I steal my cultural identity.
Which IS my cultural identity.
--
Album of the day: Damn Fever by Six Def.
I remember when I was a kid that I never thought the term sequel with the term “unnecessary” in front of it. That was because all I wanted was more time with the cultural items I identified with. I felt eager for any retread of comfortable territory that I could use to define myself. Nobody else was going to identify me for me, and I certainly wasn’t going to do it myself. I needed outside sources and checks that I could use to understand my own decisions, and to inform their honorableness and their consistency of purpose, which is what culture is meant to do. Culture is the personality of the place and its population, and it’s invincible. I mean, essentially what Batman’s saying in that part where he explains that a man can be killed but a symbol can’t is that he wants to create a culture that he can inject with a bunch of action items. In his case it’s a culture of fear, but the point is it gets people up off the couch and doing something. There’s some nobility in that.
When I was a child, back before the Mouse had Horns and the behemoth wasn’t such a force of nature so scary we’re uncertain if we’re living in individual countries or in different divisions of Disneyland, one film that spawned a franchise in an unexpected and comforting way was the Mighty Ducks. Since the film, the branding has taken on some of the oddest but coolest life of its own that something like that might do. If you don’t remember it or you’ve never seen it, the original film was about a little league hockey team called the Ducks, and it belonged to the controversial and never-since-better-represented genre that occurs at the intersection where sports movies and feel-good, kid-friendly films celebrate their skating-on-thin-ice (pun unpardonable), asking for lawsuits kind of attitude. I think the genre began and ended with Bad News Bears, because the original one with Walter Matthau was excellent but in poor taste and everyone wanted to make that movie, and the remake with Billy Bob Thornton wasn’t very good at all but still in poor taste and nobody wanted to be associated with the genre again. That’s my theory, anyway.
In some people’s mind, the genre reached its peak moment with the film The Mighty Ducks which, in retrospect…
