‘The Simpsons: Tapped Out’ on a mobile phone.Image: Mashable composite, EA When the “Every Simpsons Ever” marathon on FXX airs its final episode on Labor Day, what’s a true fan to do to continue feeding the obsession? Unless you own every DVD and want to start the whole thing over again, your
Month: November 2016
Continue Scratching Your ‘Simpsons’ Itch With the Family’s Best Games
Image: Mashable composite, EA
When the “Every Simpsons Ever” marathon on FXX airs its final episode on Labor Day, what’s a true fan to do to continue feeding the obsession? Unless you own every DVD and want to start the whole thing over again, your best bet is to dive into the world of Simpsons video games.
Once The Simpsons started taking over the airwaves, it didn’t take long for the dysfunctional family to start appearing on more than just television screens. They’ve starred in more than two dozen games since 1991.
Some of them are pretty old, and you’d only be able to play them if you’ve got an impressive collection of retro gaming hardware. Others would even require a visit to an actual arcade. Fortunately, while there are many gems in the back catalog, there are also plenty of great choices for contemporary platforms. Here’s a sampling of the best Simpsons video games.
1. The Simpsons Game
The basic premise of this title is that the Simpsons family obtains super powers. They’ll each be the star of a different section, and you need to use their powers to take down the villains. While the special skills aren’t much of a surprise, they play out in the levels in fun ways. The Simpsons Game also includes a wry sense of humor about video game tropes, with Comic Book Guy appearing from time to time when you stumble upon a well-known cliche, such as a pile of unexplained crates blocking your path.
Available on Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, PSP, Wii, and Nintendo DS
2. The Simpsons Arcade
It’s probably the least accessible of the bunch, but it’s also largely considered the best Simpsons game. It was the one that kicked off the show’s presence in games, way back in 1991. Up to four players can beat down hordes of enemies in an effort to rescue Maggie from the clutches of Mr. Burns in this arcade game. The family members had fun joint attacks for causing extra mayhem.
3. The Simpsons Arcade (Mobile)
If you don’t happen to have access to an old-school arcade with the previous title, you can still get a somewhat similar experience on an iPhone. The mobile Simpsons Arcade game was the handiwork of EA, and it focuses on Homer rather than all family members equally. It does a nice job of recreating a classic arcade vibe, though, as you chase after a donut that has information about a secret evil plan spearheaded by, of course, Mr. Burns. Good, light mobile fun.
Available on iPhone and iPod Touch
4. The Simpsons: Tapped Out
The most recent entry into the Simpsons game family is this free-to-play mobile title, also from EA. As with the best Simpsons creations, the game’s full of knowing nods to how this type of casual game works. Among the very crowded free-to-play space, this one at least has the benefit of delightful writing that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of the show. Even if you don’t usually go for this style of mobile game, the true Simpsons fan will at least give it a glance.
Available on iOS, Android and Kindle.
5. The Simpsons: Hit & Run
A combination of the animated yellow family and Grand Theft Auto probably sounds like madness, but this riff on the well-known Rockstar Games franchise wound up being one of the most popular Simpsons games. Springfield doesn’t condone the casual slaughter of pedestrians, but you will spend a lot of time behind the wheel of various vehicles as you explore and tackle missions. Expect lots of show references, a great recreation of the city, top-notch writing, and a wacky story.
Available on Xbox, PlayStation 2, GameCube and Windows
6. Virtual Springfield
This game is decidedly less goofy than most of the others. In fact, it might be better to consider it a simulator or a 3-D tour than a game. The player explores a thoroughly detailed recreation of the Simpson home town. The goal is to collect character cards, but the more enjoyable part is just to wander around and interact with the world you’ve seen so often on TV. As with Tapped Out, the great writing is also a highlight.
Available on CD-ROM for Windows and Macintosh
7. Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror
The annual “Treehouse of Horror” episodes are often fan favorites, delving into even weirder pop cultural references and zaniness than usual. In this title for the Game Boy Color, each level is based on a different segment from the first few years of the Halloween specials. The various Simpson family members each fight their way through the levels, defeating assorted macabre baddies in this side-scrolling action platformer.
Available on Game Boy Color
Homer drives the iconic “Mr. Plow” snowplow in ‘Simpsons Road Rage’.
Image: EA
8. The Simpsons: Road Rage
Did you ever play Crazy Taxi? This is the same thing. Sega actually tried to sue Fox and EA for the overwhelming likeness. As with the original game, you drive around like mad and get your fares to their destinations. It comes with all the familiar faces and humor of the show, as well as nods to specific episodes. For instance, you’ll see the “Don’t Eat Meat” signs from the episode where Lisa becomes a vegetarian, or you can opt to play as Barney in his Plow King snowplow.
Available on PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, and Game Boy Advance
Read more: http://mashable.com/2014/08/29/best-simpsons-games/
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On The Edge Of Civil War In Ukraine
In the eastern city of Donetsk, friends and neighbors have transformed into enemies, and people on both sides of the conflict worry that there’s no way out from a slide to civil war. View this image ” Ukrainian police try to stop a pro-Russian protester from attacking a pro-Ukrainian rally
On The Edge Of Civil War In Ukraine
In the eastern city of Donetsk, friends and neighbors have transformed into enemies, and people on both sides of the conflict worry that there’s no way out from a slide to civil war. 
Ukrainian police try to stop a pro-Russian protester from attacking a pro-Ukrainian rally in Donetsk. Baz Ratner / Reuters
DONETSK, Ukraine – Wearing a black shirt and white clerical collar, the pastor walked into the occupied government building that serves as rebel headquarters in this eastern Ukrainian city. Serhiy Kosyak had come to plead for leniency: Rebels threatened to kill anyone who visited the small prayer vigils he held for Ukrainian unity, the city’s last open resistance to the separatist republic rebels had declared. As he waited for an audience, he saw an old friend among the gunmen milling around. Kosyak asked how he was doing. The man’s eyes stared back at him with hate.
There’s a moment on the slide to civil war where friends and neighbors become hard to recognize. The man screamed that Kosyak was a traitor and spy, an outburst sure to doom him amid the fevered atmosphere in the building, where suspicions ran high. Kosyak, 38, had seen the same anger in the passersby who sometimes accosted his pro-Ukraine prayer tent. And he saw it now in the rebels who tied him to a chair in the building and beat him as he prayed. He thought there was evil in it – real evil, because he believed in such things. He thought Satan grabbed hold of people with the ideas pouring into Donetsk on the Russian airwaves: that Russian-speakers there were in danger and needed to rise against Ukraine’s government. When the beatings finally stopped, and he was cleared for release, he stayed in his chair for a minute to bless his assailants: God, enter their lives and open their eyes. Kosyak was still bruised a deep purple under his dress shirt when he opened his sidewalk service more than a week later, on the last day of May. The interfaith vigils once drew hundreds, but attendance was fading as worried supporters fled. Thirty people stood at the edge of a busy bridge beneath an intermittent rain. The sermons were about Sodom: a biblical city so overrun with evil that God decided it couldn’t be saved. In Genesis 19, angels send away a man named Lot, Sodom’s last good soul. Then the Lord levels it from the skies. “God didn’t destroy Sodom until Lot left,” said a pastor named Pavel Zaystev, 46. “As long as we’re here, there’s still hope.” But he worried privately that Donetsk was beyond redemption. “You don’t think even some miracle could change them,” he said of the rebels. “That’s why I think of Sodom: God destroyed them because he could not change them.” Ukraine’s corrupt president, Viktor Yanukovych, a native of the Donetsk region and Russian ally, was ousted by a popular uprising in Kiev on Feb. 22. The conflict came to Russian-speaking Donetsk, where about half of the 1 million residents are ethnically Russian, soon afterward, initially with small demonstrations. Protesters worried that the new government would punish Russian-speakers – fears fueled by Kremlin propaganda. They believed that their language would be banned and that fascists from Kiev were coming to hurt them. At first, the so-called fascists they had in mind were members of the Right Sector, a fringe ultra-nationalist group that had played an outsized role on the front lines of the protests in Kiev, but soon the label included the new government and its supporters, who had largely ignored their concerns. Then the protesters were storming government buildings as Russia warned that it would intervene, if needed, to protect its “compatriots.” They called for a referendum on secession, like the one that saw Russia annex Crimea in March, and they took up arms. Polls showed that most Donetsk residents wanted to remain in Ukraine, but outspoken opponents of the separatists began fleeing the city amid abductions and death threats. Some who remained deleted their Facebook pages, wondering who among their friends might be tracking their loyalties. “Fear is like a virus,” one said.
