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Penny Arcade - Comic - Ant Mill
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Ant Mill
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Shit I bet there was a story teller of old that was as awful as Michael Bay.
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Ehhh, this example really isn't about retelling myth and themes, or folklore. The continued regurgitation of brands and trademarked properties is not the same thing. There is something depressing about culture being what is sold to us, over and over again.
But yeah, it's a joke, and a take from a teen in a comic.
Which I'm not ready to call a dead world, yet, in spite of the long dry spell in between The Lighthouse and Jojo Rabbit in 2019 and Renfield this year. Which, respectively, feel like the last great movies of the before times, the great long-long-ago, and the first great movie of the board from Cabin In The Woods is our life now.
Especially since, moving away from film, we're getting some pretty solid entertainment.
But it does touch on something that often comes up.
Instead of going to a museum, gallery, book store, an indie theatre looking for something unexpected, or seeking out other live or local entertainment, they made the decision to go to a big box movie theatre and watch Ninja Turtles. Which is fine, but it's akin to opening a can of Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup while complaining that culinary culture is dead.
There are endless amounts of "culture" out there for those looking for it.
It also depends on what they define as "our culture" given that "your culture" is not "THE culture". It seems disingenuous for someone to hand over cash to see the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movie, the make a comment about how dead "culture" is. It's also unhealthy to assume "culture" is a universal experience, and that your viewpoint on culture is the dominant one. Unless of course, we find out later in the new posts they are specifically referencing male nerd culture...but even then, that "culture" is so diverse within itself that you have "nerds" exploring all sorts of new stuff all the time.
But still, I can see it as a commentary on middle-age male nerd culture that continues to go back to the well of nostalgia, then rushes to the internet to complain. And as a middle-aged male nerd, I'd be a hypocrite if to argue that I too drink deeply from that well.
There is plenty of culture in indie/underground and niche spheres, but it does feel like mass pop culture has hit a dead end. Harry Potter and The Matrix feel like the last original ideas to become worldwide pop cultural phenomena, on the level of everyone's mom and grandma knows what it is. Aside from maybe Rick & Morty and Stranger Things, the 21st century hasn't produced many new ideas that have achieved widespread cultural penetration and ubiquity. Where is the next Star Wars? By which I mean, where is the next original vision to come out of nowhere and take the world by storm? There are still plenty of good, original movies and TV shows being made, but almost nothing that rises to the level of phenomenon. Pop culture has gotten fragmented and everyone has their own little niche. Maybe that's part of the reason that Barbie has struck such a chord - it's not exactly an original property, but it is an original script and vision, and it feels like a shared cultural moment, which we rarely get anymore.
Buh?
The Wire
One Punch Man
Futurama
Breaking Bad
BoJack Horseman
The Amazing World of Gumball
Atlanta
Chernobyl
Black Mirror
True Detective
Arrested Development
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Steven Universe
All of these had varying success and permeated American culture. The Wire and Black Mirror especially, and several of them far, far more than a show like Rick & Morty.
Also, Star Wars was original in its setting, not its story.
Some of those things are popular, but when I say "phenomenon" I mean Harry Potter and The Matrix and Star Wars led to spinoffs, adaptations, fan fiction, memes, video games, comics, merch, etc. They became cottage industries unto themselves. You can pick a random town on the globe and find someone in a Star Wars t-shirt. Everyone and their grandma knows what it is. Your grandma does not know what One Punch Man is, unless she is extremely cool. The only thing on your list that my mom has heard of is Futurama.
Breaking Bad I think comes closest to meeting my criteria for cultural phenomenon, Better Call Saul was a popular spinoff and I do still occasionally see people sharing BB memes or rocking the Heisenberg t-shirt. Twilight and Hunger Games also come to mind, but I think of those more as fads that had their moment, compared to Star Wars or Harry Potter which are still popular today. Pokemon comes to mind as well, that came out in the late 90s though. Maybe Minecraft?
Edit: Actually, Despicable Me/Minions is probably a better example of the type of cultural ubiquity I'm talking about. When I think about the past 20 years of pop culture, the massive monoculture successes that come to mind are the MCU, Batman/Joker, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, and Minions.
It's been going that direction for decades, though. Cable TV helped a lot. Compare to something like MASH or Cheers.
These dumb kids and their music podcasts.
