Geek Punditry #33: You Joke Because You Love

August 18, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry back to the future, comedy, Galaxy Quest, Ghostbusters, Only Murders in the Building, Star Trek, Star Trek: Lower Decks, The Orville

Last week was the season finale of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, so when Thursday rolled around and I didn’t have a new installment of my favorite franchise waiting for me, I was not unlike that meme where the guy sits on a swing and pines away for something, probably football season. It was kind of pathetic to watch, actually. Just ask my wife.

“I wonder if Captain Pike’s hair misses me, too.”

But that sadness was mitigated by the fact that in just a few short weeks, on Sept. 7, the new season of Star Trek: Lower Decks is dropping. There was a time when Star Trek went off the air and we had no idea how long it would be before it returned to television (that time was called 2005 and the answer turned out to be 12 years, by the way), but in this day and age we’ve got more to work with. There’s been a semi-regular flow of Star Trek since Discovery first hit screens six years ago, and some of it has been magnificent: Prodigy, Strange New Worlds, season three of Picard…but the truth is, of all the “NuTrek” shows, none of them have made me as consistently joyful as Lower Decks.

A lot of fans were dismissive when Lower Decks was announced. An animated Star Trek? A comedy? A comedy produced by someone who worked on Rick and Morty? If you’re the kind of Trekkie who wants the show to lean more on the dramatic side, it kind of sounded like a recipe for disaster. But every Trek series has had plenty of lighthearted moments, and even the occasional full-blown comedic episode (unless you’re trying to tell me we were supposed to take “Spock’s Brain” seriously), so I was happy to give it a chance.

I couldn’t be more satisfied with the results. I went in expecting to see a parody of Star Trek, but the truth is that isn’t really what Lower Decks is. It’s funny, absolutely. The characters are hilarious and the performances by the main cast are magnificent. But it’s not the comedy alone that makes Lower Decks work – what really makes it land is the fact that if you take away the jokes, you’re still left with plots that would work solidly on a more mainstream science fiction series. The season 2 finale is a great example: when a more “important” ship than the USS Cerritos is endangered on a first contact mission, our crew has to step up and save the day. Ultimately, they discover the only way to traverse a dangerous asteroid field is to strip off the outer hull of their ship and pilot through manually. (Trust me, it makes sense in context.) The scenes of the crew coming together to dismantle their own vessel and then maneuver through the field are as tense and action-packed as Trek at its best, and still funny to boot.

Many fans were won over by the first season. Not everyone, of course. There are still some who argue that Lower Decks lacks in actual comedy, and is just a rapid-fire recitation of references to other Trek series. While it’s true that the show is very reference-heavy, to say that this is the only source of comedy is untrue and reductive. So much of what makes it funny it comes from the characters, and it is the characters that make the show worth watching. The references are fun, however, and I think it’s the references that prove something that I sincerely believe to be true: the best parodies are made by people who honestly and sincerely love the thing they’re making fun of.

Mike McMahan, the creator and showrunner of Lower Decks, was a writer on several animated shows, but he came onto the radar of the Trek producers via – of all things – a Twitter account in which he posted synopses for episodes of a fictional eighth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The account became a hit and he eventually rolled that into writing an officially-licensed book. Warped: An Engaging Guide to the Never-Aired 8th Season was a hilarious look at what might have been but, more importantly, the writing showed that McMahan truly understood the show, the characters, and their universe, and that was what he built the comedy on. When he got the chance to do the same with Lower Decks, it was as engaging and funny as anyone could have hoped for.

It should be noted that McMahan wasn’t the first writer to do that with Star Trek. By my count, he was at least the fourth. There are two previous projects that also take loving jabs at Trek while still working as science fiction in their own right. David Howard and Robert Gordon’s script for Galaxy Quest transports a bunch of Trek-esque actors into a Trek-stye adventure, and Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville started out as a comedic take on Trek tropes and quickly evolved into a sci-fi series as deep and powerful as Trek at its best, albeit with a few more jokes. In both cases, these were projects envisioned by creators who had a deep love of the franchise and wanted to pay tribute to it in their own way.

“No, it’s not a *Star Trek* knock-off. Because our captain wears blue and our doctor wears green, that’s why.”

This is the thing that needs to be understood: something can be a great comedy and still be a great example of the kind of story that’s being told. It’s always frustrated me how the Academy Awards typically ignores comedy in most of the major categories, as if it is somehow less artful than drama. It’s only slightly better with awards shows like the Golden Globes or the Emmys, which separate comedies into their own category, with a subtle implication that they don’t deserve to compete against the “real” movies. There’s a sort of snobbish attitude that thinks of comedy as “lower” art. That’s ridiculous, of course. Comedy has existed since the birth of drama. Shakespeare’s tragedies may get more play in schools, but I’ll argue that Much Ado About Nothing is a vastly superior play to Romeo and Juliet any day of the week. And as far as the acting part goes, giving a great comedic performance is a skill set that not everyone has. All acting is about building and releasing tension, but the demands of comedy require you to land the release in a way that often far more difficult than drama. Think about how many great comedic performers have gone on to give great dramatic performances. Off the top of my head there was Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon, Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society, and Carol Burnett put forth a fantastic performance in the final season of Better Call Saul. Speaking of which, the “Gilliamverse” duo of Bob Odenkirk in Saul and Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad pretty much embody this concept. On the converse, how many actors who became known as great dramatists then went on to give fantastic comedic performances? I’m sure the list exists, but the flip side is much more extensive. Go ahead, tell me Orson Welles’s best-known comedic performance. I’ll wait.

Great comedies are often great examples of the stories that they are supposedly parodying. Two of the most formative movies of my childhood, two of the movies that are probably responsible for shaping my sense of storytelling into what it is today, fall into this category. Ghostbusters began with Dan Aykroyd’s personal desire to tell a story about the paranormal. Although the script evolved and changed considerably from his original vision by the time it was on the screen, it was a fantastic story with some genuinely creepy moments buoyed up by some of the greatest comedic performances ever put to screen. The next year, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis gave us Back to the Future, a movie that’s effective as a science fiction film, but even more impressive as a relationship comedy about teenagers in love and a son rediscovering his parents. These movies are classics and are pretty much universally recognized as such. (Heck, as of this writing, Back to the Future still sits atop my personal “Perfect Movies” poll and has done so for over a year.)

Nor is this only true in film and television. Look at Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its assorted sequels. Begun as a radio drama before becoming part of the modern literary canon, Adams uses science fiction and humor hand-in-hand to satirize any number of targets. Terry Pratchett did the same thing with the fantasy genre in his Discworld novels – parodies of fantasy tropes, to be certain, but at the same time marvelous examples of a fully-realized fantasy world that had a lot of interesting things to say about the actual world we all live in most of the time.

Recently I found a new member for this club of parodies that also perfectly encapsulate the thing that they’re parodying: the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building. I mentioned this show a few weeks ago when discussing shows I haven’t watched yet that I would try to get through during the (still ongoing) writer’s and actor’s strikes in Hollywood. Since then, I’ve made it through the first two seasons and begun the third, and I’m frankly angry at myself for not having watched it before. If you’re unfamiliar, the show stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez as neighbors in an enormous Manhattan apartment building. Initially strangers to one another, they bond over their mutual love of a true crime podcast. When a murder takes place in their own building, they decide to launch a podcast of their own while they try to solve it.

“That Petit guy is talking about us again. Get the murder.”

The show is a deft send-up of podcasts like Serial, with Tina Fey appearing in several episodes as an obvious stand-in for Serial’s host, Sarah Koenig. While gently mocking the format, it also occasionally says some serious things about the nature of an audience that draws entertainment from the death and suffering of real people (which, let’s face it, is what we all do when we “enjoy” the true crime genre). There are dark moments as well, as the pasts of each character are slowly opened up and revealed to the viewer throughout the course of the investigation. What’s more, the show isn’t afraid to get experimental, as we see in the format-breaking episode seven, which tells the story in a way few shows would have the guts to do. It’s also not afraid to tug at the heartstrings, as we see in season two when several episodes revolve around the concept of fatherhood and what it means, which is something that cuts into me personally pretty deeply.

In the midst of all this, though, there are two things that absolutely have to be said:

The show is outrageously funny.
Each season so far has been a fantastically-structured mystery in its own right.

In their mocking of the true crime culture, show creators Steve Martin and John Hoffman have managed to make one of the most engaging TV mysteries I’ve ever watched, laying out clues, unraveling threads, and sending us chasing after red herrings with the aplomb of Arthur Conan Doyle or Alfred Hitchcock. Even if it wasn’t funny, it would still be a good mystery, and that’s what really matters in regards to my grander point.

Good comedy is damned hard to do, and it deserves respect. And when that comedy lands, it’s not just funny, it’s transformative. It’s not fair to say Only Murders is a great mystery “for a comedy,” to call Lower Decks a good Trek show “for a comedy,” to say that Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are solid fantasy “for a comedy.” They just are. They’re great examples of their genres that also happen to be comedies.

When we can get everybody to wrap their brains around the premise, maybe the people who make us laugh will finally be able to get their due.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Hey, he hasn’t used Star Trek as a main topic in this column for six weeks now, he deserved this one.

Geek Punditry #32: We All Need a Little Mayhem

August 11, 2023August 11, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Disney, Muppet Mayhem, Muppets

If you’re at all surprised to learn that I’m a fan of the Muppets, I can only assume that you haven’t paid the slightest attention to anything I’ve ever written or said or performed or eaten in the entire expanse of the universe, because the Muppets are straight-up delightful. They’re a magical creation. Jim Henson and company willed into existence a troupe of actors of such wild, chaotic, and lovely clashing personalities that virtually any kind of story can and has been told with them over the years. All of that makes it even more sad how, since the Muppets were purchased by the Walt Disney Corporation and Shadow Government and Tire Emporium back in 2004, they have consistently shown an inability to use these characters properly.

🎶”Look for us! Where’d we go? Disney did us wrong…”🎶

That’s not to say there haven’t been high points. In 2011 we got The Muppets, a new film in which Kermit and the crew were brought back together after an unspecified time apart to save their home, the Muppet Theater. The movie was funny, clever, and full of fantastic music, which is pretty much all you want from the Muppets. It was a great film, and it felt like Kermit the Frog and Company were back on track.

But the train derailed quickly. In 2014 we got Muppets Most Wanted, a sequel that failed to capture the magic of the previous film. The next year the gang returned to television in a new series (also just called The Muppets) which was an Office-style mockumentary series starring our favorite felt-covered friends. The show was weak at first, and although it improved quite a bit over the course of its season, it was too little too late, and the second season was never ordered. Since then appearances of the Muppets have been sparse: a few web shorts, some appearances in commercials, and a Disney+ Halloween special, Muppets Haunted Mansion, which wasn’t bad. But it wasn’t great either. What was going on? Why was it so damned hard for Disney to figure out what to do with these characters?

