The Top Ten Pop Culture Goliaths of the Naughties: Part Two
Well, this post is a little late, but what can I say? The ‘season’ is upon the best of us- it’s even upon this blog! Way to go with the snow. Clearly global cooling has taken hold here at Pop! Goes the Planet.
Time for the next tardy installment in the most epic blog series of the decade!
Onward!
8.) Remakes, Reimaginings and Sequels
Hollywood came up with some great stuff in the Noughties, but it certainly wasn’t all about the new and the innovative. Remember that great cult film, or trilogy, or series of films, or cartoons you loved in the 60s/70s/80s? Well in the Noughties they were BACK in blockbuster form.
Comic books were never safe in the Noughties as the likes of Batman, Spiderman and Watchmen were reimagined, sometimes once all over again, for the big screen. Sometimes the results were great: Batman Begins and The Dark Knight was acclaimed even though it tread over territory much of us were fine with in the first place. Sometimes the restful corpse was brought back to life, and then beaten to a bloody pulp much to all of our dismay: Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, or the Starwars Prequels, anyone?
In the Noughties, it’s a given that a successful film automatically becomes a franchise. Merchandise is not enough, and we were often stuck with the sequels soon after too. Kiddie film franchises were notorious for this: Ice Age, Toy Story… and then there were the horror films… 48 milliseconds later we’re up to Saw XII and suffering through the Return of the Living Awful Evil Dead.
Worse, we had spoofish abominations such as Scary Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, Epic Movie… ugh!
Will the tenties bring a little originality, or more of the same?
7.) Global Warming
As I write this, an iceberg the size of Sydney Harbour is headed straight for my small Western Australian city. When I was a kid, our teacher April Fooled us into believing a truck was going to drive straight past our primary school with an iceberg on the back, on it’s way to top up the emtpy dam outside the town. I feel like my 8 year old self is going to finally get her giant iceberg that she waited to plaintively for back in ’93, and it’s going to crash straight into my local.
But icebergs- aren’t they great? They’re pretty great, especially when they’re not melting and stuff, which means I get to keep my neck above water. Australia is a pretty low lying landmass you know. In theNaughties, icebergs gripped our imagination. And it was all thanks to Al Gore, and his documentary flagship for environmental consciousness during this decade: An Inconvenient Truth.
Al Gore was The Dude. His film showed us that we were doomed, and he was prepared to jump on board a cherry picker and wow the crowd with his powerpoints that went outside the projector space to prove it. Consequently, global warming, or it’s new, somehow more accepted monicker ‘climate change’ colours much of the media in the Naughties.
We kinda went off our diet of disaster movies that we so loved to dine on in the Nineties, probably partially due to the events of September 11, making the sight of national monuments crumbling to dust, being smashed by aliens or giant lizards or smothered by tidal waves slightly less palatable to audiences and movie bosses for a while. In the late Naughties though, we were ready for just a little bit more, and climate change was thoughtfully addressed with moving acting and relevant simulations in the poignant disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow.
Now, ‘green’ is no longer a dirty word, it’s now a word that spawns half-hearted, guilty apathy- and today, unfortunately, a lot of bewilderment. We all know this is something we should be paying attention too, but we don’t really know why. As we all keep half an eye on the latest climate change summit where our Dear Leaders will agree on not much of anything, we can all look forward to an uncertain future and maybe a couple more disaster films.
Tags: climate change, global warming, green, movies, sequels
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December 10, 2009 at 11:34 pm
“Will the tenties bring a little originality, or more of the same?”
Our worst predictions have come true- there’s a Zombieland sequel being planned, and in 3D! Oh hahahahaha..