So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish by Douglas Adams (1984)
One of the great things about growing up before âthe internetâ was that you could form an opinion about a piece of art without knowing what anyone else thought about it. Unless something was extraordinarily mainstream, youâd get to talk to maybe half-a-dozen people about any given thing? Maybe Siskel & Ebert would do a piece on it? A review in the paper? Some friends at school? Mostly, you were left to your own devices to like something or not.
So then, one of the really strange things about living though âthe internetâ emerging was the experience of going online and discovering the places where your long-held opinion diverged from the world at large. For example, it turns out that So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is a book basically no one liked, which came as quite a surprise to me, since I liked it very much.
The book turned 40 this past weekend, coming out a few days after the HHGG Infocom game, and like that game Iâll take the excuse to talk about it some more.
Itâs not really a Science-Fiction comedy, itâs a magical realism romance novel that just happens to star the main character from Hitchhiker. Itâs striking how different it is from Adamsâ previous work, and frankly, from his work that followed.
Of course part of that is that while it was his fourth book, it was his first novel from scratch, not based on something else. The first two HHGG books were (heavily) reworked versions of the first two series of the radio show, the third book was based on a pile of ideas that was variously a Doctor Who episode, a pitch for a Doctor Who movie, and the concept for the never-made second series of the TV version. As such, itâs his first piece of work not building on ideas that had been clanking around since the late 70s.
As I mentioned way back when talking about Salmon of Doubt, So Long and Thanks for All The Fish kicks off what I think of Adamsâ middle period. You get the feeling thatâs the sort of direction he wanted to move in, not just recycling the same riffs from a decade earlier. Thereâs a real sense of his, at least attempted, growth as an author.
Infamously, So Long was the book that after a year and multiple extended deadlines he still hadnât actually started, so his editor locked him in a hotel room in London for two weeks, during which he cranked out the novel. I had two pretty strong reactions to learning this via the aforementioned internet; first, finding our that this whole book was, essentially, the first draft explained a lot, and second, there are very, very few people who could have written a book even this good in a single panicked fortnight.
Adams occasionally expressed regret that it was never really finished, and it shows. Or rather, itâs obvious what parts he cared about, and which parts he never got around to polishing.
So, letâs get the criticisms out of the way.
The previous books have a very strong Narrator Voice, extending out from the fact that the radio show was narrated by the Guide itself, and so even the narration in the book that isnât explicitly a guide entry has the same tone and character, and is presumably still the Guide telling the story. Here, though, the narrator is clearly Douglas Adams himself, including a few places where he directly addresses the audience in what feel as much like his notes to himself as they do anything else. And thereâs a little standalone epilogue about the virtues of not being able to concentrate which is fine on itâs own, but in the context of the bookâs creation feels a little overly protest-y.
And itâs funny he has such a presence in that way, because in addition to that, while Arthur Dent was always clearly an author stand-in, thereâs also never been less distance between the two as here. This book includes at least two events that happen to Arthur that Adams claimed really happened to him (thatâs the story about the biscuits and one of his dates with Fenchurch.) Fenchurch herself is supposedly an amalgam of the two women Adams dated in the early 80s, and she lives in the flat Adams really lived in. Thereâs parts of the book that feel a lot more like Adams swapping stories over beers rather than an actual, you know, piece of fiction.
Itâs not really funny in the same way the other books are, and a lot of the attempts at humor fall flat. Thereâs a joke about a planet ruled by lizards that the population hates but keeps voting for because âthe wrong lizards might win,â that never really coheres and feels like something from one of the endless 80s Hitchhiker knockoffs than something from the real thing. Thereâs a running joke about a trucker who doesnât know heâs The Rain God that is mostly very funny, but never really connects to anything else. Even Fenchurch, who is a great character, feels like she has a name where the author was trying to outdo âFord Prefectâ and came up short.
The character most hurt by this is Ford. Zaphod and Trillian donât make an appearance in this one, so the action cuts back and forth between Arthurâs low-stakes romance and Ford being an extra-disreputable Doctor Who, crashing from one end of the galaxy to the other. This is a version of Ford you can most clearly imagine being played by Tom Bakerâor rather, being written by a person who misses writing for Tom Bakerâthereâs a bit where Ford is stalking around Arthurâs house saying âbeep beep beepâ which isnât all that funny on the page but that Tom would have made sing. Itâs never entirely clear why Ford is doing what heâs doing, but not in a intentionally ambiguous way, more of a series of âIâll explain latersâ that just never really pay off. The Ford scenes are fun, but of all the book they read the most like rough drafts. Itâs hard not to imagine that the book would have been better if Ford crashed into the narrative for the first time at the same time as he crashes into Arthurâs house.
Itâs also interesting that Arthur doesnât really start acting like old Arthur until Ford shows up, which says a lot about how those characters work. Arthur is a character who looks like is going to be a classic âstraight manâ comedy sidekick, but then starts arguing back and refusing to go along with things, refusing to give up agency despite not having a clue as to whatâs going on around him. Here, he really doesnât have anyone to argue with, and spends the book in a completely different gear until Ford shows up.
On the other hand, Marvin shows up at the very and and proves both that heâs the best character in the series and that âaggressively depressed robotâ is an absolutely bulletproof concept.
Having gotten that out of the way, letâs talk about the parts that work. Because the parts that work here really work.
The main body of the book follows Arthur, who returns to Earth, which is somehow un-demolished. The population has dismissed the âthing with the yellow spaceshipsâ as a mass hallucination and/or CIA drug experiment. (Exactly how the Earth has returned is never totally explained, but thereâs an ambiguous dream sequence that I always interpreted to mean that the Magratheans had slid the Earth Mk II into place where the original had been. Regrettably, the book declines to mention if Africa has fijords now.)
He goes about reintegrating into his old life, buys a computer, meets a girl, falls in love, teaches her how to fly, both literally and metaphorically. One of the great things about Arthur in this book is that he gets to be the one that knows things for once. The scene where Fenchurch pulls out the Guide and starts asking questions is truly greatâfinally Arthur is the one who gets to answer instead of ask.
His girlfriend, Fenchuch, is strongly implied to be the person who was going to provide the final readout of the original Earthâs program to find the Ultimate Question; sheâs been at loose ends since that failed to actually happen. As such, Arthur digs up the location for âGodâs Final Message to his creationâ that he got in the previous book, the two of them hook up with Ford, and the three of them hitchhike back out into space.
That end, though. Whatever quibbles I might have about the rest of the book, the end is perfect. The whole premise of âGodâs Final Messageâ both takes a swing at resolving the ongoing philosophical questions that undergrid Hitchhiker while still being actually funny. It really feels like a guy wrapping up this phase of his career. Happy endings, of a sort, resolve most of the open items, send Arthur off into the sunset.
(One of the reasons I have such disgust for Mostly Harmless is that not only is the book terrible on itâs own, but Adams screwed up the perfect end to the series he already had in order to do⌠that?)
Itâs a slimmer volume than its three predecessors, both physically and figuratively, serving as more of a coda than a full installment on its own, but still sending off the series on the right note. Itâs not more sophisticated to have bad things happen to people than good things; art isnât of lesser quality if the characters finally catch a break.
Anyway, I didnât let those dorks on the web change my mind. Itâs still great.
Donât Panic: Infocomâs Hitchhikerâs Guide to the Galaxy at 40
Well! It turns out that this coming weekend is the 40th anniversary of Infocomâs Hitchhikerâs Guide to the Galaxy text adventure game by Douglas Adams and Steve Meretzky. I mentioned the game in passing back in July when talking about Salmon of Doubt, but Iâll take an excuse to talk about it more.
To recap: Hitchhiker started as a six-part radio show in 1978, which was a surprise hit, and was quickly followed by a second series, an albumâwhich was a rewrite and re-record with the original cast instead of just being a straight release of the radio showâa 2-part book adaptation, a TV adaptation, and by 1984, a third book with a fourth on the way. Hitchhiker was a huge hit.
Somewhere in there, Adams discovered computers, and (so legend has it) also became a fan of Infocomâs style of literate Interactive Fiction. They were fans of his as well, and to say their respective fan-bases had a lot of overlap would be an understatement. A collaboration seemed obvious.
(For the details on how the game actually got made, Iâll point you at The Digital Antiquarianâs series of philosophical blockbusters Douglas Adams, The Computerized Hitchhikerâs, and Hitchhiking the Galaxy Infocom-Style.)
These are two of my absolute favorite thingsâInfocom games and Hitchhikerâso this should be a âtwo great tastes taste great togetherâ situation, right? Well, unfortunately, itâs a little less âpeanut butter cupâ and a little more âorange juice on my corn chex.â
âBook adaptationâ is the sort of thing that seemed like an obvious fit for Infocom, and they did several of them, and they were all aggressively mediocre. Either the adaptation sticks too close to the book, and you end up painfully recreating the source text, usually while you âwaitâ and let the book keep going until you have something to do, or you lean the other way and end up with something âinspired byâ rather than âbased on.â Hitchhiker, amusingly, manages to do both.
By this point Adams had well established his reputation for blowing deadlines (and loving âthe whooshing noise they make as they go byâ) so Infocom did the sane thing and teamed him up Steve Meretzky, who had just written the spectacularâand not terribly dissimilar from HitchhikerâPlanetfall, with the understanding that Meretzky would do the programming and if Adams flagged then Meretzky could step in and push the game over the finish line.
The game would cover roughly the start of the story; starting with Arthurâs house being knocked down, continuing through the Vogon ship, arriving on the Heart of Gold, and then ending as they land on Magrathea. So, depending on your point of view, about the first two episodes of the radio and TV versions, or the first half of the first book. This was Adamsâ fourth revision of this same basic set of jokes, and one senses his enthusiasm waning.
You play as Arthur (mostly, but weâll get to that,) and the game tracks very closely to the other versions up through Arthur and Ford getting picked up by the Heart of Gold. At that point, the game starts doing its own thing, and itâs hard not to wonder if thatâs where Adams got bored and let Meretzky take over.
The gameâor at least the first partâwants to be terribly meta and subversive about being a text adventure game, but more often than not offers up things that are joke-shaped, but are far more irritating than funny.
The first puzzle in the game is that it is dark, and you have to open your eyes. This is a little clever, since finding and maintaining light sources are a major theme in earlier Zork-style Infocom games, and here you donât need a battery-powered brass lantern or a glowing elvish sword, you can just open your eyes! Haha, no grues in this game, chief! Then the second puzzle is where the game really shows its colors.
Because, you see, youâve woken up with a hangover, and you need to find and take some painkillers. Again, this is a text adventure, so you need to actually type the names of anything you want to interact with. This is long before point-and-click interfaces, or even terminal-style tab-complete. Most text games tried to keep the names of nouns you need to interact with as short as possible for ergonomic reasons, so in a normal game, the painkillers would be âpillsâ, or âdrugsâ, or âtabletsâ, or some other short name. Bur no, in this game, the only phrase the game recognizes for the meds is âbuffered analgesicâ. And look, thatâs the sort of think that Iâm sure sounds funny ahead of time, but is just plain irritating to actually type. (Although, credit where credit is due, four decades later, I can still type âbuffered analgesicâ really fast.)
And for extra gear-griding, the verb youâd use in reglar speech to consume a âbuffered analgesicâ would be to âtakeâ it, except thatâs the verb Infocom games use to mean âpick something up and put it in your inventoryâ so then you get to do a little extra puzzle where you have to guess what other verb Adams used to mean put it in your mouth and swallow.
The really famous puzzle shows up a little later: the Babel Fish. This seems to be the one that most people gave up at, and there was a stretch where Infocom was selling t-shirts that read âI got the Babel Fish!â
The setup is this: You, as Arthur, have hitchhiked on to the Vogon ship with Ford. The ship has a Babel Fish dispenser (an idea taken from the TV version, as opposed to earlier iterations where Ford was just carrying a spare.) You need to get the Babel fish into your ear so that itâll start translating for you and you can understand what the Vogons yell at you when they show up to throw you off the ship in a little bit. So, you press the button on the machine, and a fish flies out and vanishes into a crack in the wall.
What follows is a pretty solid early-80s adventure game puzzle. You hang your bathrobe over the crack, press the button again, and then the fish hits the bathrobe, slides down, and falls into a grate on the floor. And so on, and you build out a Rube Goldbergâstyle solution to catch the fish. The 80s-style difficulty is that there are only a few fish in the dispenser, and when you run out you have to reload your game to before you started trying to dispense fish. This, from the era where game length was extended by making you sit and wait for your five-inch floppy drive to grind through another game load.
Everything you need to solve the puzzle is in the room, except one: the last thing you need to get the fish is the pile of junk mail from Arthurâs front porch, which you needed to have picked up on your way to lie in front of the bulldozer way back a the start of the game. No one thinks to do this the first time, or even first dozen times, and so you end up endlessly replaying the first hour of the game, trying to find what you missed.
