I think the ep in the Mirror Universe where they find the ship from Kirk’s time had a file flash quickly onscreen which showed the history of some of the Enterprise characters. If memory serves, Hoshi Sato will die on Tarsus IV when Kodos The Executioner kills most of the population so the others may live. As you may recall, Jim Kirk, as a young teen was one of the few who lived and remembered what Kodos looked like. TOS ep, “The Conscience of the King.”
That was the last episode of South Park that I ever watched. As a matter of fact, I watched ten minutes of it, realized what was up, and turned the TV off. To make matters worse, some friends and I had a little wager going about who Cartman’s father would be. I guessed Ms. Cartman. It was only several years after the fact that I learned, purely by accident, that I had been correct.
I know a lot of people who don’t think the Peter Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings are particularly good films or particularly good versions of the book. If you’d like to read an entire book of essays by people arguing this point, read Tolkien on Film: Essays on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (Altadena, CA: The Mythopoeic Press, 2004). The general opinion among these people is that removing the Tom Bombadil episode is the least objectionable thing that Jackson did and that skipping the Scouring of the Shire wasn’t that big a deal either. They have other objections to the film that they think are more important.
The Clone Saga wasn’t an FU, it was a pretty standard Spidey story that got way out of control and dragged on way too long. When it started, he idea that one of the Jackal’s clones had lived was pretty interesting. Eventually it turned into, “Peter is the clone, Ben is real. We swear. No, no, Peter is definitely 100%, no bullshit the clone. We swear. Peter is definitely the clone… Ha! Ben’s the clone, fooled you!”
The real FU to the fan was telling us that Gwen Stacy fucked the Green Goblin and got knocked up! Ol’ Petey was getting chaste hugs and kisses, but Norman was gettin’ some stank on his hang-low! Take that, sacred memory of the virginal Saint Gwen!
Yeah, but the whole Green Goblin “I wasn’t dead, I was in Europe” crap really turned me off to Spider-Man. I haven’t read any Spidey comics since then (I liked the movie well enough, though).
Especially when they sued 330,000 of their fans for downloading songs…hard to get any more “Fuck You” than that!
This is true. However, Stephen King is by no means a great writer. Heck, he’s not even a very good one. His only talent is coming up with intriguing stories, and that well ran dry decades ago.
I’ll nominate The Simpsons, for how Comic Book Guy became a cariacature of all those loudmouth fans on the Internet who bitch and moan about how terrible the show has become, and declare every new show the “WORST EPISODE EVER!” (Of course, that’s more of a “Shut Up Bitch” and not so much “Fuck You”…)
> IMHO these people are nitpicking ingrates. NO ONE would EVER have made the
> movies they wanted.
This distorts the views of the people who wrote the essays in that book. They have objections to the films about things that could easily have been done better by better filmmakers than Jackson and his co-writers. Read the book, because I’m not going to argue about it. I’m tired of arguments about the films that consist mostly of people telling me, “It’s intuitively obvious that the films are great and you’ll burn in hell for saying otherwise.”
No doubt. I can’t think of a bigger waste of time than to read about the objections of these type of fans. I saw enough of them when the movies were released. I try to avoid fans like this like the plague; I’m not about to search out a book of essays by them.
I don’t think you’ve read much Stephen King. King’s power is in his character development, and he is unparalleled in this category. His stories really aren’t that intriguing, and never really have been very original. It’s not the way that he writes about horror, it’s the way he writes about the mundane that makes him a great writer. If you can read The Stand or The Shining and come away from that thinking that the author was producing less than world class story-telling, then I just got to see what you call ‘great writing’.
There is a reason that he is one of the most successful writers of the 20th century. You don’t have more than 300 million copies of your fiction published when you are ‘not a very good’ writer.
Oh yes, I have…up until his writing started to really suck, that is. My favorite novels of all time include The Stand, and The Talisman. I’ve also taken several college classes which study his work in depth. King describes himself “the equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries at McDonalds,” which nails his writing style perfectly.
I absolutely agree about the world-class storytelling and the powerful character development. But “great writing” is more than just that. Allegory, symbolism, metaphor, onomatopoeia…basically, just the way words are hooked up with each other. It’s really a matter of semantics, but I’ve always distinguished “writing” and “storytelling” as two separate things. Therefore, I see King as an awesome storyteller, but only an average writer. (Whereas other famous authors are great writers, but not so great storytellers…like Leo Tolstoy…or even Tolkien, one could argue.)
However, right around Misery or shortly thereafter, King ran out of ideas. His storytelling in recent works lacks passion, and his characters are merely retreads of earlier ideas. Plus, his writing style just sounds tired…like he’s going through the motions, just to pay the bills. (Or keep up with the voices in his head, whatever.) It’s like he doesn’t care about his stories anymore, let alone the fans who read them. Occasionally he’ll type out something that’s worth reading (“The Langoliers”, and some parts of Hearts in Atlantis) but as for the rest, I get more enjoyment out of admiring my morning stool.
The only reason SK is so popular, is because he struck a chord. People in the 70’s were primed and ready for escapist horror fiction, what with the natural horrors of corrupt politicians, gas shortages, and possible nuclear war. Anyone could have filled that niche, and SK was just the first one to come along. It’s like how Tom Clancy (neither a great writer OR storyteller, IMHO) came along when people wanted highly technical spy/war novels, and J.K. Rowling slipped into the “school for wizard kids” category. And if you really believe # of millions sold must mean the person’s a great writer…well, read any Danielle Steel lately?
Here’s a few other horror-ish writers whom I prefer to King. De gustibus etc.–my tastes tend to run to pulp fiction and lit-snob fantasy.
Blaylock (as already mentioned)
Tim Powers
Richard Paul Russo
David Drake
Fredric Brown
GRRM
REH
HPL
CAS
Dunsany (the best fantasy writer ever)
Algernon Blackwood (the best horror writer ever)
William Hope Hodgson
Ted Sturgeon
Francis Stevens
Arthur Machen
Fritz Leiber
Jeffrey Ford
Arthur Conan Doyle
James Branch Cabell
John Collier
Regarding Chambers: He was astonishingly popular in his day–for writing crappy romance novels, of all things. Today, he’s remembered for one book: The King in Yellow, which is today regarded as one of the all-time classics of weird fiction, but which in the day wasn’t all that popular. The point is that popularity is not necessarily correlated with quality, and arguably is actually inversely correlated (this is verging into GD territory, though). For example, nobody would argue that McDonalds serves a helluva lot of hamburgers, but I don’t know too many people who would argue that McDonalds serves really great hamburgers.
My favorite novels of all time include The Stand, and The Talisman. I’ve also taken several college classes which study his work in depth. King describes himself “the equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries at McDonalds,” which nails his writing style perfectly.