The bodies on the gears of the culture industry

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L.I. Underhill is a media critic and historian specializing in pop culture, with a focus on science fiction (especially Star Trek) and video games. Their projects include a critical history of Star Trek told through the narrative of a war in time, a “heretical” history of The Legend of Zelda series and a literary postmodern reading of Jim Davis' Garfield.

5 Comments

  1. Flex
    September 29, 2013 @ 1:01 pm

    Wow. Loved Scooby Doo as a kid (and enjoy the current incarnation fairly well), and I knew nothing about any of this. Fascinating reading.

    Reply

  2. Jack Graham
    October 5, 2013 @ 12:17 am

    I personally don't find Nosferatu to be an Expressionist work. With its atypical real-world location filming, deeply mystical storyline about the love of a pure woman, visual quotes from Fuseli and Caspar David Friedrich, etc. I think it's far more a Romantic work, albeit filtered through the medium of cinema. Of course, part of what's interesting about the resurgence of German Romanticism in the post WWI period is the way it complements the rise of Modernism in the same place and time, despite their apparent contradictions. Both are savagely critical of modernity in the wake of the nested set of crises (world war, pandemic, depression) destroying Enlightenment certainties… and it isn't even that Romanticism offers a reactionary critique while Modernism offers a progressive one. Both German Romanticism and aspects of Modernism end up co-opted by and fused in Nazism. That isn't the 'fault' of either movement exactly… unless we count the failure of radical Modernism to carry through political revolution. Fascism wears any mask it chooses. And it would've gotten away with it too, it if hadn't been for those meddling kids.

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  3. Josh Marsfelder
    October 5, 2013 @ 9:24 am

    "Fascism wears any mask it chooses. And it would've gotten away with it too, it if hadn't been for those meddling kids."

    Now you're jumping ahead 😉

    Reply

  4. Daru
    January 17, 2014 @ 12:21 am

    Josh thanks for this great and surprising post. Nice one. I did absolutely love Scooby Doo as a kid and it is wonderful to hear about the history of its roots. I had no idea that there was so much behind it's vision. As an artist and fan of German Expressionism it certainly makes me want to go back and look at some and makes me look forwards to any further essays on Scooby Doo now.

    I am going to be catching up with your posts over the last few months and will follow you alongside you with episodes of the Star Trek Animated Series, as I can see that they are coming up. That should be cool as I have never watched them since being a child.

    Reply

  5. SMM
    July 5, 2017 @ 2:26 am

    Where can one find the concept art for Mysteries Five?

    Reply

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