While Carpenter pretty openly intended it as a satire of the Reagan era, I think the timelessness of They Live lies in the fact that it's pretty politically ecumenical — Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Anarchists, Greens, religious fundamentalists… pretty much anybody can see it as supporting their stance and…

As long as it's a "gritty" supernatural Babysitter's Club reboot.

It seems to me like there's a basic logical problem with an apparently non-suicidal adult creating a portrayal of suicide that they think will be appalling and non-glamorous in order to discourage suicide. They're not exactly working from the same premises, values, and aesthetic as the at-risk group.

I think maybe it's more of a Shelbyville idea…

Nothing definitive, just the geographic spread of them, and the degree of stylistic variety they do display, in spite of the uniformity of content.

I live in suburban Philadelphia, and was surprised to find one a few years ago down the street from me, a hundred feet or so from a state highway on-ramp — I'd assumed they were an urban phenomenon.

That idea was ripped off by the movie Phantasm, wasn't it?

Moreover, I offer myself as evidence to debunk his assertion.

There's actually the makings of a cool kind of Fugitive riff there: Two escaped convicts team up to catch the people who respectively framed them — the twist being that one's actually guilty, and simply out for revenge on someone who sold them out.

The Wendy & Lisa song was pleasant, though.

The very first explorers and trappers/traders apparently spread the diseases, often well before any organized colonists. The Pilgrims apparently found Massachusetts looking very much like a neolithic version of The Stand — they actually survived their first winter in large part by looting the food stores of dead…

Probably not in an advanced way, but I think "agricultural" isn't necessarily a clear distinction. I know that a lot of North American "hunter-gatherers" helped along the "gathering" by planting food crops that they expected to be harvestable by the time they seasonally migrated back.

First they killed Bigfoot, and I said nothing. Then they killed Slightly-Smaller-But-Still-Very-Very-Largefoot, and I still said nothing…

The tribes east of the Mississippi were all pretty heavily agricultural by the time Europeans arrived, but they and their wandering Plains relatives may all well have been the Mad Max-ian remnants of collapsed earlier cultures.

Not to mention all the coastal civilizations erased by rising sea levels — It seems possible to me that early Mesopotamia wasn't the first agricultural civilization, so much as the only one whose ruins are above water.

Perhaps not his precise theories, but the idea of any ruins of ancient civilizations in the Amazon was scoffed at in Fawcett's time. However satellite photos and traces found as a result of deforestation in recent years have proven that there were extensive, and pretty developed, agricultural civilizations in the…

[Scurrying off to work on my Real Housewives of Canterbury pitch…]

The D&D "retroclones" have definitely seemed to feel compelled to out "Monty Haul" the original.

This whole incident is going to be a disaster exhibit in public relations textbooks for years.

I've had this argument before, Kanye, but my posse found it a pale second to The Sword and the Sorcerer back when it was released, and its leaden pacing and dropped balls like the anticlimactic giant snake "battle" make it measure up poorly even against Conan The Destroyer