The Muppets are an incredibly versatile troupe. They’re musical comedians, sure, but that’s not all they are. Each of the main Muppets has spent decades being refined and shaped, given a life and a personality that belies their existence as scraps of cloth and foam rubber. They have become iconic figures, as well-known and recognizable in pop culture as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, but nobody was doing anything worthwhile with the characters…until earlier this year, that is. A few months ago, Disney+ dropped Muppets Mayhem, a brilliant miniseries that gave the Muppets a showcase they’ve been sorely lacking for years and, moreso, it gives us a blueprint for what Disney should do with these characters moving forward.

Muppets Mayhem is the first Muppets production in which the spotlight is shined not on Kermit, Piggy, Fozzie, or Gonzo, but on the Muppet Show’s house band, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem. Although those characters have been around just as long as the rest of the crew, they’ve never really been developed much beyond some stereotypes: Dr. Teeth was a parody of Louisiana musical legend Dr. John, Janice was a cliched hippie chick, Zoot was that zoned-out musician who probably got his hands on a few too many family unfriendly-substances back in the day, Lips was the guy who mumbles, Floyd Pepper was the closest thing this group had to a straight man, and Animal was…well…Animal. Muppets Mayhem starts here, but it goes so much further than that.

In this show, an aspiring record executive (played by Lilly Singh) finds out that the Mayhem owes her struggling company an album and sets out to spur them to get in the recording studio and make good on their contract. This kicks off a ten-episode quest of discovery for both Lilly’s Nora character and each member of the band itself. Over the course of the series every one of the Mayhem gets a chance to shine, is given unexpected backstory, and is developed into a character as rich and meaningful as the A-list Muppets we’ve been following for years.

So why, after being hit and miss for so long, did Disney knock it out of the park with Muppets Mayhem? For the answer to that, I think we need to look back at their last solid success, The Muppets. That film was written by Jason Segal and Nichollas Stoller, who spent years pitching on it and working on the script, even pulling in help from the Pixar storytelling brain trust (which, in these halcyon days before The Good Dinosaur, had never failed at making a successful film). The story these two conceived took the Muppets back to their roots, to the Muppet Theater, where they had to band together and put on a smash hit show to raise the money to save their home. It’s such an overdone premise, but it’s absolutely perfect for the Muppets, because of who and what the Muppets actually are.

Jim Henson created and recreated his characters over and over again over a span of over twenty years before the characters gelled into their final form in 1976 with The Muppet Show. The premise, if you’re one of the two people on the planet who’ve never seen it, was that Kermit and his friends were old-fashioned Vaudeville-style performers, putting on a nightly show with the help of some celebrity guest stars. Although earnest and sincere, most of the Muppets brought chaos in their wake, and it was up to Kermit to try to keep it all together. Most of the great Muppet productions since then have run with that premise in one of two ways. Either it’s a story about the Muppets and their performing troupe (such as The Muppet Movie and The Muppets Take Manhattan), or it is a story being told by the “actors” in the Muppet troupe (which explains the meta-humor in The Great Muppet Caper and in most of their adaptations of other stories, such as The Muppet Christmas Carol and The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz). The further we get from that formula, the weaker the Muppets get.

Segal and Stoller understood that. What’s more, they showed a true reverence for the characters that was clear in every word of dialogue and every note of music. After nailing it with one film, though, Segal stepped aside for Muppets Most Wanted…which promptly fell apart since it was about Kermit’s evil twin and a crime caper. It’s not that a crime caper doesn’t work with the Muppets (see the aforementioned Great Muppet Caper), it’s that the attitude behind the movie was essentially, “Well, we don’t quite know what to do next, so let’s try to do The Great Muppet Caper again.”

“*Muppets Most Wanted* is my favorite Muppet movie!”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it’s the LAST one!”
(Old man laughing)

The Muppets floundered again until Muppets Mayhem, which was co-created and produced by Adam F. Goldberg. Goldberg is probably best known as the creator of the sitcom based on his own family and upbringing in the 1980s, The Goldbergs, a show which at its best took a loving and reverential eye to the pop culture of Goldberg’s childhood and used it to tell stories of an often dysfunctional but ultimately loving family, and if that isn’t exactly the primary qualification for anybody trying to tell a story about the Muppets I don’t know what is. Goldberg, like Segal, lived his formative years at a time when the Muppets were at their peak, and brought the obvious love for the characters into what he did in Muppets Mayhem by expanding on their world, not denigrating it.

This is the secret, Disney, and any other company out there sitting on a classic IP and trying to figure out what to do with it. Admittedly, it can be difficult to decide what to do with older characters when the goal is to introduce them to a new audience. A lot of kids these days would reject anything that their parents pushed on them as a reflex action. And sure, times have changed – a modern child who watches The Muppet Show will have no context for the vaudevillian background of the characters.

But the thing is, neither did we. Those of us who grew up with the Muppets in that first go-around (Goldberg, Segal, myself – you know, the first three names you would think of) didn’t have any exposure to Vaudeville. We didn’t care. It was as irrelevant to us at the time as the fact that Bugs Bunny was doing impressions of Clark Gable and Peter Lorre. We didn’t know and we didn’t care. We didn’t know that Fred Flintstone was a total knock-off of Ralph Kramden, and guess what? We didn’t care. Because these classic characters are still entertaining even divorced from their original context.

So throwing out the context argument, what we’re left with is figuring out what it is people love about the characters even with the context gone. With the Muppets, there are two essential elements: the performing element and the family element. Every great Muppet production has served one or the other. Most of them have served both, but most Disney Muppet projects have lacked that. A Muppets Christmas: Letters to Santa and Muppets Haunted Mansion both told stories with the performing bit in the background at best. Letters to Santa showed a team of Muppets banding together, but it was in service of a new character that we’d never seen before (or since) and only were supposed to care about because Gonzo cares about her. Not that that’s a bad reason, but in a one-hour special, it’s not really enough. Haunted Mansion, on the other hand, showcases Gonzo and Rizzo invited to a “fear challenge” at the – well hell, I don’t have to explain where it happened. The closest thing to a family storyline here is when we discover Gonzo’s greatest fear is losing his friends, which again is perplexing, since there’s nothing in decades of Muppets lore that would indicate this is a sticking point for him.

Sure, it’s filled with the restless spirits of the dead, but they DO give out full-size candy bars.

Too many studios try to reboot a classic franchise by stripping it down to the name only and making it “edgy” or “controversial.” The prevailing attitude seems to be that they can’t win the kids, so instead they’ll go for the crowd who enjoys things “ironically” by mocking fans who had the audacity to care about the characters in the first place. (The thesis of Geek Punditry is to explore those things we love, so I won’t get too much into the shows and movies that have committed this sort of cinematic crime, but I will say that the most recent offender was Very Egregiously Lascivious and Mostly Abhorrent.) I simply don’t understand the mindset that says the way to make an old concept profitable is to attack the people who loved it in the first place, and yet we see that happen again and again.

That’s why Muppets Mayhem was so delightful, so charming, and so wonderfully surprising. It was a story about a group of performers who are, in fact, family. It was about bringing new people into that family. It didn’t just have great music, it was about great music. It made us take a look at characters we already loved and, in the process, come to love them even more. And when it went meta – and boy, did it go meta – it never did so at the expense of the people who have watched and loved them for nearly 50 years.

Shockingly, they were good just because they were…GOOD.

There has not been any announcement about a second season of Mayhem either way – neither confirming it or saying that it won’t be moving forward. Streaming services like Disney+ are notoriously secretive with their numbers, but the show hasn’t been yanked off as a tax write-off yet, so it can’t be doing that badly. If there is no more, well, the ten-episode run is perfectly self-contained and ends in a very satisfying way. But I hope it doesn’t. I hope we see more of the Mayhem, more of Nora and Moog, and more unexpected and hilarious celebrity guest stars in a second season. Even if we don’t, though, I’m happy that we got what we did, and when Disney sits down once again to decide where to go with the characters in the Muppet studio, I hope they take a look at what they just did and realize that we all need a little mayhem once in a while.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. “Which Muppet are you?” was the question long before Sex and the City fans tried to co-opt the concept, you know. Which Muppet are you? Blake is usually a Fozzie.

Geek Punditry #31: Cross-Evolution

August 4, 2023August 4, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry comic books, Contest of Champions, Crisis on Infinite Earths, crossovers, DC Comics, Final Crisis, Knight Terrors, Legion of Super-Heroes, Marvel Comics, Secret Wars, superman, Unity, Valiant Comics

The DC Universe is asleep right now.

This is not a commentary on the state of their cinematic universe. I’m talking about the good ol’ comic book DCU, which is in the second half of their two-month Knight Terrors event. A new villain calling himself Insomnia wants to get his hands on the Nightmare Stone, a powerful artifact that used to belong to the Justice League’s old enemy Dr. Destiny. Insomnia believes that Doc Dee has hidden the stone inside the dreams of somebody in the DCU, so he’s made everyone on Earth fall asleep, allowing him to search for it. It’s been an interesting story, diving into the dreams of DC’s greatest heroes and villains and getting a taste of their worst fears. (You should see what the Joker is afraid of.) Most importantly, though, Knight Terrors is the latest iteration of that thing that we comic book nerds both adore and fear: the crossover event.

The real *Knight Terrors* are the friends we made along the way.

Most comic historians will agree that the “shared universe” conceit, in which most or all of the characters published by the same company are said to co-exist, can be traced back to 1940 and the first appearance of the Justice Society of America in All-Star Comics #3. In the early days, the JSA was little more than a framing device, in which the heroes would gather around a table and tell each other tales of their exploits, but eventually the stories would evolve to the point where they were having adventures together. Guest appearances in each other’s books became common, more teams were formed, and eventually both Marvel and DC Comics had sprawling worlds of interconnected characters. In a way, it’s baffling that it took 42 years for the next logical step in storytelling to happen: mashing everybody in the universe into a single story. That story was 1982’s Contest of Champions, a three-issue miniseries in which the Marvel Comics all-stars were abducted by a couple of the Elders of the Universe and forced to battle each other. It was a completely self-contained story that didn’t touch on any other book, but it was considered a precursor for the next step: the 12-issue Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars in 1984. This time, we saw many of the Marvel heroes – in their own titles – encounter a mysterious device that whisked them away to parts unknown. They returned in the next issue after an absence of some weeks, many of them with changes. The maxiseries told the story of what happened to them in-between those two points.

“Okay, guys, let’s show ’em how it’s done.”

DC got into the game in 1985 with Crisis on Infinite Earths, and that’s when things really got wild. Contest of Champions and Secret Wars were both relatively self-contained stories. Although Secret Wars had repercussions for the regular series of the assorted characters (Spider-Man’s black costume, which would eventually become Venom; She-Hulk leaving the Avengers for the Fantastic Four; etc.) the story itself stayed in those 12 issues. In Crisis on Infinite Earths, for the first time, the story spilled out into the other comics being published by DC. While the heroes of the multiverse struggled to keep it together in the main series, most of the other books published by the company had side-stories that showed how the stars of that title were dealing with the collapse of reality. Green Lantern dealt with the destruction of an entire sector of space, DC Comics Presents booted Superman to an alternate reality where he met a young version of himself, and in Wonder Woman’s title she joined with the gods of Olympus to protect her home.

