A couple weeks ago, I discussed the twisted subtext of Cartoon Network’s Clone Wars. But there’s another, even darker aspect of the series: the way George Lucas is pushing it at the expense of the original Star Wars movies. Like all Sith plots, this one is hard to see, even as it unfolds in plain sight.

Last summer, my son informed me that he wanted to have a Star Wars: A New Hope party for his fourth birthday. This was among the proudest moments of my life. Definitely prouder than the day he was born. (Think about it: everyone gets born. Not everyone appreciates Star Wars before he turns four.)

Nope.

So it was with great relish that I went online to buy a full spectrum of party stuff from a galaxy far, far away. I wanted plates that looked like Death Stars, cups that each showed a different member of Red Squardron (I was gonna keep Wedge for myself), and a tablecloth that reproduced that original poster where Luke’s shirt is open.

What I found was page after page of Clone Wars stuff. Nothing that showed Luke, Han, or Leia. There was a lot of Vader, but I’m sure it was because he was in Episode III. Yoda was only depicted holding a lightsaber—his Clone Wars incarnation. There are 42 items listed in EZ Party Zone’s Clone Wars category. In the “Star Wars” category, there are only four items, all of which are Vader-related. I scoured the internet, and I couldn’t find a single kids’ birthday party item that was definitively original trilogy. This was a problem for me, because I am carefully shielding my child from all knowledge of the prequel trilogy for as long as I can. If he finds out Santa isn’t real, that’s alright. The day he hears about Jar-Jar, I’m going to cry.

A terrible plan.

Spoilers for 2012 follow. Although I’m not sure giving away the plot to a special effects pornstravaganza constitutes “spoiling” it. It’s a lot like revealing the plot to an actual porn movie–that’s not really why you rented it in the first place.

Roland Emmerich loves to destroy the earth. 2012 is his third disaster epic, after Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow. But there’s one crucial difference this time around, and it’s not just the lack of the word “day” in the film’s title. In 2012, the leaders of the world know about the impending apocalypse. They have years to plan. But the plan they come up with is mystifying stupid. Basically, they keep the news very quiet while they construct a bunch of giant boats high in the Himalayas. This is largely financed by charging the richest people in the world one billion euros for tickets.

Deep breath…

1. Why not just tell everyone? Evil bureaucrat Oliver Platt explains that there would be complete chaos if the truth got out. The important thing is to preserve the human species, and if everyone knows they are going to die in three years, there’s no way they can pull off the logistics of building and stocking giant-ass boats. There’s a certain logic to that. But I also think that if everyone knows they’re going to die in three years, then everyone would work really, really hard to prevent that. Think about how many giant boats could be built if everyone in the world was spending every waking moment welding? Not to mention, the extreme secrecy means that 99.99% of the world’s smartest scientists never even knew about the problem, much less get a chance to solve it. I’m not saying anyone could have stopped the earth’s crust from collapsing. But they could have tried, or at least corrected some of the dumber parts of the ark plan. For instance…

You're GODDAMNED RIGHT I ordered the Code Red, and it was delicious!

Galloway (Demi Moore): This past February you received a cautionary memo from the Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet, warning that the practice of enlisted men disciplining their own wasn’t to be condoned by officers.

Jessep (Jack Nicholson): Well, I submit to you that whoever wrote that memo has never faced the working end of a Soviet-made Cuban AK-47 assault rifle.

This is A Few Good Men in a nutshell. Colonel Jessep feels that the rules do not apply to him, because of the extraordinary danger his soldiers face.

But do you want the truth? Can you HANDLE the truth?

As far as I can tell, no Cuban soldier has attacked an American soldier in more than 50 years. In fact, Guantanamo Naval Base is considered so safe that families are allowed to live there. According to the Navy’s website, Gitmo has a child development center, a youth center, two schools, a Sunday school, a Boy Scout camp, and a Girl Scout camp. It’s probably a much safer place to raise a kid than my neighborhood.

