Geek Punditry

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.

Geek Punditry #78: In the Name of the Faithful

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I think the movie Holes is pretty good.

I know, it’s unusual for me to kick off one of these columns with something so overtly political, but bear with me here.

Holes, which came out in 2003, is an adaptation of Louis Sachar’s young adult novel of the same name. The story is about a kid named Stanley Yelnats who is falsely accused of stealing a pair of very expensive celebrity shoes from a charity auction and sentenced to 18 months at a juvenile detention facility called Camp Green Lake. As it turns out there’s nothing green about the camp, nor is there a lake there anymore – just the desert remains of a dried lakebed where the detainees are forced to dig five-foot holes day after day in an effort to “build their character.” The film bounces around three different timelines: Stanley’s story is intercut with that of his great-great-grandfather, who accidentally brought a curse down on five generations of his family, and the origin story of a brutal outlaw named “Kissin’” Kate Barlow, who terrorized the Green Lake community a century ago. 

Trigger warning: may offend people with holes.

I remembered enjoying the movie when it first came out, but a few days ago I watched it for the first time in several years and I was really impressed by how tightly plotted the film is. Even with juggling three timelines there is virtually no fat in the plot. Everything in the story turns out to be significant in the end, either to revealing the truth about the two timelines that take place in the past or to bringing the storyline of the present day to a satisfying conclusion. It’s a really good movie, and I’m not even kidding when I say that screenwriters could do worse than to study it when it comes to learning how to put a story together.

Part of the reason for the tightness of the story, I think, is because the screenplay was written by Louis Sachar himself, adapting his own novel. True, sometimes when this happens the original writer can be a tad too precious about keeping their favorite bits or not understand the necessities of adaptation, but Sachar did a stellar job. However, as I often do when I watch a movie I really enjoy, I spent a little time online afterwards looking into the history of the film and learned something I hadn’t known before: Sachar’s script was NOT the first attempt to adapt the book. The first attempt at adapting the story was written by Richard Kelly, who is probably best known as the writer and director of Donnie Darko, which film scholars among you will recognize as being one of the last movies one would think about when drawing comparisons to Holes. Furthermore, that Kelly script – as it turns out – is freely available online, and I clicked on it to take a look.

The beloved children’s classic reimagined by…this guy.

Kelly’s version begins with a narrator described as an “elderly voice” saying – and I swear, I am transcribing this verbatim: “Once…when it was still early in the twenty-first century…there existed a prison in a sea of sand.”

Holy crap.

It continues. 

“All signs of life in this place had been destroyed by something terrible…and that something had dried up into the earth…and the earth was a prison for all mankind.”

HOLY.

CRAP.

Had Kelly even read the book?

Incidentally, the ellipses you’re seeing in these passages were there originally, I didn’t omit anything. This is HOW IT IS WRITTEN.

At this point I saved the link so I could go back and read it later, because something this completely bonkers has to be examined slowly, carefully. When Stanley “Kramer” shows up later on the page, the narrator continues by telling us “He did not feel sorry for what he had done…but feeling sorrow is not adequate punishment for such a crime. Feeling sorrow does not absolve the crime from the memory of the victims…if the victims are still breathing.”

Was Kelly even aware of the fact that there is a book?

Adaptations are not a new art form, guys. The Greeks borrowed from existing myths and legends when they invented modern theater. Virtually all of Shakespeare’s most famous plays are based on history, mythology, or earlier poetry that he expanded in his own way. The Lego Movie was based on the works of Eudora Welty. So it’s not that I have any objection to adapting a work from one medium to another. But at SOME point, it seems like someone has to ask the question: if I’m changing the story this much, is it even still really an adaptation?

Change is inevitable when changing from one medium to another, and for any of a thousand reasons. In The Hunger Games, for instance, the novel is written from the first-person point of view of Katniss Everdeen and is heavily loaded with her internal monologue. This is difficult to do well in a movie, and thus the information we learn in monologue – whether it’s plot-driven or character-driven – has to be imparted to the audience in a different way. Sometimes the changes are pragmatic. Back to Holes for a moment – in the novel, Stanley begins the story as a fat boy who gradually loses weight due to the physical labor he’s forced to undergo. The filmmakers decided to drop this and cast the relatively slim Shia LaBoeuf under the reasoning that it would be too difficult to make a 14-year-old actor gain and lose weight so drastically over the course of filming, not to mention potentially dangerous to his health. That is a 100 percent acceptable change. 

Sometimes changes are just a matter of understanding what the audience can handle. I’ll give you two examples from Stephen King. Cujo is a book about a mother and her child trapped in an increasingly hot car by a violent and rabid St. Bernard. In the book – spoiler alert here for a 43-year-old novel – the child dies of heatstroke. But in the movie, the filmmakers let the kid live, thinking his death would be too much for the audience. There’s a similar change in the film version of Misery, about a writer who gets in a terrible car accident and is rescued by his “biggest fan,” who turns out to be a deranged lunatic. In the book, to prevent Paul Sheldon from escaping, the insane Annie Wilkes cuts off his feet. If that sentence shocked you it’s probably because you are more familiar with the famous scene in the movie, where she “only” hobbles him by breaking his ankles with a sledgehammer. Reportedly, the producers felt like audiences would never forgive the actress, Kathy Bates, if she went so far as to actually cut his feet off. And if you think that audiences are smart enough to know the difference between the actor and the behavior of their character, look up the way “fans” treated Anna Gunn for the things Skyler White did on Breaking Bad.

If social media had existed in 1990, Kathy Bates might still be in hiding for this.

When it comes to these changes, the filmmakers chose to lessen the tragedy of the book. I don’t think that we’re saying that book readers are more accepting of gore or death than people who watch movies, though. I think the lesson here is that it is more difficult – more disturbing – to watch certain tragedies than to read about them. On the other hand, there’s the adaptation of King’s novella The Mist, which is a book with an ambiguous ending. The film, however, goes in the OPPOSITE direction, making the ending OVERTLY tragic. In this case, though, making the ending far worse than the original actually works. Stephen King himself has reportedly said he prefers the ending of the movie to the that of the story he wrote. 

Time is also a big factor when it comes to adaptation. If you’re adapting a doorstopper novel, especially into a film intended for theatrical distribution, it’s virtually impossible to squeeze in everything. Lord of the Rings fans have elevated the absence of Tom Bombadil from the film version of the beloved trilogy to meme status. To a lesser degree, the same is true for the Scouring of the Shire. As much as I appreciate those sequences in the book, though, when we’re talking about movies that already have a running time that’s longer than the first marriages of certain people I went to college with, I can forgive Peter Jackson for laying those pieces aside.

Changes from one medium to another are a necessity, because no two types of storytelling have exactly the same requirements or demands. I don’t mind changes, provided that making the change does not alter or pervert the spirit or intent of the original work, and here’s where I’m going to piss some people off, because Starship Troopers. It’s one of those movies that flopped when it came out but has grown a devoted following in recent years. That seems to happen a lot – something people disliked when it came out is rediscovered years later and lauded or, conversely, something that was once popular is hit with backlash and people suddenly declare that they never thought it was that good in the first place and they only saw it in the theaters 27 times “ironically.” I don’t do that a lot, honestly. I’ve certainly reevaluated movies after the fact, sometimes enjoying them more, sometimes less, but I don’t think I’ve ever done a complete 180 on a film. Which brings us back to Starship Troopers. 

My friends, I’m here to tell ya that I thought it sucked then and I think it sucks now. 

I’m going to pause here so the type of person who writes angry responses without bothering to read my point can write an angry response without bothering to read my point.

Fans of the movie praise Paul Verhoeven for making a witty sci-fi anti-war satire, a movie in which the entire human military is thinly painted as Nazis in training. However, none of this is applicable to the book, which is most certainly not anti-war, nor is it in the practice of making the humans into the bad guys. In fact, the book – which I should admit I was already a fan of before the movie was made – isn’t really plot-driven at all, but is more of an examination of the life of a soldier in a hypothetical science fiction future. The war against the insectoid aliens is there, but it’s more of a backdrop, a way of examining the world that author Robert Heinlein created. It’s no surprise, then, to find out that Verhoeven admittedly never even finished reading the book, finding it too “boring” and “militaristic.” 

Sir, I must say this: if you can’t even finish reading the source material of an adaptation, I submit that you are not the right person to adapt it. 

Here’s the thing, folks: I have no objection to Verhoeven making an anti-war movie, or a satire, or a movie in which humans are thinly-disguised bad guys. This is his right as a filmmaker, and there are plenty of good movies that do just this. I do, however, have a strong objection to him doing so by trading in on a novel by Robert Heinlein which is none of those things. I simply don’t think it’s fair, either to readers of the novel or to Heinlein himself, and in disputes of this nature I’m pretty much always going to side with the original author’s intent. If Verhoven had made a virtually identical movie, changing the names and calling it something like Spaceship Soldiers instead, we would not be having this conversation right now…but it’s also possible that we wouldn’t be talking about the movie AT ALL, that without the connection to Heinlein, the film would have been forgotten entirely.

It’s not a question of which of these men I agree with more, it’s a question of whether it is ethically right of Verhoven to use Heinlein’s story to espouse views that Heinlein’s story clearly disagreed with. Personally, I don’t think it is. I know that this is an area in which a lot of people will disagree with me. Hell, maybe Heinlein himself would disagree with me. But I ask you this: Arlo Guthrie’s 18-minute song “Alice’s Restaurant,” which was essentially a protest against the Vietnam war, was made into a similarly anti-war film. Had Guthrie not been involved in the film, but rather it was made by somebody else who painted Guthrie’s character as a fool and his protest against the war as misguided, would that have been fair to Guthrie?

What I’m getting at, friends, is this: if you’re a fan of Starship Troopers, is your acceptance of the adaptation process based on which political viewpoint you agree with? If that’s the case, I’m afraid that we will not be able to meet halfway on this one, and I hope that we can still be friends and that you’ll still come back next week when I’m writing about how awesome the theme from DuckTales is or something.

