Making Sense of the CATS trailer: A Noble Attempt

A week ago, two things brought me great joy.

First, the trailer for the upcoming film adaptation of the immensely popular Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, CATS, dropped on the internet.

Second, I got to listen to a grown man scream his head off as he watched this trailer.

If you, like countless others, have felt a similar sense of dread at the thought of computer enhanced cat/human hybrids taking over the world, then I am here to help. I consider myself uniquely qualified to speak on the topic. CATS was the first full-scale musical I saw on stage, back when I was nine years old. Seeing the show required a full-day trip to Vancouver for our family. In addition, the critical portion of my Master's Thesis project included discussion and analysis of CATS, as well as the children's poems it was based on, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, by T.S. Elliot.

So lay your head on my shoulder, child. Let me tell you the story of CATS.

Adapting an Adaptation

Film adaptations are always a little tricky, but let's start with one basic premise most people can agree on. Any time you are changing mediums, expressing the same concept through a different artform leads to change. Some are inherent to the artform itself (ex: film is more visual than the novel) but some conventions are really only that: conventions of storytelling that we've grown used to and expect now. When those conventions are broken, the art itself can feel broken, even if nothing but tradition is what tells us this ought to be so.

I won't go into the whole long list of conventions film follows, but for the purposes of this discussion, I want to focus on one very important factor: Movies cost way more to produce than books, which means they need to be consumed by/appeal to far more people if they want to make a profit. This has given rise to a particular plotting style commonly referred to as Three Act Structure. I won't go into the full scale description of it here, but loosely, it goes like this:

Act 1: Establish the protagonist, where they are from, what their problem is and what tragic flaw keeps them from solving their problem
Act 2: The protagonist attempts to solve their problem (unsuccessfully), gradually learns the problem is bigger or different than they first thought, and then experiences great failure, leading to their lowest moment.
Act 3: From that low moment, the protagonist finds the fortitude to overcome their flaw, attempts to solve the problem once more and in the climax, either solves it (victory!) or fails (tragedy!). Closing image, fade to black.

Three Act Structure is so ubiquitous, it's tempting to see it in everything and assume it's the only way to tell stories. Today, most commercially viable books also follow this structure. Heck, The Hunger Games worked so well as a movie because it already read like one in book form. But go back pre-Hollywood, and the dominating power of Three Act Structure begins to collapse. It's not the defining structure of Beowulf or The Canterbury Tales. It's not what drives Alice in Wonderland.

And if we move outside of the landscape of novels, it disappears altogether. Short stories don't always have the time to bother with all that structure foofaraw. Or look at picture books. "Everybody do the Barnyard Dance!" might be your plot. Or maybe you've picked up The Book with No Pictures, which is much more about making adults say weird stuff than it is about following character growth. But both those books are stories. They're recounting of events for the purpose of social bonding. Can't get more "story" than that.

And so returning to CATS (finally, we are returning to CATS), I think it's worth asking the question: what type of story is the film adapting? If it had only ever existed as a film, had always been a film, then it would be much, much harder to explain the weirdness going on in that trailer. But CATS not only is an adaptation, it was also never a novel, the most common source of film adaptation.

The problems become clear the moment you realize there are multiple steps in this process, and that those steps never bowed down to Three Act Structure.

Before CATS was a film, it was a play, and before that, it was a book of children's poems.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

T.S. Eliot is considered one of the greats in poetry of the Twentieth Century, and rightly so. His work was beautiful, lyrical, thought provoking, and still gets quoted like crazy in Young Adult novels all these years later. That his work shows up in YA points to the fact that he understood something about young people, whether he was explicitly writing for them or not.

Also recommending him as a human: he liked cats. He wrote a bunch of poems about them for his godchildren. Eventually, he had enough, he was like, "hey, I think this might make a good book of poems" and so he published them, and therefor, little Andrew Lloyd Webber grew up reading them.

And despite what others might tell you, it doesn't just have a story, it has many! There's the story of Rum Tum Tugger, the cat who just wants to annoy you constantly. Or there's Mongojerrie and Rumpleteazer, the kittens who play with everything until it gets lost. One of my favorites is Skimbleshanks, who harkens to the tradition railways had of keeping cats aboard in Britain. See? So many stories! All more adorable than the last!

Importantly, those stories are also intensely relatable. As someone who owns pet cats, I can see my animals mirrored in the poems of cats more than I can in dozens of other stories that feature cats. I've lived with a Rum Tum Tugger and a Jennyanydots. Much of the success of those poems come from how well Eliot captures the lives of real domestic cats.

However, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats does not have an underlying through line other than "aren't cats great?" As a poetry book, this is just fine. Poetry is much more about evoking emotions or ideas in the reader than telling a character growth journey. Story itself is optional in poetry, so in that respect, the poems here are much more conventional "stories" than other poetry books might be. Still, if it were directly adapted into a visual medium today, the most logical would probably be YouTube meme compilation videos. I'd like to think in some alternate universe, there's a poem by an internet era Eliot that goes a little like...

Miss Melarosey rides round on a Roomba
Cleaning the house while the other cats slumber

You get the idea.

When Webber began adapting the poems, he wasn't initially trying to make a whole musical out of them. Instead, he used them as a personal challenge, to compose something where the lyrics were set and couldn't be bent to fit the needs of the music. The project eventually piqued the interest of Eliot's widow, and she passed on to him some poems that Eliot cut from the collection, including Grizabella the Glamour Cat, which Eliot had worried would be too sad for children. But that sad poem was the final spark Webber needed. To him, the bleakness of that poem helped contrast with the jovial, goofiness of the other cat characters, and he felt he now had the makings of a full musical on his hands.

But a musical about what???

Guys, I can't believe you're still asking. It's about cats.

CATS as Broadway Royalty

In CATS earliest days, there were a lot of people working on the show who were deeply confused by Webber's vision for the production. They tried to turn it into something more recognizable. Something that would work with conventional story telling structures.

"Maybe it's a satire of British politicians?"

No hun, it's about cats.

"What if we make this a chamber piece, with minimal effects and a small ensemble?"

Cats deserve better than that, Karen! We will have strobe lights and a cast of dozens because cats are worth it!

"Okay, so who is our hero? What cat are we following? What are they trying to accomplish?"

HAVE YOU EVEN MET A CAT??? NO CAT IS TRYING TO ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING!!!

Eventually, Webber got his wish, though not without sacrifice. The production scared so many investors away, he literally bet his house and all his money on it, just to finance it. I'm sure his family and loved ones shook in fear for him. But Webber was the one left laughing because the public ate CATS up. It became the longest running and most profitable show of all-time, only to be surpassed in that title by Andrew Lloyd Webber's later work, Phantom of the Opera.

And in my opinion, Webber was right to put his foot down every time someone tried to make CATS about something other than cats. The whole reason the show works is because it's driven by poetry, music and movement. Those things leant themselves more to the subject matter than a plot did, because real cats almost never experience character development. They are what they are, and they either annoy or entertain us. Since Eliot's poems were originally about recognizable, normal cat behaviors, this was the truest way of bringing these poems onto the stage.

In addition to Eliot's poems and some of Webber's best music, CATS also has some of the best dancing on Broadway. A lot of time was spent developing how the performers would move and emote in the show, and how the more cat-like motions they performed would be mixed with ballet and modern dance choreography.

It's actually because the show has so little plot that it can revel in the things that make it strong. It's about nothing more than a gathering of cats, who have come to strut and show-off to each other. They can spontaneously break out into dance sequences without it feeling jarring. They can switch tone and focus character song to song, because, like real cats, they don't have the attention span to have a protagonist.

What little through-line there is for the play was eventually developed based on theme, rather than a plot. Trevor Nunn, the poor soul who got tasked with directing and helping develop CATS into a full show with Webber, tried his best to piece together themes of death, rebirth and the folk tale that all cats have nine lives. It wasn't a plot, but he hoped that viewers sensed a kind of progression through ideas, that would keep them engaged.

And there is another reason it worked, and that is because CATS was intended for the theatre, not film.

Writing for Film and Theatre

At first glance, theatre and film seem like very similar mediums. Some people never go to the theatre, because it's expensive, and they don't understand what it could offer them that a film can't. Aside from the thrill of a live performance, is there any real reason to see Hamlet on stage as opposed to in a film adaptation?

As something written before the advent of film, Hamlet might seem like an odd candidate for suiting film, but in many ways, it's early inception is one of the reasons it is so adaptable. In Shakespeare's time, theatre was the primary way of sharing stories with the mass market. Not everyone could read, but everyone could see plays, which were cheap. As a result, Shakespeare's plays often fall into that comforting, digestible Three Act format mentioned earlier, Hamlet included.

