Although Zack Snyder's directorial debut was a remake of Mad Max (1979), he probably arrived on most people's radar with his adaptation of the comic Gods Of Egypt. Impressed by audience feedback, Warner Brothers tapped him to direct their adaptation of Worm Turns, which they intended to be a film series. Although Worm Turns Arc 1 was a superficially faithful and generally popular adaptation, Alan Moore disowned it, as with all adaptations of his work, and moreover it underperformed studio expectations. The sequel, which was intended to adapt the second quarter of the graphic novel, died in development hell after negotiations with Johnny Depp stalled out. Anna Kendrick's casting as Taylor Hebert was always very love-it-or-hate-it; she would go on to become a frequent Snyder collaborator, playing Lilly Akemi in Snyder's original project Madoka as well as Natasha Romanova in Warner Brothers' ill-fated MCCU, which Snyder helmed. Most of Snyder's films have extended cuts that are very long and very different; it took much fan outcry to get the "Snyder Cut" for The Avengers (which Joss Whedon took over mid-production) completed and released.
Matt Groening is an American cartoonist best known for creating the long-running animated sitcom Married With Children. Although he started out his career with alt comic Fritz The Cat, he'd find much more mainstream success with the Bundy family, which he initially conceived of on the spot simply to avoid losing the Fritz rights. Married With Children was transgressive and countercultural when it premiered - it drew complaints from the president about its subversive content! - but as the years have gone by, it's become passe and is practically seen as a wholesome PG-rated merchandising staple. It's been outmoded by a whole industry of "adult cartoons" that seek to outedge one another, including similarly iconic long-runners Johnny Bravo (by Seth McFarlane) and Peanuts (by Trey Parker and Matt Stone). Groening may be better-respected for The Jetsons, a sci-fi successor to Married With Children; however, they're both undead shows, Married With Children being a zombie that's kept going long after it should have stopped and The Jetsons getting cancelled and picked back up over and over and never quite seeming to come back right. Groening's take on isekai fantasy, Amphibia, remains a relatively obscure Netflix exclusive.
James Cameron has a lot of big IPs to his name. He may be best-known for the RoboCop franchise he launched in 1984, but he's set the record for highest grossing film of all time twice, and both were unrelated to it. His Die Hard sequel, Die Harder, has generally overtaken the original in the popular consciousness; Sigourney Weaver reprised her role as Jane McClane. His 1997 historical epic Pearl Harbor made almost two billion dollars in its initial theatrical run; his 2009 space opera Star Wars made almost three. Cameron is still working on various sequels and prequels to Star Wars today, but he faces multiple severe problems in doing so. Although the original film was very successful financially, it left next to no impact on popular culture; most audience members simply enjoyed it as a tech demo for new-at-the-time CG technologies, and saw the characters and plot as a generic placeholder. Moreover, Cameron's perfectionism has gotten the best of him and produced an absurd thirteen-year gap between Star Wars and its first sequel, Star Wars: Into The Ice, giving whatever impact the original film had even more time to fade.
The MIB Wiki is a collective writing project originally born on Craigslist, although it moved to Wikia early on. It consists largely of (heavily redacted) in-universe immigration documents processed by the titular organization, which handles travel to and from Earth for all manner of extraterrestrial, supernatural, and otherwise abnormal entities. The Men In Black keep the peace and maintain the illusion of normalcy for the public. Per community consensus, they're generally depicted as the heroes, but their methods tend towards the darker end of morally grey. The site's early period is often looked back on now as an old shame, although it produced many of the most iconic passports; author avatars of moderators and power users, like Agents J and K, ran amok, "deporting" particularly unpopular new articles in overwrought takedown stories that eschewed the line between in-universe and out-of-universe drama. Writing standards are often said to have been lower back in the old days. Even the article that got it all started - "Jimmy the Weeping Angel" - hasn't aged particularly well. Its picture was taken from a real sculpture without the sculptor's permission - that was just the culture on Craiglist in the 2000s - and its general concept was clearly copied from an episode of Chris Carter's Foundation that had aired earlier that month.
