Originally published December 21, 2001, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1466
Various thoughts…
Is anyone paying attention to the Legends of Tarzan animated series currently running in syndication? To the best of my knowledge, there has never been any dramatized version of Tarzan that has ever incorporated as much of the original Edgar Rice Burroughs material as this Disney follow-up to the animated feature has. Granted, there are changes, some of them rather arbitrary (Tarzan’s mate, Jane, for instance, is inexplicably a British brunette rather than a blonde American southerner.) But I was astounded to see such old people and places from my youth as the Waziri, La of Opar, Samuel T. Philander, Pellucidar and others crop up with regularity. Clearly the makers of the series are taking their ERB seriously. It’s stuff that means nothing to most kid viewers, but is certainly appreciated by this long-time ERB fan. If you can get past Tarzan’s dreadlocks and the overly cutesy depictions of such animal regulars as Tantor, you’ll discover a series that’s a real treat for long-time ERB fans who have had to settle for the first hour of Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan and the original Elmo Lincoln silent version as the only remotely faithful adaptations of the jungle lord.
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I almost gave poor Garrick Hagon a heart attack at the Detroit Motor City convention this past weekend. Hagon, best known to fans as “Biggs Darklighter,” Luke Skywalker’s (heavily edited out) friend on Tatooine, was in attendance at the Nexus Resurrection Convention in Berlin. There he met my sixteen year old daughter, Gwen. So there we are, a week or so later in Detroit, and Garrick’s signing table was set up across the aisle from mine. I walked across to say hi to him, and he said, “Is your daughter with you?” Without thinking, I pointed to my table and said, “Yup, there she is.” He took one look at Ariel, aged ten, and his jaw dropped. “My God… what happened to her?!” he said, utterly befuddled.
I realized the basis for confusion, but simply said with a deadpan, “Accident with the dryer.”
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Can you imagine if the first film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy had been released a year ago, and we were coming up on the middle installment this month? Because I would bet you anything that the Hollywood moguls would insist on changing the title, feeling that releasing a movie called The Two Towers would summon up all sorts of associations that they would consider decidedly uncomfortable. And then you’d have all the Tolkein fans howling and expressing disdain for Hollywood thinking, and all the execs saying they’re just trying to be sensitive to the feelings of all Americans who don’t want to be reminded of the tragedy.
And speaking of major fantasy films: The greatest magic ever wielded by Harry Potter has nothing to do with thwarting the plans of Lord Voldemort, or the sales success of the series, or the rags-to-second-richest-woman-in-the-UK story of creator J.K. Rowling. No, it has to be the spectacular feat of casting a spell upon Hollywood, the place that decided what The Scarlet Letter really needed was a happy ending. The place where even its successful adaptations of books were massively different from the source material (i.e., The Wizard of Oz.). Instead the operative word for the conversion of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to big-budget film has been “respect.” Typically movie bigwigs prefer working with dead authors so they can do whatever they want without squawking and interference. In the cases of living authors, they are sometimes kept on as “consultants” which really doesn’t mean much of anything except the director will say, “What do you think of this?” before going off and doing whatever he wants.
Not so in this case. Obviously director Chris Columbus and screenwriter Steve Kloves decided that, if they were going to make any errors in the production of the film of Sorcerer’s Stone, it was going to be on the side of fidelity to the source material. The thing is, the source material is hardly bulletproof. The last thirty or so pages of Rowling’s narrative build up a head of steam similar to the Hogwart’s Express. Until that time, Harry’s adventures are episodic at best. The tissues which tie them together lay in the characterization, and also in the subsidiary threads such as the constant struggling between the school houses (i.e., fraternities) for “points” in pursuit of the House Cup at the end of the term. So whenever Harry and pals are breaking the rules, not only is life and limb at stake, but there’s also the concern that being caught will redound to the detriment of the respective house. There’s few concerns that resonate with kids, or even adults, as the prospect of losing face with one’s peers, and that aspect was instrumental in holding the novel together. But most of the material about points was deleted because it didn’t move the actual plot along, and that sacrifice makes Harry’s escapades even more unconnected, causing the story to drag.
The problem is, there’s lots of things Columbus and Kloves could have done to streamline the narrative, and made it a better movie… but it would have been at the cost of alienating the target audience that comes out of a 153 minute movie cranky because Peeves the Poltergeist was missing. I mean, you could dump the opening sequence with Harry being abandoned as a baby at the Dursley’s, because it provides us with no information that we don’t acquire elsewhere in the narrative, but who wants to miss Hagrid’s first entrance on the flying motorcycle?
So critics are picking on the film because it’s too faithful. Some people are even complaining because Quidditch looked “too violent.” Well, heck yeah. That’s the irony of Harry’s situation. While he lived in a closet, he may have been bored and sad and neglected, but he was also safe. The far more exciting world of wizarding that he comes to inhabit is genuinely dangerous. For once, Hollywood made the conscious decision of setting aside the idiotic director’s auteur theory. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone is not a Chris Columbus film, no matter what the credits may say. It is, in fact, a J.K. Rowling film, and if it dragged in places or didn’t have the vision of a Terry Gilliam propelling it, fine. If I want to see the world of Gilliam, I’ll toss on Baron Munchausen. If I want to see the world of J.K. Rowling, it’s safe and sound at the local cineplex, and I for one am not complaining
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I like to write poetry and songs every so often. I wrote the following right before the bombing started in Afghanistan. Thought I’d share it with you. The scan of the refrain line isn’t perfect, since the syllable accent of “Osama bin Laden” varies from the original name used in the song, but it’s close enough.
(sung to “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego”)
Well he sneaks around the Mid-East from the Saudis to the Afghans
He’s a good-for-nothing bad-guy from Iran down to Iraq
He’ll be hiding ‘neath your bed or wrapped up inside two kaftans
Tell me, where in the world is Osama bin Laden?
He’s a pup inside a tent, sending lambs into the slaughter
He’s got lawn and çámël jøçkëÿš riding horseback in Peru
But the Taliban can’t find him though one’s married to his daughter
Tell me, where in the world is Osama bin Laden?
He goes from Cairo to Kuwait, Baghdad to Geneva
And Kabul to Outer Mongolia and back!
Well he’ll take a tour de France and blow up the Eiffel Tower
Then he’ll swing on through Berlin and help destroy a few more lives
Takes an ego trip through London, he’s the Big Bin of the hour
Tell me, where in the world is Osama bin Laden
Oh, tell me, where in the world is… tell me, where can he be?
Manhattan to Fresno, Beirut via Istanbul, maybe it might be he’s burning in hëll?
Well he’s hiding underground, thinks that human lives don’t matter
He’s a millionaire destroyer giving Allah a bad name
When he’s finally found we’ll have his head upon a silver platter,
Tell me, where in the world is Osama bin Laden?
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)
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