The Twilight Zone: One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1986)

I first learned about him through Star Trek.  I don't know if it's the most common way for people to become fans of his, yet that's how it happened for me.  When it comes to speaking of a writer like Harlan Ellison, there are always going to be a number of factors in play.  The first is how it's difficult to avoid anecdote and bombast.  We're dealing here with one of those writers who liked to cultivate an air of folklore about himself.  It's not too difficult to see why he might do this, either.  In many ways, Harlan was his own best publicity agent.  All he had to do was insert himself into any public situation, act out, and then exit.  No matter what he did, he knew how to make sure his actions were always talked about.  It's a strange way to guarantee immortality for yourself, though in his case, it worked well enough when he was alive.  In the years after his passing, however, Ellison's impact on pop culture seems to show signs of being in danger of slipping away into obscurity.  There will be some inclined to say good riddance, yet I am not one of them.  There's a lot to complain about with an artist like him, yet there is also, thankfully, enough genuine talent on display to be worth celebrating, even if it does drive you up the wall, sometimes.  I said that there were always two factors at play when talking about this particular writer.  If the first amounts to a legacy of notorious self-promotion, then the second has to do with a constant, sliding scale of aesthetic and personal response that Ellison was able to dredge up from his readers and viewers.

He's the kind of author whose fame and literary reputation will always exist somewhere between the poles of Derision and Enthusiasm.  This is an important, perhaps the key point to keep in mind.  This guy likes to force his audience into a spectrum between these two results of reaction.  He didn't care to do anything else.  If he ever got less than something between censure and approbation, then he'd come away feeling like a total failure, and probably then proceed to tear a new one into his own work as the most unglorified trash ever written, something not even fit for the tabloids and men's magazines.  For those that don't know who on Earth I'm talking about, you really are going to have to trust me on this.  I am not making up a single word I've said about this guy, so far.  You can take my word further when I say things are just getting started here.  The challenge will be finding a way to keep this article from becoming a book, and the book ranging anywhere from a tirade to an ode.  This is the kind of effect Ellison was always happiest with from his audience.  If he were to read this now, I'd have to prepare myself for anything from a raging bull scream fest to the warmest sort of congratulations, with maybe even a publicity boost for a moment or two.  At least it could go that way until I said or wrote something that pissed Harlan off, then it would all be a game of mortal enemies at daggers drawn.  Again, I can't say that I'm making much of anything up here about the guy.  It's all just a matter of who he was.

When it comes to the response scale between Acclaim and Derision, I always find myself moving back and forth between the two poles in my regard for this author.  If there's any comfort to be had in this kind of situation, it's knowing that it would make Ellison proud, even if it is at your own expense.  I can't believe I just wrote that.  At the same time, I'm forced to admit that this also is the truth.  If the guy I'm talking about sounds like he fits the general description of "Quite the character"...Go home....You have no bloody idea what you're about to get into.  I feel a warning of that nature is necessary, because while Ellison could be one of the wittiest, charitable, and urbane souls when he was in a good mood, when he was in a bad one...Let's just say, there are folks out there with a million stories they can tell you about him.  I think the best introduction I can give about this facet of his life is best told in the way he seemed to like the most, through folkloric anecdote.  With that in mind, this all happened once upon a time.  I'm going all the way back here not just to another time, but also something of another world.  I'm in a used bookstore chain, and I'm at the height of my Sci Fi movie and TV show geek out phase.  This was the point in my life when I was just getting to know the ins and outs of pop culture, and would eagerly grab off the shelf and gobble up the contents of any book that would sate this very desire.

On the particular day I recall now, I was lounging my way through the upstairs Entertainment section of this second-hand booksellers shop (an institution and pastime which will forever be precious to "we happy few" who have a surreal yet devoted following to the written word) and I happen to notice this neat looking book with the title Inside Star Trek, by Herbert F. Solo and Robert H. Justman.  I already owned a copy of William Shatner's Star Trek Memories, and so I was intrigued by this book promising a lot of further backstage anecdotes of The Original Series by two of the show's executive producers.  So I decided to give it a shot, paid my fee, and took the copy home with me.  Before we get into the main topic, let me just say here, that I now regard Justman and Solo's text to be perhaps one of the key Primary sources related to Gene Roddenberry's initial star fairing brainchild.  It is here that you will find a great deal of insight into the how the entire concept of the Starfleet universe was first pitched, and the struggles Gene, Bob, and Herb all went through in just getting the pilot greenlit, and letting the show's first season both find and then be able to keep it's voice.  It really is that good of a backstage history.

However, I'm not here to talk about any of that.  My concern is with one erstwhile member of the show's rotating roster of famous (or at least once famous) part-time contributors.  Solo and Justman emphasize that Gene really wanted his concept to be seen as legit in the eyes of the Sci-Fi community.  To that end, they had the very smart idea of reaching out to the best writing talent within that then burgeoning field, and asking them if they would be willing to leave their mark on the show by submitting scripts for potential broadcast.  "Scientific fact notwithstanding", the producers write, "it was Roddenberry's intent to employ the world's most famous science-fiction writers and convert their futuristic ideas into the visual medium of dramatic television.  The "future" belonged to them, to the science-fiction magazine writers and novelists, and to the sprinkling of science-fiction screenwriters, and Gene wanted to share their excitement.  Richard Matheson was the most experienced film writer and, as such, found less of a challenge than did the others.  Several, like A.E. Van Vogt, failed in their efforts to understand this plot-and-budget constrained medium.  Van Vogt submitted a number of story idea premises that contained unusual ideas and characters.  But his premises lacked story ideas and plot twists and contained elements that were unshootable.

"Some of them - Robert Bloch, Ted Sturgeon, Richard Matheson, Jerry Sohl, Jerome Bixby, Norman Spinard, George Clayton Johnson, and science fictions incredibly angry young man, Harlan Ellison - actually wrote episodes for the show.  But to his dismay, Roddenberry soon discovered that some of the science-fiction writers had great difficulty with the transition.  While their inventiveness ran amok with wild and exciting concepts, they were often incapable of developing them into believable dramas and do-able scripts.  Unfortunately, they were both marvelous storytellers and lousy dramatists.  And unfortunately, Roddenberry had given himself yet another problem.  Most of the science-fiction writer scripts had to be heavily rewritten - and he had to do it (127-28)".  Producer Herb Solo then recalls a brief anecdote about how this process worked with scribbling fellows like Theodore Sturgeon.  If he's remembered for anything at all, now, then it would have to be for just two things.  The first is the classic line that has since become known as Sturgeon's Law.  It's the one that goes, "99 percent of everything is crap".  The other thing he might be known for is in helping Gene to pioneer the concept of the Vulcans.  He did this by coming up with the ideas in a script that became the now classic episode, Amok Time.

It was there that the character of Spock, or more precisely his background, culture, and way of life were shown for the first time.  It might not seem like much, yet for Trekkers everywhere, this was the start of one the most famous of intergalactic beings in the history of Sci-Fi.  Bear in mind, this is what it was like to work with any of these guys on a good day, when the ideas could fit the limited budget of a mid-60s TV show.  Here is how Solo sums up what it was like to work with one of the most creative minds in the field on a regular basis.  After asking Sturgeon to whittle down his original novella Killdozer to fit the regular format of an ABC Movie of the Week, he gets back a rewrite that is still too complex and expensive, so he asks Sturgeon a question.  "Teddy, listen.  You were going to concentrate on character and conflicts.  What happened?"  The reply he got was simple, "Nothing".  Solo concludes, "I quickly realized Ted's world didn't permit him to accept that flying pterodactyls were out of the realm of character conflict.  Needless to say, much judicious rewriting was needed before the film was made (128)".  Let this stand as an introduction to the crux of the later conflict that Ellison had with the show.

