Themepunk Roundup: The Scratchblood Comeback

 Happy Hallow, as I guess today is! Above is not a picture of Hallowe'en. I have not been working here over Hallowe'en. God knows what's happened to the poor, brave souls who are. The work WhatsApp currently reads like the transcription of a black box. Lois has lost a finger, and I'm writing this on the train to York. I only hope they forgive my abandoning them.

“Why, to the North Po- to Whitechap- to London Bridge, of course! This is the Polar Exp- the Ten Bell- the Star Inn!”

 When my job as a conductor on the Mid-Norfolk Polar Express ended in December, I knew I wanted the New Year to be, above all else, one in which I continued to play people who carry a hurricane lamp. No, I wanted to continue doing improvisation-friendly, site-specific shift work with a regular band of friends as I wrote last post, and the London Bridge Experience was my first themepunk gig of 2024. (I am committed to trying to make "themepunk" a thing. Sorry, it's my blog.) 

 

 

London Bridge! History!

 

 It was a return to Tooley Street, and to reading on the floor between shows, and writing your own script if you wanted to just as the London Dungeon had let you do when it was the rival across the road. It was also a return to painting myself a better jawline and cheekbones.

 Look at this dashing rake! Who needs appetite supressants? Compare the portrait above taken when I started work at the LBE this February, to one below of me posing next to a stuffed tapir in Bedlam at the Dungeons in 2007, and you’ll see full rejuvenation was achieved. The dead don't age (although my phones seem to have got worse).

 

 The LBE used some of the pumped odours too – and you know what that does to a pysche –  and even some of the tunes: ducking out of Fleshmongers, past the giant spiders and through the labyrinth of killer clowns to check on my microwaved Shanghai rice in the green room, I’d hear the same plainsong which used to play on the steps to the boat ride a decade and a half ago…

 There were differences too, of course: old Horror posters on the wall as you enter, which made me feel more at home than ever, real swords and a fake Viking longboat, chainsaws, Romans, a wall of broken dolls, and the fact this place is genuinely underground (I turned my flash on one day, and you don’t get gastropodinous limestone arteries like this in County Hall...)

 Everyone there works their arse off as well, like they grew up through Covid or something. Physically, verbally, chemically, no two actors share a superpower. I think it’s the only job on which I’ve lost my voice – bloody Vikings – which is another reason I've been taking it a bit easier. so, okay, the dead do age. But, readers... work with people who work their arse off. I don't mean losing a finger. I mean, say: okay, between bouts of bursting through a blood-drenched shower curtain, for example, Sam's at his laptop in the green room, putting together something like this beautifully simple, one-shot unnerver below. Enjoy! There’s Jess and Preston in the bushes too. God, I hope they're okay.

 

PinonononoNO!

 Just as Autumn was beginning, sitting in a festoon-lit beer garden on the South Bank, I got to thinking about Pinocchio, and about how much of my adulthood seemed to have been devoted to exactly the life choices he'd been told to avoid. To showbiz and hokum. I didn't know the original book very well though, so I then decided to text Gemma Brockis, who'd once made a touring adaptation with Silvia Mercuriali in a car, and ask her what she thought Pinocchio was originally, actually about?

 Gemma answered that originally, actually the story had ended with Pinocchio getting hanged. Carlo Collodi only added the blue fairy and whale-based redemption arc after the success of his initial serial prompted its expansion into a whole book. She also said it was all tied into the Risorgimento. What was that? The unification of Italy. Collodi was apparently deeply concerned with the path his new country would take, and was convinced that education was the key to its prosperity. So, wait, was Pinocchio Italy? Totally, Gemma answered. I dimly remembered a live action television adaptation from my childhood, and decided when I got home to see if it was online. It was. Here's a taste.

 

 Nightmarish. As most live action adaptations of Pinocchio seem to be. That fox at the top of this post is in it too. Want the whole thing? Both episodes? 

 Here!

 

  "What a horrible thing, Simon, why would you share this?" 

