...of a general nature...
There comes a point in every creative process, one specific moment where someone comes up with a rough idea or general concept, takes a step back, looks at it and declares: „This is totally wicked!" This idea or concept then proceeds to go through the usual stages of production, from the original pitch of the idea at whatever meeting is responsible for this element of the creative process until it is finally signed off on by all the necessary people in charge, all agreeing that this is in fact a brilliant idea.
When the completed version however finally reaches us, the consumers, those of us with at least half a brain are left to stare at the result in shock and disbelief. The result is so tooth grindingly horrible, so unforgivably atrocious that we are left to do little more than scratch our head and ask the question I'm sure everyone of us has asked at some point in their lives, the central question of this blog: "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!?".
Moments like this can be found everywhere in any media with a creative process. Television, movies, video games, you name it. Likewise, a moment like this can occur in any part of the creative process. From casting over plot lines and character development to dialogue or game play elements and control scheme, no stage of a production, no step of the creative process is safe from what I like to call a "What-were-they-thinking-Moment" (or WWTT-Moment for short).
However, before we get to some examples to clarify what I mean, we also need to distinguish between the rhetorical question and the times, when we really and truly cannot fathom what went into the people responsible. For instance, if you purchase a video game based on a summer blockbuster the smart money says that you've just bought a game with horrible controls, atrocious graphics and mind numbingly repetitive game play. You might be prone to ask "What were they thinking, releasing this substandard example of a video game" (albeit with smaller words of the four letter variety), but bear in mind, this is a rhetorical question. No answer is required as you already know the obvious answer: They were trying to make a quick an effortless buck off a big summer blockbuster. Duh!
I however want to concentrate on the moments when you really and honestly wonder what was going through someone's head when they took that step back, eyed their creative decision from top to bottom and ruled it to be good. When what you just saw was so mind numbingly retarded, nonsensical or just plain bad that you can't possibly imagine anybody anywhere ever thinking this to be a good idea.
Alright, so to round this introduction off and to make my point clear I'll present you with some example of some WWTT-moments. Bear in mind, these are not necessarily ****c or even generally well known WWTT-moments, their just examples I came up with off the top of my head:
...with some examples...
Movies: Spiderman 3
Moment: Emo-dancing and cookie-eating of evil
What's that about? This, in my opinion, is a real ****c example of recent movie history. So, in a nutshell, somewhere along the line in "Spiderman 3" Peter Parker starts using the black-symbiont suit which slowly turns him evil. To show that this change is taking place the people in charge chose to have Peter dress in black, eat cookies and dance around like a drunken, retarded monkey imitating a drunken retarded dancer. For those of you who haven't seen this movie (though, guessing by its commercial success, most of you did), I am not kidding! He eats cookies and dances like a fool which is meant to show the audience how evil he is. When watching that you can't help yourself but to ask yourself: "What were they thinking"?
TV: Stargate Atlantis
Moment: Resolution to S4 E6 Tabula Rasa
What's that about? Dear Lord! What were they thinking? So, the episode sees everyone in Atlantis but Ronon and Teyla losing their memories. In order to distribute a cure over the ventilation system Rodney has to write a program. In the process of doing so he starts to lose his memory, so he records a message to himself instructing himself to go and find Teyla. Rodney viewing this message, is how the episode begins. From there on he proceeds to find Teyla (after overcoming a series of obstacles) who reminds him of the program he has to finish. Of course having no memory of anything at all really, he doesn't know what to do. So in desperation he presses A SINGLE RANDOM button, which completes the program.
What the schnitzel? From there on out, he is of no more relevance to resolving the situation. The cure is distributed off screen without his help and all is well. So if Rodney had just pressed that one single button in the first place instead of stopping one step from the finish line to tediously record a video message to himself, the entire episode would have been 40 minutes shorter. What were they thinking? I cannot get over this! That one push of the button nullifies the entire episode making everything that happened superfluous. What were they thinking?
Games: Nintendo Fetch Quests
Moments: When you have to backtrack for hours on end tediously collecting objects from all over the place in order to advance in the game.
What's that about? There comes a point in almost every Nintendo game, where the player is forced to backtrack, that is revisit all of the places he's been throughout the game, in order to locate some fragments of a key, or some semblance thereof. I guess the most prominent, because tedious, example would have to be "The Legend Of Zelda - The Wind Waker". Now, while it remains my favorite 3D Zelda to date (yeah, that's right, it's better than Ocarina of Time and definitely better then the disappointing Twilight Princess. I could tell you why, if you wanted to know, but you don't) not even I can deny the fact, that the fetch quest in this game is ridiculous. You have traverse a vast ocean with a tiny sailboat to get from one tiny island to the next in order to find eight fragments of the Triforce. And as there are hardly any shortcuts, the sailing alone takes hours. Not to mention the fact that before you can collect these fragments you first need to collect eight maps each depicting the location of one fragment and have those maps decoded by travelling to yet another island. What were they thinking?
Hang on, I hear you say! This is a rhetorical question you say. The answer is obvious, you claim? They wanted to increase the length of the game, you purport? Well, I guess, that was the motivation behind the fetch quests, yes, but there are better ways to stretch a game's length. And since Nintendo is one of the best publishers in the world when it comes to fun and entertaining games, I still have to wonder what they were thinking when they test-played that part and thought it was actually fun and entertaining.
...and a conclusion.
Ok, well, now you've got the gist of what my blog will be about. This is going to be my personal, half-baked attempt to show you, what might have been going through the minds of certain artists and entertainers when they made some of the most shockingly bad decisions imaginable, by "recreating" the dialogue that lead to these decisions.
Since nothing decent other than "Doctor Who" has been on recently, my "pilot episode" so to say, will be a multipart story, in which I will try to ascertain "What They Were Thinking" when discussing the future for the character of Martha Jones. Starting with "Part I - Martha Jones and 'Last of the Timelords'".
