Hollow Movies

This year there's going to be a live-action movie based on the 1980's cartoon, Jem and the Holograms. A trailer has been released, and fans are up in arms.

I didn't really understand the controversy, since the show was after my time. It was my experience growing up that kids watch cartons, but then around the time they get to the teens, they figure they've outgrown them. But by their late teens, they often come back: they've realized that the rest of television isn't that great, and they can use irony as an excuse for why they're watching cartoons even as they enter adulthood. Or maybe they just get high.

So I looked up the show on Wikipedia to try to understand it, and sure enough, it was on during my early teens. As the title suggests, it's about a rock group. But this being an 80's carton, it can't simply be about a rock group: the singer leads a double life using a holographic appearance generated by an advanced computer and projected through her magic earrings. Of course.

But judging by the trailer, the movie chucks all this, and has a straightforward story of teen girls hitting it big in the music biz after a YouTube clip goes viral. It's got themes of being true to yourself and your friends, and looks like an episode of Behind the Music as produced by the Disney Channel. So I can understand why fans of the original show are angry.

The Wikipedia article notes that the trailer for the movie has alienated the movie's target audience. Not so fast, anonymous Wikipedia editor: it's pretty clear the movie is being aimed at teenage girls, not the thirty-somethings who watched the original show. Of course that's more frustrating, since it means the studio might just get away with this cynical rebooting.

But it does bring up a question I've wondered about with this and many other movie remakes: why bother?  I know, most of them make sense. If the last Batman movie made money, a risk-averse studio will want to make a sequel or reboot. More distant tie-ins like Battleship are less obvious, but they are trying to cope with our fragmented and international media in which it's difficult to promote a movie, so you base it on a game that everyone alive has played.

But Jem and the Holograms was only on for a few years, and unlike contemporaries like Transformers or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, it didn't really have a lasting media legacy that younger people might recognize. So why would you buy the movie rights to a show young people won't recognize, so you can make a movie for young people? It would make sense if you were buying it for a good premise that you think would appeal to new generations as it did with previous ones. But that's not the case here: they ignored the premise, and used only the name. If your audience doesn't know the brand, why not base it on an all-new concept that you don't have to pay someone to use.

Worse, the people who will recognize the source might be the parents of the target audience. Good luck getting teens to see a movie that gives their patents fond memories.

Microtronicom

This little corner of the mall in Guelph has always seemed frozen in time. It's weird how tech terms can come and go. Unfortunately, Softron and Compudata - fine businesses, I'm sure - are saddled with names made of parts straight out of the eighties. Of course, the horizontal lines in the font doesn't help.

But the good news is that time catches up with all techno terms. Somewhere out there are businesses called "iCyber" or "social.com" that will get left behind too. Now you can understand why so many successful tech companies have nonsense names.

Sizing Up Sports

I've heard it said that one reason for baseball's popularity is that it seems like an everyman's sport. Yes, many baseball players are athletes, but there are also many who are just schmucks that happen to be good at this one odd skill of hitting a ball. There's something to be said for that: a lot of sports fandom is about fantasy, and it's easy for any of us with Y chromosomes to imagine ourselves playing baseball. You can be as thin as Ted Williams, as heavy as Babe Ruth, as tall as Randy Johnson, as short as Craig Biggio, or as whatever as Kirby Puckett.

That's something that's missing in other sports. Football is played by people who are increasingly far from the mean. Offensive linemen are expected to be 300+ pounds, linebackers have to be big enough to push aside people who weigh 300+ pounds, and Drew Brees is considered small at six feet. The running backs are the closest to normal size, but have the life expectancy of a fruit fly.

Hockey used to be played by average people (can you believe Rocket Richard was 5'10"?) But increasingly it's dominated by large people. Yes, there's still the odd Johnny Gaudreau, but they're pretty rare. During the draft, count how many times teams take a chance on a small player, and how many times they draft a big, unskilled player, assuming he'll learn eventually.

But the ultimate physically-unreachable sport has always been basketball. When all the seven-foot-tall people on earth get drawn to this one sport, it's hard to feel like those of us with lesser genetics even have a chance. But it's not just the super-tall people: you need to be about six-and-a-half feet to be considered for the "small forward" position. 

And it's not just the size of the players: even the players nearer the hump of the bell curve seem to be perfectly balanced muscular specimens. Not like baseball's spectrum from the lanky to the muscle-bound.

All of this is why the NBA's new MVP Stephen Curry is a breath of fresh air. It's not just his relative lack of height, it's that he's downright scrawny. He looks like the "before" picture to Lebron James's "after." And yet here he is, not just competing but dominating in a sport that that's usually too busy celebrating superstars to even notice the underdogs.

Hopefully this is a turning point for basketball. Maybe someday we'll feel like you can succeed in the sport without winning the genetic lottery, and that a team can succeed without winning the draft lottery.

Out Of Time

Today I was checking the Best-Before date on my honey mustard, and it said, "BB/MA 2015 JN 17". So I thought, May 2015, that's this month, so it should be fine. But wait, June 17? Which is it? It seems to be saying, " Best Before May 2015 June 17. That doesn't make any sense.

But then it hit me: the "MA" isn't short for "May," it means "Meilleur Avant," French for, "Best Before." Hence the slash between BB and MA.

That's great, but now I'm paranoid about how many times I've misinterpreted these dates in the past. I know I checked the expiry on something recently and it was close but still okay. Maybe it actually said Meilleur Avant Novembre.

Shouldn't this be one of those things every Canadian must know? I can ask where the bathroom is in both official languages, but this seems more important. We need public service announcements about this. I'm sure the government would agree to it because they can phrase it as one of their pseudo campaign ads: "Your taxes are protecting you from expired bilingual mayonnaise."

Things the Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #23

You know those adorable little crackers in the shape of goldfish? You can now get them in "Xtreme Pizza" flavour.

Binary Digits

I've been having some computer problems lately, which is why I haven't posted in a few days. When you're wrestling with this issue, it's easy to take it personally and conclude that your computer hates you. I try to tell myself it's just my imagination, but then I played the following Minesweeper game, which I swear I have not doctored:

Teddy Bear Market

By now it's become a popular joke that with Bluetooth headsets for phones, you can no longer tell who is talking on the phone and who is talking to themselves, or some imaginary person. And since our inner cities are dominated by young professionals and those who fall through the cracks in the mental health system, it could believably be either.

Well I've now seen something that looks stranger: a parent talking on the phone, while with a small child. Yesterday I saw a woman pushing a child in a stroller through the grocery store, chatting away. As she got closer, I realized that she was discussing the effect of unemployment numbers on investor confidence.  There was a brief moment when I wondered why she would be discussing that with her kid. He didn't look old enough to understand "going to work," never mind, "consumer confidence impact on rates of return." True, the baby talk that adults use to talk to kids is often as unintelligible as economic jargon, but I quickly realized that she must be in the middle of a call.

I should note: I didn't actually see a Bluetooth headset on her, so it's possible that:

• She was hallucinating an economist who doesn't like children.
• Her child is (or is being groomed to be) an investment prodigy.