Since this the 300th post on this site, I wanted to do something special. Why I decided to do something special for the 300th post when the 200th post was about Killdozer, I don’t know. I guess it’s because I didn’t have another Killdozer to talk about.
There are more than a few alternate scenarios where this site, or a variation of it, began much earlier than it did, with different subject matter but a similar style and purpose. Fact is, I’d been itching to write a sustained series about one topic of interest or another for a while, but all the potential ideas I batted around usually amounted to daydreaming and not much else. To be honest, I’m glad I waited—partly because all those ideas were destined for failure for myriad reasons, but also because in the intervening years I was able to become a much better writer.
I’ve been keeping one blog or another for close to fifteen years now—jeez, if you put it that way, it almost sounds like a long time. The first half of that illustrious career was spent floating on the blogging-for-blogging’s-sake wave of the mid-two-thousands, wanting a place to preserve my vacuous high school thoughts for digital prosperity. I kept that going for several years, looking at the sites I was reading for inspiration (which is to say, I was “inspired” to badly imitate what they did), but at a certain point I just grew disenchanted with the whole enterprise. The second half started almost exactly eight years ago, when I abandoned the anything-goes format and chose instead to go for pure critique and analysis on specific topics, which in that first case was books. I can still see the slightly shaky transition between the old writing style and the new one take place over the first few months on there, the jokey geek trained on hyperbolic message board posts blending uneasily with the honours English major (who, as a living cliche, wrote a term paper on Moby-Dick), but it eventually coalesces into what is more or less my current writerly voice. Narrowing down the potential subject matter and mostly sticking to a specific style and word count really instilled a sense of discipline and purpose that was lacking in my writing before, and also gave me a chance to use those academic skills for my own personal gratification in the twilight of my school days—soon enough, writing online book reviews became the only thing that used those skills. That site lasted a little over four-and-a-half years, at which point I had proven to myself that I could make something that wasn’t completely embarrassing, and also figured out that reading a book is more enjoyable when you don’t have to write 500-1000 words about it immediately afterwards. I know, I was shocked to learn that, too.
The other reason I was OK with retiring the book review blog was because I started this one, and six months in I felt that this was a good enough outlet for whatever I wanted to do, even though there was never a clear, long term idea of what that was. This started out as the home for my short reviews of every episode of Ultraman, a project I had started after discovering that Shout Factory was streaming the whole series (and Ultra Q) for free—and that’s pretty much what this site was for a whole year, with some Pokemon posts in between, and no real plans for what I would be doing after that (well, that’s not entirely true—I knew the logical next step was to review episodes of Ultra Seven, but for various reasons that didn’t end up happening.) What this site housed in the beginning were the kinds of things that I probably would have posted on Tumblr a few years before, but I had fallen out of love with that site in much the same way I had with general blogging before it. While the book reviews were meant to be a more “serious” endeavour (even when I was, say, writing about the manual for a George Foreman grill), I still wanted to write about subject matter that was a bit lighter, and when modern social media was no longer cutting it for those sorts of thoughts, I figured I could just start another blog.
I have always enjoyed and admired ongoing, culture-based columns—stuff like Nathan Rabin’s My Year of Flops, or blogs like Douglas Wolk’s Dredd Reckoning and Chris O’Leary’s Pushing Ahead of the Dame—and after years of following so many of them and seeing what could be done within their seemingly focused directives, I decided that I wanted to have (at least) one of my own. There’s something so interesting about really digging into a singular subject like that, learning its history and finding all the ways that subject has developed, all of its permutations, and how it fits into a larger cultural picture. I also like the idea of a sprawling project that you, the person reading it, can also dive into, witnessing the author’s views on the subject matter change as they learn more about it and become entrenched in its intricacies and rhythms—it becomes a journey for everyone involved. This site has allowed me to indulge my desire to have something like that on several different occasions, with many different subjects. Of course, most of them only lasted a few months, rather than the years that my inspirations often took, but what can I say, I just have so much I want to do.
