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  • Rapper NASAAN talks about his new album, establishing his own identity, and his father’s legacy

    Rapper NASAAN talks about his new album, establishing his own identity, and his father’s legacy

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    Rapper NASAAN, his girlfriend Tiva Fox, and CEO of Assemble Sound Garret Koehler are sitting in a semi circle talking about all things hip-hop. The conversation ranges from early Detroit boom bap and West Coast gangsta to who’s on tour, and who’s dropped what.

    Over the last few months NASAAN has been on an impressive press run to promote his album ERROR 404, slated for a May 31 release, including appearances on Way Up with Angela Yee, Ebro in the Morning, and The Joe Budden Podcast.

    “It’s been pretty surreal, because I’m such a hip-hop nerd, like a rap nerd,” he says. “I go to sleep watching these people so being on their platforms almost felt like breaking a fourth wall in a way. I was super nervous.”

    NASSAN is dressed in a button-down white shirt, black tie, shorts, and a caramel-colored sweater. He has on black Prada shoes, and a diamond-encrusted grill fills his mouth while 3 star shaped stickers are spread over his face.

    “I’m taking on this character, a young guy who wants to be a part of this tech company ERROR 404,” he says. “The insignia of those who have been accepted into the company is the brown cardigan. The stickers represent being employee of the month at the company.”

    NASAAN is as creative an emcee as you’ll ever meet, but he’s not just a rapper. His YouTube channel is full of comedic skits, abstract content, and witty freestyles — just think Childish Gambino meets Joyner Lucas. But he’s also the 21-year-old son of legendary emcee DeShaun “Big Proof” Holton. For those outside, Detroit Proof was simply the frontman to hip-hop group D-12, a fierce battle rapper, and the Robin to Eminem’s Batman. But for Detroiters, Proof was one of the best to ever step behind the mic, the quintessential lynchpin within Detroit hip-hop. From the Goon Squad to 5-Ela, from the Hip Hop Shop to the Shelter at Saint Andrew’s, Proof was an ambassador of Detroit hip-hop who helped lead it to its most significant wave of global notoriety. He died April 11, 2006 when NASAAN was 7 years old.

    “After he passed we moved down south,” NASAAN says. “We moved to Florida for a year or two and then moved to Atlanta because my grandma stayed there. So I pretty much grew up in Atlanta.”

    The move was an economic and a cultural shift. NASAAN says his family experienced financial hardships after his father died and his appreciation of hip-hop was influenced by Atlanta’s evolving trap music scene.

    “My stepfather was Jeezy’s bodyguard so that’s all I would listen to,” NASAAN adds. “It molded my taste and my palette to trap music and the Atlanta sound in general.”

    Along with Atlanta trap music, the mid-2000s were very diverse years for hip-hop. Detroiters Big Sean and DeJ Loaf were making their mark while seasoned veterans like Jay-Z and Pusha T were still dropping music, and Chicago drill had become the newest sound to take hip-hop by storm.

    “The first person I ever ‘stanned’ in my life was Chief Keef,” he says. “I think he had a crazy grip on my generation, period. I remember wearing a big-ass fake designer belt my mom had bought me from the flea market to try and embody what he had going on,” he adds through a laugh.

    NASAAN says he started actively writing rhymes in 8th grade and by 9th grade he was recording songs daily (although he only released one song), and was a student of the craft who was more interested in quality over quantity.

    “I used to [read] Complex every day and they had this list of best albums of every year by rappers,” he says. “And I just went through it and studied it all … I was so mesmerized.”

    In 2017, a 16-year-old NASAAN entered the Fresh Empire’s The New Wave Competition. The contest featured six emcees, three rounds, and included a DJ and live band. NASAAN finished second to Baltimore rapper Lil Key, but his notoriety skyrocketed. It appeared that NASAAN’s proverbial breakout moment had arrived.

    “Sway hosted it. Marshall and Big Sean posted me and it got super big,” he says. “I got 50,000 [Instagram] followers overnight.”

    However, what appeared to be a big step forward was used to take a step back. NASAAN felt he wasn’t ready for the adulation as he wasn’t giving the public the best representation of who he was as an artist.

    “When that happed I kind of got scared because all these eyes were on me and I didn’t wanna fuck up,” he says. “I didn’t want to make the wrong move. I didn’t know myself as an artist. I felt like I had to do this rappity rap shit because of the legacy and what people associated me with.”

    NASAAN retreated back to his bat cave where he continued to iron out his style, his approach, and grow his lyricist super powers. About a year later he popped up on the radar of Eminem’s manager Paul Rosenberg, who had become chairman and CEO of Def Jam Recordings in 2018.

    “While I was in high school he caught wind of me because I would do features with someone who was a fan of me in London,” NASSAN says. “His name is Kid Bookie, a very great rapper. He had a lot of motion going on overseas.”

    Rosenberg signed NASAAN to Def Jam of that same year and the union seemed to be a match made in hip-hop heaven. What could be more perfect that Proof’s son inking a record deal with Paul Rosenberg and Def Jam, the most historic hip-hop label ever? NASAAN released a five-song EP Kiss of Karma highlighted by the creative single “Ben/Frank,” though it would be NASAAN’s only release through Def Jam as he left the label after Roseberg stepped down in 2020.

    “Everybody left,” he says with a shrug. “I don’t even think staying was an option.”

    NASSAN didn’t stay unsigned for too long, however. He had already been on the radar of Koehler, who founded Assemble Sound in 2015 and had inked a joint venture with Atlantic Records in 2021.

    “Drew [Drialo] told me about NASAAN before he signed to Def Jam and was like, ‘Just keep your eye on him,’ and he told me about his background,” Koehler says.

    Koehler did just that. He kept up with NASAAN’s content and drops. About a year after NASAAN parted ways with Def Jam he released the single “R.I.P. FRESH” in January of 2022 and Koehler was so impressed that he knew it was time to reach out to him.

    “After he dropped ‘R.I.P. Fresh,’ that’s when I saw art that felt reflective of the artist,” he says. “It was the first video he directed and put out himself.”

    After several months of conversations Koehler signed NASAAN to a record deal on Assemble Sound in August 2022. In dramatic fashion NASAAN signed the contract while riding the Magnum XL-200 roller coaster with Koehler at Cedar Point.

    He was the first artist to officially sign to the imprint. Koehler calls him “the one,” and firmly believes that NASAAN has the skill set to become a world renowned hip-hop artist.

    “He could be a superstar,” Koehler says. “He has the energy that could fill an arena and I say that because of his charisma, his lyricism, which is both technically good and also widely creative. It embodies a very unique perspective.”

    NASAAN incorporates a variety of tools to create music. He utilizes voice notes and voice memos to store ideas for later dates, and punches in his rhymes but also writes his bars down when he wants to evoke certain feelings and articulate certain thoughts. In February of this year NASAAN set the hip-hop sound waves a blaze with a mesmerizing “On The Radar” freestyle.

    “That freestyle, it was so much pressure,” he says shaking his head. “I was in L.A., I had to fly back and do it that same morning.”

    That was followed up a month later with the bass-heavy “Cullinan Gang” which featured the melodic trap vocals of one of Detroit’s favorite emcees, Icewear Vezzo.

    “Vezzo had came up to the studio one day and we was talking, kicking it … We linked up at the 50 cent show, he was showing mad love,” he says.

    NASAAN’s most recent release is “Goated” featuring Royce da 5’9”. Within the video for the single NASAAN recreates the MTV News freestyle session between his father and Eminem. The song was released on April 11, eighteen years to the day that Proof passed away. NASSAN has also partnered with ESPN with a licensing deal for “Goated” to be featured during the 2024 NBA playoffs.

    “It was in tribute to my father,” he says. “The last line right before the first hook is and my daddy like, boy don’t blow my assist.’ I feel like he laid all this out for me man and I just gotta lay it up.”

    For NASAAN the bond he’s been able to forge with Eminem and Royce is priceless. They both were his father’s friends and fellow emcees. The waters of the music business can get nasty and complicated, so having access to veterans that have already reached their GOAT status is a game changer.

    “Royce is like super close to me,” NASSAN says. “He’s an OG, I damn near see him everyday. He has nothing but game to give me. I’ve learned so much … And Marshall is like this big presence and inspiration. I take from him artistically, subconsciously, like without even trying. Just someone I can touch and talk to because he’s somewhere I want to be one day.”

    This is the most comfortable NASAAN has ever been in his own skin and he feels it will show in his body of work. NASAAN is not the first emcee who has a father known for being a top-tier rapper. Lil Blade (Blade Icewood), Chris Rivers (Big Pun), are just two of the many emcees to follow in the famous father’s footsteps. With NASAAN, he’s found a way to embrace his father’s legacy without feeling threatened by it, and he’s no longer worried about people feeling like he’s undeserving of his opportunities.

    “My father’s legacy was something I ran from and shied from for so long,” he says. “For my own reasons, I didn’t want people to discredit me. I took pride in doing the work, I didn’t want people to take that from me. I didn’t want people to think I got shit handed to me or wanna be my friend for different reasons.”

    He also has a foot in every aspect of ERROR 404. He mapped out and co-directed all of his music videos, the sequencing of songs on the project, and says he’s confident that he’s developed the version of his craft that he wants to give the world.

    “At Def Jam I was trying to be everything I was influenced by versus using my influences to paint me as the picture,” he says. “I think I’ve just grown as a person and a human first … I always say this project to me is my ‘what’ and not my ‘who.’ It’s what I am sonically. It’s the fun shit, it’s the off the wall randomness, it’s all those things when you think of NASSAN.”

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    Kahn Santori Davison

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  • The case for raising animals in Detroit

    The case for raising animals in Detroit

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    Detroit Farm and Cider was transforming an entire block in the Dexter-Linwood neighborhood into something the city had never seen before. It would be the only cider mill within city limits and, reportedly, the first Black-owned mill in the country. The farm hosted children’s equestrian programs, farming workshops, and farm-to-table brunches at its four-acre property.

    Everything seemed to be going well until Detroit Animal Control confiscated owner Leandra King’s horses after one escaped in 2021. Three years later King is facing criminal charges for keeping livestock like horses, goats, and chickens, which are illegal in the city.

    Animal husbandry could soon become legal, however, with a proposed urban livestock ordinance underway. Since 2013, urban agriculture advocates have been working with the City Planning Department to draft the ordinance, which would allow Detroiters to keep chickens, bees, and ducks, and it’s closer than ever to becoming a reality. The ordinance has received mixed reception with the urban farmers behind it, some residents worrying about smells, and some beekeepers wanting bees left out.

    City planner Kimani Jeffrey says he’s hoping to present the City Planning Committee with the final draft for a recommendation in early May. If the ordinance gets the committee’s recommendation, it will go to Detroit City Council, which will then host a public hearing and vote on whether to pass it.

    It may be too late for Detroit Farm and Cider, however, and it’s unclear whether the ordinance would help the farm anyway. King’s trial was supposed to take place in April but has been postponed until September. She says the case will effectively shut down Detroit Farm and Cider.

    “I’ll go to court [and] I’ll lose, because I’m guilty of having the animals, and that will go on my record,” she tells Metro Times over the phone. “Within the next couple of months, when the livestock ordinance becomes legal, other people will be able to have their animals and If I get convicted, I won’t qualify to be able to rezone as a business.”

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    King feels like her farm is being targeted, as others have received permits.

    The ordinance would require farmers to get a $50 license to raise livestock or be subject to a fine. It allows for a maximum of eight birds (including chickens and ducks only) and two honeybee hives. Residents could have four ducks and four chickens, or any combination as long as they don’t exceed eight. It does not cover goats or horses.

    City Council President Pro Tem James Tate’s office held a series of community engagement meetings in the summer of 2023 and winter of 2024 for resident feedback along with a public hearing before the City Planning Commission on February 22. The commission asked Jeffrey and urban agriculture organizer Renee Wallace of non-profit FoodPLUS to do more engagement with residents before voting on the ordinance.

    City officials say they have ticketed Detroit Farm and Cider for raising illegal animals multiple times.

    “City of Detroit ordinances prohibit the keeping of farm animals and the law cannot be ignored simply because the person violating it is well intentioned,” Corporation Counsel for the City of Detroit Conrad Mallett tells Metro Times via email. “In the past, the City has had to remove horses, goats, and other animals from the property. The owner has been reminded on multiple occasions since then that it is illegal to keep these animals and she has been ticketed, yet she persists. Unfortunately, we have no choice but to ask the court to compel her to follow the law.”

    While the proposed ordinance only allows for chickens, ducks, and bees as an “accessory use,” the draft does appear to include special exceptions for “principle use” for “a non-profit entity organized for educational purposes” or a “4-H program that is officially sanctioned and recognized by Michigan State University Extension.”

