This post is actually coming to you from sunny Texas (OK, rainy Texas, but it beats single-digit Minnesota temperatures.) And I'm stuck for an idea, I'm wasting time that could be spent watching my niece be goofy, and it's only my superhuman dedication to my reading audience that keeps me from just skipping this week. (The smart-alecks among you may point out that I'm "superhumanly" posting this two days late. That's not the point, people, stay focused.)
So I'm just going for the easy post this week: Given that Hollywood seems to be remaking just about everything, why don't we use that power for good and direct them to some movies that need a little remake love? Here's five movies that need to be remade today, and why.
5. The Last Starfighter. This one had it all--a brilliant high concept, action a-plenty, heroes fighting it out for the future of the human race, and some classic one-liners ("What do we do now?" "Die.") But unfortunately, they decided to go with CGI graphics when those were still in their gestation, let alone their infancy, they had a slightly-below-par budget for the flick, and as a result, I don't think it was realized quite as well as it should be. Admittedly, a remake would lose Robert Preston's wonderful performance, but it's not like it erases the original from the shelves.
4. Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. No, seriously. Ben Edlund agrees with me, and he made "The Tick"! It's a fun, goofy idea for a kid's movie, with Martians trying to kidnap Santa Claus to make the Martian children happy, but it suffers from several poor performances and the lowest production values of any movie in history. (Seriously, Ed Wood spent more money on his films.) Imagine for about five seconds what Pixar could do with this, and you'll agree it belongs here.
3. The Lost World. Not the "Jurassic Park" sequel, although given how bad that turned out, they could probably stand to take another whack at it. No, I mean the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "hidden valley of dinosaurs" classic, done with reimagined special effects, a huge budget, and not necessarily a slavish devotion to the original like "King Kong" had.
2. All Quiet on the Western Front. This is pretty much here as a representative of all those great classic "should be made into a movie once for every generation, as a lens through which we can examine ourselves" books. The story is about World War I, but so timeless that it always seems to be about the current war, and it'd be nice to see a lavishly produced version by someone like Spielberg. (Think "Saving Private Ryan" in WWI...)
1. The Universal Horror films. I've been going on about this at length for some time now (and I'm not done--next week is "The Invisible Man"), but seriously, these could be evergreen franchises for Universal if they only took the time and effort to develop them. These could be like the James Bond movies, vehicles for unlimited numbers of popular sequels, so long as Universal doesn't make the mistake it did last time of diluting the brand with low-quality, shoddy sequels that they figured would sell simply on the strength of the title. A slick, unpretentious, exciting remake of "Dracula" is always going to work, whether today, tomorrow, or a hundred years from now.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Storytelling Engines: Sherlock Holmes
(or "The Ultimate Success")
I'm currently in the midst of reading Kelly Hale's fascinating (and undeservedly obscure) novel, "Erasing Sherlock", and it occurs to me that a large part of the reason it works so well is that the phenomenon it describes feels so real. The book, for those who haven't read it, is about a time-traveling historian who insinuates herself into the life of Holmes as a maid, in order to observe the Great Detective first-hand and discover details of his life, methods and motivations that Watson never wrote down. (Naturally, from there things Go Horribly Wrong, but I'll leave it to you to find out how. Amazon's still got it for sale...) The reason this feels so real is that large numbers of people do involve themselves in "The Great Game" of treating Watson's writings as actual accounts of a real person, analyzing and studying them with an almost obsessive fervor to learn everything they can about Sherlock Holmes...despite the fact that not only was Holmes not real, neither was Watson.
So what exactly is it that makes the Holmes canon such a magnificent storytelling engine that not only could it generate four novels and fifty-six short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, not only could it generate hosts of additional novels, short stories, TV shows and movies by authors like Kelly Hale, not only could it inspire fictional detectives like "Monk" and "House", but it could actually inspire people to treat it as though it was a genuinely non-fictional story about real people?
For starters, there's the character of Holmes himself. Doyle imbued the man with a brilliant complexity that lends astonishing verisimilitude to the stories. Holmes doesn't feel like a fictional character (and according to Doyle, was based on an actual person to some degree); he's mercurial, contradictory, displaying a full range of the moods and feelings that real human beings display (for better or worse, sometimes.) He's not exactly charming; in fact, you could make a good case that you wouldn't want to get stuck on a long train ride with the man. But he is fascinating, which is absolutely key for any character that the audience is going to be following for any length of time.
But don't underestimate the importance of Watson. For all that Holmes is the central character, Watson is as key to the series as the companion is to 'Doctor Who'. (Which reminds me, as long as I'm plugging non-canonical Holmes, if you can track down the sadly out-of-print 'All-Consuming Fire', by Andy Lane, you'll get an excellent Holmes/Doctor team-up.) Watson fulfills Holmes' emotional need to explain his brilliant deductions, but more than that, he provides a mechanism to get those deductions from Holmes' mind to the audience in a naturalistic way. A Holmes story without Watson would consist of Holmes grabbing a random man and saying, "He did it!" And where would be the fun in that?
But the final element, and the one that works the hardest to make the Holmes canon seem not just believable but actually real, is the world he operates in. Doyle set the series in what was, for him, the modern day, and grounded it in the familiar world around him. But Doyle's great gift was in bringing those details to life in ways that made them accessible even to someone who didn't live in Victorian London. To a reader picking up the Holmes series a hundred years later, Doyle paints a vivid picture of a time and place that we know to have been real, then inserts his fictional creations into them so seamlessly that it's almost impossible to find the gap. We can believe in a police plodder like Inspector Lestrade, or a matronly boarding-house owner like Mrs. Hudson, or the thousands of tiny details on everything from slum life to hansom cabs to politics that form the world Holmes operates in.
Because of that, it's small wonder that Holmes seems to have taken on a life of his own. Even when his own creator decided to kill him off once and for all, Holmes managed to survive because the audience wouldn't let him be dead. How real is he? He's got a survival instinct, that's how real he is.
I'm currently in the midst of reading Kelly Hale's fascinating (and undeservedly obscure) novel, "Erasing Sherlock", and it occurs to me that a large part of the reason it works so well is that the phenomenon it describes feels so real. The book, for those who haven't read it, is about a time-traveling historian who insinuates herself into the life of Holmes as a maid, in order to observe the Great Detective first-hand and discover details of his life, methods and motivations that Watson never wrote down. (Naturally, from there things Go Horribly Wrong, but I'll leave it to you to find out how. Amazon's still got it for sale...) The reason this feels so real is that large numbers of people do involve themselves in "The Great Game" of treating Watson's writings as actual accounts of a real person, analyzing and studying them with an almost obsessive fervor to learn everything they can about Sherlock Holmes...despite the fact that not only was Holmes not real, neither was Watson.
So what exactly is it that makes the Holmes canon such a magnificent storytelling engine that not only could it generate four novels and fifty-six short stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, not only could it generate hosts of additional novels, short stories, TV shows and movies by authors like Kelly Hale, not only could it inspire fictional detectives like "Monk" and "House", but it could actually inspire people to treat it as though it was a genuinely non-fictional story about real people?
For starters, there's the character of Holmes himself. Doyle imbued the man with a brilliant complexity that lends astonishing verisimilitude to the stories. Holmes doesn't feel like a fictional character (and according to Doyle, was based on an actual person to some degree); he's mercurial, contradictory, displaying a full range of the moods and feelings that real human beings display (for better or worse, sometimes.) He's not exactly charming; in fact, you could make a good case that you wouldn't want to get stuck on a long train ride with the man. But he is fascinating, which is absolutely key for any character that the audience is going to be following for any length of time.
But don't underestimate the importance of Watson. For all that Holmes is the central character, Watson is as key to the series as the companion is to 'Doctor Who'. (Which reminds me, as long as I'm plugging non-canonical Holmes, if you can track down the sadly out-of-print 'All-Consuming Fire', by Andy Lane, you'll get an excellent Holmes/Doctor team-up.) Watson fulfills Holmes' emotional need to explain his brilliant deductions, but more than that, he provides a mechanism to get those deductions from Holmes' mind to the audience in a naturalistic way. A Holmes story without Watson would consist of Holmes grabbing a random man and saying, "He did it!" And where would be the fun in that?
But the final element, and the one that works the hardest to make the Holmes canon seem not just believable but actually real, is the world he operates in. Doyle set the series in what was, for him, the modern day, and grounded it in the familiar world around him. But Doyle's great gift was in bringing those details to life in ways that made them accessible even to someone who didn't live in Victorian London. To a reader picking up the Holmes series a hundred years later, Doyle paints a vivid picture of a time and place that we know to have been real, then inserts his fictional creations into them so seamlessly that it's almost impossible to find the gap. We can believe in a police plodder like Inspector Lestrade, or a matronly boarding-house owner like Mrs. Hudson, or the thousands of tiny details on everything from slum life to hansom cabs to politics that form the world Holmes operates in.
Because of that, it's small wonder that Holmes seems to have taken on a life of his own. Even when his own creator decided to kill him off once and for all, Holmes managed to survive because the audience wouldn't let him be dead. How real is he? He's got a survival instinct, that's how real he is.
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Personal Favorites: Flash #50
Today, I just wanted to take a moment to talk about something I love; don't think of it as a formal review, so much as me talking about something awesome and saying, "Isn't that COOL!" like a six-year-old. Because let's face it, sometimes we all need to let out our inner six-year-old. This does mean there'll be spoilers, BTW, so if you just want to experience the issue unspoiled first and then come here and reminisce about it with me, I'd advise running to a comics shop and finding the back issue before reading this.
The subject of my gushing adoration is Flash #50, published in May of 1991, written by the wonderful (and woefully underused these days) William Messner-Loebs, penciled by the talented Greg LaRocque and inked by the equally talented Jose Marzan Jr, with Tim Harkins providing the lettering and Glenn Whitmore handling the coloring, and the underappreciated Brian Augustyn taking care of editing duties.
To fully appreciate this story, you have to understand that Messner-Loebs had been building up to it for a while. Vandal Savage, immortal super-villain, had returned, and he was well and truly making Wally West's life a living hell. He'd kidnapped Wally's friends and family, turned a Russian super-speedster into his drug-addicted slave and dubbed her "Lady Flash", feeding her a super-speed drug called "Velocity 9" to make her as fast as the Flash, and finally set a trap for Wally out in the desert. Actually, it was more sort of a dare than a trap. At the end of Flash #49, Vandal Savage displayed his latest gizmo, a kinetic absorption platform. Standing on it sucked away the Flash's super-speed, leaving him no faster than a normal man. The dare was this: Vandal Savage would let the Flash's loved ones go if he just went and stood on that platform. After that, if he could get back off of it before Vandal Savage could shoot him, he could do whatever he wanted.
So the Flash stepped onto the platform...and Vandal Savage shot him in the chest. (Best. Cliffhanger. Ever.)
We open the issue with Wally bleeding out in the desert sands, as Vandal Savage (true to his word) returns Wally's loved ones to safety. But Messner-Loebs has been setting this up for a while, and one of the things he set up was that the machine intellect Kilg%re, a former-enemy-turned-enlightened-being, promised Wally one big favor. Turns out that favor was a nanite colony in his body that would give him a one-time instant heal from any injury, no matter how apparently fatal. Nice deal, really, and Wally returns to life feeling just fine (albeit slightly freaked out at watching machines erupt out of his chest and fix his wounds.) In fact, he's feeling better than ever--his near-death experience has finally liberated him from his fears of being in Barry Allen's shadow as the Flash.
Meanwhile, Vandal Savage is using Lady Flash to clear out his competitors in the drug trade. He's planning, in his own way, to be altruistic--he's going to corner the drug market, then flood it with tainted product and end the drug problem by killing all the addicts. (He's got a bit of an issue with drugs, since an accident with Velocity 9 is burning up his immortality.) He is, to say the least, confident with the Flash out of the way.
Now is where things kick into gear. Wally goes to STAR Labs and gets a slick new costume (Lady Flash has his old one), and then uses a hologram generator to contact Vandal Savage, telling him that he's not dead, and that he's coming for him at noon tomorrow. "Why did you do that?" one of Flash's allies asked. "You lost the advantage of surprise!"
"I replaced it with something better," Wally says in the second-best line of the issue. "Fear."
Noon tomorrow, and Savage thinks he's ready for the showdown. He's got his desert mansion ringed with the speed-sapping devices, he's got armed gunmen, he's got Lady Flash hopped up on V-9 and ready to fight. Whatever's coming, he can handle it.
He's wrong. The Flash races across the desert so fast the sand is melting to glass under his feet, sending up plumes of liquified sand behind him as he runs. He slams into the speed-sappers at Mach Ungodly, instantly overloading their capacity to absorb energy and causing them all to go up in a massive explosion that knocks half the gunmen out of commission with its shockwave and leaves the whole place a blinding mix of smoke, flames, and blowing sand. In the ensuing eyeblink, the rest of the gunmen go down. It's just the Flash, Savage, and Lady Flash.
Gun out, Savage snarls defiance, ordering Lady Flash to kill him. But she refuses--she's fallen so low, but deep down, she wants to live up to the costume she wears. She wants to be a hero, and the first step is breaking her shameful subservience to Savage. She finds within her a nobility of spirit that she'd lost, and refuses to fight.
Savage is furious. He empties his entire pistol into her at point-blank range, less than an inch away from her skin. They both look down at the same time...but her skin is unmarked. "How--" Savage gasps. "Even with your speed, you could not have--"
From his position twenty feet away, the Flash opens his hand. Six bullets fall out onto the dust. "I caught them," he says, in the best line of the issue. "I could have caught them from fifty feet away, a hundred yards away, two miles away." He starts walking, slowly and confidently, towards Savage. "People always told me that I could be just as fast as Barry, if only I believed it. They're right." He grabs the barrel of the gun, and brings Savage's arm up to point the pistol at his own head. "Care to try another six shots? I've reloaded the gun for you."
That moment is immortalized in my mind, even eighteen years later.
Savage gives up on victory at that point and tries to flee, only to be stopped by his old foe the Immortal Man (whose own powers are in flux, thanks to his connection with Savage--he looks about twelve at the moment.) Their mixed-up powers react on contact with each other, and the explosion leaves neither of them to be seen...but Wally's stopped his drug trade and broken his empire, while finally casting off his self-doubts and becoming the hero he was meant to be.
Many people point to Mark Waid's run on the series as the point where Wally became a legitimate Flash, but I think it began here--certainly, Messner-Loebs seemed to feel he'd done enough, as he left the series a few issues later (although as with any writer's departure, it could have been involuntary.) But I think that this issue capped off a stellar run by a great writer, and it remains a favorite of mine to this day. If you can track it down in back issue boxes, it's well worth reading. (Okay, so there's a bit of "review-ness" to this. But only a bit.)
The subject of my gushing adoration is Flash #50, published in May of 1991, written by the wonderful (and woefully underused these days) William Messner-Loebs, penciled by the talented Greg LaRocque and inked by the equally talented Jose Marzan Jr, with Tim Harkins providing the lettering and Glenn Whitmore handling the coloring, and the underappreciated Brian Augustyn taking care of editing duties.
To fully appreciate this story, you have to understand that Messner-Loebs had been building up to it for a while. Vandal Savage, immortal super-villain, had returned, and he was well and truly making Wally West's life a living hell. He'd kidnapped Wally's friends and family, turned a Russian super-speedster into his drug-addicted slave and dubbed her "Lady Flash", feeding her a super-speed drug called "Velocity 9" to make her as fast as the Flash, and finally set a trap for Wally out in the desert. Actually, it was more sort of a dare than a trap. At the end of Flash #49, Vandal Savage displayed his latest gizmo, a kinetic absorption platform. Standing on it sucked away the Flash's super-speed, leaving him no faster than a normal man. The dare was this: Vandal Savage would let the Flash's loved ones go if he just went and stood on that platform. After that, if he could get back off of it before Vandal Savage could shoot him, he could do whatever he wanted.
So the Flash stepped onto the platform...and Vandal Savage shot him in the chest. (Best. Cliffhanger. Ever.)
