Happy Walpurgis Night

So hard to believe that this is the last night of April, that this is the night where the winter demons are laid to rest, that another year has gone by in a blur of tears, disorientation, and regeneration.

So it's appropriate that tonight I'll celebrate with a new (to me) Doctor in a brand-new Doctor Who adventure. My initial reaction to Matt Smith as the 11th Doctor is overwhelmingly positive. Though the youngest actor ever to play the role, he captures the characters combination of youth and age, wisdom and play. I like him better than what I saw of David Tennant, and I like the scripts that he's been given to work with better than anything that Tennant had.

Someday, my old Who website, "The Prydonian Order" will reappear as part of the new www.ducksoup.me, and I have a feeling I'll have something new to add when that day comes.

Earlier in the week, I took the time to sit through a couple of '50's SF monster movies, not really ideal Walpurgis Night fare, but the things that came to hand. The Monster That Challenged the World at least had a good and genuinely repellant monster in the form of a giant caterpillary-earwiggy kind of thing with creepy bulbous eyes that lays eggs that hatch a bunch of other giant caterpillary-earwiggy kind of things with creepy bulbous eyes. Yuck! It's too bad the rest of the movie is so lame, strictly by the genre numbers, with Hans Conried being the only real actor on hand to hold the thing down. He fails.

It! The Terror from Beyond Space was just the opposite. Oh, the actors were still bottom of the barrel, and the script was typed by someone with a lead ear, but the concept has possibilities for claustrophobic horror that were not realized until Dan O'Bannon stole the idea brazenly for Alien.

But that monster! Ye gods! Poor Ray "Crash" Corrigan, reduced to lumbering around in a pathetic rubber suit, waving his arms like there's no tomorrow. Perhaps, for him, there wasn't. . .

Before the Doctor comes to call, I'll re-visit Beetlejuice, which I have not seen since its original theatrical release, all those years ago.

'K, I've got to run and get my dinner going so that I can get the "celebration" started. I'm sure at least three of my quats will sit on me, and that's relaxing for all of us. The regenerating me will raise a glass to the regenerated Doctor -- an old friend with a new face, who always brings monsters.

Happy Walpugis Night!

-- Freder.

The Real, Original Rescuers

I don't want to write about moving today, although it is much on my mind, a weight that never seems to get any lighter.

Instead I will write about Miss Bianca and Bernard the Brave. Not the Disneyfied version of the movies (although the first one was okay despite its departures), but the source material, the original books by British author Margery Sharp.

Regrettably, the Miss Bianca series is completely out of print. This is a crime. Although I cannot speak for the later books in the series (my family stopped at four for some strange reason, and until later years I never knew that more existed), the first three are among the books that I most fondly remember.

They are Gothic Victorian Romantic Adventure stories -- with mice. When Disney made their version, it was Americanized and transplanted to the Louisiana Bayou, but the books are ornately European and much richer in texture. As illustrated by the great Garth Williams, the books are filled with what Williams himself referred to as "a soft furry love."

But they are also filled with darkness and wonderful villains. In The Rescuers, a young girl is forced into servitude by The Grand Duchess, who with her faithful valet lives in a decaying old mansion attended by clockwork handmaidens.

I have to stop. I may revisit this post later on. I'm not doing it justice. Just too tired. Suffice to say that you should seek out The Rescuers, Miss Bianca and The Turret, and devour them by candlelight at night.