(Not) The End of Flight

 

If you are looking for a really fine modern rendering of PETER PAN, look no further than P. J. Hogan’s 2003 version starring Jeremy Sumpter, Rachel Hurd-Wood, Jason Isaacs, Lynn Redgrave and Richard Briars. It is a beautiful and under-rated incarnation of the story that fully embraces all its themes. Roger Ebert totally Got It. Here’s a link to his review.

Now, then. Let’s discuss the latest cinematic turd bearing Peter’s name.

No fictional character in history has been more misused, abused or maltreated than Peter Pan. By my count, the new film (which I will not name nor link to in this post) is merely the third time in just the last decade that Hollywood has been unable to find anything better to do with its time and money than gang-rape Peter Pan.

This latest assault is pure revisionist Social Justice finger-wagging made by people who actively detest the original story, and see it only as a “problem” (their words) that needed to be “fixed” (also their words).

Their only talent is Arrogance.

Their laudable hatred of Injustice extends to a much less creditable hatred of all things from the past, all of history, all of art, and ultimately to all of humanity itself. People like this are incapable of creating anything original, because they hate originality.

This what happens when Hatred becomes so endemic to a culture that the people who Hate the Haters become worse than the thing that they Hate.

Here’s a principle that I wish more filmmakers would embrace: if you don’t respect the source material, find some other story to tell. Preferably something that hasn’t already been done literally dozens of times before. It shouldn’t be that hard. My bookshelves alone are filled with hundreds of great fantasy stories that have never even once been adapted to film.

The ignorance of the people who made this abortion is almost palpable. Bereft of any kind of creative instinct, brainless, ill-educated and one hundred percent talent-free they seek only to dismantle the work of their betters.

In fact they hate Talent itself: because talent is something that divides people into classes. And something they don’t, and never will, possess.

In theory, Talent is one of the more Egalitarian forces on earth, admitting anyone to its ranks regardless of things like background, ethnicity or education; and yet it divides people into haves and have-nots. Certain branches of Higher Education have trying to rid the culture of it for years, and sometimes to me it seems that they have finally succeeded. 

It’s just a fact that Hollywood has never been more bereft of the stuff in the century-plus of its existence. And they know it. But the principle that they should be held to some semblance of Creative Standards causes them become Indignant. Why should wealthy, entitled, ethically challenged people living in luxury be denied a mouthpiece simply because they have no talent?   

Rather than accept the blame of their own inadequacies, they behave like petulant children and point the finger of blame squarely at the audience. How dare we hold them to standards?

To paraphrase Patrick McGoohan’s THE PRISONER (a TV series that has seen no equal in the fifty-six years since its premiere) Standards are Un-Mutual.

Getting back to PETER PAN: James M. Barrie is not and has never been my favorite playwright by a long pinch, and yet he is by far the superior of the creatively bankrupt “filmmakers” who continue to lay siege to his most enduring creation — in this case, the Disney Company, which has devolved into an entity that Walt himself would despise, incapable or anything even remotely resembling invention or innovation. 

And yet I see a positive side to all this.

The only thing that this newest assault on PETER PAN proves is that originality, insight and creativity that connects at a deep level with universal human experience can survive anything.

Pirates of every stripe and breed have laid down an almost relentless broadside barrage against Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up — but he’s endured and survived for over a century now, and done so in the face of almost unprecedented Hatred and Abuse.

“Cock-a-doodle-doo!” 

Crow on, Peter. You’ve earned it. You are eternal. And they can’t keep an eternal boy down.

—Thorn.

www.tarotbyducksoup.com

www.ducksoup.me

Give a Shout: AROO!

 

Bruce Canwell, my good friend at The Library of American Comics (and not coincidentally the author of "The Prunes of Ire," debuting on this website this summer) has today posted at the LOAC website four new-to-the-interwebs installments of Jack Kent's delightful comic strip KING AROO. 

If you missed my earlier post about KING AROO, it's right there down below. And either way, you should go over and see the four new dailies posted at the LOAC website right here: http://libraryofamericancomics.com/what-came-next-king-aroo/

Because KING AROO is good for the Soul. Period.

-- Thorn.

Previews of Coming Attractions

 

Check out the trailer for the new QUIRK story "The Prunes of Ire," landing in July, right here at Duck Soup Productions!

It Can Happen Here.

In 2023, if you are a creative person working in any genre, you and your freedom to create are both in danger.

If you stray, even unintentionally, even in a small way, from the boundaries of what is considered to be socially acceptable art as determined by a small handful of very loud and self-important people, you will be silenced.

An apology for your Heinous Crimes will be demanded — and if you refuse to apologize for something that you didn’t do, or something that you reasonably should not have to apologize for, you and all your future projects, no matter how inoffensive, will be shut down.

God help you if you piss off the Entitled Minority.