For what it's worth, I'm reminded of something to do with Tolkien's work and the question of adapting the Rings novel to the big screen.  I've been told the author himself always held a very healthy skepticism about such a prospect, even as he was busy shopping the rights over to whichever Silver Age Hollywood studio was the next in line to show interest that week.  For what it's worth (and I know I'm going to get flack for this), I think Tolkien was essentially correct.  I've never seen any film version that was ever able to capture the full reality of that one single book that so many of its fans still mistake for a trilogy.  For me, it all comes down to a simple case of the Imagination forever outpacing our ability to set it down in anything like a definitive adapted image.  Even just the artwork of the great Alan Lee still never comes quite as close as it should.  For whatever it's further worth, I also believe this problem applies to any possible adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune, no matter what the current fans of the films say.  If you want, it might be possible to try for something like a radio adaptation, where the question of capturing the right imagery is neatly sidestepped.  For the rest, however, we've still got the pages, and that's enough for me.  Tolkien, however, kept a level head about the whole thing.  Harlan Ellison, on the other hand, turned out to be a whole different sort of beast altogether.  Here's where the legend begins.

From all accounts, the first season of The Original Series was pretty hectic to begin with in general, and that makes a goodish amount of sense.  Part of the problem facing the cast and crew was the need and ability to see if they would even be able to conjure up an entire secondary world from nowhere but the mind of this one inspired ex-cop and airline pilot.  Considering that an agreement was made to give Trek a chance only on the condition that an entire initial run of episodes was to be in the can and ready to ship to network stations by a certain given date, it's not too difficult to imagine those first initial efforts as one big scramble against the clock and the calendar.  That's the least ideal of conditions for any production to labor under.  The last thing a setup like that needs is an intemperate teammate to act as a kind firebrand willing to gum up the works all for the sake of making a point.  So the way Gene and company brought this blight upon themselves was when he made the most brilliant mistake of his life.  He decided to reach out to Harlan to see if there were any ideas he could throw their way as they were getting the show off the ground.  Ellison claimed his original idea came after he'd just read the biography of this old school Evangelist named Aimee Semple McPherson "and thought that it would be an interesting idea to have Kirk travel back in time and fall in love with a similar woman of good intent, but someone who must die in order to preserve the future. Ellison considered that it would have a heartrending effect on Kirk (web)".  With this in mind, Harlan began to work on a script for the show.

The rest of the process of was something of a self-created nightmare for all parties concerned.  To start with, the writing process itself was something of an endurance test.  Ellison would take his sweet time in bashing out the initial idea, and when it was handed in, the routine went something like this.  What Justman and the showrunners had on their hands was the draft outlines for the making of a great Sci-Fi romance.  It was also too damned uncontrollable to work as a Trek episode.  The worst part is that once this was explained to Harlan, he sort of went into warpath mode.  The man was notorious for insisting that his original idea not be tampered with, and it put Gene and his crew in a real bind of their own.  What makes this one of the most fascinating creative clashes I've ever read about is that it's just possible to see how both sides have legitimate points to make.  It is just possible to make a cautious and careful defense of Ellison's idea that a story should not be messed with up to a certain point.  This is when the Creative Idea can be said to have achieved it's fullest possible artistic expression.  The moment when the narrative can be said to have found its own natural voice, for lack of a better word.  It's the goal that every story at least tries to work toward.  All that's required is a writer with enough skill to work as much of the fossil out of the ground as possible.  Ellison seems to have had this sort of idea in mind.

If that's the only point he's trying to make, well, then, I'll have to admit I can't really disagree at all.  Stories can be fragile things, in the wrong hands.  The trick with any good narrative is that in order to be itself, it's voice must not be interfered with.  The moment someone does that, if a character or a scenario is bent out of the wrong sort of joint, if the story is "emasculated" (to use Harlan's word) in any way, shape, or form, it loses its own particular brand of "magic"; it dies.  I have no idea how that must sound.  All I can say is that it is a core concept of the Romantic Movement, and Ellison appears to have developed a liking for it, making him something of an inheritor of this outlook.  He's not the only one who thinks of storytelling like this, by the way.  It undergirds everything I'll ever write on this blog.  So if that's the perspective he's coming from, then I'll have no choice but to say it's the correct one.  The best possible irony comes in when you turn to chapter 18 of Inside Star Trek and read the following paragraph.  "Despite their hopes, it was evident to Roddenberry and Justman that the first draft of "City" was far from being shootable.  There were more than budgetary problems with this first Ellison script.  Both men were concerned that some of the "guest" Starship officers, as written by Ellison for this episode, didn't behave in the upright manner Roddenberry expected from proper Starfleet personnel.

"And Justman had other concerns: 'Although Harlan's writing is beautiful, it is not Star Trek that he has written.  It is a lovely story for an anthology television series or a feature (279-80)".  Now tell me something.  How familiar does this complaint sound in the aftermath of shows like Picard and Discovery?  Without ever meaning to at all, Justman has more or less summed up the key problem confronting the modern incarnation of a very lopsided Sci-Fi franchise that for some reason is calling itself by the name of Star Trek.  It's not opening a can of worms, so much as triggering a chain reaction in a very old, yet still dangerous minefield.  There's been a lot of spilled ink on the problems that Gene's brainchild has had to put up with in recent years.  I think Patrick Stewart was right about one thing, in a very ironic sense.  "It wasn't Starfleet".  That's the whole point Justman made years ago.  I'll say no more about the still recent enough kerfuffle that Trek finds itself embroiled in, except to point out that this is not a lone phenomenon, but rather one besetting multiple film and TV franchises, plus the Hollywood industry at large.  This is not the place to look for solutions, though most us know that would be a big help.  Instead, I'll just say this.  No matter what problems Ellison may have had while working on Gene's series, he never once took any of it as far as it's gone now.  For proof of this, go pick up a copy of Steve King's Danse Macabre, and you'll hear yet another touching Ellison anecdote.

It features Sci-Fi's Angry Young Man going to bat for none other than the Great Bird of the Galaxy himself in the face of a bunch of uncomprehending movie producers.  Say what you will about the man (and believe me, many have, and probably continue to always do so; he liked to give even his staunchest fans plenty of ammunition to work with) he knew how to stick up for the integrity of the Creative Idea, even when it came to secondary worlds that weren't his own.  It's also in King's pages where he'll tell you one of the most obvious traits about the author under discussion here today.  The guy never met a controversy he didn't like to court.  He's put all of these ingredients of himself into a blender and out pops one of the most talented and mercurial careers in the history of the Popular Genre fiction.  Not too long ago, I had the chance to catch another of this man's works adapted to the small screen.  What's funny about it is that once the final credits had rolled around, I came away with the impression that I'd gotten to know the writer a lot better than I ever had before.  It's this sense of learning a lot of vital information about the artist that finally made me decide to write up what I found out and share it here in this article.  This is the story of One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty.

The Thing in the Forest (2002).

Sometimes the biggest challenge for a critic is getting to know a new writer.  That's kind of a misstatement, in this case, however.  For one thing, not only is the English novelist A.S. Byatt an established name in her own right, she's also one of those authors who often gets touted as a very Important Name.  Entertain conjecture of a time when it was possible to speak of something known as an Ivory Tower.  It is, or was (once upon a time) something like a catch-all term to describe the hallowed halls of academe.  To tell you the truth, I don't know what that's like.  I never got the chance to experience whatever this type of setting was supposed to be.  However, everything I've either read or heard on the subject tells of a brief span of time (possibly from an inception dating to somewhere in or about the 1920s, all the way to a quiet and unremarked upon downfall at or near the mid-60s) when this academic establishment was meant to be a summation of all the best and brightest in terms of the Arts and Sciences.  In the fields of literary study, this amounted to the creation of a kind of hierarchy of what was considered the "Best Kind" of literature, if you can believe it.  I'm not sure that this was a mindset that ever took a real hold of the general audience, yet it was a criterion of a collection of critics and college professors such as Edmund Wilson, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis.  If you don't know who I'm talking about, let that be history's verdict on guys like them.