(The Babel Fish isnât called out by name in Why Adventure Games Suck, but one suspects it was top of Ron Gilbertâs mind when he wrote out his manifesto for Monkey Island four years later.)
The usual reaction, upon learning that the missing element was the junk mail, and coming after the thing with the eyes and the âbuffered analgesicâ is to mutter, screw this and stop playing.
Thereâs also a bit right after that where the parser starts lying to you and you have to argue with it to tell you whatâs in a room, which is also the kind of joke that only sounds funny if youâre not playing the game, and probably accounted for the rest of the people throwing their hands up in the air and doing literally anything else with their time.
Which is a terrible shame, because just after that, you end up on the Heart of Gold and the game stops painfully rewriting the book or trying to be arch about being a game. Fairly quickly, Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian go hang out in the HoGâs sauna, leaving you to do your own thing. Your own thing ends up being using the backup Improbability Generator to teleport yourself around the galaxy, either as yourself or âquantum leap-styleâ jumping into other people. You play out sequences as all of Ford, Zaphod, and Trillian, and end up in places the main characters never end up in any of the other versionsâon board the battlefleet that Arthurâs careless coment sets in motion, inside the whale, outside the lair of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. The various locations can be played in any order, and like an RPG from fifteen years later, the thing you need to beat the game has one piece in each location.
This is where the game settles in and turns into an actual adventure game instead of a retelling of the same half-dozen skits. And, more to the point, this is where the game starts doing interesting riffs on the source material instead of just recreating it.
As an example, at one point, you end up outside the cave of the Ravenenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, and the way you keep it from eating you is by carving your name on the memorial to the Beastâs victims, so that it thinks it has already eaten you. This is a solid spin on the bookâs joke that the Beast is so dumb that it thinks that if you canât see it, it canât see you, but manges to make having read the book a bonus but not a requirement.
As in the book, to make the backup Improbability Drive work you need a source of Brownian Motion, like a cup of hot liquid. At first, you get a cup of Advanced Tea Substitute from the Nutrimatâthe thing thatâs almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. Later, after some puzzles and the missile attack, you can get a cup of real tea to plug into the drive, which allows it work better and makes it possible to choose your destination instead of it being random. Again, thatâs three different jokes from the source material mashed together in an interesting and new way.
Thereâs a bit towards the end where you need to prove to Marvin that youâre intelligent, and the way you do that is by holding âteaâ and âno teaâ at the same time. The way you do that is by using the backup Improbably Drive to teleport into your own brain and removing your common sense particle, which is a really solid Hitchhiker joke that only appears in the game.
The game was a huge success at the time, but the general consensus seemed to be that it was very funny but very hard. You got the sense that a very small percentage of the people who played the game beat it, even grading on the curve of Infocomâs usual DNF rate. You also got the sense that there were a whole lot of people for whom HHGG was both their first and last Infocom game. Like Myst a decade later, it seemed to be the kind of game people who didnât play games got bought for them, and didnât convert a lot of people.
In retrospect, itâs baffling that Infocom would allow what was sure to be their best-selling game amongst new customers to be so obtuse and off-putting. Itâs wild that HHGG came out the same year as Seastalker, their science fictionâthemed game designed for âjunior levelâ difficulty, and was followed by the brilliant jewel of Wishbringer, their âIntroductoryâ game which was an absolute clinic in teaching people how to play text adventure games. Hitchhiker sold more than twice those two games combined.
(For fun, See Infocom Sales Figures, 1981-1986 | Jason Scott | Flickr)
Infocom made great art, but was not a company overly-burdened by business acumen. The company was run by people who thought of games as a way to bootstrap the company, with the intent to eventually graduate to ârealâ business software. The next year they âfinallyâ released Cornerstoneâtheir relational database product that was going to get them to the big leagues. It did not; sales were disastrous compared to the amount of money spent on development, the year after that, Infocom would sell itself to Activision; Activision would shut them down completely in 1989.
Cornerstone was a huge, self-inflicted wound, but itâs hard not to look at those sales figures, with Hitchhiker wildly outstripping everything else other than Zork I, and wonder what would have happened if Hitchhiker had left new players eager for more instead of trying to remember how to spell âanalgesic.â
As Infocom recedes into the past and the memories of old people and enthusiasts, Hitchhiker maintains itâs name recognition. People who never would have heard the name âZorkâ stumble across the game as the other, other, other version of Hitchhiker Adams worked on.
And so, the reality is that nowadays HHGG is likely to be most peopleâs firstâand onlyâencounter with an Infocom game, and thatâs too bad, because itâs really not a good example of what their games were actually like. If youâre looking for recommendation, scare up a copy of Enchanter. Iâd recommend that, Wishbringer, Planetfall, and Zork II long before getting to Hitchhiker. (Zork is the famous game with the name recognition, but the second one is by far the best of the five games with âZorkâ in the title.)
BBC Radio 4 did a 30th anniversary web version some years ago, which added graphics in the same style as the guide entries from the TV show, done by the same people, which feels like a re-release Infocom would have done in the late 80s if the company hadnât been busy drowning in consequences of their bad decisions.
Itâs still fun, taken on its own terms. Iâd recommend the game to any fan of the other iterations of the Guide, with the caveat that it should be played with a cup of tea in one hand and a walkthrough within easy reach of the other.
All that said, itâs easy to sit here in the future and be too hard on it. The Secret of Monkey Island was a conceptual thermocline for adventure games as a genre, itâs so well designed, and itâs design philosophy is so well expressed in that design, that once youâve played it itâs incredibly obvious what every game before it did wrong.
As a kid, though, this game fascinated me. It was baffling, and seemingly impossible, but I kept plowing at it. I loved Hitchhiker, still do, and there I was, playing Arthur Dent, looking things up in my copy of the Guide and figuring out how to make the Improbability Drive work. It wasnât great, it wasnât amazing, it was amazingly amazing. At one point I printed out all the Guide entries from the game and made a physical Guide out of cardboard?
As an adult, what irritates me is that the gameâs âquestionableâ design means that itâs impossible to share that magic from when I was 10. There are plenty of other things I loved at that time I can show people now, and the magic still worksâStar Wars, Earthsea, Monkey Island, the other iterations of Hitchhiker, other Infocom games. This game, though, is lost. It was too much of its exact time, and while you can still play it, itâs impossible to recreate what it was like to realize you can pick up the junk mail. Not all magic lasts. Normally, this is where Iâd type something like âand thatâs okayâ, but in this particular case, I wish theyâd tried to make it last a little harder.
As a postscript, Meretzky was something of a packrat, and it turns out he saved everything. He donated his âInfocom Cabinetâ to the Internet Archive, and itâs an absolute treasure trove of behind-the-scenes information, memos, designs, artwork. The Hitchhiker material is here: Infocom Cabinet: Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy : Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams
Ten Years of the Twelfth Doctor
I missed it with everything else going on at the time, but this past August marks ten years since the debut of Peter Capaldi as the Twelfth Doctor Who, who is, without a doubt, my all-time favorite version of the character.
His take on the character boiled down to, basically, âSlightly Grumpy Aging Punk Space Dadâ, and it turns out thatâs exactly what I always wanted. Funny, weird, a little spooky, âkindâ without necessarily being âniceâ. If nothing else, the Doctor should be the coolest weird uncle possible, and, well, look at that picture! Perfection.
(This is a strange thing for someone who grew up on PBS reruns of Tom Baker to admit. But when Iâm watching something else and wishing the Doctor would show up and kick things into gear, itâs now Capaldi I picture instead of Baker.)
Unlike some of the other versions of the character, Twelve took a little while to dial in. So itâs sort of appropriate I didnât remember this anniversary until now, because this past weekend was the 10th anniversary of the eighth episode of his inaugural series, âMummy on the Orient Express.â âMummyâ wasnât the best episode of that seasonâthat was easily âListenâ or âDark Waterâ, but âMummyâ was the episode where I finally got what they were doing.
This is slightly embarrassing, because âMummyâ is also the most blatantly throwback episode of the year; itâs a story that could have been done with very few tweaks in 1975 with Tom Baker. The key though, are those differences in approach, and one of the reasons a long running show like Doctor Who goes back and revisits old standards is to draw a contrast between how they were done then vs now.
Capaldi, unlike nearly all of his predecessors, was a genuinely well-known actor before climbing on board the Tardis. The first place I saw him was as the kid that falls in love with the (maybe?) mermaid in the criminally under-seen Local Hero. But his signature part was Malcom Tucker in The Thick of It. The Thick of It is set âbehind the scenesâ of the British government, and is cut from the British comedy model of âeveryone is an idiot trying to muddle throughâ. The Thick of It takes that model one step further, though, and posits that if thatâs true, there must be a tiny group of non-idiots desperately keeping the world together. Thatâs Malcom Tucker, nominally the governmentâs Director of Communications, but in reality the Prime Ministerâs enforcer, spin doctor, and general Fixer. Tucker is clearly brilliant, the lone competent man surrounded by morons, but also a monster, and borderline insane. Capaldi plays him as openly menacing, but less straightforwardly malevolent as just beyond caring about anyone, constantly picking up the pieces from the problems that the various other idiots in Government have caused. Capaldi manages to play Tucker as clearly always thinking, but itâs never clear what heâs actually thinking about.
Somehow, Tucker manages to be both the series main antagonist and protagonist at the same time. And the character also had his own swearing consultant? Itâs an incredible performance of a great part in a great show. (On the off chance you never saw it, heâs where âOmni-Shamblesâ came from, and you should stop reading this right now and go watch that show, Iâll wait for you down at the next paragraph.)
So the real problem for Doctor Who was that âMalcom Tucker as The Doctorâ was simultaneously a terrible idea but one that was clearly irresistible to everyone, including show-runner Steven Moffat and Capaldi himself.
The result was that Capaldi had a strangely hesitant first season. His two immediate predecessors, David Tennant and Matt Smith, lept out of the gate with their takes on the Doctor nearly fully formed, whereas it took a bit longer to dial in Capaldi. They knew they wanted someone a little less goofy than Smith and maybe a little more standoffish and less emotional, but going âFull Tuckerâ clearly had strong gravity. (Weâve been working our way on-and-off through 21st century Who with the kids, and having just rewatched Capaldiâs first season, in retrospect I think he cracked what he was going to to do pretty early, but everyone else needed to get Malcom Tucker out of their systems.)
Capaldi is also an excellent actorâprobably the best to ever play the partâand also one who is very willing to not be the center of attention every scene, so he hands a lot of the spotlight off to his co-lead Louise Colemanâs Clara Oswald, which makes the show a lot better, but left him strangely blurry early on.
As such, I enjoyed it, but spent a lot of that first season asking âwhere are they going with this?â I was enjoying it, but it wasnât clear what the take was. Was he⌠just kind of a jerk now? One of the running plot lines of the season was the Doctor wondering if he was a good man or not, which was a kind of weird question to be asking in the 51st year of the show. There was another sideplot where he didnât get along with Claraâs new boyfriend which was also unclear what the point was. Finally, the previous episode ended with Clara and the Doctor having a giant argument that would normally be the kind of thing youâd do as a cast-member was leaving, but Coleman was staying for at least there rest of the year? Where was all this going?
For me, âMummyâ is where it all clicked: Capaldiâs take on the part, what the show was doing with Clara, the fact that their relationship was as toxic as it looked and that was the point.
There are so many great little moments in âMummyâ; from the basic premise of âthereâs a mummy on the orient express⌠in space!â, to the â20s art deco in the futureâ design work to, the choice of song that the band is singing, to the Doctor pulling out a cigarette case and revealing that itâs full of jelly babies.
It was also the first episode of the year that had a straightforward antagonist, that the Doctor beat by being a little bit smarter and a little bit braver than everyone else. Heâd been weirdly passive up to this point; or rather, the season had a string of stories where there wasnât an actual âbad buyâ to be defeated, and had more complex, ambiguous resolutions.
Itâs the denouement where it really all landed for me. Once all the noise was over, the Doctor and Clara have a quite moment on an alien beach where he explainsâor rather she realizesâwhat his plan had been all along and why he had been acting the way he had.
The previous episode had ended with the two of them having a tremendous fight, fundamentally a misunderstanding about responsibility. The Doctor had left Clara in charge of a decision that normally heâd have taken; Clara was angry that heâd left her in the lurch, he thought she deserved the right to make the decision.
The Doctor isnât interested in responsibilityâfar from it, heâs one of the most responsibility-averse characters in all of fictionâbut heâs old, and heâs wise, and heâs kind, and heâs not willing not to not help if he can. And so heâll grudgingly take responsibility for a situation if thatâs what it takesâbut this version is old enough, and tired enough, that heâs not going to pretend to be nice while he does it.
