L. Sprague de Camp had met Tolkien in the late 60s. He had sent Tolkien a copy of the anthology Swords & Sorcery (Pyramid Books, 1963). Tolkien did not care for some of the contents but “rather liked’ the Conan story in the book.

If a reader of Lord of the Rings takes the time to read the appendices in the back of The Return of the King and then tackles The Silmarillion, you will see, there is not an especially great distance between J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard.

Take the case of Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. This is the reader’s first introduction to Aragorn:

“Suddenly Frodo noticed that a strange-looking weather-beaten man, sitting the shadows near the wall, was also listening to the hobbit-talk. He had a tall tankard in front of him, and was smoking a long-stemmed pipe curiously carved. His legs were stretch out before him, showing high boots of supple leather that fitted him well, but had seen much wear and were now caked with mud. A travel-stained cloak of heavy dark-green cloth was drawn close about hi, in spite of the heat of the room he wore a hood that overshadowed his face; but the gleam of his eyes could be seen as he watched the hobbits.”

Gandalf’s letter to Frodo describes Aragorn as “lean, dark, tall.” Tolkien described Aragorn as ”lean, dark, and tall, with a shaggy head of dark hair flecked with grey, and in a pale stern face a pair of keen grey eyes.”

Here is the very first description of Conan of Cimmeria from “The Phoenix on the Sword”:

“Behind an ivory, gold- inlaid writing-table sat a man whose broad shoulders and sun-browned skin seemed out of place among those luxuriant surroundings. He seemed more a part of the sun and winds and high places of the outlands. . . He wore no ring or ornaments, and his square-cut black mane was confined merely by a cloth-of- silver band about his head.”

Conan and Aragorn are tall, have dark hair and light eyes. Both bear the mark of living outside in the wild.

Aragorn is the descendant of Isildur and the kings of Arnor, of Numenorean blood, ultimately descended from Beor and Hador in the First Age. Indeed the houses of men in The Silmarillion are barbarians themselves.

Aragorn may have an impressive bloodline but he is little more than a barbarian himself. The northern kingdom of Arnor collapsed fifteen generations earlier. Aragorn is the chieftain of the remnants of the Dunedain who live a precarious existence fighting wolves, trolls, orcs.

Aragorn spent thirty years as a man of action:

“He rode in host of the Rohirrim, and fought for the Lord of Gondor by land and by sea; and then in the hour of victory he passed out of the knowledge of Men of the West, and went alone far into the East and deep into the South, exploring the hearts of Men, both evil and good, and uncovering the plots and devices of the servants of Sauron.”

One of Aragorn’s exploits was as Thorongil serving the Steward Ecthelion II of Gondor. Aragorn lead a fleet to Umbar for a raid where he burned a great part of the Umbar fleet. Aragorn himself “overthrew” the Captain of the Haven of the Corsairs.

So you have exceedingly competent man serving in foreign armies and making intelligence forays into the heart of enemy territory.

Aragorn himself said “I am but the heir of Isildur, not Isildur himself. I have had a hard life:”

Aragorn may be the heir of Arnor and Gondor but the kingship does not fall into his lap. He made himself king in a time of strife as did Conan.

Tolkien saw something reading “Shadow in the Moonlight” in Swords & Sorcery, a sort of kinship between his Chieftain of the Dunedain and a barbarian from Cimmeria who makes himself king

.

Subscribe now

In 2011, GM rolled out a car that was acclaimed as the savior of Detroit. The Chevrolet Volt. It was a car launched at a time when the decline of the American automobile industry could no longer be denied. In engineering, quality, reliability, and luxury Detroit had been surpassed by Germany, Japan, Italy and arguably even Britain and that last was saying something. American cars were overpriced and under-good. The only one that could be considered top of its class was Tesla’s EVs and Detroit certainly wasn’t counting those.

The Chevy Volt was indeed an engineering achievement. It featured dual-motor drive, a three clutch system, active liquid battery cooling, next generation battery chemistry, blended braking, and a 53-Mile Electric Range… All of which added to up to a $42,000 price tag in 2012 Bucks. It was called into existence by political demands and industrial death spiral anxieties that were about to stop circling the drain only because the sink was almost out of water.

The only thing you could really say on the Chevy Volt’s behalf seven years after it halted production, is that it was easy to love… If you were desperate to love it in the first place.

Which brings me to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.

It’s the Chevy Volt of 2026 Hollywood.

A product of both a dying skill stack and a filmmaking culture that has already begun to fade as the post-film industry diaspora begins. People need to work and there is simply no work to be had in Hollywood anymore, so people are leaving town

I must stress this. The kind of support this film is getting from all corners of the film industry is… Not. Normal.

This is not, “It is a good movie, we like it very much.” It’s much more, “Our hopes and dreams ride upon your shoulders Mister Nolan.” What makes this so much worse is that the movie well and truly reflects this. Its pretension reaches near Alejandro Jodorowsky levels of absurdism… But not if you really want it to be good. The Odyssey is a film you can make yourself believe in if you try hard enough.

And there are so, so many people that are desperate to try that hard.

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end”

That’s where Hollywood is at now, they’ve reached ‘some other beginning’s end.’ For one hundred years they were the entertainment capital of the world. They have no mechanism for looking at a world where that isn’t the acknowledged reality but now it’s all coming to an end. They can’t go back to making movies like they were did in the 80s and 90s because that executive talent pool that ran Hollywood has gone bone dry. The executives who run it now are all marketers not storytellers. They can’t turn back the clock no matter how much they want to.

Rather than accept this harsh reality it’s far easier to double down and claim that they way they are doing things now is just fine, and this movie with a mega-budget, an auteur director and a cast of stars will prove it.

Let’s take a look at the movie and if you’re about to complain about spoilers, please leave now because after 3,000 years you’re too far behind the power curve for me to remotely care.

The Hero of Unseason

Achilles was a hero in his proper season. It was all about personal glory. He was a product of a world working as it should. Odysseus is not.

The Fall of Troy VIIa show definitive signs of violent destruction, intense fire, bronze arrowheads, and unburied skeletal remains in the streets dating to roughly 1190 BC. This period is the start of a Dark Ages known as The Bronze Age Collapse. And Troy was hardly the only city being sacked. It was happening all over the Mediterranean World. The Sea Peoples is not a term used in Homer but they are repeatedly referred as such in Nolan’s version. There likely wasn’t a single ethnicity Sea Peoples, so much as anyone with a boat who could put together a raiding party. When you have civilizational collapse, raiding becomes a means of survival.

A season of unseason is a time when everyone feels they are being crushed under the wheel of the wheel of fate. It’s a time that cries out for the hero that is in eternal war with the whims of fate, the hero who can make the impossible happen. The Trickster Hero.

And you are NOT going to be seeing him in Nolan’s Odyssey. Instead you are offered Odysseus as Oppenheimer. No, I’m not kidding. The Trojan Horse is the atom bomb that destroys the Bronze Age. Instead of a Trickster you get to see… for three freaking hours… A man haunted by his past actions.

This is Nolan’s Odyssey not Homer’s. And it is in a word: pretentious.

The Odyssey wants very badly to be the equal of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings. It reaches for that same sense of myth and grandeur, but never gets there.

Ironically, the film’s problems stem from Nolan’s decision to make Homer as contemporary and accessible as possible. Rather than drawing the audience into an ancient and mythic world, the opposite happens. The artifice becomes impossible to ignore. Instead of watching Telemachus struggle to become the man his father was, I spent much of the film watching a Matt Damon who isn’t Odysseus, he’s Matt Damon in a peplos. Anne Hathaway is Anne Hathaway. John Leguizamo is John Leguizamo. They’re just playing themselves. I was continuously aware I was watching movie stars rather than characters from one of humanity’s oldest surviving stories. In Tom Holland’s case, I was watching a Tom Holland who had clearly aged out of the role he was hired for, Telemachus looks like he’s 30 because he’s 30.

There is a difference between making mythology accessible and making it contemporary. Jackson understood that with The Lord of the Rings. His characters felt human, but they still belonged to Middle-earth. Nolan’s cast feels like they belong in Hollywood. The result is a film that continually keeps the audience at arm’s length. Every decision seems designed to make Homer feel more immediate, makes the story feel less real. Myth requires a certain amount of distance. It asks the audience to step into another world rather than demanding that the world step into ours.

Granted there were a couple of exceptions. Robert Pattinson delivers an appropriately reptilian performance. He embraces his role as a villain with an energy and theatricality that feels appropriate to the material. Of all the principal cast members, he seems the most willing to inhabit the myth rather than merely play himself next it. Jon Bernthal manages to get close as well because he’s able to play three kinds of roles competently and luckily, Menelaus of Sparta could be stuffed into one of those boxes.

As for remaining roles, the rest of all the available human ethnicities are shotgunned randomly throughout the cast so you have Black, Asian, Pacific Islander, Pakistani and literally every other nationality the human race offers as Greeks… Except for actual Greeks - Nolan did miss that one.

I almost gave Nolan the benefit of the doubt with Lupita N’yongo as Helen. I thought he might be going for a statement about the women of Troy as human chattel who were divided among the victors and thus a black woman could convey an image of… No. No, it was a completely political choice. It’s the usual thing of inviting criticism of race-swapping in order for the film’s champions in the press to haughtily dismiss all criticism as racism.

Politics is also the reason the pivotal role of Sinon was handed to Elliot Page. I am going on the record right now and declare Page will win the Oscar for Best Supporting ACTOR. These days it’s all about who the academy wants to see giving that speech on Awards Night and they felt cheated by Emilia Perez.

The Odyssey has all the familiar hallmarks of Oscar bait, but the motivation behind it feels unusual. It doesn’t feel as though Christopher Nolan made this movie primarily to win an Oscar for Christopher Nolan. It feels as though he made it to win an Oscar for Hollywood.

This is not merely a prestige production. It is an institutional demonstration. Hollywood has assembled one of its few remaining bankable directors, an army of recognizable stars, one of the foundational works of Western literature, an enormous budget, practical locations, theatrical exclusivity, and every available marker of cultural seriousness. The finished film is being presented less as a movie than as evidence.

Look, Hollywood says. We can still do this. We can still make grand historical spectacles. We can still adapt great literature. We can still create movie stars. We can still convince adults to enter a theater. We can still make something that matters.

This is movie made to vindicate the entire Hollywood film industry. Nolan already possesses prestige. What appears to require validation is the system around him. The industry wants The Odyssey to be great because it desperately needs proof that it remains capable of greatness.

The movie opens with a title card “In a Time of Apparent Magic.” This is almost explicitly opening the door to the central theme of unreliable narration. Although, I am forced to grant there probably has never been a more unreliable narrator than Odysseus of Ithaca.

