I Think World War I is On The Cusp of a Big Public Appreciation Renaissance

Think about it. The doughboys! The trenches...the mustard gas. This was pure war, before all those Geneva Conventioneers came in muddying the "all's fair in Love and War" waters (you'll note the Geneva Convention explicitly does not apply to Love - more hypocrisy!). And then just when it couldn't get much worse, ostensibly-neutral Spain unleashed the first and, to date, deadliest bioweapon of all: the Spanish Flu Pandemic. The Great War was no holds barred, and boy did it leave its mark! Yet, there's almost no movies about it. Arguably, Gallipoli is about it. Slim pickings, once you get past Gallipoli.

I want big-budget blockbuster meditations on the cost of the era of global conflict upon the innocence of the human psyche, and contrasting the radical change in self-image for America and Americans, going into it all unsure of their place on the global stage, coming out of it pretty much running things - committed to a future of heading "Over There" to foreign lands and bailing their ass out (really, this set the trend for almost all relevant future history so far!). I want a booming nostalgia propaganda poster t-shirt industry, themed around the War. This was really the cusp of the dawn of the Golden Age of propaganda imagery! It has been nowhere near fully-exploited. I want big iTunes compilations of the hits of the age. What were the doughboys whistling in the trenches?

I want massively multiplayer videogames where Archduke Ferdinand is a playable character.

("dibs")

They say "war is hell," which is a hard truth that has a lot of truth in it. But they also say "war is cool" and "war sells." Or maybe they don't say that, but it's clear from the whole reams of war-related pop culture that war is pretty cool, that war sells pretty well. Yet the War To End All Wars got the shaft on that aspect! I think like with most things, the timing was off. By the time that whole thing was over, the whole world was like "Man, kind of sick of war right now. Can we use something else to fuel our burgeoning creative media and pop culture explosion? How about global optimism, seasoned with a dash of expressionistic existential angst?" Which was about the worst thing they could do in retrospect! Who even watches those movies now?

When WWII finally came along, and re-energized everybody's appetite for all things war, the movie industry was in full swing and the marquee matchups were poised and ready to take full advantage: that whole wild Hilter vs. Churchill vs. Roosevelt vs. Tojo vs. Stalin vs. Mussolini cage match played out in flickering black and white on the glorious silver screen, right in the face of the spellbound public! And by the time the dust settled on Victory Day, it was clear that the real winner, in the hearts and minds of the muddled masses, was war. But specifically: the winner was World War II.

It was too late for the Great War. It got passed over. Too late for One - it was all about Two. Well I say, it's high time to give the Big Red One its due.