You’ve probably heard the news by now that hedge fund Pacificor, LLC has purchased the rights to the Terminator franchise from Halcyon’s bankruptcy auction. This transaction has sparked massive speculation on the franchise’s future. Will McG make more sequels? Will T1 and T2 screenwriter Will Wisher’s treatments turn into the next two sequels? Will Pacificor go for a total reboot?

The future not set: there is no fate but what this shady hedge fund makes, right? Well, I wasn’t content with that. As a rabid Terminator fanboy, I needed to know how this turns out, so I took the liberty of using the Overthinking It Time Displacement Field (OTITDF) to travel ten years into the future to see what will become of our beloved franchise.

My report is as follows. Be warned; it ain’t pretty.

2012-2014: The Sequels

Pacificor’s first move was to get a sequel to Terminator: Salvation out the door as quickly as possible. McG, not having anything else better to do, agreed to helm the sequel. Christian Bale, upon hearing that McG had brought on the same Director of Photography from the last movie, refused to participate.

McG, in a bind, recalled Freddie Prinze, Jr’s fine work in Wing Commander and tapped him for the role of John Connor. Nicolas Cage just showed up on set, and nobody had the heart to tell him he wasn’t actually in the movie.

Pacificor, for its part, contributed the title:

[Political humor today from this guest writer. Want to trivialize tragedy through commerce? Never forget… to suggest your own patriotic t-shirt in the comments.]

Throughout history, enterprising men and woman have taken advantage of tragedy and despair to turn a quick denarius, pound, shilling and dollar. When tragedy struck, vendors of every age pulled out their screens, dusted off a few patriotic slogans and started printing t-shirts. And for some reason there were eagles on them.

The art of patriotic eagle t-shirt printing began in the last years of the Roman Republic, when vendors near the Capitol set up their tents and started selling black and white SPQR caps and these fashionable tunics.

More shirts through the ages after the jump.

[Yes, we are technically on hiatus. But here was a breaking story that couldn't wait to be overthought. —Ed.]

Font snobs around the world recoiled in horror upon seeing the font “Papyrus” used in the movie posters for James Cameron’s Avatar.

But that wasn’t the end of the horror for the Font Snobs: James Cameron wasn’t content with using Papyrus in the movie poster; he went as far as to use it as the font for all of the subtitles in the movie!

Now, I sympathize with these Font Snobs. It’s a hokey font. But all I have to say is, James Cameron’s taste in fonts could be worse. Imagine if this were the poster…

INT. FACEBOOK OFFICE

A 12-year-old boy sits behind a desk.

BOY: Hi there. I’m Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. I wanted to tell you about some of the exciting new features we’ll be rolling out in the coming months. You guys have enjoyed the “Poke” since the beginning. In 2007, we added the Super Poke. But for those times you really want to get somebody’s attention, we’re introducing the Ultra Poke.

Really, Mark Lee should be writing this post. A couple weeks ago, he had the idea of doing a schmaltzy Terminator song, in the style of “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing” or “Everything I Do (I Do It For You).” He asked if anyone would be willing to help, and I told him to “keep me in the loop,” which means “good luck.” Then he sent me a demo version of the song, and it’s been in my head ever since. So in the end, I had no choice but to make this video.

Notice the armband he’s wearing?

This song, to me, is a prime example of “earony,” a word I coined to describe my feelings towards inspirational speeches. The word is a combination of “earnest” and “ironic.” With this song, Mark is clearly mocking monster ballads. At the same time, he clearly loves monster ballads to death. Thus, it’s an earonic song.

I like to imagine this whole backstory about lovers separated by nuclear disaster, searching for each other as they dodge exoskeletons. “How far would you go to find the one you love?” No wait, maybe we play it a little lighter. Poster shows an endless line of gleaming robots walking down Santa Monica Boulevard. Tagline: “The commute is killer today.”

But here’s something to Overthink: is the end credits monster ballad a thing of the past? Robin Hood was ‘91, Armageddon was ‘98. Nowadays, they end action movies with upbeat rock songs, not cigarette lighter-waving declarations of undying affection. Of course, maybe the monster ballad itself is an endangered species. The genre definitely peaked in the 80’s and early 90’s. I might argue that the high water mark for monster ballads was 1992, which gave us “November Rain” and “Bed of Roses.” But ‘92 was also the breakout year for Nirvana. After Nevermind, rock became less glam, for better and for worse.

Anyway: Mark, you’re a rock star, plain and simple.

Lyrics after the jump.

Many fundamental physical properties obey what we scientists call conservation laws, meaning that the universe contains a finite amount of them which cannot be exceeded.  Think mass/energy, linear/angular momentum, quantum/molecular orbitals, or the number of times I can be expected to engage in conversation with a grown male  Miley Cyrus fan before somebody ends up dead.

That last one’s perilously close to being exhausted, by the way.