Adapting a story from one medium to another should be done for one of two reasons. First, if it is an exceptionally good story and you want to retell it for a different audience. Great! Do it! But if it IS an exceptionally good story, then why do you want to change it?

The second, more cynical reason, is because the story is popular, and you’re hoping to make money by appealing to the pre-existing audience. Okay, I can live with that. But if the story IS already popular and has a pre-existing audience, WHY DO YOU WANT TO CHANGE IT?

The answer, by the way, is because writers can be a vain bunch (yes, I am including myself in that number) and a good number cannot resist the urge to put their own stamp on something. This is what Richard Kelly did (remember him?) in his Holes adaptation. He wasn’t writing an adaptation of Louis Sachar’s novel Holes, he was writing a Richard Kelly movie that was vaguely suggested by a novel by Louis Sachar. And for a fan of Louis Sachar’s novel, that would have been MASSIVELY disappointing. 

But writers do this anyway, because for some people it’s more important that something is “theirs” than it is that they treat the source material faithfully. Sometimes that means they’ve created a brand-new breakout character, like the people who gave us Scrappy Doo. Sometimes that means “updating” a story for a whole new audience, the way the smash hit film Barb Wire “updated” the story of Casablanca to become beloved by the ages. And sometimes it’s because the author is just trying to trade on somebody else’s work to spread their own message to the masses, which makes me wonder how strong a storyteller you actually are if you can’t get your message out without borrowing somebody else’s name.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to do a complete re-imagining of a work and do it well. The Netflix miniseries Fall of the House of Usher is an excellent example. Writer/director Mike Flanagan didn’t even TRY to do a straight adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story. Instead, what he did was grab bits and pieces of dozens of DIFFERENT Poe stories and reassemble them into something totally original and unique. It was as if he had gotten his hands on ten different Edgar Allan Poe Lego kits, threw away the instructions, and used the bricks to create his own thing. It was fantastic, and is one of the projects I point to when I say that Flanagan is, in fact, the right man to adapt Stephen King’s The Dark Tower if anyone ever has the guts to give him the money to do it. But he didn’t do it by twisting or changing Poe’s work into something unrecognizable. Quite the opposite – he did something that was totally his and slipped in recognizable elements to help us see the larger picture. 

Definitely the weirdest Lego movie.

Then there’s the wild movie that actually gets its name from the process we’re talking about, Adaptation, which is ostensibly an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book The Orchid Thief. The book is a portrait of a horticulturalist who was arrested for poaching flowers, but that’s not the movie screenwriter Charlie Kaufman wrote. Instead, he wrote a movie about how he (Kaufman himself, as a character in the movie) struggled with adapting the book. He fictionalizes Orlean and John Leroche, the subject of the book, and creates a fictional twin brother for himself – both Charlie and “Donald” Kaufman are played by Nicolas Cage in one of those movies that earns him his reputation of doing kind of insane movies. Orlean herself was understandably taken aback when she read the script, but in more recent interviews has said she’s come around and now loves the movie, which was in no way a literal adaptation of her work but still successfully communicated the book’s themes of longing and obsession. Also there’s a car chase.

Most adaptations, I think, usually fall somewhere in-between the highly faithful Holes and the bonkers left turns of Adaptation. I always point to The Wizard of Oz here – most people’s version of Oz is the one we saw in 1939, the Judy Garland movie that has become a legitimate cultural classic. It’s a lovely movie, it’s beautifully filmed, and the music is timeless. As an adaptation, though, it’s mid. The film leaves out lots of sequences from the book, compresses two good witches into one (making Glinda seem like kind of a jerk for not telling Dorothy that the Ruby Slippers could send her home at the beginning, whereas in the original book those are two entirely different witches and the first apparently doesn’t know), and changes a few things – most egregiously the ending, which implies that Dorothy’s journey to Oz was just a dream. This is not at all suggested by the book, but the ending of the film has become so iconic that it’s inspired a thousand other “all just a dream” endings, which – speaking as a writer – is a crime I consider only slightly worse than lighting an orphanage full of puppies on fire and chaining the doors on your way out. But even then, the sense of wonder and awe that the film gives us DOES successfully communicate the wonder and awe of the book, and for that reason I can still love it. 

A good adaptation has the potential to breathe new life into an existing work. A bad one, though, has the power to choke a work to death. If it ever comes down to a choice between one or the other, I know which side I’m going to be on.

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’s not kidding about the theme from DuckTales, you know. As TV themes go, he dares you to name more of a banger.

Geek Punditry #77: Tooning In

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In 2024, there are an awful lot of us who don’t bother with live TV anymore. With the exception of sporting events (and increasingly even those) virtually every new show you could want to watch is available on at least one of the major streaming services, so the days of making sure that you’re home at 8 o’clock on Thursday so you don’t miss the new episode of Friends are long over. In my house, though, there is at least one exception to that rule: Saturday night. On Saturday night, unless there’s some pressing reason for us to be out of the house (or to watch a competing sporting event) the Petit TV is tuned to New Orleans’s WDSU Channel 6.2, the local MeTV affiliate, for the greatest TV event of the week: Svengoolie. Svengoolie is the last of the great horror hosts, the heir to the empires of Elvira, Chilly Billy Cardille, Vampira, and New Orleans’s own Morgus the Magnificent. Every Saturday Sven serves up a classic horror or sci-fi movie replete with his own brand of comedy and information, cracking jokes and telling us about the history of the film in a single breath. 

America’s greatest natural resource.

And it is because I watch Sven every time that it’s humanly possible that I knew about the announcement of another new network that hopes to lure viewers away from their streaming services and back to the antenna: MeTV Toons. Whereas the prime MeTV network serves up seven days of reruns of classic TV comedies, dramas, westerns, and the like, MeTV Toons – launching this Tuesday, June 25 – promises to do the same thing with classic animation. At launch, the network will provide a home to such luminaries as Looney Tunes, Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, Popeye and Pals, and even later shows from the 80s and 90s like The Smurfs, The Real Ghostbusters, Beetlejuice, Captain Planet, and many, many more. 

The long nightmare days of a world without Atom Ant will soon be over.

The response was shockingly positive. The network hasn’t even launched yet and there are already at least two Facebook fan groups dedicated to the station, one of which is approaching 5,000 members and the other topping 17,000 as of this writing. There’s a neat little community appearing here, and once you filter out the 14,000 members who have joined to ask if the network will be available in their area because they don’t know what Google is, there’s a lot of conversation ABOUT classic cartoons, the ones that will be on the network at launch, and what other pieces of animation history fans hope to see make an appearance in the future.

Of course, not everyone in the group is positive. That’s nearly impossible. Of all the different Facebook groups I’m a part of, there are only two that I’ve never known to have any sort of toxic presence: the Bandit group for Bluey fans sharing their journey through fatherhood I wrote about a few weeks ago, and fans of the Movie Crypt podcast, proving once again that horror movie fans are some of the kindest and most loving people you could ever meet in the real world. Some of the toxic comments in the MeTV Toons groups are complaining about the lineup, because the fact that they spend a half-hour a week showing Police Academy: The Animated Series is evidently a cardinal sin amongst a certain sect of the populace. Others are complaining because the network is not available in their area – which is a complaint I sympathize with, as for a while it didn’t look like we would get it in New Orleans at launch. I was flailing around the internet like a Dickensian waif until it was announced that it will be on Channel 41.6, which filled me with childlike glee. But even when I thought we weren’t gonna get it, I was smart enough to know that nobody in the Facebook group had any control over that and acting like everybody there broke into my house and crapped in my Cheerios wasn’t going to solve anything. 

But the complaint that really got my attention was the one guy who asked why, in this age where “everything is available streaming,” anybody would care about launching a new pre-programed broadcast network. I’m going to address the two major flaws in his logic, starting with the more obvious and then moving on to the one that has more personal meaning to me. 

First of all, let’s talk about the notion that “everything is available streaming.” The fact is, friends, that’s simply not true. As much as we might like it to be the case, there are large swaths of our television and cinematic history that are not legally available on any streaming service, or even for purchase digitally or physically. Sometimes it’s a rights issue. The original Muppet Babies cartoon from the 80s, for example, cannot legally be found anywhere, and likely never will, because that cartoon made extensive use of movie and TV clips from a half-century of Hollywood output. At the time, there was no thought behind it except for obtaining the rights for broadcast. Nobody was considering the afterlife of these shows. Now, in order to sell or stream an episode of Muppet Babies, the Walt Disney Entertainment Conglomatorium and Tiki Lounge would have to track down the rights holders of each and every movie or television clip ever used on the show to obtain permission to use it again, and in perpetuity. Disney clearly doesn’t think the effort it would take to do such a thing would be worth the likely return on their investment, and as much as I hate to say it, I think they’re probably right.

I dare you to find one historical injustice greater than the fact that this episode is lost to the world.

But Muppet Babies wouldn’t be on MeTV Toons anyway, since Disney has their own deal. What about the shows that will? Well, a quick glance shows that the Police Academy series isn’t available to stream anywhere. Captain Planet is available to PURCHASE from sites like Amazon or AppleTV, but not as part of any streaming subscription. And although there are limited (and often out-of-print) DVDs available for the likes of Underdog, Beetlejuice, and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, if you’re hoping to stream them on Netflix or any similar service, I’m afraid it’s a non-starter. And even for things that ARE available to stream – well, as we’ve seen in the last year, something that’s on Paramount+ today is not guaranteed to be there tomorrow. 

Obviously, some things are worth fighting for.

I’m not going to go through the entire MeTV Toons schedule, but you get the point. There are a LOT of things that aren’t available to stream, whether it’s because of rights or because the copyright owner doesn’t think it would be worth the expense to put it out there or for any of a thousand other reasons. A network like MeTV Toons will likely shift their lineup often, especially for shorter-run series (for example, Wacky Races is on the schedule, and that series ran for only 17 episodes), so this will be a chance to give a bit of life to lots of cartoons that otherwise have been forgotten. People love to be dismissive of animation because, historically, Americans have viewed it as something that’s “just for children.” The number of adults eager for MeTV Toons would seem to disagree – and even if it DIDN’T, so what? The Hobbit was written for children. So was The Wizard of Oz. The sublime Paddington movies were made for kids. That doesn’t make a creative endeavor invalid, or mean that it isn’t something worth preservation.

