“The War Wagon”

The first thing about the 1967 John Wayne/Kirk Douglas vehicle The War Wagon (yes, that pun was intentional, thank you) is that it has one of the most lovable theme song in movie history. 

The tune is catchy and Ed Ames' voice is warm as can be, which would already make it great, but what makes it so marvelous is that the lyrics are simply the corniest stuff ever — and proud to be. This is a story about the robbery of a wagon full of gold whose theme song's chorus goes “Those men are fighting for a wagon full of gold… Yes, biting and scratching for a WA-GON FULL O'GOOOOLD!”, a movie about a rogue's get-rich-quick plan going awry whose theme song, sung from said character's perspective, proclaims: “Three years in prison made me dream a lotta dreams… Sometimes the dream isn't as easy as it seems!”. And good God I love it. 

But why should I keep prattling about it? You have a listen.

Of course, I wouldn't be writing this review in the way I am if you could get the same experience of the good parts of The War Wagon from a YouTube music video. The movie itself is quite good too, and not just because of Dimitri Tiomkin's soundtrack, though that certainly is a factor. 

Now, the plot concerns former rancher turned ex-convict Taw Jackson returning to his home town to find that the man who sent him to jail on partially-trumped-up charges has taken over his land and is getting rich off a gold mine there. Seeing no other way to get his property back, Jackson gets a gang of rogues together to rob the titular War Wagon, the fearsome armored contraption aboard which the villain, Bruce Cabot's Frank Pierce, has his gold transported. Jackson's plan is… never actually made altogether clear but I gather that he intends to use the gold to get his ranch back in some fashion. At any rate, the real hook of the story, beyond its status as a bog-standard heist flick In The Wild West, is that one of the people Wayne's character is forced to partner up with is Lomax, Kirk Douglas's character. 

Of course, the giddy joy of it is that there is never any doubt that the real story is two of the biggest western movie stars being forced to share top billing. Neither of the characters is entirely virtuous or villainous, so the movie teeters on who's going to come out on top; and for complicated plot reasons Douglas's character spends the entire movie debating whether she should partner up with Wayne's or just shoot him. Feeeel the metaestheticism coursing through your veins! Feel it!

Ostensibly "the question" in such a confrontation or crossover-that-isn't-one (and let's face it, John Wayne  in "Far West shootist" mode was,  for most of his career, basically equivalent to Maciste, Blackadder: a single fictional character whom you followed from movie to movie even though he may have a different name and backstory each time; one could, for that matter, argue that Argus McSwine is born of the same mould — so yes, John Wayne Meets Kirk Douglas is very much a "crossover", complete with the usual "they fight then they team up" tradition) is who wins it. It's not the most interesting question, in my opinion. But it is a question, worth addressing if only because everyone, especially the marketing, and up to and including the movie itself, gets it wrong. 

The thing is that in my opinion it is unquestionably Kirk Douglas who wins, is the thing, as far as charisma goes. I love me some John Wayne, but he's not on top form in this particular flick, I think. He has his moment — doesn't he always? — but compared to the sheer vitality of the likably smug rogue played by Douglas, Wayne looks… tired. Underwhelming. 

Yet if you look at the DVD cover and the like, The War Wagon appears to be a John Wayne feature first and a Kirk Douglas feature second; and, of course, the script allows Wayne the last word and the last laugh via the admittedly-hilarious sequence of… well, I won't spoil it here. If anyone's curious, ask me in the comments — but consequently, spoilerphobes beware in said comment section.

The movie is at its best and most vital when Wayne and Douglas are bantering; the rest of the gang are somewhat less interesting, especially Wes Fletcher (Keenan Wynn), who is nothing but an uninteresting walking archetype snarling his way through the picture; even his inevitable betrayal of the good guys is very, very underwhelming. I quite like Howard Keel's cynical Levi Walking Bear, at least, with the usual "couldn't vintage Westerns ever bother to cast actual Native Americans as Native American characters?" caveat. 

As for the plot… the War Wagon itself is a marvelous hook (and a marvelous design), and I am told that casting John Wayne as a robber for once was also intended to be one of this specific film's alluring quirks, though really, if Roger Ebert said, as the Wikipedia page for this film says he did, that the film sees Wayne “play a bad guy for just about the first time in his career”, I don't know what movie he was watching. Taw Jackson breaks the law, sure, but it's all cast in light of that ever-popular John Wayne trope, “I Want My Ranch, That I Built With My Own Two Hands, Back, Please” — more of an empty excuse than ever when the movie doesn't even bother to clarify if, and how, he's going to get it back at the end of the film. It just goes without saying that he will. 

The War Wagon, all in all, is not a perfect film, but it is a hella-entertaining, and occasionally very funny one. I quite recommend it if you like westerns who know how to sell unironically exciting adventure without forgetting to keep a good sense of camp.

Post-Scriptum:

• Taw Jackson. "Taw." Bit of an odd name, isn't it? But then, I suppose so's "Lomax" (who I'm just now realizing is also denied a first name altogether).

• I don't want to be too specific about the ending, but it's a bit Treasure of the Sierra Madre, isn't it? Or Don Rosa's Treasure of the Ten Avatars, if you will.

• I didn't mean for this to be the Christmas review; it's hardly seasonally-appropriate, I know. But I got delayed. Whatever. Merry Christmas and all that!

“Fire Works” (Or, 'Adventures in Wiki-Making')

The life of a Wikimaster is a strange thing. 

You see, I was in the process of creating pages on the $crooge McDuck Wiki relating to the obscure Duck relatives depicted in Johannes A. Grote's non-canonical 1999 version of the Duck family tree. And one of these was Daisy Duck's great-aunt Griseldis Jungerpel — a name one could very charitably translate as Griseldis O'Drake, as Jungerpel is the maiden name of Scrooge's mother in Grote's family tree, and… I daresay I've already lost most you, haven't I. 

But the point is, Griseldis was no fever dream of old Johannes; she was, instead, mentioned in the 1959 German localization of Carl Barks's Big-Top Bedlam as the original owner of what the original English script merely calls a ‘heirloom brooch’. I could not, in good conscience, create a Wiki page about Griseldis when we still didn't have one about Big-Top Bedlam, so I went to work on that, and, to do so, pulled up Four Color Comics #300 to reread the Barks tale in its original form. 