    “Accessory” use means raising livestock is not the main function of the property — think of someone with a chicken coop in their backyard or an urban farm with beehives — whereas “principle use” implies the opposite.

    Detroit Farm and Cider does provide educational programming and is 4-H certified, which seems to suggest the ordinance could provide a legal pathway. Michigan 4-H programs are those that offer hands-on youth development activities which can include things like farming and working with textiles.

    Wallace explains that residents applying for a livestock license would have to select one of three categories: backyard garden, urban farm, or educational operation.

    “If you’re doing an educational operation, you have more options for other animals,” Wallace says. “If you look at 4-H clubs, they have horses, sometimes they have pigs. They train young people and show people how to care for them. They would put forth their proposal to the city… If you’ve picked that option, you’ve likely already gotten 4-H certification and then you are bringing that to the city. You may be developing a program or it’s an existing program… That would allow people to have a variety of farm animals in their program, that does not limit it to chicken, bees, and ducks.”

    A public hearing would have to be held, with review by several city departments, to approve the educational operation’s proposal.

    In addition to being 4-H certified, Detroit Farm and Cider is Michigan Agriculture Environmental Assurance Program (MAEAP) verified, which means it upholds standards to mitigate agricultural pollution from the property. MAEAP recognizes landowners for being “environmentally sound” in areas like livestock, cropping, and farmsteading. King says she is also certified through the Right-to-Farm Program via the Michigan Department of Agriculture.

    “I submitted a soil test, a manure management plan to show that my manure is being stored ethically, and I had to go through all of these processes,” she says. “My livestock are licensed and tagged. I had to go through very scrupulous training.”

    King feels like her farm is being targeted, as other groups like Detroit Horse Power and Pingree Farms have received permits to raise livestock in the city. Similar to Detroit Farm and Cider, Detroit Horse Power hosts equestrian programming for youth. Pingree Farms, located off Seven Mile Road and I-75, is 4-H certified to teach middle school students animal husbandry with rabbits, goats, sheep, chickens, turkeys, miniature cows, pigs, and ponies, according to its website.

    King was first charged with “possessing a wild animal without a permit” in 2021 and received a letter of support and temporary permit from Detroit City Council in 2023 that she thought would help her case. The charges were dismissed without prejudice in September of 2023 for lack of evidence but were refiled a month later.

    King was in the process of working with the Building Safety, Engineering & Environmental Department (BSEED) to get Detroit Farm and Cider rezoned as a business when the case against her was reopened. The farm is in a residential neighborhood.

    “I was able to go as far as having special land use. I can grow food, I just can’t sell anything here without my business license,” she explains. “I thought it was going to be resolved. In the spirit of trying to work with them… I thought that if I got rezoned, and got MAEAP approved, and certified through the Right-to-Farm program, I would be good to go. But for some reason, they are still coming after me criminally.”

    Director of BSEED David Bell says via email, “We had attempted for some time to work with the owner of this property to help her business get properly licensed after she had illegally established it in an area that is zoned only for residential use. However, we have ceased those efforts to help her until such time she comes into compliance with the law.”

    Mallet adds, “We are a City of roughly 650,000 people. The people who live across the street from the non-licensed property have rights. They have the right to enjoy their homes free from animal smells and noise. Continual violation of our ordinances ultimately will create a consequence where fines and jail time is a possibility. We are protecting all of our citizens and we are disregarding no one’s rights.”

    King is adamant that she will not stop keeping animals and facilitating children’s programming, even if the city shuts Detroit Farm and Cider down.

    “I know that this isn’t right. It’s not fair,” she says. “If I’m doing everything within my power to appease you as a small business owner, and I’m asking what more you need me to do, and then I do it, and finally your way to shut me down is to criminally prosecute me when you’ve made these exceptions for other businesses, something’s wrong about that.”

    click to enlarge City officials say they have ticketed Detroit Farm and Cider for raising illegal animals multiple times. - se7enfifteen

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    City officials say they have ticketed Detroit Farm and Cider for raising illegal animals multiple times.

    More about the proposed ordinance

    Smells and noise from animals are often cited as reasons that some residents oppose legalizing livestock in the city.

    Bridge Detroit reported a group of residents from the 48217 zip code, considered Detroit’s most polluted, strongly opposed the ordinance at the February 22 hearing.

    “I do not approve (of) this ordinance. My parents bought the house that I still live in… it was residential property, not farming property,” Bridge Detroit reported 48217 resident Patricia Gaston as saying. “If the house next door to me decides that they want chickens and all kinds of farm animals I’m going to get all that smell in my yard. I don’t want that.”

    To mitigate some of those concerns, the proposed ordinance requires that chickens and ducks be in an enclosure or shelter that is thirty feet away from any neighboring dwelling, and five feet from both the side and rear property line. The bird enclosures are only allowed behind a house, or whatever main structure is on the property, and must be less than 200 square feet.

    Beehives must be 25 feet away from the property line or include a flyaway barrier of six feet high installed above.

    At a community meeting where residents expressed concerns about animal keeping, a farmer brought a couple of chickens in a cage to prove they didn’t make much noise.

    The proposed ordinance specifies animal husbandry as “the keeping of certain urban farm animals and domestic honeybees for personal consumption or utilization of agricultural products, such as eggs, meat, or honey.”

    “These are not pets. We’re not talking about your pet chicken. This is food. This is food system work,” Wallace says. “We took a very deliberate and intentional design approach centering three things: the welfare of the animals, how do you center the animal keepers, and how do you center the neighbors?”

    This ordinance has been a long time coming. Wallace began working on it in 2011 alongside Kathryn Lynch Underwood, a former senior planner with the City of Detroit City Planning Commission who spearheaded the project. It started with getting an urban agriculture ordinance on the books, which allowed for urban farms and gardens. That ordinance was passed in 2013 and initially included animal husbandry in addition to produce, but Wallace says the animals were removed because they thought it was more likely to pass without them. At the time, animals like goats, turkeys, and rabbits were listed, but they were removed due to community feedback.

    “What we found in talking to [the] community was that not many people were raising rabbits,” she says. “Goats are food and provide a lot of different things like milk and cheese… But people said very strongly, no, we do not want to see goats. So it came down to chickens, ducks, and bees.”

    The first public hearing for an animal husbandry ordinance in Detroit was in 2016 and things stalled after that. Underwood retired in 2022 but the work continued and Jeffrey took up the charge within the City Planning Department.

    “We still worked on the ordinance after that but a lot of things affected that,” Wallace says about why it’s taken so long. “Drop a pandemic in there. Drop a bankruptcy in there when the city has a lot of other things to look at. Elections, leadership changes…. There’s been an elongated timeline for a lot of reasons.”

    While the general consensus among Detroit’s urban farmers is positive, Detroit Hives wants bees removed from the ordinance. Detroit Hives co-founder Timothy Paule tells Metro Times that the ordinance puts too many restrictions on beekeeping, and will hinder its operations.

    Detroit Hives was founded in 2016 and has hives in over 29 locations including a mixture of vacant lots, urban gardens, and educational institutions in neighborhoods like Brightmoor, Jefferson Chalmers, Osbourne, and more.

    Under the proposed ordinance, Detroit Hives would need a separate license for each location.

    “Who is pushing for this ordinance as it relates to beekeeping?” Paule says. “After attending several community input sessions, there have been numerous comments as it relates to chickens and ducks. Many residents are against it. However, there have been no complaints as it relates to honeybees… Keeping chickens and ducks is illegal. Those people that’s been keeping chickens and ducks have received numerous complaints and [have] been ticketed. Keeping bees is not illegal in the city of Detroit. ”

    Beekeeping is somewhat of a legal gray area in Detroit. It is legal in the State of Michigan, with certain regulations, but the City of Detroit doesn’t have any laws or ordinances that mention beekeeping.

    “BSEED’s interpretation is that beekeeping is illegal, and they’re the ones doing the enforcing,” Jeffrey says. “The reason I think there is a gray area is because bees are not mentioned in the current regulations.”

    The ordinance also doesn’t allow animal keeping on vacant lots, so Detroit Hives would need to have several special land use hearings to get permission to operate on these spaces. Animal keepers also have to register with animal control and be subject to inspection.

    “To me, that looks like there’s more policing in areas that are predominantly beekeepers of color,” Paule says. “We’ve been doing this for over eight years focused on vacant lots. You have a vacancy. It’s not like we’re putting these hives in densely populated communities. It seems like the ideal place to keep them.”

    Special land use hearings through BSEED typically cost $1,000 but Jeffrey says the city is considering lowering the cost for farmers. Typically the $1,000 fee is for commercial building projects.

    Even if the cost is lowered, Paule worries that the process will take too long, rendering many of their spaces illegal in the meantime. He notes that it once took four years for Detroit Hives to legally acquire a home next to one of their hives through the city.

    “We had the resources, the funding. I don’t know what it was, but it took four years,” he says. “We don’t want that to be an issue with the ordinance where it takes that long to get the proper license for us to keep bees.”

    Breaking down Detroit’s proposed urban livestock ordinance

    • Chickens, ducks, and bees are allowed with a $50 license (fee may change)
    • Residential properties, schools, educational institutions, restaurants, and civic buildings are allowed up to eight birds (including any combination of chickens or ducks) and two bee hives
    • Urban farms and gardens are allowed up to 12 chickens and ducks and four bee hives
    • Chickens and ducks must be in a shelter with less than 200 square feet in floor area, thirty feet away from any neighboring dwelling, and five feet from both the side and rear property line
    • Beehives must be 25 feet away from the property line or include a flyaway barrier of six feet high
    • Bird enclosures and bee hives must be in the rear of the property behind the lot’s main structure (a house’s backyard, for example)
    • Raising livestock is only allowed as an “accessory use” to a pre-existing property and cannot be the primary use of the land
    • To establish a primary use project, a special land use hearing must be held, which may cost $1,000
    • Goats, horses, rabbits, turkeys, and other animals are not allowed
    • Exceptions may be permitted for education-oriented non-profits or 4-H programs with city approval

    If beekeepers don’t want bees included in the ordinance, Jeffrey says he’s willing to remove them. However, he notes that in meetings with local beekeepers, the response has been overwhelmingly positive and Detroit Hives is one of few outliers.

    Jeffrey says including bees in the ordinance is a way to protect beekeepers, the same way the urban agriculture ordinance protects farmers and gardeners from having their farms destroyed if they follow the rules.

    “My approach is that you want city code to expressly say you have a right to do something because if it doesn’t, at any time it can be challenged,” he says. “If it’s expressly stated, you’re in a much safer space… Our recommendation would be to move forward and review any tweaks to the language. This has been a 10-plus-year journey so I would hate to see us get close to the end and they ask for it be removed and I don’t know when another train is going to leave the station.”

    To the naysayers, Wallace stresses that many people are already keeping chickens and ducks in their backyard. Passing the ordinance is just a way to make sure it is being done properly, for both the neighbors and the animals’ sake.

    “No one wants to deal with chickens walking down the street,” she says. “And not everybody knows how to take care of animals… I don’t care what kind of space you got, [if] you can’t take care of them, well, you don’t need to have them. This will eliminate some of the bad actors running around… Right now there are people paying the price because it’s illegal and they’re gonna continue to pay that price unnecessarily. Let’s allow people to do it well. If you don’t do it well, you don’t get [the] permits.”

    She adds, “Pray in 2024, we’re gonna have an ordinance, and a good one.”

    Photos from Detroit Farm and Cider

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    Randiah Camille Green

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  • The 2003-04 Pistons were the champions Detroit needed

    The 2003-04 Pistons were the champions Detroit needed

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    If there is a Mount Rushmore for NBA teams that feel like symbolic soulmates for their city, then the 2003-2004 Detroit Pistons are on it.

    This was a Motown team in every sense, and they played like an orchestra or jazz ensemble that season. Everyone had a role, but a role constantly being calibrated and re-calibrated toward lifting the collective someplace higher. And they played with the kind of qualities that fans from a tough city in the middle of an impossibly tough time hope for: Nerves as hard as steel. An unshakable belief in themselves and each other. Guts a mile long and a burning desire to defy expectations.

    “They were ‘Grit’ before The Lions made it popular around here,” as fan Justin Roberts put it on X.

    All this made it easy to root for them twenty years ago this month, when the Pistons stood at the brink of a bruising but ultimately dominant championship march over a Los Angeles Lakers squad stacked with four future Hall of Famers, all of them top 75 players. To this day, the Pistons’ 4-1 gentleman’s sweep is considered the greatest upset in NBA history.

    Looking back, if you’re a sucker for romantic sports stories like I am, it’s hard to imagine this happening anywhere but Detroit. From the drifters who made up the starting lineup, to the ultimate triumph over a flashier, more celebrated opponent, Detroit feels like the only landscape our unlikely heroes could have blossomed from.

