Blogs and Ends: Special Edition
FIRST
That kid is going to have the best graduation video.
NEXT
Disney is trapped by its own Woke culture. There is a rumor running around that I would grade at a “B” for reliability, that Storm from the X-Men is going to be spliced into Wakanda Forever.
Why the late addition?
Well, the problem Disney has right now is that Marvel has killed another cash cow with Black Panther. Apparently, that decision had been made even before Chadwick Boseman’s condition was known to the company. Disney Marvel is getting screamed at by the third parties over this.
The third parties are movie financiers and the toy companies.
The reason they are upset is because the Black Panther action figures were a huge hit with African American men. The toy companies who do keep a very close watch on projected sales figures based on demographics are very uncool with Disney/Marvel’s decision to not recast Chadwick Boseman.
The African American male toy market is now dead in a ditch so far as Wakanda Forever is concerned.
When Wakanda Forever fails, the press is automatically going to start screaming racist-sexism without any prompting from Disney. I suspect they already have those stories roughed in and ready to go. But that doesn’t put money in the bank.
The problem Disney/Marvel has at this point is that it is too imprisoned by Woke culture to accept the obvious workable solution. They can’t put a heroic Black Man in a movie that is now all about girl power. So, they are going to inject Storm because if you are Woke Disney, it’s the only thing you can let yourself do.
Even if it doesn’t solve the problem, (and it doesn’t) at least you’ve done something even if it isn’t the right thing.
NEXT
G4TV has returned to the grave.
In a move that should not have surprised it’s few remaining employees, Comcast has entombed the G4 brand once more. The aforementioned employees were informed by the Hollywood Reporter that there was no point in showing up to work on Monday. A quick check of their now locked e-mail accounts confirmed it for them.
I’ve gone at length elsewhere about G4’s Pet Cemetery like resurrection. Attack of the Show and X-Play back when they were on cable were light and airy fun. It was the last gasp of collegiate humor for Generation X before we got serious about entering middle age.
Honestly, the very first time I heard this brand had been revived was when Frosk went on her ridiculous rant about how Olivia Munn wasn’t hired to be hot.
Background: Back in the 1990s there was a channel called Tech TV. They did PC product reviews and tech support shows. It was basically a cable version of Linus Tech Tips.
TechTV’s biggest show was X-Play, starring Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb, and it was almost the only gaming review show in existence back then. TechTV got bought up and was retooled as G4. While X-Play was winding down, G4 blew up (sort of) big with Attack of the Show. It was a five-night-a-week, live, high-energy Gen-X popculture nerd fest. And it was defiantly peppered with hot girls in tight dresses, who liked being hot. AOTS launched the careers of Olivia Munn and Chris Hardwick.
The secret of its success was that it looked like everyone on AOTS was having a blast. They weren’t at work; they were getter paid to have fun and you were having fun with them.
However, G4 couldn’t really future-proof itself. It never moved beyond its Generation-X core audience and our kids were getting too old to have that on TV while they were awake. The Millennials went elsewhere for G4s kind of content. Long story short, YouTube ate its lunch. Universal finally pulled the plug on New Year’s Eve 2014. That was the end of G4.
Then a few years ago Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast, gave his useless but good-looking son, Tucker, a hobby business, the Philadelphia Fusion, which is a pro Overwatch team (don’t laugh yet, there is funnier stuff to come). This fell under the new E-sports division of Comcast called Spectacor, and Baby Roberts was its president.
In 2018, Tucker suddenly finds himself in bed with Olivia Munn.
Literally.
Tucker is 31, ten years younger than Olivia, meaning he was in his teens when she first showed up on Attack of the Show, (explaining his interest in her). Olivia is now 41, long past her blinking red palm crystal drop-dead date as a sex kitten actress. If you are an actress and you are older than 38, the only reason you will get hired is to act. Munn can’t do that. The only thing she ever brought to the party was looking hot and there are plenty of barely legal Zoomer girls that can do that better than she can at this point.
Which means that G4 has magic memories for her. It was what made her queen of thirsty nerds. And as it just so happens, her new boytoy’s Daddy’s company owns the long-defunct IP.
Is there any of you who have the slightest doubt that it was her idea to bring back G4?
So, the IP is transferred to Spectacor, and the property starts getting spun back up. In late 2019, Olivia gets tired of pretending she knows anything about gaming and drops Tucker for John Mulaney.
Well, Tucker can’t say, I’ve changed my strategic vision for this company because the bitch dumped me, can he? Daddy’s company has sunk a ton of money into Spectacor, they have built a $50 million arena for the (Overwatch) Philadelphia Fusion. (Now, you can laugh) He has to move forward on G4. Truth be said since Comcast is going in heavy on E-sports, having a dedicated E-sports media company makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense is using an old as fuck badge like G4 to do it. For crying out loud it’s named after a Mac processor that was discontinued the year before YouTube was founded. You want Zoomers as your core audience for E-sports. And if you have fond memories of X-Play you probably also remember when there was music on MTV.
The only thing the G4 nameplate brings to the market is nostalgia value and Zoomers don’t have any unless it’s for Eighties Mall culture. This was fundamentally a bad idea, but it was one that was made so much worse by hiring on Adam Sessler.
Sessler is the worst kind of Gamma male, he’s a Gamma in the Will Wheaton mode. I call it, The Forgotten King.
When X-Play was a big thing in gaming, Sessler had a high enough status that he felt he was no longer a ‘Secret King’ but a ‘Secret King Now Revealed to All.’ Sadly for him, the source of his ego boost was completely external. He had no control at all over the thing that created his standing. And when his status vanished completely, he became a Forgotten King. A regular Gamma can tell himself he’ll be somebody someday, but a Forgotten King has had his day in the sun and ultimately, he knows it. Sessler turned into one of the most toxic internet trolls out there. He has come to hate gaming and gaming culture. Twitter was his only source of ego inflation for years, which pretty much says how fundamentally little he brings to the party.
The man is a soul poisoned, revolting little goblin.
He got let go a couple of weeks ago and is now screaming about people’s mothers on Twitter and challenging them to IRL fights that he has no intention at all of showing up to.
While I wasn’t aware of G4’s return from the dead a few people were and the numbers, while way too low to be sustainable did indicate some potential for growth.
This gets us back to co-host Frosk’s meltdown which sank half of G4’s audience. Mostly, she was squealing about sexism in gaming. Whenever you hear that one getting brought up you know that isn’t the real issue. It never has been.
The real issue is that Frosk is pretty much retarded. That was what she was mad about. She doesn’t know some very basic stuff about the gaming world. She allegedly got bounced out of the League of Legends community because she was biased for one region and pushed misinformation as fact. This is a pattern with her. Part of her problem is that she is completely surrounded by Gamma Males who won’t correct her when she has a bad take, so she runs with it. But the other is she just doesn’t know a lot of baseline information on games and gaming culture. She stated with perfect conviction that Microsoft was going to buy out Bioware, a company that is wholly owned by EA. It’s not an indie developer but she seems to think it is.
The new G4 was heavily influenced by people who were so useless they had to become professional leftists when the cable version called it a day.
The truly ridiculous part is they had a very expensive studio in Burbank and this is for YouTube. Even the top tier guys on that media have to work out of their homes and G4TV wasn’t even mid-list. I’m honestly surprised anyone at all was still working there.
It was always a terrible idea.
Sometimes dead is better.
Okay, I’m done here.