In retrospect, it becomes easy to see just how misguided the whole idea of an Upper Echelon of the Written Word is, when you stop and think it over.  There will always be too many stories for even a single lifetime (at least I hope that's true), and beyond a general ability to say that this narrative works while the other one doesn't. it's always going to be perhaps impossible to claim any one text as the Greatest Novel Ever Written!  I think the best any of us will ever be able to do is to point to which stories are our favorites, and then see if we have it in us to defend our enthusiasms.  As long as you're not hurting anyone while doing so, then go nuts, I say.  Still, the historical record does show that there was a time when a lot forgotten critics and English Lit 101 instructors seemed to have concocted a shared mission to both define and limit whatever it was that constituted a real book.  Looking back on all that now, the one defining feature that probably still stands out the most about the thought of guys like Wilson and Harold Bloom is that most of them saw fit to dismiss the Literature of the Fantastic as beneath consideration.  This is something they took as a fundamental, axial type of mindset.  It meant there was always going to be this disconnect between what Bloom thought Literature with a capital L was supposed to be, and the actual reading and movie going habits of the public at large.  They were all working with a picture which, due to their snobbery, was always going to remain incomplete.

It meant that there was always going to be a very short list roster of Important Names that would ever be considered worthy of the Ivory Tower.  Here is where you'd find the likes of John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Williams Carlo Williams, and Henry James.  The upshot of all this academic hoarding was that it now looks like this close guarding and proselytizing means that there were a lot of good literary talents that had their chances at fame squandered by a bunch of opinion makers who were more concerned with being the In-Crowd, rather than alerting readers to the merits of the artist.  It's a categorical shirking of the critic's proper job, and perhaps that's the most telling verdict of the efforts of Bloom, Leavis, and the artistic outlook they once represented.  The funny part is that they claimed to set their sights forever against the Popular Genres, while also allowing in a handful of scribblers who just so happened to give Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction their modern identities.  Hence the Tower could admit the presence of Fantasists like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, John Milton, Dante, Homer, and or course, Shakespeare and Charles Dickens.  The idea that any of these guys might have considered themselves popular authors writing to entertain the popular masses never seems to have occurred to Bloom, or a lot of the former chalk dusted gate keepers of the Tower who preceded him.

A.S. Byatt was one of the few women authors who were allowed to have a seat this once so vaunted table.  Looking at the works that bear her name, it's kind of easy to see why they would be willing to let her past the gate (even if she was just a girl).  Not that sexism ever had anything to do with it, heavens no.  After all, didn't Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters have their own spot in the Tower (they'd helpfully point out, all while ignoring the emergence of new talents like Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, Angela Carter, and Toni Morrison).  The Tower cares nothing for the gender of a writer, of course it doesn't.  All that matters is that you write what we deem our kind of story.  I guess the subgenre of Slice of Life social dramas of the kind pioneered by the likes of Updike and Arthur Miller in the 40s and 60s was considered the "right kind" of literature for them.  Let's just ignore the presence of a Gothic bodice ripper like The Witches of Eastwick, or the haunted presentation of the Salem Witch Trials in The Crucible.  A bit of dystopian Fantasy such as Toward the End of Time, meanwhile can always be written away as a one-off.  Let's just bury these facts under a tailor-made identity that we've constructed for all of these ink-stained wretches, one that is meant to occlude their otherwise obvious liking for, and considerable skill in both the Popular and Dramatic forms of art and storytelling.

Looking back on her career now, it makes the most sense to claim that a combination of luck and timing was one Byatt's side.  When she was allowed entrance to the Tower, her two biggest works at the time (Shadow of a Sun, and The Virgin in the Garden) could both be said to have fit the mold the gatekeepers were looking for.  Both works just mentioned almost deserve to be described as a pair of roman a clef as more than anything else, and so it's it's not too difficult to see why the Ivy Covered Citadel might have thought her to be a worth addition to their trophy collection Library.  As time went on, Byatt proved herself to be one of those literary types who also possessed a deft skill at handling the settings and characterizations from the worlds of Myth.  This appears to have always been something of a latent ability with Byatt, though I think it's telling that she never brought this aspect of her skills as far out to the fore until sometime starting in the early 90s, when it was clear that the heydays of the Tower had begun their long recede into the current level of cultural obscurity that it continues to enjoy today.  It was with novels like Possession, The Children's Book, and in particular short story collections like The Djinn and the Nightingale's Eye that the writer began to show the extent her true literary colors.

The curious thing about all this lies in the way she almost had to allow, or learn to grant herself permission to shrug off the demands of the Ivory Tower, and learn how the realm of Myth might be a safe haven for her own true voice.  It's curious because there's the sense of the author learning how to work her way toward an understanding of the proper expression of the Fantastic that she was able to call herself comfortable with.  It's this idea of struggling to know how to be at ease in the world of once upon a time that is the most striking and permanent feature of just about every word that Byatt wrote.  It starts out as a muted background note in early novels like The Game, until it becomes the over-arching theme in Ragnarök which was her last published work.  It's this notion of finding out if you can ever be at ease with the Fairy Tale that is the hallmark not just of Byatt's novels, but also of the semi short story that's placed under the microscope here today.  This is the modern myth of The Thing in the Forest.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022).

There's an element of the Sonic franchise that began to puzzle me after a while.  I couldn't for the life of me figure out where all those video games were set.  It's not something I ever lost sleep over, or anything.  It was always just one of those vague, free-floating curiosities that cropped into my mind on occasion.  As I think back on my interactions with the Blue Blur, however (infrequent as it might have been), I began to realize a kind of irony taking shape.  It always seemed (to me, at least) that the more artists tried to expand upon the mythos of the games, the greater a sense of complexity began to evolve, at least in terms of the story's setting.  The more I thought it over, it soon became clear of just what kind of stage setting the world's most famous video game speedster belongs to.  Right about now is when a lot of readers are thinking, "How can you not know any of this?  Haven't you been paying attention"?  Well, time for a bit of a re-confession.  I said just a second or two ago that my interactions with the Sonic franchise was infrequent, and I mean every cent of that word.  I've never been what you might call a die-hard gamer.  The last major period in which my attention was focused on platform console entertainment was way back somewhere from 1991 or abouts to, say 94 to 5.  Somewhere along that timeline, my interest in either Sega or Nintendo just began to taper off, and I've never really been back to revisit either ever since.

That's not just a long time ago, it's practically a whole other world, another life.  It also does a good job of establishing my non-gamer credentials.  My understanding of the major franchises came to an end with Sonic and Mario.  There was a brief moment when I was kind of interested in the original Resident Evil 2, yet that went just as quickly as it arrived.  Let that stand as a testament to my lack of place in the Gaming world.  It's a fandom I've never really belonged to, in the end.  I've always been more of an outsider gazing in every now and then.  In fact, now that I think about it, the last time I ever bothered with the world's greatest chili dog fanatic was not with any of the games.  It was with the two kid's TV shows.  I'm talking, of course, about Adventures and Sonic SatAM.  For better, worse, a reversal of the two, or even a little of both, those two incarnations where the last time I ever paid attention to the little speed demon.  I bring these two portrayals up because both were like the main template by which not just me, but fans everywhere viewed the world-building of the games.  The stages, or levels of the original video games were presented as almost the exact opposite of Mario's Mushroom Kingdom.  

In the strictest sense, all we were ever given as players was a series of digitized backgrounds that were just elaborate enough to suggest hints of some kind of undisclosed identity, yet they were also generic enough so that the ambience of one level was allowed to bleed over into another with a seamlessness that made the transition barely noticeable.  It was pretty clear, even to the children at the controls that the original focus of the series was always on platforming first, and story second.  There's nothing so unusual about that.  For the longest time it was little more than just the standard approach that most consoles aimed for.  The thing to keep in mind about both Mario and Sonic is that each character emerged out of the classic era of the video game arcade world.  This was a time when the basic "story" of any game amounted to little more than the threadbarest excuse plot that existed for no other reason than to set things in motion.  In other words, it was gameplay and not plot that was the sole purpose of video games for the longest time.  In many ways, it still is.  Mario, for instance, has mostly managed to cling to it's arcade origins by keeping any semblance of plot simple and to the point.  At the same time, the makers of Sonic seemed a bit more willing to expand on the lore and nature of their creation.