Since then, the crossover has evolved again and again, with different forms that each have their own pros and cons. In some cases, a story in a single title or family of titles grew big enough that it only made sense to show the effects on other books. In Marvel’s Inferno (1989), the X-Men family of comics told the story of a demonic invasion of New York, and since most of Marvel’s heroes lived in New York it only made sense to show how Spider-Man, the Avengers, and the Fantastic Four were dealing with it as well. Later that same year we got Acts of Vengeance, a story wherein Loki plotted to destroy the Avengers by manipulating the Marvel Universe’s villains into attacking different heroes than those they usually fought. Yeah, I’m not entirely sure how that was supposed to work either, but it was a fun story: Spider-Man dealt with the X-Men’s enemy Magneto, while Daredevil’s foe Typhoid Mary set her sights on the Power Pack, and so forth. These kinds of crossovers work out fairly well, as it’s easy for readers to ignore any titles they don’t want to read. On the other hand, if they aren’t reading the core titles in which the story is taking place, they may be confused as to what is going on.

However, from a company standpoint, there’s one major problem with crossovers like that: there’s no extra books being sold. So the next level of crossover has a main miniseries, with stories touching on the heroes across the DCU. After the original Crisis, DC made this an almost-annual format for many years, with the likes of Legends, Millennium, Invasion!, Final Night, Genesis, and Underworld Unleashed all following suit. Marvel did it several times as well, with Secret Wars II, Infinity Gauntlet, and its assorted sequels. This is the kind of crossover I grew up with, and in many ways it’s still my favorite. The fact that it touches on the ongoing comics gives the story weight and makes it feel like it “matters” more than if the book is totally self-contained, and for the most part, you still only have to read the main title and any crossovers that you want, pushing aside those that you don’t.

Later crossovers like Civil War and Fear Itself would expand on this concept: the main miniseries, crossovers into the ongoing books, and assorted miniseries and one-shots that spin off of the main book. This expands the story and allows the storytellers to touch on more elements of the event, and of course, it gives the publisher more books they can potentially sell. Publishers love that. Sometimes they love it so much that they’ll do a spinoff miniseries even if the characters involved currently have an ongoing. There are 97 X-Men titles at any given time, so was it strictly necessary to do a three-issue World War Hulk: X-Men miniseries instead of just putting the story in one of those? I say thee nay.

Then there’s the tier that we’re seeing more often these days, in which the crossover doesn’t touch the ongoing titles at all, but only features spinoffs and one-shots. There are, I think, two reasons this happens.

1: Money.

2: Writers.

I don’t think the first point needs much of an explanation, but let me tell you what I mean by the second one. The comic book industry has become increasingly writer-focused over the years, and while in many ways that’s a good thing, that does come with a degree of compartmentalization. Whereas in the past, editors would call up the writer of New Warriors and tell him to link his book to Infinity War whether he wanted to or not, today there’s more of a reluctance to disrupt the ongoing story. Al Ewing’s fantastic Immortal Hulk series was an excellent horror story that is perfect for binge-reading now that it’s over. But if you’re reading that story in a collected edition years later, it would be somewhat disconcerting to suddenly stop to deal with an invasion of symbiotes spilling over from the Spider-Man comics. So instead, there were Immortal Hulk one-shot specials when the title dealt with the events of the Absolute Carnage and King in Black crossovers, and the main book went unmolested.

The benefit of this is that the crossover doesn’t impact the story when you’re reading it in a vacuum. There are two cons that come to mind, though. First, if a crossover is entirely self-contained, it’s easy to ignore it and decide it’s inconsequential to the meta-story of the shared universe as a whole. Second, it has a tendency to cause the main story to spill out into the spinoffs in a way that doesn’t happen as often with the other kinds of crossovers. Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis was a bit of a mindbender to begin with, but the ending is COMPLETELY out of the blue if you didn’t choose to read the Final Crisis: Superman Beyond two-issue miniseries that accompanied it.

A story like Knight Terrors is a relatively new variant on this format. The crossover is told entirely through crossover miniseries, but those miniseries are replacing the ongoing comics for the duration of the event. Instead of following June’s Nightwing #105 with July’s Nightwing #106, July and August give us Knight Terrors: Nightwing #1 and #2, with #106 saved for September. This is, by my count, the third time DC has done this, the previous times being Convergence in 2015 and Future State in 2021. It’s nice, in that it doesn’t disrupt the main book at all, but it also has a habit of making the event itself feel rather inconsequential. (Future State in particular has largely faded into irrelevance in the DCU.)

Up until now, I’ve really only talked about format. I’m not making value judgments on any of these stories: there are both good and bad examples of every kind of crossover. What matters, I think, is what exactly you’re trying to accomplish with the story. Are you “just” telling a big story? Well, the first format I discussed is probably the right one. We mostly see that now with smaller crossovers, things like the Sinestro Corps War that only impacted the Green Lantern books (plus one issue of Blue Beetle). But even those “smaller” crossovers are starting to go the route of having one-shots or miniseries spinoffs: the upcoming Gotham War storyline will feature in the Batman and Catwoman ongoing titles but also have a few one-shots and a miniseries focusing on Jason Todd.

Sometimes publishers label books as part of a crossover no matter how inconsequential they are, and that can irritate readers. People who picked up the Crisis on Infinite Earths issues of Swamp Thing were rightly irritated that the only connection seemed to be the skies turning red. Even when the book is objectively entertaining, it’s a bit frustrating. Geoff Johns and the late George Perez did a magnificent job on Final Crisis: Legion of Three Worlds (I would even argue that, to date, it was the LAST great Legion of Super-Heroes story), but pretending it had great significance to the Final Crisis storyline was something of a stretch.

“Guys, when we said ‘Stop, you got it right,’ we didn’t mean that LITERALLY.”

Sometimes these crossovers are intended to reset things: DC has done that with Flashpoint and Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths, which led to the New 52 and Dawn of DC reboots, respectively. Sometimes these are intended not to re-set, but to set things up in the first place. That’s what the nascent Valiant Comics did in 1991 with Unity. When their universe was still young they tied together their six existing titles (four of which were less than a year old), launched two new titles, and introduced new characters and concepts that in turn would develop into more titles in the next year. It was a huge success and Valiant was the hot ticket, becoming so successful that only a few years later Acclaim bought the company and promptly ran it into the ground.

“Get ready, guys, it’s all downhill from here.”

People like to complain about “event fatigue” in comics the same way that many of them complain about “superhero fatigue” in movies, but the fact that people keep buying these books seems to indicate that they aren’t that exhausted. And as always, quality matters. People rarely complain about “too many comics” if they actually like the stories that they’re reading – it’s only when following a story gets to be a chore that they go to the internet and gripe. I don’t think crossovers are going anywhere, and honestly, I don’t really want them to. So I guess the important thing when planning them out, publishers, is to think really hard before you get into these storylines, and ask your doctor (Strange, not Doom) what kind of crossover is right for you.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He knows that there are a LOT of crossover events he didn’t mention in this column, so before you reply with, “Hey, you forgot XYZ,” know that he didn’t. He just didn’t have room to make this comprehensive. Cut him some slack.

Geek Punditry #30: Summer Reading

July 28, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Beanstack, books, Hugh Howey, Oz, Pizza Hut, reading, Santa's Odyssey, Star Trek, Stephen King, summer

Summer reading. The phrase calls up different memories, different emotions, depending on how old you are. If you’re my age (or you’ve seen the memes), it may bring you back to those halcyon days when you were tracking each book you read in the pursuit of a free personal pan pizza. Depending on what school you went to, it may cause you to recall those last few hours before a new school year began, binging A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Of Mice and Men, even though you had two months with virtually no responsibilities in which to get it done. For a lot of people, it brings to mind the beach or the pool, where you set up on a towel or a chair and pull out a romance novel, a potboiler mystery, a spy thriller, or whatever it is that you connect to. Whatever the specifics of your personal relationship with books, it seems very curious to me that people have settled on the summer as the time to read.

Of course, if you’re just trying to SOUND smart, this sucker is available on Amazon and can tell you everything you need to know.

And we can blame teachers and Pizza Hut all we want, but there’s something that makes us all reach for that to-be-read pile during the summer months. Any book lover will tell you that we add to that pile constantly, most of us have stacks and shelves (or files bursting with digital downloads) of books that we know we have no hope of finishing in our lifetime, barring one of those Twilight Zone scenarios and minus the poor eyesight. That doesn’t stop us from piling new books on, of course, as we constantly tell ourselves and our partners that we need to be grateful it’s books and not, for example, meth. As that pile gets bigger and bigger, summertime is the only time where it seems to dip a little (or at least grow more slowly).

This is even true for those of us who, through a terrible confluence of biology and neurochemistry, happen to love both books and our own children. In my entire life, there has never been a single event that slowed down my reading more than the birth of my son. And he’s worth it, of course. I love him to death, and I make sure to tell him that every time I look at the 17 books Stephen King has published since his last haircut that I haven’t gotten around to consuming yet.

The good news, parents, is that kids get older, and eventually they do reach a point that makes it a little easier to start reading again, and this summer seems to have finally gotten my family to that sweet spot. Of course, we did need a little help. Our local public library, as they always do, has issued a “summer reading challenge” to its patrons, both children and adults. There are prizes (no pizza, sadly), and of course, bragging rights, and the weird thing is that having this carrot dangling in front of us has really worked for my family.

The St. Charles Parish Public Library is affiliated with a reading app called “Beanstack,” which allows you to track your reading time, track books you’ve read, even track the number of pages read (although I personally have not taken advantage of this feature, as most of the books I read these days are eBooks, and tracking the pages isn’t always easy). You can write reviews as well, and share your reading with others. You earn points and badges. I got a free umbrella. It’s kind of goofy that a grown ass adult (or whatever I am) would need to treat reading books like accumulating a high score on a video game, but by God, it worked.

My summer ends next week, when the teachers at my school report back for a few days of professional development in advance of the avalanche of students the week after, but when it comes to reading, I’ve really taken advantage of this summer. Since school let out in May, I’ve recorded 80 different reading sessions, 20 different books, and a whopping 2578 minutes of reading time, most of that at night before bed, because knowing I don’t have to wake up at 5 am makes me feel a little more free to stay up late with a book like I did when I was a kid. My wife – who is not a teacher and thus does not have the summer away from work – hasn’t quite matched my numbers, but she’s also found herself reading more thanks to the use of the app. There’s something oddly communal about the experience, knowing that other people in the system are reading as well, trying to stack up their numbers, and having fun doing it.

