Welcome to the Age of the Spiritual Sequel
Welcome to the age of the spiritual sequel By Dan Brown There’s been much discussion in recent days about the trailer for the new Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day. Spielberg is being cagey about the new film’s relationship to his 1977 UFO classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Is Disclosure Day a sequel to Close Encounters? Is it a standalone film? The online debate rages on. Of course, there is one other possibility: It could be set in the same world, but not directly follow the events of Close Encounters. In other words, it could be a spiritual sequel. Which wouldn’t be surprising, since this is the age of the spiritual sequel. There appear to be more and more of them all the time. When the mockumentary series The Paper debuted last year, many reviewers pointed out how it was set in the same world as The Office. It even shared at least one character with its predecessor series. The Creed trilogy follows the six Rocky movies, but the central character is not Balboa himself, but the son of his frenemy Apollo Creed. The Texas college comedy Everybody Wants Some takes place in 1980, four years after Dazed and Confused, which is set in 1976 on the last day of high school. But EWS focuses on a different set of students; you don’t need to have seen the original to understand it. And the Exorcist, which stars Scarlett Johannson, is set for release a year from this March and is not a remake of or direct sequel to the 1973 horror classic, although it is set in the same imaginative universe. Spiritual sequels – which in television were always called spinoffs – make a lot of sense. Pretty much every sequel you can think of has already been made, so billing a movie as a spiritual successor gives studio marketing departments a way to promote a motion picture while also giving directors and producers creative room to manoeuvre. Are they better than direct sequels or prequels? There may be too little information at this point to make a definitive conclusion on that question. It’s probably much harder for filmmakers to capture the “flavour” of a popular motion picture while also creating a story that can stand on its own for those viewers who have no knowledge or memory of the first one. One suspects we are going to see even more of them – look at the Star Wars movies and shows all set in the same galaxy. Having a consistent milieu makes it easier for storytellers to find a launching point they can exploit, a logical entry point into a setting that already feels familiar to fans. Me, I have reason to believe Disclosure Day may be more of a direct sequel to Close Encounters than we’ve been led to believe. When a new trailer dropped during the Super Bowl, there were at least two images that look mighty familiar to me, including a spaceship shrouded in clouds and an isolated white house situated perfectly for an alien abduction. We’ll all find out for sure on June 12, when Spielberg's latest lands in theatres. 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.
The Man Who Asked If God was an Astronaut
By Dan Brown Earlier this month, Erich von Daniken died. Even though you may not know the author’s name, you are living in the world he helped to create. Simply put, this paperback writer did more than any other single person to popularize the notion that alien beings visited Earth in this planet’s distant past. He did more than Stanley Kubrick, more than Jack Kirby, more than any other artist or scientist to make that belief into a mainstream one. What was once a controversial theory is now part of the daily TV schedule, as evidenced by shows like History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series. In 1968, von Daniken published the pulpy Chariots of the Gods?. It argued that there’s evidence in ancient art and architecture of advanced beings coming to this planet to help our ancestors perform feats of engineering they couldn’t have possibly accomplished themselves, such as building the pyramids. As least one mid-1970s paperback edition of the book came with the tagline, Was God an astronaut? It was followed by many sequels, including Gods From Outer Space and The Gold of the Gods. The initial volume caused a sensation. You have to keep in mind that in the 1970s, a lot of disillusioned people were searching for meaning, and rejected the answers provided by the institutions of the day, such as the Christian church. Some folks joined cults. Some signed up for EST courses. Yet others started to believe ancient carvings and structures were proof that little green men had landed on Earth thousands of years ago, gifting us technology beyond our primitive understanding that eventually allowed humanity to flourish. Naturally, von Daniken’s claims were discounted as pseudoscientific nonsense. Figures like astronomer and TV host Carl Sagan led the charge to debunk Chariots of the Gods?, but it was too late – the idea got traction, and is still an attractive one to many. Whether you think von Daniken is full of bunk or not, you can’t deny his influence: Ancient Aliens, to name just one offshoot of his books, has been running on the History Channel since 2009 and shows no signs of being cancelled anytime soon. There aren’t many series on the small screen that boast the same kind of staying power. Nineteen sixty-eight was the same year Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey debuted. Not only did the film depict the alien monolith appearing in prehistoric Africa, it also shows the extraterrestrial black slab providing the evolutionary spark that allowed hominids to make the transition from frightened ape to spacefaring species. When comic creator Jack Kirby returned to Marvel Comics in the 1970s, one of the titles he drew and wrote was The Eternals, which went one step further than von Daniken, portraying those ancient aliens as still living here. Chariots of the Gods? was also the inspiration for the Leonard Nimoy-hosted In Search of . . ., which set forth metaphysical, supernatural, and extraterrestrial explanations for mysteries from human history. The 1970s original then spawned a modern version in 2019. If the 1970s were about anything, they were about ancient aliens, Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle. People were looking for answers. Just like they are today. 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.
