Fiction: The Evil Possum vs. Baldy!

 So I quit a decade-long career this week, after spending two weeks looking at a doodle of a cartoon mouse. And this is the scene that started it, from the same storyline as the battle demo. Yeah, these characters were always like this.

It was a low, wide compound, which seemed to slouch across the ground. Its outer layers were razor wire, its middle tiers were brick and barred gates, and its heart was a concrete block with grudging entry points and vision blocks. All were now in flames, in a scene like the Hell of the elder gods of a forgotten race. From the midst came shots and screams, not the cries of men but the skirling squeals of rats in a trap.

In the midst of it, ten creatures darted inward. They ran on two legs, yet their gait was the skulking of creatures whose instinct was to crawl. They bore tails that swished behind them, just above the ground. What could be seen of their faces were shining eyes, gleaming teeth, and whiskers that glimmered in the flames. Two more figures approached. One was like themselves, the other was much shorter and very fat, wearing a squashed fur cap. The smaller creature moved with a loping gait, halfway between running and jumping. When it gave a skirling squeal, the others turned attentively, if only out of curiosity. Then they followed a pointing finger. As smoke cleared, they beheld the likeness of a VW Beetle without a rear windshield, next to a breached door. The rats squealed and scurried after the shorter figure as he bounded into battle.

Up close, the rotund creature was nearly hairless and exceptionally ugly, despite large eyes and rounded ears that vaguely suggested cuteness. They did not make up for his mottled, vein-streaked pink skin and wrinkled folds of fat, nor for his perpetually shifting eyes. “There’s his frinkin’ car!” he squealed in a high-pitched, whistling voice. “That means he’s already inside or he’s comin’ back! You three frinkers, come with me! The rest of you, hold the rear an’ don’t frinkin’ die!” He unlimbered the wire stock of a scaled Skorpion machine pistol. It was clear from his bare arms that what the insulating fat covered was solid muscle. Three of the rats lined up to follow. His tufted tail stuck out nearly rigid behind him. He made as if to leap, but tumbled and rolled through the door instead. The chattering of his gun rang out. The followers rushed in with a chorus of squeals, leaving their companions chittering outside. A moment later, a volley of automatic fire rang out.

The small creature peered out a vision block. The rats who had remained outside lay dead or dying. One who started to lift a weapon abruptly twitched and lay still. A huge silhouette loomed over it, a third again the height of the tallest of the rodents and far more massive. “Frink of a frinkin’ frink,” he said.

“Altimus and his son are dead, as are his Second and his chief guards,” the figure outside called out in a nasal but commanding voice. “I breached his bunker with Panzerfaust and collapsed the escape tunnel with multiple timed demolition charges. The Revenants are no more.”

“Yeah?” the much smaller creature called out. “Why are you frinkin’ telling us?”

“I am giving you an opportunity to consider your position,” the giant said patiently. “You know who you face: No-Hands, El Diablo Sin Mano Derecho, Archididelphis invicta, the Unconquered King. 100 of the slaves and debtors of Altimus pooled their wealth for 10,000 dinars to free themselves from his bondage. Because the Revenants were pledged to avenge anyone who took the life of one of their own, it was necessary to strike while you were together. If you renounce your pledge, I may consider allowing you to leave.”

“Well, frink you, Iron Nuts!” the hairless creature called out.

Saucer-like ears rose, and a mane bristled upon a high brow. “Baldur Thorndyke?” No-Hands called out.

“Yeah,” the one unavoidably known as Baldy answered. “Small frinking world.”

“Yes,” No-Hands said. His lips curled, revealing the saw-edged teeth of a possum. “This is the second time we have met since we parted ways. Surely you have considered, there are ways to stay out of each other’s way.” Two of the rats abruptly rose up, straight into three blasts of a shotgun.

“I was the frinkin’ chief guard,” Baldy said. “Altimus pulled me off duty when I told him what his frinkin’ chances were.”

“Unfortunate for him; less so for you,” No-Hands said. “You are quite good at what you do. A creature of your talents should have no trouble finding another line of work, or an employer who would not come to my attention.”

“I’m the frinkin’ top-dollar talent,” Baldy answered. “I go where the frinkin’ money is. People who don’t worry about you don’t pay my frinkin’ going rates.”

“But you have nothing to spend your money on,” the possum said in irritation. “You have no family, no lovers, and no vices to speak of. Neither do I, of course, but all know that money is not the reason I do what I do. So why do you insist on risking your life for wretched beings you would kill for free if they did not pay you?”

“Because I’m the frinking best!” Baldy shrieked. He fired a full magazine at No-Hands, then rolled for the door. No-Hands switched his shotgun for a freshly loaded PPSh-41. He fired short bursts at a target that came bouncing like a lone photon in a hall of mirrors. Baldy answered with a semi-random volley that seemed to propel his globular body one way and then the other. Several times, his shots struck the chest of his foe, only to ricochet off what appeared to be a vest of rattlesnake skin inside No-Hands’ mink coat. Finally, Baldy launched himself straight at the possum, twice his height and nearly 10 times his mass. At the last moment, No-Hands swung his head forward, and Baldy bounced right off his skull. The mouse tumbled into the dark with a squeal of pain, and the possum staggered back against his car with a rumbling call of displeasure. He refocused his crossed eyes as the final rat reared up. He stepped forward and took aim, only to topple as a shotgun blast caught him in the chest.

“Not so tough, are you?” the rat said. He pumped the shotgun as he advanced. “You’re bigger than us. They say you’re smarter than us. But you go down the same as us.”

Then both barrels of a shotgun fired from inside a boot that had replaced No-Hands’ right foot.

“Yes,” No-Hands said as he sat up. “I do.”

Fiction: The Evil Possum/ Beer War Battle Demo!

 I've ended up on a break from this blog that I was going to let go a bit longer, but I decided to come back with a repost of something I already tried and hilariously failed to plug on my beautiful, useless Wattpad page, a battle demo for a new adventure of the Evil Possum! This is, in fact, for the Beer War story line I already posted one demo for. If you read it, this might make slightly more sense. Maybe. And yeah, this is what No-Hands' enemies were always like...

