Geek Punditry #71: Gimmie a Gimmick

May 10, 2024May 10, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry Avengers, Bloodshot, comic books, comics, DC Comics, Eclipso, Fantastic Four, Justice League, Malibu Comics, Marvel Comics, Protectors, Robin, Spider-Man, superman, Valiant Comics

As you may have heard me mention once or twice, last weekend was the annual Nerd Bacchanalia known as Free Comic Book Day, one of my favorite days of the entire calendar year. And on this day, as they always do, my friends at BSI Comics were kind enough to allow me to set up a table and sell a few copies of my new book (which you should have ordered by now). From the vantage point of my table, I was facing a wall that displayed several back issues from those halcyon days of the 1990s, which were among the most formative years of my comic book consuming lifetime. The wall was adorned with lots of those flashy “Enhanced” covers that were so popular at the time – holofoil covers, embossed covers, chromium covers, glow-in-the-dark covers…you name a goofy gimmick, comic book publishers from the 1990s slapped it on the cover of a book. And as I spent hours there looking at those books, an odd realization slowly came over me.

I kinda miss those days.

I stared at these covers for eight hours on Saturday. It does things to a man.

It’s weird. During that time gimmick covers became a glut. They seemed to be coming at an ever-faster pace with ever-weirder gimmicks, and at the time I remember getting sick and tired of them. These days, however, they have become scarce. They’re not extinct, but you don’t see them nearly as much. Instead, modern publishers have decided to go with the business model of publishing 37 different variant covers for every issue. Some of them still slip in an enhanced cover in the mix, usually holofoil or “metallic” covers (for instance, DC recently did a run of metallic covers for various books with artwork featuring only the character’s symbol on a solid background). But they are not the exception, not the rule.

I’m not going to try to get into a comprehensive history of the gimmick cover, but I’m going to tell you a little bit about my personal experiences with them. The first cover enhancement I remember seeing was back in 1991 when DC Comics released their second Robin miniseries, Robin II: The Joker’s Wild, each issue of which had covers with holographic images. Holograms themselves weren’t anything new, of course – I even remember making them in my high school chemistry class – but this was the first time I saw one on the cover of a comic book. It was cool! It was new! It was fun! And it was – if I recall – only fifty cents more than the regular cover! SWEET!

The next time someone tells you they faked the moon landing, remind them that this was considered high tech in 1991.

Not to be outdone, the next year Marvel gave each of the four Spider-Man titles at the time a cover with a hologram to celebrate Spider-Man’s 30th anniversary. (If you, too, remember when these comics were published, don’t do the math. It’ll make you realize that Spider-Man is now in his 60s and make us all feel like that scene at the end of Saving Private Ryan.) The holograms were more elaborate than DC’s, and each issue was a giant-sized extravaganza back in the days when such a thing actually meant something, so while they were more expensive than the issues of Robin, they were inarguably awesome.

THIS technology, on the other hand, could have taken us to Mars.

Not long after that, there was another set of four Spider-Man covers with “holofoil” enhancements – the background of the artwork was metallic and shiny and you know how much we like shiny objects, so those were also a huge hit. And thus the floodgates were opened. Actual holograms became less common (as, if I remember from my chemistry class, they were more complicated to produce), but holofoil became a popular choice. Then other enhancements started to arrive. Die-cut covers, which had long been a popular choice in the paperback book market, started to show up. It made sense, too – have Wolverine’s claws slash through the cover of the comic book and you’ve got an obvious thematic connection. Similarly, embossed covers with artwork raised and stamped into the cardstock in a 3-D fashion made the transition from horror and sci-fi novels to comic books. Glow-in-the-dark, another mainstay of other marketing strategies, became used both for spooky books like DC’s The Spectre and goofy books like the Bongo Comics Simpsons spin-off Radioactive Man.

Valiant Comics launched Bloodshot with what I believe was the first “Chromium” cover: artwork printed on a metallic backing with some sort of plastic covering. The first two books with this process had a chromium panel embedded in cardstock, then DC upped the ante with a full chromium front cover on Superman #82 (the book that concluded the Death and Return of Superman cycle). Eventually, somebody realized that it was easier to do an entire chromium cover – front and back- – instead of just parts of one, and most chromium covers after that became full wraparound covers, with art that extended from the front to the back in one large image that was no doubt easier to produce than a chromium front and a traditional back which then somehow had to be affixed.

Most people agreed that Image Comics’ “Enriched Uranium” covers went too far.

There were a couple of really weird enhancements, too. DC’s 1992 crossover event Eclipso: The Darkness Within focused on a demonic villain that possesses people infected by a magical black diamond. To kick things off, DC published a special with a cover featuring Eclipso holding up the diamond – which was an actual plastic diamond glued to the cover. Kind of cool, until the time comes to put the comic book in a bag and store it without splitting the mylar or putting divots in the back of whatever book it’s stored next to.

My personal favorite from this era, in terms of sheer weirdness, comes from Malibu Comics. Malibu was a hot publisher at the time, and their comic Protectors kicked off a new shared universe with revamps of several Golden Age characters that had fallen into the public domain. In the fifth issue of that series, the character Night Mask was killed in an effort to show early on that being a superhero would be a dangerous path and that the untrained or inexperienced would be in grave danger. Malibu chose to communicate this message with cover art that featured a bullet hole in the character’s chest that was punched through not only the cover, but the entire comic book. I’ve often wondered if this was a last minute decision, as the hole punched straight through the art on every page, in some cases even taking out a small piece of a word balloon and making you try to guess what the dialogue was supposed to be. It’s such a weird little thing, though, that even people who barely remember that the Protectors ever existed will likely remember the comic with the hole through it. (A few years later Malibu would launch their Ultraverse line, overshadowing the Protectors universe. The publisher was later purchased by Marvel, and all of their properties would fade into obscurity except for a little IP called Men in Black.)

Historians have determined that this is the point when the Comics Code just threw up their hands and surrendered.

As tends to happen, of course, good things went too far. Whereas these sort of enhanced covers started off being used for special events – first issues, anniversaries, major storylines and so forth – they quickly became overused. Instead of a holofoil cover for a 100th issue, we were getting foil covers because it was Wednesday. An issue of Fantastic Four in which the Human Torch lost control of his flame was printed with an entirely white cover, the artwork embossed into the cardstock and almost impossible to see. They’d repeat this trick with metallic Avengers covers and, of course, other publishers would soon follow suit.

With this oversaturation, fans eventually got turned off and stopped buying them, which no doubt at least partially contributed to the late 90s collapse of the comic book speculator market, and the flow of gimmicks was reduced to a trickle. Instead, as I said before, the focus for most publishers has shifted to producing variants – the same book with lots of different covers. And these have gotten ridiculous as well: while some variants have completely different artwork, others just change the color or remove the logo and trade dress or print the uncolored artwork as a “sketch” variant. For a relaunch of Justice League of America, DC put out over fifty covers with the same artwork featuring the team raising the American flag in an Iwo Jima-like pose. For the variants, they switched out the US flag to that of each individual state and, I think, a few territories. Easiest way to sell one guy fifty copies of the same book EVER. Marvel did something similar with a series called U.S. Avengers, putting out a different cover for each state with a different Avenger, proclaiming them the official Avenger of that state. (Some of these made perfect sense: as Monica Rambeau is the only Avenger FROM Louisiana, she is the natural choice to be the Avenger OF Louisiana. But I’m still waiting for someone to tell me why She-Hulk is the official Avenger of Idaho, with an explanation other than “Well, SOMEBODY’S gotta be.”)

And don’t even get me started on the fact that Spider-Man, the most New York hero in any multiverse, is the Avenger of New Hampshire.

Whatever the case, the result with the variant wave is the same: they’re counting on completists to buy every cover variant of the book they can get their hands on. Which I suppose helps them sell comics, but it also burns out regular readers and does absolutely NOTHING to attract a NEW readership, which is where American comics are having such a difficult time right now. I’m sure it costs less to print a traditional cover than one with a hologram on it, but I’m really not a fan of the business model that says “convince one customer to buy the same book two dozen times” instead of the business model that says “make a comic book good enough that two dozen people will want to buy it instead of one.”

These days you still see holofoil and metallic covers, usually when a smaller publisher does a run with 75 different variants and then doubles it by making holofoil versions of each. Marvel and DC have also each done runs of lenticular covers (an image where the artwork changes if you tilt the page or look at it from a different angle) in the last decade or so. But there hasn’t been much else. When Superman married Lois Lane in 1996, there was a special edition cover embossed and designed to resemble a wedding invitation. When the Thing from the Fantastic Four finally married his longtime girlfriend Alicia Masters in 2019, we got a bunch of covers showing the couple from every conceivable angle, but not the slightest hint of foil, nothing that glowed in the dark, and certainly nothing that could be scratched and, subsequently, sniffed.

I don’t care what anybody says, Stan Lee’s epitaph does NOT count as a cover enhancement.

I know that if the enhancements came back they would quickly become overdone all over again. I know that after three months of Green Lantern covers where one glows and the next has a lantern shape cut out and the third glows AND has a lantern shape cut out I would probably start to get irritated because they’re charging an extra buck for each cover. But they’re doing that for a lot of the variants NOW, and while I am not someone who usually buys variants, I admit that I would be more inclined to do so if there was a little bit of an enhancement to sweeten the pot.

The hard part is not doing covers like these, it’s doing them in such a way that people don’t get sick of them. Reserve them for important occasions. First issues are acceptable. Anniversary issues are acceptable. The beginning or end of a major storyline is acceptable.

“Wednesday” is not.

I know that my yearning for these covers is tainted by nostalgia, but that’s not always a bad thing. Nostalgia is the only reason X-Men ‘97 exists on Disney+, and people seem to be pretty darn satisfied with it. (I haven’t watched it yet, so no spoilers.)

I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m just shouting into the wind and when you guys read this week’s column you’ll all think I’m crazy for feeling this way. Heck, even I think I’m a little crazy for feeling this way. All I know is this: when I go into BSI Comics to pick up some new books, I almost never want the variants…but once in a while, I wouldn’t mind getting my hands on an enhancement or two.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. If you go on eBay looking for some of these comics he’s talking about, don’t be fooled. The “coffee stains on page 17” variant is NOT an enhancement, no matter what the seller is telling you.

Geek Punditry #70: How to Use Your Noodle

May 3, 2024May 3, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry Calvin and Hobbes, Home Improvement, How I Met Your Mother, Marvel Comics, Noodle Incidents, Star Trek, The Golden Girls, TV Tropes, Wolverine, X-Men

Paramount clearly has no idea what they’re doing with Star Trek right now. They’ve announced the cancellation of Lower Decks, which scientific researchers at Harvard University have conclusively proven to be the best Trek series in the past 25 years. They still haven’t announced any plans for what to do with the crew of the Enterprise-G, as established in the fan favorite final season of Star Trek: Picard. They killed Star Trek: Prodigy only to surrender it to Netflix. They’ve announced a new movie set in the Kelvin timeline, only it’s a prequel, which doesn’t make a damn bit of sense since the timelines are supposed to be identical up until the day Jim Kirk is born. And they’ve gone ahead with a Starfleet Academy series that nobody seems to be interested in, except for those of us who were happy when it was announced that Lower Decks star Tawny Newsome was joining the writing staff. As you may expect, this irrational and erratic behavior has led to a lot of debate and hand-wringing on the internet, because that is exactly what the internet is for. People have launched dozens of (sadly competing) Save Lower Decks campaigns, people are begging for the further adventures of Captain Seven of Nine…all the things you would expect.

