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Geek Punditry #171: You’ll Figure it Out On the Way

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Recently, on the advice of – and this is a rough estimate so please forgive me if I leave somebody off this list – everybody, I picked up Matt Dinniman’s LitRPG novel Dungeon Crawler Carl. I’ve never read a LitRPG before, but a lot of people whose options I highly value told me over and over again what a great book this was and that I needed to check it out or watch my Geek Cred stats rapidly plummet. And I must concede, that first book really grabbed me.

My friends just know how wild I go over “crawling” fiction.

From what I can tell, LitRPG is a subgenre of sci-fi and fantasy in which the story emulates traits of a typical roleplaying game, including having the characters’ stats and levels prominently featured and even included in the plot. In the case of Dungeon Crawler Carl, these stats and levels come as Carl and his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut, are forced to risk their lives over and over again in a massive global dungeon with the entirety of the human race – at least those who are still alive – hanging in the balance. If that doesn’t sound like a riot, I should remind you all that Douglas Adams chose to begin his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by blowing up Earth, so an apocalyptic comedy is by no means unexplored territory. And Dinniman handles it extremely well. I admit, when I started reading the book I expected the conclusion of the Dungeon Crawler story to come by the end of the first volume, and I wondered what the follow-up would be that would extend the series to seven installments (so far, at least – the latest word is that the series will wrap up in volume ten). I was quite surprised, then, as I progressed through the novel and realized, at the pace we were going, there was no way in hell the story would be finished in one book, and Carl’s singular quest through the dungeons would, so it appears, be the entire series.

After reading some massive doorstoppers early this year, I was pleasantly surprised not only by how entertaining the adventures of Carl and Donut turned out to be, but also by just how quickly I whipped through the first novel. After spending the better part of a month on Stephen King’s It, I finished the first Carl book in less than a week. I informed some of my friends who recommended it to me in a group chat the day after I finished reading book one, and one of them told me that book eight is scheduled for release next month, May.

“I doubt I’ll make it through seven books by May,” I said.

“Yeah, you will,” he replied.

And damned if it’s not possible. When I picked up the second volume this week, I got through roughly a quarter of it in the first day, an almost unheard of chunk of novel in a modern era in which my valuable reading time is often stolen by such frivolous things as going to work, driving a car, and parenting. But I quickly noticed something unusual about the second book, Carl’s Doomsday Scenario. Most of the time, when you get to the second installment of a series, there’s a bit of an effort to restack the world for the audience – reminding them of things that happened in part one, re-explaining the rules of the world, and otherwise attempting to bring them up to speed in case there’s anybody just joining in for the first time. This is pretty common in fiction of all types. TV shows with serialized storylines will frequently begin with a “Previously on…” segment. Movie sequels will usually have some brief lip service where the characters recap the events of the first film, even if doing so makes little sense in context. Comic books make frequent use of flashbacks. 

The idea here is that there’s always the chance that there’s someone joining the audience NOW – somebody who has not seen the earlier episodes or read the earlier books, and therefore needs a little help so they don’t get lost. There was a point in the 80s when Jim Shooter, then Editor-In-Chief of Marvel Comics, issued a company-wide rule that every character be referred to by name when they first appeared in each issue, just to make sure a theoretical new reader could tell who’s who. The spirit of the policy made sense, but in terms of writing, this would often result in clunky panels with inorganic dialogue. This was never demonstrated better than the infamous “Mouseketeer Roll Call” Shooter himself wrote in the pages of Marvel’s first major crossover event, Secret Wars, when dozens of heroes and villains who had just been kidnapped and brought to the other end of the universe by a cosmic deity stopped the action, stood in a line, and identified themselves.

The Wasp and the Thing are at opposite ends, both of the panel, and in terms of the spectrum of humility.

Dinniman, however, makes absolutely zero attempt to recap the story for new readers. Although Carl’s Doomsday Scenario begins with a new Chapter One, it may as well have just continued the numbering from the previous book, because it picks up just seconds later and makes every presumption that the reader is up-to-date. It doesn’t recap part one, doesn’t explain the logic of this universe, and pretty much just goes on as if Dinniman is quite confident that anybody who is reading Doomsday Scenario will also have read Dungeon Crawler Carl, so why bother? It was temporarily jarring even for me, somebody who had just finished book one a week earlier, when Carl started getting messages from somebody named “Brandon” that had not been mentioned before in this book and I had to go back and remind myself who he was. 

I defy anybody to find evidence in this image that this book is a sequel. You can’t, can you? Because you’re too busy looking at the cat in the tiara, that’s why.

The style of storytelling in which a recap is expected…in some ways, it’s kind of a relic of a bygone era. It made a lot of sense in the days when a TV series aired one episode a week and if you missed it, you just missed it and hoped you could catch a rerun over the summer. In these days of binge-watching, when you can start a series from episode one no matter how many episodes have been made, and when the streaming service will roll right into the next episode after you finish it, it’s not nearly as important as it used to be. It’s still a little more necessary in other forms of storytelling, but not always. In movies like those in the Marvel Cinematic Universe – particularly the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday – we should expect a certain amount of recap because it’s unreasonable to presume every audience member will be intimately familiar with the details of the past three decades of Marvel movies and television, especially since the former Fox X-Men universe is being folded into the multiverse of the MCU. But James Gunn’s Superman launched a whole universe in the middle of a story and figured – correctly – that there was no need to go over Superman’s origin yet again because everybody should be familiar with it at this point. A few title cards at the very beginning told us everything we could possibly need to know.

But what about episodic storytelling like comic books? Shooter’s rule – even when it was executed poorly – made a lot of sense in an era where it was presumed that every issue was potentially somebody’s FIRST issue. Comic books aren’t really written that way anymore. Most series – even so-called “ongoing” series – are given a certain number of issues to tell a story (although this exact number is often undisclosed to the reader it is typically low – maybe five or six issues at a time). If the series sells well enough, it will be renewed for another number of issues, then another, until either it becomes unprofitable or the creative team finishes all of the stories they had planned. With this structure, even as comic book sales are on the rise, it’s reasonable to assume that the number of people jumping into a series on issue #8 is relatively slim. But we WANT new readers, so there has to be a way to make it accessible without alienating the existing audience.

And there is, and it’s a simple way. Marvel Comics have long had a policy of including a “previously” page at the beginning of each issue, recapping the story to date and showing headshots of the major characters. It serves the same purpose as Shooter’s old rule, but it’s not intrusive into the story itself. Somebody who hasn’t been reading along can use the page to get into the saddle, but faithful readers can easily skip it if they wish. It’s a sensible policy, and other publishers (DC included) have slowly gotten into the habit of incorporating similar pages in their own comic books, although I wish it would become more standard. 

I mean, without this page how would you ever know the Scarlet Witch is a witch?

With prose books, we’ve got an interesting sort of mix of possible readers. On the one hand, if somebody is an ebook reader, it would make little sense to begin in the middle of a series. If you’re browsing the Kindle store and a book sounds interesting, it’s usually labelled as something like “Book 2 in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series,” with a handy link to look at all the books in the series at once so you can get them all and start from the beginning. But for a print reader who gets these books browsing a brick-and-mortar store, it’s not always as clear. Not every series is clearly labeled as such on the cover, and even if it is, there can’t always be a 100 percent guarantee that the store will have the earlier volumes in stock on the day you pick up volume three while you’re casually browsing. 

Many of us have fallen victim to this at some point or another. Back in middle school I was poking through the shelves at our Scholastic Book Fair (if you’re someone that just got a little thrill of excitement at those words, you are my kinda people) when I saw a book with the fascinating title The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I picked it up and I read the back cover, and it sounded interesting. So I bought the book, brought it home, devoured it, loved it…and THEN I discovered that it was actually the sequel to a novel called Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Had I noticed that parts of it were a little confusing the first time I read it? Sure. But my seventh-grade self already was aware that there were jokes and references I didn’t quite understand (I did not have an encyclopedic knowledge of British politics and popular culture circa 1980, believe it or not), so when there seemed to be something missing I assumed that gaps in my knowledge could be attributed to that, rather than the fact that I’d skipped an entire book.

And even if I DID notice, based on this cover, I would have thought the book I missed was Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

In Dinniman’s case, the lack of recap makes more sense when you learn that the series originated on the online platform Royal Road, which allows writers to serialize their fiction. The Carl series was not originally written in book form, but in this more episodic format, and when the decision was made to publish it as a book series Dinniman basically chose where to end each volume based on a point where a logical pause happened rather than necessarily having it planned out as a ten-volume series. That kind of planning seems to have crept in later, as the book went from a popular online fic to a publishing juggernaut, but it wasn’t baked in from the beginning, and the book version reflects this. 

(Personal side-note: I’d never heard of Royal Road before I began digging into the backstory of Dungeon Crawler Carl and I feel the need to look deeper into this system. I’ve been thinking about looking for a new way to serialize my own work ever since the demise of Kindle Vella, and this seems like a far more stable outlet.)

The recap thing is a trope in storytelling, and although I can understand why it may be frustrating for people who are devoted followers of a particular series, I don’t think it’s a bad thing. It serves a purpose, and if it allows a story to be opened up to a larger potential audience, that’s a net positive. It just needs to be done in an unobtrusive way. “Previously” pages in comics or even in novels are a good way to do it, and although lacking one doesn’t hurt anyone’s enjoyment of the series at all, I’m surprised that Dinniman didn’t include one in Doomsday Scenario.

At the very least, publishers, make it damn clear on the cover or spine of a book if it’s part of a series. Numbers are your friends.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Seriously, go read the first part of Little Stars, because he’s working on polishing part two. He needs people to stare at him and ask him when it will be finished. 

Geek Punditry #160: The Difficulty of a Kingamatic Universe

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“Hey,” one of my students whispers to the kid sitting next to him. “He’s reading It.”

And I smile.

On the wall in my classroom is a small whiteboard. At the top of the board is written “What is Mr. Petit reading?” Underneath, I regularly update the board with the title and author of whatever book has most recently been removed from my To-Be-Read pile and is actually in the process of being read. Currently, that book is Stephen King’s It. I’ve had that board up for a few years now, and I update it whenever I begin a new book, and having it visible has led to lots of really great questions such as “Are you still reading that one?” and “How many books do you read, anyway?”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, but I read more books yesterday than some people in here will read in their entire lives. Please don’t take that as a challenge.”

Occasionally, though, the board can lead to an actual conversation if a student happens to have read the book, is curious about it, or didn’t know that a book even existed (for properties they’re only familiar with as movies, such as Ready Player One). It is the book currently on the board, and it’ll probably stay there for a little while, because even for Stephen King, it’s kinda long. Some students are horrified when I tell them that I’m reading a book that’s in the ballpark of 1100 pages. They are even more baffled when I tell them that this is not the first time I’ve read it. I don’t recall, honestly, if this is the third or fourth time I’ve taken this particular trip to Derry, Maine, but I know exactly when the LAST time I read it was – it was late August and early September of 2017, and I remember it because it happened to be the book I was reading the week my son was born. I recall sitting there, scrolling through the pages on my tablet as Erin and Eddie slept, each of them rather exhausted after recently undergoing the most dramatic moving day in the history of a human being. 

Don’t worry, I didn’t whip out my book and start reading as soon as the kid popped out – this was some time later, as we had to stay in the hospital a little while as they treated him for some blessedly minor things that prevented us from going home for about five days. If you’ve ever spent time in the hospital, no matter how serious the condition may be, you’ll know that after a few days you start crawling up the walls if you don’t have something to do. My something was to visit with my friends in the Losers Club.

In retrospect, this may not have been the best choice for a new father’s reading material.

