Let me explain: the movie centers around a farmer named Ray Kinsell, who builds a magical baseball field so the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson can play baseball in his backyard. In other words–a sports nerd’s wet dream. Who wouldn’t want to have Derek Jeter over to play ball in your backyard?

In real life, Jackson, along with 7 other players, took money from gamblers to throw the World Series. The movie makes it sound like Jackson was innocent (he was 100% guilty, and rightly banned from the sport). But Ray lets Joe bring along the other players, because this movie is about redemption.

On his quest, Ray recruits one of his heroes–a cynical ex-civil rights activist named Terrence Mann. Mann, played by James Earl Jones, has become sickened by society after Americans re-elected Richard Nixon in a landslide in 1972. So Ray offers him a chance at redemption–a chance to once again believe in the American Dream.

Joe invites other dead players so they can have a real game. And this…is where the movie really screws up. It made sense to invite the 8 Black Sox players because they were banned from baseball–but these new players weren’t banned from baseball. They’re just great dead players who want to play the game they loved.

And yet, there is not a single black player on their field. Even in this magical field of dreams, black players are still not invited to play with the white boys. Archie Graham even name-drops Gil Hodges–who was a teammate of Jackie Robinson.

We celebrate Jackie Robinson because of his courage in breaking MLB’s color barrier. The sport was rigidly segregated for decades, so African Americans formed their own teams, as part of the “Negro League.” Some of the greatest players of all time, like Satchel Paige, Willie Wells, Oscar Charleston, and Josh Gibson–were not allowed to compete in the sport. Josh Gibson, by every account, was a hitter equal to Babe Ruth, and yet he never played a single major league baseball game.

But none of these players were invited to smell the sweet grass of the Iowa cornfield, nor to emerge from cornstalks into a sky so bright that Joe breathlessly asks, “Is this heaven?” Even in a land of magic, whimsy, and hope–black players simply weren’t invited.

See, the story starts off as a redemption arc for 8 men who took money from gamblers to throw the World Series–that’s 8 guys who threw a game on purpose–they get to go to the magical cornfield. But for 70 years, black players were barred from the game simply because they were born with the wrong skin color. And they were also not invited to the magical cornfield.

So it’s particularly weird when Terrance Mann, a CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER BORN IN 1931, rolls up to the field and exclaims, “That’s Joe Jackson!” but doesn’t immediately follow up with, “Where’s Josh Gibson and Willie Wells?”

I should note that Michael Schur was developing a Field of Dreams TV series for Peacock that would have included a focus on Negro League players. However, Peacock scrapped that idea 3 years ago.

See, there’s a lesson to take away from this, and it’s very important: the director of Field of Dreams, Phil Alden Robinson, has since said that not including Negro League players is his biggest regret about the film. He called it a serious misstep, and said, “If we had to do it again, that’s the first thing I would change in the movie.” Robinson went on to direct 42, a great movie about Jackie Robinson’s difficulties when he broke the color barrier.

So you might be wondering why they didn’t include any black players. It’s an easy answer: it never occurred to the director, or anyone on the production. After baseball was integrated, the Negro Leagues were forgotten (or unknown) by white society. Like a lot of people, I learned about them from the Ken Burns documentary Baseball.

At the film’s climax, James Earl Jones gives a powerful speech: “America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again.” He’s right—we are a nation that constantly reinvents ourselves. But that erasure also erases history that makes us uncomfortable, and doesn’t fit in with our current definition of the American Dream.

Now, I am not saying that Field of Dreams is a bad movie and you should never watch it–this is still one of my favorite films. But the director’s admission that it never occurred to the filmmakers to include black players is a reminder that we are always confined by the point of view of the here and now. Your incredibly mainstream view today might be offensive and out of touch tomorrow.

Field of Dreams is ultimately a story about how, in America, everyone gets a second chance–except for all those black players who never got a first chance.