We open the issue with Wally bleeding out in the desert sands, as Vandal Savage (true to his word) returns Wally's loved ones to safety. But Messner-Loebs has been setting this up for a while, and one of the things he set up was that the machine intellect Kilg%re, a former-enemy-turned-enlightened-being, promised Wally one big favor. Turns out that favor was a nanite colony in his body that would give him a one-time instant heal from any injury, no matter how apparently fatal. Nice deal, really, and Wally returns to life feeling just fine (albeit slightly freaked out at watching machines erupt out of his chest and fix his wounds.) In fact, he's feeling better than ever--his near-death experience has finally liberated him from his fears of being in Barry Allen's shadow as the Flash.
Meanwhile, Vandal Savage is using Lady Flash to clear out his competitors in the drug trade. He's planning, in his own way, to be altruistic--he's going to corner the drug market, then flood it with tainted product and end the drug problem by killing all the addicts. (He's got a bit of an issue with drugs, since an accident with Velocity 9 is burning up his immortality.) He is, to say the least, confident with the Flash out of the way.
Now is where things kick into gear. Wally goes to STAR Labs and gets a slick new costume (Lady Flash has his old one), and then uses a hologram generator to contact Vandal Savage, telling him that he's not dead, and that he's coming for him at noon tomorrow. "Why did you do that?" one of Flash's allies asked. "You lost the advantage of surprise!"
"I replaced it with something better," Wally says in the second-best line of the issue. "Fear."
Noon tomorrow, and Savage thinks he's ready for the showdown. He's got his desert mansion ringed with the speed-sapping devices, he's got armed gunmen, he's got Lady Flash hopped up on V-9 and ready to fight. Whatever's coming, he can handle it.
He's wrong. The Flash races across the desert so fast the sand is melting to glass under his feet, sending up plumes of liquified sand behind him as he runs. He slams into the speed-sappers at Mach Ungodly, instantly overloading their capacity to absorb energy and causing them all to go up in a massive explosion that knocks half the gunmen out of commission with its shockwave and leaves the whole place a blinding mix of smoke, flames, and blowing sand. In the ensuing eyeblink, the rest of the gunmen go down. It's just the Flash, Savage, and Lady Flash.
Gun out, Savage snarls defiance, ordering Lady Flash to kill him. But she refuses--she's fallen so low, but deep down, she wants to live up to the costume she wears. She wants to be a hero, and the first step is breaking her shameful subservience to Savage. She finds within her a nobility of spirit that she'd lost, and refuses to fight.
Savage is furious. He empties his entire pistol into her at point-blank range, less than an inch away from her skin. They both look down at the same time...but her skin is unmarked. "How--" Savage gasps. "Even with your speed, you could not have--"
From his position twenty feet away, the Flash opens his hand. Six bullets fall out onto the dust. "I caught them," he says, in the best line of the issue. "I could have caught them from fifty feet away, a hundred yards away, two miles away." He starts walking, slowly and confidently, towards Savage. "People always told me that I could be just as fast as Barry, if only I believed it. They're right." He grabs the barrel of the gun, and brings Savage's arm up to point the pistol at his own head. "Care to try another six shots? I've reloaded the gun for you."
That moment is immortalized in my mind, even eighteen years later.
Savage gives up on victory at that point and tries to flee, only to be stopped by his old foe the Immortal Man (whose own powers are in flux, thanks to his connection with Savage--he looks about twelve at the moment.) Their mixed-up powers react on contact with each other, and the explosion leaves neither of them to be seen...but Wally's stopped his drug trade and broken his empire, while finally casting off his self-doubts and becoming the hero he was meant to be.
Many people point to Mark Waid's run on the series as the point where Wally became a legitimate Flash, but I think it began here--certainly, Messner-Loebs seemed to feel he'd done enough, as he left the series a few issues later (although as with any writer's departure, it could have been involuntary.) But I think that this issue capped off a stellar run by a great writer, and it remains a favorite of mine to this day. If you can track it down in back issue boxes, it's well worth reading. (Okay, so there's a bit of "review-ness" to this. But only a bit.)
Saturday, February 28, 2009
My Marvel/DC Crossover
Everyone remembers these things, right? Back in the 90s, when somehow the editorial staffs of both companies were just so mellow towards each other that they were like, "Sure, let's do two Batman/Punisher crossovers! And a Green Lantern/Silver Surfer, and a Superman/FF, and a couple of 'everyone gets together and pounds the snot out of everyone else' crossovers...why the heck not, these things are a license to print money!"
That Golden Era is pretty much over now (which is a shame just for the lack of new Amalgam titles--'Lobo the Duck' alone was worth the entire existence of that concept.) Marvel and DC are pretty much at loggerheads, scrapping for the title of "#1 Comics Company", and the last inter-company crossover was about five years ago now (and arguably, that only got made because George Perez made it a personal crusade to get it done.) So sad to say, my idea for a new Marvel/DC crossover will have to remain here, in this blog. Which doesn't mean you don't want to hear it, right? (er, right?)
It's a typical day in the Marvel and DC universes (a typical pre-Civil War, pre-Final Crisis Day), and Spidey's swinging through mid-town Manhattan and Superman's flying through Metropolis and everything's right in the world...or at least as right as things usually get in a comic-book world, because as usual, super-villains pop up and scheme their usual schemes. The Joker has a plan to plant laughing gas bombs in City Hall, the Rhino is robbing a bank, Doctor Octopus is stealing some scientific equipment from STAR Labs...
"Hang on a second," our reader says. "STAR Labs?" Because that's the trick of it. The readers realize it just before the characters do, but all the villains are in the wrong universe. The Joker's wondering who this newcomer is that's got the funky goo coming out of his wrists, the Rhino's wondering why his strongest punches don't hurt the guy in the blue long-johns, and in short, the heroes are right where they should be, but the villains aren't.
There'd be a bunch of one-shots set around the main story of issue #1, telling self-contained stories about heroes confronting these out-of-place villains. So you'd get a "Superman Vs. Juggernaut" one-shot, a "Hulk Vs. Doomsday" one-shot, a "Spider-Man Vs. the Joker" one-shot, a "Batman Vs. the Green Goblin" one-shot, et cetera et cetera et cetera. (Well, as many "et ceteras" as the market would bear, but come on, everyone has to have their own dream fight for this. Captain America vs. Kobra? Wonder Woman battles the Red Skull? The possibilities are endless...)
While the heroes are all off dealing with the various crises and catastrophes caused by panicky villains wreaking havoc, it falls to Doom to investigate the reason for it all. He finds that Darkseid has captured Access on Apokalips (Access is a character who can travel back and forth between the Marvel and DC universes freely, as established all the way back in the original "DC Vs. Marvel" crossover), and has hooked him up to a machine that exists in both the Marvel and DC universes, one that forces Access to use his powers. The machine is being looked after by Thanos, who has teamed up with Darkseid (they've been communicating through Access, natch.) It turns out that after Darkseid tried to use the Infinity Gems in the DC Universe and failed (because they're a Marvel artifact, with no power in the DC Universe--this comes from "JLA/Avengers"), he got to thinking...if the Infinity Gems are the most powerful relic in the Marvel Universe, but they have no power in DC's universe, what if there were counterparts that acted the opposite way? And what if those counterparts were disposed of at some point in the history of the DC Universe by some do-gooder like Access who could travel back and forth? And how powerful might those artifacts be if someone were to bring them back?
Darkseid and Thanos decided to test that theory. In order to keep the heroes out of the way, they swapped over a bunch of other villains at the same time as their own switch (Darkseid is now running around in the Marvel Universe, Thanos in DC.) Now they're hunting down the artifacts--Thanos is searching for the Infinity Gems, something he has a lot of experience with, while Darkseid is searching out the Eternity Spheres. Some of the cosmic heroes (the Green Lanterns, the Silver Surfer, et cetera) tweak to the plan and go after them, but it is, after all, Darkseid and Thanos we're talking about here, two master schemers with unbelievable power. They don't manage to get the complete sets of their respective artifacts, but they get enough to make them more powerful than ever before.
And then Doom steals them. Because he is, after all, Doom.
Doom uses his newfound power to siphon off the Omega Sanction, taking it for his own. He grabs the Power Cosmic, snatches the energies of the Central Power Battery--in short, he starts going on a rampage, draining away all the power sources of both universes and using them to bolster his own. The collective heroes of both universes now know about the threat and have united to defeat it, but can they?
Hell yes. A strike force of heroes breaks Access out of the machine, while a team of the greatest scientists of both universes builds a device that will super-charge the efficiency of Superman's solar-collecting physique. Once they've perfected it, Access merges Superman and Captain America to recreate Super-Soldier, the Amalgam character who combines the tactical and strategic combat skills of Cap with Superman's powers, and they hook him up to the device. He turns jet black as his body absorbs every erg of light that strikes it, giving him more power than ever and letting him go toe to toe with even a cosmically super-charged and insane Doom. They fight, the good guys win, and Access returns everyone to their own reality and goes off to have a long think about how dangerous he can be to the universe if he falls into the wrong hands.
And meanwhile, the Gems and the Spheres drift off, scattered by the fight...but scattered to which universe?
That Golden Era is pretty much over now (which is a shame just for the lack of new Amalgam titles--'Lobo the Duck' alone was worth the entire existence of that concept.) Marvel and DC are pretty much at loggerheads, scrapping for the title of "#1 Comics Company", and the last inter-company crossover was about five years ago now (and arguably, that only got made because George Perez made it a personal crusade to get it done.) So sad to say, my idea for a new Marvel/DC crossover will have to remain here, in this blog. Which doesn't mean you don't want to hear it, right? (er, right?)
It's a typical day in the Marvel and DC universes (a typical pre-Civil War, pre-Final Crisis Day), and Spidey's swinging through mid-town Manhattan and Superman's flying through Metropolis and everything's right in the world...or at least as right as things usually get in a comic-book world, because as usual, super-villains pop up and scheme their usual schemes. The Joker has a plan to plant laughing gas bombs in City Hall, the Rhino is robbing a bank, Doctor Octopus is stealing some scientific equipment from STAR Labs...
"Hang on a second," our reader says. "STAR Labs?" Because that's the trick of it. The readers realize it just before the characters do, but all the villains are in the wrong universe. The Joker's wondering who this newcomer is that's got the funky goo coming out of his wrists, the Rhino's wondering why his strongest punches don't hurt the guy in the blue long-johns, and in short, the heroes are right where they should be, but the villains aren't.
There'd be a bunch of one-shots set around the main story of issue #1, telling self-contained stories about heroes confronting these out-of-place villains. So you'd get a "Superman Vs. Juggernaut" one-shot, a "Hulk Vs. Doomsday" one-shot, a "Spider-Man Vs. the Joker" one-shot, a "Batman Vs. the Green Goblin" one-shot, et cetera et cetera et cetera. (Well, as many "et ceteras" as the market would bear, but come on, everyone has to have their own dream fight for this. Captain America vs. Kobra? Wonder Woman battles the Red Skull? The possibilities are endless...)
While the heroes are all off dealing with the various crises and catastrophes caused by panicky villains wreaking havoc, it falls to Doom to investigate the reason for it all. He finds that Darkseid has captured Access on Apokalips (Access is a character who can travel back and forth between the Marvel and DC universes freely, as established all the way back in the original "DC Vs. Marvel" crossover), and has hooked him up to a machine that exists in both the Marvel and DC universes, one that forces Access to use his powers. The machine is being looked after by Thanos, who has teamed up with Darkseid (they've been communicating through Access, natch.) It turns out that after Darkseid tried to use the Infinity Gems in the DC Universe and failed (because they're a Marvel artifact, with no power in the DC Universe--this comes from "JLA/Avengers"), he got to thinking...if the Infinity Gems are the most powerful relic in the Marvel Universe, but they have no power in DC's universe, what if there were counterparts that acted the opposite way? And what if those counterparts were disposed of at some point in the history of the DC Universe by some do-gooder like Access who could travel back and forth? And how powerful might those artifacts be if someone were to bring them back?
Darkseid and Thanos decided to test that theory. In order to keep the heroes out of the way, they swapped over a bunch of other villains at the same time as their own switch (Darkseid is now running around in the Marvel Universe, Thanos in DC.) Now they're hunting down the artifacts--Thanos is searching for the Infinity Gems, something he has a lot of experience with, while Darkseid is searching out the Eternity Spheres. Some of the cosmic heroes (the Green Lanterns, the Silver Surfer, et cetera) tweak to the plan and go after them, but it is, after all, Darkseid and Thanos we're talking about here, two master schemers with unbelievable power. They don't manage to get the complete sets of their respective artifacts, but they get enough to make them more powerful than ever before.
And then Doom steals them. Because he is, after all, Doom.
Doom uses his newfound power to siphon off the Omega Sanction, taking it for his own. He grabs the Power Cosmic, snatches the energies of the Central Power Battery--in short, he starts going on a rampage, draining away all the power sources of both universes and using them to bolster his own. The collective heroes of both universes now know about the threat and have united to defeat it, but can they?
Hell yes. A strike force of heroes breaks Access out of the machine, while a team of the greatest scientists of both universes builds a device that will super-charge the efficiency of Superman's solar-collecting physique. Once they've perfected it, Access merges Superman and Captain America to recreate Super-Soldier, the Amalgam character who combines the tactical and strategic combat skills of Cap with Superman's powers, and they hook him up to the device. He turns jet black as his body absorbs every erg of light that strikes it, giving him more power than ever and letting him go toe to toe with even a cosmically super-charged and insane Doom. They fight, the good guys win, and Access returns everyone to their own reality and goes off to have a long think about how dangerous he can be to the universe if he falls into the wrong hands.
And meanwhile, the Gems and the Spheres drift off, scattered by the fight...but scattered to which universe?
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Storytelling Engines: Mystery Science Theater 3000
(or "No, I Won't Compare It To 'Savage Sword Of Conan'")
'Mystery Science Theater 3000' (and 'The Film Crew' and 'Cinematic Titanic', its spiritual heirs) has a luxury that a lot of series don't possess; it doesn't really need a storytelling engine at all. The core of the concept is "comedians delivering a humorous commentary track to an existing movie", and Rifftrax shows that deep down, that alone is enough to deliver entertainment value. The extraneous elements--the sketches, the characters, the rationale for making fun of cheesy (and not-so-cheesy) movies--all that is just icing on the cake. This means that, since it doesn't necessarily have to carry the series every time, the writers of the series can and have tinkered with their storytelling engine quite a bit over the years--sometimes out of necessity, sometimes just to improve the comedy.
When it started, MST3K had a fairly involved backstory (much of which never made it to the screen.) Joel Robinson and Clayton Forrester both worked at Gizmonics Institute, a sort of "not quite mad science" university where people greeted each other by showing off their latest inventions. (Yes, that's what the Invention Exchange is supposed to be every week.) Doctor Forrester and his fellow scientist Dr. Laurence "Larry" Erhardt went renegade, hiding in a self-made secret lair called "Deep 13" and deciding to conquer the world by inflicting bad movies on people until they begged for mercy. Forrester chose Joel as his test subject, based primarily on an irrational dislike of him, and shot him into space to begin the experiment. Joel, in turn, built a series of robots out of non-essential bits of the ship to keep him company.
So that's the dynamic at the start of the series. Two mad scientist buddies on Earth, and Joel as the slightly-bemused father figure to a trio of wise-cracking robots (plus Cambot, who never talks, and Magic Voice, who doesn't have a body.) Fairly simple, but you can already see room for improvement. Doctor Erhardt doesn't really have much to distinguish him from Doctor Forrester, and there's a certain "comedy villain" dynamic that they're struggling to establish; the villain has to be evil enough to be credible as a villain, but can't actually succeed because failure is funny.
Luckily, necessity became the mother of invention as J. Elvis Weinstein, the actor playing Erhardt, left after the first season. Frank Conniff replaced him as "TV's Frank", and in so doing provided Doctor Forrester with exactly what every comedy mad scientist needs--a bumbling assistant. This freed Doctor Forrester up to become the cartoonishly evil mad scientist he needed to be for the success of the series, because Frank could foil his schemes through his sheer incompetence in carrying them out. (Why doesn't Doctor Forrester find a better lackey? Just repeat to yourself it's just a show...)
This dynamic continues through Seasons Two, Three, Four, and part of Five, and proves to be an extraordinarily stable generator of comedy sketch ideas. The robots settle into their personalities fairly quickly (Tom as pompous blowhard, Crow as exuberant man-child, Gypsy as the seemingly dim-witted one who actually has all the common sense), and the whole thing runs quite smoothly...
