Weekly Geekly Rundown for May 15, 2025
Pop Culture is Culture
During my finale class session with my students, I held an Ask Me Anything session where I allow the students to ask me any question that isn’t related to my personal politics. Since I teach Political Science, I believe that it is important that my students can trust that I am presenting multiple ideologies with an even hand. The current state of political polarization, and the motivated cognition attached to political identity, make it difficult for people to trust someone not of their tribe and so I stand as a non-partisan rock in the classroom who makes fun of everyone and makes pop culture references from every era. Unlike most pop culture professors, my references range from The Iliad to Skibidi Toilet instead of focusing like a laser on the 1980s, and yes there’s lore worth exploring in Skibidi Toilet-land.
At the end of the AMA, one of my students asked me how I keep up so well with pop culture and I told them that it’s because I love popular culture. It is important, both in and after its time. That all culture is a dialogue attempting to capture the human condition.
If the Geekerati Newsletter had a motto, it would be “Pop Culture is Culture.” When my Oma introduced me to The Blue Danube Waltz as a child, she didn’t merely have me listen to the music. She also taught me the dance. I make no claim to being a great dancer, my waltz is fundamental at best, but I remember the joy of dancing with her. I also remember her telling me about the waltz and how “scandalous” it was as a dance. It was, in its own way, the twerking of the era. It was a more physical dance than the dances that preceded it, and thus more sexual. It was vulgar pop culture.
As I learned more about Classical music, I learned that one of the cultural offshoots of the invention of the printing press was the ability to publish music that could be performed in the home. Where we modern listeners have the radio, streaming, and TikTok to sate our desire to hear music, those of an earlier age needed to play it themselves when their wasn’t a planned performance by the Kapellmeister or at a public venue. A lot of chamber music was more “democratic” than music that preceded it and could be shared and learned.
The same is true for most “high art.” At some point that elevated craft was, in part, made for the masses. Every Shakespeare play has moments expressly written to appeal to the cheap seats and I always like to joke that Aristophanes’ play The Clouds is a 90 minute fart joke that contains many smaller fart jokes within it. That’s an exaggeration, but it contains an element of truth.
All of that is well and good, but none of it addresses how I keep up with pop culture and that was what the student was really getting at. How am I able to make references about new and old? The easy answer was that I have teenage daughters, but that’s not actually a good answer. In part because it’s hard for even them to know about popular culture. Just as the printing press democratized music, the internet and social media have democratized popular culture. It’s done so in a way that makes it hard to know when something is coming out and the music, television, film, comic book, and literary industries are doing a terrible job of informing their public.
I’m not making a call for a kind of elite critic who centralizes taste, those exist within subcommunities today. What I am talking about is just the ability to access information. The various media industries have become bad at marketing. They are terrible at letting people know what is out there. They hope that algorithms can pick up the difference, but they can’t. Algorithms are designed to deliver the “daily me” where people are given more of what they already like. That’s culture as a closed circle, or a set of closed circles with little interplay. It is the end of culture. To really engage with ideas, one needs to escape the me and find the new and the media industries used to be good at this stuff.
Take the 1983 “Yummy Awards” by NBC as an example. The National Broadcasting Company created an hour long show with only one purpose, to advertise the kids shows that would be airing in the coming year. Yes, there’s a kind of crass commercialism to it, but there is also a kind of democratic dialogic quality to it. It is information being shared, information that you can like or dislike on your own. I, for one, love the live action Thundarr the Barbarian bit in this show.
Subcultures tend to be precious. They don’t want “tourists,” “outsiders,” “newbs,” or “poseurs” to intrude on the sanctity of their identitarianism. They are societal onanism. Culture, pop culture, is made to be a part of a large conversation. I participate in many subcultures, ranging from gamer to horror fan to cineaste to literary reader to political science, but I seek to break the walls of those subcultures and share them with everyone. Culture matters. All culture matters and I have an insatiable desire to experience other people’s ideas about the human condition and so I spend time pursuing new and old things to engage my mind. That is how and why I know as much as I do about popular culture.
There are many who know more about particular aspects of culture, as they should and I love them for it, and I want nothing more than to learn from them.
