There's A Ghost In My House

Should've done a post yesterday. Didn't. Sorry about that. Will happen again.

Not today though because last night I watched the final episode of Haunted Hotel, which means now I can write about it.  I've been looking forward to that even though I'm not sure I have all that much to say.

There's that thing, isn't there, where you find something you really like and you just want to share it with the world? Doesn't have to be anything amazing. I don't want to overamp expectations here. It's just that some things are good and word ought to spread.

Does Haunted Hotel need any help getting the word out, though? That's always a problem these days, knowing if the obscure thing you discovered is actually super-famous already and you were just super out of touch as usual. 

Remember when the zeitgeist really meant something? Those were the days, eh?

Now there's so much of everything and it's all so tucked away in its own tidy little silo it's hard to know what's big any more. Donald Trump never heard of Bad Bunny until the Superbowl thing, or so he says. Trump is easy to mock but it's entirely possible most Americans didn't have a clue who Bad Bunny was before then.

I mean, let's be honest, how many people reading this own anything by Bad Bunny? Or could name one of his songs? I've known roughly who he is for a couple of years but I've never actually listened to him. 

D'you know what? I'm going to fix that right now. Talk among yourselves for a couple of minutes... no, even better, join me...

 NUEVAYol - Bad Bunny

Pretty much what I thought he'd sound like. Not my kind of thing but I'd dance to it, if I still danced, which I don't.

The point is, I'm very much into music and I like to keep as up to date as I can and still I hadn't heard "the biggest musical star in the world" until five minutes ago. So the fact that I hadn't heard of Haunted Hotel until it popped up in my Netflix Recommendations back before Christmas doesn't tell me a whole heck of a lot about whether it's already a big hit and I'm just culturally ignorant or whether I've found a rare gem no-one else much knows about.

There are clues, though. For a start, it was created by one of the writers on Rick and Morty. At this point I should probably clarify that Rick and Morty is another Bad Bunny as far as I'm concerned. I know what it is and approximately how successful it's been but I've never gone so far as to watch an episode. I saw a couple of clips and didn't think much of them so I left it at that.

There's just so much stuff, now, isn't there? It's not like the old days. There was a time when a reasonable person could expect to do more than just know the names of the famous things of the day. We all watched the same TV channels. All the radio stations played the same songs. 

I bet a lot more people would have known who Madonna was in the '80s or the Beatles in the '60s than know who Bad Bunny is now. For a given subset of "people", that is.

Now, there's the issue of globalization to consider. Globalization of culture, specifically. Bad Bunny sings exclusively in Spanish or so I've read. I can't really offer much in the way of experiential evidence to support that assertion, having only heard that one song. It is in Spanish, but one example is hardly conclusive evidence. 

The Beatles did not sing in Spanish. Nor did Madonna. They sang in English which isn't really surprising because the Beatles were English and Madonna is American, where the main language is English, even if some Americans prefer to call it American these days.

Abba, on the other hand, who might be in with a shout as the Beatles or Madonna of the '70s, at least in terms of cultural domination, although I'm never really sure how big they were in America, also sang exclusively in English, even though they were from Sweden. Everyone sang in English unless they were a novelty act or they did if they wanted to be famous outside the hinterland of their own language.

While I'm on the subject of Abba, I'm going to take this opportunity to throw in a great cover of what is probably my favorite Abba song. I might not get another because Abba aren't likely to feature on the blog all that often. 

 The Day Before You Came - Pulp

I don't much like Abba. In their heyday I couldn't stand them but time and a broadening cultural awareness has reduced my dislike to a grudging kind of respect. It hasn't been a Pauline conversion like my Road to Damascus moment with the Carpenters, when I first heard Sonic Youth's cover of Superstar and the scales fell from my eyes. More a slowly dawning understanding that Abba's songs might actually be about something and that the words could be working in opposition to the bland, annoying tunes. 

(Don't you wish Hope and Crosby had made a Road To Damascus movie? Kinda like their version of Life of Brian...)

The Day Before You Came is a catalog song. A list of mundane thoughts and activities that recede into irrelevance as the singer arrives at a turning point in her life. It's an extremely well-written lyric with some perfectly pitched specific examples that raise it way above the generic. How many pop songs reference both Marilyn French and Dallas?

As the NME pointed out in a news item about Pulp covering the number with the BBC Radio Orchestra, it basically is a Pulp song. Certainly, if you knew Jarvis Cocker's oeuvre and had never heard the Abba original, you'd believe it was one of his. 

(That said, it also includes an echo the string riff from David McWilliams' The Days of Pearly Spencer, which could also be a Pulp song. I'd love to hear them cover that.)

Getting back to Bad Bunny, he's famous and successful even among people who have no clue what he's singing about. That might be a new development. It's noticeable that most of the KPop groups sing at least partially in English. American cultural hegemony is clearly on the wane but English is hanging grimly on as the lingua franca for the world. For how much longer, though?

All of which is a very long preamble to what this post is supposed to be about, namely Haunted Hotel. I realize I haven't even explained what Haunted Hotel is yet. Instead I've covered myself just in case I'm explaining something that almost everyone reading this already knows more about than I do. Look, I'm saying, I may be a culturally ignorant peasant but at least I know I am!

Or maybe I'm not. Maybe none of you know any more about Haunted Hotel than I do. Maybe you know less. Maybe I am, indeed, introducing you to the show for the very first time.

Oh, yes, it's a TV show. Did I even make that clear? Probably not. It's an animated sitcom currently showing on Netflix. There's only one season and it's ten episodes long. 

The situation is that Katherine Freeling, thirty-something single mother to two children, a teenage boy called Ben and his younger sister Esther, has inherited a hotel called the Undervale (Presumably a nod to the Overlook...) from her dead brother Nathan. As you probably guessed from the title, the hotel is full of ghosts. Nathan is one of them.

In fact, anyone or anything that dies there comes back as a ghost. A lot of people appear to have breathed their last at the Undervale. 

Oh, and there's one more regular cast member: Abbadon. Abbadon is "an ancient demon who is trapped in the body of a young boy from the 1700s", some of which you may have worked out from his name. I might have done, too, had I not gone the entire season believing his name was Avedon, like the photographer. It was only when I read the Wikipedia page a few minutes ago I realized my error.

Even though Haunted Hotel is built around a family and has children and teenagers in main roles, it's very much an adult comedy, by which I mean it treats the audience as grown-ups and uses adult themes. I'm not sure I'd classify it as a family show although I guess that would depend on your family. 

I'm not going to make any attempt to analyze of even describe the show other than that. I might have, if I hadn't spent all that time on the Bad Bunny stuff. It wouldn't help much, anyway. When does it ever?

What I am going to do is recommend the show unreservedly. I loved it. It's smart, funny, extremely well-paced and frequently heart-warming. All the characters have depth and detail in the writing, something strongly enhanced by both the excellent animation and the first-class voice acting. The jokes land, the plots work and there's a solid sitcom progression arc that means you come out the end of the season feeling both you and the characters know a lot more about each other than at the start.

I'm very happy to be able to tell you the show has already been renewed for a second season, which does suggest it must have been quite successful, even if I hadn't really heard about it. 

If you've already seen it, why didn't you tell me? If you haven't, what's stopping you?