It could be an album, movie, tv show, whatever.
Lost never delivered on its initial promise of cool science fiction mystery. It became increasingly clear as the seasons went on that the writers had no fucking clue where they were going with any of this stuff and just gave up and everyone-was-dead-all-along was the only way out even though they promised early on that wasn’t the case. Fuck that show and Abrams in particular.
I felt utterly betrayed that they never explained the smoke monster!!!
I think this aimlessness is more common than people realize.
For instance, dare I say it: Half-Life. The games were made with questions never meant to be answered, and even the supposed “concluding episodes” have kind of landed with a thud. Even the release of Portal with Episode 2, tying Aperture Science into the world, didn’t end up making much sense or having direct effect on anything.
I honestly don’t remember much of the plot of any of those games. Great games, though!
The Korean Netflix adaptation of one of my favourite Japanese books called 終末のフール (shūmatsu no fūrū, roughly ‘translate to fools in the end of times’). The book was about a collection of stories told from the perspectives of different residents of an apartment building in a world that’s come to accept the fact that a planetoid is going to destroy the Earth in a few years. Some struggle to decide whether to have a child or not. Some question whether there’s even a point going to school. Everyone has hard decisions to make but they’re all oddly cool with the fact that their time on Earth is limited. They felt enlightened to me because I think most of us spend our days ignoring the finiteness of our lives.
On the other hand, the K-drama was a generic apocalypse survival show. Everyone just screaming and yelling. At least, that’s how it started off as and I lost interest immediately. Even the English title was stupid—Goodbye Earth. Ugh.
The Hobbit movies
One of my favourite books as a kid, I don’t think I’ll ever watch the movies again by choice
You could tell those were going to be a gongshow just from the production process. LotR had years of prepwork to make sure everything was sorted out and ready for filming, so they had a relatively smooth time filming. The Hobbit films were rushed and you could tell. PJ apparently was finalising scripts and storyboards the night before each shoot.
LOTR was bad to me, I absolutely loved those books as a kid, I even enjoyed the animated ones from forever ago, but the movies were far too long for what they showed.
When The Hobbit came out as a trilogy movie series I was a bit confused but gave it a try.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a LotR fan whose favourite film adaptation was Bakshi’s. That’s really interesting.
I think it’s probably because I saw them a long time before the new ones, it was something I remember from childhood. The live action ones came out when I was a young adult and they skipped the better parts and embellished others in my opinion. I know the “Tom” debate is overdone, but beyond providing the ancient weapons needed to defeat the Witchking, he provides a glimpse into the lore without making it a detour that just seems out of place.
Same. I still have the discs around for no particular reason. I watched Desolation of Smaug in theaters, but then I watched all three of them in a row at somepoint.
My point still stands, so much unnecessary clutter for an otherwise short book.
Like okay, I know people were probably eager to see something Middle-Earth related after they felt like it’s been ‘forever’ ago since the LOTR films up until the Hobbit ones. But, they didn’t need to do the Hobbit that dirty. But, Amazon raised the ante later on. I’m not watching the Rings of Power, ever. Not even because of the diversity issue, but, it supposedly is based on the Silmarillion and I consider that my sacred book not to be fucked with and I don’t want to see a show that probably is going to mess with it.
Star Citizen. I’m less disappointed in the tech demo than how Chris Roberts has handled the business end of it.
I grew up on Wing Commander, Privateer, Starlancer, and Freelancer. I still have all those games on physical media with original boxes. And the Wing Commander CIC is the one website I still visit daily since 1997-ish. So when Roberts pitched a new space game back around 2012 I was thrilled. Well, we all know how that turned out. I’ve given up waiting for any release of Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
Freelancer.
I know everyone hates games publishers but this was a perfect example of a publisher untangling a mess. Microsoft bought Roberts’ company and immediately dialed back the unworkable ambition, put Roberts in a consulting role where he didn’t have a final say over anything, and actually got the game finished and released.
