Ferngully: The Last Rain Forest (1992).

I think I owe an apology to John Hughes.  Either that or someone out there sure does.  It's probably the fault of someone in the long since defunct arm of of 20th Century Fox's VHS promotions department.  Whoever is responsible for the faux pas, it's thanks to their unthinking efforts that a lot of 80s an 90s kids such as myself first grew up hearing of this film as a Coming Attractions adjunct to the otherwise unblemished awesomeness that is Home Alone.  That's how I remember first learning there was ever such as Ferngully drifting around out there.  Maybe I should back up and explain a bit.  See, back in my day, we didn't have none of this here Streaming Services and DVDS.  No sir, in my day we had nothing but good old analog equipment to go on, and somehow we managed to enjoy it.  If it explains anything, then I guess its that when it comes to entertainment, human beings are more adaptable than we think we are.  As long as its in the service of a good to fairly decent show, then we're willing to overlook any and all technical limitations past a certain point.  That's how it was for us in the X and Y generations, anyway.  

When I was still a kid it meant that sometimes anything you learned about the latest movie releases came from just two sources.  The primary one was the commercials on the family television set.  The second was the preview segments that most videotape cassettes came with from roughly the mid-80s to around 1997.  Those were the glory years of VHS, and while it was smooth sailing for the most, part, sometimes watching those old analog Coming Attraction segments could make for either some interesting to jarring tonal contrasts or combinations.  The way I first learned about the existence of Ferngully is a good case in point.

I never learned about this now somewhat notorious piece of kid's fare from a movie theater.  Instead, as I've hinted above, the way it all came about was through a simple sequence of events.  John Hughes and Christopher Columbus created Home Alone in 1990, and it became an instant pop culture touchstone.  My Mom and Dad came to me raving about it.  I was about Kevin's age back then, so at least I have a sort of excuse (however poor) for having missed out on its initial theatrical impact (okay, I'm a complete idiot, I get it!).  Then the film's first home media release comes in the form of a VHS package I'm sure most of us remember from our childhoods.  I pop the cassette into the VCR (ask your parents), the film starts, I come to understand just what everyone is talking about, and come away with a richer sense of understanding from the experience.  Just before the film began, however, I was treated to a series of promos courtesy of Fox Video.  One of them was a very ironic promo from American Airlines, which declared that they were "proud to be a partner in the video release of Home Alone."  The commercial goes on to say that "American salutes the many families that have made American Airlines something special in the air."  I guess the company must have been not too smart then as now, because if there's one thing Hughes' film doesn't do, its paint a flattering portrait of the airport industry.  You could make a whole nightmare comedy of errors scenario about the McCallisters just trying to get on the plane. 

The other commercial is a second sponsor, Pepsi Cola.  It's dated in many ways, and even teaches a bad lesson to kids if you stop and think about it.  It showcases a pair of friends going on about how you shouldn't let others judge you based on the way you dress or carry yourself, much less what kind of soft drink you enjoy.  Then a girl comes up and asks one of the kids, "You got a Pepsi for me?"  The entire point is not so much thwarted as bulldozed over and forgotten about as one of the kids who was going on about being yourself becomes a total sellout for The Pepsi Generation.  All his friend can do is observe and say, "Who knew?"  Yeah, well I for one know there is a whole world of wrong going on in a commercial which tries to peddle its product under the banner of "Just Be Yourself" in a way which turns a good idea into the worst sort of lie.  There's a hell of a cautionary tale in all of that somewhere.  However, it's the third commercial I'm here to talk about.  It also comes first in chronological order, and I think my 8 year old self knew that something was up with what I was seeing; I just didn't have the vocabulary or conceptual base of knowledge necessary to tell what seemed so strange to me back then

With the passage of time, what makes this slate of commercials so jarring to a modern audience is a combination of just how tone deaf they all are to the content and point of the movie they were meant to lead into, and that's where part of the cognitive dissonance stems from.  I mean two of them are trying to tout their products with a straight face right before a film which spends most of its runtime dismantling the cheap sloganeering of its time period.  So I guess there's an accidental sense of the joke being on the sponsors, and they don't even know it.  What made the Ferngully commercial stand out to me even back then seems to have been the nascent knowledge that I was looking at two stories that didn't have any reason to be lumped together.  One of them is just a simple animated film with strong Disney or Don Bluth overtones in its DNA.  The film its leading into, by contrast, proves to be sophisticated enough to qualify as perhaps the last great Brat Pack film in John Hughes' career.  While it's true the main protagonist is a pre-teen, it's also very clear that Kevin spends the majority of the film's runtime grappling with the same set of ideas that the Breakfast Club struggles with in their own story.  It's just that now its all being seen through the eyes of a little kid.  What's interesting about his iteration of this same setup is that he manages to not let it all drag him down to the same kind of low point like Bender and his newfound friends have to put up with,  Instead, he's more prepared by the end.  You get the sense that this kid will grow up more ready to face the challenges of adulthood.