Years before I decided to write about Ultraman, though, there were a few subjects of interest, and varying levels of scope, that crossed my mind as potential candidates for a long term pop culture writing project. The first one I seriously considered would have revolved around sword-and-sorcery films of the eighties, an idea that struck me after I watched both Conan the Barbarian films, Red Sonja, Krull, and The Beastmaster within the span of a year. I actually don’t care for high fantasy very much, but there is something about these pre-Lord of the Rings films that I find oddly compelling, maybe because their grittier and less fustian worlds offer a real contrast to what most people these days think of fantasy, taking us back to the pulp years before Tolkien made the genre acceptable kid/hippie material. It’s a lot of fantastical ideas without many pretensions, and importantly for me, also a plethora of practical effect monsters to gawk at (the cloaked people-drinkers from Beastmaster are especially amazing.) There is certainly no dearth of material for a series like that—the problem is that most sword-and-sorcery movies are kinda garbage, lacking either the great filmmaking and conviction that John Milius brought to Conan (which also benefited from actors like James Earl Jones, as well as the early career charisma of Arnold Schwarzenegger) or the bombast Don Coscarelli revelled in with Beastmaster (which also benefited from the presence of Rip Torn, and also ferrets.) Even those movies’ direct follow-ups are disappointing, minus a few choice elements (like the big, friendly guy with his bone club in Red Sonja.) Also, the further down that rabbit hole you go, the more queasily exploitative and troubling those movies tend to get—unsurprisingly, considering the genre and its entire history—and stop being particularly fun to watch. When The Sword and the Sorcerer (a movie about a guy whose swords is full of other swords) looks classy by comparison, you know there’s a problem—so I gradually came to realize that hunkering down and watching a large amount of those movies wouldn’t yield worthwhile results, and abandoned the idea.
An even more ambitious idea I had, and one that was probably even less advisable, was to review the history of non-Disney animated theatrical movies. I always love looking into the underdogs of pop culture, and it’s interesting to consider that even during Disney’s lull periods, they still had a name value that every other piece of animation lacked, and desperately tried to make up for—sometimes resulting in films that did things very differently. When I thought about that idea initially, it made sense, and would allow me to cover many genuinely good movies—everything from Yellow Submarine to The Iron Giant, and even some interesting lesser-known ones like The Mouse and His Child. But the more you look into the history of animated film, the more you realize that the main reason no one was able to touch Disney’s success before Don Bluth was because most of those movies were bad. Not just bad, though, but condescending exercises in mind-numbing tedium—if it weren’t for batches of amazing or weird animation, something like Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure would probably be completely unwatchable. Have you ever tried to sit down with The Adventures of the American Rabbit or Freddie the Frog? Just tortuous, perhaps even more than the sword-and-sorcery movies would be. In either case, I could see myself starting up a site for those things, only to abandon it a few months in, driven to madness either by Deathstalker IV or Rock-A-Doodle.
Eventually, I figured out that maybe choosing subjects that were more easily accessible and, you know, finite, would make it much easier to actualize those ambitions of mine. It probably helped that I ended up finding things that I was already quite passionate about (like monster movies and fighting games), and were fun enough to experience on their own that doing “research” didn’t feel like work. Who would have thought doing something you really enjoy would make for a more pleasant and motivating experience?
Remembering all those aborted attempts made me realize just how long in gestation a site like this was, and how many times I needed to rethink my strategy before coming across the one that worked. The grand undertakings I imagined for myself were never really a good fit, but I’d say that they still mostly represented what I find most interesting in pop cultural study: the weirder corners where fewer people are paying attention, the things that either consciously or unconsciously come from a specific mindset, or represent some part of the medium’s history. That’s what I’ve always wanted to talk about, even back in my high school blogging days—it just took a few more years of hard work and maturation, and a tiny dash of telling myself “No, that’s dumb”, for it to come to fruition.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 