Star Citizen is what happens when the same guy who made such an intractable mess of development discovers an infinite money glitch as long as he never stops developing and never releases a full game.
I think the Eurovision Song Contest has lost the innocent magic it once possessed.
…of its own choice.
Yep ,go back to 80s
Yeah it sucks since around 1994
Moving away from physical buttons and physical media. I don’t mind touchscreens and I do enjoy downloading, but there’s nothing more satisfying than a good click of a button and actually holding something in your hand that you purchased.
I’m so tired of finger-touch interfaces. Especially when they lag and they don’t register your input right away.
Gotta use the cheapest processor to get the job done.
I know it’s ancient history, but I still can’t get over the spectacular train wreck of Star Wars Episode One. So much hype, so much hope, and then you get a two hour arcade game promo with Jar Jar Binks. It was like George Lucas had picked every single terrible trope of 90s movies and packaged it neatly into a movie.
Man, Phantom Menace being the worst Star Wars movie when it came out is like George W. Bush being the dumbest US president: those were simpler times, somehow.
I’ll say the prequels aged better than I’d remembered them, though. And they get a lot better with the existing fanedits, especially HAL9000’s take on Episode I, which trims a lot of the dumb humour, dials down the Jar Jar antics significantly and tightens the plot a nice bit, to make it more of a classic Star Wars adventure.
Yeah, at least the prequels had an actual story to them and were cohesive with each other. The sequels are just a jumbled mess with each director doing their own thing. I’d take the prequels over the sequels any day.
I haven’t witnessed the edit you mention, but it sounds like it fits in 20 minutes. 🤣
I think Topher Grace was behind an edit that only used about ten minutes of episode one.
Yes! That’s what actually got me into Star Wars fanedits and fanedits in general, he made the whole prequel trilogy into a unified experience. Saw one based on his editing notes and liked it, but through the years I’ve come to enjoy other takes from the movies, as well.
The funny thing is, having been born several years after it was released and having probably played the lego games before seeing the films, I liked it! Hell I loved it!
But if i put myself in the shoes of, well, you for instance, then I can see that it’s as dissapointing as the disney sequel trilogy. And then I can see how lame some aspects are on further rewatches
Phantom Menace was great for lore expansion of Star Wars, but it was weird to see it get more infantile than the previous trilogy, seeing as original fans were actually getting older.
It has really low rewatchability too. The in-universe gap between phantom menace and attack of the clones is reallly long, making it less relevant to the rest of the trilogy. And it has huge swathes of boring stuff in the middle. Politics stuff, very hard to follow.
Jar Jar doesn’t bother me as a character.
I say this everytime phantom menace is mentioned, but the original plans would have had appropriately aged characters and been really fun.
Phantom Menace was great for lore expansion of Star Wars, but it was weird to see it get more infantile than the previous trilogy, seeing as original fans were actually getting older.
I find this a fascinating thing to think about.
I’m the same age as the original Star Wars film and grew up on the Original Trilogy. Those three were some of the best stuff ever to my kiddie brain. The older I get, the more I feel like the OT was pretty much just as childish as the prequels when it comes down to it, just without access to 1990s cartoony CGI. I’m not saying this as a bad thing, I still enjoy the OT, but it’s clear to me now as an old fart that the prequels felt more kiddie than the OT when I watched them in the theaters because I was watching the prequels for the first time with a grownup’s brain.
I still enjoy the OT, they poke those childhood brain cells that have been hooked on them all this time. I can enjoy the prequels a bit, but it’s mostly in the form of memes and cracked-out fan remixes. The sequel movies, though, always struck me as a goddamned mess and I still haven’t figured out who they were meant to be for.