It's pretty heavy stuff for a Holiday flick, yet it's the primary reason people still remember Home Alone fondly after all these years.  It's because it speaks to universal struggles that most of us have to deal with in coming of age, and realizing that maybe there's no such thing as a true grown up, and that we have to determine how be our truly authentic selves in a way that doesn't get bought and sold by the rat race of life.  Before all that, though, here's a brief clip of Robin Williams as a crazy fruit bat in an unknown Don Bluth knock-off!  So yeah, the cognitive dissonance was strong with this one.  Having the Ferngully commercial come on just before the movie started was enough to create this strange dichotomy in my mind.  On the one hand, it made the film I was watching out to be no different than your standard Mouse House oriented film.  On the other hand, it's clear Hughes was dealing with far more mature themes than any of the people in Fox's marketing division were aware of.  In practical terms, it means I was allowed to watch a disconnect between the studio advertisers and the artists take place in a manner that's kind of informative in a strange way.  It showcases how some people can misread a story as opposed to the more knowing intelligence of the audience.  On a further level, the whole experience was just curious enough to get me thinking about what kind of film Ferngully was in its own right.  I got a chance to answer that question for myself later on in elementary school.

It was during my pre-teen school days that I first got a chance to see the film on its own terms.  My schoolteachers would sometimes trot out a TV hooked up to a VCR to show their young charges (of which I used to be one) during any slow periods when there was a gap in their daily curriculum.  It's how I got a chance to see the movie presented in its own terms.  At the time, I remember not minding it all that much, yet it was difficult to tell just what (if any) sort of an impact it left on me.  I know it must have reminded me a bit of the kind of film's Bluth was famous for.  There were moments when it felt like it was at least trying to reach for that same vibe.  And to be fair, it kept me interested.  However I don't recall it making all that big of an impact on me.  Instead, from what I can remember, the final takeaway is probably best described as one of those middle of the road experiences.  It wasn't great, yet I suppose I was in a generous enough frame of mind to not call it bad.  And to be fair, some bits and pieces of it would emerge on occasion from my memory.  It never happened often; not to the extent of An American Tail, for instance.  That's a movie I still recall watching as child with jaw agape in an awestruck frame of mind that existed somewhere between terror and wonder.  It remains perhaps the key shaping event of my filmgoing life.  I don't recall Ferngully giving me anywhere near the same vibes.  And yet it managed to stick around in my mind, so I decided to go back and see why that is.

Quick Change (1990).

He doesn't need much in the way of an introduction at this point.  Bill Murray is one of those names who've managed to carve out a permanent shelf space in the mind of generations of fans by this point.  While it's true he's mostly remembered for his work on the Ghostbusters franchise, the good news there is that this hasn't managed to erase an awareness of the rest of his work as a bonafide comedy legend.  His story is a familiar up to a point.  Bill got his start, so far as most of us are concerned, when he was just this hungry young actor with a talent for comedy, working out of Los Angeles as part of guerilla theater group known as TVTV, when his efforts there and along with his stint working for the National Lampoon Magazine came to the attention of Lorne Michaels.  Since Murray was a Lampoon veteran by this point, having worked extensively as a performer for the Magazine's Radio Hour show, in addition to cutting his teeth as an improv comic at Chicago's Second City Theater under the mentorship of Del Close, winning a spot for himself amongst the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players was as much about genuine talent getting the eventual recognition it deserved, as it had to do with plain good timing.  It was during his time on Michaels' new variety show for NBC, Saturday Night Live, that Murray would put his talents as a comedian to good use, showcasing his now trademark gift for laconic, and laid back wit, combined with an air of confidence and swagger which has since gone on to be considered iconic by fans everywhere.

It was SNL that first showcased Murray's strengths as an artist to the world, and along with fellow Prime Timers Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi, Bill would eventually use the show as the launchpad for what has since become one of the most well-regarded and overall respectable filmographies in the history of cinema.  If there's any complaint to be made there, then it might come from the simple question of how do you categorize someone like him in comparison to peers like Jack Nicholson or Dustin Hoffman?  If I had to take a guess at where his stature lies in the mind of pop culture at the moment, then it's probably safe to assume the guy is still regarded as a legend, or as an example of what's known as comedy gold.  I've got no dispute with that.  All I'm asking myself is what kind of shelf space you would fit him on in a catalogue of names like Leo DiCaprio and Orson Welles.  I'm pretty sure he has to count as being "up there" among the company just mentioned above.  It's just that the nature of pop culture popularity is so precarious that sometimes it sounds like madness to even raise Murray's efforts as an artist up to the same level as the man who gave us Citizen Kane.  At other times, however, it's almost as if Murray is held with a higher regard than men like Welles.  I'm not sure how fair that is, yet I also wouldn't be surprised if it's happened more than once.  From what I can tell, it seems as if Murray's fames is more or less set in stone, with his fortunes and popularity on a steady, undulating tide.

