Weekend Reads (Feb 19): “Evangelion” Crossover, Olympic Scandals, Halftime Show, NFTs, Wikipedia
Recommended weekend reading material for February 19, 2022.
Before we get to this week’s newsletter, I’m currently offering a 50% discount on new subscriptions for the month of February in celebration of Opus’ 25th anniversary. (That’s $2.50/month or $25/year for the first year of your subscription.)
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Forget about Marvel crossovers. Four of the biggest names in Japanese pop culture — Godzilla, Kamen Rider, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Ultraman — are coming together in their own shared universe… somehow.
With Japan’s biggest Tokusatsu icons sharing a darker Evangelion touch these days, perhaps a wider crossover was simply inevitable. The companies behind each property, Toho (Godzilla), Studio Khara (Neon Genesis Evangelion), Tsuburaya Productions (Ultraman) and Toei (Kamen Rider) have come together to announce a collaboration of the Shin-universe of their larger-than-life characters called the “Shin Japan Heroes Universe.”
Details are still scarce so it remains to be seen what form(s) this crossover will take. Merchandising? Toys? Artwork? A blockbuster movie in which the four pop culture titans battle each other, only to join forces in order to save the world from a common enemy? Time will tell.
Related: Hideaki Anno finally brought his “rebuild” of Neon Genesis Evangelion to a close with last year’s release of Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time. Read my in-depth review/analysis of the entire “rebuild” project.
All of Netflix’s various Marvel titles, including Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage, will be leaving the streaming service on March 1.
The more likely ending point for the Netflix series will be Disney+, as the majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) content, including movies, TV shows, and one-shot shorts all reside there. It is, however, possible that given some of the more adult content present in the Netflix shows, they may end up on Hulu, home to animated fare like Hit-Monkey and M.O.D.O.K.
Something similar happened with Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which arrived on Netflix after getting canceled by Cartoon Network… only to end up on Disney+ alongside all of the other Star Wars content.
Related: My review of Daredevil’s first season.
Ivan Reitman, who was responsible for such classics as Meatballs, Ghostbusters, and Stripes, died earlier this week at the age of 75. Numerous accolades have poured in from the likes of Ernie Hudson, Paul Feig, Judd Apatow, Mindy Kaling, Kevin Smith, and Reitman’s son, Jason.
Folks on Twitter are sharing their favorite pop culture “white whales” (i.e., awesome-sounding projects that were never realized), and there’s a lot of “what might’ve been” going around.
On Twitter, Dan Chamberlain asked what unreleased or abandoned projects people wished could come to fruition. People responded with answers about movies, TV shows, music and games that were just too good — or too outrageous — to be true.
I would put Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness near the top of this list, but it sounds like that might still be happening? And of course, one can only imagine what his Hobbit movie would’ve been like, especially in light of Peter Jackson’s adaptation. And don’t even get me started on Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man.
I’ve come to trust Lars Gotrich’s music recommendations over the years, be it through his NPR reporting or his own newsletter. And now I see that he makes excellent comic book recommendations, too.
I am, by no means, a comics expert — I barely know the major story arcs of Marvel and DC from the last decade, and, in fact, find most of them tedious! But after I put the kiddo to bed, my wind-down includes about 30-60 minutes of digital comics on the iPad. In lieu of Bandcamp finds this week, consider this the Viking's Choice 6-Pack: Comic Book Edition!
The 2022 Winter Games may go down in history as some of the most controversial Olympics of all time. The Games began under the specter of China’s human rights abuses, followed by the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine. And then there was the “open secret” that is Russia’s extreme (i.e., abusive) figure skating program.
I’m one of those fans who knew about Eteri Tutberidze’s abuse. I fell in love with figure skating when I was 5, mesmerized by the spins and jumps I watched at the Olympics, and by the delicate beauty of the girls and young women in elegant, sparkly dresses. I begged my parents to enroll me in skating classes, but we couldn’t afford it. The only way to pursue my love of the sport was by cheering on my favorites. I’ve celebrated when products of Tutberidze’s system won medals, and tried to tell myself that it was normal and fair. But I’ve also watched documentaries about the legendary, now infamous gymnastics coaches Bela and Marta Karolyi, and they’ve helped provide a language for what I’ve seen in figure skating: a culture of child abuse.
Kamila Valieva, the 15-year-old Russian skater who became the locus of controversy after it was revealed that she tested positive for a banned heart drug, finished in fourth place.
The Olympics have probably always been problematic, but the utopian spectacle of the world’s best athletes competing for gold made it easy to say that it was worth it. (That, and I love the pageantry of the opening ceremonies.) This year, however, I’ve found it much harder to maintain belief in that sentiment.
The Super Bowl LVI halftime show, which featured numerous rap luminaries like Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and Eminem, has been widely praised as one of the best halftime shows ever. But for all of its entertainment value, this year’s show glossed over a few things.
