Ray Bradbury Theater: Downwind from Gettysburg.

If I had to describe the author in just a few words for today's audiences, then I guess you'd have to call him an unknown tap root; a well or source of inspiration.  It won't surprise me too much if that doesn't make sense to most folks.  "What the hell are you even talking about?" is a question they sort of can't avoid if they don't know any given subject.  In our day and age, a lot of the past is an undiscovered country.  I'd have to advise anyone who stumbles upon it to tread lightly.  As long as you're dealing with the all the stuff you know about, then you're in your element.  If you come across a piece of the past that just happens to be lying around, then watch out.  If you're not careful, pretty soon you'll find out what it's like to be reduced to the level of a five-year old once again, long after you've left the crib far behind.  If you insist on digging up the past, then pretty soon you'll have no real choice in the matter except to ask what this or that element means, and why, and how come?  The only other option is to just leave the past where you found it and pretend as if nothing happened.  This can seem like a very safe option for a lot of people.  The only trouble is that your choices get a bit more complicated if it turns out that the only to move forward is to explore backwards just a bit.

My point is that when you bring up guys like Ray Bradbury, the topic becomes difficult to discuss on account of there's a lot to talk about, and most folks don't know it, and so they don't have much choice in knowing where to begin.  Who was this guy, anyway?  The simple answer is that he was a writer.  Just one of those old geezers who used to be a phenomenon in the drug-store paperback trade.  There was a time, maybe some of your grandparents still know it, when you might be lucky catch one of his short stories tucked away in the folds in an old copy of The Saturday Evening Post, or even Playboy.  Sometimes one of his books could be found on those old revolving racks they had placed up on the counter.  There, if you were lucky, you might spot one of his titles.  The name tags to look for would have been such fair as The Illustrated Man, R is for Rocket, and S is for Space.  If you were in luck, sometimes one of those old magazines would feature a macabre little gem like The October Game written under his hand.

There was a span of time when the writing and publishing of printed stories was a great deal more profitable than it is now.  Back before the 80s, if a story wasn't on TV or the movie theaters, it could still be found in the pages of a peculiar artifact known as a book.  This odd looking specimen, composed in the main of processed pulp wood and smeared from cover to cover with ink and paint once represented the height of literacy for countries all over the world.  Raymond Douglas Bradbury was one of the many ink-stained wretches who were able to earn a living by getting his name published in those artifacts.  He set a great deal of store by them.  I think I recall him saying in an interview once that all anyone needs to start a civilization is to create a library.  I'm willing to argue he has a point.  I'd just be sure to add essentials like fertile soil and a usable water source into the bargain.

That's perhaps as decent an introduction as anyone can provide for an author like Bradbury.  The trouble is it doesn't really go far enough.  It's serviceable for a first introduction, and like many initial greetings, it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of things.  It might seem odd to make such a fuss about a writer who is no longer around anymore.  However, if that's the case, then who is H.P. Lovecraft?  If you can provide an answer to that question, then why do you value him so much?  What is it that makes him special?  I know the answer, I just wanna hear it from the fanbase.  Public awareness of the writer from Providence remains at a healthy 50 to 75 percent.  Bradbury's name also hovers around in that same percentage bracket.  The main reason Lovecraft is still hanging around, even from the grave, is that all these years later his writing still has a way of creeping underneath the readers skin and attacking the place where you live.  It's one of the best hallmarks of a good Horror writer.  Because of this, fans keep his work alive, even while trying to grapple with the more problematic aspects of his life and thought.

For some reason, it's easier to recognize the legacy of certain artists more than others.  Lovecraft is one writer with a noticeable legacy.  Walter Elias Disney is another.  However I don't know for certain whether it's realized that Bradbury has left just as big an impact as the other two.  In order to understand Bradbury's innovations, I think it really does help to situate him between the two other artists just mentioned.  If you talk to any genuine Lovecraft fan, he'll tell you that what makes the author unique is how he was able to provide a voice for the Horror story that was able to bring the genre into a modern idiom.  If we take that claim as our starting place, then it serves as a decent enough point to figure out where Bradbury stepped in.

