This Week You Will Gang Up On:

• the year to come
• an long-lost script
• the Robocop guy
• movie novelization
• a rock star workout
• mono- D’oh!

Raise the pitchforks and torches of gratitude to scb0212, Miller and nikmarov for contributing this week. Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

Emily St. James still prizes “Marge vs. The Monorail” over all other Simpsons episodes, but notes how differently it reads for her now (come to think of it, it does argue against public transportation):

I do wonder how much that worldview has seeped so deeply into the groundwater of people my age and younger that it will be difficult to expunge. At least in The Simpsons, it exists within the form of a terrific TV show that understands human life is complicated and people will often surprise you. But many of the show’s imitators – including wildly successful ones – took its worldview several steps further and created a sense that caring about anything is for suckers. Now, we live in an era when caring about something is usually thought to be a necessity, and even modern Simpsons episodes feint toward this more often than not. Now that The Simpsons lives on as audiovisual wallpaper for entire generations, whatever worldview its early episodes had has surely been blunted by just how completely it has become an institution itself. After all, there was a time when Mickey Mouse was read as anarchic, and now, it’s impossible to imagine him as such. It is the nature of cultural objects that become controversial to push the envelope just far enough that some other program comes along and pushes it further. Eventually, every envelope pusher becomes a little staid and rote.

At the Guardian, Charles Bramesco looks at what films set in 2024 can tell us about the year to come:

In [Highlander II: The Quickening’s] vision of 2024, the ozone layer wore away through the 90s, leading to millions of casualties from overexposure to the rays of the sun. The good news? Connor MacLeod, the Highlander himself, has invented a shield that can protect the Earth from the gaseous ball of destruction. The bad news? Earth has been plunged into a state of protracted darkness, extreme yet livable heat and oppressive humidity. And the worst news? The nefarious Shield Corporation has seized ownership of the barrier, and levies heavy taxes on countries in a globally scaled protection racket. Scarcity and exploitation aren’t such far-off concerns for us in the present, either.

For Ars Technica, Max Evry reports in detail on the recently discovered copy of David Lynch’s unfinished Dune II script:

While infused with the plot of Dune Messiah, Lynch’s script for Dune II is more than a fascinating curiosity; it is a glimpse into an alternate post–Return of the Jedi movie landscape where a visionary oddball conjured Herbert’s sci-fi works onscreen as a dark, sophisticated, and eye-poppingly weird cinematic odyssey that—as George Lucas’ Star Wars remains—could still be a viable franchise today the way Lynch envisioned it: weirding modules, heartplugs, face dancers—the works.

Eric Kohn interviews Paul Verhoeven at Metrograph:

PV: Arnold went to Carolco Pictures and told them to buy the script. [Co-founder] Mario Kassar did it immediately. Arnold told him that he wanted the director of RoboCop. Mario called me and said, “I’ll send this script over to your house. Can you read it as soon as possible? I want to talk about it this evening.” I read it and said, “There is a problem with the third act,” but immediately I found a lot that was funny, good, and innovative about it. We were sitting at the table at this restaurant. There were five or six of us. Mario said, “Well, do you think you can work with Arnold?” I had met Arnold before by coincidence because he was friends with my editor Frank Urioste. I said “Yeah,” because it was much more interesting if it was Arnold than an accountant. He said, “Let’s shake hands, you’re going to start tomorrow.” There was no talk about money. It was just, “Let’s go do that.”

At The Biblioracle Recommends, John Warner confesses he’s never seen the movie E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, but he loves the novelization:

Novelizations used to be sort of de regueur as part of film promotion, and I recall seeing many of them on the shelves of my mom’s bookstore. I’m pretty sure I read the novelizations of the Clint Eastwood classic Every Which Way But Loose and Burt Reynolds’s Hooper, and of course I read the Star Wars novelization a dozen times or more. […] [Novelization writer William] Kotzwinkle is sort of a hero figure to me in the sense that he’s a writer who has taken whatever opportunities are in front of them and done them beyond well. There’s no reason that the E.T. novelization needed to be a great work of children’s literature, but that’s what it is.

And in Outside, ultrarunner Zoë Rom attempts Taylor Swift’s Eras treadmill workout, simulating movement for over 3-hours while belting out the singer’s catalog:

At this point, I’m feeling the miles but reasonably well recovered from Tay’s first pandemic album. My bangs are plastered to my forehead, but I’m glad I don’t have to wiggle into a sequined leotard.  No sooner had I brought my heart rate back down to baseline than the Reputation set blasts on with (somewhat regrettable and very 2017) bass horns. Every song on this album is a banger of a sonic middle finger to anyone who has ever crossed Ms. Swift, and it shows in the BPM. This was likely the crux of the workout, leaving me more or less part gasping, part belting over “Look What You Made Me Do.” Then, Speak Now offered a brief but necessary reprieve before I dove into the steady-state effort of Red. (Break-up albums are great to run to; it’s just science!) There is no catharsis quite like screaming and running on a treadmill.