Until one guy on Facebook, in one of the trillion Star Trek groups I am a member of, loudly demanded a movie be made starring Worf and explaining the fate of the Enterprise-E. This ship, the main one used in the films Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Star Trek: Nemesis, was briefly alluded to in the final season of Picard when it someone made a comment that they obviously couldn’t use the Enterprise-E, then everybody turned to look at Worf, who gruffly proclaimed, “That was not my fault!” It was a hilarious moment in one of the most satisfying seasons of Trek in history, but what my fellow fan doesn’t seem to understand is that the thing that MAKES that moment satisfying is that we don’t know what happened.

TV Tropes calls this sort of thing a “Noodle Incident.” This is an event from the past that the characters make a reference to without ever actually explaining it, forcing the audience to wonder. The term comes from Bill Watterson’s legendary comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, in which there was a running gag where Calvin furiously denies that anything happened with the noodles at school or, alternately, doesn’t deny that it happened but claims it wasn’t his fault. The question that lingers with the readers, of course, is: what could have POSSIBLY happened with the noodles that would be THAT BIG A DEAL? And the answer is: we never know. When asked about it once, Watterson said he decided against explaining what the Noodle Incident was because he knew there was nothing he could put on the page that would be as satisfying or entertaining as what the readers were imagining in their heads. And Bill Watterson was absolutely right.

Since that episode of Picard dropped, there has been a LOT of furious speculation about what could have happened to the Enterprise-E and why, specifically, Worf would have been blamed. Was it lost in battle? Fell into a wormhole? Destroyed in a freak transporter accident? Did it get “Tuvixed” with the ol’ Excelsior? Did Worf lose it in a poker game with a Ferengi? There are a million theories, each wackier than the last, and while I have no doubt that some day someone will write either a novel or a comic book series about the tragic end of this ship, I personally hope that the story of its demise is never officially canonized, because I think it’s more satisfying that way.

Noodle Incidents are a staple of comedy. On Home Improvement there would be allusions to disasters caused by Tim Taylor with the implication that they somehow even surpassed the ones put on screen. How I Met Your Mother had an episode where Ted wakes up to find a pineapple in his bedroom with no idea how it got there, and it’s one of the few minor details left unexplained at the end of the series. The Golden Girls milked this trope like an over productive cow. Rose’s half-told St. Olaf stories and Sophia’s vague yarns in which one is to “Picture it: Sicily” would often leave out details that forced the viewer to close in the gaps with their mind…and in every case these episodes were all the funnier without filling in the blanks. It’s almost like watching Rick and Morty on Adult Swim, where all of the swear words are bleeped out, versus watching it on MAX, where the profanity is allowed. The truth is, it’s actually funnier when you don’t hear the curse words, even if the word being hidden is obvious.

Turns out, the unedited St. Olaf stories are way, *way* filthier than anything on *Rick and Morty*.

Noodle Incidents aren’t only good for comedy, though. They work well in more serious work, too. In Casablanca, the reason Rick can’t return to the United States is never explained, nor are all of the details of his previous relationship with Ilsa. In The Dark Knight, the Joker loves to tell conflicting stories about how he got his scars, but we never find out the truth. And it’s pretty common in action movies – especially those with ongoing characters – to make a reference to a prior incident without giving us details. We don’t know what happened to Indiana Jones in Honduras, we don’t know the truth about the “Rome affair” that James Bond was mixed up in, and we’re never gonna know what happened to Hawkeye and the Black Widow in Budapest.

And that’s probably a good thing.

It works on the same principle as hiding the monster in a horror movie. One of the things that makes Jaws so great is that you don’t actually get a good look at the shark until the very end. In this case, it was a practical consideration: they couldn’t get the mechanical shark to work properly. But the effect was solid. Similarly, in Alien, none of the original posters or marketing revealed the look of the creature, nor did it appear in full until the end of the movie. It made for one of the best haunted house movies of all time, set in outer space. By the time the sequel rolled around the appearance of the Xenomorph had become iconic and director James Cameron knew he couldn’t possibly duplicate the suspense, so he decided instead to make the second film less of a horror movie and more of an action film – and it worked very well.

“But Blake, doesn’t that suggest you may get more mileage out of the characters if you explored these blank spaces in their history?” No, no it doesn’t, because those reveals were always planned and were done for thematic effect, not plot reasons. Fans claim they want Noodle Incidents explored, but when they are, the result is invariably disappointing. I’m going to give you the most famous example in history:

Wolverine.

Turns out those things are actually made of pasta. Rotini, specifically.

When Wolverine first appeared in the comic books in 1974, he was an agent of the Canadian government sent to take on the Hulk. We found out later that he was a mutant, what his powers were, and that those claws of his were actually embedded in his hands as opposed to attached to his gloves (which was what the original creators had intended). But we didn’t know his past. As it turned out, Wolverine didn’t know his past either. He had been the subject of an experiment that bonded the indestructible metal Adamantium to his skeleton, but the process had essentially destroyed his memory. Every so often we would get vague flashes, such as an encounter with Captain America back in World War II, that seemed to indicate Wolverine was much older than he appeared, but we knew nothing specific.

And it was great. I would argue that the mystery is one of the things that made Wolverine such a popular character throughout the 80s and 90s. Then, in 2001, Marvel’s then Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada decided it was finally time for the story to be told in Origin. Quesada, Marvel vice president Bill Jemas, and scripter Paul Jenkins collaborated on a story that revealed Wolverine – who had always thought his name was “Logan” – was once James Howlett, a sickly child born to a wealthy plantation owner in 19th century Canada. The story shows James’s powers developing, including the first time painful time he extended his claws. It explored the backstory he shares with his arch-enemy Sabretooth. It even seems to offer a Freudian explanation for his obsession with redheads. And Origin was…well, it was okay.

Also the source of Wolverine’s legendary catch phrase: “OH MY GOD, THIS HURTS SO BADLY! AUGH! AAAAAAUGH! THIS IS SO MUCH MORE PAINFUL THAN YOU CAN POSSIBLY IMAGINE! AAUGH! CUT OFF MY HANDS! PLEASE!”

But here’s the thing, folks: if you’re going to take away a Noodle Incident, the resulting story should be a hell of a lot more than just “okay.” There have been a lot of Wolverine stories told in the 23 years since his origin was revealed, but I can’t say that there have been ANY that were better stories BECAUSE I know his origin now. And if it doesn’t make the stories better, then what was the point?

Noodle Incidents, these holes in the past, are a fun bit of writing. (Those are NOT “plot holes,” however. That’s an entirely different thing that people on the internet don’t actually understand. We’ll talk about those some other time.) You can dump all kinds of weird stuff in there, and leaving them open invites the readers to do the same thing. It’s a narrative device that allows the writers to seem more clever than they actually are and in a way makes the reader or viewer a participant in the backstory of their favorite characters. Once you’ve thought about an unrevealed piece of backstory for a while, you’re never going to have a revelation that’s going to live up to what’s going on in your head. It’s best that we all remember it.

Just like I had to do that time in Kansas City with the ocelot and the caprese salad. It was a wild night.

SPECIAL REMINDER:

As I’m sure you heard on the social media, the news, billboards, that Goodyear Blimp campaign, and in the hidden track on Taylor Swift’s new album, I’ve got a new book out! Twinkle Twinkle, the first volume of the Little Stars trilogy, is now available in print or eBook, and you can get your copy by going over to Amazon and giving them a designated amount of dollars, a percentage of which will then be given to me.

Not an enormous percentage, mind you, but a percentage.

But – BUT – if you happen to be in the New Orleans area tomorrow, May 4th, you’ve got a chance to get a SIGNED copy from yours truly. Tomorrow is Free Comic Book Day and I’ll be at BSI Comics in Metairie, Louisiana selling copies of the new book (plus all of the old ones). Come on down, say hello, meet the other great writers and artists who will be sharing a space with me, and get some free goodies as well.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He thinks there’s a certain irony in using 1700 words to explain the benefit of something that is best left unexplained, but he’ll leave the rest of that joke to your own imagination.

Geek Punditry #69: Judging a Book By Its Cover

April 26, 2024April 26, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry books, cover art, Grady Hendrix, Paperbacks From Hell, Stephen King, The Princess Bride

A few months ago, a friend of mine shared with me a website called Freebooksy.com, which alerts you to freebies in the Amazon Kindle store. It’s fairly simple – you click on the genres that you’re interested in when you sign up and each morning you get an email with a selection of free books available. Inclusion in the email is paid for by the authors and publishers, I should point out, as a promotional tool, so you see the same names over and over again, but it’s hard to complain about free. I check the email most days, but I don’t sweat it if I miss a day because I know that the same stuff will be comin’ around again before too long.

Also before too long I noticed a distinct trend, especially among those books that are designated as “thrillers”: utter homogony when it comes to cover design. On any given day when I open this newsletter and scroll to the thriller section, I will see a minimum of three covers with virtually the same style:

A single color palette – often blue, but reds and oranges are also popular – which creates a gradient across the book cover.
The title of the book in large unimpressive block letters.
The author’s name in smaller unimpressive block letters.
A line of text informing you what series this particular volume belongs to.
A background image that usually cuts across the middle of the book. This is often, but not always, a landscape of some sort. Popular choices are mountain ranges, swamps, beaches, and cabins in the snow.

Usually I would try to provide some pictures here to demonstrate my frustration, but considering how I’m talking about how dull and bland these covers are, I kinda feel bad calling anybody out specifically. So instead, I have used my legendary skill at Not-Quite-Photoshop-But-a-Free-Online-Alternative to create my own example of the sort of cover I see over and over and over again.

Now you know why I don’t design my own book covers.

Riveting, right? If you go to Amazon right now and click on the “thriller” genre once you figure out where they’ve hidden the books, you will see dozens and dozens of titles that duplicate that template to the letter. After a while they all blend together and there’s nothing to make me remember any of them. They always say you can’t judge a book by its cover, and that may be true, but I’m sure as hell more likely to pick up a book in the first place if the cover doesn’t look like it was made with Generic Thriller Template #1138.

The same holds true for movie posters, by the way. Movie posters were once an art form all to themselves, with gorgeous illustrations by the likes of the great Drew Struzan that made me even more anxious to see Goonies, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, or Back to the Future than the trailers did. Now book covers and movie posters seem to be churned out by committee, choosing the elements that hit the greatest number of quadrants to appeal to the largest number of people and, in the process, becoming something that is appealing to no one.