The one element that ties Lovecraft and Bradbury together is that they are both products of a thriving Pulp Magazine market.  Like Howard Philips, Bradbury got his start in such publications as Weird Tales and worked, or wrote his way on up the ladder.  There are a few things that Bradbury does in his own writing that sort of echoes Lovecraft, even if he winds up taking it all in a totally different direction.  Like Howard Philips, Bradbury could utilize the basic concept of taking some kind of fantastic element (an object,wraith, or creature) and set it down in a contemporary modern setting.  So far, there's nothing that would differentiate his work from the Providence scribe.  The difference really begins to come in when you notice the branching directions each writer takes.  One of them seems to withdraw from the world, while the other tends to expand outward towards it.  Where Lovecraft might start his tales in the normal halls of academe, or in wooded lanes and country roads, his narratives often take a direction that tends to leave these normal setting behind.  The Great Old Ones tend to cut the reader off from his surroundings, and leave everything in an impossible plain of existence.  In this sense, Lovecraft's work is more introverted and solitary.

Bradbury, on the other hand, will often cause both monsters and marvels to enlarge our picture of the world.  Rather than have his protagonists withdrawn from their normal settings, Bradbury's characters often have to learn to adjust their picture of reality to the kind that leaves room for the possibility that one day a dinosaur might be seen lumbering down Main Street, or that a Martian can move in next door, or that witches can still travel in night sky lit up with all the benefits of the electric light.  The most noticeable aspect of these tropes lies in exactly the way the artist uses them.  It seems as if Bradbury's major literary accomplishment was to discover a modern expression for a lot of the elements of ancient myth.  He appears to have found a way to make a poltergeist in the attic relevant to modern audiences.  This might sound like a very minor narrative element to highlight.  If that's the reader reaction then I'm going to argue it says less about Bradbury as a writer, and more about how audiences have grown dulled to the original innovation.  These days we've become so used to a lot of the tropes the Waukegan native helped put on the map that we don't even recognize where they came from.

Perhaps that's the real irony about Ray Bradbury's career.  His achievement may very well have been so all-encompassing, that it's managed to obscure the writer who made it all possible.  If Ray's biggest artistic achievement is to bring the fantastic into modern suburbia, then it also forces the attentive reader to realize just how much this creative inspiration has affected all the other artists who came after.  Bradbury's stories of myth's encroachment on the contemporary world in a modern garb finds its inheritance in the concept of vampires taking over a small New England town, to a lone alien getting lost and stranded on Earth having to find his way home.  The key thing to notice is that none of these ideas would have been anywhere near as possible if Bradbury hadn't come along to test the waters first.  From that perspective, it makes sense to argue that Ray's impact on the history of genre fiction is just as big as Lovecraft's.  It is just possible that Bradbury's legacy goes perhaps just a bit further.  Philips's impact seems to extend to the nature of the Gothic field, whereas Ray's manages to effect a very quiet revolution in how authors across to popular fantastic genres compose a lot of their works in terms of style, tone, and a wider range of content.

Some may argue that I'm trying to turn a molehill into a mountain by pointing all this out.  I'm gonna have to reply that somewhere along the way we got a bit too used to treating a mountain as if it weren't even there.  Without Bradbury, guys like Rod Serling, Richard Matheson, or Stephen King wouldn't have had the basic building blocks they needed in order to jump start their own careers.  None of them could afford to be sui generis.  Each of the three just mentioned had to go through their own creative apprenticeship in order to get at where they are now, even if, in some cases, the audience no longer quite realizes it.  That's no small feat, even if you can't bear to look at it.  I guess what I've been trying to say through all this is that everyone remembers freaks of nature like Lovecraft, however Bradbury was the major league champion who gave the others a kind of necessary ballpark to play in.  I think any genre fan would do well to remember that.  If that fact is kept in mind, then a lot of the tropes associated with the genre, and their usage over the years begins to make a bit more sense.  It's less of a series of disconnected fragments, and more like a collage that goes together to make up something like a coherent secondary world, or maybe something close to a shared stage in which each could find a place to perform their respective arts.

I brought up at least one other artist in the menagerie of names listed above.  Unlike Bradbury, this one is still somewhat lucky.  He doesn't need much in the way of an introduction.  Almost everyone who's anybody knows, or thinks they know who this other artists is.  However, there are a few gaps and omissions in the dossier.  Part of the problem with being a recognized brand name is that all anyone can ever know about is based on little else except popular reputation.  When you hear the phrase "The Happiest Place on Earth", you more or less know who and what you're dealing with, up to a point, anyway.  The very name tag conjures up a kind of collective memory of images and associations, whether for good or bad.  The one subject it doesn't necessarily conjure up right away is the figure of Ray Bradbury.

