Weekly Geekly Rundown for June 27, 2025
Generations of Entertainment and the Pop Culture of “Gen Skib”
If you are a regular reader, or you read the description for this newsletter, then you know that I am a huge fan of pop culture and am highly interested in the way it develops over time. My love for examining the evolution of popular culture and how it interacts with art of the past probably preceded my first encounter with T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” I’ve taken a pull quote of a section that has heavily influenced my own critical sense. In the excerpt, Eliot argues that all past art has formed a kind of canon that society ranks and that when a new work of art is introduced it not only finds itself placed within this canon, but immediately calls for a reordering and reassessment of the pre-existing canon.
As an American deeply steeped in the liberal tradition (Hobbes, Locke, and Montesquieu), my own take is slightly different from Eliot’s but it is heavily influenced by his essay (among others). Have a look at his statement and when you are done, I’ll be there with my own take below.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not onesided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. — T.S. Eliot in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
While I love a canon as much as anyone, the liberal in me asserts ardently that just as there are societal canons there are also individual canons we each form on our own. The best societal canons are a product of active dialogue between the individual canons and as such change not only when new works are inserted, but when a new individual engages with something (new or old) for the first time. I’m a staunch defender of The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a work of art and disdain the performance art that surrounds it. My love of the film is rooted in how it engages with the RKO and Universal films that precede it and lacks the ironic distance of those who perform for each other during screenings. As much as I would avoid and eye roll at any and all such performances, those performances are a beloved part of the cinema and pop culture canon. So I’m in the ironic situation where I celebrate them even as I am annoyed by them.
In part, this is because any new generation of artist and critique engages in a kind of parricide. The mere introduction of the generation’s opinions and art may ripple through time to cause a reordering, but the current generation desires to be supreme. This is not a mere act of hubris, it is a natural thing. We make the criticisms we make for one of two reasons. We either believe them as individual rebels, or we assert them because we have adopted the critical lens of the day. The skepticism I have of Frankfurt School influenced modern Critical Theory has the same sentimental roots as the late 20th Century Critical Theorist reaction to New Criticism. It’s not quite a Hegelian process, but it is an emergent one of dialogue.
All of which brings me to the pop culture art of Generation Skib. I refuse to call the young generation by the frequently used Gen A because it’s stupid and lacks the context of why Gen X was called Gen X. In this particular case Generation X was given that name because they were a featureless generation. Or as
so elegantly put it, Gen X is more Quiet than Riot.
A part of this is because the older members of Generation X were children of the so-called Silent Generation and are connected to them politically and socially via social transmission and socialization. The younger members of Generation X were also raised by Boomers and experienced these same socialization processes, but this cohort was also raised during a period of social turmoil and self-indulgence. The parents of younger Gen X-ers weren’t called the “Me Generation” for nothing.
So Gen X was called Gen X because they were the generation without a calling. They were a new Lost and Silent generation. Gen X-ers were told they would be poorer than their parents and that they kinda sucked. Neither was true, but that’s what the Me Generation told them. There are numerous fictional critiques of this period from late Boomer authors, who were teens in the 70s, like Rick Moody (The Ice Storm) and David Foster-Wallace whose discussions of the American societal shift to the Cult of Me during this time period are abundant in both his fiction and non-fiction writings. These late stage Boomers would go on to be parents of the younger portion of the Millennial generation.
Generation X was followed by the Millennials (who are sometimes called the Echo-Boomers and not uncoincidentally the Me Me Me Generation). Older Millennials (Born in 1981 to 1988 or so) received their social and political socialization from older Boomer parents, many of whom were Ex-Hippies who were nostalgic for the more radical era of their youth and who had grown out of much of the “kids can take care of themselves” mentality. Others were raised by the disillusioned era of people like Moody and Foster-Wallace.
Scholars like Morley Winograd and Michael Hais, who themselves were nostalgic for their protest filled youth, argued in their book Millennial Makeover that the Millennials would be the generation responsible for a new Idealist realignment of politics that would echo that of the Baby Boomer Generation and would fulfill the promise of that generation. The Millennials might be the Me Me Me Generation (echoing the Me Generation), but they are also “the generation who will save us all by fulfilling the promises the Me Generation made.” Both generations were viewed as civically active generations in their 20s and self-indulgent in their 30s.
