Posted 7:49 PM by Gene

Several days ago Terry Unpronounceable got upset that RUPERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'s Big Nautical Adventure is causing the moviegoers to abandon ship. "That rumble you hear in the middle distance is the sound of doom for big-budget adult movies, which were already sick unto death and have now officially straight-lined." We can blame the teen audience unto death, but here goes: the movie biz once did better. For sixty years it did better. Then came the Paramount decree, which split the movie studios from their theaters and unnecessarily deprived the industry of a revenue stream. Then came television, which pretty much took care of the audience. Then came the end of the studio system, which allowed the supply of quality talent to dry up. Then came urban renewal, which replaced the pleasure palaces of yesteryear with refrigerators, and the subsequent malling and multiplexing of the theaters, which turned them into oversized dens. Then came the conglomerates, which didn't have the foggiest idea what they were doing, and whose successors still don't. Then came JACK'S ALPHABET SOUP, which gave increasingly self-indulgent filmmakers the chance to do all sorts of things their betters didn't need, and that swept a good chunk of what remained of the audience away. Then came Lucas Spielberg, which snuck in amidst all the filmic bloviating to produce constant hommages to the B-movies of its childhood, and brought in expensive toys like CGI to make its own B-movies faster and stronger. This in turn, brought in the teens, and the bean counters. Then came the VCR, which made movies a cheap commodity and provided the wherewithal for Lucas Spielberg to do even more B-movies. Now we're stuck with movies for kids, VERY BAD MOVIES for kids, with the usual December campaigning for bloated bores and Oscars® to mollify the ad-blurb copywriters. And of course they'll get worse; as I've said, satellites and digital projection will allow for quickie infomercials and all Paris all the time. I remember how the ad-blurbist Leonard Maltin ended the chapter on Warner Bros. cartoons in the first edition of Of Mice and Magic; after many many great cartoons, he said, those classic characters no longer had to prove anything. The movie industry had a glorious run, and now it's playing out the string, a string that has already stretched for decades and will stretch into infinity.