Some days he's eclipsed by other big name talents out there, and then he's back at the forefront holding his own with the greats.  That seems like the best possible assessment so far as his career is concerned.  There's been an equal amount of highs and lows in his filmography, and as time has gone on, most of it seems to have found a way to balance out even enough.  At the top are efforts like the Ghostbusters franchise, with at least two of them being a timeless classic, and a decent enough follow-up.  On the shelf space beneath is where the best of the rest of stored.  It's the slot reserved for the likes of Groundhog Day, Caddyshack, and Stripes, and perhaps maybe the first Zombieland.  The shelf below this one represents his more serious and sober, yet still comedic efforts.  Here is where you find the works he's done for Wes Anderson and the Coen Brothers, such as Rushmore, The Royal Tanenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and The Fantastic Mr. Fox.  All of the films just listed seem to represent a catalogue of his most well known and best regarded efforts.  Beyond this point, everything seems to be in a state of flux.  A picture like Osmosis Jones, for instance, might have its fans, yet it's clear we're dealing with one of the lesser effort in Bill's filmography.  Somewhere in the middle of all this lies a film that stands as something of an anomaly in the actor's career.  It stands as the one film he's ever sat in the director's chair for.  It's a peculiar sort of comedy caper film, and it's known as Quick Change.

Vinyl (2016).

As far back as any of us can remember, this guys has always been associated with just two things, gangsters, and rock music.  I mean do the math here for yourself a minute.  What's the one film Martin Scorsese is most famous for?  For most of us there's just one answer, right?  It's Goodfellas.  In the end, it all comes down to Joe Pesci giving the kind of performance that carves a place for itself in the annals of Oscar nominations.  Even the die-hard fans of that film will admit it kind of stops being fun once Harry from Home Alone taken out of the equation.  That's what folks tend to remember the most.  Now ask yourself another question.  What's the second most important thing about Goodfellas, or just about any other Scorsese flick for that matter?  The correct answer answer is the soundtrack, and why shouldn't it be?  I mean here's a guy who clearly has a love for the music he grew up with, and for some reason he likes to plaster just about every picture he's ever made with what I can only describe as a kind of sonic wallpaper.  For me, to watch a Martin Scorsese movie is like getting a free education in the history of Rock and Roll and the Blues.  It's like the guy can't get enough of the stuff so he has to share it with us every time he yells "Action" on the set.  Say what you like about the punk from Little Italy, the guy knows what he likes, and remains dedicated to it.  When's the last time you ever heard of anyone doing that these days?

It's like Alex Godfrey describes it in the pages of an old article for VICE.com.  "Scorsese doesn’t just use music as a device. It isn’t an afterthought, something to merely manipulate audiences, to heighten emotions—it forms the very fabric of his films, an inseparable part of his process. Music has shaped him, and his work wouldn’t exist without it. “When I was young, popular music formed the soundtrack of my life,” he once wrote. Rock and roll would blare out of the jukeboxes and radios in the Lower East Side bars he grew up around, and he found it intoxicating. When he saw violence on the streets, there was always music coming from somewhere, seemingly orchestrating it. In the late 1950s, the teenaged Scorsese discovered the blues, becoming obsessed with Leadbelly and going to see Bo Diddley at the Brooklyn Paramount. When you listen to the blues, he wrote in the notes accompanying his 2003 documentary series on the genre, ‘you go right to the heart of what it is to be human, the condition of being human.’  

What Godfrey has to say about the director's relationship to the music scene is worth repeating at length, here, because it sort of explains why a guy like him would be willing to take on a task like the (extremely) limited-run TV series under discussion here.  Godfrey continues: "(It's) natural that as soon as (Scorsese)  started to make films, he began marrying action to music, using the bands that had inspired him. In the 1960s he was heavily into girl groups, queuing the songs into his screenplays. You couldn’t walk down the streets of Little Italy in 1963 without The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” blasting out of those bars at 3 AM, he said, which is why, when Keitel wakes from a nightmare at the beginning of Mean Streets, those “Be My Baby” drums pound as his head hits the pillow again. That whole film, in fact, said the director in the book Scorsese On Scorsese, was about “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Be My Baby.”

"By this he’s referring to not just the soundtrack, but to how music intrinsically influences his films. He listens to music while writing his screenplays, coming up with ideas and images based on what he’s hearing. His relationship with The Rolling Stones—both as fan and collaborator—has been exceptionally fruitful. He listened to them compulsively during the 1960s and ’70s: They tonally “fuelled” Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino, their songs inspiring him to transfer his own life experiences to film.

"More specifically, Scorsese designs scenes around music. Witness the perfect sorrow of the Goodfellas world falling apart as we find wiseguy corpses in cars, garbage trucks and meat freezers, and we hear the piano outro from Derek And The Dominoes’ “Layla”—Scorsese had the song playing right there on the set, choreographing the action in time. Every shot of Bringing Out the Dead, his 1999 study of a frenzied paramedic, was designed to music, while the nocturnal blues of Van Morrison’s “TB Sheets”—about a young girl dying of tuberculosi—inspired the entire feel of the film, which was both set and shot at night. 

