The Griffin and the Minor Canon (1885).

The history of the fairytale  reads like a list of forgotten names.  This is something of a perennial truism of the genre as a whole.  Everybody has at least heard of the Brothers Grimm, even if most of us don't have  clue who they were.  We know that their names adorn the collection of a long passed down anthology book of folklore, most of it stemming from the Northern European culture in which they were born and raised.  Beyond that bare collective of acknowledged fact, however, it's almost like those guys just never really existed.  History has a way of slipping through the cracks like that.  If we have only the vaguest knowledge of who the Grimm Brothers were, then the peasants, farmers, tale tellers, and Old Wives who passed on all these survivals of ancient mythological lore to them are as good as lost to time.  After all, how many of us even knew that the Grimm's were editors and compilers more than the actual authors of their collection of fairy tales?  It's the sort of pattern that you can find repeated just about everywhere else.  For every J.R.R. Tolkien that becomes a household icon you've got a mislaid and overlooked predecessor like E.R. Eddison, who was one of the first authors to try and tackle a complete and total fantasy novel set in a secondary world.  Eddison just takes the world of Arthurian Romance and sets it on the planet Mercury.

That might sound like a fun (albeit kinda goofy) notion.  If such a book like that exists, however, how come no one else is talking about it?  Exactly!  That's the way with pop culture.  Sometimes it bestows a sort of artistic immortality on some names (Tolkien), while allowing others (not just Eddison, but also forgotten luminaries such as Lord Dunsany, Abraham Merritt, James Branch Cabell, and Sir Walter Scott) to fade away.  Turns out there are a lot of names out there who are or were responsible for molding the modern fantasy genre into the shape and form that it enjoys now.  Guys like Tolkien don't just happen out of the clear blue overnight.  Nor is the whole truth to claim that they are of such levels of creative genius as to be able to conjure their flights of fantasy up without at least some measure of help from the fantasists who came before.  It's true that Middle Earth is, in the last resort, the result of Tolkien's gift for tapping into the psychological well-spring that is the human Imagination.  The trick is that I don't even someone with his set of talent skills would have been able to pull it off quite so well if her wasn't as avid a reader of fairy tales both old and modern.  Everything I've read or know about the author of LOTR points to him being self-aware as an Individual Talent at work within the confines of a Literary Tradition.

Odds are even that Tradition includes a whole catalogue of names or author bylines that probably made up his entire enthusiasm from the nursery on up for the once upon a time genre.  The point is even the best names of the business stand on the shoulders of giants.  The irony being that's a whole catalogue of forgotten titans right there, and it's difficult to say if we'll ever be able to get all of them back.  I have no way of knowing whether or not the lost name I want to talk about today was ever a favorite of Tolkien's. I just know that I found a short story of his in a collection by Douglas Anderson called Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy.  Anderson states in the introduction to this anthology that his major goal was to try and suggest a picture to modern readers of what the artistry and atmosphere of Tolkien's chosen literary genre was like in the years before he arrived on the scene and more or less reshaped the format's entire parameters ever since.  It was there that I came upon the name of Frank Stockton for the very second time.  At first I didn't know who this individual was.  I had to look him up in order to realize that we had met once before (sorta) way back in high school.  Somewhere close to maybe the 9th or 10th grade, my class was assigned to read a story called "The Lady and the Tiger".

It's sort of funny because of all the works of short fiction I was ever assigned for my English Lit classes back then, it is the story of a prisoner who is condemned to either fall in love and marry or else be torn apart by the other King of the Jungle which has stayed with me the most.  I think it's one of those brief narratives that manages to find a way of sticking around in your memory long after you've put the book aside.  You'll be going along just doing your thing, like always, and then maybe these final snippets of narrative description will occur to you right out of the blue.  "And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door - the lady, or the tiger".  I think it's got to be one of the main reasons that particular bit of protoplasmic Magical Realism has stuck around for as long as it has.  It's an entire narrative account based around an unanswered question.  It reminds me of something director Walter Hill once said in an interview.  He claimed that ambiguity can sometimes be the hallmark strength of a well told story.  He wasn't trying to set up an iron-clad rule, or anything.  It's just that you can tell this literary sleight-of-hand has done its work when you're able to still recall it many years later.