Name a movie poster from the past ten years that’s better than this one. Trick question. You can’t.

Look, I’m spoiled. Most of my book covers have been done by Jacob Bascle, who absolutely knocks it out of the park every time the way he did with the cover for Little Stars Book One: Twinkle Twinkle, which by the way is now available to preorder on Amazon. (That’s as subtle as I get, folks.) But I also know that’s because I self-publish, and if I ever get tied up with an actual publisher I may not have much of a say into who does the book cover or how. But none of that changes the fact that the people turning out book covers right now have totally lost the plot.

As with so many things that aren’t as cool now as they used to be, let’s look back at the 70s and 80s to see how it should be done. This was, I believe, a golden age for book covers and movie posters, especially when it came to genre fiction like horror or sci-fi. Sure, the artwork was lurid, over-the-top, and often terribly deceptive as far as the actual contents of the work, but sweet cinnamon sugar, was it memorable! For example, let’s look at Stephen King (the real one) and his 1978 epic The Stand. This is a gargantuan novel about a virus that escapes from a science lab and spreads out into the world with a fatality rate of over 99 percent. Those who survive wind up collecting in two groups – a mostly peace loving community in Boulder, Colorado, and a vicious, hedonistic sect in Las Vegas under the rule of King’s frequent boogeyman character Randall Flagg. It’s an amazing book and it’s the one that first made me a fan of Stephen King’s work when I read it in high school.

Now look at the first edition cover.

You think an AI “artist” could have come up with something this incredible?

Isn’t that AMAZING? There are SO MANY QUESTIONS to be asked here. Why does that dude look like Luke Skywalker? Who’s the rat guy with the sword? Why are Luke Skywalker and the rat guy dueling? Is Randall Flagg Emperor Palpatine? How does this tie into the epic saga of the insidious disease called Captain Trips? And the answer is: it doesn’t! There is absolutely nothing about this book illustration that has the barest relation to the 10,942 pages of text in-between these covers. It’s like some writer failed to deliver his fantasy novel about an uprising of lycanthropic rodents in a medieval setting and the publisher just said, “Hell, we gotta use this art somewhere” just before King’s manuscript arrived, delivered by three separate UPS trucks. And history was made. But the thing is, as little as this cover has to do with the actual book, it’s memorable as hell.

Then there’s another of my favorite books, William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. Everyone knows the movie – the epic comedy love story of true love and grand adventure. It’s a family favorite and a tale that transcends generations, finding new fans every day both young and old. It is the perfect movie for lovers, for adventure seekers, for parents, for children. And a lot of people have read the book as well. But how many of you have ever seen the cover to the 1974 edition of the book?

“Uhh…Larry…what exactly do you think a Bride is?”

I don’t even have a theory to explain this cover, the way I do the Stephen King book. It’s patently obvious that whoever painted this artwork hadn’t read the book – possibly had never read any book. In fact, I wouldn’t be too surprised if whoever painted this isn’t legally allowed within 300 yards of a library. And yet, I never forget that this cover exists.

I love going to used bookstores, and one of the best reasons is to look at this sort of wild cover art that just doesn’t exist anymore. The next time you’re in one, take a turn into the horror or sci-fi section – even if you don’t normally read horror or sci-fi – and just scan the book covers. Aliens with googly eyes, knives dripping with blood, monsters that may or may not bear any resemblance to the creatures inside the book. Walking through these stores is the closest I can get today to the experience of walking through a video store as a youth, going down that horror section and seeing the ghastly and yet somehow enticing cover art that adorned such classics as Evil Dead 2, Re-Animator, or The Stuff. Oh no, my parents never allowed me to rent these movies when I was a kid, but even then I was drawn to the artwork, and I’ve gone back and revisited a lot of those films as an adult…and you know, even the worst of them seem to trigger a hint of pleasant nostalgia for those trips down the video store aisle.

In 2017, horror writer Grady Hendrix released Paperbacks From Hell, a book that examined the absolute avalanche of horror fiction that was produced in the 70s and 80s. Hendrix does a great job in this book of dividing up the work into different categories and discussing some of the more prominent writers, most popular novels, and intriguing trends that existed at the time. But if we’re being honest, the biggest reason to get Hendrix’s book is to get over 250 pages of full color illustrations of some of the wildest horror novel cover art that ever existed.

If this makes you want to read this book, you’re my kind of people.

The book is a love letter to the genre, and was popular enough that Valancourt books actually did a limited re-release of several of the books mentioned, original cover art intact, with a new forward by Hendrix himself. Unfortunately, that rerelease did not include John Christopher’s The Little People, a novel about a British couple that tries to turn an Irish castle into a B&B only to learn that it is infested with Nazi Leprechauns. No, there’s not a typo anywhere in that sentence.

If you think I’m coming across as a stodgy old man lamenting the days of his youth – well, you’re very perceptive. But you can’t wander through a Barnes and Noble and look at the wall of $18 trade paperbacks that waits for you there with so many of the same cover tropes over and over again and objectively tell me that cover art has improved over the last 40 years. Nah, give me the days when an eyeball rolling around in a skull looked at me from the cover of a book, the time of creepy dolls and skeleton horses and eyes glaring at me from behind a set of venetian blinds. These were covers with personality. These were covers that meant something.

Not necessarily something that related to the inside of the book, of course. But something.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT:

Hey, have you ever missed a Geek Punditry column? Sad, isn’t it? How you don’t know what everyone at work is talking about around the water cooler, ostracizing you and pushing you to the fringes of society the same way they used to do because you didn’t watch Game of Thrones? Well, you’ll never have that problem again if you subscribe to my newsletter. I’m kicking off a (probably) weekly roundup of everything I’ve been doing, which will include links to the newest Geek Punditry, information about whatever new releases I have coming up, some chatter about what I’m working on, and the occasional bonus goodie as well. And as a thank you for signing up, your welcome email includes a top secret, never before seen short story from the world of Siegel City called “Sally Starcher is Cosmagirl!” So if you’re into that kind of stuff, if you want to know what I’m up to, if you just don’t want to miss out when Derek from accounting starts talking about Sally Starcher the way he used to talk about someone called “Khaleesi,” there’s an easy solution. Just click this link, drop me your email address, and you’re all set!

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking on this dandy little link right here. He hasn’t had any eyeballs on his own book covers yet. He’s waiting for the right time. Maybe something about bunnies.

A preorder! A newsletter! Two, two, TWO announcements!

April 24, 2024April 24, 2024 blakemp News, Writing Life Amazon, Free Comic Book Day, Little Stars, Newsletter, Other People's Heroes

Hey, everyone. It’s time for two – count ‘em – TWO announcements that anyone who cares to keep up with what I’m working on will want to know about! First of all, as you know if you keep up with me on social media, January finally brought us to the end of the long-running Kindle Vella serial, Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars. I loved writing that project, spooling out the adventures of Andi, Keriyon, Tony, Vic, and the others for over two and a half years. But so many people couldn’t get Vella or DIDN’T get Vella (it’s still not available outside of the US for some crazy reason), so now it’s time to take the story of Andi Vargas to its permanent home.

Twinkle Twinkle, the first volume in the Little Stars Trilogy, is coming out on May 4! This is an edited version of the Vella serial, with the text cleaned up and some tweaks to fix continuity errors. For the most part, though, it’s the same story you read the first time. The book will be available in both print and eBook, and unlike Vella, it should be available in every market that Amazon covers. And if you’re worried that you’ll forget before May 4th, have no fear! If you want an eBook, you can CLICK THIS LINK to go to Amazon and preorder it RIGHT NOW!

Now if print is your thing, if you prefer to feel the heft of a ream of paper in your hands, don’t worry. I’ve got you covered. For Amazony reasons I don’t quite comprehend, I can’t set up a preorder of the print edition, but the print book WILL be available on May 4th, same as the ebook edition. And if you’re in the New Orleans area, you can get your eager hands on a signed copy! Join me at BSI Comics on May 4th, which also happens to be Free Comic Book Day! I’ll be there with several other local writers and artists sharing our work. I’m planning to have copies of the new book too (as well as all of the old books) to sell and sign and chat with anyone who wants to say hello.

Funny how that timing worked out, huh?

“But Blake,” you’re saying, “You said TWO announcements. What’s the other one?” Geez what are you, an accountant?

But since you asked…I said you would have heard the first announcement already “if you keep up with me on social media,” but that may not be entirely true. Social media, as we have learned, isn’t quite the reliable democratizer of communication that we all thought it was going to be. Social media is owned by tech companies and tech companies have bills to pay and somehow they think they can pay those bills more efficiently by subjecting us all to algorithms which believe I’m more interested in using Meta AI to search for ski resorts (I am not) than I am in the fact that someone I went to college with is getting married for the fifth time (I am vaguely interested in this one, because somebody is running a betting pool).

So the solution to this social problem is to go old-school. That’s right, folks, I’m starting an electronic newsletter!

Yeah, I know it’s 2024. Shut up.

I’m new at this, so consider it a work in progress. I can promise that I won’t spam you with daily emails, though. I hate that too. When you see my name in your inbox I want you to think, “Oh cool, what’s Blake up to?” instead of “Ugh, Blake AGAIN?” As of right now, I’m planning to send no more than one newsletter a week to update you on all things…well…me. I’ll let you know about new stories when they drop, my weekly “Geek Punditry” columns, tell you what I’m working on writing (the current project, I think, is pretty cool), share witty anecdotes and bon mots, and perhaps re-share classic pieces of writing. At least, that’s the current plan. Like I said, I’m trying to figure it all out.

But, BUT, as a special thank you just for signing up, how about an all-new bonus story? When you subscribe to my newsletter, you’ll get a special welcome email that includes an EXCLUSIVE SIEGEL CITY SHORT STORY! A brand-new short story set in the world of Other People’s Heroes that I’ve never published or shared online! How’s that for incentive?

So CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE and be sure to whitelist the email so I don’t go to your spam folder.

Thanks, everyone. I’ll be back Friday with your usual dose of Geek Punditry, then probably on Saturday, check your email for the first regular newsletter. And thanks so much for following along.

Geek Punditry #68: The Importance of Being Bandit (or) Yes, I Am Taking Advice From a Cartoon Dog

April 19, 2024April 19, 2024 blakemp Dadding, Geek Punditry Animation, Bandit Heeler, Bluey, Disney, Family, Fathers, parenting, television, TV Dads, tv-shows

A few weeks ago I had one of the scariest nights of my life. My son was briefly hospitalized, and my wife and I were told he would probably have to have his appendix taken out. The idea of someone cutting open my little guy terrified me, not the least because I knew he wouldn’t really understand what was happening, and I got very little sleep sitting in that hospital chair. The story had a happy ending, fortunately. In the morning the doctors reexamined him and determined that the discomfort he was feeling was not caused by his appendix after all and was most likely a particularly nasty viral infection, and we were sent home later that day. But the night before was horrifying. I want to tell you, though, about the bright spot. That actually came early on in the process: Eddie had been sick all day and in the afternoon began throwing up with alarming frequency, prompting me to take him to urgent care. There, the doctor on call examined Eddie and advised me to take him to the emergency room.