It starts on the beach of Troy, the first person you see is Elliot Page’s Sinon. Trojans are riding out. Sinon gets up and runs to the Trojan Horse and before you can say “They did the meme!” Sinon is killed by a thrown spear. Then it bounces to “present day” Ithaca where the suitors are eating Penelope and Telemachus out of house and kingdom. Travis Scott who is playing The Bard (apparently they couldn’t bring themselves to call him Homer) starts rapping about Troy. Penelope interrupts him so we can be brought to speed on her dire political situation. After what feels like a half hour, we meet Odysseus for the first time. He’s with Calypso and is eating the lotus to make himself forget. We then get a very, very long and non-linear look at the events of the Odyssey.

Since Odysseus is now drug addled and was always a liar, Nolan has the option of presenting the mythological world of the Odyssey with the conceit of it probably being the result of a deranged imagination.

It's a shame the film's score doesn't share that same interpretive ambiguity, because the music by Ludwig Göransson is another demonstration of excess. Göransson has always danced a fine line between music and tone poem. At his best, his scores don’t just accompany a film, they become part of its language. Not so much saying what you should feel rather than immersing you within a particular place, culture, or moment. There is a reason his best work feels almost architectural. But that’s when it works. When doesn’t, like in The Odyssey, it becomes detached from the thing it’s trying to support and begins to randomly batter the audience with sound.

And speaking of random audio battery, no review of a Nolan movie would be complete without mentioning his utter incompetence at sound mixing. The Odyssey continues Nolan’s peculiar philosophy of sound design which exists in a perpetual state of quantum uncertainty. One moment I’m straining to hear what’s being said and the next I’m being blasted out of my seat by a mid-1970s Sensurround disaster movie. I literally put my Airpods in and turned on the noise cancelation at one point.

For all of my complaints about the casting, the dialogue, the sound design, and Christopher Nolan’s occasionally suffocating ambitions for this production, my greatest disappointment was ultimately much simpler than that.

Christopher Nolan forgot who Odysseus is.

We never see the Man of Polymetis. The trickster hero is never presented.

Matt Damon’s performance is perfectly serviceable for the character Christopher Nolan has written. The problem is that he isn’t playing Homer’s Odysseus. He is just playing some reasonably intelligent fellow riddled with PTSD.

Odysseus is many things. He is brave. He is loyal. He is flawed. He is arrogant enough to shout his name at the Cyclops when silence would have seen him safely home. He is simultaneously one of mythology’s greatest philanderers and one of its most devoted husbands. He is contradictory in all the ways actual human beings tend to be contradictory.

But before all of those things he is Polymētis. Odysseus of many counsels. Odysseus of many devices. Odysseus the Trickster Hero.

And the Trickster Hero is entirely absent from the first Trickster Hero’s story. This is not a small criticism. It’s like adapting Sherlock Holmes and forgetting that he is a detective or adapting Robin Hood and forgetting that he steals from the rich. One can alter almost anything else about the character provided one preserves that central truth. Remove mētis from Odysseus and there is little of Odysseus left.

The Greeks did not admire him because he was the greatest warrior at Troy. He wasn’t. Achilles was greater. Ajax was stronger. Agamemnon was more powerful. Diomedes was braver. Odysseus was something stranger than all of them. He was the man called upon to do the impossible when strength had failed.

When the world is functioning properly, Agamemnon wins the wars and returns home covered in glory. When the world has become broken, Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, the gods appear to have abandoned man and every available choice is a terrible one; that is when everyone calls upon Odysseus.

His victories are almost never proper victories. They are compromises, bargains, lies, disguises, and flexible moral calculations. That is why I found myself so disappointed by Nolan’s adaptation. He gets obsession better than any filmmaker currently working in Hollywood but not Trickster Heroes.

Conclusion

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is not a genuinely terrible movie. There are moments when you can almost see the masterpiece struggling to emerge from beneath all of Christopher Nolan’s Nolanisms. There are moments where the practical effects are magnificent, where Ludwig Göransson’s score briefly supports a scene, and where Homer himself is finally permitted a rare chance to peek through the cracks in Nolan’s adaptation.

And then Christopher Nolan invariably reminds us that we are watching CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S THE ODYSSEY…

Not Homer’s.

By the end of this review I have repeatedly found myself returning to Odysseus himself. He is not Achilles or Hector. He is the hero of unseason. He survives because he understands what must be preserved and what must be sacrificed. When to fight and when to out-wit. When to conceal and when to reveal. He is more than any other hero in Western literature, the master of disappearance.

It is therefore a tremendous irony, that Christopher Nolan is uniquely unsuited to adapting him. Nolan is many things as a filmmaker, but subtle and self-effacing ain’t it. His greatest strengths are spectacle, ambition, and technical mastery. He announces himself loudly and confidently in every frame of every film he produces.

But Odysseus needs to whisper, “No-body.”

Stories do not survive for three thousand years because they are loudly proclaimed to be important. They survive because generation after generation quietly discovers that they are true.

The Odyssey has survived the collapse of empires, the rise and fall of kingdoms, and three millennia of human history because at its heart it remains the story of a weary old solider struggling to find his way home to his wife and son.

It didn’t need Christopher Nolan to make it important.

It merely needed Christopher Nolan to tell us that story.

Instead, he gave us Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. A remarkable technical achievement, an occasionally overwhelming spectacle, and a film carrying the impossible burden of proving that Hollywood can still dream… Which it can not.

Like the Chevy Volt, it is remarkably easy to love if you are desperate to love it in the first place.

But I wasn’t.

The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend: The Odyssey (2026) [2.5/5]

JACK RABBIT COMICS Episode 200: YOU’RE Carlos Danger?

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 426: Glutton for Punishment

BEN GARRISON Episode 258: Candace Owen’s Reality Creation Machine

STONETOSS Episode 519: Off Taste

NYM COY’S DISPATCHES Episode 13: Interrogating Inanimate Objects

Visit Arktoons

NEURAL NETWORK NOVELLAS Episode 78: The Sound of Thunder

PROPHET TO THE REMNANT Episode 99: The Archbishop’s Assessment

FLYING SPARKS Episode 96: Hear Me Out

JACK RABBIT COMICS Episode 199: Masked and Anonymous

AFTER ATLANTIS Episode 48: Kari Goes Exploring

Visit Arktoons

Odysseus climbed the broken wall of Troy with a silent infant in his arms. The rubble was still smoking behind him, the wails of the defeated were still heard on the wind. More women than men, for there were few men left alive to curse their fate. They had fought well, died bravely, and he had been the one to break them. Not dead Achilles, nor arrogant Agamemnon. Him, a king so poor he had to plow his own fields. By nightfall he would be aboard his ship and finally begin his voyage home… After he did this last disgusting thing. Odysseus reached the top of the wall and saw the whole of the dispersing Greek army gazing up at him.

He held the dead man-child out over the wall’s edge. Dead children had been all too readily available, and this one looked close enough. Odysseus cast the cold pathetic corpse over the wall. After it crashed onto the rocks below, he shouted, “Astyanax is dead. The line of Hector and Priam is extinct!” Then added for a flourish – and to explain the silence of the infant – “Let all remember he fell as bravely as his father!”

Andromache, buried her face in her hands and cried out. Grief was easy, for the women of Troy had nothing but grief. For her husband… For Priam… For her murdered city… But not for her still living son.

“Come woman!” Neoptolemus commanded, “I will give you more sons to replace the one you just lost.”

Andromache in her tears offered a silent prayer of thanks, not to Thetis who had failed her so completely but to Athena, as she watched the goddess’ champion, Odysseus, carrying the large basket holding her child on to his ship.

Not the Goddess of Wisdom

Today, Athena is taguht in schools as being the goddess of wisdom. The thing is the Greeks didn’t exactly have an all encompassing concept for wisdom. It was the closest a 19th century school marm was able to get.

The Greeks certainly had words that get close to wisdom, sophia for skill and learning, phronēsis for practical judgment, but those aren’t what define Athena in Homer.

Athena is the goddess of mētis.

Translating mētis is nearly impossible because English lacks a single word for it. It means intelligence, yes, but a particular kind of intelligence. Cunning. Foresight. Improvisation. The ability to see three moves ahead. The ability to survive when strength has already failed. It is the cunning of the fox rather than the strength of the lion.

Odysseus is not merely clever. Homer repeatedly calls him polymētis: “of many devices,” or “rich in mētis.” His defining virtue is not courage, nor strength, nor honor. It is the ability to find the one path through an impossible situation.

There’s a reason Odysseus is the mortal Athena favors above all others. She doesn’t invest herself in the strongest man at Troy. She spends it on the one who thinks like her, obliquely and, several steps removed from the obvious play. In the Odyssey, she outright tells him she loves him for it: that among mortals he’s the one who comes closest to her own gift for schemes and stratagems.

Which tells you something about where the Trickster actually sits in a pantheon. As a kind of pressure valve. Achilles represents glory achieved through force, the straightforward, static, thoroughly Olympian model of heroism. Odysseus represents something the gods themselves need but can’t supply: adaptability. A way through the wall when the wall can’t be breached.

As the Goddess of Mētis, into her care is given those things not in their season, those things that must be dealt with through intelligence and not strength: the city has fallen, the harvest has burned, the ship has sunk, the king is dead, the battle has collapsed. She is above all else the goddess of intelligent survival.

And in her care too is justice when justice has failed. Orestes is compelled to commit matricide thus bringing down the Furies on his head, and Athena creates the first court of law. Heracles is driven mad by Hera and commits horrific acts but Athena intervenes. Bellerophon and Perseus are sent on suicide missions by corrupt rulers but Athena provided them with the tools they need.

In pursuit of correcting the failure of justice she uses her very special avatar…

The Trickster Hero

While I have called the Trickster Heroes the Sons of Mercury, their patron is Athena. Foremost among them is Odysseus.

There is something peculiar about the challenges Odysseus faces. Achilles is confronted by things that can be killed. Odysseus almost never is.

There is no sword stroke that defeats the Lotus-Eaters. There is no duel with Circe. He cannot kill the sea. He cannot stab a storm. He cannot overpower Calypso or bargain with time itself.

Strength is almost never the correct answer.

Odysseus survives because he understands something Achilles never had to learn. Sometimes the proper question isn’t, “How do I win?” Sometimes it is simply, “How do I endure?” Mētis isn’t merely cleverness. It is understanding that an impossible situation cannot be solved honestly. It must be survived intelligently.

When his men eat the Lotus, he doesn’t punish them, he drags them bodily back to their ships and flees before they can forget themselves completely. When trapped in Polyphemus’ cave, he doesn’t defeat the Cyclops through superior strength. He makes himself Nobody and escapes disguised as sheep. When Circe transforms his men into swine, he doesn’t slay her. He wins an ally. When faced with the Sirens he understands that courage is insufficient. He plans beforehand to become weaker than his own temptation by binding himself to the mast. When faced with Scylla and Charybdis he discovers there are some victories that cost six dead companions and can still be called victories.

And when Calypso offers him immortality itself he commits perhaps the greatest act of mētis in the entire poem…he refuses.

