Payton Lockwood watches The Walking Dead season three mid-season finale in her dorm room Sunday night. Lockwood has followed the show from the beginning in 2010. By: Gabby Rambo
The Walking Dead is a television series that has been aired for three seasons and has captured the attention of students at SFA.
The television series is based on the comic book “The Walking Dead”. The main plot of the series is about a sheriff who wakes up from a coma and finds that the world has been dominated by “flesh- eating walkers.”
The sheriff then goes in search of his family and finds several survivors along the way. The series is a drama that appeals to college students because it is something new.
On May 25, 2012, a man in Miami, Florida was caught eating another man’s face. This action drove some people to believe that this act of cannibalism was the beginning of zombie attacks.
The link below will lead to an article on the Miami attack:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/05/29/naked-man-chews-other-guys-face-shot-dead-by-cops/
“I feel like with the speculation of the world supposedly ending in 2013, students are more interested in shows like The Walking Dead. I personally like the show because it is more realistic and catches my attention with every episode. I like thinking about what I would do if the zombie apocalypse ever really happened,” said Payton Lockwood, sophomore.
About the show:
The Walking Dead television series was created by Executive Producer Frank Darabont. The comic book series it is based on was written by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore.
The show first aired in 2010 and made its announcement that it would be continuing with a third season in 2012. The show received many award nominations including a Writers Guild of America, Golden Globe, and Best Television Series Drama.
The show also received 10.9 million views on its season three premiere and became the most- watched basic telecast in history. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_(TV_series) )
The series is about survivors of the zombie apocalypse and how they get through fighting for survival against zombies and other survivors. In the show, walkers (the shows name for zombies) are not the only thing survivors have to worry about.
Survival:
Society has been dependent on survival for centuries. Not because of zombie threats, but because of threats on their country and their people.
WWII was a major event in history that had people fighting for survival against other human beings that threatened to kill them because of their differences. People thrive for survival and this television series appeals to people.
“I think people enjoy watching this show because they are interested in survival. People like knowing how others survive in crazy situations. It allows their imaginations to wonder and think about what they would do if they were put in those same situations,” Lockwood said.
Inside the show:
Where did the idea for The walking Dead come from?
“It came from my love of zombie movies and my hatred for how they end. I think that all the best zombie movies just abruptly end when the time runs out, so people either all die or they ride off into the sunset never to be seen again. I thought it would be a really cool story to tell if we followed a group of characters for an indefinite period of time watching them learn to survive in this world and continue to live and coexist,” stated Robert Kirkman for Forbes.
“I think The Walking Dead has become this huge pop culture event. It’s a successful TV show. It’s a successful video game series and the comic book has been popular for a good long time, but the audience is building,” Kirkman said during the same interview.
(http://www.forbes.com/sites/johngaudiosi/2012/11/26/skybound-entertainment-founder-robert-kirkman-talks-comics-video-games-and-the-walking-dead/ )
The link above goes to a website that has a full interview with Robert Kirkman.
Overall:
Students are attracted to the un-natural. They seem to want to be involved in things that are not likely to happen in everyday life.
In November the Freshman Leadership Academy put on an event known as the Survival of the Fittest Zombie Run. It was a 5k run intersected with mud and obstacle courses.
Students from the theater department also gave those who wanted to be zombies the opportunity to have a zombie makeover to make it more realistic. Even though there was a fee, several students registered.
The link below will lead to the Pine Log website where a preview article for this event is shown:
http://www.thepinelog.com/sga-to-bring-zombies-to-campus-1.2936622#.ULwlUINfCSo
What students think:
“The Walking Dead keeps me on my toes. The show is very suspenseful and I love that there is a lot of gore. The characters are also really diverse which makes the show more intriguing. It shows that the human race can always adapt and overcome,” said Nicolas Abshire, freshman.
“It’s interesting to see how people will change and what their reactions are when the world they live in completely changes from a routine life style and not worrying about having to survive because everything they want is in a store for them with easy access; to a world of death and destruction where anything and everything you do could potentially kill you and having to learn how to survive in some ways of the wild, kinda like back in the day,” said sophomore Derek Calvert.
“I’ve liked The Walking Dead ever since the comics, so when I heard there was going to be a show I was skeptical. But the show has something the comic never will, fear. It’s the drama of the characters becoming real and the situation becomes real, all while the ending is unknown. Also, it’s not about the zombies. Either you start thinking; are they making the right choices; are they going to actually survive? And that’s the difference, in movies there will be a happy ending to this struggle, but in the show, I mean, who really knows? In the comic the main character calls the group ‘the walking dead’ and not the ‘un-dead’, and that’s what the story is all about, them living.” Said Maxwell Smith, senior.
The walking dead had it’s mid-season finale Sunday December 2. The second half of third season will premiere February 2013.
Visit http://www.amctv.com/shows/the-walking-dead for video clips and photos on The Walking Dead
gab.rambo@gmail.com