And most vintage American comics (Four Color included) include two one-pager inside-cover gags to avoid wasting space. These are usually-untitled bits of inconsequential slapstick, and so it was, knowing I wouldn't ever get the motivation to create their Wiki pages for their own sake, that I forced myself to also create them now while I was it it because of Barks. 

Yet as I prepared to write a hundred descriptive words or so on this particularly Paul Murry one-pager, it struck me that, huh, I have things to say about this. 

Not all of them good. 

So, the first thing to notice about what I have, for Wiki purposes, dubbed Fire Works, because those are the two words of INDUCKS' rather laconic English-language summary of it, and the misspelling sort of looks like a pun if you squint:

it's got no idea how to tell a joke. 

Pacing-wise, to begin with — well, Barks could do these one-pagers in half the panel-count, and really, is there any use whatsoever to that second-to-last panel of Donald thinking ‘I smell a rat’, when we already had the one directly before it? And more broadly, what sense does it even make for him to 'smell a rat', as though it's not already perfectly clear to everyone involved what has happened? How is “the large object which looks like a Roman Candle and blew up like a Roman Candle was……a Roman Candle!” a punchline? 

Right, now for a panel-by-panel dissection. 

The art's pretty solid, I must say, and this set-up of Donald in his comfy armchair reading a book reminds me a bit of Shellfish Motives, which is a good thing to be reminded of. But already all sorts of questions arise. Donald's schedule is a riddle fo the ages to begin with, but… he reads? Regularly enough that he can make these kinds of critical statements? 

This is an… abrupt way to inform us that a fuse has blown out. 

Also, since Donald is asking for a candle so that he can see to put in a new fuse, what was the point of that strange opening about him reading? One assumes that if a fuse blew out, he'd try to repair it whether or not he was doing something specifically light-based when it happened. But our writer (whoever that was) obviously free-associated that comedies about power outages and the lights going out work best if someone was reading when it happens, regardless of whether it connects to anything else. 

I did say the art was okay, but how weird is Huey here, really? Look at his hand! It looks like it belongs to the Creature of the Quack Lagoon more than anything else. 

Also, that is some quick thinking on the boys' part, right there. Unless we are meant to assume that they caused the lights to go out specifically so they could engineer these pranks?

Also also, what about this situation (save the panel-count) demands that the nephew ‘hurry up’? 

This paritcular pair of panels makes it interestingly obvious that Murry's art is here based on Al Taliaferro more than anything else, the nephew especially. These prank-happy nephews who have never heard of such a thing as "safety and restraint" do seem like the hellions who plagued Donald back in 1937 — this gag, absent the other oddities I'm currently blathering about, would have fit right at home in the original 1938 cartoon Donald's Nephews, actually. 

This, at least, is a visually impressive sequence, just radiating energy. You might think it somewhat doubtful that the force of it would be sufficient to carry Donald into the air like that, but remember that per Barks, the Ducks weigh around 10 pounds. 

(On the other hand, if Donald is such a lightweight, how is the impact of his hitting the ground strong enough to shake his… framed picture of a sunset…?… in the second panel of this sequence? Argh.)

But it just carries the point home that whoever wrote this acted as though they were storyboarding a cartoon. Speaking of which—

—that panel on the left also looks like a piece of a storyboard. The character drumming their fingers nervously in the aftermath of the chaos as their anger mounts is a mainstay of vintage cartoons. More importantly, what sense does it make for the thought bubble to read “hmm”? Surely the point of a thought bubble is to articulate thought processes which a character wouldn't actually voice. But “Hmmm” is precisely what the character would voice here. Gah. 

Oh, d'you know what else is weird? The 'candle' has gone out now, so why is there still light?

And finally:

yet again, more questions are raised than answered. Such as: why did Huey and Dewey randomly leave their caps lying there by the crate? Why did they leave the crate lying there? What are these tiny red pebbles lying between the cap and the crate? And anyway why do they have such a crate lying there? They can't have had the time to buy it in time for their practical joke, unless they sabotaged the fuses just for the purpose and had been planning this for a while, which, for such a lame (and dangerous!) joke, is a fairly poor use of their time, I should think. 

Well, that's the end of it. This was basically an exercise in writing as many things as I could about an ultimately disposable, fairly unobjectionable little thing. It's puzzlingly odd, but was never meant to be questioned; this isn't Bird-Bothered Hero material not only because the art is much nicer, but also because unlike that legendary trainwreck actually should have tried by all rights, and didn't. Fire Works, plot-wise, doesn't try, but oftentimes not even Barks tried in his one-pagers, though the Duck Master at his worst still tends to be a lot more understandable than this. 

Scattered Thoughts and Post-Scripta:

• Why are the only color here shades of red, I wonder? I get that it reduced costs not to have too many colors, but why red specifically? 

• For those wondering why my blog went cold, I was busy with another project, which I would love you to check out. But expect some more updates in the near future here. I'm back!

“The Nutcracker and the Four Realms”

Disney are really scrapping the bottom of the barrel of potential live-action remakes with this one, aren't they? Not a bad thing, mind. The Nutcracker Suite sequence in Fantasia was so aggressively impossible to turn into a live-action picture in the copy-and-paste way of Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King that the filmmakers would be forced, not just bound but forced, to come up with some creative ideas, if they had to be dragged there kicking and screaming. 

So I thought going into it.

Well… 

…oh dear. 

The thing with 2018's Nutcracker and the Four Realms is that it looks magnificent, and the world and plot-hooks are quite nice, and original, and all. The biggest complaint I have with it on paper is that the Nutcracker is an utter non-entity, whose meager relevance to the plot does not even remotely warrant his getting first billing in the title. But as a story, it's fine. 

So the synopsis is alright. Clockwork kingdom, key, mice, life-giving machine for turning toys into recognizable British actors, yes, yes, all good. 

But the script… oh, the script… I don't think I've ever seen a script quite this unfathomably incompetent. Every word that comes out of the characters' mouth is beyond clichéd, and that goes double for the "morals" the movie keeps pushing — we are in literal "all that you need is in here… and this box contains only a mirror" is a territory, folks. The pacing's also rubbish. Everything happens far too quickly; things like the Polichinelles are broughtback for the climactic battle in what is clearly meant to be one of these ‘everything from the first half of the movie comes back at the end’ kind of things, except they feel like they've just been introduced five minutes ago. Nothing has weight. Nothing has time to settle in. 