"One of Scorsese’s most deft uses of rock music is Goodfellas‘ hedonistic cocaine sequence, a wired journey through Henry Hill’s increasingly frazzled brain which does its best to make us feel the same. It’s hard to watch it without feeling like you’re suffering a mild heart attack: the camera’s in a hurry, the cuts are quick, and the dizzying, ever-changing soundtrack makes for seizure-inducing viewing. Harry Nilsson’s “Jump into the Fire” kicks in as the first line is snorted, and the pace picks up as Henry unravels: Mick Jagger’s “Memo from Turner,” The Who’s “Magic Bus,” The Rolling Stones’ “Monkey Man,” George Harrison’s “What Is Life,” and Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” all come and go in fits and starts like a schizophrenic jukebox. Pure uncut ADHD cinema (web)".  So just in case you're one of those faces in the aisles who wonders why you're eardrums are getting blasted by Chuck Berry or Martha and the Vandellas non-stop for an hour or two every time you go to see this guy's films, there's at least the start of a much longer answer.  As you might guess, with a dedication to the Rock, Rhythm-and-Blues, along with associated styles like Punk, it's not so much out of character as it was only a matter of time before the same guy who directed Michael Jackson's Bad music video would consider turning his attention to to a project based solely around the music he grew up loving as a young fan.

That's like part one of where the whole origin of the Vinyl series begins.  The second half comes of in the form of Mick Jagger.  According to a Deadline article by Anthony D'Alessandro, "The roots of HBO‘s Vinyl goes all the way back to 1996 as a potential feature film in what was a marriage between both Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger and Oscar-winning filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s mutual appreciation of each other. For Scorsese, The Rolling Stones was the “inspiration for all the scenes in my films from Mean Streets to Raging Bull to even The Wolf of Wall Street. Even though I didn’t see the Rolling Stones perform until 1970, their songs were everything I imagined in my head,” said the Oscar-winning director (web)".  The veracity of these statements appears to be born out by the contents of another item in the Guardian from way back in the year 2000.  It's there the world first learned that "Martin Scorsese is planning to collaborate on a film script with Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger. The picture - known variously as The Long Play and Snap - will be a satirical tale of life in the music business and will be produced by Jagger's own UK-based production company, Jagged...Jagger will write The Long Play (aka Snap) with both Scorsese and experienced scriptman Rich Cohen. He admits that the film's story is heavily autobiographical. "It's a comedy," Jagger has explained "about the perils of being at the top of your game in the rock'n'roll world and the pitfalls you encounter." The ageing rocker is rumoured to be keen to woo Jude Law to play his alter-ego (web)".

Things turned out a bit different, of course, and the explanation for how what started out as a stand-alone cinematic film became a short lived TV series is given by fellow showrunner Terence Winter to the New York Times.  "Mr. Winter, an Emmy Award-winning producer of “The Sopranos” and show runner of “Boardwalk Empire,” was among the screenwriters who worked on “The Long Play.” But in 2008, he said, “The world economy dropped out, and suddenly the phone stopped ringing.” “The studio was like, ‘Eh, this is maybe not the time to do a three-hour epic period piece,’” said Mr. Winter, who also wrote “The Wolf of Wall Street” for Mr. Scorsese. Taking a page from “Boardwalk Empire,” HBO’s costly Prohibition-era gangster drama (which ran five seasons and drew about two million to three million viewers an episode), Mr. Winter reshaped the rock project as a cable-TV pilot (web)".  The final result of all this long process of development resulted in Vinyl, a late stage analog TV show focusing on a specific period in the evolution of Rock, R-&-B-Hip-Hop, and of the music world in general.  The question going into all this remain a simple one.  Just how good of a story is this thing?

Rod Serling's Nightmare at Ground Zero (1953).

Every major talent starts out small.  That's just the way things work around here.  Stories like The Iliad and Odyssey or an epic like Beowulf aren't the best demonstration of what the normal trajectory of artistic talent is like because while Homer managed at least two great works to his name, the story of Grendel and the Dragon all seem to have been complete one-offs.  We don't even have the original author's byline, or biographical details that might help tell us who the Beowulf Poet was, what his artistic temperament was like, what was his imaginative life of the mind as a creative talent, and what sort of early influences went into the shaping of how that creative gift would later be expressed for all time?  These are the questions that any half-way competent critic has to ask if they want a fuller portrait of the artist as a developing talent.  A careful and competent approach to digging up the facts of the artist and their art always tends to tell the same story: big things have small starts.  Even the mighty Charles Dickens began his career with just a handful of slice-of-life newspaper essays that showcased a series of snapshots of life on the streets of Victorian England as they happened to catch his fancy.  He'd hock these wares to whichever newspaper would take them just to find lodgings and food for the night, and his first book was a collection of these articles titled Sketches by Boz that he mostly had to help create out of his own pocket.  It was the success of this sketchbook that made other journals publish his first efforts at tackling the short story format, and these were later gathered into The Pickwick Papers, and things really took off from there.

The point is the kind of trajectory just described for Dickens is sort of the template for the way all genuine talent develops, or else fails to.  Part of the package deal that comes with this growth of the artist's mind is the occasional discovery that sometimes our favorite fantasists began not just in places, but also in the sort of modes or genres of storytelling that we might not have expected from.  It can be a surprise, for instance, to realize that someone like Gene Roddenberry really didn't emerge full grown as someone whose mind was already reaching for that fabled, Final Frontier.  Instead, when we first meet the future Great Bird of the Galaxy, he's just this retired airline pilot who's swapped his wings and flyer's license in for a badge with the LAPD, and whose speech writing for his chief get the attention of department liaisons for Jack Webb's Dragnet series, and so Gene gets his first start in TV Land with Police Procedurals, then Westerns, and even some Comedy Variety Shows, until at last he begins to construct an idea for his own Science Fiction oriented program, and at last NBC buys his pitch (web).