Until Joel Hodgson, series co-creator and the actor playing Joel Robinson, decides to leave the series. Suddenly, they're without a human host, and without a key part of the dynamic--Joel is the principal foil for the Mads, he's essential to the rationale for the series, and he acts as an authority figure to the bots (which paradoxically allows them to act out more, not less--having Joel there to put the brakes on their antics means that they can constantly push those boundaries themselves.) The series obviously needs another host, but the exact mix of elements Joel provides is irreplaceable. So how do you solve this?
Enter Mike Nelson, playing...er, Mike Nelson. Mike trades in Joel's slightly-bemused father figure role for a completely bewildered bachelor uncle, or perhaps older brother...he didn't build the bots, he's not an authority figure--or at least not one they're willing to consistently recognize. His efforts to assert some form of control over the rebellious bots, and his frequent failure (because failure is funny) becomes the new dynamic and source of comedy for the rest of the series. This gives the Mike episodes a slightly "edgier" tone, because Joel isn't there to act as a brake on the darker comedy and Mike can't fill that role, but it's nothing you can't see shades of when you look back at the older material.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Frank Conniff leaves the series, to be replaced by Mary Jo Pehl as Doctor Forrester's mother, Pearl. Pearl doesn't work very well as a second banana, for the same reasons that made her so entertaining as an occasional guest star; she's the next place up on the food chain, the figure that makes Doctor Forrester feel just as helpless and incompetent as he makes Frank feel. With her in place, suddenly he looks like the bumbling sidekick, and if there's one thing a series can't have, it's confusion as to who's the lead villain and who's the lackey.
But after six episodes (Season Seven was quite short), Trace Beaulieu bows out and Pearl becomes the lead villain. They introduce not one, but two sidekicks for her--Professor Bobo, who begins as an intelligent ape scientist but who loses about fifty IQ points an episode (because bumbling sidekicks are funnier, see above) and Observer, who actually fulfills the role of "smart, competent villain" but clearly takes his orders from Pearl (this is known, in some circles, as the "Jeeves and Wooster" comedy dynamic.) It's this final model that runs through the last three seasons of the series.
All these are mainly just variations on a theme, but it's interesting to note which variations find their rhythm and which get tinkered with over the course of the series. As the subsequent direct-to-DVD series (again, 'The Film Crew' and 'Cinematic Titanic', both very worthy successors to the original) show, vast chunks of the concept can be changed, added, or jettisoned while still retaining a good comedy dynamic ('The Film Crew' takes a mix of bored office-workers in a sinecure job and friends doing some male-bonding over a bad movie, while 'Cinematic Titanic' has vaguely conspiratorial overtones as Joel and friends reunite to save bad movies for posterity.) The core of the series, when done well, is always so vital and entertaining that the fans can enjoy a little experimentation.
'Mystery Science Theater 3000' (and 'The Film Crew' and 'Cinematic Titanic', its spiritual heirs) has a luxury that a lot of series don't possess; it doesn't really need a storytelling engine at all. The core of the concept is "comedians delivering a humorous commentary track to an existing movie", and Rifftrax shows that deep down, that alone is enough to deliver entertainment value. The extraneous elements--the sketches, the characters, the rationale for making fun of cheesy (and not-so-cheesy) movies--all that is just icing on the cake. This means that, since it doesn't necessarily have to carry the series every time, the writers of the series can and have tinkered with their storytelling engine quite a bit over the years--sometimes out of necessity, sometimes just to improve the comedy.
When it started, MST3K had a fairly involved backstory (much of which never made it to the screen.) Joel Robinson and Clayton Forrester both worked at Gizmonics Institute, a sort of "not quite mad science" university where people greeted each other by showing off their latest inventions. (Yes, that's what the Invention Exchange is supposed to be every week.) Doctor Forrester and his fellow scientist Dr. Laurence "Larry" Erhardt went renegade, hiding in a self-made secret lair called "Deep 13" and deciding to conquer the world by inflicting bad movies on people until they begged for mercy. Forrester chose Joel as his test subject, based primarily on an irrational dislike of him, and shot him into space to begin the experiment. Joel, in turn, built a series of robots out of non-essential bits of the ship to keep him company.
So that's the dynamic at the start of the series. Two mad scientist buddies on Earth, and Joel as the slightly-bemused father figure to a trio of wise-cracking robots (plus Cambot, who never talks, and Magic Voice, who doesn't have a body.) Fairly simple, but you can already see room for improvement. Doctor Erhardt doesn't really have much to distinguish him from Doctor Forrester, and there's a certain "comedy villain" dynamic that they're struggling to establish; the villain has to be evil enough to be credible as a villain, but can't actually succeed because failure is funny.
Luckily, necessity became the mother of invention as J. Elvis Weinstein, the actor playing Erhardt, left after the first season. Frank Conniff replaced him as "TV's Frank", and in so doing provided Doctor Forrester with exactly what every comedy mad scientist needs--a bumbling assistant. This freed Doctor Forrester up to become the cartoonishly evil mad scientist he needed to be for the success of the series, because Frank could foil his schemes through his sheer incompetence in carrying them out. (Why doesn't Doctor Forrester find a better lackey? Just repeat to yourself it's just a show...)
This dynamic continues through Seasons Two, Three, Four, and part of Five, and proves to be an extraordinarily stable generator of comedy sketch ideas. The robots settle into their personalities fairly quickly (Tom as pompous blowhard, Crow as exuberant man-child, Gypsy as the seemingly dim-witted one who actually has all the common sense), and the whole thing runs quite smoothly...
Until Joel Hodgson, series co-creator and the actor playing Joel Robinson, decides to leave the series. Suddenly, they're without a human host, and without a key part of the dynamic--Joel is the principal foil for the Mads, he's essential to the rationale for the series, and he acts as an authority figure to the bots (which paradoxically allows them to act out more, not less--having Joel there to put the brakes on their antics means that they can constantly push those boundaries themselves.) The series obviously needs another host, but the exact mix of elements Joel provides is irreplaceable. So how do you solve this?
Enter Mike Nelson, playing...er, Mike Nelson. Mike trades in Joel's slightly-bemused father figure role for a completely bewildered bachelor uncle, or perhaps older brother...he didn't build the bots, he's not an authority figure--or at least not one they're willing to consistently recognize. His efforts to assert some form of control over the rebellious bots, and his frequent failure (because failure is funny) becomes the new dynamic and source of comedy for the rest of the series. This gives the Mike episodes a slightly "edgier" tone, because Joel isn't there to act as a brake on the darker comedy and Mike can't fill that role, but it's nothing you can't see shades of when you look back at the older material.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Frank Conniff leaves the series, to be replaced by Mary Jo Pehl as Doctor Forrester's mother, Pearl. Pearl doesn't work very well as a second banana, for the same reasons that made her so entertaining as an occasional guest star; she's the next place up on the food chain, the figure that makes Doctor Forrester feel just as helpless and incompetent as he makes Frank feel. With her in place, suddenly he looks like the bumbling sidekick, and if there's one thing a series can't have, it's confusion as to who's the lead villain and who's the lackey.
But after six episodes (Season Seven was quite short), Trace Beaulieu bows out and Pearl becomes the lead villain. They introduce not one, but two sidekicks for her--Professor Bobo, who begins as an intelligent ape scientist but who loses about fifty IQ points an episode (because bumbling sidekicks are funnier, see above) and Observer, who actually fulfills the role of "smart, competent villain" but clearly takes his orders from Pearl (this is known, in some circles, as the "Jeeves and Wooster" comedy dynamic.) It's this final model that runs through the last three seasons of the series.
All these are mainly just variations on a theme, but it's interesting to note which variations find their rhythm and which get tinkered with over the course of the series. As the subsequent direct-to-DVD series (again, 'The Film Crew' and 'Cinematic Titanic', both very worthy successors to the original) show, vast chunks of the concept can be changed, added, or jettisoned while still retaining a good comedy dynamic ('The Film Crew' takes a mix of bored office-workers in a sinecure job and friends doing some male-bonding over a bad movie, while 'Cinematic Titanic' has vaguely conspiratorial overtones as Joel and friends reunite to save bad movies for posterity.) The core of the series, when done well, is always so vital and entertaining that the fans can enjoy a little experimentation.
Friday, February 20, 2009
The "Hidden" Theme of 'The Empty Child'
I actually hesitate to write this little analysis of the Doctor Who Series One two-parter, "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances", because it's something that seems so obvious to me that I feel kind of condescending pointing it out. But everyone has their own little blind spots, and it's entirely possible that you could be a brilliant person with great critical analysis skills and insightful recognition of themes and still manage to miss the subtext of the story--which can be summed up with the sentence, "Doctor Who is the best show on television."
The two-parter is probably now best known for introducing Captain Jack Harkness, frequent Doctor Who companion and guest star and central cast member of the spin-off, "Torchwood". Captain Jack is a ladies' man (and a man's man as well), a swift-thinking con artist, a crack shot and a debonair man about town. In general, he's exactly the kind of character you'd expect to see go from a one-off guest star to a recurring character to a series lead. But the fact that this actually happened misses a key point--Moffat was taking the piss when he came up with him.
Essentially, Captain Jack is a "Hollywoodized" version of the Doctor himself, Moffat's vision of what the character would be like if all of the quirky, eccentric edges of the character were smoothed away by slick studio executives trying to make him more "marketable". Instead of being a "Doctor", he's a "Captain". Instead of being an almost-asexual alien, he's a sexy, suave human. Instead of having a time machine that looks like an antiquated British phone booth, he's got a sleek futuristic timeship (with a "cloaking device" instead of a "chameleon circuit".) He's even got a "sonic cannon"! He's everything you'd expect a sci-fi hero to be.
He's certainly everything Rose expects a sci-fi hero to be. in the first half of the story, he "scans for alien tech", he strides around boldly zapping things with his sonic cannon, and he charms her with his debonair, Captain Kirk-esque sexuality. Next to him, Christopher Eccleston's big-eared, big-nosed Doctor, who apparently looked at his screwdriver one night and decided it needed to be a little more "sonic", looks frumpy and goofy and generally not the kind of guy who gets his own series.
But in the second half, we see what the Doctor does that Jack doesn't (and what "Doctor Who" does that other sci-fi series only make a half-hearted pretense at.) He thinks. Underneath the scares (and this one has plenty), Moffat's been carefully concealing a fact about the Monster of the Week; it has a reason for everything it does. It's not just wandering around converting people into gas-mask zombies, it's following Nancy. "Are you my Mummy?" isn't just the catch-phrase of the week, it's the desperate question of a frightened child. The Doctor doesn't save the day with a well-timed punch or a zap from a ray gun, he saves it by figuring out what's going on and fixing it with kindness, compassion, and a heroic regard for human life. ("Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, everybody lives!") While Jack, for all his swift-thinking con artistry, remains about six steps behind the Doctor the entire time. ("Like I said, I was there. Once. There's a banana grove there now. I like bananas.")
And in the end, when Jack makes his noble and heroic self-sacrifice, right out of the classic sci-fi mold, there's the Doctor, materializing on his sleek timeship with his clunky old TARDIS and saving the ostensible hero--and deflating his slightly-pompous death speech to boot. The Doctor, for all his "unsexiness", is the one who knows how to dance.
The two-parter is probably now best known for introducing Captain Jack Harkness, frequent Doctor Who companion and guest star and central cast member of the spin-off, "Torchwood". Captain Jack is a ladies' man (and a man's man as well), a swift-thinking con artist, a crack shot and a debonair man about town. In general, he's exactly the kind of character you'd expect to see go from a one-off guest star to a recurring character to a series lead. But the fact that this actually happened misses a key point--Moffat was taking the piss when he came up with him.
Essentially, Captain Jack is a "Hollywoodized" version of the Doctor himself, Moffat's vision of what the character would be like if all of the quirky, eccentric edges of the character were smoothed away by slick studio executives trying to make him more "marketable". Instead of being a "Doctor", he's a "Captain". Instead of being an almost-asexual alien, he's a sexy, suave human. Instead of having a time machine that looks like an antiquated British phone booth, he's got a sleek futuristic timeship (with a "cloaking device" instead of a "chameleon circuit".) He's even got a "sonic cannon"! He's everything you'd expect a sci-fi hero to be.
He's certainly everything Rose expects a sci-fi hero to be. in the first half of the story, he "scans for alien tech", he strides around boldly zapping things with his sonic cannon, and he charms her with his debonair, Captain Kirk-esque sexuality. Next to him, Christopher Eccleston's big-eared, big-nosed Doctor, who apparently looked at his screwdriver one night and decided it needed to be a little more "sonic", looks frumpy and goofy and generally not the kind of guy who gets his own series.
But in the second half, we see what the Doctor does that Jack doesn't (and what "Doctor Who" does that other sci-fi series only make a half-hearted pretense at.) He thinks. Underneath the scares (and this one has plenty), Moffat's been carefully concealing a fact about the Monster of the Week; it has a reason for everything it does. It's not just wandering around converting people into gas-mask zombies, it's following Nancy. "Are you my Mummy?" isn't just the catch-phrase of the week, it's the desperate question of a frightened child. The Doctor doesn't save the day with a well-timed punch or a zap from a ray gun, he saves it by figuring out what's going on and fixing it with kindness, compassion, and a heroic regard for human life. ("Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, everybody lives!") While Jack, for all his swift-thinking con artistry, remains about six steps behind the Doctor the entire time. ("Like I said, I was there. Once. There's a banana grove there now. I like bananas.")
And in the end, when Jack makes his noble and heroic self-sacrifice, right out of the classic sci-fi mold, there's the Doctor, materializing on his sleek timeship with his clunky old TARDIS and saving the ostensible hero--and deflating his slightly-pompous death speech to boot. The Doctor, for all his "unsexiness", is the one who knows how to dance.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Storytelling Engines: Universal's "Mummy"
(or "Works In Theory")
The five movies that form Universal's original "Mummy" series--hang on. Let's break this down properly. There are actually three "Mummy" series from Universal, with similar but not contiguous continuity. First, there's the original film starring Boris Karloff, in which the reanimated Imhotep uses Egyptian magic to seek out his reincarnated lover, Ankh-es-en-amon, and to punish those who stand in his way. Then, there's a collection of four films ("The Mummy's Hand", "Tomb", "Ghost", and "Curse", respectively) which follow Kharis, who shares an identical backstory to Imhotep but was reanimated not by magic, but by a drug brewed by the priests of Karnak (or Arkam in the later films.) Kharis guards the tomb of Ankara, who is essentially Ankh-es-en-amon but who doesn't get reincarnated until about halfway through the series. He uses no Egyptian magic, simply physical strength and invulnerability to kill those who would defile the tombs of Egypt. Finally, there's the 1999-2008 version, which uses Imhotep and his love for Anck-su-namun, but gives him terrifying supernatural powers and turns the secret order of priests from the second franchise into his jailers, rather than his masters.
Got all that?
So, now we can talk about this properly. The first "Mummy" series that actually has a storytelling engine is the second franchise. (The Karloff film, while excellent, is entirely self-contained.) In the tradition established by Universal's other franchises, unfortunately, the studio spent less time and effort on them as the series went on. Monster movie fans, it was felt, would attend solely on the strength of the title and Lon Chaney's presence as Kharis--why work hard on a script, pay high-end actors, and establish good production values? With the exception of "Hand", these films are exercises in plodding boredom, barely even livened up by the frequent murders the slow-moving mummy commits, and the stories are lazy and disinterested.
But the storytelling engine is quite different. Egypt already has numerous tropes and a certain mystique that makes it a natural setting for a series. Then the idea of a secret order of priests that has infiltrated every level of Egyptian society, consumed with the idea of getting vengeance on a Western society that defiled their tombs and made off with their treasures--and an order that can re-animate the dead, no less? That's a rock-solid basis for at least one movie all on its own. The idea that their champion is kept alive as much by love for his long-dead Ankara as by the sacred tana leaves, and that he longs to drink enough of the heady brew to cast off the shackles of the priests' control and decide his own destiny? That's a tension that can build off of the priests of Arkam and come to a head in later stories. Then, adding to that all, we have Ankara herself, who's in a new body with a new life and who may or may not be willing to go back to the half-decomposed Kharis, and as the heroes--a two-fisted archaeologist, his street-wise Brooklyn buddy, their stage-magician business partner "The Great Solvini", and Solvini's daughter, a spunky trick-shot expert with a short fuse and a crush on the archaeologist. (The biggest mistake the series made was in getting rid of these characters in the last three movies.)
