you may want to hold off on reading this at least until you get to issue #2 of the main title, because that’s the most recent issue as I write this.

Get ready, because this one ROCKS.

Comic crossovers are by no means a new thing, and I’ve talked before at length about them but I feel like I need to give a brief overview of what I mean here. In these “event” storylines, there is usually a main narrative that brings together the various characters of a publisher’s shared universe (in this case, DC Comics), while assorted spin-offs and special issues of the series that star the individual characters tell other angles of the story. The earliest such event I can find that followed this format is DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths from 1985-86. (It’s true that Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars came out first, guys, but there were no spin-offs of that book, which to me makes it more of an embryonic version of the crossover as it exists today.) DC has done dozens of them, as has Marvel. In fact, pretty much every publisher that has a shared universe (or even Multiverse) has dipped their toes in the format at one time or another – Image Comics, Valiant Comics, IDW, Dynamite, even Archie Comics has had crossover events. 

So what makes Absolute Power so good? In a word: construction. Some events seem to come out of nowhere and have little ongoing impact – last year’s DC summer event Knight Terrors, for instance, has made relatively few ripples after it was over. Others will sometimes take existing heroes and force them to behave wildly out of character for the purposes of the narrative (lookin’ at YOU, Marvel’s Civil War). And sometimes, they’re just so overblown and complicated that it’s impossible to keep track of what’s actually going on. Absolute Power suffers from exactly zero percent of these problems.

Mark Millar knows what he did.

A good crossover really needs to start with a good antagonist, and this story has one of the best: Amanda Waller, who has decided that superheroes are the biggest threat to the planet. Waller is an established character, best known for her role as being in charge of the various incarnations of the Suicide Squad (a group of supervillains that she forces to do jobs for the government in exchange for reduced sentences – with the caveat that if they step out of line she’ll set off an explosive device she had implanted in their NECK). Waller has always tread the line of what makes an anti-hero, usually using underhanded methods to accomplish goals that are more or less positive…ish. However, that placed her perfectly for her role of the villain in this story, being a natural extrapolation of who she has always been as a character. In fact, Waller is the BEST kind of villain – the sort that, in her own mind, is 100 percent justified in her actions. Waller COMPLETELY believes that what she’s doing is the right, moral, ethical thing to do, and that makes her both more interesting and more dangerous than any bad guy who’s just in it for the Evulz. 

What do you MEAN, she doesn’t look like a good guy?

The next thing that makes a crossover work, in my opinion, is setup. Before the original Crisis on Infinite Earths happened, there were months of stories from DC where a mysterious, shadowy figure was shown to be monitoring the heroes of Earth. (As it turned out, he wasn’t the bad guy, but you could certainly be forgiven for thinking he was.) Absolute Power has a more obvious setup, but a very effective one. Waller has taken the villains from two recent storylines – Queen Braniac from the House of Brainiac Superman story, and Failsafe, a robotic duplicate of Batman with all of his tactical genius and none of his morals and ethics. She has combined their respective tech with the work of the old Justice League villain Professor Ivo to create a set of androids who can steal superpowers, and sent them out to attack, depower, and capture both superheroes and villains alike. In the first issue of Absolute Power, dozens of heroes have their powers stolen and most of them are taken prisoner by Waller. By the time the second issue rolls around, those heroes who remain at large have begun assembling at Superman’s Fortress of Solitude to plan a counter-offensive.

Imagine how nasty a character Amanda has to be that THESE two are her MINIONS.

Another important element is that the characters be true to themselves, and here I’ve got to give it up to writer Mark Waid. Waid was a mainstay of DC Comics in the 90s and early 00s, with a legendary run on The Flash and turning out the best of DC’s Elseworlds line with Kingdom Come. After a long exile, he’s returned to DC and is crushing it with books like Batman/Superman: World’s Finest. In short, there are few people in comics who know the characters as well as Mark Waid, and he’s proving it again here. Aside from using Waller to her logical extreme, he’s showing perfectly who the various DC heroes are, such as a depowered but still dauntless Superman. When Batman and Mr. Terrific get into a squabble over who should be the leader of this little resistance group, it’s Nightwing who steps up, gives a rousing speech that would make Jean-Luc Picard stand and applaud, and takes command. The best part, though, is Batman’s reaction: watching Dick Grayson, the original Robin, take his place as the natural rallying point for a group of shattered, broken, and frightened heroes, Batman simply gives us a sly smile and says, “That’s my boy.”

For Batman, this is an almost shamefully embarrassing display of pride.

And I haven’t even talked about the artwork by Dan Mora, who is probably my favorite artist working at DC right now. It’s phenomenal, with real emotion and characterization displayed on the characters’ faces and mannerisms. A good artist can always make or break a book, and Mora – as he’s done with Waid on Batman/Superman – is doing an incredible job.

The next aspect that makes a crossover work is what happens in the spin-off books. In the original Crisis, the main story was supplemented by chapters in the various ongoing comics showing what was happening to those heroes during the Crisis itself, and that was the template for crossovers for a long time. Somewhere along the line, though, it became less likely for an individual series to be interrupted by a crossover and we’d get several – sometimes DOZENS – of spin-off one-shots and miniseries doing the job instead. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this shift in how crossovers were told corresponded with the point where the comic book WRITERS became the stars of the show, their prominence somewhat overtaking the artists. If the guy writing, for example, Uncanny X-Men at the time didn’t want his X-Men storyline interrupted because of World War Hulk, then the main title would remain unmolested and a World War Hulk: X-Men miniseries would take its place. The far extreme of this policy was what DC did last year with Knight Terrors, where EVERY ongoing DC comic was replaced for two months with a two-part miniseries showing that character’s interaction with the event, and many of them were never touched upon again.

For the most part, I’m in favor of a writer getting to tell the story the way they want, but speaking as a READER, I prefer when the crossovers touch the regular title. To me, that gives them greater weight, makes them feel more “important” than putting them into a spin-off miniseries. Absolute Power has returned to form on this. The ongoing titles are picking up the story threads started in the main series and running with them. After Nightwing gives the heroes various assignments in Absolute Power #2, we see them start to carry out their missions in the pages of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and other titles. In other books, like Green Lantern, we get side stories of some of the heroes who have been captured or are still on the run. And then there’s Green Arrow, which deals with the most shocking development of the story to date: longtime Justice League member Green Arrow has inexplicably turned tables and joined Amanda Waller, fighting his friends! Obviously, anything this incredible has to be covered in the main Absolute Power title, so what’s going on in his book right now? We see how his supporting cast – his son Connor, various former sidekicks and so on – are reacting to the fact that their patriarch seems to have broken bad. 

Crossover chapters that are actually RELEVANT? Is that ALLOWED?

There are, I should concede, two spin-off miniseries for Absolute Power, but both are a bit more justified. Absolute Power: Origins is a deep dive into Amanda Waller’s backstory, showing how she went from a grieving mother who lost family members to violence (and how many heroes have had that same motivation?) to the magnificent bastard she is today. Absolute Power: Task Force VII, on the other hand, tells stories focusing on Waller’s seven power-stealing androids and their interactions with the heroes. Neither may be absolutely NECESSARY to the story, but I feel as though they both add something that otherwise we wouldn’t have, which is what a good spin-off should do. 

The last thing that I think makes for a solid crossover is the impact of the story after it ends. I hate to keep picking on Knight Terrors, because I don’t really think it was a bad story, but the overall impact on the DC Universe since then has been negligible. The only significant thread I can think of was increasing Waller’s paranoia, but she already had that in spades and, what’s more, the Beast World event that FOLLOWED Knight Terrors did that same job, but better. Obviously, it’s impossible to tell right now just how Absolute Power will shape the DCU going forward, but there are hints in the solicitations for upcoming comics. After the series ends we’re going to be treated to a new initiative called “DC All-In,” which will start with a one-shot before branching out. This isn’t going to be a continuity reboot as DC has done in the past, but it will launch several new titles and some of the existing books will get new creative teams and new directions. The one that I’m most excited for will be the newly-announced Justice League Unlimited, done by the Absolute Power team of Waid and Mora. Although they’re playing details close to the vest until the end of Absolute Power, preliminary artwork and buzz indicate that this comic will be taking its cue from the cartoon series of the same name, in which the League expanded to include virtually every hero in the DC Universe, with different ones called up as needed. This is honestly the way I’ve thought they should have run the League for the past twenty years, since the cartoon was launched, and the fact that it’s finally happening makes me giddy. The fact that it’s Waid and Mora taking the reigns makes me ECSTATIC. 

Holy crap, guys, Santa got my letter.

So even now, only halfway through the event, I feel as though Absolute Power has all the earmarks of one of the DC Universe’s classic storylines. All the pieces are in place and the right creative team is there. I haven’t enjoyed a book of this nature this much in years, and the fact that I’m equally excited for the stuff promised to come next makes it even better. So for the next creative team – from any publisher – who’s looking to do a multi-character, multi-title crossover epic event series, I can offer no better advice than to look to Mark Waid, Dan Mora, and Absolute Power.

Because THIS is how we do it.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. Now if only the next event series were to bring back Captain Carrot to his deserved place of prominence in the DC Universe. 

Geek Punditry #85: Playing Favorites With School (Part Two)

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It’s time for round two of Playing Favorites With School! For any newcomers out there who, perhaps, didn’t see last week’s life-changing exploration into pop culture effluvia, “Playing Favorites” is my recurring feature in which I ask my friends on social media to suggest categories related to a specific topic, then I expound upon what I think are some of the best examples of those categories. In part one of the “School” series, I talked about some of my favorite School Sitcoms, High School Superheroes, High School Horror movies, and shows where the actors were maaaaaybe a little too old to be playing teenagers. This week we’re returning to the pile of suggestions for a few more rounds!

