Noel Murray

With ‘Leatherface’ hitting theaters, what are the best and worst ‘TCM’s? We rank them all right here.

By sheer chance, last week I spent five days at Disney World with my son’s high school choir, at the same time that Animal Kingdom officially opened its new “Pandora - The World of Avatar” area. Our group was slated to go to Animal Kingdom on Memorial Day, and I was eager to see how Disney had turned James Cameron’s 2009 prog-rock/science-fiction/eco-propaganda experiment into a real-world habitat. So on the morning before our designated day, I opened up the “My Disney Experience” app on my phone to check out the wait times. About forty minutes after the park opened, the line for the “Na’vi River Journey” ride was already three hours long. And the wait for “Avatar Flight of Passage?” Four hours.

Some of the most popular movies and TV shows of all time are based on true stories or pieces of literature that have been adapted multiple times. “Premakes” looks at the similarities and differences between a modern classic and one of the lesser-known works that beat it to the marketplace.

Some of the most popular movies of all time are based on true stories or pieces of literature that have actually been adapted before. “Premakes” looks at the similarities and differences between a classic film and the lesser-known work that beat it to the marketplace.

Batman made his first comic book appearance in 1939, but it wasn’t until 1972 that the Mego Corporation got the bright idea to mass-produce a line of toys featuring the superhero and all his gadgets, vehicles, sidekicks, and adversaries. Ever since then, the character has been a staple of the toy aisle, even during the years when his comics weren’t selling so well.

The musical never completely died as a movie genre, but it did lay dormant for a good long while throughout the 1980s and ’90s, with only the occasional throwback like Pennies From Heaven, Newsies, or Everyone Says I Love You popping up, like an old memory. Back then, the movie business largely conceded its tradition of song-and-dance to Disney cartoons and MTV, assuming — wrongly — that the idea of flesh-and-blood actors breaking into big numbers in the middle of narrative feature films had become too cornball for the modern mass audience.

Horror is one of the most flexible film genres, encompassing everything from the broadly fantastical to the disturbingly real. Because of that, it’s sometimes hard to nail down exactly what belongs on a “best horror” round-up and what doesn’t. Undoubtedly, genre aficionados will quibble about what’s on and what’s off the list below, not just because of differences of opinion over quality, but because of disagreements over definition.

Given how much space physical media takes up, it’s hard for movie buffs to say no to the great promise of “cloud storage,” and the idea that we could summon anything we want to watch with just a couple of clicks. But so far, reality hasn’t matched the hype. Streaming services have been focused on exclusives and original programming, to the extent that the only way to have access to everything available is to spend hundreds of dollars a month on subscription fees. Meanwhile, older films keep disappearing from the digital archives; and even items that cinephiles “own” sometimes become inaccessible whenever software updates or a site shutters.

For hundreds of years, we lived in a world where clowns were popularly understood to be funny and whimsical ... or, at the least, not absolutely freaking terrifying. Pop stars sang songs like “Everybody Loves a Clown” and “Send in the Clowns.” Parents hired entertainers in colorful satin outfits to do magic tricks and make balloon animals at their children’s birthday parties. Ronald McDonald sold us hamburgers. Emmett Kelly and Red Skelton were TV staples. We had a tacit cultural agreement not just to tolerate clowns, but to look forward to having them around.

Some say the world will end in fire; others, in ice. But whichever way we go, we can take comfort from knowing that once civilization slides into dystopia, some screenwriter will distill our downfall into a few sentences at the start of a movie.