To be fair, why should it?  Places like Disneyland are a lot more than just one ink-stained wretch scribbling away in a corner.  What the hell would a guy like the author of Fahrenheit 451 have to do with the park franchise that gave us the new Guardians of the Galaxy ride?  If you reach a point like this, you've essentially reached the limits of the popular reputation for both artists.  Try and go beyond that point and you'll soon discover that the great majority of the audience simply can't talk about what it doesn't know.  Therefore you really can't blame them if they are surprised to discover that not only is there a connection between the respective creators of Main Street USA and Green Town, Illinois.  There is also a work of fiction which has forever joined them together.  It's tale well worth telling, if you've a mind to listen.

Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel (2011).

There's a chapter in Stephen King's full-length non-fiction study Danse Macabre with the curious title of "The Horror Movie as Junk Food".  At the start of the chapter, the author claims, "I am no apologist for bad filmmaking, but once you've spent twenty years or so going to horror movies, searching for diamonds (or diamond-chips) in the dreck of the B-pics, you realize that if you don't keep your sense of humor, you're done for.  You also begin to see the patterns and appreciate them when you find them (212)".  A bit earlier in the book, King made another claim that I think has a pretty essential relation to the concept of what he refers to as "B-pics".

He says words to the effect that the particular genre he works in as an uthor is the kind that requires an extra bit of heavy lifting from the imagination.  The reason for that is simple.  What would you do if someone came up to you and claimed there was a shape-shifting monster hiding in a sewer?  Or that an old 1958 Plymouth Fury was either haunted, possessed, or else had a malevolent mind of its own, and was going around killing people?  I'm pretty sure the Flying Spaghetti Monster was cooked up as a way of mocking that kind of thinking.  The point is that once you strip a lot of modern Horror tropes down to their essentials it gets easy to see just how ridiculous they all are pretty damn fast.  It is just possible that some of the concepts, such as the monster hiding under the bed, are able to retain an elder statesman form of dignity because some childhood fears are just that universal.  It also helps that the trope itself seems to be a kind of recurring right of passage in the budding human imagination.  Beyond that, however, it really does seem like there's this inherent hokey quality that the genre has to rely on in order to achieve its desired effects.

That's a real big deal breaker for a lot of people.  And it probably explains why Horror has been (and probably always will remain) the black sheep of the popular genre family.  It is just possible that you need a certain "hitch" in your mind in order to, as they say, "get into" it.  I'm not bothered if that's the case.  I just wish those on the outside looking in would realize that just because some of us gravitate toward things that go bump in the night, that isn't the same thing as being warped or morbid.  My own experience has been that the warped aren't interested in Horror fiction for its artistic merits.  Instead, they just use as a means to ends that are, in the long run, selfish and diminishing.  An actual Horror fan, on the other hand, is able to appreciate even the lowest rent level of schlock because sometimes even second-run material can contain trace elements of gold.

That seems to have been the case with the format known as B-pics, or B- pictures, to give genre it's full name.  It also brings us to the subject of this review.  King has a great deal of kind words for a lot films detailed in Danse Macabre that most critics would consider to be "dreck".  Nonetheless, he finds himself drawn to them.  It could be because he has a junk food mind.  Another possibility, however, is that he really can see the artistic merits of these films, and in particular of one certain filmmaker.  In the second chapter of his study, King makes mention of a small independent film company known as American International pictures.  It was the brainchild of two men, James H. Nicholson, and Samuel Z. Arkoff.

King attributes the creation of American International directly to the field of modern Horror fiction.  He explains that while the genre has always been popular, there are times when it has enjoyed various cycles of mass popularity.  "These periods almost always seem to coincide with periods of fairly serious economic and/or political strains, and the books and films seem to reflect those free-floating anxieties (for want of a better term) which accompany such serious but not mortal dislocations.  They have done less well in periods when the American people have been faced with outright examples of horror in their own lives (29)".

The moment that Nicholson and Arkoff created their new studio was during a post-war lull in the genre's prospects.  "So horror languished in the dungeon until 1955 or so, rattling its chains once in a while but causing no great stir.  It was around that time that...Arkoff and...Nicholson stumbled downstairs and discovered a money machine rusting away unnoticed in that particular dungeon.  Originally film distributors, Arkoff and Nicholson decided that, since there was an acute shortage of B-pictures in the early fifties, they would make their own.

"Insiders predicted speedy economic ruin for the entrepreneurs.  They were told they were setting to sea in a lead sailboat; this was the age of TV.  The insiders had seen the future and it belongs to Dagmar and Richard Diamond, Private Detective.  The consensus among those who cared at all (and there weren't many) was that Arkoff and Nicholson would lose their shirts very quickly.

