Merry Marvel Movie-going Experience - RTOTD #867

Day 867

So I've gotta just make a public service announcement here. I'll get to it in a moment but I gotta explain why first.

So I saw Thor twice over the past weekend. Once on Friday night and once on Monday night (so I guess maybe it wasn't twice over the weekend but fucking whatever. Close enough) and in both cases, the theater was packed. The audience loved it. They laughed, they gasped, they cheered for Stan Lee's obligatory cameo. All-in-all, a typical Merry Marvel Movie-going Experience.

But when the credits hit, almost 1/3 of the theater got up and made their way to the exits. Most of them made it out the doors before being stopped. The mid-credits scene hit. A number of them stopped, as if having a moment of clarity for an Alzheimer's patient and thinking "oh yeah, Marvel does this, don't they?" and standing in the runway exit or at the bottom of the stairs, they stood and watched. And when it ended, they continued to make their way out.

I was flabbergasted. Yes, I just used that word in a non-ironic way. But these people just left. I could only shake my head.

A few noticed that other people still hadn't even made an attempt to move. They looked at us and paused and sat back down. They were having an epiphany. They conversed and waited but as the credit screen scrolled past the soundtrack credits and the thank-you to Technicolor for existing or whatever that shit is at the end, they looked up and then it happened. The post-credits scene. Because Marvel ALWAYS HAS A POST-CREDITS SCENE!

This was a movie that was filled with people that have most likely seen most or all of the previous Marvel movies. The new Thor movie is essentially the 3rd movie in a Thor trilogy with Thor and Avengers making up the other 2. So by now, the Marvel formula is pretty obvious to most of us. But for some reason, people still don't get it. And here's where we get to the public service announcement:

To everyone that ever goes to see a Marvel movie:  Look for the fattest bearded white guy you can see and don't get up until he does. Likely one with glasses and/or a comic book t-shirt on. They know when the movie is actually over. Trust them. Let them guide you. I know this is racist and probably fat-ist or whatever. And definitely a case of profiling. But guess what? The fat bearded white guy that looks like he hasn't ever gotten laid and is probably a geek knows when the comic book movie is over and when there's more to come still.

So just trust them. Do you really have anywhere else you REALLY need to be anyway?

Farewell, Blue & Gold - RTOTD #863

Day 863

Turns out my Blockbuster story from last week had great timing. The company announced yesterday that they were closing their remaining 300-ish stores around the country.

Man, this is just the next step as media stores all die.

First it was the record stores in the 90's and early 00's. Places that were dedicated record shops? They didn't last. The places that managed to transition from the record to the cassette to the cd didn't realize that the end-result of that evolution of music delivery was going to be the one that didn't include them. Digital. Big box stores like Best Buy that used media as loss-leaders to sell you a tv or a stereo were the first step. Napster and shit really put a beating on the record store even when 56k and DSL were the high-end of data delivery. The iPod and iTunes put another nail into them. Amazon and other non-traditional options for physical media really hurt them. And once we were all putting thousands of songs on our phones instead of needing to carry a 2nd device for music? That's when it was just a matter of shoveling the dirt back into the grave. It was dead.

And in a lot of ways? That's really quite sad. Obscure music becomes harder to find when you aren't thumbing through a row of import albums or checking out labels and release charts. Or in my case, checking the stuff out as I stocked the shelves in highschool. That kinda always made it easier. And as a consumer now? Finding "that guy" at the record store that knew every new album out and would recommend you this new thing that nobody else has heard about (like I spent most of late 99 and early 2000 doing with MUSE) and it would be killer? That guy doesn't exist anymore. You can't get that from iTunes. They don't have a "the record store guy" app or whatever to recommend shit. They just have their typical label shills that pay for ad space.

It was only a matter of time before it happened to movies. No, streaming hasn't yet reached the quality or market availability yet to truly be a viable alternative. There's far too many portions of the country that are missing the infrastructure and data speed yet to really replace dvds and blurays with streaming entirely. And while Redbox is great, it just doesn't replace a Blockbuster or whatever for old movies. A Redbox has no selection at all if the movie isn't under 2 months old. And adding games to them now just gives it less space for movies.

