POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Reruns Left Us Feeling Burned
By Dan Brown The word “rerun” as it applies to a repeated episode of a network TV show is quickly disappearing from the English language. Yet viewers have never watched more reruns, meaning old content. There are entire channels now devoted to repeats. There was a time, in the 1970s, when viewers hated them. Cast your mind back to an era before streaming, before satellite TV, before cable, when the schedule for network sitcoms and dramas ran roughly parallel to the school calendar. The new season of a show would debut in September, there would be a Christmas episode, things would wrap up in May as summer approached. This was my childhood. Shows didn’t just start up any old time. There were no full seasons dumped at once. Back then, the unspoken contract the networks had with the audience at home was, there would be a new episode every week of a series like, say, Happy Days. For whatever reason, sometimes a new episode wouldn’t be available. Production delays was the most common excuse. One of the options available to programmers was to broadcast an episode that had previously aired. But they did so at their peril. That’s because viewers hated, hated, hated when this happened. The refrain you would hear is, “I’ve already seen this episode! I know what happens!” No one wanted to see the Fonz date the same girl twice. I do realize all of this must sound like an ancient-history lesson to younger readers who can’t imagine a time when repeated episodes were a big problem. That’s likely because the idea of appointment viewing isn’t a thing anymore, except for some reality shows. This was a period when your favourite show was on at the same time, same day, every week. And you had to be home in front of your boob tube to see it. Then a strange thing happened in the 1990s when specialty cable channels proliferated. They needed a cheap way to fill out their schedules. Suddenly, there were entire channels devoted to nothing except reruns – Three’s Company, Soap, the Simpsons, you name it. I joked at the time that we only hated reruns when they were free. Once we had to pay for them, they became a legit viewing choice. Fast-forward through the eras of grey-market satellite dishes, legal satellite dishes, and now streaming and YouTube. In a sense, everything we watch is a rerun of one stripe or another. Some of the most popular shows are old, whether it’s Breaking Bad or the Sopranos or Mad Men. The difference is, programs such as these were made with a radically dissimilar mindset. In the network-dominated television world of the 1970s, any single episode was an ephemeral thing, expected to live only for a week in the public’s imagination. These shows were made as cheaply as possible. But just look at a typical episode of, say, the Sopranos. The production values aren’t the same as when Gilligan’s Island first aired, no, the way the Sopranos was shot has more in common with a feature film than a series of old. That stems from today’s producers understanding their creations will automatically have an afterlife, even on a format or channel or service that doesn’t exist yet. I don’t know what comes after streaming. In his graphic novel The Private Eye (which L.A. Mood’s Graphic Novel Group is discussing this Saturday), set decades from now, writer Brian K. Vaughan anticipates a future format of ceiling-to-floor television called tee vee. And sure enough, in one scene there are characters watching an old episode of The Big Bang Theory on the tee vee. Maybe holograms are the future? If that turns out to be the case, be prepared to watch a lot of holograms of old shows you’ve seen many times before. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Friendships in Pop Culture
By Dan Brown I think the world of my friends. So it won’t surprise you to learn there are many pop-culture friendships I love. Harry and Sally. R2-D2 and C-3PO. Holmes and Watson. Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy. Falstaff and Prince Hal. What can I say? I get so excited seeing friendship expressed on the screen or page. I love hearing the merits of a friendship vocalized with sincerity in a pop song. There’s something so beautiful about friendship – two or more people who aren’t related, coming together out of common interests or shared circumstances. Whether it’s the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, the Golden Girls, or Rick Blaine and piano player Sam, I take an unreasonable amount of joy from depictions of friends enjoying each other’s company. Maybe that’s why my favourite movie of all time is Dazed and Confused, which follows a bunch of different friend groups on the last day of school in 1976 in small-town Texas. It was about a million years ago (long before streaming) that director Quentin Tarantino revealed in an interview whenever he was in an unfamiliar city, he would find a video store and rent Dazed and Confused. It made him feel less lonely, he explained. Me, too. Whenever I read old Peanuts collections and I find a cartoon in which Snoopy calls Woodstock “little friend,” I end up crying. Snoopy doesn’t even understand his bird buddy most of the time but loves him just the same! As I’m often telling my wife, they have one of the most beautiful friendships in human history. And the friends don’t necessarily have to be unrelated. Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter Rory are best friends in spite of their shared blood. There are generations of women who dig their closer-than-close relationship, watching and re-watching The Gilmore Girls even years after the series went off network TV. Like every other dude, I have a special appreciation for male friendships. Probably the gold standard in that regard is the film version of M*A*S*H, which revolves around a bond forged in a nightmare situation – the Korean War. Hawkeye and Trapper John are kindred spirits who help each other stay sane under the most trying circumstances humans can experience. Nor will it surprise you to know some of my favourite tunes celebrate friendships, like You’ve Got a Friend, Thank You For Being a Friend (a soundalike became the theme to Golden Girls!), She’s My Best Friend, and Waiting on a Friend. I must have written the lyrics to Lou Reed’s My Friend George in every classmate’s yearbook at the end of Grade 13. Naturally, one of my favourite Bible verses comes from the Book of John: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” I loved how the supposedly blasphemous motion picture The Last Temptation of Christ showed Harvey Keitel’s Judas didn’t want to betray Christ, his close friend, but was almost forced to do his part to fulfill God’s plan. All these examples sustain me. They inspire me. And they make me love and appreciate my small circle all the more. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: The Joys of Summer Reading
By Dan Brown The summer of 2026 has officially begun. And I can’t wait for the best part. No, not drinking a frosty beer on a sunny patio. Not driving up to Grand Bend for long weekends. Not even the freedom of wearing shorts and Hawaiian shirts. I mean the truly greatest part, better than any of those pleasures. Summer reading. I’m not talking about beach reading, but about the feeling of satisfaction you get from crossing off titles on your summer reading list. If you’ve never heard of such a list before, let me catch you up. I got the idea from my Grade 13 English teacher, Evan Pike, who taught at the old Strathroy District Collegiate Institute. Our paths crossed in the mid-1980s when I was a snotty teen. Pike would often refer to reading lists. He would mention a book in one of our class discussions and ask me (or a classmate) if I had ever read that particular volume. “No,” would come the answer. “Add that to your summer reading list,” he would respond, not in a joking way. For him, I’m guessing, this wasn’t a theoretical thing. My bet is that when he was in school, either as a kid or later in life, my mentor was actually assigned books to read over the warmer months by his teachers. You gotta remember, he was old-school. Pike came of age when they were still teaching Latin in high school. I think the first time I had a summer reading list, maybe in the 1990s, I wasn’t even really aware of it. I just started reading novels by Ernest Hemingway then and by August I had gone through every tattered title I could find in places like City Lights Bookshop or the Coldstream Library. It may have been when the next summer arrived that I said to myself, “Well, what am I going to read now?” I had picked up the idea taking English in my last year of high school and it was growing into a conscious habit. Fast-forward to today, and at this point I’m older than Pike was when he taught us. And each time my favourite season rolls around, I make a scratchy list on a yellow Post-It with a black Sharpie of the titles that will comprise my latest reading project. One summer it was Terry Brooks, the fantasy author. Another it was all the books I’d been read at storytime at Valleyview Elementary School, so Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Charlotte’s Web and Where the Red Fern Grows and so on (and yes, as an adult I cried at the tear-jerker endings that moved me so much when I was a boy). One year it was books by the sci-fi author John Morressy. He’s so obscure, he barely has a Wikipedia page. I may be his only fan. But that didn’t stop me from devouring his written work. And so the summers went. Now it’s become a personal tradition. Pike is long gone, but summer reading still makes sense to me – if you have