Ka-Blooey
My favorite places to escape as a kid were comic books and sci-fi / fantasy. They were not cool. It was difficult to find people to talk to about these things.
— Hugh Howey (@hughhowey) April 29, 2019
Right now, Twitter is nothing but love for the genres that were ostracized when I was a kid, and I couldn't be happier.
It’s fun for me to imagine 50-year-old me time traveling to visit 15-year-old me just to tell him I’d seen the trailer for the latest Star Wars movie, that I’d watched the latest episode of the most popular television show on the planet, and it’s a Dungeons and Dragons-type show, and enjoyed the latest super-hero movie based on Marvel Comics. His tiny little head would explode.
The fact that today these genres are the world’s biggest and most successful entertainment franchises seems unfathomable to me.
When I was 13-15, there were amazing movies like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Clash of the Titans, E.T., Return of the Jedi, Blade Runner, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Dark Crystal, TRON, and Superman III (ok, that last one doesn’t count). However, not all of these were as universally accepted, praised, and mainstreamed as the same type of films today. Back then, superhero movies were barely made. Now we have 23 Marvel movies to unpack with ten years of story culminating in a three-hour tour de force. Star Wars was restarted, and the new films are more popular today than the original movies. Game of Thrones is what every kid playing D&D saw in his head as he was rolling 20-sided dice.
The generation that played with action figures, bought comics for 75 cents, and memorized the Monster Manual is making entertainment. I couldn’t be happier.
In any case, I’ll try to keep my head from going ka-blooey.