"But during the...years that the company formed, American-International Pictures...has been the only major American film company to show a consistent profit, year in and year out.  AIP has made a great variety of films, but all of them have taken dead aim on the youth market; the company's pictures include such...classics as Boxcar Bertha, Bloody Mama, Dragstrip Girl, The Trip, Dillinger, and the immortal Beach Blanket Bingo.  But their greatest success was with horror films (31-2)".

A lot of that success was due to the fact that Nicholson and Arkoff had the bright idea of hiring a struggling young director who was pretty well fed up with the industry by that time, and who was willing to sign on to the two older men's endeavor on the agreement that they were willing to give him free reign to make whatever he damn well pleased on his own terms.  Nick and Sam told him yes.  The rest is a very interesting chapter of cinema history.  What makes it not so much unique, but something more like resonant is the extent of the influence that one man can have on an entire field of art.  It's interesting in the way that it is ever present, and yet neglected at the same time.  There are a multiple number of reasons for this.  I think the one that sticks out to me the most is that after all these years it's easy to look down on certain films just because they don't meet Hollywood's A-list standards.  That's the sort of cudgel that can be wielded with easy use, especially if we're going by a kind of adult form of the typical high-school popularity contest.

It’s hard to defend the things you love.  It’s always something personal, that can only have value to you alone.  Perhaps that explains why an average movie fan can only shake their head and wonder why artists like Robert De Niro or Martin Scorsese would heap praise on a film called Teenage Caveman.  Believe it or not, both have reason for their enthusiasm.  The director of the above title was named Roger Corman.  It also happens that Corman gave the same two men their first professional gigs as an actor and director.  For Scorsese, it was behind the camera shooting a film called Boxcar Bertha.  For De Niro, it was starring opposite Shelly Winters in Bloody Mama.  It can be a weird admission for artists of their stature to make (assuming they still have any).  I'm willing to call it legit, however in order to understand the nature of such an enthusiasm, and where it comes from, we have to talk a bit about the guy who helped them reach such an appreciation.  That brings us to the film under discussion, Alex Stapleton's 2011 documentary on The Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.

Kong: Skull Island (2017).

This is awkward.  It's not the sort of confession you make in an article dealing with this kind of subject.  The fact is I'm not sure I was ever all that much of a Godzilla fan as a lot of others out there.  I remember watching a very truncated, Americanized version (featuring Raymond Burr, of all people) back when I was too much of a non-grown-up to know any better.  And that's sort of the whole point.  My knowledge about the Great Big Lizard and his exploits haven't really advanced much since then.  The closest I've come to advancing my understanding of the lore is to watch a very useful retrospective documentary on the subject that lays out all the facts about the original first film that I've seen in just a fragmentary fashion.  Aside from that?  The awful truth is I've just never really managed to find the right door into this particular franchise.

If talking about the giant radioactive lizard sounds like a strange way to begin a review of a film about a giant ape, then that's also sort of the point.  The trouble is I can't just talk about Kong: Skull Island without mentioning the franchise of which it forms an ostensible part.  It doesn't help that I don't have a clue where to begin talking about that either.  Some time ago, it was decided to try and relaunch the long-standing Fire Breathing Monster franchise for Millennial audiences.  The first attempt out of the gate, 2014's Godzilla was a respectable hit with audiences.  The film under discussion today was meant to be it's follow-up.  And as of this date it's the only franchise entry I ever bothered to see.  Even then the reason was pretty simple.  It featured the big damn ape.

I'd been more or less a fan of his ever since he made me keep running to hide behind the couch at the age of about 8.  I'm talking about the original 1933 version.  Some people, after viewing that film, will say its impossible to get any kind of genuine reaction out of a relic like that.  I'm inclined to ignore such judgments.  Besides, their skepticism doesn't change the fact that it's what happened.  It's the only possible reason for why I should have any kind of interest in Jordon Vogt-Roberts's attempt to bring the King to life again.  The real question is, is it good or bad?

The Wolves in the Walls (2003)

'These are the days of miracle and wonders
This is the long-distance call.
The way camera follows us in slow-mo,
The way we look to us all - Paul Simon, The Boy in the Bubble.