The machine gun emplacement looked like an exploded egg. Its concrete shell was caved in and bowed out. Within was carnage, so blackened and charred that the organic could not be distinguished from the inorganic. The most misshapen form of all was what finally sat up. It was a possum, species Didelphis sapiens, by name Heinrich Hilfiger, 40 centimeters tall. Bloodshot eyes came wide open as he sat up and hissed. He shook off the soot and dust that covered him, revealing a gray and black pelt only somewhat charred. In a moment, his eyes fixed on a machine gun, miraculously intact. He looked at the end of a belt still in his hand, then he began to wind it around himself. Momentarily, he had a doubled bandoleer over his chest, a belt wrapped twice around his waist and a loose end thrown over his shoulder. He threw three drums into a shoulder bag, one as large as the other two together, and slammed another large drum into the gun. It was a total of 600 rounds, enough for 30 whole seconds of fire. For good measure, he stowed two spare barrels. He examined the gun, and found half the bipod missing. He hissed and knocked the remainder off with a sharp blow. Only then did he emerge, the gun at his hip. He saw a figure even taller than himself, already receding. He all but strangled his own words as he snarled, “Nicht est Konig!!!” Then he opened fire.

No-Hands turned his head before he heard the cry. There was just time enough to choose whether to run left or right. For better or worse, he ran right, toward a basement loading dock for the warehouse. He stayed just ahead as the adversary behind him fired a barely controlled stream of fire. A final volley knocked his prosthetic leg out from under him, and he tumbled and rolled where the ramp dropped below the level of the pavement. Hilfiger loaded and emptied another drum blindly, while No-Hands slid down the ramp toward the open loading door. Directly behind him, a half-second volley disintegrated one of the barrels lined up just inside, spilling beer across the floor. Hilfiger loaded a second drum. He finally leaned into view, peering over the rail. No-Hands returned fire with a rifle longer than he was tall. With both eyes, he might have felled his foe then and there, but his snapped shot merely tore through the railing. Heinrich dropped out of sight, while No-Hands retreated to what cover there was among the barrels.

At least two more gunmen added their own fire, driving him further down the ramp. However, only Hilfiger ventured to approach, firing a score of bullets at a time. He gave a snarl as he paused to replace not only the drum but the visibly glowing barrel. The latter ejected from an opening in the side of the perforated housing with a hard metallic clang. He allowed it to clatter to the pavement. Already, he had the replacement in hand and sliding in. No-Hands fired his revolver twice as the foe once again revealed himself. This time, Hilfiger confidently let fly, without slowing or hastening his descent down the ramp. Three more barrels burst apart on the loading dock floor. Behind them, two whole stacks came tumbling down as another volley cut through the middle tiers.  No-Hands retreated from the cascade, into a warehouse floor lined with racks of beer barrels three and four high.

An appreciable fraction of a centimeter of beer splashed underfoot as Heinrich Hilfiger stepped onto the warehouse floor. A leaking keg came rolling toward him, spilling beer behind it. He stopped it with his foot. Another came flying from the right. He blew it apart in mid-air. He leaned around the nearest rack of barrels and emptied the rest of his final drum in the direction from which the barrel had come. A dozen barrels and more trickled and poured, adding to the fluid. Hilfiger calmly pressed his back against the rack. He played out one end of the belt that wrapped his body before he loaded it into the machine gun with an audible “chunk” of the cocking handle. His ear twitched at a second metallic sound. He dropped to the floor just as No-Hands fired his rifle point-blank into the other end of the line of barrels behind him.

The first barrel burst in the center and at both ends, rupturing another barrel in the other half of the rack beside it. No-Hands gagged and coughed at the resulting spray of suds and splinters, so he could not have seen if there had been time the resulting trail of destruction. Another ruptured catastrophically. A third had one or both ends blown out. A fourth was left intact by a fluke as the bullet dropped below it and ricocheted off the metal frame of the rack. The projectile went on through three more barrels before it burst out the far end, straight over the foe’s head. Hilfiger spat out beer as he rose up on hands and knees, then squalled as more poured down on his head. He whirled and fired around the rack. Another barrel disintegrated on the far end of the next rack. Over his head, the leaking barrel burst, spilling what remained of its contents on Hilfiger’s head.

Hilfiger held his fire. The sound of leaking barrels and sloshing beer came from all around. Then there was a louder splash as No-Hands loped deeper into the warehouse, past one line of racks to a third and final one. Hilfiger ran after him, through beer that had reached his ankles. No-Hands’ own saucer-like ears swiveled, triangulating the path of his pursuer. For a moment, he leaned around the rack he had just reached, his rifle at ready. Then he hissed and retreated yet again, just before two scores of bullets chewed into the rack. Hilfiger continued firing as he made his way down the line. No-Hands managed to fire one shot. The barrel it struck burst. Hilfiger jerked his head back just as the far end of the one beside it blew out still intact. Yet again, he took a spray of suds to the face. The bullet ricocheted off the next rack. Hilfiger dropped to a crouch as the unseen projectile went winging through the warehouse, finally bursting a keg on the far side of the floor.

Heinrich Hilfiger reached the far end of the floor, wading through beer halfway to his knees. By then, half the belt at his waist and the bandoleer over his left shoulder had disappeared. His tail swished behind him, stirring up a trail of ripples. He squalled in triumph at the sight of the door to a loading dock, closed and securely locked. He took a position directly in front of the door, next to a column of stacked barrels. He looked one way and then the other, but there was no sight nor sound of his opponent. He hissed and gripped the shroud of the gun. He squalled and drew back his hand. He cursed as he hastily ejected the overheated barrel, tossing it behind him. He turned, befuddled, at a splash and simultaneous metallic clang. No-Hands stood at point-blank range, holding the barrel in the pincer that served as his right hand.

