Dan O'Bannon, apparently wearing some sort of bathrobe or kimono.
If you’re any kind of a geek, you’re currently saying to yourself, “But wait, isn’t George Romero the undisputed creator of the modern zombie?” Night of the Living Dead did indeed make zombies into one of our collective nightmares. But it was Dan O’Bannon’s lesser known Return of the Living Dead that introduced some of the big “rules” for zombies that are now almost universally accepted in the genre.
What’s interesting about the zombie is that it’s the only major movie monster that didn’t reach maturity in the 30’s or 40’s. Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Wolf Man (1941) created pop culture archetypes that were pretty cemented by Pearl Harbor. There were also plenty of zombie movies being made during this period. In fact, I had the pleasure of interviewing Scott Kenemore, the author of the very clever self-help guide The Zen of Zombie, and he told me one of his favorite zombie films is actually from 1941.
I know that I missed the time when it was socially relevant to talk about Crank Dat by about three months, but whatever. It’s the internet. And I think that the song deserves some digging-into. First, a little refresher course: Crank That (Soulja Boy) is a song by the Mississippi based rapper Soulja Boy Tell’em. Mind you, both the rapper (usually) and the song (occasionally) are reffered to simply as “Soulja Boy,” which kind of gets into the main thrust of my argument. Anyway, if you haven’t heard the song or seen the video, watch it, and prepare to be amazed.
If you look up Soulja Boy on wikipedia or whatever, you’ll find him listed as a rapper. And this is technically true. But I think the old-school term “MC” is far more appropriate. He’s catchy as all get-out, but you sort of want there to be a different word for what he does as opposed to what, say, Twista does. And lyrically, when you compare Soulja Boy to noted story-rapper Ghostface Killah…