That's part of how the two Hedgehog shows came to be almost at the same time.  For a brief period, Nintendo was even willing to let Mario get in on the act.  It was from Adventures and SatAM that both constant and casual fans (like me), along with average Saturday Morning Audiences in general were given our first ever idea of where our little blue hero came from.  For the longest time, I was always under the impression that Sonic was this extra-terrestrial, along with all of his friends, on a far distant planet named Moebius.  Some viewers might have wondered how human looking figures like the Eggman could exist in this other world, though that one's easily accounted for.  Just imagine them as an alternate version of the Time Lords that never developed TARDIS technology, or the ability to transform, and there you have it, problem solved.  It might not have any bearing on the logic of real life, yet that's the fun of Science Fantasy stories like this.  They're so far removed from the real world, it's like the Imagination has been given carte-blanche to go as far out and wild as it can.  So this was my first introduction to the idea of the World of Sonic the Hedgehog.  For the longest time, that seemed to be all the world-building explanation I was given about the character, and it looked like that would be the only scraps of information we would ever have.  It would also have been all that we needed.

Even the introduction of characters like Knuckles, or McGuffins like the Chaos Emeralds did little to shake things up.  Then, as time went on, more human characters began to play a bigger role in the series, and it began to get a lot harder to tell if the Blue Blur's world was just this other alien planet (which would make a certain amount of Imaginative sense) or were we dealing with this weird, Planet of the Apes style twist, where it turns out the setting was Earth all along (which just raises all sorts of headscratchers).  To be fair, there is a scenario where this kind of revelation can be made to carry dramatic weight.  All you'd have to do is introduce a game with a more plot based design.  All you'd need to do then is create a riff on the above mentioned Charlton Heston story line.  You could write the scenario so that as you complete each level, Sonic and the gamer learns a bit more about the backstory of Moebius, until when you reach the end and discover that Sonic, Tails, and everyone else are living on this technologically re-shaped version of a post-apocalyptic Earth.  That sounds a bit grim to me, yet that's all it would take to set up a perfectly reasonable imaginative explanation for how guys like Sonic and his world came to be.  Then the franchise started transporting all it's characters to the actual Earth.

To say the confusion only deepened for me there is a bit like saying everything about showbiz appears to be in freefall these days.  For whatever reason, somewhere along the line, Sega partnered up with TMS Entertainment to give us the first successful Sonic anime series.  It the one where some BS science accident ends up sending all the main cast of the games up to that point through a wormhole that drops them all straight into the middle of the contemporary modern day, human centric Terra Firma that we call home even outside the make-believe confines of the franchise.  In retrospect, this show might have turned out to be the one installment that was able to create a shift in the nature of the original platformers, in and of themselves.  Even before the premiere of X, there had been Sonic film and video game entries that had tried to incorporate  human characters, or else Class M human-looking aliens that amounted to Homo Sapiens in all but name, and the file numbers scratched off.  These all seemed to have been an effort on Sega's part to try and take their star mascot in a more experimental, plot and lore oriented direction.  However, these early attempts (such as an infamous OVA and a trial console title called Sonic Adventures) did little to move the needle, and the company folded not too long after.

It's therefore interesting to note that the Hedgehog's current owners felt obliged to try and continue with this strategy going forward.  That seems to be how we got the Anime series which transports just about everything to Earth, while the video games themselves appear to have undergone a retcon where Moebius turns out to have just been our own planet all along.  In other words, what we've got on our hands here has been this almost constant, decades long shuffling of the deck with just a handful of the main cast remaining more or less the same in terms of personality and purpose, while always in danger of having their backgrounds, and hence, their motivations changing on a number of levels, while still being the same in essence.  It just goes to beg the question.  Is anyone else reading this as confused as I am?  I get the impression I've stumbled onto one of those classic rabbit holes in video game history.  One where anything like talk of an official, settled canon is almost ludicrous for the game developers involved.  What's remarkable about all of these shenanigans to me is how none of this constant re-arranging of the deck chairs has managed to deliver anything like a permanent sense of damage to the character and brand.  Throughout it all, Sonic and his main friends remain more or less the same.

He's just this Hedgehog with a remarkable ability for speed who goes on various adventures with his two somewhat equally fast friends as they fight a never-ending battle against the machinations of a twisted mad scientist.  And since you come to think of it, with setup as basic and simple of as that, is it really any wonder that the developers and producers have been able to create so many shifts and changes in the backstory while the basic outlines of the cast and crew more or less stand still as they are?  It's pretty clear all of this is on purpose at some level.  Sonic is designed as this one size fits all protagonist.  Someone you are meant to be able take and place in whatever scenario sounds the most profitable regardless of lore and continuity and still be identifiable as himself.  This creates an idea of who Sonic is at his core which is worth exploring in further depth later on in this review.  For now, we'll simply note how this fundamental sense of malleability was to apply even to his transition onto the big screen.  When the first official Sonic film came out way back in 2020, it amounted to yet another reset of the character's backstory.  There was nothing all that novel in the setup of that film's plot.  All it amounts to is a re-using of the basic concept of Sonic X, where the First Speedster of Gaming was born and raised on another planet (presumably Moebius) and due to plot contrivance gets sent to Earth.

The major novelty to be found in how the 2020 film approached its material was in the way it strove to give the protagonist this almost quasi-Spielbergian feel to his exploits.  I'll have to admit, out of all the direction the first movie could have taken, I'm still not sure this affectionate parody of the E.T. setup was what I had in mind.  At the same time, this one aspect of the film might be a pointer to one of the reasons it amounted to such a cozy success upon release.  That's another factor I'll have to discuss when we get into the review proper.  For now, it's enough to note that since the first Sonic Movie was such a big hit, it was inevitable that sooner or later a sequel would makes its way onto screens.  The real question was just how good of a follow up could you make to a film and character like the Blue Blur?

The Desperate Hours (1955).

I'm pretty sure we no longer live in an age of cinema icons.  If we do, then it's even odds that what we've got now is by no means the same thing.  I'm also willing to bet the matinee stars of an older era wouldn't have much of a clue of what to think about our penchant for making trolls like Justin Kjellberg into internet darlings.  They at least had the luxury of living in an analog age.  Back then, none of them had to deal with the level of exposure that we unleash on the people we choose to entertain us today.  I know it's possible to claim that the Golden Age of the Hollywood Star is over for one simple reason.  Most of the names I'm thinking of who fit that title are now almost lost to time.  It seems like just a handful of artists from that era have been able to maintain anything like a genuine pop culture legacy for themselves.  Chief among them are guys like Groucho Marx, John Wayne, or Alfred Hitchcock.  There's another one in that bunch who, as of this writing, is still able to hold an admirable spot somewhere just above 50% in terms of audience awareness and acclaim.  His name is Humphrey Bogart, and unlike a lot of stage names that sound made up, it turns out this was the actual moniker his parents christened him with at birth.  It's kind of a miracle that his legacy has hung around for this long, yet when you look at some of the films he starred in, then even today, it remains just possible to see why a guy like him could become an immortal.

In order to figure out why and how that happened, we still need to back track just a bit.  I think the words of an old documentary (made by the same producer who would give us Gene Wilder in a Chocolate Factory, no less) said it all best.  "Humphrey Bogart brought an unmistakable power and excitement to the screen".  He was the kind of actor who could convey "an innate sense of world-weary toughness", while also suggesting that "underneath lay an innate tenderness".  Another way to put it is to say that Bogart greatest calling card as an actor wasn't just that he was good at playing tough customers.  He was more like an originator of a by now familiar staple: the Tough Guy as this fundamentally Haunted Soul.  As a result, while he is by no means the singular architect of this modern archetype (its origins extend all the way back to the printed page, anyway), there is a sense in which his best work showcases the birth pangs of the kind of protagonist, or anti-hero that Martin Scorsese has gone on to make pretty much the subject of almost every single roll of film he's used.  Bogie was good at being the Lonely Everyman Outcast.  The lug with a surprising amount of hidden depths, and enough demons contained within always ready to stifle and drag his better angels off into the shadows.  To give an idea of what I mean, has anybody seen that one time De Niro directed an actual film?  It was called A Bronx Tale.  Let's just say that Bogie would have been a good fit for the role of Sonny the mobster.