The Lamentations of Luke Y. Thompson
Given my screed about the difficulty for audiences to learn about knew entertainment, even entertainment in their own wheelhouse, I found
’s review of the new movie Queen of the Ring to be serendipitous. To say Luke is a fan of wrestling is an understatement. He is to to wrestling what a cineaste is to film, and thus he is a Pankrateaste. That he was not only relatively unaware of this film, but of the person depicted in the film, is an example of how hard it is to learn about culture in general.As Luke points out, this is partially due to the fact that women’s wrestling doesn’t get its due and that lack of due leads to a lack of information. The film stars Emily Bett Rickards, who played Overwatch (the Oracle adjacent character) in CW’s Arrow. She was one of the highlights of that show, a show that has a lot of highlights to be sure, and I am happy to see her getting more work.
I’ve read Luke’s review of this film and it is now on the top of my list of films to see. Well, just below Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, but it is RIGHT below that and that says a lot about how intriguing this sounds to me. I am a casual wrestling fan who appreciates the high theater of the spectacle, but who isn’t as versed in the nuances as I’d like. I do know enough to understand that the real drama is often more exciting and compelling than the show and I am always looking for more of that real drama.
Courtney Howard’s View from the Center Seat
Romeo and Juliet is a tragic play that is far too often produced in a manner that targets the film for exactly the wrong audience. When I was young, as a reward for reading and writing about the play, my English teacher let us watch the Franco Zeffirelli version of the film. It was distributed by Paramount Pictures and is in many ways a highlight of the Robert Evans era of the studio. It is beautifully made and filled with beautiful people.
I hated it, which was odd because I hadn’t hated the play.
Similarly, when my twin daughters were Freshmen in high school, they too went through the annual ritual of reading the play and then watching a “cool” theatrical version of the film. In their case, it was the Baz Luhrmann version released in the 1990s in an attempt, once again, to have the film appeal to a youthful generation. Once more it is beautifully made and filled with beautiful people.
My daughters hated it, even though they too liked the play.
What is it that could lead to such a disconnect? Michael York, in the Zeffirelli version is phenomenal as Tybalt as is John Leguizamo in Luhrmann’s version. The Luhrmann version has the added bonus of Harold Perrineau as a magnificent Mercutio and Paul Rudd, because Paul Rudd is fantastic and was in almost every film in the 1990s.
Every time I see a new adaptation of the story, I return to the question I just asked and with Courtney Howard’s review in Variety of the new musical Juliet and Romeo, I find myself once again walking this familiar path. Courtney’s review captures quite wonderfully the failure of the most recent musical when she writes, “refurbishing it as a pop-song-and-star-studded musical minus the original’s iambic pentameter, personality and poignancy.”
Her, largely negative and highly readable, review touches on the underlying flaw that each of these productions had and it’s a flaw that doomed them to a certain degree. Yes, each has magnificent elements and now that I’m older I like both the Zeffirelli and Luhrmann versions of the film, even as I didn’t like them when I was younger. That shift in enjoyment that came with age and experience suggests to me that the flaw was not in the material or the craft, but in the intended audience.
While Romeo and Juliet is a play ostensibly about young lovers, it is also a tragedy about the potential death of two families. Families who are so short sighted in their hatred for one another that even when their scions fall in love, death is the end result. It is a tale that gives the same warning Anthony Downs gives regarding polarization, that constant fluctuation between two extremes leads to chaos and destruction.
It would be very easy to create a Hotelling style illustration of the Montagues and Capulets as a bi-modal distribution in political space. Their actions are extreme, as are their reactions to one another. These actions lead, or will lead, to the destructions of the families. That’s not the “tragic star crossed lovers” tale that high school English teachers and film directors keep trying to sell us. It’s not a message of young love gone astray. It is a message of parental politics leading to death, and that is a message for parents and for society.
Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy in the same way that the Iliad is a tragedy. In Romeo and Juliet, the best and most virtuous heirs of the families die (Tybalt and Mercutio). In the Iliad the Greek who best embodies the essence of thumos (courage, boldness) dies, but so too does the Trojan who best embodies loyalty and duty to the family and gods. In the Iliad, both die because their virtue is out of balance. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, both families have an excess of both thumos and fidelity.
It’s a subtle thing, and it’s something that Grok totally missed when I asked it about the end of the play. Grok focused on how the Capulet’s and Montague’s reconciled. It did briefly mention that it was a “glooming piece,” but totally missed out on what was happening in these final statements.
CAPULET
O brother Montague, give me thy hand:
This is my daughter's jointure, for no more
Can I demand.
