Blogs and Ends: What’s Wrecked Now?

What a fun game Hollyweird has given us with, “What’s Wrecked Now?”  And this time it’s not just limited to Hollyweird, Tokyo is included too.

FIRST

Bedrock

Do you have warm memories of The Flintstones?  You do? 

Yeah, Hollywood found about them.  They will soon be eternally tainted by the ever upwardly failing Elizabeth Banks. 

Banks didn’t use to be that much of an SJW.  Or at least she was no worse than any of the other THOTs of Tinsel Town.   But that all seemed to change when her age crossed a certain threshold. She is the kind of woman who took it very badly when men stopped chasing her.  Suddenly normal male interest in pretty girls moved from validating to something abhorrent when it no longer applied to her personally.  When the toxic male gaze stopped being glued to her, she decided to make men pay for it.

Remember Elizabeth Bank’s version Charlies Angels?  

You don’t?!?! 

Okay, I guess I don’t blame you.  Here’s some background information that seems useful to this post in general, as I have never actually posted my popculture blurring effect spiel here at Arkhaven.

Charlies Angels started life as a vehicle for Kate Jackson, who had acquired something of a following as the Nurse on The Rookies.

Then she cut her hair, became a women’s Libber and started wearing pantsuits.

Never mind, it turned out that Steve Austin’s wife had tons of hair to spare.

Charlie’s Angels let Hollywood Liberals pretend, they were making a show about female empowerment while at the same time treating the actresses in it like walking meat puppets.

And I’m not going to pretend that I minded. 

The show itself is boring and unwatchable by today’s standards. In truth, it was pretty dull when it first aired as well but let’s face it, the core audience was really just in it for the pretty girls. This Women’s Lib show had an audience that was 99% male, and they were only tuning in each week in the hope that tonight’s episode would take place on the beach.

While all of the girls in it became famous none of them had much in the way of careers after Charlie’s Angels was axed. Possible exception being Kate Jackson in Scarecrow and Mrs. King.

However, despite all of its obvious weaknesses, Charlie’s Angels easily passes the test when it comes to the Pop-culture Blurring Effect. 

My old readers can skip over this next bit.  It’s my Pop-culture Blurring Effect spiel.

Did you know that 94% of all new movies last year were franchise releases of some kind or another? I didn’t make that statistic up. Almost everything now is a sequel, a reboot or came from another pre-existing media source (Comics, YA lit and so on)

Back when Ghostbusters (1984) came out, you could hype the hell out a new property and buy back your percentage through heavy marketing. One well-placed TV ad could reach tens of millions. You could spend your way to cultural impact. That sure as hell ain’t happening anymore. It just isn’t possible to reach that big of an audience.

Movies are a business and, in a business, you need to minimize risk. The surest way to do that is to pick a property that is immune to the Blurring Effect. You pick something that already has a cultural impact.

Anything made before 1995 that was popular fits the bill.

Spiel concluded.  

And Charlies Angels was clearly a pre-Blurring Effect property. So, in 2000, a reboot was launched in the theaters. And it was a hit. The reasons for that had nothing to do with the script and everything to do with the casting. They were the flirtiest, sexist most fun actresses that were in their mid-twenties that year.

The girls looked over the script, figured out instantly that they wouldn’t be taking home any Oscars for this flick and decided to just have fun with it. The on-set chemistry translated to the screen.

They couldn’t recapture the vibe for the second film, and it flopped big time. Franchise buried again.

There was a reboot series in 2011 that I didn’t even know existed until just now. Again the blurring effect.

By 2019, the core audience for this property was non-existent. It was primarily Gen-Xers, to begin with, and we’ve hit the point in our lives where we’ve pretty much stopped going to movies.

Charlie’s Angels had always been about light dumb fun that appealed to the male gaze. The drive to change that into something that would smash the “Patriarchy” was as instinctive in feminists as it is in a beaver build a dam. 

Train wreck is a reasonably accurate description of Elizabeth Bank’s Charlies Angels. It starred the perpetually wooden Kristen Stewart. And the tragic Sir Patrick Stewart, who would have done himself a real favor by dying in his seventies rather than revealing what appears to be a feminist cuck fetish in his extreme dotage.   There were two other checkbox actresses in it. Don’t remember their names and you wouldn’t either.  The action scenes were so bad that I felt embarrassed for the stuntmen who were trying desperately to make it look like getting hit by Bella Swan would actually hurt. The plot was so weak it honestly could have been used in the original series. 

It was obvious to everyone involved that this thing was going to bomb long before it got near the theaters.  Consequently, the marketing for Charlies Angels shifted into emergency toxic-man-babies mode first used in Ghostbusters (2016).  Laugh all you like, but this strategy always dragged in just enough Stans and SJWs to make a movie break even. At least, until Charlies Angels launched. It was the first film to use this marketing angle and still fail.

Elizabeth Banks punishment for this failure?  

Promotion! 

This is Hollywood, so long as you roll hard Left when your project fails, you’ll always be a hero.  And now she has been entrusted with the abject destruction of the Flintstones.

Her new series is called Bedrock.  Pour yourself a stiff one, I’m about to paste the press release.

BEDROCK catches up with the Flintstone family two decades after the original, with Fred on the brink of retirement and 20-something Pebbles embarking on her own career. As the Stone Age gives way to a shiny and enlightened new Bronze Age, the residents of Bedrock will find this evolution harder than a swing from Bamm-Bamm’s club.

There we are, Pebbles (voiced by Banks) is on her own now, she and Bamm-Bamm broke up in college, and she doesn’t need any man to help her.  Although, I would be shocked if she didn’t have a cross-racial romance by episode six.  

