I was at a local mall a few weeks ago, absently browsing the contents
of a calendar kiosk, when I suddenly spied Rod Serling’s face staring out at
me, iconic images swirling around his head.
A Twilight Zone calendar! How did I not know about this? Naturally I
grabbed it and immediately paid for it, since encountering anything TZ in the wild is pretty much unheard
of.
It sat on my desk until today, when I finally tore off the shrinkwrap
and examined it. Here, you look it over
and I’ll meet you down below.
Well….. shit. This thing is
ugly. I hate the design, I hate the
colors… I even hate that obnoxious bold font.
I even hate the phrases they attach to each picture (in all fairness,
most of them are snatches of actual Serling narration from the depicted
episode, but the context is sometimes nebulous to the point of nonsensicality
(I’m looking at you, February; “Alone in this assurance,” really?). There’s an aggressive,
breaking-through-a-brick-wall “in your face” aesthetic that I find utterly
repellant. It just looks loud.
This doesn’t even remotely evoke The
Twilight Zone, despite the copious amounts of Twilight Zone iconography herein.
This is a post-modern,
over-modulated, recklessly-remixed attempt to reimagine something understated
and classy for today’s ADD-addled hyperactive sensibilities. It’s just wrong, fucking wrong.
However, the actual calendar portion of each page is imminently
cool. It simulates a newspaper (The Daily Chronicle, as read by Burgess
Meredith in “Time Enough at Last,” complete with monochromatic thumbs on either
side), and it looks great. I also like
how the year is spelled out to create a faux headline. It’s elegant and classy, but it’s completely
drowned out by the screaming graphics overhead.
Ugh. What a schizophrenic mess.
It’s as if two teams worked completely independently of one another, and
a blind person grafted the two parts together.
It’s just frustrating, and it makes me want to create my own calendar
for 2014.
Hey, that might not be a bad idea.....
No comments:
Post a Comment