It’s morphin’ time for Disney+

Hello. Welcome to a pretty hefty Friday edition of Popculturology. We can jump into the week’s news right after we contemplate whether or not our universe is actually inside another universe’s black hole ...

We are all that Walton Goggins reaction meme now

Wow, how about this week’s episode of The White Lotus? Wow. Where do we begin? Carrie Coon and her girlfriends bringing the party back to their pool? Sam Rockwell’s shocking monologue? The, um, brotherly love between Patrick Schwarzenneger and Sam Nivola? I’m just going to go with Walton Goggins’ reactions to Rockwell’s monologue.

• “No judgment”: Goggins discussed his character’s reaction to Rockwell’s monologues with Vanity Fair, telling the outlet: “We did it a number of times, like seven or eight times, and everything was different every single time. The only thing that I can say is that I had no judgment. It took me a moment to wrap my head around this particular life experience, so it was like, ‘wow, wow, okay.’ But without judgment — I think that's so beautiful about it.” (Vulture)
• 📖 Thank You God for All This Goggins (Brian Grubb, Vulture): “We are getting the Full Goggins in more than one way, too. Baby Billy showed up in the second episode of The Righteous Gemstones’s final season — we had to go on a little detour to the Civil War with Bradley Cooper first — and promptly pulled his pants down to reveal his own little Baby Billy in order to impress upon his nephews and niece ‘what a fuckin’ man looks like.’ There is a long history of actors on this show, to use Danny McBride’s term, ‘hanging dong,’ and even though Goggins has confirmed that said dong was, to use his term, a ‘dick double,’ just watching him gleefully take part in that grand Gemstones tradition is a wonderful treat.”

My innie and outie forgot everything that happened on Severance

We’re behind on Season 2 of Severance, only just watching the season premiere this past weekend. Woo boy, is that a confusing show to jump back into after an absurdly long hiatus.

• 📖 The Food on Severance Is Its Own Chilling Character (Tejal Rao, The New York Times): “The food on Severance leaves a bad taste in your mouth because it’s as fluent in doublespeak as the show’s most ambitious corporate climbers. In the show’s second season, which wraps up this week, food has acquired all the chilling, spine-tingling dissonance of upper management, refusing your request for a raise with a warm, unflinching smile.”

Toy Story 3 revisited

After boycotting movies for the past few months, our daughter for some reason decided that this past weekend was the time to jump into the Toy Story series. I gave her the choice of which one to pick, and based on the Disney+ icon featuring Lotso, she chose Toy Story 3 because it had a teddy bear. (I didn’t want to spoil the Lotso twist for her.)

I understand why Disney made Toy Story 4. (And why it’s making Toy Story 5.) It’s a business. You gotta keep that Toy Story machine going. Tickets need to be sold. Disney+ subscriptions need to be renewed. Toys need to be pushed. But has there ever been a more perfect ending to a trilogy than Toy Story 3? (More on Pixar later in the newsletter ...)

It turns out I was the monster?

After seeing Dreyer’s English author Benjamin Dreyer post about reading Frankenstein earlier this year, I decided that I’d add that book to my reading list.

I finished it on Tuesday, and it turns out my strategy using SparkNotes and not doing any of the reading for twelfth grade English class wasn’t as effective as I thought.

NEWS, NOTES & TRAILERS

Power Rangers reboot heads to Disney+

If you were a kid beginning in the 1990s, the Power Rangers have always been there. The original Mighty Morphin Power Rangers show was a massive phenomenon. There were toys. The movie. Toys based on the movie. There was a constant stream of new suits, new zords and new Rangers. You absolutely remember when they revealed that Tommy — his Green Ranger powers lost — was the new White Ranger.

(And, if you were like me and grew up in a household where Power Rangers was seen as too violent of a show, you made sure to time visits to your neighborhood friends’ homes for when the show was airing.)

