Reboots

This essay explores some of the ways in which Smallville, as one of many examples of popular media, places us in the position of the Swamp Thing: the series confronts us not only with the history of Superman as a transmedia phenomenon, but also challenges Smallville’s audience to understand how and why it intersects with the spatio-temporal realities of many other media stories and characters. Adopting and adapting a mode of storytelling that has dominated the comics since the 1960s, Smallville not only participates in an intense dialogic engagement with the codes that comprise the Superman media universe, but it also becomes one of many Superman realities that occupy a multiverse of possibilities.

In March 2016, the trailer for Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot debuted onli- ne and su ered the unfortunate accolade of being the most disliked trailer in YouTube history. Popular news media, including professional, pro-am, and amateur commentators, picked up on the resulting online kerfu e as clear indication that there is something ro en in the state of fandom. Feig himself frequently turned to the echo chamber of social media to denoun- ce fans as “some of the biggest arseholes I’ve ever met in my life”. Addres- sing fans that singled out the reboot as “ruining my childhood,” Feig poured fuel on the  re by criticising such a perspective as merely the product of “some whacked-out teenager,” overdramatic, pathological and, perhaps more pointedly, “toxic”. In so doing, Feig—and, by extension, the cast of the Ghostbusters reboot—replicated and re-activated traditional stereoty- pes of the fanboy—living in his mother’s basement and obsessing over trivial entertainment.
This article takes the claims of “childhood ruination” seriously to examine what is at stake for fans of the original Ghostbusters  lm. Despite the or- gans of online media heavily criticising fanboys as misogynistic relics and sexist heathens, o en in aggressive ways, I argue that fans’ a ective, nostal- gic a achment to the  rst Ghostbusters  lm—the “primary cinematic text” (Bernard, 2014)—forms a crucial component of fans’ “self-narratives” (Hills, 2012) and “trajectories of the self ”. By drawing on empirical work on “nostalgic narratives” conducted in the psychology  eld, I argue that it is not simply toxicity that drives these fans to defend the fan-object from being colonised by an invading text, but, rather, what I am terming as to- temic nostalgia, a form of protectionism centred on an a ective relationship with a text, usually forged in early childhood.  reats to the Ghostbusters totemic object, then, “can thus be felt as threats to these fans’ self-narra- tives” (Hills, 2012, p. 114).