Also, for a movie pompously retitled The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, it is strangely uninterested in exploring said Four Realms; the only one we ever really see outside of brief flashbacks is the derelict Realm of Amusements. 

There is, of course, a twist villain. She's a reasonably good twist villain, mind, as these things go, but I just thought I'd throw this out there. Disney, stop with the twist villains already. That is an order. And while, as I admitted, it is well-executed, the concept of this one is just… really? It thinks it's way cleverer than it is. “Ooh, the Sugar-Plum Fairy is the villain! Betcha didn't see that coming!” Well, no, I didn't, because it's idiotic. God. 

The cast is a mixed bag. The curiously named Mackenzie Foy is what you expect from the female lead in this sort of movie; perfectly adequate; doesn't make too strong an impression either; but you can't blame her for this because the role is so very very blandly written. Keira Knightley is hammily marvelous as the Esmé Squalor-esque Sugar Plum. Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman, the two main 'name actors', are given barely enough material to make an impression, but they acquit themselves of it quite well. The same cannot be said of poor Richard E. Grant, whose role would already be a paltry cameo were he not encased in a frankly ludicrous make-up job. Jack Whitehall and Omid Djalili (as the dumbly-named guards Harlequin and Cavalier) are, meanwhile, a wholly unfunny comic duo. 

And as for our very nominal male lead Jayden Fowora-Knight (the Nutcracker, here named Phillip), well, the truth is that he's pretty damn awful. He's blander than the screenplay itself, if that's possible. He's such a forgettable slice of nothing that, as of this writing, despite being the male co-star in a 130-million-dollar Disney extravaganza, he doesn't have a Wikipedia page. There's not even a redlink on the cast list of Wikipedia's page on The Nutcracker, which, for the Wikipedia-illiterate, would indicate that the lack of the relevant page is not unnoticed and will be fixed soon. No. Nothing. No one cares enough.

Add to that the fact that James Newton Howard's score is completely clueless as to how to handle the demand to quote and riff on Tchaikovsky's original ballet suite, and so opts to do it as little as possible. 

Really, the visuals and the cleverness of the concepts (when not too impaired by the daftness of the execution) are the only things the movie can rely on. Fortunately, the concepts are clever, and the visuals are breathtaking, so watching The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is still a mostly positive experience. By God it's infuriating, though. 

Post-Scriptum:

• I am seriously wondering if they cast Richard E. Grant as the Ice King for no other reason than because they thought it would be funny for an actor famous for his "icy delivery" to play the part. If so… good try, but Steven Moffat got there before you, and did it much better. 

• The end credits are just Misty Copeland dancing to Tchaikovsky within some fancy (but minimalistic) sets and lighting, and that would have been a way better movie. 

“An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck”

Don Rosa was not the last to attempt a grand, epic biography of Scrooge McDuck, as we have seen. Well, the fact is less well-known, but neither was he the first. As Rosa himself admits, he drew considerable inspiration from a 1974 book called An Informal Biogrpahy of Scrooge McDuck, the work of one Jack L. Chalker who would go on to become a pretty successful science-fiction writer a few years down the line. I've finally obtained it for myself, and it is well worth the read, if only because it's very nicely written. 

It's quite a lovely cover, this. It obviously plays with the fact that for copyright reason — as a preface within the book itself bemoans — no actual images of Scrooge could be used to illustrate the book. In truth, I think the book was only authorized to see print because Chalker could legally claim that it was only a critical work, not a work of fiction. 

Which I must stress is a blatant lie. 

Taking its every cue from Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts' ‘Great Game’, wherein they pretend to be historians researching Holmes as a historical figure, the Informal Biography is written with the conceit that it is an in-universe biography, the work of a historian trying to document Mr McDuck based on the "secondary sources" that are the works of his official chronicler Mr Barks. 

This is delightful, not only because it spices things up, but also because it allows the book to be fallible — if you think one of Chalker's ideas about Scrooge's life is nonsense, then that's no reason to throw out the book, it just means you have identified one of the instances in which Chalker-the-character obviously didn't look hard enough for the real answers. (I'm thinking, for a particularly conspicuous example, of the extremely curious blunder that is Chalker's assumption that Huey, Dewey and Louie are the sons of Donald's brother.)

The debts this (and, consequently, the L&T) owes to Sherlock Holmes exegesis is staggering — the tone in which the narrator treats the subject of the 'biography' is precisely the same cautious, falsely-detached respect — and Chalker owns it. The chapter about Goldie literally opens with a statement that “to Scrooge, she was always The Woman”, and just from that, as controversial as DuckTales 2017's decision to write Scrooge and Goldie's relationship as a modernized version of Sherlock & Irene (well, the pop vision thereof) might be, you can see just where they get it from. 

It goes further, actually. Towards the end of Part 1, we find the following passage, riffing off Only a Poor Old Man's statement that Scrooge once made money training cormorants: 

From Australia, Scrooge made his way north, into Indochina and China itself, where he became involved in the pearl trade. While there he discovered a special affinity for birds, and trained thousands of cormorants after learning their language. His most illustrious customer was a certain aged Oriental doctor who was often seen with cormorants in the years after—they became sort of a trademark. Later on he discovered that the doctor used cormorants trained by Scrooge for nefarious purposes, and was instrumental in the solution of the Adventure of the Trained Cormorants which, because of its unsatisfactory solution — the doctor escaped — and the illustrious reputations of all three men involved, still awaits elaboration in The Whole Art of Detection. 

In other words, Chalker is outright declaring that his Scrooge exists in the same universe as Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, and specifically as the Great Game-rooted pastiche collection The Whole Art of Detection. And further, he is very very strongly implying that Scrooge McDuck and Sherlock Holmes once teamed up to fight Doctor Fu Manchu. 

…now, my good friend Joe Torcivia (among others) is notorious for slipping titles to nonexistent "bonus chapters" of the Life and Times of $crooge McDuck in his Disney scripts, and more power to him, but you can't beat that as unseen past Scrooge adventures go. You just can't. 

