Spring time is HERE!!!
You may now safely break out the pastels
Happy Easter, friends!!!
I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter! It was a blessed and peaceful time here at the Ball house. We heard the wonderful word of Jesus’ Resurrection, ate some delicious food, and had a bubble-filled dance party in the backyard. I call that a win!
Mario Madness!!!
Katie (my wife) and I come from two different segments of the pop culture audience. Katie is a very normal person who is connected with what’s currently happening in the real world of everyday life. I’m the weirdo who lives with my head down the rabbit holes of politics, fandom, and industry news. What this means is that often times things that are a big deal to me aren’t even on her radar and things that regular folks are excited about I’m totally oblivious to.
So when the stars align and Katie and I are both excited/interested in something at the same time, we jump on the opportunity to enjoy it together. That happened this past weekend with The Super Mario Bros. Movie.
I had caught a lot of the early industry reviews that were panning this movie and accusing star Chris Pratt of being disinterested in promoting the film. But then over the past week, I had seen the early box office numbers start to mount in evidence that this was about to be a really big movie with audiences.
Friday, Katie texted me in the middle of the day to say that we should see the Mario movie. That was my personal indicator that this movie really did have some legs to it. If Katie was excited about it, then it was on the radar for regular people (not just the nerds like me!).
As 1980s babies, Mario and Luigi had instant appeal to us. In our generation, Mario practically was videogames in our earliest memories. And those videogame characters were as big to us as any cartoon or comic character in past generations. Our two oldest daughters haven’t played a lot of console videogames, but they’ve played Mario and MarioKart.
Typically with these types of brand movies, you would expect to see a lot of “fan-service” that makes in-jokes for the parents in the room. Or—worse—a bunch of innuendos designed to fly over the children’s heads and strike at the parents’ base instincts. That second strategy doesn’t really do much but sully fond memories of childhood innocence with the crudities of adult life.
The really great thing about this new Mario movie is that it doesn’t care about adult concerns… like not even a little bit. It is perfectly content to be a kids movie, something remarkably rare in the past 5+ years at the cinema. There just haven’t been many “kids” movies in recent years that have stayed out of the innuendo game or avoided the murkiness of adult’s culture wars to just have fun. Mario successfully does it and the rewards at the box office are HUGE for Nintendo.
The theater in our hometown here in Alabama was the most packed I’ve seen it in YEARS. I can’t even remember the last time I saw it this packed before COVID. It was clear that the theater management had not been entirely prepared for the surge, used to the lackluster performance of any releases not staring Spider-Man or Tom Cruise over the past 3 years. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is a big time commercial success and should send the message to Hollywood that parents want more movies they can comfortably take their kids to see, movies with stories and themes of their own that aren’t immediately obsessed with playing as allegories for yesterday’s Breaking News story.
Star Wars TV
In other news, anyone watching the new season of Mandalorian? I was behind on my Star Wars shows because of work, so I just got finished with Andor. It was fantastic! I love Star Wars as a political thriller. More of that, please! It is far better than the mess we got in the last movie trilogy. Turns out that when you produce content with an actual plan behind it, it holds up better!
I’d love to hear what you think about the latest Star Wars shows. Let me know in the comments!
A Fresh New Logo
Lastly, I’ve refreshed the logo for this newsletter. I drew the tree above. It’s actually a stylized design for an unrecorded (there are demo tracks in existence, though!) album from my college days. If you didn’t know, I actually got my start in writing with writing songs. It was always a fun image to me, so I figured why not finally put it to use?!
I drew the logo. That makes it the first drawing of mine that I’ve ever published. I like it because it is simultaneously sparse and yet budding with new life. It is like the little tree in our front yard. It is always the last one on the block to bloom, but once it gets going you can’t stop it. It just suddenly bursts to life!
That’s kind of how I see my work as a writer. It takes me a minute to get my ideas all in a row, but even in the dead of winter it is still growing, growing, growing. I’m ready to bring my next set of ideas to life with this new Batman book and I’m so glad you’re joining me for the journey!