For a parent, this is way scarier than any haunted house.

Those two words, “emergency room,” sent me into a total PANIC. I started to tremble. My hands were shaking as I texted my wife, who was at work, to meet us at the hospital. I was shaking harder when I searched for the hospital with the Pediatric ER on Google Maps – this despite the fact that I myself was a patient at that same hospital some years ago, and I knew perfectly well where it was. At that moment, though, I didn’t know much of anything and I could feel myself babbling, with questions spilling out of my mouth as frequently as Eddie gives them to me on a good day. At that moment the doctor seemed to realize that – right then and there – his primary patient wasn’t the one in the most need of immediate care. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Hey, I have kids too. He’s going to be okay. Nobody knows the pressure on a dad, do they?”

I could have cried right then and there. If I didn’t have to get Eddie into the car to take him to the ER I probably would have. But that moment of strength and compassion from this doctor meant more to me than I could have possibly told him, because he’s absolutely right. Society has bizarre and, frankly, contradictory expectations of fathers. On the one hand, we are often seen as the “disposable” parent. Mothers are considered primary caregivers, stores and restaurants frequently neglect to put diaper changing stations in the men’s restrooms, in custody battles the final decisions overwhelmingly favor the mother, and never once has anyone seen my wife with our son and asked if SHE was “babysitting.” On the other hand, fathers are expected to be the provider, to give the family everything that is needed, to push their own needs aside up to and including their mental health, and to never, EVER allow a crack in the armor to show lest it be revealed that they are anything less than a demigod who always has it together and can do anything all by themselves and make everything turn out in the end. It’s a cocktail of unreasonable expectations and toxic disrespect.

This is not to say that it’s easy to be a mother, of course – nothing could be further from the truth. Moms are looked upon as the nurturers and the caregivers, the emotional core of a family, and there is an immense amount of pressure associated with that role. The difference, to me, is that mothers are usually (justly) celebrated for their contributions and sacrifices, whereas fathers are made the butt of jokes. Think about the difference in our respective holidays. On Mother’s Day, flower shops are emptied, restaurants are packed, and everyone reminds you to celebrate Mom. On Father’s Day, the punchline is about which crappy tie Dad will be given this year.

My wife is wonderful. My wife couldn’t be more supportive. That’s not where this pressure comes from: it’s all about the pressure that we’ve been told all of our lives to bring on ourselves.

All of this is to say that Bandit Heeler is the best father on television.

Pictured: What I want to be when I grow up.

I shall try to keep my statements in praise of Ludo’s cartoon Bluey brief, but in case you don’t know, Bluey is an Australian cartoon about a family in Brisbane, Australia: six-year-old Bluey Heeler (seven after a birthday episode), her little sister Bingo, their mother Chilli, and their dad, Bandit. Creator Joe Brumm based the show on his own daughters and the way they used to play when they were little, and the majority of episodes focus on the games the children play and the way their parents (and, often, other assorted grownups) get sucked into the amazing fantasy worlds they create. The fact that the Heelers and the rest of the sentient inhabitants of this universe are all dogs is of utter irrelevance.

Over the course of three seasons and over 150 seven-minute episodes, Bluey has become that rarest of phenomenon: a show that is loved by children, but absolutely adored by parents. Bandit and Chilli love their children completely, and what’s more, love each other just as much, and none of the Heelers are shy about showing it. In an era where so many TV families are made up of characters who seemingly can’t stand each other and remain together only because of a vague description of “family” that the thesis of the show often works to destroy, the Heelers are, to put it bluntly, Squad Goals. And Bandit in particular is the father that every father who watches it wants to grow up to be.

TV dads, historically speaking, have largely fallen into one of two categories. In the early days of TV they were bland, plastic paragons of virtue like Ward Cleaver or Ozzie Nelson. Even by the 70s, when shows were beginning to allow a bit more of an edge, Howard Cunningham from Happy Days was a faultless (if loving) font of strength. Then a switch flipped and dads went from being carved out of marble to sculpted out of mud. TV dads in the 90s and 00s were buffoons. Either they were obnoxiously indifferent to the needs of their children like Al Bundy, or they were so stupid and vapid that they should probably, legally, not be allowed to have a child in their custody without adult supervision. Even the best dads of this era, like Home Improvement’s Tim Taylor, may have genuinely loved their kids, but were also often dangerously negligent in their actions and did incredibly boneheaded things in the name of comedy. It was good for a laugh, sure, but awful for the portraiture of dads in pop culture.

There HAS to be some sort of middle ground between these two.

(In the interest of painting a comprehensive picture I should mention that there WAS at least one great TV dad of this era, Heathcliff Huxtable, but real world circumstances have sadly made it virtually impossible to look upon him as a role model anymore.)

Bandit isn’t an idiot. He’s often a step ahead of his kids, playing their games but also using them to teach. In the episode “Bikes,” for example, he has Bluey observe the kids around them to learn perseverance, whereas in “Hotel” he teaches her how to compromise with her sister. Bandit is willing to become whatever is needed to keep the kids happy, and not even just his own kids. In “See-Saw,” he realizes that Bluey’s friend Pom Pom is feeling excluded because she’s so tiny (she’s a Pomeranian, you see, a small but hearty breed), so he sets himself up as the villain, sitting on the titular see-saw and refusing to budge until Pom Pom gets a chance to “save the day.”

This is actually what I look like any time my wife says, “We may as well finish this pizza, it would be silly to just have them box up two slices.”

He’s a fantastic dad, but…and this is the most important part…he is not flawless. “Magic Claw” is about trying to teach his girls the value of hard work, only to have his efforts hilariously collapse around him as all they’re really interested in is playing the game. (There’s a great line in this episode where he says that the girls are learning a lesson AND cleaning the house at the same time, only for Chilli to snarkily reply, “Neither of those things are happening.”) In “Ice Cream” the girls each want a lick of the others’ dessert but spend so much time prevaricating over how big a lick they’re allowed to take that their ice cream melts away. Bandit hopes they’ll learn a lesson from this but, like a dad, he feels bad for them and winds up giving them his own ice cream instead.

Every *Bluey* parent can quote this scene with absolutely no help from my captions.

And sometimes, the world gets to Bandit. In “Stickbird,” as the family plays on the beach, Bandit is completely preoccupied. Something is quite clearly bothering him and he’s struggling so badly that he’s not entirely present for the childrens’ game. Although the show never tells us what, exactly, is eating at him, every father who watched that cartoon saw themselves that day. We don’t know why Bandit is struggling, but we DO know that he’s trying to contain himself for the sake of his family, and I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so seen by a TV show.

The moment when every dad in the world saw themselves.

Many fans feel like the “Stickbird” mystery, the question of what was bothering Bandit, was solved in the most recent episode, the quadruple-length “The Sign.” I’m going to spoil “The Sign” now, so stop reading if you’re trying to avoid it, but I feel like pretty much everybody who cares has already seen it. And those who have seen it know that in this 28-minute blockbuster, Bandit Dadded the hardest he has ever Dadded.

In “The Sign,” the Heelers are planning to sell their house and move because Bandit has found a new, higher-paying job in another city, which he says multiple times throughout the episode will allow him to give his children a better life. Already, every dad in the audience is nodding in understanding. The trouble is that none of the Heeler women want to move. Chilli puts on a brave face, but you can tell that she’s upset, Bluey openly campaigns against the move, and Bingo is perfectly happy with the whole thing until Chilli realizes that she doesn’t actually understand what “selling our house” means, after which she is devastated. Bandit struggles through the whole episode with this decision, believing that moving will mean a better life even though the message is clear that the rest of the family is happy with the life they have and they don’t want to chase some abstract idea of “better.”

In the final moments of the episode, the family that was planning to buy the house cancels the deal after finding a home they like more (it has a pool, you see). Bandit, taking this as “A” sign, rips “THE” for sale sign out of his yard and tosses it aside just before he’s tackled by his wife, who is sobbing with joy and adoration.

THIS IS A SHOW THAT IS OSTENSIBLY FOR PRESCHOOLERS.

Bluey is the most heartfelt show on television, and although there are several episodes that have left me in tears, there has never been one that left me unsatisfied. And for me, at least, it’s because in Bandit Heeler I see someone who I wish I could be, somebody I can be on my best days and someone I can turn to for strength on my worst days. And I’m not alone. Fathers all over the world have taken up Bandit as the role model we need – someone who loves his family unconditionally, is not afraid to express those emotions, and shows us that sometimes it’s okay to not be okay. We don’t have that. The world has told us for decades that we’re not allowed to be human, that feet of clay must be hidden, that we are to have no Kryptonite. Bandit tells us that’s BS, and because of that, there are a lot of dads reaching out to talk to other dads who understand that pressure the doctor told me about.

When Eddie was in the hospital, after the doctors told us that it wasn’t his appendix after all and that he was going to be okay, I felt awash with relief. I texted my own father and the rest of the family to let them know the news. I sent messages to concerned friends, to those English Teacher Friends I mentioned last week, and called my grandmother to let them all know that the cause for fear was over.

And then, because I’d been holding the emotion in for nearly 24 hours at that point, I got on Facebook and went to a group I’m in called “Bandits.” And I started to type. “Fellas, everything is okay now, but it’s been a rough night…”

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform, and hitting print on May 4th! He could write a dozen columns about how great Bluey is, but right now, he’s in a Bandit place.

Geek Punditry #67: What Is Literature?

April 12, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry books, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hamlet, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Huckleberry Finn, Literature, Liu Cixin, Mark Twain, Star Trek, The Great Gatsby, The Old Man and the Sea, The Princess Bride, Three Body Problem, William Shakespeare

When you’re a high school teacher and spend most of your day around teenagers, you will overhear their conversations whether you like it or not. You hear about the TikToking, and you know who is dating who, and on frequent occasions you learn more about the way these kids spend their weekends than you ever want to know and you contemplate duct-taping your own children to a pool table from the time they’re 13 until they turn 27 or so. And on rare, extremely rare occasions, you’ll hear them discuss things that are actually relevant to your class. Earlier this week, for instance, I overheard a few girls talking about why so many people are using The Great Gatsby as themes for parties and dances these days.

As always happens when there’s a conversation worth joining, I jumped in. “There are three reasons,” I said. “First of all, it’s the 20s again, so people are playing with that. Second, the book went into public domain a few years ago, so nobody has to pay to use these things. And third, there are a lot of people who think the movie is fun and didn’t actually pay attention when they were supposed to be reading the book.”

“Ain’t no party like a Gatsby party, ’cause a Gatsby party ends with three people dead and a complete loss of faith in the American dream!”