The one bit I'm sure most of us have trouble remembering is who even wrote the damn thing?  For the longest time, I've been able to remember the setup, the cast, and most of all the denouement (or lack thereof?).  I suppose that means the perfect capping irony is realizing you couldn't recall for the life of ya whose name it was on the author byline to the piece.  In that sense, deciding to pick up Doug Anderson's Tolkien oriented collection was a moment of almost perfect serendipity.  "The Griffin and the Minor Canon" were the words that managed to jump out at me from the table of contents for whatever reason.  It got me curious enough leap to the story's place in the book and start reading.  Somewhere in the middle of it all I got curious enough to go and see if I could look up who Frank R. Stockton was.  Discovering he was the artist responsible for "The Lady or the Tiger" was kind of like those experiences where you'd swear time was sort of doubling back on itself.  I don't think any of us can ever foresee those moments that are able to bring our pasts back to us with a surprising amount of clarity.  Like I can still see a clear enough image of the classroom where I first read that story.

It was a pleasant enough surprise is what I guess I'm trying to say.  One of the results of that discovery is that it made me curious to find out more about the kind of artistic mindset that was able to conjure the kind of images or visions that would have that level of staying power.  So I did some more digging, and here are the results I was able to come up with.  Let's take a look now at another work by the author of "The Lady and the Tiger", and see what Stockton's tale of a priest and a mythic beast can tell us.

The Bear that Wasn't (1946/67)

I'm sort of amazed that anyone still remembers the Looney Tunes.  That kind of goes double for the fact that a group of some of the most iconic rogues gallery of characters in the history animated cinema is still able to maintain a great deal of recognition not just from long time fans, but also from ongoing generations of newcomers.  Something like that has got to be a testament to the staying power of genuine Art.  If that weren't the case, would any of us still be talking about films like Pinocchio, or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves all these years later?  The fact that make-believe figures like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner, and Wiley Coyote are able to take on a life of their own (the strange kind of half-life afforded to figments of the Imagination that sometimes makes them seem more real than reality) must also say a great deal not just about how we relate to the Arts, but also to the world around us.  It's with these thoughts in the mind that I'd like to look at one of the later products from the creators of Bugs and Daffy.  The Bear that Wasn't is a story from the mind of Frank Tashlin.  He was one of the original creators of the Tunes, way back when.  Tashlin worked on all of this comedy gold as part of a collection of animators looking for work as the idea of cartoon pictures began to take on a life of its own in the industry.

Tashlin himself was born in the Weehawken section of New Jersey in the early 1900s.  From what little is known about his personal background, I can't help but get the sense that we're dealing with one of those wayward class clown types.  These are the guys (they're most often guys) who for one reason or another find trouble fitting in to the usual social hierarchies assigned to them by their parents and teachers.  They tend to get along with their fellow kids as peers, more than they do the world of adult responsibility.  I think George Carlin gave a pretty good description of this type in one of his stand-up routines.  "Most of the time, in class, I was tempted to "Fool around, man"...You'd be bored and figure, well, why not deprive someone else of their education?  And you would set about disrupting the class by "attracting attention to yourself".  That is the name of this job, you know?  It's called "Dig Me"!  It was like, "Hey guys, didn't make the team, but bleurgh"!!!  They'd say, "Hey, he's crazy, man!  Hey, you wanna go to a party"?!  Yeah, you went to all the parties.  You got the last girl, but you went to all the parties...When I would try to attract attention in class I wasn't really like a very daring, bold youth.

"I was a little timid, really.  I didn't get right into fake epileptic seizures in the aisles, you know.  You'd just start out and test the water a little bit (web)".   He was speaking from his own personal experience, here, yet I can't help thinking that if Tashlin ever heard these words spoken aloud, he'd have been able to identify with pretty much all of it.  That's because what Carlin said about Class Clowns is just as good a description of Tashlin as it was of himself.  With that said, it just makes sense to me that Frank was the kind of brat who was willing to be flat out stupid crazy enough to fake a seizure if meant a chance to play hooky.  That's the best I can give you on this guy's character, anyway.  It should come as now surprise that he dropped out of high school early on, and promptly began a successful career of drifting from one odd job to another.  With guys like Tashlin, things can go either way.  You either find your niche (the one that helps you to scratch that ever nagging, restless itch, that causes you to act out so many times) or else you remain a kind of walking-taking non-entity drifting your way through life.