I had the opportunity to have Morley Winograd and Michael Hais speak at an event for me when I was the program director of a civic engagement non-profit, and I like them a lot as people and as researchers but they were too optimistic for my tastes. As it turned out, Winograd and Hais predictions regarding the power of the pending youth fueled revolution were overstated. They were, however, right about the political choices of the Millennials. Boomers and Millennials vote in similar patterns. They are similar in so many ways.
I mentioned the process of political socialization and generational transmission earlier and if you read deeply into that literature you won’t find these generational/sub-generational similarities surprising. As Jennings and Niemi pointed out 50 years ago, parents have the largest influence on a child’s political beliefs. It’s a finding that holds true in academic studies ever since. Yes there are age, period, and cohort effects as well (Mannheim, 1928, Ryder 1965, Mannheim 1998), all of which is why I kept breaking down generations into sub-generations. At one time a generation was thought of as a 20 year time period, but that time period seems to be shrinking with emergent communication technologies.
Children don’t necessarily adopt all of the political beliefs of their parents. Of course, there are also individuals who reject their parents’ politics. Discussions of parental transmission are merely arguing that parents are the single most powerful influence. The voting pattern, in America at least, seems to reflect this with some interesting nuances that can partially be explained by issue evolution (Carmines and Stimson, 1990), but with the core finding intact.
At minimum, this generational transmission follows the opening of Marx’s essay on the Eighteenth Brumaire, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” I see this kind of irony reflected in the fact that Millennials got a cool name because they are an extension of the Boomers, while Gen X got the shaft.
But it also looks like “Gen Z” and “Gen Alpha” are getting the shaft too. Some tried to call Gen Z by the sobriquet “Zoomers,” but I dare you to do that in a room filled with 20-somethings and older teens. The result won’t be pleasant. By the way, what is with all this Boomer obsession with passing on their name? Echo-Boomers? Zoomers?
I stated earlier that the Z in Gen Z doesn’t make any sense, but I haven’t given the step by step reason why. Gen X was called Gen X because it was a slacker generation and not because Gen X was the 24th Generation in any sense. It was, in fact, the 13th generation in America. Which is why Image released a comic called Gen 13. It’s likely one of the reasons that the 13th Generation is considered the “last” generation in Vampire the Masquerade. That’s just the kind of cynical statement I’d expect from Gen X game designers. Using the Z as an extension going X, Y, Z is a lazy sobriquet based on alphabetical ordering, but the reason X was chosen is because it’s undefined. It means an unknown variable, so calling Millennials Gen Y (until they were called Millennials) is just another way of saying that we don’t know what the defining characteristics of the generation are. That’s fine to do on the one hand, but it would be just as easy to say “it’s another unknown X generation” rather than just lazily following the alphabet because reasons.
This finally brings me to the point of this particular Weekly Oddity, for real this time, which is the pop culture of “Gen Z” and “Gen Alpha.” In case you are wondering, even after all that preamble, I still don’t know what to call Gen Z. My daughters are members Gen Z and even they don’t know what to call it. I’m not as pessimistic as psychologist Jonathan Haidt and social science researcher Zach Rausch, so I refuse to call them the “Anxious Generation.” I watched the Satanic Panic happen and know that parents are often eager to look for causes outside themselves for their children’s behavior, when maybe as
argues they are partially to blame and not screens.Speaking of screens, that brings me to what my daughters call the current emerging generation that everyone seems to be lazily calling Gen Alpha (because of course they are). My daughters call them iPad Kids. Since I think that describes a lot of the youth in my daughters’ generation as much as it does anyone in the emerging cohort, I've decided to look for some other phenomenon to describe them.
As is my wont, I looked to their pop culture for a name. It’s a pop culture that is a wonderful and amazingly metacognitive, surreal, and gonzo mess. I find it confusing on so many levels, as I should as “an old”, but I also find it enthralling. I assume we are all familiar with the younger generation’s obsession with Skibidi Toilet and their frequent use of the terms Sigma, Alpha, and Gamma.