For hundreds of years, theatre was the primary venue for social gathering and experiencing stories. But when film came along, the balance of power shifted. Films were potentially more expensive to make but they were so much cheaper to distribute worldwide. You no longer had to go see Hamlet put on by the yokels at the local theatre. You could see Laurence Olivier in the role, without ever leaving your hometown.

In order for theatre to survive commercially, it had to identify who its real audience was and what they wanted. Two particular groups of people are still interested in theatre.

1) People who value the visceral, live aspect. The joy of seeing something staged and knowing that all the pieces have to exist and move together in real, human space is exhilarating. Dance, as a result, thrives in theatre, because it can be very hard to capture the full three-dimensional nature of movement in film, especially for large crowd numbers. Film flattens the image and even 3D technology struggles to recapture the depth of movement theatre can provide. Dance looks better on stage. I've never seen any film that successfully convinced me otherwise. By a similar token, music does often sound better, or at least more emotive, live. Again, there's that visceral component of the experience that you can't get from film. Little surprise, in the wake of the rise of film, musical theatre thrived and took over Broadway.
2) People who like experimental, weird stuff that doesn't suit commercial Hollywood film making. I'm by no means suggesting that film can't be experimental or that theatre wasn't before film put pressure on it. But that pressure still matters. Most cinemas make their money off of digestible blockbusters. Theatre isn't going to grab that crowd anymore though, so it might as well cater to people who want to see a naked boy on stage with a horse. There's a reason it's the theatre club that has the reputation for housing weirdos, not the film club.

And CATS ticks the box for both groups. For a big, flashy spectacle musical, it's surprisingly experimental with it's unconventional story structure, reliance on theme to drive forward progression and lack of protagonist. It's more committed to exploring what it's like to be a cat than it is to examining the human condition. Lest we forget, CATS started off as an experiment. Webber wanted to see what would happen if he wrote music for pre-established poetry.

In recent years, Andrew Lloyd Webber has become a figure that the musical theatre community likes to make fun of. He was such a phenomenon in the 70s and 80s with CATS cat-apulting him from respected, working composer to mega-star. That fame only grew with the release of Phantom, and soon it felt like he was everywhere. Unfortunately, that meant that when his less successful work of the late 80s and 90s came around, he was a highly public figure whose flubs were likewise highly public. It was very easy to slide into mocking him as the weird cat guy. Or the guy who made a play about dropping a chandelier onstage.

But I do think we can be a bit unfair, because often, Webber's strength was being that weird cat guy. Theatre needs weirdness if it's going to survive and thrive. He understood and recaptured the spectacle of theatre better than he told stories or understood the human condition. He needed a good lyricist, like Tim Rice, if he was going to say anything profound or develop characters convincingly. Better to leave the heartfelt, emotional musicals to the likes of Sondheim and let Webber make silly things about dancing cats and chandeliers.

But with the crazy costumes, expressive dancing and energetically scored poetry, CATS did capture something real. As a nine-year-old, seeing that play was a highlight of my brief existence. I've often wondered if one of the reasons we're so hard on CATS as a play is also because of it's intended audience. As a play based on children's poems, it still is intended for children. I've spoken with so many people who struggle with the idea that something can be beautiful or artistic or profound and still be understood by a child. It's been my experience that some of the most beautiful things are those that resonate with children. Children are deeply sensitive to beauty, because they haven't learned to be cynical about it yet.

Cynical, like some of us might be about a certain movie trailer.

And so, that Trailer...

Look what you made her do

Like a lot of you, my initial reaction to the trailer was one of... horrified curiosity, let's say. It does look weird. Film, in it's over fascination with computer graphics, has turned the painted faces and lycra bodysuits of the original CATS world into photorealistic fur. What was expressive in the theatre is now rendered uncanny on film. Some people have suggested it would have been better animated in a more stylized way, like a traditional hand drawn musical. But I do empathize with the film makers, because that would have lost the dancing, and dance is one of the primary reasons to go see CATS.

If I'm being honest, what actually concerned me is the dialogue. CATS the musical gave up on having a plot, but the film seems to be trying to pull one out of the emotive, theme driven material that Trevor Nunn cobbled together. The proportion of singing to spoken lines in the trailer is way off of what it was in the musical and that... concerns me. Concerns me that someone involved in the film's production got confused and figured CATS was actually about Grizabella's quest to ascend to the heaviside layer.

For the last time, guys. It's about cats.

But this is a multi-million dollar film that needs multi-million dollar ticket sales and so, following the logic of Hollywood formula, some poor screenwriter seems to have been tasked with shoving Three Act Structure down CATS throat at last, like a pill from the veterinarian that your pet is just going to regurgitate in a few minutes anyway.

Maybe the transition will work better than I think. Maybe some of the experimental nature will still shine through in the film, or they'll at least capture some of the joyous spectacle and dancing that made the musical worth seeing. Or maybe it will be a ghastly, expensive train wreck, fueled only by a cash grab at our nostalgia for the musical.

Either way, I kinda want to see it. With it's giant franchises and carefully plotted Blockbusters, Hollywood takes so few risks any more. Whether it succeeds or fails, CATS was a risk. And at least there's singing. At least there's dancing. At least most of the leads are actual singers and dancers.

And I, for one, am curious how they picked a protagonist. Just which cat did the dart hit when they threw it at the board? And what character journey are they going to take us on between Taylor Swift shaking catnip over a crowd from a bejeweled canister?

I have only questions. No answers. And with that, I need to go feed my cat.

Tropes VS Tropes: Best Overprotective Dad

When I started this Tropes VS Tropes series, one of the things I wanted to emphasize was that tropes, in and of themselves, are not inherently bad. Sure, they can be repetitive or uncreative, but they don't necessarily have to be.

My personal belief is that a trope is most useful when it is used more as a starting point for a story idea, rather than the final execution of the idea. Take Steve Harrington from Stranger Things. When introduced, Steve is presented so that he resembles every meat-headed, privileged bully that was so popular in the Eighties. He looks and talks like the guy who shoves the hero into a locker. He swaggers up to Nancy like he's got a right to her. He's a jerk jock, plain and simple.

Since today's topic is Overprotective Dads, I give you 

Steve Harrington, being a Dad.

Except there are hints that he's not as shallow as he seems. His jokes are too genuine. He smiles at Nancy like she's the greatest girl in the world. Even his bullying of Jonathan stems from an ultimately understandable place - they caught Jonathan taking creepy pictures of Nancy.

Now true, there is context to Jonathan's actions that make them *less* disturbing (though let's put a pin in that topic for another day) and true, Steve escalates his poor treatment of Jonathan in a brutal way, considering the guy's little brother is missing. Eventually it comes to blows and for a brief moment, it feels like the classic bully vs underdog confrontation.

But then the show subverts that classic set up. After the fight, Steve comes to the conclusion that he has acted unfairly. When he goes to ask Nancy for forgiveness, he gets dragged into the central conflict and ends up helping the main cast fight the Demogorgon.

His arc is so successful largely because he's a much deeper exploration of a stock character than we're used to getting. From the outset, he's presented in a way that suggests we're supposed to root against him, yet gradually revealed to be a far better person than he seems. A lot of jerk jock characters incorrectly see themselves as the hero, but what makes Steve special is that he realizes that his actions don't match up with his own internal narrative. He wants to be the good guy, so he changes until he is, even though that's consistently the harder path.

Since Stranger Things is a show built on nostalgia, it unsurprisingly relies on a lot of tropes, particularly those that were popular in the Eighties. From kids going on bicycle powered adventures, to secretive government facilities, the show is loaded with fun twists on stock characters and plots. But no show is perfect, and so it's not very surprising that with all the reoccurring tropes, some of them don't land as well as Steve Harrington. Some are just tired retreads of clichés we've seen a million times.

The Overprotective Dad is Here to Ruin Your Fun

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS AHEAD FOR SEASON 3 OF STRANGER THINGS

When season three picks up, the series skips to a year and a half after the Snow Ball held at the end of season two. Mike is at El's house, and the two are getting their smooch on, much to the chagrin of Jim Hopper, El's adoptive father. Since it takes until the very end of the episode for any of the show's supernatural elements to directly impact the plot, for the majority of this first episode, this is the driving source of conflict for many of our main characters.

As Hopper vented to Joyce about how much he wanted to throttle Mike, it was all I could do not to groan audibly and cry out, "not this plot again." The overprotective dad is everywhere, treated almost as requisite in comedies that feature young people dating for the first time.