Both possums dropped their jaws as they roared. No-Hands swung the glowing barrel. Hilfiger staggered from the blow, his face scalded by the heat. He countered with the replacement barrel in his hand, catching No-Hands on the tufted flanges of his chin. The only known specimen of Archididelphis invicta took a step back as he raised the revolver already in his hand. Hilfiger’s tail wrapped around his massive wrist like a whip, deflecting two shots into a barrel. Hilfiger slammed the barrel into his gun as No-Hands rushed to close the distance, with a third again the mass of his wiry frame. Another round from the revolver destroyed the padlock on the loading gate. Hilfiger’s tail lashed for No-Hands’ throat. Then Hilfiger screeched in triumph as the barrel went home with a ching. He promptly fired a volley into a barrel behind him. Three more came tumbling down. No-Hands’ raised arm somewhat reduced the force of a barrel that bounced off his high brow. With his pincer, he flung open the gate… revealing a trailer full of barrels backed up to the gate. That was when Hilfiger opened fire.

A veritable avalanche of barrels rained down on both combatants. No-Hands managed to retreat while Hilfiger took the brunt of the downpour. He paused to open his revolver for reloading. A wild volley blew the weapon out of his mechanical hand. He turned to see Hilfiger scramble out from under the barrels, even as more came tumbling down. He ran once more, and Hilfiger finally held his fire as he pursued, instead playing out more of the belt. The pursuer fired a short volley before No-Hands disappeared between two racks. He zagged left and then right, just ahead of a score and half a score of bullets. Directly ahead lay a third gate, a counterpart to the one through which he had entered. A volley from behind was cut short. A single shot from the rifle blew it halfway open. A swing of the rifle butt backed by No-Hands’ momentum knocked the left door off its hinges. “Linkshander!” Hilfiger called out. No-Hands turned back, to see his foe load the other end of a broken belt into his weapon. Simultaneously, he loaded another round into his rifle and fired.

It was an incendiary round.

No-Hands grabbed the bottom rung of a guard rail to haul himself up, ahead of the wall of blue flame that erupted through the loading gate. He vaulted over and dropped to the pavement as the barrels that had not been destroyed burst or burned, prolonging what would otherwise have been a short and relatively cool blaze. Only then did something else rush up the loading dock. It was a nearly unrecognizable form awash in flame, racing blindly forward. As it ran, it cast aside a weapon and a belt of ammo that already popped like a chain of fire crackers. No-Hands only shook his head as he tracked the figure toward its clear objective, a polluted sluice pond. It became all too clear how ill-considered it was when Heinrich Hilfiger dived straight into the deepest part. The surface of the pond itself lit up in a sheet of admittedly short-lived flame.

“You were never my equal, Hilfiger,” No-Hands said, “only my opposite. You still came closer than most.” Then he picked up the machine gun and slung it over his back.

Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Giant patchisaurs!!!

 

So it's the last night of the year, and I've gone two months without a blog post, and you might think I would just bow out, but I decided it wasn't too late for a dino blog. It just happens I have something very special I've been sitting on, two specimens of the patchisaurs that started this whole thing. To dive right in, here's possibly the first patchi whose origin is entirely accounted for!

So, for the backstory, I have been seeing unusually large patchisaurs for quite a while now, and finally decided to sample a few. This particular guy came in a pair with a smallish generic rubber dragon creature pictured above, clearly an extra-large version of a patchi with whiskers or mandibles believed to have inspired the Dungeons And Dragons Umberhulk. This is a true hulk indeed, well over 4 inches tall. Soon after I got it, I ran down a lead at a blog called Fantasy Toy Soldiers which confirmed that the small price I paid was almost certainly too much. As it turns out, this was made for a playset laughably called Medieval Times from a company with the only slightly less questionable name Awesome Kids, from what I can tell sometime after 2000. Complete sets, which I found for under $30, contain 4 of these. So where did they come from? Did someone simply copy and enlarge the patchisaur? Did they find original molds to work from? Or did someone actually unearth a vintage patchisaur that even the people who actually had the owlbear had forgotten about? As usual, the chances of an answer are less than zero, but at least, for once, we have a name and a date that is within a decade. Now, behold the glory of the hulk, newish and old!

"I once ate a bus that was this big..."

And here is the other, a big version of one I've come to call Flattop, as it turns out not so flat. This is also featured on the linked blog, though that dedicated thing-finder knew no better than I where it came from or who made it. One marginally useful clue is that it bears a script of Hong Kong, which means it must have been made before China took the island back. The further patina and overall look seem about right for the 1970s or '80s at the latest, so it just might be from the people who made the originals. If it wasn't, there's enough additional detail to suggest a source better than the usual 1980s/ '90s copies. He's a modest size, probably 3 1/2 inches, but pretty bulky. Here's pics of the big guy and the original.

Ask not what they were smoking. Ask what they were NOT smoking.

So, how many more of these are there? I saw a specimen for sale of the semi-sane rhino-lizard, featured on the blog, made maybe twice or maybe only half again the size of the one I have. There are also pics of the Rust Monster in two sizes, though as far as I can tell the one I have from back when is in fact one of the "big" ones. I could also swear that a while ago I saw the chupacabra-creature in a spectacular size, but I don't seem to have saved any pics to prove it. I have confirmed and been amazed to see old versions of that malign little beast with a full array of spines on his back. They look more solid, but they do not appear substantially larger as such. I will probably get one sooner or later, and I just might find a large version again. In the meantime, let's wind this up with a pic with Sidekick Carl. I said that guy is big!

So that's it for another year. It's been good to take a break, but I'm definitely not ready to call it quits yet. As always, it's the dinos that keep me coming back, and at this rate, I'll be seeing the patchisaurs waiting for me at The Furthest Shore. And heck, here's another of the dragon creature!

That's all for now, more to come!

The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs Halloween special: Scary cute stego!

 

It's Halloween night and I've done a lot less than I used to but a lot more than I have in a while. To round things out, I obviously had to do a dino post. It happened I already had a perfect specimen for a quick post from a trip to an old stomping ground. Here he is in full glory on The Couch Mark 2.