Good luck if you wanna watch Star Wars tonight and don't own it. Redbox doesn't have it. Netflix will give it to you in 3 days, but that's not tonight. None of the streaming services have it (amazon, Netflix, etc) and the only way you can buy it online is in the "all of the movies" bundle on iTunes and the like. At least before, if you wanted to watch Star Wars or Indiana Jones, you could head out the trusty Blockbuster and rent it.

So I guess those of you that want to rent it can pirate it and delete it. And those of you that live in the sticks and it'll take 4 days to download it from a torrent site? I guess you can make a trip to Walmart and buy it. But that kinda defeats the purpose of "renting it for $3 for 3 nights" thing. But that's about it for your choices.

So RIP Blockbuster. Your lack of a porn section and constant need to impulse sell candy and DirecTV will not be missed, but your ability allow us to watch some random 80's comedy or bad Wesley Snipes 90's action movie at our leisure will certainly be. Farewell, original blue & gold signage that BestBuy kinda stole. You will maybe sorta be missed. But you could always just make your not-Redbox machines at Sheetz like 3x the size and give us all of that selection again. We won't complain.

Yet another step down the road to a virtual-media only future where nothing is manufactured and all media is consumed and stored digitally. But if you people fuck with bookstores & comic book stores and make them disappear too, I'm going to start hunting people down. Books and comics are still infinitely better when consumed in physical format. I can sacrifice a tiny bit of audio or video quality to never have to wipe down another CD or DVD or get up to change discs. But if you think I'm going to live with not being able to file my comics in long boxes ore look at my bookshelf and hold and smell and see a real book with real pages and ink on them, well you've got another thing coming, fuckers!

Nananananananananana... Affleck!! - RTOTD #830

Day 830

Seriously? Ben Affleck? As Batman?

Is his suit going to have nipples? Did I fall into a time-warp where the same guys casting for Joel Schumacher's Batman movies that gave us George Cloony and Val Kilmer (pre-fatass) as Batman never got fired? Cause it seems like it.

Or maybe Kevin Smith is going to direct it and it's ACTUALLY going to be the real Bluntman & Chronic movie. Cause that's something that I could maybe get behind.

Or maybe it's going to be the most fucked up genre twisting meta bullshit ever.

For instance:

Superman from the movie that came out this summer somehow ends up inside that Christopher Reeves Superman movie where he fights the nuclear not-superman guy that Lex Luthor built and throws missles into the sun. But it turns out that that is actually in the same universe as the Adam West Batman. So when he runs away from that mullet-wearing fake Superman guy and runs into Adam West Batman it's actually Ben Affleck in the costume because why the fuck not? And when BatFleck falls asleep, he dreams that he's actually Adam West from the tv show. And the Adam West Batman tv show is actually US watching HIS dreams that he projects into our reality because it turns out that he's REALLY superman that's been mind-switched with Batman and he's got all the weird Silver-Age Superman powers like super knitting and that chest cellophane thing he used in the one movie and the little tiny miniture superman that can pop out of his palm and fight on the microscopic level. Dream projection into tv waves is one of those Silver-Agey powers.

And in the end, Affleck ends up as Superman and that guy from Man of Steel finds out the he was just a fever dream of Silver-Age Superman who is also Adam West Batman. And somehow Brainiac is responsible.

Dum dum dum......

Seriously... this is going to be a bigger disaster than Daredevil and Elektra combined. DC/Warner Brothers really doesn't have a fucking clue what it's doing, does it? Shit, this is a worse idea than Greedo shooting first.

Why Is Captain Power Standing On My Desk? - RTOTD #821

Day 821

I really wish that the 1980's would have saved some of it's boatload of comic-book-like fictional cartoon and tv show and action figure characters for the 90's. It would have helped prevent the "everything is a fucking anime!" thing that's been going on for the past 15-20 years.