The specific reason I started reading It again this week, though, is because I finished the first season of HBO’s TV series Welcome to Derry, a prequel to the film adaptations of the novel from 2017 and 2019. The series is produced by Andy Muschietti, who directed the films and half the episodes of the show as well.  I thoroughly enjoyed the series, and it made me thirst to go back and revisit the source material again. As I’m reading it, I’m noticing the little bits and pieces, the tidbits the writers and showrunners planted in the show that help build out the world with water from the original font. 

To be clear, this TV series is a prequel to the MOVIES, not the book. There are some important differences that prevent it from working as an adaptation of the novel, chiefly the time period. The original novel is set in two eras: 1958 (when the protagonists are children) and 1985 (when they return to Derry as adults to finish what they started). The creature they do battle with has a cycle of about 27 years in hibernation, after which it returns to wreak havoc on Derry once again. 1985 was contemporary when the book was written, but Muschietti decided to keep the story set in the “present” when the films were released, meaning the events were shifted to 1989 (for the kid portions) and 2016 (for the adult portions). Welcome to Derry details the previous cycle of It in 1962. The point is that the movie universe cannot fit the timeline of the book universe, and that’s honestly not a bad thing.

People who saw the show know just what a dirty trick this poster is.

Since the show, from the outset, cannot be a direct prequel to the novel, Muschietti and the writers are playing a little more fast and loose with the story, while still paying respect to it. For example, in the original novel Veronica Grogan is the name of one of the countless victims of Pennywise during the monster’s 1958 cycle. The TV show elevates her to one of the main characters fighting against the clown in the generation BEFORE the Losers’ first encounter with the monster. The names of many other characters from the book are peppered throughout the show, some of them characters mentioned in the novel, others with names that imply (and in a few cases, make abundantly clear) that they are relatives or ancestors of characters from the original in this version of the story. 

But the connections to the works of Stephen King don’t end with elements strictly from It. At one point, a character is sent to Shawshank Prison, the setting of King’s classic novella (and its classic movie adaptation) The Shawshank Redemption. Shawshank is frequently referenced in King’s Maine-centric stories, which is to say a little more than half of them, so it’s not a surprise when it turns up here. An even bigger link, though, is the character Dick Halloran. Halloran is one of the principal characters in his novel The Shining, which was written before It, and the original novel reveals that he was somehow involved in the tragically violent events that concluded a previous cycle of It. Welcome to Derry expands upon that, showing those events in full and giving Halloran a much more significant role. What’s more, they don’t even stop there, referencing elements of Halloran’s character that come neither from It OR The Shining, but rather from the latter’s sequel, Doctor Sleep. 

“Honestly, we’re just glad somebody remembered we were here.”

What I’m getting at here is that Welcome to Derry feels like it’s inching closer and closer to something that Stephen King fans have wanted to see for a very long time: a true cinematic universe.

Yeah, we’re going to that well again. Marvel has its cinematic universe. DC is on take two. We’ve got one for Star Wars and John Wick and even horror franchises like The Conjuring. But the thing you need to remember is that none of these franchises INVENTED the idea of a shared universe. It’s been around for a very long time. William Faulkner linked several of his novels and short stories together via the inhabitants of the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. James Joyce’s Dublin serves as the backdrop for several of his stories and, inasmuch as it’s possible to understand anything Joyce wrote, several of them link together. And King, much like many other contemporary writers, delights in dropping in Easter Eggs, hints, clues, and references that tie his various stories to one another. 

Now not ALL of his stories can be said to definitively take place in the same universe. The Stand, for example, is a novel about a virus that kills most of the population of the world, which clearly precludes most of his later works from being set in the same universe. Cell isn’t exactly a zombie story, but it’s close enough that this world is incompatible with most of King’s other work. And it’s hard to reconcile the bleak, horrific vision of the afterlife from Revival with several of his other stories which feature good, even friendly ghosts on occasion, such as Bag of Bones. Then there are the Stephen King books that explicitly reference other King books – or their movie adaptations – as fiction. That’s a bit of a roadblock.

On the other hand, King himself has provided us with a handy device that can explain away any discrepancy via his Dark Tower series: a multiverse. The Tower itself is a sort of central hub around which all reality converges, and that includes many different worlds and dimensions that are similar to, but distinct from, one another. The Dark Tower provides links not only to It and The Stand, but to multiple other books and short stories. And lots of the other stories he’s written drop in casual references that remind us that yes, their universe is one of the countless that are connected to the Tower. 

If ever there was a scene that MUST be committed to film, it’s this.

So all that said, why HAVEN’T we gotten a proper Stephen King cinematic universe before? The biggest obstacle, frankly, is licensing. King’s first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, and he’s been turning out book after book and story after story since then. The most recent count I can find credits him with 67 novels and novellas and over 200 short stories over his 52-year career, and he’s been selling off the rights to them to different players all along. I don’t begrudge the man this – Lord knows I wish I could get that kind of payday – but the result is that the film and television rights to his works are all over the place. Dozens of studios and even individual filmmakers own bits and pieces of him, and getting all of them together to play nice and collaborate seems like a pretty impossible prospect. It’s the same reason that Marvel characters didn’t start meeting each other on screen until Marvel Comics stopped selling the rights to anybody who offered them twelve dollars and half a Fruit Roll-Up and started making the movies themselves. 

It’s not like King isn’t still a significant player in the entertainment game. People who don’t follow him may think of his work primarily as the grist for a huge slate of horror movies from the 1980s, but they’ve been coming out regularly since then – and they’re not all horror. 2025 brought us no less than four big-screen adaptations of his work: The Monkey (which turned a straight horror short story into kind of a bizarre black comedy), The Life of Chuck (a beautiful and faithful adaptation of a semi-fantasy by director Mike Flanagan), and two adaptations of books he wrote under his Richard Bachman alias, The Long Walk and The Running Man. These last two are both dystopian science fiction rather than horror, but they’re radically different from one another, despite the fact that they both have the same hook of characters competing in a lethal game in the hopes of a life-changing prize. But while The Long Walk is a dark, nihilistic societal commentary, The Running Man is a slam-bang action film. 

There have been attempts in the past to create a sort of King universe. Most notably, in 2018 Hulu produced Castle Rock, a series “inspired” by elements from a great number of King’s various works and set in that OTHER town in Maine that seems like it must be a nightmare to actually live in. The show was okay and it lasted two seasons, but I don’t think it actually gave fans what they wanted: a world in which the stories they love (or at least versions of those stories) could coexist. In Castle Rock, it was more like they took chunks of King’s books – characters, names, places – and pieced them together into something different. That’s a legitimate storytelling technique, of course. Mike Flanagan did it with Edgar Allan Poe for his exquisite miniseries version of Fall of the House of Usher. But it wasn’t quite what we were looking for.

In Welcome to Derry, the events of the two It movies are canonical, and the things we’ve seen so far make it quite easy to link that world with The Shawshank Redemption and the Shining/Doctor Sleep duet – if not exactly the movies we’re familiar with, then at least some version of those events. All of those movies, it should be pointed out, were released by Warner Bros., which is no doubt why they could play with those toys so easily. The show has not officially been renewed for a second season, but it has achieved real critical acclaim (although, typical for a streaming service, we have no idea what its numbers are), and Muschietti has been quite vocal about his plans for the next two seasons of the show. Future seasons would tell stories of two earlier iterations of the It cycle, in 1935 and 1908. This, I think, would be the perfect opportunity to build out the universe and add more parts of the Stephen King world. In fact, I think in some ways it would be almost REQUIRED to do that.

I loved season one of Welcome to Derry. The story was tense and compelling, the performances were great, and even though King wasn’t directly involved, the new characters all felt like the sort of characters that we get attached to in his books – ordinary people who get swept up in something far beyond their comprehension. If there is one legitimate complaint about the show, though, it’s probably that about half of the plot (the half that focuses on the child protagonists rather than the adults) is a bit TOO similar to the original It: a bunch of outcast children band together to stand against the evil of Pennywise the Clown. If we’re going to do another two seasons, they can’t just be two still-earlier stories about kids teaming up and fighting the monster. They need to bring something else to the table.

Andy Muschietti, I think, has proven himself an able enough storyteller that he is no doubt aware of this fact. The way he’s talking, it seems like he already knows what the story will be in 1935 and 1908. What I’m hoping is that he finds ways to tie in to other King stories. Could there potentially be references to John Coffey or the other characters from The Green Mile (set in 1932 in the novel, but it wouldn’t be outlandish of them to drag it forward in the timeline a few years)? Could we see the immortal vampires of ‘Salem’s Lot or the origins of the mysterious government project called “The Shop” from books like Firestarter? All of these, of course, would depend on rights issues in various ways, but I don’t think any of them are impossible either. 

Then there’s The Dark Tower itself, the rights to which currently reside with the previously mentioned Mike Flanagan. There was an earlier attempt to put the story of Roland of Gilead to film, a 2017 movie that foolishly tried to condense seven novels (all but one of which fall into doorstopper territory) into a 90-minute feature, and fans were not pleased. Flanagan, who already has several well-received King adaptations under his belt, has expressed the desire to use The Dark Tower for a television series of about five seasons, with a pair of movies to conclude the story. This is a much smarter approach to the material, and Flanagan has proven himself time and again to be someone perfectly suited to bringing Stephen King’s stories to life. 

This…was NOT perfectly suited.

The optimal version of this, for me at least, would be for Flanagan’s Dark Tower to share fabric with Muschietti’s series. Characters common to both projects could be played by the same actors, the stories could be woven in concert with one another – separate, but linked. Could it happen? Well, Warner Bros. owns the rights to It and Welcome to Derry, so for this to happen, Flanagan would have to produce his series in cooperation with Warner Bros. It’s not out of the question. His previous development deal with Netflix is over, and his current deal with Amazon does not include The Dark Tower. He could take the story anywhere he wants. And he’s got a relationship with Warner Bros. as well – he directed their adaptation of Doctor Sleep and wrote the upcoming Clayface movie from DC Studios, which coincidentally, is ALSO in the Andy Muschietti business, as he’s been signed to direct their upcoming Batman movie, Brave and the Bold.

I’m not saying that this will happen. I’m not saying that Flanagan and Muschietti and Stephen King and Warner Bros. will join forces and finally begin to create the Kingamatic Universe that Constant Readers have been craving for the better part of five decades.

I’m not saying it’s going to happen.

I’m just saying it would be pretty damn cool.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He also hopes that somewhere in there they find a way to tell us what happened to the Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon…specifically, does she still love Tom Gordon, or has she moved on to – say – Shohei Ohtani?

Geek Punditry #158: No More Hidden Tracks

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Before we start, I want to assure you that this column will NOT spoil the final season of Stranger Things. I do my best to avoid spoilers in general, but it will be particularly easy in this case because I have not yet watched the final season of Stranger Things. A lot of people around me have, though, and a lot of people have opinions about it. This week, as my students filtered back into my class after their Christmas break, I heard them discussing the series finale and I had to kindly request that they refrain from speaking about specifics in my presence. (I believe my exact words were “If you spoil anything for me I’m going to make it my mission to see to it that you never graduate.” It’s good to teach seniors sometimes.) 

“These kids were in high school for ten years, don’t think I won’t do that to you, too.”

One of the non-spoiler things I heard them discussing, though, was something people were calling “Conformity Gate.” I don’t know exactly what this is a reference to or where the term comes from, other than the generic tendency ever since Nixon to append the -gate suffix to any sort of scandal or conspiracy because people are too lazy to come up with something original. From what I gathered, the “Conformity Gate” discussion centered around an internet theory that there was a SECRET NINTH EPISODE of the final season, that the episode that dropped on New Year’s Eve was NOT the actual series finale, and that on the evening of January 7th, Netflix would surprise us all by dropping the TRUE series finale of the epic and long-awaited sci-fi/horror series Stranger Things.