Now for the story, I made this acquisition late last month at the Arizona Museum of Natural History, which I volunteered at back when it had the much cooler name Mesa Southwest Museum. Of course, I had a long history here. This is where I picked up the actually good Prehistoric Panorama Cambrian creatures, an okay pachycephalosaur I can't confirm I featured before, and my second worst dinobot. This little guy was part of a lot that appears to have flooded the shop, with several whole boxes discretely positioned under shelves and tables. His tag identifies him as made by the prolific company Aurora (maker of my first and only Valentine's Day gift), per the data entirely from recycled bottles. He's obviously a cute little guy, and pretty soft. Here's a few closeups.

"I'm innocent and adorable. But I'm still judging you."

So that's enough for a quick post. As usual, this feature is always worth the time, and finds like this make things easy when I'm in a hurry. I definitely expect a longer installment soon. And here's some more pics from the trip...

"Resistance is futile..."

Spinosaur flashback!

The Schleich vs Safari war is heating up.

"We will have our revenge when the school bully sees you with the pack..."

And why not one more in the bag?

Adaptation Insanity: The one that's the best Stephen King adaptation

 

Title: Misery

What Year?: 1990

Classification: Mashup

Rating: That’s Good! (4/4)

 

As I write this, I’m in an unplanned breather from my Halloween lineup, and the big change this time around is that I haven’t been leaning on movie reviews to fill it out. Now, I’m ready to get out one more, and I decided to go with more movies based on the works of Stephen King. And there was no better place to start than my pick for the best one of all. I speak of none other than Misery, as at a minimum the one that does the most to improve on the book.

Our story begins with a writer named Paul finishing his latest novel at an isolated cabin. He starts for home to a jaunty musical number, only to take a tumble on an icy mountain road. He wakes up to find himself being looked after by a matron named Annie who introduces herself as a nurse and his biggest fan. She assures him that the proper authorities and his agent have been notified, but proves evasive as he asks how soon they will come to pick him up. Soon enough, she lays out the truth: She has kept his rescue secret, while the wider world thinks he is dead. Annie wants Paul to herself, and when she finds out he has killed off the character that made him rich, she demands that he write a new adventure to bring her back. The author must write his own escape plan, if the nosey sheriff doesn’t get to him first- but the nurse is even deadlier than she seems!

Misery was a 1990 psychological horror film directed by Rob Reiner, based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. It was the 17^th theatrical film based on King’s work, though only the 7^th based on one of his full-length novels. Development reportedly began after producer Andrew Scheiman personally recommended the book to Reiner. William Goldman, a veteran screenwriter and the author of The Princess Bride, wrote the final script. The late James Caan was cast as Paul Sheldon and Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes, after the roles were offered to actors including Warren Beatty and Bette Midler respectively. The soundtrack was composed by Marc Shaiman. Few changes were made to the story, the most significant being the addition of the sheriff Buster played by Richard Farnsworth (d. 2000) and (spoiler…) the removal of an arc in which Paul publishes the final Misery novel after destroying a fake manuscript. Several early advertisements referenced a scene in which Annie severs Paul’s foot, which was altered in the final film. The film was a financial and critical success, earning over $60 million against a $20M budget, and won a Best Actress Oscar for Bates. James Caan died in June 2022 at age 82.

For my experiences, this is one where I’m foggier than usual. I distinctly recall seeing this movie on network television, and I can remember reading bits of the novel in the early 2000s, but I’m not quite certain which one came first. What I do recall is that I read the novel much later, somewhere in the 2015-2016 window, and very quickly concluded that the movie was if anything a substantial improvement. Sure, the book isn’t “bad”, but under scrutiny, it’s one of his more self-indulgent experiments, with a lot of on-the-nose venting that often seems to be at other writers’ expense. (Apart from anything else, Stephen King still hasn’t done a “real” sequel outside of the Dark Tower series…) By comparison, the movie improves as much as its medium can improve on a literary source, greatly aided by two superb actors. (And I meant to say a lot more about the soundtrack...) The one thing missing is the author’s searing hatred for his own character, which the novel transforms into revealed hypocrisy, but the difficulty of conveying that on-screen is obvious enough that the effective omissions of the ending are understandable.

Moving forward, I’m already feeling like this is a case in point of a movie “too good” for me to review in my usual format. What I find most worthy of comment is how easy it is to underestimate the rest of the cast in the face of Bates’ performance. Caan/ Paul himself is effectively turned into a supporting player, in itself a perversely effective subversion of the “damsel in distress” and the gender-role baggage that goes with it. That, in turn, pays off with real growth as the victim recovers and begins to develop his own plans. The big surprise is Farnsworth, whose only counterpart in the book is a nameless casualty of Annie’s wrath. He becomes an effective third player in the story, in the process adding a police-procedural element to the genre mix. It’s most intriguing to see his outside view of Paul Sheldon’s works. Finally, as with a number of things, his abrupt end is in its own way at least as brutal as anything in the book. (And dear Logos, I think I must have heard of the lawnmower scene when the movie was in theaters…)

Then, of course, there is Annie. What’s most striking is how easy it would have been for the filmmakers to compromise with an attractive or even “Hollywood unattractive” actress. Instead, we get a performer every bit as ungainly as King’s descriptions, without the script and cameras going into “fat-shaming” either.  We simply have a plus-size, middle-aged performer playing a character we could pity under any other circumstance. That is only the bedrock of her performance, which somehow gets more disturbing the more we can laugh. Then what I find most interesting is that her character becomes more sympathetic than the character in the original, and I have never been satisfied that this is simply because her bloodiest acts are removed or (arguably…) toned down. The screen version of Annie certainly tends to be absent-minded rather than actively sadistic, yet this is not played into a redeeming quality. It merely makes her less like Sid from Toy Story and more like Elmyra from Tiny Toons; she may not intend evil, but she is no less destructive for it. (Now I’m getting anger flashbacks to those idiot kids in ET…) To me, the difference is that it makes her more believable, and by implication not so different from any of us. And that brings me to a thought I had on my very first viewing, that her character would have been more disturbing and ultimately more frightening if the “backstory” had been cut entirely. All she needed to be was an outlier of toxic fandom that the wider world was still oblivious to. Portraying her otherwise was pretty much the same as making the big reveal in The Shining that Jack was a murderous wifebeater all along.

