Mass layoffs continue to be a tragic trend, major releases like Skull and Bones and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League are floundering, and hardware and software delays continue to raise questions about what we can safely look forward to. The industry is in rough shape, and its problems can no longer be disguised by a steady stream of major new releases as has been the case in recent years. If anything, the quickly declining quality and quantity of those major new releases are causing more gamers to wonder what is happening and how things are so bad.

As the industry’s console manufacturers and Triple-A studios scramble to find answers to all those questions, hope has emerged in somewhat surprising places. So far, the 2024 game of the year race is being led by unexpected titles like Helldivers 2, Palworld, Balatro, Pacific Drive, and Last Epoch.

Though those titles vary wildly in terms of their genres, gameplay, and narratives, they all have three crucial things in common. None of them ranked high among the most anticipated games of 2024 at the start of the year (if people know about them at all), each has been wildly successful, and they are all priced below the increasingly common Triple-A new release MSRP of $70. For that matter, they’re all priced below the formerly standard Triple-A MSRP of $60. Hell, you can buy both Helldivers 2 and Palworld for $70 or less.

I hesitate to call these games “budget” titles, even if that description is largely relative to the rising cost of major new releases. That word often carries a negative connotation that major companies have historically been all too happy to exploit. Along with the usual implications of inferiority comes the shame of the suggestion you can’t afford a more expensive product or that you feel the need to celebrate the lower cost of something in the first place.

But let’s be honest. A prolonged period of inflation and long-term economic issues coming home to roost have made the modern $70 game an increasingly tough sell. It’s not just a matter of having the money or not having the money. As rising prices force more people to view art and entertainment as just another product, more and more people demand reliability and consistency from them on some level.

The problem is that everyone has reasonably similar expectations of how a high-end microwave or smartphone should function. That shouldn’t be the case for video games, yet studios have spent years conditioning consumers to believe “this is what a top-of-the-line video game should look and play like” regardless of whether or not that game ends up being more functional than thrilling.

That’s what makes the sudden rise of these $40 and under phenomenons a magical (and potentially significant) moment for gamers. It’s incredible to be able to save money on a great game. Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you something. What makes these particular games special, though, isn’t just their lower price points but what those lower price points (and therefore lower budgets) allowed their developers to do.

Palworld is a survival game that looks (and sometimes plays) like a questionable Pokémon rip-off. Yet, it also doesn’t take the power of that franchise’s name for granted and instead aims to offer the kind of experience the mainline Pokémon games have often failed to provide to long-time fans.

Helldivers 2 does not look like a Triple-A game and is certainly more punishing than many such titles would ever dare to be. Yet, it is so much fun to play that people find themselves coming back to it simply because it offers a good time that can’t easily be found in larger experiences.

Last Epoch lacks Diablo 4‘s bells and whistles and action-focused accessibility. Yet, more and more who play it are discovering that it offers the kind of substantial ARPG experience they never knew they wanted from Diablo 4 until that game failed to provide it.

“Discovery” is the most important idea here. Higher prices for products make it riskier to be wrong about those products. These lower-cost games are making it easier for people to risk being wrong for the chance to discover something they truly love.

Games like Helldivers 2 and Palworld may not be for everyone (and they had to sacrifice a lot of bells to get where they are), but they are giving people something they couldn’t find elsewhere in titles that have grown too big to be anything less than broadly appealing. Even better, these cheaper titles are offering that while featuring few (or none) of the microtransactions that too often plague those $70 titles

Mind you, this isn’t a perfect situation. Helldivers 2, Last Epoch, and Palworld‘s server struggles reveal just some of the logistical limitations of their scope. Each is also dependent on future updates to varying degrees in ways that may lock their developers into dangerous live-service traps.

Furthermore, while sudden success fuelled by positive word-of-mouth is nice, it’s not exactly a replacement for a hefty marketing budget. I haven’t even mentioned many of the other great indie and Double-A games that came out this year, and let’s face facts: few of us will ever have the time and money to play them all regardless of their length and price.

But if you’re looking for something positive during a particularly bleak time for the video game industry, then perhaps it’s this. For as easy as it is to believe that people don’t want anything different, these games show that is not the case. People are willing to try and support new things when studios respect the economic factors that so often prevent them from doing so.

It’s a lesson we’re seeing with these $40 and less titles in 2024, but it’s not limited to them. Larger releases like Baldur’s Gate 3, Tears of the Kingdom, and Elden Ring all achieved widespread critical acclaim and record financial success in recent years because they respected the investment players had to make in them. They also didn’t rest on their respective legacies. Rather than use their names to get people in the door and give them exactly what they expected, they dared to be a bit bolder and trusted players (players, not just fans) to fall in love with them along the way.

I don’t know what the future of gaming looks like or how bad the industry will get before it reaches a better place. What I do know is that millions of gamers have spent the early part of 2024 celebrating the fact that the best games in a given year don’t always cost $70, don’t always have the biggest names, and often aspire to offer the perfect experience for the right kind of player rather than an acceptable plethora of content for anyone and everyone. For my money, that has to count for something.

The post Why 2024’s Best Games Are All “Budget” Titles appeared first on Den of Geek.

Midway through its second episode, FX/Hulu miniseries Shōgun features a moment that could be rife with misunderstanding.

Pilot major John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) has unceremoniously washed ashore in Japan, becoming the first Englishman to do so. No one in Osaka speaks English, having just learned of England’s existence moments ago, so to communicate with this “barbarian,” powerful regent Lord Yoshii Toranaga (Hiroyuki Sanada) summons the closest thing to a Brit he can find to translate: a Portuguese Catholic priest named Father Martin Alvito (Tommy Bastow).

Since the Portuguese had previously established trade routes with feudal Japan, much of the Catholic clergy there can speak both Portuguese and Japanese. That’s how the scene unfolds then with Blackthorne speaking in his non-native Portuguese to Father Martin who then translates it in his non-native Japanese to Lord Toranaga who then must trust that he’s receiving the most accurate information possible with nothing important lost in translation.

Oh and did we mention that viewers never actually hear Portuguese? Blackthorne and Father Martin’s words are translated into English for the benefit of Shōgun‘s largely American audience. In fact, even though multiple languages are spoken throughout the series (including Dutch and maybe even Spanish), Shōgun watchers only ever hear English and Japanese. While that may sound confusing at first, Shōgun not only makes the language barriers work but also makes them sing.

Take, for instance, that aforementioned scene. Things get off to a choppy start with the Protestant Blackthorne expressing distrust that the Catholic will accurately translate his message. Father Martin puts those concerns to rest by giving Blackthorne the Japanese word for “enemy” so that he can point at Father Martin and declare him as such before Lord Toranaga.

“I may be your enemy, John Blackthorne of the Erasmus, but I am not your assassin,” Father Martin tells him.

As the scene continues, Father Martin’s translations slowly fade away in the audio feed and before viewers even realize it, Blackthorne and Toranaga are communicating directly with each other, having achieved the most important aspect of any linguistic exchange: trust.

Based on James Clavell’s classic 1975 novel (and its subsequent 1980 TV miniseries), this FX historical drama is a greatly ambitious undertaking. Clavell’s story is enormous, incorporating exhaustive research of feudal Japanese history into a spine-busting 1152 pages of narrative. Authenticity is the name of the game in any Shōgun adaptation. The folks behind FX’s Shōgun, led by showrunners Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks, have found a way to preserve that authenticity while still making the story accessible for Western TV audiences. And it all comes down to language.