The communal aspect, I think, is one of the things that makes it work. I can see how many reading minutes everybody signed up for the Library system has accumulated over the summer (currently hovering at about 2.1 million, which means some of you people have been slacking), and there’s something about knowing that other people are reaching for the same goal as you are at the same time that makes it a little bit easier and a little bit more exciting. It’s the same reason people share their steps from a Fitbit, the same reason so many of us jump into NaNoWriMo every November. You’re aiming for a goal that you always have on some level. It’s easier to go after that goal when you know you’re not doing it alone.

Those 20 books that I’ve dug into, by the way, are also in pursuit of various smaller goals. Most of them are in series or by authors I enjoy, but that I’ve never gotten around to finishing. I’ve started a re-read of all of L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels (in case you were wondering why I wrote about that back at the beginning of summer) with the intention of continuing on and reading the other books in the “Famous Forty” that weren’t written by him, most of which I’ve never read before. I’ve read a few Star Trek novels. I’ve read books in George R.R. Martin’s Wild Cards series and Hugh Howey’s Silo saga. I’ve even tackled two of those Stephen King books that I hadn’t gotten around to yet. He wrote four more in the time that it took me, but baby steps.

If you can think of a better way to spend the summer, I’d love to hear what it is.

The only problem I’ve got with Beanstack is that I don’t think you can add friends from outside your own library system, so I don’t know that all of you fine folks out there could link up with me there – although if anybody knows of a similar app that’s not geographically-locked, by all means let me know. And while you’re at it, let me know how your own summer reading has gone. What have you read on the beach, what books have finally escaped your-to-read pile, and do you too feel like you read more when the heat is on?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Blake is also considering doing a total read-through of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson universe, but that dang Stephen King keeps adding other books he need to get to first.

Geek Punditry #29: Can Barbenheimer Save Cinema?

July 21, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Barbenheimer, Barbie, movie theaters, Movies, Oppenheimer

Without getting into the politics of it all, no one can deny that the COVID lockdowns changed things in many aspects of our lives, and by “many aspects,” I mean movies. Streaming services like Netflix and Disney+ were already ascendant, but the inability of fans to go to movie theaters to watch new films drove movies earmarked for theaters right to digital, and for many people, there’s been no looking back. In fact, as theaters everywhere are struggling, it’s becoming a cause for celebration when ANY movie convinces audiences to put down the remote and drive to the theater. Last year’s golden calf was the long-gestating and often-delayed Top Gun: Maverick, a movie any cinemagoer could be forgiven for dismissing as a cheap money grab, but which wound up garnering both audience and critical acclaim. In fact, no less a personage than Steven Spielberg made a video for Tom Cruise thanking him for “saving Hollywood’s ass.”

But it’s been a minute since Top Gun, and this summer’s “blockbuster” season has proven to be anything but. Tentpole movies have collapsed as families choose to skip the theater and wait for streaming, as the erratic behavior of certain stars turn off audiences, and as people in a dismal economy look for excuses to cut corners. To put it simply, movies need their ass saved again already.

Is it possible that this salvation may come in the unlikely team-up of Robert Oppenheimer and Barbara Millicent Roberts?

Let’s pretend for a minute that you know nothing about movies so I can explain “counter programming” to you. This is when one studio, network, or content provider puts out some form of content (a movie, a TV show, a licensed breakfast cereal) and their competitor – realizing they are unlikely to sway the audience for that work – instead schedule a work intended to appeal to a totally different audience at the same time. It’s the reason they do things like the Puppy Bowl on Super Bowl Sunday, or why Vegans hold a Sproutfest every time McDonald’s brings back the McRib.

While counter programming is a normal business practice and happens all the time, every so often the two properties are so diametrically opposed to one another that they become oddly, bafflingly, intrinsically intertwined. Hence the Barbenheimer phenomenon. Universal Studios scheduled the release of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s grim film about the creation of the atomic bomb, for July 21st, which the more astute among you will recognize as being today. Warner Bros. looked at this and thought, “You know what? Ain’t nobody who goes to see Oppenheimer is gonna be interested in Greta Gerwig’s surrealist comedy Barbie adaptation. Let’s do it on the same day.”

(There is also a theory that Warner Bros. may have chosen the date intentionally to stick it to Nolan, who – ironically – left the studio over frustrations with how they were treating their films in terms of theatrical versus streaming presentation, and jumped to Universal. I can neither confirm nor deny these rumors, but I bring them up now before some smarty-pants does so in the comments.)

On the surface, these films could not possibly be more different. One is a harrowing, bleak story about a chilling technology that, if placed in the wrong hands, has the potential to end all life on Earth, and the other stars Cillian Murphy. And once the release dates were announced, people on the internet did what people on the internet always do and tried to turn it into a stupid pissing contest. The question, as presented, became one of “Which movie are YOU going to see?” There is a loud and moronic contingent of social media who views literally every interaction as an opportunity to rank something as better than something else, to transform the entire world into a competition, and who are incapable of drawing joy from anything unless it means something else is being declared a failure. The French, with their beautiful and elegant command of language, have a word that perfectly describes people like this: buttwads.

But to everyone’s surprise, something glorious happened. Rather than drawing lines in the sand and choosing one film over the other, the internet as a whole looked Les Buttwads directly in the eye and said, “Why not both?”

It’s only a mild exaggeration to say that “Barbenheimer” has become a an actual movement. People are making memes, t-shirts, and posters mashing the two films together, sharing them online, and building an unlikely but delightfully wholesome community. Perhaps most importantly, people are also buying tickets. Gerwig and Barbie herself, Margot Robbie, have shared a picture of their tickets to see Oppenheimer, and Cillian Murphy has said he absolutely intends to see Barbie in the theater, encouraging people to do both films in the same day, adding, “Spend a whole day in the cinema — what’s better than that?”

Most interesting to me, though, is that AMC Theaters has announced that over 40,000 of their “Stubs” members have bought tickets for both movies. Rather than being a question of which movie you’re going to see, the question has become which one do you see first. (The consensus, by the way, seems to be that you go with Oppenheimer first, then see Barbie as a sort of emotional therapy.)

I couldn’t agree more with what Murphy said. I’ve spoken before about how much I love the experience of going to the movies, and every time I see a story about theaters being in trouble it gets me anxious. (Don’t feel too special, Movies, “anxious” is my default mode. They recently redesigned the box for Velveeta Shells and Cheese and I’m struggling with it.) Something like this, though, is an EVENT. It’s something that makes people WANT to go to a movie theater. This is EXACTLY the kind of double feature I would have done back in the days before I had a five-year-old child and limited babysitting options. Both movies, independent of one another, looked interesting. This phenomenon has made it look like so. Much. Fun.

And ultimately, it’s fun that has to save movie theaters. Barbenheimer won’t do it alone, it would be naive to really believe that it could, but finding ways to make going to the movies FUN again ABSOLUTELY WILL. Turn movies into EVENTS, meaning an experience, rather than “something that costs $50 before you even get to the concession stand.” Have costume contests or trivia nights. Make theater exclusive giveaways and collectibles. Don’t just show us a clip of Nicole Kidman thanking us for choosing to go to a theater, give us a REASON TO MAKE THAT CHOICE, something that can’t be duplicated by a streamer.

The best movie experiences of my life have all revolved around events. When Avengers: Infinity War came out, I saw it at a special screening hosted by my local comic shop. Everyone got a poster, a comic grab bag, and a lapel pin of the Infinity Gauntlet, which was cool, but most importantly you were seeing the film with a packed room full of like-minded people. When Batman and Robin came out…well, the movie was dismal. But I’ll never forget how the theater had a temporary art installation in the lobby shared by a local collector who spent decades commissioning artwork of Batman from the greatest artists in comics. There were interpretations of the Dark Knight by everyone from legends like Neal Adams and George Perez to wacky contributors like Sergio Aragones. As much as I hated that movie, I loved that mini-event.

Hey, studios. I know you all want theaters to survive. So do I. So this is what you do:

Step 1: Pay your damn writers and artists what they deserve and kill the AI debacle so you can get back to making things.

Step 2: Make good movies.

Step 3: Look at what the fans have done for Barbenheimer WITHOUT your help, and find ways to make going to a theater fun again.

Sure, it’ll cost a little money to do so, but how much is it going to cost – both monetarily and culturally – if the entire movie theater experience collapses and disappears forever?

Come back some other time and I’ll tell you how to fix streaming. Spoiler: it involves paying your writers and actors what they deserve.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He’s sadly probably going to have to wait for both Barbie and Oppenheimer to hit VOD before he can do the double feature, so nobody spoil them for him.

Geek Punditry #28: Strike Binging

July 14, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Actor's Strike, Addams Family, Artificial Intelligence, Black Mirror, James Gunn, Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Only Murders in the Building, Peacemaker, wednesday, Writer's Strike

A few weeks ago, when I was writing about the way AI is changing the creative landscape, I mentioned the Writer’s Guild of America strike. The WGA has been on strike, refusing to write or revise any work to be filmed, since early May, which meant that the major film and TV studios could only continue work on the scripts that were already written, nothing new. Well friends, I’m happy to announce that – after furious weeks of negotiating and bargaining – the actors are now on strike as well. The Screen Actors’ Guild this week joined the writers on the picket line, and once again, AI is one of the major concerns.

One such concern that has been talked about a lot is the practice of using AI to digitally create a “performance.” This isn’t the same thing as using CGI to generate a performance like Gollum from Lord of the Rings – in those films and many other films that have used the same technology, Andy Serkis performed the role himself and the digital character was created based on his movements, his voice, his PERFORMANCE. That’s not at issue here.

“Chat GPT? We HATES it, Precious, HATES it!”

This is about the ability to sit at a computer and whip up – for example – a digital simulation of the late Olivia Newton John to drop into the Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies series, which was fortunately canceled before that could happen. Or – and this is something that SAG claims the studios are actually planning – to pay an actor for one day’s work, scan their likeness and voice, and then use them as a background character in perpetuity. Jobs for extras and small roles, traditionally the best path for someone to break into screen acting if they weren’t lucky enough to be born with industry connections, would be wiped out overnight. What’s more, once that contract is signed there’s nothing to stop a studio from using your likeness in a role that you would never have agreed to perform – a Nazi, a serial killer, an insurance adjuster. The possibilities are chilling.

Granted, this isn’t going to hurt the likes of Tom Cruise or Jennifer Lawrence, millionaire actors who are firmly entrenched in the system and aren’t going anywhere. But this isn’t about them. It’s about everyone else who works in the movies. Percentage-wise, the Tom Cruises are a tiny fraction of the people who actually appear on screen, and while he’ll be perfectly comfortable filming Mission: Impossible sequels until he finally runs out of places to run, the practice would be devastating for the guy who played “Bartender” in a movie today, has “Cop #2” booked for a TV show tomorrow, and has his fingers crossed that he’ll get the coveted role of “Jury Foreman” next week since that one actually comes with a line and a pay bump.