So let’s move on to the second assumption of this question: why a pre-programed broadcast network? Who cares? Why not put all of these shows on a streaming service? Hell, you could even make it an ad-supported service like Tubi, which reported viewer numbers recently in excess of a lot of the premiere, paid streamers like Disney+. That seems doable, doesn’t it?

Well, yeah, kinda. And were such a service to exist, I would be first in line to sign up for it. But don’t discount the allure of a pre-programmed schedule. Apps like PlutoTV and RokuTV have built up a huge following by streaming pre-programmed channels of entertainment, supported by advertising, for free. I’ve written before about how much I love PlutoTV so I won’t get in too deep, but the fact that I can just say, “I wanna watch Star Trek” without having a specific episode in mind, then have TWO PlutoTV channels to sate my hunger…well that’s damned appealing. 

“What do you want to watch? Kirk? Picard? Sisko? Janeway?”
“Yes.”

Pre-programmed TV is easy. Not mindless, mind you, but EASY. We live in a world where SOMETHING is demanding our judgment at every single moment of the day. It starts with something simple, like ordering coffee. But what kind of coffee do you want? What size? Hot or iced? Want a shot of flavoring in that? How about a shot of espresso? Whipped cream? Cherry on top? Paper straw that’s good for the environment but useless for drinking or plastic straw that actually functions as advertised but that will cause the barista to assume you murder turtles in your sleep? What name do you want on the cup? Any snacks? Okay, great, that completes your order, sir. Cash, card, or blood donation? Great. Want to leave a tip?

If we have taken something as simple as buying a cup of coffee and turned it into a process that requires a dozen decisions before the angry barista wearing a “Justice for Donatello” button gives you your order, what happens with something IMPORTANT, like buying a car or choosing a job? I’m a teacher, and there are studies that indicate the average teacher has to make 1,500 individual decisions over the course of an average day. Numerically, this is a higher number than most DOCTORS. (Although admittedly, the decisions doctors have to make are usually more intense than whether or not I’m going to let Jimmy go to the bathroom when I don’t believe he really has to go.) I cite this number any time my wife doesn’t understand why I’m begging HER to pick what we have for dinner, for God’s sake, I don’t care WHAT it is I just DON’T WANT TO DECIDE.

Ahem. Love you, baby.

The point is, apps like PlutoTV offer something that a typical streaming service does not: easy entertainment. If I don’t know exactly what I want to watch, I can spend hours scrolling through the choices on Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, Max, Shudder, the Criterion Channel, ESPN+, Screambox, BET+, Prime Video, Shout Factory, Freevee, AMC+, Disney-Minus, Nick at Night Terrors, and Cap’n Willie’s Streaming Emporium-o-rama before finally giving up and putting on a rerun of Gilligan’s Island. Streaming is GREAT if you already KNOW what you want to watch, but sometimes all you really want is to stop thinking and get in some comfort viewing. PlutoTV and RokuTV are built on this premise. It’s worked so well, in fact, that bigger streamers like Shudder, Prime Video, and Freevee have all added “channels” to their streaming model, and rumor has it that Disney+ is considering the same thing. Sure, it’s kind of weird that we abandoned cable for streaming only for us to want to turn streaming back into cable, but sometimes you’ve got to let something go before you realize how much it means to you.

This is what comes on when you activate your Fire stick in Hell.

The point is, MeTV Toons is another outlet for this kind of entertainment, and it’s promising us something that none of the other sources have offered, and by that I am of course referring to Peter Potamus.

“Hello.”

But there are plenty of other things on that network that I would LOVE to see show up in rotation. KNOV 41.6 starts airing on Tuesday, I intend to park my TV on that channel and leave it there.

At least until Saturday night rolls around, anyway. Ain’t nothing gonna take me away from Svengoolie. 

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 is hoping against hope that MeTV Toons will find a way to show The Racoons, because he has to find out if that show is as weird as he remembers or if he just had a fever dream that lasted for much of his childhood. 

Geek Punditry #76: Butts in the Seats

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My wife and I took our son to the movies this week. You may remember last year, when I wrote about the experience of taking then five-year-old Eddie to the movies for the first time, a wonderful day that, unfortunately, we’ve only been able to duplicate a handful of times since then. I love the movies, I love going to the movies, but we can’t do it as often as I’d like. This week was special, though. Every time my wife and I have taken Eddie to the movies, it’s been our idea. “Want to see Puss in Boots? Want to see Super Mario Brothers?” But not this time. No, for the first time in his life, Eddie asked us, of his own accord, to take him to see a SPECIFIC film, and there’s no way I was going to deny that request when he asked, “Can we go to The Garfield Movie?”

Am I supposed to say “No” to this face?

It was pretty good. It wasn’t great, of course. It wasn’t Up, but it wasn’t The Good Dinosaur either. There were a couple of good chuckles and some nice Easter Eggs as well. Most importantly, Eddie loved it, and that made the whole experience worthwhile. When we left the theater Wednesday, I went to post a picture of him in the theater (like parents are now legally obligated to do) only to see a shocking headline on Facebook: “Sony Pictures Acquires Alamo Drafthouse in Lifeline to Cinema Chain.” The headline stunned me. I knew the Alamo Drafthouse had been struggling – it shockingly shut down several locations just last week – but I didn’t know that it was up for sale. And for it to be sold to Sony was particularly jarring, because it’s not that long ago that this acquisition would have been illegal.

In the 1940s, the government banned movie studios from owning movie theaters on the grounds of preventing the rise of a monopoly. After all, in an era where a town may only have two or three theaters (if that), if those theaters were all owned by Universal Studios, then it would be pretty much impossible for anyone in that town to ever see a movie from Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, or anybody else. That law was repealed in 2020, and honestly, I get the reasoning. It made sense in the 40s, but the concerns that made it necessary don’t exist anymore. First of all, we no longer live in the era of single- or double-screen moviehouses, and there’s not a studio on the planet turning out movies fast enough to fill up a modern multiplex on its own. Universal was the highest-grossing studio in the world in 2023, and they released only 24 theatrical films. Can you imagine a modern movie theater surviving showing an average of two new movies a month?

Not even Disney could fill this behemoth alone.

The other thing that makes the fears of a monopoly a nonissue is that the greatest competitor of a movie theater is no longer another movie theater: it’s the world of streaming. Streaming was already a thing in 2020, before the Covid pandemic hit, but when movie theaters were forced to close studios and viewers alike turned to streaming as the primary alternative. Now studios are trying to bring people back to the theaters, but a huge percentage of the viewers have settled in on their couches and don’t want to get back up. The Alamo Drafthouse is by no means the only chain suffering. Theaters have been closing all over the place. Last week my family took a trip to Pittsburgh for our niece’s graduation, and my wife Erin noticed a new Busy Beaver hardware store had been built since the last time we were in town. A second later I realized that the Busy Beaver was occupying the former theater where Erin and I saw the last movie we went to before the pandemic on New Year’s Day in 2020. 

While I understand the convenience and value of the world of streaming, I am firm in my belief that there’s no better way to watch a movie than in a movie theater. I don’t want them to die. But in a world where their biggest threat is a thumb-sized device that everyone can plug into their television at home, how do we convince people to go back into a theater? How do we get them to pay for tickets and concessions and do battle with the jackass in the row in front of you who won’t turn off his phone and the jackass behind you who keeps kicking your chair?

My thoughts on this question have evolved several times, and they continue to do so. At one point, I thought that the best way for theaters to push forward is to make themselves more of an all-in-one destination. Don’t just serve popcorn, but have full menus, drinks, alcoholic beverages…take the old idea of “dinner and a movie” and put it in a single location. And make the films themselves events – don’t just show new movies, but have classics, retrospectives, festivals, host Q&As with actors and directors and writers. Make going to the movies an EVENT. It sounds great! Except that everything I just described is EXACTLY what made the Alamo Drafthouse chain a success in the first place, and clearly, that is no longer enough. Sure, this sort of thing caters to people like ME, people who ALREADY would rather be in a theater than sitting on the couch at home, but it doesn’t really do anything to draw in prospective viewers who are resistant to the idea. Even big chains like AMC have tried similar things, expanding their concessions from just popcorn and nachos to include things like burgers, salads, pizza, and chicken tenders. It hasn’t made enough of a difference. 

I mean…they’re not getting RID of popcorn, though, right?

There’s also the problem that…well…“Dinner and a movie” is the classic date night, but in my professional capacity as a high school English teacher, I can tell you that kids today aren’t doing that. I don’t think they even GO on “dates” anymore. A typical teenage relationship in 2024 follows this outline: first they “talk,” then they “hang out,” then one of them asks the other one to “go out,” and then one of them “cheats on” the other, and then they “break up” and repeat the cycle with somebody else. At no point are they required to actually go on a “date.” In fact, thanks to social media apps, they can go through the entire cycle without ever even being physically in the SAME ROOM, sometimes during the course of a single fourth-period gym class. So how do you convince THESE kids to go to a movie theater? 

“And kids, that’s how I hooked up with your mother.”

The answer – the ONLY answer – is to somehow make going to the movie theaters a positive experience that cannot be duplicated at home. Last summer we got a bright spot when the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon made it cool to go to a double-feature about the creation of the nuclear bomb and the life of a plastic doll. That was GREAT, and it made both movies hits. But we’re in a hitless world at the moment. Even the one-two punch of Furiosa and The Garfield Movie (or as I like to call it “Garfuriosa”) didn’t prevent Memorial Day Weekend 2024 from having the lowest box office in nearly three decades. This past weekend people were THRILLED to see Bad Boys: Ride or Die take in $56 million at the box office, which sounds great, but is it really THAT good, relatively speaking? The previous film in the franchise, which came out in January of 2020, opened with about $68 million. Then last year The Marvels opened with $47 million, only $9 million difference, and yet it was considered a dismal failure. Obviously, it’s relative: one is the latest installment in the multi-katrillion dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe, whereas the other is kind of a redemption project for Will Smith after the Slap Heard Round the World, but STILL. 

