Lega-sequels are all the rage these days. Any reasonably popular movie or television franchise is going to get one, it is only a matter of time. Most recently, a Days of Thunder sequel of all things has been announced. In 2026, the proliferation of revivals of media entities that were popular decades ago is indicative of a decline in creativity and risk within the whole industry and the regurgitative properties of late-stage capitalism in general. It is comical how far the billionaire moguls who run these corporations and don’t care a lick for art will go just to avoid making something new, convinced that a dedicated fanbase exists for every modestly popular thing of the last forty years and that will be what compels them to engage with this product and help it turn a profit. Legacy sequels have been around for ages though, back to times when there wasn’t so naked a cynicism around them. Return to Oz , The Color of Money , 2010: The Year We Make Contact -not all good, but they ende...
If you’re a certain age and certain breed of millennial, you may remember a short film broadcast on Adult Swim in 2014 that afterwards went viral called Too Many Cooks . It was a fantastic, hilarious, deeply disturbing and surreal parody of cheesy and saccharine TV intros of the 1980s, that becomes more deranged the further along it goes. One of the notable aspects of the short is characters becoming aware that they are trapped within a rigid and (deceptively) wholesome media reality, and it is that theme that its director Casper Kelly brought with him to his feature debut Buddy , which essentially plays the same gimmick but against the context of vaguely ‘90s children’s television. Kelly is not the first person to conjure up a dark interpretation of children’s media (hell Robot Chicken was doing it on Adult Swim long before even Too Many Cooks came around). Many adult millennials have joked over the years about how freaky in retrospect things like Teletubbies , Barney & Friends ...