MONTAGUE
But I can give thee more:
For I will raise her statue in pure gold;
That while Verona by that name is known,
There shall no figure at such rate be set
As that of true and faithful Juliet.
CAPULET
As rich shall Romeo's by his lady's lie;
Poor sacrifices of our enmity!
PRINCE
A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head:
Go hence, to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punished:
For never was a story of more woe
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
Note that even as Capulet offers a hand in piece, Montague proclaims that a statue will be build to honor Capulet’s daughter (Juliet). This is something that Capulet cannot let stand and responds that Montague’s son (Romeo) will receive equal, if not superior (as rich implies even greater) acknowledgement. The Prince sees this and recognizes that the tragedy is not yet at an end.
To adapt that into a semi-Moulin Rouge! doesn’t quite vibe with the message. Moulin Rouge!, as a version of La Boheme, really is the story of naive young love running headlong into the brutal cynicism of reality. It’s a much better tale for the young, but getting the young to watch opera is its own unique challenge.
For my money, if you want young people to read Shakespeare, give them a dose of Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s filled with humor and young love.
If it wasn’t for Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and Ken St. Andre’s Tunnels & Trolls solo adventures like Arena of Khazan and City of Terrors, I don’t think I would have ever played D&D beyond my first session. Those gamebooks allowed me to get positive roleplaying game experiences even though I had few friends who played role playing games and the fact that my first experience with D&D had been with a power hungry DM who was adversarial in style and temperment.
My First Real Roleplaying Experience
My very first experience with role playing games was a session of Dungeons & Dragons in which I experienced the full horror of a certain kind of bullying DM. I will relate that experience in a later …
As I think back upon those days, I find it interesting that I never considered playing a narrative solo miniatures game. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone were, after all, the founders of Games Workshop who published (and continue to publish) one of the most popular miniature wargames ever produced. When I began to incorporate miniatures into my D&D gaming sessions as a DM, I still didn’t make the cognitive leap to use miniatures in solo play. Heck, even when I started playing Mordheim and Necromunda from Games Workshop with my friends, the thought of playing them solo never crossed my mind.
That changed when I first played Joseph A. McCullough’s excellent Rangers of Shadow Deep game, a game that captured all of the solo narrative excitement I remember from the gamebook days but with added tactical complexity. I didn’t encounter Dave Morris and Oliver Johnson’s excellent Bloodsword gamebooks, which include tactical maps, until after I’d played Joseph’s game. Had I done so, I might have made the jump sooner. The fact is that solo play with miniatures is a great deal of fun and there are a lot of great games out there.
In his most recent
, highlights a number of interesting solo games. One in particular, Forgotten Ruin: Adventure Wargame, really struck my fancy (no link in my post because I want you to use Patrick’s affiliate links). The game uses the “Five X” system that has been used in the fantasy themed Five Leagues and the science fiction themed Five Parsecs, which is a fun system that is very flexible for both solo and cooperative play. Those cooperative play elements, which exist in the Rangers games too, really bring back my earliest gaming experiences with my friend Sean McPhail and have a special place in my heart.Forgotten Ruin is based on the Military Fantasy series by Jason Anspach and Nick Cole, which looks like a fantasy version of Jerry Pournelle’s Janissaries series and I mean that in the best way. This solo game is definitely on my to read and play list.
, over at where gaming and music intersect, has an interesting newsletter this week that features a defense of Yacht Rock. It’s a wonder to me that the genre needs any kind of defense. Take the Yachtiest of Yacht Rock songs “Ride Like the Wind,” even artists like Frank Zappa have played it live (see 4:20 on the clip below). As for musicianship, Christopher Cross has frequently collaborated with Eric Johnson.
I think the reason purists and gatekeepers rejected Yacht Rock initially is because it was the music of the “studio crew.” Bands like Toto are made up of session players and not rags to riches “discovered” band members. It is the music of the mercenaries of the recording industry, people who collect a regular paycheck, and I think that rubs some people the wrong way. Not people who are casuals, or people who appreciate musicianship (the two long tails of the distribution), but those who are struggling to find a way to break in. From that perspective, I can understand the sentiment. Having said that, I still find that I agree with Rick Beato on this topic.