This is the engine behind the franchise, and it's a potentially great one. Arguably, Kharis would be a more compelling enemy if he could talk, and he might want to be a bit less, um...shambly...if he wants to be menacing, but those are minor changes. The point is, just because bad stories were told using this storytelling engine doesn't mean it's a bad engine.
The 1999 remake borrows liberally from all five previous films (with expert skill--the remake is almost a distillation of every good idea in the preceding movies)...but what's odd about it is that its sequels ("The Mummy Returns", "Tomb of the Dragon Emperor", two Scorpion King flicks, and a short-lived animated series) confuse the series' mythos with its storytelling engine. All of the later installments focused on Imhotep, Anck-su-namun, their ancient adversaries, the order of priests, other mummies that might happen to be in the vicinity...while the actual storytelling engine is simply, "two-fisted treasure hunter and spunky researcher seek out supernatural evils alongside her ne'er-do-well brother, all done in an 'action-comedy' tone." In the final iteration of the "Mummy" storytelling engine, the actual mummy, while brilliantly done, isn't necessary to the storytelling engine at all. Sometimes what you get on the screen isn't actually a representation of the potential of the series.
The five movies that form Universal's original "Mummy" series--hang on. Let's break this down properly. There are actually three "Mummy" series from Universal, with similar but not contiguous continuity. First, there's the original film starring Boris Karloff, in which the reanimated Imhotep uses Egyptian magic to seek out his reincarnated lover, Ankh-es-en-amon, and to punish those who stand in his way. Then, there's a collection of four films ("The Mummy's Hand", "Tomb", "Ghost", and "Curse", respectively) which follow Kharis, who shares an identical backstory to Imhotep but was reanimated not by magic, but by a drug brewed by the priests of Karnak (or Arkam in the later films.) Kharis guards the tomb of Ankara, who is essentially Ankh-es-en-amon but who doesn't get reincarnated until about halfway through the series. He uses no Egyptian magic, simply physical strength and invulnerability to kill those who would defile the tombs of Egypt. Finally, there's the 1999-2008 version, which uses Imhotep and his love for Anck-su-namun, but gives him terrifying supernatural powers and turns the secret order of priests from the second franchise into his jailers, rather than his masters.
Got all that?
So, now we can talk about this properly. The first "Mummy" series that actually has a storytelling engine is the second franchise. (The Karloff film, while excellent, is entirely self-contained.) In the tradition established by Universal's other franchises, unfortunately, the studio spent less time and effort on them as the series went on. Monster movie fans, it was felt, would attend solely on the strength of the title and Lon Chaney's presence as Kharis--why work hard on a script, pay high-end actors, and establish good production values? With the exception of "Hand", these films are exercises in plodding boredom, barely even livened up by the frequent murders the slow-moving mummy commits, and the stories are lazy and disinterested.
But the storytelling engine is quite different. Egypt already has numerous tropes and a certain mystique that makes it a natural setting for a series. Then the idea of a secret order of priests that has infiltrated every level of Egyptian society, consumed with the idea of getting vengeance on a Western society that defiled their tombs and made off with their treasures--and an order that can re-animate the dead, no less? That's a rock-solid basis for at least one movie all on its own. The idea that their champion is kept alive as much by love for his long-dead Ankara as by the sacred tana leaves, and that he longs to drink enough of the heady brew to cast off the shackles of the priests' control and decide his own destiny? That's a tension that can build off of the priests of Arkam and come to a head in later stories. Then, adding to that all, we have Ankara herself, who's in a new body with a new life and who may or may not be willing to go back to the half-decomposed Kharis, and as the heroes--a two-fisted archaeologist, his street-wise Brooklyn buddy, their stage-magician business partner "The Great Solvini", and Solvini's daughter, a spunky trick-shot expert with a short fuse and a crush on the archaeologist. (The biggest mistake the series made was in getting rid of these characters in the last three movies.)
This is the engine behind the franchise, and it's a potentially great one. Arguably, Kharis would be a more compelling enemy if he could talk, and he might want to be a bit less, um...shambly...if he wants to be menacing, but those are minor changes. The point is, just because bad stories were told using this storytelling engine doesn't mean it's a bad engine.
The 1999 remake borrows liberally from all five previous films (with expert skill--the remake is almost a distillation of every good idea in the preceding movies)...but what's odd about it is that its sequels ("The Mummy Returns", "Tomb of the Dragon Emperor", two Scorpion King flicks, and a short-lived animated series) confuse the series' mythos with its storytelling engine. All of the later installments focused on Imhotep, Anck-su-namun, their ancient adversaries, the order of priests, other mummies that might happen to be in the vicinity...while the actual storytelling engine is simply, "two-fisted treasure hunter and spunky researcher seek out supernatural evils alongside her ne'er-do-well brother, all done in an 'action-comedy' tone." In the final iteration of the "Mummy" storytelling engine, the actual mummy, while brilliantly done, isn't necessary to the storytelling engine at all. Sometimes what you get on the screen isn't actually a representation of the potential of the series.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Terrible Pun of the Day
If Gollum hadn't accidentally bitten the ring off of Frodo's finger and fallen into Mount Doom with it, isn't it entirely possible that Frodo could have conquered the whole world, simply through force of hobbit?
(I'm not sure it's entirely fair to put the humor tag on this one...)
(I'm not sure it's entirely fair to put the humor tag on this one...)
Monday, February 09, 2009
Storytelling Engines: Creature From the Black Lagoon
(or "The Perils Of A Really Good Costume")
Realistically speaking, Universal's "classic" horror/sci-fi movie "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" isn't any better or worse than the dozens of cheap B-movies churned out in the 1950s. In fact, it's awfully difficult to tell it apart from its many competitors--a bunch of scientists go exploring a distant part of the world looking to find the truth behind a mysterious legend, and have interminably long debates over the ethics of their profession while a monster lurks in the background, jumping out whenever a good scare is needed. Eventually, the monster is defeated, and the survivors return to civilization. Back in the days when big movie studios had standing sets and actors under contract, you could whip out two or three of these a week and slap 'em together as drive-in double features. (With a much better "A-movie" as the draw, which is where the term "B-movie" came from, for those of you who didn't know.)
But "Creature" has come to be regarded as a high point of the genre, whereas films like "The Deadly Mantis", "Beginning of the End", and "The Mole People" have not. More germane to this column, it's gotten two sequels ("Revenge of the Creature" and "The Creature Walks Among Us"), while "Them" and "The Thing" did not. Why?
Well, the less-important (but immediately obvious) reason is that Universal is very good at marketing. Instead of showing the films once at the drive-in and then letting them die a quiet death, they re-packaged them dozens of times over the years for revival in theaters and on TV sets. For well over thirty years, right up until the age of home video began, young monster fans thought of the Creature as part of an extended horror family that included Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Invisible Man. (In fact, Remco produced a line of exactly that in the early 1980s, adding in the Phantom of the Opera for good measure.) Nostalgia and the collective appeal of the complete Universal package helped the Creature stick in people's minds long after many of its contemporaries have faded away into the mists of time, remembered only by dedicated horror fans and watchers of "Mystery Science Theater 3000".
But the more important reason was that costume. Bud Westmore's stunning creation still holds up today as one of the best monster costumes ever, a somehow natural-looking mix of fish, lizard and amphibian that looks just as good in the close-ups as it does in the long shots. Ricou Browning's swimming skills make it look fantastic and graceful underwater (to the point where you assume that the Creature's misshapen back must hide a scuba tank under the costume, but in fact Browning was just excellent at holding his breath for the long periods necessary to get the extended takes.) And on land, Ben Chapman (aided by ten-pound weights in his boots) gives the Creature a graceless lumber that makes it really feel like a fish out of water. The mix of stellar acting, swimming, and costuming makes the Creature a spectacular monster, genuinely memorable to the point where a sequel was inevitable.
Which is a huge problem, because there's no storytelling engine there. (See? I do actually remember what these columns are about.) As I said, plot-wise, "Creature From the Black Lagoon" is just your bog-standard 50s monster movie. It's almost a cookie-cutter formula. You could do a sequel that repeats the formula ("Hey, let's go down there and see what those other scientists were talking about!") but that's not a storytelling engine. A storytelling engine is designed to give writers help in coming up with stories that aren't mere repetitions of the previous film (or book, TV episode, comic, or what have you.) A formula reduces every installment to interchangeability.
The series does try, though. "Revenge of the Creature" takes the next logical step, by having the next group of scientists succeed in bringing the Creature (which they call "the Gill Man", but I think that name is too stupid to use more than once) back to civilization. I somehow doubt that the Creature would actually be put on display at Sea World if that were to happen, and I think that John Agar's "Hey, let's see if we can teach the Creature to obey simple commands by giving it powerful electric shocks!" plan would be rejected in favor of actual science, but it is one of the few directions you can go with the story.
The third movie, "The Creature Walks Among Us", shows just how hard it is to come up with any more places to go beyond that, as this one is about scientists who capture the Creature and experiment on him to allow him to breathe air. (In order to prove some point about, you know, evolution and stuff.) Unfortunately, on land and with a radically-altered costume, the Creature loses most of his appeal and the movie peters out, focusing more on a pseudo-love triangle between a jealous scientist and a "dashing" sea captain who's after the scientist's wife.
And then nothing. It's not that the series closes off all opportunities for a sequel in the third movie; it ends with the Creature heading back to the ocean, either to drown with its air-breathing lungs, or to survive with gills that may be healed enough to be useful. The problem is, either way, there are no more stories to be told. The Creature is, fundamentally, an animal. It's not supernatural, it doesn't prey on mankind unless humans intrude on its territory, it just wants to swim and be left alone. There's really only so much you can do with a central figure like that, and the "Creature trilogy" has done it all. And arguably, it only did the last two movies because people really wanted to see more of Ricou Browning swimming around in that costume.
Realistically speaking, Universal's "classic" horror/sci-fi movie "The Creature From the Black Lagoon" isn't any better or worse than the dozens of cheap B-movies churned out in the 1950s. In fact, it's awfully difficult to tell it apart from its many competitors--a bunch of scientists go exploring a distant part of the world looking to find the truth behind a mysterious legend, and have interminably long debates over the ethics of their profession while a monster lurks in the background, jumping out whenever a good scare is needed. Eventually, the monster is defeated, and the survivors return to civilization. Back in the days when big movie studios had standing sets and actors under contract, you could whip out two or three of these a week and slap 'em together as drive-in double features. (With a much better "A-movie" as the draw, which is where the term "B-movie" came from, for those of you who didn't know.)
But "Creature" has come to be regarded as a high point of the genre, whereas films like "The Deadly Mantis", "Beginning of the End", and "The Mole People" have not. More germane to this column, it's gotten two sequels ("Revenge of the Creature" and "The Creature Walks Among Us"), while "Them" and "The Thing" did not. Why?
Well, the less-important (but immediately obvious) reason is that Universal is very good at marketing. Instead of showing the films once at the drive-in and then letting them die a quiet death, they re-packaged them dozens of times over the years for revival in theaters and on TV sets. For well over thirty years, right up until the age of home video began, young monster fans thought of the Creature as part of an extended horror family that included Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, and the Invisible Man. (In fact, Remco produced a line of exactly that in the early 1980s, adding in the Phantom of the Opera for good measure.) Nostalgia and the collective appeal of the complete Universal package helped the Creature stick in people's minds long after many of its contemporaries have faded away into the mists of time, remembered only by dedicated horror fans and watchers of "Mystery Science Theater 3000".
But the more important reason was that costume. Bud Westmore's stunning creation still holds up today as one of the best monster costumes ever, a somehow natural-looking mix of fish, lizard and amphibian that looks just as good in the close-ups as it does in the long shots. Ricou Browning's swimming skills make it look fantastic and graceful underwater (to the point where you assume that the Creature's misshapen back must hide a scuba tank under the costume, but in fact Browning was just excellent at holding his breath for the long periods necessary to get the extended takes.) And on land, Ben Chapman (aided by ten-pound weights in his boots) gives the Creature a graceless lumber that makes it really feel like a fish out of water. The mix of stellar acting, swimming, and costuming makes the Creature a spectacular monster, genuinely memorable to the point where a sequel was inevitable.
Which is a huge problem, because there's no storytelling engine there. (See? I do actually remember what these columns are about.) As I said, plot-wise, "Creature From the Black Lagoon" is just your bog-standard 50s monster movie. It's almost a cookie-cutter formula. You could do a sequel that repeats the formula ("Hey, let's go down there and see what those other scientists were talking about!") but that's not a storytelling engine. A storytelling engine is designed to give writers help in coming up with stories that aren't mere repetitions of the previous film (or book, TV episode, comic, or what have you.) A formula reduces every installment to interchangeability.
The series does try, though. "Revenge of the Creature" takes the next logical step, by having the next group of scientists succeed in bringing the Creature (which they call "the Gill Man", but I think that name is too stupid to use more than once) back to civilization. I somehow doubt that the Creature would actually be put on display at Sea World if that were to happen, and I think that John Agar's "Hey, let's see if we can teach the Creature to obey simple commands by giving it powerful electric shocks!" plan would be rejected in favor of actual science, but it is one of the few directions you can go with the story.
The third movie, "The Creature Walks Among Us", shows just how hard it is to come up with any more places to go beyond that, as this one is about scientists who capture the Creature and experiment on him to allow him to breathe air. (In order to prove some point about, you know, evolution and stuff.) Unfortunately, on land and with a radically-altered costume, the Creature loses most of his appeal and the movie peters out, focusing more on a pseudo-love triangle between a jealous scientist and a "dashing" sea captain who's after the scientist's wife.
And then nothing. It's not that the series closes off all opportunities for a sequel in the third movie; it ends with the Creature heading back to the ocean, either to drown with its air-breathing lungs, or to survive with gills that may be healed enough to be useful. The problem is, either way, there are no more stories to be told. The Creature is, fundamentally, an animal. It's not supernatural, it doesn't prey on mankind unless humans intrude on its territory, it just wants to swim and be left alone. There's really only so much you can do with a central figure like that, and the "Creature trilogy" has done it all. And arguably, it only did the last two movies because people really wanted to see more of Ricou Browning swimming around in that costume.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Insane Comics Moments, Part Five
Wonder Woman in the 60s. Really, I could probably just stop there, since the entire series was one long non-stop cavalcade of sheer wall-to-wall insanity, but let's just go ahead and narrow it down to a single issue that could probably sum up the madness that was Bob Kanigher's take on the character. Trust me, though, when I say that they were all like this.
Issue #135 (January 1963) featured Wonder Woman, her own teenaged self ("Wonder Girl") and herself as a small child of three or four ("Wonder Tot") all together with their mom on Paradise Island like siblings. No time travel necessary, here--Kanigher just labeled it an "impossible tale" and left it at that. She's hanging out with her own past selves pretty much because the readers wanted to see it. Suck it, continuity!
She picks out a letter from one of her many fans (Wonder Woman Words of Wisdom #1: "Nothing could be fairer than to select the first letter that fly alights on as the winner!") and takes that teenage girl, Carol, and her dog to visit Paradise Island as a gift. But first, she makes her a new dress out of her drapes! No, really. This actually happens in the issue. Carol's dress gets wrecked by the dog, so Wonder Woman just rips the drapes right off the window and sews them into a new dress at super-speed. Carol is thrilled to head off to Paradise Island after that, presumably because she wants to get Wonder Woman the hell out of her house before she decides to turn other parts of the furnishings into little craft projects. ("Look--I made paper dolls out of your carpet!")
Then, while passing a volcano, Carol comments that Wonder Woman's invisible plane obeys her every command "like magic!" To which WW responds, "The magic of science, Carol!" This is bitterly ironic, given that less than ten issues earlier Kanigher had explained that Wonder Woman's plane was made when a magical cloud turned a flying horse into an invisible airplane. But she goes on to explain that little computers in the plane make it obey Wonder Woman and only Wonder Woman, just like even smaller computers in the lasso do the same thing! (Those of you going, "Huh?!?!?!?" should probably take a little break from reading this. It doesn't get any better.)