But there was still hope for peace in Donetsk, the political nexus for eastern Ukraine’s separatists and an important economic hub, even as fighting flared elsewhere. Throughout the spring, some residents had looked ahead to two events that might swing things back toward normalcy: Ukraine holding fresh presidential elections and Russia recalling the troops massed along the border nearby. Both came to pass, but they did nothing to stop the conflict from surging ahead. Each side had already come to see the battle as one between irreconcilable ideas – with an enemy that had to be eradicated. The fabric that let two groups of people with their own histories coexist in post-Soviet Ukraine had been ripped away. “This city needs to be cleansed,” warned a Catholic priest at the unity vigil, and on another evening, inside an expanding, makeshift armory, a rebel in a flannel shirt said, “There is some dirt here now, and we have to clean it from our land.”
Pastor Serhiy Kosyak. Photograph by Evgeniy Maloletka for BuzzFeed
On the afternoon before the vigil, a rebel commander from Russia sat before a bottle of bourbon at a faded desk and outlined his mission, which he said served God. He was in a bright office at the end of an unlit hall, inside a compound that used to house the Ukrainian security service. He had a welcoming smile and tattoos that ran down his arms and peeked out from his crew neck. He was a leader in a group called the Russian Orthodox Army, and he went by the nickname Veren, or “the faithful.” “First of all it’s purification of the land – purification from fascists,” Veren said. He described an awakening of Russian identity centered on Donetsk, where it was under threat, and he seemed to be an incarnation of the ideology the pastor had seen on the Russian airwaves, personally spreading it by hand. Just a few weeks earlier, he had been overseeing what seemed like a small outlaw empire from the fifth floor of the rebel headquarters, the former government building, where masked men roamed the halls and speakers blared Soviet anthems from behind sprawling barricades. As separatist politicians scurried about overhead one day, Veren said he concerned himself with “special operations” – kidnappings and interrogations. Armed men kept handing him keys to cars they’d taken from their enemies. He has since been expanding his power, trading his spot in the crowded building for the more exclusive digs of the security compound, where men with assault rifles blocked the approaches and access was controlled with an intensity that felt paranoid. The Russian Orthodox Army’s seal of a Christendom-evoking sword and shield was stenciled onto each concrete block of one outer wall. On the wall across the street, another set of rebels, the highly professional Vostok battalion, had done the same, marking turf of their own. In the new office, a Russian flag with the army’s logo hung from a bookshelf, and portraits of a fierce-looking Jesus were taped to the walls. Stickers and insignia patches sat on the desk. The first edition of the army’s newsletter had just arrived, and beneath its banner were recruitment phone numbers. It also had a website. Veren saw untapped potential in the Donetsk region’s 5 million people – and maybe across the Russian-speaking world. “People support us, but they’re afraid to take the first step,” he said. “I’m interested in any kind of promotion that gets the flow of people going.”
They had even released a promotional rap video featuring gunmen packed into the same office. It got 200,000 YouTube views in less than a week. Veren bounced his head and lip-synched the lyrics as he twisted a computer monitor around: Till last fighter, till the victorious, glorious endOn the battlefield. Russian Orthodox!Who if not us? When if not now?Mom, I’m sorry. Nobody but us.
Video available at: http://youtube.com/watch?v=WIi7cBloy60.
Like many of the Russian nationals operating in Donetsk, Veren was something of an enigma: The dark tasks he said he employed didn’t match his amiable demeanor. He had no military experience, he said; he’d once owned a fast food chain, where he picked up his knack for marketing. He was a 34-year-old from Sochi, but his wife was from Donetsk. Rumors of covert Russian soldiers and spies – and financial and military aid – had swirled around the conflict, but Veren said he had no contact with the Russian government. He said he got his start in the separatist movement by attending the protests that erupted in March.
If he was a demon to the pastors at the prayer vigil, he was also a protector of local separatists, who believed they were largely on their own against the Ukrainian army and what they saw as its fascist allies. They worried that if enough civilians left the city, the government might bomb it. A recruit walked into Veren’s office. Overweight and nervous-looking in a button-down shirt, the young professional, 28, wasn’t built for war. But he wanted to help – he and Veren discussed whether he might do some managerial work, maybe go on neighborhood patrols. “Because I’m a conscious person,” he said when asked why he wanted to join. “And when bad things come to your house, a conscious person can’t ignore them.” With much of the whiskey, brought to the meeting as a gift, now gone, Veren described a more ambitious quality to the conflict at hand. “The Russian person should remain Russian in any nationality and any land,” he said. The rebels gathered with him in the room – some locals and others Russian – likewise spoke about their battle as if it were about more than Donetsk. One man called it a “historical conflict,” another “a conflict of mentalities.” A likeness of St. George the dragon-slayer graced the army’s flag because Russians throughout history had fought under his banner. Veren said he had started groups in nearby hotspots like Mariupol and Slavyansk – and also had his eye on Kiev, Serbia, Georgia.
But first he was building his franchise in Donetsk. Someone put the keys to an Audi on his desk. The car’s registration showed that it belonged to the company of Serhiy Taruta, the billionaire steel magnate and regional governor. Taruta had fled to Kiev recently because of death threats. Veren went down to the compound’s parking garage, empty except for a couple rows of commandeered vehicles, neatly parked. A man waiting there appeared to be working as valet.
Veren got into the Audi’s driver’s seat. “This is a good car. I’ll trade it for 20 AK-47s,” he said. It was just past sunset, and the compound was quiet as guards opened the gate so Veren could ease the car from the sealed-off rebel zone. Then he jammed the gas and sped through the city’s quiet streets. Later, as Veren and his comrades settled into a long dinner in a way that felt suddenly normal for a Friday night – they were the big, boisterous group at the restaurant carrying on happily as fellow diners tried not to mind – Fyodor, the intense young Russian who had designed the Army’s flag, gave a lesson on history. Russians made their great advances, he said, in huge, sudden leaps. The pace seems slow; the momentum builds. Then comes the exhilarating wave. “We must only run,” Fyodor said, seeming not to care where this moment would take him. “The end – it is nothing. Run to progress. Run to more.”
Rebel commander Veren. Photograph by Evgeniy Maloletka for BuzzFeed
With darkness falling on a recent Sunday, a rebel in his fifties named Oleg wheeled a compact sedan through the city, his big frame packed into the driver’s seat. A veteran of the feared Berkut riot police, he still carried a natural authority, with his shaved head and intense blue eyes. He was headed to the airport, where a battle on May 26 had shocked the city with its violence. A mechanic who lived nearby would later remember seeing dead civilians along the roadside as he sped home to get his dog; a soldier at the airport recalled getting orders to hold fire as rebels massed outside, then watching in awe when fighter jets arrived. The bloodshed, with at least 50 rebels killed, showed that war was closing on Donetsk, and some rebels embraced it. Others, like Oleg, seemed deeply shaken. Asked if he’d been at the airport that day, he paused, looked down, and said, “Yes.” Donetsk – a relatively affluent city with riverside parks and a sparkling soccer stadium – seemed to proceed with normal life as Oleg drove past glass-walled office buildings. “It looks like there is no war. Everything is quiet – peaceful,” he said. “And we will see how that will change now.” He pulled up to the last rebel checkpoint before the road to the airport became a no-man’s-land. Shirtless men in dusty jeans worked feverishly in the fading sunlight, digging and stacking sandbags, with an eye to the approaching night. Then the sedan passed into the silence of the edge of war; the Ukrainian army was hidden in the distance somewhere. Oleg stopped the car in front of a flatbed truck. Bullet holes pocked the windshield; shoes and clothing scraps were scattered around. The back was caked in blood. Some 30 rebels had died there, Oleg said, when the truck was ambushed en route to the airport by a Ukrainian RPG team. The only sound on the deserted highway came from a billboard flapping in the wind overhead. “This cannot go without punishment,” Oleg said. A silver van pulled up suddenly, and a man in a black cap pointed a submachine gun from the driver’s side window. “Who are you?” he shouted. A young couple, holding hands, approached on the sidewalk about 100 yards away, taking slow and deliberate steps toward an apartment building set back in the trees. Bursts of gunfire echoed nearby. Then the sedan was back onto Donetsk’s busy streets. “And now there is no war. So it’s a feature of civil war,” Oleg said, meaning that sometimes people don’t recognize it until it’s right upon them. “Most people still don’t understand that this is war. But when there will be more victims and more death, they will stand up.”
