Sequel Sadness: Sequel Sadness

Hey, remember that time when you were a highly respected academic, and you got so excited to see that movie? That movie that was a sequel to your favorite movie of all time?

Remember how you saw the first one, and it was so awesome that you went home and you pretended you were a paleontologist and that you went to an island where some geneticists had actually brought dinosaurs back to life and you got to see them walking around and eating people and then you also got to fire a gun at them?

Remember how totally sweet that was?

And remember how after you saw the first one you were so scared of raptors living in your closet that you smeared ketchup on your favorite stuffed animal and left him on the floor so the raptors would go for poor old Bearlykins rather than for you, snug in your bed? Remember how the next morning you found the dog with what looked like really thick, red, tomato-based blood on her mouth and you thought the raptors had gone for her, so you took Bearlykins and rubbed him all over with a raw chicken and then cut open his little furry insides so all the stuffing came out and then painted the stuffing with your mom’s nail polish so it looked like entrails? And then you left good old Bearly, boy he was a good stuffed animal, outside your door? And remember the next day, when the dog died of salmonella poisoning?

Wait I’m getting off track here. But remember how, after you saw the first one, you read The Dinosaur Heresies by Robert Bakker and went to grad school and got a PhD in paleontology, and you wrote lots of books and articles and your citation count was through the roof? And how you discovered twelve new species of Cretaceous sauropods in North Africa? And then you heard all about how there was going to be a sequel?

Then remember how that sequel fucking sucked?

Remember how you got so disillusioned with paleontology and this whole, I don’t know, this whole just STUPID dinosaur thing, how much you hated dinosaurs if they were going to get onto freighter ships and come to LA and try to eat Jeff Goldblum because, God, what a stupid fucking plot twist. What a stupid fucking movie with its stupid fucking animatronic dinosaurs.

And remember how you left the theatre and went back to the lab, after stopping at that liquor store on Colfax, and you got really drunk, and then you went home and you got your gun, and you came back to the lab, and you almost hit that car on the way because you were trying to take a drink but you couldn’t see the road through the paper bag, but you made it back to the lab anyway, and you took your gun out of your hip holster and you went into the exhibition hall next door to the lab, and you stood behind the T-Rex skull, just stood behind the back of that skull and put the cold muzzle of the gun to the back of its bony cast spine, and shot it execution style until the clip ran out?

Remember how big those Girl Scouts’ eyes looked?



Yeah, that’s Sequel Sadness. No translation needed, because this is a phrase made from the unholy union of Hollywood and Wall Street, in the American-English-speaking US of A.




… you totally thought I was going to talk about Star Wars Episode I, huh.