Meanwhile, back to Matt’s newsletter (Finger Guns — bang, bang, bang, ka-chow). Matt covers a Bluesky thread on music to play for punk/post punk table top gaming. I was surprised by the lack of reference to the most post-punk role playing game ever published, Vampire the Masquerade (for the record Tremere for life…afterlife? Both if you include Ars Magica?), which has its own musical Appendix N.
I’ll admit that not all of those are great for gaming sessions, but Sisters of Mercy and Siouxsie and the Banshees certainly hit the mark for a dark post-punk vibe. That said, the list in the Bluesky thread is very interesting and the real question being asked is what punk/post-punk music feels right for a Sword & Sorcery game which does tend to lean metal. Obviously, I think bands like Misfits and Electric Frankenstein hit the spot here, and AFI if you’re aiming post-punk.
I’m a sucker for one page dungeons and the system free Lair of Whispers from
over at looks really cool. Frederik drew the map based on a tutorial from Dyson Logos, a mapmaker who has provided DMs with a wealth of material. It’s well worth checking out. discusses Valley Girl in his most recent podcast. Valley Girl is one of the most underrated teen films from the 1980. While Amy Heckerling’s direction and Cameron Crowe’s writing on Fast Times at Ridgemont High deserve the praise they receive, and both did follow up 90s teen films of quality as well (Clueless and Say Anything), Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl deserves a lot more recognition than it tends to get. I say this even though the film was recently remade, in a version that starred one of my favorite young actresses Jessica Rothe, but that musical remake felt a little soulless in comparison to the original. Yes, there are some overplayed tropes in the original Valley Girl, but those tropes also touch on real concerns that many young people have. Based on my experience as a father of twin high school aged girls, they are concerns that still abound in almost exactly the same ways today.
Last week’s Horror Moments, Opera Edition by
over at discusses the phenomenon of Hagsploitation in the opera The Medium by Gian Carlo Menotti. Friends of mine know that I am skeptical of the Frankfurt School and of critical theory in general (though I do like Habermas’ focus on deliberation). More specifically, I’ve been skeptical since reading in detail what Adorno had to say about Jazz. That pulled the veneer of any real connection with the proletariat away from the movement and revealed him, and many other of his fellow scholars, as neo-elitists whose goal was to replace earlier aesthetic theories like those of Burke on the sublime and beautiful and Wagner’s Art and Revolution and The Art Work of the Future, not to mention classical aesthetics or the modern aesthetics of Nietzsche. Just as art itself is the long conversation of all human civilization, so too was the Frankfurt School’s advancement of a revolutionary new aesthetic analysis a part of a longer aesthetic conversation. I might not be the largest fan, but that is in part because, like them, I seek to commit a form of critical parricide and argue towards a new aesthetic.I’m far too a fan of the common to believe that problematizing things reveals their “true” dialectical meaning, but I am too much of a fan of philosophy to reject the notion that problematizing isn’t a necessary part of a larger dialogue about the meaning of art. Dr. King’s analysis of hagsploitation is a valuable addition to how we should think about what we are afraid of and why we fear it. What underlying social norms feed fears of elderly women? From Baba Yaga to the witch in Drag Me to Hell, Thinner, and Woman in Black, we see this fear made manifest. Since horror stories are best when they are rooted in our real societal fears, there is value in examining and critiquing those very fears.
Werewolf tales are a form of dadsploitation that when done well (The Wolf Man, American Werewolf in London, The Howling, The Company of Wolves) provide some understanding why women might say they would feel more comfortable meeting a bear in the wilderness than a lone man. When done poorly like The Beast Within, it is because in the last three minutes they shift from metaphor to explicit and thus become more individualized and less universal in meaning.
I read Dr. King’s piece shortly before watching the new Vince Vaughn film Nonnas. The film was written by Liz Maccie and stars Joe Manganiello, and Drea de Matteo along with Susan Sarandon, Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire, and Brenda Vaccaro as the eponymous Nonnas. In many ways, the film was a discussion of hagsploitation in general that I thought threaded the needle fairly well. There is one scene were that conversation stumbles. The Nonnas in the film are all beautiful as they are, but there is one scene where they take the time to be “made beautiful” and it was during that moment that Dr. King’s piece spoke most to me. I understand that the women needed a moment of community and connection, but they were beautiful as they were and having them keep the transformation for the rest of the film diminished the message a bit.