Hero Schools

Sandy Brophy asked about my favorite “hero schools.” I’m interpreting this as a school that is intended to teach students to be heroes, so I’ll skip the obvious answer of Hogwarts, as that’s more of a general education facility in the setting and not specifically intended to turn out champions. There’s a little overlap with one of last week’s suggestions – in “High school superheroes,” I talked about the amazing Aaron Williams comic book/webcomic PS238, which is about an elementary school for superheroes. Not long after that, though, it became known among comic book readers as “the idea so nice Disney stole it twice,” as the House of Mouse released the films Sky High (2005) and Zoom (2006), both of which feature a very similar idea. Of the two, I find that Sky High is a better film. The characters are more memorable and the world is fleshed out in a much better way. The story focuses on Will Stronghold (Michael Angarano), the son of two of the world’s greatest superheroes, who is sent off to the local superhero academy despite the fact that he did not inherit any of their powers. This, by the way, is where the comparison to PS238 REALLY comes into play, since this is almost exactly the backstory of one the main characters in that comic’s ensemble. The story goes in a different direction, though, and it’s a fun, colorful movie that really uses Kurt Russell (as Will’s super-awesome superhero dad) to very good effect.

It’s the same picture.

Marvel Comics also has a pretty good series that only came out in recent years, Strange Academy, about a school specifically for magic-users in the Marvel Universe. Set in New Orleans (which always gives it extra points from me IF it’s done well), the series focuses on a group of magic-powered kids who have been gathered by the likes of Dr. Strange, the Scarlet Witch, Magik of the X-Men (herself a graduate of one of the all-time great superhero school comics, The New Mutants) and other powerful mystical faculty members to teach them to use their abilities in ways that won’t rip open a portal to the Dark Dimension or something. The comic, by Skottie Young and Humberto Ramos, is a wild look into the magic side of Marvel, and can go from a lighthearted school comedy to a blood-chilling cosmic horror story in the course of a single issue. The main series ended a while back, but the Academy has stuck around in assorted miniseries and one-shots since then.

Class picture day is a challenge.

The last one I’ll point to is one of my favorite science fiction novels of all time, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Following an alien invasion that was narrowly defeated, planet Earth has come together in a precarious alliance to prepare for another invasion that they are certain is imminent. As part of their preparations, they are finding the most brilliant children on the planet and taking them to an orbital Battle School where they are trained to fight the wars that will determine the fate of the human race. The novel focuses on Ender Wiggin, a five-year-old prodigy, who is brought to Battle School without knowing that many of the people observing him believe that he is humanity’s last hope. The book is an absolute masterpiece of characterization and world-building, and I’ll never forgive the film adaptation for falling so flat. 

I had a whole different joke planed for this caption until I saw the STUPID sticker on the cover.

Pep Rally Scenes

Duane Hower tossed out the clever suggestion of “movies with a pep rally scene.” I’m going to be honest, I actually had to turn to Google for this one, because although I feel like I’ve seen a hundred movies with a pep rally, for some reason those specific scenes didn’t click into my brain until I went back and started looking. A pep rally, of course, is that singularly high school phenomenon where the school gathers and cheers – usually, but not always – for the school’s athletes in order to get them psyched up for the Big Game. It’s a standard of American high schools, although I admit, I’ve wondered how well such things translate in other countries. DO any other countries have pep rallies? If you went to high school outside of the US, please, let me know if you ever went to a pep rally. 

Anyway, the best motion picture to ever encapsulate this singularly academic experience is the classic Alfred Hitchcock historo-religious drama…

Project ALF.

Bah-dump, TISSSSSSS…

The first one that rings a bell to me is the Emma Stone comedy Easy A. I’ve always liked this movie, as it’s a very clever comedic modernization of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, featuring a high school girl who is scandalized when she lies about sleeping with a college guy, and before long the (false) story is turning up more places than Snoop Dogg at the Olympics. Olive (Stone’s character) leans into the lie at first, but as things spiral out of control she needs to find a way out. As part of that plan, she interrupts a pep rally with a musical performance of the song “Knock on Wood.” It makes sense in context. But the scene is goofy and wild, and utterly in character for Olive while using the tropes of a high school movie to advance the overall theme of the film. In other words, I like this silly scene because, in actuality, I think it’s pretty smart. 

It’s always fun to see fans of this movie get disappointed when they find out it’s actually based on literature.

Aaaand…I’m actually having trouble thinking of any other movies with a pep rally that I actually like. I could have sworn that there was one in Teen Wolf, but maybe I’m just thinking of the basketball games. Sorry, Duane, looks like yours is gonna be a one-and-done.

Movies based on high school reading lists

Rachel Ricks wants to know what are some of the best movies based on books that may be read in a high school English class. If Rachel and I hadn’t gone to college together, I would suspect that this question was posed by a student hoping to get suggestions for a movie to watch in order to get out of their homework and I would have to say, “Nice try.”

But the fact of the matter is, even the BEST movies adapted from books never match up 100 percent with the text. Writing and filmmaking are two very different disciplines, with different demands and different requirements, and what works in one medium does not always work in another. I like to think of movies as interpretations of a book – presenting the story in a way that, hopefully, maintains the spirit of the original while still standing on its own.

All of that is to say that I think To Kill a Mockingbird is perhaps the greatest movie ever made based on a book that I would assign to a student. The book is a masterpiece – a fable about a good man fighting a good fight against overwhelming odds. In this case, that good man is Atticus Finch, and that good fight is defending an innocent black man from charges of raping a white woman in a time and place where such an accusation not only puts the life of the accused on the line, but pushes the entire town onto the edge of a cliff that it may plunge off depending on how things go. It’s kind of sad how relevant that still is. The book is fantastic and the movie is just as good. Gregory Peck’s depiction of Atticus was once voted the best film hero of all time by the American Film Institute, and even though that was before any of the Deadpool movies were made, I think it’s a ranking that holds up.

Left: A masterpiece. Right: Also a masterpiece.

It’s a lot to get through (both the movie and the book), but I think Gone With the Wind deserves a place on this list as well. Margaret Mitchell’s novel of the Civil War is so iconic that it informs pretty much EVERYBODY’s mental image of Georgia in the 1800s, even if they’ve never read the book or seen the movie. The film itself is also a triumph of the art form, adapting a gargantuan novel into a mammoth film while still being engaging and compelling throughout. Plus, it’s indirectly responsible for one of the funniest sketches in the history of The Carol Burnett Show. 

And as an English teacher, I do have an unabashed love of the works of William Shakespeare. I’ve taught several of his plays Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Othello, but I think the best movie I’ve ever seen based on one of his works is the Kenneth Branagh version of Hamlet. The film clocks in at a hefty four hours long as Branagh – unlike most people who adapt Shakespeare – films the ENTIRE text of the play, making no edits or omissions. You’re left with a film that feels a little bloated in places but, at the same time, is an excellent tool for showcasing the bard’s words and has some dandy performances.

It’s not 100 percent accurate, of course. In the original Shakespeare Hamlet only frosted the tips of his hair.

Honorable mention goes to two classic movies that are based on classic works of literature: Frankenstein and The Wizard of Oz. The reason these two only get an honorable mention is because, as anyone who has both read the books and seen the movies can tell you, the movies are fantastic, thrilling, celebrations of the cinematic artform…but dang, they do a piss-poor job of actually adapting the story of the book. I love them both, but not as adaptations.

This brings us to the end of yet another installment of Playing Favorites, folks. Once again, I hope you’ve enjoyed this somewhat random peek into what rattles around inside my brain. What other column are you going to find that talks about both Strange Academy and To Kill a Mockingbird on the same page? If you want to participate in upcoming Playing Favorites columns, be sure to follow me on Facebook, Threads, or “Twittex” for the next time I toss out a topic and wait for your responses. Or even subscribe to my weekly newsletter, where I chat about what I’m working on and throw out my legendary “What’s Cool This Week?” recommendations. And in the meantime, have a great school year – or, alternately, appreciate the fact that you don’t have to go back.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. Was there a pep rally in Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Damn it, this is hard. 

Geek Punditry #84: Playing Favorites With School (Part One)

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It’s August, gang, and across this great fruited plain of ours, Americans are gearing up for that most turbulent of seasons: back to school. Many of us are already back in session, and the rest are getting ready to eke out those last bits of summertime fun before the doors fly open. Stores are stocked with pencils, students are picking out their first day outfits, parents are trying to get them to answer questions for their “Back to School” social media posts, and teachers are doing their best to keep the economy of Columbia solvent by buying all of the coffee. And what better way to commemorate this change of seasons than with another installment of everyone’s favorite Geek Punditry feature-within-a-feature, PLAYING FAVORITES? 

If you’re new, here’s how it works: a couple of weeks before a playing favorites column, I go out on social media and give my peeps a topic, such as SCHOOL, and ask them to suggest different categories for me to talk about. Then I select my favorite categories from your suggestions and tell you all what I think are some of the best of the best in each one of them. It’s a good time for everybody. So let’s see what kind of back to school shenanigans were on your minds this week, shall we?

Dawson Casting

Steven J. Rogers asked for some of my favorite examples of actors who are a little “long in the tooth” for their role as a high school student. The experts in this phenomenon (by which I mean the editors of TV Tropes) call it Dawson Casting, the practice of using actors in their 20s or even 30s to play high school students, named for the TV executive who invented the system, Herringbone Q. Casting.