Where do fairy tales come from?  It a question that takes a certain frame of mind to even bother asking.  By and large, most of us never bother with such a thought.  One doesn't have to be at or near the years of the cradle in order to have such curiosity, yet it does take a certain frame of mind.  The fairy tale itself is, without doubt, perhaps the closest we will ever get to defining the oldest possible form of storytelling.  The question of defining the term is never easy.  It's made all the more difficult by the fact that the fairy tale itself has existed under several different names, and has been able to encompass more than one genre form in its history.  At the beginning of things (or at least as close as anyone has been able to get) they were often described as myths.  It's a phrase whose usage can be attested to even in the writings of ancient philosophers like Plato or Aristotle.  Later, when there began to be enough odd souls left around for an actual analytical curiosity to develop about the subject, all the myths were slowly compiled together over the ages.  When enough tall tales of gods, immortals, heroes, and otherworldly creatures had been gathered together from several cultures, these curious readers made several interesting discoveries.

The first was that all the differing cultures of the world had their myths.  The second was the unaccountable fact that so many myths, told by differing storytellers who never had the opportunity to meet one another, somehow managed to craft different fables with a surprising amount of narrative similarities.  Why this should be is a puzzle that no one bothers about very much, except for a similar small handful, to this very day.  The upshot, however, is that once all the tales had been compiled, the term folklore was used to designate them.  This stems from the fact that there was a time when storytelling was a common thing done by an actual majority of the folk of any given culture.  It was the mythology they used to explain who they were, what they were, and the meaning of their own lives.  The fact that the average person on the street would be surprised such things were even possible once upon a time says a lot about how much things have changed.

The best answer to the question of where do fairy tales come from is also the simplest.  The imagination put them there.  It's accurate so far as it goes, yet it doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the topic.  It takes more than just a single article on a blog to answer that question.  All I can do is to take the problem one story at a time.  I do know that one, if not the only reason fairy tales came into existence was as an explanation for or a way of coping with a sense of threat.  Many of the first folktales originated in primitive hunter-gathering cultures in a time when everyone lived in the forest, and we lived almost nowhere else, because in a sense, there was no other place to go.  It was you, the world around you, and the  animals and fellow inhabitants you had to share it all with.  There wasn't even such a thing as Broadband, difficult as it is to conceive now.  Living with animals is really just another way of saying living with predators.  Part of the reason so many tales originated around a campfire is because it was one of the easiest ways of our ancestors to guarantee at least a small amount of safety for themselves in the watches of the night, when the eyes began to peer out of trees and thickets.

The animals of the woods would be drawn to the fire just like moths.  The  fireflies were the only ones daring enough to come right up to the flames, however.  The rest had an instinctive realization of fire, and the kind of damage it could do, and so kept a wary distance.  It didn't make the hunger, and therefore the threat, go away though.  Perhaps that's one of the reasons the more industrious of those ages soon began to contemplate an idea that eventually became indoor housing.  It might have solved a few concerns and safety issues.  However it was still a long time before the wolves no longer lingered at the door, clawing, scratching, and waiting for a chance, or a weak spot to get in.  I mention all this because in some ways it is those same primitive concerns that form at least one aspect of the title under discussion here today.

Neil Gaiman is still no stranger to the world of pop-culture as of this writing.  At the time the current book was written, he had already made a name for himself with such titles as The Sandman, Neverwhere, and American Gods.  At some point during all of that, he manged to become the father of a family.  He'd married into an American household, and his wife Mary still had relations she was very fond of and close to.  That meant sooner or later, Gaiman would have to knuckle under and move out to the States in order for her to be close to the people she loved.  The place Gaiman settled his family down was way out in the the near-wilderness of Minnesota.  It was this move to a new home that first brought the Wolves to Gaiman's attention.  He talked about it at some length to Hayley Campbell in her book about the author.

"We were living in a house that definitely had things in the walls.  I live in that house now, but lots of rebuilding has happened and the inside and the outside are a little more discrete, but back then there were bats in the walls, possibly rats in the walls, definitely mice in the walls.  And you would hear them.  They would scritch and they would scratch (250)".  There's a minor yet puzzling gap in the recollection here.  The good news is it can be filled in with the help of Hank Wagner's and Christopher Golden's brief account of the storybook's creation in their multi-part study, Prince of Stories.  According to Wagner and Golden, the whole thing got started by "Neil and Mary Gaiman's younger daughter Maddy, whose nightmares about hearing...scratching...within their home's walls inspired this book (355)".  It's from here that Gaiman is able to fill in the rest of the narrative.