some extra time, the pressure of work is off, why not use the hiatus to enrich your brain? I don’t even get summers off, like my old teacher did, so I make the time. I like to think he would be pleased that his reading advice to me has outlived him. You may be wondering what I’m reading right now. Even before June 21, I had been going through a number of biographies and memoir. Now it’s time to kick the summer reading into high gear. I’m currently working my way through Lives of the Stoics, a collection of mini-bios of philosophers, and I’ve got a stack of books on the table beside my bed – like a collection of Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, as well as Andre Agassi’s much-praised life story. I finished cartoonist Gabrielle Drolet’s Look Ma, No Hands in the spring to get an early start. So what about you? What will you be reading in the weeks before fall arrives? If you’re new to the concept, take some time to think about the titles you’ve been meaning to catch up on. Perhaps there are important books from your past you want to re-read. It’s all good. When you’re done pondering, draw up a list, then get started. Would love to hear all about what you’re reading in the comments! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: I Hate To Say It, But Spaceballs Isn’t Funny
By Dan Brown As you may have heard, there’s going to be a sequel to Spaceballs, the Mel Brooks Star Wars parody that debuted a long time ago in 1987. Brooks and the cast (a mix of old hands and newcomers) have been doing publicity to drum up interest in the upcoming film, dubbed The New One, which will land in theatres April 23 next year. Providing movie theatres still exist. I suppose, as a sci-fi fan, I should be eagerly anticipating The New One, which promises to bring more Star Wars jokes and new pop-culture references to the big screen. But can I let you in on a secret? I don’t find Spaceballs funny. It might be familiar. It might even be fun to watch. But it ain’t funny. You likely have fuzzy memories of the gags written into the Spaceballs script. For instance: *Pizza the Hutt, the alien glutton who finds himself delicious.. *Barf, a half-human, half-dog alien hybrid who is his own best friend. *Dark Helmet . . . a villain played by Rick Moranis who has a giant helmet. *Daphne Zuniga’s Vespa is a Druish princess. *The Yoda figure is called Yogurt. *The Schwartz is a mystical power derived from merchandising dollars. And so on. Jokes like these are fine. Some of them even bring a half-smile to my face. But not a one of them is hilarious. Spaceballs has certainly achieved a kind of cultural staying power. Somewhere on this planet, on some channel or network, Spaceballs is playing right now. And by dint of ubiquity, it is one of those so-so motion pictures that we convince ourselves is remarkable. Like the Austin Powers films, it achieves influence just by enduring. But it’s not a comedy that achieves greatness. It’s not even the greatest Mel Brooks comedy. It doesn’t break new comedic ground like, say, Blazing Saddles. There’s nothing in Spaceballs to compare to the Blazing Saddles campfire scene where cowboy after cowboy farts until the joke is beaten into the ground, then they let more farts rip and it becomes funny all over again. Talk about audacious for the times! The Star Wars spoof also lacks a weirdly intense lead character, like Gene Wildern, who turned in such a great performance in Young Frankenstein. Besides, if Brooks had been itching to take on Star Wars, he wouldn’t have waited until four years after Return of the Jedi appeared in theatres. By then, the George Lucas trilogy was already retreating from the public consciousness. (Spoiler for younger readers: Star Wars came back!) It’s certainly not the greatest Star Wars parody, either. In fact, you could argue that the definitive comic spin on Star Wars still has yet to be made. There’s been a long history of attempts. The 1978 short film Hardware Wars was the first try, followed when the internet was in its infancy by the 1997 online short Troops. The slam against Lucas is that he takes his space opera too seriously. Look at the fact he never mocked his own creation the way the Star Trek brain trust does with its animated series Lower Decks. At least Trek’s producers realized the comedy potential of poking fun at themselves. (Granted, Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville beat Lower Decks to the punch by three years) Of course, some crusty Star Wars fans would likely say the Book of Boba Fett itself was an inadvertent self-parody! There’s no shortage of Star Wars material to work with, so how about it, Hollywood? Just mocking The Phantom Menace on its own could inspire so many laughs! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
Pop Culture: Will 2026 Be the Year It All Happens?
