The Week In A Bad Education Towers #32

Hi! Changing things up a little by stealing from the Chip Zdarsky newsletter, because headings are always annoying and this might make them easier. Makes sense?

That's a nice way to put it. Anyways, this is still the intro; had a week off from work which meant doing lots with the family so have some stuff to talk about this week. If I don't sack it all off for this:

Bye bye productivity. But only when I open the box which I haven't yet so let's get on with it: we'll get the big one out of the way first.

Nope, but did go to see The Super Mario Bros Movie, as have a load of other people by all accounts.

The quick version; it's fine. It's fine! It's a decent family film that looks great, doesn't hang around too long and has Mario in it. I mean, were we going to get anymore than that? It's from DreamWorks, specifically Illumination, who brought us The Secret Life of Pets and Sing and Minions. All perfectly fine films. It's also a Nintendo product, which means it was never going to be able to truly play around with the Mario concepts and the nature of video games in the same way as something like Wreck It Ralph did. Especially not after what happened in the 90s.

So you get Mario and Luigi and they end up in the Mushroom Kingdom and Bowser wants to marry Peach and you have mushroom power up and fire flowers and question mark blocks and all the in jokes you would want.

Does that make for a great film? Not really, it includes lots of video game tropes without actually exploring them. Mario hits a block and gets a mushroom, like he does in the game. There's loads of floating platforms and that because it's like the game. At least the Sonic and Detective Pokémon films did some work to intergeate the film and video game sides of their franchises. With Mario Bros it sometimes feels like you're watching a game being played which isn't great.

But then, this is something that seems to be seeping into the mainstream; the biggest TV show of the last few months has been The Last Of Us which is (in the main) the game translated one to one onto TV in much the same way as the Mario movie does. Large parts of plot in The Mandalorian are essentially fetch quests that you'd see in a JRPG. We're over 40 years into the video game industry being around, so we're now at the point where people who grew up with games are getting into postitions of control within other industries so this assimilation of video game stuff into other mediums makes sense.

It still feels like more could be done with Mario though; yes The Last of Us lifts stuff from the game and drops it into a TV show but it still managed to explore and expand on things in a way that the game couldn't. Mario Bros sticks to the game to a fault, and the fact that it's directed by the people being Teen Titans Go! makes this more dissapointing; they managed to get one of the bleakest jokes I've ever seen in any comic book film into the Teen Titans movie, but I guess even they couldn't get anything similar past Nintendo.

It's fine!

At the cinema, yes but I did get some TV watched; 2 shows on Netflix in form of The Night Agent and The Recruit.

Now, both of these operate in a similar wheelhouse; The Night Agent is about an FBI agent who gets involved in a conspiracy within the American Government, and The Recruit is about a new CIA lawyer getting dragged into the world of international espionage and polciticl intrigue in the American Government.

Night Agent is the higher profile series; it debuted in March this year and did all kinds of superb numbers, whereas The Recruit was from the end of 2022 and did enough to get a second series but that was about it.

We binged the two series over the last couple of weeks and they were both good and in different ways; Night Agent is a much straighter spy thriller with plenty of twists and turns, whereas The Recruit is much more of a comedy. To try and boil down the different vibes between the two shows, The Night Agent feels like John Wick and The Recruit feels like Nobody.

The Recruit plays around a lot more with the day to day office politics of the job, and with the inherent daftness of what these people are up to. The Night Agent is more takes everything more seriously, invests more in its stakes.

I'd recommend watching the two close to each other and it's fun to see similar concepts from either end of of the spy spectrum. And it helps that both shows are good, especially the performances from the main stars in each show; both elevates their show and makes them both well worth a watch.

I did manage to turn up to the recording of the latest Conquistabores! Although after missing just one show I felt like this:

It'll be edited and into your ears by the end of the month.

I saw this tweet and can't shake it from my mind.

You’ll need to click that link by the way, thanks to the current beef you can’t embed tweets in Substack posts which is monumental levels of petty.

Anyway.

Has there been a tonal shift like that in anything else? To go from the 90s most gnarly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to Neon Genesis Evangelion? It must have seemed okay on paper, going from fun turtle adventures to Japan's favourite genre of kids piloting mechs but I guess no one knew the places that Evangelion would go to over the course of its series.

Imagine being that kid, who turns up for the Turtles and get Shinzo piloting an Eva for the first time? Good Lord.

I'm up to over 1000 words so thinking not.

Alright then! Hopefully with the kids being back at school next week I'll get some time to work on some videos; my youngest has been on a Minecraft kick for the last week or so which meant he's been hogging my laptop even with the broken screen. And maybe, just maybe, I'll get John Wick 4 watched. Or not, who knows?

Bye!