Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Stroock to Babylon Bee: Create This

The Babylon Bee, the nation's news organization of record, calls out the endless spate of sequels, prequels, reboots, sequels to the reoboots, etc etc:

Our pop cultural landscape has become mired in an endless series of rehashes, reboots, reinterpretations, "re-quels": we're in the era of the re-film, a creative slump in which the most relevant cultural reference points are little more than stale reruns, like three-day-old warmed-over hash.

This is absolutely 100 percent correct. Author Holly Ash goes on to note there are original creative works out there. We'd add to her list Midnight Mass, The Expanse, Ricky Gervaise's Afterlife. Creativity is still possible, it's just that most studios don't want to take risks.

One of our goals with World War 1990 was to do something different or creative if you will. Which is why the series starts two weeks after the war and is about NATO's strategic counterattack. Hacket and Clancy already covered the phases, we thought back in 2015.

When the audience likes the thing you just gave them, the audience wants another thing just like it. Hence World War 1990 novels number 8 and 9 and counting. But gee, here we are wrapping up two non- World War 1990 novels. We take risks, like The Austrian Painter and our upcoming nuke novels.

Audiences want a thing just like the thing you just did, but there are ways to do a thing just like the thing you just did, but differently. We think we've used our unexpected juju for World War 1990 to come up with some creative things. War in the Pacific, war in Africa, the Italian and French navies... things Hackett and Clancy barely touched. In other words, we didn't just rehash.

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