The Great Gatsby is, of course, a seminal work of American literature. It’s one of the best books ever written in this country, and it paints a complex and gripping narrative in a relatively short number of pages, but the book is about the unsatisfying nature of a decadent lifestyle and how pursuit of material things is shallow and destructive. Anybody who comes away from that book thinking that these characters are something to aspire towards is – and I’m going to be kind here – an utter moron.

I talked about this conversation with some of my English teacher friends (of course I have English teacher friends – we sit around and conjugate each other’s verbs and talk about which infinitives we’re crushing on) and discussed the fact that there aren’t a lot of books that we teach that provide role models or, for that matter, happy endings. Let’s face it, most books that are complicated enough for a really deep literary analysis tend towards tragic – or at best, bittersweet – endings. The least-depressing book I’ve ever used in my classroom is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and that book BEGINS with the complete destruction of the planet Earth. And one of my friends in this chat commented that this is why she sticks to reading lighthearted stuff on her own time – “literature” is too depressing.

Whaddaya gonna do? You’ve got to build bypasses.

I’ve always thought it was odd to use the word “literature” as a genre, the way I would “science fiction” or “horror.” What, exactly, qualifies something as a work of literature? Every time I walk into a bookstore with a “literature” section, I want to ask somebody who decides which books go on those shelves and which ones do not? Isn’t the very existence of a “literature” section sort of a low-key insult to all of the other books in the store that got shelved somewhere else? Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea goes on the literature shelves whereas William Goldman’s The Princess Bride doesn’t, but I could write you a whole dissertation on which one is a better book, and it ain’t the Hemingway.

One of these is one of the most incredible stories ever conceived by the human mind and the other one is what happens when Ernest Hemingway doesn’t go to therapy.

Is it just the age of the work? Everyone would agree that Lord of the Flies from 1954 is a great work of literature. But what about Robert Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo, published in 1947? It’s not only a book that doesn’t enter the “great literature” discussion, it’s not even usually part of the conversation when you talk specifically about the work of Robert Heinlein. We got George Orwell’s 1984 in 1948, nearly twenty years after the first Nancy Drew novel, The Secret of the Old Clock, but nobody is citing the works of Carolyn Keene in the conversation of great writers. And that’s not just because she didn’t actually exist.

Is it just about the complexity of the work? Must a work deal with heavy ideas and deep themes to qualify? The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gets my personal vote for the greatest American novel ever written (sorry, F. Scott Fitzgerald). Set 20 years before the Civil War but written about 20 years afterwards, the novel is a deep and fascinating analogy about the changes the country went through during that time period. Whereas Mark Twain’s earlier book with these characters (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) was a simple boy’s adventure story, Huckleberry Finn is about a child struggling with the ethical quandary of whether it is morally right to help his friend Jim escape from slavery. Jim’s owner, Miss Watson, has taken care of Huck, and in the eyes of the law he is betraying her by helping in Jim’s escape. But eventually, he comes to the conclusion that he’s going to be loyal to his friend, even if it goes against the law, even if it goes against what he has been taught is morally right. The book deals with the destructive nature of bigotry, ignorance, and hypocrisy, and Huck himself becomes symbolic of the moral transmogrification that the United States was beginning to undergo. In other words, literature.

The thing is, though, a lot of these same ideas and themes can also be found in random episodes of Star Trek. If I pull out Oliver Crawford’s script for “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” I can get into a deep conversation about the folly of racism as we watch two aliens whose species has hunted itself to extinction because some of them are black and white whereas others are white and black. It’s a legendary episode, but could I justifiably call the script for it literature the same way I would Huck Finn or – to use the other best-known example of anti-racist literature – To Kill a Mockingbird? Most people would say no.

“I dunno, Frank, are you sure the analogy isn’t too subtle?”

I posed this question, this “what is literature” question, to my English pals, and one of them said she once looked it up herself and read one of the characteristics that makes something literature is a focus on character and their development rather than plot. Does that really work, though? Gatsby is a very deep examination of the characters, but none of them actually CHANGE. By the end of the book, they (the ones that survive, anyway) are all the same shallow, soulless people they were when the story began and only the narrator – the criminally bland Nick Carroway – has shown any development at all, that development being disgust at the people around him. It’s like you’re left feeling when you watch the final episode of Seinfeld.

On the other hand, my friend pointed out, the male lead in Fifty Shades of Grey seems to change by the end of that series, becoming actually devoted to the narrator. I’ll let you draw your own conclusion as to whether this qualifies as development or not, I haven’t read Fifty Shades. But if there’s one thing everyone in our English chat can agree on, it’s that Fifty Shades of Grey does NOT qualify as literature.

I want to be clear here: I haven’t seen the movies, nor read most of the books. I’ve read exactly one page, the first one, in a bookstore. I was curious as to what the big deal was, and after reading one page I said – out loud – “Oh good LORD,” and put it down. It’s not that the book is smut. If you want to read smut, go right ahead, I don’t judge you for it at all. I will, however, judge you for reading such POORLY WRITTEN smut when there is smut of much better quality readily available. I’m not telling you not to read Fifty Shades because it’s explicit, I’m telling you not to read it because you deserve better smut.

Not pictured: Literature.
Or believable characters, genuine titillation, or a functional understanding of the culture it purports to depict.

Is it the fact that something is “highbrow” what makes it literature? Well that comes with the same problem as designating something literature in the first place: who decides? To pull the Shakespeare card again, my students are ALWAYS intimidated when we start reading Hamlet because they think of Shakespeare as something for “thinky” people. Sure, that may be the way he’s considered today, but in his own time, Shakespeare was a popular writer. He was turning out play after play for the masses, and because he knew exactly what the people wanted, he loaded them with sex and violence. He was the J.J. Abrams of the 16th century. The kids don’t get that, though. If you understand what he’s actually saying, Hamlet’s line “Do you think I meant country matters?” is just as raunchy (and way more clever) than anything E.L. James wrote, but in all my years of teaching the play I’ve never had a student pick up on the subtext. Only a few of them get the later, more obvious line when Claudius is seeking Polonius’s corpse and Hamlet tells him Polonius is, “in heaven…if your messenger find him not there, seek him i’th’other place yourself.” Every so often I have a kid who asks, “Did he just tell the king to go to Hell?” and that student automatically becomes my favorite.

“I don’t look thoughtful enough. Give me 20 percent more confetti.”

The bar can’t be whether something makes you think. Last week I finished reading Liu Cixin’s novel The Three Body Problem, and that’s one of the thinkiest dang books I’ve ever read. The book follows a large cast of characters who discover a secret organization attempting to prepare Earth to be conquered by extraterrestrial invaders. This is, I must stress, an extremely barebones description of the plot, and deliberately so. This story is far deeper and more complicated than my pitiable attempt to summarize it. In fact, if someone tried to argue that it’s the best science fiction novel of the 21st century so far, I will have absolutely no ammunition with which to disagree with them. This Chinese novel was originally serialized in 2006, published as a novel in 2008, and first published in English in 2014, so no matter which edition you’ve read, it’s less than 18 years old. As such, it’s not something that I hear come into the conversation when people discuss “literature.” Not YET, anyway. Come back in 20 or 30 years and that may well change. But is it only the relative youth of the book that keeps it off the table?

Not pictured: Literature, but ask me again in 2056.

Maybe it’s a combination of all of these things. Maybe “literature” has to be deep AND intelligent AND kind of old. Maybe all these things that we now call “literature” are only in that category because they’re the best examples of their time period and we’ve forgotten 90 percent of the utter crap that was written around the same time. That’s not only possible, I think the further back in the history of storytelling you go it becomes almost undeniable. The poet W.H. Auden once said,“Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered,” and by this I think he was trying to tell us that people will hopefully still be reading The Three Body Problem in the year 2100, whereas by then hopefully the only people who remember 50 Shades of Gray will be literary historians who cannot figure out why readers were so temporarily obsessed with a piece of mediocre Twilight fan fiction.

Increasingly, when it comes to the question of literature, I find myself using the late Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s description of “obscenity.” Unable to actually define the term, he simply said, “I know it when I see it.” That’s how I feel about literature, too. But my opinion, of course, doesn’t count for more or less than anybody else’s.

Except for that guy shelving the “literature” section at Barnes and Noble. He apparently holds a little more sway than the rest of us.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He doesn’t know if anyone would ever call the new trilogy version of that series, beginning with Little Stars Book One: Twinkle Twinkle, “literature,” but he DOES know it will be available in both paperback and ebook beginning on May 4, and he is CRAZY excited about it.

Geek Punditry #66: The Frankenssance

April 5, 2024April 5, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Bomani J. Story, books, Boris Karloff, Bride of Frankenstein, Christian Bale, frankenstein, Glenn Strange, Guillermo del Toro, Horror, Lisa Frankenstein, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Mary Shelley, Movies, Poor Things, science-fiction, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, Zelda Williams

Earlier this week, the internet was abuzz with an image released from the upcoming film The Bride! (The exclamation point is part of the title – I’m interested, but not so excited as to declare it via punctuation.) Written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, this movie seems to be an updated version of the Frankenstein story, moved to the 1930s and starring Bale as the monster and Jessie Buckly as the titular bride. Director James Whale’s original Bride of Frankenstein is probably the best of the old Universal Monster movies from the 30s and 40s, and ol’ Vic’s creation is hands-down my favorite classic monster, so news of this film intrigues me. But I think it intrigues me even more than it ordinarily would because with this movie, at least the fifth Frankenstein-derived film released or announced in recent years, it seems that we are in the midst of a full-scale Frankenssance.

Of course, all anybody wants to talk about is the tattoo.

Let’s do a quick bit of literary spelunking for anyone who doesn’t know the story (both of you). In 1816, Mary Godwin was vacationing at the home of her friend Lord Byron with her soon-to-be husband Percy Shelley. This was in the era when visiting a friend could be an extended stay that lasted weeks or months at a time, as opposed to modern times when it lasts until the owner of the home claps his knees and says, “Well, I don’t let me keep you any longer” because the Pelicans game starts in a half-hour and he doesn’t want to watch it with a dirty Celtics fan like you. It was an exceptionally rainy and dreary summer, and to pass the time trapped inside, Byron proposed that they each write a “ghost story” to entertain one another. If you ever wonder which of them won that little competition, remember that it’s 200 years later and the only one that we’re still reading is the one that was written by the 19-year-old girl.

By the way, I really want to stress how amazing that is to me. Whenever somebody talks about the creation of Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, they focus on how shocking it was that it was written by a woman. That shouldn’t be what surprises you. I’m a high school English teacher and I’m not shocked at all that a masterpiece of literature was written by a woman. I’m shocked that it was written by somebody the same age as a student that I had to ask to stop from pouring Pop Rocks into a bottle of Coke in the back of my classroom last week while I was trying to review gerunds.

