So, I finally got around to West YEAR Ever, which went up yesterday. Did ya read that? No? Oh, go read that. I’ll wait…
You good? Yeah, not Taylor. Who knew? Anyway, we’ve got to have a serious talk. No, really. There are some bad folks out there, doing bad things, but we’ve got to figure out a better, more precise way to punish them. You see, that Neil Gaiman expose came out a few weeks back (I linked it at the time), and the fallout was that every company started distancing themselves from him – as they should. Dark Horse Comics canceled their in-progress adaptation of Anansi Boys, while I think the Coraline play got canceled. Meanwhile, the entirety of “season 3” of Good Omens is just a 90-minute episode, with no involvement from Gaiman, while his Sandman adaptation at HBO is canceled with season 2. They’re making sure that he never makes future money from these projects. The problem, however, is he’s already rich. So, they may have cut off his cash flow, but he’ll still continue to get royalties from the works already in print, and he could easily fuck off to one of his many properties, never to be heard from again. At the same time, the cancellation of Anansi Boys means no more work on the series for scripter Marc Bernardin or artist Shawn Martinbrough. Dark Horse has also said it won’t be collected, so there go any potential book market royalties from the collection. No more TV shows means no more work for the casts and crews of those shows. In this hastily executed parting of ways, it seems the fallout is hurting everybody BUT Gaiman.
I know these things never roll out in the same way, but it seems like they always lead to hasty, poorly thought out reactions. Take the Netflix film Emilia Perez, where the film’s star, Karla Sofia Gascón, apparently had a bunch of racist and Islamophobic tweets in her Twitter history. What started as a history-making nomination, as Gascón was the first openly transgender actress nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress (Who was the first “closely” transgender actress…? Lucy, add that to my schedule!), quickly became a hot potato that no one wanted to hold. She tried to apologize, but no one wanted to hear it, especially since it doesn’t seem like anyone outside of critic circles actually liked the film. I’ve heard it isn’t very flattering to both the LGBT+ and Mexican communities.
Still, the film was an awards season darling, and currently has 13 Oscar nominations. Netflix really needs that accolade to lend some “legitimacy” to their film platform, so they’re being really aggressive in their awards campaign. That said, things are being handled poorly by both Garcón and Netflix, to the point where the film has probably ruined its Oscar chances. Garcón scheduled an interview with CNN, without running it by Netflix, where she pulled out that old chestnut of “Cancel Culture is out to get me!”. So, I’m sure you know that didn’t help her any. As a result, the latest Netflix marketing push has removed both her AND the film’s title from the poster, instead listing all of the nominations and an attempt to pivot focus to Best Supporting Actress nominee Zoe Saldaña. Also, Netflix has said that it won’t finance Garcón in any way for the Oscars, meaning no wardrobe or transportation budget. So, she can come, but it’s on her own dime. Meanwhile, the Academy doesn’t really even want her there now, as it could take attention away from the ceremony. All of this because she tweeted like a teenager.
Look, I’m not defending what she did. I do think Netflix should have done a better job vetting her social media. Contrary to popular belief, the internet is NOT “forever”, if you know the right people. Rob Delaney had a horrendous stand up set on Kimmel that I challenge you to find today. That thing was scrubbed within a week. So, I feel like Netflix is more to blame for this situation than Garcón, but she still should have probably come forward before someone found those tweets. Her portrayal was not popular, so she was gonna have a target on her. These things never just “leak”. Someone went looking for them. So, if you’re ever about to get on a large stage for something, you’d better think about who might not want you there, and what they might be able to do about it. Still, she sounds like she sucks, so I guess she and Netflix are getting what they deserve. But is that fair to Saldaña? To the Key Grip? To the GAFFER?! We love to say “Fuck around and find out”, but the one doing the finding out should be the one who did the fucking around, and not all this “collateral damage”. We’ve got to do better with this stuff.
