“Hello, New Toothbrush,” I said quietly. “You are softer, and yet more bristly.” I puzzled over this paradox with a glassy eye, and my thoughts wandered to a home tips program I had watched on PBS, hosted by a fair-haired and enthusiastic British man, who gave advice on cleaning and tidying. Among using a denture toothbrush to clean grout (but never teeth, the bristles are too firm), I thought of sewing a button to a dishcloth to scrub stubborn stains with, and vacuum-bagging unneeded pillows. I then remembered that I had watched this program at the matured age of 12, swaddled in blankets on the couch in January and yet shivering, because the furnace was being fixed and it was cold enough to frost standing water in the sink.

Brushing off these hindering thoughts, I brushed my teeth and went to Beaner’s (Biggby if you’re nasty) to steal their wifi and download Moonbase Alpha and Alien Swarm. While I waited for the downloads to complete, I wrote this blog post.

THE END

• Sign in to Facebook.
• Go to facebook.com/notifications.php and click on the “Via RSS” link.
• Copy and paste the “id=#”, “viewer=#” and “key=#” from the URL into Notepad (or TextEdit, or gedit).
• Combine those values with this:
  
  http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=#&viewer=#&key=#&format=rss20
  
  and paste your new URL into the address bar.
• Go to twitterfeed.com and create an account if you haven’t one.
• Follow the step-by-step process there, and at the finish, your Facebook status updates will be posted to twitter. Great!

You can use your Status Update RSS like any other feed, and do with it as you wish.

If you have any problems, don’t ask me, ’cause I sure as hell can’t help you.

So I was thinking. At first, when movies are released in a trilogy, that’s the end of it. You’ve got three movies that tell a good story, and are very well liked. And then, usually 15 to 20 years later, someone gets an idea, that is to say the idea of capitalising on the good faith and brand identity of the trilogy. Whether this plan was always (nebulously) in the works, or an idea that sprung up when the well of hookers and blow began to run dry, the new movie always has one thing that distinguishes itself.

It’s a pile of fucking shit. Take for example, the Mad Max trilogy.

Focusing on semi-rural Australia, the trilogy begins during the early stages of the collapse of society, and finishes a couple of decades later, when civilization as we know it is completely gone. The trilogy focuses on Max Rockatansky, an officer with the Main Force Patrol (which is essentially a fictitious equivalent to American state highway patrols) who abandons his life when his family is killed, and roams the outback in his extensively modified police car. The trilogy was very well-received, celebrated for its brooding and suspenseful cinematography, for its thrilling action sequences, and for its starkly realistic portrayal of “a world gone out of control”. Personally I love it, as do millions of other people.

This is exactly why a fourth is now in the works. Wikipedia has revealed it will not feature Mel Gibson as the character of Max, and that it is to be a 3D anime feature film, with a video game tie-in, oh boy. That shadow you just felt was a brief connection to the ongoing reaction of fans around the world, as if a million voices cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Which brings us to Star Wars.

What do I need to say? It is fucking Star Wars. It’s the most successful film franchise of all time. If you were to adjust all figures for inflation, the first movie from 1977 is the highest-grossing film ever released, even beating that abomination Titanic, and Gone with the Wind. That same film, officially called Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope, also happens to be my favorite movie. But this is where the trouble begins, as it is called Episode IV.

In this case, the neural genocide occurred after 19 years of no new Star Wars movies. And it is not merely one movie, it is a prequel trilogy. A trilogy that can be succinctly defined as an abortion. While the third movie is tolerable, the first, simply put, is miserable, and the second is just as bad. And that’s a real slap in the balls to people like me, who developed a God damn dependency on the franchise because it’s long become as integrally a part of my person as my lungs. Lungs that have apparently developed cancer, or plague, or whatever other festering malignancy accurately represents the new trilogy’s blight on my psyche. But let us not dwell.

We shall now briefly examine the Terminator franchise. Despite the incredible potential of the concept, the incredible quality of the first movie, and the fascinating development of the sequel, the franchise has not failed to disappoint. Terminator 3, while part of the original trilogy, is of the same low caliber that summarizes Terminator 4. The fourth, displaying cavalier disregard for any established timeline, simply reboots the franchise as it sees fit to make the series more palatable for potential consumers of merchandise. If that includes dicking with the story and making everything brown (it’s not asinine that a brown grit filter means realism, it’s just that we don’t get it). The same goes for the ghastly TV show, the Sarah Connor Chronicles. Terminator is the perfect example of all quality being consumed by a strong start.

Let us close with one more example, Indiana Jones. The original trilogy speaks for itself. It is very, very, very good. The recently released exploitation of the franchise is an atrocity. Interestingly, the main contribution to its destruction is Shia LeBeouf, who will be addressed in our next article.

Until next time.