Yess! Nevins goodness. As the only human being who has never seen The Fast Show, this was a valuable lesson.
Possibly more that we're running out of scope (volume of material produced has multiplied more rapidly over the past century, much of it slight variations) and rushing past most of it in without being affected or engaged
That's probably a better way of looking at it. I'm sure I read somewhere once that remakes and sequels and 'safe' media are pretty closely correlated with economic downturns. If that's true, it's pretty canny to have the recession populated by all these Bond-clones and catchphrase characters. I guess what rankles me is that everyone, Moore included, seems to assume that most culture today is a rehash or a sequel without offering any data. That's almost certainly an example of me spectacularly missing the point, however.
Bit of a long shot, but possibly Prospero was aiming to delay the moonchild until a point at which Mary Poppins (seemingly this universe's The Authority godhead) wouldn't suffer it to continue - i.e. a modern teenager rather than a less objectionable evil spawn of yesteryear?
I'm been puzzling over what exactly Prospero was doing this morning. I think the key is Excalibur. Excalibur seemed to summon Poppins. Orlando was needed, as its wielder and someone who Prospero could easily manipulate and Mina was needed as someone who could get Orlando to focus and carry out his orders.
Incidentally, I loved how Potter recognised Excalibur and thought it was cool. That was a very neat moment amongst the Akira-like carnage of the climax.
So if that specific time and place was vital to Prospero's exceedingly long game, was he behind the failures of previous moonchildren too? Rosemary's baby and Damien are referenced as antichrists that never got off the ground.
Potter's already a fairly generic absorption of earlier "magic school" fiction, including the Worst Witch books I read as a kid.
I knew it was a trope but I wasn't quite aware of how far-reaching it was. I missed just about all of that as a kid. I think I arbitrarily decided on being in the science fiction tribe quite early on.
Was the character who Haddo was inhabiting - the Hogwarts administrator, I think - a reference to anyone? It would make sense that a dispirited and exhausted Haddo would jump into a nobody after Voldemort, but I'd have thought there was someone who fit the bill.
I had a fanciful notion that perhaps Poppins took Haddo's head back in time to hang up in Orlando's room for him to hack at lazily in the opening chapter of the Woolf book. That would be worth a chuckle.
That Mindless Ones blog is a neat find; it's always nice to have some opinions and digression with the detail-spotting, even if accuracy isn't the first priority.
Yeah, they are great fun. I tend to absorb most of my information through listening in on online discussions so a well-coordinated and relatively focused version of that is right up my alley.