ABOMINABLE ACT

 Re: ACT's successful campaign against cartoon superheroes in the late 1960a--

____________

ACT might be considered the stepchild of W(ertham).  I doubt they bothered citing case studies-- even studies as flawed as those of W-- but they shared W's "monkey see, monkey do" attitude regarding audiences.

As a superhero fan, I hated ACT's successful campaign against animated supers back then. But maybe they would have petered out no matter what-- and maybe they took the hit that could have happened to hyper violent Marvel Comics. Despite being more overt about fight scenes than, say, SUPERMAN was even in the early days, I'm aware of no serious anti-Marvel screeds in the sixties, and instead, at least one vaguely friendly estimation from Leslie Fiedler in the 70s. Somehow Spider-Man never seemed threatening to the bluenoses of the time; he may have seemed of a piece with weird new cultural developments-- TM, the British Invasion, and of course "Camp Batman."  Mrs. Grundy still didn't want Spidey cartoons on TV, but nobody seemed to mind Spidey kicking butts in the comics. There might have been protests of the Warren horror mags, but if so nothing ignited a movement. I doubt Wertham could have started one had he tried to engage with Silver Age comics, but it would have been fun to see what he came up with.   

THYMOS BE DE PLACE PT. 5

 I decided I needed to follow up PART 4 with a couple of variations on the thymotic/epithymotic word-pair-- but this time, taken from American rather than Japanese cartoons.

In my previous writings on thymos, I've drawn to some extent on Thomas Hobbes in defining what I now call "epithymotic" as actions taken for either "gain" or "security." The anime example I used in Part 4 was that of the character Sakura in URUSEI YATSURA, who repeatedly beats up Ataru to defend her personal security vis-a-vis not having him paw her. But a "gain" example can be found in the 1944 Warner Brothers short PLANE DAFFY, written by Warren Foster and directed by Frank Tashlin.

PLANE is set in a cartoon version of WWII, in which the noble American warbirds are having their plans stolen by the insidious Axis spy Hatta Mari. Hatta romances naive flyers into giving her their secret plans and then convinces them to kill themselves. The high command sends their best "woman-hating" pilot into enemy territory, Daffy Duck. Daffy is ambushed by Matta, who almost does melt him into a pool of goo with her ardor. However, Daffy rallies, giving as good as he got, and then tries to escape with the secret plans. 

As he tries to escape, Matta tries to kill Daffy in various ways, failing only because he's such a darn-fool duck. He swallows the secret paper to keep it out of her hands, but she seizes him and sticks him in an X-ray machine so that she and her leaders can see what's written on the paper. The big conclusion is that the secret is no secret, but the point is that all Matta's actions are oriented upon "gain," the gain of military advantage for her allies. There's no indication that she enjoys the activities of killing or seducing for their own sake, so all of her gain-focused violence would be epithymotic in nature.

Another flavor of the opposite category, the thymotic, appears in the 1952 Daffy Duck short THE SUPER SNOOPER (reviewed here), written by Tedd Pierce and directed by Robert McKimson. The flavor I described in Part 4 focused on the general pattern of Lum of URUSEI YATSURA. Whereas Sakura whales on Ataru to protect her own security, Lum does so because she's in love with him and wants to bend him to her will. This is a particular form of thymotic activity I've previously labeled "megalothymia," indicating that the person exercising his/her will seeks supremacy (though it's suggested that if Ataru settled down to be a good husband, Lum would become a good wife-- or at least, a better one than, say, Peg Bundy). 

The opposite flavor to megalothymia goes by the name of "isothymia," and it applies to the violence unleashed upon Daffy by the statuesque seductress, "The Body." Isothymia strives to bring about equality of recognition, and in SNOOPER's parody of gumshoe-fiction, Daffy-- a very different, often-self-defeating form of the duck than we see in PLANE-- barges into The Body's home in the belief that a murder's been committed. Because The Body comes on to Daffy, he assumes she's trying to cover up a murder she committed, so he starts tossing out wild scenarios about How She Dunnit.

 The Body is of course no more complex than Hatta Mari, but the script gives the former a little more nuance. The Body keeps trying to make whoopee with the detective, but he just keeps trying to justify his fantasies by setting up murder-methods and casting himself as the murder-victim. Of the four gags in the short, only the last one shows The Body lying back and letting Daffy half-kill himself. The other three culminate with the Body either shooting Daffy or dropping a heavy weight on his head. In two of the three, she seems slightly shocked when she accidentally precipitates violence on him, and in the third-- the rifle-scenario shown above-- the artists draw her in a stoic mode, neither pleasured nor troubled by her action of shooting Daffy a dozen times. The overall suggestion is that she's just patiently indulging the goofy gumshoe's fantasies, until she finally gets a chance to explain that he's in the wrong house. Prior to the revelation, she's only mildly protested her innocence, and when he finally agrees with her, she uses that as an excuse to go after him again-- and he flees, because he has no (theoretical) defense against the menace of wedded bliss. The Body does not show any passion to hurt Daffy, but she's willing to accomodate his fantasies if it keeps him close to her. And so the Daffy Duck (of this isolated short, at least) meets the matrimonial fate Lum threatens Ataru with, but without the implication that the guy's better half will always get her way with the help of electric shocks.            

VARIANT REVISIONS PT. 2

 Some of my current terminology re: "originary and variant propositions" was preceded by the two essay-series CRYPTO-CONTINUITY AND DOPPELGANGBANGERS, starting here. In those essays I more or less used "template" to stand in for the current "originary proposition," "template deviation" to stand in for "variant propositions," and "total deviation" to stand in for "null-variant propositions." All of these terms, though, are predicated on analyzing the propositions "from outside," seen from the POV of the "real" reader.

However, it's not impossible to see many if not all such variations "from inside," as if all of the propositions weren't just created by isolated raconteurs but were instead variations on archetypal tropes that precede even the first "originary proposition." 

