So there’s an apocalypse where the Earth dies, and then we, the desolate survivors, live in the land of post apocalyptia. It is the permanent darkness of bleak hopeless despair, and nothing can change it. But lately the post-apocalypse is getting brighter and sunnier with the help from corporate sponsors. It’s the Buy’N'Large post apocalyptia. Not only are our wastelands pocketed with civilization living rape-free, but the genre once reserved for paranoid alarmist has blossomed into pop corporate art. Movies like The Book of Eli that are as genuine as the Pepsi logo.
Like many bad corporate things, it started in the 1980s. Before then Orson Welles scared the shit out of Americans with the coming Martian horde destroying Earth. Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers were laughing about how it was all going to happen in Dr. Strangelove, and A Boy and His Dog let us know that no matter how dark it got, it was always funny. This was before Reaganites trickled down, and when the Rooskies were still terrifying.
The catalyst to it was Mad Max, and The Road Warrior; the quintessential post-apocalypse westerns. Both continue to influence post-apocalypse fiction, but more importantly: the films cost approx. 200,000 and 2mil to make, but earned 9mil and 24.6mil respectively in the United States. George Miller had created a franchise overflowing with success that could be easily replicated at a low budget.
This is 1981, one year after Reagan’s election and the introduction of Reaganomics. Americans were feeling 10.8% unemployment and stagflation. The average American’s spending power steadily decreased through the early and mid 1980s. The conditions were ideal for apocalypticism. Reagan’s war rhetoric and increasing tensions with Russia had people so scared couples weren’t having children out of fear of the future.
But the apocalypse was going to become something Kevin Costner or Kurt Russell saved on a biweekly basis. In previous decades where roughly 10 post-apocalypse films were made per decade, the 80s saw a tremendous boom. A total of 56 films, including the lowest budget trash feasible, all jumped on the nuclear holocaust bandwagon. Why? As reliable as any historical trend, movie going actually increases dramatically during fiscal crises.
With a guarantee that movie going will increase, regardless of the quality, studios only had to look to George Miller’s success. They would, and it would produce an abomination of film-going: Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. First American financed Mad Max film, with catchy songs provided by Tina Turner, sponsored by a New Coca Cola and rated PG-13 for teens everywhere. It was the nadir of the transformation to corporate art. A film specifically designed to reach the largest audience base by reducing to the lowest common denominator. This trend would continue until the early 90s, but largely taper off even before Kevin Costner’s over-budgeted flop, “The Postman”.
After all: the Cold War had ended, and the economy was booming throughout the 90s, it wasn’t reasonable any longer to assume traditional apocalypse films would be the big seller they once were. But Bruce Campbell had yet to be cast in a Post-Apoc film, and he was unable to herald the end of the genre. It took until 1992 when he starred in MINDWARP for people to finally start getting the picture; except for Kevin Costner. Kevin Costner never catches on.
But history is like a river, and as time goes on it repeats itself. So with the second civil unrest and the economic depression, the market was again ripe for this noir genre. Movie studios need to keep making money, and formula flops like “I Love you Beth Cooper” and “National Lampoon’s Titties Flopping About [UNRATED EDITION!]” weren’t quite bringing in the crowd as they once did. It was the dying of the age of Dane Cookism.
Again a Republican President and Congress had frozen the minimum wage in a time warp, inflation was faster than the median growth, and a war with a global enemy had developed when the next attack was anyone’s guess. Not surprisingly, movie-going went up 13% in 2008, and domestic box office profits hit an all time high. This doesn’t mean that Movie Studios aren’t gambling every time they make a movie. They need to find a guaranteed winner.
But before the corporate art swill could start coming down our throats faster than feeding troughs, the artist had to bring it back. Danny Boyle would with 28 Days Later and start a revolution. Zombie flicks had always been wildly popular outside of the U.S., but 28 Days‘ was both a plague and zombie apocalypse. Coincidentally right after Boyle’s fiction, The Zombie Survival Guide came out to pop success. The new post-apocalypse genre had been given a golden chalice of rebirth in the living dead. While George Romero gave an original life to Zombism, Boyle created something else: blitzkrieg zombies the audience loved to fear, and The Survival Guide gave the answers on how to beat it.
Entire cultures developed around zombie contingency plans; how to collect rations, find hide-outs, and transform houses into war forts. The Apocalypse was back, baby, and movie studios green-lighting greats like: the remade Day of the Dead, Children of Men, The Road, and even Wall-E. This is how prevalent post-apocalypticism was in society: a children’s movie was made for it, and kudos to it because Wall-E is absolutely brilliant, and is the first ever Garbage Apocalypse.
Sadly, every golden era must end and in cinema it ends quickly. The Happenings was written on the wall long before 2012, as The Day After Tomorrow wasn’t looking too good for Cloverfield. The Statue of Liberty was going down more than Jenna Jameson. Studios began genetically designing movies from birth to bring in as many box office dollars as possible. Despite the decay we won’t see the last of the Survivalist Zombie Post Apocalypse film for awhile, but at least the herald of the end of this insanity is here at last: AdultSwim Games’ Radioactive Teddy Bear Zombies.
Yes, we’ve reached a veritable age of wisdom. We’ve overloaded the capacity of Zombie Stripper mild porno flicks and video game entertainment. Zombies will thrive as low-budget sex comedies, and apocalypse fiction will fade away again. National Lampoon already made their post-apoc flick, The Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell, and it’s only getting worse. To bring back the post apocalypse for much longer we’re going to need to bring a new kind of life into them.
Now there’s a few genres of apocalypse: you got your nuclear alien robot zombie monster virus apocalypse, and pretty much everyone’s been going on from there. So I propose that the next great post-apocalypse film will be the radioactive super virus that destroys all life except for those that the robot aliens from the future resurrect into a new world order lead by zombie Ronald Reagan, who must free his new people from the shackles of their alien fathers.
I’ve been collecting backers while you’ve been reading all of this. It certainly can’t be worse than Mad Max 4: Fury Road.
Nice post. I would like to elaborate on the point of people deciding not to have children. I would love it if people continued with their trend of not having children. Still it’s almost always the intelligent, responsible people, that choose not to have children because of concern for their future. Irresponsible people (two old supervisors come to mind) joke openly about how they didn’t plan on having any of their children. You are all paying for it in your tuition, taxes etc. We need a way to reward dumb people for not having children, or just to get rid of dumb people. We can try to convince Zombies to eat the dumb first. Perhaps the intelligent can spray the dumb with brain sauce before zombie Reagan and his minions are in full swing and then we’ll blast the corpses into the sun. We’ll call it “The Marching Morons meet Zombie Reagan.”
Speaking of children: this being the reduced version I actually removed a lot of non-essential references exampling the proliferation of post-apoc fiction.
And as such, I removed the reference to “Thundarr the Barbarian” which in hindsight I feel like I should re-include. Targeting children with imagery of the end of world certainly is a powerful message.
But again, only in the 80′s and late 2000′s when this trend was hitting an apex was there post-apoc fiction for children. Also in 1990, “Crystalis” was released and is far as I can tell, the first console Post-Apoc game.
Tina Turner will always be a legend in music history.~;*