If you don’t see the danger here, you’re part of the problem. Look it up: as many as eighty million people died in China's Cultural Revolution. Don't think it couldn't happen in the West.

-- Thorn.

Looking Ahead Into the Past

Hard as it is to believe, 2023 marks the ten-year anniversary of TAROT OF THE ZIRKIS MÄGI, the project that quite literally saved my life. The correct pronunciation, by the way, is “Maggie” — as with the old comic strip characters Maggie and Jiggs, or Maggie O’Connell, the free spirited lady pilot of NORTHERN EXPOSURE whose boyfriends are known for their mortality rate. It is an Estonian surname.

Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know this. I didn’t know the correct pronunciation myself until years after the deck had been published! This is particularly embarrassing, as before the deck arrived I wrote an entire novel centered around a circus family named Mägi — and I was mispronouncing the name in my head the whole time! The misperception within the tarot community is that the deck is named for the Biblical Magi, who were the three Kings “following yonder star” of the song. It’s not: it’s named for a circus which is the focus of all the action in my novel SEE THEM DANCE (which is still in print, by the way!).

So now you know! 

Ten years seems like a long time when those years are in front of you, but once they’ve passed into the rear-view mirror they seem like Nothing At All, Really. Just little “phht,” and then they’re gone.

Life Never Waits, always remember that. I wish I could remember it more consistently myself, or at least live as if I remembered it!

When I worked in the library at a local college, I used to say to my work study students, “Nothing in the first twenty years of your life prepares you for how fast the next twenty go by.” That still holds true, but I must say it gets Markedly Worse after forty.  Some of you already know what I’m talking about. Those of you who don’t, will. Surviving ten years in any business would have seemed like a Big Accomplishment to my Younger Self. Now I’m old enough to understand that it’s nothing more then pure stubbornness!

The big news this month is that I have Mostly Finished work on my latest deck, MYSTIC TAROT, and hope to fund the publication of a nice offset edition in 2023. Watch this space for future announcements. In the meantime, you can see all the cards in the short teaser film that’s currently playing right up there at the top of this post!

My main inspiration for this one comes from the strikingly gorgeous posters produced in Victorian and Edwardian times for the great magicians of that era — Thurston, Blacksone, Kellar, Houdini, and others less well-remembered. These images often dealt in supernatural themes, and were designed and made with a lushness of detail that is unequaled to this day. Not surprisingly, since our modern mode of tarot derives from works created in the same time period, I was able to find many connections between the two art forms. This was another labor of love that combined several of my enthusiasms, and I hope that the resulting deck will resonate with Tarot readers and collectors. 

You don’t have to live in the past or blind yourself to the many injustices and hardships of the past to appreciate the historic accomplishments that humanity made with fewer technological advances than are available to us now. But after all, there is still injustice in the world, and just as in the past, much of it is perpetrated by self-righteous chest-beaters who are convinced that right is on their side. I do not advocate living in the past. I never have advocated that. I *do* advocate familiarity with the past, warts and roses and all, to inform the work we do now, and help us decide how we move into the future. That’s where I’m coming from with the tagline I’m using for this deck, “Look Ahead into the Past.”

Watch for a crowdfunding campaign, coming soon! In the meantime, I want to thank everyone who has supported my work for the last decade. Without you, I might very well not have survived these ten years. You are my hope for a better future.

--Thorn.

www.tarotbyducksoup

www.ducksoup.me

A Dose of Happiness

 

It was with a mixture of Bliss and sadness that I finished reading volume 2 of Jack Kent's KING AROO the other day. AROO is a genuine Hidden Gem, a not-widely syndicated comic strip that ran in newspapers for a decade and a half, from 1950 to 1965, kept afloat during that time more by its ardent supporters within the industry than by the kind of reader success found by Charles Schulz and others. The Library of American Comics was able to bring two volumes of the strip back into print in 2012 and 2013, covering adventures through 1954, but as LOAC Associate Editor (and longtime personal friend) Bruce Canwell informed me, humor does not seem to be performing well with the modern audience.

This is probably because no one under the age of about fifty even knows what humor is anymore, or has been exposed to genuine humor in any of the available mediums, but that's a subject for another post, maybe.

The message I want to get through here is that KING AROO is a rare joy and a delight: dealing in the adventures and conflations had by the citizens of the little kingdom of Myopia. There's Aroo himself of course, the pudgy, earnest and well-meaning if ineffectual ruler of the land, aided and abetted by his jack-of-all trades retainer, Yupyop. There's Wanda Witch (a personal favorite), and Professor Yorgle, and Mister Elephant (who is of course the most forgetful resident), and Mr. Pennipost (a kangaroo who serves as the local postman) -- and a host of others, as has sometimes been said; even, occasionally, the Beautiful Princess from the kingdom next door, who may or may not be a frog under a spell. The humor is frequently reliant on whimsey and puns; and it's always gentle, kind-hearted and charming -- something we need more of in the 21st century!

