My last semester in college I took what was supposed to be a blowoff class: pop culture in the 20th century. It turned out to be hugely instructive and important.
The professor said that Boomers were the first generation to have disposable income as teenagers and be catered to when they were young so it created a strong nostalgic streak. And that nostalgia only got stronger as things became more tumultuous. The professor predicted that Millennials would be even MORE into nostalgia than Boomers because Boomers raised us and the likelihood of even greater socioeconomic instability to come. This was in the Spring of 2009.
Not to write my OWN essay here but movies like the Beetlejuice sequel are fun in theory and will at some point feature AI versions of the original characters so you don’t have to deal with the depressing passage of time but ultimately they won’t be able to recapture what made these movies exciting at the time which was how they fit in and helped define pop culture through their originality.
It’s a total ouroboros. Instead of finding the 2024 version of Tim Burton to make the 2024 equivalent of Beetlejuice we just get a shambling corpse reanimated by harnessing the sweaty desperation of David Zaslav’s need to EBITDA goals or face a golden parachute.
I think about this comic every Christmas, and how we haven't had a new addition to the Christmas music canon since Mariah Carey... a song that turns 30 this year.
On the bright side, we've entered the Auteur-as-Brand era. So in between the dreck, we'll at least be getting coherent, singular visions from high-end directors, writers and publishers. Barbie and Oppenheimer being the exemplars of this last year. Furiosa, Nosferatu, whatever Jordan Peele and Ari Aster are cooking up, plus any releases from A24 and Annapurna. It also means the return of the mid-budget film, which is a blessing. Let the piggies have their slop; I'll be jacking off in the back of the next Challengers screening.
Somewhat relatedly, I've been thinking about the value of experience and institutional knowledge lately. I've seen lots of situations where something just keeps getting stalled because people leave after six months or a year. But I've also run into old guys who just ramble on forever about everything they've seen.
My conclusion is that experience is only useful if you're still willing to do some analysis of how it applies to the present context. Otherwise you're a guy with a box full of old parts who, rather than saying "here's a useful part", just dumps the whole box on your desk thinking that's helpful.
To bring it back to this post, I am less hopeful than you about this:
"the only people old enough to remember this IP are the same ones inclined to be kind of sick of it."
I'm not so sure. Like the old guy with the box of stuff, there seem to be a lot of people who just want to dump out their memories and look at them again, rather than actually considering the experiences in a new light. A more charitable explanation may be that people are afraid of considering old memories in a new light, because what if doing so makes you realize it actually sucked all along? There's no real risk in wading in your own fond remembrances... well, other than it poisons you over time.
Matt Louv had a comedy bit about Boomer counter-cultural types trying to give advice to younger generations as a Star Wars metaphor, not acknowledging that the Death Star and the Empire were like a thousand times more powerful now. "What about the ewoks? Did you do the thing with the logs?" Anyway I'm butchering it but it was a brilliant bit that I think about all the time.
A friend of mine who works in academia said that the worst legacy of the first Trump administration is how it absolutely hollowed out the bureaucratic state (the FDA, the CDC, the EPA, etc) and how much institutional knowledge was lost
Oh, yeah, Reagan began the starve the beast strategy of cutting funding to the bone and then saying, “look at how inefficient this department is! Better privatize it!”
If you want a chilling thought: in 2040 a Democratic President could have just won re-election and Stephen Miller could decide to start the “Donald Trump Legacy Foundation” and Trump becomes the new Reagan.
One frustrating aspect is that nostalgia has gotten lazier. George Lucas didn’t make Flash Gordon, he made Star Wars. Stephen Spielberg didn’t make… I don’t know what serial character was that famous but he made Indiana Jones. Dan Akroyd didn’t make Laurel and Hardy meet the Mummy, he made Ghostbusters.
You don’t have to love Stranger Things but I would 1,000% take something highly influenced by Beetlejuice to a zombie sequel.
If you are going to remake something why not remake a property that had a good concept but poor execution or that could be updated to be better like the way the Thing or the Fly did in the 80’s?