Comic artist Carl Banks created Scrooge McDuck as the antagonist for his nephew, Donald Duck. His initial one-off appearance became an ongoing series, and Scrooge’s lore was fleshed out by the great creator Don Rosa. Rosa’s Scrooge comics were a favorite of young George Lucas, and his globe-trotting adventures would later inspire Indiana Jones and his search for “fortune and glory.” (In fact, the entire opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark was lifted straight from a Scrooge comic).

Scrooge didn’t inherit wealth–he famously started with a single dime and slowly built his fortune outwards from there. Like many people, I became most familiar with Scrooge through the TV series Ducktales, when he has already accumulated business interests across the globe and built an empire in every conceivable industry on earth.

Scrooge’s most famous possession is his money bin, a small skyscraper that is loaded with so much cash he loves to swim in his money. But have you ever considered just how much money is in the bin, and the implications this has on a global economic scale?

According to the comic, The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, by Don Rosa, Scrooge’s money bin contains 3 cubic acres of cash. According to his accountant, Fenton Crackshell–amounts to $600,386,000,000,947,522,000,000.36. That is 35 billion times the amount of the entire world economy combined. He could buy and sell Elon Musk 600 billion times.

This means that if Scrooge were inclined to share even a percentage of his wealth, he would completely remake the way ordinary people live their lives. Scarcity would become a thing of the past–the Beagle Boys would never try to rob him, because they would all be millionaires. Universal health care, free college tuition, and no one would ever go hungry, for the rest of existence.

So that’s week one–what about week two? If Scrooge opened the floodgates of the money bin to share wealth for all, then money would essentially become meaningless. Every being on earth would essentially possess infinite wealth–so why go to work? You couldn’t watch Darkwing Duck on your flat-screen TV because there would be no one to run the power station.

The entire structure of civilization would fall into chaos–every duck a king, and no one to work the fields. The only way to motivate people to do the grunt work would be brute force–essentially, unlimited wealth would recreate slavery on a global scale, ushering in an age of Might Makes Right.

Scrooge hoards his fortune because, if he were to unseal even the slightest sliver of his net worth, inflation would compound on an exponential scale and the world would end. This means that Scrooge McDuck literally holds the fate of the world locked within the walls of his money bin.

You might ask yourself, “So what? Scrooge is a kind-hearted old adventurer who loves his great-nephews.”

But the dark side of Ducktales is that Scrooge’s empire is built on blood, suffering, and genocide. Four Color Comics issue 238 introduced Foola Zoola, an African sorcerer with a grudge against Scrooge.

In the Carl Banks comic “Voodoo Hoodoo,” it’s revealed why Zoola hates Scrooge–he tried to swindle his tribe out of their land. When they turned him down, he hired an army of cutthroats to clear and displace an entire African tribe so he could plant a rubber plantation.

Now Don Rosa’s great comic book The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck adds more nuance. Scrooge’s actions cause his sisters to break from him, and he feels immense guilt. Afterwards, he lived in isolation for 17 years–until he began looking after his nephews.

Sure, Scrooge seems reformed now, but for how long? When his nephews grow up, or they discover his checkered past, will he revert to his old ways? When you are as wealthy as Scrooge McDuck, your worst enemy is boredom. How long until he opens up his money bin to buy the affection of the masses–not realizing that he’s going to doom them to a dark age of suffering?

Life is truly like a hurricane in Duckburg.

On the surface, Beauty and the Beast is a tale about the value of inner beauty–but dig deeper, and you’ll see that it is a story of the elite exercising their dominion over the working class. Let me explain: the movie’s climax created an economic and political realignment that would have destroyed this small provincial town–and sparked a country to civil war.

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First, we have to address the political state at the beginning of Beauty and the Beast. Belle and her father live in a “small provincial town,” but what does that mean? Simply, it means a settlement in a rural area, away from major urban areas or centers of power. Beauty and the Beast takes place in the late 18th century, probably around 1770, in France. At the time, France was still ruled by a monarch, Louis XV. The local people were being taxed into oblivion to pay for the Seven Years’ War, and tensions with regional provinces–like Belle’s town–were starting to fracture.