So anyway, having acknowledged where this book came from, there remains to analyze what it went to. Because it is not merely the precursor to Rosa's L&T, but rather its template. One doesn't want to diminish Don Rosa's own scholarly work, and I'm sure he made sure to pore over all those Barks references once again on his own power before he worked out his own version of Scrooge's biography, but… the fact is that the Chalker version of events lines up astonishingly well with the Rosa rendition. There are, of course, a few differences here and there (in The Empire-Builder from Calisota, Scrooge uses his damnably slow car to reach Duckburg; in the Informal Biography, he buys it shortly after settling in Duckburg), but for every minor difference there are identical leaps of logic that one cannot call coincidences. 

This, by the way, accounts for the suspicious similarities between the L&T and the DuckTales episode Once Upon a Dime, which were big enough that Rosa's protests of never having watched it failed to convince. The DT writers were borrowing from the same source, is all. The biggest smoking gun between Rosa and DT (the identical conflation of Scrooge's own Mississippi days with the 1870 steamboat race between his Uncle Pothole and Porker Hogg) is actually a Chalker invention. 

There are, of course, also some marked differences. Chalker is reluctant to make stuff up, when it isn't ludicrous three-way literary crossovers, and so Scrooge's parents and sisters are nonentities. Borrowing from the classic Sherlock Holmes vision of a restrictive canon rather than expansive one, he also limits his sources to stories written and drawn by Barks, featuring Scrooge, and printed in Uncle Scrooge — that is to say that Scrooge backups in other books are null-and-void even if they're by Barks. Only somewhat less strange is his exclusion of the early Big Threes of Barks's Scrooge, Christmas on Bear Mountain, Voodoo Hoodoo and The Old Castle's Secret, which he holds to be 'obviously apocryphal' due to Scrooge's characterization. 

This? Nah. Never happened. Totally irrelevant

to the Carl Barks canon. Don't be ridiculous.

And, much like with Rosa, Chalker has his little exceptions and quid pro quos. Like Rosa, he lets in the Vic Lockman-written The Invisible Intruder — and his stammered justifications for this 'crime' are, I think, trying too hard: it's a Carl Barks-drawn story where we see Scrooge earn his #1 Dime, of sodding course you're not going to overlook it when writing a biography of Scrooge. 

Way weirder than this very forgivable sidestep is the fact that, and for the life of me I cannot figure this out, this random Tony Strobl four-pager from 1964 (one which introduces a non-Goldie love interest for Scrooge, no less) makes the cut. I mean, I, myself, am delighted, because my personal Duck canon is a gigantic jungle that includes things like the DuckTales plush commercial from 1986 and the unlicensed Eastern European comic-strip where Mickey rivaled with Popeye for the affections of Betty Boop. In rhyme. …But in Chalker's draconian Canon, it's a bit jarring, is all. 

So at any rate, this means that all the stuff about Castle McDuck isn't in Chalker — for Chalker, it's the intact Castle in Old Castle's Secret that is the aberration, and the ruins seen in Hound of the Whiskervilles that is the real thing; whereas for Rosa it's the reverse — and neither, of course, is the Bombie the Zombie plotline. 

Amusingly, Chalker is on the other hand less quick to dismiss Scrooge's offhand mentions of improbable deals he made in the past: "that time he sold wind to Dutch windmills" is absolutely included in the Informal Biography's timeline of Scrooge's life. It almost saddens me that his claim that he learned to speak Bengali "when he was selling maps to Marco Polo" stretches Chalker's willing suspension of disbelief just a bit too far, I'd have loved to see him try to work that out. (It's not as though you couldn't imagine Scrooge getting embroiled with H. G. Wells's Time Machine, could you, Mr Sherlock Holmes vs Fu Manchu?)

The real big difference between the Scrooge and Don Rosa versions of Scrooge's life, however, is not in those details, but rather in the fact that Scrooge is already a millionaire when he arrives in the Klondike. Faced with the facts that Scrooge dug for diamonds in the Transvaal, and an offhand mention of his owning a diamond mine there in the present day, Chalker concludes that Scrooge successfully struck it rich there and then, and only continued living the sourdough life for a few years more because adventure is just in his blood. 

Which… granted, it seems anticlimatic and weird and Wrong that Scrooge would make his money anywhere but in the Klondike (and Chalker tries to preserve some dignitiy for Scrooge's Dawson City days by declaring that this was where he became a billionaire), but on the other hand, one of the most questionable aspects of Don Rosa's L&T has always been the almost Donald levels of bad luck Scrooge is required to endure so that he can simultaneously not come across as incompetent for missing his ride to wealth several times over, and still not get rich in any of his adventures before the big one in White Agony Creek.

And after all, Scrooge is still traveling the world and adventuring in the 'present day', even though he's a billionaire many times over. No reason many of his "past" adventures couldn't have been in the same spirit, I suppose. 

After wrapping up its biography of Past Scrooge, the book interestingly tries to hack together a working timeline of Barks's present-day Duckburg, most strikingly with the Beagle Boys. It mixes and matches and reorders freely, notably coming up with the amusing idea that the Beagle Boys' very first confrontation with Scrooge was Seven Cities of Cibola, a notion which is obviously wrong but also strangely fascinating. This section includes chapters on Scrooge, on his more morally dubious actions, and on the "big three" of his rogues gallery — the Beagle Boys, Magica De Spell and Flintheart Glomgold, in that order — followed by a rundown of other villains. Interestingly, Snake McViper (the Cattle King incarnation of the Pig-Faced Villain) is construed to be a member of the McViper clan from Mystery of the Ghost Town Railroad, even though those McVipers were dognoses, instead of being more reasonably rationalized as an alias of good old Argus McSwine. 

This is also the book from which Don Rosa plucked his idea that Scrooge, Donald and HDL remained so alert and unchanged throughout Barks's stories (which must surely span several years) due to having taken a sip of the Fountain of Youth in That's No Fable!. Chalker, who, unlike Don Rosa, doesn't compress the Ducks' timeline into just the 1950's and accepts that Barks's stories took place over the 25-year period in which he wrote them, goes farther with his notion than Rosa ever dared to, and posits that in most of their appearances, Huey, Dewey and Louie are no longer children at all, but simply adults in unaging childlike bodies, accounting for their unusually mature attitude. It's a vaguely blasphemous notion, but as a nutjob fan theory I think I kinda love it. 