In Frank's case, he turned out to be one of the luckier Class Clowns.  He discovered (perhaps to his own surprise) that his skills with drawing and illustration could come in handy with a bunch of independent companies that were sprouting up across the country.  These companies were in this business of making and distributing some new-fangled contraption known as "moving pictures".  Some of them were even interested in seeing if they could take drawings on pieces of paper, and make them appear to come to life with a bit of camera trickery.  Whatever the hell all that was, those guys were offering good money, and so Tashlin took up his first professional job in showbiz.   Perhaps to his own surprise, he found the niche he'd been looking for.  The then burgeoning world of cartoon animation took him from working for John Foster on an animated theatrical short series known as Aesop's Fables.  Then, in his own obvious way, Tashlin found himself drifting into the employ of Leon J. Schlesinger, a film producer working at and for Warner Bros. studios.  Schlesinger is one of those major players in cinema history who seems forever doomed to never get as much credit as he deserves.  The complicating factor here is that he's also one of those guys who goes out of their way toward making that very easy to do.

Schlesinger is the man with the most over-arching credit for giving us the Looney Tunes.  He was the guy that the studio commissioned to set up Warner Bros. first animation unit.  It was by no means the first ever created.  It also wasn't anything like the second in line after the big breakout success that Walt Disney had with the creation of Mickey Mouse.  For whatever reason, yet to his own credit, studio head Jack Warner decided to take Walt's success seriously enough to decide to try and see if his own people could maybe find a way to compete with the newly minted Mouse Kingdom in terms of the creation, production, and distribution of animated cartoons.  They hired Schlesinger to get the job done, and it will forever be to his eternal credit that he was able to do it in such a way as to setup, for a time, the only other major competitor that Disney had in the field of American Animation.  That's where his credit is due.  It's also almost the point at where it all comes to an end.  What Schlesinger basically did is he located a few blocks of unused warehouse space on the Warner lot, gave it a once over and called it good, then had the studio move in a bunch of animator's drawing boards into this dingy, damp, and cramped work space where the lighting was subpar (which is kind of a problem when you need it to see what you're drawing) and the heating/cooling was a mix of on the fritz to next to non-existent.

The place was later designated by all the disgruntled employees who had to work there as Termite Terrace.  It was here, in the most unpromising of settings, that cinematic history would be made.  All that Leon did was really just to scout around for any available animators that Disney hadn't scooped up already, and offer them a job.  The punchline is that it really seems to have been the smartest course of action.  His offers got accepted, and sometimes the people hired on turned out to be more than good.  Guys like Warren Foster, Maurice Noble, and Bob Clampett proved to have more talent and humor in their hands and minds than you'd expect guessed just by looking at them.  Others, like Irving "Friz" Freleng and Charles M. "Chuck" Jones were later brought in after being lured away from Disney.  Perhaps the greatest irony of the entire Termite Terrace operation was that they were making animated legends that would be able to achieve this amazing yet somehow real timeless quality, and yet the studio that was responsible for distributing it would always seeing it as not even anything such as a marketable product, which would at least make sense from a  profit oriented business perspective.

Instead, Leon Schlesinger himself kind of summed up the studio's whole attitude to their animator's ability to turn pen and ink into gold by a constant refrain he had when acting as pretty much the boss of the entire outfit.  Each time he took up his accustomed viewer's spot in the screening room to view the latest finished product by the likes of Chuck Jones (even if it was classics like Duck Amok) was to always begin the preview with the phrase: "Okay, roll the trash".  Let's just say the reputation that the Tunes now enjoy today is a testament to the dedication of the fanbase over the limited thinking of the studio system as a whole.  What I'm starting to realize is just how much that legacy remains reliant on those who've grown able to recognize the artistry of people like Jones, Freleng, and Tex Avery.  It's pretty amazing when you consider how bad the working conditions were at the Terrace.  Staff like Noble, Foster, and others would quit multiple times on the studio, and would then have to be coaxed back to work by making Schlesinger and the Warner management agree to certain terms and promises.  When you consider they were all the victims of a toxic working environment, the achievements they made both in the realms of animation and comedy are more than just damned amazing.