Unfortunately, Carol's daytrip to Paradise is spoiled by Multiple Man--no, not that Multiple Man, the DC one. He can turn into anything, and today he's decided to become a huge ice giant and freeze Paradise Island. Luckily, Wonder Woman, Girl, Tot, and their collective mom break free of the ice, and Wonder Woman figures out that she can stop him by throwing the volcano at him.
Yes, she picks up a volcano with her lasso and throws it at him.
Let me just repeat that: She throws a volcano. (At one point, this was really just going to be the only sentence of the whole recap.)
This melts Multiple Man, but he reforms by turning himself into a giant metal ball that rolls along the ocean floor and rams the base of Paradise Island, causing earthquakes. Luckily, having numerous Wonder Females around proves handy in a crisis, and Wonder Tot saves Carol and her dog before finding the metal ball and hurling it into space. I'd point out the terrifying physical strength needed for a three-year-old to chuck a ball of solid metal some two hundred times her size all the way out of Earth's gravitational pull, but after the whole volcano throwing incident it just doesn't seem like there's much point.
Naturally, at that point Multiple Man turns into a swarm of flaming meteors and rains back down on Paradise Island (if you're expecting some explanation of Multiple Man's motives for dicking with the Amazons, brother, are you reading the wrong comic.) Wonder Girl cools the meteors down with a handy iceberg that happens to be nearby (I'd go into questions about what part of the world has volcanic islands and lone icebergs floating around in otherwise open sea, but again, "throws a volcano") while Carol flirts with Wonder Girl's boyfriend, Mer-Boy. Wonder Girl should probably remember this for the time in her life when she becomes Wonder Woman. Then again, maybe she did. Maybe that was why she decided to dress Carol up in an outfit that could blend into the wallpaper.
After defeating Multiple Man once and for all, they dress Carol up in scuba gear and take her to visit Mer-Boy as she requests (the hussy!) But they all fall afoul of Multiple Man's latest form, a giant clam with a giant pearl inside it! And by "fall afoul", I mean "all spot the pearl and decide to climb inside, all together, to get a closer look at it." Really, did this even need to be Multiple Man's latest form for it to be a bad idea? Is it ever a good idea to all try "clam-stuffing" as your next college prank? (The clear answer is "no", as going up to any college girl and explaining that you want to try "clam-stuffing" with her is bound to get you slapped.)
Luckily, Wonder Woman's lasso was dangling outside the clam, and so she commands it to wrap around the clam tight enough to crush its shell (remember how she said that her lasso obeyed her voice, an ability it has never displayed before or since? Yes, it's all coming together now...) After being freed, they...um, pretty much they only have two panels left, so there's one panel of the clam bits washing away in the current, and one panel of bringing Carol home. Why this particular tactic proved to be devastating to Multiple Man, or whether Carol ever got more chances to two-time with Wonder Girl's boyfriend, is left up to the reader. Carol tells her friends that the tale of how she wound up hanging up with Wonder Woman is, quote, "some story!"
It sure is, Bob Kanigher. It sure is.
Issue #135 (January 1963) featured Wonder Woman, her own teenaged self ("Wonder Girl") and herself as a small child of three or four ("Wonder Tot") all together with their mom on Paradise Island like siblings. No time travel necessary, here--Kanigher just labeled it an "impossible tale" and left it at that. She's hanging out with her own past selves pretty much because the readers wanted to see it. Suck it, continuity!
She picks out a letter from one of her many fans (Wonder Woman Words of Wisdom #1: "Nothing could be fairer than to select the first letter that fly alights on as the winner!") and takes that teenage girl, Carol, and her dog to visit Paradise Island as a gift. But first, she makes her a new dress out of her drapes! No, really. This actually happens in the issue. Carol's dress gets wrecked by the dog, so Wonder Woman just rips the drapes right off the window and sews them into a new dress at super-speed. Carol is thrilled to head off to Paradise Island after that, presumably because she wants to get Wonder Woman the hell out of her house before she decides to turn other parts of the furnishings into little craft projects. ("Look--I made paper dolls out of your carpet!")
Then, while passing a volcano, Carol comments that Wonder Woman's invisible plane obeys her every command "like magic!" To which WW responds, "The magic of science, Carol!" This is bitterly ironic, given that less than ten issues earlier Kanigher had explained that Wonder Woman's plane was made when a magical cloud turned a flying horse into an invisible airplane. But she goes on to explain that little computers in the plane make it obey Wonder Woman and only Wonder Woman, just like even smaller computers in the lasso do the same thing! (Those of you going, "Huh?!?!?!?" should probably take a little break from reading this. It doesn't get any better.)
Unfortunately, Carol's daytrip to Paradise is spoiled by Multiple Man--no, not that Multiple Man, the DC one. He can turn into anything, and today he's decided to become a huge ice giant and freeze Paradise Island. Luckily, Wonder Woman, Girl, Tot, and their collective mom break free of the ice, and Wonder Woman figures out that she can stop him by throwing the volcano at him.
Yes, she picks up a volcano with her lasso and throws it at him.
Let me just repeat that: She throws a volcano. (At one point, this was really just going to be the only sentence of the whole recap.)
This melts Multiple Man, but he reforms by turning himself into a giant metal ball that rolls along the ocean floor and rams the base of Paradise Island, causing earthquakes. Luckily, having numerous Wonder Females around proves handy in a crisis, and Wonder Tot saves Carol and her dog before finding the metal ball and hurling it into space. I'd point out the terrifying physical strength needed for a three-year-old to chuck a ball of solid metal some two hundred times her size all the way out of Earth's gravitational pull, but after the whole volcano throwing incident it just doesn't seem like there's much point.
Naturally, at that point Multiple Man turns into a swarm of flaming meteors and rains back down on Paradise Island (if you're expecting some explanation of Multiple Man's motives for dicking with the Amazons, brother, are you reading the wrong comic.) Wonder Girl cools the meteors down with a handy iceberg that happens to be nearby (I'd go into questions about what part of the world has volcanic islands and lone icebergs floating around in otherwise open sea, but again, "throws a volcano") while Carol flirts with Wonder Girl's boyfriend, Mer-Boy. Wonder Girl should probably remember this for the time in her life when she becomes Wonder Woman. Then again, maybe she did. Maybe that was why she decided to dress Carol up in an outfit that could blend into the wallpaper.
After defeating Multiple Man once and for all, they dress Carol up in scuba gear and take her to visit Mer-Boy as she requests (the hussy!) But they all fall afoul of Multiple Man's latest form, a giant clam with a giant pearl inside it! And by "fall afoul", I mean "all spot the pearl and decide to climb inside, all together, to get a closer look at it." Really, did this even need to be Multiple Man's latest form for it to be a bad idea? Is it ever a good idea to all try "clam-stuffing" as your next college prank? (The clear answer is "no", as going up to any college girl and explaining that you want to try "clam-stuffing" with her is bound to get you slapped.)
Luckily, Wonder Woman's lasso was dangling outside the clam, and so she commands it to wrap around the clam tight enough to crush its shell (remember how she said that her lasso obeyed her voice, an ability it has never displayed before or since? Yes, it's all coming together now...) After being freed, they...um, pretty much they only have two panels left, so there's one panel of the clam bits washing away in the current, and one panel of bringing Carol home. Why this particular tactic proved to be devastating to Multiple Man, or whether Carol ever got more chances to two-time with Wonder Girl's boyfriend, is left up to the reader. Carol tells her friends that the tale of how she wound up hanging up with Wonder Woman is, quote, "some story!"
It sure is, Bob Kanigher. It sure is.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Storytelling Engines: Universal's "Wolf Man"
(or "The Score Stands At 4-1")
If you were to look at a single common thread that ties together the storytelling engines of the Universal horror movies, it would probably be that none of them were ever intended to be continuing series. Watching the end of 'The Wolf Man', you could be forgiven for thinking that a sequel would be utterly impossible--the movie ends with Larry Talbot being bludgeoned to death with a silver-handled cane, the exact same fate he deals out to the werewolf that bit him to begin with. (It's hard to feel a whole lot for Larry, who's a bit too slimy to really be sympathetic, but the stricken look on the face of Claude Rains when he realizes that the beast he killed is his son speaks volumes.)
And yet, legendary writer Curt Siodmak was pressed into the unenviable task of turning this one-off film into a series. Oh, and would it be too much trouble to work the Frankenstein Monster (and later, Dracula) in as well? (Thankfully, he wasn't also given the task of figuring out a way to fit Abbott and Costello in there too.)
There's really only one direction you can go from the end of 'The Wolf Man', and it's to Siodmak's immeasurable credit that he doesn't shy away from it in order to placate delicate sensibilities. If your lead character died at the end of the last movie, and yet is alive at the start of this movie, well, then he has to be immortal. (The opening sequence of 'Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man', where grave robbers crack open Talbot's tomb to find his perfectly-preserved body, is a classic.) And if you're immortal, and you also happen to turn into a vicious killing machine three nights a month, well...you're going to wish you could die. For those of you who think that entertainment in the 40s was more genteel and wholesome, picture watching five movies about a guy whose fondest wish is suicide. Because the alternative is mass murder.
The problem with this as a storytelling engine is that it's a classic "false status quo". No matter whether he's wishing for death (as in 'Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man') or a cure (as in 'House of Frankenstein' or 'House of Dracula'), he's doomed to never get what he wants, because if he did there'd be no more Wolf Man to make movies about. He gets his longed-for death four times (by silver, flood, silver, and a plunge into icy waters) and a cure once (via an exotic fungus that makes his skull soft and squishy like Play-Doh so that scientists can mold it into a shape that won't squish his brain, because pressure on the brain is what turns people into werewolves...look, the later Universal movies don't make a whole lot of sense, all right?) But none of it ever takes.
This is actually pretty common in "werewolf" series, but most of them give themselves a little leeway by finding ways to make the bestial side just sympathetic enough that the transformation isn't an unalloyed curse. But again, Siodmak's uncompromising take on the werewolf mythos (while working excellently for a single story) is a little hard on a series. His Wolf Man is pure sadistic killer. All you can do with such a beast is...well, all right, you can lock him up during the full moon to keep him away from random innocent people, but Talbot's kind of a "big picture" guy, OK? He's a bit busy trying to die to worry about the little details.
Later writers (such as Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman and Roger Zelazny) have used the Talbot character in one way or another in their stories. Usually, they've adapted the character slightly to the needs of a workable storytelling engine, as well as to their own personal tastes; the post-movie Talbot seems to have grown past his need for death, and accepted his curse of occasionally-hirsute immortality as an opportunity to battle other supernatural monsters. This tiny change turns a difficult-but-workable storytelling engine into a compelling one, and it'd be very interesting to see what could be done with such an idea on the big screen once again.
Oh, come on. A high-budget open-ended series of new "Wolf Man" movies, masterminded by Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison--I can dream, can't I?
If you were to look at a single common thread that ties together the storytelling engines of the Universal horror movies, it would probably be that none of them were ever intended to be continuing series. Watching the end of 'The Wolf Man', you could be forgiven for thinking that a sequel would be utterly impossible--the movie ends with Larry Talbot being bludgeoned to death with a silver-handled cane, the exact same fate he deals out to the werewolf that bit him to begin with. (It's hard to feel a whole lot for Larry, who's a bit too slimy to really be sympathetic, but the stricken look on the face of Claude Rains when he realizes that the beast he killed is his son speaks volumes.)
And yet, legendary writer Curt Siodmak was pressed into the unenviable task of turning this one-off film into a series. Oh, and would it be too much trouble to work the Frankenstein Monster (and later, Dracula) in as well? (Thankfully, he wasn't also given the task of figuring out a way to fit Abbott and Costello in there too.)
There's really only one direction you can go from the end of 'The Wolf Man', and it's to Siodmak's immeasurable credit that he doesn't shy away from it in order to placate delicate sensibilities. If your lead character died at the end of the last movie, and yet is alive at the start of this movie, well, then he has to be immortal. (The opening sequence of 'Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man', where grave robbers crack open Talbot's tomb to find his perfectly-preserved body, is a classic.) And if you're immortal, and you also happen to turn into a vicious killing machine three nights a month, well...you're going to wish you could die. For those of you who think that entertainment in the 40s was more genteel and wholesome, picture watching five movies about a guy whose fondest wish is suicide. Because the alternative is mass murder.
The problem with this as a storytelling engine is that it's a classic "false status quo". No matter whether he's wishing for death (as in 'Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man') or a cure (as in 'House of Frankenstein' or 'House of Dracula'), he's doomed to never get what he wants, because if he did there'd be no more Wolf Man to make movies about. He gets his longed-for death four times (by silver, flood, silver, and a plunge into icy waters) and a cure once (via an exotic fungus that makes his skull soft and squishy like Play-Doh so that scientists can mold it into a shape that won't squish his brain, because pressure on the brain is what turns people into werewolves...look, the later Universal movies don't make a whole lot of sense, all right?) But none of it ever takes.
This is actually pretty common in "werewolf" series, but most of them give themselves a little leeway by finding ways to make the bestial side just sympathetic enough that the transformation isn't an unalloyed curse. But again, Siodmak's uncompromising take on the werewolf mythos (while working excellently for a single story) is a little hard on a series. His Wolf Man is pure sadistic killer. All you can do with such a beast is...well, all right, you can lock him up during the full moon to keep him away from random innocent people, but Talbot's kind of a "big picture" guy, OK? He's a bit busy trying to die to worry about the little details.
Later writers (such as Harlan Ellison, Neil Gaiman and Roger Zelazny) have used the Talbot character in one way or another in their stories. Usually, they've adapted the character slightly to the needs of a workable storytelling engine, as well as to their own personal tastes; the post-movie Talbot seems to have grown past his need for death, and accepted his curse of occasionally-hirsute immortality as an opportunity to battle other supernatural monsters. This tiny change turns a difficult-but-workable storytelling engine into a compelling one, and it'd be very interesting to see what could be done with such an idea on the big screen once again.
Oh, come on. A high-budget open-ended series of new "Wolf Man" movies, masterminded by Neil Gaiman and Harlan Ellison--I can dream, can't I?
Friday, January 30, 2009
An Open Letter To Grant Morrison
Dear Mr. Morrison,
First, let me just apologize in advance if this expression of dissatisfaction comes across as depressing and personally abusive. Rest assured, I have a great respect for you as a writer--honestly, if you'd retired after 'Animal Man', I'd have a great respect for you as a writer, on the strength of that alone, and your later work has only helped your reputation.
That said, I think you might be slightly confused as to the source of some of the ire fans hold for the recent comics that you have written, and DC has published. This isn't necessarily your fault, of course. While I love the Internet greatly, I do find that some of the people that populate it aren't the best at articulating their thoughts and feelings. (Luckily, everyone who reads my blog is intelligent, articulate, and possessed of eminent taste and discretion.) But I do flatter myself that one of my strengths as a writer is in explaining things clearly, so let me go ahead and try to do just that.
In your recent interview at Newsarama, you express a great deal of confusion over the phrase "event fatigue", wondering exactly how someone could be "fatigued" with "events". You also express some confusion and dismay at the frustration fans felt with "Batman R.I.P.", and wondered why it was that these fans were so angry. The causes are distinct, but related. I'll try to tackle them in order.
The first one is very simple. "Event fatigue" is not a mental syndrome, but a financial one. I'm aware that most DC writers are put on the "comp list", where they get copies of the company's comics every month, so it might very well have been a while since you've had to pay for a comic yourself. I'm also assuming (and certainly hoping) that DC pays you pretty well for your efforts. Between these two things, you might have forgotten just how much one has to spend to follow an "event".
Newsarama has been kind enough to break down the cost here. If you who don't feel like wading through the article, it comes out to about $135, with an extra $152 for those who bought 'Countdown to Final Crisis', which you have said was not connected to 'Final Crisis'--a fact you politely waited until approximately one week after 'Countdown' had concluded to mention. Which does, of course, mean that the people most interested in 'Final Crisis' had already spent that money before finding that fact out. They also tack on an extra thirty bucks for 'Death of the New Gods', another series that was released as being "essential to 'Final Crisis'" that actually wasn't.
