Just The Caffeine Talking

How I Did It #3: Return to Skull Island

This story has a complicated history. By rights it ought to have been the first entry in the "How I Did It" series, because I originally wrote it back in 1995, but it didn't actually get published until 2001.

It's written in the form of an article for a low-budget movie magazine -- an article about the classic film King Kong, in honor of its upcoming 65th anniversary (that was the original version; when I sold it in 2001 I changed it to the 70th anniversary). The narrator, presumably "James L. Cambias," joins two friends to watch the new digitally-remastered special edition of the old movie.

"James" and his friends watch the movie, making snarky, Mystery Science Theater style remarks about how lame the romantic scenes betwen Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray sound. Then we get to the part where the natives kidnap Fay Wray and tie her up beyond the ginormous gate as an offering to Kong. Kong arrives, and the reader finally discovers that this isn't quite the King Kong we all remember. Kong's got scaly skin, bat-like wings, and his face is a mass of octopus-like tentacles.

Shakespeare As She is Spoke

I normally save the science posts for Science Made Cool, but this one seems more appropriate to this Web log instead. Ever wonder what Shakespeare's plays actually sounded like? Some language scholars at the University of Kansas have done their best to reconstruct Elizabethan pronunciation and accents for our amusement. The result sounds like a production of the South Boston Organized Crime & Shakespeare Appreciation Society.

Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 6

Episode VI: The Long Slog Home

In the movie, once the Wizard is off the scene, Glinda the Good drops down out of the fly gallery to send Dorothy home and wrap everything up in the last five minutes. In the book we still have six chapters to go.

Dorothy and her three companions set out on yet another road trip, to see Glinda the Good in her stronghold in Quadling Country to the south. There's yet more friction along the way, because apparently the Good Witch of the South has mysteriously made her realm as inaccessible as the Wicked Witch of the West did hers. Hmmm.

Along the way the heroes have to deal with Fighting Trees (who showed up in the movie in the form of the hostile apple trees), and the Dainty China Country. The Dainty China Country is one of the odd enclaves which practically carpet the landscape of Oz. It's inhabited by living, intelligent china figurines, who understandably spend their lives in terror of getting broken. It's implied that all china figures in the world come from the Dainty China Country, but when they leave the land of Oz they stiffen into a hideous living death state, helpless and unable to move. So when you played ball in Auntie's parlor and broke a Dresden shepherdess, you were guilty of murder.

The Winkies invited the Tin Woodman to become their Emperor after the death of the Wicked Witch, and the Wizard put the Scarecrow in charge when he left the Emerald City. Now it's the Lion's turn to gain political power. The creatures of the forest are oppressed and terrified by a giant spider, so the Lion kills the beast in less than a page, and is crowned King of Beasts by the other animals. Presumably when Jon Peters makes his big-budget Oz remake, this will be the centerpiece of the film.

After that, they have to get past the Hammerheads -- weird little armless guys with extensible necks who hit passers-by with their heads out of sheer motiveless hostility. Communities like the Dainty China Country and the Hammerheads are a favorite device of Baum's in all the Oz books, as we'll see. Whenever he needs to bulk out a chapter, his characters encounter yet another strange isolated enclave inhabited by animated household items, talking animals, or randomly hostile freaks.

Once Dorothy and the others wade through the padding, they come to the castle of Glinda. She bums the Golden Cap off of Dorothy and uses it to send the Scarecrow, Woodman, and Lion off to their new kingdoms via Winged Monkey express. Then Glinda tells Dorothy about the Silver Shoes, and off the little girl goes to Kansas and the end of the book.

This is the problem I alluded to way back in Part One: the last six chaptes of the book are a thundering anticlimax. No amount of giant spiders, Hammerheads, or Fighting Trees can match the Wicked Witch for menace, or the stunning revelation of the Wizard's true nature. It becomes just another plod through Oz. That's why the moviemakers wisely decided to just drop this whole section, and combined Glinda with the Good Witch of the North in order to streamline the story. Only nitpickers like myself seem to be bothered by the logical inconsistency it creates.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a big hit. The novel was a best-seller, and L. Frank Baum immediately penned a stage adaptation, which was also a huge success. It opened in Chicago, ran nearly a year on Broadway, and toured for several years after that. Nitpickers and book purists like myself should note that in the play Dorothy was not accompanied by Toto but instead by her cow. The reason presumably being that trained dogs are expensive, but a touring theater company can easily afford a two-man cow suit. We should be thankful the moviemakers didn't follow the stage version.

