Or as they used to be known, ‘fans.’
I was a bit shocked a few years back when the creators of Breaking Bad said that fans such as myself, ones that wanted Walter White to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after, were toxic people who didn’t get what they were saying. No, we got it all too much. Walter was the hero of the show and we were willing to follow that hero wherever he went and cheer him on in whatever he did. Yeah, he was a bad guy, but so was Spike in Buffy the Vampire Slaver and Batman for the past thirty years or so.
When I was a kid I loved all movies, even the bad ones. It wasn’t until Siskel and Ebert came around that I developed a good solid hatred for any movie that wasn’t Citizen Kane. After a while they realized what they had done, to some extent, and included things like Guilty Pleasures to try and show that even bad movies could still be fun to watch, but it was too little too late.
There was a fun series of books called The Nitpicker’s Guide to Star Trek, which pointed out the plot holes, scientific errors, self contradictions, flawed logic, and general bad writing that is at the core of most Star Trek episodes across all the series. I really loved those books.
Then came the Internet and YouTube and Mr Plinkett’s amazing reviews of the Star Wars prequels and the countless channels like Everything Wrong With and How It Should Have Ended and Pitch Meetings where the countless flaws in any film are pointed out. All kinds of random people tell the world what they think of every movie they see and every TV Show they watch and complaining about all of it. For the most part, these are also fun. But like Fox News and MSNBC, they do tend to preach to the choir. I’m not sure the people who create the content that is lambasted watch any of the videos.
If you’re a serious movie fan, you’ve likely heard tales of actors that didn’t get a certain role, directors that get a certain film, and countless films that never came into being for one reason or another. My personal favorite is that Tom Selleck was up for the role of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. James Cameron wanted to direct Jurassic Park. These alternate universe movies might have good or bad, but we’ll never know.
Or will we? There was a blip on Twitter the other day by a group that claimed they wanted to remake The Last Jedi, only in color and with a happier ending. The idea of changing a bad film into a better one is something Charlie Chaplin did, but even he could only do it once.
The technology is getting better and better, and cheaper and cheaper, all the time. What happens when the computers can whip up a Tom Selleck that looks as good as the 1980 real world version and someone says, hey, let’s do that Raiders thing!
Fans become toxic when they threaten to take ownership of something they don’t own. Even if I had all the money in the world, I can’t just crank out alternate versions of movies I hate, even Star Trek finally said knock it off to all the Fan Fiction remakes. But does the fact that a fan really loves something and never wants it to end make that fan toxic?
The guys who make Rick and Morty feel the same way about their fans that the guys on Breaking Bad feel. Rick is a bad guy. He’s evil. You’re not allowed to like him and root for him. He’s the Villain! Then your should have treated him like a villain and not like a hero. Moby Dick shows up two pages before the end. The Wicked Witch has limited screen time compared to Dorothy. The Night King has basically made a handful of cameos in Game of Thrones. You can’t make Walter and Rick the main characters and then bitch about people falling in love with them.
I don’t love movies as much as I once did. For the most part, modern movies suck. As Mr. Plinkett said about the Star Wars Prequels, it’s nice that all these people got a paycheck, but what do the fans get out of it? We don’t need or want a Han Solo movie. We don’t need or want a remake of a movie we love, such as Ghostbusters, Willy Wonka, Robocop, or Total Recall. I sure as hell don”t need any more sequels to anything.
But if you are hell bent on making sequels, prequels, and remakes, at least do a better job.
If wanting movies and TV shows that are worth my time to watch makes me a toxic fan, then, yeah, I guess I’m a toxic fan.
Well, I would like to see one more sequel. There was a script floating around the Internet for The Matrix II that actually made sense. Maybe someone could make that.
