Weekend Reads (Jul 15): “Gunbuster,” Barbie, the Wilhelm Scream, the 2023 Emmys, Mix Tapes
Recommended weekend reading material for July 15, 2023.
Every week, I compile a list of interesting and thought-provoking articles to offer you some enjoyable weekend reading material.
Max Covill dives into Gunbuster, a heavily influential anime from 1988 directed by Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion).
While it doesn’t have the reputation of Anno’s more lauded masterpiece, Gunbuster’s influence can be seen throughout Gainax’s catalog, as it contains the foundation for all the tropes and ideas that would come to define the studio. Gunbuster is only now, for the first time, being released in the West in full, with a high-definition format and an English dub. But its influence has been all over anime in the decades since it was first released in Japan, whether audiences know it or not.
Gunbuster was one of the first anime titles that I ever watched, and while the fan service was ridiculous and off-putting, I was struck by both its inclusion of sci-fi concepts (e.g., time dilation) and its over-the-top melodrama. And of course, its awesome mecha combat sequences. Buster Beam for the win!
On a sidenote, I hate the article’s clickbait-y title, which implies that it’ll contain links to where you can watch Gunbuster. However, it just contains a vague mention that Gunbuster is “being released in the West in full, with a high-definition format and an English dub” with no links to said release. So here you go: the Gunbuster Blu-ray can be bought on Right Stuf and Amazon.
Alex Abad-Santos sits down with a Barbie aficionado to better understand why Barbara Millicent Roberts has seen such a recent surge in popularity.
Barbie’s moment is one of those rare things that feels both like a fiery overnight phenomenon and a long-simmering success. To better understand Barbie culture, Barbie’s history, and what we mean when we talk about Barbie, I spoke to Maria Teresa Hart, a Barbie expert and author of Doll, which she describes as a “non-fiction pop-culture feminist critique of dolls, doll history, and doll culture.”
Related: In case you needed a reminder, Lego isn’t just for kids anymore. (I totally want one of those redesigned Galaxy Explorer sets.)
The Wilhelm Scream is arguably the most iconic sound in all of cinema, and it celebrated its 70th birthday this week.
The sound effect that’s been heard in countless movies and TV shows over the decades technically has two birthdays. As a sound itself, it originally debuted in the 1951 film Distant Drums from singer-songwriter Sheb Wooley. But it was officially given its name with the minor character of Private Wilhelm in The Charge at Feather River, a western that came out July 11, 1953. In that movie, Wilhelm (played by actor Ralph Brooks) screams after being shot in the thigh with an arrow, which would come to define its use: in all of its appearances in future media, it would be used when someone got shot, blasted back by an explosion, or fell from a high distance.
My boys and I watched the latest Indiana Jones movie this week (here’s my review), and sure enough, we heard it when Indiana was busy knocking Nazis off a train.
In addition to their impressive film catalog (e.g., Everything Everywhere All at Once, Uncut Gems, Moonlight, Ex Machina), A24 Films have published their first movie-inspired cookbook: “A collection of late-night, last-ditch recipes and ingenious back-of-the-pantry meals straight from movies.”
The cinematic recipes include “Buddy’s Breakfast Spaghetti” from Elf, “Kip’s Just-Cheese Nachos” from Napoleon Dynamite, and “George Newman’s Twinkie Wiener Sandwich” from UHF.
The 2023 Emmy nominations have been announced. I’m pretty stoked to see Andor (aka, the best thing to happen to Star Wars in a long time) pick up some nominations, including “Best Drama Series” and “Best Directing for a Drama Series.” Other favorites getting nominated include Pedro Pascal (for The Last of Us), Phil Dunster and Brett Goldstein (for Ted Lasso), Abbott Elementary, and Prey. The 2023 Emmys program will air on September 18.
However, there’s a good chance that the Emmys will be delayed or even canceled now that the Screen Actors Guild has officially joined Hollywood’s writers on the picket lines.
Generally, you can think of it this way: SAG-AFTRA believes that studios are trying to find ways around paying members enough to maintain what they term a “middle-class” existence, and they want to fix that now and protect against the threat in the future, largely so that acting doesn’t become work only available to the very wealthy or privileged. When you think of actors, you might think of movie stars, but the people who stand to lose the most are those you might never notice: background actors, voiceover artists, and other people who will never be millionaires.
As with the writers’ strike, concerns of AI replacing humans (be they writers or actors) is a driving force behind SAG’s strike, as is compensating for the impact of streaming on the entertainment industry (e.g., increasing residuals).
Related: In a move that feels very much like something you’d expect from a movie villain, several studio execs claimed that their approach to handling any such strikes was “to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.”
And speaking of AI, several authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman, are suing OpenAI and Meta. Silverman et al. claim those company’s AI tools were trained on their works without permission or consent.