But I digress. The story follows Victor Frankenstein, a college dropout (nope, he’s not a doctor) who is so obsessed with conquering death following the loss of his mother that he finds a way to reanimate dead tissue. But when he does so, he’s so horrified by the hideousness of his creation that he flees in terror, leaving it to fend for itself. I always interpret his fear as being an expression of the Uncanny Valley problem, where something is so CLOSE to looking authentically human that even the smallest deviation is unacceptable to the eye, which is one of the many ways that the story of Frankenstein is a great metaphor for modern AI.

The Gold Standard. Okay, the GREEN standard.

Most people, of course, think of Boris Karloff’s version of the creature when they think of Frankenstein’s monster: the monosyllabic, hulking brute with the flattop, green skin, and bolts on his neck, whereas none of that really applies to the vision in Shelley’s novel. But that’s okay. I think that one of the things that really makes a character – any character – into a timeless one is its potential for reinvention. Compare the original Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories to the Basil Rathbone movies, the Robert Downey Jr. version, or the Benedict Cumberbatch series. All are perfectly valid, but very different from one another. Think of all the different depictions there have been of Batman, Superman, Tarzan, Dorothy of Oz, Cinderella…if a character is unable to be adapted, it’s not a character likely to achieve immortality. Victor Frankenstein may not have lived forever himself, but the versatility of his creation ensures that his name will last forever.

Like I said, we all know Boris Karloff, but he wasn’t the first cinematic Frankenstein. That honor belongs to Augustus Phillips, who played the creature in a 14-minute film produced by Thomas Edison in 1910. After Karloff played the creature, the role was passed to Lon Chaney Jr., then Bela Lugosi, then Glenn Strange, who rounded out Universal’s original version of the creature in one of my favorite films of all time, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

I’m not kidding. This is maybe my favorite movie of all time. I will never get tired of it.

Since then the list of actors who have played the creature is staggering: Robert De Niro in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Christopher Lee in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Aaron Eckhart in I, Frankenstein (2014), Clancy Brown in The Bride (1985), and Tom Noonan in The Monster Squad (1987), and that just scratches the surface. There was a stage version in which Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller EACH played the Creature and Victor Frankenstein, alternating nights. As of this writing, IMDB credits Mary Shelley as the writer on 115 different projects, and frankly, I think that number is low. I mentioned last week that I’ve got a little obsession with creating lists. On Letterboxd, I’ve logged 55 different movies that I tagged as adapting or being inspired by Mary Shelley’s creation, including Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Hotel Transylvania series, all of the Universal films that featured the creature and several – but not all – of the Hammer Horror films that did the same. I’ve got a list of nearly 50 other Frankenstein movies that I haven’t seen yet, but I hope to get around to eventually.

There’s a LOT of Frankenstein out there, is what I’m getting at. And while they haven’t all been great, there have been a lot of very interesting ones. We seem to have reached one of those moments in the cultural zeitgeist (there’s another English teacher word for you, folks) where the Creature is in ascendance. In addition to Gyllenaal’s The Bride!, Guillermo del Toro is working on his own version of the story for Netflix starring Oscar Isaac as Victor, Jacob Eldori as the creature, and current horror It Girl Mia Goth in a role that doesn’t seem to have been specified yet. A lot of sources seem to be reporting that she’s playing the Bride, but those same sources also reported that Isaac was playing the creature and Andrew Garfield was playing Victor Frankenstein, and those reports seem to have been wrong. It likely depends on how faithful del Toro intends to be to the original novel. (The bride existed in the original novel, by the way, but was destroyed by Victor before he could bring her to life.) It’s hard to say which of these two movies I’m more interested in. The images of Christian Bale are intriguing, but I don’t think I’ve ever been disappointed by a Guillermo del Toro film. The man won best picture for what was essentially a remake of The Creature From the Black Lagoon, and let’s hear it for the Universal executive who passed on that movie.

The man made us root for THIS, he can make any movie he wants.

Of course, two upcoming films would not, in and of themselves, qualify as a Frankenssance. But those aren’t the only ones. In the last two years there have been at least three significant films based at least in part on the Frankenstein legend, all of which I’ve watched during my spring break, because that’s what spring break is for. First up, let’s talk about Poor Things, the movie that scored Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director and a Best Actress win for Emma Stone. Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, this film tells of a dead young woman (Stone) whose body is reanimated by a scientist (Willem Dafoe). The woman, dubbed Bella, starts with a blank slate of a mind, an infant mentality, and as she grows to learn about the world around her, finds herself rejecting many of the Victorian standards of morality and the world’s treatment of women. I haven’t read the book, but the film was an interesting statement about gender roles of the time period. I was a little disappointed that they didn’t spend as much time with Willem Dafoe’s character, though, a malformed scientist who seems to have an unusual kind of kinship with Bella. The film never quite makes it plain, but the interpretation I came away with is that Dafoe’s Godwin Baxter was actually the original Frankenstein monster, carrying on his father’s work. I don’t know if that was the intention of the film or the original novel. I suppose I could look it up, but where would the fun be in that?

Frankenstein, Frankensteiner, Frankensteinest.

Earlier this year we saw the release of the Zelda Williams-directed Lisa Frankenstein. In this film, set in 1989, Kathryn Newton (the actress getting all of the horror movie roles that aren’t going to Mia Goth) plays a teenage girl trying to begin a new life in a new town after her father remarries only six months after her mother’s violent death. Lisa doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere, not with her brutally abusive stepmother (Carla Guigno) or her well-meaning but vapid new stepsister (Liza Soberano). The closest thing she has to a friend is a bust on a tombstone she finds in an old, abandoned cemetery. A bolt of lightning reanimates the corpse underneath (Cole Sprouse) and they embark on a vendetta of revenge. The film is a horror comedy, although it’s got a darker, even meaner tone than I expected, but it’s made very well. The movie is the directorial debut for Williams (daughter of the late Robin) and I’m very interested to see what she can do next.

But the best neo-Frankenstein I’ve watched lately is probably the one you’re least likely to have heard of: The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, written and directed by Bomani J. Story. Originally released via Shudder and now on Hulu, if you’re a Frankenstein fan, you’ve gotta check it out. Laya DeLeon Hayes plays Vicaria, a teenage girl who (like the original Victor) has been obsessed with conquering death since the early loss of her mother. Her rage is compounded when she loses her brother to violence, and she sets out to prove that death is a disease and she can cure it. The movie is set in the present-day, and Story wears his influences on his sleeve. It’s the furthest removed film from Mary Shelly’s original time, and yet, it also seems to be the one most devoted to her original vision. The idea of treating death as a disease is very much reflective of what Shelley wrote about 200 years ago, and while Story applies a contemporary lens and modern social issues to his tale, it still feels very authentically Frankenstein.

As I always say, if there’s one thing that a geek always wants, it’s more. For a fan of Shelley and Karloff and Strange like myself, this new influx of Frankenstein material can only be a good thing. I’m always anxious to see another twist or another take on the story. Keep them coming, Hollywood, and I’ll keep watching.

And once this wave passes, we’ll talk about giving the Wolfman his turn.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. If you didn’t know he was a devoted fan of Frankenstein, he can only imagine that you didn’t pay attention last Christmas when he was re-presenting all of his old short stories, like “Warmth.”

Geek Punditry #65: Howard the Hero?

March 29, 2024March 29, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry comic books, Green Hornet, Green Lantern, harry potter, Howard the Duck, Indiana Jones, Iron Man, James Bond, Lone Ranger, Scarlet Pimpernel, Star Trek, star wars, superheroes, The Phantom, The Shadow, Zorro

I am kind of a nerd. I know, I know, I hide it well, but the truth is that I have certain areas of interest about which I am extremely passionate. And one of the aspects of my nerdity that one must be aware of is the fact that I’m a little obsessed with making lists. I’ve been doing it at least since middle school, when I distinctly remember making a paper bookmark upon which I kept a list of every book I read, a list which quickly became too large for a bookmark that fit in anything less than an unabridged dictionary. The list-making obsession hasn’t changed, only the medium. I’ve often said that there are four “quadrants” of pop culture I mostly talk about here in Geek Punditry: movies, TV shows, books, and comics. It should not surprise you that I have a separate app in which I track my activity and make ridiculously detailed lists for each of these quadrants. (That would be Letterboxd, Trakt TV, Goodreads, and League of Comic Geeks, respectively. If you’re on any of those platforms, feel free to follow/friend me.) My wife says that this list-making thing is because of an inherent desire to create some semblance of order and control because in most areas of my life I feel like everything is in a state of permanent chaos and there’s nothing I can do about it. I reply by telling her to shut up, which she understands to mean, “I love you and you’re right, now stop it.”

Anyway, on Letterboxd a few years back, I decided to whip up a list of every superhero movie I could find, part of my desire to eventually watch them all. You would think that this would be a relatively non-controversial endeavor, assuming that you’ve never been on the internet. Those of us who HAVE been online at some point, however, are acutely aware that there is NOTHING online so benign that you can’t find SOMEBODY ready to argue about it. In the comments of my list, some people complained that I decided to skip non-English language films (because odds are I’ve never heard of those and I don’t want to dedicate my entire life to tracking them down), fanfilms (because for some reason those are frequently deleted and re-added to the Letterboxd database and I don’t want to have to keep putting the same movies back on again), and “adult” films (because make your own list, you weirdo).

But what took me by surprise is when someone decided to complain that I left off the movie Howard the Duck. The exclusion had nothing to do with quality, mind you. I included every superhero movie I am even vaguely aware of, even the worst one ever made, by which I mean the Josh Trank Fantastic Four. No, I skipped Howard because – despite the fact that the movie is based on a Marvel comic book – Howard the Duck is not a superhero. He’s a comedy character, usually used in satirical stories, and while he does have adventures and has been known to interact with other inhabitants of the Marvel Universe, that doesn’t make him a superhero any more than it does Peter Parker’s Aunt May. The person who disagreed with me told me that the title of the film in his native country (Brazil) translates in English to Howard the Superhero, which he says indicates that it should be considered a superhero movie, whereas in reality it just made me question what’s wrong with the Portuguese word for “Duck.”

Never forget that THIS was the first theatrical movie based on a Marvel comic book, nerds.

So I decided that, in order to quell debate (note: this is impossible), I should probably come up with an actual definition of “superhero.” This turned out to be more difficult than it seems. You would think it’s obvious – get five different people to make a list of 100 superheroes and chances are 75 names would appear on at least four of the lists. But what MAKES a superhero? I decided to check with Merriam-Webster, which gives me two totally useless definitions. The first is “a fictional hero having extraordinary or superhuman powers,” which fails as a definition because it excludes Batman, and nobody is ever allowed to exclude Batman. The other definition is “an exceptionally skillful or successful person,” which seems kind of dumb because, arguably, Genghis Khan was exceptionally successful at what he did. And let’s not get into John Wayne Gacy.

“Behold! A superhero!”
“Put a sock in it, Diogenes.”