Even then, there’s no guarantee that this will end there, as this same technology would theoretically make it possible to generate an entire show with no human input at all. A recent episode of the documentary television program Black Mirror titled “Joan is Awful” demonstrated this perfectly. In “Joan is Awful,” Annie Murphy plays a woman who learns that, because she didn’t pay attention to the terms of service when she signed up for a streamer that is MOST DEFINITELY NOT NETFLIX she gave them permission to use AI to generate a melodrama based on her life, with a new episode based on what she was doing every day and painting her in the worst light possible. The show even “casts” Salma Hayek as Joan, and Salma herself is shocked to learn what she agreed to when she signed over her likeness. Black Mirror has always been the sort of show that looked at technology and projected a logical worst-case scenario in the near future, but I bet even showrunner Charlie Brooker is surprised to learn that this particular episode was set in August 2023.

“Charlie, are you sure we’re not being too subtle?”

For most of us, of course, there’s very little we can do at the moment except wait for the networks and streamers to run out of new stuff to dole out and start complaining. But the good news is that the last few years of TV have been so rich in goodness that, odds are, there’s plenty of worthwhile material available that you haven’t watched yet, most of which have – and this is the part that the studio heads will struggle to understand – been made by human beings. So I’m going to share with you today some of the TV shows that I haven’t watched that I plan to take advantage of the strike downtime to binge.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is first on my list. This series, available on Amazon Prime, just recently finished its five-season run, and although I’ve always been interested in it, I haven’t quite found the time to watch it before. I was already planning to move it up on my rotation with the news that the show’s star, Rachel Brosnahan, has been cast as the new Lois Lane in James Gunn’s Superman: Legacy movie, which will commence filming as soon as the strikes are settled, so hopefully sometime before the sun explodes and Kal-El loses another planet.

“Don’t you hate it when you’re on a date with a guy but he has to rush off to help an Amazon Princess and a trust fund kid dressed as a bat stop an alien invasion? Am I right, ladies?”

Mrs. Maisel, from what I understand, is about a 50s era housewife who decides to embark on a career as a stand-up comic. I’ve always kinda been fascinated by the world of stand-up, and setting it at that particular time period with a female lead seems like it would create a very unique perspective. The tricky thing about making a show or movie about a comedian, though, has always been to make sure they’re legitimately funny, which sometimes has proven difficult. But no doubt the AI joke generator has nailed Mrs. Maisel’s routines (that or a team of writers led by showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino, who also created the whip-smart Gilmore Girls), and the performance itself can be landed flawlessly just by dropping Brosnahan’s face into a computer and letting it figure out the delivery on its own.

Wednesday is another show I, shockingly, haven’t watched yet. I’m a fan of The Addams Family, both the original series and the films from the 90s, so it’s weird that I haven’t gotten around to it yet, although in my defense, that last season of Better Call Saul was monopolizing a lot of my time.

I know a little more about Wednesday than Mrs. Maisel, just by virtue of it being a new incarnation of a classic IP created by ~~the Hotspot AI Art Generator~~ cartoonist Charles Addams. I know that, in this version, Wednesday Addams is sent to a boarding school, and I know that Jenna Ortega apparently did a good job portraying the character, by virtue of the fact of her getting an Emmy nomination on the same day she went on strike. Also, there is apparently some big dance number that Ortega herself choreographed on the day they filmed it, although no doubt it could have been done just as efficiently by a computer.

Oh, also this picture. Everyone on the planet has seen 700 memes with this picture.

Hulu brings us Only Murders in the Building, a comedy starring Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez as a trio of true crime enthusiasts who go over the top trying to solve a real murder that happens in their apartment building. Steve Martin and Martin Short, of course, are comedic legends whose legacy will only be enhanced once their likenesses are inserted into a database so they can continue starring in this show for the next 70 years. Last fall my wife and I attended one of their live shows (which was really weird, since they had to do the entire thing without CGI), in which they praised Selena Gomez as being “such a good actress that she pretended to know who we were.” Why haven’t I watched this show yet? I have no idea. Seems like a terrible oversight on my part.

Two of the greatest comedic minds in the history of the planet, and Martin Short.

Finally, I’m going over to MAX to watch Peacemaker. I know, considering my comic book pedigree it’s got to be a shocker that I haven’t seen it yet. Guys, you would be horrified at how many comic book series I’ve yet to get around to watching. It’s almost as disturbing as the number I started watching but have yet to finish.

Anyway, Peacemaker is a spinoff of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, starring John Cena as the titular superhero commando who loves peace so much he’s willing to kill whoever he has to in order to achieve it. It’s a satire, of course, a concept that is probably lost on anybody who has missed the point of the previous three entries I’ve written about and, likely, Mark Zuckerberg. The character, as presented in the movie (which I have seen) is fundamentally absurd, and it’s the absurdity that made him fun to watch. I’m hoping for more of the same in the TV show, which again is written and directed by James Gunn. Gunn was also the writer and director of the three Guardians of the Galaxy movies and one Holiday Special for Marvel, which might trick you into thinking he’s got a pedigree and knows what he’s doing, explaining why Warner Bros. hired him to take command of DC Studios going forward, although they might have thought twice if they realized they clearly could have gotten the same quality of work by using ChatGPT.

Although if you had told me the costume was designed by AI, you might have convinced me.

So there I am – four series, a total of 79 episodes so far. That should keep me busy for a while. But if I run through these series before those pesky writers and actors realize how expendable they are and end the strike, there are plenty more to choose from: Yellowstone, Ted Lasso, Foundation, House of the Dragon, Andor, and all of the thousands of other shows I haven’t seen yet that could just as easily have been made by feeding some data into an AI engine.

A Golden Age of Television indeed.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. In case you didn’t get it, the point here is that all of these things were made by actual human writers and directors and actors, and that doing it all by computer would be terrible. In case you didn’t get that.

Geek Punditry #27: Death and Taxes-A Streaming Crisis

July 7, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Batgirl, Disney, Fantastic Four, MAX, netflix, Paramount+, Star Trek, Star Trek: Prodigy, streaming

A few days ago, between eating entirely too much barbecue and trying to figure out if there was room for apple pie, my sister and I were talking about movies and TV shows we’d recently watched with our kids. She mentioned a Disney+ original film called Crater, a science fiction adventure about a bunch of kids living on a lunar mining colony. I’d heard of the film before, and I thought it would be something that my son might have an interest in, at least the spaceship parts, and made a note to check it out soon. Unfortunately, “soon” didn’t turn out to be soon enough, because the next day word came down that Crater was being removed from the platform less than two months after its release, and would no longer be available anywhere.

Turns out the title was actually a reference to the film’s chances.

This isn’t the only Disney+ original to get this treatment. The Willow series, canceled after just one season, was also unceremoniously axed, as well as the quirky documentary The World According to Jeff Goldblum, among others. Nor is Disney+ the only streaming platform to do such a thing in recent months. Netflix has removed shows such as Hemlock Grove, Hulu quietly evaporated Y: The Last Man, and before they dropped the “HBO” from their name, HBO Max made headlines by removing a lot of content, including the almost-finished but now never-to-be-seen Batgirl movie starring Leslie Grace and the most beloved man on the Internet, Brendan Fraser.

If the new Betty White couldn’t save that movie, nothing could.

There have been various reasons given for these cancellations: merchandising revenue losses, a lack of viewers, to avoid paying royalties or residuals to the people involved, or most egregiously, some of them were cut so that the studio could use the massive cost of production as a tax write-off to counteract losses elsewhere in the company. Whatever the specific reason, they all boil down to the same thing: the studio believes they can somehow make more money by erasing these films and TV series and pretending they never existed than they can by allowing them to remain on the streamer.

I am not an economist. I don’t pretend to understand exactly how these things work. What I’m seeing is that we are once again seeing creative work being strangled in the name of the bottom line.

Now let me be clear about this: no, I’m not an economist, but I’m not an idiot either. I know that it’s called show business for a reason, and I accept that the people putting out the money have to make money back if they’re going to keep doing it. There are few things in the universe I find stupider than when someone says that an artist or a writer should just do their creative work “for the art” and not worry about the money, as if artists and writers are somehow immune to the need to eat. These things need to turn a profit one way or another, and I’m okay with that in principle. I just wish they would find some way to do it that doesn’t come at the expense of the people who make the damn things.

I write. I try to write every day. And I’m not doing it just because it feels good to push buttons on a keyboard, I do it because I want people (like you) to read what I have to say. When I hear about things like what happened to Crater, I’m thinking about the people who wrote the movie, the director who steered the ship, the actors who performed in it, the set designers and special effects artists and musicians and everybody else who bled for that film, believing that their work would be out there for the world to watch whenever they wanted…except now it’s not available anywhere. That has to be gut-wrenching. Even if a movie or TV show is canceled because it’s objectively terrible, I feel for the people involved. Nobody tries to make a bad movie, after all. I can’t imagine anybody who walks on to a set thinking, “Let’s make this puppy suck.” They’re doing what they can to make an entertaining product so that it will be seen. Even the infamous 1994 Fantastic Four movie isn’t immune to this principle. The movie was literally rushed out as quickly as possible so that the studio wouldn’t lose the rights to the franchise, never having any intention of actually releasing it…but none of the people making the movie knew that. They did the best they could, and honestly, crappy special effects aside, they’ve done better than anyone else with the FF in live action so far.

That’s not even a joke. This is literally the best we’ve had so far.

The issue here is that streaming services are bleeding money. None of them, not even the juggernauts, are making enough to cover the costs of the original content they’re creating, and that’s largely in part to the way the streaming universe has bifurcated. It wasn’t so bad when it was just Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Video, and pretty much everything you wanted to find was on one of those if it was anywhere. But then we saw the tentacles begin to reach out as nearly every studio or network decided to create its own service instead of signing with one of the existing streamers: Disney+, Max, Paramount+, Britbox, AMC+, Shudder, ESPN+, Screambox, Apple TV+, Peacock, MGM+…not only did it quickly get unwieldy, but it’s terribly frustrating how over fifty percent of them just stole the “Plus” from Disney rather than trying to come up with an original name.

There are simply too many streamers for the average person to keep up with. Even if they had the money for them all (which the average person does not), keeping track of what’s streaming where or what services have the shows and movies you actually want to watch is getting to be a full-time job. What’s more, there’s the question of signing up for a service just for one series or one movie – nobody sane would do that, right? So instead, people sign up for the free trial and binge what they want, then cancel once they’re finished. The streamers obviously don’t make money that way, and if they don’t make their money they’re not going to keep doing it.

Let’s look at the biggest recent example. Paramount+ (previously CBS All-Access) was, frankly, the house that Star Trek built. The big selling point for the streamer when it launched was that it had every episode of every Star Trek series, and that furthermore, it was going to be launching several new Trek series, bringing it back to television for the first time since the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise twelve years prior. And for a few years, it was working out okay…until a few weeks ago when Paramount announced that the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy was being canceled, that the almost-finished second season would not be shown on the service, and that the existing first season would be removed. And before you could blink your eyes, the crew of the USS Protostar was GONE.