It's the same pattern of start out small, build up big.  The same thing happened to Rod Serling.  Just like Roddenberry, the inventor of the Fifth Dimension doesn't begin his creative life in the realm of the Fantastic, but rather the world of gritty social drama.  It's very much as Gordon Sander writes in the preface to his biography of the mind behind the Zone.  What Sander has to say here is very pertinent to the background context of Serling's early career, which is part of the focus of this review.  For that specific reason, it's worth quoting the biographer at some length here.  "A child of the 1930s, when social concerns and realist aesthetics dominated the arts, Ser- ling was an early devotee of Norman Corwin and the other angry young men who populated the airwaves during the Roosevelt era. Like Corwin, Arch Oboler, and Orson Welles, as well as Clifford Odets and the agitators of the legitimate stage of that era, Serling fervently believed that the theater of the air, like the other literary arts, in addition to being entertaining, should be both relevant and provocative. Serling saw the dramatist’s role in American society as that of an agent of change and a spark to controversy. Or, as he put it in a speech to the Library of Congress in 1968: “The writer’s role is to menace the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time." With television, Serling was able to fulfill the writer’s role as he defined it.

"And menace the public’s conscience he did, during television’s golden age, with such powerful plays as ‘“‘The Strike” and ““The Rack,” his antiwar diptych; ‘‘Patterns,”’ his no-holds-barred look at the corporate jungle; ‘“‘Requiem for a Heavyweight,” his stomach- turning take on the fight game; in both ““A Town Has Turned to Dust” and ‘Noon on Doomsday,” his plays on prejudice; and ““The Velvet Alley,” his semi-autobiographical critique of the television industry itself. And just as Corwin’s ethereal masterworks helped to legitimize radio drama as an art form, so did Serling’s taut, powerful, and wonderfully visual works, along with those of such fellow video agent provocateurs as Paddy Chayefsky, Gore Vidal, and Robert Alan Aurthur, help make TV one of the lively arts of the 1950s.

"While Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee took Broadway on an absurdist, nonrealist track, Serling and his fellow video litterateurs made the television theater of the late 1950s the real spiritual successor of both radio and the legitimate stage of twenty years before. Unfortunately, Serling’s Ibsenesque bent did not sit well with the network tastemakers. At the start of the fifties, when TV had only just begun its explosive growth, and was still an accoutrement of the educated classes, there had been room for high populist art like “Marty” and “Patterns” on the airwaves. However, the medium proliferated, and sponsors and network officials began to worry about alienating and losing their audience. As a result, this small window of creative opportunity began to close, and TV playwrights were faced with increasing censorship from timorous ad agencies and broadcasting executives.

"Serling...complained loudest. In 1961, Television Age called him the industry’s leading critic. As Andrew Sarris has written: ‘‘Television was the biggest sociological game in town, and Serling wasn’t giving it up without a fight.’’ Unfortunately, it didn’t do TV or Serling much good. By the end of the decade, with the exception of Playhouse 90, Serling’s proscenium and bully pulpit, the dramatic anthology show, had entered extinction, giving way to filmed western and detective shows. Most of Serling’s comrades had long since left television for other less censorious and more “artistic” media, but Serling refused to abandon video: he believed in television. And—unquestionably— Serling liked the limelight. Television (contrary to what another biographer has written) was not only the medium best suited to Serling’s talents, it was also the one best suited to his intense, quirky personality.

"And so Serling continued to badger and probe and moralize— and entertain—as the guiding Aesop of The Twilight Zone. As media historian Peter Kaplan recently has written, "On The Twilight Zone...the nightmare side of American life was opened up. The national soul was the subject, and its real villains were the selfish, the shallow, the rapacious. If there was a real golden age of tele- vision, its single commercial offshoot, never to die, was The Twilight Zone. It loved wit and had wonderful actors and a patina of writing that is television’s answer to the short story (xvii-xix)".  What this helpful bit of background context means is that Serling's creativity can be divided into two differing yet allied aspects.  The first is the one we're all familiar with.  It's the artist as the Twilight Man, Televisions own precursor to what we now think of as the Urban Fantasy and/or contemporary Horror narrative, with an occasional bit of Science Fiction thrown in for good measure.  The other side of this same coin is the one Sander talks about.  This is the part where Serling gets to showcase his skills as a straightforward dramatist without the usual genre centric trappings.  Instead of a beleaguered protagonist haunted by ghosts or aliens, we're instead treated to the sight of a boxer struggling with his personal life and career.

