Reflections on Y2K and a Crappy Year on Substack
PLUS: Captain America 1990, FTNC and Eggers' Sense of Humor
In this scrapbook, I am going to discuss my thoughts on the Y2K Bug, New Year, my experience with Substack in 2024, the director’s cut of Albert Pyun’s Captain America and my thoughts on whether or not Nosferatu (2024) is meant to be funny.
Table of ContentsNew Year and Y2K Thoughts
New Year has come and gone.
It’s strange. 2025 is a quarter century after the Y2K. Anyone remember Y2K? There was this idea in the air that, for some reason, all the computers on Earth would fail because they’re not supposed to have “00” as the year in their code or something.
And that meant: Boom! The end! The apocalypse! The banks would go down, the electric grid was going to malfunction, planes were to fall out of the sky.
I remember how that New Year’s Eve, my entire family was visiting my aunt and uncle in the US. None of us were taking Y2K seriously at first. And then, we went on a trip to a supermarket and the adults got just a bit worried as it seemed almost sold out on essential supplies like water.
People were stocking up, man, and the thought became: maybe we should too, you know, just in case? I do believe I was mostly worried that I wouldn’t get to see the long-awaited hour-long Dexter’s Laboratory special called “Ego Trip,” which I think was going to premiere right at midnight on Cartoon Network. So, when it aired without any problems, it was obvious we were in the clear.*
*Given that none of the predicted mass disasters wound up happening and how untrustworthy mass media sources have proven to be, I ascribe to the opinion that the disasters were a hoax meant to generate money and/or popularity for certain individuals.
Honestly, for a Russian family like ours, the bigger, more Earth-shattering event that happened that day was the unexpected resignation of president Boris Yeltsin, who announced in his New Year’s Eve address that he was leaving six months before his term was up and that Vladimir Putin would become interim head of state until elections would be held 3 months later. That truly felt like the end of an era!
And it was a surreal experience, since we were learning about it from the United States via television broadcast. So many questions at the time. Like, why? Was there a soft coup? Was Boris’ health really that bad? Who is this Putin guy?!
Why am I talking about all this? I don’t know.
Might be because January 14 is what we call ‘Old New Year,’ plus I saw the trailer for the sci-fi movie Y2K, which looked good and brought back memories of that time period, of how weird it was. Just take a look at this hilarious Cartoon Network promo, which perfectly captured the insanity of the context:
Ah, Cartoon Network. It really was amazing back then, wasn’t it?
Honestly, I can’t think of that many movies set on or around New Year. The one that immediately comes to mind is Ghostbusters 2 (1989), where the Statue of Liberty is brought to life to battle an evil ghost painting that is powered by a river full of negative energy generated by the people of NYC being crappy to each other.
It’s a messy movie, with some ideas that are only loosely connected, though it has various inspired sequences, and a truly touching finale where New Year brings people together, generating so much combined joy and positivity that it weakens the bad guy enough for the Ghostbusters to defeat him.
The standout ‘river of sentient slime’ sequences, I’m pretty sure, inspired one of my favorite action-horror games, Parasite Eve (1998). Also, this movie had some weird sexual humor that completely went over my head when I was a kid.
Another title that comes to mind is End of Days, an action-horror film that promised viewers Arnold Schwarzennegger fighting Satan himself, who supposedly is able to escape hell around the year 2000 because “666” was really “999” inverted or something. I remember thinking it was pretty disappointing at the time, though in hindsight Gabriel Byrne’s performance as the Devil was nice.
And then, of course, there is the horror series Chris Carter had launched back in 1996 called Millennium. Its central premise was that the apocalypse was nigh and could be either religious or secular. I remember loving that show’s second season, which developed an actual story arc and mythology before literally ending the world via global pandemic in a bleak nihilistic finale that S3 would immediately undo.*
* The show was ironically canceled a few months before it got to the actual year 2000!
A Crappy Year
So, how was my 2024 as a Substack writer? My response as delivered by Pete Campbell from Mad Men:
2023 was a breakout year for me. I greatly increased my subscriber numbers and published some rather long and ambitious ‘tentpole’ articles, such as:
2024, in many ways, was the opposite of 2023. It just kept throwing curveballs at me, and life as a whole became akin to a rushed final season of many great or once-great serialized shows: stuff just keeps blowing up almost every episode but there is no breathing room whatsoever, and the quality just goes downhill.