On last week’s podcast, there was a passing reference to the “Ghost Ship Moment.” This is an idea I came up with back in 2003, while slogging through Ghost Ship on DVD. For those of you who aren’t diehard Julianna Margulies fans, this is a movie about a marine salvage team that finds a long-lost Italian ocean liner floating in the Bering Sea. They climb aboard and start poking around artfully rusted-out staterooms, and increasingly eerie things start happening. But somehow, the crew members refuse to accept that the boat is haunted, even after a bunch of them have died mysteriously.

I bet you KNEW there was a plane crash in this movie. Weird, huh?

When we walk into a theater, we usually know a fair amount about the movie we’re going to see. For instance, I haven’t seen Transformers 2. But from the trailer, I know that Sam Witwicky goes off to college and absorbs some sort of alien code from a mysterious artifact. I know that Optimus Prime fights in a forest, and it probably doesn’t go well for him. (There’s something about the way Shia yells “Optimus!” that reminds me of the way Ewan yells “Noooooooooooo!” in that Star Wars: Episode I trailer I memorized in 1999.) I know that Megatron returns. I highly suspect that the final sequence takes place at the pyramids.

(By the way, someone remind me to make a list of movies in which ancient Egyptians had direct contact with aliens: Transformers 2, Stargate, The Fifth Element…)

This is all right there in the trailer—it’s information the studio wants me to have. Depending on what other movies I went to see, I might have been shown this trailer whether I wanted to see it or not. Being surprised by Megatron’s return just wasn’t an option.

Now compare that to the District 9 trailer. (Warning: D9 spoilers ahead.)

Today marks the 25th anniversary of Ghostbusters. We celebrate, as we sometimes do here, with Ghostbusters Week, dedicated to overthinking various aspects of the beloved film.

Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light.

—Egon Spengler, Ghostbusters

Okay, Egon, let’s imagine it. Everybody you’ve ever loved, gone. Everybody you’ve ever met, gone. All the cute girls you’ve ever had a crush on, vaporized. All the cute little babies, exploded. Say so long to your favorite celebrities: George Clooney, Barack Obama, Thom Yorke, all gone. And not just humans. You like pandas? Too bad.

Now tell me, is this an outcome any sane person would risk in order to run a small business?

Of course, it’s possible that Egon is lying about total protonic reversal. Maybe he has no idea what will happen if they cross the streams, so he’s playing it safe. Or maybe what will actually happen is that the proton packs will short out, necessitating a trip to Radio Shack and a long night of repairs. But Egon’s a gadget freak–he wants people to treat his creations with respect. So when Venkman snidely asks him to “define bad,” Egon thinks of the most over-the-top bad thing he can. Sort of like telling a kid that if she keeps making that face, it’ll stay that way.

Weapon of extremely mass destruction.

I like this theory. But for purposes of this post, let’s assume that Egon’s telling the truth. In that case, it seems to me that capturing ghosts, no matter how careful you are, carries far too great a risk. The odds of accidentally crossing streams seems pretty high–the process basically requires the Ghostbusters to all be aiming at the same spot. If Venkman and Stanz were responsible adults, the second Egon told them how dangerous the proton packs are, they would have turned around, gone back to the station, and smashed their equipment to bits with a sledgehammer (although that might be dangerous too).

But what about the moment that they decide to cross the streams on purpose? It’s nothing short of a crime against humanity.

Yes, I realize they were doing it to stop Gozer. But Egon only gives them a “very slim chance” of survival. How small is “very slim,” anyway? 5%? 1%? Doesn’t matter. Even if the odds were flipped, and there was only a 1% chance all life would end, I’d still say the Ghostbusters had no goddamn right to roll the dice like that. They simply can’t gamble all life on Earth on some spur of the moment, back of the envelope hunch. Not unless they were certain that the consequences of not acting were every bit as dire.

It seems to me that it’s only morally permissible to cross the streams if you know, for a fact, that every living thing on earth is about to perish. In that case, your actions at best give people a chance at survival, and at worst offer them a painless death. So if, let’s say, the asteroid from Armageddon is heading towards Earth (“Not even plankton would survive”) and crossing the streams somehow gives you a “very slim” chance of preventing it, in that case it might be the ethical thing to do.

Is the Gozer situation that dire? Not even close.

