To be fair, Save the Cat doesn’t promote his (admittedly terrible) Stop or my Mom Will Shoot! as the screenplay you should emulate. He actually analyzes a lot of good movies. If there’s a complaint to be made about the book it is that he seems to like when great films follow formulas more than when they subvert them.

People say The Simpsons predicts the future, but The Onion does too. You gave a good example. Another is the one in which they predicted there was another celebrity to be had from Mary-Kate and Ashley’s family.

Perhaps he was confusing the singer with the mother of Christ.

It’s been done. One of the first uses for LLM (even before chatGPT) was AI Dungeon, and these days there are programs like SillyTavern  that can even be run locally using LLMs that can run on your own computer. They are fun, but obviously the scenarios they create are pretty random and have little structure.

I have absolutely no idea what an “Ethics Bowl” is, but I’m imagining some sort of sports event where stealing the ball, conducting plays designed to fake out the other team, and so on are penalized.

contained “pornography without warning”

I’m not sure there’s anything ideologically wrong with Lasseter. He just likes hugging beautiful women — whether or not said beautiful women are onboard with that.

I wouldn’t go that far. I mean, Amazon has literally made an anti-corporate series with Fallout. There’s no question that Vault-tec is evil. And yet Amazon, a corporation that can be seriously compared to Vault-tec, made it. I can only assume that Bezos, et al, either doesn’t get it or thinks that anti-corporate…

“The greatest adventure is what lies ahead...” 10x better than what Peter Jackson did to the material.

I liked it even as a non Chinese-Canadian because the pressures it describes are common to other groups (such as American Jewish).

Depends on age. I nearly already had my doctorate when Toy Story csme out (yes, I’m in my 50s, which makes me solidly GenX rather than boomer before the obvious retort). I bring this up because this is exactly what some people claim when people criticize modern Simpsons -- that we were just biased due to being kids at…

I may be disappointed with it, but I think I’ll have to track it down. Sherlock Holmes in a Blade Runner style future is like a show written specifically for me.

It’s part of the problem of The Simpsons too. Yes, I’m one of those “anything after season 10 is crap” dweebs (I even literally own the boxsets up to 10 and no more), but to be fair, a lot of the “dropoff” in quality in The Simpsons is that there is only so much you can do with the concept and there is only so much…

As hornacek noted, cocaine was Holmes’ drug of choice. He wasn’t above smoking opium on occasion (mostly while frequenting opium dens to get some info from the “inscrutable” Chinese running them), but that wasn’t his addiction. Also, in Victorian London, cocaine was legally purchasable over the counter at pharmacies,…

That actually looks cool and I’ve never heard of it.

Well, yeah, for the time. It was certainly a step up from the light cycles in Tron a few years before it. But consider just a few years later with Jurassic Park. The CGI in that (mixed with practical effects) hold up even today.

The Muppet Babies were literally in diapers!

I prefer Old Sherlock Holmes, myself

And his descendant (I’m making it canon) Dr. Richard Kimbel also had that skill!

It featured an early, terrible, CGI sequence!