Actually, it's not quite the same, and in fact the analogy between the decline of SW and ST is pretty darn valid, because it's the same reason.

Original Trek and Wars both were created by guys who had enjoyed some success but were still struggling to make a buck in showbiz.  They both acquired just barely enough clout to get to make a project that they really wanted to make, and lo and behold, both projects became This Huge Thing.

Cut to: decades later and both Huge Things got rebooted, with the original guys still in charge.   Which sounds great, except both those guys had become wealthy and complacent and both of those Huge Things had acquired decades of baggage from all the movies and books and merchandise that had been spawned.   

So now neither of those guys were trying to craft a piece of entertainment - they had become the caretakers of The Huge Thing That Was Beloved By Millions And Was Really Important And Meaningful And Stuff.

I've never been in that position, but I can see how that could really screw up a person's judgment.

Star Trek soldiered on for years with Roddenberry at the helm of all the various permutations, and then after his death it was continued further by People Who Had Known Roddenberry And Would Continue His Vision Faithfully.   

By the time it finally died a merciful death with Enterprise, the darn thing had simply grown too big and complicated and beholden to its own history to actually DO anything.

But then, after a suitable period of mourning, somebody else got handed the Star Trek franchise and did exactly the right thing - cherrypicked the tastiest bits from its corpse and set up a new version that quite literally said "All that stuff you're clinging to from all those old versions, the stuff that's stopped Star Trek from trying anything new for decades?  Well, it's a new timeline now, so THAT STUFF NEVER HAPPENED."   

Which, I gotta say, was pretty much a genius idea.    Otherwise Star Trek would still be a grey whale laying on a beach, feebly waving its flippers because that's all it can do.

Now, I'm not saying that George Lucas has to die...

but...

... wouldn't it be kinda awesome if somebody else got a shot at doing the same for Star Wars?     What if somebody (not just anybody, it'd have to be somebody talented, obviously) got to grab hold of Star Wars and shake the dust off it,  strip it back down to what made it successful in the first place, and then send it off in a new direction, freed of all that baggage it's dragging now...

well...

I think that might be pretty keen.

In retrospect I regret my decision to let you guys do New Trek without me.   Nah, go ahead I said, have fun.   Now after listening to the end result I wanna write a rebuttal so huge it feels like I'm gonna give birth.   

But I got work to do, so I will just have to keep my legs crossed and try to breathe deeply.

Short version, of course Brian's wrong.  I just wish I'd been there to explain how wrong.    For starters GAAAHHHH CONTRACTIONS  SOMEBODY GET ME AN EPIDURAL

My vote is still officially Abstain because I don't think DIF must be any one thing or other - we started out geared toward FX-heavy discussions because it's kinda sorta what we all do for a living, but we've moved away from that over time.  There's no reason it can't swerve back in that direction at whim, tho.

If we do get around to Firefly/Serenity, easily my favorite scifi franchise of the past 10 or maybe even 20 years, I can't wait.   But my love for it has absolutely zero to do with its visual effects -  the story and characters and themes are what I would want to talk about.   

So the guest can haz my chair if there's an fx-based Serenity commentary, I have literally nothing to contribute to that discussion.    But if we decide to tackle it as a movie, no power in the 'verse can stop me from showing up for that.

Only the terribly uncool people.   Tauren hunters rule.

While it's fair if you got that message from the scene, I don't think that was the intent.  I read it as a demonstration that Ellie was already who would continue to be as an adult - pragmatic and logical, and not interested in vague pseudo-answers like "God moves in mysterious ways".   

I think if the movie wanted to give us a heavy-handed message like you describe (and many a less-deft movie has), we'd have seen a scene of her going to church with her dad before he died.    Or more likely, given Zemeckis' tendency in these matters, religious memorabilia on her wall, revealed in a slow tracking shot. 

So if there'd been a crucifix and a plaque reading "Honor Student at St. Mary's Catholic School for Spookily Devout Girls", that'd be one thing.    Instead, the patented Zemeckis introduce-character-via-their-home-decor tracking shot in Contact shows that Ellie is already obsessed with radio and astronomy, etc. long before her dad's death.  He's raising a little scientist, not a little Christian - I don't think there's any indication that she had any religious beliefs to lose.   

Of course, I probably see that because that was my life too - I didn't "reject" Christianity any more than I rejected Zeus or Buddha or Cthulhu, I just wasn't trained to believe in any of them and religion has never been a factor in my life.   

I suppose you're right that a religiously-inclined person might interpret that scene the way you describe, but we already know that sort of person interprets a lot of things in the darnedest ways anyway, regardless of whether there's basis for it or not.     They make plenty of movies targeted for those people, but  I don't think Contact is one of them.

Oddly enough I just discovered theoatmeal.com today, and so I can contribute  this to the discussion.

I would say yes.   

Also qualifying as an undercover-zombie movie, I submit Assault on Precinct 13, both original and remake.

See, there's a scene that might have been really fun, in either movie.     After a lot of running and exploding, there's a brief lull, and Shia could have his own refrigerator moment:

                             SHIA
So Optimus, I've been meaning to ask - why cars and trucks?  How does that work exactly?

                           OPTIMUS
Well, I'm glad you asked, because it's really quite a fascinating -

Suddenly SOMETHING EXPLODES.  They RUN.