And I gotta tell ya, when I heard this theory, I lauuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuughed…

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard such a thing. Last fall, there was supposedly a secret episode of Peacemaker season two. At one point I recall hearing such a theory about Game of Thrones. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it for certain series of Doctor Who. And just like with those other series, Jan. 7 came and went and there was nothing except an announcement for the (previously-announced) Stranger Things animated spin-off series. 

These theories are simply never true. And honestly, the way that TV and movie production is handled in this day and age, such a thing would be virtually inconceivable.

Not impossible. In fact, it would be relatively easy to do. It’s just that the studios would never let ’em do it.

Now I’m going to preface this by saying that these theories are almost always spread by people who are upset about the final episode and unable to accept that what they just saw was the “real” ending. It’s a stubborn, childish insistence, and even in those cases where I happen to agree that the final episode was disappointing, it’s kind of an insult to the people who actually made the show. (I can only imagine what would have happened had this sort of speculation been common when How I Met Your Mother wrapped.) I’m not saying that it’s unfair to be disappointed in how a show ends – that is of course a matter of personal taste and nobody has the right to tell you that you’re right or wrong for your tastes. But it IS pretty darn childish to have the attitude that what you watched was somehow SO bad that it MUST have been an intentional misdirect. 

Think about it just for a second: is anyone who works on TV – writers, directors, actors, showrunners – ever going to DELIBERATELY make a bad episode? Would they take such a risk? That’s not anyone’s goal. They want to build interest and anticipation with each installment, and having people trash your work doesn’t do that. There’s an old adage that the only “bad press” is “no press,” and I’m here to tell you, that’s a straight-up lie. Just ask the people who made the Spider-Man quasi-spinoff Morbius.

If you didn’t share 19 “It’s Morbin’ Time!” memes were you even ON the internet in 2022?

That movie was the talk of the town. Everybody was discussing it, making memes about it, and pushing it to the forefront of the conversation…but the buzz, deserved or not, was all BAD. And then the movie came out and completely bombed. Then when people kept talking about it, Sony took a shot at re-releasing it, and it bombed AGAIN. I’m not saying that without the bad buzz the movie would have been a hit, but it’s undeniable that heavy internet chatter surrounding the film did NOTHING to help its numbers.

Then there’s the other reason that such a thing would be virtually inconceivable today: the studios who make movies and television shows are utterly adverse to surprise. Everything – and I mean EVERYTHING – has to be dumped out onto the public far ahead of time. Casting news, romantic subplots, climatic battles, full songs are all spilled out onto the internet weeks, months, even years before the movie or TV show actually makes it to your screen. Movie trailers have become particularly bad about this. I love a good trailer. Making a good trailer – essentially a short film intended to get an audience interested in watching the FULL movie – is an art form in and of itself. But the studios seem to have forgotten that, and rather than doing something artful to engage the audience and make people want to head to the movie theater, their strategy seems to be to just give away every surprise and plot point in the hopes that it will accomplish the same thing. 

I get why they do this, of course. Whether you’re talking about a theatrical release or a streaming show, in the 21st century it seems like the only numbers that matter are those that we get in the first few days of a release. Let’s use the recent slate of Avengers: Doomsday trailers as an example. In the last few weeks, we’ve started to get teaser trailers that show a glimpse of a character or two, followed by the announcement that “Steve Rogers will return in Avengers: Doomsday.” Or Thor. Or the X-Men. And by the time you read this, there will probably be teasers with everyone from the Fantastic Four to Spider-Ham to Millie the Model.

This is the one that broke the Internet.

None of these (except Millie) would be much of a shock. Last year Marvel had a huge streaming event which amounted to showing us – one at a time – director’s chairs with the names of assorted cast members, their way of telling us who was going to be in the movie. Some of them were a surprise at the time, and that was (I admit) kind of cool. But wouldn’t it have been cooler if we had NO IDEA that Patrick Stewart and Kelsey Grammar were going to be back as Professor X and the Beast until we were in the theater, watching it, and then they showed up out of the blue?

I think so, anyway.

Would in-theater surprises get people excited? Would it make them engaged? Absolutely. If an audience is excited and energized about a movie, they’ll walk out talking about it, they’ll tell their friends they have to see it, and the movie can grow legs. But the problem is that the studios no longer CARE about legs. This strategy – keep it a surprise and build word of mouth – is the way to get people excited about a movie in the long-term. That’s not how movies are evaluated anymore, unfortunately. All that matters is that opening weekend in a theater or the first 48 hours of streaming. If you don’t get massive numbers up front, a movie is declared a failure. There was a time when a movie might not have had an enormous opening weekend, but positive word of mouth would allow it to stay in a theater for weeks or even months until it became what they called a “sleeper” hit. 

The studios don’t care about that anymore. An ad that says “the number one movie in America!” is way sexier than one that says “we made back our budget in the fifth week of release!” So they do everything they possibly can do to frontload the audience and get everyone to see the movie right away. This, by the way, is one of the approximately 3,972 reasons that I’m very nervous about the prospect of Netflix buying Warner Bros. Netflix is a streaming platform, and the head of the company has frequently expressed outright disdain for the theatrical release model that I personally hold so dear. I’m very much afraid that if this deal is eventually allowed to happen, it will be the final chokehold on the already-dying movie theater experience.

But that’s a whole different topic. What does this have to do with “Conformity Gate” and the potential for another episode of Stranger Things? It’s simply this: Netflix (any studio, really, but we’re talking about Netflix specifically at the moment) would simply never take the risk of hiding such a thing. They are ADDICTED to telling you EVERYTHING. Remember, this is the studio that tells its writers that the characters have to ANNOUNCE WHAT THEY ARE DOING OUT LOUD because they assume that most of the audience will be scrolling on their phones instead of really paying attention when they’re watching a show. Do you honestly think they’ve got a high enough opinion of you to drop a surprise like that?

The tragedy of it is that I actually think it WOULD be a great thing to attempt, kind of like a hidden track on a CD. (Those don’t really exist anymore either, so kids, ask your parents.) It would be amazing if Netflix, or anybody for that matter, was capable of keeping a secret of this magnitude and then executing it. Now they obviously couldn’t do it all the time. It would need to be used sparingly, and only for exactly the right project, a story for which that kind of surprise ending would be both structurally and tonally appropriate. And let’s be honest here: they would not hide the existence of the episode right up until the moment it drops. It’s far more likely that the episode we EXPECT to be the finale to end with a “To be continued” card or something to that effect. But if executed properly, it could be a really thrilling moment.

The funny part is that Netflix actually did do something like this once. Anybody remember the Super Bowl in 2018? Like most Super Bowls, the biggest draw was the commercials. I was there to see what Doritos was up to, or Pepsi, or something dot com that probably doesn’t exist anymore. And most of all, I’m there for the movie trailers. As far as I’m concerned, every Super Bowl commercial should either be really funny, or a kick-ass movie trailer. In 2018, one of those trailers hit us with the Netflix logo, then scrolled into scenes from some sort of outer space thriller that we hadn’t heard of before. It wasn’t like getting a Marvel or Star Wars trailer, where we knew that the movie was in production and we were just hoping for our first glimpse. This was something totally new.

And at the end of the trailer, we got the title: The Cloverfield Paradox. Holy crap. It was the new Cloverfield movie, the one that had been rumored ever since 10 Cloverfield Lane. And it wasn’t going to theaters, it was gonna be a Netflix movie.

Then came the biggest shock: the announcement that the movie was NOW STREAMING. It wasn’t telling us that the movie was dropping in a year or a month. It was ON NETFLIX AND WE COULD WATCH IT RIGHT NOW.

“If it’s HALF as good as the first two Cloverfield movies, this is gonna change everything!”

I thought then – and still think now – that it was one of the most brilliant marketing moves Netflix could ever have done. It was an incredible surprise and it got me more enthusiastic about watching that movie that I think would even have been possible otherwise. And it’s a shame, really, that as a movie The Cloverfield Paradox turned out to be…well…not great. Because if it had been, that would have been checkmate. This could have been an annual thing. We could sit down for the Super Bowl every year, wondering what movie Netflix was going to announce during the game that we would have the option to watch as soon as the game was over (as opposed to the random episode of Matlock that they usually show for some reason). 

But it didn’t pan out that way, and now Netflix is more risk-averse than anybody. Remember, this is the studio that cancels entire series if they aren’t a smash hit in the week after the first episode drops. Do you really think they’d take a chance at a whole surprise episode?

It would be cool, don’t get me wrong.

I just don’t see it happening.

So the next time you’re unhappy with the finale of a Netflix show and someone floats the idea that there’s a special “hidden” episode waiting for you, ask yourself if the streamer that killed The Santa Clarita Diet would actually do such a thing before you pass that rumor along.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He’s planning to start his own Stranger Things conspiracy theory. Now that Netflix has Sesame Street, they’re doing a miniseries that will reveal the hidden connection between Eleven and all her siblings to the terrifying and legendary Count Von Count. You heard it here first.

Geek Punditry #157: One Year Later-What Is Superman?

blakemp Year of Superman , , , , ,

Yesterday, January 1st, was the first day since 2024 that I didn’t read, watch, or listen to anything related to Superman.

And I missed doing it.

Unless you’ve been living under a Kryptonite rock, you know that at the end of 2024, enthused for the then-upcoming James Gunn movie, I declared that 2025 would be my Year of Superman, and for the next 365 days I adhered to that. Every day for a solid year I read comics, watched movies and TV shows, listened to podcasts, and otherwise spent time with stories featuring my favorite superhero and his extended family. 52 blog posts later (all of which are archived right here, by the way) it’s time for me to look back and think about what it all means to me.

Nailed it.

To begin with, I don’t do this very often, but I’ve got to congratulate myself for actually accomplishing the goal. In that original column when I announced the project, I said that I would give myself grace, fully expecting that at some point in the year I would slip up and miss a day. And let me tell you, there were days in 2025 in which I didn’t want to read or watch anything. Bad days came and I didn’t want to do much more than retreat to my own Fortress of Solitude. But I didn’t. I made it without missing a single day. Let’s talk about what that means by the numbers. Over the course of 2025, the media I consumed included:

That’s – and keep in mind that I’m referring to myself here – batshit insane. I don’t know if David Corenswet spent as much time in 2025 thinking about Superman as I did. So after all that…what does it mean? What have I learned about him? 

The truth is, I find that the things I already believed were mostly affirmed. Superman has been around for nearly 90 years now, and in that time there have been many stories told about him and many different interpretations of the character. And that’s all fine. But let me tell you about MY Superman, what I get from the character, why he matters so damned much to ME.

In Man of Steel, Henry Cavill popularized to the mainstream something that had been part of the comics for a few years at that point, that the S-shield Superman wears, the emblem of the House of El (at least going back to the 1978 Christopher Reeve movie) was a Kryptonian symbol for hope. But what exactly does that mean? Is it just because Superman is so powerful? Is it because when you see that symbol, you know that the danger you’re in is only temporary, that somebody will be there to save you? Is that “S” just for “Superman,” or does it also mean “Savior?”

Yeah. That guy. Any of him.

Superman’s story has a lot of allusions to Christianity, with Marlon Brando’s Jor-El even referring to Kal-El as “my only son,” but Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were Jewish and the story perhaps fits the concept of Moses even better. If you’ll forgive a brief moment of spirituality, Jesus was sent as the Savior of the human race in a direct way, and we get that whenever Superman saves someone falling from a burning building, leaps in front of a speeding bullet, or stops a locomotive to save the kid stuck on the tracks. Moses, on the other hand, was a less direct kind of savior, a leader, someone who GUIDES his people to a better world. And it is in this capacity that the parallels to Superman are stronger. Sure, Superman will save you from a flood, but more importantly, he’s there to show you that there’s a better way.

Let’s say it one more time: It’s not subtle.

