Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 2/21/25

Live From New York edition

We would just like to take a moment here at the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker to congratulate Texas Governor Greg Abbot and his merry band of criminals and imbeciles (or ‘crimbeciles’) for doing the bare minimum amount of effort required to ensure that the power grid didn’t fail again in the recent spate of sub-zero weather. We earnestly hope that this will be the start of a new era of government efficiency in Texas, but we are also not holding our collective breath for fear of asphyxiating and causing permanent brain damage, because we are realists, rather than optimists.

FenCon XX Trip Report

I went to a regional convention last weekend, one of the few general interest cons left in the Texas area. FenCon is a catch-all for authors, artists, editors and musicians to get together and share a love and sometimes deeply abiding interest in fantasy and science fiction TVs and movies, books, music, and more. I’ve been a regular there for many years and I was even asked to be the Toastmaster in 2019, a convention role I was born to play, if we’re being honest.

Can you feel that palpable sense of excitement?

It was a fun show, mostly for social reasons; old friends I only get to see a few times a year, fellow writers and authors, fans who have been reading my work for a while, and always the chance to make new friends, learn new things, and develop new ideas.

That was the plan, of course. The hotel had other ideas; evidently, there was a potential sale of the hotel being finalized or maybe initiated, and having a pesky nerd-convention at the hotel that weekend was just a bridge too far. They reneged on a number of agreements with the convention staff, and when they weren’t locking horns with Con Ops, they were busy shooing us out of restricted areas...like the bar on a Friday night at 11 PM after they had closed.

Between the staff kicking us out of a room party for being loud (on the same floor as a high school girls’ basketball team, no less), and being told to go sit in the darkened portion of the lounge, away from the brightly lit and completely empty bar area, and getting barked at by two panelists I was trying to manage on a panel I was moderating, I never felt so scolded in my adult life.

L to R: Howard Carter, Adrian Simmons, me, and Stephen Patrick, talking about the difference between a remake, a sequel, and a reboot. None of us liked Gus Van Sant’s shot for shot remake of Psycho, for the record.

In all other respects, FenCon XX was fine, though the perennial topic came up about the graying of fandom and more and more of us with beards and blood pressure meds, but not nearly enough new people under the age of 35 in attendance. It’s a omnipresent problem in fan circles for all regional and smaller conventions—how do you convince a bunch of people who have been conditioned to stay at home and be online that they need to leave all of that and come to a Holiday Inn on the Interstate and talk to strangers about your favorite Star Wars movie of all time?

The answer is, I don’t know that you can. But conversely, I don’t know that’s the fan you’re trying to reach, either. I love general interest conventions because that’s what I cut my teeth on. Most younger fans these days only participate in one or two fandoms—anime and cosplay, for instance. That’s not at odds with the literary arts, and nothing is exclusive, but you can’t make someone go sit at a panel about under-appreciated science fiction from the golden age by telling them, “Trust me, you’ll LOVE it!” No, they won’t. You’ll have better luck getting a feral cat into a carrier than getting a seventeen-year old nonbinary anime fan into one of my readings.

And yet, there IS interest in books, in writing, in illustrating, and all of those other combinations. We’re still making books. People are still reading them. It’s a thing. My hypothesis is this: They aren’t coming to the conventions because they don’t know they exist. I think it’s on the regional shows to start looking at how they get the word out and make appropriate adjustments. Some local shows, like SoonerCon, are already doing this, and it’s completely re-invigorated their con over the last few years. Promote where your audience is.

The other thing is this, and I’m just going to say it because it’s time for a little tough love: regional authors, know thyself. If you’re not personable, good at speaking extemporaneously, and knowledgeable about a topic, don’t sign up for a panel. Play to your strengths. Get a reading slot. Sign up for a busier panel, like Pictionary, or some other audience participation activity. And if you’re not good at managing people and facilitating a discussion, don’t offer to moderate.

Enough of this insider baseball. Don’t mind me. I’ve got a strongly-worded letter to a certain hotel that doesn’t like conventions to write.

Hands down, the most dynamic shot of four people talking I’ve ever seen. L to R: A. Lee Martinez, the NTAB Administrator, Sally Hamilton, and Tex Thompson. Bunker Ops was there as well, taking the picture.

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

SNL 50^th Anniversary Special (Peacock)

This 3 1/2 hour-long live event was jam-packed with cast members, past and present, to honor the show that changed American culture, with special guests, musical duets, callbacks, and a nearly-excessive amount of flubs and gaffs.

A few weeks ago, I reviewed Saturday Night, and it sent me down a minor rabbit hole, since it coincided with all of this extra stuff surrounding the history of the show, including a four-part documentary series and a special highlighting the musical guests over the years, neither of which hold back or try to sugar-coat what happened. Mind you, it’s not a Hollywood Babylon takedown, but you can’t talk about 50 years of exceptional SNL musical guests without mentioning DEVO’s landmark appearance, Elvis Costello’s song change (for the better), and Sinead O’Conner’s brave and heartbreaking demonstration on live TV.

The SNL 50th Anniversary Special was different, of course; it was a victory lap, and a well-deserved one, at that. I think we take the show for granted because it’s always been with us at this point; I was six years old when the show premiered and quickly became one of those things you didn’t miss, because you never knew what was going to happen. Even back then, you could tell that they were making it up as they went. There was no model for the show they were doing. Oh, yeah, it was a salad bar of What Had Gone On Before, of course; Monty Python, Mad Magazine, The National Lampoon, Doctor Demento’s radio show, and a bunch of scattered and disparate pockets of improv comedy troupes, a resource that still serves as Lorne Michael’s farm team to this day. SNL synthesized and distilled all of that into a new thing that hadn’t hitherto existed. That’s not to say it was an overnight thing; this idea of “Saturday Night Live” as an entity took decades to evolve into a cultural mainstay.

