Reading all the steps Cory Doctorow takes in composing a blog post made me feel like a wimp when I grumble under my breath about having to stop to hand-edit markup on something I’m posting. Doctorow’s process is… intense. But he’s been at it for twenty years, and no matter how he publishes, he always has interesting posts.
Cory Doctorow by Gage Skidmore under Creative Commons
It is Isaac Asimov’s birthday today. It would have been his 101st birthday. He was born on January 2nd, 1920, and passed away in 1992 at 72.
I’d forgotten that Asimov passed away so long ago. He missed (for the most part) the whole internet thing. But not surprisingly, his mind envisioned it.
Here’s a nice write up about the interview with Bill Moyers from 1988: https://bit.ly/3hChgZt.
It’s Public Domain Day, where copyrighted works of art and literature from 1925 shift into the Public Domain. There’s a little Fitzgerald, Woolf, Hemingway, Keaton, and, if you can read German, some Kafka.
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2021/
Now culture will have freedom to build upon these great works, and the Internet Archive and Google Books will have some new material to offer.
Here’s the list:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/to1949.html#y1925
Let the Buster Keaton-Great Gatsby crossovers begin!
I’ll say this upfront and without equivocation: I HATE the new Star Wars fanfare that appears at the beginning of each episode of The Mandalorian. The fanfare clip, started by Marvel and picked up by the DC Cinematic Universe as well, shows some stylized images as the film begins, that brand the content as part of the overarching franchise.
When the Marvel fanfare splashes across the screen, I get a little adrenaline rush. It is because there is such an extensive story-space outside the Marvel movies that go back nearly sixty years in the comics. Since I’ve had at least a passing awareness of the comics for forty of those years, I get it. That’s what the fanfare is for, to get the fans pumped up.
So why do I devise the Star Wars fanfare with the power of ten Death Stars? I could say that it is because it is pretty cold and sterile. Or that it looks like a showcase for Stars Wars today’s more than story. Marvel and DC can have fanfares of either comic art or images based on comic art that, by their nature, have dynamic kinetics that jumps out at the viewer. The Star Wars fanfare shows droids and masks. I suspect that I’d tolerate the fanfare if it were a montage of X-wing and TIE fighter battles, the Millennium Falcon swooping, and lightsabers clashing. I might even get excited by it. The current Star Wars fanfare itself is just… boring and, at least to me, dumb.
But there is a more substantive complaint I have about the introduction of the Star Wars fanfare. I don’t want Star Wars to become like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I want Star Wars to expand. I want the franchise to explore the far corners of the Galaxy Far Far Away. What I don’t want to 27 Star Wars movies a year that spread across the whole spectrum of quality, or worse all settle to the bottom. I want the stories to expand out, not be squeezed for every nickel that Disney can get out of the property.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been a fantastic movie-going experience at its best. In a lot of essential ways, it replicated the magic of the interconnected comic book universe that birthed it. I’m just not sure that is a formula that should be heavily repeated, and one that I don’t think I want for Star Wars. I’d like to see Star Wars be less connected. What I like about The Mandalorian most so far is it broadens the Star Wars story. Leave the team-ups and formulaic beats for the Marvel and DC movies. Give me stories that don’t have anything to do with The Force or the Emperor or Young Indiana Solo. Don’t get me wrong, I loved that stuff. But there’s more to explore. Show me something new that will spark my imagination like the original trilogy did in the 70s and 80s. Be groundbreaking instead of aping what has come before or what another franchise is doing.