"I went upstairs and heard crying coming from the bedroom.  And at that time (Maddy) was still sharing a bedroom with me and Mary.  She had her own little bed down in the corner of it, but she was asleep in my bed.  And she woke up.  She was crying.  I said "What's wrong?"  She said, "The wolves came out of the walls, they took over the house!  I had to run away from them!"  I said, "It's okay, it was just a dream."  She said, "It wasn't a dream.  I can prove it."  And I said, "How will prove it?"  She said, "I can show you the place in the wallpaper they came out from."  So she showed me the place in the wallpaper they came out from.

"Over the next few days she was still deeply worried about the wolves in the walls.  And I would tell her little stories in which she and I would take on the wolves in the walls, and we would win once they came out of the house.  They were definitely wolf-battling stories.  After a while she stopped worrying that the wolves were going to come out of the walls and I thought, "This is such a story.  This is so awesome (250)".  Gaiman had already published a previous illustrated book for young readers with longtime collaborator Dave Mckean when his daughter gave him the inspiration for a follow-up.

Campbell continues: "The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish had come out the previous year, so Gaiman was now a writer of children's books, and he sat down to write what would become The Wolves in the Walls.  Afterward, he looked at his two thousand words and decided they were "really lifeless and really dull" and contained none of the vibrancy of the thing in his (or Maddy's) head.  "So I went away and thought about it a bit.  And one day I was walking home and I suddenly thought, 'When the wolves come out of the walls, it's all over'.  And I knew the rhythm of that.  And knowing that, I thought, Okay, I know what the rest of this sounds like.  I think I have a tone of voice (250-1)".  That just leaves three questions to be answered.  What does the tone of voice have to say.  Is there anything the voice has worth saying?  The most important question is what does the voice mean?

Animaniacs (1995-99): A Retrospective

It all happened a long time ago.  The way it started was more like something out the corner of the eye.  All I knew at first is that I was watching TV.  The channel must have been tuned to one of those old children's television networks such as Nickelodeon, or something like it.  I know that was the station I watched most often back during the year 1994.  I can't remember what show I was watching, however, which probably says something about its quality (or lack thereof), unless it doesn't.  At one point during a commercial break, this very odd cartoon promo pops up.  I remember it was the Warner Bros. logo, and that there something off about it.  It's colors were muted and somewhat distorted.  There was this trio of strange, grinning, black and white animal characters that poked their heads out of the logo.  From there the commercials was a blur of almost surreal looking images.  I saw a series of shots of the characters as they capered around the screen.  I can't recall exactly what those actions were now, except to call them the standard basic tropes you'd associate with a cartoon character.  What I remember most of all is the strange shades of dark reds and blues that the characters and the whole background scenery were drawn in.

I hadn't a clue what I was looking at.  All I was told is that it was a TV spot for a new theatrical short.  It had the simple title of I'm Mad.  I think I also remember the commercial telling me it was produced by Steven Spielberg, or something like that.  Anyway, it came and went.  I was left puzzled for a few brief moments, and that was it.  I never saw it in theaters and it's possible the whole thing would have slipped my memory, except as one of those vague and ill-defined images of some lost event that either may have happened to you, or else you just imagined it.  It occurs to me now that the second run in I had with the figures in that commercial happened perhaps less than a year later.  Enough time had gone by so that it was no longer on my mind.  However, the event was still fresh enough so that when the second encounter happened, there was just enough memory left over to give things an air of familiarity.  It was a sense of, "Oh yeah, I've seen you before.  Who are you again"?

I encountered the figures from I'm Mad for the second time as illustrations decorating a Happy Meal box.  There were the same three figures, still looking as if they'd strolled right out of a 1930s Max Fleischer cartoon.  The difference was that now I slowly began to learn their names.  They were about what could expect from characters drawn the way they were.  In addition to this, I was also shown a number of other characters I hadn't seen before.  There were a duo of mice who claimed they were bent on world domination.  Also I recall a trio of pigeons known as the "Goodfeathers".  The complete and total irony of that discovery means that I knew the parody of a Martin Scorsese film long before I even knew it existed.  Hell, I didn't even know who Scorsese was at this point in my then very young life.  It is just possible I learned about one of the best filmmakers of the modern age from that Happy Meal box.

They say that third time's the charm, and I guess that must have happened in my case.  Because the third encounter I had with these figures was the one that reeled me in.  The theatrical short was the hook, and the Happy Meal was the line.  The sinker came in the form of channel surfing out of pure boredom and running into the same three figures again.  This time they were busy giving the Queen of England a headache as she tried to re-build Windsor Castle.  It sounds like something out of an old Looney Tunes feature and that's pretty much what it was.  These three characters (who I then learned were siblings), all displayed actions that hearkened back to an entire era of filmmaking.  From there, I started to track down where I could watch more of the show they were in.  I got lucky in finding out which channel carried them, and the rest is more or less what I'm here to talk about.