So what do we do to entice people to see a movie in a theater? Several things have been tried, to varying degrees of success. Merchandise, for example. After all, it’s what’s keeping touring rock bands alive now that CD sales have died. When we took Eddie to see The Garfield Movie on Wednesday, he IMMEDIATELY gravitated towards a souvenir concession bundle that included a popcorn bucket, collectible cup, and a plush Garfield doll. (Odie was also available, but come on.) Fortunately Eddie’s godmother gave him an AMC gift card a couple of months ago that went toward the bundle, because it cost as much as the two drinks and large popcorn his mom and dad split that same day. Although the price is an obvious concern, I like the idea of movie theater exclusive merchandise in principle. It appeals to the collectors and it gives you a reason to go to the theater. Popcorn buckets seem to currently be the most popular type of merch. The Dune Part 2 bucket was given a rather…suggestive design that turned out to be so infamous you HAVE to believe they did it deliberately. Not to be outdone, the upcoming Deadpool and Wolverine has similarly suggestive buckets that seem to mock the phenomenon, as befitting a Deadpool movie. Of course, you have other collectible buckets as well, such as a ghost trap for a Ghostbusters movie or an Optimus Prime bucket for TransFormers. It’s worth pointing out, of course, that they are severely stretching the definition of “bucket” by featuring full-on toys or models that are buckets only in that have a cavity theoretically large enough to hold a few pieces of popcorn, but the snack is really secondary, isn’t it?

“This is it, folks. This is how we’re gonna save cinema.”

Of course the problem with merch, as with anything else, is that if it proves too successful it will quickly get overdone. By the time the 97th Fast and Furious movie hits, people will be asking if they really WANT to eat popcorn out of Vin Diesel’s head. (Be fair, though, it IS more bucket-shaped than Optimus Prime.) Also, a lot of theaters will allow you to walk in and buy the merch without buying a ticket to see the movie, which satisfies the collector but rather defeats the purpose of using merch as a draw to get butts in the seats. 

At one point, theaters thought that going 3-D was going to be the carrot that lured in audiences. After all, you can’t watch a huge 3-D movie in your HOUSE, can you? Of course, we quickly learned two things. First: 3-D televisions were relatively easy to make so you COULD watch them in your house but, second, nobody actually wanted to watch 3-D at home. From there it didn’t take long to make people realize they didn’t actually want 3-D in theaters either. The studios loved 3-D because it was harder to pirate and created an excuse to charge more for a ticket, and while it hasn’t entirely gone away, the bloom is off the rose. 3-D has never had what I call a Wizard of Oz moment. In 1939, people who had never seen color film before had their minds blown when Judy Garland opened up the door to her farmhouse and bombarded them with the multicolor wonderland of the Munchkin City. If you watched the same movie on a black-and-white TV, you’d never know what the big deal was. The Wizard of Oz proved that color can make a movie better. Nothing, to my experience, has done the same for 3-D. In fact, with the glasses darkening the screen and lots of people suffering from headaches or eyestrain, in many ways 3-D makes going to the movies objectively worse.

Every 3-D movie ever made combined never came close to the impact of this moment.

What about getting rid of the things that make people turn away from movies? Easier said than done. High prices for tickets and concessions are a concern, of course, but when’s the last time you saw the price of ANYTHING actually go DOWN? Then there’s the frequent complaint about the glut of advertising before a movie starts. If you take your seat ten minutes before showtime, you’ll see an ad for Coca-Cola, then for Honda, then for the Fandango at Home service, then Rusty’s All-In-One Tire Salon and U-Pour-It Yogurt Emporium all before the trailers even begin. It absolutely can get annoying, but it’s also helping to pay the bills for the theater and preventing said ticket and concession prices from getting EVEN HIGHER than they already are. 

Okay, so the ads aren’t going anywhere…can something be done about the jerks in the movie theater with you, the ones who won’t shut up or turn off their phone? Several years ago AMC actually flirted with the idea of making some of their theaters “mobile friendly,” allowing texting and the like. Among the people who actually enjoy going to the movie theaters, this went over about as well as suggesting they sprinkle every third popcorn bucket with anthrax powder. Of course, if the idea is to corral everybody who’s going to be an asshole by texting in the theater into a single screen where they won’t bother anybody else, I see the merit in it. On the other hand, that would bring these people into contact with each other and increase the odds that they breed more assholes, assuming the relationship lasts longer than gym class. 

 What if we tried – and this is really going to blow people’s minds – what if we tried just making more movies that people want to watch? Look, I love superhero movies, and I don’t want them to go away, but not EVERYTHING has to be a life-or-death full-blown special effects spectacle set in a 20-film cinematic universe and starring people who make more per minute of screentime than you and your entire family will make in the next 30 years. Mid-level movies used to be a thing. When’s the last time there was a hit romantic comedy? An era-defining western? A non-animated family film that wasn’t made to satisfy the ego of some aging superstar trying to cling to relevance? 

In the 1980s, John Cusack made 472 different classic comedies that nobody would take a chance on in 2024.

People complain that Hollywood doesn’t have any new ideas, but that’s not true. The ideas are out there. The problem is that the studios (in other words, the people with the bank accounts) don’t want to take the risk on something that’s not a proven IP or that doesn’t have a huge built-in audience, so those risky, experimental movies just aren’t being made. We’ve got a sequel to Beetlejuice coming out this year, which is fine, but in the current cinematic environment it seems pretty unlikely that the original would ever be made today. Oddly enough, the only genre that seems immune to this is horror: there are still lots of horror movies made, lots of ORIGINAL horror movies made, and while they aren’t making Star Wars numbers at the box office, they’re doing okay. This is because horror movies are usually relatively cheap to make, but they’ve also got the most dedicated fan base of any specific genre in film. If the romcom fans came out for their movies the way horror fans do, Sandra Bullock could buy her own island by now.

This is one of those times when I’m just talking about a problem while recognizing that I don’t actually know what the solution is. I’ve got suggestions, of course, you just read over 2000 words worth of suggestions, but I don’t know whether any of them will actually WORK. That said, SOMETHING has to be done before the modern movie theater goes the way of the drive-in or vaudeville before it. The experience of sitting in a theater with a crowd of fans and enjoying a movie together is special to me, and I don’t want it to go away. I just want to make it better again. So if you’re one of the people who have given up on theaters, tell me why you quit and tell me what it would take to make you come back. If you’re with me, if you want to help theaters stay alive, then what lifelines would you recommend? How would you do it? Remember guys, there’s no wrong answer and it’s not stupid if it works. This is about ENCOURAGING discussion, not ENDING it. Join me, won’t you?

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. And he’s not kidding, give him all the suggestions you can think of. It will save him from having to come up with another column idea.

Geek Punditry #75: The Pixar Moment

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It isn’t that long ago that Pixar was perhaps the single most reliable name in family entertainment. One movie after another was not only a box office smash, but the recipient of nearly universal critical acclaim. The Toy Story films, The Incredibles, Wall-E, Up…there hasn’t been a track record of animated success like this one since the Disney Renaissance days. But over the last few years, these fortunes faltered and the one-time juggernaut has become almost a bit player in the House of Mouse. With Inside Out 2 coming out next week, the sequel to one of Pixar’s last truly great movies, there’s a chance to course correct. I have no idea if they’ll pull it off, but this seems like a good time to look back at the Golden age of Pixar in the hopes that they can find it again.

“Okay, guys, he’s talking about us, everybody line u– oh for…WHO LET THE DINOSAUR IN HERE?”

The best Pixar movies have always been allegories, presenting universal experiences in a way that kids can understand. The Toy Story movies, for instance, form a magnificent triptych about growing up using a cowboy toy as a surrogate for the audience. In the first movie, Cowboy Woody (Tom Hanks) is upset when his owner Andy gets a new, flashy Buzz Lightyear action figure (Tim Allen). Woody is forced to confront the fact that he’s no longer the center of Andy’s universe, a lesson that every child has to learn at some point or another. In Toy Story 2 Woody is shown evidence of his former glory, and ultimately must choose between chasing this sort of false promise of fame and the family he has worked so hard to cultivate. It may not be as universal a situation as the original, but it’s still a good message. The third is an outright masterpiece: Andy is all grown up and about to leave for college, and our old friends are mistakenly tossed into a donation bin. The movie is a beautiful story about growing up and letting go, but done in a way that doesn’t make it frightening for children, not to mention remarkably powerful for the grown-ups who went through it all with Andy in real time.

It’s rare that the third movie in a series is the best one. Pretty much just this and Police Academy, I guess.

Which is why Toy Story 4 was such a damned disappointment. After a crystalline metaphor for childhood, the fourth film loses all of that, having Woody abandon the rest of the toys largely because Bonnie – the child Andy bequeathed him to – doesn’t love him the way Andy did. There’s no true core here, nothing to connect the movie to that extended storyline about life that the first three made up. One could argue that it’s about letting go, except that part 3 already used that as its message, and was infinitely more effective.

Up is perhaps my favorite Pixar film. After the tragic loss of his wife, Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner) becomes a recluse, holing up in the house he shared with her and refusing to budge. When told he has no choice but to vacate his home by a land developer, he instead hooks up the house to a buttload of helium balloons and takes it with him. The premise is ludicrous, but the movie is sublime: a fable that is ultimately about the need to move forward after a loss. It is a reminder that we will all experience tragedy in our times, but we can’t allow that to stop us from living our lives. Lots of Pixar movies can make you cry at the end. Up is the only movie I’ve ever seen that moves me to tears in the FIRST ten minutes. 

The reason behind it may be tragic, but haven’t we all wished we could do this at some point or another?

If Up is my favorite Pixar movie, then Wall-E is a very close second. A pure science fiction film, the movie is set in a future in which the Earth became so uninhabitable that humanity was forced to flee into outer space. Over the centuries, one little robot who was tasked with cleaning up the garbage left behind has kept up with his assigned task, even though it seems an exercise in futility until a probe droid from one of the human ships returns to Earth to seek signs of life. Then the remarkable happens: Wall-E falls in love.