 Well, I don''t know, look, sorry, but last night I saw Netflix's new "Pinocchio" – a film Guillermo Del Toro apparently says he has wanted to make for "as long as he can remember" –  and I think that might be even worse. At least the old BBC adaptation is nightmarishly bad. Despite its many nods to Frankenstein and the inclusion of Mussolini, the Del Toro version isn't even that. One of the problems might be that Del Toro said he "wanted to deviate from the original book’s themes of obeying authority by making his Pinocchio virtuous for questioning the rules and forging his own set of morals." But he doesn't, and when Pinocchio finds Gepetto in the stomach of a whale, it's not because he spent the last act of the story searching for him, but because he inexplicably and fortuitously was sent flying out of a fascist military academy by a dropped bomb, which maybe makes the film sound more fun than it is. I promise it's not fun.

 

 I'd also suggest that if you don't like the story of Pinocchio – whatever that is – don't adapt it. I don't care that Mark Kermode gave this film five stars. Well, that's a lie, obviously I care. If anything I care more about this film's reception than the film itself. It actually made me want to watch the Zemeckis version to see how that could possibly be worse, although as summarised by the excellent Ryan George below, that also seems to share quite a few of the Netflix version's narrative malfunctions. Don't watch the Del Toro adaptation, is really all I've come on here to say, quite spitefully, I don't know, you might love it. But if you really want to watch a terrible Pinocchio adaptation this holiday, dim the lights, press "play" above, and let the screaming start.

 

I Saw "Soul" and Realised Where You Can Find Straight Lines in Nature.

  Sort of spoilers ahead for Soul.

 "I-stroke-we have been given many names..." Twitter's just reminded me, it was four years ago today that the first of Time Spanner's two episodes were broadcast (still hearable here, shush). I've already written a little about the fug I got into trying to decide exactly what to call Belinda Stewart-Wilson's pan-dimensional inhabitant of the Fons et Origo, or "Heaven". Producer Gareth decided upon "Angel", which made a lot of sense, but did risk ruling out the possibility she might be God. I was tickled therefore, and probably a little jealous, when I came to watch Soul, and saw that its own dimensionally difficult inhabitants of an Afterlife-cum-Source-of-all-Inspiration had managed to cut through all this theological faff by just calling each other "Jerry". I also liked that the Jerrys were composed of a single line. If you're going to try to visualise a non-religious Heaven, mathematics seems a pleasing place to start, and I spent quite a bit of the film trying to work out why (beyond the cuteness of bureaucracy).

 

In 1887, B. W. Betts tried to model the evolution of human psychology through pure geometry, although he maybe didn't try that hard. (More here).

 

 Paradise is another word for Garden... I'd also just been rewatching The Crown*, and remembered how Prince Charles, nosing around his new estate in Highgrove, had said "there are no straight lines in Nature." But if that's the case, I suddenly thought, how do you know where something will land when you drop it?  Thanks to gravity, if we could perceive the world in four dimensions, we'd see that Nature is actually full of straight lines. And ellipses, and perfect geometric figures, and maybe that's what's so pleasing about these images: not their simplicity, but their powers of prophecy. And maybe, then, that's the kind of thing we'd hope to see in Heaven, especially if we weren't waiting to see God. 

 

 

* (Olivia Colman speaks quickly. Elizabeth II speaks slowly. It's taken me two series to realise my one problem with it.)

Disney's Latest Experiments In Making Things Look At You

 

 This video prompts at least two questions, both beginning with "Why": Why is Disney trying to perfect convincing eye contact in its animatronics? And why does the robot they've chosen not have skin? 

 Having finally got round to reading this tab I that had open for ages I might have an answer. Answering in reverse order: The robot above has no skin because Disney's worried this would make its experiments in interactive, human/autoanimatroic experience look too much like a sex robot. And Disney is building sex robots.

"You'll be back..." RICHARD THE SECOND RICHDUX

 Richard Pasco now models Ian Richardson's cape. I hear the two actors tossed a coin each night to see who would play Bolingbroke and who would play Richard. 

Imagine turning up to the wrong one.