The Peter Pan Myth 1: Finding Neverland (2004).

There are some ideas that a critic would like to tackle because of the potential that can, or could, exist in them.  The trouble with these ideas is that if they are left alone, they tend to grow big in the critic's mind.  Sometimes, it seems, if the critic is not careful, the weight of these ideas tends to make them not just grow, but tower long enough to cast a kind of shadow over the mind.  It's what can happen when you know you have a pretty good idea not just for an article, but for an actual series touching on the same subject.  It is possible because sometimes certain books are able to get big enough to warrant such a treatment.  These are the tomes that have become standards.  They're the kind of stories that are familiar even if you've never read them.  They are the texts, in short, that have had a shaping influence on the nature and direction of the culture, even if the great majority are never able to realize it.  The philosophical texts of Aristotle fits into this category; Middle Earth and the tall tales of Mark Twain are another.  I think something Stephen King once said about this kind of work applies here.

He spoke of them while describing a certain category or type of author in his how-to autobiography On Writing.  I'd argue what fits these writers into such a high place on the great chain is precisely their ability to write such definitive texts.  "These are the really good writers," according to King.  They are "the Shakespeares, the Faulkners, the Yeatses, Shaws, and Eudora Weltys.  They are geniuses, divine accidents, gifted in a way which is beyond our ability to understand, let alone attain.  Shit, most geniuses aren't able to understand themselves, and many of them lead miserable lives, realizing (at least on some level) that they are nothing but fortunate freaks...who just happen to...fit the image of an age (136)".

Peter Pan is one text that sometimes gets fitted into that category.  Everyone knows the characters, and the outline of the story, even if they've never read the book, seen the play, or watched a single of its adaptations.  The dirty little secret here is that perhaps not many have paid much more than a tangential form of attention to the whole thing.  The demands of life are too many, and any genuine interest in the arts in general, or the Pan mythos in particular, is too minuscule to be anything other than a coterie affair.  It's the kind of thing only a few nerds tucked away into a corner ever seem to really bother with.  It's awkward, considering literacy is one of the many requirement most folk will need to get on with reality.  You might even make a paradox of it.  You can't earn a living until you learn make-believe, it's history, and its environs.  It's a perfect natural, perhaps inevitable, state between a rock and a hard place.  The rock itself is the same reality that confronts you one day after another, the hard place are all the facts you need to learn to even use the whole damn thing properly.  Perhaps its the tension between these two facts that generates the quality we humans have decided on calling drama.  There seems to have been no other decent enough word lying around, really.

The story of the boy who could fly makes up part of the toolkit most folk will need to get ahead in life.  Like the billboard in The Great Gatsby, its always there, flashing its sign for anyone who cares to pay attention.  Even those who have never stopped to look into the story know its basic outlines.  There's the Darling Family, a pirate ship, Hook, everyone's favorite, Smee, and then there's The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up himself.  Where did they all come from, however?  Even if there is a sense in which story's just emerge out of thin air (though I suppose its proper term is just Imagination) there's always got to be "the person" around in order to make it work.  This "person" can be anything from a conscious inventor to little more than a glorified secretary taking down lists of names and make-believe incidents as they emerge from whatever the imagination is.

In the case of Neverland and its environs, the person was named James Michael Barrie.  He was the one responsible for penning the story and cast of characters that premiered on the London stage on December 27th, 1904.  The play was enough of a success that the demand for a novelization soon took place.  After a long time of indecision, Barrie wrote and published Peter and Wendy.  Both play and story seem to be the original impetus for everything that most audiences have ever known about the Pan mythos.  The question is how did it all come about?  What were Barrie's inspirations?  Where did he get his ideas?  These are all very good questions, therefore it never occurs to the vast majority of the world to even bother asking them.  However, a few intrepid souls have made the effort to discover where the stories come from.  Some of them, like Alan Knee came away determined to try and dramatize the creative process that led to the birth of the Boy Who Could Fly.