Every challenge in the Odyssey is asking Odysseus to become someone else. Forget who you are. Become a beast. Become immortal. Become a king someplace else. Become the husband of another woman. Become anything other than the King of Ithaca.

Athena never teaches him how to become something greater. She teaches him how to remain himself when the world insists that he become something else.

The Trickster is not the hero of happy accidents. He is the hero of unseason. And perhaps that is why she loves Odysseus so much. Of all the Greek heroes, he is the one most defined by unseason. Achilles shines when everything is proceeding according to the heroic ideal. Odysseus shines when there is no ideal left to appeal to.

The city has fallen. The sea has taken your ships. The gods are angry. Justice has become injustice and duty has become sin.

What now?

That is question Athena is asked, and her answer is almost never, “I shall solve this for you.” It is, “Think. There is still one move left.” That’s mētis.

The Last Temptation.

“Stay father,” Astyanax begged with tears in his eyes. “Don’t leave me.”

“Neoptolemus has answered for his many crimes and blasphemies,” Andromache said with less satisfaction in her voice than most would expect from her. “I have other children now, but there was never a night that my arms did not ache to hold my first.” She hugged Astyanax tightly as she said it. “Stay here in Epirus and rest, Odysseus. Stay and be a father. Stay and be king of a great kingdom.”

Of all the temptations that he had faced on his long road of trials this was worst of all.

Andromache wasn’t offering forgetfulness like the Lotus-Eaters, comfort like Circe, immortality like Calypso or a new beginning like Nausicaa… She was offering him a home.

Astyanax was the only son he’d truly ever known. Telemechus would not even know his face when he saw it. Had Penelope taken a new husband by now? Few could blame her if she had.

He looked at Astyanax, I never intended to be your father. I never intended to seek a replacement family. Yet now I’m being offered one. How do I satisfy both of my sons? Home. A kingdom. A son that knew and loved him.

What gift could Athena possibly offer against such a temptation?

Only himself. Mētis had preserved him through monsters, storms, slavery, shipwreck, and twenty years of exile. Not so that he could find a better ending, but so that he might reclaim his own. The Trickster is not the hero of happy accidents. He is the hero of unseason. He survives what should not have happened. He endures until the proper season returns.

Odysseus was never meant to become King of Epirus.*

He was meant to go home.

*Homer edited it out this chapter, preferring both the high tragedy of Astyanax death and avoiding redundancy with Nausicaa.

周二漫画：量子之死 Episode 4: 周二漫画：量子之死

STONETOSS Episode 518: Fined Dining

PROPHET TO THE REMNANT Episode 98: Divine Judgment at Stade de France

COSMIC HORRORS Episode 39: A Garden

THREE OF CUPS Episode 70: Acknowledgements

Visit Arktoons

Tonari no Totoro has a reputation problem in the West. Like Rashomon, it’s become one of those films people claim to love because loving it signals a certain kind of sophistication. The story goes that it’s operating on so many deep levels that only the truly refined viewer can appreciate it. Funny thing is, I’ve never met anyone in that crowd who could actually walk me through the plot from memory.

Here’s the truth: My Neighbor Totoro is a good film, but it is not a deep one and doesn’t need to be. It’s a movie made for a Japanese audience, and it means something to them on a level I can understand intellectually but never quite feel the way they do. That’s fine. It’s still a warm, unhurried film with gorgeous hand-drawn art. It’s the animated equivalent of hot cocoa with homemade peppermint marshmallows by the fireplace on a miserable day.

A Demi-Autobiography

Totoro is Hayao Miyazaki working through his own childhood. He spent long stretches of it in the Japanese countryside because his mother was sick with tuberculosis for years at a stretch. When the film came out in 1988, the rural, pre-industrial way of life it depicts, that had lived for a thousand years deep, was receding fast, as if it’s retreating into the realm of Kami. The 1950s countryside the film is set in still had real, living roots to the past. By the time Miyazaki made the movie, those roots were being cut.

The setup is simple. Professor Kusakabe and his two daughters move to the country to be closer to his wife, who is “in the hospital.” Something gets lost in the English here, this isn’t a general hospital, it’s a tuberculosis sanitarium, and sanitariums were always built out in the rural air for obvious reasons.

The house they move into is old enough that electricity barely reaches a few rooms, no more, and what there is can’t carry much of a current load. Cooking and heating run on coal. There’s a coal-fired bathhouse attached. It was kind of interesting mix of very traditional with a western addition grafted on to it. No, Miyzaki wasn’t making any allegories about Japan… Even if the house serves as one. It was just the kind of house he remembered being in rural areas in the 1950s.

The place had sat closed long enough that soot sprites had moved in, and they’re the first supernatural residents the girls encounter. Satsuki is just old enough to be skeptical of what she’s seeing; Mei, at four, has no such filter. She believes immediately.

It’s the little details that sell this story. Mei walking around on her knees when they first arrive because her shoes are still on

The supporting cast is small and functional: Granny (Ba-chan), who looks after the girls while their father works, and her grandson Kanta, who spends the whole film making faces at Satsuki in the universal ten-year-old dialect for “I like you and this is deeply humiliating.”

It’s Mei who finds Totoro asleep in the woods. He’s a forest spirit of Miyazaki’s own design and no particular species, essentially an oversized, benevolent teddy bear with the run of the local ecosystem. He’s there to look after children who need looking after. He is, like the film itself, not all that complicated. He doesn’t need to be.

The Real Story Is Satsuki’s

Strip away the soot sprites and the Cat Bus and what’s left is Satsuki working through two primal childhood terrors at once: losing a parent, and losing a little sister she’s been put in charge of. Both come straight from Miyazaki’s own childhood dread of losing his mother to tuberculosis.

There’s something worth sitting with here. Below a certain age, a child needs to believe they can’t be seriously hurt when they fall. Providing that safety, that’s supposed to be the mother’s job, the guarantee behind everything else. A mother’s unconditional love is the foundation a person’s whole sense of “I’m good enough anyway” gets built on. Miyazaki’s mother, sick and often absent, couldn’t reliably be there for that. Those are real wounds, and Totoro is Miyazaki’s way of working through them decades later, using two little girls and a giant forest spirit as the vehicle.

Kishōtenketsu, Not Three Acts

The film follows the Japanese storytelling structure of kishōtenketsu rather than a Western three-act arc, and it’s worth actually laying out because most Western viewers who praise the film’s “depth” couldn’t tell you this is what they’re responding to.

Ki (introduction): the family arrives in the country. Shō (development): the girls form a bond with Totoro and his spirit world. Ten (twist): Satsuki gets an emergency call about her mother’s condition, and in the chaos, Mei goes missing — she’s set off convinced she can cure her mother with a magic vegetable. Ketsu (resolution): Totoro summons the Cat Bus, Mei is found, and the family learns their mother is fine after all.

There’s no villain, no rising action in the Western sense, no confrontation to win. The tension resolves through connection and reassurance, not conflict. It’s a structure that a lot of casual Western viewers register as “not much happens,” without noticing that not much happening is the point, it’s the same rhythm as being a small child, where the biggest events in your world are a scary phone call and a missing sibling, not a battle.

Admittedly it had a few things that are genuine head scratchers for a Westerner. Why in hell did Joe Hisaishi use a freaking bagpipe for the opening song about Japanese kids in the country?

Other things are pretty easy to understand because and I cannot stress this enough, it’s not meant to be a deep film. Satsuki and Mei are kids and since they are kids they can still see the magic stuff that you forget about when you grow up. Within the context of the film, Totoro and the Cat Bus are big warm, fluffy, and protective if only a little bit scary.

Does It Hold Up?

Yes, easily. The hand-drawn animation is still gorgeous; every soot sprite, every rainstorm, every blade of grass in the rice paddies. And the story, modest as it is, is timeless precisely because it isn’t trying to be anything more than what it is: two kids, a summer, a sick mother, and a very large, very gentle thing in the woods that makes waiting for Mom to come home bearable.

Subscribe now

PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 198: A Thriving Community

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: COMEDY Episode 107: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

PROPHET TO THE REMNANT Episode 97: Divine Liberation

Visit Arktoons

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: MYSTERY Episode 56: The Clutching Hand

JACK RABBIT COMICS Episode 198: You Interrupted My Train of Thought

BASED COMIC Episode 362: Roach Season

BEN GARRISON Episode 257: US Soccer Team’s World Cup Run Ends

STONETOSS Episode 517: Check

NYM COY’S DISPATCHES Episode 12: Call to Slaughter

CROSS+WORD Episode 19: Nunc Stans

Visit Arktoons

Known history of the unknown

I was there at the start of something small… Then I wandered away to go look at something nice and shiny while the something small became SOMETHING BIG.

2007 was a year of transition. Generation X was transitioning into its 30s and 40s so it was having to get out of the way and let someone else be young now, even if they didn’t seem to be very good at it. The Global War on Terrorism was trying to transition into the same thing with a different name. Facebook was about to transition the internet from the wild west into a walled garden. And Secure Control Protect was transitioning into a new kind of horror story.

But it was what SCP wasn’t that was far more important.

It was NOT the product of a vertically integrated pipeline.

Secure Control Protect started life as a single document on 4Chan’s paranormal board.

SCP-173 - Documented a statue that would kill you if you ever stopped looking at it. Why, yes, the Doctor Who episode; Blink had premiered two weeks before. How did you know? Yes the monster statue was basically a Weeping Angel but it doesn’t really matter.

Sure the monster was derivative, most monsters are but a story succeeds or fails in the style of its telling and this one drastically succeeded.

It worked because this wasn’t horror as a thing going bump in the night. It was the horror as bureaucratic detail work.

I was there at the beginning, much more a lurker than a contributor. I had my own document that I never published because it didn’t really fit with a format that was quickly stabilizing - Mine was a researcher going over details of a Walkman that drove anyone who listened to it insane but only if there was Bannarama tape in it. Mostly, the scientist was awkwardly trying to get the female field agent who’d brought it in to have a coffee date with him or maybe a dinner and movie? Because he really admired her as a person and… Nah, it wasn’t going to fit.

I drifted away and didn’t really think anything of it until I had some Gen Z kid was telling me I was literally a Boomer because I didn’t get the relationship between Iron lung and SCP. It had been almost 20 years but then I told him it sounded like something we used to play around with on 4Chan and Something Awful. He suddenly looked at me like I was talking about how I used to play poker with the Apostles on Thursday nights.

I’ve been getting caught up on it since then.

The SCP Foundation may be the most important horror creation of the internet age, not because of the monsters it contains, but how it came into existence.

Hollywood creates IP from the top down, and keeps it locked up. It is vertically integrated and distributed through a cast iron pipeline where nothing from without is allowed to change the contents. SCP is what happens when the pipeline ruptures.

Like I said, SCP was almost more defined by what it wasn’t than what it was back then. It isn’t Men in Black and it certainly is not the X-Files, although those are things Boomers will default to when you try to explain it to them.

