This affective property, of course, does not extend to animated films, especially ones whose protagonists are toys that, by definition, do not accrue frown lines or jowls I suppose you could run Tim Allen and Tom Hanks’s voices through vocal spectrum analyses and compare/contrast with 1995 waveforms, but they basically sound the same. This was baked into Twin Peaks: The Return but has funny side effects in much less credible endeavors: e.g., in the barely notable American Reunion, just by virtue of surviving with personality unchanged this long, Seann William Scott’s Stifler has acquired an unexpected dignity. In live action, returning to a property that’s grown more respectable with age has the inherent pull of both nostalgia and the inherently manipulative (but no less genuine) melancholy of seeing how much everyone has aged. My next thought was that Apple had inadvertently provided a solid metaphor for the eternal franchise era: assuming all goes as planned, it is not inconceivable that there will be Star Wars movies coming out after my death, certainly not an expectation I grew up with.

A few weeks ago, Apple dropped a staggeringly ill-advised promoted tweet into my timeline: “With the longest battery life in an iPhone ever, you’ll lose power before your iPhone XR will.” I enjoy thinking about death even less than the average person, so my first reaction was that I’m not particularly cheered by a poorly worded suggestion that I’ll probably exit before my technology.

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