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Gratuitous Trailer Breakdown: GOOSEBUMPS and the Challenge of Capitalizing on Nostalgia

Ok, you’ve had some time to geek out over the nostalgia-gasm that is the new trailer for Goosebumps, right? You’ve splooshed and boi-oi-oinged to the barrage of imagery straight from the pages of R.L. Stine‘s landmark, commercially record-breaking, critically-null epic chronicle of that which lurks beneath the sink and the seemingly mundane life of every kid born between 1983 and 1988 (my apologies to the precocious and the held-back). Read More

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Gratuitous Trailer Breakdown: The Return of WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER and the Internet Age of Cult

It’s here! Fourteen years later, we finally return to Camp Firewood (unless you count the 50 or 60 times you’ve watched Wet Hot American Summer as “returning” – which I most certainly do.) In 2001, the parody of 1980s summer-camp-sploitation movies that no one asked for (and if they did they would have asked about twelve years earlier) debuted at Sundance to four sold out crowds and zero buyers. Eventually it was released in approximately  30 cities, made approximately zero money, and was pretty much ignored to death. But that is how legends are born (isn’t it?).

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