"On the screen and off, Humphrey Bogart had a style that set him apart from his fellow actors".  In truth, though, this seems to have been a talent that he had to work his way towards one grueling role of work at a time.  Like pretty much all of the great artists, there was no easy entrance waiting for him somewhere.  Bogie came to Tinseltown in it's Golden Age a complete nobody, and pretty much had to beg producers and directors to give him even a bit part in whatever project would take him on.  Before that, however, things were almost kind of amusing.  There's a sense in which he was the product of the kind of Big Apple that Scorsese knew and "wrote" about his whole life, just not exactly in the way you might think.  Based on his screen persona alone, you'd probably figure here's this guy whose grown up dirt poor in some flophouse tenement located somewhere in a piece of detritus that used to be known as the Five Points.  It's where he first learned all of life's hard knocks, and how to defend himself against whatever anybody decides to throw at him, to the point where a lot of the bullies cross the street whenever they saw him coming.  Maybe he finds refuge in Broadway's theater district, both as a good place to play hooky in and catch some shut-eye, and as a good way for him to keep out of trouble.

The only catch is, the more this young punk from nowhere hangs out in the aisles, the more the acting bug begins to take a hold of him, and soon that's where it all got started, right?  Well, no, not really.  Not at all in fact.  "Born in New York, in 1899, on Christmas Day.  Humphrey Deforest Bogart is the son of a prominent surgeon.  The screen's future Tough Guy is raised among the cultured and genteel upper middle class.  Bogart's mother, Maude, is a famous commercial artist.  And her baby, Humphrey, is her favorite model.  Her portrait of Bogart at the age of one is widely circulated throughout the nation, and will bring him his first taste of fame.  Over the years, as a commercial model, little Humphrey Bogart gazes angelically from the pages of national magazines, in advertisements for a popular baby food".  So in other words, as strange as it may seem, when we talk about the childhood of Philip Marlowe, we need to get the idea of Mean Streets out of our heads (as difficult as that is to do) and think way more along the lines of The Age of Innocence (Scorsese also claimed that was his most violent picture, for whatever it's worth).  It's the kind of thing you're just not prone to expect from someone like Bogie.

From the look of things, the young punk must have felt the same way soon enough. "By the time he's 18, Bogart rebels against his sheltered home life, and joins the Navy during World War I.  After the War, at 21, Humphrey Bogart decides to become an actor because, he says, "I was born to be indolent, and this was the softest of rackets".  It's the kind of statement which makes me wonder if maybe the punk found out his own ways of getting into trouble even before he joined the Armed Forces,  Whatever the case, the rest of pretty straightforward.  "During the 1920s, on Broadway, Bogart usually plays the romantic juvenile in drawing room comedies.  And reportedly is the first actor to utter the immortal line, "Tennis, anyone"?  Bogart fails to achieve stardom on the stage, and in private life he fails in two short-lived marriages.  But in the midst of these discouraging years on Broadway, he appears as a "lady killer" in his first film in 1929, and starring Ruth Eddings.  It's only an 8 minute Vitaphone short, and like most trivia of it's kind, it soon winds up in studio vaults, forgotten even by film historians.  But this one reeler marks the beginning of one of the great careers in motion pictures.  Hollywood in the early 30s is in the midst of transition to sound pictures.  And many Broadway actors like Humphrey Bogart get a chance in "Talkies".  Bogart, however, is given dreary roles in nearly a dozen minor "epics" like Three on a Match.  Bogart is a flop in Hollywood, and the studios write him off as just another mediocre actor.

"Returning to New York, Bogart finally lands a talked about part in a hit play, The Petrified Forest.  (It's a) part that Hollywood wants Edward G. Robinson to recreate on the screen.  But the play's star, Leslie Howard, refuses to appear in the picture unless his friend Humphrey Bogart can again play the role of Duke Mantee.  Knowing that this is his last chance for success in Hollywood, Bogart will perform with a vengeance".  It turned out to be the role that helped define his cinematic persona in various ways from then on.  In that film, the protagonist declares Bogie's character as "the last of the rugged individualists".  It's one of those lines that almost ends up sounding fated in retrospect.  "Overnight, Bogart has become a sensation, but not a star.  He is assigned as merely a supporting player, the sinister heavy.  And the top salaried stars at Warner Bros., James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson will bump him off in picture after picture.  Bogart takes this kind of fate philosophically.  He says, "The Heavy, full of crime and bitterness, grabs his wounds and talks about death.  The audience is his, and his alone".  Bogart becomes a master at delivering these farewell addresses".  A typical example of such parting wit goes as follows.  "Do me a favor, will ya?  Don't tell them a dame tripped me up".

"Bogart regards most of his films as mediocre affairs.  A proud and sensitive man, he now wants to become a serious actor.  But he finds himself acting futilely in roles far beneath his talent...Bogart says the only reason for making money is so you can tell some bigshot to go to hell.  And he publicly calls one studio boss "A creep".  But in 1941, Bogart finally gets what he wants from his studio.  A starring role, in a first class film, The Maltese Falcon.  Directed by his friend, John Huston, and aided by Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Mary Astor, Bogart breaths fire into the role of Sam Spade; a cynical, amoral private eye.  This is the turning point in Bogart's career.  Through the sheer force of his talent he has proven that he is not merely an actor.  After all these years, he has become a star (web)".  There really wasn't much in the way of looking back after that.  Bogie would go on to parlay his natural talents as a thespian in what are now considered to be some of the greatest films ever made.  His is a roster that includes Casablanca, The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not (that's picture where Bogie met and lost his heart to a his co-star, a girl named Lauren Bacall), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The Caine Mutiny.  That's a lot of accolades to rack up for oneself in such a short span of a lifetime.  Somehow, Bogart managed to take it all in stride, and was able to create an indelible image in the process.

The film I want to look at today comes from the very tail end of his career.  There's a bit of an almost humorous irony to it as well.  One of his earliest pictures features a subplot with a surprising enough amount of similarities to the picture I have in mind now.  It's a thriller called The Desperate Hours.

The Monkey (2025)

I have a policy when it comes to movie adaptations made from Stephen King's works.  It comes in the form of a number of expectations.  The first is that it's best to expect the final product to be work of pure schlock, more often than.  The second is to always keep one import fact of life in mind.  Schlock has its place.  I'm even willing go out on a limb, and proclaim that the B Grade Carnivalesque qualities not just of certain low budget films, but also of a surprising number of literary products, is in fact something of a genuine time-honored tradition of the Horror genre.  This is a critical insight that King himself appears to be aware of.  It's something he discusses in the pages of his invaluable non-fiction study, Danse Macabre.  It's where he offers his readers an important understanding to keep in mind when either reading or watching any work made in the Gothic frame of mind.  King does this through a discussion of the kind of effect that even the the most Grade Z poverty row production can conjure up if the story itself is good enough.  He illustrates how this works by telling us about the time he went to a Drive-In feature, and it was there for the first time that he saw The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  This is what happened.

"I knew, watching, that the Creature had become my Creature; I had bought it. Even to a seven-year-old, it was not a terribly convincing Creature. I did not know then it was good old Ricou Browning, the famed underwater stuntman, in a molded latex suit, but I surely knew it was some guy in some kind of a monster suit.. .just as I knew that, later on that night, he would visit me in the black lagoon of my dreams, looking much more realistic. He might be waiting in the closet when we got back; he might be standing slumped in the blackness of the bathroom at the end of the hall, stinking of algae and swamp rot, all ready for a post-midnight snack of small boy. Seven isn’t old, but it is old enough to know that you get what you pay for. You own it, you bought it, it’s yours. It is old enough to feel the dowser suddenly come alive, grow heavy, and roll over in your hands, pointing at hidden water (103-4)".  It helps to keep in mind that what King is describing here is the emotional reaction, or the Stock Response effect that the last of the classic Universal Monster pictures had on him.  The key things to pay attention to in all of that word salad is how the film was able to get its intended effect across in spite of its limitations.  King could tell the special effects were nothing to write home about, even in 1954.