SCP has a big generational divide built into it. The Boomers and the Silents were products of the Cold War and still believed institutions could self correct. They held on to a beliefs in things like NASA, the CDC, the FBI, the Police, and perhaps most important of all journalists being guardians of truth. Sure any of these could have failures due to the bad actors but there was a foundational belief that you only had to get the Truth on the news and everything else would self-correct.

Generation X was also a product of the Cold War and we could tell nothing was working the way it was supposed to.

Then came 2001 and the world changed one morning in September.

The Rise of the Foundation

Secure Control Protect was the product of a new zeitgeist that had finally stabilized by 2007. It was the result of things as varied as the GWOT, creepy little Japanese girl horror movies, America becoming a security state, and an acceptance that institutions no longer worked as advertised.

SCP posited a world where - “Yeah, the truth is out there… And for Glob’s sake, we have to keep it locked down, it will be the end of everything if it ever gets loose.” And the only reason any of it would be on the Evening News was if you wanted to completely discredit it.

The strange thing about the world of SCP is that its core conceit was that there was one institution that still did its job right: The Foundation. It doesn’t do its job morally or humanely, and certainly not compassionately. But it does do its job effectively, which is to hold the line for just one more day… Everyday.

It posits a world with unknowable Lovecraftian horrors, military SOPs, OSHA manuals, government reporting procedures and all of it written in perfectly ordinary administrative language...

...except it’s describing impossible abominations.

The horror comes from contrast. You aren’t reading a ghost story. You’re reading Form 27-B for surviving an encounter with an “Extradimensional Intrusion Event” (EIE).

This is horror with compliance documentation.

It made the Foundation oddly legible to Gen Z. Previous generations grew up with a certain degree of institutional trust. But as long as Gen Z has been around all they can remember is black budgets, special access programs, “need to know” A secretive Foundation isn’t plausible to them it’s the default.

Because Gen Z never had institutional confidence to lose. They inherited distrust as a baseline, and not a betrayal. The only institution that they trust is the uniformed military. Polls put this trust at between 62%-75%. Something that those of us who were in uniform can’t help but boggle at. They grew up with an attitude of “look we aren’t children, we know some things have to be done in the dark to protect us. Just show some restraint and try to stay in your lane.”

The Foundation plays into this. Part of its core attraction is competence porn. Lovecraft would send academic investigators to confront the sanity destroying horrors from outer-realms beyond our comprehension. The Foundation sends a tactical team of specialists who can do cool, two-gun-mojo John Woo shit in slow motion.

They will contain, classify, isolate, and at need sacrifice without hesitation or regret. It is the Foundation’s competence that is its attraction.

But you never defeat the curse, you just survive the procedure. Then the Foundation writes up the report, attaches a number to it and files it away where it will probably never be looked at again

SCP-682 (”Hard-to-Destroy Reptile”) An enormous, intelligent reptilian creature that simply refuses to die. The endless termination logs became part of the fun, showcasing the Foundation’s relentless experimentation and bureaucratic persistence.

SCP-096 (”The Shy Guy”) A humanoid entity that becomes unstoppable if anyone sees its face, even in a photograph. One of the most famous examples of an SCP whose containment procedures are every bit as terrifying as the creature.

SCP-1678 “UnLondon” (This one is the classic)

-An abandoned underground city resembling London, inhabited by eerie, faceless “Bobbies.”

-It starts as an exploration log and slowly reveals an entire impossible civilization.

-This is one of the best examples of SCP evolving from “here’s a monster” into “here’s an entire place with its own history and mystery.”

The Children of SCP

Over the past decade, SCP’s containment has begun to fail, and elements have leaked into the pop culture. Granted it mostly escaped onto Steam. It was only this year that it finally reached the screen, although no major studio was doing anything with it. It was all indies… Wildy successful indies.

The Backrooms was the most directly adjacent. Itself being the result of online collaborative fiction. Although, the ending felt much more SCP, the psychologist had been captured by operatives who were studying the Backrooms in secret. Her fate was left ambiguous. Maybe, she’d be locked up or shot or… Let’s be real, given the money that this movie made, she’ll be working for the Foundation in the next film

Iron Lung was strongly tied to Gen Z horror, not directly related to SCP more along the lines of something really bad escaped, wiped out the Foundation and destroyed the universe just like the memo said it would. Everyone who would have known what happened is dead.

But as I said, mostly it’s been games not movies, where SCP has made its mark. Institutional indifference, impossible objects, procedural language Even when the lore doesn’t match, the worldview does

F.E.A.R. was made in 2005, two years before SCP existed, but it hits so many of the checkboxes it deserves a special mention here. Call it a cornerstone, if you get this game you have a basic understanding of the Secure Control Protect

Lethal Company is a game that shares a lot of DNA with SCP, but takes place after containment has already failed. You’re not the Foundation. You’re the temp labor sent in after the Foundation stopped answering the phone, harvesting scrap off a dead universe’s leftover anomalies for a company that will fine you for the crime of dying on the clock. It’s SCP with the institution gutted and only the paperwork surviving — quota met or not met, nobody’s coming to debrief you.

R.E.P.O. runs the same circuit — salvage crew, hostile object, corporate indifference dressed up as a job description — but where Lethal Company plays it for dread, R.E.P.O. leans into the absurdity of it. The horror is still institutional, it’s just institutional horror with the seriousness knob turned down and the humiliation knob turned up. Same bones, different Foundation, still nobody signing your hazard pay.

Control didn’t bother hiding it. The Federal Bureau of Control is the SCP Foundation with the serial numbers filed off and a AAA budget behind it — the Oldest House, the Altered Items, the containment procedures written like OSHA manuals for objects that shouldn’t exist. This isn’t influence, it’s adaptation. Remedy just skipped the step where they pretended it was original.

SCP – Containment Breach is the one that closes the loop. Before there were movies, before there was Control, there was a free indie game that did the obvious thing nobody at a studio was going to greenlight: it put you inside the Foundation on the worst day of its existence, alone, in the dark, with 173 somewhere behind you and the lights already failing. It’s the purest expression of what the wiki was always describing — not the monster, but what it feels like when the paperwork stops holding.

None of these needed SCP’s permission to exist. That’s the point. The Foundation was never really an IP… It was a worldview, and once a worldview gets loose on the internet, it doesn’t need a license to keep spreading.

Conclusion

I’ve spent a lot of the past year examining Gen Z horror. They all assume

• bureaucracy

• documentation

• impossible spaces

• procedural language

• institutional secrecy

SCP didn’t become influential because it had the best monsters. It became influential because it changed what horror was.

SCP was the first truly native horror myth of the twenty-first. It wasn’t designed by a studio, shepherded by an editor, or launched by a marketing department. It evolved the way internet culture itself evolved: collaboratively, chaotically, and one document at a time. And fittingly, the most important document wasn’t the one about the statue. It was the first one that convinced readers that somewhere, in some filing cabinet, there were ten thousand more waiting to be discovered. The Foundation’s mission statement isn’t really to Secure. Contain. Protect.

It’s to Prevent Warhammer.

Every containment procedure, every incident report, every redacted page exists for one reason: because the alternative is a universe where the monsters aren’t hidden anymore. That idea escaped the wiki years ago.

You can see it in The Backrooms. In Iron Lung. In Lethal Company. In R.E.P.O. In Control. Even when they aren’t using SCP lore, they’re using SCP’s assumptions. Reality is unstable. Institutions keep the lights on. The paperwork matters because if it ever stops... civilization stops with it. SCP didn’t just create a setting. It created the default worldview of Gen Z horror. And perhaps that’s fitting. The Foundation always warned us that containment would eventually fail.They were right.

Just not in the way they expected.

That’s why so much of Gen Z horror feels like it belongs to the Foundation even when it doesn’t. The SCP Foundation began as a single anonymous post on 4chan, but it accidentally created something much larger than an internet writing project. It created the first horror mythology born entirely online, a mythology that anyone could expand, anyone could reinterpret, and nobody could truly own.

Which is why it keeps escaping containment.

Discuss in the Comments Below

NEURAL NETWORK NOVELLAS Episode 77: The Sound of Thunder

PROPHET TO THE REMNANT Episode 96: Life During Wartime

周二漫画：量子之死 Episode 3: 周二漫画：量子之死

FLYING SPARKS Episode 95: He’s My Boyfriend

JACK RABBIT COMICS Episode 197: What’s the Trouble, Little Lady?

STONETOSS Episode 516: Dull Edge

Visit Arktoons

JACK RABBIT COMICS Episode 196: Wait Your Turn, Bachelor #2

PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 198: A Thriving Community 3

COSMIC HORRORS Episode 38: A Garden

DEAD MEMORY: A MERCURY JONES MYSTERY Episode 13: Episode 11: The Crazy German

PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 197: A Thriving Community 2

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: COMEDY Episode 106: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

PROPHET TO THE REMNANT Episode 95: Underground Guardian

Visit Arktoons

You never know what will be found at a library book sale. One of my finds a few weeks ago was a hardback Louis L’Amour collection Valley of the Sun. This is a Bantam Book hardback published in 1995. The book contains nine stories over 134 pages. Bantam had started reprinting L’Amour’s pulp fiction in the early 1980s when Carroll & Graf had first published some paperback collection of public domain material. Bantam responded with “official” collections. Law of the Desert Born, Dutchman’s Flat, Night Over the Solomons, The Outlaws of Mesquite were all story collections that you could find on the spinner rack at the local Dairy Mart or drug store.

The Bantam paperbacks never had any copyright information on where and when the stories originally appeared. Here are the contents and original magazine appearance for contents in Valley of the Sun:

We Shaped the Land with Our Guns Texas Rangers, April 1951

West of the Pilot Range Texas Rangers, May 1947

When a Texan Takes Over 2-Gun Western, Feb. 1954

No Man’s Mesa Western Novels and Short Stories, Aug. 1952

Gila Crossing Complete Western Book Magazine, Sept. 1956

Medicine Ground Texas Rangers, April 1948

Valley of the Sun Range Riders Western, Jan. 1950

That Slash Seven Kid Rio Kid Western, March 1952

In Victorio’s Country Giant Western, June 1949

Louis L’Amour is not my favorite western author. I like Gordon D. Shirreffs, T. V. Olsen, Lewis B. Patten more as they are more hard-boiled in delivery. I can see why L’Amour became so popular. He melded the pre-WW2 pulp mythic western with real life elements from the Old West. He is generally an easy read and you don’t feel depressed after reading a Louis L’Amour book. Vox Day has mentioned L’Amour’s heroes are Deltas in the socio-sexual hierarchy which is what I have observed.

The contents to this book are all stories from western pulp magazine when they were in their twilight. None of the stories are even novelette length. Your lean, weather beaten protagonist comes up against a problem and figures it out in around 15 pages. There are three series characters: Kim Sartrain the Ranger, the Cactus Kid, and Red Clanahan. The frustrating part is not all the stories for these characters are gathered together in one volume. There are six Kim Sartrain stories, five Cactus Kid stories, and two Red Clanahan stories. All these in one volume would have made a good volume of pulp western short stories. I like logical story collections, not assorted grab bags.