Frank Tashlin didn't just manage to find himself in the thick of all this, he was able to leave his own mark on it.  His most notable efforts for me are 1945's Nasty Quacks, which marks the only time I'm aware of that Daffy was ever given anything close to an origin story.  The other is Hare Remover from 1946.  That one is an entire spin on Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where Elmer Fudd tries to turn Bugs into a monster.  Of all the legends in the Termite Terrace staff, Tashlin is interesting just as much for the career he would go on to have after he left Warner Bros. for good in 1946.  It comes as something of a pleasant surprise to discover that one of the artists who taught us what a sense of humor was like as a child went on to have fairly successful and steady career as a comedy writer for the likes of Bob Hope and the Marx Brothers.  That means he might have had a hand in creating some of Groucho's best lines.  In addition, he was able to find a later decent niche for himself as a director of live action films.  It should come as no surprise that most of these were laugh fests.  Tashlin's most famous work in this regard is The Girl Can't Help It (1956), where he was kind enough to go a long way towards popularizing then emerging phenomenon of Rock 'n Roll to mainstream audiences.

That's a subject for another day, however.  The film were here to look at now marks the last time the former Termite Terrace filmmaker ever worked in the field of animation.  And the interesting part is that it didn't start out as a theatrical short, but as a book.  The Bear that Wasn't first saw life as a children's book that Tashlin seems to have written in his spare time, perhaps as he was finishing up his stint at Warner's and casting about for his next niche.  It seems possible that at one point, one of the avenues he might have thought about exploring was life in the world of book publishing.  If so, then the story of a normal forest bear who wakes up to discover a big city block building sight has been constructed over his cave, and now everyone he meets insists that he's not a bear at all, but just a funny little man in a brown fur coat who needs a shave, sounds like it might have begun life at or around this time.  It's difficult to say for sure when Tashlin began the story, or how long he was at work on it.  What I can say for certain is that in 1967, Frank reconnected with his old fellow animator Chuck Jones, and the two agreed to turn the book into an animated short subject.  The results are what we're here to discuss.

Ur (2009).

Stephen King has had a very ambivalent relationship with technology.  This is something that may apply just as much to his real life as it does to anything that happens in his works of fiction.  This sense of inherent ambiguity about the Machine is something worth stressing, because a lot of times it can seem that this is anything but the case.  In his study of some of the author's most famous works, Bev Vincent establishes what might be considered an opposite, more or less positive take on the Maine writer's relationship with the Gadget.  "Over the years", Vincent points out, "King has experimented with nontraditional forms of publication (158)".  From there, Vincent goes on to provide the reader with a catalogue of all the times the Bangor Scribe has been willing to utilize the digital space to advance the publication of his stories.  He makes these little experiments in digital publishing sound like fun for the most part.  At the same time, the one thing none of this changes is the way the author treats machines within the confines of the product that matters most in King's career.  That would be the writer's books in and of themselves, and also the way that the theme of the Gadget keeps getting handled in them, even past the point where King owed his life to modern medical science.  Caution is still mixed with gratitude.  

By and large, it seems that King's thoughts about modern machinery (or at the very least, the mindset that exists in back of most pieces of our current tech) was summed up long ago by scholar Tony Magistrale in his book, Landscapes of Fear.  It's in that study that Magistrale lays out the best academic summation of King's thinking about machines.  "The more pessimistic side of science fiction..."stresses the danger of the machine age and how reliance upon science and technology weakens the basic human body and spirits" (7).  This awareness of the darker aspects of technology and the moral sacrifices that accompany its proliferation is an issue that often appears in Kings fiction (50)".  That's an accurate enough assessment so far as Magistrale is concerned.  Yet even here, it seems like just scratching the surface of things.  He notes the negative portrayals of technology within King's fiction.  However, I'm not sure he gets us any closer to the mindset underlying it all.  In order to get that, it seems like you have to get the information direct from the artist's own personal testimony.  It seems that the best explanation King ever offered for his technical themes is in the pages of Danse Macabre.