I loved the phrase, “enlightened new Bronze Age.” So many implications packed into those four words.  The smoke signal here is as thick as a 1950s London fog.  Bedrock is going to be Woke AF. I can already see the horror in the eyes of the show’s Millennial writers as they tried to watch the original series without collapsing in horror, shivering on the ground.  

I can almost hear the shrieks of outrage, “Let me get this straight! All the cavemen were white!?!?”

Well, yeah. They were. Europe has been filled with Europeans for a long time now. 

Regardless, we can expect Bedrock to be stunningly brave and diverse.  Fred and Wilma will break up sometime during the second season. Betty and Barny will already be divorced when the show launches and one of them is coming Out.  Mister Slate will now be referred to as Catelyn. And Gazoo will have gender identity issues. I have no idea what they will do with Bamm-Bamm but it won’t be pretty.  

The fundamental problems with this show are staggering.  First of all, the setup for all the Flintstones gags was that they were “the modern stone-age family.”  All 1960s tech had a Bedrock equivalent that was powered by a dinosaur.  Yeah, I know there were (almost certainly) no dinosaurs in the Pleistocene.  But as a caveman gag, it was on just this side of just acceptable to audiences.  Having Dino as the family dog in the Bronze Age isn’t workable. There was enough Edgar Rice Burroughs fantasy fiction to make Cavemen and Dinos doable.  But dinosaurs in early Mesopotamia just won’t fit. The audience won’t accept it like they did The Flintstones.

I suppose Banks can make it explicitly clear that Bedrock exists in a Lost World pocket dimension, but she is nowhere near that bright.

NEXT 

Darkwing Duck is also getting a reboot.

It’s being produced by Seth Rogan.  I wish I was lying about that.

Stand by for animated ducks telling stoner jokes.

And yes, it’s going to be on Disney +.

NEXT

Studio Ghibli’s latest trailer has dropped.

If you are a fan of Hayao Miyazaki, prepare your long-tired sigh protocol for execution.

(*Long tired sigh*)  That’s right studio Ghibli has decided for some godawful reason that the future is 3d animation.

The quality of the CG appears to be about two generations behind.  And while the art design does resemble Studio Ghibli’s past works stylistically, the use of 3d animation makes it look like a horrible burlesque of Hiyao Miyazaki’s films.

The director is Hayao’s son, Goro Miyazaki.  Goro’s record so far is very hit-or-miss.  I found Tales of Earthsea unwatchable but I think he had a genuine classic with From Up on Poppy Hill.

The fundamental problem with CG is that you break up the artwork.  One guy does just lighting, another just does hair, while another takes care of clothes design and on down the line.  This is from a studio where historically; one artist was in charge of all of this.

The results speak for themselves in the trailer and they say nothing good.

LAST

Heavy Metal

It’s not officially doomed yet.  Bad Reboot has NOT been signed and neither has Secret Hideout.  But that said, I don’t know how they can do justice to the first movie.  Let’s just pretend the second one never existed, shall we?

Heavy Metal had pretty much EVERYTHING that is utterly forbidden now.  Sex with attractive women.  Sexism with attractive women. Stoner aliens and their horny robot. Wall-to-wall bloodshed and violence on a literally epic scale.  The zombie B-25 sequence might still be allowable but that’s about it.  You can absolutely forget about the rest of it.

It’s difficult to explain to Millennials and Gen Z what Heavy Metal was like for us. First of all, it came out in 1981 and was R rated.  A bleeding-edge Gen-Xer born in 1965 would have only been sixteen when it was released.  The rest of us were a lot younger than that.  Consequently, almost none of us got to see it in theaters during its first run.  

Now given the movie’s poor performance it would have been a natural for a videotape release (most B-movies and box office failures went on tape in those days, A-movies, not so much).  However, the producers completely screwed up the music rights.  It was literally unreleasable on tape without a lot of money getting pumped into it and that was not going to happen for a failed movie.

Which means the only place we ever got to see it, for the very first time, was during midnight showings at science fiction conventions, midnight showings on campus, or midnight showings in drive-ins.  In all of those venues, the very young versions of ourselves were going to be extremely excited by seeing something so out there.  And our synapses were going to be malfunctioning due to lack of sleep, (and often as not for other reasons as well). It was so out there that a lot of us who saw it had dreams about the various sequences. I dreamt of the B-25 sequence and was pissed as hell that I wasn’t dreaming about Tarna instead. It was scary, funny, exciting, and bizarre. And let me be clear I’m just talking about SEEING the movie, not the film itself.

It was something that was hard for us to get to see for years.  That gave it a genuine mystique.   You’d go with like-minded friends and yell at your favorite parts. 

The animation and art design were generally the same quality as what you would find in Heavy Metal magazine.  Which was pretty high.  As for the content, in simplest terms, it was Anime before Anime was a thing in the US. Not the art style that was Metal Hurlant, but the initial emotional impact like that.

Normally, I would just shrug off the reboot as a disaster waiting to happen. Teenage Mutant Ninja Gamma Kevin Eastman bought it in 1992 and slowly ran the magazine into the ground.  However, after he sold the publication in 2014 it was turned around in a pretty big way and is back to being its old self.

The people who own it are music executives who seem to actually care about its integrity.

But even assuming the executives in question do in fact keep the Woke out of it, they are still faced with the big problem of music.  Heavy Metal is dead in the US.  

That said, you can find something that would work if you looked hard enough.

Okay, I’m done here.