Dead 7 (2016) and Nostalgia Casting

Nostalgia frequently comes up when discussing movies. It has come up in previous Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. Nostalgia can get people into theater seats because they want to see something that they grew up loving. It’ll get people to use specific streaming services so that they can watch things that bring back a feeling of youth. If the big studios have anything to say, something that was something will be something again. Old ideas that were popular will always be brought back to recapture that popularity. Sometimes it works.

The biggest ways in which nostalgia has permeated the public consciousness in movies and television are through remakes, reboots, and sequels. Those things are all over the place. A studio will commission a new version of something to capitalize on whatever nostalgia there is for the property. It could be a remake of a movie, a reboot of a franchise, or a long-distance sequel. The old intellectual property becomes new once again. People loved it back then, so the studios believe they’ll see the new version.

That’s not what I want to discuss, however. There’s another way that nostalgia has crept into movies and television. It might seem a little more subtle. It creeps up on the audience in a way that might not be seen as obvious nostalgia-bait. “Might” is the key word there. The movies and shows aren’t quite as up front about what they’re doing. It has to do with the cast or characters. Which one depends on the project. The idea is basically to bring together a bunch of familiar faces that will play into that same nostalgic feeling as the reboots, remakes, and sequels.

Take Dead 7, for example. It came out in 2016. Apocalypta (Debra Wilson) had taken control of a post-apocalyptic zombie western world. She was using her henchman, Johnny Vermillion (A.J. McLean), to send zombies to small towns and eradicate the population. Mayor Shelby (Chris Kirkpatrick) and Sheriff Cooper (Jon Secada) of Desert Springs decided to put together a team to go after Apocalypta. Billy (Jeff Timmons), Daisy Jane (Carrie Keagan), Jack (Nick Carter), Whiskey Joe (Joey Fatone), Komodo (Erik-Michael Estrada), and The Vaquero (Howie Dorough) set out to stop the evil warlord from destroying the rest of civilization.

There was one major part of that summary that played into the nostalgia of familiar faces. A bunch of the actors in Dead 7 were members of boy bands. It was a movie that promoted itself as a coming together of many of the late 1990s and early 2000s boy bands that racked up hits on the charts throughout that era. They were working together to make a movie.

The head of the Dead 7 boy band snake was Nick Carter. He was one of the cowriters and managed to bring in many of his fellow boy banders to fill the roles. His boy band was Backstreet Boys, and he was able to bring in bandmates A.J. McLean and Howie Dorough. Then he looked at their biggest rival in the boy band world, N*Sync, and cast Joey Fatone and Chris Kirkpatrick from that group. Jeff Timmons came from 98 Degrees. The four members of O-Town who are currently still in the group also appeared in Dead 7, with Erik-Michael Estrada taking a bigger role than the rest. There were other musicians as well, including someone from All-4-One and the singers of Everclear and Crazy Town, but the focus was on the boy band members.

You see, the nostalgia came from playing to the people who enjoyed the boy bands when they were at the peak of their popularity. The people who listened to Backstreet Boys, N*Sync, O-Town, and 98 Degrees at the turn of the century would want to see a movie that featured members from each of the groups. They would hope for a song that they would collaborate on, which Dead 7 delivered during the end credits with In the End. It was the song that people wanted, though maybe not as integral to the movie as they had hoped.

That wasn’t nearly the only case of nostalgia casting in films or television. Usually that nostalgia doesn’t come from boy bands that were popular a decade and a half previous. Instead, when casting for present day projects, there might be consideration for a property that was popular in the past. If there was a franchise or a television show that became a big piece of people’s lives in the past, it could live on through new material. Nostalgia would allow the new project to find some sort of popularity.

The Power Rangers franchise has been around for nearly three decades. It all began with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, where a group of teenagers with attitude were given special powers to fight off a bunch of monsters based on the moon. It spawned two movies, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie and Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie, and many later iterations of the franchise that changed the Mighty Morphin for some other title like Zeo, Turbo, In Space, Dino Thunder, S.P.D., or Mystic Force. Thirty years later, the franchise is still going.

