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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cloak and Dagger (1984).

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

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

Anchors Aweigh (1945).

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

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

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

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

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

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968).

When we think of Ian Fleming (if we can remember that he even existed) then it's in relation to just one name: James Bond.  This is just about the single reason why the memory of pop culture can recall the creator of the world's most famous secret agent.  The explanation for why this should be is pretty simple.  Bond is the one creation out of all his other artistic efforts that got the best notice.  Double-O-Seven is the one character in the author's gallery of wonders who managed to capture the public's Imagination in what was somehow the right time and in just the right place.  Bond himself was the product of a number of influences.  Part of it came from Fleming's own experiences as a member of the British Secret Service during World War II.  Another and more important factor, the one which seems to have been the most influential in terms of the character's ability to leave an indelible footprint in pop culture, is down to the time period in which his name first saw the light of day.  The first adventure in which the world's premiere super spy made his debut was in Fleming's 1953 novel, Casino Royale.  It was this mid-century bestseller which introduced audiences to a world of deadly secret operatives, intrigue, seduction, and a combination of action thrills combined with an improbable yet impressive technological conceit in terms of gadgets and wheels that has pretty much gone on to shape the way we conceive of espionage in the realm of make-believe.  The key thing that made all of this work so well was how Fleming became such a major beneficiary of his own particular cultural zeitgeist.

Bond can be thought of as something very close to the ultimate manifestation of the Cold War period.  He was just the sort of hero that Western cinemas were looking for in a time when all of the major Atlantic nations were locked in a global competition with the Soviet Union for ideological supremacy of the hearts and minds of the public.  It seems to have been this conflict, which was going on even in the aisles of movie-goers that first gave Bond his fame, and then immortalized him as a pop culture staple; one of many, in point of fact.  It turned Fleming's creation, if maybe not it's author, into a household name.  The perfect irony that compliments this achievement is that, just like with so many other artists, it is the one, defining accomplishment that has swiftly erased any awareness of the author's other works.  It's the same fate that Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Lewis Carroll all met with.  Each of them, along with Fleming has managed to imbue one particular imaginary figure with so much Creative life, that it's as if the audience has decreed that nothing else they ever did matters.  Roald Dahl's has met with a kinder variation of this same fate.  If the name of this Swiss-English writer means anything to anyone, then it's as the creator of Willy Wonka.  Fate has been kinder to Dahl, in this regard, however.  Far from decreeing that he never wrote anything else of worth, Dahl's other writings, such as The Witches, The BFG, or James and the Giant Peach have become household classics just as well.

Fleming was never able to have that same luck of the draw.  He never got the chance to become known as the same level of versatile talent that Dahl is now still regarded as.  Instead, whatever else the rest of his literary output may have been, pop culture memory has seen fit to consign it all to the dustheap of history.  It's James Bond we want from now on.  If it has nothing to do with the adventures of 007, then what's there to give a rip about, anyway?  There's a mercenary style quality to such zero sum thinking, and it could be worthwhile to someday examine just how this particular factor shapes the nature of modern audience reception.  It might be able to tell us a great deal of how we can be so receptive to certain Creative Ideas at one time, while others from the same artist leave us cold to the point of hostile indifference for almost all the rest.  It's a fascinating occurrence worth paying attention to, yet that's not what this review is about.  Though there may be parts of the story under examination today which can help shed some light the questions asked above.  Before we can get to any of that, however, there's the background for how the tale under the microscope came to be made.  It all happened near the end.

It starts with a heart attack, one the author suffered near the end of his days in 1961.  Fleming had nine successes to his name by the time of March in that year, and all of them were due to just one man.  Bond...James Bond.  He'd written other non-related texts by this point, yet I think it's telling that most of them were of the non-fiction variety.  These include, in seeming total, one true crime book, a travelogue, and one semi-romantic short story (web).  The only other notable title to his name is the book adaptation under discussion here.  At least it allows the critic an answer to one part of the conundrum for why Fleming isn't known for much else besides Bond.  It really does seem to be the case of the author allowing himself to be defined by success of his greatest creation.  He's almost like a version of Conon-Doyle if he were willing to rest content, for the most part, with writing Sherlock Holmes stories and not much of anything else.  It's the author's apparent comfort with this state of personal affairs that makes Chitty Chitty Bang Bang stand out all the more as the great creative anomaly of the artist's life.