I agree this is the biggest factor. If you wanted to see a movie or show, your options were the theatre, TV, or whatever the local store carried. But now the majority is available relatively cheaply and immediately.
I'm out of the loop on a lot of Disney's stuff right now because I've been making my way through tons of 80's movies I never saw for the last couple months.
Star Wars, Pokemon, and a few others are also distinct in not having to do reboots every several years to keep things going. They can introduce new characters and advance the timeline in a way that comic book heroes haven't really been able to. As great as Miles Morales is, I don't expect him to ever fully replace Peter Parker as THE Spiderman in the minds of people who watch superhero movies but don't collect comic books. Likewise, you literally cannot advance the timeline on TMNT without a reboot because they wouldn't be teenagers anymore. It does end up restricting what an IP gets to do over time.
When I saw The Force Awakens after it had been out for a week or two, the more excited people in line were some kids who'd watched Star Wars: Rebels and not middle aged nerds. That's a kind of fanbase growth most IPs can only dream of.
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Star Wars could keep introducing new characters. Outside of Andor the writers seem pretty determined to squeeze every drop out of the previous creations.
that said I think the clear counterexample here is game of thrones; obviously it was an adaptation but it's still a 'new' huge franchise
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I wish there was a good way to get real data on this, but it's pretty impossible. Part of the measurement problem is that TV just isn't the same as it used to be. Old TV had first airs, reruns and then tons of syndication for hit shows. Streaming shows have binge watches for some, trickled out for others. And people may just watch a series and move on, or they may rewatch multiple times. And some of the viewers just pirate it. It's just so hard to put your finger on.
I do know that the estimate is that 106 million people (60% of homes) watched the final episode of MASH live. All the same night. And that's with a population that was 60% of what it is now. Yeah, that was the top, but others also did some crazy numbers. Final episode of Seinfeld in 1998 was around 76 million. Final ep of Friends in 2004 was 52 million.
HBO's own numbers for the finale of GoT was 19 million live and 14 million the next day. There's some unknown number of overlapping viewers there that HBO wouldn't be motivated to reveal. They did claim an average of 44 million per episode in season 8, including delayed views. I think that's pretty low if you include syndication views for old shows. I never watched most of Seinfeld until syndication, and at this point I think I've seen all of them at least once.
And, again, you have to consider growing population in those absolute number of viewers. Life just used to be very different before even the era of DVRs. You either watched it live, taped it and watched it very nearly live, or you missed out on what everyone was talking about. And everyone was, because there were basically three choices of programming (this is all very US-centric, of course) for mainstream shows. I feel like if you adjusted per capita, it's just not nearly as high as it used to be.
Which, to me, is good. No way in hell I would have ever watched all those episodes of Cheers if I had something I was actually interested in. Even when MASH was good, it's not what I would have turned to if I'd had options.
In theory, yes, except you really couldn't talk about the show in public at appreciable length due to the "THPOILER! factor"
I never actually watched the show, although I saw a lot of clips and hugely enjoyed the "One and a Half Man" parady compilation. But I was known at work as someone who had read the books and derived a huge amount of enjoyment from providing hugely fictitious spoilers. "What happens in Book Three? Two words, Claire: Kal Hodor"
You devil
Our circles have changed because we can all find something more specifically tailored for us and have conversations with people more specifically interested in the same things as us. There are pros and cons to this, culturally. It's just the way things are.
Retelling stories is fine, but Mr. Greek Grandpa didn't charge his kids to hear the story of Hercules
Storytelling was a trade that was paid for with with food and lodging. But that's definitely much more wholesome and human than corporation wringing out every dollar they can.
As for the argument that the next Star Wars/Harry Potter/ Pokemon does'nt happen, that is not a sign of stagnation of the culture or anything. What changes is the way people consumate medias.
in a world where everyone had the same few TV channels, everyone in a given generation is going to be watching the same thing, because there is not a hundred of different options available.
If you have only one "valid" video game system for mainstream audiences and it's the NES, Nintendo is synonymous with "Video Games" in general, so anyone know about Mario.
If anything, this is due do the fact that far more things are produced nowadays (which might be an other problem on its own, but that's beyond the point). My Hero Academia or One Punch Man or whatever other mangas are popular now aren't going to be as ubiquitous as Dragon Ball when it first got popular because there are so many mangas out there just withing the action/ nekketsu sub-genre, and so many ways to access them, that not everyone is going to be reading/watching the same one at the same time.
Hodor