extending this idea: "Not all great movies win Oscars, and not all Oscar-winning movies are great." -- not all great movies are box office hits, and not all box office hits are great.
some thoughts:
It takes a long while for Quality, with a capital Q, to rise to the top
Blade Runner (1982) was a commercial dud (so is the sequel, 2049), and the reception was polar. But who can deny Blade Runner's influence and status today - spawned the cyberpunk genre, shaped modern films, and inspired innovations too.
I feel like popularity has a half life. a fast decay means its a fad. But if it sticks around for a while, there's probably something inherently good about it.
There's something I wonder about with the 70+ year artists just reaching their peak—the 75 year artist gets to judge the 35 year artist, but not the reverse. People evolve and change. Is the 75 year old artist really *better*, or do they just have different preferences, and so prefer what they are doing now to their earlier work? (As a huge fan of Ran, I guess I have to agree with Kurosawa in preferring his later work, but still...)
I liked your point about video games: it tracks with several things I've learned about my favorite games over time.
For example, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom involves a lot of aerial challenges which are extremely fun. While I was playing one of them I had a spark of familiarity and realized with a start that it was nearly identical to one of the challenges in the game Pilotwings, which was one of the first games released for the Super Nintendo, 34 years ago. Nintendo had been revisiting and refining that formula for decades.
Another example. For a lot of people, Final Fantasy 6 was a huge leap forward in terms of graphical capability from Final Fantasy 4 and 5. One of the big differences was the sprite size: FF4 and FF5 used older-style sprites, where your characters occupied a 16x16 pixel box. FF6 used a 16x32 pixel box, double the size, which fundamentally altered the scale of every environment in the game--larger character boxes implied that the viewer was closer to the character, visually, so the rest of the environment could be made to look more "zoomed in" and detailed.
Most Americans experienced the jump from FF4 to FF6 as a massive leap forward in graphical capability. But on closer inspection there was the intermediate Secret of Mana in America, and also an entry in Squaresoft's Romancing Saga series, released in Japan only, which were actively experimenting with the larger character size. I remember one of them being quite rough -- it was jarring to see graphics that were technically similar to FF6 but that looked so unpolished.
Squaresoft did something similar again when they created Chrono Trigger, moving up to a 32x48 sized character box (I may be wrong about the dimensions, but they were still larger). So, you can see this evolution of their work across time, artistically, as they continuously pushed the envelope.
In comparison, though, FF7 seems to me almost impossible to explain. As best as I can tell, they made that whole leap almost all at once, and it is almost undisputably the best game in the series. But even then you can see how they took their lessons from that game and applied it to all of the others that followed.
all great notes! thanks for sharing. i would observe though that while FF7 definitely made some tremendous leaps, it did also build very much on many elements from earlier FFs in terms of narrative, combat, etc, which I imagine kept them from going off the rails. still, a tremendous accomplishment and one I am now even more curious to dig into the details of
It speaks to the cat/mouse game a creator has with the stories they want to tell vs technical capabilities to do so. He definitely stands out in the world of video games as someone who’s had longevity due to taste.
On a different note, while holding the ideas of popular/critically acclaimed, I was thinking “system 1 vs system 2!” It’s not mutually exclusive and great work needs to hit both, but I wonder if some works take more time for system 2 to activate fully which leads to the awards misses.
Incredibly fun format to read, like 7 big ideas each with the tagline "the details are left as an exercise for the reader, for now".
"If you reintroduce something good into the commons, you are, from the perspective of the audience, just as valuable as the people who actually made the thing." - big fan of this bit
Also TBT to watching Russell Peters on youtube in the 2000s. Like you said, you had to be there to understand how there really was nothing like it at the time. I remember me and all of my immigrant friends _dying_ at his Indian dad stuff, or the $34.50 bit.
I had other comments i shared on a substack note and will probably try putting on twitter too for more discussions, but something I'd like to point out here is about you creating work as a 34 year old artist writer.
There is an aspect you might not be able to see from within your perspective, but me as a viewer can, and that is: how fun it is to follow and engage with an ongoing project, which is you as a 34 year old artist.
Aside from it being fun, there is another aspect: it is immensely enriching to have sources of reliably consistent output on anything. I always wish to find other voices like you on different subjects.
As an example, a historian-writer i follow on twitter is the number one source on horror in turkish folklore. They have 10+ yrs of reliable output on what they're focused on and i know where to go when i want more of that.
Same thing goes for videogames. There's a game i play called tf2 which has different classes. On YouTube, there is a channel devoted to one specific class. I know where to go when i want to watch more of that action.
Same thing with you—yes the good work might be yet to come (though a lot of it has come already)—yet the process towards "year 74" is quite enriching for the audience already. They know they have a reliable source for opinion pieces on media, on the internet, and being yourself on the internet; so they can always tap in and enrich their worldview.
extending this idea: "Not all great movies win Oscars, and not all Oscar-winning movies are great." -- not all great movies are box office hits, and not all box office hits are great.
some thoughts:
It takes a long while for Quality, with a capital Q, to rise to the top
Blade Runner (1982) was a commercial dud (so is the sequel, 2049), and the reception was polar. But who can deny Blade Runner's influence and status today - spawned the cyberpunk genre, shaped modern films, and inspired innovations too.