I needed something broad, but not too broad. I pondered, and I eventually came up with not a SINGLE definition, but a list of criteria. I would consider a character a superhero, I decided, if they fit at least TWO of the following criteria:

Superhuman powers and abilities. These abilities need not be inherent, mind you. Green Lantern has no actual super powers, but he has a ring that gives him superhuman abilities, so he counts.
A double identity, although this identity need not be secret. Everyone in the Marvel Cinematic Universe knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man – his ego wouldn’t allow them not to – but he still HAS that second identity.
An identifiable (and toyetic, let’s not forget toyetic) uniform or appearance. This is, I admit, somewhat subjective. What’s identifiable to one person may not be identifiable to someone else. Think of it this way: if someone is cosplaying as a character and that cosplay is easily recognizable to someone familiar with the IP, that character probably meets this criteria.
Fights crime or battles the forces of evil.

What I like about this list is that none of these criteria make somebody a superhero by itself, but each time they’re combined you get closer to that superhero line. It also makes it easy to include anybody that I want, such as Zorro. People often say Superman (who first appeared in 1938) was the first superhero, and he is certainly the character who named the genre, but I don’t think it’s true that he’s the first. He was preceded by several characters who meet many of the criteria I’ve listed. Zorro (1919), the Lone Ranger (1933), and the Green Hornet (1936) all meet categories 2-4. The Shadow (1931) and the Phantom (also from 1936) meet all four. Even the Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) hits categories two and four. If anything, Superman is the first comic book superhero, and I’m sure even that is open for debate. As such, I included all of these “proto-heroes” on my cinematic superhero list.

Fun Fact: Canonically, the Lone Ranger is the Green Hornet’s great-uncle.
Less Fun Fact: Both of these movies are embarrassments that should never have been made.

Of course, even my criteria leaves a lot of room for debate. There are plenty of characters that one usually doesn’t think of as superheroes that fit at least two of the criteria. Harry Potter, for instance, has magical powers, fights evil, and has a very distinct appearance. The same can be said for Luke Skywalker. One could even argue that any Star Trek character from a race with psychic or shapechanging abilities would qualify. Are Spock, Odo, and Counselor Troi superheroes, or do their powers not count since they’re not unusual for members of their respective species? There are certainly people who would argue that all of these are superheroes, and while I wouldn’t put them on my personal list, I don’t know that I could effectively argue against their inclusion either.

What about Indiana Jones? He fights evil. He’s easily cosplayable. And his real name is Henry Jones, Jr. Does his nickname qualify as a second identity? How about James Bond? He fights evil all the time. The uniform is a little harder to quantify – the most iconic Bond look is a tuxedo, but anybody can put on a tuxedo. And the second identity…does being Agent 007 count? Back in the day there was the fan theory that “James Bond” itself was a pseudonym passed down to whomever was Agent 007 at the time, which was a theory I liked and would most certainly qualify, until the film Skyfall quashed that theory for good.

Some people may ask what difference it even makes. We’re talking about fictional characters, after all. Who cares which ones do and do not count as superheroes? To those people I say, “Oh good for you, you’re far more well-adjusted than those of us who debate these sorts of things on the internet, please stay that way.”

For the rest of us, I know that my attempt to define the term has probably caused more debate than it stopped. Sorry about that. If you’ve got a better definition than I do (or than Merriam-Webster does) I would love to hear it. And I’d even like to hear some unusual characters that you would say meet the criteria. But in the meantime, the only thing I can really say is that when it comes to a superhero, I know one when I see one.

And Howard, I’m sorry, it ain’t you.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He looked up the Portuguese word for “duck.” It’s “pato.” Why didn’t Brazil just call the movie “Howard o Pato”?

Geek Punditry #64: Classics Are Better Big

March 22, 2024March 22, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry Alfred Hitchcock, cinema, Doctor Who, film, Gene Wilder, jaws, movie, Movies, RiffTrax, Star Trek, star wars, theater, Trekkies

With all due respect to films like Psycho, Vertigo, The Birds, and North By Northwest, Alfred Hitchcock’s best movie is the Jimmy Stewart thriller Rear Window. In this taut little drama, Stewart plays a photographer who was injured in a car crash and is stuck in a wheelchair while he recovers. Unable to leave his apartment, he takes to observing the activities of his neighbors through the windows as a sort of perverse entertainment – entertainment that takes a chilling turn when he thinks he sees one of his neighbors commit murder.

“Mr. Gower, no! No, what are you doing?”

Sure, there are some elements that are kind of icky – Stewart is literally spying on his neighbors for most of the film, which isn’t exactly kosher. And how anyone could be so interested in what’s going on across the way when your girlfriend is Grace Kelly and she’s at your house every fifteen minutes seems almost beyond belief. But hey, it’s a movie. Suspension of disbelief is a thing. The thing that makes Rear Window so great is that virtually the entire film takes place in a single room, and despite that, Hitchcock is able to amplify the tension even more than when he had Cary Grant dangling from Mount Rushmore five years later. A single-room thriller is very difficult to pull off, but he did it TWICE, both in this masterpiece and in the underrated Rope.

Pick up your pulse without ever leaving the room.

The reason I’m talking about Rear Window today, though, is not because I’m going to give you a list of confined space thrillers worth watching (Wait Until Dark, Phone Booth, Buried – that’s enough of a list to get started), but because I noticed a few days ago that this year marks the 70th anniversary of the film and, lo and behold, Fathom Events is holding a nationwide anniversary screening on August 25. This, of course, is a date of monumental significance because it also happens to be the birthdate of several notable figures, namely Sean Connery, Tim Burton, Regis Philbin, Billy Ray Cyrus, and myself. (Incidentally, if this doesn’t completely disprove astrology once and for all, I don’t know what will.) Anyway, whilst I’m sure I’ll be occupied with the customary parades, speeches, and address to the nation, the idea of seeing my favorite Hitchcock movie on my birthday IN A MOVIE THEATER is enticing as hell.

Not long ago, I saw a Facebook conversation in which one person expressed an interest in an upcoming screening of Shrek at his local theater, and somebody else began to chastise him for buying a ticket to watch a movie he can watch at home for free. This is an all too common attitude, of course, especially with younger audiences. I know I’m about to sound like a curmudgeonly old man (because I, like Tim Burton and Billy Ray and our fellow August 25th baby Claudia Schiffer, AM a curmudgeonly old man). My high school students are perfectly happy watching everything on their phone screen. Of course, they’re also incapable of paying attention to anything longer than 37 seconds in length, which I assume is the maximum amount of time you can spend watching a film intended to be projected onto a 70-foot screen on a device smaller than a slice of bread. I wholeheartedly believe that a screen as small as a smartphone is a terrible way to watch any sort of longform entertainment and that is part of the reason that younger generations have such an abysmal attention span and, furthermore, I would like to invite you all to get the hell off my lawn.

I know it sounds like I’m blaming TikTok for this, but there’s a good reason for that: I am.

That aside, though, the larger question seems to be why one would pay for movie theater prices to see a movie that you’ve already seen. That, at least, is an argument I can comprehend. My answer to that, though, is that I’m not lining up to rewatch Mac and Me, I want to see Rear Freaking Window. As I wrote last year, I sincerely believe that every movie is more enjoyable if viewed in a theater with a receptive and enthusiastic audience. That’s true whether I’ve seen a movie five thousand times or zero times (and, truth be told, I bet that watching Mac and Me could actually be a hoot if you have the right people in the theater with you).

Having the proper audience is important, of course. With new movies, this is a crapshoot – the studios tend to make every movie look as homogenous as possible to draw in every quadrant, and nobody knows for sure if what they’re going to watch is any good or not. I always HOPE a movie is going to be good, of course. I don’t understand “hatewatching.” I can honestly say I’ve never walked into a movie theater WISHING for a movie that disappoints me. But when it’s a movie that no one has ever seen before, you’re rolling the dice.

That said, the right audience is essential. My wife Erin and I saw this firsthand when RiffTrax did their live theater screening of the Doctor Who serial, The Five Doctors. RiffTrax, if you don’t know, is put on by classic cast members of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and they carry on the mission of cracking jokes at movies. It’s a blast, if you’re a fan.

IF you’re a fan.

If you don’t know what you’re getting into this poster is very confusing. Mathematically speaking.

When we arrived at the theater, we encountered a couple wearing heavy Who regalia who were very excited about a theatrical screening of the legendary story. They took a seat behind us and began to excitedly chatter…but in that chatter, it became quite obvious to Erin and I that while these two were major fans of Doctor Who, they didn’t seem to know WHAT RIFFTRAX IS. As the presentation started, the riffers launched into a short film about safety around electrical wires, cracking their usual jokes about the absurdity of the film, and I heard the man behind us tell his wife, “I hope they don’t do this during the whole movie.”

I turned into that emoji with the clenched teeth. 😬

They lasted about 15 minutes into the Doctor Who serial and left, clearly irritated at the irreverence with which their beloved Doctor was being treated. And I felt bad for them, because they obviously didn’t know what they were getting into…but once they were gone, the rest of us had a grand old time.

It’s about being with the right crowd. One of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater was when the Star Trek documentary Trekkies was released back in 1997. The film is a glimpse into the lives of Trek fans from across the country, a particularly niche subject matter, and it didn’t get a wide release. However, someone I knew happened to have a connection at the local UPN affiliate (home of Star Trek: Voyager) and scored some free passes to a screening they were hosting. The result was an entire theater full of people who LOVED STAR TREK, and there is no better atmosphere in which to watch this movie. We laughed at the people who went a little too far. We cracked jokes about the woman who dressed up her poodle as Spock. And we collectively shed a tear when James Doohan shared the beautiful (and now oft-told) story of how his connection with a fan saved them from committing suicide.

AND he was shot six times on D-Day! The man didn’t need to go to outer space to be a hero.

That “right crowd” mindset works very well when going to see a classic movie in the theater. Odds are, the majority of the audience HAS seen the movie before and is excited to see it with a crowd, and those that HAVEN’T seen it before are there because they want to join in the fun. It’s the reason that interactive screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show have endured for such a long time. To give another example: Erin’s favorite movie is Jaws, and as it was released before either of us were born (we’re old, but we ain’t THAT old), when a special screening was announced at a Movie Tavern within an hour’s driving distance, we decided to make it a date night. (It goes without saying that this was before Eddie was born, although Erin was pregnant at the time.) Near us sat a father with his daughter, who I guessed was about 13 years old and who clearly had never seen the movie before. She was doing fine right up until the scene where Richard Dreyfuss finds Ben Gardner’s decapitated head drifting in the shipwreck underwater, at which point she jumped into her dad’s lap and stayed there for the rest of the movie. It was amazing.

After Gene Wilder died, there were special screenings of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Blazing Saddles, and we did a double feature. Saddles is – and I say this with firm conviction and damn the mobs who want to piss on everything older than 2008 – one of the funniest movies ever made, and seeing it for the first time in a theater was fun. But Wonka was downright magical. The screening was full of parents with kids, many of whom had never seen the movie before. Those kids were mesmerized, drawn into the magic and swept up in this 50-year-old film in a way that the 15-year-old remake by my birthday buddy Burton couldn’t hope to match.