In the introduction to this sprawling non-fiction study, King talks a bit about how his upbringing in the Post-War America of the 1950s had an enormous effect on the way he's looked at the Machine more or less ever since.  "We were fertile ground for the seeds of terror, we war babies; we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris. We were told that we were the greatest nation on earth...but we were also told exactly what to keep in our fallout shelters and how long we would have to stay in there after we won the war. We had more to eat than any nation in the history of the world, but there were traces of Strontium 90 in our milk from nuclear testing.  We were the children of the men and women who won what Duke Wayne used to call “the big one,” and when the dust cleared, America was on top.  Further, we had a great history to draw upon (all short histories are great histories), particularly in matters of invention and innovation.

"Every grade-school teacher produced the same two words for the delectation of his/her students; two magic words glittering and glowing like a beautiful neon sign; two words of almost incredible power and grace; and these two words were: pioneer spirit. I and my fellow kids grew up secure in this knowledge of America’s pioneer spirit—a knowledge that could be summed up in a litany of names learned by rote in the classroom. Eli Whitney. Samuel Morse. Alexander Graham Bell. Henry Ford. Robert Goddard. Wilbur and Orville Wright. Robert Oppenheimer. These men, ladies and gentlemen, all had one great thing in common. They were all Americans simply bursting with pioneer spirit. We were and always had been, in that pungent American phrase, fustest and bestest with the mostest (9-10)".  Consider this aspect of his life as the first part of those "terror seedlings" that King and his peers got sprinkled with as young, impressionable minds back in the day.  The second ingredient in the recipe the artist is describing for us came about through the gradual arrival of an inevitable understanding about the so-called adults in the room who are ostensibly "responsible" for modern technological life.

King sums this up through a neat and precise quotation from Sci-Fi author Jack Finney's novel Time and Again.  From the way the quotation is framed, it's clear that while Finney might have been writing about imaginary people in make-believe circumstances, it's pretty damned obvious that King see it all as a reflection of his own personal experience.  "I was... an ordinary person who long after he was grown retained the childhood assumption that the people who largely control our lives are somehow better in¬ formed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did I finally realize that some of the most important decisions of all time can be made by men knowing really no more than most of the rest of us (333)".  In other words, it was the slow dawning recognition that often the people who create and are in charge of machinery often wind up not knowing as much about the consequences their creations will either create or unleash.  In other words, even with a lot of know-how under the hood, it's still no guarantee of an entirely one-hundred-percent optimum outcome.  This paints a picture less of someone who is any kind of thoroughgoing luddite, and more an artist with a healthy recognition of the balanced benefits and hazards of modern machinery.

When it can be demonstrated to work well, then it's enough to consider it good.  If any number of downsides begin to multiply in near perfect compliment to all the benefits, then at this point I'd have to say we're all aware in one form or another of being stuck in a land of perpetual mixed blessings, at best.  The fact of modern technology at its worst is when the design is made with the express purpose to harm or disrupt daily life.  It seems to be this negative mindset that can infuse the making of the Gadget, and the consequences that can sometimes stem from it, that fascinates King, more than anything to do with the Machine, in and of itself.  This train of thought might be expressed in a series of questions.  Is there such a thing as a bad machine?  If so, what kind of mind would be capable of constructing such a man-made monstrosity?  How much damage can such technology inflict upon the world?  Even worse than this is a very troubling corollary.  How much would it take to turn an ostensibly good machine into a bad one?  In many cases, the answer is as frightening as it is simple.  All you have to do there is to find the right way to abuse its otherwise correct use, and then, you have turned a help into something more horrible than a hindrance.  It's thoughts such as these that appear to be at the back of King's treatment of machines.  It's also at work in a short story simply called Ur.

A Tribute to Roger Corman (1926-2024).