A better love story than Twilight, and it’s not even close.

The movie is unbearably sweet, but never in a sickening or saccharine way. When you watch the interaction between Wall-E and EVE (the robot from the human ship Axiom) there is never even a second when you doubt the utter sincerity of emotion put on display. Wall-E is in love. EVE falls in love with him as well. With all the debate surrounding AI at the moment, I find it pretty incredible that 16 years ago Pixar showed us an AI with an actual soul, which is what all of the AI “art” and “writing” being churned out by the likes of ChatGPT completely lacks. Pixar made us believe in Wall-E by making him – a tiny robot with almost no dialogue and a design that (let’s be honest here) was totally ripped off of Johnny 5 from the Short Circuit movies – into a hero that displayed the best parts of humanity. Wall-E is kind, curious, and utterly devoted, not just to EVE but also to his assigned task.

Let’s talk about that task, though, because that’s where the allegory in this film comes to light. Wall-E has spent centuries gathering up garbage, compressing it into cubes, and stacking up those cubes into increasingly elaborate structures. And yet the volume of garbage barely seems to have been dented and the reason for his task (to make the world livable for humans) is long gone, seemingly forever. Why is he doing it? What’s the point? This question is echoed later when we actually arrive on the human ship, the Axiom. On this ship, the surviving humans have their every need catered to by machines, and have turned into fat, sedentary blobs who can barely even walk, let alone show the ability to make a decision on their own. But this is their life, this is all they have ever known, and thus they keep going.

And then there’s the ship itself, controlled by a computer voiced by Sigourney Weaver and cleverly designed to evoke the treacherous HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. (There’s a unit in my 12th grade English class where I show clips of 2001, and I’m always impressed when a student picks up on the fact that Pixar was doing a shout-out here). The Axiom hides the evidence that Earth may again be capable of sustaining life and tries to keep her charges in outer space. Why? Because it doesn’t seem possible. Because her task is to keep the humans alive, and bringing them to Earth poses too great a risk. While the Axiom computer is ostensibly the movie’s villain she, like HAL 9000, isn’t strictly evil in the way that you think of a villain being evil. She is doing what she believes is best, and her actions are only viewed as villainous because we – as the audience – have personally seen the evidence that she is wrong. 

“If you’re gonna steal, steal from the best.” –Pixar’s official motto.

The point is, Wall-E, the Axiom, and the humans on board have all spent their existence in a state of unbroken trajectory, doing the same thing over and over again for no real purpose. Purpose is not found until they all collide and discover that there is a greater potential in the universe than what they have been experiencing. Again, this is the brilliant message of the film: don’t just keep doing something useless because it’s the way that it’s always been done. Find something better. 

And it actually makes you care about a cockroach. Come on, that’s a damned magic trick.

Finding Nemo is probably my son’s favorite Pixar movie, or at least the one he talks about the most, even pointing out fish at the aquarium we took him to last week and indicating which ones were Nemo and Dory. This movie (directed, like Wall-E, by Andrew Stanton) is about a young fish who is taken away from his overprotective father, captured by a scuba diver and brought to a tank in a dentist’s office. The dad, Marlin (Albert Brooks) teams up with a fish who suffers short-term memory loss (Ellen Degeneres) in a desperate chase across the ocean to bring his boy home. Here’s the remarkable thing about this movie: from the description, it sounds like it would be the story of a child learning to obey his parent and not venture out into dangerous territory. If anything, though, it’s the opposite. Nemo is the title character, but the character arc belongs to his father, Marlin, who has been so protective of Nemo since the catastrophe that took his wife and other children that he has not allowed the child to grow. It’s MARLIN who has to learn the lesson in this movie, that a parent has to be willing to let their child swim on their own eventually. (Like so many movies about parents and children, this hits me totally differently today than it did when it was first released in 2003.)

Then there’s Coco from 2017, a movie I will defend as being the last truly great Pixar film (hopefully just “so far”). Coco is about a young man who dreams of being a musician, but is part of a family that hates music because of how his great-grandfather abandoned the family to chase a musical dream. The boy, Miguel (Anthony Gonzales), winds up trapped in the Land of the Dead, and must gain the blessing of his own ancestors to return home…but they want him to give up music. Like many of Pixar’s best films (especially Toy Story 3), Coco features a brilliant twist that turns the movie on its ear, but ultimately, this story is about the toxicity of anger and how holding on to resentment hurts not only you, but everyone you love. And like Nemo, the idea of letting your children find their own way is very present in the film. Was Pixar even TRYING to make these movies for kids?

The two horsemen of “You gotta let your kids make their own choices.”

I’m not saying that everything Pixar has done since 2017 is awful. Onward was pretty good, and had a good message about family, but it wasn’t groundbreaking the way earlier Pixar films have been. Luca was okay…but when you’re the studio that gave us Wall-E, a movie that’s just “okay” is a huge step backwards. I liked both Soul and Elemental much more than Luca, but again, it felt like Pixar was covering a lot of the same ground that they’ve covered in the past. Then there’s stuff like the Toy Story spinoff Lightyear, ostensibly the movie that Toy Story’s Andy loved so much that he needed the action figure. This movie has pretty much NO emotional framework, being a sci-fi movie about alternate timelines and the military. There’s nothing wrong with any of the elements individually, but not only do they never come together, the conceit that this was the favorite film of an 8-year-old boy is patently absurd. 

But let’s get back to Inside Out, since that’s the film that sent me down this train of thought in the first place. Inside Out is about a young girl named Riley whose family moves from Minnesota to San Francisco, and all the accompanying emotional baggage that comes along with that sort of move. However, the majority of the film is actually set inside of Riley’s head, with those emotions themselves – or rather, anthropomorphic personifications of the emotions – being the stars of the film. Joy (Amy Poehler) has been the de facto leader of Riley’s emotions since birth, but when the trauma of the move hits her, Joy and Sadness (Phillis Smith) get jaunted out of their control room on an odyssey across Riley’s mindscape in an attempt to re-establish her core emotions. 

It’s not a coincidence that the face of Toxic Positivity has the voice of Leslie Knope.

It’s a cute film with cute characters. The animation – like even the worst of Pixar’s movies – is fantastic. But what really elevates this film is the way it so perfectly creates a framework for the struggles of a child dealing with a life-changing event. On her first day at a new school Riley seizes up and the “islands” that represent the parts of her personality begin to break down because she doesn’t know how to deal with the way she feels. Memories that previously had been only associated with Joy begin to be touched by Sadness – memories of friends and places that she had to leave behind, once a source of happiness, are now cause for sorrow as she realizes those places and people are lost. 

The incursion of Sadness into Joy’s memories is, at first, treated as a tragic (almost hostile) act, and Joy is willing to do whatever she has to do to make Riley go back to the way she was. The need for growth in this movie, then, is not ONLY something that Riley has to do, but a vital task for Joy herself. In the climax of the film, when Riley is planning to run away in a quest to return to Minnesota (a task that any terrified parent in the audience will recognize as being both hopeless and life-threateningly dangerous), it is not Joy who saves the day, but Sadness. Allowing for sadness to creep into the older emotions is NECESSARY for Riley to really process what has happened to her, something that Joy has to come to accept. In the end, the message of the film is that it’s impossible to be happy all the time, and that true mental health isn’t possible if you ignore your sadness, but only if you learn how to cope with it.

 Hell of a thesis for a “kids’ movie,” right?

How good is this movie? Real mental health professionals have taken to using it to help younger patients learn how to deal with their emotions. And how many times have you used the term “core memory?” Right? It’s part of the lexicon. But it wasn’t before 2015, because as far as anyone can tell, this is the movie that coined what has become a VERY common term. It’s a film that works PERFECTLY because it takes a process that every human being has to go through at some point in their lives and turns it into a fantasy that we can all understand. 

And yet despite all of that, it’s STILL really funny.

Early Pixar understood that great storytelling is great storytelling whether it’s the parents or the kids watching it. Modern Pixar has sort of lost that thread. I’m hoping that Inside Out 2 will help bring it back. The conceit this time is that Riley is getting older and, as such, her emotions are getting more complex, with the likes of Anxiety, Embarrassment, and Ennui showing up in headquarters for Joy and company to deal with. As someone with his own anxiety struggles, I would be THRILLED if there’s a Pixar movie that can help me figure out how to sort them out.

Pixar: Meet Anxiety!
Me: Thanks, but we’ve been living together since 1987.

But I am, I must admit, nervous. Pete Docter, the co-writer and director of the first film, isn’t involved this time around. Kelsey Mann directs this one, making his feature film debut. What’s more, the only member of the original writing team that’s back is Meg LeFauve, whose only non-Inside Out writing credit for Pixar is The Good Dinosaur, which you may recall as the first Pixar movie to actually flop. I am hoping very sincerely that we get Inside Out LeFauve. 

I am bolstered somewhat by the knowledge that, although Pixar’s feature film division has struggled in recent years, the magic HAS still been there in the form of their shorts. People forget about short film and what a difficult type of storytelling that actually is. I mean, it’s never easy to tell a truly great story, but it’s arguably even harder to do it in five minutes rather than an hour and a half. Go to your Disney+ account and look at some of the recent Pixar shorts like Burrow, Bao, or my personal favorite, Float. They’ve got that old Pixar magic. Last year even gave us the delightful Carl’s Date, a short about the grouchy old man from Up trying to enter a new stage of life. It was wonderful and bite-sized enough not to undercut the original film.

The magic is still there. Pixar just has to figure out how to bring it back to the big screen. I hope with all my heart that Inside Out 2 is the movie that pulls it off.

But if it isn’t, here’s hoping that the spark of Joy riding around in my own head is able to take it in stride.

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 didn’t even get around to talking about how The Incredibles is actually the best Fantastic Four movie ever made. Ah well, maybe next time.