In both claims, the authors say that they “did not consent to the use of their copyrighted books as training material” for the companies’ AI models. Their lawsuits each contain six counts of various types of copyright violations, negligence, unjust enrichment, and unfair competition. The authors are looking for statutory damages, restitution of profits, and more.
Lawyers Joseph Saveri and Matthew Butterick, who are representing the three authors, write on their LLMlitigation website that they’ve heard from “writers, authors, and publishers who are concerned about [ChatGPT’s] uncanny ability to generate text similar to that found in copyrighted textual materials, including thousands of books.”
Earlier this year, Getty Images sued the creators of Stable Diffusion, claiming that it was trained on millions of copyright-protected images. And you can expect to see more of these lawsuits being filed in the months to come.
Related: The opening titles for Marvel’s Secret Invasion caused a bit of controversy when it was revealed that they were AI-generated. But they’re nothing compared to this AI-generated trailer for Heidi.
According to the Video Game History Foundation, only 13% of all classic video games are easily available for players — and that number drops below 3% for games released before 1985.
For accessing nearly 9 in 10 classic games, there are few options: seek out and maintain vintage collectible games and hardware, travel across the country to visit a library, or… piracy. None of those options are desirable, which means that most video games are inaccessible to all but the most diehard and dedicated fans. That’s pretty grim!
This is where libraries and archives should come in. Anyone should be able to easily explore, research and play classic video games, in the same way that they can read classic novels, listen to classic albums, and watch classic movies. But outdated copyright laws are preventing institutions like ours from doing our jobs.
Via io9. Read the full study and learn more about its methodology. The Foundation has several endeavors to preserve video game history, including a research library, source code preservation, and archiving games, concept art, and marketing materials.
Related: Speaking of classic video games, 1984’s Karateka is being turned into a “playable documentary” that includes early prototypes, video features, and a remastered version of Karateka.
Also related: The scarcity of video games, classic or otherwise, is yet another case for owning physical copies of your favorite media.
After spending an afternoon listening to a bunch of old mixtapes from the ’80s and ’90s, Colin Meloy had a few revelations.
“Man, I miss making mixtapes,” shouted the aging Gen Xer, himself in a sea of like voices, all shouting the same refrain. But I do. It was such a lovely ritual; a weekend afternoon or a schoolnight evening, stacking tapes and CDs on the floor of your room, deciding which song should kick things off, what sort of theme should be the connective tissue, what were the hits and which were the deep cuts. And then having to listen to each song all the way through before adding the next one to the list, always gauging the size of tape on each spool of the cassette, trying to use up every centimeter of tape without — sin of all sins — cutting something off at the end. It’s a kind of dreamstate that digital mix and playlist-making has never equaled.
As an aging Gen Xer myself, I resonate with every single word of this. Spotify playlists may be convenient, but they’ll never be as magical as a good ol’ mix tape.
Finally, astronomers have found new evidence for massive gravitational waves that are trillions of miles in size, and the discovery could shed new insights into the universe’s construction as well as its earliest days.
The discovery announced on June 28 marks the first detection of low-frequency gravitational waves. The source of these low-frequency gravitational waves is believed to be supermassive black hole binaries in the very early universe. Think of this in terms of an orchestra. LIGO can hear the dramatic single “crash” of cymbals from violent events like collisions and mergers. What the low-frequency gravitational wave signal NANOGrav heard is akin to the gentle background harmony of violins.
The strength of this signal indicates that a gravitational wave orchestra of hundreds of thousands or even millions of supermassive black hole binaries existed in the early universe.
Adam Frank waxes poetic on the discovery: “All of a sudden, we know that we are humming in tune with the entire universe, that each of us contains the signature of everything that has ever been. It’s all within us, around us, pushing us to and fro as we hurtle through the cosmos.”
Related: Gravitational waves could revolutionize the hunt for advanced alien civilizations. (Which raises a pretty serious question: If there are advanced alien civilizations out there, do we really want them to know that we’re looking for them?)
From the Blog
Last week, I wrote about Instagram’s recently launched Threads app, which has already seen over a 100 million sign-ups, and how Elon Musk’s ongoing sabotage of Twitter primed us for Threads’ release.
If Musk hadn’t done so much to sabotage Twitter since acquiring it last October (e.g., firing critical employees, antagonizing users and advertisers, embracing the platform’s worst aspects), then I’m not sure Threads would’ve enjoyed anywhere near this much success. It really is damning that Musk-era Twitter has left users so starved for anything resembling a healthy, viable platform that they’re flocking to something that, if we’re being honest, resembles a Twitter beta more than a mature release.
Public betas and test releases are nothing new, and are often valuable in terms of getting user feedback and testing. Threads’ current incarnation, however, feels like a minimum viable product that was rushed to release, not because its developers thought it was ready (every developer wants more time for testing and polishing), but because the higher ups insisted it be released now. (Although, to be fair, I’d probably want to take advantage of Musk’s bungling as soon as possible if I were them, too.)
And in other Opus-related news, the site has crossed the 7,000 post mark.
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