Alien: Romulus Comic Short, but Intriguing
How the Alien: Romulus comic fills in Alien franchise story gaps and more reasons to read the comic explained in columnist's Dan Brown's comic book review.
Read The Story
R2-D2 and C-3PO Never Did This
By Dan BrownA bunch of robots walk into a bar, but they aren’t the strangest thing about the place.That’s the premise of Robot Comics No. 0, which Bob Burden – famed in comic circles for creating Flaming Carrot and the Mysterymen – published in 1987 as a one-off “cultural oddity,” to use the eccentric creator’s own words.The book describes one crazy night down at the Blind Pig, a bar where a mummy plays banjo in the corner, two guys with axes for heads scuffle, scuba divers float through the air, beans spill out of the pay-phone receiver, and a man walks by, carrying a tombstone in anticipation of his own imminent demise.Welcome to Bob Burden’s imagination. If you’ve ever had a frantic bout of drinking at a dive that didn’t make sense to you in the morning, yet was still a lot of fun, you’ll be able to relate. The whole thing plays like an extended scene out of a Flaming Carrot comic, and indeed, Carrot supporting players like Uncle Billy and the Artless Dodger are part of the watering hole’s crowd.Those readers with long memories and unconventional tastes know Flaming Carrot (and his sometime allies, the Mysterymen) as the blue-collar hero whose mask is, well, a flaming carrot. His secret origin: After reading 5,000 comics in one sitting, the poor wretch suffers brain damage, becoming Palookaville’s B-list protector in the process.So if you’ve read any of the Carrot’s irregularly published exploits, you will grok what Robot Comics No. 0 is all about.As with all of Burden’s work, this slender volume is a riot of invention. This bar could only have come from his fertile, twisted mind, and I was lucky enough to find a copy in the bargain bin at L.A. Mood just before the summer.The surreal comic makes for engrossing reading on a muggy August afternoon.By way of introduction, Burden says he composed the tale decades prior to its publication as an exercise in what he calls “electra-fiction.” The artist/writer says the panels “exploded on the pages with no bounds of reason or any attempt to conform to known standards. It is, in essence, experimental literature guised as a leaking barrelful of rip-snorting, foot-stomping belly laffs.”I call it the cartoon equivalent of jazz. Or a nonsensical salad stocked with one random ingredient after the other.There is no plot, no A to B story, just a profile of an unforgettable night in a drinking establishment whose existence defies logic.If you’re a fan or student of tavern-derived literature, you could also classify it as Burden’s answer to the classic New Yorker piece by Joseph Mitchell, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon.Indeed, the evening’s events are narrated by a nameless reporter who figures, “As a journalist and an artist, I ought to record it all for posterity.”What does he observe? Harry Lime, from the Third Man, appears in one panel in all his Wellesian glory. The house band’s cover of Neil Diamond’s Cracklin’ Rosie upsets a patron. One of the bar’s many denizens refers to two of the Three Stooges. And then the female (?) robot leaves in the company of a Maytag repairman. Of course, several bodies are buried at the local drive-in theatre following the night’s mayhem.If all of that sounds like your kind of madness, it’s worth hunting down this little-known Bob Burden creation.No wonder his motto is “The wild shall wild remain!”Dan Brown has covered pop culture for 30 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