He ends by muttering, as much to himself as to Clara, âSometimes all you have are bad choices. But you still have to choose.â
And thatâs this incarnation in a nutshellâof course heâd really rather be off having a good time, but heâs going to do his best to help where he can, and he isnât going to stop trying to help just because all the options are bad ones. Heâd really rather the Problem Trolly be going somewhere nice, but if someone has to choose which track to go down, heâll make the choice.
âMummyâ is the middle of a triptych of episodes where Claraâs world view fundamentally changed. In the first, she was angry that the Doctor expected her to take responsibility for the people they came across, here in the second she realized why the Doctor did what he did, and then in the next she got to step in the Doctorâs shoes again, but this time understood.
The role of the âcompanionâ has changed significantly over the years. Towards the end of the old show they realized that if the title character is an unchanging mostly-immortal, you can wrap an ongoing story around the sidekick. The new show landed on a model where the Doctor is mostly a fixed point, but each season tells a story about the companion changing, sometimes to the point where they donât come back the next year.
Louise Coleman was on the show for two and a half seasons, and so the show did three distinct stories about Clara. The first two storiesââwho is the impossible girlâ and âwill she leave the show to marry the boring math teacherââturned out to be headfakes, red herrings, and actually the show was telling another story, hidden in plain sight.
The one story you can never tell in Doctor Who is why that particular Time Lord left home, stole a time capsule, and became âThe Doctorâ. You can edge up against it, nibble around the edges, imply the hell out of things, but you canât ever actually tell that story. Except, what you can do is tell the story of how someone else did the same thing, what kind of person they had to be ahead of time, what kinds of things had to happen to them, what did they need to learn.
With âMummyâ, Claraâs fate was sealedâthere was no going back to âreal lifeâ, or âgetting married and settling downâ, or even âjust leavingâ. The only options left were Apotheosis or Deathâor, as it turns out, both, but in the other order. She had learned too much, and was on a collision course with her own stolen Tardis.
And standing there next to her was the aging punk space dad, passing though, trying to help. My Doctor.
Both Moffatâs time as show-runner and Capaldiâs time as the Doctor have been going through a much-deserved reappraisal lately. At the time, Capaldi got a weirdly rough reaction from online corners of the fanbase. Partly this was because of the aforementioned slow start, and partly because he broke the 21st century Who streak of casting handsome young men. But mostly this was because of a brew of toxic âfansâ, bad-faith actors, and various âalt-rightâ grifters. (You know, Tumblr.) Because of course, this last August was also the 10th anniversary of âGamerGateâ. How we ended up in a place that the unchained Id of the worst people alive crashed through video game and science fiction fandoms, tried to fix the Hugos, freaked out about The Last Jedi so hard it broke Hollywood, and then elected a racist game show host to be president is a topic for another time, but those people have mostly moved the grift on from science fictionâI mean, other than the Star Wars fanbase, which became a permanent host body.
The further we get from it, the more obvious what a grift it was. Itâs hard to describe how how utterly deranged the Online DiscourseTM was. There was an entire cottage industry telling people not to watch Doctor Who because of the dumbest reasons imaginable in the late twenty-teens, and those folks are just⌠gone now, and their absense makes it even more obvious how spurious the âconcernsâ were. Because this was also the peak âtaking bad-faith actors seriouslyâ era. The general âfanâ âconsensusâ was that Capaldi was a great actor let down by bad writing, in that sense of âbadâ meaning âit wasnât sexist enough for me.â
Thereâs a remarkable number of posts out there whatâs left of the social web of people saying, essentially, âI never watched this because $YOUTUBER said it was bad, but this is amazing!â or âwe never knew what we had until it was gone!â
Well, some of us knew.
I missed this back in November, but the official Doctor Who magazine did one of their rank every episode polls on the advent of the 60th anniversary. They do this every decade or so, and theyâre always interesting, inasmuch as theyâre a snapshot of the general fan consensus of the time. Theyâre not always a great view on how the general public sees this, I mean, a poll conducted by the official magazine is strongly self-selecting for Fans with a capital F.
I didnât see it get officially posted anywhere, but most of the nerd news websites did a piece on it, for example: Doctor Who Fans Have Crowned the Best Episode â Do You Agree? | Den of Geek. The takeway is that the top two are Capaldis, and half of the top ten are Moffatâs. That would have been an unbelievable result a decade ago, because the grifters would have swamped the voting.
Then thereâs this, which Iâve been meaning to link to for a while now. Over in the burned-out nazi bar where twitter used to be, a fan of Matt Smithâs via House of the Dragon found out that he used to be the lead of another science fiction show and started live tweeting her watch through Doctor Who: jeje (@daemonsmatt). Sheâs up through Capaldiâs second season now, as I type this, and itâs great. She loves it, and the whole thread of threads is just a river of positivity. And even in the âoops all nazisâ version of twitter, no one is showing up in the comments with the same grifter crap we had to deal with originally, those people are just gone, moved on to new marks. Itâs the best. Itâs fun to see what we could have had at the time if weâd run those people off faster.
This all feels hopeful in a way thatâs bigger than just people discovering my favorite version of my favorite show. Maybe, the fever is finally starting to break.
Hey Boyos! The Phantom Menace at 25
Star Wars absolutely peaked just a hint after midnight, the morning of May 19, 1999.
Itâs almost impossible to remember now how excited everyone was. And by âeveryoneâ I donât mean ânerdsâ or âfansâ or whatever, I mean everyone. The monoculture hadnât splintered yet, and ânew Star Warsâ was an event. Everyone talked about it, Natalie Portmanâs kabuki-makeup face was everywhere, they ran that Darth Maul Duel of the Fates music video on MTV constantly.
The other thing thatâs hard to remember is that âStar Warsâ meant something totally different there in the spring of 1999. âStar Warsâ was three good movies, and⌠some books and video games, maybe? But as far as the mainstream was concerned, it was just three movies that mostly everyone liked. For a certain kind of blockbuster filmmaking, Star Wars was still the gold standard, it was still the second highest grossing movie of all time, having only just been beat out by Titanic two years earlier. There was a tremendous amount of cultural good-will thereâyou donât stay the highest grossing movie of all time by being outside of the mainstream. There were plenty of people who didnât like it, but there were very few people who hated it. It was like the Super Bowl, or the World Series; the default cultural response was âyeah, those were pretty good!â
âStar Warsâ was also a shorthand for quality. âStar Warsâ movies were good movies, full stop, and âlike Star Wars!â was about the highest compliment you could pay any live action action-adventure special effects anything.
And suddenly there was New Star Wars? Thatâs going to be amazing, by definiton!
And that trailer! We spent ages waiting for that trailer to download off the old Quicktime Trailers webpage over dialup. It was worth it.
It just genuinely didnât occur to anyone that a new Star Wars might be bad. That just wasnât a thing that happened.
Of course we all went to see it.
There was a big group of us that all went opening night, or rather the 12:01 am show the night before opening night. There was a bunch of us Star Wars fans, for sure, but half our group were casual at best. But it was a Thing! Everyone wanted to go.
This was before you could do this on the web, so we had to stand in line all day to get tickets. We worked out a rotation so no one had to stay there more than half an hour or so. The line outside the theature was basically a block party; everyone was in good spirits, the weather was gorgeous, someone brought a barbecue.
The little northern California town I was living in had the one Good Theatreâit was a remodeled vaudeville theature, single huge screen, lots of seats. Still had the old-style auditorium seating. The current owners had upgraded it with one of the best surround-sound systems Iâve ever heard.
The screening itself was a party. Everyone was there early, it was being âhostedâ by the local radio station, and one of the DJs was MC-ing the scene, doing trivia, giving away prizes. Some people came in costume, but not a lot. This wasât a comic book convention thing, this was a bunch of regular people in a college town ready to watch a new movie that everyone knew was going to be great.
I swear this is a true story: I remember one of my friends, one of the not-so-much-a-fan ones, leaning over and asking me âwhat are all these nerds gonna do if the movie is bad?â She nodded her head towards the group of fans that did come in costume. Someone had a full Boba Fett outfit, which was not common in those days.
I wish I could remember what I said back. I think I made a crack along the lines of âI think they could just run that trailer a dozen times and everyone would be happy.â But it wasnât a scenario worth thinking about. A bad Star War? No.
There had been rumblings of course. The reactions on what passed for the web in those days were⌠not an enthusiastic as one would have expected.
At midnight, the lights went out, and the audience roared. 12:01. Logos, then STAR WARS with that theme music. The audience made a sound I have never heard before or since, just an absolute roar of delight.
Then, that sound cut itself off very quickly, because suddenly everyone had to read a bunch of text we had never seen before.
I had another friend who was convinced that âPhantom Menaceâ was a fake title, and the real movie would have a âbetter oneâ. I remember side-eying him as THE PHANTOM MENACE scrolled into view in those chunky yellow letters.
The audience never got that loud again. There was a weird vibe in the room as the movie kept not⌠being⌠good. I distinctly remember the moment where the old guy with the pointy beard on Naboo says âThis can only mean one thing, invasion!â which was such a cool line in the trailer, but in the context of the business meeting it actually happened in, just kind of flopped onto the ground and bled out.
âOh shit,â I remember thinking. âThat lady on AICN was right.â
My other clear memory of that night was walking out into the street afterwards. It was 2-something in the morning. It was a warm northern valley night, so it was shorts and short-sleeves weather.
The mood as we walked out into the night was strangeânot sad, or angry, or even disappointed, but confused. Like leaving the stadium after your team blew what should have been an easy game. What the hell happened?
Someone I knew but hadnât come with waved to me across the street. âThat was amazing!â he yelled. We both knew he was lying, but we both let it slide. My friend that had asked what the nerds were going to do had slept through the second half.
No one would ever use âitâs like Star Wars!â as a compliment ever again.
The Phantom Menace has aged strangely, and mostly to its benefit. Itâs still a bad movie, but not a terrible one. The passage of timeâand the way âblockbusterâ summer genre movies have evolved past itâhave made it easier to see what it did well.
For starters, having the Queen of a planet arrive at the Galactice Senate to deliver eyewitness testimony about an illegal invasion only to be shut down by the senator for the invaders saying, basically, âwhy would we let this evidence get in the way of our desire to do nothing lets form a committeeâ, hits in 2024 in a way it didnât in 1999.
And that podrace still slaps. And not just the lightsaber fight, but the whole final 4-location battle is a pretty spectacular piece of action movie-making, the occasional âletâs try spinningâ non-withstanding. Lucas is at his best when heâs throwing weird images on the screen: that shot of the gungans coming out the swamp contrasted with the robots unfolding, Darth Maul pacing behind the laser fence while Darkman meditates, the fighters swirling around the command ship. The old Star War sense of humor occasionally shines through: for example, the music swells, the big door opens revealing Darth Maul and his double-bladed sword; and then Natalie Portman side-eyes Liam Neeson and deadpans âweâll take the long way.â
I havenât become a Prequel Apologist, exactly, but the curve I grade it on has certainly changed over the last two-and-a-half decades.
Thereâs a class of âbig noiseâ movies that have become the dominant form of blockbuster actionâobviously fake environments, too much CG, PG-13 without being sexy or scary, filled with beautiful-but-bored actors visibly thinking about how theyâre going to spend their paychecks as they spout whatâs not really dialogue but just sort of shout quips past each other. Part of what we talk about when we talk about âsuperhero fatigueâ are these enormously expensive live-action Saturday morning toy cartoons with nothing to say.
Part of why Phantom Menace got such a nuclear negative reaction was that it was such a surprise. Before, if a huge expensive AAA movie was bad, it was because it was a colossal screwupâyour David Lynchâs Dune, Dick Tracy, Waterworld, Batman & Robin. Those happened every few years or so, and would be followed by years of axe-grinding, blame-shifting, and explainers about âwhat went wrong.â And sure, bad sequels happened all the timeâmid-tier Roger Moore Bond movies, or Jaws 3, Superman IV, Star Trek V: the low budget, low effort cash-in sequel.
Instead, here was a huge expensive AAA movie, advertised to hell and back, and by all accounts the exact movie the people making it wanted to make, and it was still bad. That just wasnât a category in 1999. Now, itâs the dominant form. In a world where they actually honest-to-god expected me to pay full price to see Thor: The Dark World, I canât generate the energy to be too mad about the movie with the good lightsaber fight.
To demonstrate what I mean, and without getting drawn into a epistemological debate about what I might mean by âworseâ, here is a list of big-budget AAA blockbusters that have been released since 1999 that, if I had to choose, I would choose to watch Phantom Menace instead of:
- Any live action Transformers
- Any of the three Hobbit movies
- Prometheus
- Any of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels
- About half of the Fast and the Furious sequels
- That insane Lone Ranger movie with Johnny Depp as Tonto
- John Carter
- Honestly, about a third of the Marvel Movies. Well, maybe half?
