(Let’s see if I even remember how to do this…)
When it comes to our favorite pop culture, there are occasionally hiatuses (hiati?) and breaks that interrupt our enjoyment. The “mid-season finale” has become a very frustrating part of most of my television viewing in the modern era, but when I was young, cliffhangers were massively vexing. To this day, I don’t know *HOW* Harold Lloyd got down off that clock. Once upon a time, I was a fan of a comic book called “Ms. Mystic,” which had a nearly two-year break between issue #2 and issue #3, and never really regained its quality upon returning, while the LONG breaks between seasons of Power Rangers often make me forget which color Ranger is best. (Hint: It’s usually Pink.) I still remember the long summer during which my then-septuagenarian Gramma fumed and worried about who shot JR, which leads us to today’s query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) has had to face three separate extended breaks immediately following ‘Doctor Who’ regeneration sequences in less than ten years, asking: What has been the longest and most painful hiatus period in your experience?
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A month in Parris Island, SC. That it was Parris Island and that it was only a month, instead of three, should be a hint.
Waiting the two weeks for the website to come back. Quite the experience indeed. At least there was Facebook to help.
The site being down is definitely one. It has become such a part of my day, and even though I may only pop in to read a single article some days, it was still noticeably missed.
Another was just a few years back in 2011 when SOE went down after being hacked. Every single SOE game was down for over a month. Although they gave free game time and other gifts in compensation, it was still a pretty frustrating time as I spent quite a bit of time playing EQ, EQ2 and Star Wars Galaxies, as well as dabbling in Free Realms and the online TCG games for EQ and SWG.
And while it was never said that he would return, the wait for Tommy to return to Power Rangers after he left in Turbo was pretty frustrating too. I mean, c’mon, he’s the coolest of the Rangers and could make people who gave up on the series return to watch if he’s involved. His return in “Forever Red” and then full-time return in Dino Thunder were pretty neat, but his recent return to the MMPR Green Ranger was the bright spot in the otherwise unforgivable desecration of the Legend War (well, that and the super-yummy Christina Masterson, the only reason I watched Megaforce after the second episode).
And finally, the time between seeing one of my oldest friends. I was 19 when she suddenly left (long story) and her leaving was so sudden that we didn’t even get to say goodbye. Not too long after that, I had to move to escape a bad situation myself. I spent YEARS trying to find a way to contact her, but because she has a somewhat common name, my searches never panned out. It wasn’t until last year, shortly before my 34th birthday, that we FINALLY got back in touch with each other. But even though we spent all those years apart and we are both different people than we were back then, our relationship was absolutely no different. I’ve had friends that I hadn’t seen for months and our friendship had to be rebuilt, but she and I went right back to being like sisters.
Those inevitable waits between Venture Bros. seasons.
I like to rewatch “Powerless in the Face of Death” between seasons and imagine that the boys have once more died and Dr. Venture is once again trying to clone them. Plus, the montage of their deaths is always funny, particularly when it gets to the one where nothing happens (and has made me randomly spout “There was a gas leak that time” in random conversations or to break a long silence).
Number one: waiting for the snow to come back to Minnesota so I can strap on my board and ride again. Number two: the whole year of waiting between the LOTR movies. It was almost itchy waiting to find out how Merry and Pippin were going to be saved.
The time from the original KISS members departing and returning so I could finally see them in concert.
That would be the breaks in the publication of Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind graphic novels. These were published on a regular schedule, but, for the uninitiated into manga, Hayao Miyazaki, who wrote and drew the manga, is primarily an animated filmmaker, so whenever he got involved in a new film project, he’d set the comic aside for a while. There were several breaks of three to six months, and once, right after Nausicaa was swallowed by an Omu, and presumably killed, the comic went on hiatus for over a year and a half! That was a long, painful wait, specially since a lot of the smaller publishers of English translated manga were prone to go out of business before the series they were printing were finished. There was a very good chance that we might never have seen the end of the series, and the longer the break was, the less likely it was to ever come back. I give you the example of Appleseed. The publication of Masamune Shirow’s epic was interrupted after four volumes by a severe earthquake. Shirow’s studio was heavily damaged, and the artwork for the fifth volume was destroyed and Shirow never went back to it, and never went on to produce the planned fifth and sixth volumes. He has produced several spin-off “data books” and the like, set in the Appleseed universe, but these were poor substitutes for the continuation of the story, which we will probably never see since Shirow has moved on to producing pin-up art instead of manga.