Why I Fight To Bring Back Old Shows

Hey everyone!

One of the trends that I have, when writing on this blog, is to cover old television shows and video games I liked as a kid, and to explore why.  Once in a while, like with Arrested Development, there's a level of success that's achieved!  It's sort of like bringing back the dead, in a sense, so let me ask a simple question:

Why do some people like myself get caught up on bringing back old programs from their heyday?  And why, in particular, am I so caught up with it?  Maybe it has something to do with this:

See, I'm a creator.  In particular, I'm a 28 year old creator.  Ten years ago, in 2003, I was an 18 year old wanna-be creator. Two years before that, some other 18-something year old wanna-be creator got a TV show approved by MTV.  It's a complicated story, but in 2001 this Pete Williams guy, along with Josh A. Cagan and Andy Rheingold, basically got this show off the ground.  It was immensely popular...In Canada.  In America, well, MTV didn't want to keep their animation department.  So says Williams in a recent interview on the "Guys With Pencils" podcast!  Plus, I've already looked into other reasons it was unfairly handicapped.  But this doesn't answer the underlying question of, "Jesse, why do you keep attaching yourself to these crazy creative causes!?"


Personal Identification

Well...There are two fundamental reasons.  First off is the fact that this show had an impact on me.  It aired just as I was getting ready to go to college (It aired 2001, I started college in fall 2002).  It's main creative drive was a few years older than me and a local native.  It was, tacitly, about a close-knit group of friends based on real people; and it was a group who, even dramatized, I found resembled my group of friends.  So there's just a great deal of personal identification, there.  Maybe, in my starry-eyed brain, I wanted to be like this Pete Williams guy.

It helped that the show was about an awkward college guy who was trying to become something of a new person, but at the same time tied unbreakably - and pleasantly! - to his friends.  That's the life I wanted, in essence, and to this day I'm proud to be close to many of my old friends.  I could name them, but they'd kill me, so I won't.  I also loved the music; most of it was spot-on, which is actually a surprise given that the show aired on MTV.  The animation was notoriously flawed, having been produced in a korean lab that didn't quite "get" what the show was going for; in fact, a fan going by Steffan B had to actually re-edit the ending to get the damned point across:

So, one thing led to another and, the show died.  At the time I was just sad, and I bought my DVD and wrote my e-mails to MTV without anyone knowing, at the time, just how vain that second prospect was.  And, then, I got older.  I always kept an ear open, but until 2012 I sort of assumed it wasn't going to happen - we'd get little tidbits here and there, but I understood better than many that the problem was simple - MTV and others owned the rights, and that was an impossible-to-procure object.  I moved on, in large part because everyone else involved had moved on.  Then, however, Pete made his way to Canada and discovered his canuck popularity!  This guy realized, to paraphrase him, that he actually had been quite successful!  He just didn't know it.  Him, Cagan and Rheingold got a goat (hah!) and appeared at Calgary Expo, and from there shit took off.  Now, there's a vibrant fan community and there is real talk about creating a movie continuation!

Willliams regularly communicates with the fan-base, answering long-standing questions and soliciting ideas for how we can best make things work in the future.  I'm infinitely proud to say I've actually earned some shout-outs, there.


More Personal Identification

But there's an even more fundamental, selfish reason I do this gung-ho stuff.  This second basic reason I push for old TV shows to get picked up, especially Undergrads, is that, well...I want my stuff to get picked up.  You've probably figured out I write, but did you know that I literally released a novel today?  It's called Physics Reincarnate, it's the sequel to my five-star rated book Physics Incarnate, and it's available now in paperback and on Amazon's Kindle E-reader.  If you count my kindle-exclusives, this is the fifth novel I have self-published (Pillars of The Kingdom 1+2, Protostar:  Memoirs Of The Messenger, and Physics Incarnate), not to mention a short story collection.

Moreover, just like Williams, I have plans to revisit my old work.  Even now, I'm re-editing Pillars of The Kingdom 1 and 2 for re-release as Kindle exclusives (the print versions are honestly not worth purchasing except for historical value, perhaps!).  Eventually I will finish the last few chapters of the third installment of that novel.  Protostar was my National Novel Writing Month project from 2011, and I fully intend to make a sequel this November - even if that, too, is a Kindle-Exclusive.

Using my copy of Abnormal Psychology For Masochists (most assuredly written by the author of Abnormal Psychology For Drunks, Rocko's most beloved textbook from the show!), I have determined that I am projecting my desires to be a successful creator onto the people who created Undergrads.  We have similar backgrounds in terms of geography, friends, and age-group.  We have seen success, faced defeat, and we keep going.  We've learned that the best way to help ourselves is to help other creators - writers, artists, animators, musicians, what-have-you.  Is it any wonder that I would have attached myself to someone similar to me, at least in my own perspective?