At the same time, the final product was of such a quality that it's overall schlocky nature could never really get in the way of the picture's ultimate triumph as a fright flick.  It's interesting to note that the author of Carrie is not alone in his reaction.  It seems that the Creature has managed to capture the Imaginations of audiences right down to the present moment.  It's possible enough to demonstrate at least the veracity of this claim when proof can be offered by the following video review.  That word "capture" is worth keeping in mind.  Because that's what the good work of Horror does, regardless of production value.  It's the reason King is able to say with complete sincerity that "My reaction to the Creature on that night was perhaps the perfect reaction, the one every writer of horror fiction or director who has worked in the field hopes for when he or she uncaps a pen or a lens: total emotional involvement, pretty much undiluted by any real thinking process—and you understand, don’t you, that when it comes to horror movies, the only thought process really necessary to break the mood is for a friend to lean over and whisper, “See the zipper running down his back?” 

"I think that only people who have worked in the field for some time truly understand how fragile this stuff really is, and what an amazing commitment it imposes on the reader or viewer of intellect and maturity. When Coleridge spoke of “the suspension of disbelief” in his essay on imaginative poetry, I believe he knew that disbelief is not like a balloon, which may be suspended in air with a minimum of effort; it is like a lead weight, which has to be hoisted with a clean and a jerk and held up by main force. Disbelief isn’t light; it’s heavy. The difference in sales between Arthur Hailey and H. P. Lovecraft may exist because everyone believes in cars and banks, but it takes a sophisticated and muscular intellectual act to believe, even for a little while, in Nyarlathotep, the Blind Faceless One, the Howler in the Night.  And whenever I run into someone who expresses a feeling along the lines of, “I don’t read fantasy or go to any of those movies; none of it’s real,” I feel a kind of sympathy. They simply can’t lift the weight of fantasy. The muscles of the imagination have grown too weak.  In this sense, kids are the perfect audience for horror. The paradox is this: children, who are physically quite weak, lift the weight of unbelief with ease. They are the jugglers of the invisible world—a perfectly understandable phenomenon when you consider the perspective they must view things from (104-105)".

This is a fundamentally Romantic way of looking at the genre and its intended effects.  If proof were needed for that statement, all you have to do is go back and see King invoke one of the key maxims of that literary Movement, even going so far as to name drop the handle of Romanticism's primary architect.  In King's favor I'll just go ahead here and say that it's easy to prove what Coleridge says about the inherent fragility, perhaps even the innate ridiculous nature of the Gothic.  The prime example I would point to is the Shower Scene from Hitchcock's Psycho.  We tend to think of it was one of the most iconic and visceral moments in the history of Slasher film.  I'm of two minds about this.  On the one hand, it's impossible to deny.  The entire sequence works as a masterclass in pacing, editing, imagery, and sound.  I also can't help being amused at how well people are affected by a scene where, in the strictest sense, no violence is ever committed, and not so much as a single drop of blood is shed.  

Go back and look at that sequence again with a more alert eye, and you'll begin to notice all the ways in which ol' Hitch more or less tricks you into doing the dirty work for him.  Note for instance that we never really see the knife doing anything that would constitute as an actual attack.  It's even possible that the choreography of  "Mrs. Bates'" actions are deliberately a bit too slow to leave an impact.  Even the pacing of the moment, and the reactions of the characters in the scene count as unrealistic when you reflect on just how stylized everything is.  Perhaps the strangest compliment I can give to Hitchcock with this scene is also the greatest sounding, yet it's also the truth.  The Master of Suspense was always tasteful enough to never show us an actual crime being committed at any point in his career.  Instead, all we've got with the encounter between the unfortunate Janet Leigh and "Mother" is little else except pure thespian histrionics and mugging for the camera.  In other words, Coleridge was correct.  It really doesn't take much to defuse even the best made examples of Horror.  Applying the Romantic Poet's dictum to Hitchcock's most famous movie reveals it to be the cheapest sort of carnival trick.  I think this is also what makes it cool as hell.  When looked at properly, the Director has to be congratulated here.

It really does count as a prime example of a sleight-of-hand trick well done.  That's all Horror or any work of fiction amounts to, in the long run.  It's all just a magic act where the zipper on the monster suit is always visible sooner or later.  I almost want to say that the inability of all Horror to get away from revealing that zipper on the suit is perhaps the defining trait of Schlock.  What happens in practice then is that all Horror cinema comes down to a question.  Are you willing to grant the genre it's limitations, whatever they are, and be willing to meet any story in this mode on those terms?  It's the sort of question that pretty much every adaptation of a Stephen King story winds up asking of its viewers.  Though I'd argue it also holds true for Horror as a whole.  For my part, I make no bones about where I stand on the issue.  I'll always be more than happy to enter into the Schlocky spirit of things that underlines just about every King movie I've ever seen.  I make no apologies for the honest enjoyment I get out of this stuff.  It's just plain fun to me.  With that said, are there any moments where the ability to enjoy this sort of film comes to an end, and where does The Monkey fit in with this kind of scheme?

Swallows and Amazons (1930/2016).

They call it the Lake District.  It's something in the way of being a Storied Place.  Take a map of England, and then spread it open.  Note the location of it's central hub, in London, situated in the Southeast.  If you start from that point, and make your way on a more or less steady Northwestern line of travel, sooner or later you'll notice how all the signs of metropolitan life begin to drop off and fade away the further you get from the locations of Downing, Buckingham, and Windsor.  For a while you'll notice remnant signs of our first carbon footprint is you tread your way through the Country's industrial centers.  These are what someone once referred to as the lands of dark, satanic mills.  Most of these business establishments have overrun the countryside that used to reign like an undisputed green monarch long ago.  Now all of that has been eclipsed by factory towns like Birmingham, Liverpool, Northampton, or Manchester.  The curious traveler will have to make their way through or past some of these points of interest in order to reach the main locale I have in mind.  It's a hilly area located near the Northwesternmost edge of England proper.  It's not too long after you've past this particular region that you'll come to that demarcation point where Britain ends and Scotland begins.  Should you choose to take the travel route known known as the A591 past Helsington Laithes, you'll soon find yourself moving through the county known as Cumbria.

This is the spot on the map where are destination is located.  Even before we've reached the neighborhood we're looking for, however, the attentive traveler will begin to notice a further change in the landscape.  If you can manage to make your way past the various industrial centers that have come to make up a great part of the modern identity of Britain, and if you know where to look for it, you might just be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the land's other face.  This is true of places like Cumbria.  It's here that the signs of modernity begin to drop off in a meaningful way, the kind that forces you to notice almost without being aware of it.  One moment you'll find yourself surrounded by skyscrapers, however modest, and yet after a while these begin to fall back, and it's like someone was kind enough to introduce you to the idea of a natural landscape.  It's a process that begins well before you reach sight of Cumbria, though you'll have to make your way past places like Manchester first.  Once that's done, it's almost like watching a slow burn magic trick.  It becomes a game of first you don't see it, and now you do.  Traveling toward and then through the English Countryside is akin to starting out in the confines of real life, and then slowly entering the remnants of a storybook.