No, seriously, it’s named for the show Dawson’s Creek, which is one of the most well-known examples of the trope, but it’s by no means the FIRST and certainly not the WORST. The trope goes back hundreds of years. Even Shakespeare is likely to have indulged in it – Hamlet, for instance, is supposed to be a college student, but there are lines in the fifth act that indicate that he used to get piggyback rides from his father’s court jester, who has explicitly been dead and buried for 23 years. Unless ol’ Yorick was playing games with Hamlet as a zygote, the math don’t math. 

There are two ways to look at this question: am I trying to figure out who did it BEST – as in, which older actors were most convincing as teens? Or am I trying to figure out who did it in the most ENTERTAINING fashion, as in making me burst out laughing when a guy who could be doing commercials for Metamucil saunters into homeroom? I’ll answer both.

Most of these kiddos are older than they look. Especially the one in the glasses.

As far as who was the most convincing, I think the crown has to go to the TV version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When that show launched in 1997, Sarah Michelle Gellar was 20 playing a 15-year-old – and to be fair, that’s a much smaller gap than many Dawsons have had to contend with over the years. But she was the YOUNGEST member of the main cast. Alyson Hannigan was 23 and Nicolas Brendan 26, and all of them were pretty convincing as teenagers. The only one who you couldn’t really buy was Charisma Carpenter (27 at the time). And while you aren’t really shocked to hear that these actors were in their 20s, it’s not nearly as blatant as some of the more hilarious examples of this trope. 

In general, the shows that get away with this the best are the ones that don’t try to get away with as much. The high school students in Cobra Kai were mostly in their early 20s when the show began, and not noticeably too old. On Smallville, I don’t think that Tom Welling was really successful at convincing anybody that he was 14 years old in season one (the actor was 24 at the time), but the rest of the cast was mostly in their early 20s and far more convincing. I suppose the trick with pulling a Dawson is to not press your luck.

You know who DID press their luck? Stranger Things. It wasn’t a problem in the first couple of seasons – with the five main kids played by actual…y’know…KIDS. And even the teenagers were pretty convincing: Joe Keery (Steve) was 24 playing 17, Natalia Dyer (Nancy) was 21 playing 16, Charlie Heaton (Jonathan) was 22 playing 16, and all of them were believable as high school students. But the long gaps between seasons were starting to strain credulity even in season four, and Keery is going to be 32 playing 19 or 20 in the show’s upcoming final season. He may be able to pull it off, but the likes of Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin) and Finn Wolfhard (Mike) playing 15 at the age of 22 are going to be a harder sell, especially since we’re all so familiar with what they looked like AS KIDS. 

No really, it’s just two and a half years later.

But I don’t think any show has ever been as hilariously Dawsoned as the 70s sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. When the show began in 1975, you had high school students played by John Travolta (then 21), Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs (23), Robert Hegyes (24) and Ron Palillo (26) and frankly, I would have guessed older for each of them. While they were around the same ages as many of the other “teenage” actors we’ve already discussed, they were nowhere near as successful at hiding their age. Alyson Hannigan could pass as a high school student, whereas Ron Palillo looked more like somebody’s podiatrist. Gabe Kaplan was once quoted as saying that the reason the show’s ratings collapsed after three seasons is that the cast was getting too old to convincingly play teenagers, which made me ask the obvious question: at what point DID he think they were convincing? 

“Signed, Epstein’s chiropractor.”

School Sitcoms

Rachel Ricks asked for some of my favorite school sitcoms. This is an interesting subject for me. Like so many of us, I grew up watching shows like Saved By The Bell, and I loved it. And while I never really thought that show was a documentary on the lives of high school students (I must have tried that “Time Out” thing a hundred times before I got hit by that marching snare drummer and decided to call it quits), I at least thought that it would get the SPIRIT of being high school right.

Damn, was that off. It’s almost hard to watch that show now, especially as a teacher myself, not only because of how inaccurate that show is in regards to how a school actually works, but because it casts virtually every adult as a total blithering idiot. Seriously, go back and watch that show sometime – it’s a miracle Mr. Belding can even tie his shoes. 

New drinking game: take a shot every time someone does something that should have gotten a teacher fired.

So when it comes to “school sitcoms,’ showing actual respect for teachers is a high priority for me, and that’s why I can’t stop talking about Abbott Elementary. It’s the rare school show that makes the teachers the stars rather than the students AND treats their characters with respect AND does a pretty accurate job of showing what school life is like. Granted, the teachers on that show have a bit more free time away from their students than a real elementary school teacher ever would, but I’m willing to allow that for the sake of comedy. What’s more, the characters all have real depth and charm, and most of them are very good at what they do. Plus the show deals with real issues such as government funding, parental involvement, and other issues that teachers fight against every single day, but does it in a way that’s entertaining. I can’t say enough good things about this show.

This is honestly my favorite comedy on TV right now.

I mentioned how the adults in Saved By the Bell are all buffoons. This is true, but it’s hardly exclusive to Bayside High. If you look back on the annals of TV shows in a school setting, I would guess 90 percent of the teachers (and parents, for that matter) are portrayed as morons. And for that reason, I have to have a special place in my heart for Boy Meets World. The show traces Ben Savage’s character (Cory Matthews) from elementary school through college, and although there were goofy grownups on occasion, that was by no means the norm. In fact, the show gives us William Daniels as Mr. Feeny, probably the Gold Standard against which all TV teachers should be measured. He’s compassionate, wise, understanding, but firm when necessary. He’s almost as much a parent to Cory as he is a teacher. Is it really realistic that he taught the same group of kids from fifth grade until they’re going for their undergraduate degrees? Absolutely not. But it’s an acceptable break from reality in the name of keeping such a fantastic character front and center in the show.

What Bandit Heeler is to fathering, Mr. Feeny is to teachering.

And although it’s not a television show, I love Archie Comics. I mean CLASSIC Archie Comics, their teenage sitcom romcom years, not the way they were adapted on Riverdale. I’m talking about the eight decades of comic strips about Archie Andrews struggling to choose between Betty and Veronica and going to Riverdale High. As a kid, I loved reading the stories (Jughead was kind of an icon for me) and as an adult I’ve come to appreciate the fact that the faculty of Riverdale High School – Miss Grundy, Professor Flutesnoot, Coach Clayton, Mr. Weatherbee – are usually portrayed as good, caring teachers who are doing their best for their students, even if they’re doing so while trying to avoid whatever catastrophe Archie is pulling along in his wake. 

To date, not a single one of my students has prompted me to write a bestseller. Get your act together, kids.

High School Superheroes

Lew Beitz wants to know who some of my favorite high school superheroes are. It’s an interesting question – in the early days of comic books, there weren’t a lot of teenage superheroes. The kids were relegated to the sidekick role for most of the Golden Age, and it wasn’t until the 60s – specifically with the introduction of Spider-Man – that having a teenager as the main star of a superhero series started to come into vogue. Spidey eventually went off to college and became an adult, but he remains the template for superheroes that are still in their high school years. Everyone from Firestorm to Invincible to Ms. Marvel (the current Kamala Khan version) has drawn inspiration from those early Stan Lee/Steve Ditko comics, and none of them are shy about it.

I’m going to try to limit my response to characters for whom school – or at least their classmates – are a major factor in their stories. Teen Titans, for example, isn’t going to work because the vast majority of those comics don’t include school as a setting at all, instead being the stories of kid superheroes who hang out independently of their own lives. So keeping school in mind, it’s hard to think of anybody who has done it better than Peter Parker’s DAUGHTER (in one corner of the multiverse, anyway), May Parker, the amazing Spider-Girl. Created by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz in 1997, this storyline comes from a world where Peter Parker aged more or less in “real time” from the 1960s and, at this point, had a teenage daughter who inherited his powers. Originally intended as a one-off character in an issue of What If?, “Mayday” Parker proved wildly popular and spun off into her own long-running series. And just like her dad, the supporting cast was largely full of her high school contemporaries – friends, rivals, potential love interests and so forth. Few comic books since those early days of Amazing Spider-Man had made such good use of the cast of teenagers, and I think it’s one of the reasons that this series remains a fan favorite, even though these days May herself only pops up once in a while during a “Spider-Verse” thing.

What I love about this cover is that it’s bold enough to ask “Who is she?” and dumb enough to answer the same question at the top.

And although Lew specified HIGH school, I have to give a special shout out to a series about ELEMENTARY school superheroes, Aaron Williams’ PS238. This comic book featured a cast of preteen titans, many of them the children of adult superheroes, who attended a special school deep beneath a “normal” elementary school where they were all ostensibly students. The book is really funny, and does a great job of picking apart many of the tropes and cliches of superhero comics. One student, for example, has the amusingly dull superhero code name “84,” because she is the 84th person registered with the standard FISS (flight, invulnerability, speed, and strength) powerset. Although the book IS very funny, it’s also a solid superhero comic book, creating a rich world with a fascinating history and a lot of secrets to uncover. The comic lasted only 51 issues, which wasn’t nearly long enough, although Williams has continued the adventures of the characters as a webcomic. 

One of the best comic books you’ve never read.

High School Horror

Finally my wife Erin – who absolutely understands her brand – wants me to talk about my favorite high school horror movies. And naturally, there is one that leaps right to the forefront of the mind, a chilling, terrifying tale that will ring out through the annals of academia from now until the end of time.

Project ALF.

Highly educational.

Actually, this might not be as easy as it sounds. Sure, there’s no shortage of horror movies about TEENAGERS, but how many of them actually have SCHOOL as a dominant setting? Friday the 13th, of course, is set at a summer camp. Some of the other stalwarts of the slasher genre like Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream, may incorporate a school into the story (especially in the earlier installments), but the school is largely incidental. If the characters weren’t teenagers, you could have them all going to work and not much else would need to be changed.