Berkut rebel commander Yuriy Sivokonenko. Photograph by Evgeniy Maloletka for BuzzFeed
“You have to respond somehow to the killing,” said another man late that night. He called himself a scientist, and his name was Mikhail. To make a tally of the dead around the truck just after the attack, he had counted their heads, since the bodies were in pieces. Then he crept in his sandals through the woods, armed only with a folding knife. When he came upon a Ukrainian soldier, he said, he killed him with the 6-inch blade. Mikhail, 56, had served in Afghanistan, but it was different this time, killing his fellow Ukrainian. “Before it was an order,” he said. “Now it’s voluntary.” He was sitting with friends inside a rebel-held building in the heart of the city, in a room where a small arsenal of guns leant against the walls. Half were old carabiners, half modern AK-74s – rebels were accumulating more weapons as they crawled deeper into the conflict. Mikhail put his folding knife on the table, and then produced the rifle of the soldier he said he had killed, with red stains along the shoulder strap. “It was covered in blood,” Mikhail said. “I washed it, and now it belongs to me.” The Kiev government was stepping up what it had termed its “anti-terrorist operation,” and the men felt it pressing closer. They thought of it as retribution – “a punishment operation” – rained down from tanks and airplanes. The rebels in the room, all former Berkut, had created a battalion, hoping to act as police, but instead they were being drawn into the war. Their burly commander, a 57-year-old martial arts instructor named Yuriy Sivokonenko, worried for his family, and had tried to ensure that his two sons wouldn’t take up arms. His wife of 32 years, meanwhile, was breaking down, spending her days, he said, “crying and praying.”
Sivokonenko said he hoped for compromise as he served homemade cognac and jam that supporters had donated. But the possibility seemed to be shrinking; the conflict had reopened past wounds and the present had become polarized. He took a book from the armoire where he kept the cognac, describing it as a key to the truths he was fighting to defend – he had always held them, but now they felt threatened by those of his neighbors. It was a beautiful hardcover with grand illustrations, detailing a glorious history of the ethnic Russian people dating back to the 14th century. Shown the book the next morning, a local historian who supports the government would dismiss it as “fairy tales and myths.”
Read more: http://buzzfeed.com/mikegiglio/on-the-edge-of-civil-war-in-ukraine
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Sports are fun to play but they are also just as fun to watch thanks to a rich history of crazy fans and sports-specific or even team-specific traditions that have spanned across the decades. So while we fans aren’t scoring the game-winning goal, we still get heavily involved in the sport and in
10 Stories Behind Crazy Sport Traditions
Sports are fun to play but they are also just as fun to watch thanks to a rich history of crazy fans and sports-specific or even team-specific traditions that have spanned across the decades. So while we fans aren’t scoring the game-winning goal, we still get heavily involved in the sport and in our teams through a number of ways. Below are just ten of the many traditions that have defined the “sport” of watching sports. By no means is this a comprehensive list – it was hard enough just narrowing down the list to ten even when I limited myself to only professional sports – so feel free to include any traditions, rituals and/or superstitions you want to share in the comments!
The abbreviations in the list are as follows: NHL (National Hockey League), NFL (National Football League – American football), MLB (Major League Baseball), NBA (National Basketball Association), FIFA (International Federation of Association Football)
The best way to show support for your favorite team is to proudly wear the team colors. Greater solidarity comes from tens of thousands of your fellow sports fanatics all wearing the same color. Its beginnings may have come from the NHL’s Calgary Flames during the 1986 Stanley Cup Finals. The Edmonton Oilers’s fans were in the midst of “Hat Trick Fever” as they tried to win their third consecutive championship. In response to Hat Trick Fever, Calgary promoted “C of Red” to encourage their fans to come dressed in entirely red. During next year’s first round playoffs, Calgary’s opponent responded with the “Winnipeg White Out”. Now it is extremely popular in US Universities like Penn State’s Code Blue and Virginia Tech’s Orange/Maroon Effect.
This is a fairly recent fixture in the FIFA scene even though the vuvuzela has been popular in South African games since the 1990s. The vuvuzela is a simply blow horn originally made of tin but mass-produced in plastic for games. Blowing through the mouth as you would a trumpet, the vuvuzela emits a loud monotone note similar to elephant trumpets. It’s stirred up some controversy because there are many who are trying to have them banned from the upcoming 2010 World Cup. The complains range from “too loud” to “not fit for a sports arena.” The vuvuzela supporters say that it doesn’t detract from the game anymore than anything else that fans have with them and that it is a strong part of the South African culture.
This popular hockey tradition may have gotten its inspiration from the sport of cricket. In cricket, a hat trick happens when a bowler dismisses three batsmen with consecutive deliveries. The custom crossed over to hockey with Ontario’s Biltmore Mad Hatters. When one of the players scored three goals in a game, the team owner Mr. Biltmore would present him with a new fedora. Many stories describe Mr. Biltmore throwing his top hat onto the ice to salute the player and soon enough, the fans also tossed their own hats onto the ice. After they are collected, the hats are either donated, thrown away or saved for a gigantic transparent case that showcases the franchise’s hat trick history.
During intermissions, many fans will race to the concession stand to grab some more food before the game resumes. In certain stadiums, the food does the running! The most famous is the Klement’s Sausage Race at Miller Park (home of the MLB’s Milwaukee Brewers). The tradition began in the early 90s as a computer animation race on the scoreboard but they made their first live appearance in 1994. At the bottom of the sixth inning of every Milwaukee Brewers home game, employees of Miller Park and a select few highly honored guest wieners don the seven foot three inch foam costumes and race from third base down to home plate and back up to first base. To date there are five sausages: Brett Wurst the bratwurst, Stosh the Polish sausage, Guido the Italian sausage, Frankie Furter the hot dog and Cinco the Chorizo. Bratwurst is currently the race leader with eighteen wins. The race gained fame outside of baseball in July 2003 when then-Pittsburgh Pirate Randall Simon used a bat to hit Guido (worn by employee Mandy Block) on the sausage’s head. Given where he hit Guido, the bat never came near Mandy Block’s head but since the costume is so top-heavy, Guido easy fell down and took Hot Dog down as well. Simon was arrested, given a fine and suspended by the MLB for three games. Despite reprimands by the authorities, some found the situation comical. Mandy Block asked for Simon’s autograph on the infamous bat and t-shirt companies made a tidy profit with shirts saying “Don’t whack our weiner!”
The Terrible Towel is as much a symbol of the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers as their three-star logo. Its creation comes from the mid-1970s after the Steelers won their first ever Super Bowl in 1974 and were strong contenders at the 1975 playoffs after winning twelve of fourteen games during the regular season. Around that time, general manager Ted Atkins, sales manager Larry Gerrett and broadcaster Myron Cope brainstormed ideas to market of the team’s success. The first idea was a mask of head coach Chuck Noll but was dismissed due to price issues. The next idea was the more cost-effective “Terrible Towel” because it was cheap, durable and easy to carry around. They had less than two weeks to promote the Terrible Towel so Myron Cope went on TV and radio telling people to bring, buy or dye a dish towel yellow, gold or black. By the next game, somewhere between 30,000-50,000 fans were spinning towels over their heads and the numbers have only grown since then. The following year, the Steeler’s franchise printed the official Terrible Towel image onto bright yellow towels and the tradition became official. All proceeds from Terrible Towel sales go to the Allegheny Valley School, which is “a residential and educational facility for children and adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities.” To date, the Terrible Towel has made over $2.5 million for the Allegheny Valley School.
At the old Yankee baseball Stadium, the fans in section 39 had a history of bad behavior. They heckled visiting teams and high school marching band students, they ignored the warnings of stadium ushers, and they even badgered fellow Yankee fans who weren’t part of their tight-knit group known as the Bleacher Creatures. As a result of the bad attitudes, section 39 lacked access to the rest of the stadium and beer sales were banned in just that area. However, negotiations between the Yankee organization and the Bleacher Creatures ensured that the group would get to sit together in section 203 of the new Yankee Stadium in exchange for a some changes to a few of their more belligerent Bleacher Creature traditions. Now seen more as ‘extremely loyal fans’ rather than a group of nasty hecklers, Yankee home games aren’t really complete until they deliver their Bleacher Roll Call. At the top of the first inning, “Bald Vinny” Milano shouts the name of a Yankee player and the entire section will chant that particular baseball player’s name until he recognizes the Bleacher Creatures with a wave or salute. They will go down lineup until every Yankee player is called.