Skibidi Toilent is a literally surreal phenomenon that has a deep lore attached to it, even though it is essentially about a war of human heads who come out of toilet bowls against humanoids with electronic devices for heads. Yes, “human heads that come out of toilet bowls” describes one of the creatures in the Skibiti-verse. One doesn’t need to think deeply to see a potential commentary about “Shit Talkers,” and the gullibility of those who follow them just because they are edgy and “own the opposition,” fighting against a “Surveillance Society.” A battle with no good guys. I don’t know that the creators are making this commentary intentionally, but Gen Z and Gen Skib grew up during a period of peak social shaming with resultant preference falsification (Timur Kuran 1995) and a spiral of silence by much of society (Noelle-Neumann 1993). What I find interesting about the Skibidi-verse is that there is enough lore that I don’t think Michael Bay will have any trouble making a movie.
One of the primary modes of entertainment for Gen Skib, yes I’m naming them after the memenomenon that is Skibiti Toilet, is Machinima. Online entertainment has evolved massively over the past few decades. Gen X and Millennial Machinima was more formal, which is why I used to call it Internetelevision. It included shows like Homestar Runner and Strong Bad Emails (which used annotations in a Foster-Wallace-esque manner) as well as webseries like David Nett’s Gold (a series that predicted Critical Role style fandom) and The Lizzie Bennet Diaries.
My daughters’ generation watched an interesting mix of streaming content that was more personality driven. The content ranged from “let’s plays” like Dan TDM and Stampy Long Head, to reaction videos like Ryan’s World, educator/entertainer influencers like Mark Rober and Veritasium. Internetelevision was evolving and what was considered entertainment was changing. Stampy’s Lovely World was an emerging narrative and it and other content was leveraging the interactive nature of internet based communication.
Gen Skib’s Machinima (memechinima?) is a completely different beast. It’s a metacognitive merger of AI and pop culture that results in surreal works of art. These are things that don’t make sense until you make them make sense. They require you to create lore for them if they are to have any meaning at all. Heaven only knows what Skibidi Sigma really means, but it diverges from the meaning used by older generations.
After yet another meandering few paragraphs of my random thoughts on Gen Skib culture, I’d like to focus on my most recent encounter with Gen Skib memechinima entertainment, Italian Brainrot. This particular genre of entertainment started with a meme featuring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson speaking nonsense in fake Italian. The video is kind of funny, but given that I have Italian friends a little disturbing.
But it became about more than mocking The Rock when people started combining the nonsense Italian words with Imagery to create creatures based on fake Italian constructs. Now we have an entire Bestiary that rivals Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings. Bizarre as the monsters of Italian Brainrot are at first glance, for the record Tralalero Tralala is the best by the way, they are a demonstration that Gen Skib is much better at collective creative efforts than Boomers, Millennials, and Generation X were with Snakes on a Plane. This stuff is bizarre, but it’s kind of remarkable. I’m one of the most critical people you’ll ever find when it comes to the use of Generative AI, but a lot of my critiques get shoved aside when I see how AI is being used in this case. I’m not saying that this is high art, any more than a highly self-indulgent performance art piece is, but I am saying that it will result in art and that I’m looking forward to it.
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
has a Retro-Review of Friday the 13th up this week, but it’s behind the paywall so it’s not available to a wider audience. He opens with a discussion of how the film is better remembered that The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Danton and how this might outrage academics of a certain generation (you can guess which). One thing that is interesting about this statement is that the kind of storytelling involved The French Lieutenant’s Woman still gets a lot of play today with shows like the Outlander series, though I’d argue that Outlander is what one might come up with if one did a high concept mash-up of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Brigadoon, Robert E. Howard’s The Dark Man, and Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man and The Eternal Champion. None of those were the actual inspiration, but the Outlander series combines historical fiction, metanarrative, and time travel in interesting ways. Another thing that is interesting is that Friday the 13th, the original, is actually a very good movie that has some deeply embedded social criticism in it. It turns the “kids today” narrative on its head and I think that was a part of the resistance to it. Screenwriter Victor Miller (who also wrote for daytime soaps) and director Sean Cunningham were both born in the early 1940s and would have been teens when Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent was published, a book that attacked comic books (in particular EC Comics) as corrupting the minds of the young. Ironically, Wertham’s book was very methodologically similar to the scholarship of Adorno, Horkheimer, and other Frankfurt School scholars. Later critical theorists have even reiterated his conclusions about Batman’s relationship to Robin and Wonder Woman’s sexuality while using the same critical lens, though this time in praise rather than criticism in an interesting intersection of issue evolution with scholarly trends.
