The problem with getting rid of one fad is that there's always another one ready to replace it. In this case, I'm prepared to make a prediction on what fad will follow vampires. Bear in mind that I'm not making this prediction willy-nilly. I've put some thought into various factors that might come into play, including what made vampires popular in the first place, what trend is ready for a comeback, and what current trends might bleed over into pop culture. After considering several possibilities, I predict that the next pop culture trend will be....robots.
If robots do make a resurgence, it's going to require a book, movie, or tv series to spark the fire, but the kindling is already there. Robots have been popular before, but it's been awhile. There was The Day the Earth Stood Still in the 50's. There was Vickie the Android and the Terminators in the 80's. The 90's brought us Lt. Commander Data, and in 1999/2001 we had Bicentennial Man and A.I.. Most recently, there was I, Robot in 2004. So while there has certainly been a thread of interest in robots for quite some time, I think a resurgence of "robot mania" is right around the corner. This continual undercurrent of interest is ready to erupt. The only thing required is for someone to come along and make robots sexy. Someone needs to give us a robot with a heart of gold, a sense of humor, an acceptably tortured psyche, and a sex drive. Someone needs to do for robots what Twilight did for vampires.*
If you aren't convinced that robots are primed to make a comeback, look no further than Verizon wireless. All you people out there with iPhones are certainly still convinced that there is no substitute, but if you've spent much time with one of the latest Android phones, you'll know that the playing field has been leveled. Android isn't actually a phone, it's an operating system, but Verizon knows that if you try to explain that to the average cell phone buyer, their eyes are going to glaze over and they're going to get distracted by some other shiny object. So Verizon got permission from George Lucas to brand their Android phones as "Droids". The phones are thin, smart, fast, more popular than ever, and advertised using a robotic motif. Score one for the robots.
Finally, I think robots are ready to come back because science is cool again. Science no longer means you're a dork who hangs out in a lab, it means you're capable and intelligent. Even the Emmy award winning series The Big Bang Theory, which paints 4 physicists as geeks on the outlying corners of social interaction, had enough sense to pair up Leonard with the stereotypical hot chick, Penny. There is also the 2007 movie adaptation of I Am Legend to consider. The main character is Robert Neville, who is one of the few survivors after a virus turns most of the earth's population into light-hating, human eating creatures. If they'd stayed truer to the book, Neville would have been a fairly uneducated alcoholic, but instead, the movie paints him a methodical scientist who keeps a lab in his basement and is actively developing an antidote to the virus. He's also played by Will Smith. In other words, science is sexy.
So there you have it. Popularity is a fickle thing, so it might end up being centaurs or mermen, or demigods or aliens or any host of other things, but my money is on robots. I've tried to consider all the options and weigh the evidence. I've laid out my argument in a logical manner and stuck to a method in order to solve this pressing matter. Why go to so much trouble? Because science is sexy, and soon, robots will be too.
*Ok, ok, I know that Twilight wasn't the first series to make vampires sexy. I think Interview with a Vampire already did that, but I doubt most of the people with "Team Edward" posters know that. And of course, Anne Rice wrote that book 20 years before the movie came out and maybe someone else did it before her. I'm too lazy of a blogger to really trace this back to it's origins. You should know that about me by now.