It’s almost a cliche to say it at this point, but Superman’s greatest power is not his strength, his speed, his ability to fly or see through walls. His greatest power is his compassion, his unflinching belief in the goodness of people, and his ability to help others see things that way as well. Superman is the man who will never give up on you: no matter who you are or what you’ve done, he will always have faith in your ability to be better. 

If you’re going to wear that shield, Kenan, you need to remember this.

In the climax of the new movie, David Corenswet tells Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor that his greatest strength is his humanity, and that he hopes for the good of the world that some day Luthor will realize the same thing about himself. From anybody else, that line would sound trite, pat, and cloying. From Superman, you believe it. The tragedy of Lex Luthor is not that he’s a criminal or a killer or anything else. That makes him a villain. What makes him a tragic figure, what Superman laments every time he faces him, is that he has a mind that could make the world a better place, but chooses to use it selfishly. And every time he faces Luthor, Superman hopes that this will be the time that Luthor sees the light. It’s even happened in the comics a few times, where Lex has turned good. It’s always been temporary, of course, except for in self-contained continuities like All-Star Superman, but we’ve seen time and again that even Lex Luthor has within him a seed of redemption. We’ve seen time and again that Superman is right. And if he’s right – if even LEX LUTHOR has the potential to be a better person tomorrow than he is today – then what does that mean for the rest of us?

Superman believes the best of you. And he inspires you to believe the best in others. In the final episode of Superman and Lois we see him in flight with his extended family of heroes, and we learn that he and Lois manage to change their world for the better. In Final Night, we are reminded that half the superheroes in the world look to him as inspiration (the other half, naturally, look to Batman). The whole point of The Iron Giant is that the Giant himself – an alien weapon – looks to the example of Superman and sees that he can make himself better.

The Giant gets it better than anybody on BlueSky.

We cannot bend steel in our bare hands. We cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound. We cannot change the course of mighty rivers, or freeze those rivers with our breath. We cannot fly through space unaided, travel through time, or crush a lump of coal into a diamond. Those things are beyond us.

But we can believe in the best of each other. And maybe, if we do enough of that, those others will actually begin to earn that trust. And maybe, if we do enough of that, we can learn to believe in the best of ourselves.

We should believe the best of ourselves.

Because Superman would.

Remind yourself, in those times where you’re dangling off the edge of that cliff and you think you’ll never make it, that Superman would believe in you. 

And who are you to tell Superman that he’s wrong?

And don’t you forget it.

So now what?

Some people, after spending an entire year dwelling on a single character, would get tired of it. I…I’m not. I want more Superman. And there’s so much more to come. There’s the Supergirl movie coming out later this year, of course. And a new season of My Adventures of Superman is also scheduled to drop some time in 2026. Next year we’ll get Man of Tomorrow. DC Comics has announced some really interesting things for the ongoing Superman comics after the current DC KO event wraps up that I’m certainly going to want to talk about. They’ve also teased the return of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and come on, if Superman’s not involved with that in some way, what are we even doing? And let’s not forget that in March, after decades apart, Superman is finally going to meet Marvel’s friendly neighborhood webslinger again in a new Superman/Spider-Man crossover.

We’re back, baby!

Then there’s all the stuff on my list that I just didn’t get around to this year: John Ostrander’s amazing miniseries The Kents, Grant Morrison’s DC One Million event (which – let’s be honest – is a Superman story at its core), or the “world without Superman” Elseworlds series Justice League: The Nail. There are still several animated films I didn’t get to watch. I had hoped to do an entire week on fanfilms, but ran out of time. And I had stories picked out for weeks focusing on Jimmy Olsen, Lex Luthor, Kong Kenan, and other characters that didn’t get scratched off the list. 

The truth is, I don’t want to stop reading, watching, or writing about Superman. I just don’t want to HAVE to do it EVERY DAY. 

So consider this my official announcement. Starting in 2026 and going on…well, as long as I wanna do it, I’ll be bringing you SUPERMAN STUFF right here on the blog. Sometimes it’ll be new comics, new movies, new TV shows. Sometimes it’ll be classic stuff that I haven’t talked about before. I’ll still endeavor to have at least one blog post a week, but they won’t be as long as they were in 2025 (you’re welcome) and they may not necessarily always be on a Wednesday. 

The world of Superman is vast, and despite the mountain of stuff that I mentioned in the list above, there’s plenty more to dig into. The regular Geek Punditry blog here on Fridays won’t change. But I’m going to continue to devote real estate here to talking about the characters and stories that I love. 

Because there’s something to be learned here. And it’s a lesson we can all use.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. To all the people who sent him messages urging him to make 2026 “The Year of Captain Underpants,” he considered it. A little.

Geek Punditry #146: Scary Starters

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , , , , , , , , , ,

If you read last week’s column – and obviously you should have, because it was a masterpiece – you may remember me mentioning that my 11-year-old nephew is planning to be Ghostface for Halloween this year. This is amusing to me because his mom, my sister, is very much NOT a horror movie fan, and I know for certain my nephew has never seen any of those films. It’s just evidence of how pervasive the Ghostface icon has become. But a few days later I got another nice surprise when my sister asked me if I thought her daughter, who turns 15 this weekend, was old enough to watch the Scream movies.

When I tell you I wanted to squeal with delight…

I smiled bigger than this.

I get questions like this a lot. I suppose that my multiple qualifications as a teacher, father, writer, and geek pundit all make people confident that I have a good idea of what media is appropriate for what age group, and I’m flattered by the faith they have in me. On the other hand, the question isn’t always that simple. Age-based ratings like your PG, PG-13, and R from the MPAA are a decent enough guide, but that’s all they are: a GUIDE. The truth is that every kid is different. There are 13-year-olds who can handle the same scary movies that would give their same-aged classmates nightmares for a week. So when I’m given these questions, I always give a general opinion, but I couch it in the caveat that “You know your kids better than anybody else, so use your best judgment.” 

But in this case, I know my niece really well. She’s grown up to be a fan of the morbid and macabre, she is slightly obsessed with all permutations of Five Nights at Freddy’s, and she’s smart enough to separate fiction from reality. When I got hit with this question, I had no doubt that she could handle it. The bigger question, honestly, was whether my sister would be okay with it.

“As far as the Scream movies go,” I told her, “There’s not any nudity. There IS violence, but compared to a lot of other franchises it’s relatively tame. There’s language, but she goes to a public high school, so I guarantee there’s nothing she hasn’t heard before. They’re all streaming on Paramount+, so yeah, I think it’s okay.”

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Scream is – as I’ve stated many times – my favorite horror movie franchise, mainly because I think the writing and characterization are heads and shoulders above most of the other ones. But I still wouldn’t suggest that my niece be allowed to watch them if I didn’t think she was ready for it.

A few days later, I happened across a link to an article from Letterboxd that listed 20 PG-13 horror movies, films that were suggested as sort of “starters” for people who are just getting into the genre and didn’t want anything TOO intense. I’ve seen most of the films on that list and I agree that many of them are good choices – The Sixth Sense, for example, or Night of the Comet. And I was surprised at just how tonally diverse the list was, including things as chilling as The Ring and as family-friendly as Monster Squad.

I forwarded the link to both my niece and her mom, and my niece replied that she’s already seen Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and now she has an excuse to watch the others on the list. I love this kid.

For the kids.

All this is to say, I’m really looking forward to helping usher her into the world of horror movie fandom, because I find that by and large horror movie fans are some of the nicest, kindest, most down-to-earth people I’ve ever met. Compared to certain other fandoms I could mention, like those from a galaxy far, far away, horror fans are usually very respectful of differing opinions and eager to listen, able to have conversations about their favorites and least favorites without devolving into name-calling or anger, and are extremely generous and supportive of the movies and creators that they enjoy. I know my niece would be positively embraced by this community, and it’s really important to find your tribe. I’m not saying that everybody in the world should be a horror fan, but I AM saying that if more people BEHAVED like horror fans, the world would be a much better place.

So if you’re into horror, or if you’ve got a teenager in your life that’s drifting in that direction, check out that Letterboxd list I linked to above. It’s a good starting place. And here are a few more suggestions for movies that didn’t quite make the Letterboxd cut, as well as other non-movie media sources that a burgeoning horror fan could start getting into this spooky season.

This is why dads mow the lawn every other morning.

The most glaring omission from the Letterboxd list – and my wife pointed this out almost immediately – is Little Shop of Horrors. It’s the chilling tale of a little New York flower shop where a young man finds and cultivates a new breed of plant that turns out to be an alien invader that thirsts for human flesh. Fun for the whole family! The Roger Corman original from 1960 is a cheesy schlockfest – it’s fun to watch, but only if you’re really into “good bad movies.” However, the 1986 musical version directed by Frank Oz is a masterpiece. The music is phenomenal, the performances are fantastic, and it’s just one more reason to love Rick Moranis. The puppetry by Jim Henson Studios holds up brilliantly today, and it’s impossible to imagine anyone walking away from this movie without having a new favorite song. My niece is already a geek for musicals, so I know this would be right up her alley. I just hope my sister is ready for weeks and weeks of her kid casually singing “Dentist!” and “Suddenly, Seymour.”

“Do you think you’ve got the CHOPS for this one, kiddies?”

Although it’s more intense than the stuff on the Letterboxd list, I have to give a strong recommendation to the legendary HBO TV series Tales From the Crypt. Based on the classic EC Comics (which themselves are well worth reading), this anthology series presented a half-hour morality tale each week, a different story with a different twist that usually involved a bad person doing bad things and getting a karmically appropriate comeuppance. The show adapted stories from the original comic book as well as some of its sister series, The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, and others. It also gave us one of the all time great horror icons in the Cryptkeeper, the John Kassir-voiced puppet who served as the host of the show with a ghoulishly gleeful sense of humor at the beginning and end of each episode. The general content level is a step up from Scream – there was sex sometimes, and the violence was kicked up a notch. At the same time, though, the violence was often treated very nonchalantly, brought up to an almost cartoonish level and hard to take seriously, which is part of the charm. 

HBO treated this series very well, bringing in big-name guest-stars and directors like Martin Sheen, Brooke Shields, Catherine O’Hara, Christopher Reeve, Steve Buscemi, Tim Curry, and tons of others. The show gave us seven seasons with 93 episodes, as well as three theatrical films and a more kid-centric animated spinoff, Tales From the Cryptkeeper. There’s fun to be had in all of them.

“I know I look like the Cryptkeeper, but I don’t really talk. I’m animated beautifully, though.”

I also have to give a recommendation to its spiritual successor, Creepshow. In the original Creepshow movie from 1982, director George Romero (of Night of the Living Dead fame) teamed up with Stephen King for a film that was inspired by and tonally reminiscent of the original Tales From the Crypt comics years before the TV show brought it back to the public consciousness. The first Creepshow was written entirely by King, and he even starred in one of the anthology segments himself. The first sequel also adapted King stories, although both he and George Romero were absent entirely from the third installment. The legacy of the film persevered, though, and in 2019 the Shudder streaming service brought it back as an anthology TV series that lasted for four seasons and a few specials (including a Halloween special and an animated Christmas special). What’s more, the TV shows spawned a new comic book anthology series from Skybound (the company owned by Robert Kirkman, creator of The Walking Dead), bringing the whole style of tongue-in-cheek horror with a dash of dark comedy back to its original format. All of these are worth indulging and, as they’re anthologies, can be picked up one episode or installment at a time without requiring a huge binge to get through an entire story like some TV shows, comics, or film series.

The Ditko version was a lot cleaner.

Finally, if you’re looking for a horror tinged-take on characters you already know and love, there are several options available. Marvel fans may be aware of the recent Marvel Zombies animated series, but they may not know that it’s based on a line of comic books, which themselves were started by Robert Kirkman before he left Marvel and devoted himself entirely to his own company. In the original Marvel Zombies, an old-fashioned zombie virus struck the Fantastic Four, turning them into flesh-eaters. It spread out from there, and once it hit the super-speedster Quicksilver, any chance of stopping it from being a global pandemic was lost. In the Marvel Zombies universe, the undead retain their human intelligence, although their zombie hunger overtakes their former heroic morality. It’s a fun series that has had many permutations. The hard part for a newbie would likely be just keeping track of which order to read the many assorted graphic novels in and figuring out which ones are part of the main continuity or standalone.