    “That team showed what you can make happen when you give overlooked talent a place to be able to grow and succeed,” my friend Denzell Turner, a marketer from the city and lifelong fan, tells me. They also “serve as this sort of parable for working-class struggle overtaking the ruling class,” says Kamau Jawara, another friend and local organizer whose obsession with basketball began with the ’04 Pistons. They brought “the NBA’s mega-market darlings to a dogfight they weren’t ready for and absolutely broke their spirit.”

    The question now is, how will we embody the best of what they represent for ordinary working people and fans in the city, while adapting to a league completely dominated by corporate interests?

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    Zuma Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

    The Pistons’ Richard Hamilton blocks a shot by the Pacers’ Jermaine O’Neal in the Eastern Conference Finals, May 24, 2004.

    Starting over

    As the Grant Hill era came to a close in 2000, Pistons president Joe Dumars went into rebuild mode. An undrafted Ben Wallace whose full talents had yet to be tapped came first as a throw-in consolation for losing Hill to a trade with Orlando.

    The year 2002 was even more pivotal. The Pistons traded Jerry Stackhouse to the Washington Wizards for Richard “Rip” Hamilton, a nightmare from mid-range. Chauncey Billups, a late bloomer who had been ricocheting around the league since the 1997 draft, was signed as a free agent. And with a late pick in the draft’s first round, they scooped up a lanky forward named Tayshaun Prince.

    “When we got together, we all came from different places,” Billups, the starting point guard, 2004 NBA Finals MVP, and now head coach of the Portland Trailblazers, said at a March 17 ceremony honoring the championship team at Little Caesars Arena.

    “As fate would have it, we landed here in Detroit,” he said. “What we did on the floor embodied what y’all do every single day in life.” What Billups does so well here, as he has in the past, is connect the dots between the towering odds facing both the city and its NBA franchise. When Billups arrived in 2002, Detroit was reeling from decades of corporate plunder and municipal abandonment. Residents had just elected a young mayor named Kwame Kilpatrick who was seen as a symbol of promise to many, but ultimately never posed any real threat to a status quo that placed wealthy developers and personal greed ahead of ordinary people in the overwhelmingly poor and working-class Black city.

    You can see the movie posters now. A group of guys hungry for a fresh start all land in the Midwest’s quintessential fallen city, desperate for its own breakthrough.

    After getting swept by the Nets in the 2003 conference finals, Dumars replaced Rick Carlisle for Hall of Fame coach Larry Brown. They played solid ball throughout the first half of the ’03-’04 season, but never hit a stride with enough consistency to strike fear in anyone. Which means that almost no one saw what was coming.

    And then came Rasheed Wallace at the 2004 trade deadline. Sheed was a solid big man who could play both sides of the floor. But he was also called a “walking technical foul,” and it seemed like his talents might be eclipsed by some combo of his on-court challenges, a racist traditional media system (the “Jailblazers” stuff should haunt every one of their careers), and NBA executives like David Stern who plainly hated his guts and wanted him out of the league. Eight years into his career, it wasn’t clear if he would ever find a system that could harness his powers and passion for good.

    He had come to the right place this time. Sheed was a Philly boy Detroiters could recognize. And he turned out to be the final piece the team needed to really take off.

    click to enlarge The Pistons’ Rasheed Wallace attacks the net in Philadelphia on Feb. 23, 2004. - UPI Photo/Jon Adams

    UPI Photo/Jon Adams

    The Pistons’ Rasheed Wallace attacks the net in Philadelphia on Feb. 23, 2004.

    Finish strong

    After picking up Sheed, the Pistons were an almost unstoppable locomotive. They went 20-6 for the rest of the season, and finished 54-28. They were solid offensively, but dismantled opponents with a defense that could pick apart any team in the league.

    Big Ben was now firmly cemented as one of the all-time great defenders. Prince’s length made him a nightmare in his own right. And with Sheed in the mix down low and Rip and Billups on the perimeter, teams had to fight for their lives on every inch of the floor. Famously, the Pistons held 11 teams under 70 points that season. As ESPN play-by-play announcer Mike Tirico put it during the playoffs: “Every pass, every shot defended like it’s the last.”

    They entered those playoffs with the third best net rating in the league. And still almost no one had them going the distance.

    Before they could defy gravity against the Lakers, they had to make it through a notoriously scrappy Eastern Conference. After wiping the Milwaukee Bucks 4-1in the first round, they slugged it out for seven games with the Nets before advancing to the conference finals, where the Pistons knocked off the Indiana Pacers, the team with the best record that year, in six bruising games. In game 2, the teams combined for an astonishing 26 blocks, 19 of them by the Pistons.

    One of those blocks would go down as perhaps the most iconic in playoff history. Ahead by two, the Pistons have possession with just seconds to go. After a Billups turnover, Reggie Miller breaks out for what looks like an easy layup. And then our lanky hero appears, destined for greatness. Miller is in the air alone until he’s not — until Prince flies in to get a piece of the ball with so much momentum that he lands somewhere in the rows behind the basket. It was such an incredible block that it is now known simply as “The Block,” the one that every other block must bow to.

    The Pistons were now on their way to the finals for the first time since the Bad Boys’ legendary back-to-back 1989-1990 wins.

    But even after all that, popular opinion was that the Lakers might sweep. L.A. just had too much star power. The Pistons “shouldn’t even show up in L.A.,” Ben Wallace remembers hearing.

    As Marlowe Alter writes in the Free Press, “nobody gave the Pistons a chance in the Finals — the Lakers were minus-700 favorites, meaning a bettor would have to put down $700 to win $100.” That’s almost right. Nobody, of course, except the Pistons themselves, and the dedicated fans who knew what they were capable of.

    click to enlarge Jun 08, 2004: The Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Detroit Pistons 99 to 91 in overtime to tie the series 1-1. - Zuma Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

    Zuma Press, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo

    Jun 08, 2004: The Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Detroit Pistons 99 to 91 in overtime to tie the series 1-1.

    “David conquered Goliath”

    “If you look at the names on the back of the jerseys, yeah, they should have swept us,” Billups said in a 2020 interview. After all, the Lakers were that era’s most feared franchise. Kobe and Shaq were still the best players on any court. They had also picked up Gary Payton and Karl Malone, stacking a team with three championships and two Hall of Famers with two more Hall of Famers, both on their way out but still capable of contributing.

    What everyone missed though is that you can have all of the star power but none of the chemistry. And you’re going to need chemistry in order to overcome a team that has a metric ton of it and braids it together with elite game-planning — a team, like the Pistons, that knows it lacks a traditional championship-caliber lineup, and so also knows their only chance is by elevating everyone to the height of their powers. Which is exactly what they did against the Lakers, who had their own clash of the titans thing going on internally, making it impossible for them to deal with a team that “played the game the right way,” to use Larry Brown’s famous standard.

    The Pistons knew L.A.’s weaknesses and exploited them relentlessly. They let Shaq do his thing one-on-one against Wallace, but dogged everyone else across every inch of the floor. They knew this would frustrate the hell out of Kobe, who started playing the worst kind of hero ball imaginable, jacking up chaotic jumpers over Tayshaun.

    Making the best of it during a halftime interview in game 1, Kobe compared the contest to “two heavyweight boxers feeling each other out.” It wouldn’t take long to see the difference. The Pistons plainly outsmarted and outhooped the Lakers — getting stops, generating second-chance points wherever they could, and getting important minutes out of role players like Corliss Williamson, Mehmut Okur, and Elden Campbell.

    Outside of Shaq, who really was unstoppable, the Pistons jammed the Lakers’ entire offense up all series, holding them to 81.8 points per game.

    After a convincing Pistons win in game 1, the Lakers squeaked out game 2 in overtime in L.A. The Lakers wouldn’t see their arena again that season. After the loss, the team reportedly told Larry Brown “we’re not coming back to L.A.” They swept the next three games, slamming the series shut in game 5 in Detroit.

    “I knew we’d get exposed,” Lakers forward Rick Fox said in a 2015 oral history. “…I personally felt we didn’t have enough respect for the Pistons. We thought we were going to steamroll them.”

    The Pistons also knew otherwise. “When [Los Angeles] beat Minnesota, I was happy,” Billups said. “Because I felt like there was no way the Lakers could beat us.” Billups averaged 21 points, 5.2 assists, and 3.2 rebounds, and won the Finals MVP.

    A day before game 1, an exasperated Sheed let everyone know how he felt about their predictions: “Ain’t nobody scared here. Ain’t no punks on this team!”

    Seeing a squad like that reach the mountaintop after telling everyone they could do it, and then exploding with exhilaration as if part of them still couldn’t believe it themselves, is some of the best of what sports has to offer us. “We shook up the world! We shook up the world! We shook up the world!” backup guard Lindsey Hunter, his championship hat tilted to the side, shouts into a flip phone moments after the trophy presentation.

    “98% of the people didn’t believe in us, but guess what?” Sheed says in a post-game interview with Jalen Rose. “David conquered Goliath.”

    click to enlarge The 2004 National Basketball Association champions: from the Motor City to the White House. - Olivier Douliery/ABACA

    Olivier Douliery/ABACA

    The 2004 National Basketball Association champions: from the Motor City to the White House.

    20 years later

    It’s hard to properly account for everything that ’04 squad meant. For starters, fans will tell you that it just feels flat-out good to see a team full of overlooked players bring a championship to an overlooked city. And they take enormous pride witnessing those players be so loudly defiant and refusing to stay in their assigned place against more polished and decorated opponents who are right at home under the nation’s brightest lights.

    Whether it’s Big Ben, his ‘fro piled to the ceiling, swatting a shot into rows of fans wearing afros of their own in his honor, or Sheed, whose signature Air Force 1 would become a staple in the city, shouting “BALL DON’T LIE!’’ when an opponent misses a free throw after a bad call, a ruling you can still hear players roar in any open gym or neighborhood court run. And then to top it off, Jawara adds, we got to see Sheed, “the eventual all-time leader in ejections hoist the Larry O’Brien trophy.” Magnificient.

    “You’re talking about … a lot of throwaways that came together and played great basketball, loved each other, became brothers,” Billups said on a 2016 episode of the Vertical podcast.

    Sports fandom, like any fanaticism, has its share of absurdities and devastations. But at its best, it can help us imagine a version of ourselves and our communities achieving everything we deserve. The ’04 Pistons were throwaway players in a city where almost everyone knew the feeling. Guys with nowhere to go landing in a city filled with Black families who fled as far and as fast as they could from the brutality of Southern apartheid toward the promise of jobs and greater freedom in northern cities like ours.

    “Nobody gave Detroit credit,” Turner says. “The Pistons gave a lot of people hope about how bright the future could be for the city. As a young Black boy, I felt like the world was my oyster. There was no better place to be. I still feel like that to this day.”

    And there’s also the question about what this city’s largely working-class fans deserve all these years later from both the franchise’s owner and the city’s leadership as both drape themselves in the team’s romantic underdog legacy.

    Jawara warns against over-romanticizing “blue-collar basketball,” which is “something that allowed us to get in the ring with the biggest and the best, but no longer sustains us.” The NBA, after all, is a “global money machine” in which “you’re gonna absolutely need a ton of firepower [on the court] to survive” night to night.

    Not to mention, by coasting on the ’04 Pistons heroic blue-collar story, we risk letting the team’s massively wealthy owner Tom Gores off the hook for failing the its actual blue-collar fan base, Jawara argues. Gores has allowed the team to “flounder year after year while fans still show up faithfully” with “no accountability, no restoration, and most of all, little to no winning.”

    “Detroit can be more,” he adds. “We can preserve our scrappy DNA while showcasing our other beautiful traits: fashion and flashiness,” traits that also translate well to today’s game. “And we can hold the architect of this team accountable” for giving fans the team they deserve.

    And in a way, this is also an important aspect of the ’04 legacy. This was a squad that loved its fans as much as they loved playing together. They undoubtedly would want the city and Pistons’ ownership to take those fans seriously enough to put forth a genuine effort to build a competitive team.

    The ’04 Pistons are rightly remembered as conquering underdogs at a time when Detroiters desperately needed to see ourselves that way. And as the city evolves, they serve as a powerful reminder of what kind of city we should aspire to be. One where the communities who actually built that underdog reputation, and lifted its scrappiest franchise to immortality, be given everything they deserve from the city they’ve given everything to.

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    Eli Day

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  • 12 Forgotten Movie Prequels

    12 Forgotten Movie Prequels

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    Prequels are having a moment. 2024 sees the release of The First Omen (which, somewhat confusingly, is actually the sixth movie in The Omen franchise) as well as the first prequel from the Mad Max series, Furiosa. This year also marks the 25th anniversary of one of the biggest prequels in film history, Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace.

