An Open Letter to Toontown

November 20, 2011

Toontown City Council, c/o Cloverfield Development Co.

Acme Avenue & Avery Alley

Toontown, CA 90@#!

Dear Toons,

Well, gang, I just watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit again, this time for an online series called "Fixing a Hole." (You remember holes, those convenient black discs you carry around in your pockets, portable escape hatches when you're in a pickle. Incidentally, how much those go for nowadays?). Anyway, the movie was a delight as always; though the climax is a bit drawn-out, the appearance of a one-dimensional Judge Doom, crushed and cackling like some maniacal cross between Johnny Paper and Johnny Rotten, is well worth the wait.

I dug that, and I laughed along with Roger, cringed for Baby Herman (somebody tell that middle-aged infant about Viagra, or better yet, don't), and marveled at Bob Hoskins' ability to play it straight even as he was acting against thin ai-  er, I mean, against real, live Toons who must have been rather intimidating “in the flesh.” And Jessica Rabbit. Oh Jessica Rabbit. With her in their extended family, it’s no wonder the fluffy-tailed little mammals are so eager to breed.

New Age 1987 - 1990 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 26

Twenty-sixth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films

(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)


View "Chapter 26: New Age"

New Age

There was something in the air. Perhaps it was the breeze of "Glasnost" spreading outward from Russia, as the Soviet government once hoped Communism itself would. Maybe it was the end of the Reagan era in America, with a restless populace hoping to move away from the dominant spirit of hardheaded materialism (well-represented in today's second clip). Or it could have been generational - after all, these were the years when the baby boomers, onetime youthful rebels now on the cusp of middle age, with families, mortgages, and careers, came into their own, culturally speaking.

The engineers of pop culture are always going to be people between about thirty-five and fifty-five and the boomers were just entering that age group. Sure enough, more than half the filmmakers in this chapter were born between 1946 and 1954 - and most likely this new, entirely postwar generation brought a new perspective to film. Anyway, for whatever reason, there was a loosening, a freshness, and a spirit of wondrous inquiry to cinema, television, and pop culture in general in the late eighties and well into the early nineties. You could call it a mood of curious mysticism.