You get the impression that if you hang around a location like Cumbria long enough, you'll almost begin to understand how the ancestor's of the people who live here could believe that creatures like elves and dryads made their homes in trees and moors that surround you on all sides, or that you occupy what's left of the homes of a race of giants, and other things.  Such folkways appear to have come easy to a people of Cumbria.  They like to tell how it's the true location of King's Arthur's Camelot.  They'll be more than happy to point the tourist out to the site of the Round Table, or the home of the Lady of in the Lake.  As enticing as all of this neighborhood lore might be, it's still just the appetizer for the location in mind.  Moving further into the heart of Cumbria reveals a setting which is almost as near to that of a storybook as anyone is ever likely to achieve in whatever it is we think of as real life.  This would be not one, but rather a series of simple small towns with names like Grasmere, Keswick, Hawkshead, and Ambleside.  The one trait that each of them shares is just this.  The Lake District is an old place, and yet it's people have kept up with the times, by and large.  Odds are even if you're invited into any one of the quaint looking cottages that dot this landscape, you'll be treated to the comforting sight of what's become the standard setup of the modern household.  A widescreen TV that's barely used, and more than one Personal Computer and/or Laptop, complete with a corner Wi-Fi modem.

The funny thing is how even this doesn't seem to detract from the sense that we're witnessing a place that's always somewhat out of time.  You can't call the District a living relic, not by a long shot.  At the same time, there's the general impression that the hours of a man's hours are able to take their time here.  The pacing of daily life is, or can be slower than in London.  I'm not sure if there is any spot left where the air is clear, yet this place comes pretty close.  Also there's the general look of the towns about the Lakes.  What I'm about to say next is a cliche, yet it's true enough.  The Lake District really is perhaps the closest England will ever have to its own Hobbiton.  It's just possible that the ability to link this real life location with one of the most famous and well liked settings in the history of Fantasy fiction is also not a chance piece of similarity.  I have called the Lake District a storied place.  The full meaning of that description stems from the fact that it's also something of the birth place for the Romantic Movement.  In 1799, one of the District's longtime citizens took up residence in the somehow aptly named Dove Cottage, located in Grasmere.  His reason for doing this was simple enough.

This guy wanted to be a writer.  Not just any penny-a-page wordsmith, either.  This fellow had set his sights on being a full-time professional poet.  His name was William Wordsworth.  I'm not sure it's correct to label him as the Father of Romanticism in English Letters.  For one thing, while the authors that comprised the the group might have agreed that together they constituted a new Movement in the arts, they were generally averse to the idea of having any of one of them becoming a public figurehead.  In general, they tended to guard their artistic freedom very well, and none of them (least of all William Blake) would have taken kindly to the idea that the group should have its Inspiration subordinated to the whims of any one of them.  That would have been a recipe for disaster.  Wordsworth wasn't even the first one of them to start writing poetry.  That honor goes to the pioneering efforts of Blake.  Instead, it seems more accurate to say that Wordsworth was the one who came closest to giving the Romantic Poets something a like a spiritual home.  A place where like minds could gather and compare notes and share ideas and philosophies with one another.  This seems to have been the function for places like Dove Cottage and other spots along the banks of the District.  A collective writer's retreat which in time became something of a literary hub from which the ideas of Romanticism emerged and began to spread.

The story I want to talk about today is one that owes something of an eternal debt to the shared home of the Romantic Movement.  It's main setting is on the shores of the Lake District, and it serves as something of a love letter to the place.  It has the advantage of being written by an author who has gone on to be considered something of an honorary local son.  The kind of artist who is able to produce a work that is of such quality that he often gets a spot for himself on the same shelf as works like Songs of Innocence and Experience.  The story itself fits into the category of an ode.  It's a tribute to the kind idyllic childhood Summers when your family would take you on a vacation, and rather than any National Lampoon style nightmare lying in wait for you, everything just somehow turned out right.  It was never a matter of perfection.  Instead, it was about having the kind of experiences that you knew was always going to somehow define that part of your life.  The kind of experiences where can still recall the feel of it all, even after the memories of the events and what little photographic evidence you had of is has begun to fade.  Written by Arthur Ransome, this is the tale of Swallows and Amazons. 

Sorrowful Jones (1949).

I never knew he was British.  Not for the longest time, anyway.  This is something I found out about (or else my memory was jogged) just recently.  To tell you the truth, it still comes as a surprise to learn he wasn't born and raised here; and why shouldn't it?  Bob Hope is one of those names that sounds like it's got an Apple Pie baked into it somewhere.  The guy's voice even sounds like a cross between a Midwesterner with just the faintest hint of a New York Yankee drawl.  He had the kind of face you'd expect to greet you wearing a straw boater hat, grey spats, white shirt sleeves, and a red and white striped vest as he welcomed you to the Coney Island Pier.  It is just possible the guy could have held just such a job during his desperate and hungry years.  The man I'm talking about used to be referred to as America's Entertainer.  That's the title he was given by one of his official biographies, anyway.  I'm not sure who remembers him anymore, now.  In fact, his reputation seems to have reached a very interesting pinnacle.  I'm no longer certain what anyone thinks about Bob Hope anymore.  It's as if time and tide have rendered a once flesh and blood human being into a blank slate.  If Bob were here to read this, he'd probably make a joke about it.  That was his stock and trade, so far as he ever had a job aside from occasional bouts of employment from either the Army or the Oscars.  Whenever they needed someone to play the clown for the cameras, or lift the troops' spirits (usually with the help of the latest cover model) Bob was there.

It got to the point where both establishments where thinking of installing special revolving door entrances just for him.  The password for both joints was the same.  "Hello, I think you know me.  I'm Bing Crosby's golf caddy".  That's a jest, of course, yet it gives you an idea of the type of humor he was known for in his time.  Needless to say, Hope was a lot better at it than me.  Still the question remains.  Does anyone know him anymore?  Am I talking about someone who even existed?  Did I make that whole name up?  Here's what author John Steinbeck wrote about him in a newspaper dispatch that was compiled later on into a non-fiction collection titled Once There was a War.  "When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. This man drives himself and is driven. It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective. He works month after month at a pace that would kill most people. Moving about the country in camps, airfields, billets, supply depots, and hospitals, you hear one thing consistently. Bob Hope is coming, or Bob Hope has been here.

"In some way he has caught the soldiers’ imagination. He gets laughter wherever he goes from men who need laughter. He has created a character for himself—that of the man who tries too hard and fails, and who boasts and is caught at it. His wit is caustic, but is never aimed at people, but at conditions and at ideas, and where he goes men roar with laughter and repeat his cracks for days afterward (78)".  The writer also offers this interesting bit of trivia about the entertainer.  "The Secretary of War is on an inspection tour, but it is Bob Hope who is expected and remembered (ibid)".  Fast forward to today, and all most of us can do is ask one simple question.  Mr. Steinbeck, who on Earth are you even talking about?  Come to think of it, who are you anyway?  What have you done that so important?  Anyway, why waste space on an old court jester?  That seems to be the opinion most folks would have about a name like Bob Hope, even if a lot of us can't find the right words to express it.  The basic meaning behind such questions is the same, "Why should I care"?  It brings to mind something Mark Twain said a long time ago.  He claimed that "Fame is a vapor".  To which most will ask, "Who's Mark Twain"?

As to the question of whether Bob Hope is a real person, the answer, in the strictest sense, is no.  There never was a real Bob Hope.  All that happened was that once upon a time, a Welsh stone mason named Henry Hope met a girl named Avis Townes.  He was a working stiff, and she was something of a theater brat, with what was, at the time, a steady career as a concert singer.  Perhaps to Henry's own surprise, Avis accepted his proposal, and they got married in the year 1890.  It was pretty good so far as married households went.  It was almost like that Chuck Berry song, the one that goes "C'est la vie, say the old folks.  It goes to show you never can tell".  The one hitch in this fairy tale was Henry's penchant for gambling his funds away on the race track.  Henry made his growing family into self-imposed exiles in the city of Cheltenham, which was all they could afford.  While there, in 1903, the couple welcomed their fifth child to whatever this is.  They named him Leslie Townes Hope.  It's not the most promising way to start a life.  That's the kind of name that will get you beat up, if you're not careful.  It almost goes without saying that as he began to come of age, young Leslie soon learned how to become a practiced brawler.  Before that, however, there was a change in the family's household fortunes.