- Any of the live action DC movies other than Wonder Woman
- The third Matrix
- Any of the reboot âKelvin Universeâ Star Treks
- The Hitchhikerâs Guide movie, which still makes me angrier than TPM ever did
Compared to all that, Darth Maul is high art.
On the one hand, saying a bad movie doesnât seem so bad because other movies got worse is damning with the faintest of praise, but on the other hand, go look at that list again. Yeah, weâre grading on a curve here, and yes, Jar-Jar is terrible, but did you see Star Trek Into Darkness?
At the end of the day, The Phantom Menace was one reclusive billionaireâs deranged vision, unimpeded. Say what you will about Lucas, he basically paid for this movie out of his checking account, and itâs clear it was the exact movie he wanted to make. After decades of warmed-over lowest common denominator films by committees that have been sandblasted into nothing, one guyâs singular artistic vision starts to sound pretty good, no matter how unhinged it might have been. We need more movies where someone just gets a giant pile of money to make whatever the hell movie they want, not less. Even if they donât always work out.
And, TPM kicked off a cycle of directors going back and revisiting their older work, which has been a mixed bag, but we got Fury Road and Twin Peaks: The Return out of it, which was more than worth it.
What does The Phantom Menace mean, two and a half decades later?
âEpisode I badâ is still shorthand for âabsolute trash fire of a movieâ. And that night in 1999 was certainly the point where âStar Warsâ stopped meaning âthe only series with no bad moviesâ and started to mean âincreasingly mid movies with breathtakingly diminished returns surrounded by the most toxic fans you can possibly imagine.â
But it has a strange staying power. There have been plenty of worse followups, sequels, and remakes, but those slide out of mind in a way that this hasnât. No one still makes jokes about fighting Giant Spiders or âNuking the Fridgeâ, but this movie has remained the Totemic example for âTerrible Followupâ. To put that another way: No one liked Jar-Jar Binks, but a quarter-century later, everyone on earth still knows who that is.
Why does this movie linger in the collective consciousness likeâif youâll forgive the expressionâa splinter in the mindâs eye? I think itâs because unlike most bad movies, you can squint and almost see the good movie this wanted to be. And the passing of time, and the wreckage of those other bad movies, have made it clearer what this one did right, how close it almost got. This isnât a Blade Runner situation, thereâs no clever edit that could fix this one, itâs too fundamentally misconceived in too many ways. But you can nearly feel there was a version of this movie made from almost the same parts that would have worked. You can imagine what a good movie with this cast and with these beats would look like. You can almost reach out and touch it.
And yet, the movie itself remains this terrible, beautifuly-made, stodgy thing. The sort of movie where you say to yourself, âit canât possibly have been that bad, could it? We just didnât like it.â And maybe you end up watching it with friends, or with your kids, or late at night on Disney+, and as it starts you think âno, this wasnât that bad,â but sooner or later someone says âthis can only mean one thingâinvasionâ, or Jar-Jar has a big idea, or someone asks The Junior Professional if sheâs an angel, and you say âno, actually, it really was exactly that bad.â
Thereâs a scene towards the end of the first act that has ended up as my most-quoted line from all of Star Wars.
The heroes are escaping from Naboo on the Queenâs chromed-out starship. The Jedi are in the cockpit delivering stilted dialogue. At a loss for anything better to do, Jar-Jar wanders into the droid break room. As he enters, the R2-D2 and the other R2 units all wake up, and turn towards him, beeping.
âHey boyos!â he exclaims.
I have five cats in my house, and whenever I walk into a room with more then one of them, they always pop their heads up and look at me.
âHey boyos!â I exclaim.
Movie Review Flashback: Zack Snyderâs Justice League
Programming Note: Back in March/April of 2021, I wrote a review of the then just-released Snydercut of Justice League for [REDACTED, but a different REDACTED than last time]. Iâm actually not a thousand percent sure this actually got published back then, but Iâm putting it up here now for roughly its 3rd anniversary. I did a little cleanup, but mostly I left it as it was, three years ago. On an amusing personal note, writing this was one of the things that caused me to think âyou know, I should really re-light the blog.â
So, #snydercut. The tl;dr is that by any reasonable metric it's a lightyears better movie than the theatrical Whedon version, and that it's absolutely a Justice League movie by the guy that made 300.
Is it any good, though?
There's something to be said for just raw, un-compromised artistic vision, and this is clearly the movie ZS set out to make, and dang did he ever make the heck out of it.
It's extremely Zack Snyder. The guy has a style, and this might be its apotheosis. If nothing else, he knows how to make stuff look cool, and every character has at least one moment where they're doing the coolest thing imaginable. If I'd had seen this at 15 I'd have lost my damn mind. And that's kind of the pointâthis is a 15-year old's idea of what cool and grownup is.
The whole thing operates at this level of just Operatic Pomposity. Extremely silly stuff is happening constantly, and the movie just plays it completely straight-faced, as if this was the most amazing stuff you have ever seen. I mean, SIXTEEN minutes into the movie, the literal greek god Zeus shoots a Jack Kirby character with lightning, and the movie shoots it like itâs the end of Macbeth.
And you can kind of see why. The "other guys" have established a brand for self-aware, slightly self-deprecating superhero movies, and you want to carve out a space where you don't look like an Avengers knock off. Problem is, the only space where this material can work other than "Robert Downey Jr smirking" is "as goddamn serious as possible", so they went with that, and it's hard to blame them. Well, and there's also a genuine audience of people who think Frank Miller is a genius non-ironically, and I'm glad those people got a movie for them.
Having the movie at full prescription strength is intersting, because all the bad ideas are still bad, but they're fully baked, and you can see where they were going with it.
It's almost boiling over with ideas it can't figure out how to land.
ZS knows instinctually that character conflict is interesting, but canât figure out how that works. Instead, everyone settles into this kind of grumpy-surly mode, but never actually disagree about anything.
It keep gesturing at other, better movies. There's an absolutely lyrical scene where Barry Allen saves Iris West from a car crash in the middle of a job interview that both nails Barry's character as well as finally figuring out how to show The Flash's powers in live action. Wonder Woman stars in a 10 minute Indiana Jones movie with torches and secret doors and everything. There's a really neat sketch for a movie about Lois Lane and Martha Kent dealing with their shared grief over Clark's death, and exploring what it's like for the people who knew the real person when a famous person dies, and THEN, as soon as Lois decices to move on, Clark comes back to life.
Heck, I'd take any of those blown out to 90 minutes, no question. Still, abbreviated as these sketches are, theyâre good!
But, theres at least two colossal conceptual screwups in the movie that even this version can't do anything about.
The first is trying to invert the Avengers model, and introduce everyone in this movie and then spin them off. It ends up as an amazing counter-example of how well put together the first Avengers really was. Consider: basically every speaking characterâHeroes AND Villainsâas well as the core McGuffin, had already been introduced, so all that movie had to do was remind the audience who everyone was and then say "oh no! this guy from that movie has teamed up with aliens to get that thing from that other movie!" And BAM, you get to start 2/3 into the story and just RUN. Justice League has to spend the first 120 minutes just explaining things so that the rest of the movie can even happen.
The second big screwup is trying to go for the Kirby Fourth World / New Gods / Darkside stuff in one gulp. Thereâs so much there, and this movie has to push most of it to the margins. The result is a movie where the actual bad guy only shows up right at the end and has no lines, while the rest of the time they fight his least-interesting henchman.
As kind of a bonus mistake, the movie picks up where BvS left off, which means a dead Superman, which means most of the middle of the movie is a speedrun of âThe Search for Spockâ but for Superman. And itâs massively irritating, because the emphasis is all in the wrong places. Literally no one on earth thought Superman was going to stay dead, and even less people thought that he was going to sit out a Justice League movie. So the Return of Superman stuff in the middle is never interesting, it just feels like padding in a movie that already has too much going on. One more sublot jammed in that could have easily been stretched out into itâs own story, or should have been left behind in the conceptual phase.
There were some things I really liked, though. As I alluded to earlier the way they represent the Flash by having him stay the same speed but having the rest of the world go into slow motion is absolute genius, a perfect fit for Snyder's slow motion fetish, and forehead-slappingly obvious once you've seen it. And even though Days of Future Past had done something similar with Quicksilver three years earlier, this movie keeps finding new ways to use the idea, and even the lighting, instead of being ridiculous, serves as a snazzy indicator that Flash speed has kicked in before you have time to process that the background has slowed down. The shot where he steps back and catches the batarang is brilliant, and was rightly the center of the trailer.
I basically loved everything they did with Wonder Woman? Great use of a great character.
I also like that they way they solve the âSuperman is too overpowered" problem is to lean all the way into it, and just show him as being on a completely different level from everyone else. That shot when he's fighting the League, and Flash is running by the frozen slow motion melee, and then Superman's eye suddenly moves to follow Flash? That's one of the best things anyone's ever done with Superman in live action. And it almost makes the âSearch for Supermanâ stuff work, because he operates less like a character and more like a bonus mcguffinâheâs the Death Star plans, and once the League has him back on his feet theyâre in good shape.
But, here in 2021, the biggest ding on JL is that absolutely everything that this movie tries to do in terms of tone or content, Infinity War / Endgame does better. The way this movie tries to be all edgelord dark looks downright amateur hour in a world where the "goofy" superhero francise made a movie where the bad guy wins and half the main characters die, and then rolls silent credits in front of a stunned audience.
[TEMPORAL INTRUSION: Hi, Gabe from â24 here. The original version of this had a horizontal line marking a transition here, but Iâm going to replace that with something a little more thematically appropriate and #helmancut my own review from 3 years in the future.
Obviously, this was all written before we knew they were going to finally put that cycle of DC movies out of their misery and hand the keys to the guy Disney accidentally fired over some tweets, or that Marvel was going to spend the next several years exclusively stepping on rakes they had carefully placed in front of themselves. Iâm on the record as saying I think âsuperhero fatigueâ is really âbad-movie-with-assigned-homework fatigueâ, but either way, itâs a real thing. I agree with everything I wrote here, but after years of relentlessly bad superhero and superhero-adjacent movies, I wouldnât have written all this in such an upbeat tone. And also, I sorta failed to point this out before, but those last two Avengers movies werenât that great either. âGrimdark bummer-times seriousâ just isnât a key superheros play well in.
Whatâs remarkable to me now is that in the spring of â21, waiting out what we thought was the tail end pandemic and just before our fall plans were wrecked by the Delta variant, I still remembered enough about the theatrical JL that I could do a comparison without a rewatch; now, Iâm not sure I could tell you anything that happened in any of those movies. Honestly, the only part of either version of JL that I still really remember is that miniâIndiana Jones movie starring Gal Godot at the beginning. With the entire exercise now in the rear-view mirror: They should have done a lot more of that.
We now return to the spring of 2021.]
I may be slightly more interested in the practice of turning a "long bad movie" into a "shorter, less bad" movie than the average person, but I think it's fascinating to see this, the original, and compare it to what they shipped in 2017. It's clear what Whedon's marching orders were: "cut it down to two hours, and add jokes". And that first one is a hell of a thing. You can squint and see there's a decent 3 hour version of this with a really solid deleted scenes section on the DVD, but cutting out half the movie is going to require some serious restructuring. For starters, you gotta pick a main character. There's two obvious choices:
Cyborg is clearly meant to be the emotional center of the movie. He's the only character with an actual "arc" who ends the movie in a different place that he starts. There's a kind of neat story in there about moving through the stages of grief, learning how to deal with the cards life deals you, and then finding a new family and purpose. The problem isâand this is a darkly hilarious punchline after all the allegations and dramaâit turns out Ray Fisher really can't act. He's utterly out of his depth the entire time, and is utterly unable to deliver what the movie needs him to. He seems like a neat guy who everyone likes, and he was clearly treated abominably, and Whedon is a garbage person, but cutting his part to the bone was clearly the right call. That guy has no business being anywhere near a big movie, much less anchoring one.
Fortunately, however, the actual main character of the movie is clearly Wonder Woman. All the critical decisions in the movie are hers, she's the one that figures things out and gets the big exposition, she's the only one that gets a side adventure at the beginningâshe's even the only one that gets her own theme music. This is a fairly clear "Wonder Woman and the Justice League" cut where it sticks with her as a the spine as she figures things out and recruits a team; not unlike the way Steve Rogers stays as the spine of the first Avengers movie.
So Whedon, of course, cuts out all her scenes and shoots a bunch of new stuff to make Batman the main guy. And you can almost see the panic-logic here. Suicide Squad bombed, BvS got a much more tepid reaction than they were expecting, Wonder Woman wasn't out yet. Recentering the movie on the one DC character thats proven able to hold down a franchise is an easy call to make, and "this movie needs more Batman" is a seemingly safe choice. But damn, what a screw up. And then it gets all extra icky once you roll in all the stuff we now know about "Joss Whedon, Fake Feminist".