At this time, France did have a parliament that was charged with enacting the king’s rulings, but they could also veto his reforms that would have taxed the wealthy. This led to Louis dissolving the parliament in 1771, which turned France into an absolute monarchy.

Now, the Beast, before his transformation, was a prince who lived in a castle. But he was likely the prince of a cadet branch of the House of Bourbon–these were distant heirs to the throne that ruled their own “mini-provinces”-like the castle of the beast.

Belle’s provincial town is a day’s ride away from Adam’s castle. so it’s reasonable to believe that this castle technically ruled over Belle’s town. And yet, everyone believes the castle is deserted; the prince has not been seen for years, and as far as the townspeople know, the servants mysteriously disappeared. And you know what? The town is running just fine without a royal family to rule them.

When Belle walks through the village, we see that it’s clean, its people are literate with a flourishing bookshop, and the local economy is thriving. They don’t just offer menial wares–there’s perfumery, a fancy hat shop, and upscale clothing stores.

In particular, we hear that eggs are in high demand–a woman screams for six eggs–because eggs are very high in demand.

But later in the movie, the true meaning of this is revealed. When a local hero, Gaston, is buying a few rounds at the local pub, he tells us that when he was a lad, he ate four dozen eggs every morning, to “help him get large.” But now (that he’s grown) he eats five dozen eggs a day.

That is, an insane amount of eggs. Assuming that Gaston started eating them when he was 3, and continued until he was 18, and if he is around 25 at the time of the movie–he has consumed 433,620 eggs in his lifetime. Where did those eggs come from?

Well, most healthy hens lay 5 eggs a week. This means the town would need to either ship in eggs or keep 333 laying hens around at all times. And given that chickens have an 85% lay rate (like your mom), this means that the town would need 392 chickens to feed Gaston’s protein appetite. And more importantly, chickens are the goldfish of the farmyard–they die constantly. So the actual rotation would probably be in the mid-400s.

This would have necessitated a vast infrastructure, a network of coops, laying hens, feed, and farmhands. However, keeping so many chickens in town, or in the provinces, would not be sustainable, so it’s likely they imported the eggs to feed Gaston.

This explains why the town has such a thriving business sector for a village its size. The book shop, a tobacco shop, a hat store, the perfumery–the well-dressed women who lounge about to gawk at Gaston. No wonder the townspeople love him so much–this paragon of manliness single-handedly props up their economy, while the royals that technically rule over them collect taxes and contribute nothing to the land.

Remember, this was the era of French politics that led up to the first French Revolution in 1789. Wealthy royals ignored the needs of the poor until they hit their breaking point and overthrew the aristocracy–temporarily.

The third act of Beauty and the Beast is about the commoners sacking the castle in an attempt to “kill the beast” of the monarchy itself. Gaston was a charismatic leader who sadly died on the ramparts of the castle.

The night Gaston died is the darkest day in the history of their town. Not only did their entire economy collapse in an instant, but now the angry-boy prince who ruled them years ago has returned to power. Go back and watch the banquet that ends the movie–the townspeople are not invited.

It’s just Adam, Belle, and all the people who live to serve their every whim. He is living in a bubble of wealth and luxury.

Now I know what you’re thinking–maybe Belle can advocate for the common people. But Belle has an entire song where she traipses through town being mean to everyone. She looks down at the people of the village and is relieved to be free from them. And now the townspeople are being ruled by this guy that wasn’t elected, who lives in a castle filled with creatures that tried to kill them. The victory of the monarchy over the people, the ascension of a monster to the throne, and the destruction of the egg economy are probably all factors that directly led to the French Revolution.

Belle might as well have called them a “Poor provincial town, full of deplorables.”

This is the opening to the first novel I ever wrote, which I’m in a constant state of revising. I thought you might be curious about the non-ScreenCrush part of my life, and I’m open to any feedback you might have. Enjoy!

American Paradise

Prologue: Where Wings Take Dream

There was a sea of balloons on the playground, waiting to touch the sky. An entire elementary school huddled together for warmth against the cold winds of March. Most of the children wore coats made by the same label, called American Paradise, and most of the coats were purchased at the All-Mart just outside town.