I wasn't expecting to write this.  Not in the strictest sense, anyway.  All that happened is one of the bright lights of the Entertainment world went out not too long ago.  In a sense, I guess you can say it was expected.  They say it happens to everyone sooner or later.  At the same time, it's like you never can be ready for when it happens to any artist whose life and work you've come respect.  That's how it was for me, anyway, when I learned of the recent passing of Hollywood producer, director, and film distributor Roger Corman.  For the longest time, he seemed like something of a permanent fixture in both my childhood and life.  I suppose that's the reason why it came as such a shock to know he'd finally passed on.  When an artist can leave a big impact on the way you watch and think about not just films, but also storytelling in general, then it's like something vital has been lost from the Entertainment scene.  I almost want to compare his death to that of a lighthouse being shut down.  It leaves a  lot of blank spots on the map that results in an incomplete picture of the terrain, and that can come with a whole lot of costs.  I'll elaborate on where my thinking is going with this idea as we get further along in this tribute.  For now, it's enough to say that Corman's insights into the nature of filmmaking or of telling stories are a key factor in his legacy.  Beyond that, I think the best place to start a tribute like this is with his personal impact.

The Ray Bradbury Theater: The Screaming Woman (1986).

If there was any downside to growing up as an 80s kid, then it would have to be the fact that you were living in a pre-Internet, analog era.  Granted, that's not a bad thing in and of itself.  It did mean, however, that you couldn't just log on like you do now, enter the name of your favorite movies, TV shows, or sometimes even the very commercials you grew up with, and then binge watch to your heart's content.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that the closest thing to a downside about having an 80s childhood is that you could never experience all of it at once.  There was always the risk that you might miss out on something important.  Maybe you were like me, and were so addicted to the cartoons airing on the Disney Channel that you didn't bother to realize you could also catch airings of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Gremlins as well once Mickey, Donald, and Goofy had taken their final curtain calls for the day.  Or maybe you're thinking is so damned one-track because you're still just a kid that you never even realize that HBO might have been showing a George Lucas produced animated fantasy called Twice Upon a Time, and so you miss out on an obscure yet valuable gem.  These were the risks for 80s kids.  The good news on my side of the equation is that I wasn't that dense.  Sometimes I'd be smart enough to think, "You know, that Tom Hanks Big movie sounds like it could be a lot of fun.  Maybe I'll keep an eye out for whenever its on".

Still, even with these occasional moments of insight thrown into the mix, the sad fact remains that while most of us 80s kids were blessed with what I can only describe now as a resurgence of the Romantic Movement in the Arts , it still meant none of us had the kind of childhood were you were able to capture it all.  Even today, 80s media presents one of the richest cornucopias in terms of both viewing and reading material outside of the Golden Age of Hollywood.  It's an entertainment catalogue whose plethora is so vast that it makes perfect sense that a lot of its best offerings were unrecognized on their first initial run.  So that a lot of us are just now rediscovering what we missed out on when we were young.  That's sort of how it's been for me when it comes to the treasures offered by The Ray Bradbury Theater.  It's the kind of TV show that can only exist as the product of another time and era in the thinking of corporate media.  This was an era when everything was less commodified.  The original Hollywood studio system had come to an end, and the net result was a brief moment when artists kind of had full control of the car keys.  It meant they could assemble their little red wagons and not be afraid to install as many types of story engines as their Imagination could allow.  This applied to the realm of television as mush as it did to the now fading institution known as the movie theater.

It meant you were in for a treat if you were a kid in the 80s.  Because a lot of the big networks now found themselves sort of having to take risks on high concept Fantasy and Sci-Fi ideas.  Some of them were pretty obvious, like the staples we've all come to know and love such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Inspector Gadget.  Others, however, took a more daring approach to the kind of stories they could tell.  This was the case with the series that author Ray Bradbury wound up producing for HBO.  By then the noted Sci-Fi scribe was already something of a giant in the industry.  The kind of name with the sort of clout that no longer exists in the strictest sense of the term.  If Ray were still alive, odds are even he could never have managed to pitch a series which consisted of little more than adaptations of his most famous short stories and get it greenlit today.  It's also sort of an open question in my mind whether Hollywood in its contemporary form would be capable of doing his work justice.  As a character in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard once observed, "It's the pictures that got small".  That seems to apply to our ability to try and recapture all the worlds and characters we fell in love with so long ago back when we were kids.  Everybody seems to have had bigger imaginations in the 1980s.

