Before there was an internet, you REALLY had to want your media news. If you wanted to know what the newest box office reports were, you had to really dig or watch hours of E! or Entertainment Tonight. You had to have your Entertainment Weekly and Variety subscriptions. You had to do the work to get the information. Then the internet came along and brought with it sites like the Internet Movie Database and Ain’t It Cool News. Suddenly all that information that you had to dig for was just there at your fingertips. It was glorious. Unfortunately, the internet brought something else along with it: Fucking Douchebags.

There are many different kinds of Fucking Douchebags tooling along the Information Superhighway but in a general sense, they tend to travel in the same lanes. In this case, the lanes in question are talkback and comment sections at the end of news and editorial pieces. Where before Fucking Douchebags had to be content with alienating customers at video stores and comic shops, suddenly they were given a voice to tell anyone who will read just what they think of upcoming media. And what they think of upcoming media is almost always that it will suck. It doesn’t matter what it is. It could be the coolest shit in the world, the Fucking Douchebags will have shit to talk about it.

Now, I say this as a writer who has spent a decent amount of time talking shit about media and things that pisses me off. Not all bitching is created equal and while a lot of things do suck, not everything does. Reading talkbacks on every story has no real mystery anymore as it will be a procession of ‘First!,’ ‘meh,’ *insert name of director* is going to screw it up,’ ‘Why can’t Hollywood come up with anything better than this shit?’ and occasionally ‘I could do this much better.’ I think that is the crux of the geek hate. Most of us think we are auteurs who have brilliant, singular vision that is wasted at retail jobs while hacks make bullshit movies about things we profess to love.

You see the same conversations over and over again on many talkbacks, and while I wish I could just not read them they tend to be like the worst of train wrecks, and I am talking about nasty ones that kill a lot of people in nasty ways. Or like Courtney Solomon’s Dungeons and Dragons. I can’t look away and not read the talkbacks and they just tend to make me angry. That being said, there is one phrase that I keep seeing around that REALLY annoys me. It is applied specifically to the myriad remakes announced every year: ‘They are raping my childhood.’

The first time I heard this was a couple of years ago when Transformers was announced. Of course people hated the Michael Bay choice, regardless of the fact that his movies gross enormous amounts of money and if people really thought he sucked so much they just wouldn’t go. People bitched and moaned about the choice, just like they all did when Bryan Singer was announced for X-Men, Sam Raimi for Spider-man, Christopher Nolan for Batman, Jon Favreau for Iron Man and pretty much anyone else ever announced for anything. People loved Lord of the Rings? Outrage when Peter Jackson was announced. But it wasn’t until Transformers that I started hearing people say shit like ‘Thanks for raping my childhood, Michael Bay!’

It didn’t stop there, I’ve heard it in reference to GI Joe, Indiana Jones, retroactively about Star Wars, and many more. I swear to god I heard someone say it about the Chipmunks movie.

Most recently, I read it in reference to the upcoming Land of the Lost remake starring Will Ferrell and Danny McBride. The writer of said missive claims that Land of the Lost is being ruined by the obvious re-purposing of the property into a comedy. It is a fair enough criticism I suppose, particularly if the property in question weren’t a goofy blue screen dinosaurs and ridiculous make-up vehicle for Sid and Marty Kroft. Is anyone going to find the fucking Sleestack believable in some kind of hardcore drama? But, you know, fair enough if you loved it back then and you think the new movie is a terrible idea and is going in a terrible direction. But to say that your childhood is being raped because filmmakers realize that Marshall, Will and Holly are better served  by a tongue in cheek approach than a dramatic one is just completely asinine.

First of all, and I am guilty of this in the past as well, using rape as a quaint euphemism, particularly in terms of movies and TV, is really weak and disrespects those who have been raped. I am certain that what the average rape victim has gone through trumps your emotional scarring from Optimus Prime saying ‘My bad’ or having flames on his inappropriately elongated hood. I don’t want to be the sensitivity police, particularly on Up My Own Ass, but the choice of words is ridiculously dramatic and overwrought and pretty much makes you an asshole. Or a Fucking Douchebag if we want to keep up the continuity.

Second, and this really annoys me, if someone fucks up a property you loved when you were eight years old on the big screen, nothing has been done to your memories, your past nor the property itself. If you think Michael Bay fucked up the Transformers movie, don’t watch it and go back to the original show and the animated movie. They are all on DVD and readily accessible online. Trust me, they have not been altered or changed by Michael Bay. I will also submit that, as much as I love the Transformers with every ounce of my being, nothing in the old cartoons were anywhere near as badass as what was on display in the movie. I am sure that will earn me some bile in the comment section here, but it is what it is. In your heart of hearts you know it is true.

The point is that your childhood has not been, in any way at all, raped. You can always think back to when you played with your toys and watched the cartoons or whatever and have those pleasant memories. You can watch the old shows and jerk off to Cheetara (or Tigra if that is your thing) just like always. The evil Hollywood boogie monsters can never touch you in your secret place. Neither can most women either if you don’t move out of the basement, but that is neither here nor there.

Original source material is not ruined or tarnished by bad adaptations and just because such an adaptation is different it isn’t automatically inferior. When you adapt things to new mediums some things have to change. What works on the page doesn’t necessarily work on the big screen and what works when you are six doesn’t work when you are in your 30’s. And aside from that, the world doesn’t revolve around you.  If movies only made the money of hardcore fans, none of these properties would be brought to film at all. Maybe that could be considered a good thing but I think the world would be a much shittier place without the Dark Knight, Iron Man, Lord of the Rings, and so on. The point is that the movies can’t just be for the fans and some things just don’t translate.

A good example of how to look at this is Dave Gibbons’s take on the Watchmen movie. He said, and I am paraphrasing, that where the comic was satirizing super hero comics, the movie is satirizing comic book movies. That is a great take because it understands that at bottom the two things are different mediums and serve different masters. Occasionally you will get pure adaptations like 3oo and Sin City but those sort of lend themselves to direct translation more so than most other things.

At the end of the day, people who claim that their childhoods are being raped need to really put on their big boy pants and see about doing something about their adulthoods. If you are feeling real anguish like a part of you is dying because some adaptation of a cartoon you watched in elementary school is not living up to your expectations, then you have serious problems. If you then feel the need to spew all over a talkback or message board about it before the movie has even come out, then you are a Fucking Douchebag. Probably also a virgin but, again, that is neither here nor there.

In closing, I want to again reiterate that I am not saying it is bullshit to not like something or not care for an adaptation but keeping some fucking perspective is a good thing. I hated the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula (and Frankenstein for that matter) but it didn’t make me go home and strip down naked while I burned my copy of the Bram Stoker original. I still love the book and my enjoyment of it is not diminished. I think it is too bad that the movie sucked more than nipples shooting blood could ever afford but that is about as far as it goes. I didn’t have an internet to bitch about at that time though and maybe I would have. I was in high school, the age of which is roughly consistent with that type of behavior and sadly roughly the mentality of most Fucking Douchebags on the internet.  So that is that, I’ll see you in the talkbacks.