Note: This blog post was originally written in 2019, and as such, predates the creation of both this blog and some elements of my life that will be elucidated on in an epilogue at the bottom of the post.
How did we get here? More accurately, how did I get here? I don’t think we have enough to time go over everyone’s trajectory. I’ve got to thinking lately about how I got here. Now, I know that “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much, they decide to…” but I mean more specifically, how I got to this exact moment in my life. An aspiring screenwriter with a hobby of making online video content. And the journey, while probably uninteresting to most, is something I wanted to chronicle.
We could, of course, jump back to 2012, either in March when I did my first Literary Lair episode (not titled that back then, of course, it wouldn’t gain a title until a few months later) or perhaps in January when I created the BlackScarabFilmZ blog where I would upload text reviews and video content until I picked book reviews. But that’s not the beginning of the story.
Let’s jump back further. We could start with the day I discovered Atop the Fourth Wall in August of 2011, with Linkara’s review of Mightily Murdered Power Ringers #1, which I had seen as a related video of SFDebris’, as he had been banished from YouTube by CBS, and started uploading on Blip, and I found watching directly on Blip was easier than the embed on his website. Boy, do I miss those days. Being a Power Rangers fan, the title intrigued me, so I checked it out. But this is still not the beginning.
I know, this is taking forever, but bear with me, it’s important to go on this journey with me. Jumping back at least a year, we land at my attempts to rediscover an old review of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home that I had discovered right around the time I first got into Star Trek, back at the age that I believed I could find full movies online for free with just a Google search. Instead, I found a crass video that described the plot as "There's a log of shit with a disco ball floating around space, and it talks to humpback whales on Earth”. Later on, I would discover that this video was created by James Rolfe, aka the Angry Video Game Nerd. That’ll be important later.
Ultimately, searching for that, drove me to find SFDebris’ review of Star Trek: Generations on YouTube, of which I quickly became a fan of. Course, jumping back even further, we’d hit around the central crux of what got me here. Back to the Future (Zemeckis, 1985), is, of course, a film by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd. When I was a kid, probably just out of elementary school, I was watching ABC Family, and I saw a promo for a marathon of a trilogy. I’d never heard of it, but one line in the commercial piqued my interest, apart from the premise being about time travel, “Doc, are you saying my Mom's got the hots for me?” That might sound weird, but that’s why I watched because the line was just weird enough to make me say, “I’ve gotta see the context for that.” And I would become utterly obsessed with that movie, and the concept of time travel, though I had always had an affinity for it. And in my obsession, as I am wont to do, I started looking up every single thing imaginable about Back to the Future, which I believe is now called a hyperfixation, but for me, it was just what I did back then (and to an extent now, but now I have a word for it!) That would lead me to find the AVGN’s review of the Back to the Future NES game, which I feel had a subconscious impact on me, given that it all ties back together years later.
Now, there is room for interpretation, certainly, perhaps the crux was Star Trek, which is another entire rabbit hole, but I like to imagine the alternate timeline where I missed that ABC Family promo, or where I never sought out Star Trek IV on the internet, and I became a lawyer or something, because I never found a proper outlet for my creativity, and ended up stifling it, because that is what this hobby ultimately is. While I’d love for it to be a career, and I won’t deny starting it because of a misguided desire to be “internet famous”, (whatever that means, I never quite figured out), it has become an outlet for my creativity. The place for me to express myself in an environment where I have full control.
A problem I have is that I get very passionate but at the cost of coherence. I had a teacher in middle school, (one of the good ones) once recommend that, if I had something to bring to a class discussion, I should write it down before I raise my hand because otherwise, it ended up as a jumbled mess when it came out since my brain was working six steps ahead of where my mouth was. Hence the slowdown of any non-scripted content in recent years. Without a script, I lose focus. Had I not discovered a format that allowed me to talk about what I was passionate about, with the focus I desperately lacked (even if it took me a few years to work all the kinks out), I would not be where I am today. For want of that Delorean, a reviewer was lost.
Epilogue:
I think I've talked at length about the profound impact that "Back to the Future" had on me as a kid, quickly going from that movie I saw advertised on ABC Family to one of my favorite films of all time. And may have inadvertently put me on the trajectory to where I am today, in more ways than I realized in 2019 when I wrote the original "For Want of a DeLorean, a Reviewer Was Lost", because for want of a DeLorean, a bookseller was lost. In the original piece, I referred to how attempting to rediscover a review of the "Back to the Future" NES game led to me discovering "Atop the Fourth Wall", which was my most direct inspiration for the online persona that I would develop over the next decade, however, I've recently uncovered one more facet to that discovery.
Something that Linkara, aka Lewis Lovhaug, the host of "Atop the Fourth Wall", mentioned pretty frequently in commentaries, was that when he started the show he was working at a certain corporate bookstore and I took that knowledge to its natural conclusion and began applying to said corporate bookstore repeatedly for a period of up to roughly 7 or 8 years and dear reader, I wonder if you can guess where I am currently employed and intend to remain employed at until such a time that I may be in a position of great authority within one of those corporate bookstores, perhaps as a store manager. An ambition that I never knew I had, certainly it was never my dream as a kid, but now? It's pretty tempting.
This was all brought about because I was trying to write a little post about my recently completed Lego DeLorean time machine that I bought and assembled over the past week, since I'd been having a rough go of it and felt I needed some serotonin. Completing it reminded me of when I was a kid and in my very early days, before I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker, I attempted to make a Lego "Back to the Future" movie, now, of course, there was no official BTTF Legos, so at the time so I was working off modified versions of stuff I had built that came out of Star Wars and Indiana Jones sets. And like many of the things I did back then, I don't really remember what it was about, but I remember spending hours playing with those versions of Doc Brown, Marty McFly, and the DeLorean. So it's honestly just kind of incredible to me that there is an official "Back to the Future" Lego set, and even if it's not properly in scale with the Minifigures, it's still pretty incredible to finally own. Little did I know back in 2007 what watching a single triple feature movie marathon could lead to. The future really is whatever you make it, and I think I made it a good one.