By Dan Brown Like a cornered she-wolf protecting her pups, the New Year is upon us. This week, I’m in the mood to look ahead and ask – what’s going to be the biggest thing in pop culture in 2026? What event, person, or product will define the next 12 months? Will movie theatres sell even fewer tickets? Will Taylor and Travis tie the knot? Will people continue to exit social media? What will the song of the summer be? What will the most-popular film, meme, TV series, book, and podcast be? Only someone who is deluded or dangerous would give answers to those questions with 100 per cent certainty. So while I don’t have an all-powerful crystal ball, I do have some thoughts. For starters, AI. If last year is any indication, the advocates who are pushing artificial intelligence on the rest of us will crack on. Their goal: Making the general public think AI is inevitable. But from what I’ve seen so far, I’m not impressed by tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. I’m a skeptic on this one, so the question for me is: What are the odds the AI bubble will burst before 2027 a la the dotcom downturn of the 1990s? Merriam-Webster Dictionary got it right when their editors chose “slop” as the one word that defines 2025. If present trends continue, perhaps the word of 2026 will be “crap” or “crud.” At the movie theatres, people are buying fewer tickets. The entertainment data firm EntTelligence, quoted in the Los Angeles Times this week, says there were 800 million theatre tickets sold in 2024, but 760 million sold in 2025. (Those figures are for the U.S., I’m assuming.) Even the higher figure doesn’t match pre-pandemic levels. There may be more people watching movies this year, they just aren’t watching them at the multiplex. One motion picture that I am looking forward to seeing on the big screen is Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, which is not a prequel to 2001. It arrives July 17. It could be interesting. As for the much-memed Avengers: Doomsday, I’m still on the fence. Other questions on my mind: Which entertainment figure will the Trump administration go after, as the U.S. President did with Jimmy Kimmel last year? What effect will Trump have on the proposed sale of the venerable Warner Bros. studio to Netflix? (He’s already said he will be involved in the federal government’s approval process.) You also can’t discount the stuff that happens in any given year that nobody saw coming. The obvious example from last year would be the December slaying of director Rob Reiner, whose filmography included one of the best motion-picture comedies of all time, This is Spinal Tap, as well as The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, Stand By Me, and Misery. What will the big concert tour be? Which comedian will survive being cancelled? Will a seeming generation of stars – last year it was Robert Redford, Diane Keaton, Brigitte Bardot, and Ozzy Osbourne – pass into history before our eyes? Will something as simple as an album cover provoke controversy, as Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend did last August? Whatever happens, I will be here to document it all. And here’s hoping 2026 brings us more happy surprises than tragic ones! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
A Small Thing but an Important Thing
By Dan Brown I miss “the wave.” What I’m talking about has nothing to do with standing up at the right time at a sporting event, I don’t mean that wave. What I’m referring to is a tiny gesture that has everything to do with courtesy on the road and making our divided world just a little more humane. If you’re a veteran driver like I am, who has had a license for 40 years, you likely have seen “the wave.” It goes like this. Let’s say you’re stuck in busy traffic and some car from a side street is trying to ease into your lane. Good Samaritan that you are, you stop going forward to let them in. As they pull into the path ahead of you, they stick a hand out the driver’s side window and motion in your direction. That’s “the wave.” And it’s disappearing. Which is a sad comment on where we’re at as a society. The wave, as I call it, is more than just a gesture. Sometimes it’s accompanied by a smile from the other driver, who is acknowledging that by letting them in you have done them a solid. It’s a way, from one stranger to another, of wordlessly saying, “I appreciate you, man, thanks!” After all, you don’t know that other driver. Allowing them some space ahead of your vehicle is not something you’re required to do by law – I do it because I recognize they may be having a tough day, and it costs me almost nothing, maybe a few seconds, to be courteous. And some day, I’ll be in the same position. I’ll be the one having a rough time who needs a small break from the universe in the form of a kindly fellow commuter. Many people have said chivalry is dead, and the wave is one way of acknowledging the chivalrous spirit. It’s the opposite of road rage – it’s road gratitude. (It reminds me of another driving habit, flashing your high beams to oncoming cars when you pass a police speed trap, but that might be a country thing.) There’s even song about small driving kindnesses by the group Geggy Tah, who sing: All I want to do is to thank you/ Even though I don't know who you are/ You let me change lanes/ While I was driving in my car. The wave is like saying, “Thank you” when the person ahead of you holds a door open for you when you’re entering a building. They weren’t mandated by law to do that. I hope I don’t overstate the case, but it’s one of those tiny things that makes life in a city such as London tolerable, enjoyable even. And I’m worried, since I haven’t seen it for some time. I haven’t been keeping detailed notes, but I would say in the last year or two I’ve let a fair number of people in ahead of me in traffic on my daily drive to and from work. But something’s missing. No wave. That’s why I’m troubled. Those other drivers don’t appear to feel any impetus to wave anymore. I think I’m being just as gracious a driver as I’ve always been. And I’m driving as much as I always did. But I suppose it could be my fault. Perhaps people fell out of the habit during the pandemic. If so, screw you COVID-19. Or maybe distracted driving is such a problem that people aren’t paying enough attention to lift their hand for just a second or two. Maybe tinted windows play a part. Or perhaps those drivers feel entitled to butt in ahead of me in traffic. All are possible. In fairness, I will say there is one group of drivers who can still be counted on to give the wave: School-bus operators. If you want to see another human being light up on your morning commute, obey the law and stop when a school bus in the other lane has its lights flashing. And those bus drivers certainly don’t have to wave to you! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
