RetroDaddy's Open Salon Blog

"Leave it to Barack"

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 18:06:32 -0400

Starring . . .

Hillary Clinton as June

Joe Biden as Ward

Rahm Emanuel as Wally

Stanley McChrystal as Eddie McHaskell

David Petraeus as Lumpy Rutherford

and

Barry Mathers as The Beaver

Tonight's Episode . . .

“Beaver Makes a Tough Decision”

Eddie McHaskell walks up the sidewalk to the Cleavers' new White House. He rings the doorbell. June Cleaver (in pearls) and Ward Cleaver (in a suit) let Eddie in.

EDDIE

Thats's a lovely foreign policy you have, Mrs. Cleaver.

WARD

You can stop with the flattery, Eddie. Mrs. Cleaver and I heard about what you wrote about us on the bathroom wall at school.

JUNE

The Beaver was especially hurt about what you said about him, Eddie. He's very sensitive.

EDDIE

Gosh, I'm sorry, Mrs. Cleaver. I was just kidding around, honest. I'd never say anything intentionally hurtful about young Theodore. I have the highest respect for him and all his playfellows.

Wally comes running down the stairs.

EDDIE

Hi, Wally. I came to apologize to you and Theodore.

WALLY

Can it, willya, Eddie? The Beaver's really had it with you this time, ya creep. He doesn't want to play with you, so get lost.

JUNE

I think you'd better go now, Eddie.

Eddie leaves dejected.

Beaver comes downstairs.

BEAVER

Is Eddie gone?

WARD

Yes, Beaver, Eddie's gone. Now you and Wally are going to clean up the mess you made at Metzger's Field. With everything you left lying around when you were playing, it's dangerous for the people who live near there.

BEAVER

Gee, Dad, can't we just pretend we didn't make the mess? Metzger's Field is all the way at the other end of town.

WARD

No, Beaver, you can't just pretend.

Fade in to Wally and Beaver outside their White House, with trash cans and rags to clean up Metzger's Field.

WALLY

Hey, Beav. Whaddaya say we stop off and get Lumpy Rutherford to help us clean up Metzger's Field, now that we can't hang around with Eddie?

BEAVER

Gee, Wally, I dunno. I guess it'd be okay. I sure hope he doesn't faint on us again.

WALLY

Heck, Beav. Don't worry. Have you noticed how nothing really bad ever happens to us, even when it happens to other people?

BEAVER

I guess you're right. It's too bad the rest of the world isn't as lucky as us, huh Wally?

Close up on Beaver's smiling, optimistic face.

Alien Language Before James Cameron's Avatar

Sun, 6 Dec 2009 22:12:21 -0500

The Outer Limits: Michael Ansara as Quarlo, a soldier captured in another time

There have been several stories recently (on io9 and The New York Times, for instance) about the linguistic aspects of Avatar, James Cameron's new film that's supposed to completely change the face of movies forever and ever this time we really mean it please just forget about that Tom Hanks Christmas movie from a few years back that Robert Zemeckis directed called The Polar Express that kind of creeped the audience out with the not entirely realistic motion capture animation that'll never be as good as Warner Bros. cartoons or even Johnny Quest thank you.

All James Cameron movies have EX-plosives, but the makers of Avatar are proud of its mere plosives—and it's labials, fricatives, infixes, and other linguistic features.

Propaganda in Starship Troopers: "Do you want to know more?"

Paul Frommer is the linguist that Cameron went to for the construction of a language for the aliens in Avatar, another movie about space marines kicking extraterrestrial ass. (Thank you, Robert A. Heinlein, for creating that subgenre of adolescent wish-fulfillment—though director Paul Verhoeven did make a good film by turning this type of story against itself in his movie version of Heinlein's novel Starship Troopers.)

Cameron seems to going up against the Klingon language from Star Trek in an attempt to tie his film to a natural-sounding alien language.

In the Land of Invented Languages: Esperanto Rock Stars, Klingon Poets, Loglan Lovers, and the Mad Dreamers Who Tried to Build A Perfect Language by linguist Arika Okrent is a fun and informative account of artificially constructed languages, science-fictional and otherwise.

