“Here’s a theory for you to disregard completely: Music, you know, true music — not just rock n roll — it chooses you. It live in your car, or alone listening to your headphones, you know, with the vast scenic bridges and angelic choirs in your brain. It’s a place apart from the vast, benign lap of America.”
I generally don’t believe that movies are “made” for anyone. To paraphrase the above speech from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs in Almost Famous, they, like music, choose you. You find each other in dark theaters or video rental shelves or cable TV or the depths of a streaming service of indeterminate origin with a name like Watchube or Viewoobi.
The point is, you don’t always love movies because they’re good. Sometimes a bad movie hits you at just the right moment to imprint itself on your soul. Maybe you and your friends or family watched it once…then again as a goof…then again because everything is funnier in threes…and then again because now it’s tradition. You still quote it back and forth to this day, and you don’t even remember why. If we all loved only high quality, thought-provoking, challenging films, then by all rights the Criterion Channel would be bigger than Netflix. MAX would instead be handing out $70 million for extended retools of The Decalogue because of a fervent #ReleaseTheKrzysztofCut social media campaign. But crap can be beloved, and sometimes you don’t know why.
This is why you can smell a movie that is trying so hard to be made “for” an audience a mile away. But I don’t even have to really explain why movies that bank on a collective nostalgia fail so badly — because the perfect illustration already exists.
In 2014, Nickelodeon launched an animated reboot of the 80s phenomenon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And, of course, there were promotional tie-ins. One in particular inadvertently gave away the whole shell game (sorry).
Vanilla Ice, a pop culture relic who was a footnote by the time the ‘90s came to a close, is stocking shelves while singing his “Ninja Rap” song from 1991’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze — the cash-in sequel to the original live action Turtles adaptation that failed to cash in (it made $78 million at the box office to the original’s $202 million).
The young boy — who should be the target audience for the animated reboot — looks on in confusion and embarrassment as his mother perks up and starts singing along with this guy who is either an aged former pop sensation or a recently paroled meth dealer for all he knows. He has no connection to “Ninja Rap” or Vanilla Ice or likely even the Turtles for that matter. So the marketing efforts are focused on getting nostalgia-driven parents to convince themselves that their kids will be into this stuff because they were.
Today’s “cool” parents — determined not to be the same corny, dismissive, out-of-touch parental figures of the past — have completely hijacked culture to the point where everything is made for them to then pass on to their kids. Pop culture mama birds vomiting everything they digested into the mouths of their young. This leaves the kids with precious little to discover and enjoy for themselves. Nothing is choosing them, it’s all being pre-chosen by their parents based on reboots, re-imaginings, or legacy sequels to things they were allowed to discover when they were kids.
My father was an elementary school English teacher who bought a few Marvel Comics for me primarily because he was impressed by the vocabulary. Actually, let me back up — he didn’t buy them for me. He bought them. And they were just in the house at some point. He didn’t take me to his favorite comic shop on a Wednesday afternoon to pick up his pull list and guide me down the new release aisle. He didn’t explain to me why this character was cool or important, or hand-select a few “must read” titles. He just grabbed whatever. This would inspire my life-long love of comics in a roundabout way, but not because it was a legacy thing handed down to me by my father. He found them to be possibly helpful, but I discovered what made them magical for myself.
Cut to a rainy summer evening in a tiny, rented bungalow at the Jersey Shore in the late 1970s. My older brother and I are bouncing off the walls because there is nothing to do at the Jersey Shore when it rains until you discover bars. My mother, at her wit’s end, demanded my dad take us somewhere. “Just take them to a movie!” So he did. There was one theater in Lavallette at that time, a tiny, one-screen movie house that’s now a seafood restaurant. He bought three tickets to see this new movie that had just come out and seemed kid-friendly enough. It was called Star Wars. My brother and I walked out changed men. Obsessed with every detail. We love it to this day. But this was once again blind chance. A “why not?” that became something we’d love forever.
The idea that kids will love something because their parents loved it goes against the very laws of God and man.
Almost all significant art was some kind of middle finger to the previous generation. Michelangelo (the painter, not the Turtle) literally had tiny angels giving an ancient “F.U.” hand gesture to Pope Julius II (Michelangelo’s patron) on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Rock ‘n roll was meant to make your parents cover their ears. Heck, even the Turtles themselves were born out of playful, youthful rebellion — creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird took a look at the biggest selling mainstream comics at the time and saw X-Men (teenage mutants) and Frank Miller’s Daredevil (filled with ninjas called The Hand). So they made word salad: Teenage. Mutant. Ninjas. Then made them Turtles because they thought it’d be funny, and had them fight the Foot Clan (geddit?)
Star Wars, as much as I love it, is not cool to my kids, because it’s Dad’s thing. Marvel Comics? Same (and they were decidedly not cool when I was a kid). So their discovery is happening in meme form. It’s in TikTok videos that are nonsensical to me (AS THEY SHOULD BE). Eventually, this may develop into an artistic or aesthetic perspective. But for now, I am duty-bound to shrug or roll my eyes when they show me a 6-second video or speak to each other in meme language. For better or for worse, they are discovering things on their own. Meanwhile, mainstream movies continue to be children’s entertainment made by middle-aged people for middle-aged people. When that happens, you get R-rated Batman movies that kids aren’t even allowed to see (I mean…why..?) You get The Book of Boba Fett about a tired, middle-aged Fett who quits bounty hunting and just kinda…walks around a lot taking his helmet off because he’s schvitzy and then taking long baths.
I am the target audience for nearly everything on Disney+ right now. That’s not good.
One more example: I recently tried to sell a portion of my comic book collection only to find that most of them were worthless. Why? Because everyone my age or a little older grew up thinking about these as collectibles. So, ironically, they lost all their collectibility. It’s supply and demand. The reason old comics are worth more isn’t just age, it’s because comic publishers didn’t even think to reprint comics for the medium’s first few decades. They were disposable, like newspapers. You read it, you tossed it. Comic writers couldn’t have complex continuity because they couldn’t assume anyone had seen or read the previous issue. Then things changed. Issues started to be reprinted. People started collecting. And now there is no demand because everyone saved all of their 70s, 80s, and 90s comics. (Well, maybe not the 90s so much because yeesh. That whole decade was an over-pouched, x-treme Liefeldian nightmare best left to the dustbin of history. But I digress.)
My generation has hijacked nostalgia and placed it in a hermetically-sealed bag to be looked at from afar but never opened or played with or read. It’s saying: You should appreciate this because I appreciated it at your age, and that should be good enough, right?
Now put back Daddy’s toys and let’s watch a show I’ll have to explain to you while you zone out on your phone looking for something that’s yours.