Cheer up, guys. They cancelled Kirk’s show too. Twice.

Now everyone who reads this column knows I’m a Trek nerd. In fact, my inaugural Geek Punditry column was all about how awesome the first season of Prodigy was. So nobody is going to be surprised to learn I’m upset about this. But I’ll bet I’m nowhere near as upset as the cast and crew of that series.

Something funny happened once Prodigy was removed, though. Within 48 hours, the Blu-Ray of the first season was sold out at Amazon, Target, Walmart, Best Buy…pretty much anywhere you can buy Blu-Rays. Sadly, the Blu-Ray only had the first half of the first season, not the second set of 10 episodes, not the cliffhanger ending that may never be resolved now. But the fans mobilized and actually spent the money, which is what Paramount wanted in the first place.

Streaming is a great thing in terms of convenience. It’s fantastic to be able to pull up any episode of Star Trek (except for those 20 episodes of Prodigy) from my remote control without worrying about changing discs or tracking down when it’s going to be broadcast. But as if we didn’t know it already, the unstable landscape of the streaming world means that no matter how much you love something, it can be taken away at the whim of some studio accountant. Supporting the things you love, while important, is only ever going to be part of the equation. What I think we’ve all learned here is that having a permanent way to keep them is more important than ever.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. After he heard about Prodigy getting the ax, he added all of the Star Trek Blu-Rays he didn’t already own to his Amazon wish list. Can you blame him?

Geek Punditry #26: Bargain Bin Gold

June 30, 2023June 30, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry comic books, Flintstones, i love lucy, Religious Comics, Star Comics, Teen Titans, Wally the Wizard

Last weekend I got to do one of my favorite things, and something I rarely get to indulge in anymore: comic book bargain bin diving. I’m a comic nerd, of course, and like any nerd I’ve got my favorites, both when it comes to modern comics and to the classics. I’m trying to fill a run of DC’s Star Trek comics (try to act surprised) and I’ll never turn up my nose at a Disney Duck comic or anything from Archie, pre-2010 or so. But in addition to those special things I’m searching for, I also like…weird stuff. I mean obscure comics, books that most people have probably never heard of before, things that remind me of my childhood, things that have a crazy title, movie adaptations for movies that you wouldn’t believe had ever been adapted, or even just anything that’s got a bizarre cover. If I can find it for under a buck, I’ll throw it into the cart.

This kind of bargain bin excavation is something I love, but it’s not something I get to do all the time, with a five-year-old son for whom “patience” is a foreign concept and a wife with a busy work schedule. But last weekend, with Erin’s blessing, I headed to a small local show in Slidell, Louisiana, where I spent a couple of hours bouncing from vendor to vendor, most of that time sifting through the dollar bins for some of this unexpected, bizarre gold. This week, I’ve decided to share with you some of the crazier finds that I made in this most recent hunt.

“But Freeeeed, I wanna be in the shooooooow!”

First off I’d like to turn your attention to Flintstones #5, published by Dell Comics way back in 1962. Comics based on cartoons are one of my go-to grabs in these bargain bin digs. I’ve always been a fan of the Flintstones, and these Dell comics were great – five full stories and a couple of one-pagers for twelve cents? Sign me up. Story #3 in this issue introduced me to “Perry Gunnite,” an old-fashioned detective comic strip set in the world of Bedrock. Perry appeared in a single episode of the cartoon but, evidently, spun off into his own series in the comics. That find enough would have made this book worth buying, but it was what I found in the fourth story that made this a comic I’ll never forget.

In “The Champ Chowhound” we are introduced to Wilma Flintstone’s cousin Muncher, visiting from out of town and eating Fred and Wilma out of house and home. They want to get rid of him, but he can’t afford to go home and will not accept Fred’s “charity” offer to buy him a bus ticket. So the Flintstones embark upon a set of increasingly elaborate ruses to send him packing. First, Fred claims to have “found” a bus ticket back to Muncher’s home town, but rather than hopping on the bus Muncher sets out to find its rightful owner, turning it over to the first person to claim it. Next they try to guilt him into leaving, pretending that Fred has lost his job and they can’t afford to feed him, but Muncher’s general good nature won’t allow him to abandon them in their time of need. Finally, Muncher signs up for a hog-calling contest in the hopes of winning the money to get Fred back on his car-stopping feet and getting himself the cash to go home.

On the surface, admittedly, this doesn’t seem to be a particularly mind-blowing story…and it’s not. Except for one thing. Regular readers of Geek Punditry will recall a couple of months ago when I mentioned that my wife and I have been binging I Love Lucy on Pluto TV. Pluto shows the entire series in order over and over again, and with 180 half-hour episodes that means if you watch it a lot, there’s a good chance you’ll catch the same episodes every four days or so. Were it not for the fact that I’ve seen these episodes repeatedly and recently, this Flintstones comic would not stand out for me. But it does. Because I recognized that whoever wrote this comic completely ripped off a season three episode of I Love Lucy almost BEAT FOR BEAT. In the previous episode, “Tennessee” Ernie Ford came to visit the Ricardos. As this episode began, he was still crashing on their couch and tearing at their every last nerve.

And from there, it is exactly the same story as the Flintstones comic. Ernie won’t take a bus ticket, so Ricky pretends to find one, but Ernie returns it to the “rightful” owner. Ricky pretends to be out of work, even going so far as to have the Mertzes pretend to be evicting them. (It’s a wonder that the writer of the comic book resisted the urge to have Barney and Betty fill this role, but as the comic was only five pages long I guess they couldn’t squeeze it in.) The biggest deviation is that, rather than have a contest to end the story, Ernie arranges for the crew to appear on the TV show Millikan’s Chicken-Mash Hour doing a hootenanny to get them out of the red.

The Lucy episode is credited to the series’ prolific writing team of Bob Carroll Jr., Madelyn Pugh, and Jess Oppenheimer. Most Dell comics at the time had no credits given, although the Grand Comic Book Database credits the artwork to Kay Wright. The writer may have been lost to history, but I wish I knew the name of the person who had the audacity to steal a plot wholesale from an 8-year-old TV show for a comic book based on a cartoon, which makes me wonder if anybody overseeing the current IDW My Little Pony comics has double-checked to make sure nobody is knocking off the final season of Parks and Recreation.

My favorite part is the end, where Moses shows up to talk to him about the Testament Initiative.

The next bizarre book I pulled from a bargain bin last weekend was an oddity called Jesus, the Man With the Miracle Touch. I’d never heard of this book before, nor its publisher (“Cosmics”), although a little time on Google indicated this publisher released just four comics, all religious-themed one-shots in the late 80s. The story is a fairly straightforward retelling of the Biblical life of Jesus, albeit highly condensed into 32 comic book pages. The book also doesn’t have any credits, which is a shame, because I really quite like the art style. Whoever did this book easily could have been working on Harvey or Archie Comics, or maybe something from Marvel’s Star line of young readers comics at the time. (More about that later.) Mostly, though, I bring this up because when I was at the convention and handed the stack of books to the guy at the booth, as he counted them, he looked over at his co-worker and yelled, “Hey! Somebody is buying the Jesus book!”

“Thanks, Blue Robin!”
“I’m not Robin.”
“How’s Alfred?”
“I’m not–fine. He’s fine.”

At one time, especially when I was a kid in the 80s, “public service announcement” comics were a fairly big thing. There’s an infamous Marvel comic where Spider-Man and Power Pack taught you about the dangers of child abuse and another where Spidey teamed up with Storm and Luke Cage because that’s the natural trio to warn you about ill effects of smoking. I, of course, have both of these in my collection. Meanwhile, DC farmed out the Teen Titans for three anti-drug specials. This weekend I picked up the second of the three, in which the Teen Titans and their pal “Protector” try to help Protector’s cousin, who has moved to Blue Valley, developed a crush on a friend of Wally West, and (gasp!) has fallen into the world of drugs. The Titans, of course, have to help get him out of it.

When I was a kid, I remember getting what turned out to be the third of the Teen Titans specials (although I didn’t know it at the time, as these books didn’t have traditional comic book numbering or anything), and I remember being baffled by it. I knew who the Teen Titans were, of course, but who was this guy in the blue costume and cape with no powers? He was…kinda like Robin, but he wasn’t. That same “Protector” is in this book, although here we find out he’s got an actual secret identity, Jason Hart…so my fifth-grade headcanon of Dick Grayson wearing a brown wig and using a different name for…reasons…I suppose has turned out to be inaccurate. Looking back as an adult, I wonder if Dick Grayson was tied up in some sort of licensing rights surrounding the Batman due to the movies or something. It might not be the case – after all, the first of these comics came out in 1983 and the first Tim Burton Batman movie wasn’t until 1989. Then again, some of these things have a long timeline. If there’s anyone with more information on this, I would be very anxious to hear it.

(UPDATE: Reader Trey Ball has informed me that the licensing deal that prevented Robin being from used in the comics was actually due to the Superfriends, TV show, which for 1983 definitely makes more sense than the Batman movie. The anti-drug comic was produced in association with Keebler, but Nabisco had a licensing agreement with the Superfriends characters. Thanks, Trey!)

The last book I’m going to discuss today comes from Marvel Comics, specifically their Star Comics line from the 80s. (Have you ever noticed how many weird comic books have their roots in the 80s? Something in the air back then, I swear.) Star Comics was Marvel’s attempt to crack into comics specifically for young readers. The most famous alumnus of the line these days is Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham, star of big screen movies, animated shorts, and my heart. But the line also included lots of licensed comics such as Heathcliff, Care Bears, Madballs, and ALF, as well as several original characters that were created and produced by writers and artists Marvel poached away from the likes of Harvey and Archie Comics. Royal Roy was a kind of Richie Rich knock-off, Top Dog was about a kid who found a talking dog who also happened to be a spy, and Planet Terry was an elementary school Flash Gordon with a clever pun in the title that I didn’t catch until some 20 years later.

I love finding obscure, weird comics, and bargain bins are my favorite place to do it. This week I'm here to share some recent finds as Geek Punditry presents "Bargain Bin Gold!" — This is what happens when you pee swimming in the ocean one too many times.

But the book I got this week was Wally the Wizard #3, written and drawn by Archie Comics superstar Bob Bolling. In this issue Wally, apprentice to the Wizard Marlin (Merlin had the power to know the future and thus trademarked his name in the 8th century specifically to avoid being portrayed in Star Comics), discovers that his parents are in the company of a pack of Vikings. He rounds up his buddy, the Viking orphan Vikk, and sets out to find them. Bolling did countless wonderful comics for Archie, especially lots of the Little Archie series, which is no doubt what Marvel had in mind when they picked him up to work on the Star line. This issue, though, makes it seem like he needed a nap.