 Here is the first act of Richard the Second THE SECOND... From the defeated republic of Julius Caesar, via the elected dictatorship of Titus Andronicus, to the now seemingly unchecked power of God's Anointed, it's interesting how the further back in history Shakespeare goes, the more recognisably democratic become the

systems he writes about. Take that, progress! This isn't Rome then. Kings are a proper thing now, second only to God, and this one has definitely had his uncle Gloucester murdered. Mowbray is definitely the one who did it, and the only hope of avenging that murder is the King's cousin Bolingbroke. Them's the stakes. And the prouder I play Richard, the humbler I can play Bolingbroke, even though the humble man is still going to have to kill the proud man. So maybe the play's about that. Of course by going full Gloriana - or, okay, full Ian Richardson - there is a risk if not a complete inevitability of turning Richard into a full-on, Disney-style queer-coded villain. But... 

 

 Well firstly, those guys are great. But secondly, it might still be a better starting point for understanding this play than what I had before, because if you simply play the King as a wag you make it too easy for the audience to side with him against his huffing and puffing subjects, and that lets him off the hook. There is a system in place where he's the Sun and his subjects have to function within that, which is not their fault. This isn't Rome, as I said. And it isn't Marlowe's Edward the Second. Richard isn't martyred for love. This is the play the Earl of Essex staged as a prelude to revolution. This is taboo. Here's Richard the Second again then, but more alien, with eggshells, stiller shoulders and less busy mouths. Let's see.

Sometimes This Blog Will Just Be Pinto Colvig, If It's Even That.

 I feel I should have known who Pinto Colvig was before this week. He had arguably one of the most influential voices in comedy. Like Mel Blanc, he is probably best known for the cartoon characters he voiced, but while Blanc was a well respected character comedian with a regular showcase on The Jack Benny Show (basically the Seinfeld of its day, only more so because it came first) Colvig had to slum it as unrecognisable nightmare fuel in terrible circus-based shorts for Capitol Records.

 In creating the role of the Wendigo-mouthed "Bozo", Colvig certainly proved influential enough in the world of horror (a Wendigo by the way is a flesh-eating, First Nations xenomorph notable for chewing its own lips off with hunger), but that's not why I feel he should be better known. He was also the voice of Grumpy the dwarf, and Sleepy, and Bluto from Popeye, and Pluto from Mickey Mouse, but most importantly, surely, he was the original voice of Goofy. That's a voice with big ripples. You can hear it in Dan Castellaneta's Homer Simpson, Spike Milligan by his own admission straight up stole the voice for Eccles, it is the dopey voice (although of course Dopey didn't have a voice), and his nervous "gollum" debuted years before the publication of The Hobbit (it's surely a nervous swallow that gives Smeagol his nickname, rather than Andy Serkis' odd cough). So I'd love to tell you more about Colvig. Unfortunately I can't get beyond the first ten seconds of this video (so you should feel under no obligation to, either):

Designs for the Unseen (and What's Between)

 Colours aren't reflected light in the concept art of Mary Blair, they're light sources. The Disney films she worked on were nocturnal fairy tales, intimately sunless and perfect for dark rides. There were concepts in her concept art too, like filling Wonderland with signage for example.

  That seems apt. If Carroll's stories had a villain it was probably words. Tangentially, it's possible that I've been misusing the word "liminal". I've used it describe the location of an act of the imagination, but strictly speaking it doesn't mean pretend-y so much as between-y, coming from the Latin word for threshold.

 It was the video below that brought this to my attention. I know nothing about the contributor but my algorithms made a hell of a recommendation because Solar Sand's search for the fabled "backrooms" is absolutely packed with potential rabbit holes: "noclipping", kenopsia, the actual length of a fire hydrant, what kind of rooms inspire nostalgia in Russian millenials... Wait. What does the word "threshold" come from?

Benchless in Baatu (Jenny Nicholson does some digging)

 "What Walt would later describe as the best weekend of his life..."

