This may seem a bit lame, but I’m sick of hearing from non-Americans about how we’ve pillaged their cultural heritage.
The Romanians, in particular, gripe about how Dracula wasn’t a vampire – he was a Romanian cultural hero, albeit a rather ruthless one.
The Europeans squawk about how we rewrote their fairy tales.
And EVERYONE growls about how we remake non-American movies from time to time.
Now, I’ll admit, Americans can be an abrasive bunch. We aren’t as schooled at good manners as we should be, and we do have a knack for wandering in and immediately operating as if we own the place. And, yes, the recent King Arthur movie was quite wretched. On the other hand, that wasn’t entirely the fault of Americans.
But a story is a story, folks. When a story is retold, it changes, if only in that a different person is telling it. When we start violating your copyrights, THEN you have something to gripe about.
So: when all you non-Americans quit pirating our DVDs for sale and show in your movie theatres and homes all over the planet, paying not one thin dime to the creators, THEN we’ll quit pirating your cultural traditions to make entertainments that suit Americans.
Yeah, the impaling of local dissenters and nailing hats to heads isn’t very important in the grand scheme of things.
As Bram Stoker was Irish, I think that blaming the US for Dracula is a bit ludicrous. Hell, most movie producing countries around the world have done Dracula movies. Ours just more often than not truly suck.
Well, it wasn’t an American who made Dracula a vampire, and fairy/folk tales went through substantial revision before they hit these shores. There was the guy who had London Bridge dismantled and shipped here, but the U.K. has no room to squawk: the Elgin Marbles represent the best case of cultural pillaging I can think of.
On the other hand, the Hague (excuse me: The Hague) should impose the harshest penalty at its disposal on the guy who invented canned spaghetti.
I knew a few Romanians in college, including one honest-to-goodness Transylvanian. Never heard any of them gripe about Dracula, although the Transylvanian was a bit sick of the jokes. (Also of people thinking she was from Pennsylvania – her English was excellent and nearly accent-less.) I once asked her if people in her region were angry about the whole vampire thing and she said no…because they’d made so much money off of tourists because of it.
I saw *Thunderbirds Are Go * a while back on TNT in the middle of the night. One of the durndest things I ever saw. Would make an excellent drug movie, actually – the loopy plot and insanely colorful backgrounds and costumes made me wonder if I was watching some sort of weirdo version of *Austin Powers * from a universe populated by puppets…
I went back to work last night, only to find that we were now selling a new brand in our line of $38 DVD/CD machines. Symphonic, via Funai. Pure crap.
Only this one won’t play ANYTHING but retail DVD and CD discs. I have to explain to folks who buy it that "The movies you buy at the flea market won’t work. No, the ones your son is all excited about won’t work either. No, it’s not a burner, it just plays retail discs. No, not even JPEG slideshows. And MP3 is a type of audio file, and has nothing to do with VCD. (Yes, I know that’s not exactly correct, but I am dealing with folks who think MP3 means “free stolen ANYTHING, help yerselves!”
So, I’m sorry you missed out on the whole Apex thing when it happened, but from now on, DEAL WITH IT. Stop stealing those “Fullscreen” VCD disasters .
From now on, I will laugh in your face if you are only shopping for a piece of shit like that. I’m sorry that you, your family, and your children might be the folks who get pissed off 'cause they can’t find the fullscreen version of 2001, or that one “Star Wars” sorta flick where the prelude scrolls up before you can read it…
Gads, now is the time for me to put down that glass of gin…
