EPISODE 732: THE RETURN OF THE SANDERSON SISTERS
Please forgive me, I have pop myopia.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Bette Midler’s Favorite Film
This weekend Hocus Pocus 2 debuted on Disney+, to great buzz.
If you’re a Hocus Pocus-head, I can tell you, the sequel is a good ‘un. Very much of a piece with the original, with some additions to the mythology of the series that really pay off.
Put another way, yes, there are some great musical numbers.
I say all this like I know from Hocus Pocus, but honestly I’d never seen the original or the sequel until this weekend, when suddenly I was staying with friends who were like, How do you not know this, it is the story of all our lives?
And so we watched the two films back-to-back, which by the way, I recommend. There are a number of ideas and also shots that are drawing directly upon the first film.
I have to say, the thing that surprised me most is discovering that the witches are the villains. Like, they straight up kill an 8 year old girl in the first ten minutes, and their goal in the film to eat/kill all the children of Salem! WhahhhhhhttttisthisfilmandhowdidDisneysayyestoit?
I also loved seeing Sarah Jessica Parker being ridiculous. She’s made such a career of playing intensely type-A characters, I had no idea she could do just goofin’. And she’s really good at it! In some ways she was my favorite part of the film.
Of course I had to do research on the film afterward, and I learned it’s a bit of a movie unicorn. Hocus Pocus came out in the summer of 1993—you know, the best time to do a family-targeted Halloween movie. Shocker, it bombed. But its fans loved it so, and eventually introduced it to their kids, that instead of fading away it slowly over the years became an actual hit, so much so that Disney eventually greenlit a sequel, after many years of fans calling for it.
Other crazy things I learned:
You know the moths that fly out of zombie Billy Butcherson’s mouth when the stitches sewing his lips shut are cut? They were real moths that had been placed in actor Doug Jones’ mouth. Hideous.
On a similar note, Sarah Jessica Parker really did eat a spider in the role. Ah, 1993, you were so nasty.
They used nine cats and a robot for Binx the black cat. Which sounds shocking until you think about what are the actual chances that a cat will agree to do anything that’s asked of it, let alone all the different things. Then it’s a miracle they used real cats at all.
The child actors apparently hated this arrangement, too, which makes sense. Imagine having to try and charm not just one cat, but nine. Not gonna happen.
Turns out it really is also Bette Midler’s favorite film, which I love. She’s made a ton of movies, been nominated for Oscars twice. But her favorite role is playing a singing, child-eating witch.
It’s not a flashy movie—and neither is the sequel, by the way, though it does go bigger in a couple fun ways. But I really was charmed by them both. And I think there’s probably a great lesson there for writers. You don’t necessarily need top production values or even a clever script to make a successful movie. You just need some characters that people can take delight in.
Sorry, I don’t really care for music.
MIND THE GAP
Watching Hocus Pocus got me thinking a lot about the relationship between pop culture and different generations. Because truly, before my friends insisted we watch the films this weekend, I had never given them a single moment of conscious thought. I think I assumed they were films for little kids—and given that they came out when I was 22, that’s about right. It was targeted at an audience younger than me, and so it never registered to me.
There’s an entire set of pop culture projects that fit this description for me. And as I started to catalog them, I realized they all happened in the 1990s. Freaks and Geeks, Tommy Boy, the classic Adam Sandler comedies, Full House, Sex and the City, That 70s Show—they’re all 90s programs. (Full House is the one exception; it started in 1987.)
It’s not like I wasn’t watching TV in the 1990s, or going to the movies. So it’s not as simple as saying in the 90s (and/or in my 20s) I wasn’t consuming much. No, I think it’s your age versus the age of the target audience. Most of the stuff I missed was aimed at kids in middle school and high school, and I had already graduated college. Compare that to Friends, which also debuted in the 1990s, but my age cohort was obsessed with it. Why? How about because it’s about people our age. Meanwhile Sex and the City also didn’t make any impression on me, but perhaps because those characters were in their 30s (and they really seemed to be late 30s, at the earliest).
I feel like there should be some sort of name for this phenomenon. Maybe the classic shows/movies/books we missed for this reason should be called “Gap Shows.” Or maybe there should be a word for the inability to realize certain important pop culture things are happening because of your own distance from them. Some kind of equivalent to face blindness—Generation blindness? Generational myopia?
Or how about Pop myopia (n.)—the inability to actually see or hear about certain big pop phenomenon, generally because they do not sync up with your age or life experience.
It’s not that I didn’t like The Simpsons. It’s just my pop myopia.
And speaking of my pop myopia…
AVATAR IS BACK BABY, SAID SOME PEOPLE, I GUESS?
Avatar is back in theaters right now, in preparation for its sequel, the first of four, because that is what the people have been demanding for the last 13 years, apparently?
The original came out in 2009. It definitely had its moment, and it has its fans. But four sequels, really? Creator James Cameron is known for taking death-defying leaps and absolutely nailing them, so I guess don’t write him off, but man, if I’m only about 50/50 about going to see the next tentpole blockbuster from Marvel, what’s the likelihood I’m going to drop a twenty to see the sequel to a film from 13 years ago about blue cat people?
Over at Vulture Bilge Ebiri has a tight take on why Avatar is genius. And he makes an interesting point that the film’s up-until-now lack of a million tie-ins—no animated cartoons, no YA book series, no TV shows—is part of what makes Avatar distinctive. It has rejected the ever-extending universe business plan of Marvel, which he argues is the cinematic equivalent of over-planting your crops. They suck all the nutrients out of the soil, leaving nothing left for anyone else. Meanwhile Avatar has respected the environment in which it was planted.
To me Ebiri’s argument ascribes an awful lot of intentionality to Cameron’s decision to avoid expanding Avatar’s footprint. The man has been talking about these sequels for years at this point. And he’s partnered with Disney on a ride.
But it is a interesting to think about the “ecology” of the movie business, and how a single set of stories can completely disrupt that.
The wi-fi where I’m staying this weekend has been very much on the fritz, so I think I’m going to have to leave things right here. Have a great week. If you’re coming to New York Comic-Con look me up, I’ll be the guy wearing the funny costume.
See you next week with news from the trenches!