It's true thar often the originary proposition is the strongest one in terms of evoking one or more of the four potentialities, which is why I previously compared such propositions to the sort of template used, say, in early printing technology. I mentioned in the CRYPTO series major icons like KING KONG and DRACULA, and it would be hard to argue that any of the variations on these figures, however entertaining, exceeded the originals in any way. 

      

  However, there are times that the originary proposition is not the most compelling, even on simpler levels. The durable Terrytoons stars "Heckle and Jeckle" are known by most viewers as a pair of wisecracking male magpies. However, the first cartoon in the series, 1946's "The Talking Magpies," posited them as a married male-and-female couple that caused no end of trouble for Farmer Al Falfa. Paul Terry then chose to issue a "rebooted" Heckle and Jeckle that same year with "The Uninvited Pests," and as two identical males with differing accents, the characters enjoyed another 51 theatrical cartoons. So in terms of popular success, the variant proposition was the more successful, not least because two obnoxious males could be used in many more slapstick situations than a married magpie pair.

Now, if one wanted to take the archetypal perspective I suggested above, one could imagine two parallel worlds, one in which Heckle and Jeckle were both male, and one in which they were a married couple. Most fictional propositions regarding parallel worlds are not much less chimerical. The parallel-world explanation for duplicate versions of DC characters such as Flash and Green Lantern sometimes verged on expressions of archetypal realities, though usually in fairly clumsy terms. The first Green Lantern begins very poorly-- I read the first volume of Golden Age reprints and could barely see any reasons for the success of the character beyond the base idea of a hero with a wonder-working "magic ring." Later in the series writers conceived a few subordinate characters-- Solomon Grundy, Vandal Savage-- evocative enough that DC Comics made them major figures in the company's later cosmology. But I'm not sure that, taken just on their Golden Age appearances, Grundy or Savage were as good IN THEIR TIME as the better villains of that era, from serials like Batman, Wonder Woman, or even Airboy and The Hangman. In contrast, the Silver Age Green Lantern, which crossbred the rudimentary Alan Scott concept with the "space ranger" ideas of the prose "Lensmen" series, displayed excellence in the kinetic and mythopoeic potentialities within a few years.

Even "soft reboots" within the same cosmos-- which make no use of "parallel worlds" as such-- are often treated as constituting variant propositions in, say, fandom-wikis like the DC Database. The 1988 ANIMAL MAN, reviewed here, dispenses with any idea that two separate Animal-Men co-exist in two distinct worlds. Rather, the first one knows that he was created by one author and rejected in favor of an updated hero with the same name by another author. Yet at the same time, Grant Morrison suggests that there's some loosely archetypal limbo where even the lamest characters ever created (hello, Ultra the Multi-Alien) continue to exist. And some soft reboots are performed not through intention but through error. In the first VARIANT REVISIONS, I took pains to analyze how Bob Haney first created a reasonably evocative mystery villain in one TEEN TITANS story. Yet when Haney later needed a make-work villain to plug into a hastily conceived scenario, the writer simply rewrote the established character's motivations to suit his current needs. As if to compound the error, George Perez constructed yet another ramshackle artifice on top of Haney's blunder and, to the extent that DC fans think of The Gargoyle at all, they probably defer to the Perez interpretation.

Some soft reboots even occur simply in response to changing tastes or priorities. Jerry Siegel's original Superman, while always devoted to justice, sometimes played fast and loose with legalities. DC editors didn't like that, possibly fearing a profitable character would get targeted by moral watchdogs-- which eventually happened anyway-- and so Silver Age Superman became an absolute stickler for obeying the law, even the law of made-up planets. Here too I would probably argue that Silver Age Superman surpassed the originary proposition in many though not all respects-- though the more creative Golden Age concepts of Siegel and his collaborators became the essential foundation for the Silver Age proposition.  

More to come.

        

AN AESTHETIC OF NONSENSE PT. 3

 If, in my previous writings on the rationales for metaphenomenal fantasy, I've given the impression that nonsense-fantasy was a new creation, I should correct that by mentioning that a fair number of archaic tales invoke the rationale of "just because." In fact, in Chapter 7 of Susanne Langer's PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY (which I referenced in yesterday's post), Langer begins her generally unflattering description of simple folktales with some examples from Melanesian lore. Her first example, for instance, involves a buffalo and a crocodile having a dispute, whereon they ask various other animals, or even inanimate objects like a mortar and a floor-mat, to judge the quarrel. The idea of attributing life even to clearly nonliving things seems to me more extreme than that of talking animals who behave like people, though both are examples of nonsense-fantasy. Another example of non-living things being given life appears in the (presumably much later) Japanese conception of tsukumogami.                                                       

The Aesop's fables offer a lesser range of nonsense-fantasy. Sometimes the animals therein are shown only doing regular animal activities, as in "The Dog and the Bone," with the exception that the animal may be given some degree of human intelligence. Other stories show such creatures like the Fox and the Stork dining together and using human utensils.                                                              

In the annals of literature, the example of Lewis Carroll's Alice-verse stands as one of the most sustained examples of pure nonsense-fantasy. However, L. Frank Baum's later Oz books might be termed "impure nonsense-fantasies." Sometimes Baum's world follows rough rules about what its system of magic can accomplish, with its witches and flying monkeys and prophetic hats. Other times, though, the world stretches to include a number of entities I'd consider "just because" fantasies, like the Hammerheads and the porcelain-people of China Country. I'd have to read more of the Oz books to judge whether the logic of magic or that of "just because" holds greater sway overall.                                                                               

As impressive as some of the nonsense-fantasies of both oral and written stories might be, those that appeared in early American cartoons might outdo them both by sheer preponderance. Felix the Cat, rated as the first major continuing character of those early short cartoons, might be exemplary here. I don't know if he's the first character in all fantasy who could break off a part of himself-- almost always his tail-- and just will it to become some other object, like a fishhook or a question-mark. But thanks to the popularity of Felix, animated cartoons became increasingly associated with the ability to transform themselves, or aspects of their universe, into anything they pleased.           