One of our brain’s tendencies is to focus on the negative over the positive, and that sucks for us, because I think you lose a lot of the forest for all of those trees sometimes. We all kvetch about it when the show, according to our brain’s limited perceptions, “sucks now,” implying that it used to be great and now, suddenly, isn’t. There are some who like to add, “not that it was ever that good to begin with,” but that’s a hipster-contrarian stance and I refute it unconditionally. No, SNL is not high art, and it was never meant to be. But I don’t think you can point to a more significant source of memes, catch-phrases, star-making and boundary-pushing in the last fifty years that changed how we look at things in our popular culture.

This is something you might think about in the moment, or note with interest when you see old cast members together in another project, like when Andy Samberg guest-starred on Parks and Recreation. You go, “Oh, hey, they both used to be on...” and then you get back into the movie or the TV show. But I don’t know if you’ve stopped to think about just how many beloved icons and touchstones and game-changing people have passed through that “not very funny anymore” show on their way to their own personal creative success.

SNL has become a kind of crucible, one that has been hinted at in all of the retrospectives of late. It's hard work, grueling hours, and unrelenting pressure to perform and produce, every week. While some cast members are featured players, meaning they act in the sketches but don’t write, and some cast members are writers who don’t act in sketches, the vast majority of the cast members do both.

This gets into the other reason why I think people tend to dismiss SNL unless it’s their SNL, meaning, “the first cast I ever watched, probably at the age of nine or ten.” Comedy writing is hard. Most people think little, if any, about what makes them laugh. They’ve never tried to write a seven-minute-long skit, or a short story, or a musical parody, or anything else along those lines. Then again, most people think they have a great sense of humor. I love that phrase, “sense of humor.” In my mind, I always think about the squiggles over Peter Parker’s head when his Spidey-Sense is tingling. “I can sense...a non-sequitur pun! Coming right at me! Duck!” In general, folks don’t fully appreciate how hard it is to do what they do on SNL every week. There’s an inherent snobbery built into higher echelons of critical thinking that comedy is lowbrow, easy to do; all you need is a crème pie in the face, and that’s not “art,” now, is it?

Well, Saturday Night Live is the laboratory wherein comedy is cooked up, experimented on, and flung against the wall to see what sticks. It’s a classroom where we get to see everyone’s homework assignments in real time, with only the slightest of filters in place. Of course it’s not always funny. It’s a very public first draft, for Pete’s sake. But when they land one, it takes off, and SNL has positioned itself as a reflection of the times we live in (by way of New York City, which is its own ecosystem, like Ka-Zar’s Savage Land).

You can’t ignore what the show over the years has produced. Not the movies; well, aside from Wayne’s World and The Blues Brothers. I’m talking about the people, the catch phrases, the little bits that have seeped into our vocabulary of life, and of course, all of the the post-SNL projects. Consider that there’s bits you can do from shows that are 20-35 years old that people acknowledge, when they have no idea where it came from. Much like how in the 1970s, everyone had a Bogart impression and lines from Casablanca triggered nods of recognition. Kids who were not alive when the sketches first aired know all the words to “Lazy Sunday” and Natalie Portman’s inspired gangster rap. You can say “ACTING!” and raise your hand over your head and most people will get you’re referencing the Master Thespian. Every line of dialogue from Wayne’s World, which was already embroidered with the patois of the times, got magnified with the movies. Wanna live in a van down by the river? Think about this: we call negative people “Debbie Downer.” That’s a thing everyone knows.

And what about the cast members? Chevy Chase went on to a successful movie career, which included Fletch and the National Lampoon’s Vacation movies; Christmas Vacation has become a beloved mainstay. Bill Murray? Pick a movie, any movie. The guy has become his own meme. Andy Samberg? Brooklyn 99. Tina Fey? 30 Rock owes its existence to SNL. You like Ted Lasso, right? What about Barry? Parks and Recreation? Austin Powers? Bridesmaids? How about Phil Hartman’s eternally-quoted characters from The Simpsons? Adam Sandler’s entire movie career? Chris Rock? Eddie Murphy?

I think you get where I’m coming from. SNL deserves a victory lap; it’s earned it. Even when you don’t like a particular cast member (and oh boy, do I have problems with...never mind). Even when you can’t stand a musical guest, or think the guest host is dumb, or doesn’t gel with everybody, SNL is usually good for a few chuckles, a couple of guffaws, and so what if they ground out to single? They can’t all be home runs. That’s what the batting average is all about. And I’d say that SNL over the last fifty years is batting .375. That’s a hall of fame stat, right there.

Oh yeah, I was talking about the 50th Anniversary Special. My bad.

Yes, of course, after all that; watch the damn show. Here’s what they got right:

• They acknowledged some deeply held beliefs about the show, like the fact that after the Weekend Update segment, things tend to fall off. It was nice to see them kinda lean into the truisms.

• They didn’t do an “In Memorium” bit to acknowledge the fallen. Adam Sandler’s musical number covered it in a bittersweet way without descending into schmaltz. The “In Memorium” sketch they did do, with appropriate commentary from Tom Hanks, was perfect.

• They made the show an All-Stars Game, where cast members from different eras got to perform together. That and the sketch choice gave it a “greatest hits” kind of quality. This is probably why I’m using so many baseball metaphors. Well, that and the Yankees.

It wasn’t a clip show, or a greatest hits collection. They’ve done that before. This was much better as a celebration of (many of) their biggest stars, most recognizable guest hosts, the various musical eras, and so much more. I am sure some of it has been spoiled already, but it’s really worth the time to check it out.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every obnoxious film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”