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As if They Never Left. Animaniacs 2020 and What We Want from Television Reboots
The famous 1959 film, Ben-Hur, won 11 Oscars the year it was released and grossed the second highest box office total for any film ever made at the time. It was a cultural phenomenon the likes of which very few movies, then or now, could ever hope to achieve. It is still remembered today, though opinions on it after sixty years are of course mixed. It is something of a time-capsule of a film, a view to a very different Hollywood that made movies in very different ways with very different means of profit-making and different audiences in mind. Ben-Hur was also a remake of a 1925 film titled: Ben-Hur:…
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The Great, and Its Many Reflections on Power
So I’m going to begin this article today with a somewhat embarrassing admission. You know that famous Oscar Wilde quote: “Everything in the world is about sex except for sex. Sex is about power“? While I’d always found that quote funny and useful (acknowledging that it may be something Oscar Wilde never said), I don’t believe I ever fully understood what it was getting at until I was most of the way through binge-watching the first season of Hulu’s The Great this weekend. You see, I’d always thought it was about lust as motivation and the way in which lust can transform and curdle. Or, to put it more directly…