Geek Punditry #74: Playing Favorites With Summer Part Two

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It’s time for part two of Playing Favorites with Summer, folks! In case you missed part one, when I do a “Playing Favorites” column I ask my pals on social media to suggest categories related to a given topic, then I share what I think are the best examples of each from the worlds of movies, TV, books, and comic books. In part one of “Playing Favorites With Summer,” I talked about my favorite summer road trip movies, coming of age movies, and beach movies, as well as some of the best summer reads for students. Let’s delve into part two, shall we?

Baseball Movies

Lew Beitz wanted to know what I think are some of the best baseball movies out there. Although baseball season starts in the spring and ends in the fall, almost any great baseball movie will also qualify as a summertime movie, since that’s when most of the season falls and, frankly, we’ve all pretty much decided that baseball is the official sport of summer. Last week I mentioned The Sandlot when I was writing about coming-of-age movies, so let’s just take that one as a given.

Beyond that, there are plenty of great baseball movies out there. A League of Their Own is one that frequently comes up, for example. Penny Marshall directed this 1992 film loosely based on the real story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a  women’s baseball league that was founded during World War II, as too many of the male baseball players had joined the fight against the Axis powers to put on a baseball season. The league folded in 1954 because AAGPBL was far too unwieldy an acronym to compete with MLB, but the league still has its legacy today, by which I mean this movie. The film stars Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Rosie O’Donnell, and Madonna as members of the Rockford Peaches, with Tom Hanks doing a great turn as a washed-up coach trying to redeem himself with the girls’ team. There’s something about sports movies that lends itself really well to the “dramedy,” that hybrid film too serious to call a pure comedy but too funny to be called a drama, and A League of Their Own is one of the all-time great examples of that.

It’s a shame Jeter never wore that uniform.

If you want something more dramatic, there are a pair of numeric “true stories” well worth watching. 42 is the story of Jackie Robinson, the man who famously broke the color barrier by becoming the first African American to play major league baseball. The late Chadwick Boseman is phenomenal as Robinson, bringing the same sort of strength and dignity that defined not only his most famous role as Marvel’s the Black Panther, but also defined the man himself. Also well worth watching is 61*, directed by Billy Crystal, about the year that Roger Maris (Barry Pepper) and Mickey Mantle (Thomas Jane) raced one another in an effort to beat Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. Crystal’s love of baseball is legendary, and he really puts every bit of that love on the screen in this film. 

You know what makes a great baseball movie, right? Math.

But my all-time favorite baseball movie, one that I have never grown even the slightest bit tired of, is the 1989 fantasy film Field of Dreams. Kevin Costner plays an Iowa farmer who is persuaded by a mysterious voice to turn his cornfield into a baseball diamond. Although it seems crazy to risk his livelihood in such a fashion, once the diamond is finished, it becomes populated by the spirits of lost baseball players, miraculously brought back into the game. It’s a beautiful story, with great performances by Amy Madigan, Burt Lancaster, Ray Liotta and James Earl Jones. However, I would be remiss not to point out that this movie is, at its heart, a story about a father and a son. That didn’t quite resonate with me when I was 12 years old. But like a lot of other stories that I’ve revisited since my own child was born, it hits differently now. I hope I don’t sound like a broken record with this kind of thing, but there’s an emotional component to parent/child stories that I don’t know that anyone can quite understand if they aren’t a parent themselves. I know I didn’t get it before 2017. I get it now, and it makes the movie all the better for it.  

If you show it on HBO 492 times a month in the early 90s, we will watch it.

Summer Annual Crossovers

Cameron James asked me what some of my favorite comic book “summer annual crossover events” were. Here’s a quick history lesson, for those of you who aren’t comic book fans. Comics, historically, have come out once a month, twelve times a year. Fairly early on, though, publishers started releasing giant sized special issues once a year, hence “Annual.” In the early days, these were often reprints of popular stories, but later they started to produce original stories, bigger stories. The first Amazing Spider-Man Annual, for example, was the issue where his greatest enemies first banded together as the Sinister Six. 

For a time in the late 80s and early 90s, Marvel and DC Comics both observed a tradition of using those annual editions – traditionally published throughout the summer – for a special crossover event, with one story that threaded throughout all of them. Marvel started this in 1988 with a storyline called The Evolutionary War, but I’ve always found their BEST summer annual storyline to be 1989’s Atlantis Attacks. In this story, a despotic ruler takes over the undersea kingdom of Atlantis and plans a war against the surface world – at first in secret, but later openly – as part of a master plan to resurrect the ancient Egyptian serpent god Set. The story serves as a sequel to several older Marvel stories in which Set had played a part, and in addition to the main story each issue had a back-up feature re-telling the story of Set with art by Mark Bagley, who would later become one of my favorite Spider-Man artists of all time. The story itself was really good, and the back-ups gave a lot of interesting insight into classic Marvel history that was pretty cool for a 12-year-old Blake who hadn’t been born yet when a lot of those stories were told.

The funny thing is that the world nearly ended because a bunch of people were fighting over a hat.

Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, DC followed suit in 1991 with their first – and, as it turned out best – annual event, Armageddon 2001. In a not-too-distant future, Matthew Ryder lives in a world controlled by a fascist dictator named Monarch who has shaped the world into his own Orwellian version of perfection. Nobody knows who Monarch is, although rumors persist that he was once one of Earth’s superheroes, before he killed the rest of them back in the year 2001. Ryder subjects himself to a time-travel experiment, gaining powers and taking the name Waverider. He travels back to the “present” of 1991, ten years before the rise of Monarch, to read the futures of DC’s heroes and stop the Monarch’s reign before it can happen.

He’s a 10 but he doesn’t use his power to see the future to tell you the Powerball numbers.

The practical result of this was that each issue told a story of a possible future for the hero, freeing the writers up to do wild stories free of the consequences of continuity. Like any crossover with lots of different writers taking part, the individual stories can be hit and miss, but I’ve always had a great affinity for certain ones in this crossover: the Flash retired and in the witness protection program, Batman incarcerated in Arkham Asylum, and Superman becoming President of the United States. The story was great, but the ending was derailed because somehow the identity of Monarch was leaked early. Fans found out that Monarch was going to be revealed as Captain Atom in the final issue of the story, and DC balked. It’s funny, since these days comic book publishers release spoilers to their OWN stories months in advance, but back in 1991 that was considered serious enough that they changed the ending, instead revealing Monarch to be Hank Hall, aka Hawk. The rationale here seemed to be that, since the comic Hawk starred in (Hawk and Dove) was being canceled anyway, no one would be upset. The problem, though, was that since Hawk wasn’t as popular as Captain Atom, it felt anticlimactic – not to mention confusing, since in the future that Waverider observed, Hawk was one of the few heroes shown to actively fight AGAINST Monarch, seeming to make it IMPOSSIBLE for him to be the despot. Every time I look back at that series I wonder what the original ending would have looked like.

The summer annual crossovers only lasted a few more years after that, although both DC and Marvel have brought them back every so often. With the modern compulsion to relaunch and renumber their titles every year and a half, though, it’s gotten pretty confusing to keep track of them all, and it’s just one of many things I’m going to fix when they all come to their senses and put me in charge of comics.

Summer Comedies

And finally, my wife Erin asked me to chime in with the best summer comedies. I knew I would have to save this for last because a lot of the best summer comedies also fall into one of the other categories that I’ve already covered. So let’s take it as a given that National Lampoon’s Vacation, Back to the Beach, The Sandlot, and A League of Their Own all belong on this list. 

That said, let’s get to some of the great summer comedies that haven’t already been covered in one of the other categories, shall we? And let’s start with the greatest summer comedy of all time, perhaps the greatest movie ever made, perhaps the yardstick against which all cinema – past, present, and future – shall invariably be measured. 

Project ALF.

The real Project ALF are the friends we made along the way.

My favorite summer comedy is, like many of the other movies on this list, a film that has been near and dear to me since my childhood: 1987’s Ernest Goes to Camp. I unironically and unapologetically love this movie. Jim Varney’s “Ernest” character, created originally as an ad pitchman that was hired out to assorted companies for regional commercials across much of the south (I remember him originally as a spokesman for the Louisiana Gas Service Company) has his first great adventure as a handyman at a summer camp who gets his shot at a dream job of being a camp counselor for a group of troubled young boys. The film has a lot of the staples of 80s comedy: the “slobs versus snobs” mentality, the bad guy is an evil land developer, and there’s a startling lack of supervision for the children in this story…but at the same time, Jim Varney is charming and endearing as the most iconic goofball with a heart of gold since Gomer Pyle. The world just didn’t deserve a star as bright as his, did it? 

If he had been the counselor at Crystal Lake, Jason wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Ernest has achieved a nice sort of renaissance in recent years. People sincerely love many of his movies (especially the Christmas and Halloween films), the camp where the movie was filmed hosts an annual Ernest Day celebration every summer, and a documentary about Jim Varney and Ernest is in the works. When the temperatures soar and school lets out, this is a movie that I have to return to just as surely as I watch him save Christmas in December and see him Scared Stupid in October. 

Summer camp, of course, serves as the setting for a lot of great comedies, such as Meatballs (the beginning of what I think of as the Bill Murray Summer Trilogy along with Caddyshack and What About Bob?), and last year’s indie darling Theater Camp, all of which are summer comedies I greatly enjoy. Of course, in the interest of fairness, I should point out that summer camps are also a popular setting for horror movies, like Sleepaway Camp, the Friday the 13th series, and the truly gruesome Wet Hot American Summer. 

Moving away from camp, though, let’s take a look at some other great summer comedies. When Erin proposed that I write about this category, she specifically asked if I’d ever seen the John Cusack movie One Crazy Summer. I told her that, no, I hadn’t. She acted shocked. I told her, “Yeah, well, you still haven’t seen The Rocketeer.” And she said, “Yes I have!” And I shot back, “No, you fell asleep while I was watching The Rocketeer, that doesn’t count.” And there’s your little glimpse into married life for this week, kids. 

