Here’s a nice, short rant from Paul Chato (who I’d not heard of before) on why Disney’s social justice re-imagining of classic franchises fail: It’s not just their woeful ignorance of their own franchise, it’s the woeful ignorance of the vaster connected universe of fandom/geekdom/nerdom.
Put a bunch of us nerds together, even complete strangers, into a room, well, Heaven help you, and soon we’ll be talking about Cowboy Bebop or Akira Kurosawa, or NES, Atari, ColecoVision, Ultraman, Kirby, Adams, McFarland, Studio Ghibli, second breakfasts, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Fireball XL5, Scooby-Doo, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Matrix (only the first one), Terminator, Blade Runner, Aliens, Herge, Miller, Robert E. Howard, Harryhausen, Lasseter, good scotch. Has anyone heard Kathleen Kennedy talk about any of those things? Of course not, and I can hear you laughing.
That’s a pretty good name check list, though I’d add Robert A. Heinlein and H. P. Lovecraft (among others).
But it’s an interesting point: Social justice showrunners are woefully ignorant of vast swathes of knowledge held by the fandoms they hold in such withering contempt.
Tags: Disney, Kathleen Kennedy, Marvel, Media Watch, science fiction, Social Justice Warriors, Star Trek, Star Wars, video
Yes. They hate smart people. Smart people are hard to control. They’d prefer more imports who swallow the latest capesh*t fiasco and leave the theater like a satisfied retard ready to pay double for sequels 7, 8 and 9.
Interestingly enough they want to do the same thing with the electorate. The great replacement is real, for theaters and the nation.
The handwriting was on the wall with Starship Troopers. That should have, and could have been a major movie franchise, but they put it into the hands of an avowedly anti-American director who didn’t even read the source material for comprehension. His characterization of the novel’s social ideas and ideals as “fascist” were trite and entirely delusional. On top of that, they didn’t even try to include the things that would have been really cinematic, like the drop ships and the powered armor. I understand that the reality was that they borrowed the title and some of the background material to graft over a “bug movie” they already had half-way written.
The idiocy of it all was that I think that if someone had really given it an honest try, they could have made a movie true to the source material that might have been a very successful movie. But, they didn’t bother.
The real problem with the majority of these people is that they’re mostly morons who’ve been educated well past their actual level of intelligence. They’re not really original thinkers; they’re indoctrinated, not educated. They don’t actually understand the source material, nor do they really appreciate it for what it is. They’re actually not the geeks; they’re more like the grinds, the kids who did “all the right things” like joined the clubs, took part in the school functions, and got themselves elected to the student council. They’re conformists, and they resent the fact that they don’t really understand what they’re working with, and truly loathe the people who do. Most of them are poseurs, pure and simple; they’ve been imposters all of their lives, and they damn well know it. So, they destroy what they can out of rage and pique.
Most of Hollywood isn’t there for the art; they’re there for the cheap and easy access to sex that playing at art gets them. It’s a cavalcade of perversion, and always has been. If you go back and look, a really large component of why they took off from where Edison had control over them was that Edison was a bit of a moralistic prig, who didn’t want them wrecking his image with their off-camera shenanigans. Which was why they established Hollywood as far as they could get from Menlo Park…
The whole milieu is an elaborately curated den of perversion, and always has been. Just go back and look at how they carefully created all the images for the old stars, the things they covered up in the name of sales. They only reined in a little when it looked like they might get banned, and then that only lasted until they’d eroded everyone’s sensibilities to the point where they could do away with the codes.
A huge mistake was made when we put the power of the movie industry into the hands of these people, the majority of which should have been imprisoned for moral degeneracy and the corruption of the young lives that they purposefully lured into their stage-lit Sodom and Gommorah. I’m not a huge moralist, but the industrial scale of the things that Hollywood has done down the years is flatly disturbing.
I used to correspond with someone who was a part of that whole milieu, and it was a fascinating insight into the nightmare that is Hollywood. The crap that was related to me, especially about the sexual exploitation of child stars? Holy crap… The things you heard from Cory Feldman really only cover the tip of the iceberg. There’s more and worse crap than we’ve heard going on, to a really sickening degree. You wonder why all those actors and actresses are so f*cked in the head? Yeah. There are plenty of reasons… I’m reasonably certain from details related to me that my informant wasn’t lying to me in any way, shape, or form.
