EPISODE 734: WE'RE ALL LIVING IN A PREQUEL...
...and the Most Chaotic Four Word Phrase Ever Written.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
I said last week I was going to write about adapting stories this week, which I now regret because I have a lot to say about the finale of Rings of Power, ha ha ha. But I live to serve, so here we go.
ADAPT THIS
People have hated the Mario Brothers movie from the moment that Chris Pratt was announced as its main character. A lot of that seems to be just the general fandom shift against Pratt that’s been going on for a minute. But then the trailer only reaffirms fan concerns. It spends a lot of time setting up the villain, and his vibe is weirdly violent. Like, there’s a sense of humor there in the middle where the penguin people are throwing snowballs, but in general there’s this super heightened sense of malevolence and destruction which feels absolutely nothing like a video game about two dudes hopping on mushrooms.
Then when we finally do get to Pratt it turns out though the character is clearly Italian Pratt’s just doing his own normal voice. Which honestly may turn out to be a better choice, because is anyone going to love some kind of stereotypical Italian pizza man accent? But it, too, lacks anything that feels specifically Super Mario Brothers.
Peter Rabbit has been a big success, but for me the character is far too mature and knowing. In the books Peter Rabbit is not a loudmouth troublemaker; nor is he an adult. He’s a sweet little kid who gets into trouble and then doesn’t know what to do.
Meanwhile you look at the HBOMax Last of Us trailer that recently dropped, and it’s pretty much picture perfect to the video game series. The characters actually look just like their game counterparts, and the scene references from the game are spot on, too.
Now HBOMax has a lot more to work with. Last of Us has a really clear narrative and set of events. Its characters also have clearly established voices. One of the troubles with adapting Peter Rabbit and Mario Brothers is that those characters pretty much never speak.
But even so, those stories have very clear “voices,” and it’s important that they’re heeded. Just as Last of Us needs to be grim and scary, Super Mario Brothers needs to be super playful and antic. Peter Rabbit should be innocent. But it isn’t.
OTHER VIDEO GAMES THAT COULD BE ADAPTED AND WHAT HOLLYWOOD WILL LIKELY DO TO RUIN THEM
Donkey Kong, voiced by Bryan Cranston, as a giant ape who sets out to seek revenge on humanity after his family is killed by Southern white racist hunters.
Pac-Man, voiced by Zac Efron, about a high school kid who is always hungry and late for school and just trying to meet up with the girl of his dreams when suddenly he finds himself trapped inside a terrifying haunted house full of dead bullies.
The Legend of Zelda (live action) starring Chloë Grace Moretz as a princess who is kidnapped by villains and after escaping with the slight help of some adorable kid named Link (Evan Peters) sets out to seek revenge on those villains down as she taps into a dark, bloodthirsty rage.
Space Invaders (live action)—Jennifer Lawrence stars as the president of the United States who must find a way to stop an alien invasion. Chris Pratt co-stars as the scrappy fighter pilot who promises to get it done for his momma, who was killed in the first wave.
Tetris—Scarlett Johansson stars as a T-shaped object that never quite fits with anyone else at school or at home, who discovers her real purpose when she enlists.
I found this retelling of the actual Peter Rabbit story, read by a child. It perfectly captures everything that is wrong with the movies. Also it’s wonderful.
IS THIS YOUR FINAL ANSWER?
Amazon’s mega-expensive Rings of Power concluded its first season on Friday. And it was by far the strongest episode of the season, not only because it revealed some pretty big stuff that we’ve been waiting for, but because it finally felt like the Lord of the Rings. It had some classic halfling moments; a very cool magical fight scene; a great temptation sequence that it’s kind of unclear whether the hero won or lost.
It even turned a Tolkien poem into a song at the end (and boy was it good).
The show’s creators, who had never made or been on a show before—yeah, it’s wild—have said that you can see them learning what the show should and shouldn’t be over the course of the season, and I’d say that’s pretty accurate. But watching the ep also got me thinking about the unique importance of finales in the life of a show. Rolling out a show is a little bit like writing a great script: you want nothing that pulls the audience out of the experience. Things like punctuation, spelling and proper script format are important not only because they signal whether or not you are a professional, but because they’re a distraction. And distractions break the spell.
You know what else breaks a spell? The 9 month (or in the case of Rings maybe 18 month) hiatus between seasons. (The creators have already started to shoot season 2 but apparently it’s not coming out until 2024. Oof.) The season finale has to be compelling enough to overcome that interruption. Some shows, that’s not such a big deal; I can’t tell you what happened at the end of Grey’s Anatomy but I’m definitely all the way in on its return. But then again they only have a 3 month hiatus. I used to watch The Flash and really liked it, but when the pandemic came and basically shut it down for a longer-than-normal period of time it completely fell off of my radar. It wasn’t that the show had changed; the interruption just broke the spell.
Story itself can be at least as disruptive. If characters make decisions that don’t make sense or that haven’t been properly set up—at NYCC I heard author Brandon Sanderson talk about the gambling planet in The Last Jedi, and how the reason people hated that storyline is that the film and its predecessor had set up a completely different arc for Finn, leaving them confused when that wasn’t pursued—it snaps us out of the story.
One classic example of this is the murder of Glenn Rhee in The Walking Dead. He was one of the all-time great characters on that show, I think because he very much felt like us. Where most characters on that show are sort of archetypal, their humanity kind of burned away by the world they live in, Glenn very much felt like a normal person in this crazy world. He was a pizza delivery kid. When he was brave it was hard and high risk, just like it would be for us.