H'yuk H'yuk

Kim Possible, who can literally do anything and frequently is in physical danger, gets more pushback from her dad about dating than anything else. Hotel Transylvania is a charming Halloween romp about Dracula trying to control his daughter's life, particularly when it comes to romance. Scott Pilgrim gets chased by the sword-wielding father of Knives Chau for daring to date her. Veronica Lodge's father exists to hate Archie, and not for much else.

In the unusual event that a comedy features a father and daughter where he DOESN'T threaten her male suitor with bodily harm, the show will often go to great lengths to hang a lampshade on this fact, and make that the joke.

Take, for instance, the episode of the Big Bang Theory where Leonard meets Penny's father for the first time, and is shocked to discover that the man adores him. He's over the moon his daughter is dating a physicist! Except, at this point in the show, the pair are broken up. Penny, however, wants to impress her father, and so talks Leonard into pretending to still be her boyfriend in order to make her dad happy. When the rouse runs out, her dad is angered by the lying, then insists on speaking to Leonard alone. At this point, he begs Leonard to keep pursuing his daughter. Once Leonard agrees, Penny's dad then pretends to "throw him out" with aggressive shouting, in hopes of making Leonard seem more desirable to Penny by virtue of his disapproval.

Even though this instance SEEMS like a subversion, it still plays into exactly why it is I dislike this trope so much. Whether it's Penny's dad begging Leonard to date his daughter or it's Dracula asking Johnny if he truly believes it would be safe for Mavis in the human world, the conversations are usually between Dads and their daughter's boyfriends, not the girls themselves. These girls love lives get treated as transactions between men, rather than choices they make independently. The jokes tend to depend on either a) not trusting the daughter or b) assuming that whatever the boy chooses will somehow overrule the "good" choices the daughter makes.

To make one thing perfectly clear, none of the examples I've cited have involved rape, sexual assault or any behavior from the boy that suggests a possibility of these things. These are treated like ordinary, every day, relatable responses to seeing a girl date.

At this point, some people may be saying, "but it IS relatable!" And I'll grant you that, yes, it can be relatable. You do see this behavior in real life. Barack Obama once made a joke about sending predator drones after the Jonas Brothers if they ever made a play for one of his daughters.  (Har har har…) But that doesn't mean it's a terribly healthy behavior. Plus, it isn't only art's responsibility to represent reality as it is - it's also to provide mirrors for what it COULD be.

If this trope wasn't so ubiquitous, it probably wouldn't bother me so much. I'm not - per say - against the idea of a plot line involving a dad struggling to know what to do with his daughter once she's reached an age where she can date. What bothers me is that the conversations are almost never WITH her, just about her, and that they default to the same set up, reactions and jokes again and again, without examining any potentially problematic elements. Instead, this trope is treated as a symptom of how all men must behave, because that's how they express love for their daughters. But friends! There are other ways to show you love your daughter that don't involve exerting control over her love life.

A Different Type of Dad

One of the reasons I don't like the trope is because it also is completely unfamiliar. My own father gets excited with me when I like a boy. And if something dangerous were to happen to me while dating, I'm a heck of a lot more likely to tell him about it, because he's always been supportive of my choices rather than controlling. Luckily, I'm not completely alone in the world of fiction, and so for a counter example to all the groan worthy behavior above, I present to you Dr. Covey from To All the Boys I've Loved Before.

This scene is one of the best additions the movie made to the book.

As the father of three girls, by the time our book's heroine, Lara Jean Covey, starts dating, he's been around the block once before with this thing. He makes a point of getting to know Lara Jean's new boyfriend, Peter, but there's none of the hard line theatrics of other shows. Peter is frequently invited over and included in family activities. Dr. Covey checks briefly when the pair are off to a party together to make sure there will be no drinking and driving, but never gives off an air of distrust.

And in one of the best scenes in the film, he takes Lara Jean out to the diner so they can talk alone after she breaks up with Peter. They don't talk about Peter directly, since she doesn't want to hear about that, but instead her dad makes it clear to her that he's proud of her for trying new things and stepping out of her comfort zone, something she'd struggled with in the past. He's just the best, guys. May we all aspire to being as kind and helpful as Dr. Covey!

But Actually...

While Dr. Covey might be one of my favorite fictional dads, he is NOT my favorite Overprotective Dad, by virtue of the fact that this is not his character flaw. He's another type of character entirely, and one I'd like to see more of. Still, he's not the trope, so he cannot win this contest.

When I was watching Stranger Things and saw Hopper veering hard into this trope, I found myself wondering if I could think of good examples of the trope, because here's the thing: I like Hopper. His behavior annoyed me a little in season three, but overall, I like him. So does that make him a "good" example of this trope?

In fact, it made me realize that I don't often address tropes that I dislike. All of the others I've covered for this series have been things that, on some level, I enjoy. Yes, self-defeating villains and big freaking kiss songs can be done poorly, but while I spent a little bit of time making fun of those tropes, they're ones I generally like and get excited to see.

As I said earlier, I'm not opposed to the existence of this conflict, just seeing it done lazily or treated like some sort of primal response all father's share. After all, even if this father/daughter dynamic wasn't my experience, I CAN sympathize. It is hard watching kids grow up and make choices about their lives and bodies that a parent would not personally make for them!

In making this list, I decided to consider the following criteria:
1) He is the father of a daughter
2) He freaks out when she starts dating someone
3) His overprotective streak is triggered SPECIFICALLY by his daughter's romance. So no Liam Neeson intimidating kidnappers in Taken. That's too justifiable.

BONUS POINTS FOR:
4) He learns a lesson about trusting his daughter's judgement
5) The bulk of the conflict is focused between father and daughter coming to see eye to eye, not father and daughter's love interest reaching an agreement about her.
6) There's some additional element that makes it so that the audience is getting more than the same old recycled jokes about waiting up with a shot gun or baseball bat
7) He's just a cool character, okay?

So after some soul searching, I present to you a short list of men who might go a little crazy when their daughters start dating, but ultimately learn and grow through the experience, making me love them. They are...

Runner-Up: Best Villainous Overprotective Dad

Ben Linus from LOST

One easy way of fixing the Overprotective Dad trope is by giving the role to a villain. Suddenly, the controlling undertones of the behavior are not problematic, but instead a symptom of being a bad dude. This is on full display with Ben who first kidnaps Alex from her birth mother, then raises her in extremely limiting conditions. Imprisoning and torturing her boyfriend is one of just several creepy, controlling things this guy does!

Ben is just a rad villain, and his treatment of Alex is a fascinating part of his character. You could even argue that towards the end of the series, he learns *something* about letting Alex go. That is, if you count the flash side-ways timeline.

WINNER: Best Villainous Overprotective Dad

Adrian Toombs (The Vulture) from Spiderman: Homecoming

I would have peed myself if I was Peter.

The moment when Peter Parker shows up at his date's house for the Homecoming dance is perfect. As Liz's dad drives them to the dance together, there's an amazing verbal game of cat and mouse Peter is playing with him as it gradually dawns on Toombs that he knows Peter from somewhere. Bit by bit, he realizes that Peter is Spider-Man, and this previously accepting father takes a dark turn.

One of the things that's so fun about this example is that Toombs himself is consciously playing with the trope. Once they arrive at the dance, he tells Liz he needs to give Peter "the dad talk" and she leaves, expecting it to be the usual cajoling about "getting her home on time." That's in there but let's just say his threatenings are way more terrifying than anything she dreamed up.

This all plays super well into his villainous motivation and character arc. His whole illegal arms dealership is driven by a desire to provide for his family. He wants nothing more than to protect Liz and give her a normal childhood, and he expects Peter to play by that script exactly, or face the consequences.

In this instance, the Overprotective Dad trope is invoked for interesting reasons and other levels of conflict are layered on top. It might not be an instance where the conflict is focused on the girl, rather than the boy, but that also seems justifiable, since this is Peter's story. Plus, it has a more interesting resolution to that arc than usual. Instead of them coming eye to eye or agreeing how to "broker" Liz's choices, Peter instead has to make choices that are independent of what he wants with Liz, and that he knows will ultimately ruin his chances with her. It's heartbreaking and awesome.

Runner-Up: Best Overprotective Dad

Jim Hopper from Stranger Things

He reappears!

So first off, I am not a fan of how all of this arc was treated on Stranger Things, mostly because there's some squandered potential here. As mentioned before, tropes are at their best when they are used only as a starting point for something, not the final execution. One of the things that frustrated me about the use of this trope was how they failed to notice that of all men, Hopper had exceptional circumstances for his feelings going into this scenario.