    These are all high-profile projects, but prequels often mark the last, desperate act of a dying franchise. Having exhausted all other creatively promising options, and/or having lost key stars or filmmakers to other projects, they have no choice but to turn back the clock, hire actors who sort of look like the stars of previous movies, and hope for the best.

    While some prequels, like The Phantom Menace, have become major hits, and one even won an Academy Award for Best Picture (thanks a lot, The Godfather Part II!) so many others have faded into obscurity. Of course, we here at ScreenCrush can’t let anything go. In our personal lives, that is a huge problem. But professionally, it allows us to make articles like this about the world of forgotten movie prequels. So on the whole, it all sort of balances out.

    These 12 prequels — some decades old, a few released in just the last few years — all exist…ish. But they certainly didn’t break records at the box office, or do much more than extended the life of a fading movie franchise. Let’s hope for better from Furiosa.

    12 Forgotten Movie Prequels

    These prequels were made. Then they were forgotten. Or in some cases, people never knew they existed in the first place.

    READ MORE: Remakes and Sequels That Were Better Than the Original Movie

    10 Awful Movies With Devoted Cult Followings

    Even though these movies were terrible, their fans still love them.

    Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky

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    Matt Singer

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  • Detroit Institute of Arts works to return Indigenous remains and sacred objects amid federal law updates

    Detroit Institute of Arts works to return Indigenous remains and sacred objects amid federal law updates

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    During a visit to the Detroit Institute of Arts in February, I noticed a section of the Native American Art exhibit was missing with signs that read, “Gallery work in progress. We are preparing something new for you. Come see in March!”

    A new exhibit of contemporary Native American art had been unveiled in the DIA’s Cosmos Gallery upon a second visit in March. Next to it, a sign says the museum removed items that had been displayed without consent.

    “Why Are There Empty Spaces in the Native American Galleries?” the sign reads. It continues, “The DIA has removed some items from display in an effort to return cultural items in the collection that likely were taken from Native American communities or individual makers without consent. The DIA is in discussion with Native American Tribes and is following the process outlined in the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).”

    The DIA tells Metro Times the NAGPRA notices were installed in the Native American Art galleries in early 2023.

    Across the nation, museums have been removing items from Native American exhibits or dismantling them entirely in response to updated federal regulations that require institutions to obtain informed consent from Indigenous tribes, lineal descendants, or Native Hawaiian Organizations (NHOs) before displaying, possessing, or conducting research on culturally significant items.

    A revised version of NAGPRA went into effect on January 12, 2024 with stricter guidelines for institutions to return human remains, funerary items, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony to the tribes they originated from. Museums have five years to consult with tribes, update their inventories, and return the remains of ancestors and funerary objects.

    click to enlarge

    Randiah Camille Green

    A sign notes that the “DIA is in discussion with Native American Tribes and is following the process outlined in the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).”

    NAGPRA isn’t a new law that suddenly appeared in 2024, however. It has been the federal law since 1990 and regulations requiring institutions to consult with Native American tribes went into effect in 1995. Unfortunately, as Chief Executive and Attorney for the Association on American Indian Affairs Shannon O’Loughlin explains, several loopholes in the previous iteration of NAGPRA allowed museums to get away with non-compliance.

    “There was no definition of what consultation meant,” O’Loughlin says about the faults of NAGPRA as it was previously written. “So what we saw is, institutions who didn’t want to comply would simply send a letter or an email, and that’s all they would ever do to communicate with tribes. Then they would make their own determinations without true consultation.”

    She adds, “The law has been in place for more than 30 years saying, you don’t have a right to these items. You’re supposed to be repatriating these items, but institutions haven’t done that… If you want to do an exhibit or you want to do extractive research and pull DNA out of my ancestors, you need to ask permission first because it’s native nations who are the primary experts of their cultural heritage and the rightful holders of these materials.”

    In 2021, DIA Assistant Curator for Native American Art Denene De Quintal “encountered” the remains of 13 Indigenous ancestors and six funerary objects in a storeroom for the museum’s Indigenous Americas collection during a “comprehensive inventory,” according to transcripts from a NAGPRA Review Committee meeting on June 7-8, 2023. De Quintal joined the museum in 2019 after the position was vacant for nearly a decade.

    click to enlarge Empty display cases visible in the DIA’s Native American Galleries in February, 2024. - Randiah Camille Green

    Randiah Camille Green

    Empty display cases visible in the DIA’s Native American Galleries in February, 2024.

    The American Museum of Natural History removed two of its Native American exhibits completely following the updated regulations. The Cleveland Museum of Art and Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History covered display cases with Native American items in response, and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University vowed to remove all funerary items.

    The DIA has a history of consulting with tribes and has worked to return the remains of at least 21 ancestors and several cultural objects in its possession over the past several decades, including the ancestors discovered in 2021.

    Despite a month of back and forth with the museum via email prior to the unveiling of the new exhibit, the DIA would not provide Metro Times with additional information on what items were previously displayed in the Cosmos Gallery “out of respect for the tribes.”

    A representative for the museum wrote about the new exhibit, “This gallery has been planned for more than a year. The galleries have been installed since 2007, [and] the new gallery is a chance to highlight contemporary art and contemporary voices before a full reinstallation of all the galleries can be planned.”

    The DIA told Metro Times it was consulting with local tribes and “[deferred] to them to share that information.”

    “In our commitment to adhering to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), we have and continue to welcome consultations with Native American tribes,” a statement from the museum reads. “Consultation has been used in the recent past and will continue to be used by the DIA to determine what items are and will be on display. The museum will make every effort to ensure its compliance with the new NAGPRA regulations.”

    I also observed in February that an item described as a “model of a Shaman’s guardian figure” from the Central Council of Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska had been removed from a display case at the DIA. A placard in its place notes “this item has been temporarily removed” and is dated August 1, 2022.

    O’Loughlin says museums covering up and removing collections is a red flag that shows which institutions haven’t been compliant with NAGPRA all this time. O’Loughlin sat on the NAGPRA Review Committee from 2013 to 2015 and is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

    click to enlarge The DIA’s Native American Gallery in late January, 2024. - Steve Neavling

    Steve Neavling

    The DIA’s Native American Gallery in late January, 2024.

    The DIA’s history of repatriation

    At the June 2023 NAGPRA Review Committee meeting, De Quintal and other DIA staff received the committee’s approval to repatriate the remains of 11 ancestors and six funerary objects to Michigan’s Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians.

    The museum needed approval because the 11 ancestors had been deemed “culturally unidentifiable,” an egregious term O’Loughlin says museums have used to claim they couldn’t trace the ancestors’ origin and, therefore, didn’t know what tribe to return them to. The other two ancestors out of the 13 that were discovered were determined to be affiliated with Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

    One of the updates to NAGPRA was removing the “culturally unidentifiable human remains” category.

    “It’s a lie under the law,” O’Loughlin says about Native American ancestors being culturally unidentifiable. “Most of these institutions, the inventories that they’ve produced have plenty of information, including geography, to affiliate those ancestors with their nations. But, they determined that — because they didn’t consult [and] they just sent a letter — ‘I guess they’re not identified with anyone, so we’ll keep them.’”

    She continues, “Harvard is a great example of this because, unless an ancestor was deemed affiliated, they would continue to do extractive DNA research and other types of research on human remains and cultural items even though they had no legal right to do so… So the new regulations are really important, not just because they’ve now defined clearly what consultation means, but they’ve also eliminated this concept of ‘unidentifiable.’”

    De Quintal said at the June 2023 meeting that the DIA invited “43 Indian tribes, as well as the two Michigan State Historic Tribes whose aboriginal land includes Michigan” to the museum for consultation and “no one objected to a culturally unidentifiable determination based on a lack of evidence.”

    According to De Quintal, after monthly meetings with NAGPRA representatives of Michigan’s Anishinaabe tribes and the Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation and Repatriation Alliance (MACPRA), the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe requested the remains be returned to them.

    The DIA confirmed to Metro Times that the ancestors had been returned.

    Marie Richards, who was the Repatriation and Historic Preservation Specialist for the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe at the time, was responsible for removing those ancestors from the DIA and bringing them to the Upper Peninsula. She now works for the federal government as a Tribal Relations Specialist.

    “I made a trip from Sault Ste. Marie to [the] Detroit Institute of Arts that Wednesday before Thanksgiving,” Richards recalls to Metro Times. “I met with staff and was able to, under the language of the law, take possession [and] have stewardship, and [I] escorted those ancestors up to Sault Ste. Marie… It’s a culturally sensitive thing but we try to help them continue their journey back to the spirit world after having that disturbance the best that we can, and part of that is reburial.”

    Richards explains that the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe is often the designated caretaker for “unidentifiable” ancestors in cases like these, as decided by the Michigan Anishinaabek Cultural Preservation and Repatriation Alliance.

    “Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians is based out of Sault Ste. Marie, [Michigan]. It’s the gathering place, where on different occasions, bands of Anishinaabe from all over the Great Lakes would meet,” she says. “Because of that historical role that we played in our culture as the host to people from many nations, we continue doing that… Those ancestors do have a right to something, so it’s just a matter of figuring out how we can do that in a good way.”

    Richards says the Sault Ste. Marie tribe has also received the remains of ancestors repatriated from Michigan State University in a similar situation where they were deemed “culturally unidentifiable.”

    click to enlarge The Native American Gallery at the DIA spans thousands of years. - Steve Neavling

    Steve Neavling

    The Native American Gallery at the DIA spans thousands of years.

    According to ProPublica’s Repatriation Database, the DIA has made all of the 23 Native American remains that it reported having to the federal government available for return to tribes. The same database reports that Michigan State University has made 100% of 544 ancestors and over 84,900 associated funerary objects it reported possessing available for return to tribes.

    However, making the remains and funerary objects “available for repatriation” doesn’t always mean those ancestors and sacred items make it back home.

    “That’s one of the problems that we tried to correct with the new regulations [is] that you don’t really know what actually happened or not,” O’Loughlin says.

    After an institution submits a “notice of intent to repatriate” on the federal register, the affiliated nations then have to submit a request for repatriation, O’Loughlin explains.

    “So there has to be that formal, ‘yes, please give these back,’” she says. “This signifies kind of an administrative return… but there’s no notice that will tell you if something’s actually been physically returned.”

    On January 16, 2024, days after the NAGPRA updates went into effect, the DIA filed a notice with the National Park Service’s federal register to repatriate seven objects of cultural patrimony and four funerary items. These were reportedly removed from “unknown locations in Alaska” and have been traced back to the Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes. Some of the objects include a Gooch Shádaa (wolf headdress), a Weix’ S’eek Daakeit (sculpin tobacco pipe), a Xixch’ S’eek Daakeit (frog tobacco pipe), a Kaashishxaaw S’eek Daakeit (dragonfly pipe), and a bear tooth amulet.

    The DIA confirmed that the Shaman guardian figure removed from display in 2022 (and whose space was still empty during our visit) is one of the items it intends to repatriate

    “The museum’s work on this gallery continues,” a DIA representative told Metro Times. “In addition to tribal consultations on the collection, items are often removed from display or rotated as is common in museums. As that continues more items may be removed from the galleries and may through the process established by NAGPRA. Out of respect for the tribes and their preference on how this process should be handled, the museum will not make an announcement every time this happens, but the work is ongoing.”

    Four of these items are believed to have been placed “with or near individual human remains” as part of a burial rite or ceremony, and all were determined to have ongoing historical, traditional, or cultural importance to the Tlingit and Haida Tribes.

    click to enlarge The DIA’s Native American Gallery includes art from as far south as Peru and as far north as Alaska. - Steve Neavling

    Steve Neavling

    The DIA’s Native American Gallery includes art from as far south as Peru and as far north as Alaska.

    “The documents were published in January but the decision was made before that,” a representative for the museum said about the notice of intent to repatriate. “The process can take years from the initial consultation to the formal request from the tribe.”

    Back in 2001, the DIA filed a notice of intent to repatriate a bear claw necklace of cultural patrimony from its collection. The necklace — made of 30 grizzly bear claws, glass beads, and otter fur — belonged to James White Cloud (1841-1940), a chief of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. According to the federal register, the DIA purchased this necklace in 1981 from a man named Richard Pohrt of Flint. Documents and oral testimony show the necklace had passed through an Oklahoma pawn shop, Oklahoma’s Southern Plains Indian Museum and Crafts Center, and another man named Mildford Chandler of Detroit before landing in the DIA’s possession.

    Judith Dolkart, DIA Deputy Director of Art, Education & Programs, told the NAGPRA Review Committee the necklace had since been repatriated to the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska.