That acceptance of the "anything goes" propensity of cartoons of course didn't keep some animators from following the more circumscribed pathways of Aesop. Donald Duck debuts in the 1934 cartoon "The Wise Little Hen," which like its source material simply depicts its anthropomorphic creatures dressing like humans and doing human things.                                                                                   

 I tend to believe that the majority of Disney's stories about anthropomorphic creatures follow the Aesopian pattern, in which clothes-wearing ducks and mice and dogs go around doing all sorts of human things, not least the mouse named Mickey owning a non-anthropomorphic dog. Carl Barks is justly celebrated for creating scores of stories about Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge having adventures indistinguishable from what humans might do in similar circumstances, with the protagonists' ducky nature being the only "nonsense" element. Once in a while, though, Barks did apprise himself of random nonsense elements, such as "Lost in the Andes," wherein Donald and his nephews encounter square chickens that lay corresponding square eggs. Some of Barks' stories might be considered another breed of "impure nonsense," in that they combine the base nonsense-fantasy of human-like animals with either scientific or magical rationales. Here's what I wrote about Barks' use of a particular type of magic in his story "Oddball Odyssey:"                                                                                                                                                                                                                       'For her part, Magica provides exposition for the reader about her great new powers, about having "scrounged secrets" from old temples and caves that have given her control over the elements. Most interestingly, Magica advances a fairly sophisticated theory for the origin of the Greek pantheon: "those gods were more likely live sorcerers than figments of ancient dreams." This theory allowed Barks to have his cake and eat it too: he doesn't have to show his witchy villain garnering power from either old gods or, for that matter, Satanic sources. Instead, it's implied that ordinary mortals can generate magic powers from study of the universe's secrets, which is certainly an odd thing to find in a Disney comic book of the period.'                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           Thus endeth my short history lesson, though I expect to reference some of these observations in related essays,

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 2

Here's the statement I made at the end of Part 1:

...despite the strong association of the colloquial use of the term "fantasy" and the "magic rationale," I think there's a more fundamental appeal to "magical fantasy" than the use of said rationale...

One reason I eliminated "the magic rationale" as the main attraction is that some extremely popular "magical fantasies" make only very minor usages of magic.

Case in point: the ARABIAN NIGHTS folktale of "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." In the standardized version of the story-- which is the one most often adapted for modern narratives-- poor woodcutter Ali Baba witnesses a gang of thieves using a magical cave to conceal their ill-gotten treasures. The cave-door, which opens or closes in obedience to certain magic words, is the only magical item in the story. Everything else in the narrative, however improbable or melodramatic, would be deemed isophenomenal, governed by naturalistic laws. We don't know if the "open sesame" cave is the result of active or passive magic-- though I tend to favor the former, that some individual placed a spell on the cave-mouth to act as cave-mouths don't usually operate. But there's a sense of a regular magical procedure involved in the treasure-cave's makeup. The cave doesn't open "just because," say, it's funny for the purpose of a gag, a la my earlier example of ROGER RABBIT. That nonsense-rationale would imply the cave might open some times and not others.

The appeal of magical fantasies, whether they use a lot of magic or very little, inheres more in the fact that they reproduce a society that is fully or mostly "pre-industrial," in which it's possible for the characters to invest in magic because there is no competing rationale of "science." That does not mean that there is no science as such in the world, such as (say) the engineering principles needed for Ancient Egypt to build the pyramids. But in an archaic world, science simply is not as IMPORTANT as magic.

So, I'm admitting that "magical fantasies" have a vital appeal because they invest in the magic-rationale and not the other two rationales-- but there's also a greater, supervening appeal in that the contemporary reader/audience is transported back to a time when science had less influence than magic. And I'll look at some possible reasons for that appeal in Part 3.

Parenthetically, Ali Baba got the "just because" treatment in 1937's POPEYE MEETS ALI BABA, and in that cartoon short it's clear that gags like "Abu Hassan got 'em anymore" overshadow any investment in even the minor magic of the "open sesame" cave.

 

 

MIND OUT OF TIME PT. 1

I see from Google that others have used the reverse-pun in my title before this. Still, I suspect the connotations of my pun are a little different from anyone else's.

In UP WITH FANTASY, DOWN WITH HORROR, I suggested that one could regard "fantasy" and "horror"-- categories which usually appear in that famous marketing troika, "fantasy, horror and science fiction"-- as two "super-genres," at least in terms of how they organize what I've called sympathetic and antipathetic affects. Having said all that, I'm going in a different direction now, Now I'm asking the unmusical question, "is there something that sets the genre we usually call 'fantasy' from all other genres with metaphenomenal content?"

Before going further, I'd note another specification I made here regarding the three rationales all or most authors use to justify the metaphenomena in their stories:

(1) The rationale of science.

(2) The rationale of magic.

(3) The rationale of "just because."

These rationales become important partly to sorting out some of the problems with the standard colloquial usage of "fantasy." At least where prose fiction is concerned, the "magic rationale" is the one most often connoted with works called "fantasy," because so much of the genre's development in the U.S. was influenced by Tolkien. But colloquially "fantasy" can also take in "just because" works like WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT. And though "science fiction" as such is usually considered as something of an "opposite number" to fantasy, even within the "Big Tent" of SF one sees certain works labeled "science fantasy."

On a related note, I talked a little bit about the history of my personal response to the "magical fantasy" genre in this Rip Jagger's Dojo comment:

I did not get converted to Tolkien first, but to Lin Carter, at least as editor. I got a half dozen fantasy paperbacks at a college book sale, and they included at least one CONAN, a Ballantine called DISCOVERIES IN FANTASY, and the Lancer collection of JIREL OF JOIRY. My memory is that I saw new depths in those fantasies for adults that I hadn't seen in things directed more at kids, like Oz and Peter Pan. I continued to read voluminously in both fantasy and SF for the rest of my life, but something about seeing a new potential in a genre at just the right age makes me prefer the fantasy genre in an affective sense.

Now, I ask myself, to what extent was my liking for "magical fantasies" associated with the appearance of the magic-rationale?

