But I think that popular culture should thrive in a popular medium, so I don’t think it’s crazy to look for signs of life on the broadcast channels (if we can still call them that).

Helena: I certainly wouldn’t compare our age to the glory days of Athenian theater… even though we don’t have most of the evidence from those guys. (Sturgeon’s Law probably applies even to Attic poetry.) But in the past several years there have been some really good movies based on comic books–Marvel has produced some good movies (if we politely look askance from the FF films), A History of Violence and The Dark Knight were very good work and (though it may seem like blasphemy for I classicist to say this), I liked 300. I even liked the Disney Hercules movie. (As a retelling of the Hercules legend it’s a waste of time, clearly, but it’s at least a good cartoon movie, which is more than can be said for the Lou Ferrigno Hercules, or Hercules in New York or Hercules Against the Moon Men or a host of other awful myth-related movies I’ve sat through.)

A thought: this era of pop culture may be something like the high Roman Empire, when there was a flowering of prose fiction in Greek and Latin, e.g. Lucian and Apuleius. These guys too were working our genres: Lucian writing about a trip to the moon and Apuleius writing about witches and whatnot.

It was awesome.