It's in part because of this, along with the factor of the breakout success of films like Jaws, Star Wars, and E.T. that Ray was in a position where the idea for a TV show made up of nothing but his own words and characters was able to get that much coveted greenlight.  It didn't hurt his chances that HBO was also still just a fledgling network at the time, ready and thankfully more than willing to take chances on the kind of material it would broadcast in order to let itself stand out from what was then a very large and generous yet competitive pack.  It was an era when the Nielson Ratings ruled the roost.  Anyone who could get even a sizeable enough chunk of eyes glued to sets showcasing the network's products would guarantee it at least a good enough spot to begin with in the Ratings charts.  Hence the willingness of HBO to take chances with stuff like Lucas's almost forgotten animated feature, or Ray Bradbury's own collection of short stories.  The final results turned out to be pretty good, by and large.  At the same time, this was one of those programs that was ostensibly a part of my childhood  that I just never got around to seeing when it first aired.  I've been playing catch-up for a while now.

In that sense, it's like being given a second chance to recapture those aspect of your childhood that you may have missed the first time around.  When it comes to reviewing a show like this there's a lot of good offerings to be had.  Some of the stuff on that old anthology can surprise you with the level of their sophistication.  I think it's best to start out by keeping things simple, however, and focus for now on one of the more easily read episodes to feature on the program.  It's a nice little little bit of childhood thrills and chills, and it goes by the title of The Screaming Woman.

Antigonish (1899): or The Man Who Sold the World (1970).

Here's the deal.  There's this thing my mind does with works of art.  I'm not sure how much of a conscious process or choice this is.  It's just something I've noticed every now and then.  What I'm talking about here is the ability to understand one work of art (regardless of medium, be it a poem, TV episode, book, or film) in terms of another.  In other words, sometimes I'll manage to get a better understanding of one story or narrative when I find myself contrasting it with another.  The reason I'm able to do this is because sometimes I'll just run across a Creative Idea that sounds interesting, yet it's also too obscure to figure out on its own.  Then the I'll find yet another, seemingly unrelated story concept, and for whatever reason, just the act of reading and being able to understand this bit of unrelated material will help me to gain a greater knowledge of the previous one that I had difficulty with before.  I'm not sure how common this is among the faces in the aisles.  All I know is that it's just something I do.  I want to say this is a habit that got started sometime way back when I was little.  Like somewhere before I hit the age of nine.  I'm basing this judgment call on a lot of those hazy memories that you're surprised to find still hanging around after such a long time.  The kind that exist on the edge of recollection, and yet the basic gist of their content remains somehow understandable.  This is how it's been for me, anyway.

Like I say, I can't really tell anyone how common this particular type of reading practice is.  I just don't know how many others study the narratives they like in the same way that I do.  So it's kind of useless to ask me if this is anything like part of a greater phenomenon of literary practice.  All I can tell you beyond this point is that this is what happened to me when I had the good fortune to read first an old, forgotten poem (I guess you could call it a children's rhyme), followed by song, also old, this one dating back to the start of the 70s.  The name of the poem was Antigonish.  It's one of those titles that no one remembers, even while there's something memorable about it.  The sort of thing you hear in passing, and then wonder why the word popped into your head later on.  The almost limerick style composition was written and published in the year 1899 by a now obscure poet and educator named William Hughes Mearns.  The song that helped me understand Mearns' poem was The Man Who Sold the World, by David Bowie.  I'm sure that's a juxtaposition few if anyone reading this would be expected to make.  I know I wasn't.  For the longest time, this forgotten poem and the chart topping song were complete and separate entities in my mind.  I ran across Mearns' work in a collection of children's verse in an illustrated primer book whose title I know forget, except that it was edited by Jack Prelutsky.