I guess I was naive to think that a CGI Harold Ramis showing up to give a thumb’s up to the production from beyond the grave at the end of the last Ghostbusters would be the most tasteless riff on an eighties movie.
Uh, did that really happen or were you just making a point? Please be the latter.
It was so mindblowingly tasteless that you almost had to respect it. You could imagine a team of suits clapping politely and assuring each other "he would've wanted it this way".
There's also a shot of a Twinkie falling out of the ECTO's glove compartment that holds for about five seconds. Remember that? Remember when he said the thing in the first movie?
This was probably implied in your piece, but the most annoying thing about the Beetlejuice sequel is the very fact that it's called "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" suggests that studio execs have already vetted a third film, with the logically required title of "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"
It made me laugh when they announced The Matrix 5 a couple months back, and everyone posted the clip from Resurrections where Jonathan Groff's character explicitly criticizes this kind of IP mining. (Matrix Resurrections is great in large part because it self-critiques, although that was a property I was happy to see again - as someone on Twitter once noted, we are more forgiving of nostalgic pandering if it's pandering to us.)
I wish we had more stuff like the Brady Bunch and 21 Jump Street movies, or the Saved By The Bell show - revivals that are both loving and disdainful towards the source material.
I would like to think the beetlejuice film was made with people who actually care. And it's okay that a sequel to a film from 30 years ago does get made. But, yeah, this is probably not that.
Beverly Hills Cop - woof. This is like seeing one of those classic rock bands from the 70s/80s that only plays their old stuff and never records anything new.
My last semester in college I took what was supposed to be a blowoff class: pop culture in the 20th century. It turned out to be hugely instructive and important.
The professor said that Boomers were the first generation to have disposable income as teenagers and be catered to when they were young so it created a strong nostalgic streak. And that nostalgia only got stronger as things became more tumultuous. The professor predicted that Millennials would be even MORE into nostalgia than Boomers because Boomers raised us and the likelihood of even greater socioeconomic instability to come. This was in the Spring of 2009.
Not to write my OWN essay here but movies like the Beetlejuice sequel are fun in theory and will at some point feature AI versions of the original characters so you don’t have to deal with the depressing passage of time but ultimately they won’t be able to recapture what made these movies exciting at the time which was how they fit in and helped define pop culture through their originality.
It’s a total ouroboros. Instead of finding the 2024 version of Tim Burton to make the 2024 equivalent of Beetlejuice we just get a shambling corpse reanimated by harnessing the sweaty desperation of David Zaslav’s need to EBITDA goals or face a golden parachute.
I too took a blowoff class in college. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but they sure seem to love me in the steam room at the YMCA.
I think about this comic every Christmas, and how we haven't had a new addition to the Christmas music canon since Mariah Carey... a song that turns 30 this year.
https://xkcd.com/988/
On the bright side, we've entered the Auteur-as-Brand era. So in between the dreck, we'll at least be getting coherent, singular visions from high-end directors, writers and publishers. Barbie and Oppenheimer being the exemplars of this last year. Furiosa, Nosferatu, whatever Jordan Peele and Ari Aster are cooking up, plus any releases from A24 and Annapurna. It also means the return of the mid-budget film, which is a blessing. Let the piggies have their slop; I'll be jacking off in the back of the next Challengers screening.
Somewhat relatedly, I've been thinking about the value of experience and institutional knowledge lately. I've seen lots of situations where something just keeps getting stalled because people leave after six months or a year. But I've also run into old guys who just ramble on forever about everything they've seen.
My conclusion is that experience is only useful if you're still willing to do some analysis of how it applies to the present context. Otherwise you're a guy with a box full of old parts who, rather than saying "here's a useful part", just dumps the whole box on your desk thinking that's helpful.
To bring it back to this post, I am less hopeful than you about this:
"the only people old enough to remember this IP are the same ones inclined to be kind of sick of it."
