I had never played "Super Smash Brothers" until this summer.
Embarrassing, I know. I feel like I've lived in a cave the past 16 years. I don't even own a copy. I only played when I visited my friend's house, and my skill level was way lower than everyone else's. Besides, most of the time we didn't play actual Smash.
We had a very specific way of playing. My friend had made a custom map that was basically just a box with a hole at the top. The rules were simple. Everyone starts at 300% with one life, you have to go in the box, and you must use Lucas. After an hour or two you never wanted to hear "PK fire!" ever again. We called it "Fight Club", and it was the greatest thing ever. Even better was the fact that none of us had actually seen or read "Fight Club". We just knew it existed and naming this test of patience and friendship after it was funny.
If I hadn’t found this beautiful form of entertainment, I probably would have partaken in the same pastime that kept me occupied during the school year- "Mr. Robot". I stopped counting how many times I’d seen the first episode. I’ve probably seen the entire first season about four or five times, and I’m planning to watch it again over fall break. Anyone who has seen the show knows you can’t watch it just once. Once you hit the finale the first time, you have to go back and find the things you missed. It was and still is one of my favorite shows.
I keep a list of movies to watch. Some of them are cult classics, some are foreign films or indie, and some are things everyone is ‘supposed to have watched’ that I haven’t. Last night I saw "Fight Club" for the first time. I had seen bits and pieces on TV before, but never the whole way through. I loved it, of course, but every so often I couldn’t help but think, “Wow, this is so similar to 'Mr. Robot'.” Obviously I now know that there were parallels for a reason. Clearly Elliot Alderson took a lot of inspiration from Tyler Durden. Yet they’re still two entirely separate entities. There are things in "Fight Club" that never show up in "Mr. Robot", and vice versa. These two pieces of media are prime examples of the advantage of the remix culture we live in.
One of the most interesting articles I've read this year also inspired me to write on this topic. "Truly original ideas don't take off," says VanDerWerff in "Stranger Things proves we don't want totally original stories. We want familiar ones.", "but slight tweaks to favorite tales thrive." So many of our favorite shows build off something else. "Once Upon A Time" remixes our favorite fairytales just like Disney does. The Grimm (the story collectors, not the show) versions end up very different in either of their hands. The Grimms themselves were remixers in a way.
This is not bad. Reusing the same stories to create new, slightly different ones is largely what our entertainment is based on. Think of all the YouTubers who make their fortune on parodies, commentary, alternate endings, song covers, what have you. Think about songwriters that get their lyrics from folk tunes, or fiction writers that are inspired by a song. So much of our entertainment is people being inspired by other people.
This is not bad. It doesn’t mean we aren’t creative or original. In fact, maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe we’re more creative because we see ways to build off what others have created. We see a hole in something, an aspect we want to expand, another way to tell a tale, and we go with it. As the saying goes, two heads are better than one. Collaboration, whether you’re in the same room or whether it’s across time and space, has created some of the most beautiful, thought-provoking pieces of media in history. So whenever you're next listening to the new single sampling the "Munsters" theme or watching another season of "American Horror Story", appreciate where ideas come from, and enjoy participating in remix culture.