So… that's the Informal Biography. Vaguely infuriating in all sorts of ways (not least its tiresome annotations system), but it is the immediate missing link between Arthur Conan Doyle and Don Rosa, and the importance of that cannot be underestimated. Plus, it's a fun read. As fun as the L&ToSMD? Probably not (except for that bit about Dr Fu Manchu, which, but holy hell I want to read that). But fun. 

Post-Scriptum

• As you can see from the cover above, the title is An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck. Why every second-hand dealer on the Internet refers to it as just Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck, I cannot tell you. 

“Two Rode Together”

John Ford! 1961! James Stewart! Wheee!……

This is 1961's Two Rode Together, a film John Ford made, though I am informed by Wikipedia that he didn't particularly want to, based on a novel by Will Cook adapted for the screen by Frank Nugent. Like many a western, its title doesn't connect to anything in more than a superficial way, and one of the main things you'll notice about it is that it's not as full of "flaring violence" as the above poster would have you believe, not by far. In fact, there isn't really a single action sequence in the whole picture. There's a three-way fistfight, but it's played squarely as a comedy moment. Otherwise, it's just tension all the way down — lots of "shhh!" and pointing guns and calling out bluffs, where no triggers are every pulled. 

Extremely representative of what I mean is how the movie builds up a Comanche warrior called Stone Calf as the athletic bad guy who's obviously going to have to be reckoned with before movie's end, probably after he kills the more level-headed Comanche chief our heroes have been dealing with, allowing for a climactic action sequence… except that buildup pops like a balloon when he tries to attack the protagonists' camp alone and is immediately shot, er, Stone dead, if you'll pardon the turn of phrase. 

The other really surprisingly thing about this film is how dark it is in its preoccupations, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the main character. Marshall Guthrie McCabe is played by James Stewart, except you could not be more wrong if you tried to make assumptions based on that fact, because Stewart is playing (masterfully) against type as a pretty nasty piece of work; one who mellows before movie's end, obviously, but his is a chattier, more openly sarcastic and cynical version of a character more often associated with John Wayne. No, not even that; in any other movie, McCabe would be the villain. When else has the corrupt town marshall who sells weapons to Indians and alcohol to soldiers been the hero in a John Ford movie? Just to stress how unusually despicable Stewart's character is for a hero, Richard Widmark co-stars as a straight-laced, perfectly virtuous co-hero. Mind you, being despicable never stops him from being a charismatic protagonist, because James Stewart is just that good.

Widmark's quite good too, though he's playing much less compellingly unusual a figure. Actually, everyone with a character of any importance is quite good. 

The Comanches are represented… curiously. Stewart's McCabe has a long monologue about how horrible they are, but, of course, it's McCabe, so the movie certainly doesn't seem to agree with all he says (if nothing else, McCabe is simultaneously the guy who trades with the Comanches). On the other hand, Running Wolf is pretty stereotypical and one-note in a way wholly consistent with McCabe's diatribe. So… I don't know. It's certainly not the most progressive portrayal of Native Americans to be found in classic western, let aloen something that could be shown today without public outcry, but it's not distractingly awful or anything, if you keep in mind that McCabe's opinion on things are sour by definition and should not be trusted. 

The Comanches, of course, are not played by actual Native Americans, because they never are. The actors have names like Woody Strode and Henry Brandon. That being said, Strode is an African-American, which is something; and Brandon's casting as Quanah Parker is actually more historically accurate than casting a German-American as a Comanche chief might otherwise be, because Parker was the son of a mixed marriage between a Comanche and a European woman. (Clever, then, to pick him as the voice of the Comanches for this story, considering its premise. The movie never points it out, leaving it as a nugget for the audience to find out or not.)

It is, besides, a stunningly well-made movie, because of course it is. John Ford. I highly recommend it, so long, again, as you're not too bothered by the somewhat schizophrenic portrayl of the Comanches.

Post-Scriptum: 

• …What the hell kind of name is Stone Calf, anyway?!

“The Enemy of the Daleks”

…or Enemy of the Daleks, as it is more commonly, but also incorrectly, referred to.

This audio story from 2009 is the first Big Finish effort we'll be looking at; it features mainstays Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred, once again reprising their roles of the Seventh Doctor and of Ace, respectively. Big Finish may quite possibly never have gotten off the ground if not for those two's stunning willingness to return to their old characters at the drop of a hat, whether or not the production has a license — Aldred put in an appearance in the low-budget Internet parody series Bitesize Who just a few years ago, for example. 

At any rate, they're very good, and in general The Enemy of the Daleks' cast is quite good (if nothing else, Nicholas Briggs as the Daleks, need I say more?). So is its sound design, though the Kiseibya's voices are not as intelligible as I think they're meant to be.

Now the writing… ah. Hm. Well, there's this divide in Who fandom — though it is somewhat arbitrary, as has been well-argued elsewhere — between the ‘frock’ and ‘gun’ approaches. The former embraces the beautiful silliness of a story about a daft old man moving through time and space in a police box and whose greatest enemies are pepperpots who sound like parrots with laryngitis, and are named after the “frock coat” worn by the Doctor (not that it's actually a frock coat in any incarnation past the first, any fashion enthusiast will be happy to tell you, but that's neither here nor there). The latter, whose totem is, ahem, obvious, prefer darker, more mature stories about war and moral dilemmas and totalitarian dystopias. 

The Enemy of the Daleks is an extremely gun story (…just look at the cover!), is the thing, and I just don't like gun stories very much. 

The central conceit is that this Japanese scientist in the future, while humanity is at war with the Daleks, creates a new and equally monstrous species to act as predators for the Daleks, finally kicking them off the top of the food chain that they otherwise occupy. These monsters, uneuphoniously called the Kiseibya, eat flesh in larval state and metal in adult form, making the Daleks the ideal food-source for them. The first sign that the Professor cannot control them is, however, when they begin eating all his scientific equipment, and it's clearly played for drama, even though, guys, this here is a mad scientist who created metal-eating monsters and is now upset that they're eating all his stuff. This is a joke. A good one too. Own up to that. 

