T.V. Digest #21 Kicks off the Scrapbook line
December 2024 Posts and reflections
Happy New Year! This is the 21st issue of what is typically an ongoing monthly-ish series that I like to call Mikhail’s Textual Variations Digest, aka MTVD, for short. It includes links to my recent posts, as well as some additional related thoughts and notes.
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The Digest
December 12
This was the first installment of what I like to call the “Scrapbook” series, which I’m positioning as a subcategory of the VARIATIONS newsletter. For me, it was an opportunity to start writing and publishing a little faster by making the goals I set for myself a tad easier. In such posts, I hope to gather all the stuff that doesn’t normally fit into other newsletters, like film/TV reviews, brief thoughts I’ve had about this or that topic, a link to nice article I’d read recently, cut material from larger essays, comments on recent developments in media or film revision, etc.
For instance, I knew I wanted to talk about Venom 3, but then I also simply had to respond to the noise that was being stirred up by the El Mayimbe article about the so-called “death” of the Sony-verse, and here I felt I had the freedom to do that, without needing to worry about how it was going to fit in with everything else. Making these has creatively re-energized me and so I plan on publishing a lot more of them on T.V. going forward. Hopefully, this year I’ll be able to make that 52-week undisrupted run.
December 19
For a little while now, I’ve wanted to talk about the sexual undertones of Alien Resurrection, a movie that I started out liking, then wrote off, then came back around to loving following a recent rewatch. I don’t think that would’ve been quite enough to make for a satisfying essay in and of tiself, especially as the subject already had been tackled. But it made perfect sense to include it in a scrapbook article, along with my thoughts on poor Kraven. (I’ve been encouraged to write a defense article of this movie, which is actually great, so I hope to do indeed make it at some point soon.)
I’m still figuring out a proper format for this series, as you can tell from the title and image. In this case, I thought of having a picture with an issue number but I might not stick to that in the future. I’m really into using .gifs these days.
December 24
X-Men to this day remains one of my favorite superhero movies.
I’d been thinking about writing about the canceled alternate “1.5 Cut” of the film (which I’d known about as I was an avid reader of DVDFile.com before it went downhill) for some time but never really got around to it until now.
Initially, I didn’t think there was going to be enough material for a standalone post, so I designed it as a section of a larger Scrapbook article. However, as I found more and more material to draw on in the course of research, the section grew until I realized it was substantial enough to indeed work as an article all by itself. I’m really happy with how it turned out and the response to it has gone beyond my expectations.
December 31
So, I was going to do a relatively brief Revisio-News article about the controversy surrounding It’s A Wonderful Life, which erupted on Twitter after writer Germain Lussier posted a now viral tweet about the missing Pottersville sequence. Many people were understandably upset that such a beloved film was being presented in this way, with the loss of the Pottersville sequence ruining what it was about.
Unfortunately, as tends to happen, folks started jumping to conclusions and the media picked it up, distorting reality even further. Before long, the internet was filled with half-baked takes about how “Amazon butchered a classic” to make it ‘less dark,’ apparently going by the synopsis of the abridged edition.
All one had to do though was look at the ‘studio’ listed on the Amazon page for the abridged edition or check the end credits to see that Amazon was not responsible for making it. Rather, a colorization company called Legend Films was.
My research led me to discover that the edit was really made in order to circumvent whatever secondary copyright restrictions existed after the movie fell into public domain in 1974, and that it wasn’t the first or the last time someone tried to exploit the original version’s copyright situation. Of course, this also meant the article kept growing until it unexpectedly turned into a tentpole piece!
I’m hoping this becomes a go-to article for people confused about why the abridged edition exists and clears up any misinformation currently perpetuated on the web.
But what do you think?Please let me know in the comments what your favorite article is of this December round-up. What really appealed to you? Do you think I should do more modest length, yet informative posts like the X-Men article, for instance?