And that gets to the “one scene”, and there’s one that always stood out in the movie and the book. After Paul’s first attempt to revive Misery on demand, by rewriting the final scenes of his book, Annie simply says it’s “all wrong”. Paul is polite in asking for her input, with a level of returning assurance that will grow. To illustrate, she goes into a story of her childhood (which Paul questions in the book) of going to the serials, and an especially contrived resolution of a cliffhanger. Bates delivers it in top form, if anything with surprising restraint. She concludes, in a line that seems to be unique to the film, “Misery was buried in the ground at the end, Paul, so you’ll have to start there.” It’s all great, and it not only checks all the boxes of “AU” and “canon” that I can now hate that I know but does sound very much like me on one of my rants. This is what fandom is and was like, though I maintain that even then, we still understood that the point was to have fun. And I can give no better defense of the critique I laid out above than this, that if this sequence was the only time we learned anything about Annie’s past, the story wouldn’t be the least bit worse for it.

In closing, what I come back to is what I really think of Stephen King. I’ve been very sparing in covering his work, but I have still covered a good sample: Creepshow, Maximum Overdrive, Sleepwalkers and most recently Trucks. (See also The Signal, kiiind of...) These definitely give a representative sample of what I find good in Mr. King’s work. I can add that what I find bad, I cannot find in any story or book I have read through. My overall policy with King has been to sample cautiously, and either read what engages with me or respectfully set aside what doesn’t. The end result is that I have read some of what is agreed to be his best work, skipped a number of his “classics” and come to greatly appreciate some of his works that remain decidedly offbeat. (Again, how in Cocytus did we not get a Rose Madder movie?) The present film similarly shows how to get a good movie out of King’s material: Don’t worry about what’s most popular, or his “best”, but just run with something that’s different. It’s a lesson Hollywood may not learn anytime soon, yet there are enough quirky projects out there to have hope for the future. For now, we can appreciate what we’ve got. “Isn’t that an oogie mess…”

Crypto Corner Returns?! The ship with nobody on it

 

It’s almost time for Halloween, and I have been thinking about the future of my blogging. That brought me back to one of the things that got me here in the first place, my interest in Forteana. That, in turn, got me thinking about something that I had never really thought about trying my own hand at either way. It’s the most famous and iconic of mysteries, the one that is still hailed as “unsolved”… and the one that has the highest volume of absolute nonsense. I speak of the Mary Celeste, the greatest of maritime mysteries… and I will be presenting the explicit hypothesis that it was a scam.

The facts of the case are already so frequently retold as to be moot in serious discussion. In 1872, a ship named Dei Gratia sighted another ship near the Strait of Gibraltar, moving erratically. The captain, David Morehouse, gave orders to approach what was presumed to be a vessel in distress, only to find that it in fact had no crew aboard at all. Its name was the Mary Celeste, an already disreputable vessel commanded by one Benjamin Briggs, a well-regarded if undistinguished seaman who had set off from New England with a cargo of alcohol, a handpicked crew and his wife Sarah and young daughter sophy on board. Though the lifeboat was gone, the ship was still largely seaworthy. But what made it remarkable was that a logbook found aboard recorded the ship’s last position as hundreds of miles further west. Further investigations would raise allegations of mutiny, murder, conspiracies and outright insurance fraud. Yet, in the end, multiple inquests could give no explanation, and neither the captain nor the crew nor his missing family members were ever found. So, of course, decades of literature suggested that it was the work of mutineers, or murderous ex-slaves, or pirates, or giant squid, or aliens, or… Yeah, we all know, this was bunk.

Now, to back this up, what’s really noteworthy are the two figures who gave the story its eventual form. One was none other than Arthur Conan Doyle, who turned out an early yarn with a fictionalized retelling of the vessel, subtly renamed Marie Celeste. In his telling, the tale became a racially charged tale of vengeance. Though it specifically lacked a supernatural element, he made a number of additions and omissions to present a scenario that was far more mysterious than the mundane facts, notably portraying the vessel with its lifeboat still in place and with a “hot meal” on the table. (The latter detail seems to have come from a slightly earlier retelling in the Los Angeles Times.) The other is the infamous Frederick Solly Flood, an attorney general who investigated the case. He was quite justifiably incredulous at the truthfulness of the received account of events, but could not come up with a better alternative than increasingly contrived speculations that the captain and the crew had either murdered each other or been killed by the crew of the Dei Gratia. It is worth further note that, prior to the rise of the Fortean community, his was the dominant “narrative” of the event, as further reflected in the multiple lurid hoaxes that made the worst school library Forteana look like naïve exuberance.

Now is the point where we can double back to the “savvy” version of events, represented by Ian Wilson’s frequently cited Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries and Brian Hendricks’ fine scholarly rundown Ghost Ship. These accounts have at least set a bar of discussion higher than the self-mystification of the “true mysteries” books. We intelligent anomalists and historical investigators all know now that the lifeboat was gone from the ship. It has long since been agreed that, while the Mary Celeste was reasonably intact at the time of discovery, it had suffered significant damage that would probably have claimed it if not for its seemingly happenstance encounter with another ship. Finally, while items of significant value were left aboard ship, as well as the ship’s log book, the captain and crew did take the time to bring navigational instruments. The upshot has been at least to place the “mystery” in the realm of psychology rather than the paranormal. Obviously, the captain and crew decided to leave the ship, without believing the situation so dire that they deserted without preparation. It is sensibly postulated that they believed they could either reach land or simply return to the ship once some temporary problem resolved itself. At some point, they miscalculated or had a further mishap, leaving the captain, crew and a woman and child to a fate that was, in Wilson’s words, “tragically obvious”.