 Here's animator Ward Kimball and his boss larking around at the Chicago Railroad Fair in 1948 (and here's the source). This delightful photograph pops up in the video below, another great piece to camera from Jenny Nicholson and the subject of today's post (I blogged about her visit to Pandora here). If you've absolutely no interest in Disneyland, then move on, dear reader, but if, like me, you think it might be the most impressive work of art of the twentieth century, BOY does Nicholson deliver! "Star Wars Land: An Excruciatingly in-Depth Prequel" is an almost literal dissection of the place. Here's a map:

It is a map I grew up with – hung by the front door where we kept our wellies – of Disneyland from 1976. Dad was a huge fan. When I finally visited the park in the nineties – although I didn't take it in at the time – the area depicted just to the left of Fantasyland was unrecognisable. I'll enlarge it a bit:

 Those tracks are a ride called "Nature's Wonderland". Nicholson's video is full of footage showing it was more than just a mine train ride (although "Walt Loved Trains", and Nicholson makes a great argument for the whole of Disneyland being one huge train set). The place was actually crammed with many modes of transport...

  Importantly they served not only as "conveyances" but a "futuristic mode of ornamentation." To quote Nicholson: "they are not just rides for the people who are on them, they are also symbiotically enhancing the experience for everyone in their sightline."

I love talk about sightlines. The reason you can't see any evidence of the rest of Disneyland is that the whole area was dug out to be eight feet deeper than the rest of the park. By the time I visited, twenty years later, it had all been concreted up – animatronic elk, the lot – to be replaced by the Big Thunder Ranch, including a petting farm with real animals, where Jenny would later work (the park's least popular attraction, but "a quiet place to chill for a minute"). All this was then re-excavated a couple of years ago to create the planet of Baatu for Star Wars Land, which is why I said this video is an almost literal dissection.

  I also love talk about seating arrangements, so it's worth noting the end, where things get darkest, as Nicholson interrogates "Project Stardust" – the plans made by the park to help the "flow" of visitors to Baatu by removing "benches and planters", that is, literally anywhere to sit down or find shade, or as Jenny puts it "a place to linger". There's no petting zoo on Baatu. I don't think that's a decision Walt would have made.

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in... Oh we are?

Thanks to this pinterest account.

 Continuing my celebration of youtube essayists completely obsessed with theme parks, here's Kevin Perjurer's "Defunctland". The first two series pesented beautifully researched info-dumps about extinct attractions from Kevin's (and my) own childhood, but series 3 goes back even further, to the childhood of Walt Disney and a golden age of fevered Can-Do-ism that gave the world the Ferris Wheel, the Eiffel Tower*, and "Elecric Park": In 1900 the Brothers Heim had spent the then equivalent of three million dollars on a tram to bring citizens of Kansas to their brewery out of town, but when it turned out nobody wanted to take a tram to a brewery they shelled out even more on the introduction of lightbulbs, roller coasters, actors dressed as mermaids, alligator wrestling and the world's strongest magician, resulting in both a roaring success and a decisive inspiration on the tiny Walt (as well as, I assume, on The Simpsons' Duff Gardens). Enjoy the full history of this wacky Xanadu below, including tales of airship crashes, escaped carnivorous animals and "hooligan loop" accidents, all with zero causalties.

 DefunctTV's six-part documentary on Jim Henson is also hard to beat.

* And apparently, before settling upon the Eiffel Tower as its centrepiece, the 1889 Exposition Universale had considered a one-thousand foot tall guillotine, while proposals put to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, charged with topping this, included a five-thousand foot tall tower from the top of which visitors could toboggan to Manhattan.

POW NYEEOW PEGASUSES BANG tink tink tink - Two "Avengers: Endgame" thoughts

 Stark staring

"We're not beginning to... to... to mean something?"