This is a tradition that started with the NHL’s New York Islanders. From 1980 to 1983, the team won the championship and lifted Lord Stanley’s cup high above their whiskered faces. Since then, many teams and their fans have put away the razorblade for the duration of their playoff run. In addition to discussing team strategies and playoff series, fans also get into debates over which players can grow the best, worst or the most nonexistent playoff beard. Many teams will also sponsor Beard-A-Thons in which players and fans grow a playoff beard to fundraise money for various charities. The Playoff Beard tradition is strongest within hockey but it has found its way into other sports through players like the NFL’s Jake Plummer and tennis pro Björn Borg.
Fans love to show their support by wearing their team colors. Some may take it to the next level with brightly-colored facepaint or tattoos (whether temporary or not) but there are a select few superfans who are dressed so bizarrely that everyone takes notice. The NFL’s Washington Redskins have the Hogettes. When the group was formed, no one had even thought it would become an unofficial football mascot. As founder Michael Torbert describes it, he attended a Halloween Party at his grandmother’s retirement home dressed in her tea party finest and he was so popular that he and his friends thought they could take this act to local hospitals to cheer up sick children. As lifelong Redskins fans, they decided to go attend a game in their drag wear including pig snout masks referencing the offensive linesmen who were nicknamed the “Hogs.” The Hogettes have become a fixture within the Redskins community and through their fame, they have found greater exposure for their many charities. To date, the Hogettes have raised over $100 million for various charities like the Ronald McDonald House and the March of Dimes.
Heckling is one of the least favorable traditions in pro sports fandom but jeers and taunts are as common at games as the cheers and applause. No one has a heckling career as quite as prestigious as that of Robin Ficker (above), an ardent fan of the former Washington Bullets (now known as the NBA’s Washington Wizards). For twelve years, Robin Ficker held season tickets to Washington Bullets games that were directly behind the visiting team’s bench. He would taunt players through his megaphone. He made fun of coaches’ outfits. When the Chicago Bulls came to play, Ficker would read the sex passages of Bull’s Coach Phil Jackson’s 1975 autobiography “Maverick.” He’s had some supporters over the years, including basketball player Charles Barkley who had flown him to Phoenix when his team was in the finals against the Chicago Bulls. In 1997, the former Bullets moved to the MCI Center and Ficker decided not to renew his season tickets because the new seats were too far from the visitor’s bench. He faded from the sports world for focus on his political career but has recently taken to attending and heckling at wrestling matches at the University of Maryland.
A practice that remains strong for the Detroit Redwings of the NHL that (hopefully) won’t catch on with the other teams is the tossing of octopuses onto the rink. The origins of this tentacled tradition began in 1952 when fewer NHL teams meant that the road to the Stanley Cup only took eight playoff wins. To mark this occasion, brothers Pete and Jerry Cusimano threw the eight-legged creature onto the ice to represent the Redwing’s eight games against the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Montreal Canadiens. Since then, hundreds of octopuses have rained down onto the Redwing rink, including one tossed by Bob Dubisky and Larry Shotwell that weighed 50 lbs (22.68 kg). With every octopus purchased for the purpose of tossing, the Superior Fish Market gives out an “Octoquette” which is a pamphlet of recommended guidelines for octopus tossing, including boiling the octopus for half an hour (raw octopus tends to stick to the ice and leave a slimy residue when removed), launching them only after a Redwing goal as any other time may result in a Delay of Game penalty, and toss the octopus in a direction away from any players, officials and personnel.
Read more: http://listverse.com/2010/05/04/10-stories-behind-crazy-sport-traditions/
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10 Video Games That Impacted Gaming
Video games are getting bigger and bigger every year. With the mass production of “crap-ware” coming out, there are still a few games released that really change how people game. Whether its a serious game, or more casual, these games really made an impact on the video game industry. This Sony
10 Video Games That Impacted Gaming
Video games are getting bigger and bigger every year. With the mass production of “crap-ware” coming out, there are still a few games released that really change how people game. Whether its a serious game, or more casual, these games really made an impact on the video game industry.
This Sony made MMO (massively multiplayer online) was the first of its kind, and really defined how MMO’s are played today. The games user interface is the standard blueprint for every new MMO that comes out: sometimes so similar you can even call it a copy. Regardless, if you loved or hated Everquest, nobody can deny that it was the launching pad for every new MMO that hits the scene.
The RTS (real time strategy) video game genre has been defined by this game. With its very high paced gameplay and a massive online fanbase, its hard to dispute the impact of Starcraft on the gaming industry. In my opinion, with the rise of console gaming, Starcraft is one of those games that really kept PC gaming alive. The game is even televised nationally in Korea. Yes, its that big. With the release of Starcraft II I would imagine the RTS genre will only grow.
Anyone who had a Playstation in the mid-90′s knows about this one. You can even call it the flagship game of the first generation Playstation. Anyone who plays RPG’s (role playing game) has a special appreciation for this game. Between the cutting edge graphics (for its time, of course) and compelling plot / side plot, this game can easily be known as the most famous RPG to date. There is still a huge demand for the game to be remade. The words RPG and Final Fantasy go hand in hand, because of this 7th installment of the franchise. Not to mention, Sepheroth is the most bad-ass villain ever!
Mothers around the world hated this game. Its a sandbox game that allowed you to do, literally, anything. The game really got heated after the release of “San Andreas”, particularly because of the “hot coffee mod” or sex scene shown. The games company had to re release the game without that scene. Regardless, Grand Theft Auto and sandboxes go hand in hand.
Microsoft can really thank this series for the huge success of XBox live. Sure, I mean we have Call of Duty now, but nobody can deny what halo did for the console FPS (first-person shooter). Because of Halo, the use of online console gaming was born with XBox live. I can’t remember a kid who didn’t play xbox live with halo.
Casual, yet so addictive! This game is the first thing to come to mind when you think of a portable game. How many of you kids out there have a mom that does not play games, but will play tetris? Need I say more?
Anyone who has Facebook either plays this game, or knows 5 people who do. If you are like me, your Facebook notifications are constantly full of annoying requests from those people that are addicted to the game.
This one is a no brainer. The mix between RPG, hack and slash, and action/adventure made this game a big hit from its first day of release. Nintendo struck gold with this one, and it is still a major series of the Nintendo platforms today. Not to mention, Link make an appearance in so many other games. That is how loved he really is.
It”s hard to not put this game as number 1. With over 10 million players currently, and growing, it’s easy to see how this game impacted gaming. People who don’t play games at all play WOW. The mix between satisfying content and the social network involved in this game truly puts it in its own category. There have even been reports of suicides concerning this game.
Any disputes here? This game from Nintendo started gaming. I know there was the atari and other systems prior to, but Mario made all games what they are today. With a new Mario releasing every year, its undeniable what this Italian plumber did for gamers all around the world.
Read more: http://listverse.com/2011/04/27/10-video-games-that-impacted-gaming/
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Zac Efron Bros Down To Grow Up
Our teen idols are “all heart, no libido” – so what happens when they grow up? Ricky Nelson, Rock Hudson, Zac Efron, and the impossible contradictions of masculinity. View this image ” Zac Efron “looks like something a gay guy designed in a laboratory.” That’s how Seth Rogen puts it in
Zac Efron Bros Down To Grow Up
Our teen idols are “all heart, no libido” – so what happens when they grow up? Ricky Nelson, Rock Hudson, Zac Efron, and the impossible contradictions of masculinity.
Zac Efron “looks like something a gay guy designed in a laboratory.” That’s how Seth Rogen puts it in Neighbors, when he looks out his window to see a tank top–clad Efron moving his fraternity into the house next door.
It’s true, right? The perfect body, the beautiful face, the Paul Newman-esque blue eyes. But for most of his career, Efron has been something that a teenaged girl designed in a laboratory: that same beautiful face and body, but with an equally beautiful heart. Efron – and the characters he played, whether Troy Bolton (High School Musical), Charlie St. Cloud (Charlie St. Cloud), or Logan Thibault (The Lucky One) – were sensitive pieces of man meat who really just wanted to respect, cherish, and maybe, just maybe (and totally only when you’re ready!), have a single kiss and/or very lovingly take your clothes off.
