Honest question: Why do pop culture references work and get a laugh in things like Shrek, but in others they just come across as just being lame and forced? What makes a pop culture reference work?
I think the thing with references in general is that they need to either a) work on their own even if someone DOESN’T understand the source material and/or (preferably and) b) are brief enough that someone who doesn’t understand them most likely won’t notice them, instead of stopping the story shut in its tracks for a minute so you can wink at the viewer and say “geddit? eh? eh?”… metaporically speaking.
Example: in Shrek 2, Shrek sees an old poster in Fiona’s old room in the castle.
When I was a kid, I genuinely didn’t recognize that this was supposed to be Justin Timberlake, because I wasn’t that up on celebrity stuff (and he already wore a full beard at this point). But I still smiled, because even if you DON’T recognize the celeb it still is a solid joke even without that, narrative is still easy to recongize that Fiona as a tween had a crush on some male celebrity, and it ties into character development of Shrek feeling insecure because he’s not human – so it fullfills point a).
And in addition to that: that shot? It lasts for THREE SECONDS. It’s a quiet scene (except for music), noone makes any mention of that poster, there’s no dialog or callback or anything. If you don’t get it, you miss absolutely nothing. So it fulfills point b) at the same time.
Shrek is pop culture references as frosting.
Ready Player One is pop culture references as the entire damn cake.
it’s so hard to comprehend the scale of homestuck….. people literally celebrate the anniversary of the day it began like a holiday. it spanned obama’s entire u.s. presidency. it raised a couple million on kickstarter. it crashed several hosting sites. it might as well be it’s own medium. it amassed a major presence on the internet and at cons yet it was never on tv or advertised or anything- just a comic drawn by some dude spreading through word of mouth. people are still reading and talking about it a year after it ended. it’s getting it’s own fucking game. it’s got a soundtrack with hundreds of songs spanning anything from nicolas cage saying “boner” to a goddamn symphony. this was supposed to be short but so was homestuck
You ever just wake up one day and thank god that Homestuck had its peak before Steven Universe, thus not allowing the existence of “HS-critical” blogs to flourish?
Imagine a 1000-word Tumblr post with the bolded title of “Is Vriska Ableist?”