I found it best to space these stories out with at least two days in between. They can become repetitive in the setup and resolution. It is a good way to wind down for a half hour before going to bed. There was a paperback edition that is currently available. L’Amour must have still been making money for Bantam Books in the 1990s to warrant this slender hardback instead of the usual mass-market paperback. L’Amour was one of the great pulp magazine survivors along with John D. MacDonald, Poul Anderson, John Jakes, and probably a few others I am not thinking off right now. Tom Selleck and Sam Elliott certainly owe their careers to CBS adapting L’Amour to T.V. in the late 70s and early 1980s.

The Explorer Hero

The PhD who can win a bar fight. The hero who is driven by his thirst for knowledge to travel to the ends of the Earth. The man who comes from the Realm of Law and ventures deeply into the Realm of Chaos. The hero who plants and enforces the border between these two realms. He is the man with a foot in each Realm and can interact freely with each realm.

Hawkeye

Daniel Boone

Professor Challenger

Tarzan

Indiana Jones

And Allan Quartermain

“It is far. But there is no journey upon this earth that a man may not make if he sets his heart to it. There is nothing... that he cannot do, there are no mountains he may not climb, there are no deserts he cannot cross... if love leads him and he holds his life in his hand counting it as nothing...” King Solomon’s mines

Rick Marshall was one of the last members of this dying breed of heroic archetypes. Killed not by Hollywood but by cartography.

The jungle adventure movie had been one of Hollywood’s defining genres since the silent era. Many of the earliest were filmed around Silver Springs, Florida, where the mouth of the Spring River could convincingly stand in for Africa or South America. People loved them because it spoke to a need for adventure that was being closed to them. The American West was no longer in the Realm of Chaos. It was thoroughly tamed, the Realm of Law had claimed it, it was now mythology not a destination. Yet the frontier, the unknown was a big part of the stories we told to ourselves about ourselves. In a world where the daily trip to the office or the factory was becoming a ritual act of surrender, Jungle movies provided a vicarious escape. They had a hugely popular run through the thirties, stopped cold in the 1940s, made tentative comebacks in 60s at Hammer Films. Then made a huge comeback when Raiders showed up. But the thing about Raiders is that it was clearly a nostalgia movie. Spielberg and Lucas understood that the classic explorer adventure had become a period piece. Indiana Jones only worked in a world where big parts of the world map were labeled, Unknown. By the 1970s thanks to airplanes, satellite photography, and sonar cartography there was no place left on earth with that label on it.

Rick Marshall found an unusual solution to this problem. He left our world. Rick Marshall wasn’t exploring Africa or the Amazon; he was discovering an entirely unknown world. The Last Explorer Hero had found somewhere to go. It was a place where every river bend might reveal a new mystery, every cave might lead somewhere no human had pressed foot, and every sunrise brought the possibility of genuine discovery. In an age when Earth itself no longer had unknown corners, and for all the hardship that it inflicted on him and his family… The Land of the Lost was his home.

The Explorer Hero doesn’t just need an unknown place. He needs the possibility of genuine discovery. That’s why Land of the Lost works. Rick Marshall isn’t trying to retrieve an artifact. He is discovering civilizations, physics, ecology, mapping proto-language, discovering mysteries of time and evolution.

Rick Marshall the very last Victorian explorer.

This show had no right to be anywhere near as ambitious as it was.

Just a Dinosaur Kid’s Show

Syd and Marty Kroft made stuff like H.R. Puffnstuff and Sigmund & Seamonsters, which notably did not rate multiple remakes and a cult status. Okay, Puffnstuff did have a cult status but for drastically different reasons.

It was kid’s show that didn’t speak down to its audience: it actually challenged them. The Land of the Lost was the only American show to ever really go toe-to-toe with Baker era Doctor Who, which it should be remembered was still a kids’ show.

As near as can be reconstructed; someone at NBC’s kid’s division had noted that Star Trek was demographically speaking doing fantastic with the little monsters that would one day be designated Generation X.

NBC Exec: Tarzan show is doing great and Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek cartoon is also doing pretty well, although we’re going to have to pull-the-plug on that one, the cast is too big and actors want to get paid actual money. Let’s see if Gene is interested, because if you want to do a science fiction show it’s either him or Rod Serling, and this is supposed to be for kids.

Roddenberry was NOT interested, he already had projects like Genesis II lined up and the idea of being permanently trapped in Kiddie Krap hell horrified him, but he did recommend David Gerrold. Gerrold for his part, had done development work on the Tarzan cartoon, so he was a known commodity in good standing. The project was handed to Syd and Marty Kroft, they cut out a bunch of pictures from Sci-Fi magazines and sent it to David Gerrold with no particularly detailed instructions about dinosaurs and a family, Dad is a scientist man, Mom is a nurse and the kids are boy and girl. A note was sent shortly thereafter to pair down the cast, Dad is now a widower. Budget issues were always going to be a thing on that show.

The resulting series should have been so obscure it wouldn’t have rated becoming a trivia question. This series wasn’t just cheap, it was loser cheap. This is a program that suffers drastically on a modern 50 inch HDTV. The once dreaded Sleestak are obviously various high school basketball players, (to include I shit you not Detroit Pistons legend Bill Laimbeer). The zippers are clearly visible, the dinosaurs are herky jerky stop-motion and the same footage got used in every episode. The cardboard sets are constantly shaking when brushed against. The hand puppets don’t really break immersion because it didn’t exist in the first place. But you have to remember this was being seen on broadcast television where the reception was rarely better than “good.” The screen was on average 18 inches, and there were even a few hold-outs that were still in black and white. A kid’s imagination was already trained to do a lot of heavy lifting, that built in a lot of forgiveness for herky-jerky stop motion and make the Sleestak the most horrifying thing on Saturday morning TV.*

With almost no instructions at all, and David Gerrold knowing he couldn’t deliver visual wonders with his microscopic budget, he decided he would go with big ideas. He started running through his rolodex of science fiction writers.

Land of the Lost, a zero budget kids’ show assembled a writer’s room dream team of 1970s science fiction writers:

Larry Niven

Theodore Sturgeon

Ben Bova

DC Fontana

Walter Koenig (a better screen writer than he gets credit for)

And David Gerrold himself.

The result was the most cerebral kid’s show of the seventies, and arguably, all time.

The esteemed members of this writer’s room had in one way or another been connected (if sometimes tangentially) to Star Trek. It was where a lot of these people had bumped into each other in the first place. It was the product of a writers’ network that was downstream of a show that had been canceled little more than five years before.

What is truly impressive is just how little credit this show gets in terms of its influence. A lot of the hallmarks that would define late 20th and early 21st century science fiction are there.

A Kid’s Anthropology Course

The Pakuni (a tribe of Paranthropus Robustus) had their own dedicated constructed language, it wasn’t actors making ook-ook noises. And it was the first ever on TV to have one, years before Klingon language camp became a thing. It had a real phonology, grammar, and vocabulary, designed by UCLA linguist Victoria Fromkin to sound non-English while still being learnable by children. The language used simple roots, plural patterns like Paku/Pakuni, and short, repeatable words; ayo for yes, anu for no, amura for friend so the Marshalls’ gradual communication with Cha-Ka felt like field anthropology rather than caveman pantomime. There is a group of truly hardcore geeks that have reassembled the language to include its base seven counting system.

Why base seven? My nerd guess is that one hand is usually occupied carrying a spear, a child, or dinner. The free hand counts with the thumb touching each finger and the spaces between for a total of seven positions in all.** It’s exactly the sort of detail that tells you this show was thinking far harder about prehistoric culture than a Saturday morning dinosaur show had any right to.

And that was simple stuff

Early in the series, when the Marshalls decide to simply go down the river down hoping to get permanently away from Grumpy and Alice, they discover that they’ve come back to their starting point. This place is a place you are seriously trapped in. An enclosed pocket universe, there’s no escaping from.

The Land of the Lost contained hyper advanced super science that was indistinguishable from magic. The pylons were one of the most sophisticated pieces of worldbuilding in 1970s television. They weren’t simply mysterious alien machines. They were the operating system of the Land of the Lost. Each pylon contained a matrix table filled with colored crystals. Touching, rearranging, or removing the crystals altered some aspect of the world’s operation. Different pylons controlled different systems: weather, the movement of the suns and moons, time doorways, dimensional travel, even the sun itself. This was programmable matter, modular software, configurable hardware and environmental control systems in an age where Univac computers still took up entire floors.

And this stuff wasn’t info dumped right away, either. It was doled out to you over the course of the first season. It was serialized mythology. This show was breaking ground for Stargate, Farscape, Babylon 5, and the 90s Star Trek shows that didn’t suck.

One of the worst problems the Marshalls had were the inhabitants of the Lost City. Early on, they find a warning written in English, “Beware of Sleestak.”

I Don’t Want to Hear About How Scary Daleks Were

The family was shortly introduced to some of the worst nightmare fuel on Saturday morning TV. When the TV is small, the reception is snowy and the audience is used to using its imagination; hissing, bug-eyed, green rubber monster suits are pants crappingly terrifying, no couch is thick enough to protect you from them. Credit to the 2009 movie, it made an effort to keep them scary.

The Sleestak were kinda sorta dinosaur descendants… At least early 1970s dinosaurs. They were exothermic. Disliked bright sunlight and preferred underground caverns.

Their activity is tied to geothermal heat from lava chambers. They undergo seasonal hibernation, becoming nearly immobile in cool conditions until volcanic heat revives them. They laid eggs that were kept in communal hatcheries. Giant Altrusian moths were necessary for fertilization. Every so often a Sleestak hatchling was born as an evolutionary throwback possessing the intelligence and memories of the ancient Altrusians. These individuals were feared by ordinary Sleestak.

The Stranger

Enter Enik. Frequent guest star Walker Edmiston, largely unrecognizable did some of the best acting on the entire show, as Enik (Gerrold said it was originally meant to be Gene spelled backwards). Someone who looks like a Sleestak but is clearly hyper-intelligent. He didn’t seem to care much about the Marshalls one way or the other. He was not a friendly alien, so far as Enik was concerned they were about at the level of “food that talks.” However, he was cultured, articulate, and assumed at first that he had traveled deep into his own past and then to his horror discovered the Land of Lost’s Planet of the Apes secret.

Suddenly the Sleestak aren’t just things that can chase you up a ladder.* They’re a fallen civilization. Somewhere back down that evolutionary chain there were Sleestak who built cities, who had hyper-technology, who had culture and the guys with the flashlight-eyes hissing in the caves are what’s left after the fall. The monsters get a history. Once you have the Sleestack have that kind of past you start to feel something closer to pity for them, which is a much more complicated thing to ask a seven-year-old to feel for a guy in a lizard suit.

