Velma, if you haven’t heard, is HBO Max’s “re-imagining” of the animated Scooby-Doo TV show. And by “reimagined” I mean “mangled and mutilated to fit the angry, narrow confines of social justice warrior ideology.”
Since I don’t have cable, I can’t go out of my way to watch it for the sake of reviewing it, so let’s let The Critical Drinker take a whack at it:
If that weren’t enough, let’s let Ryan George of Pitch Meeting also take his turn at bat:
The original Scooby-Doo is hardly going to go down in the annals of television as a classic on the order of Hill Street Blues or I Love Lucy, but it was a solid, wholesome kid-vid TV show that made good use of its limited animation budgets to produce solid, fondly remembered shows that the franchise was strong enough to survive decades of tweaks (“with special guest Don Knotts”), soft reboots, a series of unlikely direct to video movies…
…two “meh at best” live action movies, and even inflicting The Vile Abomination on American viewers.
Even apart from the social justice idiocy, throwing away that legacy for derisive belittlement is just wrong. Moreover, these projects never seem to be profitable or even well-received (remember the disasterous Land of the Lost remake with Will Ferrell?). If you don’t treat the source material with a due amount of respect, all you’re doing pissing off generations of people that grew up watching the originals.
This sort of thing is natural meat for The Critical Drinker, who delights in tearing into Social Justice crap. But the pointed Pitch Meeting takedown seems far more significant, as George has never been one to wade in culture war commentary.
Velma seems to be the show that everyone hates.
Tags: animation, Critical Drinker, HBO, Media Watch, Ryan George, Scooby-Doo, Social Justice Warriors, TV, video
Hey I thought the first Scooby Live action was OK. You just have to accept that it’s a parody of itself, and the actors know that.
“all you’re doing pissing off generations of people that grew up watching the originals”.
Gotta get rid of all the “olds”. Old ideas, old customs, old culture, and old habits of mind. Only THEN can we enjoy the Glorious Communist Future in which you will own nothing, and be happy!
You can interpret a lot of what’s going on in modern culture as self-immolation of the creative classes.
Here’s what I think is going to wind up happening, eventually: Most people are going to tire of the crap these people are churning out. The market forces are going to take over, and nobody is going to be buying tickets to the movies or watching the TV shows. They’ll still need entertainment, so what they’ll wind up doing is going to the ChatGPT market and telling an AI what they want to watch/read/hear, followed by said AI generating content for them on the fly. This is going to put a lot of the woke media types out of business. Which is going to happen, no matter what–It’s just a question of what replaces them, because they’re driving their audiences away with the crap they’re producing.
I’m only halfway serious about the AI, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if something like that did happen, with each of us getting our own customized entertainment, and good stuff getting shared. You can already kinda see the outlines of it, with all the game walk-throughs and generated content on YouTube and elsewhere. Some of that stuff is halfway decent; I think that the tools are only going to get more and more accessible and affordable, with someone eventually being able to hand off a written description of what they want for special effects to something like one of the AI illustration programs, and they’ll generate all the necessary background material, even characters.
Not sure where this is going to end, but it will be a different place than these audience-contemptuous types imagine they’re going. What will “woke” do, when people start producing their own content, which will likely be to the order of their own value systems, which won’t be in compliance with the wokists world-views?
You can almost hear the market fractionating as we speak.
What Kirk suggests as a future is, in fact, something already portrayed in Star Trek. Yes, I mean the ‘holodeck’. The holodeck was designed to do just as Kirk says — take a suggestion and from that build an immersive environment in which someone, or a small group of someones, could interact.
Of course, the holodeck always glitched. Always. It demonstrates that even back then, screenwriters had their crutches, be it a holodeck, a phone booth or a police box.
But yes, a holodeck could do exactly as Kirk suggests — unless the elites and wokemeisters gain control and limit your holodeck to only approved content. In which case, we’ll all be interacting with Velma…
Nah. We won’t be intersecting with Velma. We’ll be playing unapproved videogames, watching pre-2010 videos on old CD-players and stuff like that. Or, if they manage to block that folks will start going outside to shoot hoops or play stickball or skateboard, or do other stuff disconnected with electronics.
I don’t thing anything like the Star Dreck holodeck is anywhere near in the offering. What I do think will happen will be that increasingly sophisticated tools like ChatGPT will be available for someone to say things to, things like “Write me some more Dune novels, but the dad did, not that crap the son churns out…”
At that point, the tool will make serious inroads on the writer’s market. T’won’t be pretty, for our creative class. How’d you like to be a “starving artist” in a world where most of what you produce can be put out with the push of a button and a halfway detailed outline? It ain’t here yet, but it will be.
Hell, I kinda wonder about some of the crap that’s on Amazon Unlimited, right now…
Man, we really need an “edit” function around here… There ought to be a “like” there, in between “but” and “the” there at the end of the first paragraph.
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