In the first episode of FX’s official companion podcast for the series, Marks talks about the show’s shrewd use of languages and compared Blackthorne to his historical inspiration William Adams.

“[English] was sort of our lingua franca that we decided on early,” Marks said. “If you have European characters speaking, for the most part they’re speaking Portuguese. William Adams, historically, and John Blackthorne, the fictional character, both spoke a number of languages. It made sense that Portuguese could be his way of getting in with them.”

Podcast host and Shōgun writer Emily Yoshida also notes that the writers’ room for the series was made up of English-speakers. For the Japanese dialogue, the English scripts were sent to a team of translators in Tokyo who would translate the text into modern Japanese and then to a Japanese playwright specializing in history who would make the final product more appropriate for the time period. The English subtitles were translated from the this older version of Japanese spoken by the actors on the show, making the final English text frequently far different from what began on the page.

In episode 2 of the podcast, Kondo even recalls how this process frequently changed the language on the show for the better. At the end of episode one, Toranaga approaches Toda Mariko (Anna Sawai) to ask for her help in translating for the barbarian. He wants to know if she will feel conflicted about dealing with a heretic due to her Catholic fate.

“In the script [she responds] ‘it would be a problem if I was one thing,'” Kondo said. “It went to the Japanese and it came back ‘I have more than one heart.’ I thought that was a beautiful and much more spiritually accurate way to put it.”

It’s clear that Shōgun appreciates translation not solely as an obligation but as a creative opportunity.

The first two episodes of Shōgun are available to stream on Hulu now. Episodes premiere Tuesdays on Hulu and Tuesday nights at 10 p.m. ET on FX.

The post Shogun’s Clever Approach to Japanese, English, and Portuguese Explained appeared first on Den of Geek.

Den of Geek has put together a release schedule of the biggest games coming out in 2024. From exclusive AAAs to third-party heavy hitters to exciting new indies, there’s something for everyone on the calendar. While we’ve not featured every single title shipping this year, we’ve curated a list that we feel encompasses all the major upcoming titles as well as smaller but notable releases in a variety of genres.

Want to read more about the games below? Click through the links to check out all of our coverage of the biggest games of the year!

Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments! We’ll continue to update this schedule as more release dates are announced.

In the meantime, check out all our Xbox, Nintendo, PlayStation, and PC Gaming coverage. Or if you’re into retro gaming, we have plenty of blasts from the past here.

The post Video Game Release Date Schedule 2024: What’s Coming to Nintendo, Xbox, PlayStation, and PC appeared first on Den of Geek.

“It was the Wild West back then,” says Stephen Kick, CEO and co-founder of Nightdive Studios. “[There was] a lack of foresight for saving work… it was lost in a closet or thrown out if a studio was acquired or went bankrupt… it’s just gone.”

Kick co-founded Nightdive Studios in 2012 after trying and failing to download an official copy of one of his favorite games, System Shock 2. Since then, Nightdive has helped rescue many formerly lost games through remasters, re-releases, and remakes. 

“It’s always been about treating video games as art,” Kick says. “In order to have that distinction, we have to do a better job of preserving our past so that people can appreciate and experience it.”

Restoring those works of art is a daunting challenge that often requires hunting down rights, design documents, and even original code. Early on, though, one of the greatest obstacles was indifference. 

“When we started talking with other publishers, they said, ‘Why would anyone want these old games?’” says Nightdive’s director of business development Larry Kuperman. “They were surprised that a lot of people wanted these games because they didn’t see them as old; they saw them as being classic.”

Nightdive’s current catalog includes blockbuster classics like Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, System Shock, and a brand-new remaster of Star Wars: Dark Forces. Yet, it also features more obscure titles like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Blood, and Noctropolis. It’s a seemingly eclectic collection that spawned from powerful roots. 

“[Our] first titles were games that I played with my dad growing up,” Kick says. “It was a personal mission to restore the games I remembered playing with my dad.”

Nightdive’s various successes have allowed the studio to pursue increasingly bigger titles. Yet, the heart of their mission can be found in all their projects regardless of size. 

“As we get older and become parents and grandparents, these [games] are our memories,” Kuperman says. “These are sensations that we want to share with our children and grandchildren.”

For as much as we talk about nostalgia when we talk about retro games, Nightdive is just as interested in ensuring that future generations are able to experience these titles. 

“As we’ve grown, more of our audience is people who never had the opportunity to play these games the first time,” Kuperman says. “The compliments that do it for me begin with the words, ‘I didn’t know.’ The biblical phrase is ‘A call lifted up their eyes,’ and they go, ‘Oh my goodness, this was here all the time, and I just didn’t know about it.”

Nightdive’s work has also shown how much of gaming’s history can be lost when that history is so often written by the most successful. 

“With any art, the goal is to inspire or influence,” Kick says. “When the originators of this industry have their products and experience being locked away, their collective knowledge is basically inaccessible to people who may become developers or designers in the future… a big goal of ours was to ensure that future generations of game developers have that knowledge in their hands that will hopefully inspire them to create something wonderful.”

To that end, Nightdive emphasizes the accuracy of its projects. Though they may optimize games to run on modern hardware or add lost content, such alterations always serve the same greater purpose. 

“When we remaster a game, our goal is that the game should play the way you remembered it playing,” Kuperman says. “It’s about recreating that original experience.”

Recreating an original experience can be an arduous process. Many of these games weren’t just lost; they were buried. What motivates the Nightdive team to press on?

“It’s the fans,” Kick says. “They will share their memories of what it was like playing those games with their parents or siblings. Just seeing the trailer again takes them back to that time when they didn’t have the burdens of modern life weighing on their shoulders. They’re kids again with fewer responsibilities or cares.”

Anyone who grew up a gamer has those memories. They are powerful, but they are sometimes not enough. If we want to share and play the games we remember most fondly, the efforts of companies like Nightdive are more vital than ever. 

“Do you think that museums are important?” Kuperman asks. “You kind of remember how the pictures look, so why would you want to go see them again? It’s the same thing with playing video games.”

Nightdive Studios’ remasters of Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion and Star Wars: Dark Forces are out now for all modern platforms.

The post Star Wars: Dark Forces and How Nightdive Studios Is Restoring Gaming’s Lost Art appeared first on Den of Geek.

Which is to say that the first look at Bill Skarsgård in the upcoming remake of The Crow might be a bit of a shock. And if you were a teenager in the ’90s, your heart isn’t what it used to be, so you might want to sit down. Have a look at the first image of Skarsgård as the titular anti-hero…

Directed by Rupert Sanders, The Crow stars Skarsgård as Eric Draven, a musician who gets possessed by a spirit of vengeance after criminals brutally beat him and kill his fiancée Shelly (FKA Twigs). The spirit takes the form of a crow, which inspires Draven’s persona.

The new version of the Crow certainly has aspects of the original character, as designed by writer/artist James O’Barr and faithfully recreated for Brandon Lee in the beloved 1994 movie. We see dark circles around his eyes and black paint across lips, creating the suggestion of a grin. And he does appear to be putting on a leather duster, to match his leather pants.

But then, there are the tattoos. There’s a radiating third eye on his chest, broken chains across his abdomen, a millipede emerging from his crotch. Are they cheesy? Sure. But they also seem believable for a rock musician in the 2020s. In other pictures, featuring Eric and Shelley before their downfall (like the one at the top of this article), we see his pseudo-mullet haircut and the word “Lullaby” tattooed across his forehead.