And of course Baum also started work on a sequel, which we'll start blogging in a couple of weeks.
   

Are We Helping?

I've lately been reading about the Inklings -- C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and their buddies, who used to hang out together in Oxford to drink beer, eat ham, and talk about literature and religion. They functioned as a writers' workshop, not unlike the redoubtable CSFW which tolerates my presence.

But lately I've been thinking about the Inklings with my roleplaying game designer hat on. Reading about Tolkein's detailed world-building, and Lewis's creation of imaginary lands as a child, I find myself wondering if roleplaying games help or hinder that sort of creativity.

Does the existence of Dungeons & Dragons encourage budding Lewises and Tolkeins by example -- giving them a community and a (marginally) socially acceptable framework for creating imaginary settings and characters? Or does it stifle them by diverting their talents?

I've occasionally joked that, were the Inklings around today J.R.R. Tolkein would have the best D&D campaign ever -- and a half-finished draft of a novel about a hobbit sitting on his hard drive. There's an interview with Tim Powers by Darrell Schweitzer in which Powers comments that he finds the idea of roleplaying games fascinating, but avoided getting involved in them because he's afraid they would suck up all his creativity.

So, I'd like to know what other gamers and writers think: do games promote or stifle literary creativity?

 

Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 5

Episode V:  The Wild Wild Wizard

After the Witch dies, L. Frank Baum kind of loses track of his story. I suspect he realized he was getting close to the ending, but was nowhere near the word count. So he did what all of us do in a situation like that: he started padding.

How else can one explain a whole chapter devoted to the origin story of the Winged Monkeys and how they came to be under a spell which lets the owner of the Golden Cap boss them around? The Witch has Winged Monkeys because, well, she's a witch and witches have things like Winged Monkeys to do their bidding. There, it took me one sentence to explain. We don't need any backstory.

With the help of the monkeys, Dorothy rounds up her companions and the newly liberated Winkies patch them up and give them a rousing send-off back to the Emerald City. The Wizard puts them off and then (just as in the film) gets exposed. He reveals that all his magical feats are accomplished through ventriloquism, special effects, and clever patter -- oh, and he's been doing this for decades now.

I don't know about the rest of you, but the Wizard truly is the most amazing person in Oz. Think about it: he drops out of the sky and though sheer testicular fortitude and his ability to lie with a straight face, becomes ruler of the land. Not only that, he convinced the people of central Oz to construct a city, then managed to persuade all of them -- even the ones who actually did the building -- that it's made of emeralds. As a ruler and politician he managed to keep both Good and Wicked Witches at bay, intimidated by his magical power, even though he can't do magic at all!

Having ragged on Gregory Maguire's alternate take on the Wicked Witch let me now put forth my own interpretation of the Wizard. In Dorothy and the Wizard In Oz we learn his name is Oscar Z. Diggs, of Omaha -- but this is almost certainly a lie. He is described as an "old man" when Dorothy meets him in 1900. But Omaha was founded in 1854. If Mr. Diggs was really born there, he couldn't be more than 46 years old when he meets Dorothy. And that means he would have been barely out of his teens when he arrived in Oz. Obviously Mr. Baum isn't telling us the whole truth.

Diggs is probably about 60 at the time of his meeting with Dorothy. Even in 1900 that's about the lower bound for being a "little old man." That puts his birth date around 1840, and he would have been in his thirties when he arrived in Oz about 1870.

That also makes him about the right age to be a veteran of the Civil War, but he doesn't seem the soldierly type. My suspicion is that Diggs was one of Alan Pinkerton's intelligence agents during the Civil War, and afterward served in the newly-created United States Secret Service. The television series The Wild Wild West chronicled the weird adventures of a pair of Secret Service agents during the Grant administration, and it is startling how much Artemus Gordon's mastery of disguise, deception, and gadgetry matches that of Mr. Diggs. If "Artemus Gordon" and "Oscar Diggs" aren't the same person, they must certainly have been colleagues in the Service.