So for horror that’s actually ABOUT a school, I’m going to give a shout out to a movie that I really think is underrated – Robert Rodriguez’s sci-fi/horror movie The Faculty. In what is essentially an updated version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Frodo Baggins and a group of high school students start to see signs that the faculty of their high school have become overcome by parasitic alien invaders, conquerors from beyond the stars who are coming to take over the Earth. Of course, it’s only this band of high school misfits that have a hope of stopping them. The Faculty came out in 1998, riding a wave of post-Scream teenage horror movies, and it somewhat got lost in the mix. But it’s a good movie, one that defies the surge of slasher knockoffs that it was swimming amongst, and has its own identity that’s pretty darn entertaining.

And this time it didn’t take Elijah Wood twelve hours of movie time to save the world.

Carrie, of course, is another classic of this particular subgenre. The movie is based on Stephen King’s first published novel, so the story of Carrie White really is what made his name in two different mediums. Sissy Spacek is Carrie – a teenage girl who has lived a sheltered life with a brutal, unforgiving fundamentalist mother. A rather late onset of physical maturation brings with it a telekinetic power of great destructive potential, and when her crueler classmates push Carrie too far, the blood flows. It’s a great movie, although I’ve always felt like Carrie was less a villain than a victim – an innocent who is beaten and berated until she actually breaks, and when someone with her kind of powers break, the consequences will be devastating. 

Finally, as someone who enjoys a good horror/comedy hybrid, I want to give a shout out to the 2020 film Freaky, directed by Christopher Landon and written by Landon and Michael Kennedy. This film is a slasher movie crossed with the body swap comedy of Freaky Friday. Millie Kessler, a bullied high school senior (Kathryn Newton), is attacked by a serial killer called the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughan), who has gotten his hands on a cursed knife. The attack winds up swapping their minds, placing the Butcher’s consciousness in Millie’s body and vice versa (which is another example of a body swap comedy). A lot of the fun of this movie comes from watching Vaughn’s performance as a teenage girl, trying to get Millie’s friends on his side while Newton goes on a killing spree. It’s a really good movie, and helped Newton blow up to a point where she’s showing up in Marvel movies, while still doing indie horror like Lisa Frankenstein.

I’ve watched this trilogy seven times and it still doesn’t make a damned bit of sense.

That’s it for this week, guys. There will be more Playing Favorites next week, and if you’ve got some more suggestions, they’re welcome. In the meantime, a reminder for those parents who have yet to get their kids back-to-school supplies:

There is no excuse for Rose Art crayons. Ever. Just don’t. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. Have you ever tried to color an entire page with one of those stupid Rose Art sticks? You may as well be using a candle.

Three Wishes: The Toys That Made Us

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A few days ago, a long national nightmare ended when Nacelle announced two new seasons of their hit documentary series, The Toys That Made Us. I became a huge fan of this series right away, and it’s been a long five years since we got any new episodes, so I’m absolutely ecstatic. To commemorate the news, I thought I would re-present to you a piece I wrote between seasons two and three for a sadly-defunct pop culture forum, a “Three Wishes” column where I suggested potential topics for future episodes. I’m happy to say that one of my three suggestions was included in season three, and the other two are going to be in the new episodes that were just announced, albeit in slightly different forms than what I suggested. It’s incredible that my ability to predict the future is incredibly accurate, provided that I only use it in ways that have absolutely no potential for monetary advancement on my part. Anyway, here’s what I wrote way back in 2018.

The best reason to subscribe to Netflix these days isn’t Orange is the New Black or Arrested Development. Heck, it’s not even Bright. The shining jewel in the streaming service’s crown is The Toys That Made Us, a documentary series that looks into the history and impact of some of the most popular toy lines of all time. With a lighthearted tone, the series dives into things that the viewer grew up with, chock full of interviews with the people who conceived the toys, creators who made the TV and comic book tie-ins, and supercollectors. Plus, you get all the classic toy commercials you grew up with.

The eight episodes, to date, have explored the worlds of Star Wars, Barbie, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Star Trek, TransFormers, LEGO, and Hello Kitty. That’s a ton of toyetic goodness. But if you’re like any other human being, you probably read that list and immediately asked, “Hey, what about…” and then filled in whatever your own favorite toy line is. That’s natural, there are hundreds of toy lines that have achieved enough success to have their fans, and while not all of them may have an incredible story to go with them, there are bound to be enough to fuel several more seasons of this show. Considering how popular and relatively cheap the show is to produce, Netflix would be bonkers not to ask for more. In Three Wishes, we take a look at something in pop culture and express three hopes for the future, whether those wishes are almost inevitable or pie-in-the-sky dreams. Today, we’re going to talk about three toy lines the producers should consider for their next round of episodes.

1. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The first choice here is pretty much a no-brainer. When you look at the independent comic book bubble of the 80s, it would be virtually impossible to argue that there was a bigger success than Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. From their humble beginnings as a parody of Frank Miller’s Daredevil, the Turtles exploded into a global phenomenon. Their comics, through countless relaunches and spin-offs, have been featured at no less than five publishers They’ve starred in five television series and six theatrical films, and most significantly, they have dominated toy shelves for years. 

Playmates Toys has held the Turtles license since 1988, producing thousands of action figures and playsets. In addition to the countless iterations of the Turtles themselves, there have been figures of their allies and foes, movie- and TV-specific versions, the turtles in costumes such as (not officially) the Universal Monsters and (officially) the cast of Star Trek, and pretty much any other piece of merchandising you can name. With a documentary, the challenge is to find what’s compelling in real life and push it to the forefront. Although I don’t know anything about the Playmates company or how they have worked with Eastman and Laird or the Turtles’ current owner, Nickelodeon, the sheer volume and popularity of this franchise seems like it would be a ripe property to focus on for 45 minutes. 

2. Toy Biz/Marvel Toys: On the other hand, here’s a property where there is undoubtedly enough drama to make for a compelling TV episode. It may be hard to believe today, but there was a time in the 90s where the future of Marvel Comics was in serious doubt. Bad business decisions and bad acquisitions sent the biggest comic book publisher in the industry spiraling into bankruptcy, and things looked bleak at the house that Spider-Man built.

One of the things that helped pull Marvel Comics through was an unexpected merger of sorts with Toy Biz, a Canadian-based company that had the license to make Marvel toys at the time. The story of the twisting, winding relationship between the companies has been written about extensively, but that doesn’t mean there’s not more gold to mine. I’d love to hear the story told by the players in the game, as we learn the truth about how, without this little toy company, Marvel Entertainment may not have lasted long enough to make your kids cry all the way home from Infinity War.

3: McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys: In my house, we have a term for people who didn’t love McDonald’s Happy Meal toys: filthy liars. Because no matter what kind of Keto-adherent, La Croix-chugging diet you may be on today, when you were a kid there was nothing better than a cheeseburger, fries, and a new toy. Since 1979, McDonald’s has released thousands of toys, from licensed Disney characters to Chicken McNuggets in Halloween costumes to the legendary McDonald’s Changeables (toys that transformed from McDonald’s food into robots. That I never completed this series is my one regret in life.)

Not only can’t the Happy Meal toy be beaten in sheer variety, but it’s also ubiquitous as anything you can imagine, touching virtually every child in North America for the last four decades. What’s more, some of them are insanely collectible. Give me a tour of some guy’s crazy attic Happy Meal museum and, I promise, I’m watching to the end. Let’s see if anybody feels that strongly about the Burger King Kids’ Club. (Answer: no.)

Blake M. Petit, whose college roommate once said he could never date a woman who didn’t “get” Grimlock, has been pontificating about pop culture online for over a decade. You can follow him at BlakeMPetit.com and, if you’re feeling generous, check out his books on Amazon.

Geek Punditry #83: The Simple Way to Save the Day

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The truth is, I kind of blame myself. The very first Geek Punditry column I ever wrote was to extoll the virtues of Star Trek: Prodigy on Paramount+. Then, like a thief in the night, the Paramount bigwigs decided to cancel the show, despite the fact that the second season was nearly finished, and even removed the previous season from the service. A few months later, at the conclusion of Star Trek: Picard, I made a powerfully compelling case (if I do say so myself) for using it as the launchpad for showrunner Terry Matalas’s proposed Star Trek: Legacy project. And yet here we sit, over a year later, with no movement on that front. You would think I would have learned my lesson, but no – upon the conclusion of season four of Star Trek: Lower Decks, I wrote about what makes it the best Star Trek series of the century so far. I may as well have signed its death warrant myself.

“WHY? Why would he TELL THEM he likes us?”

It’s enough to make a guy consider pretending to like crap just to get it off TV.

But no, I refuse to compromise my principles like that. I’m going to keep talking about those things I love, damn the consequences. The word from Paramount+ is that the Lower Decks will end after the upcoming fifth season, but consarn it, this show deserves more. Sure, some people point out that it’s ending after five seasons, same as Discovery, and while there certainly HAVE been “save Discovery” campaigns, they haven’t caught fire or gained traction like the Cerritos fans. I think what you have to remember here is that, as a half-hour animated series, a ten-episode season of Lower Decks only gives us five hours of content, a total of 50 half-hours. A season of Discovery would have as many as 13 episodes, with a runtime usually between 45-60 minutes, totaling 65 episodes at the end of the run. That’s far more than twice the Disco, comparatively. Or to put it in even clearer context, back in the 90s a season of Next Generation or Deep Space Nine could go on for 26 episodes. With commercials, that’s 26 hours of Trek. Lower Decks will end with five five-hour seasons – altogether the entire run of the show will be less than a single season of any of those series we grew up with. It’s simply not time for this show to end.