The other day, comic creator Rob Liefeld announced that he was done working with Marvel. Apparently, he felt that Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige slighted him and his family by ignoring them at the premiere of Deadpool & Wolverine, and then not inviting them to the afterparty. Now, to set this up, Liefeld says that he had approached Marvel about receiving a special credit at the beginning of the film, as the co-creator of Deadpool, rather than the standard acknowledgement that creators gets in the end credits. As this was the first Deadpool film from Marvel Studios (the first 2 were from 20th Century Fox), Marvel wanted him to know they did things differently, and he says they yelled at his PR team and hung up on them. He insists that he wasn’t seeking any financial arrangement, but rather opportunities to help promote the film, such as screenings and publicity events. Going further, he said that there was a photoshoot with him and the film folks, where he later found out the pictures with him in them were not used and deleted, as they were only taken as a “courtesy”. After all of this, Liefeld said that Marvel and Feige don’t treat comic creators well, given that they’re the ones responsible for these ideas that make billions for Marvel and Disney.
This is a tough one. I’ve been in this comics game over 3 decades, and one mainstay has been Rob Liefeld. He’s the 4-color Herpes I’ve been unable to shake. When I first started reading comics, everyone was telling me how awesome he was, and I thought everyone was taking crazy pills. Over time, it seems folks came around to his level of talent, but it’s almost like they went too far. Liefeld had a pre-internet level of hatred directed toward him that we’d really only come to see post-internet. I’ve often wondered if it’s deserved. When he runs his mouth, does he really feel he’s that important, or is it fanboys and media amplifying him so it appears that way? I mean, the same industry that made him, then, turned around to destroy him. Don’t get me wrong – he’s his own worst enemy, as he has more ideas and ambition than talent and hours in the day. I’ve found that comic readers seem to hate him more than his own peers, as most comic pros will just kinda shake their heads, going, “Well, that’s Rob for ya.” I’ve had many of them tell me that, outside of Stan Lee, Liefeld was comics’ greatest cheerleader. And I’ve seen some of that. But the way he goes about things…It’s like he’s learned nothing over the past 30 years.
Trying to put myself in his shoes, I don’t really blame him. He’s not wrong, in saying that he provided the source material for this franchise. And I’d probably feel the same way. Hell, I have a post on this very site where I was pissed and offended that Brian Michael Bendis slighted me, and I’m a Nobody. If I had the legal documentation that I was the co-creator of Deadpool, I’d probably expect a little bit of genuflection. I’m a petty man, and Game recognizes Game.
It’s just that Rob does this ALL THE TIME! And his stories are so grandiose. It’s rarely something rational, but more like “That story is wrong, and I know because I was there. Stan once told me I was his secret illegitimate son so, after that revelation, he used to let me listen to all of his phone calls.” In life, you’ve really got to choose your battles, and Liefeld has never met a fight he didn’t want to jump into. It’s a shame he missed the mosh pit era because he was busy finding ways to get out of drawing feet.
Plus, I’m the first one to point out that this was work-for-hire, and these creators knew it at the time. Is it unfair how the corporations benefit from the creators’ work? Sure, but they signed the contract. Seeing as how Rob is taken care of better than most creators, yet not really fighting for their rights, but instead asking for even more, I have a hard time siding with him. So, even if I can understand, and might even say I’d do the same thing, I still know I’d be in the wrong – at least to go public with it, and swear off future work from the #1 comic publisher in North America. This is something he could have just done quietly, but those Robservations podcast eps need material to discuss, so…
Trailer Park
Jurassic World: Rebirth (Theaters, July)
Look, I know these films have their fans (Hi, Jordan!), but you’ve gotta go away long enough for me to miss you. There were 14 years between the end of the Jurassic Park trilogy and the beginning of the Jurassic World trilogy. To get even more granular, though, there were at least 4 years between Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park: The Lost World. Here, it’s been *three* years since the release of Jurassic World: Dominion, and I just can’t get excited for this. That’s not a long enough refractory period for me. Hell, I’ll be honest with ya: I checked out of the whole Jurassic Franchise after the first Jurassic World. When the original JP film came out, 31 years ago, that was a SPECTACLE! We were seeing DINOSAURS (!) that looked REAL (!) on the BIG SCREEN (!). Now, as B.B. King sang, “the thrill is gone away”. And the gimmicks they’re forced to come up with to justify these things! “This is the island where they did the research for the original park.” So, the park is on one island, but I guess to test out how islands would fare in such a scenario, they conducted research on a different island. If you’ve got rich friends, you know that there are actually tons of islands out there for the buying. Nothing lavish. Just a chunk of land in a body of water. Something you can throw a house on. But I’m getting Moonraker vibes, where that dude just had money lying around for SIX space shuttles, at a time when space shuttles weren’t exactly a common item you could order from Barney’s. And now, old Colonel Sanders ass John Hammond just had a bevy of islands? Nah, have fun with that nonsense. Call me when they get to Jurassic Galaxy.