The children were cold and bored, but the teachers said they had to endure this misery. The children did not understand. It was cold, far too cold to stand around. And even though they were on the playground, this was not recess. They were not allowed to play. The slide and swingset and jungle gym were right there, but whenever a child ventured too close Ms Sweeney would bellow, “NO TOUCHING!” and the kids would huddle closer, like male penguins weathering a south pole winter.

“Ms. Sweeney how come we can’t go inside or have normal recess?

“Because,” teacher said, “We’re having fun.”

Every child was holding their very own balloon, and tied to each balloon was a laminated letter they wrote to a possible pen pal who might–someday–find this letter. The project would teach children about the postal service, about geography, community--and that was all very nice, but it was still cold enough to freeze the tits off a frog.

Ten year-old Adam Duty stood to the side, wrapped in a corduroy coat. The coat, from far away, looked like a potato sack. He had a sad face that other kids didn’t want to look at. After six years in school, no one ever talked to him on the playground.

However: in his greasy hand he gripped a letter to the first friend he would ever have.

He wrote the letter, that morning, on the school bus. His handwriting was never neat, but this letter was barely legible. All across the page, his pencil marks would dart up and down, recording every pothole on his lonely country road, like a machine recording brain waves. And, even though the letter was pressed neatly inside his Spelling book, it sported crinkled edges and a mysterious brown stain at its center.

It read like this:

Deer Sumone,

I am Adam Duty and Im in fif grad. Im gong to put this noat ona buloon and let it go two day. I think you shuld cum stae at my hows if you reed this noat. I will sleep on the floor and you can haf my bed.

Your Friend,

aDam Duty

Though he couldn’t know it, this was the first time in his life that Adam spelled “friend” correctly.

There was an adult taking pictures and moving across the playground.

He was the kind of man you can’t help spotting around town. He looked like a Sears catalog Santa Claus, with a wide white beard sprouting above his temples and branching outwards to meet his shoulders. His mouth only emerged from the beard to shout, smile, or sing hymns. Though, after going bald in his mid twenties, he hadn’t had much use for God or His songs.

His name was Tilden Dellow. T. Dellow in print, T to his friends, Bubby to his dead mother. For thirty years he’d ridden the white-knuckled life of a small town newspaper editor. He had the same thought at least once a day: Don’t die from Alzheimer’s like Mom and Dad. In his dreams he met death with clenched fists, socking the reaper in the jaw before surrendering artfully to the mat like a prizefighter on the take.

His life’s work was chronicling spelling bees, police dogs with bulletproof vests, and balloon pen pal sendoffs. He needed a quote from one of the kids and a shot of balloons flying through the air. If he didn’t get that photo, it was no big deal. They had stockpiles of balloon sendoff photos from years past.

He dreaded weaving through the tangle of youngsters. He ached for a real story, intelligent interview subjects. If only the terrorists would attack the school, create some carnage, spill some blood...he wanted to write a novel.

He spotted Adam Duty, standing without friends, alone inside his overcoat. “Hey there young man, can I talk to you?”

Adam said nothing. He wondered if he were in trouble.

“What’s your name?”

“Adam Duty,” the boy cast down his eyes, ready for the man to make chuckles at his last name. Everyone made chuckles at his last name. Even grown ups.

“Well Adam, what did you write in your balloon letter?”

The boy was silent. T. Dellow couldn’t decide if he was rude, shy, or considering. His fingernails cut into his palm, staining the plastic balloon string with blood.

“Reckon this balloon will find my friend.”

Tilden’s inner journalist compelled him to ask the young man about his hopes and dreams. There was something big happening with this boy. He could feel it—but when the teacher called everyone together, the strange boy was forgotten.

Adam had a plan for the sendoff. He was not bright, so ideas—let alone plans—seldom came to him. The night before he pictured his balloon getting lost in the jumble, one letter among hundreds. The poor balloon would feel lost and scared. Then his letter wouldn’t find anyone. His clever scheme was to release his balloon string seconds before everyone else. If his letter had a head start, it was sure to find his friend.

