Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
minerva42 mentioned that she had Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs on DVD, and it reminded me... My mom used to read me that book when I was a little kid. I remember thinking the ending was conceptually kind of off, and being confused about whether it was intentional. Saying that the people in the new world got their food from supermarkets didn't seem to capture the important differences between our world and Chewandswallow. But it wasn't until last year, when I saw posters for the movie, that I realized what a stark fall-from-paradise story it was. In fact it's basically exactly like the story from Genesis, but with even less justification.
I wonder how they handled, or changed, or lampshaded that theme during the expansion to a feature-length film. All I know about it is that there's a scientist and a monkey, but I guess that offers plenty of distraction potential already.*
* (maybe the girl is a scientist too? but she's not wearing a labcoat. actually, you'd think that in Chewandswallow, everyone would wear labcoats.)
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I'm now speculating about whether predatory scarcity-based capitalism could develop, or even survive, in a world with minimal need for shelter and surplus food literally falling from the sky. It seems like it probably could, as long as there was any concept of property rights or any de facto regulation of who could gather where. Most folks are probably familiar with the story in the Bible about God feeding the Jews with manna from heaven, but if you read the original text, God imposes a bunch of very specific rules to reinforce its communal, non-commodifiable nature. I'm also thinking about the grail slavers from Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld stories. I'm going to stop now before this gets even more depressing.
I wonder how they handled, or changed, or lampshaded that theme during the expansion to a feature-length film. All I know about it is that there's a scientist and a monkey, but I guess that offers plenty of distraction potential already.*
* (maybe the girl is a scientist too? but she's not wearing a labcoat. actually, you'd think that in Chewandswallow, everyone would wear labcoats.)
---
I'm now speculating about whether predatory scarcity-based capitalism could develop, or even survive, in a world with minimal need for shelter and surplus food literally falling from the sky. It seems like it probably could, as long as there was any concept of property rights or any de facto regulation of who could gather where. Most folks are probably familiar with the story in the Bible about God feeding the Jews with manna from heaven, but if you read the original text, God imposes a bunch of very specific rules to reinforce its communal, non-commodifiable nature. I'm also thinking about the grail slavers from Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld stories. I'm going to stop now before this gets even more depressing.