Her piece also made me think about the Russian fantasy novel The Scar by Sergey and Marina Dyachenko. There is a mysterious old women of the forest in that book as well, but the role she plays is one of healing and teaching and she is not an object of fear. The novel has other difficult, and pretty Russian, elements regarding the love story that comment on what is necessary for redemption or if redemption is possible, but the sequence in the forest where the protagonist reads the fairy tales provided to him by the old woman present their own conversation points in the hagsploitation conversation.
The idea of people vacationing in a themed amusement park filled with action and adventure that allows them to be the heroes of their own action stories is at least as old as Michael Crichton’s film Westworld. That movie explored how such a park could serve to amplify less than desirable social traits, a kind of “what happens in Westworld stays in Westworld,” as many of the characters in the film immediately devolve into immoral behavior once they realize there are no consequences for their actions. Being a Michael Crichton film, they soon learn that amusement parks — whether filled with robots or dinosaurs — are dangerous places and that there are very real consequences to their actions.
The first game designed for players to take on the role of characters who visit such a park was Chaosium’s 1982 role playing game Worlds of Wonder. The game was designed to highlight the flexibility of Chaosium’s Basic Roleplaying System, the mechanics that formed the foundation for the Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and Runequest Roleplaying games. Worlds of Wonder featured a Westworldesque amusement park where player characters could visit Magic World, Superworld, or Future World. The first of those settings, Magic World, was translated into Swedish and became the foundation for the Drakar och Demoner role playing game that eventually developed into the modern games Trudvang, Ruin Masters, and Dragonbane. Super World was the inspiration for the George R.R. Martin edited shared universe super hero series Wildcards. Superworld was eventually expanded into a full role playing game by Steve Perrin. Future World was the longest book, and featured some interesting design elements similar to Traveller, and while Chaosium has written some expansions for it (Outpost 19) it did not serve as the wellspring for other games like the other two components of the game did.
The novel Dream Park by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes mixes thematic elements from Michael Crichton’s Westworld with the role playing elements of Worlds of Wonder to create a fantastic setting for a TV series or roleplaying game. Unlike Crichton’s Westworld, Niven and Barnes’ Dream Park isn’t a place where people go to act as immoral as they want and where they only face off against robots. Dream Park is live action role playing taken to the ultimate level where gamers compete against one another as they engage with adventures designed by Dungeon Masters. These adventures are often high concept mashups where Wizards and Space Marines might stand side by side battling the fungi-men of Antarctica. The Park is a wonderful setting and Niven and Barnes’ book is a riveting tale that combines a real world murder mystery with an intriguing in Park adventure. The Dream Park book series currently has four volumes and each one touches on the interconnection between new forms of media and the price of celebrity.
In 1992, game designer Mike Pondsmith licensed Niven and Barnes’ book and created the Dream Park Role Playing Game. By this time, Pondsmith was an experienced game designer who had created Mekton, Cyberpunk, Teenagers from Outer Space, and a host of other games.
Pondsmith’s Dream Park game really leans into the concept that players within the Park can win and lose the points they use to buy their special abilities (kind of like in Ready Player One) and so each player character has two “layers” of play. There is a base layer that includes their basic skills, these are hard coded skills that represent the underlying capabilities of the character. This is not the real world player or the “in game” player, rather the characters that in game player plays in the adventures within Dream Park. This base character must also be aligned with a “class” or archetype that allows the player to purchase skills and equipment in the game with their “Skill Points.” These Skill Points are used to buy Options, everything from flashlights and long swords to super powers and magical spells.
The Options purchased with Skill Points will change from adventure to adventure, but the Basic Skills and Class of the character will not change. The game includes both Basic and Advanced rules, though the basic rules are really just there to introduce how to play the game and are the Dream Park equivalent of Heroquest. They are fun, but very simple. The advanced system is where the action is.
When making a character, the player chooses and archetype based on the kinds of optional skills they will want to purchase during play. If you want to play a Wizard, you should probably select the Magic User character type.
Once you have selected this Class, you have three points to customize the Base Skills ensuring that there is some variation between characters of the same class even before Skill Points are spent. Options include skills that range from Easy (costing 1 point per point of skill) to Extremely Hard (5 points per point) to learn, with Skills from outside your Class costing Double. Superhero skills are a little different in that they have their own costs (EXPENSIVE), so if you want to play a superhero you’d better pick that class.
