This week, the guys from the Nerd Lunch podcast imagine would it would be like to have a “pop culture eraser.” What if you had the power to erase a person, movie, TV show—whatever—from pop culture history? Who or what would it be and why? It was a really great episode and you’d be surprised at some of their choices (Oliver Stone? Really?).
The idea of a pop culture eraser, though awesome, is a dangerous one. One does not simply walk into Mordor erase things from history without serious repercussions—have you learned nothing from Back to the Future? Erasing someone or something also means forcing yourself to deal with the repercussions, as if what you’re erasing never existed. For instance, if we would have erased Corey Feldman from the nineties (his ’80s-era career can stay), he would have never given us the critically-acclaimed film Lost Boys: The Tribe. Oh wait.
When you start really thinking your choices through, it’s actually pretty challenging to come up with something that you can “safely” erase from pop culture history. However I’m fairly confident that it wouldn’t hurt anything or ruin anyone’s lives if we all agreed to erase this atrocity from all known memory:
For me, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the ultimate sequel that should have never happened, surpassing the likes of even Spider-Man 3, Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, three films that also share the honor of ruining beloved franchises, but are unquestionably more terrible. So why all the hate?
Remember when Indiana Jones was an awesome trilogy?
Me too! I would have liked to have kept things that way. Indiana Jones was perfectly fine as a trilogy thankyouverymuch. It was one of the last great trilogies, if I may be so bold. If you’re going to keep milking your franchise for all it’s worth, you have to go big like Star Wars or go home. Otherwise you end up with a mixed bag of shit like the Alien quadrilogy. Nobody wants that. Besides (and this may be petty but I don’t care), “quadrilogy” doesn’t have nearly as nice a ring to it as “trilogy” does. And we can no longer refer to it with fun, made-up marketing words like THRILLOGY.
Geriatric Indy makes me sad.
There is nothing sadder than a celebrity past his prime, especially when said celebrity is most well known for portraying a badass action hero. Nobody wants to see old, frail Indy who’s a shell of his former fortune and glory. Trying to distract us with the much younger, hotter Shia LeBouf only made things worse by the added comparison. I’d have rather paid $12 to see a CGI Indy crack a CGI whip with Harrison Ford’s voice-over…or I could have just played Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb.
Aliens. It had to be aliens.
When will Hollywood learn that adding aliens for the sake of adding aliens is never a good idea? Even Stephen Spielberg agrees it was a bad idea.
And also:
It was a terrible movie. Let’s not forget that.
You thoughts?
If the fourth Indiana Jones movie had never happened, would the world be a worse place? Would anyone’s careers have been ruined? I say no.
Complaints? Counterpoints? Condonation? Can we safely obliterate Kingdom of the Crystal Skull from existence?