Here's where things get just a bit a complicated.  It's obvious enough that at some point Knee, the original playwright was inspired to write the play that later turned into the film under discussion here.  The trouble I can't find a single scrap of backstage info that would tell anyone how his inspiration came about and what fascinated him about the subject matter in the first place.  I can't even tell whether or not we're talking about inspiration when it comes to the events not just at the heart of this play, but also the story that made it possible.  All I know is that at some point Knee's play was adapted into a movie by Marc Forster with Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet as the two leads.  The film received a critical lauding at the time.  However, the question is whether or not it holds up after all this time?

Savageland (2017).

There is a kind of minor debate going on, here and there, in the community of Horror fandom.  It all started with The Blair Witch Project.  Ever since making its initial splash back in the last year of the 20th century, it seems to have sparked an ongoing, off-again-on-again, debate.  The whole thing kind of hinges on whether the modern method of the Found Footage, or Mockumentary style of filmmaking is useful as narrative tool for telling a story on film.  The style itself seems to have attracted an equal amount of praise and criticism from the very moment it got launched out of the starting gate.  Those who like it claim that it's able to give cinema a new form of realistic storytelling, while others just claim it's an excuse for poor cameramen to show all their faults without having to take the blame.

My own response has been forever on the fence.  I seem to have found a neat enough place that works out for me.  For the longest time, it has become ever clearer that what counts for me has nothing to with the visual quality of a film.  My approach to it just isn't tactile enough to be interested in how realistic any of it is.  I have no real idea why this should be, except to say that it is the ideas, themes, or concepts underlying a story that really interest me more than how it all looks in the mirror.  The upshot for my film and book intake is that my focus automatically seems to zero in on the narrative itself, rather than on questions of realism in either appearance or acting.  This seems to work out for me, more often than not, for some reason.  It can sometimes be an added bonus for those moments when I'm able to come away saying I was able to find some sort of merit in films or books that don't hold a favorable view with others.  On the converse side, certain artistic products that hold a popular appeal often just leave me puzzled or unsatisfied.  It's a natural circumstance which has sort of left me sliding back and forth among audiences with every turn of the see-saw.  It can be either amusing or disconcerting, depending on how you look t it.

All I know is I don't really need or ask for a certain amount or dosage of realism in anything I watch or read.  I'd also argue that most fiction in general is never, in the strictest sense, all that real to begin with.  This hang-up with whether or not the final artistic product can consider realistic in any shape or form seems to amount to a kind of collective chimera, rather than any objective value.  Besides, in back of all the arguments for realism lies the question, not of reality, so much as the ability to gain a sense of respect.  The real question doesn't amount to "is it natural", but rather, "is it respectable in the eyes of the neighbors"?  This may sound a like a surprising idea to some.  Why should anyone worry about whether a work of fiction is respectable?  It's just make-believe, after all.

I think the answer can be found somewhere in the very statement of the question.  It posits art as a fundamentally second-class citizen.  The kind of element that always takes a backseat to the more essential aspects of living.  The inescapable fact is that most civilizations have regarded the Arts as something of a trifle.  It's there whenever one's spirits need amusing, nothing more.  Stephen King seems to have been on-target when he observed the kind of social status and function that artists like him have in a modern society.

"America has turned the people who entertain it into weird high-class whores, and the media jeers at any "celeb" who dares complain about his or her treatment.  "Quitcha bitchin!" cry the newspapers and the TV gossip shows (the tone is one of mingled triumph and indignation).  "Didja really think we paid ya the big bucks just to sing a song or swing a Louisville Slugger?  Wrong, asshole!  We pay you so we can be amazed when you do it well - whatever 'it' happens to be in your particular case - and also because it's gratifying when you fuck up.  The truth is you're supplies.  If you cease to be amusing, we can always kill you and eat you (422-23)". 

When you have to operate under this kind of social handicap, is it really any wonder that so many artists, and even a good chunk of the audience, is obsessed with making the art look as respectable as possible?  It's a setup that would give even Shakespeare an inferiority complex.  The trouble is I can't get rid of the idea that it all amounts to a form of artistic prostitution.  When the artist lets concerns with respectability override the task of making sure the story gets told right, regardless of form and format, then I don't see how it's any better than caving to a form of prejudice.  Granted, this in itself is a topic that any half-way decent work of art can explore to good symbolist (not literal) effect.

That seems to be the case with Savageland, a 2017 mockumentary co-directed by Phil Giudry, Simon Herbert, and David Whelan.  Like its predecessors in the sub-genre, the format is used to document an event that never happened, all the while filming it in such a way as to lead the audience into believing it did.  In doing so, it tries to raise a number of important topics.  Whether it is any good at delivering these ideas in an entertaining fashion remains to be seen.