Efron wasn’t the first to blend the beautiful face and generous heart – that’s provenance of the matinee idol, whose lineage goes all the way back to Wallace Reid and Rudolph Valentino. But Efron’s career struggles are the result of the impossible contradictions of total masculinity and total sensitivity we ask of our aging teen idols. There’s a reason that so many of them “bro out,” sometimes fatally.
There’s an impossible ideal set out for female stars – it’s constantly discussed, whether in memory of Marilyn or in reference to Britney. Male stars supposedly have it easier: They get to play sexy for longer; they get good, meaty roles well into their sixties, and since teenage boy tastes run Hollywood, they get roles that rotate around them and their interests.
In reality, though, Hollywood’s only actually good to male stars who can play a very certain type of hetero hero. That hero is also straight, virile, and designed, above all, to be someone whom 1) men want to be and 2) women want to have sex with. Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Brad Pitt – the only way you can get around that imperative is to be funny, in which case you can be someone, like Will Ferrell, whom men want to be friends with and women find adorable.
The former teen idol, however, can’t really be either of those things. Even as he grows up and maybe grows a beard, his image is forever bound by his status as a fetish object for teen girls. And it’s not just that he’s “cute” – he’s a very particular type of cute. Truly and exquisitely beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that most could’ve grown their hair and passed as teen girls. They’re enormously attractive to pubescent girls not because they’re sexual, but because they’re not.
When a girl is first confronting her attraction to the other sex, it’s terrifying. The thought of the sexual act itself, all that physical action and mess, is terrifying. What you do want to think about is romance – a guy who thinks you’re special, who wants to do nice things for you, who wants to hold your hand. Teenage boys who already look like men are threatening, but teenage boys who look not that dissimilar from your best girl friends – only they want to be your boyfriend… that’s comforting. Thus: Robert Pattinson, Justin Bieber, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, Davy Jones, ad infinitum.
Adam Larkey / © Disney Channel / Courtesy: Everett Collection
But first there was James Dean. Because in order to have a teen idol, you had to have teens – and before the 1940s, there wasn’t such a thing. Before the Depression, there were two ways of being a person in the world – first, you were a child, and then, when you were old enough to bear children and work on your own, you were an adult. But the lack of work during the Depression made it so that thousands of teenagers who would’ve otherwise transitioned into adulthood were able to go to high school, not get married right away, and, gradually, establish themselves as a separate demographic, a distinction further ratified when the United States entered World War II. You were a teen or you were a soldier.
And advertisers knew a promising new market when they saw it. The first teen magazine, Seventeen, published its first issue in 1944, and over the decade to come, the teenager became king. So much of what we associate with ’50s pop culture – the poodle skirts, Elvis, sock hops, The Twist – was all teen culture. From that point forward, the culture industries (film, television, music, fashion) would begin marketing primarily not to the median, but to the demographic with the capital, and the lack of other financial demands, to purchase it freely. Teenagers!
Dean was the perfect star for the budding teenage market: young and pretty, reckless and wounded, and he was super sensitive – he cried! All of which made it all the easier to really fall for him when, at all of 24 years old, he died in a fiery car crash. The fervor around Dean’s death was unprecedented: Sure, women supposedly had attempted suicide in the streets after Valentino’s death in 1926, but he was established as the biggest male star in the country for years. By contrast, Dean had been in a single film (East of Eden) at the time of his death, with just two more (Rebel Without a Cause, Giant) to be released in the months to come, which only helped sustain the general frenzy among girls between the ages of 12 and 19 for years to come.
It makes sense, then, that entertainment executives all over Hollywood began working themselves into a frenzy creating new teen idols. It also made sense that these new idols were a bit less James Dean (volatile and unpredictable) and more along the lines of Ricky Nelson, the clean-cut star of the smash hit Ozzie and Harriet. Ozzie and Harriet offered a cookie-cutter, totally palatable, somewhat boring portrait of the ’50s ideal, complete with a totally cute, totally vanilla younger son.
In some pictures of Nelson, he looks like the popular guy from your high school who was probably named Chad or Brad. There’s a certain future Business Leader of America quality to him, something more Biff from Back to the Future than Marty McFly. But take a look at him singing his No. 2 hit, “A Teenager’s Romance,” on a 1957 episode of Ozzie and Harriet.
Nelson’s a horrible performer – the way he awkwardly shuffle-dances right around the one-minute mark – but his inability to look the camera in the “eye” is pure bashful teenager. He had the Dean-esque bouffant and the rolled-up shirt sleeves, but he was performing for his mother, who promised to provide “the down beat.” Crucially, this wasn’t some actress playing his mother – it was his real mom, and that was his real dad and real older brother who step into the frame to watch him, authenticating his goodness and sincerity.
Pabulum, sure, but coupled with Nelson’s fresh good looks – and the fact that you could watch him on ABC every week – it transformed a semi-talented kid into one of the biggest stars of the decade. Suddenly, he was usurping the traditional stars on the cover of the fan magazines – the first television star to do so – a move that signaled the rise of a new generation of media consumers. Elvis may have been sexier and more exotic – those hips! – but you could get your parents to buy you a Ricky Nelson record. Wholesome, white, straight, safe, plus he looked great as a cowboy in Rio Bravo, a film that cemented his popularity.
Warner Bros
Nelson also set the business model for teen idols to come: He acted, he sang, he appeared in movies. He could be cross-promoted across all spheres, exploiting teen girls’ desire to own as much of their object of affection as was made available to them. His appearances on Ozzie and Harriet turned into de facto music videos, and between 1957 and 1962, Nelson had an astonishing 30 Top 40 hits. Dozens of teen idols – most notably, Donny Osmond and Davy Jones – followed this strategy, and it served as the slightly altered foundation for Disney’s reboot of its own teen franchise, The Mickey Mouse Club, in 1989.
We all know the talent that came out of The All-New Mickey Mouse Club over its six-year run: Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, JC Chasez, Keri Russell, and Ryan Gosling. Young potential molded to sing, dance, improvise, and be charismatic on cue.
The All-New Mickey Mouse Club also coincided with Disney’s reboot years, when, along the renaissance of Disney animation, the company was remembering how to successfully exploit its new product across media in a way that Walt had pioneered with Mickey, Disneyland, and thousands of other Disney products. Disney owned everything these kids did with MMC in the early 1990s, but they weren’t playing the long game: When the show ended in 1995 and at least four of the Mousketeers went on to tremendously lucrative singing careers, Disney’s name wasn’t on any of it. (Which is part of the reason these stars could go on to major careers: no one cared when Gosling’s first major film role, for example, was as an anti-Semitic neo-Nazi.)
It took another decade – and the massive success of Hilary Duff – for Disney to fine-tune what would become its own “studio system” of young stars. By 2006, it had the infrastructure in place; starting with Miley Cyrus, Disney would never let an opportunity to cross-promote pass it by again. The new “class” of Disney talent was almost entirely “raw” (new to entertainment, unshaped) and ready to be molded into franchise lynchpins. Hannah Montana was a massive hit, but so were Wizards of Waverly Place and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody; together with a slew of Disney Channel original films, they helped The Disney Channel overtake Nickelodeon in ratings for the first time in years.
For Disney, this was much more than a ratings game. It was what a growing swath of cross-media properties could mean for the conglomerate at large. Put differently, it wasn’t just that Hannah Montana was a hit; it was that the soundtrack to her show, her concert series, her Disney Channel movies, and the ever-unfurling spirals of merchandise were generating incredible profits – upwards of $1 billion by 2007. But Miley was only half of Disney’s success strategy. The other half became a veritable phenomenon: High School Musical.
Disney
High School Musical is a perfect reverse-engineering tween product. If tweens want little more than to experience high school, then Disney offers that experience – only frames it as one in which all matter of stereotypes (jocks, cheerleaders, artists, nerds) can eventually leave behind their self-consciousness and social roles to collaborate in the name of music.