Adam didn’t have the imagination for his balloon’s failure.

The other kids began counting down with the teachers. Adam didn’t join in because he had trouble counting forward, much less in reverse. When the chorus rang out “5” he released his bloodstained balloon string.

It shot into the stratosphere like a happy tadpole, and Adam Duty smiled.

Five seconds later the other balloons were flying into the air, a rubber rainbow smearing the sky. For one sweet moment, one hundred and ninety-seven children watched in silence as the wind carried their secret messages to the heavens.

The teacher explained that most of the letters would be lost and that, of those found, only a small number would actually receive returns. Less than a week later, they had their first reply. Tatum Tibbs brought in a letter sent to her from Brighton, two towns over. The person writing back to her was a librarian, who moved there from the city.

Mrs. Garry hung up three maps: one of the county, one of the state, and of the entire United States. A pushpin was placed in Brighton. As time went by and school bells rang, the maps filled up with pushpins. There were more replies than they expected. As winter vanished and summer vacation neared, two-thirds of the kids had return letters.

Adam stayed inside during every recess to glide his fingers along the map, wondering where his pushpin would land. Maybe in another country, he dreamed. It must have found a friend someplace far away, because his letter was taking such a long time.

One day, the last bell rang and Mrs. Garry told everyone to have a good summer. No more school. The last thing Adam saw before he left the classroom was Mrs. Garry removing the pushpins and folding up the map. No one seemed to care. They had forgotten.

That’s when it occurred to Adam that his balloon wasn’t found. The wind worked against him. Stupid letter. He worked so hard to keep his handwriting neat, but now he would never get a pushpin.

On the bus ride home he kept his face in his book bag and wept, quiet as he could.

That June was one of the hottest on record. Fields of crops wilted in the heat and wild animals were scarce. Adam’s days were spent doing farm chores, and during clear nights he slept in a sleeping bag under the sky. Maybe the balloon is still rising. Could have gone to the stars, or the moon. I bet it rises high enough to touch heaven, and an angel is gonna read it. These ideas comforted Adam as the crickets chirped him to sleep, and the cool grass tickled his ears.

It stormed on the Fourth of July.

Every year, the Duty family invited friends and relatives to celebrate Independence Day with food, fireworks, and firewater (the latter two brought over from Tennessee). Rick Duty, Adam’s dad, amassed enough fireworks to destroy his farm and half the neighbor’s too.

But today was a tragedy. Tunderheads filled the sky instead of explosions. The elder Duty squeezed his face against a window, staring between the raindrops. There was an arsenal leaning against his wall. Bottle rockets and Roman Candles, Cairo Blasters and 36 shot aerial repeaters, 500-gram pyrotechnic delights lovingly packed by small Chinese hands into tight cardboard missile casings, the power of a sun, able to set the sky on fire like Judgment Day a-coming early: all wrapped in their original plastic, dead. Bored.

The guests tried to put a good face on things. Some played horseshoes in the barn, others pounded coozies of Bud Light around card tables. There was also fried Lake Erie cod, which was rated to be excellent. Adam was the youngest of his cousins by five years. While they played video games and grown up card games, he stood in the middle of the kitchen, staring at his shoes.

There was a knock at the door. No grownups around, so Adam answered it. The man on the porch was wearing a dripping wet suit, and a duck sat between his shoes. Adam asked, “You wanna come in?” He assumed this was a relative, because relatives had been showing up all day and he didn’t know any of them.

The man produced a badge, “My name is Roman Lawhorn, Environmental Protection Agency.”

Adam thought the man had an awful long name. “Are you my uncle, Mr. Agency?”

“No.” He nodded to the duck. “And this is Pryma, of the Pribble Flock.”

“Howdy-do,” said the boy.

“We’re looking for the person who wrote this,” the man pulled a Ziploc bag from his breast pocket. Adam nearly jumped out of his britches when he saw his balloon letter inside.

“Well sir, that’s my letter!” the boy said. Finally his Friend had come (a little older than he expected) and he brought his pet duck, too.