Three things make Hopper and El a unique version of this father/daughter dynamic. One, that El is adopted, and this at least the show touches on. He isn't prepared for this challenge, largely because he's only been her father for a couple of years, and it was a relationship that grew organically, rather than one that either entered into knowingly. But there are two other factors the show forgets to touch on and AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH! It would have been so much better if they did!

So factor number two, Hopper might be new to doing things with El, but she is not his first child. He had a daughter die young, which destroyed his life and relationship with his ex-wife. There are a couple nods to this in season three, but most of that is unexplored potential. I really wish there was more acknowledgement of him as a man still learning how to put away the trauma he suffered years ago, because it would help contextualize his actions when he is a total jerk to Mike in the first episode of season three.

Also, there's the question of El herself. Hopper is more justified in worrying about El's dating habits, because El has only been experiencing a "normal" life for a couple of years. Lest we forget, she had to be taught the concept of "friend" by Mike in season one. To see this same boy then initiate a romance with her could be understandably troubling. If "friend" and "boyfriend" are synonymous, that's a problem. El's world is painfully small and she's naïve in a way most girls her own age aren't. I would have loved to see Hopper articulate some of this in some way - just a worry that childhood was already leaving for a girl who never got to have a childhood. There's more loss there than in the regular scenario.

In fairness, the show does address some of El's inexperience and need for other friends, but it's not directly tied to her arc with Hopper. And so that saddens me. It was right there, Duffer Bros! RIGHT THERE!

So why is this ranked so highly? Partially because, as mentioned above, I love Hopper. But also because that even though it follows the strictures of this trope a bit too much, there's some nice depth to what Hopper experiences and expresses over the course of the season.

In the first episode, he knows he needs to have a conversation with El and Mike about boundaries, but struggles to find the words to say. Eventually, he writes them down and rehearses them. But when he goes to talk to the kids, Mike is kind of obnoxious, and all his preparation goes out the window. He ends up threatening the boy instead and the audience groans along.

Then, towards the end of the season, El finds the letter and sees what he really wanted to say. And instead of being about controlling Mike's behavior, the letter is all about her. How much he loves her and values his time with her, and how he's nervous about this new stage in her life, but doesn't want to hold her back. The scene is ridiculously touching. It does a lot of heavy lifting of redeeming his earlier behavior and that makes a huge amount of difference.

Also, side note: Mike really was annoying in that first episode. It's not ALL Hopper's fault.

WINNER: Best Overprotective Dad

Costas Portokalos from My Big Fat Greek Wedding

Look how sweet he is! He really is the best.

Did you know that this movie is not a romantic comedy? It's really not. The romance is not the center of the story. Her relationship with Ian is rather conflict free. As they say in writing class, if there's no conflict, there's no story, so where is the conflict coming from?

The heart of this fun and fabulous film is in the relationship between Toula and her heritage, and symbolizing that heritage more than anyone is her father. Costas is immensely proud of his Greek background and wants to see Toula feel the same way. He's bossy and controlling at times, and desperately wants her to marry a Greek boy, so when she comes home with "white toast" Ian, he is devastated. And so goes our plot!

Returning to the list of BONUS POINTS, Costas ticks every box. He gradually learns to accept Ian and see his family as part of theirs. He stops questioning Toula's decisions so much, and tries to show her his support the way he knows how (giving a kind speech at her wedding and giving her a very generous gift) and through that, Toula reconciles with him. She's able to see herself as Greek, without focusing on how it makes her weird. She feels loved by her father and valued, instead of seen as the ugly duckling or rebellious child.

The jokes also don't feel as stale, because they're not the usual one dimensional posturing. His disdain for Ian is rooted in cultural differences, a gap which is harder to breach than simply not threatening the boyfriend. Even when he's trying to be accepting, there's still moments where his cultural baggage gets in the way, like when he orders wedding invitations that misspell and misgender Ian's parent's unfamiliar, English names.

Most importantly, he's just really, really funny. Despite his character largely being built out of the Overprotective Dad trope, he's charming, entertaining and a fresh take on the concept. Overall, this movie is great and Costas remains one of my favorite fictional dads. He ain't perfect, but he sure is fun to watch.

So there you have it. Even tropes we personally dislike don't necessarily have to be done poorly. If there's a fresh enough take, tired material can become new again. All you need is a little Greek culture or a Demogorgon and you're on your way.

Tropes VS Tropes: The Big Freaking Kiss Song

As a life long musical theatre nerd, I feel very lucky that my college days managed to coincide with the rise of the Wicked Witch of the West on Broadway. While kids today go around singing their Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen, I came of age to the angst filled power ballads of Idina Menzel in her most famous pre-Frozen role, that of Elphaba, the famous Ozian witch, in the musical Wicked.

If you have even a passing interest in musical theatre, you know Wicked. If you don't, you've probably still heard a few of it's songs. It was everywhere at it's height, with shows like Glee featuring it's most famous song, "Defying Gravity" in one of it's earliest episodes.

As a nineteen-year-old, I was obsessed. I had the soundtrack memorized. All I wanted was to see a proper production of it. To my incredible luck, a touring production of it visited Toronto the very week I was scheduled to be in Ontario, visiting my sister for reading week. She lived a few hours south of the city, but we took a bus up, spent a couple days sightseeing Canada's great metropolis and, of course, saw Wicked.

Overall, it was spectacular, but I do have one memory of a particular song falling short of my imagination. Towards the end of Act II, Elphaba and her love interest, the dashing Fiyero, are reunited and sing "As Long as You're Mine," a passionate song about how they're gonna smooch and snuggle and probably do more things. This was, in my Wicked addicted brain, the sexiest love song to ever exist.

But on stage, it kinda… fell flat. They just stared at each other and stroked each other's arms a bunch. I kept waiting for it to heat up or for there to be choreography or something. Anything to give the scene a bit more shape than just singing forcefully in the face of the one you love. Instead, it felt like the song was a thing the characters had to get through, before they could finally reach the kissing that came at the end.

I learned a valuable lesson that day. Apparently, you can't smooch and sing at the same time. At least, not in real life. When I listened to the song on the soundtrack, it had played more like a music video in my mind, with shots of the characters making out, cut together with overlays of the actors singing at each other. Like, check out any Taylor Swift song. She makes out with dudes while singing all the time. But this doesn't translate to the stage. In concert, I'm guessing she's never snogged a man while crooning "Wildest Dreams" at him.

For Ms. Swift, this isn't much of a problem. Her songs may exist in the broader context of an album or a music video or a live performance, but they're rarely defined by them. Pop music is meant to exist as something the audience vicariously experiences and can imagine their own lives and fantasies onto. With great songs that come from musicals, there's an aspect of that, but most theatre songs require the context of their plots and performers in order to give full weight to the experience of a particular song.

"As Long as You're Mine" requires context and it still saddens me a little that it's stronger with only the context of the other songs on the album, not the actual performance. It might sadden me more if it weren't such a reoccurring problem in theatre. Yes, Wicked fell into the trap of the boring pre-kissing song, but it's far from the only show to do so.

Oh, Where is the Song that Goes Like This?

Quick question! In a musical, are the characters actually singing? Within the confines of his reality, does Javert actually stand next to the university students, belting out his plans to trick them and infiltrate their numbers, as he appears to do in the song "One Day More" in Les Miserables? Do a group of nuns actually argue about "How do You Solve a Problem like Maria" via song, as they appear to in The Sound of Music? Within the confines of their own realities, the answers are almost certainly "no." I mean, Javert would have to be really stupid to do that. Leader of the students, Enjolras, is literally just a few feet away from him during that number.

Most musical numbers aren't meant to be taken literally. Instead, the music and dancing is meant to stand in for something else. So what do they represent? The quick answer is usually something like "emotion" or the "feel" of a particular scene. Energetic, frantic songs coincide with when the mood is particularly tense or exciting. So in The Sound of Music, Maria sings the bouncy "Confidence" when she's trying to convince herself she feels braver than she does. In contrast, Javert sings the slow, contemplative song "Stars" when he's feeling, well... contemplative. Emotion and mood are the major drivers of song choice and placement in traditional musicals.

So it's little surprise that there are lots and lots of love songs in musicals, especially songs that come right before characters kiss. Great, big kiss scenes frequently come at the emotional height of a piece, as they release the tension of the character's building romance. Whole stories are structured around that moment of triumph. So of course there are songs about it! On paper, it sounds so incredible, ending a soaring ballad with the leads finally locking lips. But often, it falls flat, because these songs can't help but grind the plot to a halt. As mentioned before, you can't kiss and sing at the same time, which means that often, the characters have to get the song over with before the plot can advance any further, because the next plot point IS the kissing!!!