Sometime in the middle of the 19th Century the United States government must have learned of the existence of a mysterious realm of magic and strange creatures, accessible by air from the center of the continent. It may have been Steven Kearny who discovered it, or at least impressed on Washington the importance of the discovery. The struggle over slavery distracted the government's attention, so it was only after the Civil War that anyone could be sent to investigate. Agent Diggs was sent up by balloon to find the passage and determine what lay beyond.

He made it, but found himself in the position of John Lloyd Stephens, an earlier American envoy to a remote and exotic country:  there was nobody to whom he could present his credentials. Like the Republic of Central America, Oz was divided into four or five rival regimes, each with only vague control of its own territory. More alarming still was the fact that Oz's feuding governments weren't run by ambitious caudillos but by Witches, with real supernatural power.

Agent Diggs took advantage of a power vacuum in central Oz to set himself up as ruler of the Emerald City. I suspect he had help -- even the cleverest fraud could hardly bluff an entire kingdom. He probably made an alliance with some local strongman who died before Dorothy's arrival (presumably by natural causes, but Mr. Diggs had a ruthless streak). And there's the fact that the four Witches seem to have been genuinely intimidated by the Wizard's power.

Now, undoubtedly the Wonderful Wizard was a truly remarkable showman. A whiz of a Wiz, if you will. Had he stayed in America the fame of the great Diggs would overshadow that Wisconsin upstart Houdini. There's even a historical precedent for using stage magic to gain political power in an "uncivilized" land: in 1856 the French government sent the conjuror Jean Robert-Houdin to overawe tribes in Algeria with a display of magical marvels. It worked, too. The desert tribes knew the French had more guns, but Robert-Houdin's show meant they couldn't console themselves with the notion that they could triumph with supernatural support. Robert-Houdin demonstrated that France had that nailed down, too -- which meant it was time to negotiate. (Was the talented Mr. Diggs originally trained in stage magic to do something similar to the plains Indians? A display of "white man's magic" to undercut the "Ghost Dance" movement of the 1880s which ended so badly?)

Perhaps the Wonderful Wizard seemed so wonderful -- and so intimidating to the Witches -- because his fraudulent magic didn't play by the rules they were accustomed to. The counter-enchantments and spell-analysis magics of the Witches would have little or no effect on the Wizard's illusions of painted canvas, smoke and mirrors, and electricity. To a Witch, the existence of magic she doesn't understand would be powerfully disturbing -- and even more disturbing would be the fear of seeing that magic fall into the hands of her three rival Witches.

So the Wizard presumably used adept diplomacy to keep the Witches at bay. The one time he raised an actual army and assailed the Wicked Witch of the West, he failed. (That may have been when his local partner died.) Yet even then, the Wicked Witch didn't push her luck by counterattacking the Emerald City. Perhaps she was checkmated by Glinda and/or North.

At any rate, with Dorothy and her companions now threatening to expose him, Mr. Diggs realizes the jig is really and truly up. He puts together a balloon and promises to take Dorothy home, but "accidentally" leaves her behind. Why am I not surprised? With no Dorothy to contradict him, the Wizard can come up with just about any story he wants to tell his superiors in the Secret Service. Very handy. Bon Voyage, Mr. Diggs! We'll see you three books down the line!

Concluded in Part Six!

Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 4

Episode IV:  Ozpocalypse Now

Having been given the mission to kill the Wicked Witch of the West, Colonel Willard -- oops, I mean Dorothy -- heads off into the wilds of Cambodia, or Winkie Country. There's no road, as the Wicked Witch has cut off her realm from the rest of Oz. Sadly, Dorothy doesn't go by patrol boat.

In the novel we first meet the Witch sitting at the door of her castle, watching everything in her domain with her single all-seeing eye. No mention of whether it's wreathed in flame, but the foreshadowing of Tolkein's Sauron is pretty neat. "One eye?" you ask. "Margaret Hamilton didn't have one eye!"