Were there better ways to spend that 70 million bucks? Probably. It it a great movie? Not really. This isn't a Blade Runner-style "good movie becomes great" recut, this a Heavens Gate-style "oh, it turns out they really werenât incompetent".
I'm glad they did this though. Its easy to see why the cast was so disgruntled, and I'm glad we got to see the movie they signed up to make. As the various studios figure out what to do with their personal streaming services, I hope "original cuts" of movies becomes a thing. If nothing else, I hope this encourages Disney to drop the first version of Rogue One on Disney+, or even, dare I say it, the real Star Wars.
But you know what? We've all had our work fucked up by other people. I'm glad someone got to haul their real work back out the trash and say "no, I made THIS."
April 8, 2021: A Sketch From The Midst Of A Pandemic
This was originally written for [REDACTED] on April 8, 2021. Iâm republishing it here on its 3rd anniversary .
I got my shot at the Sacramento County "distribution center" at Cal Expo. Cal Expo, for those who don't know or don't remember, is the permanent home of the California State Fair. It's plunked down unceremoniously on the north side of the American river, in the middle of a weird swath of the city that's been permanently in the middle of one failing urban renewal project or another for my entire life. These usually involve "rebranding" the areaâaccording to a sign I drove past which is both brand new and already battered, I'm told we're now calling this area "uptown sacramento". It'll have a new name this time next year.
Cal Expo itself is a strange beastâa 900 acre facility built to host an annual 17 day event. The initial fever-dream was that it would become "DisneyLand North", mostly now it plays host to any event that need a whole lot of space for a single weekendâRV fairs, garden shows, school district-wide science fairs.
The line to get in to the vaccination site is identified with a large hand-lettered sign reading "VAX", surrounded by National Guard troops. Everyone stays in their car, and the line of cars snakes between dingy orange cones across acres of cracked parking lot. Enormous yellow weeds pour out of every crack, and I realize, in one of the strangest moments of dissonance of the last year, that this is the section of parking lot that in the before-times hosted the christmas tree lot. Now it's full of idling cars and masked troops in camo.
As befitting it's late 60s origins, Cal Expo mostly composed of bare dirt and giant brutalist retangular concrete buildings. They're all meant to be multi-use, so they've got high ceilings, no permanent internal fittings, and multiple truck-sized roll-up doors. They give the impression of an abandoned warehouse.
The line of cars contines into one of these bunkers. Incredibly friendly workers; a mixed of national guard, CA Department of Health and Human services, and a bunch of older RNs and MDs with strong "retired and now a docent" energy.
The whole thing runs like clockwork - directed into a line of cars, get to the front, get the shot, they drop a timer set to 15 minutes on the dashboard, and then directed out to the "Recovery Area", which is the next parking lot over full of other lines of cars.
The air is incredibly jovial. The woman who gives me my shot compliments my Hawaiian shift, and hopes we'll all be "somewhere like that" soon. A grandmotherly RN comes by and give me advice about where to keep my vax card. A younger guardsman in a medic uniform explains the symptoms to watch for, and then we shoot the breeze about Star Wars for a minute before he moves on. An older Guard Colonel walks by, sees the "JANSSEN" on the card on my dashboard and says "Ahhh! The one and done, NICE!" with a fist pump as he walks on.
Another HHS RN comes by and tells me my timer is up, along with every other car in the row. Another national guardswoman waves at me as I drive off. Everyone is wearing a mask, but you can tell everyone is smiling.
We Need to Form An Alliance! Right Now!!
Today is the fourth anniversary of my single favorite piece of art to come out of the early-pandemic era, this absolute banger by the Auralnauts:
Back when we still thought this was all going to âblow overâ in a couple of weeks, my kids were planning to do this song for the talent show at the end of that school year.
(Some slight context; the Auralnauts Star Wars Saga started as kind of a bad lip-reading thing, and then went itâs own way into an alternate version of Star Wars where the jedi are frat-bro jerks and the sith are just trying to run a chain of family restaurants. The actual villain of the series is âCreepioâ, who has schemes of his own. Iâm not normally a re-edit mash-up guy, but those are amazing.)
BSG, Fifteen Years On
Itâs been called to my attention that the last episode of the ânewâ Battlestar Galactica aired fifteen years ago yesterday?
My favorite part of that finale is that you can tell someone whose never seen it that the whole show ends with a robot dance party, and even if they believe you, they will never in a million years guess how that happens.
And, literally putting the words âthey have a planâ in big letters in the opening credits of every episode, while not ever bothering to work out what that plan was, thatâs whatever the exact opposite of imposter syndrome is.
Not a great ending.
That first season, though, that was about as good a season of TV not named Twin Peaks has ever been. It was on in the UK months before it even had an airdate in the US, and I kept hearing good things, so Iâahemâobtained copies. I watched it every week on a CRT computer monitor at 2 in the morning after everyone else was asleep, and I really couldnât believe what I was seeing. They really did take that cheesy late-70s Star Wars knockoff and make something outstanding out of it. Mostly, what I remember is I didnât have anyone to talk about it with, so I had to convince everyone I knew to go watch it once it finally landed on US TV.
It was never that good again. Sure, the end was bad, but so was the couple of years leading up to that end? The three other seasons had occasional flashes of brilliance but that mostly drained out, replaced by escalating âwhatâs the craziest thing that could happen next?â so that by the time starbuck was a ghost and bob dylan was a fundamental force of the universe there was no going back, and they finally landed on that aforementioned dance party. And this was extra weird because it not only started so good, but it seemed to have such a clear mission: namely, show those dorks over at Star Trek: Voyager how their show should have worked.
Some shows should just be about 20 episodes, you know?
Caves of Androzani at 40
As long as weâre talking about 40th anniversaries, this past Saturday marked 40 years since the last episode aired of âCaves of Androzaniâ, Peter Davisonâs final story as Doctor Who.
One of the unique things about Doctor Who is the way it rolls its cast over on a pretty regular basis, including the actor that plays the title character. This isnât totally unusualâBond does the same thingâbut what is unusual is that the show keeps the same continuity, in that the new actor is playing literally the same character, who just has a new body now.
The real-world reason for this is that Doctor Who is a hard show to make, and a harder show to be the lead of, and after about three seasons, everyone is ready to move on. The in-fiction reason is that when the Doctor is about to die they can âregenerateâ, healing themselves but changing their body.
This results is a weird sub-genre of stories that only exist in Doctor Whoâstories where the main character gets killed, but then the show keeps going. And the thing is, these basically never work. Doctor Who is a fairly light-weight family action-adventure show, where the main characters get into and out of life-threatening scrapes every time. âRegeneration Storiesâ tend to all fall into the same pattern, where something âreally extra badâ is happening, and events conspire such that the Doctor needs to sacrifice themselves to save everyone else. And theyâre always deeply unsatisfying, because itâs always the sort of problem that wouldnât be that big a deal if the main actor wasnât about to leave. There have been thirteen regular leads of the show at this point, and none of their last episodes have been anywhere near their best.
Except once.
In 1984, Doctor Who was a show in decline. No longer the creative or ratings juggernaut that it had been through most of the 1970s, it was wrapping up three years with Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor that could most charitably be described as âfineâ. Davison was one of the best actors to ever play the part, but with him in the lead the show could never quite figure out how to do better than about a B-.
For Davisonâs last episode, the show brought back Robert Holmes, who had been the showâs dominantâand bestâwriter throughout the seventies, but hadât worked on the show since â79. Holmes had written for every Doctor since the second, but had never written a last story, and seemed determined to make it work.
The result was extraordinary. While most previous examples had been huge, universe-spanning stakes, this was almost perversely small-fry. A tiny colony moon, where the forces of a corporation square off with a drug dealer whose basically space Phantom of the Opera, with the army and a group of gun-runners caught in the middle. At one point, the Doctor describes the situation as âa pathetic little warâ, and heâs rightâitâs almost perversely small-scale by his standards.
That said, there are enough moving pieces that the Doctor never really gets a handle on whatâs going on. Any single part would be a regular day a the office, but combined, they keep him off balance as things keep spiraling out of control. Itâs a perfect example of the catalytic effect the Doctor hasâjust by showing up, things start to destabilize without him having to do anything.
Whatâs really brilliant about it, though, is that he actually gets killed right at the start. He and new companion Peri stumble into an alien bat nest, which lethally poisons them, even though it takes a while to kick in. Things keep happening to keep him from solving all this, and by the end heâs only managed to scare up a single does of antidote, which he gives to his friend and then dies.
It's also remarkably better than everything around itânot just the best show Davison was in, but in genuine contention for best episode of the 26 seasons of the classic show. Itâs better written, better directed, better acted than just about anything else the old show did.
Itâs not flawlessâthe showâs reach far exceeds the grasp of the budget. As an example, thereâs a âcomputer tabletâ thatâs blatantly a TV remote, and thereâs a âmagma beastâ thatâs anything but. But thatâs all true for everything the show was doing in the 80sâbut for once, itâs trying to do something good, instead of not having enough money to do something mediocre.
My favorite beat comes about 3/4 of the way through, when the Doctor has either a premonition of his own death, or starts to regenerate and chokes it backâitâs ambiguous. Something happens that the Doctor shakes off, and the show wonât do something that weird and unclear again until Peter Capaldiâs twelfth Doctor refused to regenerate in 2017.
It also has one of my favorite uses of the Tardis as a symbol; at the end, things have gone from bad to worse, to even worse than that, and the Doctor, dying, carries the unconscious body of his friend across the moonscape away from the exploding mud volcano (!!), and the appearance of the blue police box out of the mist has never been more welcome.
As a kid, it was everything I wanted out of the showâit was weird, and scary, and exciting. As a grown-up, Iâm not inclined to argue.
Nausicaä at 40
Hayao Miyazakiâs animated version of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind came out forty years ago this week!
Miyazaki is one of the rare artists where you could name any of his works as your favorite and not get any real pushback. Itâs a corpus of work where âbestâ is meaningless, but âfavoriteâ can sometimes be revealing. My kidâs favorite is Ponyo, so thatâs the one Iâve now seen the most. When I retire, I want to go live on the island from Porco Rosso. * Totoro* might be the most delighted Iâve ever been while watching a movie for the first time. But Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is the only one I bought on blu-ray.
Nausicaä is the weird one, the one folks tend not to remember. It has all the key elements of a Miyazaki filmâa strong woman protagonist, environmentalism, flying, villains that arenât really villains, good-looking foodâbut it also has a character empty the gunpowder out of a shotgun shell to blow a hole in a giant dead insect exoskeleton. He never puts all those elements together quite like this again.
I canât now remember when I saw it for the first time. It must have been late 80s or early 90s, which implies I saw the Warriors of the Wind cut, or maybe a subbed Japanese import? (Was there a subbed Japanese import?) I read the bookâas much of it as existedâaround the same time. I finally bought a copy of the whole thing my last year of college, in one of those great âIâm an adult now, and I can just go buy thingsâ moments. And speaking of the book, this is one of the rare adaptations where it feels less like an âadaptationâ than a âcompanion piece.â Itâs the same author, using similar pieces, configured differently, providing a different take on the same material with the same conclusions.
So what is it about this move that appeals to me so much? The book is one of my favorite books of all times, but thatâs a borderline tautology. If Iâm honest, itâs a tick more âaction-adventureâ that most other Ghibli movies, which is my jam, but more importantly, itâs action-adventure where fighting is always the wrong choice, which is extremely my jam (see also: Doctor Who.)
I love the way everything looks, the way most of the tech you canât tell if it was built or grown. I love the way itâs a post-apocalyptic landscape that looks pretty comfortable to live in, actually. I love sound her glider makes when the jet fires, I love the way Teto hides in the folds of her shirt. I love the way the prophecy turns out to be correct, but was garbled by the biases of the people who wrote it down. I love everything about the Sea of Corruption (sorry, âToxic Jungleâ,) the poisonous fungus forest as a setting, the insects, the way the spores float in the air, the caves underneath, and then, finally, what it turns out the forest really is and why itâs there.
Bluntly, I love the way the movie isnât as angry or depressing as the book, and it has something approaching a happy ending. I love how fun it all is, while still being extremely sincere. I love that itâs an action adventure story where the resolution centers around the fact that the main character isnât willing to not help a hurt kid, even though that kid is a weird bug.
Sometimes a piece of art hits you at just the right time or place. You can do a bunch of hand waving and talk about characters or themes or whatever, but the actual answer to âwhy do you love that so much?â is âbecause there was a hole in my heart the exact shape of that thing, that I didnât know was there until this clicked into place.â
March Fifth. Fifth March.
Today is Tuesday, March 1465th, 2020, COVID Standard Time.
Three more weeks to flatten the curve!