I think that the concept of magic has definite appeal. Magic usually takes two forms in fiction: one active, one passive. The active form involves some entity-- typically a mortal sorcerer, a god, or a demon-- using magical procedures to influence some aspect of the universe. The passive form takes the form of depicting the existence of entities that are thought to be intrinsically magical, but are not brought into being by anything but the intrinsic rules of a fantasy-universe. One finds both forms in LORD OF THE RINGS, in that characters like Gandalf and Sauron utilize specific procedures to influence their world, while whole categories of entities, such as dwarfs or trolls, are passively magical in nature even though they utilize no magical procedures. 

However, despite the strong association of the colloquial use of the term "fantasy" and the "magic rationale," I think there's a more fundamental appeal to "magical fantasy" than the use of said rationale-- which I'll discuss in the next section.

A SHORT DEFENSE OF TIM BURTON

 I saw the following quoted from Roger Ebert with respect to Tim Burton:

..design over story, style over substance - a great-looking movie with a plot you can’t care much about.

 I have a probably unprovable theory that Burton's mature creativity was strongly influenced, as he came into his own, by his apprenticeship at Disney's animation department.

With animated movies, plot, in the sense I believe Ebert's using, is far less important than character. Whereas in live-action films the characters can literally become cogs in an overarching plot-- Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS comes to mind here-- animated characters need vivid scenarios that express what each of them can do. The structure is more like vaudeville, or a Marx Brothers movie. A loose plot allows characters to come out "on stage," establish their personas, and bounce off other characters as needed. 

That's how Burton's movies seem constructed to me. It's not "style without substance," as Ebert says, but the substance is more free-flowing. With METROPOLIS, one knows the theme behind the plot, because the storyteller is very overt in expressing said theme. But what's the theme of BEETLEJUICE? One may be present, but it's not overt by any means. The theme isn't expressed by the precise movements of the plot, but by all the character-arcs bouncing off one another until things are sorted out as the storyteller desires.

This approach worked well with BEETLEJUICE and Burton's two BATMAN films but not with DARK SHADOWS. With both BATMAN and DARK SHADOWS, Burton had a certain range of characters he had to play off one another, sometimes because of producer interference (he reputedly didn't want the Penguin in RETURNS). But he was able to impose a loose structure on RETURNS, with Max Schreck bringing Catwoman into being and trying to use Penguin to his own ends. With SHADOWS Burton seems at a loss, unable to figure out how to boil down the unwieldy ensemble of long-term characters into something he could work with.

AUTHENTICATING ARTIFICE PT. 3

 In Part 2 of this essay-series, I provided a broad sketch of how the specific genre of "the costumed superhero" had been treated in American movie serials, stand-alone films, and TV shows both live-action and animated for several decades. I purposely excluded narrative radio-shows, about which I have no expertise, as well as all of the "superhero-adjacent" genres, like jungle-hero tales, superspies and spacemen. In this essay, I want to include some "costumed crusaders" I omitted for the decades of the 1950s and 1960s (up until 1966 and the birth of Batmania). In addition, I'll mention some of the "adjacent" genres that arguably affected the superhero's development in movies and TV, though I'm going to set aside both space opera and all forms of archaic heroic fantasy as too complicated for this essay.

So I noted that the last serial of any kind appeared in 1956, and that American television in the 1950s did not show nearly as much enthusiasm for costumed heroes:

Though five space-opera teleserials showed up during the first decade of television's ascension, only three costumed crusader shows appeared-- THE LONE RANGER (1949-57), THE ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN (1952-58) and ZORRO (1957-59)-- and the first two of those were indebted to earlier radio serials, even using some of the same scripts. 

 

As for "adjacent types," DICK TRACY got a live-action teleseries that lasted from 1950 to 1951, which did adapt some of Chester Gould's freaky fiends, like Flattop and the Mole. Later, around the time both Bomba and Jungle Jim stopped appearing in features, Jungle Jim and Sheena both got one-season TV shows in 1955. One year later, ADVENTURES OF FU MANCHU presented the classic non-costumed super-villain with his own series. And all of the above did better than James Bond. One year after Ian Fleming published the first Bond tale, that novel was adapted into a single episode of the teleseries CLIMAX, which didn't exactly launch a new media franchise for the hero. During that decade Fleming would use more Gould-like villains in the novels, but in movies and TV the character would not catch the world on fire until nine years after the appearance of the book CASINO ROYALE. 

I also noted that though there had been a smattering of stand-alone films for live-action costumed heroes in the 1930 and 1940s, in the 1950s there was nothing but two LONE RANGER features, INVISIBLE AVENGER (a failed TV pilot issued as a feature), and a handful of "masked swashbuckler" movies. (I don't count SUPERMAN AND THE MOLE MEN, the pilot for the teleseries, even though it received theatrical release.) The only "superhero-adjacent" franchise that continued production of feature-films throughout the fifties and into the sixties was that of Tarzan. 

As for 1950s cartoons, I mentioned only the packaging of Mighty Mouse cartoons for THE MIGHTY MOUSE PLAYHOUSE, but there are others worth noting, and sometimes excluding.

The first made-for-TV cartoon was CRUSADER RABBIT, produced in 1950 by Jay Ward's animation studio. I've seen a few episodes of this cartoon-- which loosely borrowed the format of the live-action serial, albeit with episodes of five minutes at most. I don't think CRUSADER was relevant to the superhero idiom despite the fact that the opening shows the bunny dressed in a knight's armor. From what I've seen, Crusader and his buddy Rags Tiger just walked around sans costumes (or any attire but their fur). In fact, the opening cartoon emphasizes that even though Crusader wants to be heroic he doesn't have any powers, like flight or X-ray vision. As more than one person had asserted, Crusader and Rags, being an intense little guy and a big dumb guy, look like a template for Ward's later Rocky and Bullwinkle.