Instead of ghosts on Mars, we see a fresh made and naive young corporate executive as he gets a brutal schooling in the fact that being promoted to the upper class means spending the rest of your swimming around in a shark cage, and hoping to God you're not next on the menu.  The point of such dramas is simple and declarative.  They all count as rages against a very old machine.  The same one that tries to manage a person's life by cementing their worth as a person to second class status, and that will then crawl across hot coals just to make sure things stay that way.  In these moments, Serling resembles nothing less than an early small screen version of Martin Scorsese.  Just like with the auteur of the Mean Streets, the other side of Serling's artistry is concerned with the various mindsets that cause chaos and suffering in modern American life.  What makes Rod's explorations of these same themes stand out from Marty's is that he'll choose to lighten things up with what's best described as a form of proto-Spielbergian humanism on occasion.  Like with Taxi Driver Serling doesn't flinch away when taking a good look at the dark side of the mind of man.  Unlike Scorsese, however, Serling always left room for enchantment into the mix.  He seems to have believed that even the darkest corners can have just a little worth and light to them.

The story under discussion here today is somewhat unique in that it almost acts as a snapshot of the artist at a crucial moment of transition in his career.  It's almost like seeing Rod's mind at work as it begins switching gears from the mode of Scorsese to that of Spielberg.  When Television's Angry Young Man starts to think in terms that will one day inspire one of his fans to become the director of films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.  Both of which films carry several degrees of resonance with the kind of narratives Serling once helped to tell.  Before all that came about, however, Rod had a simple writing assignment to fulfill.  He was commissioned to write a half hour script for a TV show known as Suspense.  It was a crime drama centric show, yet it's focus also allowed a certain amount of room for the Gothic macabre.  Such is the case with an obscure Serling tale called Nightmare at Ground Zero.

Charles Dickens' To Be Read at Dusk (1852).

He would have found his way here sooner or later.  That's because he's one of the Big Names.  He belongs to that select group of writers whose fame and renown grants him the kind of status which allows us to know of him, even if we've never read so much as a single word he ever wrote.  This is the weird game that history likes to play with those lucky handful of authors whose writings were good enough to leave such an impact on their times, that they became this strange kind of pop culture juggernaut.  Time hasn't been able to erase our awareness of Charles Dickens, though it has managed to flatten our understanding of who he is, and what he did.  If he's known for anything these days, then it all comes down to just one, or maybe a handful of his efforts.  The most well known of course remains the Christmas Carol.  It's become so much a staple of the Holidays, that we've paid the author the worst sort of compliment he could have imagined.  We've taken what was meant as a social plea for the plight of the poor and the English working class, and turned it into a Hallmark Card about "keeping good cheer" at least once near the end of every year.  I have said that pop culture has a way of playing tricks on those artists who manage to stay alive in it.  I should also point out that sometimes these trick can turn a good reputation into the worst sort of cruelty.

Still, for better or worse, this bit of historical irony is what has allowed Dickens to survive in the memories of countless fans who have never heard of him from his numerous volume of books.  Beyond the Carol itself, he's perhaps remembered also as the author of books like Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and for being the creator of both David Copperfield and Oliver Twist.  That's a handsome sampling so far as pop culture memory goes.  The saving grace there is that all of the books and characters just listed do go a long way toward giving a fair overview of the writer, and a good idea of his best strengths as an artist.  Dickens has been lucky in that regard.  He may not have escaped all the vagaries and tricks that time and history likes to play on those it can bother to remember, he never gets it as bad as others.  Instead, the former street urchin who once had to earn his keep by the sheer will power of his words as a grubbing journalist now gets to take up the same shelf space as his most famous forebearer, Shakespeare, and alongside his near contemporary, Jane Austen.  They seem to have become a trio of gold standards that all the rest are compared to.  Or at least that's seems to be the effort on someone's part out there.  It might all be a construction of the Ivory Tower, yet at least these Names are being recognized in some way for the genuine strength of their talents as writers and storytellers.

At the same time, the fact remains there was always more to Dickens' reputation that just these handful of later Sketches by Boz.  He's also written plenty of other stories that no one, not even tenured academic scholars, have bothered to give much time or attention to.  Since The Scriblerus Club has a policy of shining the spotlight on the stories that fall through the cracks, it does make enough sense to try and see if the formula can be applied where you wouldn't expect it.  What happens if we take a well known writer, and then bring the audience's attention to some of his lesser known efforts?  I think it can be done, and what's interesting in this case is that it follows up on, and continues a bit of criticism from a previous post.  The last review published on this blog was about an item in Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.  The big revelation of that article was how the chilling story of "The Dream" had its origins in a very specific literary source.  It's possible to claim that the true author of that story is a Victorian Gothic writer by the name of Elizabeth Gaskell.  She's an important, yet overlooked architect in the construction of the modern Horror genre as we now know it today.  This importance extends all the way to a greater understanding of such genre tropes as the Final Girl.

It all got its start thanks to the efforts of writers like Liz Gaskell and Anne Radcliffe.  The review of "The Dream" goes into greater detail on these topics, and there has to be more worth exploring on the topic of how women constructed the Horror genre as an expression of protest and satire.  For now though, the relevant thing about that previous article is that it was mentioned in passing that one of Gaskell's friend was none other than the author of A Christmas Carol.  She remained a contributor to not just one, but two magazines owned by Dickens, Household Words, and All the Year Round.  It was a position and a friendship she would maintain to the end of her life.  In fact, as pointed out in "The Dream" review, it seems that Dickens himself might have tried his hand at bringing Liz Gaskell's untold tale of modern day Folk Horror to life in a short story of his own.  It's the content of that short story that I'd like to unpack, examine, and compare/contrast now.  It's a story that's meant "To Be Read at Dusk".

