Leading up to its release, Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One has been receiving mostly positive reviews from critics. Based on Ernest Cline’s science fiction novel, the film is a love letter to nerd culture, referencing everything from The Iron Giant, to Back to the Future, to Star Wars. Of course it’s not the first movie to bring a wide variety of pop culture icons together.
Back in 2014, The Lego Movie not only created original characters like Emmet and Wyldstyle, but also assembled the likes of Batman, Gandalf, and Milhouse from The Simpsons. Chris Miller, who co-directed the first Lego film and is also co-writing its upcoming sequel, recently poked a little fun at Ready Player One on Twitter. Reminding audiences which movie did it first, Miller wrote, “There’s a certain movie coming out w/ a bunch of famous characters from different movies & TV shows & games that all interact in the same shared universe, and let me tell you, it is AWESOME. Yep, THE LEGO MOVIE 2 is coming this February.”
Of course to be fair, Cline’s novel was published back in 2011, three years before The Lego Movie hit theaters. Heck, you could even argue that the idea of uniting fictional characters in a shared universe was done before either of these two properties. Remember the Imaginationland story arc on South Park? When that three-part epic aired all the way back in 2007, it brought together pretty much every imaginary character you can think of, including Aslan the Lion, Glinda the Good Witch, and Snarf from ThunderCats. Actually, during a 2017 Hollywood Reporter interview, South Park co-creator Trey Parker stated, “Now that Spielberg is doing Ready Player One — which is like the most Member Berry thing ever invented — we can’t out-Member Berry that.”
In case you haven’t been keeping up with South Park, Member Berries are sentient fruits that remind us of nostalgic movies and shows.
With Ready Player One coming out on March 29 and The Lego Movie sequel slated for a 2019 release, it should be a great couple years for pop culture savvy audiences, especially if they have an appetite for more Member Berries.
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