What else even is there to say at this point? Covid is real. Long Covid is real. You donât want either of them. Masks work. Vaccines work.
It didnât have to be like this.
Every day, I mourn the futures we lost because our civilization wasnât willing to put in the effort to try to protect everyone. And we might have even pulled it off, if the people who already had too much had been willing to make a little less money for a while. But instead, we're walking into year five of this thing.
40 years ofâŚ
Just about 40 years ago, my Dad brought something home that literally changed my life. It was a computerâa home computer, which was still on the edge of being science fictionâbut more than that, it was a portal. It was magic, a box of endless possibilities. Itâs not even remotely hyperbole to say that bringing that computer home, which had just been released into the world, utterly changed the entire trajectory of my life.
I am, of course, talking about the Tandy 1000.
Thatâs not how you expected that sentence to end, was it? Because this year is also the 40th anniversary of the Mac. But I want to spend a beat talking about the other revolutionary, trend-setting computer from 1984, before we talk about the ancestor of the computer Iâm writing this on now.
Iâve been enjoying everyoneâs lyrical memories of the original Mac very much, but most have a slightly revisionist take that the once that original Mac landed in â84 that it was obviously the future. Well, it was obviously a future. Itâs hard to remember now how unsettled the computer world was in the mid-80s. The Tandy 1000, IBM AT, and Mac landed all in â84. The first Amiga would come out the next year. The Apple IIgs and original Nintendo the year after that. There were an absurd number of other platforms; Commodore 64s were selling like hotcakes, Atari was still making computers, heck, look at the number of platforms Infocom released their games for. I mean, the Apple ][ family still outsold the Mac for a long time.
What was this Tandy you speak of, then?
Radio Shack started life as a company to supply amateur radio parts to mostly ham radio operators, and expanded into things like hi-fi audio components in the 50s. In one of the greatest âbet it all on the big winâ moves I can think of, the small chain was bought byâof all peopleâthe Tandy Leather Company in the early 60s. They made leather goods for hobbyists and crafters, and wanted to expand into other hobby markets. Seeing no meaningful difference between leather craft hobbyists and electronics ones, Charles Tandy bought the chain, and reworked and expanded the stores, re-envisioning them as, basically, craft stores for electronics.
I want to hang on that for a second. Craft stores, but for amateur electronics engineers.
Itâs hard to express now, in this decayed age, how magical a place Radio Shack was. It seems ridiculous to even type now. If you were the kind of kid who were in any way into electronics, or phones in the old POTS Ma Bell sense, or computery stuff, RadioShack was the place. There was one two blocks from my house, and I loved it.
When home computers started to become a thing, they came up through the hobbyist world; Radio Shack was already making their own parts and gizmos, it was a short distance to making their own computers. Their first couple of swings, the TRS-80 and friends, were not huge hits, but not exactly failures either. Apple came out of this same hobbyist world, then IBM got involved because they were already making âbig ironâ, could they also make âlittle ironâ?
For reasons that seem deeply, deeply strange four decades later, when IBM built their first PC, instead of writing their own operating system, they chose to license one from a little company outside of Seattle called Microsoftâmaybe youâve heard of themâwith terms that let Gates and friends sell their new OS to other manufacturers. Meanwhile, for other reasons, equally strange, the only part of the IBM PC actually exclusive to IBM was the BIOS, the rest was free to be copied. So this whole little market formed where someone could build a computer that was âIBM Compatibleââagain, maybe youâve heard of thisâbuy the OS from that outfit up in Redmond, and take advantage of the software and hardware that was already out there. The basic idea that software should work on more than one kind of computer was starting to form.
One of the first companies to take a serious swing at this was Tandy, with the Tandy 2000. In addition to stretching the definition of âcompatibleâ to the breaking point, it was one of the very few computers to ever use the Intel 80186, and was bought by almost no one, except, though a series of events no one has ever been able to adequately explain to me, my grandmother. (I feel I have to stress this isnât a joke, Grandma wrote a sermon a week on that beast well into the late 90s. Continuing her track record for picking technology, she was also the only person I knew with a computer that ran Windows Me.)
As much as the original IBM PC was a âhome computerâ, it was really a small office computer, so IBM tried to make a cut down, cheaper version of the PC for home use, for real this time. I am, of course, talking about infamous flop the IBM PCjr, also 40 years old this year, and deserving its total lack of retrospective articles.
Tandy, meanwhile, had scrambled a âbetter PCjrâ to market, the Tandy 1000. When the PCjr flopped, Tandy pivoted, and found they had the only DOS-running computer on the market with all the positives of the PCjr, but with a keyboard that worked.
Among these positives, the Tandy 1000 had dramatically better graphics and sound than anything IBM was selling. âTandy Graphicsâ was a step up from CGA but not quite to EGA, and the âTandy Soundâ could play three notes at once! Meanwhile, the Tandy also came with something called DeskMate, an app suite / operating environment that included a text editor, spreadsheet, calendar, basic database with a text-character-based GUI.
So they found themselves in a strange new market: a computer that could do âbusiness softwareâ, both with what was built-in and what was already out there, but could also do, what are those called? Oh yeah, games.
The legend goes that IBM commissioned the nacent Sierra On-Line to write the first Kingâs Quest to show off the PCjr; when that flopped Sierra realized that Tandy was selling the only computer that could run their best game, and Tandy realized there was a hit game out there that could only run on their rigs. So they both leaned all the way in.
But of course, even the Tandy couldnât match âarcade gamesâ, so the capabilities and limits helped define what a âPC gameâ was. Adventure games, flight sims, RPGs. And, it must be said, both the words âoperatingâ and âsystemâ in MS-DOS were highly asperational. But what it lacked in features it made up for in being easy to sweep to the side and access the hardware directly, which is exactly what you want if youâre trying to coax game-quality performance out of the stone knives and bearskins of 80s home computers. Even when the NES cemented the âhome consoleâ market that Atari had sketched in a couple years later, âPC gamesâ had already developed their own identity vs âconsole gamesâ.
Radio Shacks got a whole corner, or more, turned over to their new computers. They had models out running programs you could play with, peripherals you could try, and most critically, a whole selection of software. I can distinctly remember the Radio Shack by my house with a set of bookstore-like shelves with what was at the time every game yet made by Sierra, Infocom, and everyone else at the time. Probably close to every DOS game out there. I have such clear memories of poring over the box to Starflight, or pulling Hitch-hikerâs Guide off the shelf, or playing Lode Runner on the demo computer.
A home computer with better graphics and sound than its contemporaries, pre-loaded with most of what you need to get going, and supported by its very own retail store? Does that sound familiar?
Iâm cheating the timeline a little here, the Tandy 1000 didnât release until November, and we didnât get ours until early â85. I asked my Dad once why he picked the one he did, of all the choices available, and he said something to the effect of he asked the âcomputer guyâ at work which one he should get, and that guy indicated that heâd get the Tandy, since it would let you do the most different kinds of things.
Like I said at the top, it was magic. Weâre so used to them now that itâs hard to remember, but I was so amazed that here was this thing, and it would do different things based on what you told it to do! I was utterly, utterly fascinated.
One of the apps Dad bought with computer was that first King's Quest, I was absolutely transfixed that you could drive this little guy around on the screen. Iâd played arcade gamesâIâd probably already sunk a small fortune into Spy Hunterâbut this was different. You could do things. Type what you thought of! Pushing the rock aside to find a hole underneath was one of those âthe universe was never the same againâ moments for me. I could barely spell, and certainly couldnât type, but I was hooked. Somewhere, and this still exists, my Mom wrote a list of words on a sheet of paper for me to reference how to spell: look, take, shove.
And I wasnât the only one, both of my parents were as fascinated as I was. My mom sucked down every game Infocom and Sierra ever put out. The Bard's Tale) landed a year later, and my parentâs played that obsessively.
It was a family obsession, this weird clunky beige box in the kitchen. Portals to other worlds, the centerpiece of our family spending time together. Four decades on, my parents still come over for dinner once a week, and we play video games together. (Currently, weâre still working on Tears of the Kingdon, because weâre slow.)
Everyone has something they lock onto between about 6 and 12 thatâs their thing from that point on. Mine was computers. Iâve said many, many times how fortunate I feel that I lived at just the right time for my thing to turn into a pretty good paying career by the time I was an adult. What would I be doing to pay this mortgage if Dad hadnât brought that Tandy box into the house 40 years ago? I literally have no idea.
Time marched on.
Through a series of tremendous own-goals, Radio Shack and Tandy failed to stay on top of, or even competitive in, the PC market they helped create, until as the Onion said: Even CEO Can't Figure Out How RadioShack Still In Business.
Meanwhile, through a series of maneuvers that, it has to be said, were not entirely legal, Microsoft steadily absorbed most of the market, with the unsettled market of the 80s really coalescing into the Microsoft-Intel âIBM Compatibleâ platform with the release of Windows 95.
Of all the players I mentioned way back at the start, the Mac was the only other one that remained, even the Apple ][, originally synonymous with home computers, had faded away. Apple had carved out a niche for the Mac for things that could really take advantage of the UI, mainly desktop publishing, graphic design, and your one friendâs Dad.
Over the years, Iâd look over at the Mac side of the house with something approaching jealousy. Anyone who was âa computer personâ in the 90s ended up âbilingualâ, more-or-less comfortable on both Windows and Mac Classic. I took classes in graphic design, so I got pretty comfortable with illustrator or Aldus Pagemaker in the Mac.
I was always envious of the hardware of the old Mac laptops, which developed into open lust when those colored iBooks came out. The one I wanted the most, though, was that iMac G4 - Wikipedia with the âpixar lampâ design.
But the thing is, they didnât do what I was mostly using a computer for. I played games, and lots of them, and for a whole list of reasons, none of those games came out for the Mac.
If â84 saw the release of both the first Mac, and one of the major foundation stones of the modern Windows PC platform, and I just spent all that time singing the praises of my much missed Tandy 1000, why am I typing this blog post on a MacBook Pro? What happened?
Let me spin you my framework for understanding the home computer market. Invoking the Planescape Rule-of-Threes, there are basically three demographics of people who buy computers:
- Hobbyists. Tinkerers. People who are using computers as a source of self-actualization. Hackers, in the classical sense, not the Angelina Jolie sense.
- People who look at the computer market and thought, âI bet I make a lot of money off of thisâ.
- People who had something else to do, and thought, âI wonder if I could use a computer to help me do that?â
As the PC market got off the ground, it was just that first group, but then the other two followed along. And, of course, the people in the second group quickly realized that the real bucks were to be made selling stuff to that first group.
As the 80s wound on, the first and second group clustered on computers running Microsoft, and the third group bought Macs. Once we get into the late 90s the hobbyist group gets split between Microsoft and Linux.
(As an absolutely massive aside, this is the root of the weird cultural differences between âApple peopleâ and âLinux peopleâ. The kind of people who buy Apples do so specifically so they donât have to tinker, and the kinds of people who build Linux boxes do so specifically so that they can. If you derive a sense of self from being able to make computers do things, Apples are nanny-state locked-down morally suspect appliances, and if you just want to do some work and get home on time and do something else, Linux boxes are massively unreliable Rube Goldberg toys for people who arenât actually serious.)
As for me? What happened was, I moved from being in the first group to the third. No, thatâs a lie. What actually happened was I had a kid, and realized I had always been in the third group. I loved computers, but not for their own sake, I loved them for the other things I could with them. Play games, write text, make art, build things; they were tools, the means to my ends, not an end to themselves. I was always a little askew from most of the other âcomputer guysâ I was hanging out with; I didnât want to spend my evening recompiling sound drivers, I wanted to do somethat that required the computer to play sound, and I always slightly resented it when the machine required me to finish making the sausage myself. But, thatâs just how it was, the price of doing business. Want to play Wing Commander with sound? You better learn how Himem works.
As time passed, and we rolled into the 21st century, and the Mac moved to the BSD-based OS X, and then again to Intel processors, I kept raising my eyebrows. The Mac platform was slowly converging into something that might do what I wanted it to do?
The last Windows PC I built for myself unceremoniously gave up the ghost sometime in 2008 or 9, I canât remember. I needed a new rig, but our first kid was on the way, and I realized my âgame playingâ time had already shrunk to essentially nil. And, by this time I had an iPhone, and trying to make that work with my WindowsXP machine was⌠trying. So, I said, what the hell, and bought a refurbed 2009 polycarb MacBook). And I never looked back.
I couldnât believe how easy it was to use. Stuff just worked! The built-in apps all did what they were supposed to do! Closing the laptop actually put the computer to sleep! It still had that sleep light that looked like breathing. The UI conventions were different from what I was used to on Windows for sure, but unlike what I was used to, they were internally consistent, and had an actual conceptual design behind them. You could actually learn how âthe Macâ worked, instead of having to memorize a zillion snowflakes like Windows. And the software! Was just nice. Thereâs a huge difference in culture of software design, and it was like I could finally relax once I changed teams. It wasnât life-changing quite the way that original Tandy was, but it was a fundamental recalibration in my relationship with computers. To paraphrase all those infomercials, it turns out there really was a better way.