For comparable reasons I also dismiss 1957's TOM TERRIFIC from consideration. The titular character was a little boy with a magic hat, and he sometimes used his magic to thwart villains, but mostly in a comic manner, lacking the superhero's emphasis on action. But 1957 also introduced a spaceman/spy/superhero hybrid in COLONEL BLEEP. In this series-- some episodes of which may be missing from circulation-- Bleep, a super-powered alien with a gumdrop-shaped head, functioned as an "intelligence agent" hunting down criminals with names like Doctor Destructo and the Black Knight of Pluto, some of whom made multiple appearances. In fact, one surviving episode, "Knight of Death," may be the first time in which previously established villains teamed up on a TV cartoon, for in that episode Bleep is challenged not only by the aforementioned Black Knight, but also the Black Robot and a pirate named Black Patch. (I sense a recurring motif in there somewhere.) The same team returned in "The Hypnotic Helmets."

Even though I asserted that the TV studios seemed unwitting of the "birth of the Silver Age" in comic books, oddly 1960 opened with an animated parody of Batman and Robin. A studio known for very crude early TV toons-- one online article called the studio-head "the Ed Wood of TV cartoons"-- accepted a pitch for COURAGEOUS CAT AND MINUTE MOUSE. And as most fans know, the pitch came from the man who co-created Batman, Bob Kane. The show has its fans, but though I'm not one of them, there's no debating that CCAMM is a costumed-crusader show, in which cat and mouse used a variety of super-weapons to defeat villains. (I should also note that in 1960 Kane was still packaging BATMAN comics for DC, who would buy out Kane's contract in 1966.)

Like Mighty Mouse, Popeye's theatrical cartoons had been airing on TV for some time, and in 1960 King Features commissioned 220 new Popeye cartoons, at least some of which still showed the sailor-man using spinach-power to smite such nogoodniks as Brutus and the Sea Hag.

Briefly detouring into live-action, in 1961 one production company made the attempt to adapt another King Features property: the superhero/jungle adventurer The Phantom, but all that resulted was an unsold pilot. The same year saw the debut of a DICK TRACY cartoon show. However, though the slapstick scripts did utilize mild versions of classic Gould grotesques like Mumbles, Pruneface and The Brow, Tracy himself only appeared in the role of a supervisor, handing off the arrest-chores to four goofball detectives. Again, I disallow this one due to the downplaying of the combative mode.

Jumping back for one paragraph to the general category of live action, James Bond made his movie debut in 1962's DOCTOR NO, which arguably re-created the "superspy," realizing effects far beyond anything the genre had accomplished in serials like SECRET AGENT X-9. Though NO and later Bonds were British productions, the American company United Artists provided funding, thus tying the franchise into the American aegis. Surprisingly, it took about two years for either America or Europe to begin coming out with their own superspies. Then France initiated in 1964 a "re-imagining" of the FANTOMAS property, a three-film series that showed some Fleming-esque aspects. The U.S. launched THE MAN FROM UNCLE that same year, and WILD WILD WEST would follow in 1965 . After that, the floodgates were opened, though few imitators were as good as Fleming at creating vivid super-villains. Also, as mentioned in the previous essay, in 1963 Disney released its second costumed crusader TV-show, a three-episode adaptation of Russell Thorndyke's "Scarecrow of Romney Marsh."

Back to TV cartoons. THE MIGHTY HERCULES, debuting in 1963, deserves a quick mention, despite my disallowing archaic fantasy here, because the Greek strongman kept encountering a regular rogue's gallery, AND kept defeating them with the softness in his eyes and the iron in his thighs (if you believe the theme song). 

UNDERDOG showed up in 1964, and got right everything that COURAGEOUS CAT did wrong. The super-powered dog in the baggy long underwear had a decent rogue's gallery, though only two evildoers, Simon Bar Sinister and Riff Raff, made more than one appearance. JONNY QUEST debuted that year as a night-time animated show, and some Bond influence can be seen there as well, as in the debut episode "Mystery of the Lizard Men," with its very DOCTOR NO-like plot.

With 1965 we get into nebulous territory. The idea of adapting BATMAN as a live-action series began to get serious consideration in 1964, but it's hard to say if the earliest negotiations were known to the public. The actual show had to begin production at least by late 1965, but Hollywood would have been gossiping about the project long before the actual production. Did any cartoon shows about superheroes and their near-relations take influence from such gossip? Probably not 1965's SINBAD JR, about a heroic sailor who obtained super-strength from a magic belt (rather than a green vegetable). Nor ROGER RAMJET, with Jay Ward finally dipping his toes for real into the genre of the funny superhero. But in Fall 1965 Hanna-Barbera released its comical versions of both a superhero and a superspy-- i.e., ATOM ANT and SECRET SQUIRREL-- and the former might have been inspired in part by some notion that superheroes might start getting hot again.

And that's where I will leave things for now, because after BATMAN came the deluge.

THREE WAYS TO BREAK OR BEND THE WORLD PT. 1

 My posts on the NUM theory have gone into great detail as to how literary metaphenomena, whether uncanny or marvelous, are created through the use of story-tropes. In both cases, the author of a fictional world seeks to diverge from the world of the naturalistic, the domain in which all phenomena are unified (and therefore are termed "isophenomenal.") In the essay LIKE A TROPE, ON THE WIRE, I said:

The domain of “the naturalistic” emphasizes conformity with whatever idea of “natural law” an audience may expouse, whereas the domain of “the marvelous” conforms to whatever concepts are seen as transcending natural law, be it through Christian miracles or futuristic inventions. The domain of “the uncanny,” though, endeavors to perform a high-wire balancing act between these two literary phenomenalities. 

My general metaphor for the difference between the two metaphenomenal domains has been the difference between breaking down normal causality or simply bending it.  However, I have not supplied a list of rationales that authors use to justify the tropes that either bend or break causality. The three rationales are as follows:

(1) The rationale of science.

(2) The rationale of magic.

(3) The rationale of "just because."

Most of what fans view as "mainstream" fantasy and science fiction deals with phenomena that breaks down the viewer's sense of causality, or, in my system, "causal coherence," by evoking either the fictional logic-systems of either science or magic. There is no limit as to the extensiveness of the tropes open to either the magic-rationale of mainstream fantasy or the science-rationale of mainstream science fiction. Fantasy has elves, SF has aliens. Fantasy has doors into fairyland; SF has faster-than-light space travel. Fantasy has Doctor Strange; SF has Iron Man. The distinction is not between any hypothetical limit upon either rationale, for in effect there is no limit. Rather, the distinction is between the ideas attributed IN FICTION to the system of magic as opposed to the system of science. 

