The Conservative Abandonment of Pop Culture

Politics is downstream of culture. Conservatives made a mistake when they decided that Pop Culture was beneath them. It is "only" superheroes or comics or movies or whatever. They abandoned the arts. But humans have been telling stories since we were painting images on the walls of caves.

What is the difference between Hercules and Superman? How is Achilles' origin story different from Wolverine? And while people love to hate on Man of Steel one of the things I'm always struck by is how messianic that story is. From the "he sent his son to save Earth" aspect, to the knowledge granted at age 12, to accepting the mantle of authority in his 30s. It is one of the reasons that the Superman story has resonated through the decades. It is quite literally a timeless story.

Anyway, Superman is DC and Disney didn't buy DC. This is a post about the downfall of Disney.

Disney bought Marvel in 2009. (The first Iron Man movie came out in 2008, and made almost $600 million at the box office and another $14.8 million in Blu-ray sales.) And then Disney proceeded to systematically destroy Marvel. Not at first, but eventually. And I thought Marvel was in trouble when Avi Arad was producing everything. Arad lacked vision, but he was a genius compared to what Disney has done.

Then they also systematically destoryed Star Wars; they purchased Lucas Film in 2012 for just over $4 billion. I think they thought the original Star Wars was Sci-Fi. In reality, it wasn't mostly Sci-Fi. It was mostly the standard hero's journey. The mentor (based on the original Mentor, from Homer), the rogue, rescuing the princess from the Dark Fortress, defeating the Dark Power, etc. It wasn't that much different from most fantasy.

Today, Star Wars as a franchise is basically worthless. It is a series of shows on a failing streaming service. No one cares about the shows. No one.

People talk about fatigue, but in the 1990s there was Star Trek: The Next Generation, ST:DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise. I'm not sure that they were all on the air at once, but it was wall-to-wall Star Trek and no one was fatigued. There was also Babylon 5 if you weren't getting enough Sci-Fi, and then there was Red Dwarf and Farscape to follow up. No one was fatigued as long as the stories were good. (More on "fatigue" after the video.)

Anyway, what kicked all of this off is Nerdrotic's video Disney is a Disaster | Marvel is Dying and Star Wars is Dead.

People are going on about how there is "superhero fatigue" to explain why Disney (and DC) movies are failing. I don't think that is the case. The stories that Disney and DC are telling today suck. They are not concentrating on good stories, but pushing Woke messages. No one wants that. No one wants a race-swapped Tinker Bell. No one wants a brown-skinned Snow White. You do know what her name means, don't you. "Who is the fairest of them of all?" If Disney would tell a decent X-Men story, that wasn't woke, people would see it. They won't. If DC would tell a Superman or Batman story that wasn't woke, people would see it. They won't. Disney will try to tell an Avengers story based on Captain Marvel (everyone hates Bree Larson) and Ms Marvel and Falcon. DC will tell the story of an angst-ridden Superman or a gay Robin. No one wants that either.

On a side note, I have been trying to restict the "Movies and TV", and "Comics and Manga" posts to the weekends, but I found this video after Sunday's post on DC Comics and the post on Clifton Duncan's about "Saving Hollywood" were published. So here we are. Politics is downstream of culture, and Conservatives abandoned culture - for the most part - to the Wokest part of the Progressives. Witness the result.