For here you are, standing there... standing there.

Both Les Miserables and The Sound of Music have scenes that suffer from this. In Les Miserables, Marius and Cossette sing at each other through a gate, and I remember as a kid thinking this scene took for-freaking-ever. They don't necessarily kiss at the end, but they want to, and nothing exciting is allowed to happen until they're done making goo-goo eyes at each other. In The Sound of Music, an even straighter example occurs, where Maria and Captain VonTrapp stand in a gazebo and stare sweetly at each other while their silhouettes delay kissing just long enough to get a refrain of "Something Good" out.

Researching for this article was a blast, because I got to relive some truly hilarious stage direction as I looked up examples of this phenomenon. How many times can Marion run back and forth across a bridge before finally ending her song and kissing Herald Hill in the Music Man? How long can Christine sway side to side before realizing that all Raoul asks of her is a kiss in Phantom of the Opera? Why does the Baker's wife keep wandering away from him during "It Takes Two" from Into the Woods, except to delay his inevitable kiss of her face?

By now, you might be asking what could possibly please me? Haven't I any romance inside of me? Don't I appreciate the need to slow down for these moments? IF THE PLOT CAN'T STOP FOR LOVE, WHAT CAN IT STOP FOR??????

It might be tempting to assume this kind of thing is inevitable--that it's impossible to end a song with a kiss without it coming across as cheesy and overblown. There's a reason White Christmas interrupts the smooch at the end of "Count Your Blessings" with another character stumbling in on the happy couple, because it stops an intensely earnest moment from feeling too corny. But to that I say, the presence of examples where it's done well shows that there's no excuse for doing it poorly. So who did do it well?

The Multitask Scene

The next slew of examples are all going to have one thing in common: In addition to being songs that end with dramatic kisses, they also do something else for the scene. Some subtext or character moment is going on, or the plot is carefully advancing without you noticing it. Returning to Sound of Music and Les Miserables, these shows actually have TWO of these scenes, and the other two are far more poignant.

For Sound of Music, the scene in question is the kiss between Liesl and her baby Nazi boyfriend, Rolfe. The classic "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" serves as a precursor to her first kiss, and between the singing and prolonged dance section, it takes a looooooooong time to get there. But, here, the delay is justified. She and Rolfe are young, inexperienced and nervous about love. When they finally do kiss, it's an impulsive peck by Rolfe, before he runs off into the rain. All the foofering around delightfully illustrates his nervousness, even while he's trying to front maturity to her.

Les Miserables has it's second occurrence with Marius again, but this time, he's cradling Eponine during "A Little Drop of Rain." And, erm, spoiler alert I guess, but... SHE'S DYING! As an audience, we're all heartbroken, like Marius. You get the sense he didn't even know to expect the kiss she gives him at the end, because this is the first time she's desperate enough to make her feelings clear to him. It is, quite literally, her last chance. This subtext makes the scene far richer than any he shares with Cosette and helped launch the wallowing of a thousand lonely theatre girls, who forever see themselves in Eponine's tragic friend-zone fate.

So, now that we've explored this issue thoroughly, what are the best examples? In order to qualify for honors on this list, a scene must involve:

1) A love song.
2) At the conclusion of the song, the characters kiss
3) At some point, they preferably sing directly into each other's faces. Bonus points for volume.
4) While indulging in the pathos above, the scene still manages to progress the plot meaningfully
5) As in yes, there is kissing, but you aren't just waiting for them to get the singing over with so that they can kiss.

And now, for the awards for best use of the singing-in-face-leads-to-kissing trope...

Best Classic Example:

"If I Loved You" - Carousel

Despite having incredible music, this is one of those musicals you don't see very often any more, largely because sections of it haven't aged well. At all. It takes a... VERY outdated stance on a few issues, and I say this as someone who watches Howard Keel movies. But this song, guys. It's that good.

Rogers and Hammerstein were masters of the I-Swear-I'm-Not-In-Love-With-You song. "Sixteen Going on Seventeen," mentioned earlier, has aspects of this with the way Rolfe clearly has no clue what he's doing. More famously, Oklahoma has "People Will Say We're In Love," which is delightful, even while making you want to smack the people singing it. But those still aren't "If I Loved You."

There's a cat and mouse feel to the whole thing, as both Julie and Bill swear to the other that they don't love each other, but if they did? Well, they know exactly what that would be like. And what would it be like? It would involve failing to say it out loud, because they're both too nervous and proud to admit what they feel. They verbally dance in circles around each other during the song, underscoring the tension in their relationship, yet by the end, they can't help it! They must give in! And yes, we get that glorious kiss.

Bonus points: The sheer length of the scene. I'm amazed this song stays enjoyable when they're taking SO LONG to get to the point, but that's the beauty of a song that spells out multiple levels of character.

What could make it better: They actually face each other very little, and never sing at the same time in each other's faces. Wasted opportunity.

Best Lyric: Longin' to tell you/But afraid and shy/I'd let my golden chances/Pass me by

Best Comedic Example:

"The Night is Young and You're So Beautiful" - Robin Hood: Men in Tights

I had to break the rules a little here, since this number doesn't technically end in a kiss, but it gets pretty close. One of the running gags in this movie is that the characters aren't allowed to kiss, so that's part of why it gets a pass.

The other reason why is because in comedic songs, they don't tend to end with the kiss actually happening. Whether it's "Where is the Song that Goes Like This?" from Spamalot, "Love is Strange" from Galavant, "Let's Have Intercourse" from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or even "The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room" from Flight of the Conchords, the kiss doesn't come to be. Part of the comedy of the thing, I guess. But the purpose is pretty clear with all of these songs. They're designed to subvert our romance expectations and poke fun at the common tropes associated with these songs.

And with that disclaimer out of the way, the best of them is definitely the one Robin sings to Maid Marion. The whole scene kills me. Carey Elwes hams up his role fantastically, but it's Amy Yasbeck as Marion that really sells the scene for me. She's trying so hard to be into it for his sake, but she's mostly just startled and terrified by the theatrics. Man, this movie is a frickin' classic.

Bonus Points: He sings at her so forcefully her crown falls off her head.

What could make it better: Some sweeping camera angles? Spinning, maybe? I dunno, aside from the lack of a kiss, it's pretty perfect already.

Best lyric: What can I DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO??????

Best Disney Example:

"A Whole New World" - Aladdin

In the movie, both of Aladdin and Jasmine's kisses are scored to this classic, Oscar winning tune. So yes, there is technically a delay between the song and their first kiss, but the instrumentation comes in with the song when they kiss on the balcony and see??? At the end, they kiss as they sing a reprise of the song again. So it counts. It's my list, I say it counts.

This song has been overplayed a little, and even as a wee one back in 1992, I remember getting tired of hearing the pop version on the radio. But this list is all about context and how the scene plays into the overall narrative. And here, it absolutely works. Aladdin works his way up to their epic balcony kiss by giving Jasmine the adventure she was never able to have before. Within the context of the movie, the scene is wonderfully charming. And like the best of these song+kiss scenes, it's about more than their romance. It's about the thrill of discovery and magic of their world. Subtly, it's also about Jasmine putting together the pieces that Prince Ali is the same boy she fell for back when she dressed up as a commoner in Agrabah.

Bonus Points: A flying magic carpet! Obvious, I know, but you'll notice they do way more interesting things than stand in a gazebo or walk back and forth across a bridge.

What could make it better: If the balcony kiss came more immediately on the heels of the song so that I didn't feel like I'm fudging it a bit.

Best lyric: Hold your breath/It gets better.

But enough beating around the bush! You came for the best triumphant, end-of-song kiss, and there must be one! So what is it? What beats out all the others to be Emily's all around favorite scene of this variety? How do you beat Disney at dramatic musical theatre kisses?

You do it by looking at what the guys who wrote all your favorite Disney Songs did before coming to Disney. You go just a little Off Broadway to...

Best Dramatic Kissing Song

"Suddenly Seymour" - Little Shop of Horrors

So first off, fun fact:

Back when Disney was trying to kickstart their animation division again, Broadway was experiencing something of a revival. Both Andrew Lloyd Webber and Stephen Sondheim were at the top of their game in the Eighties. What a time it must have been to be alive in New York city! They weren't the only ones doing great work either, with two talented, young writers named Howard Ashman and Alan Menken collaborating together on numerous smaller shows. The strongest of them, and the one that caught Disney's eyes, was Little Shop of Horrors.