Look, there’s good reason to be skeptical of The Crow 2024. Sanders previously directed the brain-dead stinkers Snow White and the Huntsman and Ghost in the Shell, movies that demonstrated the most generic action brain and no understanding of what made the source material interesting. Casting Danny Huston to play yet another bad guy builds no confidence, especially in contrast to colorful actors like Joe Polito and Michael Wincott in the 1994 movie.

And yes, it must be said, Nü-Eric looks a lot like Ninja from Die Antwoord and thus invokes Chappie vibes. Nobody wants Chappie vibes.

But there is a primordial power to the story of The Crow. It comes from O’Barr’s anger at the meaningless death of his own fiancée. He poured his anger and longing into every page of his original comic. That power carried the 1994 movie’s clunkier parts, and (to a lesser extent) the three sequels and the TV series.

All of that said, the few images we have so far aren’t enough to decide if The Crow will be bad or good, especially for us ’90s teens who have strong feelings about the original movie. Does Nü-Eric look dumb with his excessive tattoos? Of course! But we think that about most kids these days. After all, we’re in our 40s now and we don’t get kids these days.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to listen to For Love Not Lisa before taking my afternoon nap.

The Crow hits theaters on June 7.

The post The Crow Reboot: First Photos Reveal a Drastic Updated Look for ’90s Icon appeared first on Den of Geek.

Any adaptation of a piece of art, especially if it’s beloved, is going to need to make changes. Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender was no exception, especially with it adapting 20 episodes of an animated series to eight hour-long episodes of live-action. Cuts would need to be made, story beats switched around, character motivations altered, and a team of creators fresh to the franchise would put their spin on the material.

Some of these changes were fascinating. The remixing of the story with original episodes placed within the stories of other episodes took serious skill to pull off. Other changes just didn’t work. Koh the Face Stealer, originally an evil power so great he could never be defeated, was over-explained to the point that he lost much of his menace. The lack of Zuko (Dallas Liu) directly attacking Kyoshi Island robbed him of important development.

Yet the one change that stood above all the rest, for all the right reasons, involved Zuko and his crew. The 41st Division. In the original season 1 episode 12 “The Storm,” Iroh reveals Zuko’s backstory to the crew of his ship. In a flashback we see the event that caused the prince to be banished, when he spoke out of turn at a meeting of Fire Nation generals. A key part of a plan being laid out was that the Fire Nation would gain the upper hand in a battle against the Earth Nation by utilizing a distraction. A distraction made up of new recruits, the 41st Division. They’re not meant to have a fighting chance, as the General explains,

“What better to use as bait than fresh meat?”

Zuko’s outraged at the idea of sacrificing an entire division this way. He implores, “Those soldiers love and defend our nation. How can you betray them?”

This doesn’t go over well and Zuko faces dire consequences at the hand of his father, Fire Lord Ozai. To him, Zuko challenging a general in his army was an act of complete disrespect. Zuko was forced into an Agni Kai, a fire duel, but he wouldn’t be fighting the insulted general. He had to fight his father, who punished him with his scar and banishment.

While earlier in the episode the crew had been openly questioning Zuko, after hearing this story they demonstrate a new respect for him. “The Storm” was a key moment in Zuko’s character but the crew of his ship were merely there as people for Iroh to tell the flashback story to. They were never that important and after this we don’t learn much about them.

Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender took this original story and made one crucial change that drastically improved upon it. In season 1 episode 6, “Masks,” the flashback to Zuko questioning the Fire Nation general proceeds much as it did in the original series, though Zuko shows more concern for the 41st Division. Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim) directly backs up his general’s plan, stating that “sacrifice is a part of war.”

Zuko can’t hold back, “it’s a terrible plan. Soldiers are gonna die, and for what? It’s unworthy of a Fire Nation officer.”

This once again causes the Agni Kai between Ozai and Zuko but here we get to see more of the events after that battle. Ozai banishes Zuko, giving him the goal of capturing the Avatar. As an afterthought the Fire Lord practically sneers, “and since you’re so concerned with the 41st Division, take them with you as your crew.”

In the present Iroh (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) explains to Zuko’s crew that they’re alive, “because of my nephew’s sacrifice.” Zuko’s crew is the 41st Division.

This inspired change breathes life into Zuko’s crew. Where in the original series they were barely notable, here they’re given new relevance. Everyday Zuko’s around them he’s reminded they’re the cause of his banishment. While he saved their lives, were they worth it? How can he reconcile the actions he believed were right with the ever-present resentment and disappointment of his father? 

It also gives weight to the newfound dedication Zuko’s crew has toward him. They didn’t just hear Zuko’s tragic backstory and simply think better of him. They learn over the course of this episode that they’re alive because of him. When Zuko returns to the ship after the main events of the episode, the soldiers all show him respect. He’s their prince and they’re ready to do anything for him. Most importantly, they care about him as a person… Unlike his father.

The change lines up with the show’s theme of responsibility, one that’s been brought to the fore across many plot lines in this version of Avatar. Zuko has to take responsibility for his actions and live with the consequences, good and bad. Ozai said that sacrifice was a part of war… And Zuko will never forget the sacrifice he made for the 41st Division.

The change welded two separate pieces of the original’s story, drastically enhancing them both in the process.

All eight episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender are now streaming on Netflix.

The post The Best Change in Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender Isn’t What You Think appeared first on Den of Geek.

Well, if that’s what you think, then let me introduce you to Axel Asher, aka Access. And let me tell you right from the beginning, that he is not the greatest comic creation of all time.

A History of Crossovers

Before going too far into the history of the greatest comic find of his generation, we have to put the distinction between the big two into their proper context. Long before Snyder bros blasted the MCU for making unserious movies about people in colorful tights, long before Marvel Zombies knocked DC for dealing in boring gods, kids bought comics with their favorite superheroes and the creators took any work they could get. In fact, so little did people care about the borders between universes back in those days that Marvel and DC even crossed over with each other at several points, with each company’s biggest characters stepping into each other’s worlds without much explanation as to how it was possible. It just was.

In the first DC/Marvel crossover (not counting a co-production of Frank L. Baum’s The Wizard of Oz), 1976’s Superman vs the Amazing Spider-Man (written by Gerry Conway, penciled by Ross Andru, inked by Dick Giordano, colored by Jerry Serpe, and lettered by Gaspar Saladino), Peter Parker and Clark Kent just happened to attend the same reporters’ conference. In 1992’s Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire (written by Dennis O’Neil, penciled by Barry Kitson, inked by James Pascoe, colored by Matt Hollingsworth, and lettered by Ken Bruzenak), Frank Castle drives into Gotham looking for Jigsaw when he runs afoul of Batman (well, the Jean-Paul Valley Batman, anyway). No universal distinctions needed.

The easiest explanation for these crossovers is that they take place in an alternate reality in which the universes are already combined. For example, 1995’s Galactus vs Darkseid: The Hunger (by John Byrne and Rick Taylor) takes place in a universe where Galactus has devoured most planets, leaving only New Genesis and Apokolips.

But as crossovers between DC and Marvel grew more common in the ’90s and 2000s, the alternate universe explanation no longer worked. Fans wanted to see the real heroes interact, which meant that writers needed to address the universal distinctions.

In the best of these crossovers, 2003’s JLA/Avengers and Avengers/JLA (written by Kurt Busiek, illustrated by George Pérez, and colored by Tom Smith), the DC villain Krona encounters Marvel’s Grandmaster while traveling across universes. The Grandmaster offers Krona a wager, which drives the JLA and the Avengers to visit each other’s universes, and leads them to combine and mutate.

