Do you see this? Right here - look where I'm pointing. See that?
Know what that is?
It's my heart. And it's weeping.
I ran out of Farscape. I have, since I first mentioned it here, watched every episode of the four seasons it ran in addition to the straight to DVD movie. I did little else. I ate when I was hungry, and I exercised now and then to stave off a pulmonary embolism. Remember that Korean guy in Korea who died after playing an online role playing game for, like, a month straight without stopping for anything?
Pulmonary embolism. Little bringer of death. A blood clot forms in a lower extremity, breaks loose, makes its way north, and then wrecks your lungs while leaving you in pain for a few hours before finally killing you. Sitting still for long periods is what brings it on.
It preys on people with no life, and then sees to it that there's a really good reason to say they have no life.
That's how I've spent the past month: being entertained while fighting off death on several fronts.
As you can see, I am victorious. But this victory comes at a price.
I ran out of Farscape.
I am all out of Farscape...
What does a man do with himself when he's run out of Farscape? Some of you would tell me to go watch every season of Stargate SG-1 back to back, but my response would be "Again?" Others among you would tell me to go take the finest woman in the land for myself, but my response would be "Again?" Still others would tell me to start doing that thing where you stick sailboats into bottles for no reason, but my response would be "No."
Since there's nothing else in the world to watch or do that I haven't already watched or done, I've been thinking about what I saw. I'll think about Farscape until I run out of thoughts on it. And then I might start putting sailboats in bottles.
I've been wondering why it was such a good series. It was fairly low budget, CGI FX shots were reused through practically every episode (even the movie used CGI from years before), and some cast members were Muppets. I started off thinking that, despite these factors, the show managed to succeed.
I have since decided that it's because of these factors that the show succeeded.
People...
Money breeds Ewoks. That's the problem.
Come with me on a journey of discovery down history's gullet and out its sphincter where we'll discover why some entertainment sucks and some entertainment holds a gun to your head and challenges you not to be delighted.
Put on your time traveler's helmet - here we go!
Work: Hamlet
Author: William Shakespeare
Created: More than fifty years ago, so it doesn't matter (they say nobody really knows)
Budget: Four chickens and one plague-ridden leper
Hamlet is the finest thingy ever written in the English language. There is lots of parts and many good words used in it. The characters are neat and.
So the finest thingy ever written in the English language was written down and produced with nothing but spare parts. Some parchment, some ink, some apparatus with which to apply the ink to the parchment, and one genius.
Now, more than fifty years after Hamlet began the longest run on Broadway ever (it lasted centuries), the play is still current. It continues to be the finest thingy ever written in the English language. The runner up is Thomas the Tank Engine Gets Bloated.
Work: Hamlet the Musical
Author: Who cares
Created: In our darkest hour
Budget: A cool $100,000,000.00
Give someone money and too much free time, and what do you get?
Hamlet the Musical.
Not content to leave Hamlet the way it was (good), some nincompoops saved up their allowance and took Shakespeare's great work into a disturbing realm. All musicals are bad, and Hamlet the Musical is a musical. You do the math.
Without the money, the people behind the production could never have set parts of Hamlet to musical belching.
Money corrupted the minds of these fruitcakes.
Money breeds musicals.
Work: Star Wars (IV - A New Hope)
Author: George Lucas
Created: 1976 or something
Budget: Food stamps
The first Star Wars film almost wasn't made. All involved assumed it would be the only one, and that there would be no series.
It was sloppy, the dialogue was goofy, the casting was all over the place, and the whole thing was just plain weird for the time.
But it worked.
Lucas had very limited resources with which to put it together. He had to focus on being as cheap as possible. He achieved this by working on the story, flow of the story, and editing.
Yay!
Work: Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
Author: George Lucas (?)
Created: 1983 or something
Budget: One billion food stamps
Having done well selling little plastic Harrison Ford dolls, Lucas worked his way through Return of the Jedi by leaving the actors in their trailers and simply leaving piles of cash all over the set instead.
The movie was training-wheels for what he would create over a decade later. He was entering a nasty phase during which, rather than using special effects to tell a story, he was using a story to tell special effects.
It wasn't a bad movie overall, but there was this one forty minutes where... well...
Money breeds Ewoks.
"Can we get a few thousand more Ewoks right over there?"
"Wouldn't it be cool if we had a third Death Star that was made entirely of Ewoks?"
"I'm hungry - somebody get me a bowl of Ewoks."
"The pizza boy's here - whoever gets the door, tip him a couple Ewoks."
"That explosion was missing something... let's do it again, but this time with a few dozen Ewoks on top."
The man lost his mind. He had so much money to spend that he didn't have to restrain himself.
If he wanted an army of sapphire Ewoks, he got it.
With all the time he spent attending to growing his Ewok collection, he couldn't focus on the things that would have made the movie good.
And so a potentially great work was lost to...
Money. Which breeds Ewoks.
Work: Farscape
Author: Some guy whose name I keep forgetting
Created: Around the time when people making simple web pages made more money than the president
Budget: Three-hundred Australian dollars - with a metric/standard conversion, that's about eleven American nanodollars
As I wrote earlier, this was one cheap ass show. Rather than doing CGI work through the series for a couple characters, Muppets were used. The Muppets were the most expensive part of the show.
With so little with which to create, story was key, as was the editing to make sense of it. Nobody cares about the FX shots. It was *all* story.
Where Lucas made story a supporting character, these Farscape people put it right in the center, where it should be.
The new Battlestar Galactica has it going on, too. It's newer, so they can squeeze more out of their rendering farms, but story is still central.
Good television is totally Ewok-free.
So here we are.
Movies were good when money was scarce.
Movies were better than television until television hit the point movies had been at previously - just enough money to do some FX work, but not enough to ruin everything.
What scares me is that television is eventually going to get to the point where it will be possible to screw things up the way movies were screwed up. Television will no longer be a safe haven for entertainment from terrible movies.
But something will come along and take its place. Two things, in fact.
The first is YouTube. In a few years, YouTube will take the place of television, and we will all laugh as we watch video after video after video of some idiot jumping out of a tall tree, hitting his private parts on every branch on the way down, and then dying when he hits dirt. The guy shooting the video will sound very concerned and say many things a concerned person would say, but then he'll run over to his dead friend and record the mangled body, all of which should please the modern audience.
The second place is Star Trek fanfic movies. With chromakey having finally made its way into the hands of the common simpleton, the Star Trek franchise is (a bit too) boldly going in every direction possible. Mostly down.
When you tire of guys intentionally falling out of trees, know that there will always be a Star Trek fanfic show out there in which a Vulcan falls out of a tree and hits his private parts on branches all the way down. It's totally different than watching a "regular" guy do it, and this shall one day be a joy for all mankind to share. Your children will know a world in which it wasn't Christmas if everybody didn't get together by the fire before opening presents to watch some alien double over with his hands between his legs, shout obscenities, and vomit occasionally before passing out in the dirt.
New traditions for a new age. Old ways done in because...
Money breeds Ewoks.
Australian (and Canadian, of course) dollars breed fantastic television.
And tens of dollars plus decent consumer video equipment breeds injured fanfic Vulcans.
That's all for now. Remember to remove your time traveler's helmet. If you leave it on and then try to use the bathroom, it gets really complicated.