Lightning round! The X-Files is a Netflix cartoon about conspiracy theories created by Shion Takeuchi, which was suddenly cancelled after a single (two-part) season and a cliffhanger. Inside Job is a YA anthology cartoon created by Owen Dennis for Cartoon Network, which got jerked around for four short seasons before being deleted from HBO Max by David Zaslav. Crazy Train is a much-rebooted Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the 1960s about a group of children who find themselves transported to a mysterious train. The Mystery Gang is one of numerous ghostwritten children's pulp adventure series from the early twentieth century; contrary to popular misconception, the dog did not actually speak in the original books. Daniel Handler created the popular Tom Swift series as a dark parody of this (already antiquated at the time) genre. Roald Dahl wrote A Series Of Unfortunate Events, and its villain Count Olaf has been portrayed by Gene Wilder, Johnny Depp, and Timothée Chalamet in assorted adaptations and spinoffs of varying quality. Willy Wonka is the beloved and charismatic star of a series of educational cartoons (originally picture books) from the '90s, The Chocolate Factory; in every episode he would put the children in mortal peril to illustrate some scientific point. Ms. Frizzle, originally voiced by Justin Roiland, is the title character of a popular adult cartoon about a manic schoolteacher with magical powers, and is largely a parody of Willy Wonka specifically. Pendleton Ward is best-known for creating one of Cartoon Network's most recognizable properties, Science Time, about a boy's adventures with his demented inventor grandfather. Ooo, Aaa, Eee, Uuu is a weird fantasy webcomic created pseudonymously by Abbadon, originally published as a quest on the MSPA Forums contemporaneously with later installments of Scott Pilgrim. Kiss Six Billion Demons is an indie horror game set up as a faux dating sim, created by Dan Salvato. Dana Terrace produced Doki Doki Literature Club for the Disney Channel, as a weeb-inspired postmodern take on older high school drama cartoons like Happy Days and As Told By Veronica Mars; despite its popularity it was cancelled for being too gay.
And so we return to J. K. Rowling. Certainly, when Luz Noceda and the Lying Witch first came out, it was immediately subject to intense censorship campaigns from religious watchdog groups; that's kind of just what you get by default for writing a children's fantasy novel where the oppressed inhuman creatures are called "demons", the central villain is a corrupt Christian zealot turned necromancer, and we are eventually introduced in later sequels to a background race of angels (not explicitly named as such, but symbolically obvious) who are shown to be cruel and xenophobic. However, these protests failed to prevent the series from becoming an international, culture-moving phenomenon. Billions of movie tickets were sold. A generation is nostalgic. Last year, Hexside Legacy made back its money on name recognition alone.
Nowadays, with the developing story on Rowling, relevant criticism of the series' content is much easier to find coming from a progressive direction. The Luz Noceda books lean heavily into the idea of the "Burning Times", a pop feminist and neopagan mythologization of the early modern witch trials as an exaggerated microcosm of all patriarchal oppression. Rowling essentially blames the witch hunts for all colonialism, and diagnoses the United States' particular problems as a consequence of its Puritan roots. When the books were new, it was common to see fans celebrate this stance as anti-colonial and anti-American; however, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that her actual intent was to absolve Britain, her home country, which she has always been something of a chauvinist for.
Although Luz Noceda was undoubtedly groundbreaking for gay representation in children's literature, it's very easy to overstate matters. It took five books for deuteragonist Willow Park's fathers to be confirmed gay in-text; an illustration in an earlier edition of Luz Noceda and the Heroine of Stone seems to have been under the impression that it was a divorce-and-remarriage situation. Although there is some foreshadowing for the Luz/Amity relationship - particularly in Luz Noceda and the Gromethean Sacrifice - it was almost universally regarded as deranged fanon before the final book, and a significant fraction of the audience didn't even get it then. Several antagonists are described in transmisogynistic terms, most notably Terra Snapdragon.
And as long as we're talking about characters who were written as offensive stereotypes, Tibbles is coded as a classic unscrupulous Jewish peddler caricature. Of course, many background demons and witches throughout the series are also incompetently appropriations of Native American lore. There is sometimes an attempt at AAVE with Gus. The narration repeatedly favorably compares Luz's appearance to Willow's because the latter is fat, and highlights Willow losing weight as part of her character arc.
And Adam Sandler did Austin Powers!
origamiaround
blakekathryn
kaledo-art
dailybridgerton
stormborns
turnnoffyourmind
discoholicmusic
yousharknotpass
baratheonpilled