The good news is, it ain’t over yet. Netflix swept in and saved Prodigy, giving both the first season and the new season a home, and that second season has garnered immense critical and audience acclaim. Matalas still talks about Legacy in a way that doesn’t say “never gonna happen,” but rather, “not at this time.” And then last week, at San Diego Comic-Con (which, as you may recall, I was unable to attend), Lower Decks showrunner Mike McMahan talked about the future of Lower Decks in a way that seems somewhat hopeful. Specifically, McMahan was quoted by several sources as saying “You’re getting a closure that feels like the end of a chapter, but you’re not getting a closure on the Cerritos or these characters.” In other words, he does not see the final episode of this season as the final word on our pals Beckett Mariner, Brad Boimler, Sam Rutherford, and D’Vanna Tendi. And that’s great, because these are amazing characters with the potential to have more and more adventures for many years to come. 

But perhaps even more encouraging than McMahan’s statement was one made by Alex Kurtzman, the sometimes-controversial figure who is in charge of the entire Star Trek franchise these days. After McMahan suggested that fans “watch the hell out of this season when it airs,” Kurtzman further added, “Watch it twice because, actually, it does register. Finish it, and then watch it again… Guys, your petitions are incredible. They’re incredible. Look what you did for Prodigy. Do it again.”

“That’s right, people! It ain’t over ’till the fat Horta sings!”

If this doesn’t ring in your ears as a call to action, I don’t know what will. Talking to the fans, to the actors, to the creators, to the producers, it doesn’t seem like ANYBODY wants Lower Decks to end, with the exception of the boardroom guys at Paramount. THOSE are the people who have to be convinced. One theory I’ve heard – and one that I think has merit – is that they feel like Lower Decks has too limited a potential audience. To be fair, the show is VERY continuity-heavy and a lot of the stories rely on the audiences’ familiarity with the various incarnations of Star Trek. Paramount would rather focus on projects with an easier entry point for new fans. I get that. I think it’s stupid, but I GET it.

The sad truth is that the “business” part of “show business” is often what makes the creative decisions, and the only way to convince the boardroom guys that a show is worth saving is to give them numbers that indicate such a thing. So yeah, that means watching the show, RE-watching the show, and doing it as soon as possible when it drops, because something else they look at very carefully is how QUICKLY an audience engages with the provided content. 

And this is why it drives me absolutely CRAZY when I see fans talk about how angry they are at Paramount+ (I get that), how they don’t trust Paramount+ to give the show the love it deserves (I get it) and how, rather than paying for Paramount+, they’re just going to download the show illegally (you blithering idiots). 

“That’ll show ‘em!” they say. “I’m not gonna give those evil corporations one thin dime, but I’m STILL going to reap the benefits of what they make!” Swell! And in so doing, you’re putting the nail in the coffin of those things you love.

“For your information, MANY Orions haven’t pirated any movies or TV shows for over FIVE YEARS!”

I’m not going to sit here and debate the morality of pirating TV and movies with you guys. I know I’m not going to change your mind. But I AM going to point out that if you really want a series like Lower Decks to continue, pirating it is one of the WORST things you can do. 

Like I said, the studio looks at the viewership numbers. And to be certain, some of you will point out that large numbers of illegal downloads demonstrate that there’s a demand for a series. Sure, that’s true. But it’s even MORE true that the studio doesn’t give one flying fig for your download numbers because they do not make any money off of those numbers. In fact, every number that rings up for an illegal download is a number that they consider a loss.

“It’s not a loss,” you say, “because I wouldn’t have paid for it anyway.” 

My favorite argument.

I want to put yourself in my position for a moment, guys. You know that I’m a writer. I write books and then I try to convince people to buy them. I am not particularly GOOD at that part, but I try anyway. I’ve even got a little Facebook page where occasionally people talk about them. And there is, I believe, exactly ONE person who is blocked from that page, someone who had read one of my books and liked it, and that’s swell. And then she made a comment about how she downloads all her books to “beat” the big companies like Amazon. And I gotta tell ya, it feels GREAT to know that she swindled Jeff Bezos out of his cut of MY book when I’ve got to buy my kid school supplies with a royalty check that looks like a soccer score. But it’s okay because you wouldn’t have read it anyway? You know, I think I would have preferred that you didn’t instead of you popping onto my page and telling me how proud you are of getting away with something.

Independent authors are eating ramen noodles, but at least Lex Luthor had to settle for only six yachts this year.

But that’s getting back into the morality of it again, and I’m sure nobody wants to hear that, because it may force you to question your judgment. Let’s get practical. The guys in the boardroom look at the pirate numbers and ask – surprisingly logically – “why should we keep spending money to make something that these people are going to watch for free?” The point of a business – ANY business – is to make money, and to continue spending money making a product that loses money is foolishness. 

The way to save Lower Decks – to save ANY television show that’s on the cusp – is to convince the studio that keeping it alive makes financial sense. That means buying the DVDs, getting the t-shirts, snagging the merch, pre-ordering the comic books, supporting the sponsors, and (and this is the part that’s going to make some people angry) WATCHING IT ON A LEGAL PLATFORM. Whether that’s a paid subscription like Paramount+ or a free ad-supported platform like the Roku Channel, these are the ways that the creators of the shows make their money. If you want them to keep making the shows, you need to keep making money for them.

Plus, you’ll still have the physical media if the studio decides to remove it from the app as part of their plan to commit tax fraud.

By the way, I’m talking about TV shows because Lower Decks is the current show that’s sending out the S.O.S. signal, but this is all true of movies and any other form of media as well. Everyone wants to complain that Hollywood has “no new ideas,” that all they make are sequels and spin-offs and remakes. Guys, look at the top movies for the past decade. How many of them are sequels or spin-offs or remakes? Hell, look at the box office receipts for THIS year! As of this writing, the top TWELVE movies for 2024 are all sequels or spin-offs or remakes. You don’t get an original idea (John Krazynski’s imaginary friend fantasy IF) until spot number THIRTEEN. Now ask yourself how many lower-tier movies – movies that AREN’T sequels or spin-offs or remakes – have been downloaded. 

I took a screenshot in case it’s changed by the time you read this. Inside Out 2 totally deserves that spot, by the way.

If you love Lower Decks – and if you’ve bothered to read this far I believe that you do – you need to heed McMahan and Kurtzman’s call to watch it, watch it a lot. But if you don’t watch it the right way, it doesn’t matter at all. If you don’t, then our pals on the Cerritos will join the likes of Trelane, Beverly Crusher’s husband that Picard got killed, and those salamander babies Tom Paris and Janeway had  – a vibrant afterlife on Memory Beta, but in canon, merely a remembrance of something golden.

RED ALERT: UPCOMING PLAYING FAVORITES!

Well, friends, back to school is creeping up on us. Whether your kids go back next week like mine or if you still have a free chunk of August, the time is approaching…so I’m going to celebrate with another PLAYING FAVORITES! In “Playing Favorites,” I throw out a topic and ask YOU to give me categories to cover in an upcoming “Geek Punditry” column. For instance, when the topic was “Christmas,” I was asked for my favorite songs written for a Christmas movie. With the “Superhero” topic I was asked my favorite sidekicks. In the “Summer” topic I talked about my favorite beach movies, and so forth.

This time the topic is SCHOOL. I’m looking for categories that apply to the usual Geek Punditry quadrants: movies, TV, books and comics. As always, I’ll pick my favorite suggestions and give my picks. Let the nominations begin!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He really wants you to think about a creative parent having to explain to their kids why they have to get Rose Art crayons instead of Crayola the next time you download something. Jerk. 

Geek Punditry #82: I’m Going to Go Back There Someday

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It’s that time again, friends. Every year, as July races to a close, kids sharpen pencils for school, and teachers spend an inordinate amount of time and money getting their classrooms suitable to post on Instagram, the geeks of the world converge on San Diego, California for the annual bacchanalia officially known as Comic-Con International. And every year I sit here in Louisiana, gazing to the west, and wishing I could be there with ‘em.

Goals.

It’s a bucket list thing for me, guys. Some day, at least ONCE, I want to go to San Diego Comic-Con. I’ve got a lot of friends who have been – heck, with the pals I have who work in comics, I’ve got a lot of friends who go pretty much every year. I see the posts and I gaze at the photos shared on social media and I think about what it would be like to be there, even though I know it’s not going to happen any time soon. It’s expensive, first of all. Admission to the convention aside, I think about the costs of airfare, food, car rental or Ubers to get around, and hotel rooms (some reportedly going for over $1000 a night on this particular weekend) and I know there’s no way this can be swung on a teacher’s salary in the current economy. Then there’s the kiddo – making this trip would either require my wife to take time off work to stay home with our son or her take off work so all three of us could go together. Going together is my preference, but not really feasible at the moment. So it stays on that bucket list, unchecked, right next to “Play Benjamin Franklin in a production of 1776.”

Also goals.

“Ah, it’s okay Blake,” say some of my friends. “Comic-Con isn’t what it used to be anyway.” And that, at least, is true. It’s been a really long time since Comic-Con was actually about comic books. The media empires have taken it over – movie and TV studios are the stars of the really big panels, and video game companies flock there to shill their upcoming games. And while I don’t begrudge any of them, comics are my real jam, and are what I’d really want to see. I’d rather go to a DC Comics panel than a Warner Bros. panel most days…although if it were James Gunn and company talking about the upcoming Superman movie, it’d be a heck of an internal battle. 

Still wanna go, though.