The man held out a white envelope, and Adam took it. “Young man, this is a subpoena. You’ll need to show it to your parents.”

And then, it was the duck who spoke to Adam: “Lord Farmer King, I am finally here. I beg you, please: may I have my feathers back?”

In every Toy Story installment, the characters face some existential threat that comes with being a toy. The first movie’s climax centers around a toy’s greatest fear, “what if the kids didn’t love them…and in fact, were mean to their toys?” We see Sid tear his toys apart, Frankenstein them together, and even blow them up–but does this make him a bad kid?

Let’s look closer at Sid’s life. His house and backyard are in disarray. We only ever hear his mom, so we can assume this is a single-parent household, and the poor woman likely struggled to make ends meet, so she can’t be attentive to her son. Hell, they even have the same ugly 70s carpet from The Shining.

Sid doesn’t have the luxury of owning all the best toys, like his well-off neighbor Andy. So, he has to get creative–he takes his toys apart and mixes them back together. He even turned this toy into a hook-er, get it? He’s got a warped, mature sense of humor.

When he finds Buzz, he’s so excited and says, “A Buzz Lightyear, no way”--because this poor kid just scored the hottest toy in America. This is the best day of his little life.

And sure, Sid bullied his younger sister a little. But I’m sure those of you with siblings have endured a lot worse. He takes her doll away to do an operation on her–a double bypass brain surgery. The kid just invented double bypass brain surgery–think what he could have achieved if Woody didn’t drive him to a life of hard drugs.

See, Sid has no idea that the toys are alive–to him, they are objects, and outlets to express his creativity. He doesn’t have a dad around to help him through these complex emotions of puberty, and his mom is stretched thin.

Now Sid also likes to blow stuff up… which doesn’t make him evil–he’s just like every other boy in America–we all like to blow stuff up. I used to gnaw on my action figures–but that doesn’t make me a cannibal.

When he gets the idea to blow up Buzz Lightyear, it’s because he wants to make him fly. Which, by the way, works–that’s how Buzz and Woody fall with style to meet up with Andy on moving day.

So then Woody devises a plan to absolutely traumatize this kid for life–he breaks the number one Toy Law and speaks to the human.

Sid is freaked out–and for the rest of his life, genuinely believes that objects come alive–he believes that toys are sentient beings. Think of the long-term consequences here.

This kind of psychiatric damage was probably treated with medication–the heavy stuff that sedates a child to kill their sense of whimsy and wonder. And adult Sid makes a cameo in Toy Story 3 here–he’s a garbage man. Now there’s nothing wrong with being a garbage man–it was my dream job when I was a kid.

But Sid’s type of play indicates a child with career objectives in mind–he pretends to be a doctor, and an astronaut.

A study commissioned by Genius of Play concluded that 32% of adults claimed the toys they played with as children affected their career choices. Unless, that is, their emotional growth is stunted by a talking psychotic toy.

But instead, we see our final look of Sid here, in Pixar’s Coco. Now this is unconfirmed, but there are some sites describing how the Pixar movies can all take place in the same universe. And this one is not a stretch–Coco and Ty Story are both about people in the real world–not talking Cars or something

This is the land of the dead–and that is a skeleton wearing a skull tee shirt–implying that Sid died an early death. I think that the prescription drug use in his early years, coupled with his low economic upbringing and lack of parental guidance, really set Sid down the wrong path.

For his entire life, he would have been haunted by the memory of a talking toy, a toy that told him that they can see everything, and there are people watching him everywhere.

Sid would tell his parents, his teachers, doctors–but no one would believe him. The kid is crazy, give him Meds. So this poor child would gladly accept the meds–anything to block out the sound of Tom Hanks’s voice. So, he overdosed and died young.

Justice for Sid.

There is an incredibly ridiculous Stranger Things conspiracy theory–and why I think it’s the perfect example of internet privilege and why AI can eventually destroy–or rebuild–Hollywood.