Note those last two points. Stories not connected to 'Final Crisis' were being sold as "essential to 'Final Crisis'." This is also an issue with "Batman R.I.P.", which was first sold as "the end of Batman", then sold as "the end of Batman that ties into 'Final Crisis'," then finally explained as "a Batman story that came out at roughly the same time as the end of Batman which happens in 'Final Crisis', because Dan DiDio asked me if we could have these two relate to each other so I made sure they happened at roughly the same time." (If I can slightly paraphrase your statements in the interview. I hope I'm not taking too severe a liberty with them; the link is, of course, there for those who want to read your exact words.)
These two issues relate there, at the convergence of DC's marketing strategy (which I could charitably describe as "disingenuous") and the rather large financial outlay required to pick up all of the stories that DC is marketing as "essential to 'Final Crisis'." Very few fans have unlimited financial resources that we can devote to comic books. We have to pick and choose the titles that we're interested in, and fit our purchases to a budget. Event crossovers are a strain on that budget, because of the extra purchases they require--asking fans to bear that burden too often, and essentially tricking them into bearing a larger burden than needed through deceptive advertising and deceptive public statements, invites discontent which eventually becomes frustration which eventually becomes exhaustion with the medium as a whole. Hence, "event fatigue".
Now naturally, you have the right to feel as though laying this at your doorstep is unfair. You are not DC's marketing department, nor are you DC's editor-in-chief. You didn't schedule 'Final Crisis', nor did you participate in the various marketing tactics that caused people to spend large amounts of money on comics that they didn't enjoy, and found out they didn't need only after they'd spent that money. In that sense, yes, the ire directed at you is entirely misplaced.
But as noted, you weren't exactly speaking up at the time to protect your fans' financial well-being. You waited until after we'd spent our money, then explained that of course we didn't need to spend that money in order to follow your story. Who could possibly have thought otherwise? And it's hard not to feel that you're being deliberately obtuse in that regard. Surely you had to know that they were marketing a full year of build-up to your story, one that would ultimately be nothing more than a waste of time and money? Surely you had to notice, as you did interviews leading into "Batman R.I.P.", that DC was promoting it as "the end of Batman," "the last Batman story", et cetera, something that you knew it wasn't going to be and wasn't intended to be? Surely you have to understand that it's a bad idea to create expectations of a work that you know it's not going to be able to fulfill?
In short, I think that if you want less dissatisfaction from fans, you need to take a greater hand in the promotion of your work at DC. I'm aware that such a thing is probably much easier said than done, but a good share of the frustration with 'Final Crisis' comes from a feeling--probably one a lot of fans couldn't even articulate to themselves, much less to others--that the series was badly misrepresented to us, and that DC walked away with a lot of our money based on that misrepresentation. That creates mistrust, which is a very dangerous thing in an industry that relies on its customers returning every week for the rest of their lives. The last thing you want is for your readers not to trust you, and clearly 'Final Crisis' proves that the promotion of your work can't be left in the hands of the DC marketing department. While you blithely suggest in the interview that dissatisfied fans "Do something else, buy cigarettes or booze or bananas," if they don't want to buy the series, I'm sure you don't want to see readers abandon DC en masse.
I hope that this proves helpful to you. But really, I'd settle for you ever actually seeing it in the first place.
Sincerely,
John Seavey
First, let me just apologize in advance if this expression of dissatisfaction comes across as depressing and personally abusive. Rest assured, I have a great respect for you as a writer--honestly, if you'd retired after 'Animal Man', I'd have a great respect for you as a writer, on the strength of that alone, and your later work has only helped your reputation.
That said, I think you might be slightly confused as to the source of some of the ire fans hold for the recent comics that you have written, and DC has published. This isn't necessarily your fault, of course. While I love the Internet greatly, I do find that some of the people that populate it aren't the best at articulating their thoughts and feelings. (Luckily, everyone who reads my blog is intelligent, articulate, and possessed of eminent taste and discretion.) But I do flatter myself that one of my strengths as a writer is in explaining things clearly, so let me go ahead and try to do just that.
In your recent interview at Newsarama, you express a great deal of confusion over the phrase "event fatigue", wondering exactly how someone could be "fatigued" with "events". You also express some confusion and dismay at the frustration fans felt with "Batman R.I.P.", and wondered why it was that these fans were so angry. The causes are distinct, but related. I'll try to tackle them in order.
The first one is very simple. "Event fatigue" is not a mental syndrome, but a financial one. I'm aware that most DC writers are put on the "comp list", where they get copies of the company's comics every month, so it might very well have been a while since you've had to pay for a comic yourself. I'm also assuming (and certainly hoping) that DC pays you pretty well for your efforts. Between these two things, you might have forgotten just how much one has to spend to follow an "event".
Newsarama has been kind enough to break down the cost here. If you who don't feel like wading through the article, it comes out to about $135, with an extra $152 for those who bought 'Countdown to Final Crisis', which you have said was not connected to 'Final Crisis'--a fact you politely waited until approximately one week after 'Countdown' had concluded to mention. Which does, of course, mean that the people most interested in 'Final Crisis' had already spent that money before finding that fact out. They also tack on an extra thirty bucks for 'Death of the New Gods', another series that was released as being "essential to 'Final Crisis'" that actually wasn't.
Note those last two points. Stories not connected to 'Final Crisis' were being sold as "essential to 'Final Crisis'." This is also an issue with "Batman R.I.P.", which was first sold as "the end of Batman", then sold as "the end of Batman that ties into 'Final Crisis'," then finally explained as "a Batman story that came out at roughly the same time as the end of Batman which happens in 'Final Crisis', because Dan DiDio asked me if we could have these two relate to each other so I made sure they happened at roughly the same time." (If I can slightly paraphrase your statements in the interview. I hope I'm not taking too severe a liberty with them; the link is, of course, there for those who want to read your exact words.)
These two issues relate there, at the convergence of DC's marketing strategy (which I could charitably describe as "disingenuous") and the rather large financial outlay required to pick up all of the stories that DC is marketing as "essential to 'Final Crisis'." Very few fans have unlimited financial resources that we can devote to comic books. We have to pick and choose the titles that we're interested in, and fit our purchases to a budget. Event crossovers are a strain on that budget, because of the extra purchases they require--asking fans to bear that burden too often, and essentially tricking them into bearing a larger burden than needed through deceptive advertising and deceptive public statements, invites discontent which eventually becomes frustration which eventually becomes exhaustion with the medium as a whole. Hence, "event fatigue".
Now naturally, you have the right to feel as though laying this at your doorstep is unfair. You are not DC's marketing department, nor are you DC's editor-in-chief. You didn't schedule 'Final Crisis', nor did you participate in the various marketing tactics that caused people to spend large amounts of money on comics that they didn't enjoy, and found out they didn't need only after they'd spent that money. In that sense, yes, the ire directed at you is entirely misplaced.
But as noted, you weren't exactly speaking up at the time to protect your fans' financial well-being. You waited until after we'd spent our money, then explained that of course we didn't need to spend that money in order to follow your story. Who could possibly have thought otherwise? And it's hard not to feel that you're being deliberately obtuse in that regard. Surely you had to know that they were marketing a full year of build-up to your story, one that would ultimately be nothing more than a waste of time and money? Surely you had to notice, as you did interviews leading into "Batman R.I.P.", that DC was promoting it as "the end of Batman," "the last Batman story", et cetera, something that you knew it wasn't going to be and wasn't intended to be? Surely you have to understand that it's a bad idea to create expectations of a work that you know it's not going to be able to fulfill?
In short, I think that if you want less dissatisfaction from fans, you need to take a greater hand in the promotion of your work at DC. I'm aware that such a thing is probably much easier said than done, but a good share of the frustration with 'Final Crisis' comes from a feeling--probably one a lot of fans couldn't even articulate to themselves, much less to others--that the series was badly misrepresented to us, and that DC walked away with a lot of our money based on that misrepresentation. That creates mistrust, which is a very dangerous thing in an industry that relies on its customers returning every week for the rest of their lives. The last thing you want is for your readers not to trust you, and clearly 'Final Crisis' proves that the promotion of your work can't be left in the hands of the DC marketing department. While you blithely suggest in the interview that dissatisfied fans "Do something else, buy cigarettes or booze or bananas," if they don't want to buy the series, I'm sure you don't want to see readers abandon DC en masse.
I hope that this proves helpful to you. But really, I'd settle for you ever actually seeing it in the first place.
Sincerely,
John Seavey
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
The Silence of the Sublime
Sometimes, I worry that I only write reviews on this blog (and in general) when I've read something I dislike. Not that I think I'm unfair in my bad reviews--I try to give specific, concrete reasons why I dislike something, and I like to think I'm fair, even if I admit that I can be cruel.
But what I worry about is that if people read only negative reviews, they'll start to think that I'm actually a negative person. I worry that I'm coming off as a grump, a curmudgeon that doesn't like anything at all. Whereas in fact, I'm a grump and a curmudgeon who likes a lot of things. (Rimshot.) I just find it harder to talk about the things I like than the things I dislike.
Because the fact is, it's a lot easier to write a bad review than a good one. A bad review can point to specific areas where improvement is needed, giving concrete and constructive advice like, "These two characters are telling each other information that both of them already know, solely to provide exposition for the audience. That's a mistake." Or, "A car chase scene doesn't work nearly as well in a book as it does in a movie. Work to the strengths of your medium." Or, "Research is important to a believable and well-crafted book. If you're going to use intelligent zombie rats and mice in your novel, you should do some reading on actual rats and mice, so that your book doesn't wind up filled with plot holes because you don't understand just how hard it is to 'rat-proof' a building." (Um, sorry, Brian Keene, author of 'City of the Dead'. But it's all true.)
But a good story...it touches the soul. Whether comedy or tragedy, horror or romance, there's an indefinable element to the alchemy it produces in its audience. When you describe something truly brilliant, eventually all you're left with is synonyms for "good". You can say "the characterization is wonderful," you can say "the story was brilliant", you can say "the acting was amazing", but you can't ever really describe why. That brilliance exists on a level deeper than words. The sentence, "If Bruce Springsteen had ever recorded 'Born To Lurk', these two would have been on the album cover," cannot be pinned down or quantified to explain exactly why it is funny. It just is. There is a transcendent comic genius to Simon Pegg jump-kicking an old lady in the head that you cannot explain to anyone who has not seen 'Hot Fuzz' for themselves--and you'll get some odd looks if you try. The end of 'The Kindly Ones' will always bring tears to my eyes, but I can no more explain why than I can tell you why 'Slither' terrifies me.
Which is, of course, what we love about these stories. It's why we make art, to create something that transcends a mere description of its contents. But it does mean that ultimately, any good review can only say, "Go and experience this for yourself. I cannot do it justice." And you feel silly writing that every time.
But what I worry about is that if people read only negative reviews, they'll start to think that I'm actually a negative person. I worry that I'm coming off as a grump, a curmudgeon that doesn't like anything at all. Whereas in fact, I'm a grump and a curmudgeon who likes a lot of things. (Rimshot.) I just find it harder to talk about the things I like than the things I dislike.
Because the fact is, it's a lot easier to write a bad review than a good one. A bad review can point to specific areas where improvement is needed, giving concrete and constructive advice like, "These two characters are telling each other information that both of them already know, solely to provide exposition for the audience. That's a mistake." Or, "A car chase scene doesn't work nearly as well in a book as it does in a movie. Work to the strengths of your medium." Or, "Research is important to a believable and well-crafted book. If you're going to use intelligent zombie rats and mice in your novel, you should do some reading on actual rats and mice, so that your book doesn't wind up filled with plot holes because you don't understand just how hard it is to 'rat-proof' a building." (Um, sorry, Brian Keene, author of 'City of the Dead'. But it's all true.)
But a good story...it touches the soul. Whether comedy or tragedy, horror or romance, there's an indefinable element to the alchemy it produces in its audience. When you describe something truly brilliant, eventually all you're left with is synonyms for "good". You can say "the characterization is wonderful," you can say "the story was brilliant", you can say "the acting was amazing", but you can't ever really describe why. That brilliance exists on a level deeper than words. The sentence, "If Bruce Springsteen had ever recorded 'Born To Lurk', these two would have been on the album cover," cannot be pinned down or quantified to explain exactly why it is funny. It just is. There is a transcendent comic genius to Simon Pegg jump-kicking an old lady in the head that you cannot explain to anyone who has not seen 'Hot Fuzz' for themselves--and you'll get some odd looks if you try. The end of 'The Kindly Ones' will always bring tears to my eyes, but I can no more explain why than I can tell you why 'Slither' terrifies me.
Which is, of course, what we love about these stories. It's why we make art, to create something that transcends a mere description of its contents. But it does mean that ultimately, any good review can only say, "Go and experience this for yourself. I cannot do it justice." And you feel silly writing that every time.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Storytelling Engines: Universal's "Dracula"
(or "Undead Means 'Not Dead'")
When it comes to horror, Bela Lugosi's turn as the infamous Count Dracula has gone beyond simply being a classic, genre-defining role to become a pop culture touchstone. Millions (possibly even billions) of people who've never in their life seen the original 1931 film still know that vampires all talk in Hungarian accents and say things like, "Children of the night...what sweet music they make!" or "I never drink...wine." Universal didn't have to think twice to realize that they had a bona fide hit on their hands, and even in an era where horror was becoming increasingly neutered due to film censorship boards, they were thinking 'sequel'.
There's only one small problem. The movie, the stage play and the book that both were based on all end with Dracula getting a wooden stake pounded through his heart, finally ending his eternal life once and for all. Um...oops?
This is actually a problem with more storytelling engines than you might think, particularly those in the horror genre. Historically speaking, lots of people have failed to realize that they have a potential series of films on their hands, and they go for the closure of seeing the villain meet his or her grisly demise instead of disappointing audiences with a teaser ending. (Heck, it doesn't even have to be horror. The Joker was slated to be killed in only his second appearance as a Batman villain, and only a last-minute addition to the art saved his life. Anyone want to imagine Batman without the Joker?) Freddy, Jason, Michael (who seemed to survive the first movie, but bit it in the second), and the shark in "Jaws" all shared Dracula's remarkably definitive fate.
This problem--how to resurrect a very dead yet very essential character--shaped every subsequent appearance of the character. "Dracula's Daughter" tried to escape the snare by being about, well...Dracula's daughter, not the Count himself (I know, the title led you to suspect a twist.) In fact, it opens with Marya stealing and incinerating Dracula's body in order to try to escape her own curse of vampirism. Unsurprisingly, she fails. Even less surprisingly, the sequel turned out to be less popular than the original, in no small part because when people go to a movie with "Dracula" in the title, they expect to see Dracula.
"Son of Dracula" decided to skirt the issue by being ambiguous. Count Alucard could be a vampiric descendant of the original count...or he could be Dracula, concealing his true self behind a pseudonym. The movie never really decides one way or the other, and it almost feels like the screeenwriters (Curt Siodmak and Eric Taylor) were arguing about it behind the scenes. Whether imitating his famous father, or reprising his fate, Alucard nonetheless bites the dust (no pun intended.)
Which leaves the door open for the solution finally decided upon in the last two Universal films featuring Dracula, a solution later used by Hammer Films for their Dracula series, and for that matter by Freddy and Jason and all his pals. Namely, that Dracula's a resilient little cuss. "House of Frankenstein" has a scene where the evil scientist finds Dracula's corpse, stake still protruding from his chest...and wouldn't you know it? As soon as he pulls it out, phoomp! Instant Drac, just add blood. Sunlight, crosses, holy water, they all put him down but not out.
Which has also become part of the myth of Dracula. As Buffy says, "I've seen the movies. I know you come back." Dracula might have died back in 1931, but the power of imagination and our need to see him return has made him far more immortal than any vampire's bite ever could. It took Universal a little while (and several actors) to see that, but eventually they caught on to Dracula's eternal appeal.
When it comes to horror, Bela Lugosi's turn as the infamous Count Dracula has gone beyond simply being a classic, genre-defining role to become a pop culture touchstone. Millions (possibly even billions) of people who've never in their life seen the original 1931 film still know that vampires all talk in Hungarian accents and say things like, "Children of the night...what sweet music they make!" or "I never drink...wine." Universal didn't have to think twice to realize that they had a bona fide hit on their hands, and even in an era where horror was becoming increasingly neutered due to film censorship boards, they were thinking 'sequel'.