Top to bottom, it's a fantastic musical, and once you know that the same people who wrote the music for Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast are helming it, you can never unhear how much the show sounds like a Disney movie. It's got their classic brand of villain song, as well as one of the best love ballads anywhere.

Mind you, "Suddenly Seymour" isn't a song that works great divorced from it's context. Part of why it's so good is because it's tailored to its characters. During the song, they both have the realization that they can and should be together. One of the many tragedies of this show (especially if you see the stage version, which is altogether far more tragic) is that it's taken so long for them to admit this to each other. Both Seymour and Audrey have adored and admired the other from a distance, but until this moment, they don't feel good enough for each other.

This song is so loaded with catharsis. Over the course of the show, we've watched Audrey go through so much abuse and heartache. In "Suddenly Seymour," he finally gets up the courage to put himself forward, Audrey works through part of her own baggage about life and love, and then together, the two of them beg the universe to let this moment last. This song is an absolute emotional ringer of a number.

It's also a good example of how these songs should work. At the beginning of the song, they are not ready to kiss. The emotion isn't there yet. They have to work their way through the emotions of the song and the little character transformations it involves before they reach the moment where they are ready to kiss. The song isn't a delay on the road to kissing, it's the vehicle by which they get there. As a result, it's so satisfying.

Bonus points: This song hits everything. Character transformation in the course of a single song, agonized wailing directly in each other's faces, interlocking melodies, plus a totally sincere smackeroo at the end. What else could you ask for?

What could make it better: As adorable as Rick Moranis is, I've generally preferred the live versions I've seen of this show to the filmed one. For one thing, I think there's some subtext lost to the song with the movie's happier ending.

Best lyrics: All of Audrey's verse. It breaks my heart every time, despite how silly the musical is.
Nobody ever treated me kindly/Daddy left early, Mama was poor/I'd meet a man and I'd follow him blindly/He'd snap his fingers. Me, I'd say, "sure."

You'll notice those lyrics don't seem to have a lot to do with loving Seymour, but that's what makes the song work so well. It points out how all the lies and garbage we believe about ourselves impacts our ability to seize love when it comes to us.

So if you're feeling lonely tonight, maybe get out there, grab someone attractive, and belt your personal issues at their face until you feel like kissing them. I mean... I've seen it work on stage.

Umbrella Academy and the De-Marvelization of Netflix

Over the past ten years, two juggernauts within the entertainment industry have risen up that, for better or worse, have permanently shifted the way movies and television are made today.

The first, The Walt Disney Company, was an old player in the Hollywood system, well established and with a familiar brand presence. But through a series of aggressive purchases of other companies, plus a daring new strategy of cross-promoting their films through "cinematic universe" style movies, they effectively forced all other major studios to play by their new tent-pole franchise strategy. The acquisition of Marvel was probably the most significant moment in this narrative. The subsequent "Marvel Cinematic Universe" (or MCU) rewrote the handbook for how to get movie-goers into seats, at a time when audiences willingness to head to the theatre was dwindling.

Speaking of dwindling cinema attendance, the second industry juggernaut, Netflix, effectively destroyed the home video rental market, and ever since then, has been chipping away of what is left of regular cable services. Other streaming services, like Hulu and Crave, have risen up to compete with them. Even television broadcasting companies, like CBS, are trying to entice viewers onto their own streaming services, but despite this, Netflix has remained the front-runner. Even when major networks pulled their content from Netflix, hoping to protect their own viewership, Netflix survived and thrived by fostering it's own original content.

By the force of these two companies, one thing has become very clear. No one wants to leave their house unless given a very good reason. Otherwise, we'd all rather stay in and watch Netflix.

So it's little surprise that for a while, these two teamed up to create content. Marvel launched several TV shows on Netflix, including Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and the Punisher. All of them developed followings, and the shows allowed the Marvel brand to pursue stories that might be too mature to be palatable as part of the MCU. But gradually, these shows have been dying off. Netflix cancelled the last two quite recently, and while it might be easy to get mad at Netflix for doing this, my guess is their long-time collaborator is no longer playing ball.

Because yet another media giant is coming for Netflix and this time, it's Disney. Their own streaming service, Disney+, is due for a US launch in the fall. Let's face it. They'd rather not let Netflix enjoy a slice of their Marvel pie. 

So with Marvel no longer in the picture, where was Netflix going to get wham-bam super hero content for our lazy I-don't-want-to-leave-the-house butts?

Enter a team of heroes. Enter The Umbrella Academy.

Tale As Old As Time

The Umbrella Academy follows a group of super-powered siblings, who were all adopted as infants by eccentric millionaire, Reginald Hargreaves. Raised to be a crime-fighting team, they've since gone their separate ways, largely due to the abuse they suffered as children at the hands of their "father." But when they get the news that dear old Dad has died, they're forced to reunite for the funeral, which is crashed by an unexpected guest.

Their time-travelling brother, Five, ran away as a child, but he's back now, with bad news to boot. One, that he's a fifty-eight-year-old man trapped in the body of a thirteen-year-old. And two, that the apocalypse is coming in eight days and it's up to their dysfunctional family to try to stop it.

It's only been a couple weeks since the show launched, and already it's made an enormous splash. While Netflix's formulas for measuring viewership are a bit confusing, by most metrics, Umbrella Academy's debut has surpassed every Marvel property TV show that Netflix has ever carried. And yet, undeniably, Umbrella Academy owes much of its success - perhaps even its existence - to Marvel. Not just because of the economic pressures that likely played a role in Netflix choosing to develop the show as outlined above. But in terms of tone, character, plot and theme, Umbrella Academy owes more to Marvel properties than almost any other source.

Many have pointed out that The Umbrella Academy is essentially what you get if Professor Xavier had been abusive towards the X-Men (one of the few Marvel properties Disney doesn't control the movie rights to. Yet.). Or it's a goofier, more stylish version of the Marvel/Netflix shows it was designed to replace. But if you ask me, there's an even clearer analogue in the MCU, and for the remainder of this essay, I plan on focusing on the similarities between the two.

Before I do though, please remember that similarity is not necessarily the same as plagiarism or unoriginality. Most of the similarities these properties share are due to the fact that both are superhero genre science fantasies. The tropes I describe are healthily on display in most superhero teams, whether you're talking about The Incredibles, The Justice League, or The Avengers. In many ways, Umbrella Academy's use of these tropes is more a form of "joining the conversation" or responding to tropes that have existed for a very long time. After all, even if Reginald Hargreaves is basically an abusive Charles Xavier, the implications of that are dramatically different, and why not create a property that explores the impact of an abusive mentor figure on a team of superheroes? But setting X-Men aside for another day, let's take a look at...

Guardians of the Academy: Umbrella Galaxy

We're all so used to the MCU, it might seem hard to remember that there was a time Disney wasn't certain Guardians of the Galaxy would be a smash hit. But once upon a time, the film was considered a gamble. Enough so that it was scheduled for release in August, a month that is famously lean for new releases. Disney didn't run the risk that the movie would fall flat among the bigger, flashier movies released earlier in the summer, prime "tent-pole" movie season. Guardians likely did benefit from being the only thing worth seeing in theatres for the month of August, but in hindsight, the film didn't just succeed because of marketing strategy. It succeeded because it was good.

Unlike previous entries into the MCU, Guardians was the first to feature heroes that by and large, no one knew. And it just looked so silly! A talking racoon? A sentient tree monster? Who was going to watch that? As it turned out, literally everyone. It knew it was silly, and it reveled in it. The characters were memorable, the aesthetic appealing and the theme of misfits coming together to save the world just so satisfying. In many ways, the relatively unknown nature of the property freed up the production team to pick and choose what elements they thought would work and what would build a strong movie.

In a similar vein, I'm not even going to pretend I'd heard of The Umbrella Academy before it popped up in my Netflix feed. And I say that as someone who actually reads comics. Not religiously. Not enough so to try to claim a high degree of street cred. But enough so that I know more than the big players of Marvel and DC. Enough so that seeing The Umbrella Academy get an adaptation, it made me hopeful Netflix might distribute the rumored adaptation of Black Hammer. Like, see? Enough so I've read at least SOME comics.

And so, Netflix had a lot of leeway when it came to adapting The Umbrella Academy, and what they chose ended up being something that hits almost all the same notes as Guardians of the Galaxy. Swap outer-space for an Edward Gorey soaked orphanage vibe, and you've essentially got this series. And because we all prefer seeing these comparisons as outright contests, let's bring back one of my favorite features of this blog. 

Trope VS Tropes!!!! WHO DID SUPERHERO GROUPS BEST???