I'm not so sure. Like the old guy with the box of stuff, there seem to be a lot of people who just want to dump out their memories and look at them again, rather than actually considering the experiences in a new light. A more charitable explanation may be that people are afraid of considering old memories in a new light, because what if doing so makes you realize it actually sucked all along? There's no real risk in wading in your own fond remembrances... well, other than it poisons you over time.
In summary, America is a land of contrasts.
Matt Louv had a comedy bit about Boomer counter-cultural types trying to give advice to younger generations as a Star Wars metaphor, not acknowledging that the Death Star and the Empire were like a thousand times more powerful now. "What about the ewoks? Did you do the thing with the logs?" Anyway I'm butchering it but it was a brilliant bit that I think about all the time.
A friend of mine who works in academia said that the worst legacy of the first Trump administration is how it absolutely hollowed out the bureaucratic state (the FDA, the CDC, the EPA, etc) and how much institutional knowledge was lost
I mean that started with Reagan but absolutely
Trump stole his slogan from
Reagan after all.
Oh, yeah, Reagan began the starve the beast strategy of cutting funding to the bone and then saying, “look at how inefficient this department is! Better privatize it!”
If you want a chilling thought: in 2040 a Democratic President could have just won re-election and Stephen Miller could decide to start the “Donald Trump Legacy Foundation” and Trump becomes the new Reagan.
One frustrating aspect is that nostalgia has gotten lazier. George Lucas didn’t make Flash Gordon, he made Star Wars. Stephen Spielberg didn’t make… I don’t know what serial character was that famous but he made Indiana Jones. Dan Akroyd didn’t make Laurel and Hardy meet the Mummy, he made Ghostbusters.
You don’t have to love Stranger Things but I would 1,000% take something highly influenced by Beetlejuice to a zombie sequel.
If you are going to remake something why not remake a property that had a good concept but poor execution or that could be updated to be better like the way the Thing or the Fly did in the 80’s?
It's been years since I watched it and I was high off my ass when I did, but I'd love to see a remake of The Day The Earth Caught Fire.
I guess I was naive to think that a CGI Harold Ramis showing up to give a thumb’s up to the production from beyond the grave at the end of the last Ghostbusters would be the most tasteless riff on an eighties movie.
Uh, did that really happen or were you just making a point? Please be the latter.
Oh it happened, baby, even I'm not cynical enough to just dream up such a thing.
Sweet baby Jesus, that's gross.
It was so mindblowingly tasteless that you almost had to respect it. You could imagine a team of suits clapping politely and assuring each other "he would've wanted it this way".
Next thing they'll be resurrecting dead actors to shill Corona.
That ruled.
That's so real it depresses me. A bunch of back slapping over the most disgusting move.
Hmm, I'd make an excellent producer.
There's also a shot of a Twinkie falling out of the ECTO's glove compartment that holds for about five seconds. Remember that? Remember when he said the thing in the first movie?
This was probably implied in your piece, but the most annoying thing about the Beetlejuice sequel is the very fact that it's called "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice" suggests that studio execs have already vetted a third film, with the logically required title of "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"
Why so cynical, Bob?
:COMMENT BROUGHT TO YOU BY SKY VODKA
It made me laugh when they announced The Matrix 5 a couple months back, and everyone posted the clip from Resurrections where Jonathan Groff's character explicitly criticizes this kind of IP mining. (Matrix Resurrections is great in large part because it self-critiques, although that was a property I was happy to see again - as someone on Twitter once noted, we are more forgiving of nostalgic pandering if it's pandering to us.)
I wish we had more stuff like the Brady Bunch and 21 Jump Street movies, or the Saved By The Bell show - revivals that are both loving and disdainful towards the source material.
I would like to think the beetlejuice film was made with people who actually care. And it's okay that a sequel to a film from 30 years ago does get made. But, yeah, this is probably not that.
Beverly Hills Cop - woof. This is like seeing one of those classic rock bands from the 70s/80s that only plays their old stuff and never records anything new.
Please refer to him as "that guy who played Taggart (and also played Marvin in "Midnight Run")