Category: Blog

Tony Lazlo’s Thoughts on The New She-Ra

Netflix’s She-ra series got me thinking about the different approaches to reboots.

I’m stating the obvious here, but there are a few ways to go about revisiting old material. Until recent memory, the most common way to reboot a property was simply to remake it. (I’ll discuss the current definition of reboot—as I understand it, at least—in a moment.) More often than not, studios remade old properties that had some brand recognition (The Ten Commandments, Ocean’s Eleven, Sabrina). Whether or not these properties could benefit from being remade was immaterial. Opting to produce (or re-produce) a familiar property no doubt felt and continues to feel like a safe bet for Hollywood suits.

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General Writing Thoughts: Screenwriting

Whether or not you work in Hollywood, I submit that screenwriting should be a part of every novelist’s routine. At the very least, it can provide a welcome change from writing standard prose, and it provides a host of different challenges for a writer. Let me explain:

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General Writing Thoughts: The Medill Maxims

Basic Writing was supposed to strike fear into my heart. Instead, it brought the world into relief.

When I attended Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the school’s curriculum required all freshmen to take a class called Basic Writing. Known as a weed-out course, the class was reputed to be one of the most challenging at Medill. And it was challenging, but it was challenging in the best way possible – you had too much fun to realize how hard you were working.

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Influences: Richard Adams and Watership Down

It might seem unusual to list Richard Adams as an influence, seeing as how I’ve only read one of his books – but what a book.

For the uninitiated, Watership Down is The Aeneid in the animal kingdom. When the incursion of an industrial development forces a tribe of rabbits from their home, they must set out to find a new one. Along the way, they have a series of breathtaking adventures across the English countryside, all of it against the backdrop of Adams’ brilliant world-building.

Yes, world-building. Even though it takes place on modern-day earth, Watership Down stands as one of the best pieces of speculative fiction I’ve ever read. Adams invents an entire culture, vocabulary, social-structure and – most wonderfully – a mythology for his rabbits.

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Influences: Rock and Rule

I’ve always been a Disney geek, but the Canadian animation company Nelvana made five of my all-time favorite cartoons. Four of them came on a mysterious four-pack that my sister and I used to religiously rent from our local video store. The four half-hour features include A Cosmic Christmas, The Devil and Daniel Mouse, Romie-0 and Julie-8 and Please Don’t Eat the Planet. All four cartoons are charming as hell, and they’ve aged surprisingly well over the years.

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Influences: Starchaser: The Legend of Orin

Now this is a deep cut. I credit the eccentric programmers at HBO back in the 80s for introducing me to this exciting feature, which borrows liberally from the Star Wars mythos to tell the tale of an escaped slave who finds a magic sword and frees his people. STARCHASER also features a lot of undeniably Christian imagery, as well as some offensively stereotypical middle-eastern villains.

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