I had no context to recognize this at the time, but I came of age in a golden era of fantasy cinema. Some of my earliest theatrical experiences included Superman II (1981), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Return of the Jedi (1983), Ghostbusters (1984), and Back to the Future (1985). Movies like those were made, by and large, by a generation of filmmakers—notably but not exclusively Steven Spielberg and George Lucas—that had been raised on the sci-fi and fantasy offerings of 1950s B-movies and comics, and later became the first students to major in cinema studies and filmmaking; when that formal training was fused with their pulp passions, the contemporary blockbuster was born: first with Jaws (1975), then Star Wars (1977), and then Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Superman: The Movie (1978) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and The Goonies (1985). That cornucopia of imaginative fantasy—hardly an all-encompassing list, by the way—was my first exposure to the movies. Is it any wonder I was hooked for life?
Tag: The Hunger Games
You sensed it right from the start: The familiar plot machinations of The Hunger Games series weren’t there to comfort us (in their perversely dystopian way) in the latest theatrical entry, Mockingjay, Part 1. The world and characters were the same, sure, yet we found ourselves, like the protagonist herself, immediately disoriented in this third go-round; nothing about this adventure, for us or for her, could be deemed business as usual.
So, what changed?
I’ve written a great deal about how indispensable I find Blake Snyder’s ten story models, but have offered little thus far in the way of illustration. The Hunger Games series, a powerhouse big-studio franchise if ever there was one, provides an object lesson in two distinct types of Save the Cat! genres.
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