Mirroring the novels the game is based on, the adventures the characters face will have some restrictions and may only allow skills from certain eras (Ancient, Historical, Modern, or Future) to be used and may forbid certain other kinds of options like Magic or Superpowers. The Gamemaster is supposed to give you clues when you are spending your points, so that you don’t waste them on abilities you won’t be able to use. Of course, if you are playing a superhero game using the rules, or a multi-genre role playing game, you can ignore such limitations.
At the end of each adventure, the characters earn (or lose) a certain number of skill points based on their performance. Of these points, 3 may be used to permanently boost Basic Skills while the rest must be retained for options. Think of this as the players getting better at the games as time goes on, or a kind of dual layered experience system. Given that points assigned to Basic Skills can never be lost, it’s a good idea to put them there.
The combat system is very simple and uses opposed d6 + Skill rolls while the task resolution system uses d6 + Skill versus a target number. I think that opposed rolls slow down play, so I’d shift the game to a player sided roll against target number system (the Skill of the opponent +4) to speed things up. Player sided roll systems are gaining in popularity as many players like to roll to hit and dodge. One minor wrench in the gears for this approach is that characters always have the option to dodge in Dream Park (hence the reason the Dodge skill is grey above) after they’ve been hit. Using a player facing system would mean rolling twice (as opposed to three times) if the player tries to dodge.
The mechanics are simple, but very flexible. It includes rules for multiple attacks that are similar to those in Dragon Warriors and you can spend skill points on an attack to add a special effect like disarming etc. in a design element that predates Fantasy AGE’s stunt system.
To show how flexible the system is, and to highlight that starting as a Superhero isn’t a great idea unless you get more Skill Points for options, I’ve made a very early career Johnny Storm below. A starting character only has 20 Option points available and his flying alone costs that much. Someone playing Johnny’s first adventure would have to be very insightful regarding the Options they purchased for that first adventure. Then again, Superhero adventures go pretty quickly and you’d be able to stat up a full scale Johnny in no time.
No album signals the transition of Genesis from Prog Rock to Pop Rock band better than Duke and no song demonstrates it better than “Behind the Lines.” It’s the first song on the album and opens with fanfare that is pure Prog sound. This opening would fit nicely on any early Genesis or ELP album, shifts to a relatively catchy melody, then transitions to some remarkable Phil Collins written fills, an interesting if brief guitar solo, only to return to Prog sensibilities and eventually fades into silence. It’s a wonderful song that represents how well the band navigated shifts in the market and shifts in its own membership. It is one of my favorite songs to write and listen to.
I was introduced to the band Joy Division by my friend Ron. They were his absolute favorite band and every mix CD he ever made me had at least one Joy Division song sprinkled in at what always seemed to be the right spot. Ron had impeccable taste in…well, everything, but in particular music. He was the kind of person that when you first looked at his room, and eventually apartment/house, it looked almost hermetic in how spartan the space was. It was the kind of space Marie Kondo would approve of because it only contained that which brought joy. He only owned a few role playing game book, but they were iconic books in the hobby.
He had a highly curated music collection and owned just exact books to become informed on the history of punk. I’m much more eclectic. I’m not a hoarder, but I do have to go through significant culling rituals from time to time. I cull annually. Ron curated constantly. For three years we were inseparable, but we drifted apart for a couple of years as work and college took up time. We eventually reconnected and I was getting ready for more Two for Tuesday nights at the Riverboat Casino, where we could get two full chicken dinners for $5, when he took his life. The world is worse for his absence, but my life is better for having known him. Of all the Joy Division songs he shared with me over the years, the one that hits hardest for me is “Shadowplay.”
Boy, that was a bit of sorrowful nostalgia and when I get into moods of sorrowful nostalgia, my heart longs to hear Cocteau Twins. I don’t think any band captures the sound of sorrow better. There’s a beautiful haunting quality to all of their songs and like many other bands I enjoy, I wish they had a bigger following. Their sound is layered with interesting sonic textures that ask you to just sit, relax, and listen.
You are probably very familiar with “May the 4th Be With You,” the annual viral Star Wars marketing chant that saturates social media to announce the anniversary of the theatrical release of the first Star Wars film on May 4th, 1977. I doubt that you are familiar with the fact that May 3rd is Gymkata Day, a day that celebrates the greatest Gymnastic Martial Arts Espionage film ever made. That’s probably because I’m the only person in the world who celebrates it, but celebrate it I do.
