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.

Anchors Aweigh (1945).

It's known as the Golden Age of Hollywood.  It used to be one of those time periods that others used to point to as a high watermark in the history of American cinema.  It's also an open question if anyone out there, especially among the younger generations, can remember that it ever existed, even if its celluloid remains are still lying everywhere about the place, just waiting to be picked up.  For better of worse, this was the era of film history that I got exposed to as a newborn.  I was a child of the 80s.  That's an era which has begun to take on all the tropes and characteristics the used to typify how people once viewed the Classic Era of Old Tinseltown.  My childhood now seems to have attained its own level of mythic status.  To be fair, it's kind of easy to see why this is the case once you look at a lot of the films and TV shows that were on when I was just a kid.  When movies like Return of the Jedi and Back to the Future make up part of the wallpaper of your first experiences, then it's difficult not to look back with a certain sense of satisfaction and think, yeah, man!  That was my time and place.  Recognize!  The punchline in my case is that while I had the same exposure to films like this, just as any other self-respecting 80s kid, there was also this other component which gives my experience a whole different atmosphere from that of my peers.  This is all thanks to the film's my family would let me watch.

Like a lot of impressionable young 80s toddlers, I know what it was like to be blessed with an era of awesome movies, a lot of fun Saturday Morning TV Shows, and a parental household that hadn't discovered the glories of helicopter child rearing.  It means unlike a lot of you suckers today, I was basically allowed to be a free-range boy growing up.  So that means I got to enjoy works like Amadeus alongside Garfield and Friends, I shit you not.  That latter day classical drama and Mark Evanier's incarnation of Jim Davis's comic strip creation are two of the strongest memories I have from my well-spent youth.  It's just that there's such an easy cognitive dissonance to the way we live our lives today, that it wouldn't surprise me if most folks would need a hell of a lot of time before we could ever find room in our heads to fit these two diametrically opposed entities up on the same mental shelf space together.  I never seem to have had that problem, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I got exposed to both high and popular culture at the same time at a very impressionable age.  The result was a process of psychological molding where I'm able to hold the mental atmosphere's of Milos Foreman's urbane sophistication in easy balance and concord with Jim Davis's couch potato sensibilities.  This is the quirky kind of kaleidoscopic experiences I had as a child of the 1980s.

It's something I'm able to look back on with a great deal of fondness, yet the passage of time has also made me aware of just how sui generis most of it was, compared to the lives of my fellows 80s brats.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the fact that my parents and grandparents thought that it would be a good idea to see if I might like to watch the kind of films they used to grow up on back during the 40s and 50s, and even further back into the 1930s.  It's the best explanation I've got for how I managed to grow up knowing about a giant ape named King Kong, or how I one day found myself laughing my five year old ass off as I watched three guys named Larry, Moe, and Curly beat the ever-loving shit out of each other in the most comedic fashion possible.  The same thing happened yet again when I recall seeing what looked for all the world like a triad of circus clowns without the make-up tear about all over the screen as they tore apart an express train in a totally whacked-out effort to keep a locomotive engine running.  That was the first time I ever saw the Marx Brothers, as it turns out.  Not long after I learned about an old special effects wizard by the name of Ray Harryhausen, when I saw his pioneering efforts of stop motion in the film Mighty Joe Young.  It was during this same time period that I learned of a taciturn tough guy who prowled through the shadows and took on the mean streets all by himself.

That's how I found out about the career of Humphrey Bogart.  These serve as just a handful of the most familiar careers that belong to the Golden Age of Hollywood, and I was introduced to all of them as a boy.  In doing so, my parents and grand-folks more or less managed to get me acquainted with the Glory Years of American Cinema.  I seem to be one of the few 80s kids out there with as much of a solid grounding in Classic Hollywood as Nickelodeon's Double Dare, or Inspector Gadget and the TMMT franchise.  It probably never hurt my chances that Nickelodeon also specialized in the airing of nostalgic programming as part of its cable TV lineup.  This means I got my first glimpse of the artistry of Alfred Hitchcock at a young age, and Nick at Nite back then would sometimes even air the same kind of films that remain a staple of  Turner Classic Movies.  It seems, then, that I was given a rare sort of upbringing.  I appear to be one of the few 80s kids out there who was sort of allowed to grow into a fan of classic movies.  That's a category term which encompasses everything from the early days of black and white cinema up to the early years of filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, with a side interest in Silent Films thrown in for good measure.  It's through this early introduction that I was given an accidental education by my family in the the artistry of the earlier days of cinema long since past.

A good way to say it is that guys like Tom, Jerry, Bugs, and Daffy led my down a road that sooner or later led me the doorsteps of actors like Charlie Chaplin, Errol Flynn, James Cagney, and Elisha Cook Jr., or directors like Robert Wise and Jacque Tourneur.  I've even managed to familiarize myself with the like of Federico Fellini and Francois Truffaut.  All of it makes me into something of a subset of the 80s pop culture experience, one that fits the label of off the beaten path.  If this is the case, then so be it.  The old adage of, If you get to them when they're young, then they're shaped for life, is applicable to me when it comes to the Golden Age of Hollywood.  I've long since become a devotee of classic cinema.  Though it should be pointed out that none of this comes with a more than logical bit of criticism, on occasion.  There are some old films out there that are, lets say, less than progressive in their moral and social outlooks.  This is glaringly obvious in the case of how some filmmakers handled the portrayal of other races and ethnicities in their films.  The good news is that it doesn't happen as often as it could, yet when it does, the results always remain cringe as hell.  Thankfully, that's not an issue with the film I'm here to look at today.  Instead, Anchors Aweigh presents a more technical sort of cinematic conundrum.