What is most noteworthy in all this is that these revisionist takes have done very little to put Flood in a better light. If anything, he has been the foil of the debunkers as he was to the credulous lay Forteans. In their accounts, he becomes a kind of misguided extremist, trying mightily to refute the posited facts of the case only to see them affirmed again and again. What is undoubtedly true is that there was precious little that was reasonable in his conjectures. The one thing that can still put him in a sympathetic light is the desperation that must have driven to it. He becomes the epitome of the specifically Victorian brand of rationalism, determined to find a “reasonable” explanation even for what was by all appearances a series of irrational acts. As the centerpiece of my own scenario, I posit what I find closest to the truth: He was the kind of prosecutor who, given the opportunity, would overstate and distort his case to the point of irreparable harm even if the facts and evidence were already in favor of the accused being guilty. We can thus frame the question as, just how much did Flood set rational inquiries back?

On this vein, we can see that Flood fundamentally botched his case as soon as he arbitrarily fixated on the notion that the crew had mutinied after getting drunk on alcohol from the ship’s hold. In fact, even if the alcohol was not strictly toxic as usually reported (only Hicks seems to admit any uncertainty on that point), it was certainly never intended for recreational consumption in any quantity. Beyond that, an uprising of intoxicated and enraged sailors changes the scenario from a crime of passion rather than cold-blooded fraud, without any advantage in accounting for the evidence. It was notably unlikely that such a ragtag band could act without resistance from loyalists in the crew and/ or infighting in their own ranks, either of which would almost certainly have left clear signs of struggle. What should have ended the discussion is and if such a group had given any thought at all to covering their tracks, they would simply set fire to the ship and its flammable cargo. Then the most consequential and malign error was that Flood all but rejected the simplest solution of all, that Briggs decided to abandon, burn or flat-out explode his own ship to collect the insurance. On this point, it must be considered that even if Flood was right, his unwillingness to accuse a captain of wrongdoing surely reveals a cultural blind spot that could easily have cost us key facts and context.

Now, we get to the infamous details, and I freely maintain that if my scenario does not explain everything, it leaves no more plot holes than any other. For example, we know that a certain amount of alcohol had leaked into the hold, and that at least one hatch was secured open. This was in fact a reasonably favorable circumstance for the kind of fuel-air explosion already prominently discussed by revisionists, as much as a man of the 1800s could have understood the phenomenon. It is especially noteworthy that this would allow for multiple contingencies. If whatever igniting mechanism was set up failed to produce an explosion, the resulting blaze could still destroy the ship. If it had not, then the flames could still burn up the cargo along with any evidence of intentional sabotage. The one thing would-be arsonists might well have been unprepared for was for a carefully planned detonation to fail entirely. That would have left the crew in the position we already know, either paddling away from the ship in the lifeboat or watching from a calculated safe distance. In the latter scenario, we can envision an argument whether to go back to the ship, just possibly long enough to delay a decision that would have changed their fate.

Another detail this can account for is the abandoned logbook, and the further fact that the last entry was 9 days prior to the ship’s discovery. From what we know now, this was probably at least a day or two before the abandonment of the ship, and of course, the apparent gap in the nominally daily log is all the more strange if anything untoward had happened in the meantime. It has also been freely noted that several calculations of the ship’s position may have been incorrect. This is precisely where outright fraud becomes, at a minimum, more economical than any other solution. Perhaps Briggs discontinued the log when his real plan started. If he had cared enough to make the effort, he might have kept two separate logs, a fraud known to Christopher Columbus. Or, for simplicity, the logbook may have been abandoned because the captain realized it contained information that would contradict whatever story he planned to tell.

At this point, the problem once again falls into the realm of psychology. Much has been said about Briggs’ piety and mild temperament, which is certainly a fair point against the broken-record guessing that he drove his crew to mutiny. But if the charge is premeditated fraud, the story of the scrupulous and reliable professional taking the money and run has long since become its own cliché. Of course, it can be further allowed that he objected to the plan only to be overruled by other conspirators, most obviously the ship’s frequently discussed owner, James Winchester. We might also reconsider a role for Morehouse, the one point where even Flood backed off. If Morehouse and any of his crew had been let in on a plot, they could have been induced by a chance to play hero by picking up the survivors as much as any share in an expected payout. If they were not, it could very well have been planned for the Mary Celeste to cross paths with his ship, notwithstanding the known discrepancies in their known and intended courses, and ideally give truthful witnesses to the destruction of the Mary Celeste in the process. Then we might wonder about a comment reported by his widow: “Poor Briggs! He and his wife and crew must have perished in that small, open yawl. There can be no other way out of it.” It is the same conclusion reached by others much further removed from the case, but wouldn’t the certainty and finality of his remark make all the more sense if that was what he expected to find on the fateful day?

The one obvious counterpoint is that Briggs would have to have embarked on the plot with not only his wife but the younger of their two children onboard. On consideration, this is no more or less than one more unknown, and another point where the lingering filters of Victorian morality have done us no favors. The later hoaxers were especially apt to push Sarah Briggs into the role of a passive damsel, which is in fact the one thing we can be sure she was not. In reality, she was  an intelligent and resourceful woman who had accompanied her husband often enough to be an seasoned mariner in her on right. From what can be known, Briggs in turn respected her as a partner in his ventures. If a plot to sink the Mary Celeste had been discussed between them, it is at least not preposterous that she might have approved. As usual, we can spin further motivations. She may have already wanted to return to a life on land and bring her wayfaring mate with her. Perhaps she would have seen a scheme as no more than a romantically piratical adventure. And of course, the only thing that needs to be added to this “what if” is, as usual, that something went very, very wrong.

And that brings us back around to the aftermath, as Dei Gratia’s crew surveyed the scene. We have already seen that it is not essential that they were party to a conspiracy, if one occurred, but it is all too easy to envision a spontaneous and organic “coverup”. If even the suspicious Flood was unwilling to sustain an accusation of wrongdoing against Briggs, his peers and friends would have been all the more reluctant to implicate him in a petty plot or for that matter a simple error that in all likelihood cost him, his crew and his wife and daughter their lives. Then, if the scenario laid out here is anywhere close to correct, there are plenty of things that would only have been “obvious” to experienced seaman, and many of those might only have been seen by a single person. It would have been easy to dispose of some crucial piece of evidence or remove it from context, easier still simply to omit it from the reports and subsequent testimony. The unavoidable irony is that if anyone had tried to come clean, it might only have further antagonized the likes of Flood.