The other problem is that, in presenting a “History tragically repeats itself” scenario, the story is trying very hard to be a thematic sequel to Genesis of the Daleks — a thematic sequel where the Doctor actually crosses the wires and exterminates the Daleks/Kiseibya before they can escape into the universe. Fair enough, but Bishop isn't actually up to the task of exploring the moral ramifications of this decision; in fact, the Doctor's main reason for going through with it appears to be that he has known all along that a great atrocity must be committed on this day in this place, and so It Is His Destiny to do this, and he knows it, and so he does, and GAWD NO. The fact that the characterization of McCoy's Doctor, as time went on, was increasingly swallowed up by the “machiavellian chessmaster who knows in advance everything that must be done, and does them out of a grim sense of duty” idea, is usually trumpeted as a good thing, but rather than making him epic and complex, I always felt it just robbed him of any real characterization.

Oh well. It's not boring at all, but it's all a bit too grim and gritty for me. 

Post-Scriptum:

• Not entirely sure what the point of the local human army detachment being a “Valkyrie Unit” entirely composed of women is, whether in- and out-of-universe. It's just there, a vaguely nonsensical detail in a story so very desperate to be taken seriously. …And come on, if you're going to stick Ace with a whole batallion of other trigger-happy female soldiers, you had bloody well better do something with it.

• This was my first exposure to companion Hex (I am not listening to the Big Finish audios in anything like chronological order) and, I mean, he's okay, I guess? I don't see much to tell him apart from Rory for now — yes, Hex actually came first, but that's neither here nor there. I also wish that just for the hell of it, it was Hex from Discworld as a companion. I don't even know what that would look like, but it sure would be funny. 

“Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth”

…so the ironic thing is that it'll probably be a while before I watch the actual, televised version of this story, seeing how I've already watched two other takes on the same plot and am getting pretty sick of it. The first version, of course, was the excellent bit of fun that is the Peter Cushing movie, which, in its sole greatest flaw, bears the syntaxically-nightmarish title of Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.. (All the rights words are there, but it just doesn't………!) 

The second, and subject matter of the present review, is the Terrance Dicks novelization of the same book, from 1977 — well, no, not even that; what I actually got was the 2009 audiobook read by William Russell (Ian Chesterton in the TV series, way, way back) and Nicholas Briggs (the latest and greatest of Dalek voice artists). 

I could recite the plot by heart at this point, but for the benefit of those not currently suffering from Dalek Invasion of Earth overdose: after numerous travels through time and space with 1960's English schoolteachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, the two runaway Time Lords known as the Doctor and Susan English, respectively, finally manage to land the TARDIS in what appears to be London, where they have been trying to return Ian and Barbara since the second episode. Unfortunately, it soon turns out that this is 22nd century London, and in ruins at that, following many long years of Dalek occupation. 

For indeed, the Daleks, last seen being karmically exterminated by their ancestral enemies the Thals at the end of The Dead Planet, are back with a vengeance. After meeting up with the local resistance, the TARDIS travellers are soon separated and all sorts of things happen as they trudge about the devastated England trying to figure out what the Daleks want on this planet and how to stop them. 

Notable secondary figures in this plot are the laughably-named Robomen, a first draught of the Cybermen (being robotized, emotionless humans) who serve as the Daleks' henchmen; Tyler, a resistance leader who has lost the use of his legs, but not the will to think up a giant bomb with which to rid the planet of the Daleks' filth; and David, a handsome young fighter in the resistance, who develops into Susan's love interest. (In both the televised episode and the audiobook, his last name is Campbell, but I'm told that in the printed version of the novelization, his name was, rather hilariously, David Cameron.) 

So how does it fare? 

Well, for a start, four hours and ten minutes is way too long for this story, which was perfectly condensed as the hour-and-a-half Cushing feature. But that can't really be helped, and I know there is much, much worse (some Doctor Who audiobooks push on 10 hours! Ten blinking hours!). 

As an audio product it's otherwise quite good. William Russell was always a bit too deadpan for my taste as Ian, but he's perfect as a narrator; he doesn't sound much like himself anymore, it must be said, making the times he's reading out Ian's dialogue somewhat eerie; but on the plus side, he's very good at voicing the First Doctor. He's not limiting himself to an impression of his late co-star, not by far; he couldn't do that if he wanted to, because Terrance Dicks took many liberties with the original teleplay when turning it into a novel. 

If nothing else, the Doctor's farewell speech to Susan is very different, and Russell's delivery of it, accordingly, couldn't be further from Hartnell's serene “one day, yes… one day I shall come back”; the corresponding line in the Dicks script (simply “One day, I'll come back!”) is angrier here, as if he's scolding Susan for doubting that he would. 

Aside from the weirdness inherent in an old man voicing Barbara or Susan, there is one weird bit that doesn't quite work, though; the Robomen's voices are described by Dicks as “slurred”, and Russell took that, I think, a bit too much to heart. They don't sound like zombies, they sound drunk. 

Meanwhile, Nicholas Briggs is predictably awesome as the various Daleks, bringing his full range into it, bless him; it's not that the original voices were bad (1960's Dalek voices, whether on the small or big screen, are the best non-Briggs Dalek voices, in my opinion), but Briggs is an outright wizard. At the drop of a hat, he is the Daleks, and that is because he gets them; as he has explained, when he voices the Daleks, he's not voicing emotionless robots, he's voicing three-dimensional people — it's just that those people happen to be inordinately awful, perpatually-angry little people. Hence he is convincingly confused or vainglorious or angry, without ever forgetting the all encompassing irrational hatefulness lurking beneath their every dark throught. 

The sound design is great; the music, where there is some, is fitting, though a bit forgettable; it's certainly no patch on Bill McGuffie's fantastic score to the Peter Cushing film, which contains, among other things, a marvelously energetic theme song, and one of my favorite pieces of movie music ever, Fugue For Thought. 

What of the script? Well, it does what it can with the meandering plot; certainly it conveys the apocalyptic scope quite well, and while no character is particularly deep, they're all believable people. Dicks is inordinately good at setting up moods, better than he is at thinking up people; thus things are creepy when they need to be, or majestic, or tense, or thrilling. The opening line “Through the ruin of a city stalked the ruin of a man” is justifiedly famous. 

The story itself, for which, of course, we cannot blame Dicks, is as I said needlessly meandering and needlessly reliant on Susan twisting her ankle at convenient times of the plot, but the sheer fun of a premise like “the Daleks have taken over the Earth” usually makes up for it, and the worldbuilding of what life is like under the Daleks for the resistance forces and for the mining slaves is actually quite well-thought-out. 