Samuel Beckett, Endgame

 Am I wrong, or have Marvel movies changed what film stars are, changed them back to what they were? These charming, witty, principled but troubled and surprisingly middle-aged heroes of Marvel Phases 1, 2 and 3 aren't the kind of blockbuster surefire things I or even my Dad grew up with. They're Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, and like those stars - and unlike the singular Schwarzenegger or Connery - they're legion. If Disney really is buying all the cinemas and Netflix all the telly then the Studio System might be returning, and I don't know what to feel about that because I've always loved old movies... That was one thought I had after "Avengers: Everyone". The other's a SPOILER, so anyone who doesn't mind those, meet me under the table, and everyone else, BYE x

Okay the other thought was:

SPOILERS, REMEMBER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

She lets him die. "We're gonna be okay... You can rest..." The more I think about it the more gutted I am. I've never recorded on this blog before how oddly important Downey's "piping hot mess" has been to me. Iron Man wasn't a comic I knew anything about and I'd always found RD Jr a bit too get-out-of-my-way in previous films, but from "Iron Man 2" onwards Futurism was suddenly a thing again, and curiosity and hope, all served with newly smart grasp of the USA's unique relationship with fantasy, and this excited me. And I loved Tony Stark. So to see him finally diagnosed with a death wish, and to see that wish granted by the person who cared for him most was devastating. There were other reasons he had to die of course narratively speaking: as an idealisation of post-War America, Stark's mini-Hiroshima with the finger-click couldn't go without a reckoning (just as the earlier murder of Thanos had to turn Thor blurry). But I'd hoped for a happy ending with "Endgame", and feel something has been let go, and that it being let go is final proof it was untenable. And I don't want to type the words "Rest In Peace" again either I don't think. At least the alternative "Fare Forward" avoids the idea life's a chore. Ideally I'd just like to say from now on "Sorry you've gone"... Good film though.

Clark staring

"At just a little under a dollar a word, becoming fluent in Na'vi is a very expensive investment."

Re: the implausibility of humankind ever actually visiting another inhabited plane... Avatar!

Commenting on the previous post, @tealin wonders if our hopes of encountering higher intelligences might be as much about a kind of "looking-glass colonialism" as they are about angelic conversations, and of course she's right. But the success of "Avatar" suggests a third and opposite fantasy – the desire to re-encounter the "Noble Savage". Were that ever to happen, the video below may be as accurate a prediction of that meeting as we'll get. Some of my happiest recent viewing has come from discovering, and then bingeing upon, the work of youtubers who share my fascination with theme parks. And if that sounds niche, let me inform you that Lindsay Ellis's piece on Hobbiton was just nominated for a Hugo, so keep up, old-timers! I'll share more of Ellis's stuff in another post, but what we're here to enjoy today is the work of Jenny Nicholson – specifically, her hilarious, fifty-nine-minute-long account of a visit to the newly opened Avatar theme park in Disney's Animal Kingdom.

Why not search for images of "Avatar theme park", and see if you can immediately distinguish the concept illustrations from photographs of the finished park?

Now, I appreciate this might not sound like everyone's cup of tea – an hour-long monologue about a theme park based on a nine-year-old movie – but the sustained simplicity of the presentation is part of Nicholson's genius. My favourite detail is the Jordan Peele-y ambience of dread she notices pervading the park, as a result of its invented backstory: the world's indigenous Na'vi have welcomed this second human invasion, we're told. There's statues and framed photographs everywhere, celebrating human and Na'vi cooperation. But no Na'vi. Nicholson can also just describe rides, and I like just descriptions of rides, but they too add to a portrait of an idea that has over-reached itself just enough to be ceaselessly entertaining. Enjoy...

The First Futurama (ADAM CURTIS SAYS "WATCH IT")

 Oh Heavens! I had wanted to post - for quite a while now - something about General Motors' Futurama, the centre-piece of the 1939 New York World's Fair that I first saw mentioned in Michael Chabon's superb book "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay". Quite a bit of the research behind "Money" concerned expositions in which businesses invite citizens to queue up and have their future dictated to them - perhaps partly because of the structural similarity of a theme park ride to a lot of Shunt's work - and it seemed to me that the 1939's World Fair, and the Futurama specifically, had really set the trend for this kind of experience: it was Disney's work there that led to the spawning of Disneyland, Disney World and the Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow EPCOT (and it's very probably why Tony Stark's dad in Iron Man 2 has that moustache). However when I finally came to research the Fair properly to write this post (and by research I mean of course "surf youtube") I re-read the Chabon only to find out that the exhibit into whose remains Clay and Bacon  sneak was not actually the Futurama at all, but its companion piece "Democracity", and looking up footage of that I came across this typically arresting and gigantic accompanying narrative from Adam Curtis about the attraction's creator Edward Bernays (particularly fascinating for me as the similarly arresting and gigantic sci-fi sitcom pilot that I am currently putting off is inspired by this exact same link between Futurism and Shadowy Figures Of Influence... or might as well be... I dunno, haven't written it yet...)