I was born the same year episode 6 came out, so I was 16 when Phantom Menace came out, and grew up loving the original trilogy. And my teenager brain enjoyed the Phantom Menace too. Yeah, Jar Jar was annoying and the CGI was jarring sometimes, especially growing up watching the practical effects they used in the originals, but I still loved it. I just really think they should have aged Anakin up in TPM though, he should have been a teenager instead of a kid because it just made the scenes with him and Padme really weird.
It’s because it was for Star Wars fans to take their kids too.
I’ve seen it twice. I bought tickets to two showings on opening day because after sixteen years of waiting there was finally going to be a new Star Wars movie. I had one for the very first showing in the morning and the other for that night. There hasn’t been a more exciting moment in a movie theater than when I saw the Lucasfilm logo and “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” and then that blast of trumpets. And then the movie happened. After the closing credits rolled, I spent the next few hours debating on whether or not to use the second ticket. I bit the bullet and went, surrounded in the line outside by all of these hopeful, happy people. I didn’t have the heart to warn them.
Nobody would have believed you, anyway. Expectations were so high, you would have just come across as a hateful troll.
Star Wars : The Parliamentary Debates ?
I actually walked out somewhere in the middle of it
my two favorite media franchises are Star Trek and Sonic. how long have you got?
Oh god… Star Trek just got… I dont even know how to describe what had been done to it.
Basically star Trek died after ST: Enterprise
Anything after that was vapid shitty pew pew cgi flare fest sci-fi, and the Picard series ruined TNG for me for years. I used to watch ST at least a few times per week, DS9, TNG, mostly. After ST :Picard i stopped. I couldn’t anymore, it was ruined for so fucking long
But there was a small ray of light, though
Watch “The Orville”, it’s made by Seth McFarlane after he rejected what the execs wanted for star Trek. It’s basically TNG updated for the 2020s and the first two seasons are amazing and have a BOBW episode, even, and hell, even a “family” type episode after. Seriously, it looks and feels like modern TNG, has great episodes like TNG used to have. The third season kinda went the pew pew direction as well, very few very long episodes where the good writing got replaced with loads of CGI, but it’s still doable.
There isn’t a fourth season, yet, anyway, but Seth recently said he is finishing writing the fourth season, let’s see what happens
Those first two seasons though, are star Trek magic, the Orville magic
First, The Orville is excellent and for anyone who watches Trek I always recommend The Orville. It’s a little crude when it starts, but it’s levels out and is really great.
Second, since you didn’t mention it, Strange New Worlds is the modern Star Trek in universe show you’re looking for.
SNW can be ok, but it leans pretty heavy on the action, and the moral quandary episodes are hit or miss to a high degree. I can’t think of a single high concept scifi premise episode of SNW that made me say “Wow.” and stuck with me. The war PTSD episode with the transporter buffer triage was very good, but more emotional and less scifi high concept. And I’ve already seen MASH.
Season 2, episode 2, Ad Astra per Aspera is my go to answer for best episodes that I think about. It’s clearly inspired by TNGs The Measure of a Man while that episode will always be the best, the SNW episode still scratches that itch.
I’ve watched them all, and none of them really felt elevated for me. Ad Astra per Aspera was fine, but I didn’t come away with any new interesting thoughts about anything from it.
Basically star Trek died after ST: Enterprise
Many trekkies said that Trek couldn’t be a Saturday morning cartoon and that after TAS would never survive, there are people who said that after TNG came out star trek was dead because the captain was bald, and some people who said DS9 killed it as a space station was not exploring, then some people complained that VOY killed it because the ship had infinite torpedos and a lot of people said ENT was the franchise’s death knell because touch screens, and OMG what did JJ Abrams do? After DSC came out some people said Star Trek was over because people dont cry in space, After PIC came out some people said it ruined everything that came before because space captains can’t change, some people said that LDS was turning ST into Rick and Morty fan wank, a horde of people said that PRO was trying to be be Clone Wars and that it gave the franchise a terminal diagnosis, it was the consensus of many fans that SNW was shitting on the memory of Kirk and crew, a loud group of trek consumers suggested that there couldnt be female Jem’Hadar and therefore SFA caused the franchise to flatline…
Yet there is more trek in development, that will be loved by some and derided by many
*edit: Section 31 definitely murdered the franchise because Rachel Garrett something something, irish vulcan space robots?
