If Only the Super Bowl Were More Sci-Fi
I hate to play directly into the cliche of the likes of a guy who maintains a weekly column about sci-fi movies, but, yes, it is true. I don’t care about football. Never have, chances are I never will. I’ve got nothing against sports in general (I like hockey), I just never got into football to the point where I cared about any team at any level. That’s why it’s easy for me to say that Super Bowl XLIV sucked.
I’m sure it was a good game (I hear the Saints both deserved and earned it), but it still sucked. Why? Because it’s the year 2010 and the Super Bowl is still the biggest televised sporting event of the year. This isn’t the future that my steady diet of sci-fi has prepared me for. Where are all the ludicrously vibrant player jerseys? Why aren’t people flying through the air? Why isn’t the football made of metal? And, most importantly, why aren’t people dying while they play?
Again; it’s the year 2010. If sci-fi has taught me anything it’s that football should have given way to a number of different, cooler sports by now. The original Rollerball took place in 2018, but the remake was set in 2005. So why can’t I tune into some satellite broadcast from a third-world country in Europe to watch co-ed teams skate around an elliptical track while trying to break each other’s bones whilst attempting to throw a metal ball into a hole? I don’t want my kids to grow up with posters of their favorite quarterback in their bedrooms. I want posters of Rebecca Romijn as a badass Rollerball queen to give them blood-thirsty inspiration when they wake up in the morning.
If the world isn’t ready for the thrilling intriguing of Rollerball, though, shouldn’t our global infatuation for reality TV have given way to some kind of last-man-standing tournament to the death that’s televised for our pleasure in place of the Super Bowl? Surely that must be the direction we’re heading considering I can’t think of a more popular future sport depicted on film. I’m always hearing complaints about prisons being over crowded, so why can’t our entertainment tycoons take a hint from Death Race 2000, The Running Man, Gamer, or Series 7? I know the Superbowl is a ratings juggernaut every year, but there’s no way it can compete with all the viewers that keep tuning in to see a hero try to survive the most dangerous game.
And hey, if there is indeed such a thing as too much sex and violence on TV, there are more family-friendly alternatives. Tri-Dimensional Chess from Star Trek is a good start, as is HoloChess from Star Wars; and neither result in death (unless you beat a Wookie, they don’t take kindly to losing). Then again, chess isn’t Super Bowl worthy no matter how futuristic it is. Futurama’s Blernsball, on the other hand, is a phenomenal replacement sport for the Super Bowl. It might take people a few years to get used to the rules (or the fact that the stadium is also filled with robots and aliens), but it’s certainly a more entertaining sport than simply trying to move a ball from one side of a field to the other.
But, if football is indeed the only sport America cares about in the 2010s, can we at least get a campaign going to make it more like the extreme-to-the-max arena football game from Starship Troopers? Tossing around a pig skin is so 1999, metal footballs are where it’s at in the future. I want to see an astroturf field that has ramps on it. I want to see players doing back flips over other players. I want to see a complete and utter disregard for the laws of physics and gravity. That’s how all football games should be played post-millennium.
When America’s new infatuation with Starship Trooper’s greatest contribution to the world, we can all expect the apocalypse to come, anyway. After that it’s goodbye Jump Ball Super Bowl, hello Thunderdome…
Click here to check out last week’s MindFood