I was saving the second volume for Someday, and this winter proved to be That Day. I'm very sad that it's over, I love it that much, but I know that I will return to these books (which I believe are still available, hint hint) again in the future. They are Just That Delightful. They make me Happy in a world that is currently crushing happiness as fast as it can push its shoots through the surface.

For your edification, I include a few AROO strips below (click to enlarge, I think) that I was able to glean from online sources. If you like the samples, you will LOVE the books, as I do. And Because Reasons, here is an interview with LOAC Associate Editor Bruce Canwell -- who additionally, wrote the new QUIRK adventure which I'll be posting at this site, come Springtime. Everything that The Library of American Comics publishes is worth your attention, but KING AROO is good for the SOUL. It will pick you up, dust you off make you smile and put a bounce in your step.

--Thorn.

Back to Gont

 

Because Reasons, it seems to have taken me sixteen years to get around to Goro Miyazaki's TALES FROM EARTHSEA. Despite its deliberate slow pace (and it is sometimes VERY slow) I thought it was Kind of a Masterpiece -- especially for a first-time director. I was a little bit shocked afterward to discover how badly the critics savaged it, and by how wide a mark they missed the whole point of the thing. I was a little bit less surprised to learn of Ursula Le Guin's disappointment with it, although reading her full comments I could at least understand why she felt that way.

A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA was one of the first fantasy novels I read as a young teenager, and it made a big impression on me: although I was not smart enough to grasp all the implications of Le Guin's themes, I could at least see and understand that she was dealing with Big Stuff: like, quite literally in this case, coming to grips with one's own mortality. It remains a favorite, although I never went on to any of the other Earthsea stories that Le Guin wrote later. To some extent I afraid of being disappointed; and Ged's story was complete in this one volume; I didn't feel a need for continuation. I feel differently now, and suspect I'll headed back to this realm after all.

Because it was a joy to see Ged turn up forty years later, very well realized on film. Some of his story was given to another character, but despite the author's disappointment I very much felt her presence in this picture.

I was forced to watch this in the English dub, which is NEVER my choice for foreign language movies; but this is a better than average job with a good cast.

I say the critics and the author are both wrong here! This is a very good (though slow and measured!) film fantasy, and MUCH more thoughtful than the average.

-- Thorn.

www.tarotbyducksoup.com

"D'you Want Onion Rings With That?"

 

Something at the heart of Popular Culture died on the day that we started to accept the notion that our heroes are nothing more than “franchises.”

I hear it all the time: the STAR WARS “franchise,” the MCU “franchise,” the DOCTOR WHO “franchise” — even The Universal Monsters “franchise,” although the franchising of anything, even food, was scarcely a phenomenon back in the 1930s when Universal was first spinning its shambling, misfit anti-heroes into sequels. 

But fiction, art, film and pop culture are not hamburgers, although the huge multi-national conglomerates that own everything in the twenty-first century have certainly been treating them as if they should be served with a side order of fries. Today, it’s considered simpler and more cost-effective (as it probably is) to keep artificially pumping life into an existing “property” than to create something new. There’s no profit in originality, at least not a profit that’s perceptible to their tiny little business-college trained minds.

The problem is that, inevitably nowadays, the management of a “franchise” falls into the hands of someone who would rather be doing something else, and the “property” falls into disrepair in a way that is painful for the fans.

Once upon a time, people made Entertainment. Even when Television was a meat-grinder and series producers were expected to churn out as many as thirty-eight weekly episodes a year, producers still took some pride in what they were doing, in delivering real stories about interesting characters — and when those series had run their course, as happens in the real world, the tent was folded and everyone moved on to the next Big Thing.

Characters and stories. Cycles that end. What a concept!

Fictional characters, just like living people, have a lifespan. They live, and they die. We have reached a time in the death cycle of Popular Culture when long-established characters like Batman, Spider-Man, Doctor Who and Superman have been done, and done again, and again, and again, until all that is left is ridicule and disgrace. They have long outlived their natural lifespan. 

Perhaps their ethics and character become incompatible with a new generation; perhaps they exhaust the potential of their notions. The time comes for them to pass on, and join the Immortals in another realm. Those of us who love them can still hold them in our memories, and continue to enjoy their adventures in the same way that we watch old serials and read old comic books, but the window for new adventures has long been closed, though we hate to admit it.

The world of the present seems inhospitable for my dusty old heroes. Time for new adventures from a new generation of heroes — if a new generation of creators can step up to the plate and deliver fresh characters and stories worthy of our time and support. The failing here is that not much of value has come down the pike, and the only thing that young creators seem capable of is mocking the work of their betters. 

And so rather than give the heroes of a more civilized world a decent burial, we are forced forever to watch their crumbling, reanimated corpses lumber across our screens in an ever more tragic state of decomposition and decay. I for one am tired of it. Let our heroes rest in peace. They have earned it.

-- Thorn.