The book had it's genesis in the wake of the heart attack which Fleming can be said to have survived, yet just up to a point.  It was while he was convalescing that a friend did a personal favor for the author that, on the surface of things, seems like the last sort of gift you'd give to the writer of a book series centering around the exploits of a serial womanizer.  Fleming was given a copy of Beatrix Potter's Squirrel Nutkin to read while bedridden.  His immediate reaction is one that fans might expect from the creator of 007.  Fleming came away less than impressed.  What happened next is the part most audiences would never have expected.  For all intents and purposes, Fleming appears to have been seized by the idea that he could write a better story for children than that.  However unexpected or unprecedented the final results may seem, this is what happened.  He began to compose a story with the working title of The Magic Car, and proceeded to pack a lot of his own previous enthusiasms into the plot (web).  These include the tell-tale penchant for taking a simple yet stylish looking automobile, and then transforming it into a fantastical marvel of technical engineering.  This part of the author's repertoire should be familiar enough to longtime fans of the franchise's trademark Astin-Marten.

The car at the center of Fleming's single children's novel amounts to a toned down version of this same conceit.  It's possible to posit the author as creating a children's librarian version riff on the usual tropes that had defined his fiction in an up till then adult key.  The somewhat poetic irony is that this tale of a Magic Car that transports its owners on a grand adventure turned out to have been the very the last writing Ian Fleming ever accomplished.  On the 11th of August, 1964, the creator of James Bond passed away, as much a victim of the work schedule that sudden fame catapulted him into, in addition to a lifetime of hard living, both within and aside from the call of duty (ibid).  The story of how the author's single children's novel found it's way to the big screen is somewhat fitting considering that it was none other than Albert R. Broccoli, Fleming's longtime collaborator and producer of the Bond film adaptations, who was ultimately responsible for the film we're looking at here today.  The book was published in three installments after Fleming's death, and when Broccoli had the completed manuscript in front of him, his reaction probably mirrors that of a lot of longtime Bond fans who learn that Fleming also wrote for children (however briefly).  He came away less than impressed, thinking there was no way material like this would ever make for a good movie.  Then Walt Disney changed his mind.

The sudden breakout success of the Mouse House's freely adapted version of P.L. Travers Mary Poppins seems to have been enough of an incentive for Broccoli to swallow whatever doubts or misgivings he might have had about the manuscript, and instead hit the green light that got the ball rolling on this story's eventual road to the big screen.  The filmmaking process as a whole seems to have been time consuming on this one, as it was first in pre-production for almost two years, and that was all about trying to get the script right (more of which anon), and the production process itself seems to have dragged on for three whole months.  Whatever behind the scenes issues were going on with this picture, the movie adaptation of Ian Fleming's final novel at last made its feature debut on December 16th, 1968.  What remains to be seen now is just how well the film holds up after all of these many years.

The Manhattan Project (1986).

If you were born and raised at any point from the mid to early 80s, then there's a specific type of social phenomena you might recall from those glory days of childhood.  The way this scenario tends to work is you'll be going about whatever your daily routine is, and at some point or another, you decide to crash out on the couch in front of what used to be the reigning form of mass media back in the day, the television set.  It's what the Analog Generation relied on instead of Wi-Fi.  Just as younger age brackets can't fathom a life saturated with digital equipment more or less everywhere you turn, rest assured, it's still difficult for an 80s kid like me to figure out how the shows I used to watch on the Idiot Box could ever have been made in Black and White with the most primitive forms of broadcast technology imaginable.  I can even recall growing up among the detritus relics of the 40s, 50s, and 60s of my parents generation, and even with the proof of human development and the passage of time right in front of my face, it still took me a long time to put two and two together.  By the time I got old and (I hope) smart enough to be curious about all the items of days past that I came of age around, it was all too late.  Now what's left are just memories.  Anyway, part of the Analog Kid routine would be to crash in front of the Tube, and channel surf.