Seriously horrific stuff, in a lot of ways.
The actual wonder is not that they’re destroying the franchises that they’ve taken over, the real wonder is that any of those franchises ever got built in the first damn place.
Oh, and don’t get me started on the weirdness that is prevalent in the science-fiction realm, either. Heinlein was a great entertainer and a hell of an entertaining writer with some provocative ideas, but the man was also more than slightly aberrant in some regards. He was at least on the periphery of the Marion Zimmer-Bradley and Walter Breen BS, and when you learn that fact, then make the connection to all of his free-love craziness…? You really have to wonder. I suspect that if he’d been allowed to fly his freak flag early on, without the strictures imposed by the “squares” back in the day, we’d have seen some seriously bizarre stuff coming out of him. Either that, or his health issues in later life destroyed the self-censoring part of his mind. Who the hell knows, though? I lost a chunk of my childhood wonder when I learned about the whole Breen thing, and Heinlein’s almost certain knowledge of at least part of the situation, which he did nothing that we know about. Disillusioning, to be certain.
“The idiocy of it all was that I think that if someone had really given it an honest try, they could have made a movie true to the source material that might have been a very successful movie. But, they didn’t bother.”
No, they didn’t. I still hope someone does one day. Like you I think a faithful adaption of Starship Troopers could a big hit, much like Band of Brothers turned a niche work into a huge miniseries.
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For me, the most interesting parts of Starship Troopers was the Basic Training and the OCS as well as the scenes with his History and Moral Philosophy instructor in High School. A movie should have explored Johnny’s maturation from a no-nothing kid to a really good officer and leader.
By the way, I would add Asimov to the list.
Paul Chato is a gem. Worth a follow on YouTube and Twitter. I think he’s been red-pilled (IMO) by all the nuttiness, and informs with the passion of a convert.
The fundamental flaw with the movie was that the arguments that Heinlein was making about citizenship went completely over their heads. The whole “franchise for service” thing was what they glommed on to, and because that offended their sensibilities and because they didn’t actually read the book for comprehension, they missed the rest of the actual argument, which was essentially that something you get for free isn’t worth very much to you. That was the heart of his basic argument, vis-a-vis civic duties. The military stuff was just the romantic window-dressing he was using to sell his argument.
If you actually read the damn book for comprehension and thought about it, there were clear markers that you could earn the franchise via any form of public service… That the Federal system would have to find work suitable, even if you were a blind paraplegic: They’d have you inventorying the fuzz on caterpillars for a couple of years, in order to ensure you were invested enough in things to make the sacrifice…
Hollywood missed all of that, entirely. As do most of the “Only veterans should get the vote…” lot, who love that idea ‘cos they happen to be manly veterans…
Vast majority of people read Starship Troopers and completely missed the mass of the points Heinlein was making, and mistook the sizzle for the steak. Which was sad, really… It’s a far deeper book than most realize.
I watched (with growing horror and causing much annoyance due to me speaking loudly to the screen along the lines of “that’s not how that works”) the fist season of “Star Trek: Disco”, and the main takeaways for me were 1) The writers and showrunners and producers never watched any ST, so multiple instances of just basically incorrect tech-canon (not even the mushroom-powered-hyperdrive, basic stuff like interstellar distance transportering) stayed in all the way to broadcast, and 2) They all also never interacted with any military-ish rise through a rank structure organization, so the Mikey Spock character could get brought aboard by her adopted dad right out of Vulcan-school to get handed over and hired as the first officer of a Federation Starship, and then later spout speeches along the lines of “when I took the job of first officer” as if she got the gig via answering a LinkedIn post, instead of the normal way, going to the academy and starting off as an ensign who got sent to Engineering for a container of 1d10t lube and a left handed hyperspanner.
They didn’t know about any of that geek stuff, and didn’t care that they didn’t know, because anything they didn’t know was not worth knowing, and their job was to enlighten not entertain.
And from reports, any of the production crew, some of whom had worked on prior Trek productions, who tried to point out those canonical problems got fired for being difficult.
