A movie trailer-song playlist, bowling pin animations, and a big map

Roundup 4/7/2022

hYou’re reading Read Max, a newsletter about the future. This is the weekly roundup edition, which is usually available only to paid subscribers but which I’m making public this week only as an enticing free preview of the kind of high quality and frankly sometimes quite disturbing content you gain access to when you pay to subscribe to Read Max.

If you like Read Max and know other people with the same sick, sad taste as you, please share this with them: I don’t tweet anymore, so the only way for me to get the word out is to depend on the kindness of my subscribers.

Let’s say you’re a successful editor of movie trailers and you’ve been asked to market a classic, life-affirming drama. How do you communicate to potential movie watchers the scale of human feeling that they can expect from this movie? How do you suggest to them that the movie will feature emotional turblence but end in slightly bittersweet but ultimately satisfying triumph? How do you say: “You will cry when you watch this movie — but in a good way”? The answer, of course, is to play the song “Take Me Home” by Phil Collins. Watch the new trailer for Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate’s full-length Marcel the Shell With Shoes On movie and tell me you are not being successfully manipulated:

“Take Me Home” is the exemplar of a microgenre I have been calling, unimaginatively, “Trailercore,” a canon of which I am now making available to you, reader of Read Max, as a Spotify playlist:

“Trailercore” is not, simply, “songs that appear frequently in movie trailers.” It’s more like, “songs that appear frequently in trailers for movies where emotions are felt, lessons are learned, and life is affirmed.” Trailercore songs are unabashedly earnest and communicate strong, heartfelt emotion, but they’re not unambiguously cheery — Karina and the Waves’s “Walking on Sunshine” has been featured in an estimated hundreds of millions of movie trailers since it was released in 1983, but its tone is too straightforward to really qualify. “Walking on Sunshine” only tells potential moviegoers that someone in the movie is happy. A true Trailercore song tells potential moviegoers that someone in the movie is, finally, happy because they have uncovered a hard-won epiphany about life and family after a near-death experience. Or whatever.

Also not Trailercore, even if they are in a lot of trailers: George Thorogood’s “Bad to the Bone,” which signals to viewers that the movie is a comedy in which someone who is not really bad to the bone acts as though they are bad to the bone; The Jackson 5’s “ABC,” which signals to viwers that someone in the movie is learning something or teaching something in some incogruous fashion; any whispery/children’s-chorus cover of a pop song, which signals to viewers that the movie they’re being asked to watch is fucking twisted, man; The Baha Men’s “Who Let the Dogs Out,” which signals to viewers that in the movie some likely, though not necessarily, metaphorical dogs have been let out.

Astute listeners will note that the canonical Trailercore list skews quite old: most of the songs are from the 1980s and 1990s. As someone born in 1985, I associate Trailercore very specifically with movies where mean Wall Street traders who got fired/divorced learn to love life from a homeless man who is maybe their brother (?) or father (?) and was crazy, but also has a lot of wisdom.

This kind of movie is, tragically/thankfully, no longer made very often. Contemporary movies attempting to hit the same emotional notes for some reason tend to be about sad kids who have absurdly beautiful mothers and CGI imaginary — or are they? — friends. Trailers for these movies are soundtracked by Arcade Fire and M83, and manage to hit many of the same “raw emotional catharsis” notes as “Take Me Home” or “Solsbury Hill.” And yet, something holds me back from considering these songs true Trailercore. Is it really Trailercore if Kevin Kline is not in the movie? Is it really Trailercore if there is no dramatic role for Robin Williams?

I leave these questions to readers. Please enjoy the Trailercore playlist responsibly. Read Max cannot be held legally responsible for the effects of exposing yourself to such high levels of emotional sincerity.

If you’re looking for a new vintage electronics category to add to your saved eBay searches — and believe me, I always am — this week’s Chaoyang Trap House is about Chinese electronic dictionaries, which seem to occupy roughly the same socio-cultural space that TI-89 calculators did to Americans around my age:

These compact machines flip open and present an air of discovery. A learning device should invite possibilities. It should feel personal, and be personalisable. A textbook isn't a dairy, but this is something you can build a connection with. There is no internet browser—the world it affords you is a private one. Navigation is enhanced by small, often cute graphic touches. Like the chinese-knot style bordering above. Then there's the quirks—separate password controls for games/personal/music / just about every function (a level of granular parental oversight that screams China). 