The LYT article I am sharing this week is a very heartfelt memorial to one of his dear friends Brian T. Gaughan. Luke’s piece is a lovely read and a great demonstration of how important the little details in films can be, even years after their release.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
Courtney Howard was not impressed with the most recent Jurassic film, Jurassic World Rebirth, and opens her review with a marvelous mix of praise and criticism:
There are two nail-biting, white-knuckle sequences tucked deep inside JURASSIC WORLD REBIRTH. The trouble is making it to the picture’s midway point requires patience and enough stamina to stay awake.
It’s an overall good review, but I was struck by her discussion of how the film lacks any discussion of climate change. Based on her review, it appears that one of the crises the dinosaurs face is climate related so she argues that there should be discussion of the underlying issue. I agree with her to some degree, but I wonder if this particular film is the right one to discuss climate change. Sure, she’s right that Twisters would have benefited from including discussion of climate change and weather patterns. After all, it’s a movie about Climatologists fighting the Climate and one would expect them to theorize about why they are experiencing this remarkable explosion of tornadoes.
However, I think that this kind of discussion makes less sense in a film about dinosaurs, or at least concern about global warming makes less sense. After all, the Jurassic Period was, according the the United States Geological Survey website, a period when “Warm tropical greenhouse conditions occurred worldwide.” This is a period when, according to the University of Plymouth, the average temperature of the Earth was up to 8C warmer than the modern era. The dinosaurs would benefit from global warming, rather than suffer from it. Pollution, like microplastics, would have potentially devastating effects on the dinosaurs, so there is plenty of fertile soil to sow for environmental concerns if the authors want to do so.
Interestingly, according to Courtney’s review, Rebirth inverts Crichton’s critique of hubris in the first movie and this film suffers for it. This, combined with Courtney’s discussion of environmental concerns with both Twisters and this film make me wonder if it isn’t pressure from the Crichton estate that pushes these two films away from environmentalism. After all, Crichton’s last novel (State of Fear) was about eco-terrorists manufacturing natural disasters in order to manipulate the public regarding global warming.
Courtney’s review reassures us that the Dinosaur action is engaging, even as the human characters and drama falter. That’s the problem with a lot of franchises though. Even when you have an interesting villain, how do you keep the villains opponents interesting story after story. The best Godzilla films understand this problem and they address it by either giving us realistic slice of life characters or by ignoring the human component as much as is possible. When it comes to films like the Jurassic series, the screenplay has to have a purpose. In Godzilla, the purpose of the films is typically to watch Godzilla destroy stuff. In Jurassic films, they should be making a point but if that point is muddied for whatever reason the film loses it raison d'être.
I’ve included two of Dr.
’s articles this week. It could easily have been three, but I didn’t want to spend too much time talking about my time as an undergraduate watching Teletubbies as my “wake up” programming, which is what her most recent piece on horror in children’s spaces is about. The combination of pleasant sounds and surreal imagery were just the right combination to start the day after late night studies, but I’ve said too much. Instead, I wanted to focus on her pieces on a dream sequence in The Sopranos and her latest Tea and a Tale.In promoting her discussion of a horror related dream sequence in The Sopranos, Dr. King posted a note asking people what their favorite dream sequences in film/tv were and I didn’t have an answer. In fact, as I read her piece the discussion of dreams wasn’t the item that stuck most with me. What stuck with me was this particular quote about Tony being a called a “Golem.”
Back in the third episode of season 1, a Jewish man had reluctantly approached the mob to help him persuade his abusive son-in-law to divorce his daughter. In an altercation with Tony, he had described him as a golem, a creature made from clay in Jewish folklore, and also as ‘a Frankenstein’ (meaning, of course, the monster). Tony was upset by the comparison, so the motif appears here in the dream.
As is the case with a lot of mythology and folklore, my first exposure to the legend of the Golem was in comic books. In this case, it was issue 13 of Marvel’s Invaders series written by Roy Thomas. In this particular issue the Invaders, a superhero team made up of Captain America, the Human Torch (android), Toro (the Human Torch’s sidekick), Bucky, Namor, and Spitfire (a British heroine), have been captured by a Nazi scientist while on a mission in the Warsaw ghetto. The scientist has imprisoned the Invaders using restraints that take advantage of their individual weaknesses and things are looking pretty bad for the team.