Well, the end of everything until next issue.

DC Comics has also given us two horror-themed worlds to explore in recent years. First was DCEased, a book that I have to believe was given the greenlight primarily on the strength of the pun in the title. In the main DC Universe, Darkseid has spent 50 years or so trying to find the “Anti-Life Equation,” a formula that would give him control over all life. In DCEased, the equation is cut loose, transforming anyone it touches into a mindless killing machine. It’s not TECHNICALLY a zombie story, but it uses many zombie tropes to tell what turns out to be a generational tale of broken heroes desperate to find a way to save their world.

“Okay, but that’s just a placeholder title, right? We’re gonna come up with something more clever before it’s published, right? Right? Guys?”

Finally, there’s DC Vs. Vampires where – once again – some of DC’s best and brightest are turned into creepy-crawlies. This time, we wind up with a world where Batgirl becomes queen of the vampires and the heroes are divided into dead and undead and are embroiled in a civil war that engulfs their entire world. The most recent (and possibly final) volume of this series just ended, and the paperback edition should be coming soon. Like Marvel Zombies and DCEased, it works as a fun horror take on some familiar characters.

So there you are, friends – a few gateways into the world of the macabre. I’m sure you have suggestions of your own, and I’d love to hear them in the comments. With two weeks left until Halloween, it’s time for the Creepy Content to completely take over.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He skipped over recommending Plants Vs. Zombies. They know what they did. 

Geek Punditry #134: Three Wishes For the DC Universe

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m sitting here two weeks after the debut of James Gunn’s Superman movie and I’m quite happy. As of the time I write this, it’s sitting at almost $260 million domestically and nearly $433 million worldwide, which in this post-COVID era is nothing to sneeze at. It’s already the top-grossing superhero movie of the year so far, and most importantly, it’s been embraced by the public. The critics love it, the fans love it, and people are still talking about it two weeks later, something you can’t really say for some of the other summer movies like Jurassic World: Rebirth. Lines like “Maybe being kind is the real punk rock” have achieved meme status, and not in a mocking way like that CEO at the Coldplay concert. Most importantly, it has gotten people reenergized. Sure, there are some people who don’t like it, and it’s fair to not like something, but if the REASON you don’t like something is because Superman believes in goodness, has a sense of humor, or wants to protect the life of even the smallest creature, then I’ll be frank: your opinion does not matter to me.

My face when I think about the bit with the squirrel.

With this movie doing well, eyes are now turning to the rest of James Gunn’s new DC Universe. When he and producer Peter Safran took over as co-heads of DC Studios a few years ago, they announced a slew of projects, but Gunn has also been very clear that he’s not going to move forward with anything until the script is ready, so several of those projects are on the back burner. The ones that are definitely on the schedule are – in order of release – season two of the Peacemaker TV series next month, the Lanterns series for early next year, the new Supergirl movie next summer, and a Clayface movie next fall. (Clayface, by the way, is the most indicative of the fact that Gunn is not married to a roadmap – it was not part of the initial announcement and Gunn said the character wasn’t even on the radar for a solo film, but writer Mike Flanagan pitched him a story that was so good they put it on the fast track.)

The hero we didn’t know we needed.

Movies in the works but not yet on the schedule are a Brave and the Bold movie (featuring Batman and the Damian Wayne Robin), The Authority, Swamp Thing, and Sgt. Rock. On TV, they’re working on live-action shows including Paradise Island, Waller, and Booster Gold, and in animation, they’re working on Blue Beetle, Mr. Miracle, and a second season of Creature Commandos. Other things have been tossed around, including a movie featuring Bane and Deathstroke, and Supergirl screenwriter Ana Nogueira has reportedly turned in a script for a Teen Titans movie AND has been hired to do a script for Wonder Woman. Following the success of Superman, rumors are flying about shows starring Edi Gathegi’s Mr. Terrific and Skyler Gisando as Jimmy Olsen. There are other series and films in the works as well, but the ones I haven’t mentioned thus far (such as the sequel to Matt Reeves’ The Batman or an animated Starfire series for children) are mostly intended to be part of DC Studios’ “Elseworlds” imprint and not part of the DCU proper. 

So obviously, there’s a LOT to look forward to in the next several years. But what is it I always say about fans? What do fans want above all else?

That’s right. Fans want MORE.

So today I want to talk about my Three Wishes for the new DCU. What are three projects that I would love to see? If I had a chance to sit down with James Gunn and convince him to add three of my dream projects to the schedule, what would they be? Let’s do one live-action series, one animated series, and one movie, just to cover all the bases that this DCU is touching. I’m also going to try to incorporate some themes or genres that the other projects haven’t gotten around to yet. 

Live action series: Legion of Super-Heroes

Call the casting department and tell them to put a pot of coffee on.

My love for the Legion of Super-Heroes is no secret. I think it’s one of DC’s greatest franchises: the heroes of the 31st century, who have modeled themselves after the greatest heroes of our time. Dozens of heroes from different worlds, cultures, and species, allowing for any number of different characters and character dynamics. The series presents an opportunity to do science fiction and superheroes at the same time, and as Gunn has made it clear that he wants the different DC projects to each have a different feeling, this would fill a niche that isn’t there yet. (Okay, technically I suppose the Lanterns TV series will have a science fiction element to it, but from all the descriptions it seems like that show is going to be more of a military mystery/drama. That’s great, but I want a real space opera.) 

But this would have to be a TV series. The Legion of Super-Heroes is, frankly, just too big for a movie. There are literally dozens of characters in the group, and even if you were to narrow down the focus to a core group of, say, seven or eight, you need time to explore who each of them are and how they relate to one another. You couldn’t do justice to the Legion in two hours. 

The next thing is that I believe that the Legion is strongest as a spin-off of Superman. It’s how the characters were first introduced back in 1958, as kids who loved the legend of Clark Kent and travelled back in time to recruit him to join their club when he was just a teenager. It creates something of a stable time loop: the Legion models itself after Superman, but the Legion also taught Clark Kent to be a superhero in the first place. So I would use the early 2000s Legion of Super-Heroes animated series as my inspiration, casting someone to play a teenage Clark Kent and having him as a regular member of the cast. This would also open the door to have David Corenswet do a cameo as adult Clark at some point, probably in the last episode. 

I don’t know if Corenswet is a jewelry guy, but I think this ring would look pretty good on him.

What’s more, although the Legion is set 1000 years in the future, that doesn’t mean that it can’t still be used to establish things for the contemporary stories. Alien races like the Khund or the Dominators, who could easily show up in other DC projects, could be introduced there. And the series could be used to give sneak peaks as to what will happen in the other movies and shows. (“Hey, why does the woman in this old photo have a golden lasso?” “Don’t worry, Clark, you’ll find out soon enough.”) 

Is the reason I’m suggesting this series just because I love the Legion and I want other people to love it too? I’m not gonna lie, that’s probably at least 75 percent of my reasoning here. But that doesn’t make it a bad idea. I think this show could be great. 

Animated Series: Deadman

With Clayface playing in the realm of body horror (it has been compared, tonally, to David Cronenberg’s The Fly), the supernatural corner of the DC Universe is waiting for some exploration. Deadman is the answer. If you’re unfamiliar with the character, Boston Brand was a circus performer who was murdered in the middle of his act. Rather than going to the great beyond, though, he was sent back to Earth as a ghost to solve his own murder. With the ability to possess the bodies of other people, Deadman has had a long and bizarre career as a superhero that most people (even in the DC Universe) don’t even know exists. 

And you thought YOUR Monday sucked.

By the very nature of who the character is, Deadman has been used plenty of times to delve into the world of horror stories. He is, of course, a literal ghost, so haunted houses and poltergeists and all manner of demonic foes are par for the course for him. And he also regularly runs across other DC characters who are mired in this world of magic and the supernatural, like the Spectre, the Phantom Stranger, and Zatanna, giving a series of this nature an opportunity to open up the world even further.

As for why it would be best as an animated project – there’s a certain creative freedom in animation. It allows you to do things that would stretch credulity in live action, even with the best special effects. Have you ever noticed that the animated Star Trek series are far more likely to bring in characters who are not, strictly, humanoid? Creatures with three arms or body types that you could never fit a human actor into? That’s because in animation you don’t have to pay for huge animatronics, make actors spend days in the makeup chair applying heavy or even painful prosthetics, or worry about sketchy CGI that just doesn’t mesh against the human actors standing in front of a green screen. Animation would give them the freedom to really explore the afterlife, plunge into the depths of Hell, or put Deadman through extreme transformations like the nearly-skeletal Kelley Jones version of the character without having to torture the performers. 

Very few actresses would be willing to have their torso removed to do this scene justice.

It could be groundbreaking in another sense as well. Animation is finally starting to crack free from the decades-old bias that it’s only intended for children, but it’s still rare to see adult-oriented animated projects that aren’t comedies. Even Creature Commandos, which was basically an action movie with monsters, leaned heavily on dark humor. Any humor in Deadman would likely come from Boston himself cracking wise, as the situations he plunges into would be deadly serious…no pun intended. 

Movie: Firestorm

With page-rippin’ power!

Firestorm is one of DC’s perennial B-listers. The character inspires incredible amounts of devotion from his fans, but the NUMBER of fans just isn’t big enough to crack him into the mainstream. This could finally be a chance to fix that. Although several characters over the years have shared the name and the powers, the crux is usually that two people (originally scientist Martin Stein and high school student Ronnie Raymond) are fused into a single super-powerful being as the result of a nuclear accident. One of the two – Stein in the original – is dormant in the fused Firestorm persona, only able to offer advice to the one who’s steering the ship. This allows for a sort of “odd couple” dynamic, putting together two characters who don’t necessarily belong together and forcing them to literally work as one for the greater good. 

Writer Gerry Conway, who co-created the character, had done a long run on Marvel’s Spider-Man and was attempting to recreate the dynamic of a younger hero, which DC didn’t really have at the time. Their heroes were all older, the younger ones were all sidekicks, so putting a teenager in the driver’s seat was different for them, and the character quickly became beloved, even becoming the youngest person to ever join the Justice League (at the time at least). But after 100 issues of his solo series, the doors were shuttered way back in 1990 and, despite several strong attempts to give him a resurgence, he’s struggled to really become big again ever since.

For the movie, I would make Martin Stein sort of the “man in the chair,” the person inadvertently responsible for Firestorm, but not part of Firestorm himself. I’d keep the part of Ronnie’s origin where he gets suckered into joining a group of “protestors” to impress a girl, only to find out that they’re actually eco-terrorists. But when the accident happens, rather than fuse with Stein, I’d have him fuse with the second Firestorm, Jason Rusch, who I would make Stein’s lab assistant. 

“Fusion Confusion” was my nickname when I worked at that restaurant making sushi burritos.

The dynamic we’d have here would be Jason believing Ronnie’s a dumb jock while Ronnie sees Jason as a stuck-up egghead, and the two would slowly and begrudgingly learn to respect each other – the old “together we are more than the sum of our parts” routine. The eco-terrorists would be linked to a bigger bad, of course, who is targeting different scientific institutions in the DCU such as S.T.A.R.Labs, and giving us an opportunity to include other science-based heroes such as Captain Atom, Hourman, Stargirl, or the Flash – who has been oddly absent from all official conversation about the current DCU. There’d even be a clear opportunity to bring in Edi Gathegi as Mr. Terrific again, because when you have a science problem, who better to call than the smartest man in the world? I kind of like the idea of Stein being one of Mr. Terrific’s former professors who now finds himself running to his old student for help. 