But for the much lesser event DC Versus Marvel and Marvel Versus DC from 1996 (by various creators), the two universes are represented by twin figures called “The Brothers,” who kinda look like Robotech creations and cause heroes from DC and Marvel to zap back and forth. And, of course, fight.

For the Versus miniseries, the companies let the fans choose the outcome of the matches. Comic book shops carried ballots that fans would fill out and send in, deciding the winner of Wolverine’s throwdown with Lobo or Wonder Woman’s bout with Storm. Because these were fan polls, story logic didn’t matter. Wolverine trounced Lobo (mostly behind a bar, so we couldn’t see) and Spider-Man beat Superboy, after freaking out about the revelation that Kon-El is a clone… a touchy subject for Spidey in the ’90s.

Amid the clashes of heroes of two worlds, the Versus miniseries also featured the coming of a new hero, a man called Access.

Amalgamated Adventures

Originally, DC and Marvel planned to swap characters for a bit after Versus. She-Hulk was going to get stranded in the DC Universe while Martian Manhunter would go to Marvel. Various legal hurdles prevented that from happening, but the two houses did manage to agree on a character that they would share Access.

Introduced in DC versus Marvel #1, Axel Asher has a tragic backstory in the form of the anger he feels toward his sister. When he was a child, his kid sister accidentally shot him in the leg, leaving him with a limp. Somehow, that resentment allows Axel to see the Brothers and draws him to the multiversal energy.

Given the fact that the companies created two towering robots to represent their universes, you’d think they’d come up with something cool for the multiversal portal that attracts Axel, right? No such luck. Axel gets bathed in the energy and becomes Access by touching a glowing cardboard box found in a back alley.

That disappointing origin kind of sums up Access. He’s a whiney character who spends his time either getting confused when he jumps between worlds or convincing the heroes to stop fighting one another, essentially nagging them until they stop doing the fun thing that fans want to see.

The follow-up stories DC/Marvel: All Access and Unlimited Access from 1996 and 1997 treated Access a bit better, because he served as a guide who transported the characters between worlds, but that only furthered the suspicion that he’s a nothing character. Why would you want to spend time with the usher instead of paying attention to the main event on stage?

So dull, in fact, was Access that he immediately was overshadowed by DC and Marvel’s better shared characters, the Amalgam Comics heroes. Amalgam Comics was the result of the Versus crossover, which led to a shared universe featuring mash-ups of characters from the worlds. Batman and Wolverine combined to make Dark Claw. Superman and Captain America made Super-Soldier. Iron Man and Green Lantern combined to make, well, Iron Lantern.

Although the quality of the Amalgam one-shots varied, there’s no denying the sandbox fun of the characters, which felt like the creations of little kids with a bunch of toys. Access should have been a key figure in the Amalgam Universe, but instead, he felt like an interruption, a dull nothing that did nothing to draw attention from weirdos like Speed Demon (Ghost Rider + the Flash + Etrigan).

Un-Access-Able

As superhero fandom has grown, both Marvel and DC have embraced their Z-list characters. After all, Peacemaker has his own TV show and Binary appeared in a recent post-credit sequence. But neither company has bothered to revisit Access.

Since the end of the original miniseries, Access was only briefly mentioned in Superman crossovers with the Silver Surfer (1997) and the Fantastic Four (1999). Even when the two companies met one last time in JLA/Avengers, which featured every single character who had ever been a member of either team, Access remained absent. Gilgamesh? Present. Rage? Present. Access? No way.

That said, it’s hard to believe that somebody, somewhere, wouldn’t stick Access on the Great Lakes Avengers or in the background of the Fire and Ice book. With the two companies finally reprinting the Amalgam Comics for the first time in decades, is it Access’ time to shine? Keep your eyes peeled for glowing cardboard boxes.

The post The Terrible Superhero That Is Somehow Owned by Both DC and Marvel appeared first on Den of Geek.

The most recent example comes from author Isaac Young, who took to Twitter to critique the film’s approach to satire. Young argued that director Paul Verhoeven failed to make fun of the Terran Federation because the attractive heroes, clean cities, and technologically advanced schools look nicer than the ugly bugs they fight.

While it might be easy to dismiss Young’s surface-level critique as the result of a viewer deeply concerned with attacking “lib” aesthetics, a common theme among the author’s tweets, many great critics made a similar mistake when the film released in 1997. “[I]t certainly is a jaw-dropping experience, so rigorously one-dimensional and free from even the pretense of intelligence it’s hard not to be astonished and even mesmerized by what is on the screen,” wrote Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

In the New York Times, Janet Maslin described Starship Troopers as a pandering film, “what with pretty actors, grisly critters, brains sucked out of skulls, buckets of green slime and a plot that is half beach blanket bingo, half Iwo Jima.” Maslin chalked up this glossy excess as nothing more than an American blockbuster pushed to the extreme, as Verhoeven did in his last movie, Showgirls. Roger Ebert agreed, acknowledging that “The one redeeming merit for director Paul Verhoeven’s film is that by remaining faithful to Heinlein’s material and period, it adds an element of sly satire.” Ebert spoke for most critics, suggesting that any satire that Starship Troopers achieved happened by accident.

If we’re being generous, we can understand why so many would make the mistake. Not only does the Robert A. Heinlein novel on which the movie is based have some fascist tendencies, but Paul Verhoeven gives the film a slick beauty, employing blockbuster tropes that most of us take for granted. But with the Starship Troopers-inspired video game Helldivers 2 taking the world by storm, there are lots of new viewers who are discovering the film for the first time and missing the point of one of Verhoeven’s best pictures…

Strange Troopers in a Strange Land

When Navy vet turned best selling sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein sat down to write Starship Troopers in the late 1950s, he intended to encourage support for the American military, which he considered on the wane at a crucial point in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Concerned about the country’s loss of civic spirit, as well as President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s decision to suspend nuclear weapons testing, Heinlein wrote a novel about the glories of service and the importance of sacrifice.

Even before Verhoeven made Starship Troopers, many readers recognized fascist undertones in the Heinlein’s novel, which led some to accuse the book of being militaristic propaganda on par with what the Nazis disseminated under Joseph Goebbels. But that reading simplifies Heinlein’s actual position. Before becoming a writer, Heinlein was active in the 1934 gubernatorial campaign of author Upton Sinclair, who ran as a socialist in California. In 1938, Heinlein ran as a left-wing Democrat for California State Assembly.

In response to critics that called out Starship Troopers for its alleged fascism, Heinlein insisted that readers focused too much on the militarism depicted, ignoring other types of service. In his mind, individualism and civic duty were the important lessons of his novels, which he considered contrary to the all-consuming nature of fascism.

Whatever Heinlein’s intentions for his book, the tone changed when Starship Troopers was adapted to the big screen, and not just because of Paul Verhoeven. It’s because that’s the nature of cinema.

“The spectacle grasped in its totality is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production,” wrote French theorist Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. “It is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism of the real society.” By “spectacle,” Debord means the larger-than-life nature of society under capitalism, best demonstrated in mass media, such as cinema. It’s loud, shiny, and beautiful. It enchants and excites us, drawing our attention away from the world as it is and toward the world as it could be.

For Debord, spectacle had become so powerful that it was accepted as normal, replacing the direct experience with real life for most people. “In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life.”

Debord sees fascism as a potential outcome of capitalism, when the society it creates falls under siege. “Fascism was an extremist de­fense of the bourgeois economy threatened by crisis and by proletarian subversion,” Debord writes in The Society of the Spectacle. “Fascism is a state of siege in capitalist society, by means of which this society saves itself and gives itself stop-gap rationalization by making the State intervene massively in its management.”

For Debord, fascism is not as much an ideology as it is “a violent resurrection of myth which demands participation in a com­munity defined by archaic pseudo-values: race, blood, the leader.” Thus, the spectacular nature of cinema makes it an ideal media for disseminating that myth.

Even before Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl made her first feature, the 1932 fantasy The Blue Light, D.W. Griffith employed filmic techniques to make the white supremacist historical fantasy Birth of a Nation into America’s first blockbuster. Riefenstahl in particular used cinema in movies such as Triumph of the Will to accentuate the power of the German army and to minimize individuals.

Early in Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl’s looks down on ranks of soldiers moving in a clean and impressive fashion. Later she cuts from the camera panning by adoring German citizens giving the Nazi salute to Hitler, massive in the center of the frame, waving in response. Later shots, show the power of the Nazi army, with its members solidified into a war machine mass. Riefenstahl uses the language of cinema to realize the myth of the leader’s power and the perfect community of a shared volkgeist.

Because of this inherently spectacular and unreal nature of cinema, even standard storytelling tropes about charismatic leaders, hideous villains, and communities of sameness can get amplified to a mythic degree. If creators and viewers are not careful, the combination of medium and trope can result in fascist implications, regardless of the filmmaker’s intentions. But what Verhoeven does is use that spectacle for his own exploration of the people enticed by fascism, while also poking fun at them and their beliefs throughout.

Would You Like to Know More?

Johnny Rico slaps down his application on the desk of a recruitment officer (Robert David Hall). When the officer sees that Rico wants to join the mobile infantry, pride fills his eyes and he reaches out to shake the boy’s hand. “Good for you,” barks the officer as he grasps Rico’s human hand in his mechanical appendages. “Mobile infantry made me the man I am today.” As the officer pushes away to file Rico’s paperwork, the camera pans down to reveal the stumps where his legs used to be.

Even the most inattentive among us can see the satirical menace in that scene: mobile infantry destroyed the man he was, making him little more than a cog in a machine. But that’s hardly the only time Starship Troopers invokes and satirizes militarism. Working again with RoboCop co-writer Edward Neumeier, Verhoeven decided against leaning away from the fascist undertones in the book. Instead the scribes took full advantage of cinema’s natural tendencies to exaggerate and, ultimately, belittle those ideas.

That approach is also obvious in the over-the-top victory sequences in Starship Troopers, such as when Rico defeats the tanker bug. While Verhoeven does include some disgusting gore in the scene, he and cinematographer Jost Vacano shoot it straight. The incredibly handsome Johnny Rico shows exceptional valor taking down an ugly, inhuman monster, all presented with slick imagery and a rousing score by Basil Poledouris.

When Rico gets promoted to leader of the Roughnecks, complete with his own recruits, Verhoeven and his co-creators present the scene like any other inspirational military speech sequence. The camera looks up at Rico, capturing the edges and angles of Van Dien’s jawline while rollicking musical stings punctuate every word of his speech. But when we cut back to his new troops, and see adolescent children in the crowd, the film once again lifts the veil on the horror actually taking place in the scene.

But Verhoeven goes even further to include direct allusions to Nazi cinema. “The first shot is taken from Triumph of the Will,” Verhoeven told Entertainment Weekly in 1997. ”When the soldiers look at the camera and say, ‘I’m doing my part!’ that’s from Riefenstahl. We copied it. It’s wink-wink Riefenstahl.”

Starship Troopers works as satire precisely because it doesn’t wink at the audience. It uses the tools of cinema to present the ideology of fascism in a spectacular manner. Which, of course, can and has gone horribly wrong.

At the end of Starship Troopers, Rico’s classmate turned high-level intelligence officer Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris) inspects the captured brain bug. The camera pushes close on Jenkins as he puts his hand on the creature, sensing its feelings. “It’s afraid,” he whispers in a tone so low that it would be inaudible if the score hadn’t softened. “It’s afraid!” he repeats with a shout, and the soldiers cheer in excitement.

As soldiers drag the brain bug away for experiments, Jenkins and Rico reunite with their classmate Carmen (Denise Richards). The blocking, acting, and cinematography of the scene all foreground the reunion, as if we’re watching three old friends coming back together for the glory of the Federation. But in the final wide shot, amid the cheering soldiers and hugging old friends, we can see the brain bug writhing in pain and fear. The scene demonstrates the key to understanding Starship Troopers. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll be taken in by the excitement of the soldiers, by the beauty of the stars, or by the victorious feeling of the music. You’ll be susceptible to the Federation’s fascist ideologies, much like the pretty, vapid people onscreen.

But if you’re watching with empathy, you’ll mourn the children about to die under Rico’s command. You’ll notice the flat intonations and empty stare of Neil Patrick Harris’ Jenkins, signifying the loss of his humanity. You’ll feel for the fearful bug, despite its ugly features. Watching with empathy, with a mind toward the evils of suffering, is the only thing that offsets the potential fascist tendencies of cinematic spectacle.

On one hand, Young’s critique of Starship Troopers is right. The bugs are ugly and gross. It’s a lot easier to just stare at the pretty actors and thrill to their exploits. But if we watch movies with an eye for caring for other people and beings, then we won’t get distracted by the spectacle.

Only then can cinema be what Roger Ebert saw: a machine for empathy. Only then will we truly “get” what the story is actually trying to tell us.

The post Why Is Starship Troopers Still So Misunderstood? appeared first on Den of Geek.

Featuring broad comedy and characters who don’t seem to be taking their jobs very seriously, the first trailer for The Orville suggested that the Fox series would be a spoof of Star Trek.

In said trailer, Captain Mercer (Seth MacFarlane) tries to eat a marble and asks an alien to move over so he is framed better in the viewscreen. Lt. Gordon Malloy (Scott Grimes) drinks beer while on duty, flying a shuttle, at 9:15 a.m. Commander Kelly Grayson’s (Adrianne Palicki) former marriage to Mercer is treated to rather stale “comic” arguments about going to therapy. Mercer’s reaction to Lt. Commander Bortus’s (Peter Macon) species being entirely male is to observe, with truly cutting and original wit, that they probably don’t have many arguments about leaving the toilet seat up. (The response, that they only urinate once a year, is much more original and funny).

But most of that broad comedy turned out to be restricted to the pilot. Over the course of its first two seasons, The Orville became less a spoof of Star Trek shows, and more like a Star Trek series itself, one modelled after the late 1990s and early aughts branches of Star Trek (The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise). It was also always much darker than you think.

The Orville Had Deep Star Trek Connections

The Star Trek similarities aren’t very surprising when you look at some of the people involved in making the show. The Orville features Deep Space Nine’s Penny Johnson Jerald (who played Captain Sisko’s girlfriend Kassidy Yates) in a regular role as the ship’s doctor Claire Finn. It guest-stars The Next Generation’s Marina Sirtis, Voyager’s Robert Picardo and Tim Russ, and Enterprise’s John Billingsley. The show’s directors include Star Trek’s Brannon Braga, Robert Duncan McNeill, and Jonathan Frakes. Most importantly, Braga and his current writing partner Andre Bormanis have written seven episodes. Other episodes have been written by Joe Menosky (who has written for The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Discovery) and David A. Goodman (who has written for Enterprise).

Anyone watching The Orville from the beginning will have noticed it making a slow move towards being less comedic and more dramatic over its three seasons. The first season featured episodes that twisted Star Trek tropes, like “Cupid’s Dagger,” which gender-flips the storylines about an alien guest exuding a sex pheromone that affects the crew’s behavior that were often given to Majel Barrett’s Lwaxana Troi in ’90s Trek. 

Other episodes in that first season played out almost exactly like ’90s Trek episodes – “Mad Idolatry” combines The Next Generation’s “Who Watches the Watchers” with Voyager’s “Blink of an Eye.” Meanwhile, “Into the Fold,” co-written and directed by Braga, is almost a rerun of Voyager’s “Innocence.” This trend towards less comedy and more drama continued with increasingly dramatic storylines throughout season 2, culminating in a war with Isaac’s (Mark Jackson) species of artificial lifeforms, the Kaylon.

New Horizons Was a New Beginning

Eventually, season 3 moved from Fox to streamer Hulu and was slightly rebranded as The Orville: New Horizons. MacFarlane told Collider that the new subtitle was an idea pitched to him by Dana Walden at Disney, and that “I thought it was kind of cool because it’s not a reboot, it’s a continuation, but it was just enough to tell the audience that we’re expanding a little bit. That the scope is bigger. The show is more ambitious.”

The trailers for The Orville: New Horizons dropped the feeling of a “spoof” all together, presenting the show as a more straightforward, if sometimes light-hearted, sci-fi drama. This trailer opens with Mercer quoting Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous poem “Ozymandias” (which had been name-checked in the final season of Breaking Bad in 2013) and features diplomats sitting around a table, explosions, and dialogue emphasizing dramatic themes like risks, danger, peace, and heart. There’s still a little bit of lightness thanks to Malloy’s wish for music on the bridge and a brief Star Wars reference, but overall the tone is of a pretty straightforward Star Trek-inspired sci-fi drama.

By then The Orville had become more of an unofficial addition to the Star Trek universe than a parody. But surprisingly, and despite its origins as a comedy, it is actually darker than many incarnations of Star Trek. And this darkness doesn’t suddenly appear in the later episodes and more dramatic third season – it’s there from the very beginning.

The Orville Was Dark From the Very Beginning

The Orville season 1 episode 3 “About a Girl” is incredibly dark and downbeat. Bortas and Klydan’s (Chad L. Coleman) Moclan species had been introduced as entirely male in the pilot, but at the end of episode 2 their egg hatches, and they are surprised to find that their offspring, Topa, is female. 

Episode 3 reveals that their species is not born entirely male, but when rarer females are born, they are immediately operated on to change their bodies to be male (since this is being done to a newborn and not to a consenting person who has asked for it, it does not count as gender-affirming surgery). Bortas tries to stop the surgery, but Klydan is determined to carry it out, and a Moclan court decides in Klydan’s favor.

The ending of this episode is incredibly dark and depressing. Topa is a newborn baby who is far too young to be able to express their own feelings about their gender, and the surgery is performed on a healthy child for purely social reasons, against the wishes of one of their parents. Much later, in season 3, Topa has grown enough to be able to put forward their own views and Dr. Finn performs gender-affirming surgery at Topa’s request as Topa realizes they identify as female. 

While there is a slightly happier resolution in the end, the original episode remains a deeply depressing watch. And it does not even have the excuse of the somewhat similar (and equally depressing) The Next Generation episode “The Outcast.” That installment dealt with gender, in its own very ‘90s way, but followed adults with their own clearly articulated thoughts and feelings. Sex reassignment surgery on a newborn has nothing to do with the current issues facing young adult or adult trans and nonbinary people.

Season 1’s darkness does not stop there though. Episode 7 “Majority Rule” has the same basic concept as the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive,” as Lt. John LaMarr (J. Lee) runs afoul a society run entirely on social media upvotes and downvotes. Episode 10 “Firestorm” is darker again and includes tropes straight out of horror films, as Lt. Alara Kitan (Halston Sage) is indirectly responsible for another crewman’s death because of her fear of fire, which is the result of a frightening incident from when she was a child. The episode also features a scary clown, a giant spider, and murderous versions of some crew members. Sure, Star Trek has done horror movie-inspired episodes too, but this is particularly freaky stuff.

It is not surprising, then, that this darker side only grew over time. Multiple episodes in season 2 follow a story arc in which Isaac betrays both The Orville and the Planetary Union as a whole and takes part in an attack on the ship, killing several officers, and instigating a war. When his refusal to kill Dr. Finn’s son Ty (Kai Wener) eventually gets him back on the side of our heroes, he has to spend the rest of the series trying to make up for his actions.

Seasons 2 and 3 also see Malloy, the day-drinking comic relief of the pilot, thrust into increasingly dark and depressing romantic situations. In Season 2’s “Lasting Impressions,” the old “falling-for-a-holodeck-character” storyline is given a sad twist by making the character in question a representation of a long-dead 21^st century woman. But that’s nothing compared to poor Malloy’s time travel mishap in season 3. Accidentally stranded in 2015, he actually marries a real woman, Laura (Leighton Meester), and they have children together – until Mercer and Grayson appear, intending to grab him from the moment he arrived and erase the entire timeline. Malloy begs for his family’s lives, especially his son and unborn baby, but to no avail, and it doesn’t matter how much Regular-Timeline-Malloy reassures Ed and Kelly that they did the right thing, the whole episode is brutal.

Is The Orville Darker Than Star Trek?

The Orville has often been described as more like Star Trek than Star Trek – especially in the early days, when Discovery was doing grim, gory war stories across multiple episodes and The Orville was doing planet-of-the-week adventures. At that time, The Orville was structurally a lot more like ‘90s Star Trek, while Discovery had a more 2010s serialized structure and grimdark tone. (Both are great, by the way – this is a structural observation, not a value judgement).

But The Orville was always hiding a much darker edge than Star Trek tends to have. Of the Star Trek shows that provide The Orville’s main inspiration, Deep Space Nine is the darkest, followed by season 3 of Enterprise. Deep Space Nine’s “In The Pale Moonlight” is probably the darkest hour of the entire franchise, at least since Kirk had to let Joan Collins die in The Original Series’ “The City on the Edge of Forever,” and Captain Archer turned space pirate in Enterprise’s “Damage.”

We do see this increasing darkness in some of the more recent Trek series as well. Discovery is the most obvious example, but the conclusion of Strange New Worlds’ “Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach” is even more shockingly dark and miserable than anything we’ve seen on The Orville, featuring as it does the torture and eventual death of a child – even The Orville has not gone that far. The upcoming Section 31 TV movie will likely be fairly dark as well. 

To some extent, all these bitter, depressing storylines are just reflecting fashions in current television. (We maintain that Captain Kirk would have happily let the rest of the planet die to save the kid). But overall Star Trek’s main themes are still largely positive and optimistic. The Orville, on the other hand, has turned the often-dark satire of MacFarlane’s Family Guy into a vision of the future in which everyone is trying as hard as they can to do their best, yet often finding they cannot fight forces that are bigger than they are. 

The Orville presents itself as a lighter show, in which the crew can order pot brownies from the replicators and drink beer on duty – cleverly hiding the real darkness and sense of doom within. But season 3 does end with the joy of a wedding, and we can only hope that it will eventually be renewed for a much-delayed season 4, and that our heroes will be able to regain a bit of hope – or at the very least, that poor Malloy will catch a break in the romance department.

All three seasons of The Orville are available to stream on Hulu.

The post The Orville Is Actually Much Darker Than You Think appeared first on Den of Geek.

On this list of wrestlers who needed more time with their championships, we will not be including those who were forced to vacate due to injury (well, with an asterisk, but we’ll get to that later). It seems too easy an answer, so here’s an honorable mention for Finn Balor, Daniel Bryan, Edge, and the rest of the champs who had to vacate the belt for physical reasons.

15. Triple H as Undisputed Champion (2002)

It feels kind of weird including him on this list because the last thing Triple H needs is more time as a champion. Still, the Undisputed Championship in general was fairly cursed up until Brock Lesnar claimed it. Chris Jericho was the first to hold the double belt and came off as a total paper champ due to how much cheating and interference was involved in his wins, how much everyone looked past him, and how secondary he was in his WrestleMania X-8 match with Triple H.

While Triple H attained the Undisputed Championship in the WrestleMania main event, paying off his return from injury, Royal Rumble win, and Jericho’s ability to escape defeat, the real story was Hulk Hogan’s big match with The Rock. People were ravenous for Hogan’s face-turn and it caused Hogan to beat Triple H for the title soon after that. Too bad it was a bust of a title run, ending in a horrendous Undertaker match. Undertaker dropped it to The Rock, who was all but rejected by the audience until Brock usurped him. Maybe Triple H deserved a long run as the Undisputed Champion after all.

14. The Rockers as WWF Tag Team Champions (1990)

Imagine buying a ticket to a taped wrestling show and getting to see a major title change in person. You tell your school friends about it. You’re so excited to see it talked about on TV. But then…nothing. The match is never on the show. They never even reference it. Officially, it never happened, despite the fact that you yourself saw it with your own eyes. That’s the story of Saturday Night’s Main Event in the fall of 1990.

The Hart Foundation were dropping the tag titles to The Rockers so that Bret Hart could branch out to a solo career. So the Rockers won, but ultimately, the match was never aired and the incident was never officially recognized. Depending on who you ask, Vince thought the match wasn’t up to snuff, something from that episode of Main Event needed to be cut due to timing issues, or it was decided to hold off on splitting up Bret Hart and Jim Neidhart. Regardless, the only title run for the Rockers is a phantom one that doesn’t count.

13. CM Punk as World Heavyweight Champion (2008)

Many of CM Punk’s world title runs are laced with controversy, but his first time as World Heavyweight Champion was a masterclass in screwing the pooch. Punk wasn’t even meant to be champion initially, as he only won the WrestleMania XXIV Money in the Bank match because penciled-in winner Jeff Hardy was suspended for a wellness violation. Despite being a face, Punk cashed in his briefcase after Batista beat the hell out of champion Edge, but it worked because it was Edge getting his just deserts.

But Punk’s opponents during this run did not do him any favors. JBL was over-the-hill and they decided to do a face vs. face match against Batista. Sure, it ended with a double DQ, but the company did little to make Punk appeal to the audience, meaning the crowd was more on Batista’s side by a wide margin. When it came time for Punk to lose, it was handled in the worst way.

At Unforgiven 2008, Punk was supposed to defend his title in a Championship Scramble (wow, remember those?), but he was instead attacked by Randy Orton backstage and written out of the match with an injury, meaning Chris Jericho won the title off a match Punk wasn’t even in! Punk never got any real revenge on Orton or Jericho and luckily had a much more fruitful Money in the Bank cash-in in 2009.

12. Neville as Cruiserweight Champion (2017)

Yes, Neville had a long run as Cruiserweight Champion. He was treated as the final boss of that division, and while he had some frustrations about his spot on the roster (and the payouts that came from doing PPV pre-shows), he made the most of the last leg of his time at WWE. He did at least appear to be moving towards some kind of alliance with Braun Strowman on the main roster, so there was that.

Then the Cruiserweight division and its show 205 Live went in a very different direction by bringing in Enzo Amore, whose in-ring work was lacking, but he had more than enough charisma to make up for it. Neville not only dropped the title to Enzo at the first opportunity, but Enzo then became the focus and sudden top heel of the cruiserweight corner of WWE. 205 Live immediately revolved around him. Neville was set to lose a rematch, but decided to walk out and sit out the rest of his contract. Due to his real-life issues, Enzo was not long for WWE and was removed from the company while he was still champion. All things considered, they probably should have kept the spotlight on Neville.

11. Eddie Guerrero as WWE Champion (2004)

At No Way Out 2004, Eddie Guerrero became SmackDown’s top guy after defeating Brock Lesnar, with a little assist from Goldberg. Eddie retained against Kurt Angle at WrestleMania XX, giving us the final image of Eddie and fellow world champion Chris Benoit celebrating together. Endearing then, depressing now. At the time, Eddie becoming WWE Champion felt like a long time coming.

The problem was that after WrestleMania, the title picture on SmackDown was hurting. The WWE writers just couldn’t seem to find a captivating challenger to keep things interesting, and behind the scenes Eddie felt like a failure, as he was the face of the ailing brand. Bradshaw was eventually repackaged as JBL to give the company a new villain and within a month or so succeeded in dethroning Eddie. JBL proceeded to have a lengthy reign, and Eddie never reached those heights again.

10. Big E as WWE Champion (2022)

There is no reason why the stretch between Big E winning Money in the Bank and losing the title should have been as bad as it was. The muscle of the New Day got his chance at the bigtime and after weeks of hinting that he was going to prey on Universal Champion Roman Reigns, he finally announced on Twitter that he was going to cash in against WWE Champion Bobby Lashley on Raw. And so, he showed up after Lashley retained against Randy Orton, which wasn’t exactly the behavior of a face, but he got the job done. Then Big E proceeded to lose just as often as he won, only in the form of non-title matches.

On the Day 1 event, Brock Lesnar was thrown into a multi-man match for the WWE Championship and, of course, won. A new flavor in the title picture was discarded in favor of a Roman Reigns vs. Brock Lesnar rematch. Big E fell back into the midcard and it didn’t take much longer for him to be hit with a career-threatening neck injury. Big E deserved better.

9. Rey Mysterio as WWE Champion (2011)

One of the most annoying things in wrestling storytelling is when a face does something that paints them as a total asshole and nobody ever calls them out on it. In this case, that asshole was John Cena. In 2011, CM Punk defeated Cena for the WWE Championship at Money in the Bank right as Punk’s contract was running out. On the following night’s Raw, an eight-man tournament was held to decide a new champion for the vacated titled, with Vince McMahon preparing to “fire” Cena for his failure against Punk. Due to time restraints, the finals got moved to the next week. In the final segment, Cena ended up not getting fired.

The next Monday had Rey Mysterio defeat the Miz in the opening match to win the vacated WWE Championship. Backstage, he was told that he would be defending it against Cena that very night. For Mysterio, this was his fourth match across two Raws, while Cena, having not participated in the tournament at all, was well-rested, which wasn’t exactly a fair matchup. Cena obviously won so the WWE could fast-track Cena vs. a returning Punk at SummerSlam. They absolutely could have saved Mysterio vs. Cena for SummerSlam, giving us a fresh main event instead of the cheap way they resolved the storyline. It’s not like Mysterio had anything else going on, as he ended up wrestling in a six-man tag at the show and was written out for nearly a year the following night.

8. Mickie James as WWE Women’s Champion (2010)

At a time when Michelle McCool was WWF Women’s Champion and her partner Layla was depicted as something of a co-holder, Mickie James challenged them, and it was kind of awful. The mean girl duo started calling Mickie James “Piggy James. The feud had them humiliate Mickie over and over again, with Mickie breaking down in tears several times. The more you know about Vince’s personal habits, the more disgusting the whole thing is in retrospect.

That’s not to say a storyline based on bullying can’t be saved. At Royal Rumble 2010, Mickie gave LayCool their comeuppance by winning the title match in 10 seconds. Great! Mickie got her revenge, the bad guys were punished, and we could all move on! Only instead, they kept the Piggy James thing going and had McCool win the belt back in a rematch a month later on a random SmackDown. Mickie left shortly after but returned years later so the WWE could make fun of her age.

7. Kevin Owens as Universal Champion (2017)

From August 2016 to April 2017, WWE’s top storyline was the friendship between Universal Champion Kevin Owens and fellow heel Chris Jericho. Jericho constantly helped Owens retain his title and the story seemed to be pushing towards a breakup followed by a WrestleMania showdown between the two for said championship. We were also likely to see Jericho win the star-studded 2017 Royal Rumble as part of this storyline.

Instead, the title picture took a detour. Bill Goldberg returned to WWE to squash Brock Lesnar at Survivor Series 2016. Lesnar was able to talk Vince McMahon into turning their WrestleMania rematch into a title match, which meant that at Fastlane 2017, Goldberg would have to take down Owens for the belt. It ended up being a match that lasted mere seconds, leaving Owens and Jericho to wrestle over the United States Championship in the WrestleMania undercard. This situation greatly annoyed Jericho and helped convince him to move away from WWE, leading to his major role in AEW’s genesis.

6. Zack Ryder as United States Champion (2011)

Low on the card and rarely on TV, Zack Ryder worked his way towards popularity with his own self-produced YouTube series and by using Twitter to enhance his brand. Fans really took to Ryder and let the company know it by demanding him at shows. Even at Survivor Series 2011, during the post-show in-ring promo, the Rock was met with Ryder chants and played it up, talking about how insanely tall that son of a bitch was.

Finally, the company seemed to relent. Ryder won the United States Championship from Dolph Ziggler and even got to rub elbows with Hugh Jackman in the lead-up. Then he was demoted to John Cena’s suffering sidekick, constantly brutalized and humiliated on a weekly basis in order to build up a match between Cena and Kane. Part of this included Ryder losing the title to Jack Swagger, which was the beginning of the end for the Ryder Revolution. Ryder had a few gasps of air in the years that followed, but never anything nearly as substantial as his initial run.

5. Seth Rollins as Universal Champion (2019)

In wrestling, sometimes huge matches can write you into a corner. But WWE really didn’t practice restraint when it came to Seth Rollins and Bray Wyatt’s Fiend persona. Rollins got the most star-making win of his career at SummerSlam 2019 by cleanly defeating Brock Lesnar at a time when doing so was impossible for someone who wasn’t the Undertaker or maybe Roman Reigns. On the same show, the Fiend debuted and annihilated Finn Balor.

Within two months, WWE was already booking Rollins vs. Fiend for Hell in a Cell. Rollins’ momentum as top face crashed into a wall as Fiend’s mystique and invincibility was just too new and powerful to ignore. The WWE was so high on the Fiend as the brand-new big bad that they turned Rollins into a crying, scared child when confronted by him. They very badly wrote a no contest ending to the Hell in a Cell match, which got such a negative reaction from everyone that they did a rematch at the very next PPV and had Fiend win. It took Rollins a while to recover from this storyline.

4. Ricky Steamboat as WWF Intercontinental Champion (1987)

WrestleMania III was the first WrestleMania that felt like a gigantic deal. The Pontiac Silverdome gave it the perfect atmosphere, and it was remembered for two huge matches: the style of Hulk Hogan vs. Andre the Giant and the substance of Randy Savage vs. Ricky Steamboat. The latter was the highest profile match in early WWF remembered for its in-ring workrate. Of course, if you just go by the PPVs, it’s a bit of a mystery why Steamboat’s big IC title win was followed by him falling into obscurity and being gone in a year.

As the story goes, Steamboat’s fall from grace at WWF was allegedly the result of the wrestler requesting to take a bit of time off for the birth of his son after winning the company’s second biggest belt. Acting like that was some kind of major betrayal, the WWF booked Steamboat to lose the championship after a mere two months. Steamboat floated around the midcard in the year that followed, finally leaving after being booked to lose in the first round of WrestleMania IV’s one-night tournament. The WWF really should have just held back on the outrage.

3. Rob Van Dam as WWE Champion and ECW Champion (2006)

Sadly, this one is the champion’s own fault. As the second Money in the Bank winner, Rob Van Dam was the first to tell everyone when and where he wanted his title shot. WWE was building to the return of ECW as a third brand with its own show and the PPV One Night Stand 2006 was the launching point. It was also the perfect place for RVD to challenge John Cena for the WWE Championship, which he won, thanks in part to an assist from Edge.

RVD was not only WWE Champion, but he was also made the new ECW Champion. He defended both titles as a way to give the new show some shine. Unfortunately, RVD and Sabu were pulled over in real life while under the influence. Though RVD was suspended, he first wrestled at a couple shows so he could lose the WWE Championship to Edge and ECW Championship to Big Show. When he returned, RVD found himself on very thin ice, and his days with the company were numbered.

2. Wendi Richter as WWF Women’s Champion (1985)

The Rock ‘n’ Wrestling Connection, the collaboration between WWF and MTV, helped the promotion become a major part of pop culture in the ’80s. One of the big players at the time was Wendi Richter, the champion of the women’s division, and on-screen buddy to Cyndi Lauper. But while Richter was popular in the ring, behind the scenes, she was having some arguments with Vince McMahon over her pay. Vince being Vince decided to resolve the issue in the most controversial way possible.

Richter was doing the house show circuit, repeatedly defending against the Spider Lady, a masked wrestler portrayed by Penny Mitchell. At a Madison Square Garden show, Richter was surprised to see former champion Fabulous Moolah backstage, as she rarely showed up at events where she wasn’t booked. Not thinking anything of it, Richter did her match with Spider Lady, only for her opponent to legitimately hold her down at one point as the referee did a fast count. The Spider Lady – revealed to be Moolah under the mask – was deemed the new champion. Richter was so pissed at the last-minute change that she left the promotion, never to return (except for a Hall of Fame spot decades later). Before Shawn Michaels was made to beat Bret Hart in Montreal, this was the original screwjob.

1. Shawn Michaels as WWF Champion (1997)

Many of these entries have been in defense of the champions. How they were great and they were screwed over by the writers. This one is more about how the champion in question needed a longer run for the sake of actually losing the title in a way that helped someone other than himself. Shawn Michaels was infamous for losing titles without actually losing. Instead of being pinned in a meaningful match, he would vacate due to a variety of reasons.

The most disastrous of all was in 1997. Citing a bum knee (which is widely considered to be something he milked to high heaven) and a loss of smile, Michaels gave up the WWF Championship months before WrestleMania 13, where he was set to lose to Bret Hart. This altered lots of plans and furthered the existing rift between the two performers, later causing Bret to refuse to lose to Shawn out of principle. If Michaels wasn’t so selfish, the Montreal Screwjob could have been avoided and wrestling history would have been all the better for it.

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