While Power Rangers has continued to live on, repurposing footage from Super Sentai to create versions that spanned from Power Rangers Zeo in 1996 to Power Rangers Cosmic Fury in 2023, the franchise has been been looking for a firm pathway forward in the 2020s.

An attempt at a new theatrical series flopped with Power Rangers in 2017. The 30th anniversary special Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once & Always was too little too late, attempting to reassemble the original cast after the deaths of Jason David Frank and Thuy Trang, the original Green and Yellow Rangers. The fantastic Mighty Morphin Power Rangers comic series from Boom! Studios could’ve been a blueprint for a path forward, but the only live-action take we got on it was Frank as Lord Drakkon in a brief promo for the series. (If you love the original Power Rangers, do yourself a favor and read this series.)

Hasbro, which acquired the Power Rangers franchise in 2018, is now reportedly teaming up with Disney+ for a new series that’ll fully reboot the franchise.

Hasbro will produce the series, which will reinvent the franchise for a whole new generation of fans while delighting those who already know and love the world of Power Rangers.

If you had asked me ten years ago how I thought whoever owned Power Rangers (it was Disney from 2002 to 2010!) should move the franchise forward, I would’ve told them to go the legacy sequel route, bringing back the original actors like Frank to firmly seed the next generation of storytelling. With Frank gone, though, it’s probably best to reboot the entire thing. Hopefully Percy Jackson and the Olympians showrunners Jonathan E. Steinberg and Dan Shotz, who are in talks to write and showrun the project, will do a more faithful reboot than what we saw with the 2017 film. (TheWrap)

• A different kind of Mighty: Power Rangers is in a better position for a Disney+ revival than some of its fellow 1990s pop culture properties. The franchise has the benefit of remaining in the zeitgeist in an almost constant form since the 1990s, allowing new generations to become fans. Contrast this with the Mighty Ducks series. Millennial fans of the trilogy spent years asking for a new movie, but when The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers hit Disney+ in 2021, it was aimed at an entirely different generation — a generation that had zero connection or interest in the franchise.

Ted Lasso Season 4 threatens “endless joy and laughter”

Despite Brendan Hunt’s insistence that the Ted Lasso finale wasn’t a dream, I’m still going with the theory that those final scenes were in the mind of Jason Sudeikis’ Ted Lasso as his plane went down. That view of the show’s series finale makes the news that Apple TV+ is bringing Ted Lasso back for a fourth season even more jarring.

“Ted Lasso has been nothing short of a juggernaut, inspiring a passionate fanbase all over the world, and delivering endless joy and laughter, all while spreading kindness, compassion and unwavering belief,” Matt Cherniss, head of programming for Apple TV+, said in a statement. “Everyone at Apple is thrilled to be continuing our collaboration with Jason and the brilliant creative minds behind this show.”

Apple may be thrilled that Ted Lasso is coming back, but are fans? The show really tanked in terms of quality over the course of its third season. I know I’m not excited to keep watching it — are you? (Apple TV+)

• “Ted’s coaching a women’s team”: While Apple TV+ was tight-lipped about what Season 4 of Ted Lasso will be about, Sudeikis revealed during an appearance on New Heights, the podcast from Jason Kelce and Travis Kelce, that his character will be “coaching a women’s team” in the revival. (The Athletic)
• 📖 Ted Lasso Should Remain Dead and Gone (Kevin Fallon, The Daily Beast): “In the renewal announcement, Channing Dunney, chairman and CEO of Warner Bros. TV, the studio behind Ted Lasso, heralded, ‘If ever there was a show the world needed more of right now, it would be Ted Lasso.’ And I’m just like … is it?”
• I’ve abandoned my boy! When Ted Lasso returns to the pitch, there’ll be a new actor playing his son, with Apple TV+ ditching Gus Turner in order to age up the character. (Deadline)
• I mean, how much can that Joel Kinnaman aging makeup really cost? According to The Information, Apple TV+ is losing $1 billion a year — the only Apple subscription service to not turn a profit. (The Information via The Verge)