Okay, James Gunn, the ball is in your court now. You’re doing a great job so far, don’t get me wrong, but there’s always room to bring in even more goodness. Here are my suggestions. 

Now I’ve got to get back to finishing up season one of Peacemaker before season two drops. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Come back to him in a month, he’ll probably have three totally different suggestions. 

Geek Punditry #127: Revival Vs. Reboot

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As you no doubt have heard by now, at least partially because I’ve mentioned it here two weeks in a row, Disney’s brought back its fantastic animated series Phineas and Ferb, and the first part of the new season dropped on Disney+ today. It may surprise you, then, to know that as of this writing, I haven’t watched it yet. You see, I have to wait for my wife to get home from work, because as any competent marriage therapist would tell you, holding off on watching coveted television programming until your spouse is available to watch it with you is a love language. 

But I don’t want to talk about Phineas and Ferb specifically today, I want to talk about what it represents: the TV Revival. That concept of bringing back old TV shows from the dead. It’s not a new idea, of course. The history of television is littered with shows that were cancelled and then came back after some time. Game shows like Jeopardy, Supermarket Sweep, and Let’s Make a Deal are all better remembered from their second incarnation than the original, for example. The 80s gave us resurrected versions of old sitcoms like Leave it to Beaver and The Munsters. And for a time, it was popular to continue a TV series by creating an animated version, as they did with the likes of Star Trek, Happy Days, or Gilligan’s Island. 

It’s like time stood still.

But in recent years, where studio executives are more hesitant than ever to take a chance on a new idea, it seems as though the revival has become a fundamental part of the television landscape. Is anybody going to want to watch a comedy about the goings-on at a municipal courthouse? Maybe not…unless we remind them that they already DID a few decades ago by making that show a new version of Night Court. Go ahead and look at any current network TV schedule (or spin through the offerings of a streaming service) and you’ll be astonished at just how much of the current episodic landscape is stuffed to the gills with shows that have relaunched older ones. I don’t object to revivals as a concept, but like anything else in the sphere of entertainment, I fear that we’ve reached a point of saturation where they’ve become a crutch rather than a tool.

That said, that doesn’t mean resurrecting an old show can’t be successful. But what, exactly, does it take to make a good one? The creators of Phineas and Ferb released a video to social media a few days ago, ramping up to the new season, where they very explicitly chanted “It’s not a reboot – it’s a REVIVAL!” It’s an important distinction, although I think there are a lot of people who don’t understand the difference. A reboot, to me, means starting a franchise over from scratch. You take the concepts, the tropes, the characters, but begin from square one, as though there had never been a previous iteration. Wednesday is a good example of this – there’s nothing that specifically ties it to the canon of any of the previous versions of the Addams Family – not the original TV series, the animated series, the 90s film series, the more recent animated films, the Broadway musical, or the original comic strips that the whole franchise was based on. It’s using the pieces of the older shows, but it is inherently its own thing. So yeah, reboots CAN be good.

In general, though, I prefer a revival – you’re not eliminating the previous canon. You’re not starting over. You’re just picking up where you left off. The original Phineas and Ferb took place across one epic summer. The new season – which they wisely promote as “Season Five” rather than “Season One” of a new series – starts one year later, at the beginning of the NEXT epic summer. Night Court returned to the same courtroom after an absence of many years, bringing back one returning character and one new character who was the child of an original. You get a revival more often when the old cast – or at least some of them – is still active and wants to return. We’ll be getting that with the new version of King of the Hill, coming to Hulu soon, and creator Bill Lawrence has announced a Scrubs revival where – although nobody has officially signed on yet – many original cast members have expressed interest in returning.

If this picture doesn’t make you vaguely uncomfortable, you’re too young.

Sometimes it can be difficult to tell whether a show is a revival or a reboot at first. In 2005, when the BBC brought back its defunct science fiction series Doctor Who, it wasn’t immediately clear if the old shows were in canon or not. And as part of the Doctor’s whole deal is that he occasionally regenerates into a new body, you couldn’t even make up your mind based on the fact that there were no returning cast members. Slowly, references to the old series started to appear, and eventually it was made explicit that this was a continuation – not only of the old series, but it even included the American co-produced TV movie that had tried (and failed) to revive the franchise a decade before. The show has been reinvented many times since then, and the DNA of the franchise makes it fairly easy to do so, but every version has thankfully been a revival rather than a reboot.

This straight-up wouldn’t work with a revival of The Andy Griffith Show.

The reason I prefer revivals is because a reboot has a tendency to dismiss the original. It takes place in a universe where the original didn’t happen and doesn’t matter, and that makes no sense to me. From the perspective of a studio, the only advantage a revival or reboot has over a brand-new property is the built-in audience, so why would you START by declaring that the thing the audience loved doesn’t exist anymore? Paul Feig and the cast of the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot will claim until their dying breath that their film failed at the box office because the fans were put off by the all-female cast, but any conversation with a true fan of the franchise will make it pretty clear the reason it was rejected was because fans wanted a revival. And when they got a true revival a few years later with Ghostbusters: Afterlife (with a main character that was a preteen girl), fans were delighted. 

That’s not to say that a reboot CAN’T be good. When J.J. Abrams was given the task of rebooting Star Trek for the big screen, he wisely took the track of making it an alternate universe. A villain traveled back in time and created an alternate reality in which these new films would take place. The original timeline still existed, and was still available when the TV revivals began a few years later. No matter what you think of the Abrams Star Trek films, most fans will agree that the alternate timeline was a good idea. Similarly J. Michael Straczynksi has been trying for years to get a reboot of his seminal science fiction series Babylon 5 off the ground. In 2023, he even gave us an animated film, Babylon 5: The Road Home, which ended in a way that – similar to the Star Trek example – opened up a different, alternate timeline in which the reboot could take place.

The classic sci-fi trope of “Eh, close enough.”

Of course, it’s easier to do that with a science fiction series than it would be a drama or a sitcom. If somebody wanted to do a reboot of The Golden Girls, for example, it’s unlikely that they would start with a CGI Betty White causing some sort of temporal rift that would take us to a different dimension where the girls all moved in together in 2025 rather than 1985. But that also begs the question: would you really WANT a reboot where they cast people other than Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Estelle Getty, and Betty White anyway?

That’s another thing that revivals have over reboots: the continuity of keeping a cast that the fans love. One of the reasons a Babylon 5 reboot is more likely than a revival is because so many members of that cast, in the years since the show ended, have sadly passed away at a surprisingly young age. Over the course of that show’s five years, 17 actors were series regulars for at least one season. Seven of them are no longer with us, and several others have retired from acting altogether. It would be anathema to many of us to see Bruce Boxleitner’s John Sheridan return with somebody other than Mira Furlan playing his wife, Delenn. In a new timeline, though, with new actors in BOTH roles…that feels a little easier to swallow.

Some shows, however, simply should never be brought back, for many of these same reasons. Any ideas of a Friends revival, for example, went up in smoke with the sad death of Matthew Perry. Any revival, even a one-off movie – would necessitate either recasting Chandler Bing (which fans will tell you is basically impossible) or writing him out of the show by having him either die or leave his wife and children, which would be depressing as hell. As for a reboot…poll the fans. Ask if anybody would want a different cast, and I’m pretty sure you’ll hear a resounding NO.

It would be impossible to recreate this and a mistake to even try.

It’s less of a problem if the actor is still alive and has chosen not to return, or if they’ve fallen from grace in the years since the show’s airing and neither the studio nor the fans want them back. Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum, two of the stars of Smallville, occasionally make noise about wanting to bring back the show as an animated series or through animated movies. Many fans would welcome this, although it is unlikely that anyone will bat an eye if Chloe Sullivan is recast. (I’m not gonna get into it – if you don’t know why this would be necessary, just Google it.) In a less problematic example, former child actor Erik Per Sullivan has retired from the business, so when a revival of Malcolm in the Middle was announced, nobody was really angry that they decided to recast his character of Dewey.  

In general, though, revivals are more interesting to me – I want to see a continuation of the original series. There was chatter for years about a reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but Sarah Michelle Gellar wasn’t interested. Therefore, I wasn’t interested. Then they announced that they’d landed on a pitch that Gellar IS interested in, a pitch in which she is mentoring a new character entirely rather than trying to have somebody else play Buffy Summers… well, at this point, I’m willing to listen.

(There’s an irony here in that Gellar’s series was, in fact, a reboot of a mediocre movie starring Kristy Swanson as Buffy. But again, it just goes to prove to you that reboots CAN work sometimes.)

There’s an adorable video of when Gellar called Ryan Kiera Armstrong and told her that she got the part, because REAL slayers go by three names.

For some shows, the question of reboot vs revival is academic, of course. It doesn’t matter for nonscripted series like game shows, or shows that dramatize real events such as Unsolved Mysteries. You may miss Robert Stack, but that doesn’t mean the show can’t be made without him. Similarly, anthology series like The Twilight Zone are by their very nature immune to this. That show has been brought back several times over the years, and as there was never a regular cast or set of characters to follow, it’s a non-issue as long as the show has the flavor of the original – in this case, that of a sci-fi show with horror elements and, usually, some sort of twist ending. 

The biggest problem comes when a resurrected series – whether it’s a reboot or revival – lacks that taste of the original. Every so often you’ll hear about a new version of a show where they proudly announce that none of the current creators are fans of the original. This is a position so bafflingly stupid that I’m surprised it’s not mandated by federal law. While it’s true that some fans can be a bit too close to the property, a bit too reverent, if NOBODY involved in the creation of a show has any passion for it, the odds of creating something that satisfies the existing fan base drops so dramatically as to be almost nonexistent. 

“Well, we’re not making this show for the OLD fans,” some of these studio executives say. “We’re trying to appeal to NEW fans.”

Bullshit. If all that matters is acquiring a new audience, there’s no reason to bring back an old property. By bringing back a classic IP you are inherently announcing a desire to get the attention of an existing fan base, and by creating something you know will dissatisfy them, all you’re doing is trying to court controversy, as if that somehow inoculates you against the need to make a good show. Sometimes I think they’re COUNTING on that. They know their reboot is weak, so they rile up the fans against it, giving them a handy shield of claiming that these narrow-minded old fuddy-duddies just don’t want something new, thereby preventing them from having to admit that they made something that sucks.

Ultimately, I try to judge any show – revival, reboot, or brand-new idea – on its own merits. But when you’re reaching back to a classic series, you need to really think about what made that show successful in the first place before you even THINK about giving it a try.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Someday, he swears, somebody is gonna do a revival of Cop Rock, but they’re gonna do it RIGHT this time.

Geek Punditry #115: Swept Up By the Past

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I know that parents brag about their kids a lot, and a lot of it is overblown and unwarranted, but today I’ve got a legitimate achievement for you. I am willing to bet that my son is the only second grader in the entire state of Louisiana who plays Supermarket Sweep when he’s supposed to be getting ready for school in the morning.

Bite it, Teletubbies.

I’ve written before about my love for Pluto TV and their various channels full of old TV shows. If you’re a Pluto viewer, though, and you stick with a single channel long enough, you see the shows start to cycle back to the beginning, so I find that we tend to go through phases. For a while there, whenever we turned on Pluto TV it was to watch I Love Lucy. Then there was a period where we were stuck on the channel with old episodes of Cheers and Frasier. We went through a Top Gear period and a Nick Jr. Channel phase and a nice chunk of time where we watched the old Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. But in recent weeks we’ve gravitated towards Supermarket Sweep, the old 90s game show where contestants answered trivia questions and played games about groceries and shopping, not to win money, but to win TIME. Then they used that time in a mad dash through the supermarket, trying to grab as much as they could in bonuses and merchandise for the right to play the final $5000 game. If you were around in the first half of the 90s, I’m sure you watched this show. I’m sure you thought about being ON this show. Hell, host David Ruprecht even ENTICED you with it at the end of every episode: “Remember, the next time you’re at the checkout counter and you hear that beep (BEEP BEEP), think of the fun you could have on Supermarket Sweep!”

