Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 06/01/24

Real Proud of Yourself Edition

It’s been a week fraught with peril here at the bunker, as the impending Summer fun time appears to have snuck up on us and sent everyone in Admin and Bunker Ops scrambling for their respective To-Do lists before the Administrator is pulled away by the annual pilgrimage to Cross Plains, Texas and the gathering of Robert E. Howard fans from all over the world.

Proof of Life, taken 5/29 with Friend-of-the-Bunker Tim and his stylish glasses. Catching up with old friends at the Humble Texan coffee shop.

On the Topic of Cultural Intelligence

Growing up, I didn’t have control over the radio and I very rarely had any kind of say over the television.  At my grandparents house, we listened to the music they wanted to listen to—big bands, crooners, and a slew of godforsaken Eddy Arnold. At home, with the few exceptions of shows like Planet of the Apes and the Six Million Dollar Man and The Incredible Hulk, the only time I ever had total control over the television was Saturday morning. The rest of the time, my folks were in charge of the evening’s entertainment, and sidenote: I was their remote control.

I know what I know about Hee Haw, not because it was my favorite show, but because all of the adults watched it, along with The Lawrence Welk Show, Gunsmoke, and The Rockford Files. Incidentally, it’s because I had no control over the television that I first experienced Casablanca, The Thin Man, a brace of John Wayne movies, and I watched legendary performers like Sammy Davis, Jr. and Frank Sinatra on late night television yukking it up with Johnny Carson. And I’ll bet you most of you 50 plus year olds had similar experiences as kids.

I didn’t have a television in my room until 1978. It was a portable black and white TV with a diagonal screen maybe 14” wide. Two giant rabbit ear antennae sticking up from the back with a hastily constructed swag of aluminum foil across the tips. Classy! There was a UHF dial that you used to tune in local access TV stations, which wasn’t anything in Abilene, but sometimes, the right combination of a specific UHF channel and those bunny ears adjusted juuuuuust right would get you most of a channel from Dallas.  

What I did have in my room was a record player and a radio. I was limited to whatever albums and singles I could buy, and the radio was just on, because it was novel, and you could sometimes call in a request and they would play it, but most of the time, you had no control over what the DJ wanted to play.

One of the best things about growing up is the incremental wherewithal to choose what you watch, listen to, etc. By the time I was a teenager, I had my own musical tastes, cultivated out of everything I’d listened to prior, along with input from friends who turned me on to new bands and songs. Once I was able to drive, I could go see a movie without the parents tagging along. Game changer, I tell you what.

I told you that to tell you this: that hasn’t happened in decades. In the 90s, there was cable, running 24 hours a day, and you could put it in every room that had a television in it—a minimum of two, but often three or more TVs in a house. At least one of them had a VCR and later, a DVD/Blu-ray player, so you could just pop in that Disney movie whenever you want and give yourself a good 60 to 75 minutes of relative peace. CD players gave way to iPods. Then online streaming. More screens. More websites. Apps.

Now it’s all out there, a click or two away, and available on your phone, your tablet, your computer, or your smart TV. As soon as a child is old enough to hold a tablet, they can watch the Wriggles anywhere, anytime. Give them headphones for some real peace and quiet, at least until they need to get up and run around. But now the onus is on you to know what you want. If you’re an adult, that’s pretty easy to navigate, until one of these amazing pieces of technology doesn’t have what you want on Netflix.

What did that generation lose?

Random exposure to new media by outside forces. By the age of 12, I knew who Humphrey Bogart was; he was parodied in TV skits and movies and imitated by comedians. The guy was in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, trying to serve Bugs to his dinner date. Peter Brady was walking around in an episode of the Brady Bunch, lisping, “Pork chops and applesauce. That’s nice,” for crying out loud. And all of those quotes, used and misused over the years. “Here’s looking at you, Kid.” “Play it again, Sam.” “I’m shocked—shocked to find that gambling is going on here.” “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, she walks into mine.” And so on, and so on, and so on. Bogart was one of the largest movie stars of the 20th century, but in 1981, when I was 12, he’d been dead for over twenty year. I still knew who he was.