It is at this point that Rabbi Jacob Goldstein sets aside his arguments for the nobility of submission and enduring suffering and summons the Golem to rescue the Invaders and protect his people. It marks a shift from pacifism to open revolt on the part of the character and it is one of my favorite comic book stories.
This particular telling of the Golem stories draws upon the story of Rabbi Loew who is said to have summoned a Golem in Prague in 1609 to defend the Jewish population from oppressors during a very tumultuous time in European history. This summoning happened during the unstable era that ranged from the beginnings of the Dutch Revolt (aka 80 Years War) and lasted until the end of the 30 Years War in 1648 which was in part a spinoff of the Dutch Revolt.
The concept of the Golem is Biblical in origin as the term is used in Psalms, but the extension from a description of the development of the human body as embryo into a full homunculus happens over a long period of time.
"Thine eyes," he says to God, "did see my golem" (Heb. golmi), my unformed embryo, its limbs not yet fashioned, lying in the dark depths of the Earth (Psalms 139:16).
One particular interpretation of the Golem involves a ritual where letters of the Hebrew alphabet associated with one of the names of God (shem) are used to animate the creature. Sometimes this shem is written on a piece of paper that is inserted into the Golem’s mouth and at other times it is written on the forehead of the Golem in the malleable clay. In Roy Thomas’ version the word אמת (emét or truth) was inscribed on the Golem’s forehead and when the Golem rubbed off the aleph א the word truth was changed from truth to death (מת, mét, dead) at which point the animating force leaves the Golem.
This story was brought to mind because in the quote that Dr. King excerpts from the show, Tony takes being called a Golem or Frankenstein as an insult and as you know I agree with Tony that Frankenstein’s monster is one of the villains of Frankenstein (the other is Victor). But my view, and that of Tony, isn’t in synch with the typical modern view. In modern tellings, the monster is a sympathetic figure a thing to be pitied. Similarly, Golems might go wrong when misused (and they do in the 1915 silent film inspired by Rabbi Loew’s tale), but they are also used to defend the people. This comparison makes me want to rewatch the Sopranos because it sounds as if the father understands the monstrosity of Tony, but also sees him as a proper tool for vengeance.
Dr.
’s Tea and a Tale podcasts are really one of the great treats I’ve discovered on Substack. It’s not just that she has chosen an interesting collection of tales for her readings, though she has. It’s not just because she has a wonderfully expressive manner of reading, though that is certainly true. The real listening pleasure comes from how spontaneous the reading feels. It feels like an old story time meeting at a friend’s reading club salon, if those ever dealt with the wonderfully weird and trivial. We can hear the kettle boiling, a sound that reminds me of my childhood, as she introduces the tale and reads the preamble. Then all ambient sound ends and the reading begins, clear and isolated. Dr. King reacts in real time to the story as she did not practice the reading repeatedly and their are chuckles and minor corrections in the reading, the kinds of thing that make this real and not overproduced. I can imagine a nice warm fire in the fireplace illuminating the book as Dr. King reads another classic tale of suspense or horror.As Dr. King mentions in her post-reading chat, the tale was adapted as a segment of the 1945 portmanteau film, what we might call an anthology film stateside. That film was entitled Dead of Night and the film starred Michael Redgrave in one of the other tales. Redgrave is one of at least four actors in the film who also starred in The Lady Vanishes. In the Hitchcock classic, among his best, Redgrave plays Gilbert who is the romantic interest of the lead character and is almost as charming as Michael Wilding was in Stage Fright as “Ordinary” Smith. Two of the other actors from The Lady Vanishes are the performers in the particular tale adapted from “The Inexperienced Ghost,” which makes the connection to The Lady Vanishes even deeper in my opinion. Dead of Night is currently available for free on Plex and since I don’t mind a commercial or two, I think my wife and I will watch it this evening.