There's only one small problem. The movie, the stage play and the book that both were based on all end with Dracula getting a wooden stake pounded through his heart, finally ending his eternal life once and for all. Um...oops?
This is actually a problem with more storytelling engines than you might think, particularly those in the horror genre. Historically speaking, lots of people have failed to realize that they have a potential series of films on their hands, and they go for the closure of seeing the villain meet his or her grisly demise instead of disappointing audiences with a teaser ending. (Heck, it doesn't even have to be horror. The Joker was slated to be killed in only his second appearance as a Batman villain, and only a last-minute addition to the art saved his life. Anyone want to imagine Batman without the Joker?) Freddy, Jason, Michael (who seemed to survive the first movie, but bit it in the second), and the shark in "Jaws" all shared Dracula's remarkably definitive fate.
This problem--how to resurrect a very dead yet very essential character--shaped every subsequent appearance of the character. "Dracula's Daughter" tried to escape the snare by being about, well...Dracula's daughter, not the Count himself (I know, the title led you to suspect a twist.) In fact, it opens with Marya stealing and incinerating Dracula's body in order to try to escape her own curse of vampirism. Unsurprisingly, she fails. Even less surprisingly, the sequel turned out to be less popular than the original, in no small part because when people go to a movie with "Dracula" in the title, they expect to see Dracula.
"Son of Dracula" decided to skirt the issue by being ambiguous. Count Alucard could be a vampiric descendant of the original count...or he could be Dracula, concealing his true self behind a pseudonym. The movie never really decides one way or the other, and it almost feels like the screeenwriters (Curt Siodmak and Eric Taylor) were arguing about it behind the scenes. Whether imitating his famous father, or reprising his fate, Alucard nonetheless bites the dust (no pun intended.)
Which leaves the door open for the solution finally decided upon in the last two Universal films featuring Dracula, a solution later used by Hammer Films for their Dracula series, and for that matter by Freddy and Jason and all his pals. Namely, that Dracula's a resilient little cuss. "House of Frankenstein" has a scene where the evil scientist finds Dracula's corpse, stake still protruding from his chest...and wouldn't you know it? As soon as he pulls it out, phoomp! Instant Drac, just add blood. Sunlight, crosses, holy water, they all put him down but not out.
Which has also become part of the myth of Dracula. As Buffy says, "I've seen the movies. I know you come back." Dracula might have died back in 1931, but the power of imagination and our need to see him return has made him far more immortal than any vampire's bite ever could. It took Universal a little while (and several actors) to see that, but eventually they caught on to Dracula's eternal appeal.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Showcase Update '09
Another year begins, ripe with the promise of twenty-four brand new thick volumes of black-and-white goodness on cheap paper. That's right, it's time for another update of my wish list for DC's "Showcase Presents" line!
DC's slowed down considerably from their first year, where it seemed like every month had two brand-new series coming out. But that's only to be expected; having released collections of most of their "big guns", they're starting to get deeper into those series' original runs. Two volumes of the Flash, three of Green Lantern, four or five now of Superman...it starts to cut into the number of new series they can release. (Marvel's in the same boat.)
And looking at last year's list, it kind of shows. Of the fifteen titles I picked for my wishlist, only two (Blackhawks and Doom Patrol) were released or are slated to be released. That's not to say those were the only new series DC put out--did anyone ever expect to see a "Showcase Presents Ambush Bug"? But in terms of their score of catering to my personal wishes, they didn't do so good.
So what are my personal wishes for the coming year?
15. Kamandi. Really, this and the "New Gods" material should have been released in preparation for "Final Crisis" (and probably some "OMAC" stuff as well.) Sure, DC can point to their big, thick Kirby Omnibii and say, "Look, we're putting out our Kirby backlist to help make "Final Crisis" comprehensible," but those things aren't cheap. I'm not made of money, here, DC!
14. Tomahawk. DC's been pretty good about getting their war comics into the line, but their westerns have been far less represented; why not start here, with the frontier adventures back from when everything in the United States counted as "frontier"?
13. The Demon. Another Kirby creation (how he's not featured prominently in "Final Crisis" is downright inexplicable to me), the Demon has tons of material available for collection. Sure, his own original series only ran sixteen issues, but he's had numerous revivals, guest appearances galore--heck, they could toss in his appearances in 'Batman Adventures' if they wanted!
12. New Gods. Again, this is something that should be out already--"Final Crisis" is so dense in Fourth World mythos that it desperately needs supporting material to make it comprehensible. And yet, the only "Fourth World" collections are sixty bucks apiece and need a forklift to get them out of the comics shop. It's a travesty, I tells ya.
11. Superboy. Sometimes, it can be hard picking new series to go up here, especially for someone like me who didn't spend his childhood steeped in DC lore. (I was a total Marvel Zombie as a kid.) Luckily for me, I have a feeling this one is here to stay forever, what with the endless litigation over the rights to the character between DC and the Siegel estate. (Which I have literally no opinion over--it's strictly a business matter between the Siegels, Warner Brothers, and the court system, and with any luck it will be resolved fairly between the two parties.)
10. Sugar and Spike. I was gratified to find out that I'm not the only person who really wants to see DC's classic humor series published; none other than the legendary Chris Sims, of the Invincible Super-Blog, referred to the situation of this book not being in print as "DC hating money".
9. Plastic Man. Or maybe it could just be, "DC hates fun." Plastic Man is pretty much their only signature character who doesn't have a "Showcase Presents" volume--the entire Super Friends pantheon has one, including an actual "Super Friends" collection coming soon, but Plas is left out in the cold. (Hope he doesn't become brittle.)
8. Warlord. They're launching a new "Warlord" series soon, if memory serves me right, so that might mean we actually see this one--DC's been pretty good about marketing synergy like that (although there's always room for improvement.)
7. The Question. I've heard rumors that "The Creeper" is coming soon (all right, I did a search for "showcase presents" on Amazon and it listed it as coming soon.) Point is, if they're doing "The Creeper", can "The Question" be far behind?
6. Blue Beetle. Or for that matter, can "Blue Beetle" be far behind? (Note for non-die-hard comics fans...who I have to imagine are reading this solely out of sheer bloody-mindedness..."The Creeper", "The Question", and "Blue Beetle" were three of Steve Ditko's classic series during the time he worked for Charlton comics. Charlton was later bought out by DC, so they're DC characters now.)
5. Swamp Thing. This had so many A-list creators working on it that half the series has already been collected in color; why not give us a nice, cheap black-and-white version we can lend out, too? (I suspect the answer is, "Because that's a Vertigo series." About which I will say no more right now.)
4. Firestorm. I don't think DC realizes just how popular this volume would be--the original Ronnie Raymond Firestorm is just old enough now to catch a strong wave of nostalgia (and the fact that he was in a couple of seasons of "Super Friends" can't hurt.) The old series could segue into the new series pretty effortlessly, if they needed additional material, and increasing the character's visibility before trying another "Firestorm" relaunch couldn't hurt.
3. Hawk and Dove. It's another classic Ditko series, but more than that, the later run written by Karl and Barbara Kesel is my personal favorite series DC ever published, and it's the series that got me into DC. More than any other item on this list, this is a personal indulgence on my part, but I don't care.
2. Suicide Squad. So after canceling the "Showcase Presents Suicide Squad" volume, and telling everyone that it would be resolicited next year...DC did not, in fact, resolicit it. It's the lies that really hurt, DC. You can make it up to me by putting this collection of 80s awesomeness out this year, though.
1. MAD Magazine. People have pointed out to me that you can get a CD-ROM collection of every MAD Magazine issue, but if I've managed to get one thing across with these yearly lists, I hope it's that I still prefer old-school, hard-copy, ink-on-paper editions of these classic stories. You can't toss a CD-ROM in your bookbag and read it when you're in line at the bank, you can't grab it off the shelf on your way to the bathroom when you're just looking for something to while away a minute or two, and you certainly feel a lot worse if you drop it in the tub by accident. I'd like all of MAD, from the beginning, in a convenient and affordable format. Because I love it.
DC's slowed down considerably from their first year, where it seemed like every month had two brand-new series coming out. But that's only to be expected; having released collections of most of their "big guns", they're starting to get deeper into those series' original runs. Two volumes of the Flash, three of Green Lantern, four or five now of Superman...it starts to cut into the number of new series they can release. (Marvel's in the same boat.)
And looking at last year's list, it kind of shows. Of the fifteen titles I picked for my wishlist, only two (Blackhawks and Doom Patrol) were released or are slated to be released. That's not to say those were the only new series DC put out--did anyone ever expect to see a "Showcase Presents Ambush Bug"? But in terms of their score of catering to my personal wishes, they didn't do so good.
So what are my personal wishes for the coming year?
15. Kamandi. Really, this and the "New Gods" material should have been released in preparation for "Final Crisis" (and probably some "OMAC" stuff as well.) Sure, DC can point to their big, thick Kirby Omnibii and say, "Look, we're putting out our Kirby backlist to help make "Final Crisis" comprehensible," but those things aren't cheap. I'm not made of money, here, DC!
14. Tomahawk. DC's been pretty good about getting their war comics into the line, but their westerns have been far less represented; why not start here, with the frontier adventures back from when everything in the United States counted as "frontier"?
13. The Demon. Another Kirby creation (how he's not featured prominently in "Final Crisis" is downright inexplicable to me), the Demon has tons of material available for collection. Sure, his own original series only ran sixteen issues, but he's had numerous revivals, guest appearances galore--heck, they could toss in his appearances in 'Batman Adventures' if they wanted!
12. New Gods. Again, this is something that should be out already--"Final Crisis" is so dense in Fourth World mythos that it desperately needs supporting material to make it comprehensible. And yet, the only "Fourth World" collections are sixty bucks apiece and need a forklift to get them out of the comics shop. It's a travesty, I tells ya.
11. Superboy. Sometimes, it can be hard picking new series to go up here, especially for someone like me who didn't spend his childhood steeped in DC lore. (I was a total Marvel Zombie as a kid.) Luckily for me, I have a feeling this one is here to stay forever, what with the endless litigation over the rights to the character between DC and the Siegel estate. (Which I have literally no opinion over--it's strictly a business matter between the Siegels, Warner Brothers, and the court system, and with any luck it will be resolved fairly between the two parties.)
10. Sugar and Spike. I was gratified to find out that I'm not the only person who really wants to see DC's classic humor series published; none other than the legendary Chris Sims, of the Invincible Super-Blog, referred to the situation of this book not being in print as "DC hating money".
9. Plastic Man. Or maybe it could just be, "DC hates fun." Plastic Man is pretty much their only signature character who doesn't have a "Showcase Presents" volume--the entire Super Friends pantheon has one, including an actual "Super Friends" collection coming soon, but Plas is left out in the cold. (Hope he doesn't become brittle.)
8. Warlord. They're launching a new "Warlord" series soon, if memory serves me right, so that might mean we actually see this one--DC's been pretty good about marketing synergy like that (although there's always room for improvement.)
7. The Question. I've heard rumors that "The Creeper" is coming soon (all right, I did a search for "showcase presents" on Amazon and it listed it as coming soon.) Point is, if they're doing "The Creeper", can "The Question" be far behind?
6. Blue Beetle. Or for that matter, can "Blue Beetle" be far behind? (Note for non-die-hard comics fans...who I have to imagine are reading this solely out of sheer bloody-mindedness..."The Creeper", "The Question", and "Blue Beetle" were three of Steve Ditko's classic series during the time he worked for Charlton comics. Charlton was later bought out by DC, so they're DC characters now.)
5. Swamp Thing. This had so many A-list creators working on it that half the series has already been collected in color; why not give us a nice, cheap black-and-white version we can lend out, too? (I suspect the answer is, "Because that's a Vertigo series." About which I will say no more right now.)
4. Firestorm. I don't think DC realizes just how popular this volume would be--the original Ronnie Raymond Firestorm is just old enough now to catch a strong wave of nostalgia (and the fact that he was in a couple of seasons of "Super Friends" can't hurt.) The old series could segue into the new series pretty effortlessly, if they needed additional material, and increasing the character's visibility before trying another "Firestorm" relaunch couldn't hurt.
3. Hawk and Dove. It's another classic Ditko series, but more than that, the later run written by Karl and Barbara Kesel is my personal favorite series DC ever published, and it's the series that got me into DC. More than any other item on this list, this is a personal indulgence on my part, but I don't care.
2. Suicide Squad. So after canceling the "Showcase Presents Suicide Squad" volume, and telling everyone that it would be resolicited next year...DC did not, in fact, resolicit it. It's the lies that really hurt, DC. You can make it up to me by putting this collection of 80s awesomeness out this year, though.
1. MAD Magazine. People have pointed out to me that you can get a CD-ROM collection of every MAD Magazine issue, but if I've managed to get one thing across with these yearly lists, I hope it's that I still prefer old-school, hard-copy, ink-on-paper editions of these classic stories. You can't toss a CD-ROM in your bookbag and read it when you're in line at the bank, you can't grab it off the shelf on your way to the bathroom when you're just looking for something to while away a minute or two, and you certainly feel a lot worse if you drop it in the tub by accident. I'd like all of MAD, from the beginning, in a convenient and affordable format. Because I love it.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
TV Schedule For Tonight
Tonight, at 8 PM (7 Central), George W. Bush makes his "Farewell" address to the nation.
Following that, at 9, Barack Obama makes his "Don't Let The Door Hit You In The Ass On The Way Out" address to George W. Bush.
Following that, at 9, Barack Obama makes his "Don't Let The Door Hit You In The Ass On The Way Out" address to George W. Bush.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Storytelling Engines: The Muppet Show
(or "Failure Is Funny")
I don't think it'd be controversial to say that Jim Henson was something of a genius when it came to comedy (then again, judging by some of my previous posts, I also don't think it'd be controversial to say that I'm not good at guessing what's going to be controversial and what isn't.) He certainly spent time thinking about settings and character dynamics that would help him come up with skits for a half-hour variety show; he's famously quoted for his axiom on how to end a comedy sketch ("blow something up, have one character eat another, or start tossing animals in the air"), but he also spent a lot of time working on ways to begin one. 'The Muppet Show', his best-known series, is filled with recurring gags and repeated characters that somehow never get old, and it all comes from one of the simplest rules of comedy. Failure is funny.
Well, let's clarify that a bit. Other people's failure is funny, so long as you don't focus too sharply on the consequences of that failure. 'Requiem for a Dream', for example, is never going to be regarded as a comedy classic. But looking at the Muppets, you see a group of people united by a) their passion for entertainment and their dream of making people happy through art, and b) their lack of talent at their chosen field. The gap between their desires and their actual abilities provides fertile ground for chaos, confusion, and comic misunderstandings as events slowly (and sometimes quickly) spin out of their control.
It starts with Kermit, who's the emcee and showrunner, but who has problems controlling his temper and asserting his authority. Not only can he not keep his cool when problems hit, but when he does fly into a rage, it's endearingly cute instead of intimidating. Then we have Fozzie, who's almost the perfect emblem of the show; he's a comedian who's so unfunny it's funny. Miss Piggy is a diva who doesn't conform to the traditional feminine standards of beauty, but who acts like she does. Gonzo is an avant-garde performance artist trapped in a run-down vaudeville theater, Bunsen Honeydew's inventions don't work, Sam the Eagle continually fails at injecting moral uplift into the show, Wayne and Wanda can't ever finish a single song, Statler and Waldorf are continually disappointed in their hopes of seeing quality entertainment--really, the only characters who seem fulfilled are Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, and you still get the feeling they'd rather be doing arena rock for a bunch of counter-culture types.
This "comic disaster" mentality permeates every aspect of the show, helping to create not just sketches but entire episodes that are structured around a slowly building crisis--Carol Burnett, for example, comes on the show to do her "classic" comedy bit, the "lonely asparagus" sketch. But due to a scheduling conflict (Gonzo's running a dance marathon in the theater that week), all her efforts to get some stage time are continually frustrated until at the end, she only manages to get off one joke before time runs out and the show's over. Quite clearly, they only had one joke they could come up with in the "lonely asparagus" sketch (it's too terrible to repeat, even by my pun-happy standards), but by turning the story into the failure of the sketch, they made that one terrible joke into an entire hilarious episode.