There’s so many rabbit holes to go down here, you don’t know where to start. Were the Altrusians supposed to be born with all their knowledge as a genetic memory, and that stopped happening? Were the Altrusians a no shit dinosaur civilization on Earth and was whatever catastrophe destroyed their civilization, the extinction level event that wiped out the dinosaurs, and after 280 million years there is no remaining trace? Well I suppose the Land of the Lost is in fact a remaining trace, if that’s true.

That’s the difference between Land of the Lost and every other Saturday morning show with a monster-of-the-week. The monster-of-the-week shows needed you to be scared and then forget about it by next Saturday. Land of the Lost wanted you to be scared, and then it wanted you to feel bad about it. That’s not a kids’ show move. That’s a science fiction move.

Land of the Lost Didn’t Talk Down Its Audience

This was a show that first introduced Generation-X to concepts like boot-strap paradoxes, and enclosed universes. The Marshalls at the end of season one escape, because Gerrold thought he wasn’t getting a season 2. So Larry Niven created the bootstrap paradox that trapped the Marshalls.

Land of the Lost was a profoundly ambitious show on a shoestring budget.

It was, however, doomed from the start. Directors who bluntly weren’t bright enough to understand the scripts would re-write them right before shooting. There were a bunch of “I don’t get it,” notes from NBC executives. Inevitable requests to dumb things down into order widen the audience came down the pipe, this had the effect of losing the audience that had enjoyed being challenged in a way that ScoobyDoo never provided, the kids already watching Scooby and Scrappy had no reason to the turn the dial. The audience shrunk. Budgets got cut. The actor playing Rick Marshall started making unreasonable demands of being paid the agreed upon amount and then walked off the show rather than take the pay-cut. David Gerrold decided his leading man had the right idea and left too, the Dream Team writers room promptly flaked away.

And were replaced by Kroft Brothers regulars who weren’t anywhere near smart enough to keep the show at the level it had been at. Rick Marshall was replaced by Uncle Jack Marshall, Generic Man of Adventure. Without its Explorer Hero, the show was canceled at the end of the third season.

Does It Hold Up?

W-e-l-l-l... I really want to say yes, but I just can’t. I’m not nine anymore. My TV is too big and my taste is too jaded. The zippers are zippers. The stop-motion is herky-jerky. Bill Laimbeer is still very obviously Bill Laimbeer.

But none of that was ever really the point, was it.

Indiana Jones solved the death of the Explorer Hero by sending him backward, into a past still allowed to have mysteries in it. Star Trek solved it by sending him outward, into a future with enough blank space to still call it space. Land of the Lost solved it by sending him sideways into a pocket universe the satellites couldn’t photograph and the sonar couldn’t chart, a place that could still, well and truly be summed up with the word Unknown.

Three different shows, three different decades, three different budgets, all quietly answering the same question: once you’ve mapped the whole planet, where does a man like Rick Marshall or Allan Quatermain, or Indiana Jones, or James Kirk go looking for something nobody’s found yet?

Land of the Lost’s answer was cheaper than anyone else’s and, honestly, weirder. The thing is it was never a show about dinosaurs. It was the last television jungle adventure and it didn’t assume that kids were dumber than the adults making the show.

Discuss in the Comments Below — especially if you want to talk about The Zarn because this article has gone on too long as a it is

*I don’t want to hear shit about the Daleks. The Sleestak could follow you up a ladder.

**From a Pakuni perspective, there probably wasn’t much need for numbers beyond seven. Once you get past seven the distinction between eight and one hundred twenty-eight stops being terribly important. You can get by with just “many.”

Holly: “Cha-Ka, how many Sleestak are coming?”

Cha-Ka: “Many!”

Holly: “Okay — RUN!!!”

Today we'll be examining one of Western fiction's oldest heroic archetypes. The Explorer Hero. Once he dominated adventure fiction. Today he has almost vanished. Not because audiences stopped loving him, but because the world he required disappeared.

There was a huge boom in Frontiersman fiction in America of the 1950s. Davey Crockett and Daniel Boone and Jim Bowie were suddenly back in the limelight as well as a host of fictional heroes from the Old West. When Walt Disney opened Disneyland it would have been unthinkable if one of the gates hadn’t been Frontierland (Tall tales and true from America’s legendary past).

There were also new explorer heroes, Astronauts were rock stars in the fifties and sixties. Science fiction heroes of that period were almost all explorer heroes. Gene Roddenberry sold Star Trek by lying about it being Wagontrain to the Stars. John Kennedy landed a solid rhetorical punch with his New Frontier speech. The constant refrain was that America is the Nation of Frontiersman.

Where did the Explorer Hero come from in the first place? Why did the he resonate so strongly in the Fifties America.* And why has he been completely banished today?

The Frontiersman Hero is not uniquely American but our attitude towards him is. In the 1800s citizens of the United States lived on continent where a big chunk of the landmass was a great big scary Unknown. I know people understand it intellectually, but most people can’t get how that made people feel. Once you had crossed the Cumberland Gap and were living on the other side of a nice tall and very protective, natural border of a mountain range. If you were living on the other side of the Appalachians there was only a river (admittedly a horking great big one), standing between you and the unknown.

The unknown is the realm Chaos, the place where Law does not exist. There is nothing to defend your family, your property and livelihood in the realm of Chaos, nothing but you. The flipside is that there would be no one to judge your own actions in the realm of Chaos because it is a place of All against All. Where there is no law and no order, there is opportunity. If you are in a place where everything is a matter of chance, then chance may favor you, and perhaps greatly. But, easy gains are easily lost in the state of Chaos because there is nothing to protect your wealth.

Naturally, men want to make their fortunes in the realm of Chaos and then return to the lands of Law where their gains will be protected.

But who determines where the boundary is?

The Explorer Hero.

The Explorer Hero only exists where there are dragons left on the map.

Allan Quatermain needed Africa.

Daniel Boone needed Kentucky.

Professor Challenger needed an unexplored plateau.

Tarzan needed an unknown jungle.

Rick Marshall needed a pocket universe (more on him tomorrow)

Every Explorer Hero requires a frontier that civilization has not yet crossed.

The American frontiersman is a good example of this archetype of being a man with one foot in two worlds. Take Hawkeye from last of the Mohicans. He was raised by the Delaware Native Americans but as he repeatedly says, “I am a man with no cross,” meaning, I am not a half-breed, I’m white. The American frontiersman freely interacts with both the White Man and the Indian, he is accepted by both and knows the ways of both but he never quite fits in with either one.

Back when America was allowed to have “real life heroes,” the more questionable events in the lives Boone, Crockett and especially Bowie were quietly sanded away in primary school history books. Not so much denied as never brought up. Stuff like that was for college courses where you were expected to challenge your preconceived notions (God, I miss America). But for the masses heroes were allowed to stay pure. The Frontiersmen were a roughhewn subset of the Aspirational Hero.

Since the Explorer hero delineates the boundary between Law and Chaos, he is a source of security in times of insecurity. Which the 1950s most definitely were.

Everybody thinks the 1950s were a time of incredible stability and prosperity for America. And they were but you have to take into consideration what the previous forty years had been like. A gargantuan war in Europe, followed by a decade of out-of-control behavior where anyone who had a beer was a law breaker, meaning everyone was a lawbreaker. This was followed in turn by ten years of complete economic collapse and famine. With a new and global war batting cleanup. Of course, everyone was insecure. How could they not be?

The really worrying thing for people in the Fifties was that while everything was calm at the moment there were worrying rumbles beneath the surface like the first warning tremors the people of Pompeii felt coming from Vesuvius. There was something coming, they could feel it and they didn’t know what it would be.

Consequently, the heroes that had always held chaos at bay provided a great deal comfort for people that were feeling secretly terrified about things they couldn’t control. Besides, the story of the how the West was won was the story of the triumph of Law over Chaos. America had done it once, surely, we could do it again, right? Right?

That answers where the Explorer hero came from, and why he appealed to 1950s America.

My last question was, why has he been banished?

Darklings: Do you really have to ask, oh Dark Herald?

Not really.

The Explorer Hero wasn’t destroyed by Hollywood.

He was destroyed by cartography. By the early 1970s the Earth had become a photographed planet. Satellites circled overhead. Aircraft had flown over every jungle. The last white spaces on the map disappeared. There was nowhere left to hide King Solomon’s Mines. Storytellers had only two choices. They could move the Explorer Hero backward in time...or move the frontier somewhere else. Indiana Jones chose the past. James Kirk chose the stars.

Land of the Lost chose another universe entirely.

The Explorer Hero didn’t really die. He packed his bags and left the Earth.

Discuss in Comments Below

*(The period between 1947 to 1965)

JACK RABBIT COMICS Episode 195: Therapeutic Breakthrough

BASED COMIC Episode 361: Find the Votes

BEN GARRISON Episode 256: The USA- The World’s Maternity Ward

STONETOSS Episode 515: Independence Daze

NYM COY’S DISPATCHES Episode 11: The Fire I Left Burning

THREE OF CUPS Episode 69: The Road Beneath Her Feet

NEURAL NETWORK NOVELLAS Episode 76: The Sound of Thunder

PROPHET TO THE REMNANT Episode 94: Escape from Wembley Stadium

DEAD MEMORY: A MERCURY JONES MYSTERY Episode 11: A Secret Admirer

Visit Arktoons

I had probably seen his name mentioned in introductions to Conan collections by L. Sprague de Camp and Karl Edward Wagner. Where I took notice was a short description by Lin Carter in the introduction to the first of Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin collection from Popular Library. I read two stories by Smith in the anthology Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, an Arkham House book edited by August Derleth.

I was at Eide’s in Pittsburgh for the first time. Eide’s was a store, then on the north side of Pittsburgh that carried comic books, science fiction, and punk rock records. I spotted The City of the Singing Flame and snatched it up. I began reading story after story by Smith and really liked it. I picked up The Last Incantation a few months later (April 1983) for summer reading. There was a third collection in the summer of 1983. Here are the contents:

The City of the Singing Flame Clark Ashton Smith (Pocket 0-671-83415-0, Aug ’81, pb)
Edited by Donald Sidney-Fryer.

