I've always found 'meets' descriptions to be a necessary ugliness in marketing. You know the sort: describing Kung Fu Hustle as "David Zucker meets The Shaw Brothers", or Serenity as "John Wayne meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer on the Millenium Falcon." I always cringe when I see those sorts of phrases in advertising -- they compliment neither subject nor object of comparison.
The other danger to them is the lack of focus. In 2004, I tried writing a novel entitled "The Quoxcerpt", and I had pitched it to myself as "Saturday Night Fever meets Indiana Jones". Awesome like a glee bomb, right?
Unfortunately, it put me in a situation familiar to all Canadians: defining my identity by what it resembles, then trying to prove that it doesn't. In the end, the novel turned into "Xanadu meets Cory Doctorow", which wasn't quite the same thing.
And yet, here I go again. A concept so bizarre that I can't turn down the challenge of writing it: The Secret of NIMH meets Godzilla.
I have no idea how this is going to turn out, but I'm definitely enjoying the research -- in addition to the horrible, wonderful movies, I've bought copies of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Watership Down, and an undergraduate textbook on parasitology.
Don't put that glee bomb away just yet.
2 comments:
Another Wigu fan? Huzzah! I assume you know that Jeff is doing strips again on MWF, but I won't assume that you've seen the frame I made for my Bogeys poster.
(I had a lot of free time when I was leaving up in the Yukon.)
I've been reading Wigu since it was an acronym, but I've never seen anything like that frame. Great job!
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