Guardians of the Galaxy is the undeniable breakaway hit of the year, outpacing every movie released so far, so of course it’s got to have a Lego parody. The Lego take on Guardians , though, reveals a big bummer about Star-Lord’s Awesome Mix tape that you might not have thought of.
The Awesome Mix Vol. 1 — a collection of classic pop jams given to Star-Lord by his mother before he left Earth — was pretty much the heart and soul of Guardians of the Galaxy , providing an emotional anchor for Star-Lord, as well as a fun soundtrack for the movie on the whole. If you think about it, though, even if the tape was responsible for giving us Dancing Groot , it would still kind of suck.
Not that the tracks from the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack suck, no. Not at all. Quite the contrary: they’re terrific, as evidenced by the fact that the Guardians soundtrack is still among the best-selling albums of the year. It’s currently in the No. 3 spot for albums on iTunes, beating out Ariana Grande, even. It’s got us hoping that one of the new female characters in Guardians 2 will have her own mixtape from another era. Maybe Moondragon or Monica Rambeau got zapped into space at the end of the 90s? Come on, Marvel, we can make this happen.
The physical tape itself, though, would definitely suck. For this, it helps if you’re around the same age or older than Guardians of the Galaxy’s Star-Lord, and thus old enough to remember what actual cassette tapes were like. The snagging tape, the twisting, the inevitable warping. That odd top-of-the-register hiss, the audible Press-Play-pop. All of that.
Yeah, none of the Guardians would’ve been too psyched to hear “Come and Get Your Love” on that tape, especially not if it’s 20-something years old. Back in the day, we had an original copy of The Chronic on cassette. It wore down so badly that it would only play backwards. And we weren’t out in space, being exposed to cosmic rays and stuff.
Then again, Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn took to the internet a few weeks back to take on pretty much just this kind of nitpicking . Gunn pointed out that the Guardians of the Galaxy universe has interstellar flight and mining colonies built into the heads of dead space gods. It’s probably not too much of a stretch, then, for Star-Lord to get a cassette player that won’t eat his tapes.
In any case, Guardians of the Galaxy doesn’t look like it’s going to relinquish the top spot at the box office in the near future. The weekend after Labor Day is typically an abysmal one for movie receipts, and Guardians’ only new competition is the faith-oriented The Identical . The Hollywood Reporter notes that observers expect Guardians to easily best that film and pull in between $9 and $10 million over the weekend. Guardians of the Galaxy is already the top film of 2014, with $282.6 million in domestic receipts and $555.7 worldwide.