• Poet of the Singing Flame · Donald Sidney-Fryer · in

  The City of the Singing Flame [City of Singing Flame] · ss Wonder Stories Jul 1931

  The White Sybil · ss The White Sybil & Men of Avalon, ed. William L. Crawford, Everett, PA: Fantasy Publications 1934

  The Tale of Satampra Zeiros [Satampra Zeiros] · ss Weird Tales Nov 1931

  The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles [Satampra Zeiros] · ss Saturn, The Magazine of Science Fiction Mar 1958, as “The Powder of Hyperborea”

  The Door to Saturn · ss Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror Jan 1932

  The Dark Eidolon [Zothique] · nv Weird Tales Jan 1935

  The Black Abbot of Puthuum [Zothique] · nv Weird Tales Mar 1936

  The Garden of Adompha [Zothique] · ss Weird Tales Apr 1938

  The Maze of Maal Dweb [Maal Dweb] · ss The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies, Auburn Journal: Auburn CA 1933, as “The Maze of the Enchanter”; Weird Tales Oct 1938

  The Flower-Women [Maal Dweb] · ss Weird Tales May 1935

  The Enchantress of Sylaire · ss Weird Tales Jul 1941

  The Beast of Averoigne · ss Weird Tales May 1933

  The Hunters from Beyond · ss Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror Oct 1932

The Last Incantation Clark Ashton Smith (Pocket 0-671-83543-2, August 1982, pb)

Edited by Donald Sidney-Fryr

Introduction (The Last Incantation) • essay by Donald Sidney-Fryer

The Double Shadow • [Poseidonis] • (1933)

The Last Incantation • [Malygris] • (1930)

The Death of Malygris • [Malygris]

Seedling of Mars • (1931) • novelette by E. M. Johnston and Clark Ashton Smith (variant of The Planet Entity) [as by Clark Ashton Smith]

The Ice-Demon • [Hyperborea] • (1933)

Ubbo-Sathla • [Hyperborea] • (1933)

The Plutonian Drug • (1934)

The Colossus of Ylourgne • [Averoigne] • (1934)

The Holiness of Azédarac • [Averoigne] • (1933)

The End of the Story • [Averoigne] • (1930)

The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis • [Mars] • (1932)

The Devotee of Evil • (1933)

The Root of Ampoi • (1949) •

Genius Loci • (1933)

The Monster of the Prophecy Clark Ashton Smith (Timescape 0-671-83544-0, Apr ’83, $2.95, 238pp, pb)
Edited by Donald Sydney-Fryer.

• Lyricist of Lost Worlds · Donald Sydney-Fryer · in

  The Monster of the Prophecy

  The Monster of the Prophecy · nv Weird Tales Jan 1932

II: Zothique

Xeethra [Zothique] · ss Weird Tales Dec 1934

The Empire of the Necromancers [Zothique] · ss Weird Tales Sep 1932

The Charnel God [Zothique] · nv Weird Tales Mar 1934

The Witchcraft of Ulua [Zothique] · ss Weird Tales Feb 1934

III Vulthoom

Vulthoom · nv Weird Tales Sep 1935

IV: Hyperborea

The Weird of Avoosl Wuthoqquan · ss Weird Tales Jun 1932

The Seven Geases · nv Weird Tales Oct 1934

The Coming of the White Worm · ss Stirring Science Stories Apr 1941

V: Lost Worlds

Master of the Asteroid · ss Wonder Stories Oct 1932

The Immeasurable Horror · ss Weird Tales Sep 1931

Monsters in the Night · vi F&SF Oct 1954, as “A Prophecy of Monsters”

The Gorgon · ss Weird Tales Apr 1932

A Voyage to Sfanomoë · ss Weird Tales Aug 1931

I later tracked down the four Ballantine collections of Clark Ashton Smith edited by Lin Carter. These Timescape/Pocketbooks paperbacks hold a special place. These were my first Clark Ashton Smith books. I have fond memories of reading them while listening to the Psychedelic Furs’ Forever Now, Lords of the New Church 1^st album, Echo & the Bunnymen’s Porcupine, and King Crimson’s Beat albums.

The thing I liked about these collections are they are balanced. The number of stories varied among Smith’s imaginary realms. Donald Sidney-Fryer adjusted the contents so there was a consistency. Arkham House had started publishing Smith’s best stories first not knowing if the imprint would last very long. As a result, each Arkham House book has diminishing returns. I wish there had been three more of these Timescape paperbacks. Unfortunately, David Hartwell, editor of the Timescape imprint was let go in late 1983 and the Timescape imprint was dead.

You don’t see these paperbacks in used book stores. They probably did not sell that many copies to begin with and readers like me don’t get rid of their Clark Ashton Smith (or Robert E. Howard) books.

Smith had a command of language unlike any other. It is rich, you will encounter words you may never had read before. Some have tried to imitate him but none have ever succeeded.

“Have Lobo murder him, not Supergirl!”

Homicide in the Public Interest is not something you can have a heroine walk back from later.

More on that in a minute

This movie fails on every level: tone, pacing, world-building, adaptation, and even franchise strategy. But where it falls completely on its face, in a drunken stupor and drowns in a puddle of its own vomit is characterization. There is a genuinely compelling character to be found in Kara Zor-el and James Gunn was absolutely never going to find it.

The first Supergirl first appeared in Superboy in 1949. She was a one shot love interest and had no superpowers. The next was a legitimate test run in 1958 to gauge interest in a derivative character. It was good enough that Supergirl became a thing a year later when Kara Zor-el arrived.

Kara was a product of Silver Age Krypton, which gives her some baggage that modern corporate creators don’t really know what to do with. That Krypton was really just a futurist vision of America. Technology would always make everything better and being ruled by a technocratic The Council made sense. Nonetheless, she remembered this world occasionally observed its customs, holidays, and religion.

Krypton as a techno utopia was doomed to fail eventually. However Richard Donner sped up the process considerably when he turned Krypton into a place of massive mythic weight. This influenced Kara’s backstory but not as much as it should have. Krypton was extensively rewritten by John Byrne in 1986 but Kara was currently dead at the time.

She was resurrected in 2004, her back story was now that she was born on Krypton instead of Argo City. She remembered Kal-El as an infant and was put in suspended animation to save her life.

This version of Kara became a kind of Atlantean Princess. Unlike Superman, Krypton was home. It was a real place to her not an idealized image like it is to Clark. She is forever displaced. The sole survivor of a dead world in a way that Clark can only pretend to be.

And now she’s drunken slattern in a vintage Blonde Tee-shirt.

Tom King’s loathed and detested run on DC comics is noted for his complete disinterest in following the established canon and traditionally entrenched character traits. He was only ever interested in using characters as IP wrappers for his own derivative stories. His battlecary was, I’ll give you the same thing but different. Hollywood instantly fell in love with him.

This character is Tom King’s creation wearing Kara Zor-El’s costume devoid of pretty much all the internality that made Supergirl who she is.

It was never going to be good but at least it would have been coherent. However, this movie had many writers and as a result many Supergirls.

There is no real internal consistency because none of the writers seemed to care what the other was doing. So there are three different images of Kara:

Ana Nagoyan’s Hard-drinking party girl whose self-destruction is framed as empowering. The drunken Punk Rocker in Blondie Tee-shirt. I’ve known real Punkers, she was a revolting besotted mess who slept in the same clothes she wore for days at a time and she was still nicer to be around than they were.

James Gunn’s female Peter Quill. Seriously she felt exactly like Peter Quill

And finally ChatGpt’s Heart broken survivor who can never go home and whose only only remaining family is reaching out to her but feels as alien as everyone else. The Clanker got it closer to right than the wet-brains did.

I’ve seen complaints about Milly Alcock having been badly miscast for this role. This is not accurate. Alcock was perfectly cast for the role she played, It’s just that that role was never Supergirl.

James Gunn was early on asked how his films were going to be different, the guy who started as a screen writer declared they weren’t going to shoot anything until the script was rock solid. This was an explicit rejection of the Marvel Method of begin with a weak outline, extensively map out the action beats, go back and write the next draft covering the stuff that happens between the action scenes. Then finally use humor to try and paper over the weak spots. It works as well here as it does for Marvel.

This movie is a collection of derivatives. The villain is from Mad Max, the subplot is from Hand Maid’s Tale, there’s scene stolen from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the heroine is from a James Gunn movie which technically this is not… even though it is.

That’s one of the film’s biggest issues. Any of the Guardians of Galaxy could walk through this thing and not look out of place. Everywhere you go its the Star Wars cantina with 1970s music, Blade Runner back alleys, quirky aliens, suggestions of seriously weird and off putting sex, and sarcastic ensemble found families. As for her real family? Well that’s Clark and she’s trained Krypto to piss on his picture.

The plot is pretty much exactly what you’ve seen in the trailers. It’s kind of funny, back in the 1980s they used to do the same thing. It was kind of flex, a way of saying, our movie is so great we can tell you everything about it and you’ll still come see it! Of course those movies were actually good. This one is not.

But it could have been a lot better. The plot is True Grit but in Spaaaaaaace. The young girl, Ruthie’s family is killed by Krem of the Yellow Hills who escaped from a Mad Max movie. She tries to find someone to hunt down Krem so she can kill him.

She runs into Kara who is clearly not Supergirl yet, she had rejected the identity that her cousin Clark has created for her. This is actually understandable if you think about it which the makers of this film certainly didn’t. Clark’s Idealized vision of Krypton and the mission Jor-el and Lara have crafted for him are the result of mistranslated recording and Kara knows the subject matter of it before arriving on Earth, but lets forget most but not all of that because this movie does nothing to backtrack James Gunn’s mission of conquest and rapine Jor-el and Lara gave to their son. Truthfully, she only left Earth to be repulsive drunk so the movie could happen.

Kara was a teenager when she arrived, hence the name Supergirl and not Superwoman. It gets brought up in the film. The completely expected “Well, if he’s SuperMAN why aren’t you SuperWOMAN. The smart thing would have been to have Kara wave it away with, “Branding issues.” But it was too good of a “patriarchy bad” moment to pass up.

Anyway, Kara is celebrating her Birthweek, which is honestly kind of defendable, I mean a year is determined by the length of time a planet takes to orbit its star and her planet doesn’t do that anymore. Hours, days and years were doubtless different from Earth’s and a week is probably as close as she can reconstruct it. Regardless, she seems to be a terminal alcoholic and her Birthweek is probably indistinguishable from the rest of the year.

Ruthie tries to talk Kara into her mission, she says nah, stuff happens and Krem shoots Krypto with a contrivance poison that sets a ticking clock cliche in motion. Gunn’s Dogsel in Distress’ life is in danger once again. She’s got three days to retrieve the antidote, which the Brigands (they are called Brigands endlessly so I suppose they’re ripping off Kurosawa too) carry in vials around their necks. This is an absurd contrivance that would get most writers fired on general principle, it must have been Nagoyan’s contribution because Chatgpt has assured me it would request permission to self destruct on the grounds of fatal corruption rather than deliver something like this.

So Kara sets out to find her dog’s antidote and set off pre-determined action scenes.

Along the way she keeps running into Lobo, and honestly he should have been the star of the movie. People actually wanted to see a Lobo movie or at least more than they wanted to see a drunk-ass Supergirl movie. And this plot is obviously True Grit in space. If that is your plot and if your choice for papering over Rooster Cogburn is Lobo or Supergirl… Who would you pick?

This was a story that didn’t want to be a Supergirl story. The biggest problem the writers had was insisting on making Supergirl morally grey. Which you cannot do with a character who has a god-level power set. You can make them evil, which I think is Gunn’s preferred default given Bright Burn’s plot. But if you make that character the hero then you either have to give that character a cast iron unbreakable moral framework that limits their actions from doing anything evil (you know like Superman?) or come up with a bunch of ridiculous contrivances that constantly scale back the hero’s power until it’s time for the next action scene.