Smurfs (Theaters, July 18)
I was having this discussion on Bluesky yesterday, but I never liked The Smurfs. Growing up, they always equated to “boredom” to me. They kicked off NBC Saturday morning, before the “good stuff” started. In syndication, if you were home sick, when they came on, you knew you had time to take that nap before Eek! The Cat or whatever came on. People will tell you “They’re popular in Europe!”, but so is Asterix. So is Tintin. And I’m not dying to watch them, either. Anyway, this is the 3rd attempt at a Smurfs rebirth in the past 20 years. Maybe they’ll get it right this time? I doubt it, because everything here feels off. I love John Goodman, but that’s not Papa Smurf. I know Rihanna was stunt casting to get butts in seats, but that didn’t exactly work for Battleship, did it? And I don’t like Gargamel’s “Gru” redesign. The only thing that works for me is Nick Offerman as Papa Smurf’s brother. Plus, shouldn’t they have saved the Paris thing for a sequel, called Smurfs In Paris? It’ll probably do fine. Kids are dumb.
Fantastic Four: First Steps (Theaters, July 25)
Boy, July is gonna be a busy month! So, I can say that, well, that was a trailer. Look, I’m not a Fantastic Four guy, so I’m not even gonna pretend here. The whole pitch of that franchise is “First and foremost, they’re a FAMILY”, which all sounds well and good, but I’ve never really experienced that in any Fantastic Four comics I’ve checked out. Sure, a dysfunctional family at times, but never this great, cohesive unit that has each other’s backs. I know all the downbeats of the franchise: Reed depressed that he turned his best friend into a monster; Reed being emotionally detached from Sue, which tends to drive her toward the advances of Namor; Reed in some weird, sort of homoerotic, battle of wills against Victor Von Doom; Franklin Richards being the most powerful mutant (?) ever, but the writers have to keep him as a boy, no matter the cost, or else they’d have to reckon with what that would mean. Bottom line is Reed kinda sucks, in a lot of ways, but he’s the lynchpin. At the end of the day, they all come together and share a meal, as a family, no matter how much Skrull blood and brain matter is caked on their uniforms.
I’m not gonna critique this thing frame by frame, but rather do something I don’t actually like to do often: MCU speculation. Since we’ve been told this is another universe, and not the standard 616 universe of the other films (remember, the Multiverse is what all those 2023 movies were about), they’re gonna have to find a way to bring them over. We see the shadow of Galactus who, let’s face it, is a foe that universe isn’t prepared to handle. I think that, in their universe, Galactus wins. No more Earth. But the FF find some way to cross over to the 616 universe (either one of the torn space-time holes from The Marvels or one of the portals Doctor Strange had been messing around with), vowing that the same fate won’t befall another Earth. Now, the 60s setting is weird to me, in that I’m not sure if it’s set in the 1960s of another Earth OR if the present day of another Earth simply looks like our 1960s, since maybe they had slower technological growth? If it’s the former, then they’ll undergo some sort of time dilation thing when crossing universes, which will spit them out present day. They will NOT, however – I repeat NOT – face Galactus in the 616 in this film. That universe, also, isn’t prepared for that. What, Shang-Chi and Miss America are coming to the rescue? The 4 surviving Eternals? No, that’s a seed you plant to revisit post Secret Wars. Let’s see if I’m right!