Obviously, the Super Bowl stage isn’t built for gangsta rap canon like Snoop’s “Murder Was the Case.” But the halftime show offered the sort of big-tent progression that conflicted with hip-hop’s founding principles as a rebel subculture. The choice to book Dr. Dre, a producer and rapper with a record of abuse against women, also sent a message about what hip-hop is willing to sacrifice in its evolution — and it isn’t the legends. This was hip-hop playing the long game, taking its presence and acceptance as an achievement, conceding that the gatekeepers want a level of assimilation with their authenticity.
Related: Back in 2018, I wrote about the controversy surrounding Super Bowl LII’s halftime show, which featured Justin Timberlake performing a duet of sorts with Prince (who died in 2016).
Back in 2020, Apple rolled out changes to its iOS mobile operating system that gave iPhone users the ability to limit the amount of info that advertisers could learn about them, touting it as an improvement for user privacy. That decision had a dramatic impact on Facebook, which relies heavily on advertising revenue.
The short version, as COO Sheryl Sandberg told investors last week: Facebook’s ad targeting became less accurate because it now knows less about its users. Which means Facebook advertisers have to spend more money in the hope of reaching people on iPhones — and that Facebook advertisers, who had been used to measuring the effectiveness of their campaigns down to the penny, now have to make much-less-informed guesses about whether their ad dollars are working.
Via The Loop. It’s pretty easy to cheer this development, given that this is Facebook we’re talking about and they already know way too much about us. But as the article points out, Apple’s decision was not entirely altruistic.
There was a time when Firefox was riding high. But with a declining user base, increasing competition, and financial woes, the once-popular browser seems to be just barely hanging on these days.
In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape, it has been key to shaping the web’s privacy and security, with staff pushing for more openness online and better standards. But its market share decline was accompanied by two rounds of layoffs at Mozilla during 2020. Next year, its lucrative search deal with Google — responsible for the vast majority of its revenue — is set to expire. A spate of privacy-focused browsers now compete on its turf, while new-feature misfires have threatened to alienate its base. All that has left industry analysts and former employees concerned about Firefox’s future.
I’ve never been a regular Firefox user, due in large part to it never feeling like a native Mac OS app until fairly recently. But I don’t want it to go away. Competition and diversity are good things to have.
Casey Newton interviews Molly White, the developer behind Web 3 Is Going Just Great, a site that chronicles the latest scandals, controversies, and grifts in the Web3/crypto scene.
As I began to pay more attention to the space, I was seeing all of this hype for web3 with all these new projects, but so many of them were just absolutely terrible ideas when you got past the marketingspeak and veneer. Medical records on the blockchain! Fix publishing with NFTs! Build social networks on top of immutable databases! I started my Web3 is Going Great project after seeing a few particularly horrendous ideas, as well as after I began to notice just how frequently these hacks and scams were happening (with huge amounts of money involved).
Speaking of crypto-related controversies, one of the latest is a scheme to create NFTs of Magic: The Gathering playing cards… without the permission of Wizards of the Coast, the game’s owner.
There is a rich and complicated market of Magic: The Gathering filled with people who make speculative purchases and treat the cards like stocks instead of tools for a game. This secondary market exists alongside the card game people enjoy every day. mtgDAO, a group of crypto people online, wants to lean into the financialization of Magic by building a layer of NFTs on top of the original card game.
Shortly after this piece was published, the creator of the mtgDAO Twitter account admitted that they “don’t know shit about copyright law.” Which, I think is fair to say, comes as a complete shock to absolutely no one.
Finally, Annie Rauwerda was fascinated by the photos on Wikipedia’s “high-five” page, and especially the four photos depicting the classic “too slow” routine. She decided to track down the couple who appears in them, and uncovered a true feel-good story.
Thanks to an overabundance of time alone with my laptop and a growing pile of responsibilities that I wanted to push off, I found myself fixated on these photos recently. I became increasingly convinced that there was nothing platonic about this high five — I mean, you can feel the chemistry through the screen. Just look at her smile in the first frame! Look at their gazes in the third frame! There’s no way two people so young and so beautiful could exchange such a flirty high five without feeling flutters of the heart.
I couldn’t help but wonder what their story was — and what had happened to them.
A story like this is a truly welcome tonic to the vitriol, outrage, and idiocy that so often fills our newsfeeds these days.
From the Blog
It’s been awhile since I’ve written for Christ and Pop Culture, but I recently reviewed Welcome to Earth, an excellent nature documentary series hosted by Will Smith.
Good nature documentaries like Welcome to Earth serve as a necessary reminder that we are but divinely-appointed stewards of creation. We are not its masters. And indeed, its ancient and primal rhythms — the migration of wildebeests, the breeding habits of sea turtles, the unceasing processes of erosion, the moon's gravitational pull — will go on with or without us because they are not for us. Given our human-centric view of things, that's humbling... and a little aggravating. Then again, Jesus Himself reminded us that if human beings, who have been created in the image of God, fail to acknowledge their creator, then the stones will always still cry out.
Welcome to Earth is currently streaming on Disney+.
This post is available to everyone (so feel free to share it). However, paying subscribers also get access to exclusives including playlists, sneak previews, and podcasts. If you’d like to receive those exclusives — and support my writing on Opus — then become a paid subscriber today for just $5/month or $50/year.