The Literary Folklore of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark: The Dream (1991).

It's difficult to know where to begin.  This is one of the major problems with those works of fiction which manage to achieve a kind of culturally monolithic status in the minds of generations of fans.  There's so much to talk about you that you don't know where to start.  That's the way it is for a lot of 80s and 90s kids when it comes to the reputation of Alvin Schwartz's collection of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.  In some ways, it's not the sort of outcome you might expect for a book series like this.  While the reputation of Schwartz's books are widespread now, what's interesting about the way the series grew it's reputation is just how quiet it all was in comparison to the way any work of print fiction catches on the pop culture zeitgeist now.  Schwartz never got to enjoy the kind of digital connectivity that later writers like Suzanne Collins were to have and benefit from.  He was one of the world's last great analog children's writers.  His texts were made and produced in an era when word of mouth was a very literal term and practice  The first book in the collection hit the shelves in the year 1981.  Computers and video games were already making waves, yet both were still so much in the crib that it's useless to talk about them with the same ubiquity they have now.  No one could share info on these weird little tomes on a message board somewhere, the way we all can now.  It really was one of the few examples of a genuine literary underground phenomenon amongst the Young Adult Reader bracket.  It all seems to have started as its own, peculiar form of urban legend.

Perhaps that's kind of fitting for a collection dedicated to the preservation of Old World Folklore, with a particular emphasis on the Macabre.  It marks the books as having a literary debut that's fitting to the way in which they were constructed, with just as much patient care in terms of scholarship, as much as the regular necessity of story craft.  What happened is that one kid somewhere in the United States would see the first volume on a bookstore shelf somewhere, or tucked away in the stacks of the local school library, and the very first thing that got their attention was the book's cover art.  Here's the part where I have to pause and give a detour for a bit.  Partly that's because I'll get flamed into oblivion if I don't.  And also it's because there's really no longer any way you can separate Schwartz's text from the illustrations of Stephen Gammell.  The first thing about that initial volume in the series that jumps right out at the viewer is the sight of a decaying human skull with bits of flesh still hanging onto it, including a set of very devious looking eyes, which peer out at the reader with an equal sense of menace and invitation.  It's a real "Step into my parlor, said the Spider to the Fly" type moment.  You can tell right away that Gammell's grotesque cover mascot is there to beckon the reader in, and also deliver one hell of a fair warning in just that one, single side-eye glance.  This book ain't here to hold you hand, folks.

That cover is letting you know that it means nothing other than dead serious business.  It's here to entertain ya, if you'll let it.  Heaven help you, however, if ever think it's there to hold your hand.  If that's what you're after then you're in the wrong place, my friend.  You'd better leave, because what's waiting for you in the pages beyond the cover is nothing less than on ongoing gallery of fresh nightmares, each of them brought to a wonderful, ghastly sort of half-life through Gammell's pen and paint brush in combination with Schwartz's stories.  In a fitting irony, it is the words of the books most virulent critic, Sandy Vanderburg that sums it up best.  In a Chicago Tribune article, Vanderburg is quoted as saying, “If these books were movies, they’d be R-rated because of the graphic violence (web)".  To which all I can say, looking back on those thoughts today is, "Ma'am, take my word for it.  I can only wish that's the kind of final product we got out of those books".  By all rights any decent adaptation should gear itself more towards the Tales From the Crypt and Creepshow crowd.  It shouldn't be concerned with catering to the Young Adults, and should instead focus on the actual mature content of the folklore that Schwartz crammed into each volume.  I'd even go so far as to argue the fact that any decent adaptation of this material would have to veer into a hard R rating is one of the strange glories of the book's success.

That's because while it might have been Schwartz's intention to cater to the Pre-Teen demographic, in order to do so, he relied on series of ancient folktales whose roots and origins are anything but child friendly.  The fact that some parents likely told such stories to actual children as far back in the Middle Ages says more about how our ideas of what is appropriate for young audiences has changed, more than it does about the content of the tales themselves.  Still, that's how it all began, with some kid somewhere deciding to be brave enough to pick that first installment off the shelf, with the skeletal head grinning at you like the Crypt-Keeper waiting for you to take a peak into a dark and twisted other world.  The kid would then come away so impressed that he'd then go out and share the text with his friends on the playground or at their after-school hangouts.  Those friends would then see what he was talking about, and come away just as frightened, and therefore delighted as that first lucky audience member.  From there, everything about the series just grew, until it's become the beloved staple of 80s and 90s childhoods that it is today.  What I don't think gets enough appreciation as it should, however, is the amount of scholarship that Schwartz placed into those updated collections of ghoulish folklore.  Hence this article's efforts.