Unlike other kids’ products – SpongeBob SquarePants, say, or Pixar – there’s no second meaning available for adult audiences. HSM plays it completely straight – in both meanings of the word – and is wholly bereft of irony. The purity of emotion, coupled with its marketing toward tweens and young teens, helped turn it into a phenomenon: Sure, parents thought it was cheesy, but who cared, so long as every kid from 8 to 13 was buying the soundtrack and participating in the Disney-branded productions at their own schools.
HSM was filled with would-be stars: the all-American Ashley Tisdale, the affable Corbin Bleu, around whom Disney would later try to build another franchise. But the true prizes were the star-crossed lovers in the lead roles: Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens. Efron was a bright-eyed, floppy-haired jock; Hudgens was the ethnically ambiguous mathlete. Societal expectations tried to keep them apart, but musical theater brought them together! Their relationship was completely chaste, the musical numbers were ridiculous, but with those blue, smizing eyes, Efron was a teenage dream: all heart, no libido.
Like Ricky Nelson, Efron couldn’t really act in HSM – but he didn’t really need to. He was what, back in classic Hollywood, they’d call a “trouper” – someone who could passably sing, dance, and perform on demand. And like all Disney Channel product, what matters isn’t the talent, but the ability to look and act like something that tweens would like to become and/or spend their allowance on reproducing on their backpack.
Off screen, Efron’s actions fit the on-screen image. Trained, undoubtedly, by the Disney publicity team, he became an expert at reproducing the banal tidbit: “I was always the shortest kid in school,” he told People. “Plus, I had a huge gap in my teeth. I got teased more about my gap than anything else.” He couldn’t live without his skateboard and kept a poster of Tyra Banks above his bed. “I’m good at Hacky Sack,” he explained, and, “I consider myself a pretty good kid. There are always little slipups, but I try to work hard at my job.”
Whether or not Efron was, in fact, a “good kid” matters less than Disney’s ability to make sure that their images remained as such. It’s one thing when you’re a twentysomething appealing to an adult audience – if you show up drunk on TMZ, it’s not the end of your career. But these stars’ livelihood was rooted in a very specific, very wholesome appeal to supposedly impressionable tween kids: What they did off screen absolutely mattered.
From January 2006 to October 2008, that was the guiding logic of Efron’s off-screen career. But he – or someone at Disney – knew that the most effective way to amplify his star (and HSM) was a tried-and-true one: Make the on-screen romance come to (real) life.
Photograph by Matthew Rolston for Rolling Stone / Via rollingstone.com
Rumors of Efron and Hudgens’ flirtation thus began to circulate in summer 2007. Paparazzi caught them holding hands on the beach, but Efron was tantalizingly cagey in press for Hairspray, his first non-Disney film. High School Musical 2 debuted on Aug. 17, 2007 – coinciding with a Rolling Stone profile titled “The New American Heartthrob,” with a perfectly bronzed Efron removing his shirt on the cover.
When asked whether a ring on his finger is a “commitment ring,” Efron “turns red” – “I’m not going to say who it’s from,” he says, “This is just a ring from a friend that I got. ‘Commitment’ is way too weird a word for me right now. I’m wearing it for a friend … It is a female friend, but I can’t say who, because then it would be chat-room pandemonium and teen magazine hysteria. Yeah.”
Which is precisely what happened when, just days later, People magazine debuted a cover featuring “Their Real-Life Romance!” promising the details of how “America’s hottest teens fell for each other.” And so “Zanessa” was born: the couple that got to kiss (although very carefully out of sight) even when their on-screen counterparts couldn’t, and had to deal – very, very, carefully – with the revelation of Hudgens’ nude photos, which were quickly framed as a) a “mistake” or b) taken solely for Efron, which, as her one and only, diffused the sexual explicitness. The relationship would last for five years, but the acceptance of the photos were one of many events that trumpeted Efron’s willingness to toe the Disney publicity line while ignoring the overarching Disney publicity line.
He’d bailed on the High School Musical tour in order to film Hairspray, in part because, as he readily admitted, it wasn’t his voice on the soundtrack. And even though Efron was a passable singer, he resisted the dozens of offers for a music contract – “I didn’t want to do what everyone else did,” Efron told Entertainment Weekly. “I thought to myself, What can I contribute to the music industry? I can’t say that I would be proud of the work that I put down.” He was cagey about whether or not there’d be a High School Musical 3, and after accepting a role in the remake of Footloose – which would clearly replicate his High School Musical image – he backed out.
Efron ended up doing HSM 3, which, like the first two, was a smash hit – and even gave Efron a chance for an out-of-focus kiss with Hudgens, performed in the classic Hollywood style that I like to refer to as “fish kissing,” aka no tongues allowed. But before he could even finish publicity, the conversation had already turned to the difficulty of transitioning out of teen idolhood. Amid the revelation of his relationship with Hudgens, he’d ironically been “phased out” of the tween demo: As Leesa Coble, editor of Tiger Beat and Bop, explained, “When people are on the cover of Rolling Stone and in People, that’s sort of a sign for us that the peak has happened for our readers… You don’t want to like what your parents like.”
An article for EW declared “navigating the perilous journey from teen phenom to grown-up actor is a full-time job”; USA Today did an entire piece on failed teen idols in order to talk about Efron’s potential future. But Efron (or his agent-publicist) had a game plan. He was set to star in 17 Again, which seemed like a perfect transitional film; he was to play a teenage version of Matthew Perry, who, through some murky movie magic, wins a chance to redo his senior year in high school. Efron opened the film in a basketball uniform – a clear visual throwback to his tenure at HSM – and danced to “Bust a Move,” but the moonfaced sincerity was (almost) gone, replaced by genuine comedic timing. The way we feel about Lindsay Lohan in Freaky Friday, that’s how we should feel about Efron in 17 Again: It’s like a revelation of actual talent. Just look at the way he defends his Ed Hardy T-shirt.
Warner
The other prong of Efron’s strategy was to earn a bit of indie cred in Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, starring Claire Danes, with Efron in an eager high school drama role. Again: close enough for coherency with his existing image, but far enough away from Disney to add cultural cache. But the conceit of the film was all just a bit too precious. It flopped, but Efron was buoyed by the success of 17 Again, which had grossed $136 million on a $40 million budget.
The year was 2009. Efron was 22 years old. It was time to play adult – but how? He’d successfully broken free from Disney, but the next chapter, at least for the male teenage idol, has always been almost impossible to navigate. When you’re no longer a teen, how do you stay a star?
Ricky Nelson grew out of his teens, but he couldn’t shake the image. He changed his name to Rick, but nobody would call him that, and attempts to exploit his marriage (his wife, Kris, made appearances on Ozzie and Harriet) were contradictory: Here he was, in the same teen setting, trying to be an adult.
The British Invasion pushed Nelson aside, and he spent the next 30 years of his life with intermittent hits and, later in life, a scandalous divorce, covered in detail by the tabloids. He was the first victim of the double bind from which all teen idols must escape: Your fame is based on your teen status, but no one can stay a teen forever. You must escape, but if you do, you’re also escaping the very thing that made people love you.
Hulton Archive / Getty Images
In articles about teen idols, authors always hold up the handful of stars that managed to negotiate this transition. Johnny Depp escaped 21 Jump Street; Leonardo DiCaprio ditched Titanic; Heath Ledger banished 10 Things I Hate About You. But those stars are the exception, most certainly not the rule.
And it took all of them a while – DiCaprio wallowed through The Beach; Ledger survived Casanova – but they endured and, on the strength of their performances, won the roles and the accolades that changed the conversation about them from one of beauty to one of skill. They became active “actors” instead of passive pinups, masculine performers instead of feminized objects of desire.
But if you can’t shake that feminized beauty, you can ride it into something more mature – which is precisely what Efron decided to pursue. He wasn’t following the script of former teen idols, however, so much as the matinee idol, sometimes known as the “romantic lead.” The most prominent of the last 50 years, and the closest to Efron’s position, was at the height of his popularity right around the same time as Ricky Nelson. He had slightly better acting skills, a much broader chest, scant singing skills, but a combination of beautiful and kind that appealed to what we’d today call grown-ass women. That man was Rock Hudson.
Getty Images / Hulton Archive
Rock Hudson had a farmer’s body and a pretty boy’s face, with that slight hint of vapidity that makes it easy to believe he’d be loyal to you always. Like Channing Tatum, only with bigger dimples and more flannel. During his teen years, back when he was still named Roy Scherer, he’d been an anonymous high school kid who, upon graduation, was stationed in the Philippines with the U.S. Navy during World War II. When the war was over, he moved to Hollywood in hopes of making it big, working as a truck driver to pay the bills. Desperate, he sent his picture to an agent named Henry Willson who, seeing his dimples, agreed to take him on as a client.