Such a tease, that David Ruprecht.

The face of temptation.

Anyway, we can never quite predict which shows Eddie will latch on to, and something about Supermarket Sweep has really captured his attention. He runs around the house, grabbing random items for his “sweep,” and declaring which ones are bonus items and how much the bonuses are worth. Unlike the original sweep, where bonuses were usually worth something between $50 and $300, sometimes Eddie will declare the bonuses his mother and I have won to be worth, and I quote, “ZERO DOLLARS,” followed by an insane giggle. It’s all about the joys of parenting.

Watching this 30-year-old game show is a kind of television comfort food. It’s very low-stress, except when you’ve figured out one of the clues and the contestants haven’t and you’re YELLING at them that they’re supposed to be looking for the FLINTSTONES VITAMINS, NOT THE FRUITY PEBBLES, YOU MORON! At one point, I was writing something on my laptop when my wife shouted “KUDOS!”, and for a moment I thought she was congratulating me before I realized she was referring to a granola bar. Sometimes the answer will be a product neither Erin or I have ever heard of, or sometimes it’ll be something they stopped making 20 years ago and suddenly we find that we miss it. It really tugs on those nostalgic strings. 

This episode triggered Ralphie Parker’s PTSD.

There’s also a quaintness to it. For instance, in one game the contestants are presented with three different products and they have to guess which one costs more than, say, $2. And I laugh, because every one of those products would be at least $7 today, and I realize that if I were to go back in time and be a contestant on this show, I would be very, very bad at the pricing games.

There was a revival of Supermarket Sweep a few years ago hosted by Leslie Jones, but it didn’t last. I watched it a couple of times, and it didn’t really get to me the way the old ones do. I feel like modern games shows work really hard to amplify the stakes. Bigger prizes, bigger sets, flashy graphics. I’ve seen shows that literally have an enormous roulette wheel, others where an incorrect answer will have someone ejected into a pool of water…and I still haven’t got the slightest idea what Fox’s The Floor is supposed to be.

Like this, but starring Rob Lowe.

Even the old stalwarts have had to change with the times. Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy both have bigger prizes on the line than they did back in the day, and while part of that can certainly be chalked up to inflation, it also feels like there’s an effort to keep “modernizing” it. Wheel has new types of puzzles than they used to, for instance, with sometimes baffling rules. Jeopardy is still played more or less the way it always has been, but it’s become more attached to the cult of celebrity. It’s been a long time now since they got rid of their five-day limit for returning champions, but in recent years there’s been a push to make “stars” out of any champion who gets on a particularly long winning streak. I get it, it’s playing the media game, but watching these shows today does bring out a thirst for the classics.

A few years back, after Hurricane Ida hit, we were without internet at our house for about a month. Fortunately, we have an antenna, so we weren’t completely cut off from the world around us, but we certainly didn’t want to watch news coverage of the storm 24 hours a day. So my wife and I (this was before Eddie had quite reached the point where he was demanding control over the remote) settled on leaving the TV most of the time on one of the many digital channels that have cropped up since the analog signal was abandoned, one that showed nothing but game show reruns 24 hours a day. There was no Supermarket Sweep there, but we found ourselves reacquainted with old shows like Hollywood Squares, Match Game, and Card Sharks, cycling through the old games and chuckling at the old prizes. 

That’s right, Bob, flip it like you mean it.

It’s a similar feeling to watching old sitcoms or science fiction shows, but there’s a strange contradiction when it comes to the stakes. If I’m watching an old episode of Star Trek, there’s a tension there about the fate of the crew of the Starship Enterprise, even though I know for a fact that these are all actors, that nobody was actually hurt in the filming of this episode, and that pretty much everybody not wearing red is guaranteed to be back next week unless their name is Denise Crosby. On the other hand, watching an old game show has none of that tension, even though the people on that show WERE real people and WERE playing for real money and prizes that might have changed their lives. The game shows are less intense for the viewer, even though there is far more at stake for the people involved. It’s such a weird juxtaposition, but it’s true.

“And if you get the Jolly Green Giant bonus, it comes with some of your absent father’s love.”

I don’t know how long Eddie is going to remain obsessed with Supermarket Sweep. If past performance is any indicator, it will go on until we stumble upon something else, purely by chance, that diverts his attention. It could be a cartoon, could be a sitcom, could be another game show. There’s no telling. But in the meantime, I’m kind of enjoying a virtual run down the aisle, trying to stack up on those big blocks of cheese worth $30 each or grabbing the three items from David Ruprecht’s shopping list for a bonus $250. And when the contestant can’t figure out that the clue is supposed to send them shopping for Aquafresh Toothpaste, I am there to yell the correct answer at the screen, only for Eddie to echo me a moment later. 

It’s not game-changing television. It’s not Squid Game or Yellowstone, it’s not something people will be talking about around the water cooler if people still do that sort of thing. But it’s nice.

Sometimes just nice is okay.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Also nice: reruns of The Dating Game that do not involve serial killers. So, that’s at least 75 percent of them.

Geek Punditry #113: The Medium is Killing the Message

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When you teach the same subject for long enough, there are certain topics and certain lessons you start to look forward to. One of my favorite things to cover with my 12th grade English students, for example, is Hamlet, and I particularly look forward to the famous “To be or not to be” scene. I always start by telling the kids that this is the big one, the grande supreme enchilada, the most famous speech that Willie Shakes ever wrote which, by proxy, also makes it one of the most famous speeches ever written in the entire history of the English language. Then I look at the kid who has already volunteered to read the speech out loud and say, “No pressure.”

Here’s a level three nerd joke. Ahem: “Took him 900 years to get this part right.”

After we read and discuss the speech together, I show them clips of several different film versions of Hamlet. We talk about how different actors play the role, how the different settings change their interpretation of the scene, and fun English class stuff like that. The most entertaining version – to me, at least – is when we watch Ethan Hawke’s depiction of the scene from 2000. In this version, director Michael Almereyda has changed the setting to the modern day (or at least, what was modern in 2000) and has Hamlet deliver this speech wandering the Action Movies section of a Blockbuster Video store. But I’m showing this to contemporary high school students. Even the oldest of them wasn’t born until 2007, and the vast majority of them have no idea what they’re looking at. Popular guesses include a gas station, a convenience store, and a bookstore. The ones that DO recognize Blockbuster Video, I assume, do so because they’ve seen Captain Marvel.

The weird thing is, after updating the setting, they kept the headgear 100 percent historically accurate.

It’s funny to me, to see the cultural disconnect between the film and the modern audience. No doubt Almereyda intended to make the movie contemporary, but in choosing that particular setting, this film feels even more dated than a traditional version of Hamlet set in the 7th century. And the percentage of my students who know where Hawke is before I explain it gets smaller with each passing year. These are kids who have never – and WILL never – browse the video section of a store.

And as entertaining as the lesson usually is, the fact that this is an artifact of times gone by makes me a little sadder each year.

I grew up in the 80s. I was in high school and college in the 90s. The peak of Video Store Culture is intertwined with the most important developmental years of my life. I remember as a kid, my parents taking us down to the video store and letting us roam the aisles looking for movies to watch. My younger brother and sister would gravitate towards the kids’ movies, and while they would pour over the shelves trying to make their own decisions, I found myself drifting to sections of the store I knew my parents would NEVER allow us to rent from, especially the horror section. Ghoulish monsters, blood dripping down faces, whatever the hell was going on with the box art for The Stuff…I was mesmerized. 

9-year-old me would have TRADED my brother to find out what was going on here.

VHS box art of the 1980s was a unique art form that has no peer in the history of pop culture, save perhaps for paperback book covers of the same era. Great box art could make even the lamest, cheesiest low-budget schlockfest seem tempting. But my folks weren’t the sort who would allow a 9-year-old kid to rent something like Creepshow no matter HOW enticing the box art was. So those movies found a home in my psyche only in poster form, which is how they remained until I was old enough to rent them and watch them myself. At which point – let’s be honest – I discovered that a great many of those movies were better as box art than they ever were as films. But that was okay.  

As I got older and went to video stores myself, I would gravitate to all kinds of movies, devouring things that I’d been curious about for years but had never been able to indulge in before. Not just horror, but classic sci-fi, old comedies, or indie darlings I’d heard good things about like Magnolia. It didn’t hurt that around the time I graduated college, my best friend Jason became the manager – and eventually owner – of the video store I most often patronized, so I got to sample an awful lot of movies for free. And as culture shifted from VHS to DVD, I went from being simply a viewer to a collector. I would go to Best Buy, Circuit City, Borders, or Barnes and Noble and spend hours walking through the shelves, examining the DVD cases, trying to find old favorites to add to my shelf or new movies I’d never heard of that were worth a watch. I could do this alone, but it was more fun to do it with Jason or our other friends. Either way, though, there was a tangibility to holding those cases in my hands, reading the description on the back, studying the list of special features to see if there was a good making-of featurette or commentary track that would be worth listening to or – of course – admiring the cover art.

This is a pleasure that has largely been lost to us. Netflix slaughtered the video store in its sleep, and of those retail stores I mentioned the only one that both still exists and has a physical media section at all is Barnes and Noble, and it’s nowhere near what it used to be. And while I know that we always lose certain cultural elements as time passes and culture evolves, this is one of those changes that has hurt not only the people who make these movies, but the consumers who watch them as well. 

It’s the streaming era I’m talking about, of course. That’s what killed the video store, that’s what has DVD and Blu-Ray sales on life support. (Thank God for horror movie fans, one of the last stalwart groups to demand physical media for their preferred art form. They’re the ones keeping the whole thing alive right now.) Sure, the convenience of streaming can’t be beat. I don’t need to go down to the video store anymore. I don’t need to HOPE that the movie I want to watch will be available. I don’t have to take the risk that I’ll get a disc with a scratch that has rendered it unplayable, and never again will I need to double-check that I’ve rewound a tape before I return it.

Was there anything worse than opening the DVD case at home and seeing THIS?

But this same convenience has made the entire movie-watching experience feel more disposable, like it doesn’t matter anymore. If I went down to Jason’s video store hoping to rent Scream 2 only to find that it had already been rented, that’s when I would look for something different and discover movies that I may otherwise have never watched, like Amelie. With streaming, you just have to hope that the movie you want is on a service you subscribe to, and if it is, there’s no need to roam.

But even if the movie you want ISN’T on your service, or even if you don’t know what you want to watch, the browsing experience isn’t the same. In a store, looking at a movie case, you had the opportunity to pick it up, read the back, gaze at that beautiful, beautiful cover art. Today, every movie is reduced not to art, but to a thumbnail. Most of the time it’s a still shot from the movie, probably a close-up of the biggest star in the film, with the title superimposed on top of it. It’s bland, lifeless. Just as the greatest box art could make me watch the worst movies, so can a cookie-cutter thumbnail cause me to scroll right past one of the best movies of the year, and I’ll never know. 

We’ve lost the community aspect as well. For people like me, TALKING about the movie after I’ve watched it is just as vital a part of the experience as actually watching it. Discussing what we liked, what we didn’t like, what did we think the sequel would be like, should there even be a sequel at all? At the video store, you can chat with other customers. “What are you getting? Oh, I’ve seen that one, that’s great. Say, I really liked From Dusk ‘Till Dawn but I’m not sure what to watch next. Any suggestions?” Sure, the streaming services TRY to do this, but I would take the suggestion of a random film geek in a video store over the Netflix algorithm every second of my life, and it wouldn’t even be a struggle.