So in case you haven’t heard about it, there is a growing movement on the internet of Stranger Things fans who didn’t like the finale–and they are claiming that the ending of the show isn’t real, because it was an illusion that Vecna created in Mike’s mind. The reasoning behind this is that the ending is SO happy that it couldn’t possibly be how the series ends—it has to be a trick. These fans believe that the Brothers Duffer are secretly pulling a bait-and-switch, and the real ending is coming soon.

So they have found numerous clues–even looking at the dice rolls in the D and D game–they’re trying to turn Stranger Things into Twin Peaks, when it’s not.

The Brothers Duffer (I’m sticking to that) have refuted this—as have the cast—and they have even clarified that there are almost no deleted scenes from the season. And yet, stubborn fans have doubled down. Ironically, the Duffers created this sitaiton by landing on an ambiguous note—is Eleven alive? Is it the Lady or the Tiger? The ambiguity is a metaphor for the magic of childhood—she’s alive if you believe that she is alive.

Now conformity gate is another fad conspiracy. Like how people genuinely beieved, for decades, that Elvis faked his death. So the actual conspiracy will fade away with time—but I’m scared of what this conspiracy represents. These are fans who simply did not like the ending of the show, so they have convinced themselves that there is a real, secret, better ending that is tailored to them.

Only the internet can produce a generation of people who think this way–because the internet is always there, to give us exactly what we want. If you don’t like how game of thrones ended, you can go read fan fiction, or watch YouTube videos about how it could have been better. I make these videos for a living—they’re a lot of fun, but they’re also ridiculous. We can sit back, with no worries over cast scheduling, production budgets, and nitpicking actual art created by actual artists. Did I like the ending of Game of Thrones? Not really, but I know I could have done any better.

I think the next step of this entitlement will be people making their own episodes of Stranger Things with generative AI. This is leading to a world like the Oasis in Ready Player One. In that book (and movie), most of the action takes place ina. virtual reality called The Oasis. In this reality, every IP you can think of is walking around. You can fight beside Gundams, and Ferris Bueller can be your neighbor. Fans can move art around, but they don’t create anything new.

This is where the internet is headed—anyone will be able to take the work of others and remix it into whatever they want. In this kind of landscape, it’s going to be impossible for artists to create anything new, because a million people on the internet will immediately change it to “the fan’s version.”

But let me throw out this idea–what if these AI remakes are actually good? There could be a generation of young filmmakers who use generative AI as a tool to realize great stories. When I was a kid, I didn’t even have access to a VHS camera—I had to borrow one from a relative to make school projects. I’d like to think I would have made something pretty kick-ass with generative AI—but I probably would have just made crap.

But what about the young Spielbergs or Tarantinos? Will tools like this empower them or create a crutch for them to lean on that limits their creativity?

I know that AI is stealing source art from across the internet—so you’re essentially always copying. But isnt that how all art works? Yo start off copying the handwriting as the teacher has it on the board, then you develop your own signature?

That would suck even worse, right? If Skynet was right? What do you think?

This had lasting implications for Hollywood. Afterwards, producers could no longer use the likeness of actors without their permission. This ruling came just in time for the rise of CGI and digital media. Fred Astaire was digitally resurrected to sell vacuum cleaners in a commercial. And of course, legacy franchises like Tron and Star Wars will keep bringing actors back until they pass into myth and legend. Future kids will be surpised to learn that Luke Skywalker was once played by a real human boy—this will be one of those fun facts you tell people on whatever platform replaces human interaction in a hundred years.

But I also think that Glover’s lawsuit hurt the BTTF trilogy. The original plan was for Crispin Glover to star in Back to the Future 3 as Seamus McFly, the great-great grandfather of Marty McFly. In that movie, Seamus teaches Marty that it’s okay to back down from a fight. This would have brought the trilogy full circle, as Marty taught Crispin Glover’s George how to fight in the first film.

Instead, we had to settle for Michael J. Fox playing his own ancestor, with the most godawful OY-resh accent ever put to film. And weirdly, Lea Thompson plays his great-great-grandmother, confirming that there is definitely a history of incest in Marty’s family tree.

Sorry to ruin these movies for you.