Both magic and science operate to manipulate commonplace causality. In science, the logical ideal is that the scientist produces causality-breaking miracles by discovering new principles that underlie those phenomena, and he manipulates those principles to explain FTL travel or transistor-powered armor. In magic, however, the logical idea is that the magician transcends the overt principles underlying commonplace phenomena in order to create faery-doors and magical spells. Human will of some type, whether for good or ill, directly impinges upon reality within the magical rationale, while in the scientific rationale, the will acts indirectly, creating re-arrangements of phenomena.   

Now, whether or not a reader subscribes to the rational explanations as to how a fictional faery-door or a fictional FTL drive exists, the reader should perceive that both explanations appeal to a system of logic regarding potential change of phenomena. The third rationale, "just because," ceases to appeal to any system of logic, and it's possible that this is why its use far more fiction-categories than either of the other two. "Just because" is used to justify everything from a magical-realist premise like that of Jose Saramago's 1994 THE STONE RAFT, in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks off from the European continent and starts floating into the Atlantic, to an animated cartoon in which Bugs Bunny can pull a hammer out of nowhere to crown Elmer Fudd. 

I conceived the idea of the three rationales some time back, but I recently realized that all of them were configured with respect to the phenomenality of the marvelous, the one that breaks causality. In my second essay, I will deal with how the same such rationales appear within the domain of the uncanny.

MY PROBLEM WITH "THE PROBLEM WITH APU"

Here's a short argument I presented on Classic Horror Film Board, in response to the news that the SIMPSONS character of Apu was going to be sidelined in future episodes of the cartoon show, partly in deference to the objections of activists like Hari Kondabolu and his "Problem with Apu" documentary.

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Caricature isn't always designed as a mockery. Sometimes it's simply shorthand for something that the target audience sees every day.

Classic Hollywood films, for example, are filled to the brim with Irish cops. That's because, after long decades in which Irish-Americans were deemed the dregs of criminality, some of them began getting into the low-paying but more respectable business of crime prevention. I'm sure a lot of Irish-Americans in the early 20th would have preferred to do jobs other than walk a beat. But life is not fair, and we can't change the past; only understand how the past impacts on the present.

I recall hearing one Indian-American, whose name I did not note, speak on a radio show, saying that, in effect, Apu mirrored his own experience. As I recall, he said that his father immigrated to America as a scientist, but couldn't find work in that department. So he got into motel management, and today, this is still a burgeoning source of employment for Indian-Americans. Again, maybe it wasn't fair that the scientist had to go into motel management. Maybe it was the result of white privilege, maybe it wasn't. But it remains a fact that a lot of Indian-Americans found employment in the management of motels and convenience stores.

I agree that it sucks when Indian-American kids get called "Apu" or have to listen to "Thank you come again." I'm sure it sucked when Chinese-American kids had to listen to "Chinamen" songs and get mocked for being the sons of laundrymen. Yet I think it's unfeasible to say, "We don't like the image of this caricature, no matter whether it represents any aspect of real life or not." I think Hari Kondabolu may be guilty, at the very least, of using too broad a brush to paint his picture of anti-Asian racism.

THE READING RHEUM: THE ENCHANTED SCREEN (2011)

I'd read one or two works by Jack Zipes before sampling THE ENCHANTED SCREEN, and to say the least his heavily Marxist interpretations of fairy tales were not to my taste. Still, SCREEN was touted as the first extensive survey of cinematic fairy-tale adaptations, so I couldn't resist giving it a try.

Although the book's subtitle is "the unknown history of fairy-tale films," my word "survey" applies better than "history," which implies a tracing, whether synchonic or diachronic, of developments over a timespan. Zipes' first chapter sets forth his theoretical preferences. Then, in the next four chapters, he (1) excoriates all of the fairy-tale works of the Walt Disney company, (2) champions the greatness of George Melies, and (3) provides quasi-histories of short fairy-tale cartoons and of feature-length animated fairy tale films. Live-action fairy-tale films are discussed in later chapters, but they don't get this summary treatment. The rest of the book is somewhat in the diachronic mode, as Zipes devotes whole chapters to cinematic treatments of particular fairy tales, such as "Cinderella" and "Snow White," or to general topics of academic interest, such as the lugubriously titled "Between Slave Language and Utopian Optimism." In a prologue Zipes admits that he simply didn't have room for some subjects, such as adaptations of the Arabian Nights.

What Zipes finds plenty of room for-- over and over and over again-- are his aesthetically hollow validations of only those works that conform to his Marxist dialectic. On the first page of the book proper, Zipes describes his priorities.

Fairy tales hint of happiness. This hint, what the German philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch, has called the anticipatory illumination, has constituted their utopian appeal that has a strong moral component to it.

Much in the same vein as a similar Marxist work, Rosemary Jackson's FANTASY: THE LITERATURE OF SUBVERSION, Zipes' survey celebrates fantasy for purely utilitarian purposes, in line with the Marxist project of restructuring corrupt society. Thus, a fairy-tale story that has "a strong moral component" gets the Zipes stamp of approval, but if it in any way supports the bad old bourgeoisie, it gets condemned to commodification hell.

Here's Zipes clarifying that what he doesn't like about the bad fairy-tale films, i.e. almost everything done by Disney, because they're not "carnivalesque" in the sense of the word coined by Mikhail Bakhtin:

Fun is cotton-candy, fluffy, sweet, and without nutrients. It is the staple of all banal products of the culture industry up through the present. Fun has nothing to do with carnivalesque laughter... for the carnivalesque fairy tale ridicules fun and provokes reflection and self-reflection-- p. 56.

The idea that one should divorce "fun" from any concept related to carnivals-- which are, by the bye, a great source of cotton candy-- is not redeemed by such Marxist moralizing as "a questioning of the hierarchical arrangements of society" and so forth.