What I'd like to do is mix things up here, not by a lot, just a little.  There may be a few elements of the regular review style in this essay, where it seems appropriate.  However the main focus will be on revealing the hidden qualities of learning that Schwartz brought to bear upon his stories.  A better and fuller understanding of this collection of ghastly tales is helped a great deal by keeping in mind that it's not just a work of fictional artistry, but also that of folklore, proper.  It means there's an extra layer of strategy at work in these books, one that perhaps offers an overlooked explanation for why they've lasted so long.  One that goes beyond the usual fan reactions of just praising Gammell's warped, yet admittedly brilliant art style.  This is a perspective that keeps in mind the pedagogical aim that Schwartz had for his collections.  He meant them to be as much as learning as a frightening, and entertaining experience.  It's what explains the most unique feature of all three books.  These have got to be the sole YA short story series I'm aware of that have actual scholarly footnotes attached at the end of each volume.  In the back of all three entries is where readers can join Schwartz as he dons his professor's cap, and tries to see how well his audience has been paying attention to the folk studies aspect of his efforts.  The dearth of commentary here isn't encouraging on that score.

It tells me that no one is taking seriously the goals Schwartz set out for himself in writing this series.  He wanted to see if it was possible to find a way to make learning about folklore fun for kids.  His big light bulb idea was to realize that at least there was a chance this could be done, provided the lesson plan was packed into the kind of entertainment that kids loved to interact with.  His genius move was in realizing just how much kids love to be spooked by a good scary story, and how well this insight jibed with the kind of tales from old times that he'd collected in his job as a folklorist.  What better way to get kids interested in all of this quaint and curious forgotten lore than by repackaging them as a book of Horror stories.  In some ways, this also means that the very cause of the books' success has also been somewhat of an undoing for the purpose it was meant to serve.  The twin strengths of Schwartz's skills as a natural storyteller combined with Gammell's Inspired sense of the nightmarish means it's always these two elements that anybody remembers nowadays about the books.  This state of things tends to hold true even for those of us who've still kept ahold of our old, battered, yet well loved childhood copies from elementary school.  That's not to say this isn't without reason, just that we're missing the full picture, here.

If you want to get a completed picture of the idea Schwartz was trying to pass on to future generations when they were young, then it helps to see what can be done by actually taking the time to interact with the scholarship that's presented at the end of each book, and see what happens.  There's at least one enterprising fan out there who's taken it upon himself to get things rolling in this direction.  I'm sure Jon Solo is, as of this writing, something of an honest-to-goodness Internet personality.  His specific area of expertise is in trying to dig down into the roots of our favorite stories, and pop cultural pastimes, and see just how far down the rabbit hole of artistic Inspiration he can go.  He does all of this with a constant, recurring interest in world folklore.  In other words, he's sort of the ideal audience member that Schwartz might have been looking for this whole time.  Not too long ago I ran across a video of Jon's that contained just enough of the best sort of information that would help a reader gain a better understanding of the scholarship that Alvin placed into his books.  What makes this particular video an ideal subject for an article examining the scholarship behind Scary Stories is because of a hint dropped in the course of his excavation into the source material Schwartz complied for the third volume entry called, "The Dream".

Cloak and Dagger (1984).

Henry Thomas will always be synonymous with Steven Spielberg's E.T.  He may have managed to find success in a host of other films, and even other genres (the most notable of which remains his work for none other than Martin Scorsese), yet the memory of pop culture often turns out to be a fickle and cruel tyrant.  There used to be a saying in Hollywood that you're only as good as your next picture.  However the passage of time seems to have proved that a more accurate maxim goes something like, "If you ever manage to make something great, then nothing else you do will ever matter".  Spielberg is sort of lucky in that regard.  The story of a lost alien child remains one of his most iconic and beloved pictures, yet it's clear he's just as well known for movies like Jaws and the Indiana Jones films, or his collaborations with Don Bluth, just as much as that archetypal image of a bicycle flying across the face of the moon.  It could be argued that even the fact that a former critical flop like Hook is starting to have its reputation re-evaluated in a positive way is a testament to the director's ability to not be limited just to any one singular bit of accomplishment.  That's got to be a sign of the best sort of talent an artist can ask for, in the grand scheme of things.  The fact remains, however, that while the filmmaker who directed him continued to flourish and thrive, Spielberg's former main child star from 1982 is still just Elliott so far as most viewers are concerned.  

Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if most of us don't even recognize him from any of his adult performances.  And I'm willing to be you anything that nobody recalls that he was ever in a kid's action adventure thriller involving spies.  It was the very next thing he did right after that trip across the Moon.  Cloak and Dagger is an interesting sort of film, in that it's one of those few times when a studio decides to update one of its old properties for whichever audience is currently packing theaters.  Back in the 1980s, with Spielberg's Sci-Fi family epic causing its own little juggernaut in pop culture, it meant creating a studio system eager to capitalize on that picture's success.  One of the most obvious ways to do that was to try and see if you could still bank on the star power of E.T's lead actor.  This seems to have been the sole motivating factor in getting Cloak off the ground.  The studios sniffed a potential goldmine waiting to be exploited for however long Spielberg's juggernaut lasted in the popular consciousness, and so they remade an old film for the specific purpose of having Thomas star in it.  The final result was the film under the microscope today.  And the real question is just how well it holds up under its own merits.