Henry had a brother named Frank, and at the time of Leslie's birth, his uncle was holding down a steady job in Cleveland.  A bit of reading between the lines makes you sort of realize that in terms of family dynamics, Frank was always the reliable, dependable sibling who knew how to be a diligent worker, and hold on to a job.  Henry, meanwhile, seems to have been as close to a polar opposite black sheep as you can get without ever having the label handed to him.  Still, you've got to give Leslie's father some credit, he seemed determined to do right by his growing family.  So when the opportunity came to get some much needed income by moving to the United States to work alongside Frank, Henry made one of those decisions that seem pragmatic at first glance, and then later on reveal themselves to be a fateful turning point for the future of at least one of his children.  Henry Hope landed in the States sometime in 1904, just a year after Leslie's birth.  Despite his often lazy and irresponsible ways, Henry surprised perhaps even himself with a newfound ability to put his nose to the grindstone same as his brother, and slowly and surely began to stockpile enough money to send for the rest of the family to join him.

The reason for this newfound responsibility is obvious enough once you realize that with Frank breathing down his neck keeping an eagle eye on his brother, Henry was less prone to falling into his usual habits such as gambling, drinking, or girl chasing.  It was a lesson in humility for Leslie's father.  It might also have been proof to Henry just how much of a myth there was in the idea that hard work ennobles the soul.  All it did was make him feel thirsty and stifled in all sorts of ways.  He might even have felt a great deal of sympathy with another saying of Mark Twain's.  "It's always the early bird that gets the worm (I once knew a fella who tried it; got up at sunrise; the horse bit him).  Henry might have felt bitten, yet he also got the reward of being reunited with his family into the bargain.  The Hope clan even got the extra added bonus of soon being able to move into their own house.  The punchline that was lying in wait for Henry and Avis Hope came in the form of their own son, Leslie, and the way they raised him from a pup.  It was a textbook case of be careful what you wish for.  However, when you're dealing with people as headstrong as Mr. and Mrs. Hope, does it really make any true difference?

Whatever the case, while Henry Hope seems to have straightened up after his move to America, it couldn't erase his past as something of a vagabond rogue,  Avis, meanwhile, was still a theater brat at heart; one of life's great frustrated actresses.  This could be seen in the fact that not long after moving into their own American home, Ava made Henry buy her a piano that she could play around with and belt out some of the old music hall tunes she was most likely born and raised on.  It's a hell of a household situation for a child to be born into.  It's so out of the norm of the average American home that there's almost a case to be made for describing the Hope family as one of those odd chances where you get an entire clan made up of misfits of various stripes; each with their own ways of expressing some deep seated sense of malcontent.  For Henry, is was a long held desire to be the big shot man about town.  For Avis, it was her name (or any member of the Hope family) "up there" in bright lights on the stage.  This made for a very bohemian styled home life that had nowhere else to go except for rubbing off on the Hope children.  The good news in all this for Leslie Townes Hope is that his folks and siblings all seemed to belong to the rare positively charged version of the misfit tribe.

His parents doted on him, for one thing.  Nor was there any false notes in their love.  It also something they spread to all of their kids.  I was unable to find anything that would label them as bad parents.  Yes, they were oddballs, yet there's never anything really abusive about them that I could find, especially when the whole bunch got to the States.  Instead, it was all just a case of Mom and Dad channeling the youth that neither of them ever got a chance to misspend into more productive outlets for their kids.  In Leslie's case, this involved sooner or later getting bit by the same showbiz bug that infected his mother so long ago.  In most homes this kind of thing would single Les out as the runt of the litter.  In the Hope manse, however, he just made his folks proud.  With that type of encouragement under his hat, Leslie Townes soon found himself taking his chances in between dropping out of school forever and holding down a series of odd jobs by trying his hand at getting his start in the world of Vaudeville.  To give an idea of what this long vanished institution was like, imagine a bawdier version of The Muppet Show, except that unless someone like Edgar Bergen was onstage, there wasn't a puppet anywhere in sight.

It was a pretty ramshackle operation all around, and yet Vaudeville's circuit was the birthing ground for some of the biggest names in comedy during the Golden Age of Cinema.  The more you know the filmography of this era, the more impressive the list of names to come from Vaudeville sounds.  It included the likes of Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, George Burns and his wife, Gracie Allen, and their lifelong friend, Jack Benny.  Sooner or later, after a lot of dedicated hard work, Leslie Townes Hope was able to add his name to that impressive roster as well.  He had to find a better stage name for himself first, though.  It's the kind of thing that's probably not so much of a big deal now.  However, Henry and Avis's most talented son figured no one was ever going to put up with, much less remember a name like Leslie.  So after a bit of digging around for ideas, he settled on the moniker of Bob Hope.  The rest is pretty much history.  Finding the right name seems to have done a lot for Leslie Hope's confidence.  He began to get more laughs for his audience as he continued to workshop his material.  With greater laughs came greater notices, and his star continued its upwards trajectory from there.

In retrospect, the greatest achievement Hope ever managed to give himself was realizing that he'd found a place outside of his family where he could say he belonged.  Left to his own devices out on the streets, Leslie Townes would have still been a survivor.  He also would have been stuck as the odd man out.  His natural roguish ways and mannerism would have left with the kind of bad reputation that, if he wasn't careful, might have landed him in all kinds of hot water.  Up on the stage, as Bob Hope, however, his smart mouth was appreciated for the clever wit that emerged from it, often before he even had a chance to think about what he was going to say.  All he had to do was look on a scene of human foibles, and the puns and jabs would start to crowd into his mind waiting for a chance to become the punchline.  It was Hope's ability to channel all that reckless energy into a stage practice that soon became one of the earliest examples of what we now know as stand-up insult comedy.  The best part about it all was that Hope found himself embraced for being a wit.  It was like discovering there was this second home away from home that was out there just waiting for him to arrive.  After cutting his teeth on the Vaudeville stage, that home began to expand for Bob Hope in a lot interesting ways.

Like every single comic on that list above, Hollywood came scouting for talent on the circuit, and Hope got scooped up to Tinseltown, just like Burns, Allen, Benny, and the rest.  This was a somewhat regular occurrence for a brief span of time in Hollywood's early history.  Film moguls like Carl Laemmle and Louis B. Mayer had just begun to set up shop in the Valley of L.A.  Studios like Metro Pictures and Universal began with first buying up land, then building soundstages and home offices, then gathering together all the camera and editing equipment that you could either get your hands on, or else build up from scratch.  Then they would assemble a team of artists, technicians, and writers to operate behind the cameras.  All the Studios needed to complete the picture where stars to perform in front of the lens.  It wasn't a question of being starved for talent, either.  It was more like a bunch of independent entrepreneurs (yes, there was a time when you could have said this about the Big Studios with an absolutely straight face) were able to open a series of privately own megamart stores, and then had to go out and hunt for products to put in the shelf aisles.  The major difference is that storytelling was Hollywood's stock and trade back then.  It meant you needed faces to help make believe come alive.

So, if you were an enterprising studio head like Samuel Goldwyn or Walt Disney, you sent scouts out to look for talent wherever you could find it.  A lot of times, the kind of talent you were looking for could be found on the Vaudeville stage, and one day Bob Hope found himself as Tinseltown's latest discovery.  In many ways, it's fair to say he never looked back.  While his name has faded into a near obscurity by this point, at the time, he was able to enjoy the kind reputation that stars like Bill Murray, Steve Martin, or Eddie Murphy are still able to enjoy today.  This marks the first time one of Bob Hope's movies has ever been reviewed here on The Scriblerus Club.  It comes from somewhere in the middle of Hope's career, after a heyday of covering himself with glory as an entertainer for the troops during World War II.  It's a nice little piece in which he stars alongside a bright young comedian named Lucille Ball.  It's also a film that manages to surprise you with how familiar it's story is if you're an 80s kid.  Made in 1949, and based off the work of Damon Runyon, this is the tale of Sorrowful Jones.