The Bowie song I ran across by seemingly pure chance one night while staying up late watching a now defunct VH1 programming block.  It was an entire program or segment dedicated to music from the 70s, as I recall.  Somewhere between Ozzy Osbourne's Iron Man and being introduced to the music of Leo Sayer for the first time (yeah, VH1 was dedicated to it's eclecticism back then) someone in a broadcast booth somewhere made the now wise choice to air an old live performance that Bowie gave of the song way back during a 1995 MTV concert special.  It was one of those things where at the time it had no greater meaning than just a way to enjoy a few minutes before dozing off to sleep.  It was the kind of thing I caught once or twice, enough anyway, so that the song got lodged in my head.  The sort of tune that recalls itself to your conscious mind, and you sort of remember it as being kind of interesting, yet you still don't attach all that much importance to it.  What changed that for me was running across that song again in connection with Mearns' bit of poetic doggerel.  What I didn't expect to happen was for Bowie's lyrics to help inform the meaning of Mearns' little rhyme.  The result wound up as something that was less a pair of unrelated verses, and more like a complete and greater poem told in two movements.  That's how I'd like to look at each effort, as two parts of a greater whole.

I do this first because the ideas that came about from pairing the efforts of these two artists in my mind suggest a rich vein of thematic ore that is just too interesting not to share.  Another reason for looking at these two poetic attempts together is because each of them seem to share the same genre.  In many ways, the placing of Antigonish and The Man Who Sold the World together is to create the kind of narrative that is more or less perfect as we get into the Autumn Festival season.  What we have here is a kind of ghost story that I don't think either Bowie or Mearns intended to write.  Yet when you pair their efforts up, what you get is a whole greater than the sum of its parts.  I'd like to know it's meaning.

The Tell-Tale Heart (UPA, 1953).

A while back I did this brief little retrospective on an old animation studio.  It was called United Pictures of America, or UPA for short.  To try and summarize a whole lot of history in just a short span of words, the studio was created out by a cadre of Disney animators as a result of their collective decision to revolt against the House of Mouse over the question of wage pay.  For the purposes of this review, that group included all of the artists who worked on the short film under discussion today: Producer Stephen Bosustow; Ink and Paint Designer Paul Julian; Animator Pat Matthews; Production Manager Herb Klynn; Cameraman Jack Eckes; Scriptwriters Bill Scott and Fred Gable; and Director Ted Parmelee.  With Bosustow in the lead, these and a host of other animators, in-betweeners, and illustrators first went on strike against Disney, then left the company all together to set out their own course in the field motion picture animation.  UPA was the eventual result of these efforts, and for a time, it was possible to claim that they were the closest rivals Walt ever had outside of Warner Bros. when it came to making successful theatrical cartoons.  One of the reasons UPA was so good at this was because of their deliberate choice not just to animate outside the boundaries that Disney and Chuck Jones had established with their previous successes.  They were also able to successfully wed their chosen avant-garde minimalist technique to the type of sophisticated subject matter that was perfectly suited to it.

Its a mistake to claim that UPA was the first ever animation studio to base its films off of pre-existing literary source material.  That honor doesn't even belong to Walt Disney himself, but rather to former newspaper comics illustrator Winsor McCay, who has to count as the first published author to ever use the then new medium of animated pictures to bring his own Little Nemo comic strip to life.  From there, of course, Walt would go on to draw from the sources of European folklore and the Brother's Grimm to create some of his most iconic works.  In this sense, UPA wasn't even trying to play catch-up, so much as just continuing the game of Follow the Leader.  What continues to make their efforts stand out from the pack was in the type of literary models they used for inspirations.  UPA was the first studio to take the works of of modern writers such as James Thurber, popular contemporary music, or as in the case of today's offering, popular works of Gothic Fiction.  They did all of this in an effort whose goals were twofold.  First, they wanted to prove that they had what it took to get out of Walt's shadow.  Second of all, Bosustow and Company knew that the way to do that was to prove to the audience that animation could be used to tell stories whose subject matter was more mature than the regular cartoon fair.

It was with this goal in mind that one day Scott and Gable appear to have been the ones to hit on the idea of taking the work of one of the great pioneers of Horror fiction, turning it into a theatrical animated short, and getting none other than Oscar winning actor James Mason to star and narrate in it.  The result was a 1953 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", and it went like this.