The last of the articles I’m going to highlight this week, though certainly not the last of all the Substack articles worth reading this week, is an article from
’s Critical Parader Substack. In it, he discusses a lost Blue Öyster Cult/Michael Moorcock collaboration, or at least a song that started as a collaboration but changed the lyrics away from Moorcock’s original words.Long time readers know that Michael Moorcock was my gateway writer into the field of Fantastic Fiction and I’ve got a particular love in my heart for his character Corum Jhaelen Irsei who is both Corum of the Scarlet Robe and Corum of the Silver Hand depending on which trilogy of Corum tales we are talking about. The first trilogy, where he is Corum of the Scarlet Robe, draws heavily on Cornish folklore and includes identifiable locations. As is typical of Moorcock’s writings, this particular tale inverts the original folklore and casts mankind (Mabden) as the villains. The destruction of the mythic and fae from the world as Christianity grows is a common theme in Arthurian tales, but rarely is that tale told from the perspective of the fae. Even more rarely is the Arthurian side shown to be horrific perpetrators of barbarity who serve Chaos, but that is how they are depicted in The Swords Trilogy.
In the second trilogy, Corum is the Prince with the Silver Hand and in that series he is drawn into our own (Earth’s) past as Nuada Airgetlám (Nuada of the Silver Arm). Where the Mabden served Chaos and were his opponents in the first trilogy, he is their savior against the forces of Chaos in the second series. It is once again a tragic tale. There is a reason that the Michael Moorcock and Blue Öyster Cult collaboration about Corum is called Veteran of the Psychic Wars. As much as people tend to like Elric more than Corum, it is Corum who has always appealed to me more. In part because of one scene in the Swords Trilogy where Corum is forced to use a magical eye he possesses, but where he knows that doing so will lead to the final fading of a once beautiful people from existence. Elric and he might find themselves in similar situations, but only Corum would weep in this circumstance. Elric would laugh at the cruelty as an act of morning and rebellion.
Welcome to the dark and mysterious world of Colonial Gothic, where the American colonial period is infused with supernatural elements that will keep you on the edge of your seat. In this game, you play a character who slowly uncovers the hidden truths and malevolent enemies lurking in the shadows, influencing events, and conspiring against the world as we know it. You can be a pastor or a witch hunter battling evil, the choice is yours.
But beware: in this world, magic is real. Creatures of the occult and supernatural exist, and they will stop at nothing to achieve their goals. As a player, you experience the thrill of the unknown, the terror of the unseen, and the satisfaction of defeating the forces of darkness. As a Gamemaster (GM), feel the excitement of crafting your many ideas and resources. So, join us in the world of Colonial Gothic, and let the darkness consume you. — Richard Iorio, Primer to Colonial Gothic 2025
I’ve been a fan of Colonial Gothic for a long time. Not only does it utilize the most underused die of all (the d12), but it is meticulously researched game that is a great introduction to US history as well as a great horror role playing game. An inside joke in my family, based on our experiences watching The Patriot, Brotherhood of the Wolf, and Last of the Mohicans, is that you should never make a veteran of the French and Indian War angry.
This is a game that let’s you find out how they got to be so fear inducing. Colonial Gothic is a rich game that incorporates American supernatural mythology in a way that would make Manly Wade Wellman proud and his Shonokins might just be lurking in the Wilderness. Andrews McMeel Publishing did an adaptation of Colonial Gothic that used the Zweihander rules set, but that game was it seemed a little too heroic and modern in many was and it lacked some of the narrative charm of Richard Iorio’s 12 degree system. This isn’t to say that the 12 degree system is grim dark with player characters dropping off like militia facing a British infantry company, because it isn’t. The 12 degree system is more flexible than the Zweihander version and accommodates many styles of play in a manner that is more narrative focused rather than mechanics focused.
There is a new version of the game coming soon and I’m really enjoying what
is doing in the upcoming version, but until that game is out the excellent Third Edition is available for your use.
My introduction to Brainrot led me down a rabbit hole of songs and one of my favorites is this video that features an anime introduction style song highlighting all the Brainrot characters and all I can say is that this is what Michael Bay should be doing instead of the Skibidi Toilet movie.
There’s also a modern Chacaron equivalent Brainrot song that combines the recent Gen Skib song Sigma Boy with Latin rhythms and changes the lyrics to the names of the Brainrot characters, but I kind of dig it because it lacks the ick factor of the original Sigma Boy song.
Speaking of Chacarron, it’s time to go old school.
