[Weekly Update] Copycat and Trend-chasing

Sorry! Sorry! I uploaded our new episode on Saturday and it completely messed up my sense of schedule. I thought today is Monday.

CHANNEL UPDATE

Hope you enjoy our last video on the Ip Man movies. It was actually a lot of fun to make, mainly because the movies are actually easy to sit through. I took like 200 lines of note per movie, that's how much I pay attention to them.

Up next, we have a few video ideas in the work:

Back to the world of bad movies, we have the final "Other movies" video instalment, in which we look at the 2020 Mulan movies, made to capitalize on the predicted success of the Disney film. It should be interested, especially consider how bad the Disney movie ended up being, that it just killed the Mulan IP over night.

But before that, we'll have a few other movies I want to talk about:

• Legend of a Rabbit: I'm scared to watch this movie, might hold off on this one for as long as possible.
• The Raids: Currently researching all the behind the scenes material, so I can talk about the insane low budget achievement the filmmakers made.
• Ong Bak: Mainly I just wanna explore the series' slow descent into madness.

Finally, we have two long term projects in the work:

• American stereotypes in East Asian movies
• Interracial relationships in East Asian movies

If you have any recommendations regarding these two long term projects, let me know!

MEDIA TALK

Since we are on the topic of copycat and trend-chasing movies, what are some movies in this category that you remember?

The prime example for me is the surge of Sword and Sorcery flicks in the 80s after Conan the Barbarian (even though in reality, a lot of those flicks predates Conan). The same also applies to the Mad Max boom. Man, the early days of movie rentals were insane.

But one strange example is Eragon, which always felt like a movie that is so 2000s, yet also dated even when it was new. It was based on a book written by a young writer (a teenager at the time, iirc). And like most young writer creations, the book is just borrowing elements from famous pop-culture trends, like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. That alone already makes it a trend-chasing copy cat book.

The film adaptation was made, no doubt, in response to the success of three different movie franchise: Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars prequels.

Anyway, if you haven't watch this movie, give it a watch. it's one of the most shockingly bad and bland movie ever made. I was just a teenager when I saw it, and even my dumbass know how stupid it was.

Following Twister and Independence Day, there was also a huge surge of disaster movies, mostly world ending ones. Funnily enough, most of these movies are either classics (Dante's Peak), or they are guilty pleasures (Armageddon).

But the one movie that, I think most people didn't realize, falls into this category is Contact. It is sci-fi. It's about aliens and space. It's about an impending possible world ending disaster. Let's be honest, if Independence Day wasn't a success, Contact would not have been made.

Oh and The Fifth Element, too. Although something tells me Lum Besson will make that movie one way or another.

Finally and quickly, a recent example: The Cinematic Universe trend. When the The Avengers was announced to be a thing, I was deeply skeptical. I mean, how are you going to put all these successful movies and the stars together? It's going to cost of fortune! And indeed it did. But the film was a success.

I guess that miracle has convinced many other executives to jump on the bandwagon. The ones that I actually wanted is The Dark Universe, a horror universe created by iconic Universal monsters, something that the studio has done 100 years ago. But that sure died very quickly.

DC, of course, made their own attempt. You know how that turned out.

The only other successful example I can think of is the Legendary Monsterverse, in which Godzilla ended up fighting Kong. But that only contains 4 movies and honestly just feels like a single series of film.

It really goes to show how much of a lightning in a bottle MCU was.

Anyway, that's the update for this week. We have one more video planned for March, but it'll take some time before it comes out. See you soon in our next update!