I was at a dinner with a friend and his family a few days back, and had a very interesting encounter. In fact, it is what motivated me to break out of my little introvert exile and find this place online, something that is, well, not really like me (countryside isolation becomes a very comfy blanket after a few years).
The young person had mentioned that a "trend" on online video and image sites that has become pretty big is more biblically correct portrayals of angels, and was showing another young person images of the wheels-in-wheels and six winged depictions, all of them very well made. I guess they noticed me looking at the images, too, because they started asking me about the images. For some time, we talked about biblical stories (the basics, I am no scholar), and at some point, one of them dropped the big question: "Why don't they make movies and games about this just like they do comic book characters?" And honestly, I had no good answer. Why has nobody picked up the ball on this? Many of my former students (retired teacher) love characters like Castiel, an actual angel, in the TV show Supernatural, even though the show really seems to be a typical monster-of-the-week action series, and there are other characters and stories like that out there, very popular. Kids are craving communities that sound remarkably like what I know from church in my own youth. And it seems like the towering giant that is Disney has finally begun to run out of steam with things like Star Wars and Marvel. Maybe it is time for something rooted in Christian lore?
Of course I know that this is not an easy thing to create, but it seems like every kid under the age of 20 knows how to do at least some level of media stuff, and I see youngsters doing amazing stuff just for fun. I am honestly thinking about researching it a bit to see what it would take to do some quality stuff, even if on the low end, to create a Christian Cinematic / Media Universe (though I do not like that name), perhaps hiring talented youngsters with too little good to do with their time. Something that builds more on deep thought and wholesome stories than just the bang-pow-crash stuff that I feel every movie or show is turning into these days.
What do you all think? Is it time for Christian media to move out of the cookie cutter budget movies and try something new? Something with deeper movies, novels, comics, even computer games? Or is it just the pipe dream of an old nut like me? I will try to add a poll but this is my first day on the board, so forgive me if I do not know what I do