oddspinnaker
Hey nice! Surprise half days happen so infrequently at work that I remember when it has!
Water main break in a major city, VP ran in and said “So… how quickly can we shut the servers down? They fire department said we have a few minutes before the water might start coming in.”
Thankfully I was just an engineer and he was like “everyone else can just go home!” So I did.
I’ve asked three other people close to my age (they’re between 41 and 44) and none of them knew.
This is fascinating, I don’t know how this information got lost within ten years! Lol
What’s weird too is that I live where there were a lot of drive-ins so you’d kind of assume there would be more double features but maybe not
Oh hey, this was essentially my experience too, but with the Walking Dead comic! The TV series used plot points from the comic book and I think you can kinda tell where the TV series’ success started affecting the comic and the whole thing turned into an ouroboros of trying to maintain the success of a flashy zombie TV show.
I think maybe it was inevitable. Robert Kirkman’s original idea of a never-ending human drama surrounded by the pressures of zombies doesn’t seem profitable long-term without insane character deaths and (more) deliberate gore porn.
I don’t know if it matters that the characters inherently understand how to kill zombies. Shaun of the Dead does this well, where they hear it on the news in five seconds and they’re like “oh that makes sense.”
The original Dawn of the Dead I think they say it on the radio or TV too, I believe. There isn’t really a spot where they don’t know and it matters. The thing that forces drama in zombie movies to me isn’t aiming for the head, it’s being overrun.
But I also mostly just like the old Romero ones so I may be wrong!
When the original Walking Dead comic books came out around 2003 I was just getting back into comics and I remember reading Robert Kirkman’s ideas about what he wanted it to be.
This is exactly what he said. That the original classic zombie movies that he liked — mostly the Romero Living Dead ones — were stories about the people trying to survive. The zombies are secondary and, sometimes, even kind of ridiculous (see Dawn of the Dead, one of my favorite movies).
I thought the Walking Dead TV show and the comics after a certain point went into more gore porn, so I tuned out.
But you’re 100% right for me. George Romero made zombie movies to look at people. Not the zombies.