I’m honestly so confused by (presumably) adults who consider Sonic as their favorite media franchise… Just… What?
Have you, like, tried reading books or watching movies since you’ve become an adult, or…?
I don’t want to sound judgmental, but I kind of feel bad for people like this. If you enjoy it, you enjoy it, I guess… But you’re missing out on like actual good shit lol
Edit: hurr durr gotta go fast!
Heaven forbid an adult should enjoy video games. It’s also possible to have a favorite franchise and read books, including outside of that franchise.
Prole, why do you always have so many hot takes?
People who grew up with the games have a certain fondness for the series that even better written franchises cannot replicate.
What’s wrong with people deciding the franchise that made them happy in their childhood should continue making them happy in their adulthood? None of this suggests they haven’t tried or enjoyed better written stories.
None of this suggests they haven’t tried or enjoyed better written stories.
It kind of does though. They said it’s their “favorite media franchise,” not just that they were a fan.
It’s for literal babies
And I have a problem with it, because it’s not a rare thing and it demonstrates a lack of curiosity that I find to be dangerous for a modern society.
If the video game for babies that you played when you were 10 is still your favorite media franchise, then you need to expose yourself to more media.
You are very judgemental and keeps repeating the same argument I’ve already addressed as to why someone can have their favourite franchise be something that is not the best thing they’ve ever read. I think you need to expand your perspective a lot more about the world. Being so narrow-minded is even more dangerous for modern society.
Oh no I’m judgmental whatever will I do.
Maybe it’s the person who’s a grown adult and still considers Sonic the Hedgehog to be their favorite media franchise is he one who needs to expand their perspective.
I want you to be honest, do you actually know what the plots of these games are like?
You could, you know, be less judgemental, especially for something simple like a favourite media franchise.
You’re still refusing to acknowledge my point about why someone would consider it their favourite, and it has nothing to do with not expanding their perspective. It’s you that refuses to expand your perspective beyond your own capacity to understand stuff.
Do I need to care what the plot is like? My favourite media franchise has a pretty terrible plot, as well. It’s not the reason I love it. You seem unable to grasp such a simple concept.
you can enjoy all types of media at the same time. Someone who enjoys Sonic or a franchise of similar caliber doesn’t ONLY enjoy Sonic and nothing else.
They said it was their favorite media franchise, not that they enjoyed it.
Have you ever seen the “plot” of a Sonic game? If you’re an adult, and that’s your favorite media franchise, then you should be embarrassed
Great Expectations. It just wasn’t all I’d hoped for.
I thought 2 Great 2 Expect was fun, at least.
Yes!
And is Great Expectation: Tokyo Drift part of the same franchise? It wasn’t clear…
65 was such a missed opportunity. It’s about a guy who crash lands on Earth right before the asteroid that kills the dinosaurs. Spoiler alert: he escapes just in time to avoid the asteroid. It’s just a generic survival movie with generic monsters. Waste of a premise. It should have shown the beautiful side of the dinosaur world and made us sad when they died
The Dark Tower movie.
One cannot fit a 9 books series into 1 movie. What a just terrible idea to begin with. Also, if you haven’t read the books and want an amazing Stephen King adventure, this is your series to read!
I’m a lifelong Stephen King fan and have read just about everything else he ever released, but I could never motivate myself to get started on the Dark Tower stuff. There’s just SO MUCH and I kind of dread committing to it.
(And yet somehow I reread a bunch of his stuff including the extended The Stand every couple years. I claim no rationality about it.)
As a fellow constant reader, do it. The Dark Tower series ties everything together, all his works revolve around this one in a way. It can seem daunting, but trust me, those pages can’t turn fast enough as you’re reading them.