    “[NAGPRA] is only 34 years old, and if everyone had followed it as they should have, the only issue would be new acquisitions. But unfortunately, that’s not the case,” Richards says. “With objects of cultural patrimony, that is the one where we’re seeing more changes in the federal law and that’s why many institutions immediately pulled objects they did not have consent for, or covered them. [The] DIA had already had such items not on display.”

    Richards says the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe was invited to the DIA along with several other tribes to consult with the museum about patrimony objects in 2023.

    “I’m very vocal about why consultation has to happen, why these conversations with tribes have to happen collectively,” she says. “There were several tribes present so we could talk with each other as well as interact with the items. It’s important for the institution to talk with the tribe and also for us to be able to interact with our colleagues who also want what’s best for the ancestors and those objects of cultural patrimony.”

    According to transcripts from the June 2023 NAGPRA Review Committee meeting, the DIA submitted notice of having 10 “culturally unidentifiable” Native American ancestors in its inventory in the early 1990s that had been “removed from Detroit or the surrounding area.” After consulting with several of Michigan’s Anishinaabe tribes, Dolkart told the committee, those ancestors were returned in or after 2009.

    She also noted that the DIA held monthly virtual meetings with Michigan tribes between October 2022 and April of 2023, who advised the museum on what items should be removed from display.

    “Throughout those seven months, the tribes determined which images should be removed from the DIA’s website, which items should be removed from display, and which items the DIA collection staff should make available for examination during an in-person consultation,” she said.

    At that same meeting, Veronica Pasfield, a NAGPRA Officer for Bay Mills Indian Community in Brimley, Michigan, commended the DIA for its efforts.

    “I was involved in the Detroit Institute of Arts consultation and I just wanted to publicly state that I give a lot of credit to the Detroit Institute of Arts,” she said. “They and we were surprised to realize that the museum had some outstanding NAGPRA obligations, and the Detroit Institute of Arts really seemed to take seriously its federal legal compliance responsibilities, as well as the human rights imperative that Congress set forth when creating NAGPRA in 1990. And for any museum that’s listening or any tribe that’s listening, if you want an example of what is possible when you have the institutional will, the Detroit Institute of Arts, with the support of Jan Bernstein [of Bernstein & Associates NAGPRA Consultants] and her team, really stepped up in a way that was very admirable and, in my experience, quite rare.”

    According to the Oakland Press, a ceremony to thank the DIA for its work returning Native American ancestors was held in February. At the ceremony, De Quintal was presented with a Healing Blanket and DIA Director and President Salvador Salort-Pons was given a plaque from South Eastern Michigan Indians, Inc., American Indian Health and Family Services Inc., and the Northern American Indian Association of Detroit, the Oakland Press reported.

    click to enlarge A new exhibit of contemporary Native American art had been unveiled in the DIA’s Cosmos Gallery. - Randiah Camille Green

    Randiah Camille Green

    A new exhibit of contemporary Native American art had been unveiled in the DIA’s Cosmos Gallery.

    In O’Loughlin’s eyes, closing entire Native American exhibits is taking the easy way out of a nuanced issue. Instead, she says, museums should do the work to consult with tribes so they can learn exactly what they have in their collections and display them accurately and respectfully.

    “As we were all going into NAGPRA and institutions were often fighting against NAGPRA, the complaint was that all their shelves would be empty,” she says. “And what we found was that when true consultation actually happens between tribes and those institutions… they learn about the values of various and diverse native nations so that they can properly educate the public because that’s the mission of a museum anyway…They’ve only had information provided by an archaeologist or an anthropologist and it often does not include the primary experts, the original peoples where the items came from.”

    She adds, “Native nations do want to educate the public about who they are, but they want to have control of it. They want to be able to be a part of that education, and they just haven’t ever been at the table until NAGPRA was passed… Also, there’s about 150 tribal museums that are owned by native nations and they are likely better places to go if you want to learn about them.”

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    Randiah Camille Green

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  • What’s the Difference Between a Remake and a Reboot?

    What’s the Difference Between a Remake and a Reboot?

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    Webster’s Dictionary defines a reboot as “the act or an instance of starting (something) anew or making a fresh start.” Which is actually not all that helpful for the purposes of figuring out how a reboot is different from a remake. What the hell, Webster’s? You’re supposed to define these things for us!

    It feels like the terms remake and reboot are used almost interchangeably these days, depending on which of the two is more in favor at any given moment. “Oh, did a high-profile remake just bomb at the box office? Well, my new movie is actually not a remake. It’s a reboot!” or “No, see, people don’t like reboots. What I’m directing is a remake!” And so on.

    So what the heck is a reboot and how the heck is it different from a remake? Take 2024’s  starring Jake Gyllenhaal in the role originally played by Patrick Swayze. If we want to get technical about it, is it a remake or a reboot?

    READ MORE: Road House: The Craziest Moments in the Original Film

    What Is a Remake?

    A remake is a new film (or TV show, or whatever other medium you‘re talking about) of an old film (or TV show, etc.) If someone (let’s call this person “Jack Moron”) took Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz’s script for Citizen Kane and reshot it with a new cast — Colin Farrell as Charles Foster Kane, Anne Hathaway as Susan Alexander, Logan Paul as Jed Leland, and so on — the result would be a remake. (The result would also be a Hall of Fame bad idea. But what else do you expect from a guy named Jack Moron?)

    Now in this hypothetical (and catastrophically misguided) example, we haven’t changed anything about the original film beyond the cast. Remakes like that do exist; Gus Van Sant remade Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho page for page, line for line, scene for scene, with only the tiniest cosmetic differences.

    But changing nothing about a movie’s script is pretty rare. Most remakes update their premise to a modern setting. Take, for example, the 2005 version of The Longest Yard starring Adam Sandler. It’s the same essential concept — a disgraced NFL pro leads a bunch of convicts in a football game against their prison guards — but it’s been shifted from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s.

    The cast is different (although original star Burt Reynolds shows up in a different supporting role); the setting, the story, and even some of the character names are identical. Thus, a remake.

    Warner Bros.

    Okay, Then What Is a Reboot?

    Things get more complicated when you are making a new version of something that exists beyond a single film. In a long-running franchise, a remake is rarely just a remake; it is far more common that the film in question wipes away years or even decades of continuity to start over fresh. That’s when a remake becomes a reboot.

    Consider the Friday the 13th series. The original slasher saga spanned 11 films over more than two decades. Then, in 2009, producers started over with a new Friday the 13th. It wasn’t a straightforward retread of the original. In the first Friday the 13th from 1980 Jason Voorhees was the MacGuffin, not the killer. (Uh, spoiler alert?) The murderer in the first film was Jason’s mother, Mrs. Voorhees.

    The update in 2009 combined elements from several different Friday the 13th movies to establish a new storyline; Jason’s mom appears in the opening, then a grownup Jason goes on a killing spree decades later in the rest of the movie. So Friday the 13th (2009) is a reboot, not a remake.

    And so is Casino Royale (2006), which reset the continuity of the James Bond franchise at square one, introducing a new 007 at the start of his career. The key moments in the life of the old James Bond — like the death of his wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — were wiped away, along with all of Bond’s other prior exploits, meetings with Blofeld, battles with SPECTRE, and so on. Thus, a reboot.

    Is It Possible to Remake a Film With Multiple Sequels?

    We’ve already pinpointed the main difference between a remake and a reboot: A remake is a new version of one film, whereas a reboot is a new version of a multipart film series. You can’t reboot something that’s only had one movie in the first place. It would be technically incorrect, for example, to call the Frank Oz Little Shop of Horrors a reboot, because there was only one prior Little Shop of Horrors by Roger Corman to begin with.

    That raises an interesting question: Is the reverse possible? Can you make a remake a film that is part of a long-running series that’s not a reboot? Or does the fact that a movie is a new version of a film that started a long-running series automatically make it a reboot?

    Let’s use the 2014 RoboCop as our test case. The original RoboCop from 1987 inspired two direct big-screen sequels, along with comic books, video games, a live-action TV series, and two animated series. The sheer quantity of secondary stuff in its wake absolutely qualifies it for reboot status.

    But is RoboCop (2014) a reboot? Technically, I suppose it is, since it ignores all of the secondary stuff and returns to the basic premise of a murdered cop who is Frankensteined into a robotic avenger. But the film is also close enough to the 1987 film in terms of plot, setting, style, and tone, that in a world where RoboCop 2 and 3 didn’t exist, you would absolutely call it a remake without a second thought. If a reboot can also be a remake, RoboCop is both. In my personal opinion, whether you call RoboCop a remake or a reboot you are right.

    Universal Pictures

    You would also be right whether you called Peter Jackson’s King Kong a reboot or a remake. 1933’s King Kong got several sequels through the years, including Son of Kong and King Kong vs. Godzilla. There was a prior remake with its own sequel, King Kong Lives. If a reboot is “a new version of a multipart film series,” then Jackson’s King Kong is definitely a reboot.

    But Jackson’s King Kong is also one of the most slavishly faithful remakes in history. It’s got all the same main characters, all the same locations, the same exact story, the same ending, even the same timeframe. (Jackson chose not to update the story, and set his film in 1933.) It seems ludicrous to not call Jackson’s King Kong a remake on a technicality.

    That brings us back to the 2024 Road House. It’s got to be a remake, right? Ah ah ah — not so fast. There is a Road House sequel; 2006’s Road House 2, featuring Jonathon Schaech as the son of Patrick Swayze’s character from the first movie.

    Road House (2024) ignores the events of Road House 2. (Shocking, I know.) So is it a reboot? Technically, I guess it might be.

    But like RoboCop, I think it is safe to call this a remake. It features the same basic premise — man who hates wearing shirts cleans up seedy bar — and the same title character (Dalton, the man who hates shirts and loves ripping out dude’s throats). Even if there was a little-seen direct-to-video sequel to contend with here, If that’s not a remake, nothing’s a remake.

    Forgotten Movie Remakes

    These movie remakes replaced the films they were inspired by in the minds of absolutely no one.

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    Matt Singer

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  • The Best and Worst Oscar Best Picture Winners Ever

    The Best and Worst Oscar Best Picture Winners Ever

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    The Oscars are the unofficial conclusion to a year of movies. Yes, a calendar year technically ends on December 31. But for cinephiles, the year is not done until the thousands of members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have their say, and name the winners of their annual awards. Only then can we all collectively move on to the new year’s crop of movies.

    But history gets the true final word on any and every film, not the Academy. Just because a title wins Oscars — even if a title wins the prize for Best Picture of the year — doesn’t mean it will graduate to canonical masterpiece status. In some cases the film everyone remembers from a certain year turns out to be its Best Picture winner. In a lot of cases, it doesn’t. And sometimes a film becomes infamous for winning Best Picture over a more deserving alternative that winds up becoming a consensus classic in spite of getting snubbed by the Academy.

    Today we’re looking at both examples: The best movies to win the Oscar for Best Picture and the worst movies that somehow campaigned and cajoled their way to a dubious sort of immortality. Keep them in mind before you get too excited or too upset about any of this year’s Oscar winners or losers. The Academy comes to one conclusion, but time can still come to a different one.

    The Best Oscar Best Picture Winners Ever

    More than 90 films have earned the title of Best Picture from the Academy Awards. These are the best of the best.

    READ MORE: Actors Who Won Oscars For Their Very First Movie

    The Worst Oscar Best Picture Winners

    These movies won the Academy Awards for Best Picture over better, more deserving films.

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    Matt Singer

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  • Carl Weathers’ Best Performances: His Greatest Films and Shows

    Carl Weathers’ Best Performances: His Greatest Films and Shows

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    Movie and TV fans were shocked today by the news that Carl Weathers, best known as Apollo Creed in the Rocky franchise, but a perennial presence in film and television for almost 50 years, had died. He was only 76 years old. (In a statement, Weathers’ family said he “died peacefully in his sleep on Thursday, February 1st, 2024” but offered no further details.”)

    I’m guessing Carl Weathers fans are going to want remember him this weekend by watching one of his best performances. There are certainly a bunch to choose from. Weathers left his mark on movies and TV in a wide range of genres from action to comedy to science-fiction.

    Below, I’ve put together a list of his most memorable work onscreen, although he had plenty more films that you might want to check out. (Force 10 From Navarone, anyone?) And here’s some food for thought for you: While Rocky is, in my opinion, the undisputed best Rocky movie, is it also the Rocky movie with the best Carl Weathers performance?

    I’m not so sure. In fact, I am pretty sure it’s not. Weathers got progressively better as Apollo Creed as the franchise went on; he’s better in Rocky II than in Rocky, and he might be better in Rocky III than in Rocky II. As for Rocky IV, I don’t think I’m ready to rewatch that one right now. It would be too painful.