Run The Numbers
Here’s where my reading totals stand at the end of this week:
Things You Might Have Missed This Week
- Unable to right the ship, Warner Bros Games has announced that their MultiVersus mashup game will be shutting down on May 30th, after the conclusion of its fifth and final season, which began this week.
- Gonna be real quiet around NBC News, as Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd, as well as MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell, stepped down from their positions within the last week. Todd is leaving the network entirely, while Mitchell will be given another role at NBC News.
- But fans of #FakeNews need not worry, as Lara Trump will be getting her own weekend show, My View with Lara Trump, on Fox News. I mean, even Jenna waited until W was out of office before she joined The Today Show…
- It was announced that Amber Ruffin will host this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner, which will, no doubt, be the most uncomfortable gig she’s ever had.
- The TV show graveyard got some new entries this week, as the following shows got canceled: Wipeout (TBS), The Cube (TBS), How To Die Alone (Hulu), and Hysteria! (Peacock)
- With Heidi Klum returning to Project Runway, Mel B, of Spice Girls fame, will be returning to America’s Got Talent next season.
- 9-1-1: Lone Star ended this week, and series star Rob Lowe originally pitched a finale where his character would die heroically. The producers, however, felt the show needed to end on a more upbeat note. Just look at that guy – before The West Wing, he couldn’t get work due to his sex tape scandal. Now, he’s having input on a lame duck prime time show on the #4 network. Never give up on your dreams!
- Since everything old is new again, Nickelodeon is reportedly developing a sequel spinoff of VICTORiOUS – without series star Victoria Justice. In this series, original cast member Daniella Monet will return to the setting of the original show, now as a teacher at the performing arts school. Dan Schneider has no involvement this time around, and they seem to think they’re gonna get Ariana Grande to make an appearance, but Ariana Grande ain’t making an appearance.
We do things somewhat differently around here. Sometimes, a weekly recap will focus on something that was important universally, while other times it’ll be something that was important to me. Today, we’re going with the latter.
I’m not what you would consider a “sports fan”. Never understood it. Honestly, I think I reside on the part of the spectrum that doesn’t understand “school spirit” and “home team pride”. All the groupthink phenomena, that are probably a notch below all the social interaction stuff. When someone goes “We’re going all the way to the championship!”, I have to stop myself from saying,“‘We’? You work in a bank!” The argument could be made that sports bring money to a city/community, but…OK? Doesn’t mean I have to root for it. I just don’t get it. I’m weird, I know. And then there was that team name…
So, this was especially difficult when I met my wife, as she was a big football fan. Actually, she’ll watch the finals of any sports, as you’re theoretically watching “the best of the best”. Meanwhile, I don’t care if I don’t have anything invested in it, and I’m not a gambler, so that’s out the window. In the beginning of the relationship, we did that thing all folks do: We lied to each other. She pretended to care about comics, and I pretended to care about sports. Every Sunday, after church, we’d go to some bar to watch football. I just liked the nachos aspect of the tradition. But I didn’t understand the game, so I’d ask questions. You’ll find these people are more willing to answer your questions when things are good, but less so when the game isn’t going in their favor. So, as her team started to lose, she sometimes got kinda mean about my questions. I get it. She was involved, it wasn’t directed to me, blah blah blah. But, by this point, she had long since stopped pretending to care about comics (and I was giving her that indie shit that women are supposed to eat up), so I figured I could stop trying to understand sports (Ya know, the most frustrating part is how everyone gives up when there’s, like, 3 minutes left in a football game. In football, that’s a lifetime, and I’ve seen games where I’m like, “Surely, they could do something!” But she’d just be resigned to the idea that it was “too late”, and I’d be like “Well, yeah, with that attitude!”, and they didn’t do something, so they lost. And then she’d be doubly mad. So frustrating!).