Category 1: Plot

The plots are almost identical between these two, aside from the inciting incident. In Guardians, a group of misfits meet in prison, and discover they can make a lot of money if they work together to bust out. But as they pursue the cash, they realize that they have something world-ending on their hands. Can they overcome their personal weaknesses to form an effective team and save the world????

In Umbrella, our heroes meet at a funeral and as befits a funeral, they have history with each other. Initially, they each want to get something out of that funeral - closure, cash, validation. But as they each pursue their goals, they realize that they have something world-ending on their hands. Can they overcome their personal weaknesses to form an effective team and save the world????

Without giving too much away, I'll say this. Despite the characters not knowing each other, Guardians has the stronger, tighter inciting incident and, all the way through, the more motivated, driving plot. This is pretty typical of movies compared to TV properties, but whoever said these contests are fair? Still, when it reaches the final act, there is no denying that the stakes feel higher and more compelling in Umbrella Academy. There are some incredible moments through the end of Guardians of the Galaxy, but I'm not sure anyone ever really engages with the villain or feels the sense of dread Umbrella Academy manages to invoke. Still, due to never lagging and never wasting a moment of my time, this point goes to Guardians of the Galaxy. Way to go, guys!

Category 2: Tone

Both films are marked by high amounts of humor, undercutting the casual violence that the characters participate in. Of the two, Umbrella definitely has the darker tone, with actual blood appearing in several scenes. Much of this has to do with Guardians making certain they maintain their PG-13 rating in theatres, where red blood is marketing poison. In fact, I'd argue that if there was blood, the violence would feel almost identical between the two. I'm guessing one of the reasons Umbrella Academy was more successful than previous Marvel/Netflix collaborations is because that, even with the red blood, the level of violence is more on par with MCU movies than the television shows.

But even outside the violence, Umbrella Academy deals with more mature themes. Both properties are about traumatized misfits, making jokes about how much their lives suck, but in Umbrella Academy, the suckage is just more real. People die in the present, not just backstories. The line between hero and villain is blurry. Guardians tries to explore some of these same emotional places, with characters like Nebula crossing over from evil into good come the sequel. But I'm of the opinion that the darker moments are just better done in Umbrella Academy. When Klaus cries, you cry.

Guardians is almost hampered by its own optimism when it comes to the dark moments. Though, on the other hand, it's more consistently funny. Since it's not trying to balance anything as dark as what Umbrella Academy does, it's less likely that a joke arrives at a time when the audience isn't ready to laugh. 

Umbrella Academy is assuredly darker than Guardians, and so the comparison isn't as one-to-one here as it might be in other categories. It won't be for everyone, and in many ways, whichever you prefer will win out. But for my part, I found the tone more interesting in Umbrella Academy. It gave itself more room to do more things. Some have complained it tries to be too many things, but for me, the blend absolutely worked. So point to Umbrella Academy!

Category 3: Music

It was when I searched out a playlist of the Umbrella Academy music and put it on that the similarities between the two properties really began to hit me. This one is closely related to tone, and it's striking how much both properties rely on music to carry the humor and tone of their stories. It's pretty easy to trace a line between a jailbreak happening to "The Pina Colada Song" in Guardians and Five dispatching a team of assassins in a doughnut shop to the tune of "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)."

Both rely on nostalgic music to tell parts of their stories, and some of my favorite scenes owe their impact to the soundtrack. Guardians is anchored to seventies pop, Umbrella Academy draws from wider sources and decades, with a penchant towards rockabilly. Overall, Umbrella Academy featured more music that I like. Artists who I love and wish got more attention appeared all over the show, so I'm a bit biased towards their soundtrack BUT! But...

Guardians of the Galaxy uses licensed music better than almost any movie or television show has within recent years. Most of the music is diegetic too - meaning that the audience understands that the soundtrack heard by the audience can also be heard by the characters. On top of that, the music is clearly used to tell a character story, about Peter Quill and his relationship with his mother. In Umbrella Academy, only a few scenes bother with this level of character integration (hint: they're also the most powerful). Otherwise, it's just awesome, funny music playing overtop of dramatic scenes. Guardians does that, plus ties the music into the identity of the main character.

So overall, the win goes to Guardians. Even if I'd personally rather listen to Umbrella Academy on loop.

Category 4: Theme and Villains

The enemy is Dad. Bad parenting is the root cause of almost every problem both groups face. Ronin the Accuser is something of a villain-by-proxy for Thanos in the first Guardians, and then, in the second, the metaphor lands much closer when Starlord meets his actual father.

From the outset of Umbrella Academy, child abuse and reconciliation are central themes. I don't want to spoil how everything plays out over the course of the series, but rest assured, Reginald Hargreaves plays an instrumental role in how everything goes down, even after his death. Umbrella Academy has a plethora of villains, and manages to explore its themes around overcoming your childhood in a variety of ways through them. By the time the true villain of the series does reveal themselves, it's not enough to wipe the record clean for Reginald Hargreaves or others who supported him. It's still kinda true. The enemy is Dad.

Overall, the villains are scarier, more memorable and more thematically resonant in Umbrella Academy. Honestly, I wish I could say more, but I'd rather not spoil anything, so I've confined myself to these words. But I don't think you have to say much in order to beat out someone as forgettable as Ronin the Accuser. And much as Ego was an improvement, he doesn't hang over the series the way Reginald Hargreaves does. That much is evident from episode one. So in the end, our winner is Umbrella Academy, by a long shot.

Category 5: The Heroes

When Guardians of the Galaxy came out, it copied a lot of the successes of the Avengers. After all, Disney was trying to make money off of an unknown intellectual property. Why not follow the formula of their most successful franchise? People have made a lot of jokes about how easily the team members match up across the two films and, wouldn't you guess it...

THE HERO: Captain America = Starlord = Luther

THE LADY FRIEND: Black Widow = Gamora = Allison

THE MUSCLE: Thor = Drax = Diego

THE WISE GUY: Iron Man = Rocket = Five

THE SWEET HEART: Hulk = Groot = Klaus

THE OTHER ONE: Hawkeye = Mantis = Ben

 THE MENTOR: Nick Fury = Yandu = Hargreaves

Superhero teams tend to function on a system that can be described as a Five Man Band. The five core characters that form the Avengers, the Guardians and the Hargreaves siblings have been repeated ad nauseum across superhero fiction. Much of the drama that comes from these superhero mash-ups come from how different characters inhabit a role and whether they play with or against type.

FOR EXAMPLE!!!

Of our classic "hero" role outlined above, Captain America is the only one who plays the trope completely straight. He's ethical, kind, a touch naïve and a natural leader. Even though Tony Stark is the more prominent character in the group, he's not an organizer. So that role falls to the good soldier. Contrasting him is Black Widow, a pragmatist who serves as an ideological foil for him, with her history as a hired killer. Among the reasons Black Widow is more compelling opposite Captain America than The Hulk is because, frankly, their roles are more intertwined. 

On the other hand, Starlord is a self-centered rascal, and it takes some time before he settles into the role of leader and organizer. The lady friend who contrasts with him is Gamora, a far more ethical, determined person. She makes up for what he lacks, steering him towards doing good. They're something of a deconstruction of the leader classic, with more qualities of a good leader embodied in the second-in-command, rather than Starlord himself.

And then there is Luther. On the surface, he's very much Captain America, with his brawny physique, dedication to the team and reliance on black and white morality. But as the series progresses, it becomes clear that the naivete that made Steve Rogers sweet might be making Luther dangerous. It's a deconstruction of a different variety. Allison has a more world-wearied persona, having made more of her own mistakes. 

Similar comparisons can be made across the other characters. Thor, Drax and Diego are the least deeply entrenched in the team drama, and function more in a supportive role, whether that be by punching things or cracking jokes. Iron Man, Rocket and Five all could, arguably, lead the group if they wanted to. They're the most powerful and effective individual, so wouldn't that suggest they'd make the best person to call the shots? But through a combination of ego and surliness, they struggle to take on the squishier, people handling aspects of that role. 

Finally, there's the team sweet heart. The one who makes the audience cry with their tragic backstory or willingness to sacrifice for the group. Classically, without the sweetheart, the team falls apart. The Hulk is probably the most playing against type, as he eschews the whole role at points, much to the distress of his teammates, who all just want to convince him he's worthy of love. Groot is lovable, largely because of his willingness to protect the others and his innocence. And finally, there is Klaus, who despite his numerous addictions and calloused selfishness, is probably the most loyal take on the character type. He's the literal connection to the team's past, through his ability to commune with the dead, and as mentioned above, if Klaus cries, the audience cries. He's a precious little cinnamon roll that the world keeps pooping on, and there's almost no better recipe for audience sympathy.