In the years after World War II, Hollywood was dramatically reconfiguring the way it found and made stars. Before, each studio cultivated its own stable of would-be stars, scouting girls, boys, men, and women on the street, on vaudeville, on the stage. They’d sign potential new talent to a contract and, depending on their age and level of sophistication, put them through the wringer: new hair, new face, new accents, new name. Elocution lessons, riding lessons, dancing lessons, and “testing” in various bit roles to see what type of star you’d be. But the anti-monopoly Paramount Decrees, issued in 1947, not only forced the studios to sell off their exhibition arms (their massive chains of theater), but also engage in massive cost-cutting, including the gradual dismantling of their star-making systems.
Who, then, would make the stars? People like Henry Willson, who became his own mini-star-making apparatus. Willson, however, had a speciality: strapping young men who could convincingly play the part of the all-American man. It didn’t matter if they could act – all they needed, and all men like Hudson really had, were the looks. The rest could be taught later.
Willson, whose homosexuality was an open secret in Hollywood, specialized playing in men who, unlike him, had the potential to play straight and hot: Where Willson was paunchy, middle-aged, and balding, his discoveries had the sort of natural musculature that comes from working with your body. Corn-fed, homegrown, square jaws: men. No matter that most of these men also enjoyed having sex with other men – the performance of heterosexuality can be readily taught.
Which is precisely what happened with Hudson. Willson gave him a name, sent him to lessons to rid him of a slight effeminate lisp, and gave him some good-man hobbies to list as “interests.” In the beginning, he couldn’t act – for his first bit role, he had but a single line, and needed 38 takes to complete it – but Willson knew that he could build demand in other ways, like planting pictures of Hudson, with that soft, endearing smile, all over the fan magazines. After all, you couldn’t know what a bad actor he was when you were too busy staring at his face.
Hudson, in other words, wasn’t marketed to men. Willson understood that Hudson would never be a John Wayne or a Frank Sinatra – he wasn’t gruff or rugged enough, nor was he truly sophisticated. But there was something about his face that seemed to emanate warmth, and something about his size that promised safety. If Marilyn Monroe was the male fantasy of the ideal ’50s woman, with an image that combined the contradictory messages of pure sex and total innocence, then Rock Hudson was her counterpart: a female fantasy, purely masculine yet totally sensitive.
That image was borne out in film after film – starting with Magnificent Obsession, in which he plays an asshole turned warm and generous by the love of a good woman (think A Walk to Remember, only less Jesus). Over the course of the ’50s and early ’60s, he played a laundry list of sympathetic he-men (every Douglas Sirk film ever made, but especially All That Heaven Allows) and winsome sweet talkers, most often opposite Doris Day, in films like Pillow Talk.
Universal Studios / Everett Collection
Hudson’s characters were rarely sexual, just flirty – and in hindsight, it’s easy to see just how performative his version of hetero-masculinity really was. That ideal of the totally masculine yet totally sensitive man was the product of a gay man and his gay manager – two men with the objectivity, the very lack of stake in the game, to understand just how to cater to what women wanted, which was all love, all promise of passion, with little actual sex itself.
Hudson was the master at this type of role for more than a decade, but he had successors: Robert Redford in The Way We Were, Ryan O’Neal in Love Story, Richard Gere in everything, Patrick Swayze in everything else. John Corbett in My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Sex in the City; Joseph Gordon-Levitt in (500) Days of Summer. And, of course, today’s leading romantic man, despite appearing in only three romances in his nearly two-decade-long career: Ryan Gosling.
Each of these stars are fundamentally understood in terms of their beauty and sincerity. Even if they have a hard body, it shields a soft and generous heart within – which, depending on the narrative, will either a) heal a broken woman or b) slowly emerge through the love of a good woman. The Notebook’s Noah Calhoun, for example, is Southern, charismatic, and works with his body. He’s passionate but not overemotional; caring, but not a sissy. He shows his love by acts – dangling from a Ferris wheel, rebuilding a crumbling plantation house. But that love is singular: His heart ignites only for the right woman.
Popperfoto / Getty Images
It’s relationship porn – the grown-up version of teen idol movies – and it’s almost identical to the scenarios of Rock Hudson’s stardom. It’s also exactly what Efron chose to pursue after the disappointment of Me and Orson Welles.
The first attempt, Charlie St. Cloud, was preposterously bad. And not “so bad it’s good,” but “playing-baseball-with-dead-little-brother” bad. Some conceits that work well in best-selling books, especially those involving ghosts, simply do not translate well on screen – and usually have the unfortunate effect of making everyone who has to interact with the ghost look ridiculous.
It should’ve been better: It had the same director as 17 Again; there’s lots of sailing and thus ample time for Efron to look hot and/or valiant. But the love scene is in a graveyard, and the romantic love interest, played by Amanda Crew, looks like Entourage’s Emmanuelle Chriqui plus Pretty Little Liars’ Troian Bellisario, but without any of the sparkle. It’s all the pathos and redemption of a Nicholas Sparks narrative, but with none of the charisma that always makes those movies better than they deserve to be.
St. Cloud grossed $46 million on a $40 million budget, which, in Hollywood economics, is a disappointment, if not a near flop. But Efron was already lined up to play an actual Sparks hero in The Lucky One. As U.S. Marine Logan Thibault, Efron survives Iraq with the help of a photo of a woman he finds on the ground in the aftermath of a night raid. He comes home from Iraq, suffers from some demonstrative post-traumatic stress disorder, and decides to walk from Colorado to Louisiana, the site of the photo that “saved his life.”
The woman in the photo (Taylor Schilling, pre-Orange Is the New Black) lives, naturally, in the South, on a body of water, and runs an animal care facility along with her grandmother and adorable young son. The photo had been given to her brother, also a Marine, who had been killed the year before…but Logan can’t quite admit what brought him, on foot, along with his loving German shepherd, to hang out with and look longingly/respectfully at this slightly older single mom.
Warner Bros
The Lucky One has all of the Sparks hallmarks, including lots of water, golden slanting light, and a ramshackle old house that a character makes his/her own. Efron is more reserved – like he’d learned the lessons of too much cry face in Charlie St. Cloud – and, at times, you could mistake his veteran’s stoicism for emotional flatness. But there are moments of greatness: dancing with Schilling and, most importantly, having a super-heady love scene in the dog shower. Trust me on this one.
There’s a matinee idol moment when he takes off Schilling’s bra with one hand – Tumblr’s all over it. That’s a suave move that people write about in books, but it’s not viscerally sexual.
Warner Bros
Same for the everybody-sigh scene when he tells her that, “You should be kissed every hour, every minute, every day.” No girl actually wants that; they want the sentiment behind it. But there’s also a stolen, incredibly erotic moment when he bites Schilling’s lip.
This isn’t the moment before the kiss memorialized on all the Sparks covers, perfectly dubbed “White People Almost Kissing.” That moment before the kiss – that’s romance. The kiss itself, especially a kiss like this – that’s sex. The Lucky One made almost $100 million on its $25 million budget thanks to the Sparks romance, but it was that sex that made him a fit for Lee Daniels’ The Paperboy – Efron’s chance to not only ditch the teen idol image, but the matinee idol as well.
The Paperboy is a totally bizarre, totally engrossing film, doubly distorted through the telling of an unreliable narrator who may or may not be in love with Efron. It’s ostensibly about Nicole Kidman’s love for an imprisoned murderer, and Matthew McConaughey’s investigative journalism around that murderer’s trial, but it’s really all about Efron: sweaty, awkward, beautiful, broken Efron.
As in 17 Again, Charlie St. Cloud, The Lucky One, and even Efron’s real life, he’s skipped college (or, in this case, dropped out) and gone straight to adulthood. But instead of making him a man, it’s made him: He spends his days lying around in his tighty-whities, flirting with the maid, and resenting his father. He’s as beautiful as he ever was, but that beauty has nothing to do.