I'm pretty sure the process I'm about to describe is also something of a dying social practice.  It's the kind of thing that still might exist in a few household across the Nation, yet it's nowhere near the frequency it once had back in a time before the advent of Broadband.  The best way to describe it is that it was my age bracket's version of side-swiping.  The trick was that instead of just using your fingers to move the screen around, in order to make the display change, you had to use this mostly rectangular handheld device known as a TV remote control.  It was a battery-operated electrical box that fit in the palm of you hand.  It came equipped with all sorts of dials and buttons on it, some of which you used to change the channels on the television set.  The rest were all sorts of other functions that I'm sure most of us never bothered with, and so several decades of Analog Children coasted through our viewing life not knowing just what the hell all that other stuff was for.  I know I still don't, anyway.  The point is that this TV era ritual I'm talking about here would involve lounging in front of the Tube, using the remote to flip through various television channels.  One other built-in feature of those pre-Internet days is that there was a whole world of difference between the content you might have wanted to see, as opposed to whatever the broadcasters either would or could offer up to the viewing audience on the airwaves.

I can recall many occasions when I knew I'd rather be watching my favorite cartoons, and yet all channels like TNT, Nickelodeon, or the Big Three Alphabet Soup Stations had to offer were boring looking sitcoms, News at 10, or NBA matches.  As you get older, you learn to appreciate the latter, but when you're a kid, all you can think about is fun with Bugs and Daffy.  That's pretty much were my mind was at on a lot of those occasions when it seemed like there was nothing good on to watch.  This used to be something of a staple for 80s childhoods.  It was kind of like a general standard operating procedure imposed on the audience by the inherent dictates and limitations of the televisual medium. 

Sometimes, however, you got lucky, and it was here that what might be termed the Lottery flipside of TV channel surfing comes into play.  It's the shared social ritual that I'm talking about in and o itself, now.  The way it works is, sometime you'd be channel surfing the brain drain machine to see if there was anything good on, and your efforts would land you right in the middle of a snippet of action from a film you've never seen or heard of before, but that either managed to capture your interest, or else you might have wound up as one of that lucky fraternity of 80s kids who accidentally scarred themselves when the TV channel you flipped onto showed you the kind of films where it was clear the violence and gore levels were aimed squarely at the adults, and not the eyes and ears of little pitchers.  I've been on the receiving end of both sides of the channel surfing equation, and sometimes even the surprise discoveries that had me running for safety behind the couch have become longtime favorites as (what we must be jokingly referring to whenever we choose to describe ourselves as) an adult.  The film I want to talk about here today was one such example of a channel surfing catch.  It belongs to the former category of films caught in passing that can be described as Intriguing, rather than the latter section now known affectionately as Kindertrauma.  This was back during the 90s, on the Disney Channel.

I think the TV might have just been left turned on to that station, rather than any effort at channel surfing on my part, yet what I know for sure is that at some point during the end of the day, I came into my room, noticed the TV was on, and I saw Dr. Dick Solomon, from 3rd Rock From the Sun, helping this teenage Brat Pack looking kid (kind of a Ferris Bueller wannabe, if that makes sense) to make his way safely out of a military facility.  Both men had guns aimed in their direction, and they were carrying a fully loaded and armed nuclear device between the two of them. For better or worse, that's the sort of thing you might chance to happen upon if you came of age during the final glory days of broadcast television.  You could run across something that scared the wits out of you, or else be left thinking along the same lines I did when I saw Emilio Lizardo and Frasier Crane's dad in a race against a ticking nuclear clock as they tried to disarm a nuclear bomb before they all went up in atomized smoke.  In my case, that was the kind of cinematic scenario that left me thinking, "Well now that sounds interesting.  Too bad I just caught the tale end of this flick, though.  Sounds like it could be a lot of fun".  When an occurrence like this happens, a number of things can result with the viewer here.

It's like you're faced with a choice, if that's how you want it.  You can decide to let what you've just seen go as a nice yet momentary bit of diversion.  Just something to enjoy in passing, and not the kind of thing you need to give any further thought.  On the other hand, you can come away fascinated by just a few snippets of film caught in passing, to the point where you make a semi-unofficial vow to yourself to make sure and hunt down a copy of the movie to watch in full, so that you can get a clearer picture of what you just saw.  This is what happened in my case.  The ending of the film had just enough of the right of sort of nail-biter quality to it that it managed to leave a good impression in my mind.  It also didn't hurt that I could tell there was a nice bit of humor inscribed within the the film's writing, at least based on what I had seen of it in media res, and walking in blind.  It created just enough of the right sort of positive impact in my mind that the picture has always managed to linger around in the back of my thoughts.  It didn't take me too long to realize that the reason it kept hanging around was that some part of me was always curious to see the rest of the picture from start to finish.  So, recently, with nothing much on my plate, I sat down a re-watched a 1986 comedy, The Manhattan Project for the first time.