you ruined my childhood

In which we breath in the good and breath out the bad...

Remember how fuckin good Pizza Hut was when you were a kid? They used to be sit-down places where you’d get a giant red plastic cup of Dr Pepper and there was a salad bar and the restaurant looked like something that was vaguely a hut but when you’d pull into that parking lot with your parents there was nothing more exciting other than getting a Nintendo for Christmas. If you read enough for BOOK IT! you were gonna get your own personal pan pepperoni pizza and go to town. Absolute bliss.

Then you eat Pizza Hut as an adult… Holy moly it is NOT GOOD. I haven’t had it in years, and it was probably because a work manager ordered it for the staff as a ‘treat’ for all our hard work instead of just paying us more fuckin money, cuz that pizza is not a treat. Oily, gloppy shitty whatever it is that they use to substitute for cheese, just all around some of the worst chain pizza out there. And this is coming from someone who orders Domino’s on the reg. They’re also bad, but they have a policy where if they mess up any part of your order, your next pizza is free, and trust me they will mess it up every time. Pro-tip: order a side of extra marinara, they will always forget it. I will eat any pizza if it’s free.

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The thing like this that mostly manchildren are struggling with now: Movie franchise sequels and remakes. I don’t even have to explain this to you, we’ve all seen people just absolutely rageshitting their pants because the new children’s comic book movie isn’t what they imagined in their feveraddled brains that have been destroyed by the internet. YOU MEAN TO TELL ME WOLVERINE IS A LADY NOW AND SHE’S BLACK THIS IS FUCKIN BULLSHIT YOU ARE RUINING MY CHILDHOOD BUT I’M STILL GOING TO SEE THE NEXT EIGHTY MOVIES YOU MAKE IN THE FRANCHISE AND HATE ALL OF THEM BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE ANY LEGITIMATE INTERESTS OUTSIDE OF WHATEVER $20 BILLION MOVIE THAT COMES OUT ONCE A MONTH THAT ARE THE BIGGEST ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY IN THE WORLD BUT I’M ALSO A NERD STILL RIGHT?

Nerd culture, man. Everybody and their mema is a nerd now. How can you be a nerd when your primary interests are comic book movies and video games which are things that literally almost everybody is into? Marvel movies have earned $25,529,847,829 worldwide to date, and that’s not even including all the toys and television shows and all that other bullshit. You’re not a nerd, you like all the same things as everybody else. That’s fine, like what you like as long as it doesn’t hurt other people, but don’t kid yourself.

The only ‘nerd’ franchise I ever got into was Star Wars. ‘Return of the Jedi’ (1983) came out the year I was born and is the first movie memory I have as a kid. Loved em! Played with the action figures, read the books, tried to find out as much lore as possible. The Star Wars Collectible Card Game was my first foray into gaming. Couldn’t get enough of it!

So of course it was a big event when they rereleased the special editions. Star Wars! In the theater! I was like 12 years old. How awesome! And it was fun, seeing all the new scenes. Watching them now, though, it’s like, damn George you really just screwed the pooch. I get that you wanted to include that legendary scene of Jabba the Hutt in Mos Eisley threatening Han Solo and show off the digital FX you were working on but maybe… maybe you coulda just left em on the cutting room floor. Speaking of Jabba, the scene in his palace added a dumb dance sequence and a bad song but the worst offense was cutting out my man Max Rebo. Goddamn shame.

But I was undeterred, was just happy to get to see Star Wars on the big screen. So when ‘The Phantom Menace’ (1999) came out, baby oh baby the whole world was on fire with Star Wars fever. Taco Bell trophy cups and shit, we get to find out Darth Vader’s origins, and finally get the ball rolling on a series of nine movies that George had hinted about for years and years about how he had it all planned out. I do not believe him at all, and especially now that we’ve concluded the ennealogy, it is clear he was full of shit. I don’t believe he even had the story arc for the original trilogy worked out, he was just flying by the seat of his pants.