Dicks is quite good at foreshadowing the Susan/David romance, but not so much the Doctor's decision to leave her to live with him. The way the televised story made a story arc out of the Doctor's slow realization that she wasn't his little girl any more may have been a bit ungraceful at times (“jolly good smack-bottom” indeed), but it was something; here there is no trace of it; we spend most of the story with no insight into the Doctor's view of Susan, nor any signs that he's getting on in years in a way that would justify her determination that she needs to stay with him to take care of him. Then suddenly, we're told (in quite a hamfisted fashion) by David that “he knew all along”. Well, okay, jolly good, why shouldn't he have? What have we discovered exactly? 

Oh, and another failing, simultaneously very small and quite major: Dicks made the very questionable decision to refer to the mining-cart in which Ian gets trapped for most of the climax as a “giant bucket”. It is much, much harder than anyone in the production expected to take seriously the travails of a man trapped in what an old British actor keeps calling a “giant bucket” with the utmost seriousness. 

All in all, I enjoyed Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth, but if you're not a dedicated Who fan, there are probably much quicker, much funnier ways to experience the story, starting with the Cushing film. (Unless, of course, you are visually impaired, in which case, yes, I'm not an expert, but this seems like a pretty fun audiobook.)

Post-Scriptum:

• An oft-repeated bit of trivia that non-Whovians in the audience may not be aware of: the cover of the novelization, here reused for the CD jacket, was drawn with the Peter Cushing flick as a reference, rather than the TV episode; as a result, the Dalek spaceship is modeled on that in the film rather than the one in the episode itself. Though it's endlessly cut that the Daleks are the only A-list aliens in popular culture who genuinely, unironically use flying saucers as their primary mode of transportation, there's no denying that the hovership in question is a much more interesting bit of design-work. 

• Also about the CD jacket: that Roboman, from this angle, looks fainty like he's about to ask me if I'm his mummy. 

“Cranford”

Where have I been? I wonder too. But among other things, I've been watching more of those awesome BBC period dramas. Including 2007's Cranford, a mashup adaptation of three of Elizabeth Gaskell's novels, penned by one Heidi Thomas. It was excellent watching, and beyond that, I am fast running out of things to say about BBC period dramas based on A-list 19th century British literature (and Gaskell, from what I've read of her, belongs on the same list as Charles Dickens, in a heartbeat). So let me run through the things I say every time that isn't Vanity Fair:

• The actors are uniformly excellent and a perfect mix of old and new fances — here we have Imelda Staunton and Michael Gambon in recurring roles, which incidentally fills our “every BBC period drama will have at least one (1) actor with a role in the Harry Potter films” quota, as well as Judi Dench, Jonathan Pryce, Jodie Whittaker, and, of all people, Tom Hiddleston (who's actually quite good); and we have some younger faces who nevertheless succeed at being excellent; and we have old reliables like Jim Carter, Francesca Annis and Julia McKenzie who aren't household names but frankly deserve to be. 

• The script is full of wit and true human sentiment and neither too slow nor too quick; it bears deep criticial analysis if you care for it (there's very interesting dilemmas there about the coming of modernity) but doesn't beat you over the head with a hammer of moral superiority. It succeeds beautifully in carrying over Gaskell's stunning handle on humanity.
• [Related: the adaptation is a very clever mix of three different Gaskell novels, and while this does at times jar just a little bit (the medical-drama bits are operating on an entirely different system of priorities from the properly Cranfordian bits; there's more than a bit of whiplash when the stakes of one subplot are life-and-death for a recurring child character who's caught the croup, and the other is whether Judi Dench will swallow her pride and deign set up a tea shop, you know?), you certainly wouldn't guess that those were originally unrelated stories without reading the Wikipedia page]

• It's beautifully shot. I lack the technical knowledge to go more into detail than that, but it is. The angles, the lighting especially, the choice of locations make it into a marvelous experience on a purely aesthetic level. 

• The music's quite good, with a theme song that's pleasantly quirky and unhummable. 

Look, there is nothing else to say. Go watch it. Also read the original Cranford if you like, it's a brilliant little book. 

Ye Inevitable Olde Post-Scriptum:

• The last episode of Return to Cranford (the two-part Christmas-special epilogue in 2009, which I watched alongside the main series and consider more or less of apiece with it) ends with a cameo-ish appearance by… well, I won't spoil it. But the identity of the man, and the circumstances of it, are absolutely the last thing you'd expect as the conclusion of an Elizabeth Gaskell-based BBC Christmas drama, let me tell you. I have no clue how they even got him. He's predictably excellent, mind you, if you can get over the shock of his sheer presence. 

• Bessie is one of my favorite recurring gags in a BBC period drama, ever. 

• Oh yeah, Jodie Whittaker's in this, I should probably say something. Well, she's very good at being cute, flustered and slightly out-of-her-depth. I see no evidence that she has in her that which critics keep finding missing in her Doctor, though, namely the slightest drop of toughness. Not that you'd expect it to come out in such a part, you understnad; Peggy Bell shouldn't be in any way, shape, or form, tough. It would go against the whole point of her. But while it confirms that Whittaker is a good actress, it does little convince me that she has very much in the way of range. 

“Alice the Whaler”

There is no cliché more annoying in the annals of Disney history than It all started with a mouse, because it really didn't.

…No, wait, scratch that, there is no cliché more annoying in the annals of Disney history than starting an article about pre-1928 Disney by refuting the It all started with a mouse dogma. But then again, here were are. So.

For those who do not know, the first Walt Disney cartoon was actually a hugely uninspiring animated newsreel created for a backwater cinema theater belonging to some fellow by the name of Newman. Only the pilot of that series remains, under the title of Newman Laugh-o-Gram. After his contract with Newman ended, Walt Disney took the Laugh-o-Gram brand to greener pastures and created a cycle of off-kilted fairy tale adaptations under this title. Among the characters developed therein was an adventurous black cat, later known as Julius. 

