Continuing the thread from yesterday, I’ve been doing a review of notable genre mash-ups. I have just started watching (for the first time) the premiere season of Veronica Mars<\/i>, an excellent mash-up of “High school drama” meets “Film noir detective”.<\/p>\n
It’s a show that follows in a continuous thread of great mash-ups that have woven their way through decades of popular culture. Immediately before VM, you can see the influence of Buffy<\/i>, and of course immediately after VM you can see the influence upon Rian Johnson’s insanely brilliant Brick<\/i>. <\/p>\n
All of this makes me wonder: Are some cross-genre mixes inherently better than others? Or could you mix any<\/i> two genres together successfully, if you really knew what you were doing?<\/p>\n
Somewhere there is a game \/ challenge here. Get a group of great writers in a room together and pick two genres at random out of a fishbowl. Right then and there they need to write a treatment, be it “Beauty contest” meets “Police comedy” (I think we all know how that turned out) or “Killer clowns” meets “Star crossed lovers” (that one, I think we are still waiting for).<\/p>\n
Maybe the very incongruity of the challenge would be a source of inspiration. After all, a film that was essentially a mash-up of “Western” meets “Space Opera” wasn’t at all an obvious choice before it led to the most successful cinema franchise of all time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Continuing the thread from yesterday, I’ve been doing a review of notable genre mash-ups. I have just started watching (for the first time) the premiere season of Veronica Mars, an excellent mash-up of “High school drama” meets “Film noir detective”. It’s a show that follows in a continuous thread of great mash-ups that have woven … Continue reading “Optimality of genre mash-ups”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17041"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17041"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17046,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17041\/revisions\/17046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}