To have that character beaten to death in front of us, his head completely bashed in, was just way too much for a lot of fans. Which is fascinating; the world of The Walking Dead is brutal and cruel. The cold-blooded murder of a main character is totally in keeping with its rules. But the cold-blooded murder of someone like us very much was not. The fact that this is one of the most graphically violent deaths on the show probably didn’t help.
In any case, it woke a lot of the audience up, aka broke the spell, and away they went. The series lost a stunning 6 million viewers that season, one third of its at-that-point 17 million member audience. It lost another 3.5 million the next year. Three years later, in its seemingly endless final season, it’s down to a little over two million viewers a week.
BEWARE OF STORYTELLERS BEARING PREQUELS
These kinds of concerns are particularly important in a show’s first season, when it’s still building audience loyalty, and still proving it knows what it’s doing. Let’s be honest, Rings of Power has been very pretty but kind of a mess. It started strong and then basically spent 4 or 5 episodes sitting on its hands teasing a big battle that didn’t really happen and ended up being an origin story for Mordor that no one really needed.
And in doing so it committed what I’ve come to the thing is the cardinal sin of a prequel series: it let an explanatory origin story guide its storytelling rather than character. In a sense when you’re writing a prequel you have to forget where you’re headed and write the character like you would any new figure in a story (which by the way is really hard), or else invariably you will end up making some story choices that are not true to the character because you’re trying to get them to where you think they need to be. Whether they can articulate it or not, the audience is going to see that and it’s going to take them out of the story.
Better Call Saul is a tremendous example of how to do a prequel right. The character we meet at the beginning is somewhat recognizable, but in a lot of ways he’s also not. He has a brother, there’s a brilliant woman that he’s kind of in love with. He’s very much trying to be a real lawyer and live up to his brother’s expectations. And as though to suggest how different he was, he also has a new name. And this story of Jimmy McGill ended up being so compelling that the writers, much to their own surprise, let it go on for years longer than they intended.
As problematic as House of the Dragon is, it, too, has worked by telling its own story, with fresh characters and settings and seemingly no inclination to “explain” anything about the Westeros we know from Game of Thrones. Which is not to say there’s nothing like that ever going on; it introduces a major house, House Velaryon, that we’ve never heard of. Why is that? Well, last week we learned: their name died out 200 years ago.
When Rings suddenly turned its long-awaited action sequence—it is more than a little strange that a show which cost so much money still seemed hamstrung by finances when it came to big blockbuster-y sequences—into “And that’s how we got Mount Doom,” rather than being a cool reveal, it freaked audiences out, because, lacking much else in terms of story or character to hold onto—don’t get me wrong, I love Elrond and Durin, I love the Harfoots and the Stranger, but there is just not much going on there—it suggested this whole story had just been created to explain stuff.
It’s very much the Trojan Horse experience; Amazon gave us this gift of a cool new Lord of the Rings show but then once we spent six weeks waiting for it to do something it turned out to be just middling fanfic. Episode six is the reveal; episode seven is the reaction to the reveal which seems to sort of end all the storylines. I mean, it doesn’t right? We still don’t know who the Stranger is, or who Sauron is, or anything about the rings. But so much of the driving thrust of the story has been about the Southlands, with the storyline resolved—its characters don’t even appear in the finale—it seems like we’re done.
THIS ONE GOES TO ELEVEN
But it turns out we’re not. And where most of the season has been walking in place, suddenly Things Are Happening. We’ve got big fights, and big choices. Suddenly the show has kicked into a completely higher gear. And for a show that really has squandered a lot of goodwill, that’s such a smart decision. Some critics responded by saying “Finally the show is starting,” and while there’s some great snark going on there, in a way that is exactly the vibe that episode was designed to create, a sense of newness that can erase any bad taste in the mouth audience members might have picked up after the turtle’s pace of the season.
I’d say the show isn’t out of the woods yet. Even if it’s going to be forever until the series comes back and we’ll all be like, wait, who is who here?— actually who am I kidding, there are so few characters or big events in the series it’s highly unlikely that we’ll be wondering anything—still, as audience the experience of a show, the way it made us feel, is something that gets imprinted pretty deep. Unconsciously we’ll be waiting for the series to return to the kind of problems it had in season one, and if we sense them, a lot of us are going to be out.
The first season was eight episodes. I’m going to say episodes ten and eleven, those are going to be the ones to really watch. That’s where we’ll see whether the new season’s storylines are something different and fresh, something with real stakes and momentum, or more meandering through pretty scenery.
THREE TWEETS
Nobody is Getting Out of Here Alive
Nobody Chewbacca is NOT Getting Out of Here Alive
Nobody is Deserves to Getting Out of Here Alive
SHE-HULK UPDATE
She-Hulk finished its first season this week. It was very, very meta and so, so wonderful.
She-Hulk is the show for Marvel fans who have grown exhausted by Marvel movies.
She-Hulk is also a great sitcom.
You should watch She-Hulk.
I BET IT’S GOOD THOUGH
So I’m breaking the rules a little bit here, because I have read part of this, but only part. It’s an interview with actor Sara Porkalob, who stars as founding father Edward Rutledge in the new all-female production of 1776 on Broadway.
I saw the show in previews and found it by turns half-baked and fascinating. High School Musical: The Broadway Show: The History Lesson meets (at its best) Jordan Peele.
Porkalob has A LOT to say about the production and their work on it. Like, this is the vibe of what I’ve read so far.
Let’s check back next week and see what you think.
I went to NYCC last week; probably the craziest thing that happened was that I got to report on a Sam Heughan fan event. It was um, wild.
I’m headed on vacation next Friday for 10 days, but I am very much hoping to get another newsletter ready for you before I go, because you deserve all the things, even if they are my things.
Have a great week!