It also doesn’t seem to be quite as big in terms of making news as it used to be. For years in these waning days of July, I would refresh my web browser all day long, waiting for news reports coming from San Diego to tell me what was going to happen over the next year in the world of entertainment. Marvel would unveil whole slates of films there back when such a thing seemed like a wise thing to do, and fans like myself would teeter on the edge of Firefox to see what was coming next. I don’t feel like that happens as much anymore. Studios are so desperate to stay relevant that they squeeze out announcements all year long, often prematurely, very often promising things that wind up never happening. It’s frustrating, to be sure. But in terms of what it does to Comic-Con it’s even worse, as so many of the “big” panels have changed. There’s no longer an opportunity to blow our minds with announcements of what’s to come, but rather just a recap of the announcements that have been made since the last time they recapped their announcements. 

Yet I still wish I was there.

It’s not like I’ve never been to a convention, of course. When I was young, I went with my Uncle Todd to a few Star Trek conventions (these don’t really exist anymore, as Comic-Con and its many imitators have become a catch-all for pop culture and cons specific to a single franchise have become much rarer). When the Chicago Comic-Con was still a big deal I did a road trip with my buddies Mike and James. I’ve been to Philly and Houston, and many Wizard World-turned-Fan Expo shows here in New Orleans. And I’ve been to dozens of smaller shows, which are honestly better when it comes to the comic book side of things. Back in April, Erin and I took Eddie to a small show in Covington (right across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans) and it was honestly the BEST show I’ve been to in YEARS when it comes to the number of vendors selling comic books and comic paraphernalia, as opposed to thousands of headshots you could get signed by whatever actors are in attendance. I loved that little show, and I’m looking forward to the next one.

Observe the Native North American Geek in his natural habitat.

But I still feel that COMPULSION to go to the BIG one.

Why?

Because in a weird way it feels like home.

I don’t know if younger readers will get this, because the stigma about being into “nerdy” stuff seems to have largely gone away. With Marvel and Star Wars being so mainstream and things like Game of Thrones and The Boys becoming media juggernauts, things that we used to consider niche entertainment have become dominant parts of the cultural zeitgeist. But when I was in high school in the 90s, I was always made to feel like I didn’t belong because I read comics and watched cartoons. I clung to the things I loved, but often felt the need to hide them, lest I become even more of an outcast than I already was. I’d even quit Disney and Archie comics not because I didn’t like them anymore, but because I let people put it in my head that if I was in high school and reading Uncle Scrooge something must have been wrong with me. If I was seen with a Star Trek novel or an X-Men t-shirt, the reaction quite clearly elicited the same response every time: you do not belong here. High school was a bitch of a place, guys.

I’ve got a core memory of a time in 1993 when Superman: The Man of Steel #22 came out. This was during the whole “Death and Return of Superman” storyline, and John Henry Irons IMMEDIATELY became my favorite of the four potential heirs to the throne. I brought the comic to school with me and, on a break outside, I sat on a bench to read it. And within seconds, a jerk from my PE class yanked it out of my hands because I was such a “nerd,” threw dirt into the die-cut cover, and stomped away laughing.

I can’t help but feel that John Henry would have known how to deal with it.

I don’t remember the guy’s name. I couldn’t pick his face out of a lineup. But I’ll never forget what he did, because you CAN’T forget anything that makes you feel that small.

I look at my own students, and I don’t see that anymore. Oh sure, there are still cliques and groups, there will ALWAYS be cliques and groups, but they aren’t really based on things like what kind of pop culture a kid is into anymore. I see a lot of kids who read Manga (not enough into western comics, but that’s a separate issue), but I never see anyone get bullied for that. You want to pick on a kid for playing video games? Dude, that’s a club whose membership is EVERYBODY. Things have changed and, in this respect at least, have very much changed for the better.

But I come from a time BEFORE those changes, when I only knew two or three other kids in my school who were openly comic book fans, and most of them wound up moving away before we graduated. It was a lonely time.

The first time I walked into a comic book convention, it was like I had finally found my tribe. There were people here who not only wouldn’t MOCK me for reading Superman, but would join me in a spirited debate over the credentials of the Man of Steel, Cyborg, Superboy, and Eradicator, and which of them (if any) were the real deal. There were people here who could ALSO explain why some crew members on the Enterprise wore red while others wore gold or blue. There were people who not only wouldn’t mock me for loving Uncle Scrooge comics, but they would join me in line to get a print and comics signed by Don Rosa, perhaps the greatest artist ever to draw the Laird of the Clan McDuck. (Yeah, I love Carl Barks too, but I said what I said.)

If my house caught on fire I would save my son, and then this. My wife is faster than me, she’s already outside at this point, that’s why I didn’t mention her.

Nobody should ever have to feel the way I felt on that day back in 1993, certainly not because of what they like to read or watch. But I wish that EVERYBODY could have that experience of walking into a room and suddenly feeling like that’s where you’ve belonged all along.

I still get that when I walk into my local comic shop (BSI Comics in Metairie, Louisiana – and I’ll never be shy about giving them the shout-out). I feel that way on Free Comic Book Day, when hundreds of like-minded folks come together to see what’s new. And I feel that way when I attend a show full of people selling, drawing, reading, and talking about comics and movies and TV shows. And even the people who aren’t into the same comics and movies and TV shows as I am are still part of the same tribe, because we know that even if I’m into Star Trek and you’re into Star Wars, we’re still more alike than we are different.

Not like that Stargate weirdo.

So why would I possibly want to go to the big, bloated, past-its-glory-days Comic-Con International in San Diego? 

Because in a way that I don’t know if you can understand if you’re lucky enough to never have felt like an outcast, it’s where I feel like I belong. With my people. With my tribe. Just because I’ve never been doesn’t mean it doesn’t call to me like home.

Ah well. Maybe next year.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He believes the Great Gonzo said it best when he sang, “I’ve never been there, but I know the way,” and a tip of the hat to Steve J. Rogers for putting that bug in his ear. 

Geek Punditry #81: Whatever the Era

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During the school year, I spend most of my time around teenagers. I teach high school English, and as such I am constantly exposed to the youth of today, with their thoughts and their ideas and their imaginations and occasionally their aromas, because some of these kids pay as much attention to the personal hygiene lessons in health class as they do when I’m trying to get them to understand 1984. But it’s July and school is not currently in session, and the only teenager in my usual orbit is my 13-year-old niece, Maggie, so the only teen ideas I am exposed to are mostly about something called Five Nights at Freddy’s.

♫“Thank you for bein’ a frieeeeeend…”♫

When I AM surrounded by the kids, though, one of the battles I fight a lot is attempting to convince them that just because something is old doesn’t mean it has no value. Shakespeare is the most frequently-cited example of this: yes, the language is old-fashioned and frequently archaic, but once you get past that the stories are pretty darn timeless. Romeo and Juliet is about a couple of kids YOUR AGE (or often younger, as I teach 11th and 12th graders) who want to date but their parents hate each other. Othello is the story of a man driven to homicidal envy because the girl he likes married someone of a different ethnicity. Hamlet is about a college kid whose father is murdered and then his mom marries his uncle, which everybody can agree is pretty messed up and will make Thanksgiving very awkward. When you boil it down, the greatest works of the past are just as relevant today, except that they’re too deep to discuss in-depth in a 15-second TikTok video.

Helping kids to see this, to understand the value in works of the past, is part of my job. In fact, in many ways, it’s my favorite part of my job. Don’t get me wrong, reading a well-written essay from a kid who struggled to put a sentence together at the beginning of the year is a badge of honor, but if that essay is explaining what they think the whole Green Light thing from The Great Gatsby is about in a way that makes sense…well, that’s like winning an Olympic medal. And most kids, I find, are pretty open to this, once you can find the right path in. It may take some trial and error, but I sincerely believe that any young scholar can find the value in the classics if you try hard enough.

I wish the opposite was true of their grandparents.

Tag someone you know in this picture.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the creation of a new over-the-air broadcast network, MeTV Toons, dedicated to showcasing classic animation 24 hours a day. It’s a great idea and one that I truly hope to be able to watch if the New Orleans affiliate – which finally launched just TODAY – would boost their damn signal a little bit so I could pick it up from my house. But that’s not the point. In that previous column, I also talked about a few online communities that have sprung up around this new network. The communities are thriving now. The largest of them, which was at 17,000 members when I wrote the previous column a month ago, has ballooned up to almost 65,000 people. And as is expected, there’s a lot of talk about the cartoons and what people’s favorites are and how much they’re enjoying the network, which I love. There are also a minimum of 750 posts a day from somebody who doesn’t understand how to watch the network, because apparently many of these people, who I would estimate are largely in their 50s and 60s, have completely forgotten how antenna television works. But the worst part of this community are the entirely-too-frequent posts that exist not to talk about the classic cartoons, but to complain about modern ones.

“I hope they don’t start making NEW shows. That’s what ruined Cartoon Network.”

“They shouldn’t show anything from later than the 70s. All of that stuff sucks.”

“You know who’s a fan of Powerpuff Girls? Hitler.”

And so forth.

I find it incredibly frustrating to read through this stuff, for a few reasons. First of all, and most importantly, is the sheer negativity of it. The world has enough negativity in it, and I hate the fact that Social Media – an invention that SHOULD have been used to bring all the people in the world together – has instead merely given us different ways to tribalize ourselves and spit venom at anybody who’s not part of Our Group. And second, it’s just not true. I can’t fathom the mindset of somebody who can turn on an episode of Help!… It’s the Hair Bear Bunch! and then claim with a straight face that this is the apex of animated entertainment.

Where the culture of Western Civilization apparently reached its climax.