Guess what they went with?

Kara was constantly being powered down until some contrivance came along to get her to get her near a yellow sun. Or Lobo would show up.

Lobo did occasionally get them out the fix they were in, and then fuck-off in to the void again until it was time for his next appearance.

The ridiculous part is that there was one scene where he was desperately needed. Krem has been defeated. Supergirl talks Ruthie out of killing Krem because it will stain her soul forever and that is perfectly true. If you kill somebody, you will never be the same man again, trust me on this point. And then Kara kills him. And freaking Lobo was right there! It should have been the only reason to have him there. It’s why I thought he was there. Kara would walk away, Krem would start boasting about all the horrible things he was going to keep doing. Kara’s hand tightens on the sword hilt, she’s going to have to do it, she’ll have to commit murder, but then Krem boasts about having bounties on his head on a hundred systems. Kara smiles as great weight is lifted from her. Krem looks confused and suddenly Lobo appears stage left, “Hello, gorgeous!”

But no, they make Supergirl a murderess because Ana wanted to recreate the scene from Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Giles murders the bad guy instead of Buffy. So, I guess there was one decent writer working on this – Joss Whedon.

Supergirl is supposed to be a goddess-heroine. Compassionate, idealistic, yet sometimes emotional and impulsive. She is indeed in great pain but she is NEVER morally gray.

Perhaps this film’s biggest problem is that James Gunn is a Gen-Xer, and my generation’s besetting sin is that we’ve always mistaken cynicism for maturity. A goddess-heroine doesn’t become more interesting by drinking, swearing, and killing. She just stops being a goddess and turns into a female Lobo.

The biggest problem this film had was the business model driving it forward. When Superman seriously underperformed last year, this film should have been suspended. At least if Supergirl making a profit was the objective. But it wasn’t. This film had one purpose: it was to convince potential buyers that DC actually had box office momentum instead of aggressive book keeping. This wasn’t about making a movie that audiences actually wanted to see, it was like a used car dealer who packs down the differential with sawdust, covers up the rust holes with a gallon of bondo, puts a cheap paint job on it, takes the money and runs before the buyer is any the wiser about what he’s bought.

From that perspective, Supergirl is a roaring success. The deal on Skydance’s Warner buy out is closed.

As of this writing it appears that Supergirl has had a disastrous opening weekend of $38 million, which is significantly lower than The Marvels.

This. Is. A. Bomb.

But the check and cleared and Ellisons are stuck with the repair costs so all good?

The saddest part of this whole debacle is that this film has just enough moments that tell the audience what it should have been. The sweet and sad princess of the eternally lovely and eternally lost island kingdom. Every happiness she finds here is borrowed. Every grief she carries is hers alone and forever. And yet she still finds the strength to follow her moral code and be a goddess-heroine. That is Supergirl. That is who they threw away so someone’s self-insert could get loaded in a Blondie Tee shirt.

Avoid Like the Plague (0 / 5)

COSMIC HORRORS Episode 37: A Garden

JACK RABBIT COMICS Episode 193: Just as Planned

PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 196: A Thriving Community

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: COMEDY Episode 105: The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

PROPHET TO THE REMNANT Episode 92: Prophetic Condemnation

Visit Arktoons

“Here’s looking at you kid.”

“I am big! It’s the pictures that got small.”

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

“I’ll be back.”

“You can’t handle the truth!”

“Say hello to my little friend.”

“What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Except for herpes. That shit’ll come back with you.”

When was the last time you quoted a line from a movie to a friend? I mean the whole 9 nine yards.

Got into Johnny Ringo’s character from Tombstone and said, “Well… Bye.” Or squinted like Eastwood and ground out, “Go ahead… Make my day.” I’m willing to bet it’s been quite a while.

Years most likely.

For reasons we’re about to explore we stopped quoting movies. And we lost something kind of important when did because…

We were never just repeating dialogue. Movie quotes were one of the last surviving forms of participatory entertainment. And now it’s lost.

Somewhere around 2010 and 2013, Hollywood quietly stopped producing movie quotes that entered the language. That wasn’t just because screenwriting got worse. It happened because one of the last surviving forms of participatory entertainment finally died.

There’s several reasons for that and they speak to a lot of the issues now affecting our culture. Before we dig too far into those, we first need to look at what movie quotes really were, why we indulged in them, what we got out of them and what it means now that they’re gone.

The Callback: You Already Know Half This Story

A Year in the Death of the American Superculture

We’ve covered what killed the pipeline. The internet fragmented the American Superculture. A century-long bottleneck burst. Institutions that confused control for trust found out what happens when the audience simply moves on.

But something smaller and stranger died with it. Something that had survived the entire transition from participatory to passive entertainment — from barbershop quartets to cinema, from Vaudeville to television — something that had quietly persisted through all of it.

Movie quotes.

And they weren’t just quotes.

We were never just repeating dialogue.

“Go ahead... make my day.”

Your friend instantly reconstructs the scene. For a few seconds both of you relive it together. You aren’t referencing a movie. You are performing it. You became Clint Eastwood for a moment, and your friend was right there with you.

Movie quotes were one of the last remnants of participatory entertainment.

They weren’t repeated because they were clever. They were repeated because they recreated an emotional experience. They were a technology for transporting two people back into a shared moment, and then briefly living inside it together.

That’s not nostalgia. That’s something specific. And understanding what it is requires going back a little further than Hollywood.

Before 1900, entertainment was always local. Completely decentralized.

Barbershop quartets. Parlor music. The local brass band (the pride of your small town). Vaudeville. Political speeches, back when American politicians understood rhetoric.

But mostly it was just singing Steamboat Bill with your friends in a bar.

Entertainment was ephemeral and participatory, yet deeply embedded. “Beloved Poems of the American People” was a book of poems that everybody already knew. In a Vaudeville performance the audience was expected to join in singing “Daisy, Daisy — give me your answer do...”

[Sidebar: Daisy could probably do better. The poor bastard’s financial planning appeared to involve nothing but a bike.]

You were expected to be part of the show. A perfect night of entertainment was something that belonged only to memory after it was lived ephemeral by nature, with no way to experience it a second time.

Then came cinema. Then radio.

Entertainment stopped being local, participatory, and ephemeral. It became centralized, passive, and permanent. No longer something you did with people you knew. It was something delivered to you by distant institutions. Nationally shared stories, shared songs, shared celebrities. All of it remotely created and curated and aimed at you while you sat still.

“And by the way, we own it. Not you.”

But the Audience Didn’t Stop Performing

Here’s what the studios didn’t anticipate — and eventually came to depend on.

The human need for participatory entertainment didn’t die. It couldn’t be delivered out of existence. It just found a new outlet.

People performed: Arnold. Clint. Bogart. Nicholson. Vader.

The audience carried the movie into schools, offices, and bars. They became the distribution system. Back when a classic film could expect theatrical re-release, the best free advertising money couldn’t buy was somebody doing their Gable impression. “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

The studio made something. The actor performed it. The audience picked it up, carried it out into the world, and performed it again but now in their own voice, in their own moment, for their own reasons.

That’s the circuit. Studio → Theater → Audience → Conversation → Schools → Workplaces → TV → Cable → Next generation.

You would likely hear the famous quote long before you saw the movie. This meant that the audience kept classic movies alive for decades. Movie quotes were analog memes, and the audience spread them for free. Everyone got what they wanted: the studios got free advertising, and the audience got to participate.

It was the last functioning remnant of something ancient.

What Killed It

Multiple forces arrived simultaneously, roughly between 2005 and 2013.

The internet shattered the shared context the quotes depended on. You can’t quote The Matrix to someone who spent that weekend watching something else entirely and felt no need to catch up. Movie quotes required a common cultural experience to land. The Superculture provided that. But when the Superculture fragmented, the ground quotes stood on fell way.

Then memes replaced quotes. Not because they were better. Because they were faster, frictionless, and required nothing of the person sharing them. Which is exactly the problem.

When you quoted a movie, you were performing. Your timing, your delivery, your choice of moment, these things were yours. You became the delivery mechanism. The quote lived in you before it traveled through you.

When you send a GIF, you’re just a middleman. The content passes through you without you leaving your mark upon it. The technology performs. You distribute. And it ends there, you have in no way, shape, or form made it your own.

The Writing Changed Too

It wasn’t only the ecosystem. The dialogue itself changed.

“I’ll be back.” “May the Force be with you.” “You can’t handle the truth.”

Complete thoughts in the form of character-defining declarations. Lines that told you exactly who someone was in five words or fewer. You could perform them because they were designed to be performed. Meant to be performed, so you performed them too. They had weight. They landed somewhere definite.

But, characters that are just tag-bundles simply can’t declare themselves in five words because there is nothing to declare. Characters without identities can’t make definitive statements because they possess no internal certainty from which those statements can emerge.

In an age when engagement is the all and the everything, current year screenwriting optimizes for something: dialogue that feels real. Overlapping, reactive, self-aware, interruptive. Scenes that breathe. Characters that talk like people actually talk.

Absolutely un-performative and completely unquotable.You can’t perform the banter. You can only clip it. Scenes aren’t quoted today they are forwarded, curated, remixed and reacted. But NEVER performed.

Certain scenes became memorable but lines stopped being so.

Netflix Didn’t Cause This. It Confirmed It.

Netflix didn’t create the vacuum it just filled it.

By the time streaming dominance arrived, the ecosystem that produced quotable movies was already dying. Netflix simply optimized for the environment it found.

The objective shifted:

Old objective: Be remembered. New objective: Keep watching.

These produce completely different work. A film that wants to be remembered lets lines land. It trusts the audience to sit with something uncomfortable or strange or definitive. It lets a character say something that might alienate half the room because it’s true, and specific, and theirs.

A platform built for retention sands everything down. Any moment of friction is a moment someone might reach for their phone. Any line too declarative, too strange, too fully in and of itself is a risk of disengagement.

This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s math.

Conclusion: What We Actually Lost

Movie quotes didn’t disappear because writers got worse. Not because Netflix destroyed Hollywood. And certainly not because audiences stopped wanting memorable dialogue.

The entire ecosystem that produced, rewarded, spread, and preserved them collapsed. And most people didn’t notice what went with it.

For over a century people entertaining their friends moved from participation to performance to distribution.

Movie quotes were one of the last moments when ordinary people were still part of the entertainment itself. Not consumers. Not an audience. Participants. You carried the line out of the theater and into your life. You chose the moment to use it. You performed it. For a few seconds, two people stood together inside a shared experience that neither of them owned but both of them had.

When we stopped quoting movies, we lost more than catchy dialogue.

We lost one of the last everyday rituals where entertainment became something we created together rather than something we merely passed along.

Discuss in the Comments Below