In all three of the above iterations, each of the characters doesn't just exist as an individual, but as a member of a team. It might be tempting to cherry pick a perfect team from across the three properties best characters - one where the hero is Starlord, the lady friend Black Widow, the muscle Drax, the wise guy Five and the sweet heart Klaus - but even though these five would be my five favorites in each category, they don't work well mixed together. 

And even though only Black Widow made it into my top pick for each category, I think somehow, as a team, the Avengers are the strongest of the bunch. Maybe it's because they've got add-ons like Hawkeye and Nick Fury. I don't know. Suffice it to say, there's a reason the Guardians were modeled on the Avengers and that the Umbrella Academy echoes that themselves.

So I'm breaking my own rules and giving it to Avengers for this category. I CANNOT BE STOPPED!

OVERALL:

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With both Guardians of the Galaxy and The Umbrella Academy, the franchises are still in progress. I'd say that I probably preferred the original Guardians movie, but some aspects of the second disappointed me, which raises the new kid in my estimation - The Umbrella Academy - due to having had fewer chances to mess up it's legacy. 

I'm mostly just grateful that we live in a world that gets to have both - the optimism of the MCU and the dour stylishness of The Umbrella Academy. And as Disney and Netflix move into competition with one another, my hope is that Netflix has enough of their Marvel formula mastered to carve out its survival underneath the pressure of Disney's streaming service. Disney has eaten up a lot of companies recently, and, as much as I enjoy their content, I get nervous thinking of a world where they consume too much of the media pie. 

So I'm all here for Netflix creating its own mythos. And if The Umbrella Academy is the first step towards the new media landscape, I'm excited to see where it goes.

Momentum and the Art of the Ending

Growing up, one of my favorite things to do was play video games (she said, as if this phase had passed at all). I was particularly into RPGs and like any good 90's kid with a Playstation, this meant a lot of Final Fantasy. Little surprise, I was largely into these games "for the stories," but my favorite part of the games usually came when the gaming mechanism and the storytelling were the most at odds. My delight was the late game side-quest.

I really wanted that dress made of belts, I tell ya.

Side-quests are like the subplots of video games - not strictly necessary for the wider narrative, but very important in that they add richness and depth to the world. In genres like science fiction and fantasy, which numerous video games and all Final Fantasy games fall into, side-quests and subplots are essential for giving the epic scope to the world building that a too tightly hemmed story could not.

But there is a time and place for all things in fiction, and video games often fall into a trap of going off the rails thanks to the inclusion of the side-quest. In every Final Fantasy game, all the best side-quests opened up right at the end of the game, when you finally had an airship to fly around the map and enough weapons to blow up whatever might be at the end of your little diversion from the plot. Often, the end of a game played out like this:

Girl in dress made of belts: Oh no! Thousands have been murdered by Lord Eveelus and his laser drill! If only we'd beaten him to the cave of Ger'blath and the mystic jewel inside!
Spikey-haired dude: BROODING
Guy with guns even though everyone else has swords: We must go to the government facilities at Rindondonk and stop Eveelus from activating the drill again!
Spikey-haired dude: Now that my amnesia is gone and I know Lord Eveelus is my father, I must kill him. This war cannot wait.
*COLLECTIVE BROODING*
Girl with glasses: I'll fire up the engines and we'll go to Rindo-
Me, the Player: Nope. Please head to the northeast corner of the map.
Glasses girl: But Lord Eveelus-
Me: Nope, definitely not. We finally have an airship and there's an island in the northeast corner we haven't explored yet and what if there's a really big sword on it? Don't worry, it can wait.

And it could! It was never essential that you actually head to Rindondonk right away. Lord Eveelus would wait. By the time I got around to the main plot line again, I'd generally forgotten half the details of the final conflict and all sense of urgency was gone.

In books, the author controls the pacing of the plot and inclusion of subplots, so this kind of thing is rarer, but it does still happen. I've heard a few people comment that the end of the first Hunger Games book can be a bit rough for this. Right as Katniss is starting to get confident in her position in the games, she spends a few chapters getting Peeta's health back in order. It serves the narrative well in many ways, but as my sister once put it, for some reason it feels like she's stuck in that cave with Peeta for forever. All the momentum the book built up to that point screeches to a halt.

Even Katniss is so done with this cave.

Pacing refers to the speed at which the reader is pulled through the plot, and is one of the trickier things to master in writing. Both the romance with Peeta and even that quest to the north east corner of the video game world are necessary parts of their stories, even if they are subplots. But included in the wrong place or dragged on too long, they reduce the impact of later scenes that are maybe more important for the resolution of the overarching story.

For endings in particular, good pacing usually means preserving momentum. By the time the climax arrives, readers generally don't want diversions. They want to feel the urgency of the characters carry them through to the end. Achieving this means that all the set-up for the ending needs to come earlier - those subplots need to be woven in before the crush of the final conflict squeezes out space for them. Yes, parts of the subplot can come back. Take the end of the Harry Potter franchise where, right before the final battle with Voldemort in the seventh book, Percy Weasley turns up, begging his family to forgive him for being a butt and let him fight alongside them. There's a tense family moment, but very quickly, that resolution happens, because that subplot was set up a long, long time ago. Not much is needed by the time Percy bursts onto the scene. His character growth feels like a part of the climax, rather than a diversion from it.

So while the problem with Katniss and Peeta might happen in the cave, the root cause was probably earlier. Suzanne Collins showcases the pair together plenty in the first half, but Katniss doesn't demonstrate much vulnerability to Peeta until the cave scene. If Collins had let them be a little more tender together earlier, she might not have needed to spend so long in the final third of the book trying to earn all those "feels" she needed for the final climax to work. Maybe that story Katniss told about Prim's goat should have been back on their pre-games train ride. Then there could have been a quick allusion to it, then immediate kissing and behold! The cave scene is a chapter shorter and my sister is a chapter less antsy for the action to pick up.

As is the case in most things in life, one of the best examples of pacing endings properly comes to us from the TV show Survivor. I've mentioned before on this blog that I find the show a fascinating lesson in editing, and often what I'm meaning by that is editing for pacing. Survivor pioneered a lot of tropes in reality TV, but it's fascinating what particular tropes they carefully avoided from the beginning of the show, and one was the late episode commercial cut.

MUAHAHAHAHA! I'm talking about Survivor again!!!

From American Idol to Cutthroat Kitchen, almost every other elimination style reality show relies on a cheap form of cliffhanger to keep viewers around past commercial breaks. Right as the host is about to announce the eliminated contestant, the camera cuts away and you're suddenly watching a woman dance around her kitchen with Mr. Clean. But not on Survivor. This was a conscious decision on the part of the producers, who didn't want to compromise the momentum of these important moments or cheapen them with content they didn't control. It paid off, and eighteen years after it aired, the show is still going strong, while scores of imitators have fallen. I'm of the opinion that people get tired of being manipulated. Those pre-elimination commercial breaks serve as reminders that producers see their audiences as potential customers, and their own shows as gimmicks that get you to watch advertisements. Obviously this isn't the only reason most of these shows turn-over and get replaced by other, similar reality shows, but it speaks to a lack of care from the show runners. If the climax of a story isn't sacred, then nothing is.

In contrast, on Survivor, from the start of tribal council to the eliminated contestant getting their torch snuffed, there are no commercials, no artificial breaks and no outside-the-moment confessionals from other players. For writers, the lack of confessionals is particularly important. Throughout the rest of the episode, confessionals are used to provide narration alongside the scenes of camp and give the viewer a glimpse into what the contestants are *really* thinking. During tribal council, however, the emphasis is on the moment at hand. All the set-up that gets the viewer into the players heads has to be already done.

In a particularly well crafted episode, the viewers know enough about the inner workings of camp-life to have a sense of who is vulnerable to elimination each night, but not enough to know for certain who it will be. Tribal then unfolds in a manner that makes it feel more "live," even though the whole show is pre-recorded and edited. Still, it tricks the brain into feeling the urgency of the moment and the show doesn't relinquish that urgency until after the votes are read. It's solid, good storytelling.

Survivor isn't perfect from a storytelling perspective. Believe me, I have examples. But I find some of the choices they make interesting and instructive because for how silly the show is, it's edited extremely well. Meandering, unfocused endings are very easy to write, and I've seen a few of them editing unpublished works. Truthfully, I've written them as well.

Luckily, I've got reality TV to correct all the things I learned from video games.