But Erin, you’ll be happy to know that I DID watch your precious One Crazy Summer in preparation for this column, and I found it to be…okay. In this 1986 comedy, Cusack plays “Hoops” McCann, a fallen high school basketball star who takes off after graduation with his pal George (Joel Murray, meaning we’ve pulled off the Murray Hat Trick if you count Brian Doyle-Murray’s appearance in National Lampoon’s Vacation) to spend the summer on Nantucket Island. Hoops winds up getting involved in the efforts of a local girl (Demi Moore) to save a family home from some land developers, because in the 80s a full 87 percent of movie villains were land developers (as opposed to a mere 79 percent of villains in real life). 

Am I the only one who thought the sun in this poster was supposed to look like Jack Nicholson?

Like I said, I thought the movie was okay, and I imagine that I would have much warmer feelings for it if I had seen it in its intended context (that being 1986). The thing is, it doesn’t quite seem to know what it wants to be. There are moments, especially during the Bobcat Goldthwait antics, where it seems to be treading the line with the kind of surrealist slapstick we get in movies like Airplane! or History of the World Part I, but if that’s the intention it doesn’t quite go far ENOUGH. If you’re going for surreal comedy, it kind of needs to be over-the-top to land. In One Crazy Summer, though, the first real hint that it may be that kind of humor is when George denies being lazy just before the camera pulls pack to reveal a dead Christmas tree strapped to the roof of his car (this is in June, remember), then it’s several minutes before we get anything else that feels like that brand of comedy (some girls making faces at George’s sister who get stuck that way). If you’re trying to party with the Zuckers or Mel Brooks, you’ve gotta go all-in, and with all due respect to the great Savage Steve Holland, he doesn’t quite reach that peak.

Okay, this column is already getting super long, so let me throw out two more summer comedies that couldn’t be more different than each other. The first is a movie that STARTS as a summer camp film before leaving the camp for other family summer activities, the 1961 Disney classic The Parent Trap. Haley Mills plays a pair of identical girls who happen to meet at summer camp and figure out that they’re twin sisters, separated by their parents when they divorced years ago, and hatch a scheme to force them back together. The sheer cruelty of doing that to a pair of siblings aside, this is a movie I DID grow up watching over and over again, and it’s always held a warm place in my heart. Aside from growing up with a crush on Haley Mills despite the fact that she was some three decades too old for me, the movie features Maureen O’Hara at her loveliest as their mother, while Brian Keith does his best John Wayne impression. I am aware of the Lindsay Lohan remake, and while it has its good points, this is one of those times that nothing will ever conquer the original. 

Sassy sister films.

And finally, let’s bounce ahead to 2010 for the Alan Tudyk/Tyler Labine comedy Tucker and Dale Versus Evil. Tudyk and Labine play a pair of good-hearted rednecks on a camping trip who run into a pack of college kids on their own vacation. The guys in the college group, showing a shocking lack of genre awareness, mistakenly believe that Tucker and Dale are Wrong Turn-style psycho killers and go on the offensive, only to find themselves on the wrong side of the fight. The movie is kind of a horror/comedy, with Tudyk and Labine giving hilarious performances in a movie that upends the “Killer Hillbilly” subgenre of horror by turning the usual victims into the bad guys. Both of our stars are so sweet and charming that it’s incomprehensible anybody could think of them as dangerous, and you quickly find yourself rooting for the snobs to get their goofishly gory comeuppance. I dearly love this movie and, frankly, I don’t think it’s too late to give us a sequel. Tucker and Dale Save Christmas, anybody?

There are so many great summer movies out there. While writing this column, I wound up putting together a Letterboxd list (because that’s what I do), and I would welcome anyone to fill in any omissions I may have. Summer is long, my friends, and there’s plenty of time to spend indulging in the greats of cinema and comics while we wait for the chill of autumn to hit the air. Have a great summer, and I’ll see you next time when, once again, I decide it’s time to Play Favorites.

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. In response to his wife’s unspoken question, no, he hasn’t watched Better Off Dead yet, but he’ll try to get to it soon. Erin seemed to have a crush on young John Cusack that rivals Blake’s fondness for Haley Mills. 

Geek Punditry #73: Playing Favorites With Summer Part One

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We are, my friends, on the cusp of one of the most storied times of the year: summer! Time to hit the beach, go out on vacation, pull the kids out of school and spend a lot of time with a good book in your hand, longing for the days when such an activity would reward you with a personal pan pizza. And with the new season before us, we here at Geek Punditry Global Headquarters and Corrugated Cardboard Museum have decided to spend a couple of weeks PLAYING FAVORITES with summertime. For newcomers, Playing Favorites is that occasional feature in which I throw out a topic and ask you, the hive mind of social media, to suggest categories related to that topic so that we can discuss some of the best of the best. Let’s take a look at what you guys suggested in part one of this feature.

Beach Movies

Lew Beitz cut right to the chase and asked me for some of my favorite summer beach movies. This is the kind of thing we all think about when summer rolls around, isn’t it? Not just going to the beach, but entertainment regarding the beach. In the 60s it was an entire subgenre all of its own, with approximately 17,000 such films made during this decade starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello alone, sporting subtle titles such as Beach Blanket Bingo or How to Stuff a Wild Bikini. To be honest, I don’t really have a great affinity for those movies – they were well before my time and I didn’t really grow up with them. On the other hand, I do have a great deal of affection for Back to the Beach, the 1987 vehicle starring those two as a pair of midwestern parents who wind up returning to the beach of their youth. I think part of my appreciation for this bizarre little movie can be attributed to my mother, who was a fan of the original films and saw to it that this movie was on rotation in our house when I was young. But beyond that, there’s an inexplicably entertaining element to this movie. It was meta before meta was cool, acting not only as a sequel to the ol’ Frankie and Annette films, but as a parody of them as well. On the other hand, the humor IS pretty dated, with a lot of it requiring an awareness of old pop culture that modern audiences just won’t have. There are a lot of cameos from TV and movie stars of the 60s, for instance, and the joke about Annette’s obsession with peanut butter will just be baffling to anybody too young to remember that she did a series of commercials for Skippy back in the day. On the other hand, the scene of Pee-Wee Herman performing “Surfin’ Bird” is pretty timeless. 

If you don’t necessarily want your beach movies to be full of comedy, it’s hard to go wrong with Jaws. It seems sort of pointless to recap this movie – if you’ve seen it, you know that it’s great, and if you haven’t, no amount of pontificating from me is likely to change your mind. But the movie that made Steven Spielberg is practically a flawless film: tense, thrilling, and full of great characters and wonderful character moments. Even the things that may be technically flawed, such as the artificial nature of the shark, work to the movie’s advantage, as Spielberg was forced to minimize Bruce’s screen time and thereby making it far more effective than it possibly could have been if they put him on screen at every opportunity. It’s the film that made everybody afraid of the water! What better movie to get yourself into the mood for the beach?

These two movies should be all it takes to yet you to September.

Summer Reading

Rachel Ricks wants to know what I think are the best “summer reading books” for elementary, junior high, and high school. This is actually a tougher question than you would think, considering that I’m both a writer and a teacher, but the truth is I’m not 100 percent sure what it is the kids are reading these days. Not elementary or middle school, anyway. For my high schoolers, I see waves happen. There was a time where every kid was carrying a copy of Twilight, which gave way to The Fault in Our Stars, which in turn passed the torch to 13 Reasons Why. These days, the name I’m most likely to see from a kid who digs reading is Colleen Hoover. And the thing is, guys, while I am still a voracious reader (that streak I mentioned last week currently stands at 358 days) I haven’t made a huge effort to check out these particular books because…well…they just aren’t my type.

Anyway, the way Rachel phrased the question makes me think she’s speaking specifically about the sort of summer reading that is often required by schools: when a kid leaves at the beginning of summer with a list of books that they’re going to pretend to have read by the time they come back in the fall. Assigning a book to read is tough. You always know that a substantial portion of the class will do anything they possibly can to avoid actually having to crack the book open. And we’ve all heard those stories of people so discouraged by some required book that they give up on reading altogether. I can promise you, folks, that no teacher wants to assign a book that makes you never want to pick one up again.

I’m going to bow out of elementary school recommendations, as I have none. As far as middle school goes, you can’t go wrong with classics like The Giver or The Outsiders. And if you’re looking for a gateway drug to get a young reader into the world of Stephen King, I think that middle school is an appropriate age to introduce them to his fantasy (yes, fantasy) novel Eyes of the Dragon. I’m also a fan of a few more recent works for this age group, such as Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series or the other assorted spin-off series set in that same universe. 

If you haven’t read at least ONE of these books, then either you didn’t go to school in the United States, or you’re the reason Cliff Notes is a thing.

For your high schoolers, you shouldn’t be surprised to see The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird or Grapes of Wrath show up in their reading lists. And these are all good books, fundamental pieces of American literature and well worth reading. That said, these are books for people who are deeply into books already, and aren’t exactly casual reads. Try to hook a modern reader with things like The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, or Twinkle Twinkle, book one of the Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars trilogy, now available both in print and as an eBook from Amazon.com! 

(You had to know I was going to work that in somewhere.)

Road Trip Movies

Tim Stevens wants to know what I think are some of the best summer road trip movies. The road trip is a classic subgenre, usually in comedy, although there are some great road trip dramas or dramadies (Little Miss Sunshine for example) as well. When you think of a summer road trip, though, the thing that comes to mind is vacation movies, and the king of them all is National Lampoon’s Vacation. While this 1983 Chevy Chase film has become heavily overshadowed by its Christmas-themed threequel, I think people forget how much fun the original is. Clark Griswold (Chase, of course) and his wife Ellen (the grossly underrated Beverly D’Angelo) load the family into a station wagon to take a road trip out to the legendary Wallyworld Theme Park, and all hell breaks loose along the way. It’s not the first road trip movie, of course, but I think it is the platonic ideal of the road trip as a slapstick comedy. A lot of the jokes are very 80s and may not land that well with modern audiences, but I still enjoy the movie. Honorable mention goes to the sequel, European Vacation, in which Clark and Ellen take two entirely different children with the same names as the previous pair to tour the continent on another wacky road trip. 