Chato has talked about this before, and he’s right on: The showrunners and their writers room all could not care less about the existing fan culture. In their view fandom is all bad people anyway, so if they can’t be redeemed enough by the sermons that fill in the space between the lens flares they are not worth thinking about.
And that’s how you kill off an IP franchise worth huge piles of money.
Starship Trooper movie was an unbought Verhoeven script about kids coming of age under Nazi rule during WWII. After pitching the thing for years with no buyers he shelved it, then after being successful elsewhere someone on his staff brought him a super cliff-notes version of the RAH book, which the RAH estate was willing to license, and he had minions take his script and wrap it with bits and pieces of the book.
Verhoeven has proudly stated he never read the book at all.
There was also a “bugs in space” movie lurking somewhere in the background, from what I’ve read.
Verhoeven is the worst sort of craptastic director. If you actually read the source material that his reputation-making movie Soldier of Orange was based on, you’d be left looking at what was put up on the screen and thinking “Jesus wept, but he missed 90% of the real story, here…”, and managed to turn it into a very left-wing polemic. The actual guy it was based on was fascinating; he was a war correspondent in Finland during the Winter War, had written a best-selling book about his travels as a hobo in the United States before the war, and on and on. He was not the character portrayed by Rutger Hauer, at all.
LOL. The Starship Troopers discussion is a perfect example of what Chato is talking about. Love it.
The real problem with Starship Troopers was having Denise Richards, but no Denise Richard’s nude scenes.
Well, and the plot. But still…
I will respectfully dissent on the Starship Troopers shade. I was a fan of the book from a young age and I knew what I was getting into as a fan of Verhoeven’s Robocop. At first disorientating because it wasn’t following the book in many ways, I adjusted my appreciation as the newsreels hit. It’s a WW2 propaganda movie. I loved it. It was smart and clear. Even genius. I didn’t bother with any of the sequels.
Verhoeven didn’t make Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. I would still love to see the definitive Heinlein Starship Troopers movie. But I would say Verhoeven’s movie holds up. It didn’t make money (although maybe it has subsequently and it has movie cred) because it went just to the line on satire without wrapping that line around your throat. People don’t like to be confused.
Heinlein’s actual book was a candy-coated rumination on civic duty and citizenship.
Verhoeven’s movie was just eye-candy, and eye-candy that missed many of the opportunities presented by the text he raped. Can you imagine the cinematic potential of showing the actual “drop” sequences, delivering powered armor from orbit, and then showing Mobile Infantry moving through the Skinny city in that first opening sequence of the book?
Yeesh. Woulda cost a fortune in special effects, but… What a lost opportunity.
@Doofus,
Somehow, your post showed up out of sequence, and I missed it.
I agree with you about the really interesting bits in the book being in the background sections, well away from the “sexy” bits with powered armor and bugs. Heinlein did a lot of good with those pieces, and it’s frightening how prescient he was about the social decay elements he worked in. Although, he does show some hope in terms of people regaining common sense at some point after the fires went out…
I would also have to question placing Asimov on a pedestal. That was another seriously aberrant individual in his personal life, and while it should probably be looked at separately from his work, I don’t think it was at all accidental that his son was caught with the up-to-then largest cache of child porn in history. Nor, that said son was let off due to his connections, by none other than Mueller the sainted FBI official who also let Whitey Bulger run amuck… Which is something to think about.
One of the things I keep running into with a lot of the “artistic types” is just how “off” they are from normal people. It’s almost like you can’t find anyone with true artistic talent or merit without discovering a horror show in their personal lives…
Which is disturbing as hell. I mean, the way it looks to me, the more I look into things? You don’t get good art or entertainment from staid, boring people who live lives of quiet virtue. The artistic types all seem to have demons driving them, one way or another…
Which is one hell of a disturbing thought.
Paul Chato is awesome! He was one of the four who were the Frantics. He was Mr Canoehead. Check out their tv show Four On The Floor, all available on YouTube. Rick Green was one of the masterminds behind the Red Green show.
@Michael Puttre,
If Verhoeven and his producers didn’t want to make Heinlein’s movie, then they damn well should have made their own and called it something else.