I only thought about that because I came across an old toy that had as a kid back in the 80's. Captain Power. Does anyone even remember captain power? I only have a vague recollection of him but he's about eh same size as a GI Joe, so I think I let him be the awesome future soldier that would come back to prevent COBRA from taking over the world in the epic basement warfare scenarios that I would often orchestrate on a regular basis.

I'm pretty certain he was one of those "let's make up a character and then make a toy of that character and then make a tv show of that character so that we can use one to sell the other but not really certain which one sold which one" things that happened all the fucking time in the 80's. And to be honest, he got lost in the shuffle of the heyday of the Transformers and GI Joe and MASK and a dozen or 4 other tv/action figure-hybrid sales/rating model marketing campaigns of the same era.

And then the whole model died on the vine for a little while and was replaced by a comic book speculator bubble. Not because of lack of quality (though the quality did certainly suffer) but because of over saturation. Or maybe those reasons go hand-in-hand. Mattel and Hasbro and ToyBiz and all the other ones kept pumping new material out into the market but didn't really give any creative behind it. Honestly, it wasn't much different than 90's comics. It was "hey, this shit looks cool that I just drew/designed... let's make a new franchise" and instead of investing the time to actually build that franchise, they just kinda say "oh look, I drew another cool thing. Another franchise!" and on and on until there were 74923953 new fucking franchises without a single coherent story behind them.

And that's where it all fell on it's face. GI Joe and Transformers in the 80's were huge hits because someone actually told some stories with them before moving on to the next 83 franchises being launched that week. And once there was a significant number of stories out there for people to reference and kids to enjoy, the sales just kept going.

Although a business plan of "grow it every quarter to sell people another half dozen versions of Snake Eyes" is one I still don't understand. A kid still isn't dumb and can't play with all (legitimately) 66 different costume variant versions of Snake Eyes at the same time. He only plays with 1 because there's only 1 Snake Eyes. And 1 Duke. and 1 Road Block. No matter how cool that other version of him is, they still know inherently that they can only use 1 of them in that particular battle.

But I got off onto a tangent there. The point I was making was that the other 9234945921 franchises like Captain Power that were launched at the same time didn't really HAVE any story. They had a little bit, but at least with Captain Power, I was always confused at how it was supposed to work. As a kid and now.

See, the thing that happened was that you'd get this action figure and with the toy came a VHS tape. And some sort of gun thing. The action figure had a hole right thru his chest and you were supposed to do this thing where you'd play the VHS tape and stick the gun into the hole on the back of his chest so that it would shoot out thru the clear plastic window in the front. And then the VHS tape was supposed to be some sort of video game.

Except that even as a 7 year old kid I realized "something here doesn't make sense... it's a VHS tape. Even if you don't play the "game" and just press play on it, the same things show up on the screen. The same video game "blam" noises happen and nothing changes whether you play the game or not. Because it's a vhs tape and it's not fucking interactive. And it couldn't be. You can't do a choose-your-own-adventure VHS tape without fast forwarding to certain times or changing to another VHS tape but that's essentially what this was. Or what it was portraying itself as.

And see... when even a 7 year old can tell that you're insulting their intelligence, that's a bit of a problem. And your "franchise" is going to fail.

I guess I got off topic a little just because I got into a little rant. But what I'm saying was that there were like 9000 of these fucking things created in a few year span that all fell flat on their face because there wasn't enough thought put into it ahead of time. They totally could have tried holding onto a couple of those ideas for the 90's when they totally fucking lost any ounce of creativity. And just imported Anime cartoons and made a bunch of confusing card games.

Then again, now that I think about it... how the fuck did Duck Hunt work? It wasn't VHS, but still... that's going to bug me now.

The Importance Of A Physical Thing - 810

Day 810

So I've realized something: I read a lot more when I have physical books than when I just have stuff thrown onto my iPad. And while it's a lot less convenient to carry around, physical books still have a draw for me that ebooks don't.