    Carl Weathers’ Best Performances

    The late, great Carl Weathers left a huge mark on the worlds of film and television.

    READ MORE: Every Rocky and Creed Movie Ranked

    The Worst Movies Ever Made, According to Letterboxd

    According to Letterboxd users, these are the ten worst films that have ever been made. Do you agree?



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    Matt Singer

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  • The Most Meta Movies Ever Made

    The Most Meta Movies Ever Made

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    Sometimes, watching a normal movie isn’t enough. Sometimes we want something weirder, something thornier, something more self-referential. For those times, there are meta movies, films with the type of twisty-turny narrative that doesn’t even acknowledge that the fourth wall exists.

    One could argue that every movie is “about movies,” but we’re not here to do that. Instead, we’ve chosen to celebrate the type of movie that turns moviemaking on its head, examining it from all angles, in ways that are often funny and often disturbing. The horror genre has plenty of these — yes, of course Scream made the list — but you can also find it in comedies, in dramas, and even (especially?) in documentaries, where the craft of filmmaking is laid most bare. It’s fun to watch these and feel them winking at you, poking your ribs, daring you to be entertained by not just the film but also by the experience of watching it and noticing all its little in-jokes.

    There is, however, a slight difference between a meta movie and a parody. For this list, we’re highlighting the metatextual, so we’ve tried to steer clear of straight-up parodies like Spaceballs and Scary Movie, though even those have plenty of meta elements. The line between meta and parody is blurry, but meta movies tend not to just make fun of their subject matter. They can be pastiche genre mashups or anxious labyrinths, but they all promise one thing: to show us something we’ve never seen before.

    The Most Meta Movies Ever Made

    These movies will have you questioning what’s real, what’s not, and what’s just a simulation.

    READ MORE: The 25 Most Important Sex Scenes in Film History

    The Worst Movies Ever Made, According to Letterboxd

    According to Letterboxd users, these are the ten worst films that have ever been made. Do you agree?



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    Emma Stefansky

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  • The Worst Prequels Ever Made

    The Worst Prequels Ever Made

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    Scholars believe that the very first prequel in history may be the Cypria, an epic poem that dates to the days of ancient Greece. Although the poem is now lost, it was composed as a chronicle of events leading up to Homer’s Iliad — thus telling the backstory and origins of the events of that great work.

    In other words, prequels aren’t anything new — although the word “prequel” itself is an invention of the 20th century. (Inventing a word for a specific kind of sequel? Who would do something like that?) Still, it certainly seems like the prequel has become far more prevalent in recent years, coinciding with the rise of blockbuster moviemaking in Hollywood and the need to contniue franchises forever — even in cases where a more traditional sequel is impossible because of the nature of a film’s story (i.e. the main character died) or a star’s demands (i.e. an actor doesn’t want to return for a new installment).

    I don’t know too many cinephiles who self-identify as “fans” of prequels. It’s worth noting, though, that there are several great movie prequels. The Godfather Part II is partly a prequel — and a brilliant one, at that. Just last year we got Godzilla Minus One, a prequel to the original monster movie that was one of 2023’s best films, and maybe the very best Godzilla film ever made since the 1954 original. Good prequels are possible!

    They are not all that common, however. In the list below, we countdown the 15 worst prequels ever made — at least until we we make a prequel to this list someday…

    The Worst Movie Prequels in History

    Before there was a movie you loved there was … a way worse movie.

    READ MORE: 20 Forgotten Movie Sequels

    The 12 Worst Wins in Oscar History

    Sometimes the Academy gets it right… and sometimes they give awards to Bohemian Rhapsody.



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    Matt Singer

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  • The Best Movie Musicals For People Who Hate Musicals

    The Best Movie Musicals For People Who Hate Musicals

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    “To start off saying ‘musical, musical, musical,’ you have the potential to turn off audiences. I want everyone to be equally excited.” 

    Those are the words of Paramount president of global marketing and distribution Marc Weinstock, explaining to Variety why his company made the decision to obscure the fact that their new version of Mean Girls was actually a musical in most of the film’s trailers and ads.

    “We didn’t want to run out and say it’s a musical,” Weinstock added, “because people tend to treat musicals differently. This movie is a broad comedy with music.”

    Call me crazy, but I feel like a really good word to describe a “broad comedy with music” is a musical. But what do I know? Definitely not much! And certainly less about marketing than Marc Weinstock. His strategy paid off, as Mean Girls opened in theaters to $32 million, nearly earning back its entire budget in less than a week of release.

    In explaining that strategy, Weinstock also noted that you can see the same thinking in the trailers for Wonka and The Color Purple, two more recent musicals that minimized (if not outright hid) their true musical nature from prospective ticket buyers — something I noticed and wrote about here at ScreenCrush a few months ago.

    Right now I’m less interested in the reasons why studios are doing this. (I assume they think that musicals don’t sell tickets after West Side Story, Dear Evan Hansen, and In the Heights flopped.) And while I would love to know why studios are making musicals in the first place if they think audiences don’t want to watch them, let’s table that part of the conversation for now, too.

    Instead, let’s focus on these people who supposedly don’t like musicals. Now, I have heard enough anecdotal stories to believe that there are moviegoers out there who feel this way. (More than one person who saw Mean Girls in theaters told me they witnessed audible groans from other audience members when characters started singing and they realized they’d been hoodwinked into seeing a movie where people [GASP] sing!)

    What I don’t believe is that anyone who has been introduced to the right musicals would still dislike them.

    Because musicals are beautiful. Like great action movies, they take advantage of the unique pleasure of watching bodies in motion on screen. You might think you’re not a fan of musicals; I happen to believe you’re just not a fan of musicals yet. 

    And so below I have collected a list of 12 musicals I think can turn any musical hater into a musical fan. There isn’t a single title on this list based on a Broadway show. In most cases, the singing onscreen is motivated by the characters’ jobs or interests. In other cases, the worlds of these films are so fantastical that it’s really no great leap for the characters to to burst into song.

    (For the record: I love musicals based on Broadway shows, and I have no issue when singing in movies isn’t motivated by plot. But I can see how they can feel odd.)

    Here are 12 movie musicals to watch if you want to fall in love with musicals… and then keep scrolling for a sampling of musical scenes from each of my picks. I think they all have the potential to turn on audiences. I want everyone to be equally excited.

    The Best Movie Musicals For People Who Hate Movie Musicals

    These movies are so great they might turn a musical skeptic into a believer.

    BONUS: A Selection of Scenes From These Great Musicals

    READ MORE: The 21 Best Movie Musicals of the 21st Century

    The Best Action Movie Posters in History



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    Matt Singer

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  • Someone Used AI To Rewrite My Book. It’s So Much Worse Than I Could Have Imagined.

    Someone Used AI To Rewrite My Book. It’s So Much Worse Than I Could Have Imagined.

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    April 1994 was not an especially memorable time for movies — or an especially memorable time for Siskel & Ebert. One week that month covered the following five films: Bad Girls, The Inkwell, Naked in New York, Brainscan, and Surviving the Game. That’s the opposite of an all-star lineup. That’s like the movie equivalent of the starting nine for the 1962 New York Mets.

    The only movie in the bunch that is slightly remembered is Brainscan, a sci-fi horror film that turned out to be the first feature from future Se7en and The Killer screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker. It follows a teenage video-game enthusiast (Edward Furlong) who discovers that the violence he commits in a hyper-realistic game also takes place in the real world.

    Neither Gene Siskel nor Roger Ebert were impressed, calling Brainscan “repellant” and comparing its central villain, The Trickster, to a “low-rent Beetlejuice.” (Siskel and Ebert gave two thumbs down to Beetlejuice, so that was even more of an insult than it sounds.) Ebert, always the more forgiving of science-fiction movies of the pair, did at least concede that the central premise of Brainscan asked a potentially frightening question.

    “If computers can create a convincing level of virtual reality,” he wondered, “how will you be able to tell the real world from a digitized one?”

    That quote has been bouncing around in my head this week, after I read an article in Wired about the rise of “scammy AI-generated book rewrites” that are “flooding Amazon.” The piece details how AI technology “has supercharged the spammy summary industry,” wherein folks looking to make a quick buck can create an AI-generated knockoff of a book in a matter of minutes with minimal effort, producing what one expert quoted by Wired compared to a “a KidzBop version of the real thing.”

    “It’s common right now for a nonfiction author to celebrate the launch of their book, then within a few days to discover one of these summaries for sale,” according to a publishing expert interviewed by Wired.

    I wrote a book last year about Siskel & Ebert. Sure enough, when you search my name and my book’s title on Amazon, the first result is my work, Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever. The second non-sponsored result is something called SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS OF Matt Singer’s Book OPPOSABLE THUMBS: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever by an author named Shirley Miller.

    Miller’s creation, whose cover image is clearly designed to evoke the beautiful photograph of Siskel and Ebert that adorns my own book, is available in either a paperback for $11.99, or on Kindle for $6.99. If you subscribe to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service, you can read her “book” for free.

    READ MORE: Watch Siskel and Ebert Do Karaoke

    Infuriated and, as always, deeply masochistic, I decided I need to read Ms. Miller’s version of my work. I expected to find a bland, homogenized description of Siskel and Ebert’s relationship and their television show — akin to a subpar version of the CliffsNotes I sometimes bought in high school when I was struggling through a particularly impenetrable old novel. But Shirley Miller’s book was so much worse than that — and really to call it a book at all is an insult not only to my book but to literally every legitimate publication written by an actual person in the entire history of human civilization.

    I should say that I’m not necessarily upset that someone used artificial intelligence to do this. Does AI have some genuinely dystopian implications? Heck yeah. But I could also be convinced that in some instances it could have reasonable, non-horrifying uses. I’ve tinkered with AI on this website before myself.

    However, this is not a matter of an artificial intelligence summarizing my words in a clear, lucid manner. This “summary” (And analysis! Two for the price of one!) is 20 pages of worthless word salad. Artificial? Absolutely. Intelligence? Not so much.

    See for yourself. Here is are the first two sentences of Miller’s “Introduction.”

    Photo By Author

    After reading those paragraphs and letting out a four-minute-long howl of rage, I recognized that this wasn’t really written, by an AI or anyone else. It was just cut and pasted from somewhere with words substituted to (very badly) disguise what they were doing. “Performer” was a bizarre replacement for my last name; “Wonder’s Bug Man” was a nonsensical version of the title of my first book, Marvel’s Spider-Man: From Amazing to Spectacular – The Definitive Comic Art Collection.

    Once I figured that out, it wasn’t hard to work backwards and find the text they had stolen. Turning “Vocalist fights that Siskel and Ebert democratized film assessment” back into the way a sane human being might phrase it — “Singer argues that Siskel and Ebert democratized film criticism” — I immediately found the original source of these words. It’s the Publishers Weekly review of my book. And unlike Miller’s summary (and analysis!), which costs up to $12 on Amazon, you can read the actual, non-gobbledegook version on PW’s website for free.

    The scamming doesn’t end there. The second half of the summary (and, sigh, analysis) include this paragraph.

    Photo By Author

    “Is it likely that you are listening to Netflix?” Shirley, you can’t be serious.

    Again, if you care enough to do even a cursory amount of Googling, it’s easy to find where this material originates. In this case, Miller copied the top reader review of Opposable Thumbs on Goodreads. It’s word for word — with a stray phrase here or there replaced by a synonym.

    Photo By Author

    The credited author of this summary (and analysis) is Shirley Miller, whose Amazon author page claims she is “a mother and a nutrition expert” who “has researched the effect of food on health for over 15 years.” But most of the “books” credited to Miller have nothing to do with nutrition or health. She recently wrote a summary — which no doubt contains much analysis — of Sam Wasson’s The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story. I guess when she’s not researching the effect of food on health Shirley really loves cinema!

    I couldn’t find any concrete evidence of this Shirley Miller’s existence beyond the bounds of her Amazon page. I would assume it’s a pseudonym if for no other reason than if I created this junk, I would never want my actual name on it — not for legal reasons, but out of shame. I do know that Shirley Miller’s headshot is not a woman named Shirley Miller. It’s just a stock photo of a “portrait of happy and relaxed senior woman”:

    I get it. If I was cranking out dozens of worthless Kindle books for a living, I would probably be happy and relaxed too.

    Wired’s article says that after they contacted Amazon about a specific example of a scam summary book (my mistake — a scam summary and analysis book), the site delisted it. They also provided a statement that read “While we allow AI-generated content, we don’t allow AI-generated content that violates our Kindle Direct Publishing content guidelines, including content that creates a disappointing customer experience.” I wasn’t sure how to complain directly to Amazon about my disappointing customer experience, so I wrote this article instead.