Not as well known but highly entertaining is the 2014 movie Chef, which was written by, directed by, and starred Jon Favreau. Favruea plays Carl Casper, a famous chef (duh) who boils over at a food critic and loses his restaurant job. With his zest for life gone, Carl and his son Percy (Emjay Anthony) buy a food truck and set off across the country to try to infuse themselves with the savory parts of existence. Just thinking about movies for this list makes me realize it’s been way too long since I devoured Chef – it’s such a great movie. It has some of the same flavor as City Slickers and Hot Tub Time Machine, films about men who have been diced and minced by the world and inexplicably discover ways to relish life again. But the added ingredient of Casper’s relationship with his son helps to separate from those other films, baking up not only a road trip movie, but also a film about a family learning to love one another again. 

To be honest, though, I don’t know that John Leguizamo was the best choice to take over the Beverly D’Angelo role.

Summer Glau Movies

Duane Hower asked me what my favorite Summer Glau movie is. I see what you did there, Duane, very funny. I bet you thought I wouldn’t entertain your joke suggestion, didn’t you? Well, the joke is on you, my friend, because we all know the right answer to this question. The best movie ever starring Summer Glau? Clearly.

Project ALF.

Can you imagine what Melmacian tanlines look like?

Summer Coming-Of-Age Movies

Duane also asked what the best summer coming-of-age movies are. (Jeffrey Lee, I should note, asked for summer “life lesson” movies, and I think that’s pretty much the same thing, so I’m going to combine those two suggestions.) Coming-of-age, like road trips, is kind of a subgenre all of its own, one that often (but not always) crosses over with summer movies in that ol’ venn diagram in our heads. And once again, I think the best example is also the obvious one. Stand By Me, the 1986 movie directed by Rob Reiner and based on the novella “The Body” by Stephen King, is one of those films that sort of codifies the trope for all films that come afterwards. Four young boys (River Phoenix, Jerry O’Connell, Corey Feldman, and Wil Wheaton) discover that a missing boy from a nearby town has been found dead near a railroad track, but the discoverers don’t want to report the body because they found it while in a stolen car. The boys decide to set out on a hike to find the body on their own, and along the way, face the treacherous precipice between staying a kid and becoming an adult. This is the second time I’ve mentioned Stephen King in this week’s column, and in neither case was I talking about horror, have you noticed that? I mean yeah, the macguffin in this movie is a dead body, but that’s as close to being a scary movie as it gets. Instead, it’s a deep, meaningful, and powerful character study about these four boys that gives us glimpses of the men they will grow up to be. Reportedly, after Stephen King watched this movie he broke down in tears and told Reiner it was the best movie that had ever been made based on his work. (Admittedly, this was before Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, or The Green Mile, but that doesn’t change the fact that Stand By Me is an incredible film.)

The other great summer-specific coming of age movie, which again is a film that will probably say more about my age and the era of movies that was fundamental to me than anything else, is the 1993 movie The Sandlot. New kid in town Scotty Smalls (Tom Guiry) befriends a group of young boys that play a perpetual baseball game in a nearby sandlot. Smalls joins the game and becomes a member of the group during a summer that really feels authentic. While not nearly as serious or deep as Stand By Me, The Sandlot is a fun movie that feeds the sort of nostalgia that summer triggers in a lot of us, reminding us of bygone days without real responsibilities or anxieties that seem to be the fundamental building blocks of adult life.

One of these movies features a ghastly, bloodthirsty dog that terrorizes the boys of a small town. The other is based on a Stephen King story.

Okay, friends, I think that’s about enough for part one. I’ve got a few suggestions banked for part two of this segment next week but there’s room for more! If you’ve got an idea for a summertime topic from the worlds of comic books, movies, television, or books, I would LOVE to hear it! Post it in the comments, on the socials where you found the link to this column, or you can email it to me at info@blakempetit.com. See you next week, where we continue playing favorites!

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. His REAL favorite Summer Glau movie, of course, is Knights of Badassdom. He knows you all expected him to say Serenity, but Joe Lynch’s horror/comedy deserves more love. 

Geek Punditry #72: They Call it The Streak

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , ,

My streaks, as I write this, are in mortal danger.

Last night, a nasty storm ripped through my part of Louisiana. Although my family is fine, no one was hurt, and we didn’t suffer any real damage, our power was knocked out at about 11:30 pm and, as of right now, they’re not estimating that it will be returned to my street until about midnight. We live in a weird nexus of energy, right near the parish line but connected to the grid in the neighboring parish, so when weather strikes it is not at all uncommon for us to lose power while the street on the other side of us still has theirs. When I left the house to go to work this morning, I saw that not only was the street to the west still juiced up, but so was the eastern territory to which we are ostensibly connected. In other words, it is literally JUST my street that is out of power.

So my streaks are in trouble.

It’s weird how many of us have started to carve away little corners of our lives in deference to keeping a streak intact. I kind of blame Wordle. Wordle didn’t start the concept of a streak, of course, but I think that the rush of popularity when that particular game was new and fresh is what kickstarted it. If you guys recall, back in 2021 the then-new Wordle game added a function that allowed people to share their results on social media. Suddenly, it became the hot thing, and everybody’s Facebook wall looked like they were showing screenshots of a Tetris game that only had blocks in green, gray, and gold. That’s what made Wordle catch fire, but I think one of the things that has kept that fire burning is the concept of the “streak.” How many days in a row can you play? How many days in a row can you WIN? Falling asleep at night without at least having attempted the day’s Wordle is unthinkable to the devoted. 

My Wordle for the day looks like a duckie.

Then came the Wordle imitators – the ones specific to different TV shows, sports, genres. Similar daily games started to crop up that asked you to guess movie box office totals from the past. Other games were based on Major League Baseball or the NFL. Then the New York Times bought Wordle and added it to their own growing accumulation of word games (they’ve got to do something to get people interested, no one is buying newspapers anymore), and each of those individual games has, of course, its own streak counter. And the streak CANNOT BE BROKEN. If your spouse suddenly leaps from bed at 11:45 and sneaks off downstairs, don’t worry. They’re not cheating on you, they just remembered that they haven’t done today’s “Connections” puzzle.

Besides the NYT word games, I have two other game apps where I’ve got a streak going that I admit I feel nervous to allow to lapse. It’s ridiculous, of course. There’s no practical benefit to maintaining said streak. There’s no prize or reward, except for the occasional in-game bonus, that makes it worth your while to be certain there’s five minutes carved out every single day for this particular game. And yet somehow, the idea of intentionally walking away and abandoning my streak gives me the same kind of anxiety I would have if I realized that I hadn’t eaten that day. Worse, actually, because Lord knows I could afford to skip a meal or two, but if I skip a day of playing Disney Magic Kingdoms I might not unlock Zeus in the all-new Hercules mini-event. It’s a terrifying thought.

The most inaccurate thing in Disney history is portraying these two as loving parents.

Other streaks give you little, silly awards like badges that you can only view in the app or share on social media. It’s not like they give you an actual prize, an actual medal, an actual award. I can’t walk into a coffee shop and claim a discount by flashing my Spirit Pegasus badge (believe me, I’ve tried). So why do it?

Because streaks help breed consistency, and while things like the Disney game are admittedly silly, there are other areas of my life in which consistency has real value. 

There are two streaks I’m on that I’m actually proud of, both of which are terribly close to reaching a solid year and both of which I feel I’m better off for having maintained. The first is in the Beanstack app, an app that I was introduced to last year when my wife Erin signed up the entire family for the library’s summer reading program. That particular challenge does have a few physical prizes – we got umbrellas last year for signing up, for example. We were to use that app to log our reading each day. Perhaps it’s the part of me that’s terrified to lose a streak, but of the three of us in the household, I am easily the one who used it the most. And when last summer ended, I realized I could continue to use Beanstack to track my reading, even though the summer reading challenge was over. I’ve always been an avid reader, but that reading fell off considerably after my son was born. My fear of losing my Beanstack streak has brought it back to me in force. As of right now I’ve read at least a few minutes (usually more, of course) every day for 353 consecutive days. I have logged 69 separate books at 11,822 minutes of reading time spread across 451 sessions. At this rate, I may well turn out to be the Joey Chestnut of licensed Star Trek novels, and I’m okay with that.

With summer approaching again, yesterday Beanstack let me know that my local library is once again participating in the summer reading challenge and asked me if I wanted to sign up for it again. I certainly did. Later that day, I got a text from my wife (whose email address is the one attached to the family Beanstack account) asking why she just got an email informing her that I had earned a free minitool that I can pick up at any library branch any time after June 1. That moment of confusion on her part, in and of itself, made the whole challenge worthwhile.

The other streak I’ve maintained comes from a website (not an actual app, oddly enough) called 750 Words. This is a site used to track not your reading, but your writing, with the goal of logging a minimum of 750 words a day. And guys, I’m ecstatic to announce that as of this column you are currently reading, I’ve hit 363 consecutive days, just short of a year. A lot of those words were generated via these very Geek Punditry columns I give to you every Friday. Many of them, up until January of this year, were in the service of Little Stars. There have been other assorted short stories and pieces of writing effluvia, and then a while back I started the new novel I’m working on (which I occasionally will update you on in my handy dandy newsletter). And on some days when I just plain have no juice and no energy for anything in a creative vein, I keep a journal. But whatever the case, I’ve gone almost an entire year writing at least 750 words a day, and I am quite proud of that. And yeah, I give the credit for that to me not wanting to break my dang streak.

Who knew that this would turn out to be the all-time writing motivator?

So to these last two streaks, at least, I owe a debt of gratitude. And I’m glad I live in an era where, even if there’s no power to my laptop computer, I can turn out 750 words on a tablet or phone, because it’ll still count, dang it. And I’ll play my silly little games. And I’ll read, if I have to, in the dark, to make sure that streak doesn’t die.

Because sometimes it’s the little things that make it all count. 

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 is currently on a 17,067-day uninterrupted streak of not wearing Crocs, and he has no intention of stopping that any time soon.