Now as an epilogue, we might consider a deeper part of maritime lore, the supposedly “cursed” ship. As we all know, the Mary Celeste was the epitome of the legend even without the incident that made her infamous, from a maiden voyage with a captain who got sick and died to a wreck and costly rebuild that gave the ship its name to a final trip where she was in fact wrecked in what a court of law ruled to be deliberate insurance fraud. Through it all, we can see a bedrock of rational plausibility. The ship started as an undistinguished specimen of a type that would soon become both obsolete and unprofitable. In its rebuilt form, it became an awkward compromise, larger than it was meant to be yet only marginally improved, with a sunk cost that would weigh down its profitability. Along the way, it acquired a bad reputation that on objective scrutiny can be counted as nothing more or less than self-fulfilled prophecy. Captains and crew were increasingly unwilling to sail aboard the ship, especially after the disappearance of the Briggs and its crew. More tellingly, it passed through a series of increasingly indifferent or malicious owners, until it finally came to one who was willing to destroy it on purpose. The truth of the matter was that the ship was doomed not by any curse, but by economics that left it unprofitable yet too expensive to abandon until the very end.

And that ends this little rabbit trail. So, what do I think? I’m willing to say, I still don’t know. I have run with my scenario just to see how far it can go. Having come to the end, I will be the first to admit that it’s not a very likely solution. But I can also say, it certainly is not so unlikely that it can be dismissed out of hand. The real lesson of Mary Celeste research is that there will never be a perfect answer to every question. To believe otherwise is to enable the mystification that prevailed for so long, and also to overlook the true horror. If we cannot figure out why an experienced captain would take his wife and child as well as his crew onto the open ocean on a marginal lifeboat, does that not simply show us the limits of our reason? And who are we to say that any of us could not make an equally unfathomable decision, if we had to make it under the same limitations? That should terrify us more than any spooky yarn, and that is why the mystery will live on.

Futures Past: The Captain N comic book

 As I write this, I'm two months and counting in my sabbatical from blogging, and have also spent two weeks watching my retro gaming parody/ fan novel not sell, and bought a new computer for good measure. In the midst of all this, I got to thinking more about something I mentioned once before, a traumatic experience that scarred an entire generation. I speak, of course, of Captain N: The Game Master, a show even kids who were several years/ eons away from Batman: The Animated Series knew was kaka. And what really brought me back to it wasn't writing a 100,000-word novel, or buying a Samus figure for three times its retail price, but finding out there was a comic book. And by reputation, it is actually... good? Okay? Tolerable??? Clearly, I was going to have to investigate first-hand.

So, to back things up, I did indeed watch Captain N first-hand during its run, and as usual, I have some very distinct recollections  that I now know don't line up with the actual run of the show. I'm sure I saw it first during a vacation that could have been before I had a TV at home, a story arc I assumed was the pilot that I figured out would actually be episodes 4 and/ or 5. It could easily have been a year or more before I watched it again, on the same network affiliate where I first saw Darkwing Duck, in a slot that required getting up early to watch it at all. I can recall several of the more famed/ notorious episodes (including their Tetris one!), of which I'm sure all were in a half-hour, single-story format. From the research that I did for this post, that means I only saw seasons 1 and 2, the last episode of which aired in very early 1991. However, I'm sure I was watching it well after that, probably into 1992 if not later. This fits with certain reports that it was in network syndication as late as 1994.

Now, with all the easy jokes already at hand, I'm sure everyone is expecting me either to destroy this show or defend it as a neglected classic. However, that simply isn't how it was. The now-storied clashes of titans that defined modern animation were all happening after school between Fox Kids and the Disney Afternoon.  Even back then, it was obvious that Saturday mornings were the low end of the pool, the usually short-lived experiments, the outdated-on-arrival tie-ins, the reruns and reboots of shows you had thought you were too old for the first time around. If you accepted the ritual of getting up before 7 in the morning, then you were probably going to watch whatever they threw at us without complaining. And you could get lucky, with shows like Darkwing Duck or a good episode of Garfield And Friends. Then again, you could get the likes of ProStars, Karate Kid and Hammer Man, all of which I most certainly watched in the same timeframe if not the same network and lineup as Captain N. And in their company, yes, Captain N reached the proverbial high standard of mediocrity. We were already past the Dark Ages, into a time where even a low-tier cash grab could be expected to have some measure of technical quality and narrative coherence. If it came to that, when Mother Brain was competent, when Simon Belmont wasn't actively stupid, when Kevin and Princess Lana aren't vying to be both bland and irritating (yes, even compared to Simon and Kid Icarus), when they actually did something creative with the "guest" game characters no matter how little sense it made in relation to the game, it could be entertaining.

And then there is the comic, which I had absolutely no idea existed until noting a few passing mentions in connection with Metroid. This one was published by Valiant, also responsible for a Super Mario comic I'm now sure I encountered in the wild sometime in the 1990s. The first issue was published in May 1990. Alas, the run ended in September of the same year after only five issues. In its short run and after, it gained a reputation as both more faithful to the source games and far better in quality than the TV series. Unsurprisingly, copies are scarce and quite expensive. Fortunately, the real-world heroes at Captain N.net have assembled a library for all the internet to read, for the moment.