The Criterion Channel recently added Michael Mann’s 2006 film Miami Vice to its monthly line up of films as a part of their Miami Neo Noir collection. It’s a great lineup of films that includes Out of Sight, Body Heat, and China Moon as well as Mann’s film. Mann has long been among the best neonoir directors and his love of the genre extends back into his work in television. Miami Vice is a perfect intersection of the two parts of Mann’s career.
The film itself was a bit controversial among cineastes for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it used a combination of film and video in its production. Like Collateral Mann alternated use depending on desired visual effects. Some scenes were shot on 35mm Kodak Vision 2 film stocks, a lot of the film was captured using a 1080p HDCAM SR. Some will claim that both films were fully digital, but if you know what you are looking for (motion smoothing and difficulty capturing light in some night shots) you can tell the difference.
I’m pretty forgiving of Mann’s alternation of the two media in his productions because he was using the media to express aesthetic aims rather than to cut costs. As much as I advocate for film to be used as the medium of image acquisition, there are times when digital can get the “feel” you want more naturally than film can and more recent cameras do better in low light settings. We’re still in the early stages of lighting digital to create mood, which is why we see so much tweaking in post production with color correction etc., but eventually the texture of digital images will rival those captured on film. Film will still have a warmth lacking in digital, but both can and will look great.
Critics talking about Mann’s film experiences often assert that he emerged on the scene as an auteur with a sophisticated sense of how to direct moody sequences, but statements like this leave out how Michael Mann’s artistic sensibilities were hammered into him on the anvil of broadcast television. These broad sweeping statements by critics often make me ask “does this person even like the visual entertainment? Does this person watch a wide array of movies and TV, or just what they are ‘supposed’ to watch?”
Michael Mann is indeed a fantastic director and Miami Vice is this week’s recommendation because it is an excellent film that reflects Mann’s many experience working in the grindstone that was 70s and 80s television. During the 70s, Mann worked as a writer on a number of shows but his Starsky & Hutch tern really stands out as something special. Not because it was on one of the most successful cop dramas of the 70s, a series that many argue redefined the genre on tv by making it more raw. Rather because episodes written by Michael Mann are standout episodes on that show. When people talk about and episode that reflects how the show redefined cop shows, they are likely talking about a Mann episode.
In general, Starsky & Hutch (which my wife and I watched in entirety during COVID) can be described as a show that “jumped the shark” immediately. By episode 5, excluding the pilot, one of the main characters is turned into a heroin addict by evil drug dealers and has to be detoxed by his partner and once clean Hutch never even thinks about heroin again. By season 2 they are hunting a vampire, which puts it on the same level as The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries where they also took on Dracula in season 2. Mann’s episodes were something different though. Episodes like Texas Longhorn, Lady Blue, The Psychic, and Jojo just felt different than a lot of the other episodes. They were grittier and more in line with the cinema of the 70s. When Mann got the greenlight to make his own television series, Miami Vice, he once again redefined the cop show. The pilot episode of Miami Vice is a work of art and it holds up extremely well, especially the scene leading to the final shootout.
Mann’s television productions were good enough, and an important enough a part of his cinematic education, that he pulled elements from them for his later work. Not only did Mann adapt Miami Vice into a theatrical release, but the movie version of Miami Vice pulls a scene from a Starsky and Hutch episode. Remember the trailer park scene in the movie version of Miami Vice? That moment is taken straight out of JoJo (Season 1, Episode 19) at about minute 43. Starsky and Hutch run into a trailer park in search of a perpetrator and Starsky pulls a pizza box out of a garbage can and uses it as a decoy in almost exactly the same manner as it occurs in Miami Vice. The overall effect is more powerful in the movie, but over 20 years of filmmaking experience can have that effect, but the point is that the idea and craft were honed in television.
Critics, rightly, give a lot of praise to the gritty filmmaking style of theatrical releases in the 70s. They praise directors like Coppola, Scorsese, and Don Siegel, but they often forget to mention their work for Roger Corman’s AIP (in the case of Coppola and Scorsese) or television (in the case of Siegel and also Mann). Great filmmakers, like great game designers, hone their skills somewhere, often hidden from view or in a medium where directors/writers tend to be overlooked.
Mann’s skills were honed in television and you can see the influence of his work on Starsky and Hutch in the Miami Vice television series and you can see how that show contributed to his mastery of the art in Miami Vice the film. The setting and style are all there.