Fast forward to the present. I’ve listened to a comedy podcast on Sirius for the better part of a decade, called The Bonfire, and one of the original cohosts was a comedian named Dan Soder. He left the show last year, around the same time he got engaged to sports media personality Katie Nolan. Now, prior to that relationship, I knew nothing about Nolan. While she worked for ESPN, had I seen her while flipping through channels, I’d have said “She’s cute!” and kept on flipping. After leaving ESPN, she popped up on Fox Sports for a while, but again, not in my purview. In the past year or so, however, she’s popped up in my realms, first as a very strong performer on Celebrity Jeopardy!, but later as a guest on Soder’s new podcast, just called Soder. She’s cute, smart, and funny? So, when I learned that she was launching a podcast, I knew I had something to add to my playlist immediately.
Casuals with Katie Nolan is her twice-weekly podcast, where the focus is on breaking down sports news for casual fans. It’s for the people who don’t really follow any particular sport, but want to understand the goings on in the various leagues. Her guests range from stand-up comics to athletes to sometimes just her producers. Since sports is one of my huge blindspots, this sounded perfect for me. I binged all 6 available episodes this week, and I learned A TON. There’s all the drama surrounding the Jimmy Butler trade from the Heat. The surprising trade of Doncic to the Lakers. The fact that Tom Brady signed a 10-year, $375 million broadcasting contract to do a job he’d never done a day in his life – in fact, due to his partial ownership of the Raiders, he’s unable to perform many important aspects of said job. Nolan and her guests are able to sort of “pop culturize” these events to make them understandable to non sports folks. She and her guest, Mike Golic Jr, were trying to explain the magnitude of the Doncic trade, as Nolan said that one of her friends had asked her to “put it in Girl Terms”. So, she and Golic said that this was the equivalent of *NSYNC sending Justin Timberlake to the Backstreet Boys in exchange for Howie. Sure, Howie’s been there the whole time, and he’s on the posters, but is he as strong a performer as what *NSYNC was losing? That was like a “Eureka!” moment for me. Something so simple, yet so impactful. Also, poor, poor Howie.
My favorite part of the show is at the beginning, in the segment that Nolan calls The Yap. Similar to the rambling I do over here, it’s fun to hear her get sort of manic about the things she’s passionate about, be it the prevalence of gambling in professional sports or the laws claiming to be designed to “keep women safe” in sports. I think what I find refreshing is she seems to be coming from the place of someone who has no real desire to ever work in sports broadcasting again. I mean, she’s not necessarily dragging anybody, but she’ll be the first to tell you “It’s all fake. That’s just for TV.” For example, in explaining her Super Bowl Bingo Card, she had “Someone Streaking” as a square. She said that it happens every year, yet you’d never know at home because broadcasters are told to ignore it, as it would give the streaker undue attention. So, if you ever see the broadcasters quickly cut to some distraction, and they’re kinda rambling, they’re probably deflecting from a streaker. Also, she has the same concerns fans do, like “Are we sure the refs aren’t deliberately calling plays in favor of the Chiefs?” Someone who wanted to ever return to that industry wouldn’t really cast a spotlight on how, ya know, it’s possible.
Anyway, I love this podcast. It’s still early, and the wheels might fall off. I can also see some folks not loving The Yap as much as I do. Hell, a lot of you only open this post to scroll down and see what I named as having the West Week Ever, but a week later will ask me if I watched something that I specifically wrote about in the post, above the West Week Ever announcement. I’m also not gonna say that I’m a “sports fan” now. I will, however, say that I’ve found a wonderful resource for gaining knowledge about the goings on in the sports world, and I’m really excited about that. So, for that, Casuals with Katie Nolan had the West Week Ever.