Betcha he never would have used AI and charged kids fifty bucks for a half a lemonade, either.

And you know, I don’t think those kids would care if they HAD seen the movie before. Seeing it on the screen is DIFFERENT. It’s only adults that are too stupid to push that aside. If my son can watch the same YouTube video of the 2017 Times Square New Year’s Eve ball drop 47 times in a row, he sure as hell isn’t going to walk into a screening of Despicable Me and say, “Daddy, I’ve seen this before.”

When I was a kid, Disney used to frequently re-release their classic movies. I got to see films from decades before I was born like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and The Sword in the Stone. With the exception of one-night or short-term engagements, that doesn’t happen anymore (possibly because Disney is afraid people will remember how much better the original versions of these movies are than the lifeless remakes they’re turning out lately). But damn it, it should. My family doesn’t get to the movies much these days, but if I was at a movie theater right now and given a choice between seeing Fast and Furious 11 for the first time or watching Raiders of the Lost Ark for the twentieth time (but the first time in a theater), it wouldn’t even be close.

With movie theater attendance struggling, there’s a desperate effort to create content that fills seats, but I feel like theaters are missing out on an obvious opportunity here. Doing a revival screening of Casablanca or The Wizard of Oz may not sell as many tickets as a Marvel movie, but it also costs a hell of a lot less to put back into theaters. Give us more classic family movies! Give us more events! When the Special Editions of the original Star Wars trilogy hit theaters in the 90s, we fans came out in FORCE (pun intended), not because we wanted to see Greedo shoot first, but because we wanted to see him in a room the size of a house and full of other people who loved the movie as much as we did.

These screenings DO happen. Like I said, Fathom Events does anniversary and event screenings a lot. There was the aforementioned Gene Wilder double feature. And Disney just announced an all-day nine movie marathon of the Star Wars films on May 4th. But I don’t want to have to wait for an anniversary that ends in a 5 or 0 or for somebody to die before I get to see a classic.

I wish there were a nearby, easily-accessible theater in my area that frequently did revivals or special screenings of classics, but alas, there aren’t a ton of options, especially if you don’t have a lot of opportunities to go into New Orleans proper. So I keep an eye on Fathom events and I cross my fingers for special screenings and I long for the day when the cinematic community figures out how to make this happen.

And I hope to see Hitch’s cameo the way it was meant to be seen: big enough to fall into his nostrils.

Geek Punditry #63: The TV Land Pet Sematary

March 15, 2024March 15, 2024 blakemp Geek Punditry cheers, ducktales, frasier, night court, Star Trek, Star Trek: Picard, television, tv

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a new season of Night Court airing right now. Now that may surprise you if you, like most of us, remember the show going off the air back in 1992. But it may be slightly less shocking if I tell you that the new series, like approximately 75 percent of television these days, is a reboot.

We live in the age of reboots on TV, and I think there are few obvious reasons for that. First of all, the people who fell in love with shows like Night Court during their formative years in the 80s and 90s are now largely the ones calling the shots at the networks, contributing greatly to the already-cyclical nature of pop culture. If you loved something once, it’s not unnatural or unusual to want to reclaim it and bring it back again, so when that kid who grew up watching DuckTales was given a shot at pitching an animated series to Disney, you damned well better believe he was gonna pitch a new DuckTales.

The other reason, of course, is that the TV world in utter chaos as ratings for broadcast television drop like Wile E. Coyote strapped to an anvil and nobody knows how to interpret what little data we get from streaming services. It’s considered a safer bet to hitch your star to an older series that might bring its older audience along for the ride. It’s why we got shows like The Connors, Fuller House, Girl Meets World, Quantum Leap, Animaniacs, Raven’s Home, One Day at a Time, And Just Like That, and, for the kiddos from the aughts, iCarly. It’s why every couple of months somebody floats the idea of a new version of The Office and why Bryan Cranston likes to tease us to say he’d totally be down to resurrect Malcolm in the Middle. Reboots are here and they’re not going anywhere. It’s like all these old shows were buried in the TV Land Pet Sematary, and sometimes they come back VERY wrong.

More shambling corpses than 10 season of *The Walking Dead.*

The truth is, like any other wave in entertainment, there are good and bad attempts, and I think one of the things that contributes to how well a reboot is accepted is the adherence to the original. It’s bizarre how often a studio will bring back an old show and then change everything about it, sometimes resulting in something as appalling as Thundercats Go! (the Gage Creed of the TV Land Pet Sematary). The logic of the producers is usually something along the lines of “We’re trying to get new fans, not old ones.” My response to this is, “if you’re not trying to get the old fans, why the hell did you call the show Walker: Texas Ranger?”

One of the most interesting examples of both a failed AND a successful reboot is Star Trek: Picard. When the first season was launched, the idea was to focus solely on Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard character, with only sparse appearances from some of his old castmates. They didn’t want to just make season 8 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The problem, of course, was that the fans just wanted season 8 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So after two seasons of – I’m going to be kind here – dubious quality, for the third and final season they threw away most of the elements that weren’t working, got the crew of the Enterprise-D on the phone, and made one of the most entertaining and warmly-regarded seasons of TV in Trek History.

I’m never gonna get tired of this picture.

But back to Night Court. The new series is set in the same courtroom as the original, and it is a continuation rather than a full continuity restart such as Charmed, which I for one prefer. The head of the new ensemble is Melissa Rauch (of The Big Bang Theory) as Judge Abby Stone, daughter of the character played by the late Harry Anderson in the old series. While many of these reboots make an effort to have a cast that frequently blends the old and the new, there isn’t a ton of cross-pollination in Criminal Court Part Two, and for a fair enough reason: most of the original cast is no longer with us. Night Court, tragically, has suffered a far greater attrition rate than most other shows of the 80s. Of the entire original main cast, only three of them were still alive when the reboot was announced, and one of them (the great Richard Moll, who played Bull Shannon) passed away after season one without ever agreeing to make an appearance. Marsha Warfield, touchingly, has made two appearances, and Brent Spiner (who played a recurring character for a few years on the original) has shown up as well, but fans looking for familiar faces will be disappointed.

The only original cast member that’s a regular on the new version is John Larroquette, whose Dan Fielding is almost unrecognizable as the same character. 80s Dan was sleazy, lascivious, and somebody that wouldn’t last ten minutes in a modern courthouse without getting “Me Too”ed into oblivion, which is probably the reason for the drastic change. Modern Dan is old, curmudgeonly, a combination of Oscar the Grouch and Mr. Wilson from Dennis the Menace. I’m not saying that I need a sleazeball character for a show to be enjoyable, but considering how it was his defining characteristic, it seems ridiculous that his bed-jumping past is almost completely ignored in favor of this somewhat lonely man that Dan has become. I don’t even mind that he’s changed, I just wish there was a clearer path of transition, because they don’t talk about his past at all. He’s mentioned the death of his wife, which is implied to have triggered this change in his personality, but HELL, that’s a story I want to know! Tell me about the woman who changed Dan!

I just want someone to make this make sense.

The show isn’t quite as wacky as the original either. Oh sure, the classic series didn’t start wacky, but it spun wildly out of control and by the final season it was practically a live-action cartoon. In fact, in one memorable episode, a defendant in a one-scene gag turned out to be the fully-animated and aforementioned Wile E. Coyote. The reboot occasionally makes a flailing grab at bringing that sensibility back, but it usually feels forced. So far the most authentic thing about the series is ditching the actor playing the Court Clerk and replacing him between the first two seasons.

Anyway, the new Night Court is okay. It’s not great, it’s okay, and that’s how I feel about most of the reboots that I’ve watched. Fuller House drew most of its charm by reminding the viewers about the cheese of the original series. The Animaniacs relaunch gave me a few laughs, but there was nothing that came even close to the genius of the Anvilania episode of the classic.

And then there’s Frasier.

The show that gave the world tossed salads and scrambled eggs.

I’ve written before of my love for Cheers and how I consider it one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, and that love extends to its spinoff. In fact, I would say that Frasier and Better Call Saul belong on a special shelf labeled “spinoffs as good as and sometimes even better than the original.” It is a very, very exclusive club. Laverne and Shirley keeps petitioning for admission but is denied on the grounds of the Cindy Williams-less last season. And because I loved Frasier so damned much, I was wary of the reboot when the first season dropped last fall. I finally worked myself up to give it a watch and…

…be surprised by this…

…it’s okay.

Let me tell you a little bit about the new set-up. In the original Frasier, Kelsey Grammer’s character from Cheers moved from Boston to Seattle where his father Martin (John Mahoney) wound up moving in with him. Frasier, of course, was a Harvard-educated psychiatrist with more than a little bit of pretension, whereas his father was a retired cop who liked beer and basketball. The Odd Couple style dynamic between them provided a lot of the fuel for what was one of the greatest comedies in television history (and that’s not even bringing up the brilliance of the rest of the cast). In the reboot, Frasier moves back to Boston and moves in with his son, Frederick (played by Jack Cutmore-Scott) who has inherited both his father’s intelligence and his grandfather’s working-class sensibilities. The original show gave us a long and rewarding arc of Frasier and Martin reconnecting and forging a sincere and touching bond. In perhaps the reboot’s most interesting twist, Frasier deliberately moves in with his son in an attempt to recreate this father/son bond following Martin’s death.

“I’m confused. Which one of them is supposed to be the new Chopper Dave?”

Cutmore-Scott and Grammer work well together, mirroring the Frasier/Martin dynamic but reversing the archetypes of the characters. The rest of the cast, though, isn’t as engaging, and I don’t think there’s anybody who watches the reboot who isn’t waiting for Niles and Daphne to show up. Obviously the late John Mahoney can’t make an appearance, but his specter hangs over the first season of the reboot and it makes for one of the most authentic elements of the show. It’s telling, though, that the two best episodes of the first season are the ones that guest-starred Bebe Neuwirth (as Frasier’s ex-wife and Freddy’s mom Lilith) and Peri Gilpin (as Frasier’s old radio producer Roz Doyle). Supposedly David Hyde Pierce and Jane Leeves, who played Niles and Daphne in the old show, were approached to appear in the reboot but declined. I’ve probably heard a half dozen explanations for why they turned the offer down, and since I have no idea which if any of them is correct, I’m not going to speculate or point fingers. All I’m going to say is the show has a much better chance of getting a season three if they find a way to get Pierce and Leeves to show up in season two.

If you’re going to bring back something from the past, you need to keep in mind what people loved about it in the first place. That doesn’t mean it needs to be exactly the same. In many cases – be it because of changing societal values or the loss of beloved performers – it can’t be. But if you don’t at least identify the spirit of the original and do your best to bring it back in the reboot, then what the hell is the point?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He’s waiting with baited breath for the reboot of Mama’s Family now that Vicki Lawrence is actually age-appropriate to play Mama.