You're right. The Witch in the book isn't green, either. You hear that, Gregory Maguire? SHE ISN'T GREEN! Sorry, but I simply can't stand the Wicked retcon of the Wicked Witch of the West as some kind of put-upon minority girl, shunned and oppressed because she's green. If you go by the book, she's the same color as everyone else in Oz. If you go by the movie, she's the same color as all the other people in Winkieland (or Cambodia or wherever the hell her castle is). Either way, she's not some kind of green-skinned freak.

Why am I so vehement about this? Because the Wicked Witch of the West -- in both her incarnations -- is one of the baddest-assed villains in film or fiction, and turning her into a victim is as bad as turning Darth Vader into a petulant teen-ager with mommy issues.

I must admit, Movie-West is even more awesome than Book-West, because she is one scary woman. Book-West is reluctant to do anything to Dorothy because of North's protective kiss (though she is willing to give the Lion the Colonel Nicholson treatment from Bridge over the River Kwai, locking him up without food until he agrees to be harnessed like a draft horse; only Dorothy sneaking him food at night keeps him alive). Her efforts to get the Silver Shoes are almost petty.

But Movie-West! Ah! One of the greatest villains in cinema history! I even figured out why, after reading a 'blog post by the redoubtable Alex Jablokov. The Wicked Witch is particularly awesome because she has no bumbling sidekicks (as so many Disney villains do.) A bumbling sidekick reassures the viewer -- "See? That villain may be bad, but she keeps these comic relief characters around so she can't be too bad." Plus, laughable henchmen can be outwitted; they reduce the tension and suspense.

None of the Wicked Witch's henchmen are reassuring at all. There is no comforting incompetence, either. The Winged Monkeys are like a furry tornado of destruction. The green Cossack dudes carry enough vicious-looking halberds, glaives, guisarmes, glaive-guisarmes, voulges, glaive-voulges, ranseurs, pikes, guisarme-voulges, pointed sticks, and Bohemian ear-spoons to warm Gary Gygax's heart. Judy Garland as Dorothy is properly terrified by the witch, along with the audience. If you're a child the Wicked Witch is (in many cases, literally) your worst nightmare: an adult who means you harm, with no one to restrain her.   

Best Movie West villain moment:  when Dorothy activates the crystal ball and sees her beloved Auntie Em, giving her a moment of hope and reassurance -- and then the Witch appears in the ball and mocks her! That's just cruel. Even Darth Vader didn't mock Princess Leia when he was interrogating her aboard the Death Star.

Attempting to "humanize" a supervillain like the Wicked Witch is, in my opinion (which is the correct one), a mistake. The villain is in the story to make the hero look good. The Witch is an awesome, terrifying villain. Dorothy is scared out of her wits and her three companions have to summon all their brains, courage, and love to rescue her. Beating the Witch makes them truly heroic. Making her someone with an unhappy childhood who got picked on in witch school and had some failed relationships just makes the heroes smaller. It's one thing to try to gain a deeper understanding of a real historical "villain," but the Witch is a made-up character. There are no nuances, no hidden depths. She should be allowed to retain her perfection.

Book-West, as I said, isn't so bad. She is cruel, but kind of petty. In her attempt to get Dorothy's silver shoes away from her, she creates an invisible bar to trip the little girl, and snatches one of the shoes when it goes flying off. This, as it happens, is the Witch's last mistake. In the book, Dorothy accepts her captivity with patience and forbearance, but this last trick PISSES HER OFF. She picks up a bucket and throws it at the witch. She's not putting out a fire, she's just angry. Result: one dissolved witch.

That's the trade-off between the book and the film. The movie has a more awesome villain, but Judy Garland's Dorothy is less of a badass. She melts the Witch by mistake. Baum's Dorothy is angry enough to throw a bucket of water at a Wicked Witch on purpose. Evidently the Wizard looked into that girl's eyes from his hiding place behind the throne room back in the Emerald City and said to himself "This is the stone-cold killer I need."

Tra-la-la, the witch is dead.

Continued in Part V!