I didn’t grow my audience nearly as much as I wanted to and while I managed to put out some good work, especially my article about the Fury Road Practical FX Myth, my consistency went out the window. It didn’t help that I started to really worry about my ‘open rate,’ which visibly diminished as my subscriber count grew.
That led me to both turn on double opt-in and try to significantly prune my email list of “inactive” subscribers, a decision I now regret. Double opt-in can be a good way to prevent bot sign-ups and fake sign-ups (when some bad actor signs someone else’s email to your newsletter without consent) but it can really slow one’s growth.
And I should’ve been more careful and strategic when pruning, as I feel I left some potential readers off the list for the wrong reasons.*
*I have discovered that there is, in fact, a way to increase your open rate without removing inactive subscribers, but that’s a whole other topic that I hope to expand on later.
Anyway, I’m hoping 2025 will be the rebound season.
If anything, I’ve learned from the mistakes I’ve made as a Substacker and hope to improve considerably. And 2025 is definitely the year I’m going paid.
I don’t know when precisely. Possibly not until the end of the Spring or beginning of Summer, as I still need to figure some things out. But it’s finally happening.
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Revisio-News: Albert Pyun’s “Captain America”
Did you know that prior to Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), there was another live-action Captain America movie released in 1990? I recall hearing about it here and there, with word being that it was a very bad low-budget effort that was best forgotten to time, much like the unreleased Roger Corman adaptation of the Fantastic Four.
What I hadn’t registered until recently was that the film was directed by Albert Pyun, a low-budget cult filmmaker that some have unfairly compared to Ed Wood. Growing up in the early 90s, I’d encountered a whole bunch of Pyun movies on cable and video, and although I never quite became a full-blown fan, I never forgot the ones I liked.
The dystopian sci-fi b-movie Cyborg (1989) was an early video favorite of mine and arguably remains one of the best JCVD vehicles.* Brain Smasher: A Love Story (1993) was a weird, fun, martial-arts romantic comedy where a bouncer tries to save a wo-man pursued by a gang of Chinese monks(?) that are hilariously mistaken for ninjas.
* It also somehow spawned a lesser though inventive sequel starring Angelina Jolie.
In my mind, Pyun’s masterpiece was Mean Guns (1997), essentially a pure action movie where a bunch of badass killers, played by the likes Christopher Lambert, face off against one another in a sealed building for a suitcase filled with money. Like his other works, it is cheap, yet stylish and AMAZING in a way that’s difficult to describe.
Pyun, sadly, almost never got true creative freedom over his films. Back in the 2010s, he sold director’s cuts of a lot of his titles on DVD and Bluray from his now defunct personal website. I unfortunately never got any of them before the sales stopped due to Pyun’s declining health.
All of this is a preamble to the fact that I’m quite excited to hear that Pyun’s director’s cut of the much maligned Captain America (1990) has now been seen and could become available to the public in a new, digitally transferred edition.
The news comes courtesy of Pyun super-fan and author Justin DeCloux, who had recently seen the director’s cut and released an amazing video about it. I highly recommend watching the whole thing: it tells you how different the director’s cut is from the theatrical, the story behind it, and why he thinks it is better.
Justin also made an extensive post about it on Letterboxd. Here’s a quote:
“For decades, Albert Pyun lugged around five 35 mm film cannisters everywhere he went. His wife Cynthia hated having them around, but Albert wouldn't let them go. If they moved, it was the first thing he grabbed. If they were living out of a tent, the cans would come with them. If they took a long road trip, the cans would be tossed in the trunk.
So, what was so important in those heavy cans?
It was Albert's original cut of CAPTAIN AMERICA. Yep, the film that negatively defined his career, the huge box office bomb, the long-standing joke as the worst superhero film of all time, and the project that led Albert's career to slide into the land of smaller and smaller budgets... He kept that thing by his side until his dying day.
Why? Because the public had never seen the version he had in those canisters. Until now. ”
I’ll be honest that I’m not entirely sure if it’s accurate that the cut hasn’t been seen until now, given that Pyun apparently held a screening of it in Las Vegas in 2011, around the time The First Avenger came out in theaters.