The day it opened me and my friends were buzzing balls of energy. We brought our plastic lightsabers to school and were fighting with them in the red lockerlined hallways in between classes. Halfway through last period, the power went out in the whole school and we all got to go home early. It was like pulling into that Pizza the Hutt parking lot knowing you were about to get that personal pan pie.

We’d bought our tickets the moment they went on sale and had somebody’s mom dump us off from the minivan in the theater parking lot. STAR WARS! A ton of the crowd was dressed up in costumes, before the movie started two dudes had an epic plastic lightsaber battle in front of the screen. They weren’t even hired and I don’t think they even knew each other. One guy in Darth Maul cosplay just went up front doing sick lightsaber moves and then another guy dressed as Anakin ran out from the crowd and they clumsily battered their cheap toys together. Everybody in the room was clapping and cheering. There wasn’t a single person in that theater not expecting a movie experience that would change their lives.

And, well, maybe it did. This might’ve been the movie that really changed how fan anticipation and expectations would go on to define how blockbuster movies are made to this day. That opening night, I walked out totally stoked. Podraces! Badass lightsaber fights! Child slavery! Saw it again in the theater, loved it even more.

But then it comes out on video, you spend a little more time with it, realize the podracing is actually pretty fuckin boring, most of the movie is about space politics, and we all know about Jar-Jar Binks, no reason to elaborate there.

It was a similar experience when ‘Attack of the Clones’ (2002) came out, I was still pretty psyched. More Star Wars! Loved it, saw it twice, but the same letdown hangover when I saw it on the video release. By the time ‘Revenge of the Sith’ (2005) came out, I’d tempered my expectations. It’s the best one of the prequel trilogy, but still… not great.

There was so much nerd outrage about these movies that have built over the years, and oftentimes for good reasons. Removing the practical FX and sets of the original films and replacing them with green screen CGI that is often too glossy and awkward, stretching out the runtimes with senate debates and political intrigue, actors with no chemistry, there’s a lot that went wrong.

All of that kind of discourse has amplified a hundredfold and made fandom so toxic now. When the final trilogy came out, people were just rage watching them to complain on the internet about how there’s a plot hole or they thought something was stupid. You know what else was stupid? THE ORIGINAL STAR WARS MOVIES. They’re about space fighters with laser beams and there’s puppet monsters. They are dumb movies. But that’s okay, not every movie has to be ‘The 400 Blows’ (1959). Hell, I’m sure most of the neckbeards complaining have never seen a foreign movie that didn’t involve animated Japanese robots.

We’re at the point now where fans are writing petitions for studios to change the movies to fit their individual whims, like begging for a 4 hour cut of ‘Justice League.’ You would seriously have to pay me to watch that, that’s literally half of a work shift. Donate to the links at the bottom of this story with ‘Justice League’ in the title and if I get $50 I’ll watch and write a story about that movie that I have less than zero interest in ever seeing.

Then you get where they make Lady Ghostbusters and all these virgins scream about how their childhood has been ruined because there is another version of a movie about men using vacuum cleaners to suck up goofy spirits that like to suck Dan Akryod’s dick and there is a character named Slimer who is possibly most globally famous for being the mascot for a children’s juice box. Who gives a shit? You didn’t like the movie? Great, guess what you still have your old Ghostbusters. If all it took to cause the pillars of your childhood to crumble was to give you more of the Gerber’s baby food you wanted but it doesn’t taste the same, well your childhood (and adulthood) are pretty uninteresting.

I’ve gone back and watched the Star Wars prequels several times and they don’t grow on me. However, I’ve been digging all the new stuff since Disney took over, which surprised me. I mostly had a lot of fun with the new trilogy and all the streaming TV stuff. Mostly, I think it’s because I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I just want more Star Wars. I love that universe, it’s fun, and it does tap into an important part of my childhood. But if they make something that I don’t like, it doesn’t hurt my feelings because I’m a slightly-adjusted adult and at the end of the day I can always take a deep breath and remember I still have my original VHS copies, and that’s enough.

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