I think you make a very good point - there is a difference between explaining the magic beans (which by definition don't need an explanation, they're just magic) and explaining how the magic beans WORK.     

For example, we never know exactly how the deLorean does what it does, but we DO know that it needs 1.21 gigawatts for the time circuits, and needs to be moving at 88 mph,  because these became key elements of the plot.

or Kyle Reese's limited understanding of time travel -  he explains HOW it works, enough so that we understand why the Terminator doesn't have futuristic weapons, etc.  But when it comes to explaining WHY, he can't because he "didn't build the f**ing thing!"   

Or the arbitrary Gremlin rules - they're ridiculous, but hey, those are the rules, and then the story proceeds based on those rules.      And so on.

I think that's a big missing piece in Transformers (and from listening to the commentary, apparently in Tran2 as well) - what the hell are the ground rules with these machines?   It doesn't have to make SENSE per se, but at least tell us what the rules ARE.   

Without that, we're left with robots punching each other until ILM runs out of money.

Aha, well - while those things are improbable (really, nearly everything that happens in any action movie is improbable), they're not impossible or literally magical, which is really what Double Mumbo-Jumbo is describing.     

i.e. the movie wants us to accept the existence of a could-never-have-existed rocket pack, so okay fine.   If then at the beginning of Act III, a wizard showed up, or the archangel Gabriel or what have you, that'd be double-mumbo-jumbo - two unrelated inexplicable/impossible story points in one story.  But there's nothing impossible or magical about Nazi's secretly hiding out in Los Angeles, or hiring local goons to do their bidding.   

But it's certainly okay if you didn't buy the idea, that's entirely fair.   Me, that's my favorite part of the movie, it comes right from the classic movie serials that Rocketeer was emulating.   Just as Star Wars was partly an homage to the Buck Rogers serials, Rocketeer was an homage to RocketMan and Spy Smasher, etc. 

And in those, boy, there were Nazi's and mob bosses hiding behind every bush in America.   Which kept Spy Smasher pretty busy, as you can imagine.

At the risk of spoiling Rocketeer for those who may not have seen it (and if not, you should), I'm curious what you think the "second magic trick" is in Rocketeer, I've never noticed one myself.   

The one trick I can think of would be "somebody invented a working personal rocket pack in the 1930's" which isn't even anywhere near the magic-trick level of  "Guy uses a ham radio to talk to his dead dad in the past" (Frequency) or "Sandra Bullock can send letters through time to Keanu Reeves" (The Lake House) and so on.   For the record, I liked both of those movies too - they both explored the ramifications of their magic trick pretty well, I thought.

Where's the double hocus pocus in Rocketeer, in your opinion?    You could rock my world here if you've found one. 

As for Bill Campbell, I liked the guy myself.  Always thought he should have had a bigger movie career, though he's done pretty okay for himself, just never became a household name.

That is a good one.   But it doesn't replace my own fave phrase which I learned from a co-worker twenty-some years ago.

We were on the set working, the door opened and a gang of suits walked in.  My buddy turned to me and said "Uh-oh... squirrel farm."

Why squirrel farm, I have no idea, but I was still stifling my laughter when they left an hour later. Somehow it just fit.

If I ever have a job that involves regular dealing with studio people, I look forward to being able to say, "Gotta go, I got Squirrel Farm at 3:00".   

Or you may see it IN AN EMAIL THAT'S ALL CAPS.   

SQUIRREL FARM!

You're right that ticket prices aren't directly tied to inflation - the Boxofficemojo list is actually based on a formula that calculates ticket prices in a given year.   And for extra fun you can adjust it to any year - Avatar's 1939-era gross is just over 22 million dollars, Gone With The Wind in 2010 comes to more than 1.5 billion, and that's just in the US.

And it's true that GWTW and other pre-1980's movies ran for longer than modern movies - while Gone With The Wind wasn't in release for 30 years, it didn't even go into what we'd now call "wide" release until 1941.   When I was a kid, the local theater ran The Sound of Music for well over a year - so long that they painted a big mural of Julie Andrews on the side of their building.    And Star Wars was in theaters for more than a year in its first release as well.

But although in the olden days movies stayed in the theaters longer, they also ran on fewer screens in a country with a then-smaller population.     The movie multiplex didn't exist until the '60's, and was still a rarity when Star Wars opened in a whopping 12 theaters nationwide in 1977. 

So it was months before you could just walk up to the one theater in Washington DC where Star Wars was playing and buy a ticket for the next show.  Until then you were lucky to get a ticket two or three shows in advance, if the whole day wasn't sold out already by the time you got there.    And if it was, your only option was to hop on a plane to New York, which was the next closest theater where it was playing.   Believe it or not.

Nowadays movies open on thousands of screens at once, so people have easier access to new releases - but if the movie's not a blockbuster then most of those seats are empty.    So I still think older movies' popularity can be validly compared to modern ones.  In them days we were just accustomed to having to wait a few months to see the latest popular flick, so while they ran longer, they also made their money more slowly.  And they only ran longer if the audiences kept showing up.   

Really, the reason that Gone With the Wind can never be beaten is it didn't have to compete with television and home video and the internet for its audience.   That's a handicap that no modern movie can overcome.

By the way, I'm working on a plan to make a movie and charge a billion dollars per ticket.   Sure, that's high, but I only need to sell one ticket to tie with Avatar for the biggest movie evarrr.