Well, here we are already two weeks into a new year, a new decade, in fact. The 2010s are over. And you know what they say, hindsight is 20/20. So here it is a look back and a look forward.
Big changes at our newspaper that you may have noticed. The Didsbury and Carstairs newspapers and now Olds newspaper are all amalgamated into one big paper, the Mountain View Albertan.
Our online content is all in one now as well at MountainViewToday.ca, which encompasses the Albertan as well as the Innisfail Province and Sundre Round Up on the World Wide Web.
Now as we shift our eyes to the small screen, we see there were some great shows in the 2010s.
HBO's Game of Thrones was the biggest show of the decade by most accounts. The fantasy show saw some great battles between zombies, dragons, kings, queens and other interesting creatures. At least up until the last season when it seemed to be a huge rush to finish.
Another great show of the decade was Lost, which set its show on a mysterious, magical island. Breaking Bad was the other great series of the 2010s with its science teacher turned drug kingpin Walter White.
On the big screen, we just saw the conclusion to some 42 years of Star Wars with Rise of Skywalker. Not a great conclusion but entertaining. A little bit too heavy a lean on the past some might say.
The Marvel universe really hit its stride with hit films like Dr. Strange, Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor: Ragnarok. All of which set the stage for the Avengers Endgame, which got everyone together to tackle Thanos and attempt to set things right.
This past decade saw the use of a couple of newer terms like fan service and canon. I suppose they've always been around but now people talk about them because of the internet.
Fan service is when a show makes decisions that seem to be based on what they think fans want to see. This can be a slippery slope. In the new Star Wars movies, I think we all loved seeing Han, Luke and Leia back on the big screen. But too often the new movies reused some of the original series ideas too heavily such as the death star (again?) in the Force Awakens and the return of the Emperor as the big bad guy in the final one.
Fan service seemed to take hold of Game of Thrones towards the end. One certainly was having the Hound fight his now a zombie brother the Mountain. This went back to a long feud where the older brother, the Mountain, burnt the Hound. Anyway, over seven seasons the Hound grows as a character and has a nice arc. There is no need for him to fight anymore especially when it appears to be a suicide mission.
Canon is when something appears in a show or movie and it's accepted as part of it. So say with Star Wars all the movies and cute little Baby Yoda in the Mandolorian are accepted as canon but some comic books and video games aren't. Those aren't part of the overall "world" of Star Wars.
Of course, my thought is that canon is only as good as the next movie or next director or next change the studios want. If you look at the Batman or Spiderman movies with multiple actors, as soon as you have a new one, everything more or less resets. Yes, the backstory for those guys never really changes. Batman/Bruce Wayne saw his parents killed outside a theatre. Spiderman left the bad guy to kill his Uncle Ben. But everything else in between and since all depends on what works.
Back to Star Wars, it was all about midichlorians being why some people have the Force powers. Well, no one liked that so it was never mentioned again. In The Last Jedi, Rey is said to have normal parents. That was a big deal meaning anyone in the universe could be strong with the Force. However, in the Rise of Skywalker suddenly she's the granddaughter of someone "important." It's kind of a very abrupt turn.
So what can we expect in the 2020s? Eventually I'm sure we'll have more Star Wars movies and some Marvel Universe shows. Those are pretty popular. It'll be sad without Captain American and Iron Man but I'm sure we'll be fine. Who knows, we may have new Captain Americas and Iron Men.
We can expect many changes around these here parts as well. One carbon tax bids farewell and is now replaced by the federal version. Policing costs are going up for rural municipalities in Alberta with the new police funding model.
So that and other cuts by the provincial government should provide plenty of challenges to municipal governments as they try to balance budgets and keep roads clear and water flowing.
Craig Lindsay is a reporter with the Mountain View Albertan.