But one of the most interesting languages ever in a science fiction story was in a teleplay by Harlan Ellison for the 1960s show The Outer Limits. It was entitled “Soldier” and might be the best episode of the series. (Its only competition is from another episode Ellison wrote, “Demon with a Glass Hand.”)

In “Soldier” Michael Ansara plays Quarlo, a soldier from the future. (Ansara also played a Klingon named Kang in an episode of Star Trek, but I don't remember if he spoke any Klingon in that show.)

The Klingon Kang (Michael Ansara) fights Captain Kirk

In Harlan Ellison's story “Soldier,” Michael Ansara plays a soldier who's trying to communicate with people in his past, the 1960s. His language is finally understood by a scientist played by the outstanding character actor Lloyd Nolan.

Lloyd Nolan as Cold War scientist

The scientist realizes that Quarlo is speaking English as it had changed between the Cold War of the twentieth century and Quarlo's war, which the story hints may be just a continuation of the Soviet-American conflict. (Here's the scene on YouTube.)

Not only was this episode of The Outer Limits one of the best science fiction films ever produced, it presented the linguistic phenomenon of language change accurately.

Also, in Quarlo's time, cats are in charge.

Memo to Barack: Pollyanna for Economic Advisor

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:10:09 -0400

I've offered President Obama quite a bit of political advice on the Retro Daddy blog—absolutely free, I might add.

I pointed out how movie director John Ford had detected a possible weakness in his opponent, Senator McCain. I also brought to Senator Obama's attention the problems a previous “candidate of change” named Hal Phillip Walker had had while campaigning in Nashville, Tennessee, back in the 1970s.

Finally, I suggested that he watch old movies to help him implement his agenda. If the Republicans in the Senate try to filibuster the healthcare reform bill, President Obama may learn from the experience of Senator Jefferson Smith decades ago.

Inspiration

Right now, more than almost anything, America needs to regain its economic strength.

To do that we need to recover our sense of fairness and good will for each other. We need to recognize what we owe each other as citizens. This is more important than historical economic knowledge or mathematical acuity, or even years of experience running a nation's central bank. We need inspiration.

Since I was ten years years old, one person has inspired me a great deal.

Walt Disney.

The young entrepreneur

In 1960, Uncle Walt presented the story of an orphaned little girl who was brought to a turn-of-the-century town called Harrington. The series Pollyanna was based on a novel by Eleanor H. Porter.

Walt Disney was no socialist. He lost a nasty labor dispute with his animators union in 1941. (See Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s.) In Pollyanna, Disney's conception of what we owe each other as citizens comes out in the story when there's a fire in the town orphanage (with no children dying, as I recall).

Jane Wyman as Aunt Polly

Pollyanna's strict Aunt Polly was played by Jane Wyman in a part she obviously took as seriously as her great roles in Johnny Belinda or Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows and Magnificent Obsession. Aunt Polly wants to repair the orphanage, her family's gift to the town. Aunt Polly says it's her duty, but actually it's a way of holding the townspeople in a kind of feudal relationship.

Richard Egan as the town doctor

However the town doctor (Richard Egan—perfect as this solid character who was once in love with Aunt Polly) says it's the town's responsibility to raise the money to build a new modern orphanage with proper medical facilities.

Aunt Polly learns several lessons. She learns to give in to the feelings she still has for the doctor. She learns how precious her young niece's optimism is.

The doctor has a cure for Pollyanna . . .

. . . and a cure for Aunt Polly

And Aunt Polly learns that a community needs to provide for itself by working as a community for the things that benefit everyone.

A lesson in citizenship

Village of the Damned & Children of the Damned

Fri, 9 Oct 2009 01:10:24 -0400

The latest series of the British science fiction television series Torchwood—Children of Earth—has been acclaimed in the UK and the United States. I haven't seen it, but what I've read about the story reminds me of two other classic British movies about children who pose a threat to the planet—Village of the Damned (based on John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos) and its sequel, Children of the Damned. Fortunately you can get them together in a double-feature package.

The original novel

There are only four years (from 1960 to 1964) between the two films, but there's at least a decade (maybe a whole generation) separating them in style and theme.

