http://www.pamedia.com/
THis is the web site of Post-Apocalyptic Media - basically, all that and more dealing after the world goes 'Boom', falls over from some super-bug, the aliens show up and go 'Now, you're going to be my little bitch!', and what happens to the world afterwards.
Give it a look.
I don't know... I've always been interested in post-apocalyptic fiction.
The Stand - more the novel, VERY less so the ABC miniseries... Harold Emery Lauder as a Nazi-type and oh, did they REALLY frak up Nadine Cross... Laura San Giocomo as Nadine? Jesus, that's GOT to be the worst piece of miscasting since Mary Elizabeth Mastriantonio as Maid Marian in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves! (gags reflexively) You know who would have made a great Nadine? Lindsay Sloane, from Sabrina, The Teenage Witch (who, if she were the right age, would make a perfect Stacy Rowe for a live-action Daria film).
Jericho. Can't wait for it to come back in February.
Captain Power and The Soldiers of the Future. If you don't remember this, it ran for one season - 1987-1988. It was the work of the great J. Michael Strazinski - the big man who created my personal favorite show of all time, Babylon 5. It had the hallmarks of what makes J. Michael a hell of a creator, and you have GOT to see the last episode, when - ah, that would be telling. One thing about J. Michael is that he's always been able to elicit emotion out of, and bring a level of understanding about even his 'evil' characters. You can see this in the way he wrote Overlord, and that last episode...
Robotech. Yes, I know that Cark Macek's name in anime circles is akin to Adolf Hitler's; to all of those people, I have only one thing to say. Watch Episode Eighteen - Farewell, Big Brother. Also, any show where they damn near zero off the human race not once but THREE times, and once by the Earth military commanders themselves... well, that show deserves a chance.
Oh, yeah. Wouldn't Lynn-Minmei be PERFECT for the Lawndale High School Fashion Club?
Miracle Mile. This film about the last hour or so before nuclear war is Last Night.. the Lite version. At least somebody has hope... and the most terrifying moment of the film?
"Put down the phone... and go back to sleep."
A Boy and His Dog. Give it a chance.
Silent Running. Damn. The last shot, of the little robot maintaining the forest dome...
Fallout and its sequel, Fallout II. Oh, to have Mark II Power Armor, a couple of Gauss pistols, plenty of ammo and Stimpacks, as well as a few Super Stimpacks, some Rad-X, Radaway, Psycho, Jet and Mentats? Hello, world after the bomb! You're going to be my bitch!
Take everything I've mentioned, and walk through the Mob bars in Reno, or the Sierra Army Depot...
The Mad Max series of films. They make me smile.
The Ashes series of novels. William W. Johnstone (and his ghost-writers) had a really solid handle on Mankind after the bomb... and the last novel puts a perfect capper to it all. Bonus points for the Night People/Believers.
Resident Evil. The games or the movies... lots and lots of Zombies, and fewer and fewer humans. That asshole redneck S.T.A.R.S. officer with the cowboy hat on the roof DESERVED to get blown up - come on! You're shooting everything else that doesn't look human in the forehead and dropping in where it stands, but Nemesis comes walking around the corner with enough artillery to make Xena's nipples go harder than True Adamantium and you suddenly forgo all that 'head shot' stuff for 'center of body mass'?
Give props, though, for one very funny moment:
Deep Impact. Everyone says it's 'more realistic' than Armageddon, which came out in roughly the same time-frame... BULLSHIT! There was a time when I was thisdamnclose to becoming a reporter, and I can tell you that the reporter does not exist who could possess all of the qualities that Tea Leoni's character of Jenny Lerner had (not to mention the position she rose to) and WOULD GIVE IT ALL UP TO COMMIT SUICIDE WITH HER FATHER BY STANDING ON A BEACH AND GETTING HIT BY THE BITCH QUEEN-MOTHER OF ALL TSUNAMIS, rather than (at least) be there with a camera crew doing a live shot as to what's happening on the beach as the wave comes in!
Oh, and don't give me that 'there are some things more important than...(insert your bullshit belief here) line, either. Man is an animal, and if nothing else, will fuck his children, wife, siblings, parents or dearest friends over in order to survive, win or keep anyone else from doing the same! There's a line from the Helen/Quinn duet in the MTV series Daria's musical episode 'Daria!' that really says it all:
Coming in second wouldn't be the worst
As long as no one else was first.
Oh, yeah. I have faith in human nature, which is why I like post-apocalyptic media. It's a refreshingly honest look at humanity. Bitches and bastards who'll do anything to survive.
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Brad Hicks, one of my favorite bloggers, wrote a post called "The Politics of Survival and 'World War Z'. In it, he looks at the post-apocalyptic mythos that you have to be utterly ruthless to survive:
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/373087.html
Using a study by Xavier Maniguet on what happens when situations go ass-up, Hicks writes:
"But one of the main conventions of the survival horror genre is that unless somebody utterly callous decides early who isn't going to make it and forces the rest of the group to callously abandon at least half, preferably 3/4ths or more, of the group to immediate death, nobody at all will survive. And scientific study of survival in desperate situations shows that it's just not true. On the contrary, the people who survive the longest are the ones who show the most determination to save everybody who can possibly be saved, who err on the side of keeping the group together and alive rather than on the side of callousness, who wait until it really is inescapably obvious that someone isn't going to make it to give up on them. There are almost no genuinely awful situations that can't be made better by having more help. (emphasis mine - JB)"
After that, Hicks gets into a review of the novel World War Z, which is the sequel to the Zombie Survival Guide, and a book that I very much want to read (it answers the questions: what would Howard Dean end up doing in an world full of zombies? what would Colin Powell do? what would Ann Coulter do? -- supposedly, the characters are "disguised" but a clever person knows who they are).
Then Hicks gets into whether post-apocalyptic horror is so popular because it's the best way to talk about...Reagonomics, and the outsourcing/rightsizing world of the modern job market. After all, you have to be a ruthless bastard to survive...!
I'd be curious to know that Maniguet's argument is. The libertaroid arguments that maximum economic well-being depends upon viewing humans as individual and isolated economic agents always failed to convince me because its invalid from the standpoint of evolutionary biology: human beings are social animals, and the individual, isolated human in the state of nature is about as helpless an animal as you can get. There's a reason for the phrase "babe in woods": it's what for dinner.
Along that line of thought, I figure you need to be part of a cohesive and loyal band of folks with varied skills to survive, but that there might be an optimal group size / optimal area under control after which ruthlessness might become the better strategy. In other words, below the skill and resource threshold for making the group self sustaining, drag everybody in and gain their loyality; past that, it's a closed community. The ones who survive outside of a particular closed community will be members of other similar communities. What am I missing?
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