The same sort of thing that McDonalds does with it's menu items. Chicken sandwiches, chicken nuggets, crispy chicken wraps...it's all the same chicken folks. Thus is seems that this is the modus operandii of the world these days. Create something, then juice it until the last drop, no matter how bad it tastes. Stargate, Star Trek, Star Wars, Terminator, and I simply cannot wait for Avatar: The Navi Porn Channel.
Now, there are those who rail against the well trained masses of fans, the "fan-guard", if you will, who have pioneered what has come to be known as the "reboot". Witness the staggering success that was Battlestar Galactica, or dare I say, the latest Star Trek movie. They shattered stereotypes, used creative licence to change some of the mythology, while still appealing to the rock'em sock'em spirit of the original work. It seems that sometimes the reboot is the safest approach on the road of innovation, because often when real creativity take place, the market simply can't support it. Farscape, Caprica, and Jericho were all TV series whose creative premises forced us to think...then they were cancelled.
A friend of mine recently commented: "shouldn't they [studios] be educating viewers?". Nope. The raison-d'etre of TV studios is to entertain, not to educate, not to push the creative envelope, and most importantly, to make money. At least this is how I feel when I'm in a particularly pessimistic mood. On a good day, however, I still know that guys like J.J. Abrams are trying to rail against the status quo with the only weapon they have at their disposal...success. With success comes creative freedom; but is up to us, the market, to open our minds to new possiblities instead of railing against the fact that they turned Starbuck into a female or left William Shatner out of the last film.
So it is within the world of whisky-blogs. There are those blogs which have become the canon of whisky writing - Whisky Fun, Malt-Madness, What Does John Hansell Know? among the better known ones - and others that have emerged to fill nagging gaps such as the recently launched canadianw
hisky.org. However, for every original blog, there are a hundred other blogs, all following the same recipe, profile a whisky, profile a distillery, post tasting notes, press releases and a nice picture of a bottle. Then just wait for the free samples to arrive! Why not? It's the capitalist way. If it works, juice it.
However, there are those who have successfully introduced innovation. The ever-eclectic Ralfy.com is one chap who has really perfected the idea of a "vlog" (video blog), and he is to be commended for the volume of his work, if not his overly campy humour. Johannes Van den Heuval also peppers his tasting notes with polemics on a variety of political and economic topics, which draws on a variety of audiences as potential readers. So, I decided that if I were going launch a blog, it had to be more than just a critical platform for whisky, it had to allow me to talk about other topics that I find interesting and stimulating.
So here is my new blog, it's about Sci-Fi and Single Malt, though not limited to single malt whisky. And why not? Romulan Ale, Ambrosia, and whatever it was that Col Tigh was coiffing, there's plenty of spirit to go around in the world of Sci-Fi. I love bourbons, cognacs, and wonderful rhums. I love the creative matrix of spirits and all the different types of wood management innovations out there. I don't care about "traditional methods", though they do have value, all I care about is a good product. Go ahead distillers, "reboot" your whisky, or go back to your roots. So long as you end up providing me with a quality product, you've succeeded in meeting your objective.
