14: Study Notes
On why summer has a media curriculum.
Happy rainy Memorial Day Weekend.
I learned that, unofficially, this will be one of the longest summers. This is the earliest Memorial Day Weekend and Labor Day will be the latest it can be this year at September 7th. So much opportunity for everyone to sit and reflect on why summer is the best season :), and to move through the only season that arrives with a pre-packed curriculum.
For months (years in the case of The Odyssey’s marketing team), publication companies and publishing houses have primed us with teasers, trailers, summer specials, the things they've decided we should read, watch, listen to.
If winter is the "buy this" season, summer is "consume this."
Starting with books
As the American middle class started taking summer vacations in the mid-1800s, they needed something to do on their long train rides or leisurely lounges on hotel patios.
Publishers noticed, and started marketing directly to middle-class women, who were a growing share of book buyers because more of them were literate with free time. Publishers positioned whatever they had on hand as perfect for “idle summer days” or “the mountains or the seashore.” By 1872, a trade journal was running the first advertisements for books labeled specifically as "summer reading," a category that hadn't existed before. The novels they pushed were designed to be picked up and put down without losing the overall thread.
Reverend T. De Witt Talmage, a Brooklyn preacher with ~concerns~ about young women reading novels on vacation, delivered a sermon warning that “there is more pestiferous trash read among the intelligent classes in July and August than in all the other ten months of the year.” Publishers responded by framing summer reading not as a guilty habit but as a respectable and aspirational pastime.
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The big screen
Before 1975, mid summer was considered dead time for theater releases with studios holding their major films for fall and winter.
Then, Jaws was released June 1975 and the logic reversed almost immediately and permanently. Two years later, Star Wars releases Memorial Day Weekend, almost cementing the summer release as the ultimate cash cow. Studios spent the next fifty years filling the summer calendar with event-sized releases, leaning into the insight Jaws stumbled into by accident: kids are out of school and people have enough idle time to watch.
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Here are my unrequested takes on this year’s summer movies:
Toy Story 5 (June 19): To catch everyone up, in Toy Story 3, Andy goes off to college and gives his toys to a girl named Bonnie. Toy Story 4, and now 5, revolve around Bonnie. Toy Story 5 introduces a new villain, Lilypad (voiced by the perfectly-styled Greta Lee) which is a not-so-direct jab at iPad kids. If you yearn for nostalgia the original cast remains with Tom Hanks as Woody and Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear!
Moana (July 10): I’ll admit that I’m basic and weak and got suckered into an “aww” during the trailer’s dramatic pause before hearing Maui say “you’re welcome.” But I can still be confused as to why The Rock is playing the live-action version of himself ten years later…?
Spider-Man: Brand New Day (July 31): No thoughts because I have no idea what’s happening here. Attempting to follow Marvel is a task I don’t have the stamina for at the moment, but go Tom!
The Odyssey (July 17): This isn’t net-new story, and there have been plenty of remakes and renditions, but if you slap Christopher Nolan on anything it will undoubtedly receive glory. I don’t think the story of Odysseus is that great, compared to other myths. A ten year journey isn’t that efficient, to me. And there isn’t anything particularly interesting about Odysseus, to me. But I am looking forward to Robert Pattinson as Antinous because a villainous Pattinson is better than a moody Pattinson
Disclosure Day (June 19): This is Speilberg’s first feature film since 2022. Will probably be decent because Spielberg, but great because Josh O’Connor
And the music
To ground us, here are some summer songs you probably forgot because, in an effort to save yourself from being the person who is always whistling Black Eyed Peas, you had to block these from memory.
2003, “Crazy in Love”
2005, “Hollaback Girl”
2006, “London Bridge”2007
2009, “I Gotta Feeling”
2010, “California Gurls”
2016, “One Dance”
Music critic David Hajdu traces the roots of the summer hit to the sheet-music era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when popular songs circulated through home pianos and other shared listening spaces.
The summer hit became a more recognizable cultural phenomenon in the post-war era, especially as radio and recorded music made the same songs audible in cars and public spaces.
Billboard formalized the modern “song of the summer” as an annual category, calculating it from cumulative streaming, radio airplay, and sales on the Hot 100 between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
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