Now, one can be trained in this manner of thinking for only so long before it becomes habit to assume that anything of importance must  fall under the constraint of a conservation law.  Economist Charles Issawi, for example, postulated that in a closed system the total amount of Evil remains finite, but can change its form.  (Hence, say, the dissolving of a single, enormous totalitarian regime in the Soviet Block would result in many smaller civil wars and incidents of ethnic cleansing.)  I for one have a hard time not assuming that things are conserved; despite Fenzel’s numerous, herculean efforts at proving to me otherwise, I remain unconvinced that there isn’t a finite amount of money in the world.  Maybe if I had actually ever held some money with my own two hands, that might make the argument more convincing.

But lately I’ve been thinking less about the intangible, fundamental building blocks of the universe, and more about the paralogous bits from which our Pop Culture is composed.  Take Soul: after Ray Charles died a few years back, did the large agglomeration of R&B harbored in that man’s body disperse itself back into the pop culture ether?  Or does it pass, chose-one-style from one generation to the next?  Am I the only one who noticed that Justin Timberlake got appreciably more soulful after The Genius passed on? There’s almost certainly some interesting math there, somewhere.  The kind of math you do by candle light, clad only in white silk bedsheets, and while humping.

Mmm, girl.  That’s some fine-ass analytic topology.  Damn.

Anyway, I digress.  On Tax Day I suggested that we collectively seek out the Good News offered by one Mr. James Brown.  I’m a huge J.B. fan, and something I’ve marveled at for some time now is the large, eclectic list of nicknames he collected for himself during his career.  A good number of these were bestowed upon him (“The Godfather of Soul,” “Soul Brutha’ Number One”…), but then, a good number were literally just  the name of a number-one hit he’d gotten, sometimes preceded by “Mr.” (“Mr. ‘Please, Please, Please,’” “Mr. ‘It’s a Man’s, Man’s, Man’s World’,” “Brother Rapp”…).  Really, when the final outro for your live performances is just the enumeration of your complete list of monikers, and when said outro takes ~8 minutes to complete, it’s time to consider if you’ve just started naming your songs things you’d like to hear yourself called in public.  It is perhaps the most grandiose example of resume padding ever achieved outside of Russian Politics.

But this stockpiling of stage names could be seen as another way in which not only J.B.’s musical sensibilities, but his showmanship would help establish paradigm for the next thirty years or so.  Consider the number of alternate monikers and/or personae taken on by his contemporary George Clinton, his acolyte Prince, or frankly, the entirety of the Rap community.  Heck, I can’t even bring myself to make a joke about Kool Keith; I’ll just advise that you block out a good 2-3 hour chunk of free time, and direct you to this page.  One day, SAG will demand that, like actors’ names, nicknames must be unique identifiers.  On that day, Kool Keith’s hilltop castle will be stormed by swarms of pitchfork-wielding wannabes, each demanding their fair share.

He will lay waste to them all.

So, do stage personae obey a Pop Culture Conservation Law?  Now that Mr. Brown’s new bag is, in fact, a pine-wood box, and he just might literally have ants in his pants, what becomes of his collection of nicknames?  I postulate that the existing community of people who’d lay claim to them might very well take this opportunity to coopt them.  Click on the pic below to see a small rogue’s gallery of those I suggest might fit the bill:

Soul Brutha Number 24601

So, did I miss any of your favorites?  Got better suggestions?  Any other artists whose ability to rebrand themselves has been a subject of your fascination?  Sound off in the comments!

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to pick my favorite cliches from the 84 comments we received. Most comments had multiple entries. So in total, we got hundreds and hundreds of cliches (approximately half an episode of 24). It took me hours to write this post; the fact that there was absolutely no prize at stake makes it all the more embarrassing.

But in all seriousness, I’m astonished at how clever you all are. There were many fantastic lines that had me giggling on the subway, and I’m sure that if I sat down to do it again I’d pick a completely different set of cliches. So basically, feel free to disregard this post entirely.

INTERVIEW ROOM

A middle-aged man in a shirt and tie faces the camera. He looks kinds of like Steve Carell.

MATTHEW: My name is Matthew Schott. For the past four years, I’ve been producing a documentary TV series about a paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I wanted to call it “Paper Tigers,” but corporate didn’t like it.

I swear that this isn't photoshopped.

I always hate to let advertisers win.  I love advertising, in a perverse way, but whenever I realize that an ad or a piece of product design has convinced me to buy a product, I die a little inside.  I am a unique snowflake with free will, dreams, ambitions, my own little spark of divine fire, etcetera, but bombard me with pretty lights and colors and suddenly I can be programmed to exchange my money for your goods, another cog in the capitalist machine.

But as much as I hate it, sometimes I will come across a piece of branding that sends me blindly fumbling for my wallet.  This happened to me today.  Readers, I give you:  Doritos Late Night.

Hello, America.

Those of us you who are gainfully employed have probably noticed the special significance today, April 15th, the ides of April, holds.  Yes, today is the day for which years of standardized test-taking have prepared each and every one of us.  It is a day that encapsulates the very core of the American political soul – the great social equalizer.  Today is the day where some modest but precious modicum of our meager salaries are joined together in great union, the ultimate confluence of national cohesion.

Today, we celebrated our Taxation Day.

We’re going look at taxes as viewed from both sides of the Atlantic, through the lens of pop music.  Read on – but if you qualify for the Earned Income Credit (EIC), please make sure to first fill out the worksheet on page 15.