And unlike all of Efron’s previous directors, Daniels understood that a man in his early twenties doesn’t go around looking for romance. There’s lust there, but it gets turned back on itself, frustrated, curdled, confused. As in 17 Again, The Lucky One, and even New Year’s Day, when he helps sad Michelle Pfeiffer fulfill her bucket list, he’s attracted to older, seemingly unavailable, blonde women. But this blonde woman has a self-identified dark side, and Efron’s equal parts desirous of her and disgusted with that desire. It’s a coming-of-age story, but the age that Efron comes into is one of disillusionment.
I stand firm in my belief that this film is underrated. Sloppy, yes; confused, certainly – but with moments of electricity that vibrate through you for days. Part of that is Nicole Kidman’s fearless performance, but part of it is the way that Efron orbits around her. Yet the story of the film wasn’t Efron’s risky, nuanced performance, but the tidbit that Kidman pees on him. A highly symbolic gesture to relieve the pain of dozens of jellyfish stings, but still: She pees on him. It could’ve added the sort of bizarre titillation – the true indie cred – that Efron needed to break free from his past roles. But after a successful festival run, it became an American punching bag: The A.V. Club went so far as to name it the worst film of 2012. It made $2.5 million on a $12 million budget.
Efron was still committed to trading idolhood for legitimacy. He and Hudgens had broken up in 2010, cutting the last of his explicit ties to the HSM image. In addition to Paperboy, he appeared in three indie movies (a supporting role in Liberal Arts; co-lead in At Any Price and Parkland) over the course of a little more than a year. Each of these films could’ve been a breakout – Liberal Arts was filled with indie darlings; At Any Price was to be the first mainstream film from Ramin Bahrani, whose Chop Shop and Goodbye, Solo had been critical, if small, smashes. On paper, Parkland should’ve been an Oscar contender. But all three films barely saw limited release; At Any Price made just over $300,000 at the box office; Parkland took in just over $1.5 million.
In all these films, Efron plays something approximating an adult – one whose main task isn’t being beautiful or learning how to love. He played a stoner. He raced cars; he held a gun. He had an M.D. And nobody wanted to watch him. Of course, there are larger industrial forces that swallow indie movies like these, but it’s also easy to look at the fate of those films, coupled with the vitriol surrounding The Paperboy, and understand what Efron did next. He became a bro.
It happened both on screen and off. While all of the movie bombs were dropping, Efron was already busy filming That Awkward Moment (co-starring fellow up-and-comers Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan), in which he plays a twentysomething committed to playing the field, and the Judd Apatow–produced, Seth Rogen–starring Neighbors, which figures him as a sort of ageless frat dude, forever committed to theme parties, abs, and keg beer.
While shooting Neighbors in spring 2013, rumors of Efron’s drug use began to surface – but not just alcohol or weed, the bro drug of choice. He disappeared from public view for months until, in mid-September, E! broke the news that he’d been in rehab for alcohol abuse months earlier; now he’s “healthy, happy, and not drinking” and “taking time to focus on working.” Hours later, TMZ reported that Efron’s rehab had been for cocaine and ecstasy, and had been in so deep during the making of Neighbors that he failed to show up for filming. Rumors swirled that he’d mixed oxy with alcohol and had to be revived, that it was two rehab stints, not one.
Efron posted a picture of himself in Machu Picchu, Peru, looking bro-tastic in a bandana: “Hey guys! Just returned from an incredible trip to Peru with my dad and wanted to thank you for all your support these past few weeks….means the world to me. Love you guys! -Z.”
It was classic Disney–style PR – as were the multiple appearances at Lakers games, some with his That Awkward Moment co-stars, others with his six-month sobriety chip very much on display. There was very strategic evidence of a relationship with model-turned-actress Lily Collins – paparazzi caught them leaving a movie and holding hands at none other than Disneyland – and only a savvy few pointed out that Efron and Collins just so happened to share a publicist.
When Efron slipped and broke his jaw in November, only TMZ and the tabloids insisted on talking about the curious fact that there hadn’t been a 911 call. And in a very savvy and very strategic move, Efron, flanked by Teller and Jordan, appeared in a tongue-in-cheek promo insinuating that Efron had broken his jaw after failing to adequately pleasure a female visitor. It was all very in keeping with the message of That Awkward Moment – enough to push the film to a $53 million international gross on an $8 million budget.
That Awkward Moment is a confused film filled with charismatic performances – and the first time that Efron was really allowed to hang out with other guys, live in a “den of testosterone,” go get wasted at a bar, and say the line, lying in bed with a beautiful girl, “I was going to make you wait too…but then I realized, I’m a dude.” It’s still, at bottom, a love story, but it’s also cloaked in bro clothing. The matinee idol is gone, replaced by the well-trod performance of American twentysomething masculinity.
Which, if the trailers are to be believed, is exactly what we’re to expect from Neighbors. Efron gets to experience the college life he skipped to become a full-fledged romancing adult, and he’s living it as loudly as he can. The trailer is hilarious the way all Apatow-produced trailers are hilarious – and the very existence of a “red band” version (which Awkward Moment had as well) signals that the movie is for adults who like sex and dick jokes.
It’s difficult to be surprised, then, by the reports of Efron’s rehab stints, or by his (purported) relapse last month, when he, along with a “bodyguard” with a long arrest record, were involved in an early morning fight on Skid Row. The details are jumbled; the stories aren’t straight. What’s clear, however, is that Efron’s appearance at a Lakers game, just days later, with Neighbors co-star Halston Sage, was a planned distraction, as was his shirtless appearance at the MTV Movie Awards, flexing and saluting just long enough to morph from endearing to embarrassing.
MTV
Neighbors will be a hit. And Efron seems more than ready to embrace the new image: He sold his high modernist home and bought Sean Kingston’s “raging party palace.” In Neighbors promos masked as an ESPN commercial, he’s the guy in a muscle shirt who knows who Aaron Rodgers is, not Seth Rogen. On a visit to Workaholics, he admits to “plowing a lot of chicks,” so many that “it’s hard to count.” In another promo, Efron confesses that Rogen had instructed him that his sole purpose was to “stand here and keep his pretty mouth shut.” It’s all very tongue-in-cheek. Or maybe it’s not.
In truth, the success of That Awkward Moment and Neighbors, after so many lukewarm successes and failures, suggests something important not only about the state of the film industry, but our demands of the male millennial as he makes his way into adulthood. Many millennials grew up on Disney, which taught them that Zac Efron, and his particular teen idol unification of beauty, bravery to follow his passion, and overarching emotionality was the way to succeed in life.
But when those kids made it to actual high school and college, there were contradictory understandings of what it meant to be “a real man” for other men (misogyny, homophobia, intolerance, sexually exploitative, in various shades of sublimation) and a “real man” for women (sensitive, emotional, vulnerable). In both understandings, the new American man is supposed to be jacked, but that jackedness is for contradictory purposes: For men, it’s a sign of discipline and power, for women, it’s the way to make yourself into a pinup, a passive fetish object. But the ultimate confusing message remains: Be a dick, but be a sweetheart.
Millennial women face similar problems, usually in vivid variation of the virgin–whore dichotomy: Be sexually adventurous but don’t be a slut, but smart but don’t be a downer. Be a Cool Girl. And just as that construction is ultimately unsustainable, so too is the dick–sweetheart persona. Efron tried being the good guy, and men’s magazines asked if he was wearing “guyliner.” He tried being the weird, independent guy, disarticulated from his beautiful face, and no one saw the movies. So it’s natural that he’d adopt the role of the bro: one of the few contemporary archetypes that demands dude respect and attracts female attention.
Jason Merritt / Getty Images
But when does the bro ever get to grow up? Efron skipped from high school directly to adulthood – both on and off the screen – so it’s understandable that he’d go back and spend some time flexing his abs, doing keg stands, making out with a girl without wearing a promise ring. As Efron told BuzzFeed’s Adam B. Vary on the set of Neighbors last year:
I had to grow up pretty quick. When I hit 18, I took my, I guess what you’d call a professional career, pretty seriously. I really cared about it and worked really hard toward it. So I didn’t really have much of a chance to do the fraternity thing, to do that. So this is my way of taking my anger about that out, you know what I mean? Fighting to party and to keep that last bit of youth before I have to grow up.
In Neighbors, “fighting to party” looks ridiculously fun – all costumes, barbecues, and an endless stream of girls and beer. No hangovers; no consequences. In Efron’s real life, “fighting to party” looks like a broken jaw and a Skid Row brawl. But when you’ve spent your formative years in the s
Read more: http://buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/zac-efron
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