Today the Overthinking It staff tackles the pressing question of which 80s franchise they would most like to see revived, inspired by the upcoming Ghostbusters revival and by our general obsession with the decade of (many of) our births. By the way, Were You Aware that Beverly Hills Cop, Robocop, Short Circuit, Escape From New York, The Thing, Scanners, and Police Academy are ALL scheduled for sequels or remakes?  Truly, there is no new thing under the sun.

Read Part 1 today, and stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow—and your chance to vote for the winner.

Conan, by Belinkie

I always liked the Schwarzenegger Conan the Barbarian movie, but I didn’t truly get the awesomeness of Conan until I read Robert E. Howard’s original stories. Howard wrote pulp fiction during the Depression, for magazines like Weird Tales and Fight Stories. And when you read his stuff, you feel like a ten-year-old reading under the covers by flashlight. Here’s the beginning of an early Conan story, “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”:

The clangor of the swords had died away, the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The bleak pale sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice-fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blade, where the dead lay as they had fallen. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads back-drawn in the death-throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in last invocation to Ymir the frost-giant, god of a warrior-race.

Goddamnit, Robert E. Howard, you are a magnificent bastard! I love the way this guy writes. He just goes for it, you know? A lot of people will dismiss this as pretentious cheese, and maybe it is. But it’s the most glorious pretentious cheese ever put to paper.

Now I’m not going to deny that the second Conan film, Conan the Destroyer, is pretty weak sauce. (For starters, the producers wanted the violence toned down to get a PG rating.) But the third film is already written, and by all accounts it is awesome. It’s by the screenwriter of the original, John Milius, and it’s called King Conan: Crown of Iron. The title alone makes me happy.

I’m just going to quote some of the awesomeness that this screenplay contains, as recorded in this script review. Here’s Conan, imparting some wisdom to his young son.

There seems to be a consensus that the Oscars are becoming less and less populist. Back in the day, movies like Star Wars, Tootsie, Ghost, and E.T. were all nominated for Best Picture. This year, a lot of people haven’t seen a single one of the nominees. The Oscars have gone all snooty on us. But here’s my question: can “snooty” be quantified? Can we graph the Academy’s turn towards art house?

(NOTE: This post would not be possible without the badassery of sheely, whose day job involves all sorts of numerical kung fu.)

So way back in April, I first had the idea of editing together inspirational speeches. Since then, the Dow has dropped 3,000 points and one million jobs have been lost. The people of the United States are now a ragtag bunch of scruffy underdogs, down by three touchdowns at halftime, with a whole horde of orcs waiting for us right outside those locker room doors. Inspiration has become something we need. (By the way, you couldn’t tell because it started the sentence, but “Inspiration” was capitalized.)

What I’m trying to say is, I may have just single-handedly saved the economy with this montage:

TRANSCRIPT:

I did some clicking around on IMDB this morning, and out of the top 100 highest grossing live action films of all-time (U.S. only), not one is directed by a woman.

You’ll notice I said “live action.” That’s because women did co-direct a couple films that break the top 100 when you include animation. Vicky Jenson co-directed Shrek (#38), and Judy Morris co-directed Happy Feet (#92).

And you’ll notice I said “U.S. only.” That’s because on the list of highest grossing films worldwide, a woman is currently at #48 and rising. The English director Phyllida Lloyd helmed Mamma Mia! this summer. Apparently, it did much better internationally than it did here – on U.S. box office chart, it’s only at #183.

And believe it or not, the situation for ladies behind the camera might be getting worse. Dr. Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University compiles a yearly study on women in Hollywood. Her report on the top 250 domestic grossing films of 2007 found that…

Women accounted for 6% of directors in 2007, a decline of one percentage point since 2006. This figure is almost half the percentage of women directors working in 2000 when women accounted for 11% of all directors.

However.

Twilight is directed by Catherine Hardwicke. In order to break into the top 100 domestic, it needs to gross over 187 million. I’m guessing it should do that by December 1.

So feminists — if you were disappointed that Hillary Clinton and/or Sarah Palin didn’t get to the White House, and least you can be proud that the celluloid ceiling is about to get busted wide open.

[I'd tell you to do your part by going to see the movie, but you were going to do that anyway. Or you already have. So I won't bother. --Ed.]