This structure also allows Henson to come up with recurring characters and sketches that nonetheless manage to be funny every time, despite only slight variations; somehow, seeing incompetence never manages to become too formulaic, no matter how many times we see it repeated. The basic gag for the Swedish Chef is the same every time, but it's always funny to see an incomprehensible guy fail spectacularly at a simple task. In fact, the Swedish Chef is probably the perfect distillation of the entire concept of the Muppet Show (and 'The Jim Henson Hour', and 'Muppets Tonight', and all of the various movies and specials and, well, everything else Muppety.) Watch the Swedish Chef, and you'll understand Jim Henson's genius in less than two minutes. He wants to teach people how to cook, but he can neither cook nor teach. That's just always going to be a good start to a comedy bit.
I don't think it'd be controversial to say that Jim Henson was something of a genius when it came to comedy (then again, judging by some of my previous posts, I also don't think it'd be controversial to say that I'm not good at guessing what's going to be controversial and what isn't.) He certainly spent time thinking about settings and character dynamics that would help him come up with skits for a half-hour variety show; he's famously quoted for his axiom on how to end a comedy sketch ("blow something up, have one character eat another, or start tossing animals in the air"), but he also spent a lot of time working on ways to begin one. 'The Muppet Show', his best-known series, is filled with recurring gags and repeated characters that somehow never get old, and it all comes from one of the simplest rules of comedy. Failure is funny.
Well, let's clarify that a bit. Other people's failure is funny, so long as you don't focus too sharply on the consequences of that failure. 'Requiem for a Dream', for example, is never going to be regarded as a comedy classic. But looking at the Muppets, you see a group of people united by a) their passion for entertainment and their dream of making people happy through art, and b) their lack of talent at their chosen field. The gap between their desires and their actual abilities provides fertile ground for chaos, confusion, and comic misunderstandings as events slowly (and sometimes quickly) spin out of their control.
It starts with Kermit, who's the emcee and showrunner, but who has problems controlling his temper and asserting his authority. Not only can he not keep his cool when problems hit, but when he does fly into a rage, it's endearingly cute instead of intimidating. Then we have Fozzie, who's almost the perfect emblem of the show; he's a comedian who's so unfunny it's funny. Miss Piggy is a diva who doesn't conform to the traditional feminine standards of beauty, but who acts like she does. Gonzo is an avant-garde performance artist trapped in a run-down vaudeville theater, Bunsen Honeydew's inventions don't work, Sam the Eagle continually fails at injecting moral uplift into the show, Wayne and Wanda can't ever finish a single song, Statler and Waldorf are continually disappointed in their hopes of seeing quality entertainment--really, the only characters who seem fulfilled are Doctor Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, and you still get the feeling they'd rather be doing arena rock for a bunch of counter-culture types.
This "comic disaster" mentality permeates every aspect of the show, helping to create not just sketches but entire episodes that are structured around a slowly building crisis--Carol Burnett, for example, comes on the show to do her "classic" comedy bit, the "lonely asparagus" sketch. But due to a scheduling conflict (Gonzo's running a dance marathon in the theater that week), all her efforts to get some stage time are continually frustrated until at the end, she only manages to get off one joke before time runs out and the show's over. Quite clearly, they only had one joke they could come up with in the "lonely asparagus" sketch (it's too terrible to repeat, even by my pun-happy standards), but by turning the story into the failure of the sketch, they made that one terrible joke into an entire hilarious episode.
This structure also allows Henson to come up with recurring characters and sketches that nonetheless manage to be funny every time, despite only slight variations; somehow, seeing incompetence never manages to become too formulaic, no matter how many times we see it repeated. The basic gag for the Swedish Chef is the same every time, but it's always funny to see an incomprehensible guy fail spectacularly at a simple task. In fact, the Swedish Chef is probably the perfect distillation of the entire concept of the Muppet Show (and 'The Jim Henson Hour', and 'Muppets Tonight', and all of the various movies and specials and, well, everything else Muppety.) Watch the Swedish Chef, and you'll understand Jim Henson's genius in less than two minutes. He wants to teach people how to cook, but he can neither cook nor teach. That's just always going to be a good start to a comedy bit.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
ConBestiary #7
Celebrity Shade: These poor souls were once human as you or I, but their life essences were captured by television cameras a long time ago. Unlike regular celebrities, who maintain the semblance of normality by regularly renewing their contact with the film industry, these people only snagged one or two choice roles over the course of their life, and never managed to act again. Without a soul or a connection to one, they must exist in a perpetual half-life where their existence is defined by that one TV series they appeared in twenty-five years ago.
Celebrity shades can be found filling out the lower echelons of the guest list at any convention, lurking in the Walk of Fame in a desperate attempt to feed on the glimmerings of their half-remembered fame. They're too weak to be really dangerous; instead, they come off as somewhat pathetic, sitting around all by themselves with an occasional burst of happiness as someone remembers their show from when they were kids. One can only hope that they somehow manage to reclaim their soul someday, either by returning to the TV studio where it's being kept or by finally breaking it free of the seductive embrace of fame once and for all.
Celebrity shades can be found filling out the lower echelons of the guest list at any convention, lurking in the Walk of Fame in a desperate attempt to feed on the glimmerings of their half-remembered fame. They're too weak to be really dangerous; instead, they come off as somewhat pathetic, sitting around all by themselves with an occasional burst of happiness as someone remembers their show from when they were kids. One can only hope that they somehow manage to reclaim their soul someday, either by returning to the TV studio where it's being kept or by finally breaking it free of the seductive embrace of fame once and for all.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Hopefully Meaningless
I now have a Gmail account, and since it was glitching all the time when I used my old Blogger account to try to post to my Blogspot account now that Blogspot is owned by Google and Google runs Gmail and Gmail wants me to use my Gmail account to sign into Google's Blogspot...
Basically, it was all starting to seem a bit Doctor Seussy, so I added my Gmail version of me in as an author, gave him admin privileges, and then removed my old Blogspot self. If it all works right, nobody but me should ever notice any difference at all. If it doesn't, well...this post is here to tell you why some stranger is suddenly posting as me.
Basically, it was all starting to seem a bit Doctor Seussy, so I added my Gmail version of me in as an author, gave him admin privileges, and then removed my old Blogspot self. If it all works right, nobody but me should ever notice any difference at all. If it doesn't, well...this post is here to tell you why some stranger is suddenly posting as me.
The Metastory Trap
This is one of those ideas that I've been looking for a place to fit into the "Storytelling Engines" series, as that tends to be where I put my ideas on how writing a long-term, continuing series of stories. But the problem is, it's a relatively recent phenomenon, and most of the books and TV shows and movies I've been writing about don't fall into it very often in the material I'm reading/watching for the columns. (Which isn't the same as "all", and I have touched on the idea in my entries on Buffy, Angel, and Spider-Man.) So I've decided to just devote a quick post to it, which neatly saves me from having to come up with something to write about this week.
Put simply, the metastory trap comes when a long-running series of separate-but-linked stories gets more interested in its metastory than the individual stories that compose it. Put even more simply, you get caught in a metastory trap when you're more worried about your arc than you are about your individual installments. Put even more simply, you're caught in a metastory trap when you write "Countdown to Infinite Crisis". *rimshot*
This is a relatively recent phenomenon, as I said in the opening paragraph, but you can definitely see its roots in Chris Claremont's 80s X-Men comics. As the series went into the 200s and the crossover began to rise in popularity, issues would come out that would have no payoff at all in story terms other than to set up the next crossover. Claremont did a pretty good job of balancing these "arc" issues with stand-alone stories, depending on who you ask (there's still a lot of fan griping about #229-280, a long run with progressively more arc material), but you can see the problem starting to take shape--as the series grew more complex and the plots grew too large to contain in twenty-two pages, the issues became chapters in a book instead of short stories.
But really, the problem didn't explode until after 'Babylon 5' really sold TV fans and writers on the idea of having a series with an over-arching metastory. While each episode of 'Babylon 5' theoretically told a stand-alone story, fans tended to focus on (even obsess about) the moments within each episode that advanced the overall plot of the war with the Shadows. They dissected each episode, looking for clues to Stracynski's "five year plan" and how it all was going to play out...something which was not lost on the creative team, who attended enough cons to notice that people cared more about the arc plot than they did about any given story.
That's the real essence of the metastory trap--once fans start caring more about whether an episode is "important" to the Big Picture than whether or not it's good, it's hard for a writer to keep on an even keel. Reviewers (and not just fans, but professional reviewers) will start dismissing episodes as "inconsequential", and "nothing really changed by the end" becomes an insult. The demand becomes a drumbeat: Every story has to do something big and change the status quo, and big stories that change the status quo are inherently exciting and dramatic.
Once that idea gets into a writer's head (and worse, an editor/showrunner's), there's trouble ahead. Because not all changes to the metastory are good ones, and if you're in a position where you're forcing yourself to make changes to the metastory just to keep audience interest, sooner or later you're going to make a mistake. Example: Xander and Anya's wedding in Season Six of "Buffy". (Spoilers ahead, although if you haven't watched the show after seven years of chances, I don't feel too guilty about telling you now.)
At the end of the episode, Xander left Anya at the altar, and Anya responded by resuming her ways as a vengeance demon. Big, shocker ending, major metastory advancement, and a big twist...except that the writers didn't have any idea where to go with this particular plot point, it flew in the face of the character development of both characters, it left them both without anything to do in the series, and after less than half a season, they reverted Anya to human...then killed her off half a season later when it became clear that she had no role in the series anymore. The obsession with advancing the metastory led the writing team to make a decision they probably wouldn't have made if they weren't feeling that pressure to do something big and shocking.
Likewise, "Civil War" is a good example. Mark Millar said he refused to do a crossover unless it was something as earth-shaking as "Crisis On Infinite Earths". It's telling (if a bit unfair to point out) that he cited "earth-shattering" instead of "good" as his primary criterion for the story's success. It's also telling that many of the consequences of "Civil War" were retconned away or quietly ignored not long afterwards--Spider-Man's secret identity has been re-concealed, registration is rarely enforced in the stories themselves, and apart from a few vague threats to "talk", Thor's taken it remarkably well that one of his oldest friends made a murderous clone of him and unleashed it on his other friends.
DC right now is all about the metastory, both in terms of its readers and its fans. Dan DiDio has been constantly building everything to "the next Crisis", from Identity to Infinite to Final, and that doesn't even count the way that the Sinestro Corps War has built to Rage of the Red Lanterns to The Blackest Night and the way that Batman has built from RIP to Battle for the Cowl. I don't blame DiDio for this, either; when your fans are constantly showing up at conventions, demanding more metastory, more big changes, more "important" stories that "shake up the status quo", what can you really do except bring back everyone who's dead and kill off everyone who's alive every two years, just to keep things moving?
So if the fans like it and the writers like it, why is it a metastory "trap" then? The answer is simple. The existing fans are not the only audience. A series that is all about its metastory rapidly develops a complex, tangled mythos that can obscure the simple, powerful idea at its heart ("A teenage girl fights monsters in a high school that's literally hell", "Intergalactic cops have near-magical weapons to help them fight space crime", "A boy sees his parents gunned down and grows up wanting to fight crime") and turn off new readers/viewers. And given that all existing audiences are subject to attrition (and not just from death or sickness, either--who hasn't cut back their comics buying at least some due to the recession?) ...well, if you're not getting in new people, you'll eventually lose your audience as frustration sets in and the mythos grows too impenetrable for even the die-hard fans to care about. Then the whole thing collapses into a mess, lying dormant for years, even decades until someone cares enough to dust off that central concept at its heart and make it shine again.
Sort of like "Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man".
Put simply, the metastory trap comes when a long-running series of separate-but-linked stories gets more interested in its metastory than the individual stories that compose it. Put even more simply, you get caught in a metastory trap when you're more worried about your arc than you are about your individual installments. Put even more simply, you're caught in a metastory trap when you write "Countdown to Infinite Crisis". *rimshot*
This is a relatively recent phenomenon, as I said in the opening paragraph, but you can definitely see its roots in Chris Claremont's 80s X-Men comics. As the series went into the 200s and the crossover began to rise in popularity, issues would come out that would have no payoff at all in story terms other than to set up the next crossover. Claremont did a pretty good job of balancing these "arc" issues with stand-alone stories, depending on who you ask (there's still a lot of fan griping about #229-280, a long run with progressively more arc material), but you can see the problem starting to take shape--as the series grew more complex and the plots grew too large to contain in twenty-two pages, the issues became chapters in a book instead of short stories.
But really, the problem didn't explode until after 'Babylon 5' really sold TV fans and writers on the idea of having a series with an over-arching metastory. While each episode of 'Babylon 5' theoretically told a stand-alone story, fans tended to focus on (even obsess about) the moments within each episode that advanced the overall plot of the war with the Shadows. They dissected each episode, looking for clues to Stracynski's "five year plan" and how it all was going to play out...something which was not lost on the creative team, who attended enough cons to notice that people cared more about the arc plot than they did about any given story.
That's the real essence of the metastory trap--once fans start caring more about whether an episode is "important" to the Big Picture than whether or not it's good, it's hard for a writer to keep on an even keel. Reviewers (and not just fans, but professional reviewers) will start dismissing episodes as "inconsequential", and "nothing really changed by the end" becomes an insult. The demand becomes a drumbeat: Every story has to do something big and change the status quo, and big stories that change the status quo are inherently exciting and dramatic.
Once that idea gets into a writer's head (and worse, an editor/showrunner's), there's trouble ahead. Because not all changes to the metastory are good ones, and if you're in a position where you're forcing yourself to make changes to the metastory just to keep audience interest, sooner or later you're going to make a mistake. Example: Xander and Anya's wedding in Season Six of "Buffy". (Spoilers ahead, although if you haven't watched the show after seven years of chances, I don't feel too guilty about telling you now.)
At the end of the episode, Xander left Anya at the altar, and Anya responded by resuming her ways as a vengeance demon. Big, shocker ending, major metastory advancement, and a big twist...except that the writers didn't have any idea where to go with this particular plot point, it flew in the face of the character development of both characters, it left them both without anything to do in the series, and after less than half a season, they reverted Anya to human...then killed her off half a season later when it became clear that she had no role in the series anymore. The obsession with advancing the metastory led the writing team to make a decision they probably wouldn't have made if they weren't feeling that pressure to do something big and shocking.
Likewise, "Civil War" is a good example. Mark Millar said he refused to do a crossover unless it was something as earth-shaking as "Crisis On Infinite Earths". It's telling (if a bit unfair to point out) that he cited "earth-shattering" instead of "good" as his primary criterion for the story's success. It's also telling that many of the consequences of "Civil War" were retconned away or quietly ignored not long afterwards--Spider-Man's secret identity has been re-concealed, registration is rarely enforced in the stories themselves, and apart from a few vague threats to "talk", Thor's taken it remarkably well that one of his oldest friends made a murderous clone of him and unleashed it on his other friends.
DC right now is all about the metastory, both in terms of its readers and its fans. Dan DiDio has been constantly building everything to "the next Crisis", from Identity to Infinite to Final, and that doesn't even count the way that the Sinestro Corps War has built to Rage of the Red Lanterns to The Blackest Night and the way that Batman has built from RIP to Battle for the Cowl. I don't blame DiDio for this, either; when your fans are constantly showing up at conventions, demanding more metastory, more big changes, more "important" stories that "shake up the status quo", what can you really do except bring back everyone who's dead and kill off everyone who's alive every two years, just to keep things moving?
So if the fans like it and the writers like it, why is it a metastory "trap" then? The answer is simple. The existing fans are not the only audience. A series that is all about its metastory rapidly develops a complex, tangled mythos that can obscure the simple, powerful idea at its heart ("A teenage girl fights monsters in a high school that's literally hell", "Intergalactic cops have near-magical weapons to help them fight space crime", "A boy sees his parents gunned down and grows up wanting to fight crime") and turn off new readers/viewers. And given that all existing audiences are subject to attrition (and not just from death or sickness, either--who hasn't cut back their comics buying at least some due to the recession?) ...well, if you're not getting in new people, you'll eventually lose your audience as frustration sets in and the mythos grows too impenetrable for even the die-hard fans to care about. Then the whole thing collapses into a mess, lying dormant for years, even decades until someone cares enough to dust off that central concept at its heart and make it shine again.
Sort of like "Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man".
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)