I have read indications that there might actually be more than one director’s cut version available though, so perhaps it wasn’t the exact same version.
In any case, I do hope that the cut DeCloux saw indeed comes out because I want to check out the early low-budget Cap movie the way Pyun intended.
FTNC Updates
As mentioned before, I have been going through a backlog and adding newsletters to the Film and Television Newsletter directory. Here are the most recent additions:
- // Mat Bradley-Tschirgi
- // Rinzy Reviews
- // // Estelle Artus
What I’m Reading/Responding to
I’ve been thinking a lot about Eggers’ Nosferatu after seeing it recently. The film was technically very impressive and Lily Rose Depp gives an amazing performance. And yet… I somehow found the film somewhat unfulfilling, even as I thought it superior to both The Northman and (especially) the overrated Lighthouse.
What really lingered in my mind long after the credits rolled though is the film’s tone, in the sense that I can’t really tell if Eggers ever intends for the movie to at any point elicit laughter. This is a very operatic, over-the-top picture, one that seems wholly committed to full-blown theatricality. And yet… there are sometimes these moments, where I wonder if it’s way too serious, way too theatrical to not be taken ironically.
The ending in particular is a bit of a puzzle for me, especially considering that it reveals Orloc in his full glory and kinda-sorta tries to present him as sexy and desirable, while at the same time emphasizing how decayed and grotesque his physical body is. All of this leads me to believe that Nosferatu may very well be an example of post-irony: a kind-of movie that can evoke emotional sincerity that is nonetheless tinged with a sense of ironic self-consciousness.*
* Though this perhaps stems from other elements than the performances – like the obvious visual references the film makes towards past and present films.
One reason I’m becoming increasingly inclined to think this way is because I’ve found more than one article arguing that Eggers’ movies are actually replete with humor, though the kind that doesn’t really call attention to itself.
Here, for example, is a quote from Joe Hoeffner’s piece in Collider from 2022:
“All three of Eggers’ movies are engaging, thrilling, and just plain fun, so long as the viewer can get on their particular wavelengths…. But in addition to atmosphere and authenticity, Eggers’ films have a secret weapon: a subtle sense of surreal humor, a taste for the absurd and unexpected that’s all the funnier for never winking at itself.”
Here is another quote from Adam Nayman’s article in the Ringer, which refers to The Witch as a ‘comedy’ and talks about The Northman leading to “belly-laughs”:
“Still, the biggest surprise in this lavish vampire drama has to do with the mysterious and reclusive Count Orlok’s facial hair, which is, as they say, a Choice—one that speaks to Eggers’s already much-ballyhooed sense of specificity, and also, perhaps, his more inscrutable sense of humor. ”
For a counter-point, here is a quote from a really well-written review of the film by my colleague Jeremy Beck, where he states:
““And there are certainly times when Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’ sumptuous remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 touchstone, dances up to the cliff’s edge of parody. But what rescues it—what turns your stifled laughter into shrieks of horror and gapes of wonder—is that it approaches its material with absolute sincerity, and without a shred of irony or detachment.””
Indeed, I’m thinking I should at some point rewatch the first three Eggers movies with all this in mind. All three texts cited here are recommended readings.
But What about you?What were you doing around Y2K? Did you think the world would end? If you saw the Y2K movie, what did you think? Any interest in the Pyun director’s cut? And does Eggers have a sense of humor? Any other thoughts? Happy Old New Year! And please,
Dear reader, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, can you please share this article with someone? It would really help me get more views and later turn this into a true business. I’d really appreciate it. Best, Mikhail
I'll go to bat for Pyun's original "Captain America" cut being better than, hm, I dunno... how about 2003's "Daredevil"? Definitely down for a longer cut.
Fromtheyardtothearthouse.substack.com
Y2K didn't happen because tens of thousands of programmers worked tirelessly to update systems across the world to make sure the bug was patched before 1/1/2000. Perhaps the panic was a little overblown, I don't think it would have been the end of the world, but there absolutely would have been massive system failures had the issue not been addressed. In many ways the panic helped create an urgency to address the issue. But it's also a boy who cried wolf thing. Most people just heard the panic and then saw nothing happen, without realizing the work that went into achieving that scenario.
Here's a pretty cool Reddit thread about the situation: https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/s/ol8HSG45LL