EDITORIAL: Where's The Outrage? (3/13/98)
Damned if I know. I mean, the whole point of these Friday editorials is to vent off some of the steam that builds up over the course of the week, reading about and dealing with the morons that infest our everyday lives.But the morons have been relatively quiet this week.
Oh, sure, I happen to think that Video Game Spot (oh, excuse me, Videogames.com now)'s review of "Gex: Enter The Gecko" is unfair and wrong, and suspect that perhaps, just perhaps, someone might have gone in with a bit of anti-Dana Gould bias, but for the most part, they're a great site, so I won't pick on them too much.
And yeah, I think that the American public is about to be sucker-punched again by Nintendo when the Color Game Boy is released this summer. I mean, folks had their chance to buy the Lynx, the Game Gear, the Turbo Express, and the Nomad, each of which, despite being released from 1.5 to 6 years ago, are more powerful than the Color Game Boy will be. But now it's a Game Boy, and all of a sudden Nintendo is going to have invented the color hand-held in the minds of most Americans. Don't look at me. I'm not the one who bought into the whole Game Boy thing, nor the "Game Boy With Colored Case" thing, nor the "Game Boy Pocket", nor even the "Game Boy Pocket With Colored Case" thing.
And for that matter, I'm not even all that cranky about the Blockbuster Awards, in which Uma Thurman won for "Favorite Actress, Science Fiction" and Chris O'Donnell won for "Favorite Supporting Actor, Science Fiction", both for the Goldsman/Schumacher masterwork, "Batman and Robin".
GLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH!
OK, that's not completely true. Yeah, I'm cranky. What the hell were they thinking? Who's responsible for this? Why haven't they been shot? How could any sane human being put anything from "Batman and Robin" on their list of "Favorite" anythings? Maybe "Favorite Thing to Never Show Anyone Anywhere Ever Again". You want to know how these awards were picked? I'll tell you. And I quote:
"The winners were voted on by more than eleven million customers of the nationwide Blockbuster video chain and Planet Hollywood restaurants."
And there you go. How much more mass media, cud-chewing consumer zombie can you get than that? Not only do these people rent from Blockbuster and eat at Planet Hollywood, but they actually thought it would be cool to vote on their little award thingy. I'm not even sure it's possible for a system to be better at self- selecting morons to participate.
Lemme tell you something. I ate at Planet Hollywood once. Once. I'd won a contest. It was a cool contest. In addition to the cool things, it included brunch at Planet Hollywood. And you know what I saw there? What particular horror that would make Lovecraft need a change of underwear? A half-scale replica of an all-but- naked Sylvester Stallone, encased in lucite, hanging face-down right over my TABLE. From "Demolition Man". I swear, that thing haunts my nightmares to this day. So it doesn't surprise me so much that people who would voluntarily expose themselves (note the neat double-entendre there, folks. I ain't doing this just for my health, you know.) to that kind of display would think that "Batman and Robin" is science fiction and had anything worthwhile in it.
Ah. There's the outrage. I knew I'd left it around here somewhere.