The truth is, none of the Star-original comics were all that great, although I do have a fondness for Top Dog. None of them lasted more than a couple of years, but some of the licensed books (Heathcliff and ALF, specifically) had long runs. But you know, that’s okay. In this day and age, when comic book publishers seem to think the solution to a dwindling readership is to publish 75 different covers of the same book to sell to the same readers they’ve had for decades, it’s nice to remember that there was at least a time when one of the major publishers was trying something to get kids reading comics again.

Some comic collectors are in it for investments. They spend all their time looking for flawless copies to slab and flip, speculating that a book is going to go up in price because someone announced a movie deal, treating it like a business. I do not understand these people. But I know I’m never going to encounter them sifting through a dollar bin, because the books in those boxes aren’t for them. They’re for people like me – people who see comics as fun, as a little escapist entertainment. And especially, people who like to uncover stuff that others have probably forgotten about. I may not get there often anymore, but the next time I get around to a convention or a used bookstore or anywhere I can sift for cheap, weird comics, I’ll come back with another installment of Bargain Bin Gold.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. To date, the greatest thing he’s ever pulled from a bargain bin was the four issue run of Roy Thomas’s Alter Ego, a great comic from the 80s (of course) that you should totally hunt down if you can.

Geek Punditry #25: Artificially Entertaining

June 23, 2023June 23, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry AI, AI Art, Artificial Intelligence, ChatGPT, Secret Invasion, Writer's Strike

In this week’s episode of “Things People Are Outraged Over on the Internet,” we’re going to talk about Marvel’s Secret Invasion. The new miniseries dropped its premiere episode this week, bringing back Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury as the star of an espionage thriller about the Skrulls – a race of shapeshifting aliens – infiltrating Earth and subtly influencing world events by pretending to be human, a clever analogue for what happens when Californians move to Texas. But the thing that has people upset isn’t the content of the show, it’s the opening credits sequence, in which the bizarre and unsettling images shown to the viewer turned out to have been created, at least in part, by an AI image algorithm.

AI has become a hot button topic in creative endeavors. Not so long ago, the world of comic and commercial art was consumed with a debate over how AI functions, with many programs essentially scraping the internet for existing artwork and using that as a basis to synthesize new images. Some people argue that this isn’t all that different from a human artist drawing inspiration from the works of other artists, while others say that this amounts to plagiarism on the part of the person using the AI to generate “new” work. While I’m not an expert on any of these matters, I find them fascinating and a little bit scary, not only as a fan of media, but as a writer and as a high school teacher as well. AI is becoming more and more prevalent, and the fact of the matter is that we as a society are going to have to decide what the place for things like the Secret Invasion opening sequence is.

For what it’s worth, the US Copyright Office has already laid down a ruling. Earlier this year, following a debate over a comic book created with AI art, the Copyright Office ruled that only work made “by humans” is eligible for copyright. So the next time your neighbor tries to show you that painting made by having his dachshund dip his little weiner legs in paint and walk across a canvas, feel free to steal the painting and put it on a T-shirt.

Back to Secret Invasion, though. When word got out that the intro sequence was made using AI, there was something of an internet firestorm. Artists were pretty angry about it, saying that the AI had cost graphic artists work, and the studio responsible for it quickly tried to “clarify” the announcement that it was AI animation. Method Studios, the company that made the sequence, released a statement to the Hollywood Reporter which read, in part, “AI is just one tool among the array of tool sets our artists used. No artists’ jobs were replaced by incorporating these new tools; instead, they complemented and assisted our creative teams.” If that doesn’t clear things up for you, congratulations! You’re normal. One of the things that makes AI so controversial is the confusion over how exactly it works, and for those of us who don’t entirely understand it all, statements like this one do absolutely nothing to illuminate the issue.

Speaking purely from an artistic standpoint, I get what the makers of the show were going for. A lot of AI art is, for lack of a better term, “unearthly.” For all the things it can do well, a lot of the images you get from an AI generator like OpenAI are still a little “off” when it comes to creating realistic images of people. You get people with extra fingers, noses where they shouldn’t be, or faces that look like they went right up to the edge of the Uncanny Valley and bungee jumped in. That unearthly quality is actually quite appropriate for the story behind Secret Invasion, which is (again) about alien shapeshifters that are ALMOST human, but not quite. So yeah, I get the idea. But just because I understand the idea doesn’t make it a good one, particularly considering the current climate in Hollywood when it comes to AI.

In addition to the aforementioned controversy that consumed the world of comic books not that long ago, I feel like somebody at Marvel Studios should have opened the blinds of their office windows and looked at all of the writers currently marching in picket lines. The Writer’s Guild of America went on strike on May 2, and for almost two months Hollywood has not been allowed to generate new scripts or make any changes to existing ones. They could go ahead and film scripts that are already finished, but nothing new is being made. A lot of film and TV productions have had to freeze production, including some of Marvel’s own upcoming shows like Daredevil: Born Again. And while there are many, many issues at play here in the writer’s strike, one of the big ones is the proposed use of artificial intelligence in Hollywood productions. The fact that apparently NOBODY on the Secret Invasion team thought about this at any point in the seven weeks since the strike began and said, “Hey, maybe we should change up the title sequence” is truly baffling.

This is what AI sees when it looks out the window. Uncanny.

Writers, as you may imagine, aren’t keen on the idea of AI being used to turn out scripts. Of course, many of you have probably seen posts on the internet where people used AI to write a script for, say, an episode of Seinfeld, and what it returned was something that was full of cliches and tropes related to the material, but laughably inept. It was funny because of how close it was, but wasn’t close enough to pass for the real thing. The same thing goes for a lot of the AI artwork we’ve mentioned. “Ha ha!” you say. “An algorithm will never be able to produce work of the same quality as a human being!”

Elaine: Hello, Jerrald. Shall we resume our frequently-alluded to previous relationship?
Jerry: Perhaps, after I have finished enjoying Superman and breakfast cereal.
George: Women despise me.
Kramer: I have entered the room!

Except that ten years ago, it was unfathomable that an algorithm would be able to produce something as close as those fake Seinfeld scripts, or that almost-but-not-quite real image of a Skrull used in Secret Invasion. And here’s the other thing, guys: the AI isn’t going to get any dumber. It’s just going to get better at it. And while some people will still argue (and I hope they’re right) that no AI will ever be able to produce something as good as a work of art created entirely by a human being…that’s not the point. With most of the media we consume being turned out by giant corporations (remember Secret Invasion is owned by Marvel, which is owned by Disney, which is owned by the Skrull Empire), the question is will it get good enough? At what point will CEOs say, “Why are we paying writers when we can just have the computer spit out a script that people will come and see anyway, even if it’s stale and derivative and just a Xerox copy of a thousand better ideas?”

Because if that remains an option, you know they will.

“No,” the corporate types say. “AI is just a tool, and artists have always had to learn to use new tools to create their own art. It’s no different.”

It is different, though. A typewriter is a tool that allows people to put words on the page faster. An airbrush is a tool that allows painters to have very precise control of their lines. Photoshop is a tool that allows for different effects to be made on preexisting images, carefully and intentionally manipulated by the person using the software. But never before has it been possible to say to one of these tools, “Hey, give me a picture of Santa Claus wearing a Star Trek uniform” and then just sit back and wait 0.8 seconds for the work to be done.

As I mentioned before, I’m a high school teacher, and I actually teach an entire unit about Artificial Intelligence in which we touch upon many aspects of the concept. The idea is that it’s a high-interest subject that’s going to be very relevant to the lives of my students (most of whom are in the 16 to 18-year-old age range) that is very controversial, allowing for them to learn to write arguments to defend their positions on a complicated topic, no matter what that position may be. The upshot of it is that I’ve learned way more about AI than I ever thought possible, and some of it scares the bejeezus out of me. When I started teaching this unit a few years ago, the conclusion that many students arrived at was that the integration of AI into society would eliminate many low-level jobs and that our economy would have to pivot to something that’s more craft-based – in other words, giving more importance to the arts. Writing, painting, making things by hand, things that AI can’t do. Hah. Boy, were we wrong.

Another thing that’s come up is the problem of academic dishonesty, of students using AI the way that the studio bosses will, and just having them whip up their schoolwork for them. In the past, it’s been relatively easy to catch someone plagiarizing an essay. You just pop the text into Google and you can find it in seconds. I’ve caught students copying from Sparknotes, from Wikipedia…one time a kid turned in a book report that had been copied verbatim from the back of the DVD case of the movie version of the book. It’s almost funny. But with AI doing the work, the student still isn’t learning squat, but it’s a lot harder to catch.

“In conclusion, the best part of *The Great Gatsby* was when Leo Titanic held up his champagne and made that meme.”

Last week, as an experiment, I played around a little with ChatGPT, probably the best-known of the AI algorithms that are being used in this fashion. I fed it an essay prompt regarding Kate Chopin’s classic “The Story of an Hour,” a story that’s less than four pages long, and as such makes for a great subject for a quick writing exercise. The essay that ChatGPT spit back to me (so fast that my hand hadn’t even left the keyboard yet) answered the question fully, on-point, and if a student were to turn it in to me the only clue I would have had that it was plagiarized would be if I simply didn’t think the kid in question was capable of work that good…and I’d have no way to prove it.

Now I’m not bringing this up because I want anyone to suggest solutions to the problem. We (and by we, I mean the teachers and school district I’m a part of) are already discussing the issue and looking for ways to deal with it. I bring it up just to illustrate the point. Some people will say, “Well why does it matter if the kid knows ‘The Story of an Hour’? When are they ever going to use that information in real life?” They won’t, you moron, that’s not why we write essays. We write essays so that students will know how to construct an argument, and having the computer do it for you is just going to leave you unable to do it yourself. (These are probably the same people who whine that they were never taught “how to do taxes” but also slept through every basic math class they ever took.)

Now to be fair, AI can be used as a tool. Not long ago I had a very interesting discussion with a comic book writer/artist of my acquaintance who told me some of the ways he was using it – to help with research, for example, or to evaluate his own work. And there’s definitely merit to that. I played around with ChatGPT some more and tried it in the ways he suggested. As a research assistant, I determined that it can definitely give me better and more nuanced details than a simple Google search can. On the other hand, some of these AI programs have been known to make up information out of whole cloth that SOUNDED correct in order to answer the query. Some of them have even written citations for sources that do not exist, which is kinda hilarious to me.

Then there was the question of using it to polish your own writing. I fed ChatGPT the first two pages of a new story I’m working on and asked what it thought. It gave me a response that was very complimentary, telling me that the characters were well-illustrated and that I’d done a good job of painting a picture of the two teenagers having a conversation on that page. Then it gave me tips for improving my sentence structure.