Within the different seasons of Power Rangers, there have frequently been team-up episodes. They typically commemorate some special anniversary. The tenth anniversary saw a team-up with the Red Rangers from each of the previous series. The twentieth anniversary saw all the Power Rangers from each of the series coming together for a giant fight against a tough enemy. Within the Power Rangers franchise, itself, nostalgia has been utilized for major events.

That’s all fine and dandy, but the discussion here is about using the actors in other projects together to strike on that Power Rangers nostalgia. Power Rangers hasn’t been the only thing to capitalize on the nostalgia that people have about growing up with the franchise. In 2016, a fundraising campaign began for a movie called The Order. A trailer was released. The movie would feature a slew of former Power Rangers cast. The campaign was successful, but the movie still hasn’t been made or released. The many fans who donated to the film are waiting for their nostalgia to be fulfilled.

Other television shows have had as much of a lasting impact, if not more, on television than Power Rangers. HBO is one of the top-rated cable channels, releasing shows on a regular basis that people love. Going back a few years, HBO was one of the few cable channels that helped usher in a new era of television. It helped elevate the television artform above a lesser-than-film form of entertainment. It brought respect to the artists working in that realm. Much of that can be attributed to turn of the century shows like Oz, Sex and the City, and The Sopranos. Over the next few years, they would build a stable of quality shows that people continue to fondly look back on.

One of those shows was a western called Deadwood. It ran for three seasons, with a myriad of now recognizable faces, before being cancelled without a real ending. More and more people found the show over the years and joined in the chorus who wanted an ending. It would eventually come in the form of an HBO film over a decade later. The wait wasn’t all that bad, though. People got to see the actors from the show appear in other things. They got to see the actors become respectable stars and character actors following the conclusion of the show. No place was better to find Deadwood cast members, however, than the television show Justified.

Now, Justified can easily stand on its own. It was a great show. The thing is, Justified was a modern western starring Timothy Olyphant. Deadwood was a historical western starring Timothy Olyphant. There was bound to be some crossover. Fans of Deadwood who tuned in to watch Justified would be delighted by how many Deadwood actors showed up in supporting or guest roles. There ended up being nineteen actors from Deadwood, including Timothy Olyphant, in Justified. Only twelve of them had major lead or supporting roles in Deadwood, with the other seven essentially being elevated extras in Deadwood, but that’s still enough to bring Deadwood nostalgia into Justified.

Actors aren’t the only way that nostalgia can be brought into a new project. Characters, movies, and video games can also be an important part of the nostalgia. If a story can tie together a bunch of different works, it can bring a whole bunch of nostalgia to a project. People will want to see it, if only to see a bunch of things they love interact with one another. I have two examples of this sort of thing happening. And, no, these don’t include someone bringing a bunch of their own properties together into one movie. Sorry, Kevin Smith. You’re sitting this one out.

Adam Sandler thrives on nostalgia. Half of the people that work on movies with him are people who came from Saturday Night Live. They could have been performers or writers on the show. They stick with Adam Sandler though every project he does. They are a major part of the Sandler Stable, something that I brought up when I wrote about The Ridiculous 6. That’s not what I want to discuss here, though. There is a specific movie in his filmography that plays off nostalgia more than most. That movie is Pixels.

The main idea in Pixels was that a bunch of 80s competitive gamers banded together to save the world from an extra-terrestrial invader. Why were those people brought together to fight the aliens? It was because the aliens were taking on the form of classic video games. A time capsule containing many of the video games was sent into space as a message to extra-terrestrial life. The aliens took it as a declaration of war and used the form of video game characters to fight against earth.

The nostalgia throughout Pixels was based on the premise. The aliens took on the form of classic 80s video game characters, so the movie was filled with those characters. Q*bert was an important character. The main characters battled it out in games of Galaga, Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Centipede. The aliens took on pixelated forms like the video games had in the 1980s. It was 1980s video games brought to life in a 2010s movie. The producers hoped that the nostalgia of that idea would be enough to bring audiences in.