Now, that's not to say I have an issue with ebooks by any stretch. I love that I can take hundreds or more books with me anywhere I go with just a thing that I can (kinda tightly) fit into my back pocket. I love that there's a lot more options for interactingness, which is a word I think I just made up, in ebooks over physical books. I can only imagine how fucking badass a Choose Your Own Adventure book could be in ebook format. It' could be truly limitless. I love how  an author can update a book after it's published and, as long as they're just editing the same item on the Kindle store or iBooks store or whatever, you just gotta update the version you have and all of a sudden, major edits just pop up on your device without having to go and buy a new copy.

Not to mention how you can integrate media of all sorts into an ebook that is just not possible with a physical book. It's great. Want a certain song playing in the background or to set a mood with media instead of words? You can do that with an ebook when it's not really an option for a physical book.

But there's still something about holding  a book in your hands. Smelling the pages. Feeling the texture. Feeling how much or how little you have left to read. Flipping from page to page. That's something that you can't do with an ebook.

Or setting them up on a shelf or in a box with dozens of other books. With an ebook, it's just another file in a whole folder filled with them.

Having it staring you in the face when you put it down on the end table and it tempting or demanding you to pick it back up and finish it. There's none of that constant reminder when you've got an ebook on your tablet or phone or kindle. There's no taunting of a book cover that says "fucking read me, asshole! You're not done yet!" the way there is with the physical book.

And that's not to mention that sometimes you don't WANT a different version of a book that's been updated. Sometimes there's something refreshing or quaint about the little mistakes or incompleteness of the original version. Like a first edition. The oldness of the pages or for truly antique books, the idiosyncrasies of the original printer that make it unique.

I don't know... it's why I'm always torn and why I often wish that Amazon or Barnes & Noble or whoever would do something like Hollywood has done with their system. Where you get a download code for a digital copy when you buy a new dvd, but for books. So when you order a book from Amazon or something, it automatically shows up on your kindle account so you can start it now while you wait for the physical copy to arrive from the retailer. That way, when you're at home, you can read the physical copy but when you've got to go somewhere but want to carry the book with you, you just throw your kindle in your pocket or bag or car and you don't have to carry a bunch of books around with you.

It's weird that the Comic book industry is the only one to have even kinda figured this out yet. And even their system is imperfect. But it's getting there. And maybe one day in the future, we won't have to balance our desire to carry our things with our desire to actually own physical things.

DESTROY - RTOTD #803

Day 803

I've been trying to figure out what Douglas Murray reminds me of for a week or so now. Last night, I discovered the answer.

*yes, this is a combination hockey & comic book joke. Many of you won't get it if you don't watch Pens game and/or have never read an X-Men comic or watched the cartoon in the 90's. But fuck you, it's funny to me.

Utility Belt - RTOTD#787

Day 787

So when is the last time Batman actually USED his utility belt? Except for some bat-arangs that I don't know how they fit in there, and that grappling hook gun.

In fact, what the fuck do ANY superheroes keep in all the pouches and pockets they have on their costume? I mean, you MIGHT need like 1 pocket for a couple bucks and a pack of smokes, but you're a costumed hero... You sure as fuck don't have your ID or credit cards. I don't think Citi Bank will issue a card for "Spider-Man". Well, maybe. Maybe that explains the Wall Street collapse? The Avengers and FF and X-Men decided "fuck it... We're done paying our credit card bills. What are they gonna do? Sue us?"

I would totally have grenades in my utility belt. And a flask. And some cigars & a lighter. Maybe my phone? But I think with my luck, one punch from a rampaging hulk and even Gorilla Glass won't stand up to that.

So seriously... What the fuck does Batman have in there? Even superman has a couple pockets on his belt. So unless he's folding up his Clark Kent clothes like super small in a vacuum bag, I don't see what the fuck Superman needs a single pocket for...

Ok... Comic rant over.