This year marked the 40 year anniversary of the May 3, 1985 release of the Kurt Thomas vehicle and I’m going to do everything I can to convince you to watch this prime example of Hollywood low budget high concept pop culture action at its best. In an era dominated by blockbuster films, it’s hard to imagine a world where film studios would quickly produce films in order to take advantage of trending pop culture fads but it was once normal practice. In this case, the fad being leveraged was Kurt Thomas’s fame as a gymnast and how the Cold War cost him his one real opportunity to win a Gold Medal.
After the 1978 World Championships, Kurt Thomas was viewed as a huge favorite to win the Gold Medal at the 1980 Olympics, but when Jimmy Carter boycotted those Olympics in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the chances of him ever winning a Medal diminished to a near impossibility. At the time, the Olympic Committee only allowed amateur athletes to compete in the games and Olympians in free market democratic countries often had to choose between making a living or achieving their Olympic dreams. The most tragic of these cases is the story of Steve Prefontaine, who was a major advocate for allowing athletes to earn money while they trained and who died in a car accident.
I point out that it was democratic nations that suffered because athletes in socialist countries were allowed to participate, even though they were essentially the paid employees of their states. Because Kurt Thomas chose to earn money using his talents after the boycott, he could not compete in the 1984 Olympics. That his withdrawal from competition was so tied up in the Cold War, provided him with a lot of sympathy and it made a perfect combination for a Hollywood action film and the industry took full advantage.
The premise of Gymkata is that World Champion Gymnast Jonathon Cabot (Kurt Thomas) has been recruited to enter the fictional country of Parmistan in order to secure a satellite monitoring station the US can use to keep track of the Soviet Union. You can already see how the elements tie into Thomas’ own life. Parmistan is obviously analogous to Afghanistan. The Cold War is the back drop and Cabot is the Gymnast caught in the middle.
The movie is loosely based on the Dan Tyler Moore 1957 novel The Terrible Game, but diverges in a number of ways that made the film more topical in 1985. Like many espionage authors, of both the literary and pulp variety, Moore had experience in intelligence and worked for the OSS during World War II and was friends with famous Treasury Agent Eliot Ness. In all honesty, Moore’s life story would probably make a better substantive film than Gymkata, but let’s have that slide by for the moment.
The central conceit of The Terrible Game and Gymkata is that anyone who enters the remote fictional nation (Parmistan in the film) has to participate in an activity called “The Game” where they either die or are allowed entrance into the country and one favor. I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a pretty harsh immigration system. “Want to come to our country? Then you have to let us hunt you like a character in The Most Dangerous Game. If you survive, then you can get a visitor’s visa.”
The film was directed by Robert Clouse, who leveraged his credibility as the director of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon and Game of Death to market this film as one of the most realistic martial arts films ever produced. To be fair, the film did feature Tadashi Yamashita, Sonny Barnes, and Richard Norton who were all skilled martial artists. Yamashita and Norton had worked together on the Chuck Norris film The Octagon (1980) and Barnes and Norton had worked together on another Clouse feature Force: Five (1981). Norton is one of the most respected martial arts stunt coordinators in film history, having worked in both the US and Hong Kong in the early days of the martial arts genre and helped update how fight scenes were presented in film. Among his more recent work was coordinating the fights in both Suicide Squad movies and in starring in and choreographing the fights in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.
As a movie, Gymkata is extremely silly. As a lynchpin in the history of action films, it’s a central piece of American cinema. It’s a film from a bygone age when major studios would invest modest sums to take advantage of current trends. The peak of this behavior, in my opinion, was Cool as Ice starring Vanilla Ice. The production schedule on that was ridiculous and so too was the cinematography. Gymkata lacks Cool as Ice’s cinematography, but it has heart and if Hollywood had any sense, it would have made a quick remake starring Stephen Nedoroscik. Sadly, we live in a world where even meme films like Skibidi Toilet get development deals with Michael Bay and if they come out at all (unlikely) they will come out as big budget extravaganzas instead of films where journeyman creators develop their craft. The slower modern Hollywood did lead to a Minecraft movie that was actually good, but it’s also led to many an expensive disaster. Gymkata might be a disaster, but it wasn’t expensive and it’s this week’s recommended film.
The Yummy Awards. Incredible!
Great list and thanks so much for including my adventure. I really appreciate the shoutout.