The thing is, guys, both my Bard-averse teens and their Cartoon Network-hating parents and grandparents are suffering from the same problem, and it’s a problem that most of us have to overcome in some form or another. We are exposed to certain media when we grow up, and that media fundamentally contributes to the structure of our preferences in our brains. In other words, the stuff that we like when we’re young is the blueprint for the kind of stuff we like throughout our entire lives. If one of my 11th grade students tells me how much their mom hates the music she listens to, I suggest she ask her mom what HER parents thought of New Kids on the Block, and what THEIR parents thought of the Beatles, and so forth. Every generation firmly, steadfastly, believes that music reached its absolute pinnacle during their own formative years, even though it’s obvious that the best decade for music was the 1980s.

The same is true for everything: movies, TV shows, books, fashions, food, sports, and of course, cartoons. The big difference between my kids and their parents is that by and large, I find the kids FAR more likely to expand their horizons and look at work from another time. My students were in diapers when The Office was popular or not even born when Friends was a hit, but they’ll binge those shows and come to school talking about them. But trying to get one of these Toon-haters to give a chance to a modern cartoon like Bob’s Burgers, Star Trek: Lower Decks, Gravity Falls, or the finest cartoon of them all, Bluey, is a challenge that would make Sisyphus ask if he can just go back to pushing that rock up the hill.

Sorry, guys. I’m being told by the Facebook group that none of you are as good as… *checks notes* ‘Yakky Doodle.’

I know I’m generalizing here, and that’s not really fair. There are most certainly older people willing to give more recent works a chance. I know, I’m one of ‘em. And there are a lot of people like that. My uncle Wally, who happens to be an animator, would frequently talk to me about Animaniacs in the heyday of that particular cartoon – which was after his time, obviously, but one of the favorites of my time. He obviously PREFERRED the classics of his youth like the Looney Tunes and the Hanna-Barbera all-stars, but he was (and still is) always willing to give the new stuff a CHANCE.

The problem with the MeTV Toons group – like any other group – is that the most obnoxious people also tend to be the loudest. They’re the ones that complain, the ones that whine, the ones that come in with a sense of entitlement because the network has the TEMERITY to show Captain Planet instead of a 23rd rerun of The Flintstones for half an hour. 

Is it true that there are a lot of bad cartoons these days? Sure. But that’s true of ANY field of creative endeavor in ANY era. As sci-fi author Theodore Sturgeon once observed, “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” For every Scooby-Doo that was turned out, there are a dozen Hanna-Barbera cartoons that died after one season. Looney Tunes gave us the work of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the Road Runner and Coyote…but it also gave us Merlin Mouse and Cool Cat.

I swear, these were actual, official Looney Tunes. Google it.

Hell, even my beloved Willie Shakes is considered the greatest writer in the history of the world…but name five other writers from the late 16th century. Unless you’ve got an English degree, chances are you can’t. There’s just as much good stuff being produced now as there ever was. The reason the past seems “better” is because it’s only the good stuff that gets REMEMBERED. If you lock yourself in to the work of your own formative years, you will miss out on a wealth of great storytelling, great music, great ART. And if you’re okay with that, I can’t change your mind, but at the very least you need to RECOGNIZE that bias and not make blanket statements about everything that’s from outside of your time period, because that’s not fair to anybody. 

I have a challenge for you, my friends. Right now, I want you to identify your formative decade. Are you an 80s kid? 90s? What was the time period in which you did the majority of your growing, say from first grade through twelfth? For most of us, that is the period where these preferences and feelings are most firmly established.

Okay, have you got your decade identified? GREAT. Here’s the challenge then: this week, I want you to go out and find something from OUTSIDE that decade that you think is worth watching, reading, or listening to. I don’t care if it’s from before your time or after, but I want you to find something from a different time period that you think is worthwhile, something that you can get excited about, something you want to tell people to check out. And then I want you to come back here – or hit me on Facebook, Twitter, or Threads – and tell me WHAT you read or watched and WHY you like it. 

There’s plenty of great stuff out there, guys – from any era. The trick is just to figure out where to look.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He considers himself an 80s kid, but he has just as much love for The Honeymooners and The Good Place as he does for Mama’s Family. Wow, that’s a weird list.

Geek Punditry #80: If You Liked the Movie, You Should Read the Book

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For some time now I’ve had the novelization of the TV show Charles in Charge sitting in my eBay searches, contemplating whether or not I should jump on it.

The first thing they teach you in blogger school is to start a column with a sentence that will compel the reader to continue in the hopes of making sense of what you’re saying. How am I doing?

You see, we live in a time when people like me (nerds) often go back and recapture things from our youth – things that we remember fondly or that tickle a nostalgic button somewhere in our soul. Often these things take the form of toys, but just as popular are other collectibles like trading cards, comics, vintage video games, and – of course – books. So the reason I’m thinking about getting this book, which is oddly enough a novelization of the opening episodes of the SECOND SEASON of Charles in Charge (I later learned that there is a novelization of the pilot I’ve never seen in person), is because I remember getting it at one of those glorious Scholastic Book Fairs that we used to anticipate with the same excitement and fervor as we would Christmas morning. It’s purely a nostalgia thing, friends.

Don’t tell the eBay seller I borrowed their picture for this, okay?

Eh?

Oh, you mean you were wondering why the hell there was a Charles in Charge novel in the first place, aren’t you?

That also goes back to the time period in which I grew up, a magical, halcyon time known as the 1980s. It was a heck of a time to grow up. We had the best music, sodas were clear sometimes, and cigarettes had only been bad for you for like 20 minutes. But that doesn’t mean everything was perfect. This was in an era before streaming services, an era before you could pull up popular entertainment on demand from your remote control without even having to get off your couch and look for clean pants. If you saw a TV show you liked, the only way to experience it again was hope for a rerun. If you loved a movie, you had to wait for it to come on HBO (if you had it) or rent it from these ancient temples that we called “video stores.” You couldn’t even just go out and BUY the VHS tape the way you later could the DVD, because in the early days of home video the studios made the movies prohibitively expensive (nobody in their right mind would – or should – have paid $120 for a VHS copy of The Land Before Time 2) so that most people couldn’t afford to build a home library and, instead, the studios made their money using the video stores as the middleman. Eventually, the prices of VHS tapes dropped and home libraries became a thing, but for much of my childhood if there was a movie you really loved, there was only one surefire way to experience it again whenever you wanted: buying the novelization.

When you need to hear Madonna as Breathless Mahoney, this is the next best thing.

Novelizations have been around almost as long as film, going back to the silent era. In 1966 Isaac Asimov was hired to novelize the film Fantastic Voyage. (He was so disappointed with the result that he came back years later with a “sequel” called Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain, which just used the premise of miniaturized scientists going into a human body and otherwise was completely independent). One of the most interesting examples, I think, is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Author Arthur C. Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick collaborated on the story, then Clark wrote the novel WHILE Kubrick worked on the film, so which of them technically is the adaptation of the other? If you ever figure it out, let me know.

But in the 80s, the novelization was huge. I had stacks of them for the formative movies of my youth: E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Batman, Dick Tracy, Back to the Future…not to mention the requisite Star Trek and Star Wars books. Not all of them were very good, of course. Some of them were downright terrible. But there was something interesting about reading these books, which were often based on early drafts of the film’s script. The novels had to be written quickly, usually while the film was still in production, in order to have them printed and on the shelves when the movie came out, so if things changed during the production, the novel would sometimes be based on the original version rather than the change. The novelization of the second X-Men movie, for example, is so different (up to which characters lived and died) that you’d be hard-pressed to believe the writer even KNEW anything about the X-Men…if it weren’t Chris Claremont, whose work on the characters in the 70s and 80s is pretty much the main reason that those characters survived past the 70s and 80s without falling into obscurity.

“Claremont! Who the hell is ‘Bolverine’?”

Screenplays often lack the detail that you get in a novel as well, and as such the authors had to conjure up a lot of the characters’ backstory, inner monologue, and other elements that wouldn’t have room to go into in a feature film. Goonies is a phenomenal example of this. It’s a movie that everybody my age grew up idolizing, that we watched over and over again, that became a fundamental part of our psyche. So we all know that the reason Josh Brolin’s character Brandon has to steal a child’s bicycle after his brother Mikey (Sean Astin) lets the air out of his own bike tires is because he flunked his driver’s test. But the novel tells us that the REASON Brand flunked his test is because he suffers from claustrophobia and freaked out about being the car with the driving instructor, a stranger. Overcoming his claustrophobia in the caves becomes an interesting running element through the novel. It also gives us a little insight into what happens to the characters after the movie ends – for instance, Chunk’s parents officially adopt Sloth and give him the name Jason Sloth Cohen at his Bar Mitzvah. It’s adorable. 

Not to mention the subtle suggestions that Mikey is actually the reincarnation of One-Eyed Willie.

And of course, these novelizations were turned out in large numbers, especially the ones for kids. The Charles in Charge book I mentioned before is only one of many such novelizations I got from a Scholastic imprint called Point, which specialized in middle grade books. This resulted in a lot of those aforementioned novelizations, plus an avalanche of the kind of kiddie horror books that would turn so many people into lifelong horror fans, such as the Goosebumps line. It got to a point (no pun intended) that I would actually look for that Point logo at the Scholastic Book fair, as I knew those were books for people like me. In fact, a while back I finally DID jump on eBay to snag one of those old Point books from my youth, their novelization of the Mel Brooks comedy Spaceballs. When I got the book I saw, to my surprise, that it was written by “Jovial Bob Stine.” This name meant nothing to me when the movie came out in 1987, but looking back on it now I realize that this was one of the various pen names used by someone who would soon become a Scholastic legend – R.L. Stine, creator of those Goosebumps novels I mentioned before.

