(Re-)Caps and Gowns: The Review Class of 2025 Gets a New Look

Rick Retro’s Realm, The Realm Report #7: A new section, a new look, new subscribers and more.

The Realm Report #7: A new section, a new look, new subscribers and more.

Introducing Recaps

Rick Retro’s Realm has just added a new section that I call Recaps.

Retro Recaps are simply shorter reviews. In a typical full Retro Review, I lay out my opinions in prose, punctuated with still shots from the film, but in a Retro Recap I trim down the coverage of the reviewed work to 5 main points:

1. About — The basics of what the recapped work is about.

2. Pros — What I liked about the work.

3. Cons — What I didn’t like about the work.

4. NPCs (Not Pros or Cons) — Other comments about the work.

5. Bottom Line — Whether or not I recommend the work, and to whom.

Retro Recaps may (or may not) include most of the other information that I typically include in a Retro Review, so the Reference Overview and other pages in the Reference section will still help you understand what all the abbreviations and emojis used mean.

Reference Overview

In fact, there are two different reasons why I might post a Retro Recap instead of a Retro Review.

The first reason for posting a Retro Recap is that I have just experienced a work and want to save the time that it takes to write a full review, in part, because the work doesn’t seem important enough to write that full review. I still want you to know what I thought and felt about the work, but it saves a couple of hours to write a Retro Recap instead, and I can use that time for other improvements to Rick Retro’s Realm. In such cases, you will still usually see all the extra information that I typically include in a Retro Review.

The second reason for posting a Retro Recap is that I want to let you know about a work that I experienced some time ago, before I began writing reviews regularly. In these cases, I haven’t found the time to experience the work again for a full Retro Review yet, so the extra information that I typically include in a Retro Review will probably be missing. The grade I give won’t include one of my arrows, because I didn’t assign those previously, and I’m just going by my increasingly weakening memory as to the Pros and Cons of the work. 😂 These Retro Recaps serve as good placeholders to point out Bottom Line recommendations until such time as I can write a full Retro Review for the work.

No matter the reason for posting a Retro Recap, any of you inhabiting or visiting The Realm can request an upgrade to a full Retro Review by adding a 🩷Like or comment to the Recap. From time to time I will upgrade the most requested Recaps.

Here’s a link to the Recaps section.

And here’s Retro Recap #1, due out tomorrow.

Gowns, aka Reviews Get a Makeover

From time to time, I’ve noticed little things I want to improve here and there in my Retro Reviews. But it’s a lot of work to go back and touch every review to make them more consistently the way I want them.

So I’ve been saving up some thoughts until the weight of needing to make changes became overwhelming enough to go forward. 😁 At least this way I can combine several changes into one makeover for each review.

From the top of the review to the bottom, here are the changes you will see:

1. The first line of each review (and also each post that is not a review) will now repeat the subtitle of the post. I don’t like this redundancy, but Substack kind of forces it on me by not including subtitles when I include inter-stack links in my posts. They do include the first line of the post in links, so by including the post’s subtitle within the first line, I am working around the Substack oversight.

2. I’ve added a Review-at-a-Glance Section into the Header Block of Retro Reviews and Retro Recaps. This section includes the Grade I’ve given the work and also how I rate the work’s Family Suitability and Alignment with Judeo-Christian Values. I still give more details on these items later in the review, but I wanted to help out my conservative and Christian subscribers by including those ratings, very important to them, right from the start of the review.

3. I’m ditching the old form of the Left-Right Line in the Opinion Block and replacing it with a new, more objective approach where I will collect and evaluate the opinions of a spectrum of critics about the work. This will leave n/a (not available) ratings for a while until I have compiled that data, but will eventually give you better info about how the work is viewed across the spectrum than my guessing about how it is viewed.

4. I’ve changed the scale for content in the Family Suitability ratings and Content Detail ratings. It used to be +3 to -4 including both a +0 and -0. Now it is +4 to -4 with all of the plus ratings adding one point. So there is no longer a +0 rating, and the ratings are more symmetrical.

5. Other pieces of the review are moved around a little and formatted differently for more or less emphasis. All of the Reference section has been updated to explain and reflect the new formatting. The first Retro Review to get the full makeover is Big (1988). I will be updating all the archived posts to the new format as time allows.

New Old Post Posted to Substack!

In case you missed it last week, Rick Retro’s Rankings #1, The Big Three Christmas Specials, from the old text group was finally uploaded and upgraded onto Rick Retro’s Realm on Substack for the first time. That still leaves 25 old reviews to bring over, plus a few more Retro Rankings. So you can still expect more emails for reviews of Christmas movies here in the summer of 2025! 🤣🎅

Behind the Scenes: Scheduling Disaster Continues!

At this point, I have to accept that Project #3, Dark Whimsy Favorites will not be completed in 200 days by August 28. At this point, I just hope to complete it by September or October. I’m not even going to try to project review release dates any more. I just have to accept that with my chronic disease it isn’t reasonable to commit specific long-term dates to you. I have recently had some longer-than-usual disease spells, which I could have probably avoided by being less active, but sometimes the chance to connect with people away from home overrules the known cost I expect to pay. And spending a lot of time on building out the site with new sections and new looks takes away from reviewing time too. So the updated Project #3 schedule no longer includes dates, just guess-timates. At least the release order is correct, so if you wish to follow along, you still know what to watch next:

Subscriber Count!

Every now and then I also check my follower count. Currently it’s over 150. That’s a lot! I have no strong idea how to convert them to subscribers, but perhaps that will come in time. Odds are they are people who saw something they like, but just don’t want to make a commitment yet. We will focus on improving The Realm and our subscriber community to make it more inviting over time.

We are up to 41 subscribers in our community, up four from last issue, when it was 37. It’s humbling to see 5% to 10% growth on almost a weekly basis, when I’m not even trying for that yet. And when I look at what other Substacks my subscribers are reading, I find a lot of you seem to be movie lovers, and many of you share my conservative and Christian viewpoints. Movie lovers of all viewpoints are welcome here, and we’re looking to create a community of subscribers that have at least one or two things in common with each other, whether that be conservative Christian views or just a love for movies, books, and/or Dark Whimsy! It looks like we are succeeding! Thanks so much for being part of the journey. The Realm is growing!

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Last updated 2025-07-17