The dictionaries are riddled with archaic and bizzare turns of phrase, rarely marked as obsolete—for example “sucking the monkey” (Oxford: “the illicit act of using a straw to siphon off rum from its container”). More than one good chuckle was had by making the dictionaries say dirty things in an admirably passable voice. All this adds to the charm factor. There is a thriving second-hand market. The online listings show the kawaii aspects played up, and the fun people have had customising their dictionaries with stickers.

Here’s a link to an extremely large and detailed map of Europe in 1444. Look how incredibly fucked-up the Holy Roman Empire was.

This week I learned about the burgeoning computer-animation practice of fucked-up bowling-alley “strike” animations. For reference, for non-Americans or other culturally deficient readers, in many bowling alleys, a 3D-animated clip will play on the score screen after you bowl. Often the clip is elaborately “funny.” It is one of America’s great folk-art traditions, alongside Shaker furniture and airbrush-painting RVs.

This week Nintendo of Europe tweeted some footage from the bowling game in Nintendo Switch Sports; in response, a user with the display name, ahem, “CEI Enthusiast” tweeted an animated clip, rendered in an immediately recognizable, classically janky CGI style. What happens in the video is that, and look, I’m not going to embed it but I’m also not going to mince words here, a bowling ball sprouts a big dick and ejaculates all over the pins, which tumble over, the word “STRIKE!” washing down over the screen. If you can’t take my word for it you can watch the video here.

The animation, as well as another, somehow even more explicit “strike!” video, the link to which you should not click in front of small children or your boss, unless you work at a business that might want to hire a 3D animator with experience rendering sexual anatomy on inanimate objects, is the work of a Twitter user called @wyerframeZ. Both of @wyerframeZ’s videos have circulated widely on Twitter since he published them late last week, much to the dismay of Twitter users, but they’re only two of a variety of strike animations that have been created by enterprising animators over the last few months. (Naturally, Know Your Meme has the most comprehensive documentation of the meme, if your computer can handle its insane ad load.) Here’s another that’s been shared a lot on Twitter:

grimm @ExileGrimm

This particular strike video comes from a very popular YouTube video “We Made Slightly Offensive Bowling Animations,” published in November by YouTube channel called Corridor Crew. It’s a nice video, showing a bit of the creative work that goes into replicating the pitifully cheap and crude style of the original bowling-alley animations:

The single best one of these I’ve seen, however, predates the work of both @wyerframeZ and the Corridor Crew. It’s by an animator who goes by DigiLuxe, and it’s a masterpiece:

I loved this beautiful essay about work and war in the Times by Thuy Linh Tu:

Did they ever think about doing anything else? I asked Tung, and later Mike. They said some version of maybe, if things were different. But if you’re born in Torrington, like Mike, it’s probably hard to tell which came first — the factory or the town — so you “just go with the flow, sign up like everyone else,” he told me. If you find yourself in Torrington after having been displaced from central Vietnam to camps in Malaysia and the Philippines, like Tung, it’s maybe hard to see how you can avoid being swept into military-industrial labor, having had so much of your life shaped by U.S. militarism.

So they learned to press metal. My dad went through two wars with these men. The conflicts no doubt helped to keep their machines running, and after years of repeating tasks and passing time, they began to impress themselves upon one another.

It is unlikely my father thought much about what happened when the parts he made became whole. It was so noisy inside the factory; how could anyone think? By the time he retired, my father had lost much of his hearing. He yelled when speaking, because he couldn’t perceive the force of his own voice. When he was not working, he soothed himself with television. He loved Dan Rather. I think he loved us too, but we did not soothe him. We were mouths to feed, bodies to house, minds to educate, and every week he turned his paycheck over to my mother and let her do just that. He would quietly watch the evening news.

I was trying to figure out why I found this video so funny and relatable and then I realized that the basic arc and emotional beats of the story are exactly what it’s like to go viral on social media, down to the final turn:

Kayla Ancrum ✨MURDER OF CROWS OUT NOW!✨ @KaylaAncrum

This is so violently funny