It's the difference between the 1950s and the 1960s, between Pat Boone and the Beatles.

Village of the Damned takes place in the village of Midwich, middle England at its most pastoral. Midwich is subject to a parthenogenetic invasion of blond alien children.

Children of the Damned is set in hectic London, filled with immigrant families. This story is about a group of children with different skin colors and languages but the same Mind, mutations that may be the next step in human evolution—not Them, but Us.

The Children of the Damned: England's Dreaming

The "Midwich Cuckoos" in Village of the Damned are a murderous threat to the adult humans around them.

The children in Children of the Damned are the victims of their governments' attacks, not the aggressors themselves.

In the Cold War 1950s of the Village of the Damned, authorities in Great Britain (the freedom-loving West) at first only want to study the children, but they receive word that east of the Iron Curtain Communist leaders with no regard for human life have tried to massacre "their children" when they couldn't be controlled.

These can't be our children

By 1964, the Children of the Damned have seen the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the start of the Vietnam War. The Cold War is no longer a struggle between good and evil, it's a feud between two greedy superpowers. Eventually the generals of both East and West try to murder their own children rather than let their superhuman mental powers fall into enemy hands. The children have other ideas, and the sequel makes it clear they are only protecting themselves. Every time the children strike out, the authorities have tried to harm them first.

One theme of Children of the Damned is that mothers are bad. There's really only one good mother in the movie, and he's a man, the psychologist played by Ian Hendry.

Two scientists worried about the children

This psychologist lives with his male geneticist friend, who doesn't have the same emotional attachment to the Children that his roommate does.

In one scene in Children of the Damned the two scientists come out of separate bedrooms at night, but they're not fooling anyone. The geneticist walks around their flat carrying a frying pan, trying to strike a balance between Basil Rathbone and Oscar Wilde. (This may be the Swinging Sixties, but some things can still only be said in code.)

The geneticist agrees with the military—destroy the children as a threat to humanity's domination of the planet. ("It's the law of nature—ask any ape.")

It's the law of nature

Both movies end the same way, with the children being destroyed by the adults, though in the later film the children freely accept their fate, perishing together, which makes them triumph in a way.

They know they won't be the last.

They scientists only think they've won

Meanwhile, any adults who came out of theaters showing Children of the Damned on a double bill with The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb in 1964 saw their real children dressing, talking, and acting strangely, as if they were being controlled by an alien force.

These Children of the Damned weren't about to give up their newly evolved consciousness so easily.

The Ending Roman Polanski's Chinatown Was Supposed to Have

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 18:09:37 -0400

In 1975, film critic Pauline Kael wrote that the 1974 film noir Chinatown, written by Robert Towne and directed by Roman Polanski, was originally supposed to have a different ending.

In the script by Robert Towne (who also wrote the screenplays for The Last Detail and Shampoo) the monster Noah Cross was killed by his daughter, Evelyn. Evelyn had been raped and made pregnant by her father. In Towne's version, Evelyn killed her father to protect her daughter from the old man's predations.

Evelyn tries to save her daughter

This is the kind of ending you can imagine Raymond Chandler writing. Evelyn might die along with her father, the only way to put an end to his evil, but there would be some hope, with Evelyn's daughter having a chance at salvation.

Polanski changed Robert Towne's ending to let Noah Cross destroy Evelyn and take possession of his grand-daughter as his new slave. Why did Cross do this? Because he could. Because he was rich and politically powerful and normal human beings didn't matter next to his whims. He may even have thought of himself as an artist.

Noah Cross: "The evil that men do lives after them . . ."

“Forget it Jake. It's Chinatown.” That's a movie cliché now, but there's a reason people remember those words from that film—they express the time they were written (the 1970s) as much as the time when they were supposed to have been spoken (the 1930s).

Against power, right doesn't stand a chance.

Pauline Kael called Polanski a “Gothic-minded absurdist,” which is understandable after watching Polanski's 1968 film Rosemary's Baby, another movie where a mother is forced to accede to evil to protect her child.

The director as actor

Polanski rewrote the past in 1974. Three years later he rewrote his own future.