And THAT in turn led me to Adam Curtis' equally arresting take on interviewing the Goldsmiths here.

So what I'm saying is I got a bit distracted.

But let's plough on. Here are stills of the 1939 Futurama taken from a contemporary home movie. It's not simply the scale of the ride that knocks me out - far, far larger than I expected - but the accuracy. Look at it! No steam-powered rain-shields or helicopter-bussles here, this is pretty much how 1960 turned out, isn't it? It's like General Motors said "This is the Future", and the world said "Oh, okay." Keep your hands in the machine please...

Those are moving cars by the way, driven by a clockwork mechanism. The effect is startlingly realistic in some  footage. Anyway, into the night...

See? BIG!

No but REALLY BIG!

"Residential, commercial and industrial areas all have been separated for greater efficiency, and greater convenience," says the narrator. It is that sinister.

"Here is an American City re-planned around a highly developed modern traffic system..." he goes on.

"On all express city thoroughfares the rights of way have been so routed as to displace outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas whenever possible..."

"Man continually strives to replace the Old with the New. Rich in sunshine is the City of 1960."

Sigh.

The full promotional film, complete with spooky organ music, is here.
And the home movie from which these images were taken is here, I think. I lost the link. It's spectacular whatever it is.
Oh and of course Money's still on here.

(originally posted on myspace)

Goode's Pertinent Binary

Hooray! Chris Goode* is back on the blog: 

"I sometimes have recourse to what I take to be one of the most pertinent binaries in contemporary culture: the underlying social philosophies of, on the one hand, Disney, and on the other, Sesame Street. In Disney World (or Land or whichever you prefer), "it's a small world after all": people are all basically the same, once you get past their superficial differences. This is Peter Brook's line, and it ends up being a reason to not bother trying to penetrate those superficialities: which is why 11 & 12 is so unbelievably gay. On Sesame Street, the message is not that everyone is the same, but conversely, that everyone is different, and it's your job to deal with that."

 "The Persauders" Charlie White

 * That link doesn't seem to work. Mm. Okay, it was meant to take you here:

... Still not working - Oh just copy and paste it. Maybe I've been infected by a poem. 

"Makes the Caucasian Chalk Circle look like Eastenders"

So the reviews are in and WE'RE A HIT!

"... fabulous, fabulous set..." Kirsty Wark

"... spectacle... " Robin Ince

"... trying to tell you anything at all. It was super-... a laugh I suppose... reminded me of the stuff from the eighties they had on Channel 4..." John Harris 

"... the set is good..." Oliver Kamm

"... not a complete waste of time... there was nothing new about it. BUT -..." Germaine Greer

 Well at least television's regained some of its mystique for me now. All that Mitchell and Webb stuff had just made me cocky. But I'd love to know what GG was going to say after that "BUT" before Kirsty Wark cut her off to point out that the Enron show had sold out. She was spot on about reading the "event" as the "organism Money", and had stuck her tongue out at me in our Parliament so was clearly one of us. Also it was enlightening to see Robin Ince chance upon the perfect mind-set for enjoying the show; the only question now is how do we get an audience that *haven't* missed the first forty minutes to approach us in as good faith... Anyway, work continues: 10am calls, a little less audience interaction, a lot more cast interaction (which is jolly). And Lizzie's produced a fantastic series of prints for the Institute upstairs now (see above) which may just explain everything: the organism, on wheels, everywhere. We set out. They've just turned the lights off. The machine's kicked in and it's probably time to let our sixth audience pile in. My sister got it anyway. Who knows what's out there? Oh, for anyone who enjoyed Disney's Magic Highway here's Disney's Life on Mars. Well, the visuals anyway, but you all like Techno, right?

(originally posted on myspace)