    Needless to say, I am pretty disappointed! And also angry and slightly embarrassed that my name is even tangentially attached to such a shoddy piece of garbage. I would hope that anyone who would buy this summary (slash analysis, so much analysis you guys) would recognize that my book was a passion project that took years of my life to research, write, and edit. It also contains words strung together into coherent sentences, unlike this mess, which is an attack on the very concept of the written word.

    But maybe they wouldn’t? In that otherwise unremarkable Brainscan review from April of 1994, Roger Ebert wondered about a world where computers could create a level of reality so convincing it could fool our senses. With the rapid advancement in technology like CGI and deepfakes, that fear is even more timely now than in 1994. And as depressing as this experience was, I’m now struck with an even more disturbing thought: If this is what it looks like when an artificial intelligence “writes” a book, what happens when all the actual authors and journalists lose their jobs and are replaced by AI?

    Movies That Were Originally Supposed to Have Much Darker Endings

    These movies were originally intended to end on down notes. Somewhere along the way, that definitely changed…

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    Matt Singer

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  • 50 Movies Turning 50 in 2024

    50 Movies Turning 50 in 2024

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    1974 was quite a year for movies. Several of the most famous films of all time were released; pictures that remain widely viewed even to this day, a full half a century later.

    It was also a transitional year for film; it was the time when the young directors of the so-called “New Hollywood” movement began to suffer their first flops, and another crop of more commercially-minded filmmakers began to find their first footing at the studios. Within a year, Steven Spielberg would release Jaws. American films would never be the same again.

    Looking at the box-office chart for 1974, theaters were dominated by disaster movies, a genre that remains hugely popular to this day (especially on streaming), and by spoofs, which are sadly in desperate need of a revival. (When we do get a spoof these days, it is almost always terrible.) The Oscars were more into honoring gangster and detective films, of which 1974 had several iconic masterpieces — including one that modern audiences still consider one of the greatest sequels in the entire history of cinema.

    But in between those well-known hits there were all sorts of other lesser-known movies too; musicals and romances and science-fiction oddities and women-in-prison-pictures and drive-in fare and blaxploitation favorites. All these movies deserve recognition, so here are 50 of the most notable films released 50 years ago, in 1974…

    50 Movies Turning 50 in 2024

    1974 was a great year for movies — 50 years ago.

    READ MORE: The Best Movies That Are Longer Than Three Hours

    70s Movies That Could Never Be Made Today

    These movies include some of the biggest of the decade — a few even won Academy Awards. But all of them would have trouble getting made today.

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    Matt Singer

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  • The Worst Superhero Movies Ever, According to Letterboxd

    The Worst Superhero Movies Ever, According to Letterboxd

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    The only thing more fun than watching movies is obsessively rating and reviewing them on Letterboxd, the film site and app that’s part database and part nerdy social media platform. Letterboxd lets you track, rate, and review everything you watch, and read reviews from your friends and any one else on the site who publicly publishes their activity.

    It’s also a great resource for finding movies to watch or movies to avoid. If you click on “Films” at the top of the Letterboxd home page and then go to “Genre” and then click “Sort By – Average Rating – Lowest First” you’ll see the worst of the worst of any genre under the sun, at least according to Letterboxd users.

    At least as of this writing, Letterboxd doesn’t have a specific listing for the superhero genre — but if you look through other Letterboxd genres (action, adventure, science fiction, etc.), sort by the lowest average rating, and then scroll through, you’ll find the titles that Letterboxd users consider the absolute worst ever made.

    Or if that’s too much work, just keep scrolling here. I went through every one of their genres, and found the 25 lowest-rated superhero movies of all time. The picks run the gamut from Marvel to DC to Dark Horse and even a couple of films that aren’t based on any existing comics. There are even a few titles I disagree with! That’s the beauty of a site like Letterboxd. It lets you speak your mind, and see how others feel about the same films.

    So let’s see how many (many) other movie lovers feel about the worst superhero films ever made…

    The Worst Superhero Movies Ever Made, According to Letterboxd

    According to millions of users on Letterboxd, these are the 25 worst superhero movies of all time…

    READ MORE: The Best and Worst Superhero Movies Ever Made

    The Worst Marvel Moments of 2023

    The lowlights from a pretty bad year for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

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    Matt Singer

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  • The Worst Movies of 2023

    The Worst Movies of 2023

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    2023 was a great year for movies; easily the best year for movies so far this decade. And even better, it was a good year for movie theaters. After a long, painful stretch where it looked like multiplexes were in serious trouble, I saw so several movies in 2023 in packed theaters. Even with a strike, Barbie, Oppenheimer, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Taylor Swift, and others kept auditoriums full all year long.

    (I’ll never forget going to see a press screening at a New York City multuplex on a Monday night in late July — not usually the busiest time for theaters — and having to push my way through a sea of moviegoers, all outfitted in hot pink.)

    Of course, it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows at the movies in 2023. Despite an above-average year for cinema overall, we still had some out-out-and stinkers this year as well. That includes screwy sequels, bad biopics, awful action films, blockbuster blunders, and one of the worst and most shameless cash-ins on a respected and recognizable children’s brand I have ever seen in my entire life.

    Below, I have ranked the 15 worst movies I personally saw in 2023. Plenty are big theatrical releases — a couple were contenders for the biggest budget movies of the year — but a couple bypassed theaters entirely for the vast and unreliable world of streaming, where the movies are often bad but the cost of viewing is low — unless you measure cost in the precious moments of your life you lose watching a crappy rom-com starring Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher.

    Here now are my picks for the worst movies of 2023, ranked from almost watchable to borderline pestilential…

    The Worst Movies of 2023

    Of the hundreds of movies I watched in 2023, these were the worst of the worst.

    READ MORE: The Worst Sequels and Remakes Ever Made

    The Best Movies of 2023

    ScreenCrush’s editor and critic picks the best films of the year.

    Gallery Credit: Matt Singer

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  • The Worst Marvel Moments of 2023

    The Worst Marvel Moments of 2023

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    For basically the entirety of the 2010s, Marvel seemed nigh-invulnerable — like Galactus, if Galactus stopped eating planets and started releasing three major motion pictures every calendar year. Every Marvel movie opened to huge box office and strong reviews, and with every release, the buzz for the company and its larger Marvel Cinematic Universe only seemed to get bigger and bigger, hitting its peak with 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, which concluded over a decade of storytelling with a thrilling, emotional (and wildly profitable) finale.

    But the Marvel Cinematic Universe, like Marvel Comics, is never allowed to end; there’s always a new monthly issue and now a new film (and show) every couple of months. And thus far, The Multiverse Saga — as Marvel dubbed their post-Endgame efforts — has been a roller coaster of highs and lows. And in 2023, the roller coaster got awfully bumpy, with disappointing TV shows, frustrating movies, and multiple major behind-the-scenes issues for the company, its executives, and its stars.

    As a fan of Marvel dating back decades before the company made its own movies, I’m hoping they turn things around quickly. But you would have to be the hardest of hardcore Marvel zombie to insist 2023 was a good year for the company. In fact, it doesn’t feel like too much of a stretch to say this might have been the worst year in Marvel Studios’ history to date. Below, here are ten reasons why.

    The Worst Marvel Moments of 2023

    The lowlights from a pretty bad year for the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

    READ MORE: How She-Hulk Broke the Marvel Cinematic Universe

    Every Marvel Cinematic Universe Movie, Ranked From Worst to Best

    It started with Iron Man and it’s continued and expanded ever since. It’s the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with 33 movies and counting. But what’s the best and the worst? We ranked them all.

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    Matt Singer

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  • ‘The Iron Claw’ True Story: How Accurate Is the Von Erich Movie?

    ‘The Iron Claw’ True Story: How Accurate Is the Von Erich Movie?

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    The following post contains SPOILERS for The Iron Claw — but really they’re just the actual historical events detailed in the movie.

    Pro wrestling is at its best when it blurs the line between fantasy and reality. The fights are staged and predetermined, but sometimes the animosity between the opponents can get very real, and the storylines are often inspired by elements of the participants’ lives. The more real the matches and their stakes feels, the more the audience invests.

    So you could argue that whatever the inaccuracies in the wrestling movie The Iron Claw, it is only taking its cues from its subject. The film depicts the lives of the Von Erichs, a family of Texas wrestlers who rose to national stardom in the 1980s thanks to their infectious energy, boundless charisma, and their convincing true-life wrestling storylines. In the ring, the Von Erichs (including Kevin, played by Zac Efron, and Kerry, played by Jeremy Allen White) essentially played themselves: A tight-knit crew of brothers who had each others backs through thick and thin.

    Of course, the reality of the Von Erichs was not always so simple — and the same could be said of The Iron Claw’s version of the family as well. Below, we’ll go through all of the things the movie accurately portrays, and all of the things it fudges for the sake of telling a cinematic story — primarily all of the details it leaves out, some of which are even more astounding than the stuff depicted onscreen.

    ‘The Iron Claw’: Separating Fact From Fiction

    The Iron Claw tells the unbelievable true story of the Von Erich family, a dynasty of wrestlers who were hugely popular in the 1980s before suffering a series of horrible tragedies. But what in the movie is real? What is fiction? And what was left out? Keep reading…

    READ MORE: ScreenCrush’s The Iron Claw Review

    The Best Movies of 2023, According to Letterboxd

    The users of Letterboxd logged thousands of movies in 2023; these 25 titles had the highest average ratings.

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    Matt Singer

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  • The Worst Movie Every Year Since 1980

    The Worst Movie Every Year Since 1980

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    Cinema is a perpetual state of change. Everything about movies is in flux: What they look like, who makes them, who is in them, how are filmed, what they cost to make, what it costs to see them, how they are projected in a theater or screened at home.

    The only thing that remains constant: Some movies are good, and some movies are bad. Really, really, really bad.

    The list below charts the latter constant, and includes the single worst movie released every year for the past 40+ years starting at the dawn of the 1980s (AKA the dawn of all history) and proceeding through the ’90s, the 2000s, the 2010s, and into the early years of the 2020s. The films run the gamut of nearly every conceivable genre: Musical, comedy, action, erotic drama, swords and sandals, science-fiction, animation, horror, raunchy puppet farce, and thriller. A few are low-budget affairs, but many feature some of the biggest stars of their day. (The bigger the star, the bigger the chance for catastrophe, it seems.) What they all share is their general level of crapitude, which is quite high.

    Let these movies serve as a reminder to all: That bad movies come in all shapes and sizes, and that any concept under the sun could be made into a fine motion picture. Unfortunately, that just did not happen in these specific cases.

    The Worst Movie Every Year Since 1980

    Here are several generations’ worth of crummy movies — the single worst movie released each year from 1980 to today.

    READ MORE: The Worst Netflix Movies of 2023

    The Worst Oscar Best Picture Winners

    These movies won the Academy Awards for Best Picture over better, more deserving films.

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  • I Am Eating Everything on IHOP’s ‘Wonka’ Menu

    I Am Eating Everything on IHOP’s ‘Wonka’ Menu

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    The original Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory ends with one of my favorite scenes in any movie. Pure-hearted Charlie Bucket proves himself worthy and Willy Wonka bequeaths him his amazing chocolate factory. After they launch themselves into the sky in the Great Glass Elevator, Gene Wilder‘s Willy pulls Peter Ostrum’s Charlie in close for one final lesson.

    “Charlie, don’t forget what happened to the man who got everything he always wanted,” Willy says.

    “What happened?” Charlie asks.

    “He lived happily ever after,” Willy replies.

    Well, I am about to get everything anyone could want … from the Wonka tie-in menu at IHOP.

    (Somehow, I don’t think this is quite what Willy had in mind.)

    For those coming in late, here is a refresher about why I do this. I once joked to my old boss after I goofed up the press pass application for Comic-Con that if I didn’t get to cover San Diego that year I would eat the entire Josh Trank Fantastic Four menu at Denny’s as my punishment. To understand just how much of a punishment this was: The menu contained a “Thing burger” drizzled with a generous portion of “Thing sauce.”

    I got into Comic-Con, but it didn’t matter — I had already implanted this deranged idea in my boss’ mind. And then when I did eat the entire Fantastic Four, it got more attention that pretty much all of our Comic-Con coverage that year.

    With that, it was established: Any time a fast-casual dining establishment makes some sort of menu tied to a big blockbuster movie, I have to eat it. All of it. For science. 

    My previous cinematic culinary escapades can be read here, archived under the accurately titled tag page “Matt Singer Is Stupid.” (The boss is long gone, by the way, possibly because he was concerned he may be held legally responsible if I die of four spontaneous cardiac arrests while eating a plate of purple pancakes.)