Sure, I might just be crazy.  I think all creators are crazy because we're standing here and attributing serious value to the stories we conjure out of our brains!  We're standing here saying, "you will be happy if you spend your hard-earned money on listening to our tale, because this tale will leave you changed."  Well, Undergrads changed me.  It served, most of all, as proof that someone could just walk into a room (in Pete's case, enter a contest), prove they're skilled, and actually get something produced!  Isn't that every creator's dream?

That's why I keep fighting to get this show a proper conclusion.  If you watch the show, you'll understand why you should, too!


My new website can be found at http://www.JPohlmanWriting.com, where I'll keep talking about old TV shows quite a bit, among other things...

Statute of Limitations: Personal Narratives, Coming-Of-Age, and Employment Tales

Quick show of hands, folks?  Who's seen High Fidelity?

How about Kevin Smith's breakthrough comedy, Clerks?  If you have, you've probably figured out that they both feature protagonists who work in a shop of some sort, deal with romantic stress, engage in all sorts of hi-jinx with their colleagues, and tell a now-legendary "coming of age" story about how the main character comes to terms with their aging.

In High Fidelity, John Cusack's character Rob Gordon deals with a pretty miserable break-up.  He cavorts with the employees he's hired to work his record store (dated?  Perhaps!), and with their help he figures out how to set his life on a "better" path.  He frequently talks to the viewer directly, opening the movie with the story of his Top-Five Breakups.  There's the early-on elementary school disaster, the high school disaster, and the college disaster!  Rob follows up with his past loves, trying to figure out what to do with his present despair.  It's a funny tale, and it's got some great music in it to boot.

More renowned with the budding creator, however, is Clerks.  Filmed by nerd legend Kevin Smith on a shoestring budget, at night, at the convenience store he worked at, Clerks is about Dante Hicks and Randall Graves, two miscreants (well, Randall is) who fuck around at work all day, play hockey on the roof, and - oh, yeah - have to come to terms with the fact that they are getting older.  Dante's conflicted between two love interests, and in the end he has to deal with that problem, as well.

You're not here for a compare-and-contrast essay, though.  There's thousands of points of comparison!  There's equally as many differences between the two.  None, though, are more stark than this one fact:  High Fidelity is based on a 1995 novel of the same name by Nick Hornby.  Did I know this when I first watched the movie?  Nope!  In fact, I have yet to read it.

But I have learned something from this contrast, and from both films put together:  Stories change and become distant over time.

Statute of Limitations

Both stories are about young, disaffected men having relationship issues, employment disassociation, and general-old-lives.  They have fun with friends!  The events of each film (debates over music; debates over Star Wars) are pretty familiar to any twenty-something American male.  It's a universal appeal that practically begs people to tell their own twist on it.  And that's a danger to any writer - tropes are attractive because they're easy to fall into, but virtually impossible to pull off.  You need, at the very least, a hook.

You also need to have something you can still relate to!  After fifty or so years, you just won't remember the details.  It becomes hard to remember exactly why your friend Billy was hilarious, and you'll have boatloads of difficulty explaining why the events of May 27th, 1997 were so incredibly awesome!  And explaining it?  To a reader, or a viewer?  Even when you decide to twist the actual events and embellish it, you're still not doing anything more than patching the core of the story up.

Fiction often has a core of truth; writers draw from their lives all the time.  They're stories about fake people, and the circumstances they find themselves in are only somewhat lodged in what can possibly be real.  An autobiography, a personal narrative, a story about your youth?  These contain facts, or at least are supposed to!  But time adds a fog to certain things, and even well-kept journals and friends who retell their experiences will differ from your recollection.

The point, here, is the same as any other time you, as the creator of art, have an inspirational flash.  If you plan to tell a story, tell it while it's rather fresh.  Sure, you need a few weeks' removal from it, to really process what happened.  In fact, sometimes even a couple years could benefit the wordsmith!  But with each re-telling, each re-hashing, each passing minute, the raw impression of the incidents you were so enamored with become fainter and fainter.  It's a balancing act, just like the act of editing and processing a story can fundamentally change it from it's more primal roots, waiting too long can cause your memory of an experience to go beyond crystallization and into fracture.

Sometimes, you just have to act.

Dystopian Lit Guest Post at BookGoodies

Howdy, sports fans!

I open with this line because if you're a sports fan, you're well aware of the Har-Bowl coming up?  Sweet.  I dislike that the Patriots made it that far, but at least they ain't gettin' another Super Bowl!

Moving on.  I recently submitted a guest post to BookGoodies.com, and low-and-behold they posted it, today!  This marks the second one they've posted by me, the first being about NaNoWriMo.  It's about Dystopian literature (and art in general), and it serves as a fairly basic introduction to the genre.  All in all its a fun, quick little read to get you into the spirit of nightmare worlds!  I might write another one for them, one about Hyper-Local Journalism.

Moving on.  Again!  Today is a special day for me because it's the year-and-a-day of Physics Incarnate.  My precious little baby novel is getting so old!  And as much as I'm working on its sequel and other projects, I'm celebrating by having it as a free book on Kindle, today.  So, check it out!

Enjoy yourself, and stay safe!