none of you chumps reminded me but here we go anyway nearly a decade later. the phantom empire is a film serial from 1935 (a film serial is basically kind of like a tv show with weekly episodes but they released it in a movie theater before the main feature) with gene autry in his first starring role. gene autry was a popular country singer in the 1930s, and this role is what cemented him as cinema’s “singing cowboy”. he plays a version of himself as the owner of the “radio ranch”, which he runs as a dude ranch but is also where he sings for his radio show. for reasons i don’t remember, if he ever misses a single episode of the radio show he will lose the ranch. enter the badguys, who try to make this happen so they can get control of the ranch, which they want because it’s built above a giant deposit of radium, which they want to get rich off of. what they don’t know is that underneath the radium is a secret, super-advanced civilization that has flourished underground for 10,000 years. there’s also some teen sidekicks and a bunch of side business i don’t remember because it was close to 20 years ago that i watched it. anyway my main point is that
movies have always been made as a product and the final quality of that product is irrelevant to the money people behind the scenes 95% of the time as long as they’re able to get theater owners to buy them, so given that framework i prefer movies that are stupid and bonkers because they were just churning out whatever they could as cheaply and quickly as possible in order to have something to sell, rather than bloated expensive horseshit that somehow costs $250 billion despite looking like dogshit and is all just the same dumb focus-tested superhero crap over and over and over again; and
the robots in the underground civilization have hat brims built into their heads:
Fuck that post going around saying “you can have coffee in your story without justifying it :) you don’t need to explain everything :)” I want, no, I DEMAND a fully researched ethnobotanical paper on every single food item in your work, if you don’t explain to me where did potatoes come from in your fantasy setting or don’t explain how the industry of coffee works over interstellar distances with full detail you are doing things wrong and I personally hate you and I hate your stupid story, fuck you
Why are your stupid little wizards and knights eating potato stew in your dumb European middle ages fantasy world. Where did they get potatoes from. Where is the center of domestication of potatoes, do you have a fantasy Andean civilization? What are the social and economic consequences of having such a calorie rich crop in cold climates. I don’t care about “themes” or “enemies to lovers with found family”, I didn’t ask about that. Where does your idiot space captain gets their shitty coffee from. Is it imported from Earth? Are there coffee growing worlds? Is it an alien species replacement with the same name? What are the social consequences of that? Don’t try to change the subject, I’ll stop pointing the gun when I want, I’m trying to have a conversation here,