The real-world history of applied Marxism does not exactly suggest that it can deliver on its "utopian" anticipations. At best, Marxism has provided critiques of particular manifestations of social corruption, but so far its perfect society, like More's original utopia, exists in "no place." Thus, for someone who advocates fairy-tale works that are "reflective," Zipes is pretty unreflective about his discriminations. For instance, he validates most of the Fleischer Brothers' fairy-tale works, particularly those starring Betty Boop, since Betty is the picture of a harried working-girl. But for paltry reasons he dismisses three long Popeye cartoons of the late 1930s-- wherein the sailor-man encounters such entities as Sinbad, Aladdin's genie and the Forty Thieves-- largely because Zipes thinks the Fleischers were trying to emulate the works of Disney, that evil emissary of the culture industry. I would say that there's nothing in the Fleisher history more "carnivalesque" than one scene in POPEYE MEETS ALI BABA'S FORTY THIEVES. Popeye, facing off against the nasty Abu Hassan (Bluto in Arabesque gear), somehow steals the villain's longjohns off his fully clothed body, and then remarks:

"Abu Hassan got 'em any more."


Clearly, Zipes only likes moral arguments he agrees with. Of other non-Disney works that he faults is Jacques Demy's 1970 DONKEY SKIN, because "it is unclear at the end of the film whether Demy winks at the serious nature of incest." Demy's film might have some problems, but I find it ironic that Zipes dismisses it, simply for not being overtly serious about the subject of incest, given that many of the actual oral stories in the "Donkey Skin" tradition don't supply a pellucid moral. Thus, in Zipes's world, the foremost requirement of the carnivalesque is-- seriousness.

The most that I can say for THE ENCHANTED SCREEN is that it should introduce readers to many, many fairy-tale adaptations that aren't well known to Americans. But the tired recitation of nearly every Marxist cliche-- from "culture industry" to "commodification" to "appropriation"-- renders most of Zipes' observations less than illuminating.

NEEDFUL SPECIALTIES

Helen: Everyone's special, Dash.

Dash: [muttering] Which is another way of saying no one is.

SYNDROME: And when I'm old and I've had my fun, I'll sell my inventions so that everyone can be superheroes. *Everyone* can be super! And when everyone's super...*no one* will be.

I have no reason to disbelieve Brad Bird, in interviews like this one, when he says that his 2004 INCREDIBLES wasn't informed by any readings of weighty philosophers like Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche. It's much more likely that he was primarily seeking to invest his big-budget superhero cartoon with as much drama and comedy as he could, the better to impress the "big kids" in the audience. His principal strategy was to take the superhero concept at face value and figure out what made the concept popular, as opposed to reading it as a fascist construction or the like.

As far as THE INCREDIBLES is concerned, the core concept is that of a hero with special abilities or talents rescuing ordinary people from assorted menaces. This was how almost all superheroes and their related congeners were treated in the pulps and comics of the early 20th century. However, in the 1960s Marvel Comic Books spearheaded a new paradigm. Now superheroes still strove to rescue ordinary human beings from danger, but the people didn't always reward their saviors properly, responding instead with pettiness, greed, and superstitious fear.

To my knowledge Brad Bird has never admitted his film's borrowings from Marvel's FANTASTIC FOUR. Though this indebtedness is very likely, it's less important to me than his translation of the Marvel paradigm into a standalone cartoon form. Bird may or may not be familiar with the earliest Lee-Kirby-Ditko breakthroughs, in which petty human responses to superheroes were used largely for comic relief. Yet later comics-writers expanded on these tropes to show the full span of human intolerance, which often led to situations in which superheroes were banned from active service to humankind.

Real superhero comics started out with heroes receiving nearly unconditional accolades for their deeds in the 1940s, and began dealing with more ambivalent responses from the 1960s on. Bird's scenario begins with a time of acceptance, wherein superheroes endlessly contend with super-villains and other threats and win public gratitude, but this period only occupies the first fifteen minutes of the movie's running time.

The period of rejection begins with the film's viewpoint character, Mister Incredible, who becomes the focal point of his world's paradigm shift. In the space of one evening-- when he's scheduled to marry the costumed heroine Elastigirl-- Incredible tries to get in a few more good deeds. The first indication of trouble-to-come is his meeting the obnoxious "Incrediboy," who presumptuously demands that the superhero adopt Incrediboy as his sidekick-- a demand Incredible instantly rejects. The same night, Incredible rescues an attempted suicide. This fortuitously leads him to encounter a crime-in-progress by super-villain Bomb Voyage. But Incrediboy, not one to take "no" for an answer, intrudes, arguing that his special rocket-boots make him fit to join Incredible's crusade, A complicated set of circumstances results in one of the villain's bombs destroying an elevated train-track, though Incredible manages to save the passengers. However, both the attempted suicide and the passengers then sue Incredible for injury-claims. (All are seen wearing neck-collars, which in pop-culture has become code for "phony injury.') These suits lead to the widespread banning of superheroes, who are forced to hang up their capes and live the same ordinary lives as everyone else.

The first quote at this essay's opening is from Dash, youngest child of Incredible and Elastigirl, fretting that he's been forced to conform to an unfair standard of ordinariness. He's what I'll call "the positive face of exceptionalism," which applies to a person who possesses exceptional qualities and seeks to use them well-- be it simply for self-fulfillment, as Dash initially desires, or for the protection of people without such qualities, which is the main orientation of Mister Incredible.

But what does it mean when Syndrome-- the embittered Incrediboy turned super-villain-- expresses the same sentiment? Syndrome, though he's aged fifteen years by the time Mister Incredible encounters him again, is more like a child than Dash ever is: a being of pure ego who has no empathy for victims and merely wants to be lionized. Syndrome plays an indirect role in bringing about the circumstances that exile Mister Incredible from the game of superheroes, but this isn't enough. His ego is so deeply bruised by the rejection that he must eradicate all of the retired superheroes from existence, humiliate and kill Incredible, and eventually become the world's premiere superhero by an act of phony heroism. Thus he's clearly the negative face of exceptionalism, desiring to be seen as the pinnacle of creation. Yet, once he's satisfied himself with duplicating Mister Incredible's popularity with ordinary people, he then plans to put an end to the raison d'etre of superheroes by giving artificial super-powers to everyone.