Cohen's Hallelujah was not really recognised until Jeff Buckley's version was re-released, and that went through different covers from different artists over 2decades! (source: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/hallelujah)
I feel like popularity has a half life. a fast decay means its a fad. But if it sticks around for a while, there's probably something inherently good about it.
I had been thinking of including a bit about Hallelujah too! Definitely plan on writing about it. Agree with everything you're saying here
There's something I wonder about with the 70+ year artists just reaching their peak—the 75 year artist gets to judge the 35 year artist, but not the reverse. People evolve and change. Is the 75 year old artist really *better*, or do they just have different preferences, and so prefer what they are doing now to their earlier work? (As a huge fan of Ran, I guess I have to agree with Kurosawa in preferring his later work, but still...)
I liked your point about video games: it tracks with several things I've learned about my favorite games over time.
For example, Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom involves a lot of aerial challenges which are extremely fun. While I was playing one of them I had a spark of familiarity and realized with a start that it was nearly identical to one of the challenges in the game Pilotwings, which was one of the first games released for the Super Nintendo, 34 years ago. Nintendo had been revisiting and refining that formula for decades.
Another example. For a lot of people, Final Fantasy 6 was a huge leap forward in terms of graphical capability from Final Fantasy 4 and 5. One of the big differences was the sprite size: FF4 and FF5 used older-style sprites, where your characters occupied a 16x16 pixel box. FF6 used a 16x32 pixel box, double the size, which fundamentally altered the scale of every environment in the game--larger character boxes implied that the viewer was closer to the character, visually, so the rest of the environment could be made to look more "zoomed in" and detailed.
Most Americans experienced the jump from FF4 to FF6 as a massive leap forward in graphical capability. But on closer inspection there was the intermediate Secret of Mana in America, and also an entry in Squaresoft's Romancing Saga series, released in Japan only, which were actively experimenting with the larger character size. I remember one of them being quite rough -- it was jarring to see graphics that were technically similar to FF6 but that looked so unpolished.
Squaresoft did something similar again when they created Chrono Trigger, moving up to a 32x48 sized character box (I may be wrong about the dimensions, but they were still larger). So, you can see this evolution of their work across time, artistically, as they continuously pushed the envelope.
In comparison, though, FF7 seems to me almost impossible to explain. As best as I can tell, they made that whole leap almost all at once, and it is almost undisputably the best game in the series. But even then you can see how they took their lessons from that game and applied it to all of the others that followed.
J
all great notes! thanks for sharing. i would observe though that while FF7 definitely made some tremendous leaps, it did also build very much on many elements from earlier FFs in terms of narrative, combat, etc, which I imagine kept them from going off the rails. still, a tremendous accomplishment and one I am now even more curious to dig into the details of
Have you seen Hideo Kojima’s talk on the evolution of Metal Gear? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq1Jyr6ffU
It speaks to the cat/mouse game a creator has with the stories they want to tell vs technical capabilities to do so. He definitely stands out in the world of video games as someone who’s had longevity due to taste.
On a different note, while holding the ideas of popular/critically acclaimed, I was thinking “system 1 vs system 2!” It’s not mutually exclusive and great work needs to hit both, but I wonder if some works take more time for system 2 to activate fully which leads to the awards misses.
Incredibly fun format to read, like 7 big ideas each with the tagline "the details are left as an exercise for the reader, for now".
"If you reintroduce something good into the commons, you are, from the perspective of the audience, just as valuable as the people who actually made the thing." - big fan of this bit
Also TBT to watching Russell Peters on youtube in the 2000s. Like you said, you had to be there to understand how there really was nothing like it at the time. I remember me and all of my immigrant friends _dying_ at his Indian dad stuff, or the $34.50 bit.
but have you heard of two trenchcoats inside of a kid? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpMEWBisteM
indeed I have, as I am a wHiMsY boy!
I had other comments i shared on a substack note and will probably try putting on twitter too for more discussions, but something I'd like to point out here is about you creating work as a 34 year old artist writer.
There is an aspect you might not be able to see from within your perspective, but me as a viewer can, and that is: how fun it is to follow and engage with an ongoing project, which is you as a 34 year old artist.
Aside from it being fun, there is another aspect: it is immensely enriching to have sources of reliably consistent output on anything. I always wish to find other voices like you on different subjects.
As an example, a historian-writer i follow on twitter is the number one source on horror in turkish folklore. They have 10+ yrs of reliable output on what they're focused on and i know where to go when i want more of that.
Same thing goes for videogames. There's a game i play called tf2 which has different classes. On YouTube, there is a channel devoted to one specific class. I know where to go when i want to watch more of that action.
Same thing with you—yes the good work might be yet to come (though a lot of it has come already)—yet the process towards "year 74" is quite enriching for the audience already. They know they have a reliable source for opinion pieces on media, on the internet, and being yourself on the internet; so they can always tap in and enrich their worldview.
To this day, I will randomly exclaim to my friends "you have a room!?" Absolute classic!