I caution the series to newbie King readers for the very same reason. The series is long, and they won’t understand all the references and tie-ins. You will though, and you’ll enjoy it (or I hope so, I’ve never met a fan who doesn’t like them [except for the ending, but what King book doesn’t have a contentious ending?]).
I’ll second this, especially if you’ve read and enjoyed most of his other work (his horror novels especially have a lot of interconnecting themes that pop up and converge in fun ways).
You won’t regret it.
Perhaps I may have to put it back on my stack and give it another honest try.
Thanks for the motivation!
Honestly I just love it - it is my favorite series I’ve ever read from any author. It’s certainly a journey but a fun one!!!
Ready for more disappointment? They’re making a new adaptation.
It’s a TV series by Flanagan, I have hope!
Me too, but not too much.
Fuck
I think book 4 is the peak, quality-wise. 5 was alright.
It’s been so long since I’ve read them, but I remember the very end of the series being great (and really, the only possible way it could have ended). However, I remember the last two books, up to that part, being kind of dumb lol
The Netflix version of Cowboy Bebop.
The cast was great but the script was just horrible and really ruined the show.
If that cast and production crew had made an original show about a dark funky future and bounty hunters and whatever, clearly inspired by Bebop but not trying to be it, they could have knocked it out of the park so hard.
They would, of course, have had to get some decent writers instead of just feeding the original anime scripts to crack-smoking monkeys and then smearing their poops onto script paper.
On a related note, I was really underwhelmed and disappointed by last year’s new Shinichiro Watanabe anime series, Lazarus.
As a huge fan of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo (and to a lesser extent Space Dandy) I was really looking forward to another serious anime helmed by Watanabe. What we got was, for various reasons, not the least of which being the untimely death of Bebop writer Keiko Nobumoto, really boring and subpar at best.
I struggled to finish it, and I probably wouldn’t have bothered it it wasn’t by a creator that I like and respect.
it was genuinely baffling how superficial and shallow the writing was, how underwhelming the direction was and how uninteresting the character designs were (I genuinely can’t remember a single one). The animation and music were great but overall it basically felt like a painfully average Netflix flick rather than a Watanabe.
Yes, I agree. To me it is almost like they ignored the original storytelling and the story and instead wanted to make something more “hollywood”.
It is the deep background and how the stories are told along with the awsome music, that makes Bebop so good. Not flashy one-liners
I watched a few episodes of Lazarus and just couldn’t get over how convoluted and bizarre in a bad way the premise was.
Perhaps controversial but I don’t think animated shows should ever be translated to live action, at least where fantasy, sci-fi, and exaggerated action are pivotal to the story or art style.
Especially when they try to make it available and shoe-horn it to a wide general audience that probably haven’t seen the original show.
One Piece turned out okay.
I can’t think of a better example of disconnect between source material and output. Just… What happened? It’s like it was written by a focus group.
I have zero hope that there will ever be any good live-action remakes of anime. I remember how everyone was excited that the Ghost in the Shell live-action was just mediocre.
I know I will get hate for this… Breaking Bad. Everyone I know was hyping it up as the best series ever and how much of a complete bad ass Walter turns into - “it starts slow, but give it a chance and it gets so good”. It really set my expectation for what the show would be to something… else entirely I guess? I watched the entire series thinking I was still in the “give it a chance” phase and any episode now it will get proper good and I’ll stop hating Walter. Then the end happened and I was left so confused.
For the record I loved Better Call Saul. And I think it’s possible that in an alternate timeline where someone just told me “you should watch it, it’s decent”, I’d might have really liked it. But it was built up so much, and Walter was built up to be such a “cool bad-ass”, which he basically never is, that it just ruined it for me.
The biggest fault was walt being built up to be a good guy. He’s the main character, but he’s definitely not a “good guy”. That’s kinda the whole point of the show. Most people who walk away thinking walt was a badass have a relatively immature take on the story.
