"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall. - Confucius
From a purely monetary standpoint, it’s not so bad. We only paid J.L. $850,000. It could have been much worse. Take the movie “Gigli,” in 2003, for instance. It starred Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck – who were known as “Bennifer” at the time. The film cost $74,000,000 to make and brought in only $7,266,209. It was withdrawn from cinemas after only three weeks, one of the shortest theatrical runs on record for a big Hollywood film.
But as bad as that was, it doesn’t hold a candle to last year’s “Mars Needs Moms,” a 3D animated film with a price tag of $175,000,000. I’m not really sure why it would cost so much to make a cartoon but it did. We’ve come a long way since Roadrunner every Saturday morning.
“Mars Needs Moms” is centered on a nine-year-old boy who realizes he was wrong to be rude to his mother, and has to rescue her after Martians abduct her. Well, that explains a large part of the huge budget; great writing like that can’t come cheap.
The fans, however, didn’t agree and “MNM” brought in less than $39 mil. The film is currently (unadjusted for inflation) the biggest box office bomb in film history, with a net loss of $136,007,242.
So, compared to those investments, we didn’t do so terribly.
But about the great fall. Arkansas finished the 2012 season ranked 5th in the AP, their only losses to numbers 1 and 2. It was hard not to be excited about this season, even after Easy Rider let us all down.
History documents well those great falls like we just endured. Here are some of them.
We should probably begin at the beginning, with the Fall of Man. Adam and Eve fell from the grace of God by tasting the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and starting mankind’s burden of Original Sin. Adam knew the rule. But he blamed Eve, who in turn blamed the talking snake (i.e. Old Scratch, who had actually fallen himself, much earlier).
There’s a lot to learn from this, like how the blame game can get awfully ugly.
Later, there was the fall of the Roman Empire, which was not so much a sudden fall as a slow decline. To make matters worse, they tried to give the Romans some respect back in 1964 with the film of the same name. But that bombed, too, losing $14,250,000 (or, adjusted for inflation $106,783,262). Even Sophia Loren couldn’t save it.
So where are we now? Good question, and one posed to J.L. after the thrashing last week. His answer – “I don’t really know.” Well, huh. I guess I don’t either, coach. But at least I have an idea. Let’s hire Bobby back. As long as we’re making comparisons here, what he did wasn’t as bad as say, O.J., or Pete Rose, or Tonya Harding or even the 1919 White Sox. Come on A.D. Jeff - forgive and forget. And let’s do it before all those smart wood chopping Scarlet Knights from Joisey get to town on Saturday. (Foggetaboutit!!)
Confucius also say something else I ran across. He say this: “By three methods, we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.” We sure got a heaping helping of experience last Saturday. While it’s still so bitter, how ‘bout doing something wise?