There is something seriously creepy about people that do that sort of thing, which is crawl into the corpus of someone else’s work and then reanimate it with their own ideas, which is almost always because their own are so bad and so nasty. I’ve yet to see one of these “re-interpretations” that wasn’t fundamentally disturbing, whether it was that deal where they “re-imagine” Winnie the Pooh as a horror movie or any of the other zombified properties they’ve effectively stolen and then polluted.
It’s particularly egregious when it was something like Starship Troopers that had an important message to go along with it. Which, admittedly, nearly everyone else has managed to breeze right on by.
I was seriously shocked, once upon a time, upon discovering that while the Marine Corps had it on their reading list, at least one of the guys who lectured on it and had study notes available seemed to be more focused on the military innovation and training aspects than the lessons on citizenship I thought more important. I got done reading the notes he had put out for it, and I wanted to drive to 29 Palms, find his ass, and ask if his version of the book had deleted all of the “duties of a citizen” scenes, or something…
Verhoeven wanted to make a movie mocking WWII propaganda films? Fine; there’s plenty of other material, out there, God knows. I mean, Taika Waititi did just fine finding something to make JoJo Rabbit from in Christine Leunens’ Caging Skies, which remained true to the source material. Or, perish the thought, he could have written something entirely new, himself.
As it was, the movie version of Starship Troopers was an excresence, an act of deliberate vandalism performed by a true philistine. There were, despite Heinlein’s usual foibles, a lot of important things said in that book, many of them absolutely pertinent to today’s sadly diminished world. The current squalor in the streets of our major cities would have fit right in with his description of the pre-war conditions prevalent before the world war that led to the formation of the Federation.
Like I said, a lot of people miss what I think is the real message of that novel. Perhaps, even Heinlein himself…
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What Michael R said.
This entire comment thread proves the point of the video its commenting on.
Should any of the Disney showrunners or writers or directors stumble upon this thread, they likely wouldn’t have any idea what the discussion is about.
“Who’s this Heinlein fellow they keep mentioning?”
While it reeks of “No true Scotsman…”, I think the majority of the people running things like Disney are the same sort of dipshits I remember from high school that were “on the make” and doing things like “Future Business Leaders of America”. They were objectively setting themselves up as the managerial types, even then. And, they were not in any way qualified, other than by ambition.
In other words, they’re all variations on a theme of Tracy Flick, Reese Witherspoon’s character in Election. That sort of fake personality is a definite type, and once you’ve encountered them the first time and recognized them for what they are, they’re pretty hard to miss. They infest our culture, and the idiots currently running Disney and other institutions into the ground are typical of the type. They mouth the forms, but really know nothing of the realities about anything they seek to “manage” into the grave.
I thought the CGI animated “Roughnecks” was a much better adaptation of the characters’ stories, and it seemed like they toned down most of the fascist rhetoric, as well as told more interesting story arcs. Being able to introduce truly alien characters instead of actors with prosthetic foreheads was a plus in my opinon as well. I’m really not surprised that it didn’t succeed as well as it should, and I’m glad I managed to buy all the DVDs in the series before it went away.
@Kirk
“That sort of fake personality is a definite type, and once you’ve encountered them the first time and recognized them for what they are, they’re pretty hard to miss.”
Spotlight Rangers. Anyone who’s served is very familiar with the type.
I always called them “careerists”.
Primary identifying feature? Their incessant cries of “It will be good for my career!!!”
Frankly, I’d like to take anyone who says things like that, or who has elaborate “I love me” walls set up in their offices out to the range to serve as either tamping on cratering charges or live pop-up targets. The mentality is utterly corrosive to anything good in the military.
Actually, I think that it’s definitely pathologic; these are the scum that turned the awards system into a merit badge scam, rendering everything shy of the Medal of Honor basically meaningless because of the politicization.
A lot of art training used to be about the craft and moral underpinnings of art, as well as the business side from mentors — so that art became a steadying influence that supplemented law, religion, scholarship, et al.
This is no longer the case, which is why creative types go so far astray. The mentors are more like groomers.
I blame a lot of it on the way they have, to coin a term, “academized” everything. When they start offering college degrees in something, put a fork in it, it’s dead.
We’ve put far too much of a gap in between the practitioners and the theorists, I fear.
As was said, “The difference between theory and practice is smaller in theory than it is in practice”
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