Wizards makes especially poor use of this central idea, as the rise of magic is no real net gain or change for the world other than an increase in the overall percentage of fairies with rockin? tits in the population. Nuclear bombs can accomplish a lot of things, but exploding so hard that magic exists isn?t one of them. About the best this kind of story can aspire to is the goofy fun of a Thundarr the Barbarian, as it?s otherwise a completely stupid fictional conceit. There are actually quite a lot of post-apocalyptic settings that build themselves around the idea of our world getting a?sploded and a new, more interesting world that just coincidentally resembles a Western or Buck Rogers or D&D rising up in its place. From the insane live-action opening in which a bored female narrator reads to us from a goofy kid?s picture book about how the current world ended when it nuked itself to death, to her equally bored information about worldwide nuclear death leading to magic, elves, and fairies with rockin? tits returning to the world, this is really the cinematic equivalent of a van with a wizard riding a unicorn in front of a rainbow painted on it. This is a film that was richly marinated in the patchouli oil of decrepit 70?s counter-culture, and boy does it show. Granted, this approach would force a massive decrease in the number of sweet-awesome kung-fu fights and power suit battles, so it probably wouldn?t fit in with the Warshowskis?s vision.ĭid you watch Ralph Bakshi?s 1977 cartoon flick Wizards in high school? Congratulations, you?re either a stoner or hung around with the stoners as their one hilarious non-stoned buddy. The machines would get way more benefit out of just using whatever power sources the human resistance was, killing off the flesh-bags in the Matrix to save energy, and then settling in to making Earth an environment where humans couldn?t synthesize enough oxygen out of the environment to survive. It?s especially dodgy that weak, out-of-shape humans are somehow powering their own life support systems, the Matrix itself, AND whatever bullshit the evil machine empire is supposed to be up to. A whole bunch of humans in pods aren?t going to generate enough power to run, well, any goddamn thing you see the machines doing in the Matrix. We?re an energy-losing system, that?s why we eventually up and die. Now, here?s the problem: humans, even inactive humans, don?t actually produce excess body heat or electricity. The machines use humans for power plants because human resistance movements blotted out the sun to cut off their solar power (in the process making all life on earth unsustainable, but whatever).

Basically, the titular Matrix is a post-apocalyptic world where people are treated to illusions of day-to-day 20th century life while their bodies are actually atrophied blobs of flesh trapped in mechanical pods that harvest their bio-electric impulses and body heat to run vast networks of artificially intelligent machines that are hostile to the human race. Actually, this flaw makes it hard to watch any apocalyptic story that?s stumbled into the same trap. While the original Matrix flick is a viable post-apocalyptic setting in a lot of ways, it has one super-critical flaw that makes it kind of hard to watch once you notice it. This is about their insultingly stupid status quos. Note that we aren?t necessarily dogging the stories here (although a lot of these stories are pretty shit). Here?s a list of the most irritatingly wrong-headed post-apocalyptic settings we?re ever run across. (That?s covered by our sister site, Robot in Petticoats.) No, we?re about the awful, the stupid, the insultingly bad, and in this case, what?s just plain annoying. Ah, but great fiction isn?t what we?re about here at Topless Robot.

Houses and human apocalypse world