Netflix has “We think you’ll love these.” Your local video store had “Vinnie’s picks.” Nobody ever saw Vinnie. No one knew who he was. But Vinnie introduced you to Boondock Saints and you LOVED him for it.

And with this, the respect given to a movie by the audience is being cut down. I know a lot of people who’ll stop a movie if they aren’t engaged in the first five minutes. And sure, that’s your prerogative, but there’s something to be said for a slow burn. Some movies need to be given time to get into the story, and sometimes that’s what makes it effective. In the video rental days, once we made it home with a movie we WATCHED the damn thing, no matter how bad the first five minutes were, because that was our only option. And I think we were better for it. I don’t want to tell you that you should sit around watching something you don’t like, but the disposability of entertainment has caused us to forget how to give a story a fair chance. I can spend twice as long scrolling through the options on Hulu than I ever did looking at the DVDs at Borders, but I’ll end up far less satisfied.

Then there’s the way movies are presented today. TVs have, for the most part, gotten substantially larger than they were when I was a kid. You would think that would make the viewing experience better, but somehow the opposite has happened. My students, my nieces and nephews, are more likely to watch a movie on their Chomebook, their tablet, or – worst of all – their PHONE. Not to say I’m not guilty of this at times – when my sports fanatic son is bound and determined to watch a lacrosse match between two colleges I’ve never heard of with an announcer who has all the life and energy of the sloth from Zootopia, minus the personality, I’m certainly not above pulling up an episode of Star Trek on my laptop. But it’s not my preferred method of watching anything, and the idea of watching an entire motion picture on a phone screen is giving me a migraine. But to kids today it’s common. I’ve had students tell me they’ve watched entire movies chopped up into two-minute segments and posted (in portrait mode for the love of God) to TikTok, a practice which I’m pretty sure is directly responsible for the sharp rise in instances of bird flu in the United States.

I took this picture myself just to illustrate my point and it STILL makes me want to punch me in the face.

The only thing that mitigates the sting for me is that I know I’m not alone. I have many friends – both in real life and on social media – who join me in bemoaning the decline of video store culture, and while there may not be enough of us to bring that culture BACK, it helps to know that other people feel the same way as you do. Coincidentally, on the same day this week my students were confused by the Blockbuster store in Hamlet, I listened to an episode of the Movie Crypt podcast in which filmmaker Alex Ross Perry discussed his new documentary Videoheaven, a “video essay” (in his own words) about the rise, influence, and fall of the video store told through clips of movies and TV shows featuring video stores. The movie is almost three hours long, he says, and frankly, it sounds amazing. I am very excited about this film and very anxious to get a chance to watch it.

I’ve never met Mr. Ross Perry, but just based on this poster, I suspect he’d be my kinda people.

Ironically, I’ll probably have to wait until it comes to streaming.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Yes, he’s old. You wanna make somethin’ of it?

Geek Punditry #106: Spoiler Alert

blakemp Geek Punditry , , , , , , ,

This time it’s Squid Game’s fault. The most popular Netflix series on the planet dropped a second season a few weeks ago, right in the middle of the break between semesters for most schools, so approximately seventeen bajillion people binged the entire thing before they went back. Of all the human beings on the planet Earth, according to my meticulous records accrued by reading social media posts, the only one who has not watched the entirety of Squid Game season two is some schlub named Blake M. Petit in Louisiana. In my defense, I’ve got other things occupying my attention. In December, I mostly watch Christmas movies until the 26th, at which point I try to spend the next week catching up on movies I missed that year. Then on Jan. 1, I began my Year of Superman project, so while I certainly WANT to watch Squid Game, I simply haven’t gotten around to it yet. 

Spoiler: The real Squid Game is the friends we made along the way. Who then get shot in the head.

This does not stop my students, of course, and when we returned from the Christmas break on Monday, I found myself several times having to stop them from babbling everything that happened in the show that I haven’t watched yet. I ask you to remember, now, that this is season two. This is a season that dropped mere days ago, not months or years, but several of them walked into the room wanting to tell me all about it, despite my admonitions NOT to do so. And I think it’s time, once again, to talk about spoilers.

I’ve seen the studies that say that some people PREFER to be spoiled – that knowing beforehand what happens in a story reduces their anxiety and allows them to enjoy the story better. Speaking as somebody who lives with anxiety as a constant companion that I wish I could jettison out of my brain and into outer space, I can only call this theory utter balderdash. It makes no sense to me AT ALL. I cannot, for the life of me, fathom how it feels BETTER to know that Rosebud was his mother’s maiden name, that Jack Dawson makes it onto the door, or that Captain America dies from using the Infinity Gauntlet before you actually see it. I get far more anxiety from being AFRAID of getting spoiled than I EVER have from wondering what will happen in the story next.

However, I’m also mature enough to accept that no two brains work the same way, and that while the messed-up hunk of meat in MY skull is absolutely spoiler-adverse, that doesn’t mean that people who prefer spoilers aren’t real. I get that. I don’t UNDERSTAND it, but I GET it. However, the fact that people watch and enjoy things differently from one another makes for an even BETTER reason to avoid spoilers, not a WORSE one. You see, if a person WANTS spoilers for virtually anything – a movie, a book, a TV show – they are readily available. They can be found in just seconds on Google, or if you want to get absolutely insane fake spoilers like I wrote in the preceding paragraph, you can get them on ChatGPT. Those who want to be spoiled can easily alleviate their anxiety. But for those of us who DON’T want spoilers, someone throwing them around casually is a severe blow to our enjoyment of whatever story you guys are out to ruin for us.

“But you know, Blake,” some of you say, “If the spoiler ruins the story, then it wasn’t really a good story in the first place.” I have heard this from many people, many times. I have also heard people say that thin crust pizza is better than thick crust. All of these people are – and here I’m going to use a somewhat complicated literary term, so I apologize in advance if you don’t quite get where I’m coming from – full of horseshit. 

Writers construct stories in a certain way. They create characters, select conflict, craft a setting, all to generate a certain effect in the reader or viewer. All of these things are tools in a vast and complicated toolbox, and one of those tools is the power of the reveal. Take something like The Sixth Sense, for example. I’m going to spoil it now, and I’m warning you in advance because that’s the decent thing to do, but I also know that it’s a relatively old and very well-known movie, so I’m not TOO worried about ruining it for anybody. Still, if you don’t know what happens, here’s your last chance to bow out.

“And they keep calling Chicago Style ‘casserole’.”
“What, do they think that’s an insult or something?”
“I guess.”

In this movie, a psychologist played by Bruce Willis attempts to help a boy played by Haley Joel Osment who believes he can see ghosts. Most of the movie focuses on Willis’s character as he tries to steer Osment through this bizarre ability of his and lead him to making peace with his strange power in the moments before the final revelation at the end – that Willis himself is a ghost, although he didn’t know it. 

It was a great moment, a fantastic surprise that not only made the movie exciting, but made viewers want to go back and watch it again to look for the many clues they missed the first time around. There’s a scene, for instance, where Willis is at dinner with his wife, talking to her as she grows frustrated and walks out on him. On first viewing, it seems as though she’s angry at him and is refusing to have a conversation, but watching it later it becomes clear that she can’t see or hear him, and what the audience thought was anger over his frequent absences is actually grief over his death. Once you realize that, you realize that NOBODY other than Osment’s character ever directly talks to or interacts with Willis in the entire film, a realization that is far more meaningful and rewarding the second time you watch it…IF you didn’t get it the first time.

Although writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has become something of a punchline in later years for an overreliance on twist endings like this one, this is the movie that made his career, and it was a hit for a reason. But if you go into the movie knowing that Willis is a ghost, you lose that shock at the end and, instead, spend the movie picking apart the little clues that are only intended to be significant in retrospect. 

What’s really weird is that Moonlighting had the same twist, but nobody ever caught on.

Or, to put it more simply, if a writer chooses to use a reveal in a story, they are doing so for a purpose. If that reveal is spoiled, you are both robbing the writer of the right to tell the story as they intend AND robbing the audience of the ability to enjoy the story as the writer wanted them to. Saying that if a spoiler ruins a story then it wasn’t a good story is like saying that if you make a pizza without sauce and it doesn’t taste right that means it wasn’t a good pizza. Maybe not, but if COULD have been if you hadn’t LEFT OUT A VITAL INGREDIENT.

What I’m getting down to is that avoiding spoilers should be a simple matter of common courtesy. If you want to get spoiled, you can. Fine. Go nuts. As I always say, it’s your life and you have the right to enjoy things the way you want, and my feelings about it should have no dominion over your own. However, when you throw around spoilers on social media or in a crowded room, you’re taking that same right away from other people. Not being able to go to the movies very often – especially to see R-rated movies – I knew I would be spoiled on Deadpool and Wolverine long before I actually got to watch it, and I was right. That movie is built on several surprise moments, with cameo appearances by actors and characters who haven’t been seen in Marvel movies in years, or in at least one case, ever. But I didn’t get to see the movie until four months after it hit theaters, and every cameo in the film had been spoiled for me before I got to see it. At this point I don’t even get angry anymore, just frustrated. I still enjoyed the movie, don’t get me wrong. I just know I would have enjoyed it MORE if I DIDN’T know that Lea Thompson was going to show up to reprise her role as Beverly from Howard the Duck.

“Well that’s on you, Blake,” someone says. “You should avoid those parts of social media.” By the way, if anybody ever figures out who this person is who keeps shouting out from the back of the room to interrupt my columns, let me know. He’s a jerk. The thing is, people drop these spoilers EVERYWHERE. It’s not like I’m part of a Deadpool Group on Facebook where I expect to get barraged by this stuff. It shows up in random posts on all social media. And even if I unplugged from social media entirely, that wouldn’t save me from things like the kid who walked into my classroom the day before the second Doctor Strange movie was released and – loudly – announced who one of the unrevealed characters was. 

To his credit, when he saw how angry I was, that kid at least had the decency to apologize. 

People shouldn’t have to spend their entire lives like Keanu Reeves in bullet time, twisting and contorting in midair to avoid having things ruined for them. Common courtesy should dictate that spoilers be restricted to a time and place where they are expected and welcome. 

Pictured: Logging on to Facebook the week any given Marvel movie is released.

All that said, there IS a statute of limitations here. People use common experiences – such as stories – as a shared reference point just as a basic element of communication. We aren’t quite as bad as the aliens on that one episode of Star Trek that communicated 100 percent via metaphor (the “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” episode – even if you don’t watch Trek, I guarantee you’ve heard the reference online), but we DO use our common experiences, including story, to relate to one another. Eventually, any story that is sufficiently popular enters the sphere of public knowledge, and it’s no longer reasonable to expect to remain spoiler-free. Another example from school – a few days ago my English class was discussing the way artificial intelligence is depicted in the media, and the movie The Matrix came up. I started to hem and haw a little bit, trying to talk about the movie without giving away anything important, until one of my students said, “Mr. Petit, that movie is 25 years old.” I thanked her for making me feel like Methuselah, but her point was well-made, and after that I stopped worrying about ruining the movie and just talked about it. The conversation went much better after that. 

But again, this is a movie that was released a quarter of a century ago. (If I have to feel like an old man when I think about The Matrix, so does everybody else.) I would never have done this with a movie that came out last year, let alone last month. And even if the movie WAS old, I wouldn’t do it if somebody had asked me not to.

What I’m calling for, my friends, is simple courtesy. If you don’t mind spoilers, fine. That’s your prerogative. But that doesn’t give you the right to ruin things for people who DO. Think before you spoiler. And the newer a movie or TV show is, think even harder. 

And here’s hoping I get around to season two of Squid Game before one of these kids ruins season three for me.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. In case you didn’t catch the joke, all of the spoilers he dropped in this column (except for the Sixth Sense example) were fake. Lea Thompson wasn’t in Deadpool and Wolverine. It was Lady Gaga.