Since Syndrome is defeated without realizing any of his goals, Bird's story doesn't have to deal with what might or might not happen if the villain succeeded. But the question remains: why would it have been bad, to have a world in which everyone had artificial super-powers?

The answer may lie in the philosophical ruminations of Nietzsche, even if Bird never read him. Nietzsche's ideal of his Ubermensch is not covalent with any version of the superhero, with one exception. the motivation of magnanimity. The Nietzschean "superman" is magnanimous because he has so much more "spirit" than common people. Superheroes generally don't show as much contempt for the rabble as Nietzsche did, but there's still a sense that superheroes are frequently magnanimous for similar reasons. But even here, there's a crucial difference. Mister Incredible enjoys getting praise and plaudits for his super-deeds, but his deeds primarily spring from empathy: from the realization that ordinary people need his help. Syndrome has no motivation beyond lionization, and so it's easy for him to restructure the world so that it reflects his own mediocrity. Once everyone has access to artificially-enhanced superpowers, will anyone feel any need to feel empathy for those weaker than themselves?

Lastly, the opposition of "natural powers" and "artificial powers" begs some consideration. The only real superheroes the viewer sees are the four Incredibles and their family friend, Frozone; any others get only brief references. These five seem gifted with "natural" powers, though, because Bird provides no origin-stories, there's no knowing if they were all born with their powers like Dash and Violet. When Incrediboy makes his second audition to be Incredible's sidekick, he claims that not all superheroes have super-powers, meaning that there may be analogues to Batman and the Green Hornet in Bird's world. But this sort of niggling would have distracted from Bird's main theme: the opposition between that which is ordinary and that which is "super" or "special." Syndrome, with his plethora of weapons, is first and foremost an evocation of classic super-villains like Luthor, able to unleash a never-ending series of challenges to a hero or group of heroes. (It's also worth mentioning that a fellow named Xereb, rather than Syndrome, was originally going to be the movie's main villain, until the character of Buddy/Incrediboy impressed people enough to rework him into Principal Villain.) There's no suggestion that artificial enhancements are wrong when used for good purposes: the whole idea of Edna, costume-maker to the superheroes, depends on her being able to pursue her own ideals of excellence with the use of technological items like expanding fabric and invisibility cloth.

RALLY ROUND THE ROGUES' GALLERY PT. 3

Repeating my end point from Part 2, I'll assert that in general one cannot have a "monster rally" if one has just one type of monster versus another type of monster. Examples of these would the meeting of "werewolf star" Waldemar Daninsky with assorted vampires in FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR, or the encounter of the Big G with one-shot nasty insect Megaguirus in GODZILLA AGAINST MEGAGUIRUS.

A potentially different situation arises even when one is dealing with more than one centric monster of the same nature, as seen in GODZILLA'S REVENGE. Since Godzilla and his "adopted" son Minya share a common biology, they are virtually identical, just like the vampires in BLOODY TERROR. However, this film is still a "monster rally," given that the two allomorphic monsters take on at least three other creatures on Monster Island. This scenario also appears whenever a single non-centric opponent comes up against a multiplicity of centric monsters. The latter case appears in the Toho film immediately preceding REVENGE: DESTROY ALL MONSTERS, wherein most of Toho's monsters take on King Ghidora.

However, a one-on-one "monster rally" is possible if one is dealing with a situation where the two creatures have sustained their own "centric" stories. KING KONG VS. GODZILLA was one of the few Toho films that qualifies for this "honor," while others include FREDDY VS. JASON and ALIENS VS. PREDATORS.

It's also possible to see the narrative structure of the monster rally when there is one "starring monster" allied against several non-centric types. FRANKENSTEIN'S BLOODY TERROR does not qualify, but 1969's ASSIGNMENT TERROR, which pits the wolfman against both a mummy and a doppelganger for the Frankenstein Monster.

It's also possible to see "teams" of monsters opposed to ordinary humans, as in 1943's vampire-and-wolfman team for THE RETURN OF THE VAMPIRE.

Or conversely, one may reverse this structure. In ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN, where the demihero-characters played by the comedians are the centric stars of the show, and the three monsters are their non-centric opponents.

A similar dynamic holds for heroes as well as demiheroes. Marvel superheroes are the stars of the one-shot comic MARVEL MONSTERS: MONSTERS ON THE PROWL, but it's still a "monster rally" because they're pitted against a mess o'monsters who originally had separate story-arcs in old monster-comics.

There are also a number of situations where the story concerns a team of "good monsters' versus a team of not-so-good ones, as seen in the game-turned-cartoon DARKSTALKERS.

However, if you've got one team of monsters for good, you don't need a team for evil to have a monster rally, as witness that salute to 1950s fiends, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS.

All of these examples involve some strong life-or-death conflict. However, there are also various stories which follow the "domestic comedy" pattern. Thus, in one cartoon special, the demiheroic Flintstones meet a monstrous family in THE FLINTSTONES' NEW NEIGHBORS.

And this, of course, was a direct swipe of one of the earliest "domestic monster rallies" in popular fiction, THE ADDAMS FAMILY.

So, in all, I count ten distinct storytelling variations which manage to cross over more than one distinct monster-types-- which is probably the most attention that anyone has ever devoted to this perhaps deservedly arcane subject.

ADDENDUM: I should add that there's one exception to my rule about "fairly distinct characters." This is when the monsters all have the same origin, but they are BASED on originals who were distinct. Thus in the movie SCOOBY DOO 2, a scientific process creates monsters who look like some of the costumed villains who appeared in earlier SCOOBY DOO TV episodes. This also applies to dreams, in which a dreamer simply dreams about a bunch of monsters that have their own existence in the "real life" of the ongoing narrative, or when human agents impersonate a bunch of monsters that were supposedly real at some time-- which itself sounds like a SCOOBY DOO episode.