So, happy birthday, to both of my most influential computers of the last forty years. Hereâs to the next forty.
But see if you can pick up some actual games this time.
Sunday Linkblog, Nightmare before Christmas edition
Noted science fiction author and unrepentant Burrito Criminal John Scalzi has spent every day of December reviewing various âComfort Watchesâ, movies you can, as he says, enjoy every time and watch with your brain turned off.
So far, every movie on this list has caused me to ho âheck yes! Love that movie!â when the title pops up in me feed reader. Iâve been meaning to link to this series for a while, so let me gesture towards two fo them for you.
Todayâs was The December Comfort Watches, Day Seventeen: The Nightmare Before Christmas. I fully endorse everything he has to say about it, but especially that Danny Elfmanâs work was and continues to be the main attraction.
Heâs about a decade older than I am so I didnât come on board with Oingo Boingo like he did; my entry point was Pee-Weeâs Big Adventure, which was just about the greatest movie my then 7-year old mind could imagine. (Well, greatest movie with Luke Skywalker in it, obviously.). Even then, the music was incredible. I spent hours designing breakfast-making Rube Goldberg machines on paper, and that wasnât just because Abe Lincolnâs expression was funny.
I canât now recall when I saw Edward Scissorhands or Beetlejuice, so instead flash forward with me to Batman â89. Recall how the movie opens: the camera is moving though some kind of strange.. Tunnels? Canyons? Itâs not clear. Meanwhile, whatâs immediately one of the greatest movie themes of all time is playing over the credits. Itâs perfect music for Batman, a little spooky, a little exciting, has a kind of haunted church organ thing happening. The music kicks up a gear, and the camera pulls out of the whatever-the-ares, and it turns out weâve been flying along inside the Batman logo; and as the logo fills the frame and the music starts going âBUM BUM BUM BUM BUMMMâ, 11-year old me thought that was the single coolest thing he had ever seen. Even today, when I occasionally rewatch the movie, that shot sends me right back to being 11 and thinking âholy smokes, they really made a Batman movie!â
Anyway, after that, I was on-board for whatever those guys did.
When Nightmare came outâ checks notes huh, also thirty years ago, would you look at that, what the heck was in the water in â93âI was pumped for it.
It did not disappoint. All three of the major creativesâHenry Selick, Tim Burton, Danny Elfmanâhave done great work since, but nothing better than this. The absolute peak for everyone involved, and considering their other work, thatâs saying something.
However! As long as I have you here, I wish to also call your attention to the Special Edition re-release of the soundtrack from some years ago. This had Patrick Stewart re-record the opening narration, which is as you would expect excellent, but also record the original unused closing narration.
Reader, Nightmare is an almost perfect movie, but I think that ending would have been even better.
As an addendum, let me also direct you to: The December Comfort Watches, Day Six: Down With Love. Down With Love isnât so much under-rated as under-acknowledged, there are days I think maybe I dreamed it since no one else ever seems to remember this movie exists. Itâs phenomenally good, a movie where absolutely everyone is doing career-best work and knows exactly what the job is. Other than general relief that someone else has seen it, I also mention this because my kids are both at an arts-heavy school, and theyâre talking about what pieces from movies they could use as an audition piece. And there a⌠thing? Towards the end of the movie? Which even obliquely mentioning is too much of a spoiler, but 1) after they shot that they should have directly handed Rene Zellweger the Oscar for that year, and 2) would be an incredible audition monologue. So Iâm trying to figure out how to trick my teenagers into watching a 20-year old spoof of a 50-year old movie series.
Doom @ 30
I feel like there have been a surprising number of â30th anniversariesâ this year, I hadnât realized what a nerd-culture nexus 1993 was!
So, Doom! Rather than belabor points covered better elsewhere, Iâll direct your attention to Rock Paper Shotgunâs excellent series on Doom At 30.
I had a little trouble with experienced journalists talking about Doom as a game that came out before they were born, Iâm not going to lie. A very âroll me back into my mummy caseâ moment.
Doom came out halfway though my second year of high school, if Iâm doing my math right. My friends and I had all played Wolfenstein, had been reading about it in PC Gamer, we knew it was coming, we were looking forward to it.
At the time, every nerd group had âthe guy that could get stuff.â Which usually meant the one with well-off lax parents. Maybe going through a divorce? This was the early 90s, so we were a little past the âdo you know where your kids areâ era, but by todayâs standards we were still pretty⌠under-supervised. Our guy showed up at school with a stack of 3.5-inch floppies one day. Heâd got the shareware version of Doom from somewhere.
I canât now remember if we fired it up at the school or if we took it to somebodyâs house; but I _do_ remember that this was one of maybe three or four times where I genuinely couldnât believe what I was seeing.1
Our 386 PC couldnât really handle it, but Doom had a mode where you could shrink the window down in the center of the monitor, so the computer had fewer pixels to worry about. I played Doom shrunk down nearly all the way, with as much border as image, crouched next to the monitor like I was staring into a porthole to another world.
I think it holds up surprisingly well. The stripped-down, high-speed, arcade-like mechanics, the level design that perfectly matches what the engine can and canât do, the music, the just whole vibe of the thing. Are later games more sophisticated? Sure, no question. Are they better? Well⌠Not at shooting demons on a Mars base while early 90s synth-rock plays, no.
Reading about Doomâs anniversary this last week, I discovered that the current term of art for newly made Doom-like retro-style shooters is âBoomer Shooter.â I know everyone forgets Gen-X exists, thatâs part of our thing, but this will not stand. The Boomers canât have this oneâthere is no more quintessentially, universal âGen-Xâ experience than playing Doom.
Other than everyone forgetting we exist and giving the Boomers credit, that is.
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The others, off the top of my head, were probably the original Kings Quest, Tomb Raider, Grand Theft Auto III, and Breath of the Wild.
Doctor Who @ 60
And, squeaking in just before midnight, the best show of all time turned 60 years old today.
Thereâs a whole bunch of exciting stuff coming up, very much looking forward to seeing what this next iteration of the show is going to be like. Thereâs probably going to be a real spike of Doctor Who related content around these parts over the next few weeks?
(And, Beep the Meep is in the âComing Soonâ section of Disney+. What a time to be alive.)
Apparently the Last Veridian Note was fifteen years ago?
Wow! Turns out today is the 15th anniversary of the Last Viridian Note. The Viridian Design Movement was one of those fun early web things where Bruce Sterling & company dressed up climate change activism as a design movement. It was a very late-90s âha ha only seriousâ thing. It all seems a little bit precious now, in retrospect, but mostly thatâs because it was a movement populated entirely by people who hadnât lived through the first decades of the 21st century yet.
But also this was 6 years before the phrase âgrim meathook futureâ emerged; everyone could sense that the future was coming in fast and would be very different that anyone could predict1. The veridians, at least, saw it coming and tried to redirect some of the energy in a positive direction, rather than lie back and accept it, or figure out how to use it to get rich. The positive side to all that stuff I was griping about WIRED yesterday2.
Anyway, I was super into it. It was always out on the fringe of the fringe, and so after Sterling wrapped up the party in â08 it seems to have vanished from the discussion. I myself never would have remembered if it hadnât been referenced in the âthis day in historyâ section of todayâs pluralistic.
The Last Note was really Sterling wrapping up everything heâs learned about how to live in current era. While the rest of the âViridian thingâ has floated back into the mists of the âOld Internetâ, this essay is something I find myself coming back to every few years.
You should go read the whole thing! But a few pull quotes;
This tends to be the bit people quote if they do:
You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.
- Beautiful things.
- Emotionally important things.
- Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.
- Everything else.
âEverything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year â this very likely belongs in "everything else."
You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe â along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.
Then remove them from your time and space. "Everything else" should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.
But my favorite bit is this, which I quoted almost word-for-word when I handed my teenager her first Swiss Army Knife at her birthday:
I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.
That's because a multitool IS a set of keys. It's a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.
A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.
As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should aspire to this better condition.
And thatâs really the whole thing wrapped up: be someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options.
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As a total aside, I first saw the phrase in something Warren Ellis wrote, probably whichever of his newsletters was running in â05. I had forgotten, or just mashed up in my head, that the phrase was coined by Joshua Ellis, no relation. But I digress.
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Of course, it was more important to keep an ironic distance than let anything think you were sincere or earnest, soâŚ.
Still out there: The X-Files at 30
The actual anniversary date whipped past me before I noticed, but apparently The X-Files is thirty years old? Let me settle back into my mummy case and enthuse about it.
Iâm also late to this party, but it turns out they did a whole remaster/cleanup on the show a few years back, presumably for Blu-Ray, and those copies are whats streaming now. They went back and rescanned the original film and rebuilt the edits from there, and he show looks amazing! Haircuts non-withstanding, it genuinely looks like it could have been filmed this year, unlike a lot of itâs contemporaries. Weâve been watching them on and off, and man, what a fun show that was! There are very, very few shows where you can almost just pick episodes at random and know youâll enjoy them quite the way you can with The X-Files.
I actually didnât come in on the show until halfway through the second year; but I was immediately hooked. My initial reaction was that this was as close as we were ever going to get to an âAmerican Doctor Whoâ (or really any new Who at all there in the wilderness years of early 90s). A pair of FBI agents solving supernatural/monster/alien problems on a weekly basis? And mostly solving those problems by not just, you know, shooting them? Yes Please!
That said, Iâm pretty sure I was the one one that saw a Doctor Who connection. While the cited inspiration is always Kolchak, and UFOs and conspiracy theories were hot in the 90s, The X-Files always struck me as a show designed outward from trying to figure out how to make Twin Peaks viable as an ongoing show.
It took the core premise, âEccentric FBI agents investigate possibly supernatural crimes in small town Americaâ and then made several very savvy changes.
First, everywhere Twin Peaks satirized nighttime soap operas, X-Files swapped that out with the shape of a standard police procedural. Gone was the sprawling ensamble cast, replaced with a core regular pair and a one-off guest cast, in the mold of something like Law & Order. Instead of a single small town, it was a new semi-rural location every week, freeing up the guest cast to meet the needs of the mood of the week instead of servicing their own stories. The relationship between Mulder and Scully was similar to that between Agent Cooper and Sheriff Truman, but both main characters were FBI, freeing the core cast from being stuck in any one location. And as many, many people have observed, making the âbelieverâ character the man and the skeptical scientist the woman went against the grain of the prevalent gender stereotypes of the time, adding a unique flavor to the show almost âfor free,â alongside a light dose of Moonlighting-style sparks. (Not to mention The X-Files even stars one of the best guest-stars from Twin Peaks.)
And both the main characters were really fun to spend time with. They were interesting, and complicated, and had a unique relationship, and were both actually really good at their jobs. Personally, I always wanted to be Scully when I grew up (not a gender thing, I just wanted to be really good at my hard job, be well respected by my peers, have cool banter with coworkers, and then once or twice a season haul a pistol out and shoot a monster without missing. Mulder tended to miss a lot for drama reasons, but if Scully pulled her gun out, someone was getting shot.)
But most critically, it learned the most important lesson of Twin Peaks: that Laura Palmer was too central, and revealing her murderer effectively ended the show. The X-Filesâ equivalent, Mulderâs sisterâs disappearance and the alien conspiracy, would be an ongoing concern, but was never as omnipresent as Laura Palmer, and was never fully explained or revealed. Of course, X-Files ended up overcorrecting too far, and allowed the alien mythology to sprawl out far beyond any reasonable attempt to make sense.
Personally, I always much preferred the monster-of-the-week episodes, and those were still fun long past where the âmythologyâ imploded into incoherence. And that was the thing: the show was always fun. And we can just ignore those last couple of years where they squandered the built-up goodwill and the alien plot fizzled out.
Thirty years on, though, thatâs what fascinates me about The X-Files. There are plenty of examples of shows that were initially very popular that blew the landing. Lost, theânewâ Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, even something like Quantum Leap. Mostly, those shows have slipped out of the conversation, and when they do come up, itâs always with a groan about the end first, and usually thatâs all. No one talks about BSGâs stupendous first season, they talk about the robot dance party it ended with.
But not with the X-Files! When that comes up, the topic is always the relationship between Multer and Scully, or the best monsters, or the vibe of the thing, and the last years get treated as an afterthought. Most people wonât even remember that it started Terminator Two for a while unless reminded. For a while The X-Files looked like it was going to be the definitive example of how not to do a long-running plot, why you should work things out ahead of time, and for running out clock too long, but no, Lost took that seat.
