They closed THE BOOK OF BOBA FETT just in time

Plus we bring back the Quick Bites

It’s Saturday, February 12, and here’s where we are…

Have you heard about Dillon Helbig and his Crismis adventure?

I suspect one of the reasons Dillon’s story struck a chord with anyone who heard it is because we are starved for stories about kindness and decency and sweetness and creation for the sake of it. Helbig is a second-grader living in Idaho who wrote and illustrated his own homemade book. In December, he had his grandmother take him to his local library, where he snuck his book, The Adventures of Dillon Helbig’s Crismis by Dillon His Self, onto the shelves. He told his mother what he did two days later, but by that point, the book had already been discovered by the librarians… who loved it.

And why wouldn’t they? It sounds charming. And 81 pages long! Good lord, Dillon, I already feel bad about how much I accomplish in a month, and you’re out here throwing down like Robert Jordon on a meth binge. The book has now been officially entered into the library’s system and there is a two-year waiting list for people who want to check it out. It’s just a matter of time until someone makes a deal with Dillon’s family to publish a version of the notebook, and I am all for it.

It’s a sweet story. It’s a simple story. It’s so uncomplicated and Dillon’s such an easy person to root for. It doesn’t matter if the book’s good. It’s the story around it that makes it so charming, and I think that is increasingly true of most media these days. It’s not the thing you’re selling that is your primary product. It is the marketing around it. This is why Disney is so good at owning the commercial space. They understand that the entire world is the line outside the ride at Disney World, and then the movie or the TV show is the ride itself. When you got to a Disney park, they don’t just have you line up. They try to start immersing you into the world of the attraction as you’re standing there captive for forty-five minutes or an hour or three hours, god forbid. Disney’s marketing is like that… an attempt to turn the entire world into the queue for whatever mega-event they’re carpet-bombing us with next. Fans aren’t complaining, either. If anything, they want more of it. Fans would always start marketing campaigns before the studios actually do, which is something I find disorienting. One of the many Repeating Modern Fantrums is the “WHY HAVEN’T YOU RELEASED THE POSTER/TEASER/TRAILER/COSTUME PHOTO/CASTING NEWS/MCDONALDS COLLECTOR CUP YET?!?!?!” variation, and the insane intensity of it each time seems crazy considering they always end up getting the thing eventually anyway. I wish movie marketing and political campaign seasons were both limited to a month at the longest. Everything else seems like excess to me considering how much new stuff there is available to you at every possible moment. There are so many more things than anyone can possibly watch, but there’s something about that non-stop slow drip that modern fandom craves, and when companies figure out how to tap into it, it can pay off for them in loyalty, the fans doing the legwork for you due to their manic enthusiasm.