The other day, I spoke to a 12-year old girl who had no idea who Bruce Willis was. I wasn’t mad that she didn’t know anything about Moonlighting, but she’d never even heard of the movie Die Hard. She’s not some weird homeschool kid that lives in a compound, either. She’s a modern kid with devices and full access to the outside world. How do you miss all references to Die Hard? That’s a movie that has become a perennial favorite, during Christmas if no other time. We would certainly put it in the “Classics” category now.

It comes down to kids only ever listening to and watching the things that are inside of their bubble, their inner circle, their peer group and not being exposed to anything outside of that. I don’t know if it does any actual cultural damage, but I think overall it shortens and thins the depth and breath of knowledge available to people of at least one generation and maybe two.

It gives me pause because there was a whole two generations’ worth of cultural knowledge that I was indirectly exposed to, and now that’s gone. Kids today are not exposed to anything else because their parents, by and large, generally speaking, can’t wait to throw a screen in front of their kid so the adults can watch whatever shows they want.

The problem with that is they are kids and as such they are… hmm, how to do this without throwing everyone under the bus? What they are uneducated and uncurious. They don’t have an understanding, if not an appreciation, of anything that was created before they were born, there is no value system, arbitrary or otherwise, that they use to evaluate a piece of art, be it commercial or fine. They just watch what they wanna watch and they don’t watch what they don’t wanna watch and no one forces them to sit with the family and take in a movie older than 20 years that isn’t animated and produced by Disney.

Will this bite us on the ass? I really don’t know. Obviously, there are people who know nothing about any cultural event from the 1990s who are driving cars and holding down jobs and paying their phone bills and otherwise being productive humans. I can’t throw shade at that person. but I also can’t stand it when I say something about Raiders of the Lost Ark and they look at me like I’ve got chickens falling out of my nose.

Maybe in the big picture, it doesn’t matter that much. I kinda think that it does. I joked on Facebook about us losing 75 years of commercial jingles when the last member of Generation X dies. I was being facetious, of course. Knowing the Oscar Meyer Bologna song isn’t the same as having read the works of Shakespeare, a guy who predates everything but is also part of the stew that invented modern culture and our ideas about love, death, power, family, grief, and revenge. There’s a reason why his plays keep coming back every generation.  

And speaking of Shakespeare…

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

Note: this movie slipped in at the end of last year between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, so a lot of people didn’t see it. We have now watched it...so you don’t have to.

Anyone But You (Prime)

Two incredibly beautiful people randomly meet in a coffee shop, which blossoms into a spontaneous first date. But a comedy of errors ensues that turns them against one another and thus assures that the movie will happen. They end up at a destination wedding and are forced and coerced, in turn, to play nice and even pretend to be a couple. What, oh what, is going to happen, I wonder?

Bea, short for Beatrice, is played by Sydney Sweeney, and Ben (presumably short for Benedick) is played by Glen Powell. That’s the movie, right there. If you know who these two up-and-coming movie stars are, and you think one or both of them is ‘hawt,’ then go watch the movie now. You’ll love it. They both look great and pair well together.

For the rest of us, I didn’t key into their names, nor the fact that this movie was borrowing heavily on Much Ado About Nothing, one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, until the two families of the bride and bride start a whisper campaign to convince the two romantic rivals that the other one does, in fact, love whichever one of them is in earshot. This is a pivotal scene in the play, but here, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it does signify that they are treading on familiar ground.

There are a lot of quotes in the form of couplets uttered at the end of a modern-day sentence. It’s funny, sure, it’s cute. But where Anyone But You drops the ball is that they didn’t steal enough of the plot of the original play to prop up the various shenanigans. I wonder if there was more of Much Ado in an earlier draft that someone got scared of producing and told the current writer to change it to make it more in line with the raunchy sex comedies of today.

Ultimately, Anyone But You tries to straddle the line between Shakespeare and Bridesmaids and doesn’t do either one any favors. There’s probably enough in the movie for a modern rom-com fan, but I wanted more actual writing, not an extended singalong to “Unwritten” with the whole cast in the credits.

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 film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”