Then things took a turn for the ambitious as Disney's growing band of ragtag artists took on the massively more ambitious project of the Alice Comedies, a series where a live-action girl by the name of Alice traveled about in an animated landscape. The series reintroduced Julius the Cat in its third episode (Alice's Spooky Adventure; watch it here), beginning the long-running tradition of shared characters as Disney jumped from one series to another — Julius tied the Laugh-o-Grams to Alice, and Peg-Leg Pete, introduced in the 15th episode of Alice will later brige the gap with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Mickey Mouse. And if you want to keep playing that game, the Skeletons from Episode 1 of Silly Symphonies recurred in the Mickey short The Haunted House , though in this case the timeline is flipped. Not to mention, of course, that it's a fairly straightforward line from Mickey to Donald to DuckTales. 

But I digress. The first few Alice episodes played with the notion that the animated segments would just be dreams or tall tales of Alice, and had bookend segments in live-action; while these segments are pretty darn fun in their own right, it was clearly the cartoon bits that people wanted to see more of, so the framing devices were jettisoned pretty quickly to just cut to Alice having wacky adventures in the cartoon setting, whose reality was no longer in doubt. 

I am a big fan of the Alice Comedies — not only is the animation as good and inventive as anything Disney did back in the 1920's and early 1930's (there is an imagination in the early black-and-white stuff that very much rivals what Warner Bros. was doing by the mid-1930's), but the various child actresses to have portrayed Alice are some of the best of their kind. For lack of serious dramatic moments to examine I can't truly name them among the very best of child actors, but there is no denying that Virginia Davis is one of my favorite child actresses of all times. And Dawn O'Day, Margie Gay and Lois Hardwick were no slouches either (with the latter perhaps coming closest of the lot to recapturing the same charming magic as Virginia Davis). 

What's more, Alice and Julius have much more chemistry as costars than many comedy duos from the era, or at least, a much more interesting kind of chemistry. You don't have “the dumb, slow one” and “the long-suffering wily one”, or even a duo of fools; instead, Julius is a goof, but more in the way of an overconfident boy than an idiot (his age is never clarified, but the fact that he's just as much of a kid as Alice is, I think, enshrined by the fact that clearly we're not supposed to feel weird about it in Spooky Adventure when he proposes to her on a whim), while Alice has more spunk but less courage, and is the more inventive one of the two, acting towards Julius kind of like a more cunning younger sibling who feels responsible for her silly big brother, but doesn't want to let on to him that she's the one taking care of him rather than the other way around. 

But good things sometimes, sadly, come to an end. (I would have said ‘always’ as the proverb requires, but Mickey Mouse's about as old and it certainly hasn't.) So today, after this gaudily long intro, let's have look at the last Alice Comedies short — or, rather, the last available one, because the actual last short in the series is unavailable to the public and the one before that is missing form the archives. 

From 1927, Alice the Whaler is one of the Lois Hardwick picture, not that you could tell, for she is not in it very much. Jumping right into the criticism, this is the big issue of this third-to-last hurrah for the Alice and Julius duo, namely that they have their movies stolen from under them. From the title, this is supposed to be about Alice going on a whaling trip, presumably with Julius as first mate; and nominally that's what this is, except that what you'd expect to take up the whole cartoon, namely the actual business of Julius and Alice whaling, starts less than one minute before the end and is left without a resolution. Julius is on-screen for all of 10 seconds, and does not, at any point, interact with Alice,fares slightly better; she gets something like, oh, 30 seconds. Yes, they are 30 delightful seconds of Lois Hardwick hamming up as she alternates between dancing a sailor's jig and pretending to be Captain Ahab, but there is no getting around the fact that 30 seconds of a six-minute cartoon is a pretty slim share for what is supposed to be (and clearly has it in her to be) the main character. 

That's 40 seconds accounted for of the slim 6:14 runtime — what else? Not very much of substance as you'll have gathered. The crew of varyingly-anthropomorphized animals goof off and laugh at each other's silliness. Some of these gags are good (there is a great bit with a wholly non-anthropomorphic goat who, presumably thanks to experience in mountainous areas, remains perfectly balanced as it stands on the deck, no matter how many times the ship threatens to flip over), mind you, but it's all very insubstantial. 

The most interesting thing is no doubt that three characters are given particular attention in all fo this; one is a monkey whom the animators clearly liked way more than I do, but the others are a cohort of mischievous mice wearing shorts and nothing else, and a fat bully of a cat, the ship's cook. It's hard — nay, impossible — to look at it and not see shades of Steamboat Willie; if we accept David Gerstein's argument that Steamboat Willie was not meant to reimagine the thus-far ursine Peg-Leg Pete as a cat, but rather feature a separate “cat bully” character called Terrible Tom, then it might be worth it to consider the hypothesis that ‘Tom’ debuted much earlier than usually reckoned. 

All this makes Alice the Whaler an extremely typical 1920's cartoon, and an extremely poor send-off for the brilliantly inventive Alice Comedies, sidelining the main characters as it does; but a typical 20's cartoon is still a nice enough watch if you've got five minutes, and it does feature a strange glimpse of the future. And also Lois Hardwick dancing a sailorman's jig, and guys, I'm telling you, she's adorable. So go on then! Scroll back up and watch it!…

Post-Scriptum: 

• …Unless you prefer to forego the modern Alexander Rannie rescoring and go with the earlier 1930's Raytone Films rescoring. I linked to the Rannie version earlier because the picture quality (and, of course, sound quality, on a purely technical level) was better, but this is the more period-accurate one, certainly. Both orchestrations have their strengths; take your pick. 

• I didn't address the obviously-problematic-to-modern-ears matter of the story's being about, well, whaling. That's because the cartoon itself doesn't care very much about being about whaling; it's just an excuse to put the characters on the boat. It's true that some harm does come to a whale (and a mother at that) in the last thirty seconds, though. Pretty nasty stuff, but then again, this is a series where in Pete's debut, Julius had his tail cut off with a sword while Pete himself ended up skewered on a big metal rod cast adrift at sea. I think the whale would have been fine if the series had lasted long enough for it to make a return appearance.

• It has recently occurred to me that Alice Comedies' being in the public domain means Pete probably should be too, if only in his bear design. Hmmm. 

• It has further occurred to me that combining said public-domain-ness of the series and my griping about the lack of a proper Alice finale, the world is ripe for me to write an achingly nostalgia-filled novel where an adult Alice reunites with Julius and they return to Spookville where they first met to fight bad guys together. This is no joke, folks, I'm gonna write this someday, and it's going to be great.