Meanwhile, what brought me to this comic was its chief claim to fame or infamy: Unlike the entirety of the TV series, it featured Samus Aran as a major character. In fact, she was introduced as a "guest" character in the last of several storylines in the first issue of the comic, and continued to appear at least once in every remaining issue of the run. In the first appearance, titled "Money Changes Everything", she was set up as a neutral bounty hunter willing to consider an offer from Mother Brain. By "The Happy Zone" in the following issue, she was already established as a member of the "N Team" and a rival to Princess Lana for the affections of Captain N/ Kevin, which admittedly wasn't a big deal in the TV series. After appearing in a single panel of "The Fabulous Powers of Captain N" in issue 3, she got a full protagonist treatment in "Breakout" in issue 4, where a corrupt judge sends her and Princess Lana to a prison planet from which they must escape. In issue five, she got not one but two appearances. First, in "Garbageworld", a time travel mishap sends her to a future where Kevin is finally willing to reciprocate her interest, but also is reduced to leading the remnants of the resistance to Mother Brain from an interstellar garbage dump. Then in "When Friends Fall Out", Princess Lana discovers evidence that the bounty hunter was responsible for the disappearance of the old king of Videoland, in a story that was obviously meant to be finished in the announced but never printed issue 6.

So, with that out of the way, is this comic any good? Having read the Samus story arc, and skimmed a few more storylines, I can certainly affirm that this is vastly better than the TV show. The unavoidable punchline is, this is pretty much like saying the show was better than the Battletoads pilot. We aren't just comparing two different things, but two things in very different stages of development. The relative strengths of the comic come down to the fact that it is trying to establish its world and characters, but there was a point when the show made some effort to do the same. Whether the same level of quality could have been maintained over a longer run is unknowable at best. What can be seen all too clearly is that this is far from a top-notch comic for its own or any other time. The artwork is no better than average for a newspaper comic, and particularly weak when called on to establish a larger setting, the one thing that the show was undisputedly good at as long as it was trying at all. The stories serve up several duds, notably "Breakout". The real bottom line is that the comic is still everything the show was reviled for, a middling to low budget cash-in built around references to niche pseudo-mythology, though with the difference that it gets said mythology mostly right.

And then there is Samus, the one thing that made this at all memorable. As with many things, you can see where they were trying, not so much where they did this right. Sure, she's a developed and sympathetic female character with a "dark" side that isn't simply waved away by the power of love (yet...). However, while her open infatuation with the male lead isn't exactly "stereotypical" as such, it is quickly magnified to a level that can only be regarded as either actually disturbing or wholly contrived, to the point that she seriously goes through with accepting the garbage world timeline. Given the general intelligence of the material, it can be allowed that this really is meant to show her conflicting emotions and very gray morality. The deeper problem is that the story arc never pushes its own point. Every time she is presented with a choice between her mercenary ways and the good guys' ideals, the story always throws a softball rather than making her admit to past misdeeds or ongoing flaws. It's by all means a step forward, especially for a video game tie-in (Hell, the show wasn't afraid to show the dark side of unrequited "love" either), but it's the kind that shows just how far we still had to go. Oh yes, and this could all look far, far worse if we actually knew how the Hell old our "hero" is... 

So that's Captain N, the show and the comic book. So, was this worth it? Considering how notorious this has gotten, it was definitely worth a rematch, and I'm more than happy to have dug up the comic book. For myself, I hope I have at least given some perspective. By my standard rant, this wasn't "good" by any means, but anyone who thinks this is the "worst" we got is either too young or suffering from repressed memories. (Hey, sometimes, I wish I could come down with that...) All in all, a weekend isn't too much time for a trip down this rabbit hole. That's all for now, more to come!

Image credit valiant.fandom.com.

The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Return to the wild!

 

It's Tuesday, and I've been busy enough to consider throwing in the towel a while longer. Fortunately, it just happens that I spent some decompression time at the Store of Stores, source of the silliest AWESOMEST dinosaurs to appear in this feature. So, here's a quick lineup of the latest sightings there, plus a few more things that even I wouldn't pay money for, which I swear I almost had ready over the weekend. To kick things off, how about a dinobot?

This here is, of course, a clear if generic knockoff of the Transformers Dinobots, previously represented in my original dinobot lineup and my relatively recent Grimlocks followup. This one looks good enough that I genuinely considered buying it, except that its price tag was in the same range as a real Transformer, and not just the discounted and/ or small ones I usually buy. Of course, I did consider that the exact same store sold me the mindbogglingly awful generic ankylosaur dinobot, possibly the worst thing I have reviewed for this feature that I bought new. The mask you can kind of see didn't help; it really is a full-sized Halloween mask with an alleged electronic feature. If that's what drove the price up, they lost the sale twice over. Oh, well. And then there was this...

So this is a bag of big dinos that appears to be from the same makers as the generic dino bag and the Oviraptor. This time, there's only about three of them in correspondingly large sizes, as far as I can tell solidly built. There's even signs of articulation on that ceratopsian. The problem, which you might or might not be able to see, is that the included T. rex has two heads, which somehow failed to be a selling point for me. It all comes down to the dictum I laid down with the patchisaurs, if you're going with dinos as an excuse for fantasy monsters, don't try to make them look like "real" dinosaurs. And here's another pic that might or might not give a better view. One more thing, I swear that Styracosaurus thingy looks exactly like a stop-motion model used in Son of Kong. Dammit, I'm going to go back and buy this thing, aren't I?

And here's another item, clearly intended to look like a therizinosaur. Wow. Just... wow.

On the other hand, there's this. I'm actually impressed. Is this supposed to be a dino, or the Alien as a plush toy?

And while I'm at it, a sighting from a previous visit. I'm sure this is from the same offenders as the generic bag. Well, if kids aren't traumatized, how will they get into dinosaurs?

And while I'm at it, a few from Walmart. This is the source of my header illustration. It feels like what would happen if a real therepod thought he could host a kid's show...

And another Walmart entry. It's brought me the Lanard megafauna, a Marx clone set, the cyborg zombie T. rex, and the actually good spinosaur; so you can't win 'em all.

And here's something different, from the store where I got the anime space jet transformer, now finally closed down. This had definitely been there a very long time...

And speaking of Walmart/ Lanard, I found this outside the direct-to-Walmart channels.

And that's enough for me to call it a day/ night/ week. This is truly what I do, and this time around, I've felt good going in and coming out. My material isn't always great, or epically bad, but I can always come up with something interesting. And while I'm at it, here's one more pic from the Store of Stores. Sometimes, something normal is the weirdest thing of all...

That's all for now, more to come!