Why? Why does X-Files get a pass on the ending, which was just as much a fumble as those others?
I think thereâs two big reasons.
First, the showâs pleasures extended beyond the âbig plot.â Even at its peak, there were plenty of fans who preferred the non-mythology episodes. The big story failing to cohere didnât intersect with the joy of watching Scully and Mulder deal with monsters, or vampires, or Peter Boyle.
But more importantly, is something a friend of mine said while talking about this: âEveryone quit watching it when it was still good.â And I think thatâs it. Those other shows everyone stuck around to the bitter end. The plural of anecdote is not data, but I donât know anyone other than myself that stuck it out to the last episode of the X-Files. There were plenty of off-ramps: the moves from Friday to Sunday, the movie, Duchovny leaving. It stayed pretty good for a long time past its peak, and most everyone drifted away before it got actually bad.
I mean, Friday Night X-Files was appointment viewing when I was in college, but everyone had something better to do on Sunday nights. (Except that brief window where it was Simpsons-Futurama-X-Files, that was pretty good.)
As such, most peopleâs last memory of the show is something like Multer being trapped in the past in the bermuda triangle, rather than, say, Bran having the best story, or Sam just not going home, or whatever the hell Lost tried to sell us.
And so I think all thatâs the real lesson The X-Files has for us, all these years later. Long-form serialized TV is great, and as a form is here to stay, but if you only have the one big plot, all you actually have is the ending. If your show works week-to-week without that, and itâs full of characters that are fun to spend time with, people are still going to be rewatching it three decades later.
What seems to be your boggle, citizen? 30 years of Demolition Man
Sometimes, the best movies are the ones that you find by accident. Demolition Man was one of those.
I distinctly remember there was a mostly-playful rivalry between Demolition Man and Last Action Hero over the course of â93. Both were the new âbig moviesâ from Schwarzenegger and Stalloneâthe two biggest action stars of the timeâand both were pivoting into the âaction comedyâ space of the early 90s. (As opposed to the absurdly straight-faced camp the two had been dealing with throughout the 80s.). This had some additional overtones with Arnold operating at a career peak thanks to T2, whereas it had been âa whileâ since Stalone had a hit.
Last Action Hero, of course, bombed. (To be clear, itâs a bad movie, but the whole middle third in the movie world is better than most people remember, and the joke with Arnold cleaning himself off after he climbs out of the tar pit with only a single paper towel deserves a better movie around it.)
My memory is that Demolition Man didnât do that well either. The attitude I recall was âwell, better than Last Action Hero, anywayâ, but not terribly positive. If there was a winner between the two movies, Demolition Man was it, but more by default than anything? (Skimming old reviews, it clearly got some blowback for being âtrying to be funnyâ, action and comedy still not being a common pairing, which considering how the next 30 years went is hilarious. In that respect, at least, the movie doesnât feel three decades old.)
I didnât see it in theatres, but it stuck in the back of my mind as âhey, maybe check that out sometime.â
Months later, it found itself, like so many other middlingly successful movies, on constant rotation on cable. (HBO, presumably, but I refuse to go look it up). For some reason, my sister and I found ourselves at home some evening on our own with nothing better to do, and stumbled across it just as it was starting. Sure, letâs give this a whirl for a bit, see if itâs better than the reviews made it sound.
And, of course, it turned out to be great.
Itâs an almost perfect early-90s action movieâviolent without being too violent, sweary without being too sweary, big explosions, fun action set pieces, jokes that are funny, and a cast that looks like theyâre having a great time.
To briefly recap: Sylvester Stallone plays John Spartan, a police officer in the then-near-future of 1996 nicknamed âthe demolition manâ for the amount of property damage he causes while fighting crime. Westly Snipes is Simon Pheonix, crime lord of near-future LA. Phoenix frames Spartan for the deaths of a building full of civilians during a raid, and the pair of them are sentenced to CryoPrison, where theyâre frozen in giant ice tanks to wait out their sentences. (In one of the movieâs many literary references, the CryoCells are frozen instantly something isn't named but is clearly supposed to be ice-nine from Vonnegutâs Catâs Cradle.)
Thirty six years in the future, Phoenix escapes from a parole hearing, whereupon Spartan is thawed out to earn an early release by catching his old foe.
The future, meanwhile, is not what either expected, as they find themselves in âSan Angelesâ, a seemingly utopian combined LA, San Diego, and Santa Barbara, where thereâs no real cime, the police donât enforce anything, swearing is a ticket-able offense, the radio only plays vintage commercials, Otho from Beetlejuice is wearing a mumu, and all restaurants are Taco Bell since the end of the Francise Wars. Because, of course, weâre in one of those âfriendly on the surfaceâ dystopias of the THX-1138 / Brave New World mold, where everyone is either trapped in the authoritarian regine with a smile, or eking out a living in the sewers. (Actually, the closest other example I can think of is Doctor Whoâs anti-Thatcher scream, âThe Happiness Patrol.â)
Spartan is partnered up with a pre-Speed Sandra Bullockâs rookie cop Lenina Huxley (speaking of literary references,) and the two of them track down the mystery of how Phoenix was able to escape and whoâs really behind it all.
The action is pretty standard early 90s stuff, mostly real guns with with vaguely science-fictional bits glued on the end, that kind of thing. The centerpiece of the movie is watching both Stalone and Snipes react to the future starting with morbid fascination and ending with open horror than anyone would live like this.
Stalone is always better when he gets to be a little funny, and he does some of his best work in years as John Spartan is constantly wrong-footed by the future while just tying to be an action hero. Sandra Bullock nails both âcomic sidekickâ and ârookie copâ while hitting the very specific tone of the movieâs jokes (âyou can take this job and shovel itâ). And Westly Snipes turns in one of the definitive comic book villain performances as Simon Phoenix. The rest of the cast seem to be having a great time, even Denis Leary shows up to be extremely early-90s Denis Leary.
The movies milks a lot of mileage out of Stalone as a fish out of water the âevil utopiaâ future. The âthree seashellsâ in the bathroom has proven to be the joke with the most pop culture staying power, but for my money the better joke are the ticket printers constantly clattering in the background whenever someone swears. Which feels like a subtle comment on the style of movies at the time?
Itâs one of the few movies to try and do future dialect in a convincing way; âenhance you calm,â âwhat seems to be your boggle?â and the like all elicit a surprised âwhat did you just say?â reaction while feeling like something that could evolve in the passive agressive dystopia of San Angeles.
Plus, all restaurants are Taco Bell!
Itâs aged better than many of its contemporaries , but itâs hard to imagine a plot more wrapped up in the illusory anxieties of the early 90s than the twin pillars of âGang violence has turned LA into a literal war zone,â and âthe worst possible future is if the Politically Correct crowd oppresses the poor libertarians.â
Daniel Waters, who wrote the final script, claims he didnât have a political angle, but considering weâre talking about the guy who wrote Heathers, youâll forgive me if Iâm skeptical that all that stuff ended up in there by accident.
But, while it still has Dennis Leary show up and deliver the Big Speech About Freedom, itâs a movie with a far more nuanced and ambiguous take on the subject than, say, John Carpenterâs Libertarian Manifesto disguised as Escape from LA. (Although even that movie gets way more interesting when you remember to pair it with They Live, the definitive anti-Reagan movie; but I digress.)
Westly Snipesâ Simon Pheonix has the futureâs architect figured out when he calls him an âevil Mister Rogersâ; this is a movie that knows that there are worse things out there than wearing mumus and having too many rules. The futureâs villains are displaced with comical ease by Phoenix and his gang, and even more critically, the future libertarian resistance proves utterly useless against a real threat. Even the 90s machismo is quietly undercut by Staloneâs knitting.
Instead, the movie ends on a final note of âyou dorks all need to relax,â which is probably a moral we could use more of.
But! That all value add; the joy of this movie is in its impish sense of humor as it works through the various action standards.
A favorite example: Towards the end of the movie, Stalone is standing with the now allied rebels and police, all on their way to stop Snipes from waking up the denizens of the CryoPrison.
âLoan me a gun,â he says to Denis Learyâs character, who immediately slaps a revolver in his hand faster than he expects. Without missing a beat, Stalone immediately follows up with âLoan me two guns.â
It didnât do terribly well in the fall of â93, but it seems to have been one of those movies that got a real second life on home video. Many, many people seemed to have the same experience I didâstumbling across it, going in with low expectations, and then being delighted to discover something brilliant.
Iâm not sure where it lies in the greater Action Movie Canon these days, but I note that everyone Iâve ever talked to about it have fallen cleanly into two campsâfolks who donât remember it at all, and people who love it, a movie that quietly found its people over the years.
Itâs a good one.
(And my sister and I still say âIlluminateâ whenever we turn on the lights to a room.)
Thirty Years of Tentacles
How can Day of the Tentacle possibly be thirty years old?
A stone cold classic, and still one of the best adventure games ever made.
I have an incredibly clear memory of standing in the games section of CompUSA as a teenager, watching the opening of DOTT loop on one of the demo machines there, and literally laughing out loud in the middle of the store. I couldnât believe a game could actually look like that. It was actually funny! And well animated! One of those times where the future has arrived and you canât quite believe your eyes. I wish it had been more of trendsetter in that regard, and that more games had chased âChuck Jones Looney Tunesâ as a model, instead of âphoto-real direct-to-video action movie.â
As another sign of the changing times, as if CompUSA wasnât enough early 90s nostalgia, I never would have remembered that DOTT came out in June. I got it for christmas that year, and itâs hard to believe we waited for six months. And I remember agonizing about getting the floppy disk or CD-ROM version, since we were worried the CD versions âfull voiceâ might be âtoo distracting.â Too distracting! Phew, maybe it has been 30 years.
Wild Things at 25
Wild Things turns 25 this week! Let me tell you a story about the best time I ever had in a theatre.
My roommate really wanted to go see Wild Things. âItâs our generationâs Fatal Attraction!â she said. I did not want to go see this movie. Everything about it looked mediocre.
From all the advertising, it looked like it was going to be another piece of mid 90s Sleeze, Sex & Violence thriller bubble, where dangerous women lure unsuspecting men to their doom; the kind of movie youâd rent only if Blockbuster was already out of Fatal Attraction, The Crush, Disclosure, and Basic Instinct.
There was also kind of a mid 90s âwe just found about about Carl Hiassenâ bubble, which resulted in a bunch of vaguely noir-ish movies set in florida. (See also: Striptease.)
And, who was in it? Matt Dillon, who was mostly âno, not the guy from 90210, the guy from The Outsiders. No, the other one. No, the OTHER one,â four months out from Something About Mary. Neve Campbell, who was still mostly âthe girl from Party of Five.â Denise Richards, who was still mostly âthe girl from Starship Troopers.â Kevin Bacon? Not a great 90s track record, but sure. Bill Murray, who was still six months away from relighting his career with Rushmore, still in the âfunny cameo in Ed Woodâ phase.
A cast that looks way better in retrospect than at the time, but in context a sort of vaguely b-list talent in what looked like a vaguely b-list knockoff of a Verhoeven Movie. Everything about it had the quality of a movie everyone knocked out over the summer between ârealâ projects. Make a couple of bucks, take a nice vacation to Florida. Sure! No judgement! Everyone has bills to pay.
I made this argument. We went to go see the movie opening weekend.
[Spoilers ahoy, I guess?]
And the first 20-30 minutes of the movie play exactly like you expect. Two high school girls, one ârich/hotâ, one âpoor/gothâ. Dorky guidance counselor. Maybe something happens? Maybe consensual, maybe not? Rape accusation. The movie is running the standard playbook. You could basically set your watch by the plot beats you were expecting.
Except.
The whole thing is just a little bit better than it ought to be. The camera work is intertesting. The music by George Clinton is way better than youâd expect, generating this haunting swamp-noir vibe. Bill Murray shows up and demonstrates why heâs months out from a whole second act of his career. All the actors are doing more careful nuanced work than it seems like they ought to be. The whole thing demonstrates a level of care that a schlocky knockoff shouldnât have.
And then it turns into a totally different movie.
With absolute confidence, the movie trusts the audience has seen all the same movies that itâs seen, and then winks and swerves out into a whole different thing, turning into a twisty, intricately plotted web of quadruple crosses where everyone is up to three more things than you thought they were.
I remember this mounting sense of glee as the movie suddenly wasnât what I expected, and then kept going, careening into more and more interesting places that I imagined.
This all continues right through the end, when the movie delivers whatâs still the best set of post-credit stingers of any movie, putting the whole set of events into new light. Itâs phenomenal.
Hands down, the most any movie has ever exceeded my expectations. So much fun to have a movie pretend to be something else in the marketing, and then turn into a different movie.
It doesnât seem to come up that often; I suspect the marketing worked against it, and has slipped out of memory. An under-appreciated gem from the late 90s. Happy Birthday!