The Pop Corporation

You may have read that headline and assumed that we’d taken a massive blow to the back of the head. Alas, no. Y’see, Lin-Manuel Miranda seems like a genuinely nice fella and all, but he’s got that unswerving confidence and wide-eyed optimism that you only find in musical theatre kids from NYC.

Add to that, Miranda was born in the Big Apple to a clinical psychologist and a consultant to the Democratic Party, and you’re not exactly dealing with someone with the kind of personality that isn’t going to grate the more jaded or cynical amongst us. It’s invariably on us more than it’s on him, but whatever.

Anyway, latest sports news off the street boppers, is that a musical version of one of the greatest B-movies ever made? Sure, why not? Micheal Beck went from The Warriors to starring in Xanadu with Olivia Newton John and Gene Kelly, so what do we know? And y’know, we’re dealing with a man who seemed to have found himself studying the birth of The United States of America, looked at those guys and thought “Man, they just got together and started the greatest country ever! That is SO GANGSTA! So gangsta… wait a minute… I’ve got an idea!”

Incongruous ideas are not something Miranda is going to shy away from.

Originally, it was a book in ’65 by Sol Yurick, and of course, a cult movie from ’79, and all we currently know is that a) It’s going to happen and b) Lin is involved. Can you dig it? Almost certainly not, and we strongly suspect we’re being fantastic killjoys here, but this hums of being relocated to early ’80s New York, with Adidas tracksuits, Kangols and a rap-reimagining. We can sense it.

As long as no current and dweeby band are roped in to do a cover of Joe Walsh’s ‘In The City’, we won’t start our own street gang and start exacting violence on those we walk into.

Of course, Lin has been involved in all manner of stuff since Hamilton (one of the most dreadful musicals we’ve seen – and we like musicals so we’re not even being like that), such as The Little Mermaid, Enacanto, and probably some other stuff that we can’t be bothered looking up. He’s obviously very talented, especially when it comes to getting things green-lit by people with huge amounts of money, but we can’t shake the feeling that our blood will run cold when we see members of the Baseball Furies dancing around their bats.

Still, someone singing “I’ll shove that bat up your ass and turn you into a popsicle!” might make us come around, just for the campness of it all?

Interestingly, we won’t be the first to hate an adaptation of The Warriors. Yurick, the writer of the novel loathed the movie because it was much darker than the film, and based on the Greek war tale ‘Anabasis’.

Go figure.