Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2011 April 23

= April 23 =

Game popularity
How popular is Pokemon now compared to other video game series such as Halo, Mario, Need For Speed, etcetera? I keep on hearing people talking about how awesome it is, and its mostly high school and college students that I hear talking about this instead of elementary/intermediate school kids, which is a little surprising for me. 72.235.230.227 (talk) 02:17, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
 * My stepson plays this series of games (not sure exactly which game you're referring to.) I play them with him sometimes. I can't give you exact numbers on popularity vs. other games...but I will say that it's highly addictive, in a Farmville kind of way. Quinn &#10025; STARRY NIGHT  02:24, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
 * List of best-selling video game franchises will answer ALL of your questions. Pokemon is the second best-selling video game series after the Mario series.  -- Jayron  32  02:47, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Bear in mind that Pokemon has been around for years, since 1996, so the kids who played when it was new are now 15 years older. Chances are that the age range of players is also spread accordingly.  After all, I still play Mario, a game I first played in the '80s. Mingmingla (talk) 03:09, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Sonny from Treme
In the HBO series Treme, what drug(s) is the character Sonny addicted to and did he actually perform heroic rescues during Katrina? 83.70.226.85 (talk) 02:54, 23 April 2011 (UTC)

Easy Rider quote
In the classic movie Easy Rider, I've never quite understood the famous quote near the end, when Peter Fonda's character says "We blew it." Our article on the movie ascribes it to a spiritual failure, but could somebody elaborate a little more on this? Is it somehow related to the bad trip in the New Orleans brothel? Kansan (talk) 05:08, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
 * It's a statement on the entire hippie/60's counterculture ethos. In many ways, Easy Rider is the epitaph of the hippie movement.  "We blew it" isn't just refering to the specific plot of the movie, it refers to the entire hippie movement; the movie itself is highly symbolic of the difference between the ideals of the 60's counterculture movement and the reality of what its practitioners became.  Really look at what happens to the protagonists of the film: they're petty drug dealers who are heading to New Orleans to party, they piss off a bunch of locals by trying to have sex with their daughters, and end up getting killed for it.  The films protagonists aren't really heroes to be emulated, and Wyatt's statement of "We blew it" is as much about losing the ideals of what the counterculture was supposed to be about.  Ideally, it shouldn't have been about doing lots of drugs and trying to get laid; but really, what else to the films protagonists try to do?  Likewise, though the hippie movement ostensibly was about greater ideals, especially during the Summer of Love, by the time the film was made, in 1969, things had progressed well past that idyllic time to a very different time.  Events like the 1968_Democratic_National_Convention_protest_activity, the rise of the Weather Underground and other events had recast the Hippie movement in drastic ways, and Easy Rider reflects that.  -- Jayron  32  05:36, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
 * So in some sense the film was "pro-establishment" instead of "anti-establishment"? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:35, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Somehow it reminds me of the end of The Magnificent Seven, where Yul Brynner says to a fellow gunslinger after they've defeated the banditos: "The farmers won. We lost. We'll always lose." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:37, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Man, what a great movie! "...I was aiming for his horse." Classic. Quinn &#10025; STARRY NIGHT 13:06, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
 * @Bugs: No, its wrong to frame it as "pro-establishment" vs. "anti-establishment". After all, the "establishment" is all but invisible in this film (unless you count the rednecks at the end).  It's written from the POV of the hippies, saying "We had the keys to the kingdom and screwed it up".  It's not that it portrays the ideals of the hippie movement as wrong headed, and that the "establishment" was right, its that it views the people entrusted with that movement screwed it up... -- Jayron  32  16:57, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Sure. For example, thanks to the situation at the 1968 Democratic Convention, they convinced a lot of folks to vote for Richard Nixon. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:32, 23 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Picknit time. The quote is actually, "We always lose." Clarityfiend (talk) 00:01, 24 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Your question has been gnawing at me day and night. Well, not exactly, but for about 13 minutes anyway. I hadn't seen the film for quite awhile, so I went and checked my DVD, just to hear that great, iconic Elmer Bernstein score, and to jump to the ending. "We'll always lose" is the way Brynner says it. "The old man was right. The farmers won. We lost. We'll always lose." Ride off into the distance, over closing theme. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:29, 30 April 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I guess I wasn't thinking that broadly, even though I was introduced to the movie in an academic setting (an undergrad course about film in the 1960s.) Kansan (talk) 16:23, 23 April 2011 (UTC)