Blogs and Ends: The Stuff I Didn’t Believe Edition
I don’t run with every rumor that crosses my radar, despite the ever-hungry beast that is the need for daily content. I don’t want a reputation for being Little Doomcock.
So, once in a while I pass on posting a rumor that I’m not buying into on common sense grounds and it turns out to be true. This week there have been a couple of things that I didn’t go with that turned out to be true.
FIRST
The Powerpuff Script
I’ll start by saying I am way too old to have an emotional stake in the Powerpuff Girls but I was aware of the show because my eldest daughter was the right age when it came out. I get where the outrage is coming from. The Power Puff Girls were superpowered little girls that loved fighting crime but still did little girl stuff. They had a bedtime and everything. They’ve got fans with warm memories of these sweet, funny little cartoon girls.
The leaked script for the CW’s live action Powerpuff Girls reboot is one of those things that I didn’t cover because I knew it couldn’t be real.
Wrong again. The CW is copyright striking the script everywhere it crops up. It’s real and it’s spectacularly awful.
It turns out the Powerpuff Girls hated fighting crime and think the police should be defunded. They are ultra-Woke sluts, one of them is a lesbian. Somewhere along the line, Blossom murdered Mojo Jojo?!?!? I mean he was evil, but he was a talking monkey. Under no circumstances do you kill a talking monkey unless you are in a Planet of the Apes movie. Who the fuck greenlit these ideas for the Power Puff Girls?
And the producers hired Diablo Cody to write it. Forgive me for stating the freaking obvious but Diablo Cody is a 42-year-old Gen Xer. She hasn’t been a thing for the last 16 years. Her style of, (I suppose you would have to call it “writing”), was the hotness for all of five minutes in 2005. Why the hell would anyone hire her to write sharp, skewering, like, totally fire Zoomer dialogue in 2021?
Bubbles: Blossom’s fine. I saw on her Insta that she has a boyfriend, I saw on her LinkedIn that she got promoted, and I saw on Facebook that she still talks to Grampa despite their political differences.
Buttercup: Coming back here is probably “triggering” for her.
Bubbles: ’cause she’s the one who killed Mojo? I mean, moveon.org—
Yeah, that’s about as close to good as Cody ever got. A decade and a half ago it came across as edgy cool. Now her writing feels like Mom dancing with the high school boys. “I’m so young and with-it you’d think me and my daughter were sisters!”
Like big yikes.
I’m older than Diablo Cody by a decade and I know for a fact that Zoomers won’t go near Linkedin or Facebook. This is the old people internet. Cody should have been awkwardly trying to shoehorn in references to Venmo and TikTok.
Or given what comes next; OnlyFans.
Buckle up, it gets so much worse from here.
Bubbles: look, we loved being Power Puff Girls, but sometimes we wanted to be other things, too. Like in Dirty Dancing. Baby wanted to join the Peace Corps but she also wanted to be a fancy slut. And her dad didn’t get it.
Drake (Emotional): Jerry Orbach was doing his best to understand.
INT. Power Puff Girls home hallway Buttercups room – day
Blossom heads upstairs where the bumping sound continues from Buttercup’s room then abruptly stops. Blossom opens up the door and finds Buttercup in bed with Macy. The woman she eyed at the bar the night before they’ve just “finished.”
Blossom: Oh God, I’m sorry!
Buttercup: It’s fine. (To Macy) We’re done right?
Macy: I’d say 6 times is enough.
Because being not just a lesbian but a slutty lesbian is super emo-powering. This is possibly the most tragic thing here, but this next gives it a run for its money.
Buttercup: Bloss wake up! Or we’ll leak your nudes everywhere!
Blossom: That worked for you once.
You can find better fanfic than this mountain of Woke ultra-cringe on Wattpad. Fifteen-year-old high school girls write better than this. Sadly, we are to be denied this Woke horror show. CW is so embarrassed by the universal, pan-political hatred, they have burned the pilot and claim they are reworking it. However, it’s the exact same team so, I don’t know see how they are going to come up with anything substantially different. A live action, adult Powerpuff Girls show is a fundamentally hideous idea but there is no end to the ways Diablo Cody can make it worse.
NEXT
Flash! Amazon is in fact buying MGM studios after all.
I’d heard this one too but didn’t run with it. I knew that MGM had reason to sell their studios, and there have been rumors about a potential sale to various buyers since last year. But, I didn’t think Amazon had much reason to buy.
Metro Goldwyn Mayer started life as studio merger in 1924. It grew into being one of the Big Five of Hollywood and had the best contract players in the industry, their motto during the Golden Age of Hollywood was “more stars than there are in heaven.” however, towards the 1970s its history became “troubled.” The list of its bankruptcies, sales, acquisitions, and resales would take up several pages. MGM got rid of its physical studio years ago. It has gone in and out of active film production several times in the past 20 years.
It’s attempts to get into streaming have been failures. MGM streaming did nothing. So, they bought Epix, which sees a little of what I call branch-swinger streamers. People who sub for a month, watch the halo shows and disconnect again. Obviously not going anywhere.
MGM does own its own film library (again) which has 4,000 film titles and 17,000 hours of TV shows. However, it doesn’t have much in the way of franchises. James Bond, Rocky, the Jackson Tolkien movies, Stargate and that’s about it. Not much else on the radar besides Handmaid’s Tale.
So yeah, it made sense for MGM Holdings to dump the “studio.”
But I didn’t see what Amazon was going to be getting out of it except another anti-trust suit. Justice will have to okay this one and Disney and Discovery-Warner have plenty of reason to object on vertical integration grounds.
UPDATE: Disney isn’t cool about it but Discovery-Warner is cheering from the bleachers. Which means Discovery-Warner is fluttering its lashes at Apple, hoping for big tech buy-up themselves. If Apple is staying in the entertainment business and is in the market for a film library and studio, then HBOmax is a better fit for them than Disney would have been.
LAST
Marvel to buy DC
My instinct says there is nothing to this, but it already said that about the Powerpuff Girls and the MGM sale.
Discovery-Warner has a new turn-around CEO, so yeah, maybe. Those guys like to make their presence felt.
The sale of DC would help reduce what I suspect is a substantial debt burden that AT&T would be placing on the new spin-off company. And it’s not like it’s been some kind of cash cow for Warner. Bad Reboot has been given the keys to DC films and if Walter Hamada signed the kind of horrifying corporate enslavement contract that Les Moonves did for Secret Hideout (AKA Little Bad Reboot), I could understand if a new CEO, one who can tell good from garbage, would dump the whole franchise if he could get some decent money for it.
That’s the problem with this rumor. Where would Disney get the money? They are up to their eyes in debt. And while this wouldn’t be a gigantic acquisition, I don’t think Disney can afford another $4 billion in debt. Not after the brutal 2nd quarter they just had. In addition, Marvel is swamped with its own superheroes. They don’t seem to know what to do with what they’ve got now, let alone deal with the entire DC pantheon.
My suspicion is there might be something to this rumor, but Disney isn’t the buyer. The only guy with this much ready cash in his pocket is Rupert Murdoch and his new company is starving for franchises.
We’ll see what happens.
SECOND UPDATE: It came out that Bob Iger DID try to buy Warner in 2016. But the deal with AT&T was secretly already in stone. He wasn’t interested in getting back lost Marvel characters, he was just desperate to buy anything and Fox was his second choice.
Okay, I’m done here.