    This time, the site of my meal is IHOP. And the subject of their pure culinary imagination is Wonka, the new prequel to the classic children’s story featuring Timothée Chalamet as a young Willy Wonka before he built his magnificent and deadly chocolate factory. The mad men and women of the International House of Pancakes have devised no less than seven (!) items connected to Wonka, including chocolate pancake tacos, lemonade with icing on it and, yes, purple (iced!) pancakes.

    READ MORE: I Ate Everything on The Addams Family’s IHOP Menu

    Willy Wonka believed that a little nonsense now and then is relished by the wisest men. So if you’re reading this, you can confidently call yourself highly intelligent, because some Grade A nonsense is about to go down.

    Since that old boss left for less stomach-churning pastures, I’ve typically done this alone. (And if you ever want to know what it feels like to be looked at like you’re a crazy person, just go to an IHOP by yourself and tell the waiter “I will take one of every item on The Grinch menu. Yes, even the ‘roast beast’ omelette.”) This time, however, I will have company: The great Griffin Newman, co-host of the Blank Check podcast, has decided (against the advice of his doctor, I assume) to join me. Griffin shares my fascination with movie merchandise and cross-promotional items; let’s hope he also shares my masochistic tendencies and iron stomach.

    Here’s how this works. As you read this, Griffin and I are currently getting settled in at one of Brooklyn’s finest IHOPs. As we eat, I’ll be updating this live-blog accordingly. I’ll also be posting pictures and videos to social media where applicable.

    What happens next? Honestly, there’s no earthly way of knowing which direction the food is going … in or out. So stay tuned.

    COURSE #1

    Come with me… and you’ll be… in a world pure indigestion.

    We’re starting today with a “Daydream Berry Biscuit.” The IHOP menu describes this as

    Warm and flaky buttermilk biscuit split and filled with creamy cheesecake mousse a mixed berry topping, topped with purple cream cheese icing and powdered sugar.

    Here is what it looks like on the official IHOP website…

    And here is how it looked on my plate…

    Photo by Author

    Now Wonka does involve some running gags involving daydreams, but I’m not sure what about this constitutes a “daydream.” Do diabetics ever enter a daydream state if they eat too much sugar? If yes, this is a daydream biscuit because it is one of the sweetest things I have ever eaten in my life — whipped cream and creamy cheesecake mousse and mixed berry topping on this giant biscuit (which, for the record, was warm but not especially flaky). And we didn’t even get the promised purple icing. I did not miss it. (And I think we’ll be getting all of that we can handle very shortly.)

    Look, if you want 1000 calories in a single dish, there are theoretically worst ways to eat that? This daydream isn’t necessarily a nightmare, except maybe for a nutitionist. As Griffin said as we were sitting here “As the one sweet thing at the end of a meal, I would enjoy that thoroughly. To eat it as the first dish, made it feel more ominous.” That about sums it up!

    COURSE #2

    So remember two paragraphs ago when I said the Daydream Berry Biscuit was maybe the sweetest thing I’d ever eaten in my life? That record didn’t last long!

    It is time for the main attraction of the Wonka IHOP menu: “Wonka’s Perfectly Purple Pancakes.” The menu calls it…

    Four purple buttermilk pancakes layered with creamy cheesecake mousse & topped with purple cream cheese icing, whipped topping and gold glitter sugar.

    And here is the official beauty shot:

    And here’s what it looked like when they served it to us…

    Photo By Author

    I mean… it is purple. It’s so purple it would not surprise me if I suddenly started turning purple, like Violet Beauregarde.

    It is also beyond sweet; Willy Wonka himself would look at this and say “Maybe we should ease off a little bit?” But perhaps that actually makes it a well themed item? I must admit: So often I eat these sorts of movie-related foods and I wonder “What does this Gomez Green Chile Omelette have to do with The Addams Family?” And the answer invariably, is “Absolutely nothing.” But in this case, I see the connection. Willy Wonka loves purple, he loves sweets, and he loves weird unexpected candy inventions. This ticks every box. So … good job, IHOP?

    Griffin had this to say about this item, which he agrees is easily the sweetest food ever created (narrowly beating out the previous course): “The amount of creams and icing are so significant that you can barely feel the texture of the pancake in your mouth.” It’s true. You could serve this purple stuff on a grilled cheese and it would still be an impossibly saccharine meal. (Then again, maybe I shouldn’t give IHOP any ideas. They might just try it.)

    Okay, so twice so far in this meal I have declared something the sweetest thing I have ever eaten in my entire life. Will it happen again? Let’s find out…

    COURSE #3

    You know that scene in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory where Charlie and Grandpa Joe drink fizzy lifting drinks and they start floating into the air and then they almost get cut to ribbons, and then they are saved by burping a lot?

    That’s me right now. Only I haven’t had any fizzy lifting drinks and haven’t floated into the air. Basically, I’m just burping a lot.

    Next up on the Wonka menu is “Willy’s Jr. French Toast Dippers.” IHOP menu speak calls it…

    Sliced French toast with a side of strawberries, banana and chocolate dipping sauce.

    Here’s what it’s supposed to look like:

    And here’s what we were served.

    Photo By Author

    In terms of the ideal versus the execution: This is definitely the closest. It looks relatively close to the beauty shot. And it’s also the closest thing to normal human food we have eaten thus far. This is basically just French Toast sliced up into strips with chocolate dipping sauce. My wife does this at home for my kids, only with syrup to dip instead of chocolate. It’s pretty good diner French toast. So it’s probably the best item and the worst Wonka item if that makes sense. I suspect the next selection will really up the Wonka-factor significantly.

    COURSE #4

    Before we move on to the next item, here are a few of my favorite tweet responses to what’s been happening here today…

    You guys are funny. Or maybe you’re not. I’ve had so many calories this morning that everything seems hilarious to me right now. Either way, we move on right now to the “Scrumdiddlyumptious Jr. Strawberry Hot Chocolate.”

    Hot chocolate flavored with strawberry syrup, topped with whipped topping, a drizzle of chocolate sauce and gold glitter sugar.

    When you order off the menu, this is what you think you’re going to get:

    And here is what we got:

    Photo By Author

    Well, it’s close. The gold glitter sugar could use a little more pizzazz, but it’s not too far off. The visual appeal is less of a problem here than the flavor. I’ve never been punched in the face by a strawberry before, but that is how I would describe the experience of this hot chocolate. (Excuse me “hot chocolate flavored” drink, which really makes you feel good about the high-quality ingredients you’re putting into your body.) It is so strawberry forward.

    Griffin said the only way to get through this one was to “cut the strawberry with the whipped cream.” When you are using whipped cream to cut the intense sweetness of a beverage, you might be in a little trouble.

    Unfortunately for us, we’ve got a whole lot more trouble before we are done.

    COURSE #5

    It’s kind of bizarre that we are five courses into the IHOP Wonka menu, and this is the first chocolate entree. It’s Wonka! Shouldn’t they all be chocolate items?

    Anyway, we move on to the “Hoverchoc Pancake Tacos.”

    3 silver dollar chocolate pancakes folded & filled with chocolate chips, creamy cheesecake mousse, fresh sliced strawberries & a chocolate drizzle. Served with extra strawberries on the side.

    This is the official picture:

    This is my picture:

    Photo By Author

    This turned out to be the worst item so far, and by a pretty wide margin — which is kind of nuts because, again, we’re talking about a Wonka menu, and one would think the chocolate item would be the centerpiece that holds the whole thing together.

    Not quite. Maybe if you love chocolate you could get behind this, but it is so dense and rich, and then the middle of each “taco” is filled with more of IHOP’s favorite cheesecake mousse, which basically just tastes like cream cheese. Who wants chocolate pancakes with cream cheese on top? Not me.

    Griffin concurred with my assessment, and said that that “the mouthfeel” of this one was particularly unpleasant. We speculated that perhaps the pancakes used for the tacos are deliberately made thicker and denser than a regular pancake for reasons of structural integrity; the light and fluffy texture of a standard pancake is sorely missing here.

    It’s just a big thick gloppy mush. If given the choice between falling into Wonka’s chocolate river and getting shot like a cannon out of the intake pipe, or eating this again I think I’d pick the pipe. This might as well be something from the Slugworth theme menu.

    Come to think of it: In Wonka, the hoverchoc are literally flying chocolates. They make people float into the air when they eat them. No one is floating anywhere with hoverchoc pancake tacos in their stomach. I might get rushed the emergency room in the next hour, but only by an ambulance.

    And we still have a ridiculous burger with hash browns on top to eat…

    COURSE #6

    Right about now I really could use that Wonka T.V. that shrinks anything you put in front of it. Then I wouldn’t have to eat this monstrous burger.

    It is officially called the “Fantastical Wonka Burger.” And it contains…

    100% USDA Choice Black Angus beef steakburger with lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, four-cheese blend, avocado, 2 strips of vacon, fried hash browns, IHOP sauce & a ranch drizzle on a brioche bun.

    It is certainly a fantastical amount of stuff on a burger. And here is what it is supposed to look like.

    This is what it actually looked like.

    Photo By Author

    This one is a real headscratcher. (Or maybe I have eaten too much food and I’m just itchy? I don’t know.) As a burger it’s okay. I have no idea why you would put avocado on a burger that already has hash browns and cheese and “IHOP sauce” (shudder). You can’t taste the avocado at all; all it does is make a sandwich that is already enormous more messy and unwieldy.

    More importantly, Griffin and I are sitting here trying to think of how this has anything — anything! — to do with Wonka and are coming up empty. (It is, at this moment, the only way in which I feel empty.) A sweet burger is obviously a bad idea, so what else could you do? Stick a little flag with a W in the bun? Make the four-cheese blend out of giraffe’s milk? We noted the total lack of Oompa Loompa representation on this menu, and thought perhaps this was a missed opportunity. Maybe a little orange burger on a bright green bun?

    Okay, clearly we are not of sound mind after eating all of this. Let’s wrap this up.

    TO BE CONTINUED…

    Every Movie Theater Candy, Ranked From Worst to Best

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  • The Original Mickey Mouse Is About to Enter the Public Domain

    The Original Mickey Mouse Is About to Enter the Public Domain

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    For years, one of the laws passed in Congress to extend the term of a copyright on a work of art was referred to as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” because Disney was among the companies that was most invested in maintaining their legal protection over their signature creation for as long as humanly possible.

    By law, all films, music, and books created in the United States are protected under copyright. But copyrights eventually expire, and when they do, those works enter the “public domain” which means anyone is free to share those works — or to create derivative works based on the original works without the original author’s (or, more realistically, the author’s estate’s) permission.

    Well, on January 1, 2024, that’s exactly what will happen to Mickey Mouse — or at least the Mickey Mouse who appeared in the very first cartoon featuring the character, 1928’s “Steamboat Willie.” It’s essentially the day Disney has spent decades working to put off as long as possible. Now it is here.

    READ MORE: Winnie-the-Pooh Horror Director Plans More Scary Kids Movies

    In a statement, Disney made it clear that just because “Steamboat Willie” is in the public domain doesn’t mean the character himself is free and clear for anyone to do what they wish with him. As they put it:

    More modern versions of Mickey will remain unaffected by the expiration of the Steamboat Willie copyright, and Mickey will continue to play a leading role as a global ambassador for the Walt Disney Company in our storytelling, theme park attractions, and merchandise … We will, of course, continue to protect our rights in the more modern versions of Mickey Mouse and other works that remain subject to copyright.

    Disney is correct. While you could theoretically share “Steamboat Willie” without any repercussions, you can’t just turn Mickey Mouse into the logo of your animation company; Disney still holds a trademark on Mickey Mouse in that form, and that is not going to expire any time soon. And given how carefully Disney has protected Mickey and their other signature creations through the years — the story of the company demanding a Florida day care remove unlicensed Disney images from their walls, for example, are legendary and true — I would expect them to be as or more litigious about copycats or knockoffs moving forward.

    January 1 has become a big day for the public domain, as it is the first day every year’s crop of old works leave their copyright protection and become available to anyone. A few years ago, for example, it was a major story when the original Winnie-the-Pooh joined the public domain — and before too long an enterprising horror filmmaker made an unauthorized (but legally permissible) slasher film titled Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey. The movie got disastrous reviews — and made a slew of money.

    If you saw it, you know that the film only featured Pooh and his pal Piglet; their buddy Tigger was nowhere to be seen in the film. That‘s because Tigger wasn’t in the original Pooh story that was in the public domain; the rights holders could have sued if they had included his character. But guess what? Tigger joins the public domain on January 1, 2024 along with Mickey Mouse. I think I smell a sequel coming…

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    The Best Movies of 2023, According to Letterboxd

    The users of Letterboxd logged thousands of movies in 2023; these 25 titles had the highest average ratings.

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