by: Mike Allocca

 

Everyone's had that thirty to forty minutes at work where there was nothing to do and someone asked the ageless question "What would you do in the case of a zombie attack?" Now if you'd asked me that a year ago I could've talked until my jaw fell off from postmortem decay. But today, I can't even drive to work without seeing an ad for something that is threatening a zombie invasion. My local cafe has 2 rival tip jars, this week voting on how the apocalypse will come; either you support the idea of 2012 or you believe the world will be overcome by flesh-eating zombies. We all know of Rules of the Internet, but I think today we should add one more: if it exists, it can be zombified.

A quick search on Amazon.com will tell you that Pride and Prejudice will come up after Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. The parody has become more popular than the actual work. Any store you go to today, whether it's an electronic leviathan like Best Buy or a convenience store like CVS will be eager to sell you a copy of Left 4 Dead 2. 

Now zombies are an interesting subject, but they do have one characteristic that no other fad can really touch. The idea of zombies is based on a swarming invasion, and here they are, completely over saturating the market. It's got a certain irony to it that just perfect. But I guess my biggest gripe with this subject is that many companies have embraced the idea "Throw some zombies at it." Everything, even if it was fine on it's own, has zombies crawling all over it. Shown here is a comic that was just released today called "Victorian Undead" featuring a zombified Sherlock Holmes. There's also a Marvel story arc bluntly titled "Marvel Zombies" that came out, as far as I can tell, for no apparent reason. To support that, there's even a MiniMates box set of these characters. And when conventional characters are used up and exhausted, there's always the nonsensical route that "President Evil" follows, giving President Obama a crack at the zombie apocalypse. 

Small timers, too, are jumping on this band wagon. The second any of us log into XBOX Live, you'll see an ad for the game shown here, Zombie Apocalypse. Now I've played this game, and it is fun, but it is nothing new. It's about equal to Robotron. The original. It's simply a case of trying to reuse a format any way possible and zombies were the golden ticket to get there. Same goes for Plants Vs. Zombies. Again, a ton of fun, but it could have been Plants Vs. Soldiers, or Mexicans, or Horses. Why zombies? Now this is a game with absolutely no plot or story. Zombies do not need to be there. Through my whole rant and rave, what I'm begging for is something new to need to kill. I feel as if I'm a t.v. season away from "CSI: Zombies." If that comes to be, I think I might have to kill myself. And knowing how this world is going, I'll probably come back to life and have to go shopping at the zombie department store for second winter jackets and register at the DMV as an Undead Voter.