I was gobsmacked, not just by the entirely accurate critique of my structure problem, but by how well it understood what I was trying to write about. It said, and I quote, “Overall, the passage you wrote has an engaging and descriptive style that draws the reader into the narrator’s perspective and world…There is a conversational tone to the narration, which adds authenticity and relatability to the character’s voice. The passage effectively blends introspection, self-reflection, and storytelling to create a strong narrative voice.” I’m quoting this, by the way, not to brag about how awesome I am, but because if I were to read this in a review of my work written by a human being I would have been terribly flattered, and when I realized I was equally flattered by the AI…well, I was a little embarrassed. Fortunately, nobody would ever know I felt that way even momentarily unless I did something stupid like post it on the internet.

AI is an increasingly complicated issue, and I’m not trying to settle the debate, merely to illustrate how I feel about it. There’s no getting rid of it at this point, the box is open and Pandora has run away to hide under the bed and point a finger at Epimetheus to try to deflect blame. Since we can’t eliminate it, then, the only thing to do is to try to figure out how to use it responsibly.

As for what exactly that means, your guess is as good as mine.

UPDATE: A Facebook conversation about this topic with artist Jesse Elliott has led to him posting his thoughts on the issue on his own blog. Please head over there and read his perspective!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Just for giggles, after he finished writing this column he showed it to ChatGPT to ask its opinion. It returned a seven-point critique that basically said, “Hey, ya did pretty good.” ChatGPT is at least genial. If it takes over the world it will do so very politely.

Geek Punditry #24: Searching For a New Style

June 16, 2023June 16, 2023 blakemp Geek Punditry Escape Rooms, Found Footage, Missing, Movies, mysteries, Searching

Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about experimental storytelling, looking for movies, books, or other media that found a new, innovative way to tell a story. As tends to happen, shortly after I wrote that column, I stumbled across something that absolutely would have been under discussion had I been aware of it at the time. It’s kind of like getting home from the supermarket and realizing you forgot an essential ingredient for the cake you’re making for my wife’s birthday, and I better haul ass back over there before she gets home. As a purely hypothetical example.

Last week I watched Searching, a 2018 film starring John Cho and Debra Messing, directed by Aneesh Chaganty, and written by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian. The film is a mystery and thriller about a father (Cho) whose teenage daughter (Michelle La) disappears, and the only clues he can find to her disappearance are those he can plumb from the depths of her laptop computer. Fortunately, despite the setup, they resisted the urge to do a Taken knock-off. The interesting thing about Searching is that the entire story is told through the screens of phones and computers. All you – as the audience – ever see is what appears on that screen.

John Cho checks his Reddit upvotes: THRILLER!

This isn’t the first movie to use that conceit, of course. I can think of at least three movies from the past decade told via computer screens: Open Windows (2014), Unfriended (2014), and Host (2020). Those three movies all have far more in common with each other than Searching, though. First of all, those are all horror movies. Second, the things we see on the screen in those films are mostly open Windows for Skype, Zoom, or other such teleconferencing aps. Although there is some playing with the format, in many ways they’re an evolution of the found footage craze.

Searching is different. We still see the actors on screen fairly frequently (there’s a lot of Facetime happening in this movie, plus security footage, TV news broadcasts, and other justifications to put them on camera), but that’s not the usually compelling part of the film. The interesting thing is seeing Cho’s character using the information on his daughter’s laptop to track her down: old vlogs, emails, and different social media and other accounts that, over the course of the film, paint a picture of the girl he raised. It helps the audience to understand her, and from a storytelling standpoint, it also helps Cho to realize he no longer really knows his daughter the way he believed he did. The mystery is good. It’s compelling. But the format is what I really want to talk about today.

Although some of those earlier movies I mentioned do some of the things we see in Searching, it’s the way the movie uses the digital space that makes it stand out. We’re watching this mystery solved as the different elements are revealed to Cho. It’s not exactly realtime, there are jumps and lapses and the whole film takes place over the course of about a week, but it almost feels like realtime. We get to see things from Cho’s perspective – a text message he types then deletes unsent, for example – that reveal things about the character. In a conventional movie, this is all the stuff that happens before the scene where the detective shows up and says, “I found some information about your daughter, Mr. Kim.” In this movie, that stuff is the story. You wouldn’t think a scene focused on someone trying to change their Gmail password would be tense and compelling, but I’ll be damned if Chaganty didn’t make it work.

The face of every parent checking out their teenager’s browser history.

At least part of it, I think, is that it feels so relatable. We’ve all used social media, we’ve all done Google searches…we actually know what it is that Cho’s character is doing throughout the film, so we’re anxious to see the result. Occasionally, our familiarity with the language of computers clues us in to information that may not be immediately obvious to the detective himself if he’s not looking at the right area of the screen. And most importantly, in this digital age we live in, it seems very possible that REAL mysteries are solved this way now. All of this together made it a film that was fun to watch.

This raised a question, though. Did I like Searching because it was a good story, or did I like it just because it was an original gimmick? There are a lot of storytelling gimmicks that are cool the first time you see them, but get stale quickly. 3-D is the best example I can think of. Sure, there’s a visceral thrill to seeing a 3-D movie…or at least, there was the first 500 times it was done. But I have yet to see a movie in which 3-D actually improved the story, and that’s what it will take to convert me. I call it the “Wizard of Oz” moment. That was the movie that demonstrated that color could be used to make a story better than it would be in black and white. I haven’t seen 3-D’s Wizard of Oz moment.

And that’s what I needed to answer about the way Searching was told. Was this “on-screen” narrative technique something that could add new elements to the vocabulary of cinema, or was it just a one-off trick that would grow stale if repeated? There’s no way to answer that without trying it again.

And so they did.

Earlier this year we got Missing, a sort-of sequel to Searching written and directed by Nicholas D. Johnson and Will Merrick. I say “sort of” because, although it continues the use of the on-screen narrative, the stories really aren’t connected in any way. It’s a new cast, a new mystery, and except for a few times where the characters reference a Netflix “true crime” series they watch that (in-universe) depicts the events of the first movie, there’s no connection between the two whatsoever. In Missing we follow the efforts of a daughter (Storm Reid) trying to track down her mother (Mia Long), who never comes home from a vacation in Columbia with her boyfriend (the terribly-underutilized Ken Leung).

Storm Reid checks her Reddit upv — what, they can reuse the poster but I can’t reuse the joke?

Okay, so it’s another missing person movie. But complaining about that would be like going to see a Chucky movie and complaining that they’re using that talking doll again. It’s just the conceit of the franchise. The question is whether the sequel can tell a satisfying story, now that the audience has seen and is used to the trick of following the events on the computer screen. And from my perspective, at least, the answer was yes.

Except for the missing person angle, Missing really doesn’t borrow from Searching in the plot department. First of all, using the teenager as the protagonist (and, for purposes of the story, the main detective) makes us approach the story in a different way. Her resources weren’t quite as vast as those of an adult, and she was less likely than an adult may be to sit back and wait for the police to take care of matters happening in another country. This leads to an unlikely friendship between Reid’s character and Joaquim de Almeida, who she contacts using an app to hire someone for minor chores and turns him into her man on the ground in the country where her mother disappeared, but she can’t follow. The way the two of them work together from thousands of miles apart to unlock clues is entertaining and leads to some touching moments.

There are, admittedly, a few times where it seems like the filmmakers are aping Searching a little too closely, but they wind up using those as opportunities for plot twists and surprises. Without getting into spoiler territory for either film, I feel like anyone who has seen Searching will have certain expectations that make it almost impossible to identify the villain of Missing until the reveal. Storm Reid’s character and circumstances are different enough from those of John Cho that it doesn’t feel any more derivative than any other two missing person movies you might watch.

Like all sequels, there is an imperative to escalate the story. The scope is broader – the movie goes international this time – and the climax is told more through security camera footage, making it a bit more traditionally “cinematic” than the first film. Even then, though, the story manages to use the concept and the characters to their advantage, providing a key piece of information that would have been a little dull if they tried the same trick in a conventional movie. The important thing here is that, once again, the style worked. And if it works twice, that’s a good indicator that it may not just be a gimmick, it may be a legitimately new way to tell a story.

I think, to me at least, that’s the difference between a gimmick and a new storytelling technique: repeatability. The aforementioned found footage movies are a perfect example. The Blair Witch Project wasn’t the first found footage movie, but it catapulted the concept into the mainstream. Several years later Paranormal Activity brought it back. Both of them inspired dozens of imitators that were found wanting, but that doesn’t mean found footage itself can’t work. It just needs to be applied to the right project. Although there have been found footage films in numerous genres, the most popular and successful examples have usually been horror movies, which lend themselves to that format very well. Similarly, this “on-screen” narrative works very well for a mystery, because what you’re really watching is somebody trying to piece together a puzzle. Do I want to watch a thousand crappy mystery movies about someone using their kid’s laptop to track them down? No. But now that the format is out there and proven, I am very interested to see what other kinds of stories can be told this way.

She was actually crying in this scene because they made her watch the sequel.

And that doesn’t just mean in movies, either. The more I think about this setup, the more I think it could make for a very compelling video game. It would be a sort of digital equivalent to an escape room. In fact, it reminded me of the last time I played an escape room on a family vacation to Hot Springs. In the game, we used a deceased relative’s computer to sift through documents and emails to figure out where in the room to look for clues. For my nieces and nephew, the high point of the game was when I retrieved a hidden clue tied to a pair of ancient granny panties from an air duct, but for me I really enjoyed the way the game was put together, which I think would translate digitally very well.

This photograph is the reason I can never run for political office outside of Chicago.

I can imagine a game where the player takes the role of the detective, similar to John Cho and Storm Reid in their respective films, and has to crack some sort of mystery. As the game begins you are presented with a laptop interface with a video clip that you’re instructed to play to set up the story, then you use the information on the computer to crack the case. This would, admittedly, be a pretty substantial undertaking. The game would have to come preloaded with documents, files, video and audio clips, emails, social media platforms…it’d be a task to plan the whole thing out and produce all of the clues necessary, not to mention figure out a way to guide the player through it in a way that creates a satisfying experience, but I honestly think it would be a lot of fun.

I should mention here that I am not a gamer, I haven’t owned a video game console since my parents got a Sega Genesis I shared with my brother and sister, so it’s entirely possible that what I just described already exists. If it does, I don’t know about it, but I would be very interested if you could point me in that direction. In fact, I imagine at least three of you have already posted an angry response to point out my ignorance of some game that fits the pattern exactly. (“Clearly you’ve never played Leisure Suit Larry 19: Larry’s Hard Drive.”) If so, just send me a gentle notification, will you? Especially if it’s a mobile game.

I’m happy to find something that I hadn’t encountered before. Storytelling is one of my favorite things in the world (it comes #3 after my family and the return of the McRib), so any time someone can show me a way to do it that I haven’t seen before, I’m fascinated. I’m just crossing my fingers that the storytellers who see Searching and Missing and think “I can do that” learn the right lessons instead of just hitting copy and paste.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. It’s kind of amazing how much better the security was on John Cho’s kid’s laptop than in the entire Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles.