I *finally* got to see The Dark Knight yesterday–Amy and I wanted to go together, but the first couple of IMAX weekends sold out immediately and we couldn’t go during the week as she’s been working swing shift lately. The anticipation has been driving me a little…batty, you might say. That is, if you were into bad puns, which I am totally not.

What I AM totally into is Batman, if you’re just joining us. Comic books, movies, soundtracks, games–you name it, and I’ve probably swung into a room shouting ‘I’M BATMAN’ while doing it. Hell, one of my college assignments was to write a ‘virtual pet’ program, and I made myself a virtual pet Batman. I am at a level of geekery that makes most normal people physically ill.

Unlike most people, I really loved Batman Forever–yes, it was campy, but I think both Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey are the bee’s knees, and Val Kilmer made one damn hot Batman. The Batman Forever soundtrack was also the very first CD I bought, and feel free to mock me, but it introduced me to some artists who remain favorites to this day, like Nick Cave and The Flaming Lips.

It was unfortunate that Batman & Robin was such a turd–I never expected great shakes out of George Clooney as Batman, but Batman & Robin introduced me to a whole level of suck I didn’t even know *existed*. I still listened to the soundtrack often, though, and was a little disappointed that the second Pumpkins song didn’t get the love I felt it deserved.

The Dark Knight was worth every second of anticipation, although I was more than a little disappointed that I ended up sitting next to The Most Annoying Man On Earth. Even though I am apparently shaped like a Mr Potato Head, I manage to fit within the confines of my seat easily. TMAMOE, on the other hand, although quite slender, couldn’t seem to grasp the concept that my sides were NOT where his elbows belonged. Every single time he shifted in his seat, I got jabbed. And he was a shifter. A SMELLY shifter. Wait, strike that. A smelly, TALKATIVE shifter. Wait, one more time. A smelly, talkative shifter, with the smallest bladder known to man. There we go. TMAMOE thought it was very important to have full-on conversations during the movie with the person on his right, jabbering and jabbering and jabbering, all the while invading my personal space, aka the seat I paid a ridiculous amount of service charges to park my ass in. When he was not talking, he was moving up and down the aisle, in and out of the theater. No less than six times did he cruise up and down the aisle during a two and a half hour movie. This is why I am not allowed to pick theater seats or a place in a bar or a place to stand during a concert–it’s almost I’m drawn to the places where I’ll be most annoyed. Seriously, who goes to a movie to talk through the whole goddamn thing? Wait until it comes out on DVD, you asshole!

Aside from wanting to slap TMAMOE until I was too exhausted to slap any further, I thorougly enjoyed every minute of The Dark Knight. I loved watching it on a ridiculously huge screen. I loved recognizing Gotham as being Chicago. I loved seeing the bridges and being reminded of my Batman Begins story*. I loved that the people involved are clearly Batman fans and have pulled from the comics for the movie, particularly ‘The Long Halloween’. I loved geeking out in the theater with a bunch of people who are just as clearly nutty about Batman as I am. I love that this Batman resurgence has kept him as a loner vigilante instead of sanctioned watchdog; Batman is best when he’s outside the law.

AWESOME. I may have to see it again before it leaves the theater. And again at the drive-in. And then six more times when it hits the cheapy theater in Federal Way.

*I went to Chicago with starladear13 in 2004, and ended up having to catch the train home to Kenosha. I checked the train schedule and realized that my train was leaving an hour earlier than I’d thought (uh-oh!) and left immediately to walk to the train station, figuring I’d make it there with 10 minutes to spare. To get to the train station, I needed to cross the river. As I approached the bridge, a man wearing the bright yellow and orange jacket of a traffic director told me that the bridge was closed. Cursing, I turned around and walked around the block to cross at a different bridge. At this bridge they had more than 100 people stopped from crossing. “Don’t worry folks, we’ll be re-opening the bridge in 15 or 20 minutes, we have it closed for your safety.” “For our safety” meant they were shooting something for Batman with a helicopter that was flying low over the bridges and didn’t want any people in the shot. Well that would have been fine if my train weren’t leaving in ten minutes and the next one was FOUR HOURS LATER. The crowd started getting unruly. One man said “What are you going to do if we go across? Shoot all of us?” and another one said “They can’t stop all of us. Let’s go!” So as a big unruly mob with a helicopter buzzing over our heads we ran over the bridge. One of the guards was calling frantically on her walkie-talkie for the police, which only made me run faster. Sirens started up behind us, but I was almost across…just a few more steps…Several people were being stopped by police, but I managed to duck into the train station and hopped on my train just before it pulled out. So now, like most of my co-workers at the time, I now had a ‘running from the police’ story. Only mine didn’t involve drugs.

First there was The Mummy. It was hardly high art, but it was good at what it was intended to be–a fun popcorn flick and a delivery system for hot, hot mostly-naked Arnold Vosloo.

Then came The Mummy Returns. Less fun, but somehow Arnold Vosloo was even hotter in this movie, so all was forgiven. At this point, watching Brendan Fraser flail around haplessly has gotten quite old. “Help, I’m ineffective! Someone call in geriatric Elvis to finish this guy off!”

Next was the spin-off, The Scorpion King. What a piece of crap.

So the franchise died, as well it should have. Pop culture sensations very rarely have the momentum to live through multiple iterations of badly-written, pushed-to-release-to-capitalize-on-the-only-actual-success movies.

Have you ever owned a t-shirt so long it went from cool to uncool and right back into cool? Franchises often revive themselves this way, and the last few years have been all about reviving already-owned properties than risking money on a new venture; the Transformers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Battlestar Galactica, and even the X-Files have seen their day dragged out from the closet and into the sun, some more wildly successful than others.

In a recent issue of Wired, Scott Brown developed a Nostalgorithm for pop culture sensations.

Where L= probability of lameness. “Translated crudely from the calculus, this simply means pop properties have expiration dates, like Lunchables or Tom Cruise. And fan love doesn’t steadily decline — it plummets as exposure (E) reaches an unhealthy level….But as Noah points out, non-awesome pop objects are primed to become awesome again. While what’s old is eventually new again, it takes about a generation (tgen = 20 years) for kids to pick up what their parents discarded.”

Although I failed calculus for myriad reasons, including but by no means limited to 7am classes, inept teaching assistants, no grades counted other than two tests, a basic lack of caring on my part and Unreal Tournament, to the best of my ability, I have figured that the prime release date for a Mummy revival (if one is EVER appropriate, which is debatable) is 2021…not summer 2008.

Apparently studio execs liked Unreal Tournament even more than I did, and ‘The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor’ is set to release this weekend. Unbeknownst to any historians, the Egyptians weren’t the only cultural group who grooved on mummies, oh no. The Chinese got in on that action, starting with a terrible foot-binding accident, and that explains why an archaeologist with a primary focus on Egypt is muddling around China when an Emperor rises from the dead to start a quest for world domination. When he’s done, the whole planet will be known as One China. And they’ll ALWAYS get the Olympics. And that’s just unacceptable to Our Bumbling Hero.

Now that we’ve started bastardizing living cultures, let’s keep this mummy train rolling. I’d like to pitch *my* movie idea, called ‘The Mummy: Curse of the Liger Czar’. It will be set fifty years in the future. Brendan Fraser has accidentally locked himself into a frozen dairy case, thus fulfilling a prophecy made by his mother when he was but a lad–“If you keep making that stupid face, it will freeze that way.” Thanks to the global warming caused by Al Gore, it becomes too expensive to continue to enjoy delicious frozen treats, and the power is disconnected to Fraser’s freezer case, loosing his powers of stupidity onto the world. By coincidence, his clothing style happens to be back in fashion, so no one believes him when he says he is from the past. He discovers that his now-geriatric wife (who never really went to all that much trouble to find him and now looks like a mummy herself) has been kidnapped by a risen Russian Czar to be his wrinkly bride, and that this same Russian Czar also has control over legions of what were previously dismissed as mythological creatures, which are wreaking havoc worldwide. He also runs into a smolderingly hot twenty-five year-old who claims to be his son, but neither the looks nor the timeline fits. Fraser sets off in a rage to find his pancake-boob wife because she’s got some ‘splainin to do. Hilarity ensues.

…What? It can’t be worse than what’s coming out tomorrow!