Yeah I do see them everywhere, but always in malls it seems.

It's people! Gigantic, all-knowing cube of sentient meat is PEOPLE!

Cool -is- kind of dead; it followed X-Treme off a cliff. But I suspect you're talking about mono-cool, a set of seeming universal traits that anyone could recognize as cool. The Fonz, Dean Martin, the girl who works at the record store, etc. I think cool still exists, it's just every sub-genre has it's own barometer…

The 3rd personality: Kali? Pandora? Lilith? Morrigan? Persephone? Mina?

"Someone has stolen the Eiffel Tower, but they've vanished into the wind. We need you to come out of retirement, Inspector Waldo. You're the only one who knows how she operates."

Only 25 years after Independence, the United States' first foreign war was with Barbary pirate states of North Africa; it most famously led to the creation and expansion of the American Navy. But it was also America's first conflict with Islam, and resulted in thousands of white people enslaved in Africa just as…

I would love it if the latest Final Fantasy installments were reimagined as a video games.

The Thrilling Adventure Hour as an animated anthology series. Hell, Sparks Nevada and Beyond Belief could probably stand on their own, but I don't want to mess with the structure.

For a second I thought you were talking about ol' Phil McCracken!

She's also a self-hating race traitor. "Now girls, all you have to do to get the man of your dreams is keep your mouth shut and literally change everything about yourself."

Sadie Doyle, but Paget Brewster can come too.

In the same 80s camp vein, how much more fun would life seem narrated by Waylon Jennings a la Dukes of Hazzard?

As great as PFT is, I'm not sure how you can consider him and then not immediately realize the actual correct answer is Paget Brewster as Sadie Doyle.

If we're talking singing instead of narration:
Ladies: Mimi Parker from Low, or Margo Timmins from Cowboy Junkies.
Dudes: Mark Lanegan or Richard Buckner.
Or if I can cheat I'd go 50/50 with Dead Can Dance's Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard.

Victor explicitly says Lily was 'perfect' in the beginning. When she was doe-eyed, naive, dependent on him for company, but oh so fuckable. That's a repellent opinion for one of the supposed 'heroes' of the show to have. Lily is now mostly a villain, but a campy, scenery-chewing kind of villain—the kind that's easy to…

This is a very good point, and it places the children of the 80s and 90s—today's adults—in a unique pop culture situation. I had posted in an older article (paraphrased below) about how Gen X was the last one to live through pop mono-culture, but as you note we were also the first to be able to endlessly re-watch that…

Oh, I know that intellectually. It's 100% an emotional response, and there's probably more than a little of the whiny brat to it. Even still, somehow the knowledge that an alternate version is going to exist—or worse, signal the dawn of yet another Cinematic Universe—really bums me out. I think it's just pop culture…

The counter-argument that 'remakes have always been a part of Hollywood' is undeniably true. But it misses the point that it seems like -everything- is getting remade or rebooted lately. While I like Ghostbusters a great deal, I never considered it (or Back to the Future, or The Goonies) to be sacred. But suddenly it…

Like many a good Canadian kid, my first realization that Canadian music could be great came through The Tragically Hip. As I got older and more jaded, I developed a too-cool opinion of them, scorning the same arty blues rock and Gord Downie theatricality that hooked me in the first place. But that's totally on me, not…

As I grew up I got 'too cool' for the Hip, but for me and a generation of kids they were the first Canadian band that showed that modern CanCon could be good. They were one of the primary factors in the 90s Canadian boom, and it's a sad development for the entire industry.