Something I never hear people talk about with BB is how it hit differently when it was first being broadcast, than when it hit streaming.
The original show spooled out slowly, an episode a week, and then nearly a year before the next season, then they broke the final season in half, and dragged that way out. So between episodes and seasons, you remember the excitement, and you apply that to Walter, and sort of forget all the atrocities he’s committing. He’s just a cool anti-hero.
But when you binge it on streaming, your shock at his behavior doesn’t dissipate, it accumulates, and by the end, he’s just a bad guy who got a lot of people killed, and deserves his fate.
I watched it during its initial run, then binged it, and I can’t think of any other show that had such a different dynamic between the two.
I didn’t finish the show but I got the idea pretty early on; he’s like Captain Ahab, right? Not a good man, at least not anymore - a tragic character.
That’s a pretty good analogy.
Yeah, it’s very obvious from the start that he’s a mediocre person. Saying he becomes a badass is false advertising
I was also disappointed in the series not because it wasn’t good, but because people overhyped it. I’ve learnt my lesson to never listen to people’s hype for series I am interested in watching.
I’m with you on it. And you can’t even have an honest discussion about Breaking Bad with anyone because if you say you didn’t like it you’re just dismissed out of hand.
Episodes 7 through 9 of Star Wars. Yeah 7 was a retelling of the same story almost but we also live in a world where we’re repeating history so… It provided some New Hope for the series but 8 was total subversion of everything though I doubt it was all that well planned out to begin with. There were some questionable decisions and characters in that movie. And 9, I didn’t even bother to watch it after I found out Palpatine is back. Just…yeah.
7-TFA was too afraid to establish a new status quo in the Star Wars universe. It was just the Empire up against the rebels again. It didn’t feel like any of the struggle and victories from the previous movies mattered. The New Republic technically existed but we never really saw it enough to get invested. We just saw the confusing Resistance. Han Solo was still a smuggling bum wearing a vest. It was vapid nostalgia bait.
8-TLJ was made by someone who seemed to actively hate Star Wars. Somehow a Star Wars movie starting with a Yo Mama joke managed to just get worse and worse.
9-TROS isn’t even worth discussing. I don’t think anyone wanted to make or see it, but it had to be pushed out by obligation.
At least The Matrix Resurrections successfully lampshaded the concept of its characters being stuck in a forced cycle.
I at least appreciate what 8 was trying to do, even though it really needed more time in the oven and probably would have worked better as a side movie, but 9 was an abject disaster. It convinced me that JJ Abrams literally can’t concieve of a Star Wars story that isn’t just the original trilogy with a different coat of paint. He deliberately undid everything in 8 so that he could cram ESB and ROTJ into the same movie. Hell, he got Adam Driver onboard with 7 by telling him that Kylo Ren wouldn’t be a rehash of the Vader plot, then rehashed the Vader plot with Kylo anyway. At least 8 showed some form of creativity.
My roommate has only experienced 9 by way of Lego Star Wars and said the characters side-eye the camera every time the plot doesn’t make sense. I’m pretty sure that’s the best way to see the movie.
I really liked episode 8 and was let down by episode 9. I feel like the sequel trilogy was poorly planned. Abrams and Johnson were trying to take it two different directions. Some fans preferred Abrams’ vision and others preferred Johnson’s, going back and forth between the two resulted in an ending that was sort of meh for everyone
Dr Who after Peter Capaldi left.
The plots went to crap. The retconning destroyed decades of canon. I’ve nothing against the actors involved but the writers should be taken out and beaten.
I keep trying to give it a chance and don’t understand what the fuck happened, but I feel so bad for Jodi Whitaker and Ncuti Gatwa. The writing is so awful it’s like they don’t even get to play the same part.
I agree it’s a mixed bag, but there’s still some Stephen Moffat episodes in there that are fantastic, though.
