Free Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse by David Mitchell Page A

kids’ shows nowadays and there was plenty of crap then. All I’m really bemoaning is my loss of innocence and childish wonder. When I first saw
The Muppet Show
, I had no expectations and I was blown away. I can’t ever watch anything in that spirit again.
    People say that we tend to read the books that impress or move us most before the age of 25. Not because we read less in later life but because we get too sophisticated to be so easily awestruck. Once you’ve read
Great Expectations
, anything you subsequently read would have to be even better than
Great Expectations
to impress you to the same extent as
Great Expectations
did – it would have to compensate for your greater expectations as a result of having read
Great Expectations
. That’s asking a lot of Nick Hornby.
    To make matters worse, we’re living in an era when the media constantly try to manage those expectations with trailers, adverts and reviews. At the end of episodes of TV shows, they tell you what to expect next week. These packages of clips are designed to intrigue, to draw you in, to build keen anticipation which next week’s show will then struggle to fulfil. We’re consigned to a perpetual hype–disappointment loop.
    There’s no joy without peril. If you’re not willing to risk massive disappointment – if you only eat at award-winning restaurants or watch films with five-star reviews – you’ll experience it in a mild form all the time. And you’ll never wander into a garden-centre cafe for a spot of lunch and have your modest expectations blown away by the bill.
    *
    On the subject of an arrestingly incongruous image from October 2012 …
     
    There was an amusing photograph in the papers last week. It shows all the Disney theme park favourites – the human-sized but giant-headed mice, dogs and ducks – dressed up as
Star Wars
characters. Goofy is Darth Vader, Donald Duck is sporting elements of an imperial stormtrooper’s uniform, Minnie Mouse is wearing a Princess Leia dress and Mickey is in full Jedi get-up, light sabre raised, giant immovable mousey grin turned perkily to the camera as he prepares to use the force to make Walt proud.
    But the most entertaining figure is in the middle – a rotund, bespectacled old man, also holding a light sabre, dressed scruffily in shirt and jeans but with gleaming white trainers, a neat grey beard and hair as precisely coiffed as a Mollie Sugden perm. His facial expression is somewhere between exhaustion, sorrow and bafflement, as if some kindly carers have taken him on a day trip of which he has little understanding. Of course, in reality he fully grasps his surroundings, for this is billionaire film-maker George Lucas and the photo has been taken on the occasion of the sale of his movie empire, Lucasfilm, to Disney.
    I don’t understand why he agreed to the picture if he wasn’t going to enter into the spirit of it and make some attempt with his comparatively tiny human features to echo the massiveDisney grins surrounding him. So maybe this snap caught him in a downbeat instant between exaggerated cheesy gurns. Or maybe he thought his glum look was more appropriate to the dignity of the great moment, like when a statesman signs an important treaty. Maybe he felt Mickey and co were lowering the tone with their gaping mouths.
    The announcement caused excitement among
Star Wars
fans, not just because it adds another range of funny outfits to the Disney parade wardrobe, but because, along with the purchase of Lucasfilm’s renowned high-tech production companies, the Indiana Jones franchise and the rights to manufacture cuddly mouse-eared R2-D2s, this deal allows Disney to make a new
Star Wars
film. That’s something which, very recently, seemed unlikely ever to happen again. Lucas told the
New York Times
the previous January that he would never make another: “Why would I make any more when everybody yells at you all the time?” I think we can rule out his writing a column for