It’s JOVIAL, see. Also hilarious. Says so right there.

Some of these books have become real collector’s items. If you look up the original novelizations of some of the 80s horror movies like Halloween, Friday the 13th, or A Nightmare on Elm Street, you see them going for hundreds of dollars now. Considering the demand, it’s actually really surprising to me that you don’t see them reissued more often, or at least offered digitally. In some cases, I suppose it’s a rights issue (the rights for Friday the 13th are notoriously complicated at the moment), but some are less understandable. DC Comics recently announced a new novel, Batman: Resurrection, which will serve as a direct sequel to the 1989 Batman movie. That sounds cool – but why not reissue the novelization of the original movie to go with it? 

Trust me, geeks will eat this stuff up.

Novelizations are still produced today, but not as many as there were back in the 80s and 90s. A lot of sci-fi movies still get them, but the odds of seeing a novel based on, for instance, the premiere of Abbot Elementary seems fairly remote. Obviously, with the streaming era, it’s not as necessary to have a book to get your hands on the story the way it was when I was a kid. More than that, though, I think that the streaming era has broken down the audience so that these things aren’t part of the cultural conversation the way they used to be. When something like the first few Star Wars movies came out, they were a phenomenon that EVERYBODY had to talk about, had to experience. They lingered in theaters for months, even years, before finally filtering out and making way for something new. That doesn’t happen anymore. A movie lives or dies based on its opening weekend. TV series dump an entire season at once and everybody has forgotten about it a week later. It’s a sad thing, I think, a change that I’m not fond of, but it’s the world we live in now.

So I’ll keep my eye on eBay and keep my finger over that “buy it now” button. I’m not saying I’ll get every old novel I see, of course. I’m just saying that if I COULD, I WOULD.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. If you ever see a decent price for the novelization of Howard the Duck, let him know.

Geek Punditry #79: The Case For ID3

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On holidays, we all have certain favorite movies that we like to return to. At Christmas we all binge It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, and dozens of others. Around Halloween we’ll sit down to watch Hocus Pocus or, appropriately, Halloween. On Arbor Day, of course, Swamp Thing. And although the Fourth of July doesn’t quite have the cinematic pedigree of some of those other holidays, there are definitely movies appropriate to watch at this time of year. 1776 is one of my favorite musicals of all time, and my wife’s favorite movie, Jaws, has enough July 4th talk to count even though the film ends several days after the holiday. But of course the most obvious movie to watch in early July is the 1996 blockbuster film Independence Day, the Roland Emmerich/Dean Devlin sci-fi extravaganza in which the Fresh Prince, Lone Starr, Cousin Eddie, and Jeff Goldblum come together and summon the power of America to save the world from an alien invasion.

If you had barbecue this week, you have this man to thank.

The movie – which I know we’ve all seen – is big, over-the-top, aggressively bombastic, and I love every frame of it. It is FUN, fun in a way that many blockbusters in the years since have forgotten how to be. The special effects are better than most movies we get today, the musical score is an absolute masterpiece, and the final act of the movie has one Big Damn Hero moment after another – and when done well, there’s nothing better than a Big Damn Hero moment. It is, quite frankly, a perfect film for what it is. If Bill Pullman had REALLY run for President in 1996, he would have won in a landslide. 

20 years later, a sequel was attempted. Independence Day: Resurgence was…not as good as the original. For reasons that I’m going to get into shortly, the movie felt kind of stale and like it was trying too hard, whereas the original made its sense of spectacle feel effortless. But this year, after rewatching the original a few days ago, I decided to give the sequel another chance. It…still isn’t a great movie. But the tragedy of it is that it had the POTENTIAL to be. The actual STORY is very strong. Let me give you the reader’s digest version of the important stuff that happens in Resurgence:

“If it helps, imagine you’re hearing this in my voice.”

It has been 20 years since Earth successfully destroyed the invading alien force. In that time, humanity has come together in a way previously unheard of, scavenging the alien technology to create an age of technological advancement that has helped create peace across the planet. Suddenly, another spacecraft appears. Humanity, fearful of a second invasion, attacks first this time, but discovers that this is NOT the same alien race that attacked them before – in fact, our old enemy is PURSUING this newcomer. We again have to battle the invaders, this time with the help of the newcomer, who we learn is an envoy of a coalition of survivors of the Big Bad Aliens, whom they call the Harvesters. We discover that Earth has become famous across the galaxy for being the only planet to ever successfully defend itself against the Harvesters. They are our FANS, and they want us to come into outer space to lead the fight to stop the bad guys once and for all.

“See? That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?”

If that sounds 1000 percent better than the movie you remember watching back in 2016, that’s because it is. The plot is fantastic – it expands upon the original mythology and elevates the threat, with the promise of exploring a much larger and grander universe that the original film only hinted at. But the final product didn’t deliver on that level. The cast was reduced to a series of Xerox copies of the original characters and the story structure was broken down in such a way that it mimicked the first movie far too comfortably to be satisfying. I always say that if there’s one thing fans want it’s “More,” but movie executives never understand what that MEANS. We don’t want the SAME thing, we want that familiar thing to CONTINUE and GROW and EXPAND. And while Resurgence had all the potential in the world to do that, by reducing it to a copy of the original, it failed.

The characters didn’t help. They tried to elevate the children of Will Smith and Bill Pullman’s characters to the new heroes, but there was none of the sense of heroism from the original. Pullman’s President Tom Whitmore at least got a proper sendoff, but Will Smith died off-screen and the wife Goldblum reconciled with in the original is gone without a trace, replaced by a new love interest. Was Margaret Colin unwilling to return? I have no idea. But we’re stuck with another less interesting love interest in a movie that already has a less interesting love story between Pullman’s daughter and Thor’s brother. (The one who isn’t Loki.) This also largely damages the character arc Goldblum received in the first movie, and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s a sequel that erases previous character development. 

I dare you to name a single one of these characters who wasn’t played by Jeff Goldblum. See? It’s even harder than Avatar.

But that spark, man…that spark is still there. And the idea of a movie about the human race joining together with an intergalactic federation to take the fight TO the Harvesters still REALLY appeals to me. So that’s why I’m here today, friends. Since the 20th Century Fox acquisition, Independence Day is now the property of the Walt Disney International Shadow Government and Entertainment Consortium (although they had to be reminded that this only referred to the film franchise and not the actual holiday). That in mind, I want to suggest that they take a chance on a new movie – or maybe even a Disney+ series – to continue the story.

Let’s talk about how to do this, guys. First of all, we don’t want to FORGET Resurgence. The whole point of this exercise is to remember that there IS a solid core of a story there. So instead, I say we do an Evil Dead 2. The second Evil Dead movie had a much greater distribution (and budget) than the first, and since he couldn’t be sure that much of their audience would ever have seen the original, creator Sam Raimi used the opening act of the sequel to make a condensed recap/remake of the previous movie. It is possible to watch Evil Dead 2 without ever having watched the original and not miss a beat. So with ID3, we start with a sequence that runs through everything I just said in my recap, because nothing else in that movie is really necessary for the story that’s going to get told next.

Second, at this point we need an almost entirely new cast. Bill Pullman’s character died in the sequel, and most of the new characters are pretty forgettable. We can try to squeeze in Jeff Goldblum just because he’s Jeff Goldblum and I don’t think it’s possible to look into those steely eyes and tell him “no,” but the one guy we can’t do without? Brent Spiner as Dr. Brakish Okun, whose increased screen time in the sequel is probably the best part of Resurgence. Not only is he the in-universe expert on the aliens, but his long contact with them gave him a sort of psychic link that will be invaluable.

Not to mention his experience in interspecies relations.

Once we’ve got all that established, we need a ten year time skip. We’re in space now. We are in command of the coalition of survivors, and here’s where we REALLY have fun, because we get to see all of these different kinds of alien creatures. We learn about their worlds that have been destroyed and the society they have built in the wake of the Harvesters attacks. We can tell the story of the war with the Harvesters, and there’s room for a lot more beyond that. What about the previous wars, the ones that were lost? Are there other races out there in need of a rescue? Are there other races out there even WORSE than the Harvesters themselves? There’s potential in every one of these ideas to tell a compelling story. Everybody is all about doing “shared universes” these days – this would be a chance to expand the universe of Independence Day into a sci-fi backdrop as rich and exciting as the best of Star Trek or Star Wars.

IF it’s done right.

Which of these two did it right, Disney? Come on. This isn’t a trick question.

That’s what it always boils down to, isn’t it? The truth is, a lot of modern sci-fi is pretty divisive. For everyone who loves The Mandalorian, you can find five people complaining about The Acolyte. Some Star Trek fans refuse to consider Lower Decks canon, some hate Discovery. Picard is that amazingly rare show where virtually everybody agrees it got BETTER in the last season. And the truth is, no matter what would be attempted with another Independence Day, there are a lot of people who will hate it sight unseen and never give it a chance.

But I don’t think that’s a good enough reason not to try.

Everybody knows that the studios are terrified to take a chance on a NEW idea, a NEW IP. They would much rather just try to pump dollars out of the ones that already exist. And since they’re doing that anyway, why not at least TRY to do so with a franchise that still has a lot of unrealized potential? 

That’s my thoughts on it, anyway.

Maybe next time I’ll tell DC Comics how to fix the Legion of Super-Heroes. Really, the fact that they haven’t just put me in charge of this stuff yet is ridiculous. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. Step one of fixing the Legion is to pretend the most recent incarnation never happened, by the way.