Another movie that took intellectual property nostalgia into account during the storytelling was Ready Player One. The source material, a novel, had done the same sort of thing. It wove many cultural markers into the story to tell something that would play on nostalgia as much as it would play on the dystopian future setting. The film adaptation couldn’t use every pop culture reference from the book and chose to focus on what rights could be cleared.

Not only were there characters in Ready Player One that would bring nostalgia to the audience, but there were locations as well. An entire sequence of the film was set within The Shining, the 1980 Stanley Kubrick movie. The characters had to navigate their way through the hotel hallways, into the bar and bathroom, and around the hedge maze corners. The characters interacted with characters from the original film, while still being nostalgic references within themselves through their pop culture avatars. It was a double layering of nostalgia.

The whole reason for Ready Player One being filled to the brim with nostalgia was that it was playing out a character’s own nostalgia. A video game designer had left a quest upon his death that the players of the game had to solve. The quest was nostalgia, based on what that designer liked throughout his life. The characters played through the designer’s nostalgia to solve a series of mysteries and riddles he left behind. The movie capitalized on nostalgia, for sure, but the story made nostalgia an essential component. It was self-aware about the abundant pop culture references that brought nostalgia. It steered right into them.

One of the easiest ways to sell a movie to the general audience is to fill it with a bunch of familiar faces. A star-studded cast can raise interest in something solely based on the cache that comes with hiring those actors. An added twist could be the use of specific actors for nostalgic reasons. People who were a part of something that audiences grew up with. People who were a part of something that audiences loved years prior. Bring a bunch of people from that property or genre together and there’s some added nostalgia that can bring audiences in. It could be the members of various boy bands from the turn of the century, a bunch of people involved in Power Rangers, or a bunch of people involved in Saturday Night Live. It could be video games from the 8-bit era or characters from various pop culture franchises. The key is bringing together people or characters that audiences hold a special place for in their hearts.

Nostalgia is something that studios have latched onto as a major source of income. People love the properties they grew up with, so much so that they’re willing to spend big bucks on anything to relive that moment of their youth. Remakes, reboots, and long-awaited sequels are made to try and catch an audience who loves the IP. New Spider-Man movies, new Ghostbusters sequels and reboots, live-action adaptations of animated Disney films… They’re all made because of the nostalgia that people have for the older versions.  The nostalgia trip won’t be stopping anytime soon.

These notes will end the post soon:

• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (week 226), The Ridiculous 6 (week 344), and Pixels (week 407) were mentioned in this post.
• Dylan Vox has now appeared in four Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were Showgirls 2: Penny’s from Heaven (week 170), Mega Shark vs.Crocosaurus (week 300), Attila (week 321), and Dead 7.
• Dead 7 was the third Sunday “Bad” Movie for Chris Kirkpatrick, who was previously in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (week 190) and On the Line (week 342).
• Erik-Michael Estrada, Dan Miller, Trevor Penick, and Jacob Underwood were each in Dead 7 and Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 (week 50).
• Nickolas Nielsen returned from Little Dead Rotting Hood (week 202) for Dead 7.
• Joey Fatone, of N*Sync fame, was in Dead 7 and On the Line (week 342).
• Finally, Debra Wilson was the villain in Dead 7. She did some voice work in The Emoji Movie (week 373).
• Have you seen Dead 7? What did you think about it? What other movies with a nostalgic cast do you enjoy? Let’s talk about that stuff on Twitter or in the comments.
• If there’s a movie that you think I should cover for a future Sunday “Bad” Movies post, let me know about it in the comments or on Twitter. I always like to discover movies I might not otherwise know.
• Give Sunday “Bad” Movies a look on Instagram. There’s always some interesting stuff going on there.
• Next week, I’m revisiting a movie I watched back when I was reviewing bad movies for a horror site. It’s not really a horror movie as much as a gory superhero comedy. There’s a man with knives. He fights against a doctor who wants to get everyone hooked on drugs. I’ll be checking out Hectic Knife for next week’s post. Come on back to see what I have to say about it. Have a good one!