The Lindsay Brothers

Author: shanelindsay

  • Don Quixote

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    92

    As Don Quixote teaches us, there is nothing wrong with the world that can’t be cured by reading books and then pretending that you are the characters in them.  Have we not all be doing this since childhood?  Most of us grew out of it, but old D.Q. is like the 17th century Spanish version of the Star Wars Kid:  still out there spinning his fake lightsaber for all the world to see.

    Darth Windmill is his father.

    Don Quixote has what is politely referred to as an “overactive imagination,” and he is what is scientifically referred to as “nutty as a Scientologist.”  His library is well stocked with stories of knighthood and chivalry, and these books convince him to become a knight-errant.  Hey, I have lots of Hardy Boys books, but that doesn’t mean I’m about to become a teen detective.  For one thing, I don’t own a jalopy.

    The novel by Miguel de Cervantes is at once both high adventure and ludicrous comedy, aptly aided by sly pretentions that it is historically accurate, or at least based on historical accuracies.  Cervantes even goes so far as to acknowledge that the book is much more simple than traditional stories of high adventure, in that it contains no ballads or Latin phrases.  These, he explains, can always be added later—instantly endearing himself to those of us who find such pretenses absurd.

    It may not look it, but the horse is as old as he is.

    No matter Quixote’s lofty goals for himself, the predicaments that he finds himself in are hysterical.  Witness his dinner with the prostitutes, who he thinks are princesses.  They remove his armor, but his helmet is stuck, so he eats with it on, presumably with the flimsy makeshift visor open.

    A sturdier piece of equipment I could not devise.

    People are constantly trying to swindle him, only to find out he has no money.  When his family frets about what to do with some 50-year-old uncle gallivanting across the countryside and crashing his old plow horse into windmills, their solution is to burn the library so that he’ll give up this nonsense.

    Only one problem with that:  The library is extensive and stocked with rare and priceless tales.  In the end, they merely decide to burn only the poetry books, because the only thing worse than an uncle who thinks he’s a knight is an uncle who thinks he is a poet.

    If your hair sticks out like Doc Brown, you are probably crazy.

    Now about those windmills…  It is perhaps the most famous scene from the book, and represents everything that is magical about Don Quixote, because he mistakes them for giants.  They are the perfect foe for a crazy person because presumably they can’t fight back.  That doesn’t stop D.Q. from making a fool of himself by getting his lance caught in the windmill’s sails and getting thrown off his horse.  But everyone covers nicely by telling him that an evil enchanter turned the giant into a windmill at the last second.

    In fact, this seems to be their excuse for everything.  An enchanter sealed off his library, an enchanter magicked the inn, an enchanter took his lunch money.  People, take this to heart:  If your family ever invokes the idea of an “evil enchanter” in order to protect your dignity, then it is a good sign that they probably think you are bonkers.

    Oh, sure, it's obviously this guy's fault.

    The story has its down moments, so it is not a straight up comedy.  There is definitely something pathetic about a grown man crushing on the neighborhood stable girl (who he names Dulcinea, as if she were royalty), and embarrassing everyone he knows.  Don Quixote gets beat up a lot, ruthlessly mocked, and the only reason he isn’t taken for everything he’s worth is because he isn’t worth much, in spite of the rare books.

    Even his loyal squire Sancho Panza, to whom D.Q. has promised the rulership of an imaginary island (apparently this neighborhood has a wealth of idiots), is forced to admit that his master is a bit of a dunce.  You can only defend your friends so much, before their tackling of random pilgrims or insulting of goatherds begins to make you look bad too.

    Mental issues of the hero aside, none of this changes the fact that Don Quixote of La Mancha sees the world not as it is, but as we would like it to be:  A place of fantastic adventures and lady fairs and galloping steeds.  And sometimes it’s worth it to just venture out into that fantasy world for a moment, even if our armor is made of cardboard and the stable girl is sort of ugly.

    Next up, #91!

  • Planet of the Apes

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    94

    What would it be like it if you weren’t the most dominant species on the planet?  You might be hunted for food, domesticated as a household pet, or experimented on by cosmetic companies.  And how bad would you feel if those excruciating make-up tests still made people look like this?:

    Welcome to the Planet of the Apes, where the above is actually considered fantastic make-up.  In the bizarro world of Hollywood, they actually give you honorary Oscars for that, which is strange, since at first blush, Planet of the Apes doesn’t look like Oscar material.  It’s a movie with a bunch of actors dressed up as monkeys, imprisoning other actors dressed up like idiot humans (insert your own actor joke).  And yet 40 years later, the movie is a hallmark of American cinema, enshrined by the Library of Congress, honored as having one of the best film scores by the AFI, and quoted by millions of people every day who want to call their boss a “dirty ape.”

    Apes are actually quite fastidious.

    The movie begins several thousand years in the future, with a group of astronauts crash landing on a planet.  This happens with some frequency in sci-fi stories.  Contrary to The Right Stuff, fiction writers believe that astronauts are actually among the universe’s worst pilots.  They never simply land on the planet.  They always crash.

    Also common in sci-fi stories are planets that are well suited for human living, and the Planet of the Apes is no different.  The oxygen is breathable, the soil is found to produce vegetation, etc.  In fact, there are already humans living on the planet, though they are mute, feral, and quite fetching in their little buckskin miniskirts.

    Meow.

    Like all good Twilight Zone episodes (the first draft of Planet of the Apes was written by Rod Serling), this is a story where the hero is the same and everyone else is different.  The hero is, of course, Charlton Heston, playing the part of the incompetent astronaut pilot who is immediately captured by great desert warriors.  I don’t want to spoil anything for you, but the humans are not the planet’s dominant species.

    Give up? It's the armadillos!

    On this planet,  it is the apes that enslave the humans, and they’re pretty mean about it, so shut your trap, Jane Goodall.  The apes are quite surprised to find that one of their new captives can read and write, and even more surprised to find that he once went to flight school.  They want to keep this smart human quiet so as not to disrupt the ape supremacy thing that they’ve got going.  They have many methods for doing this, such as hitting him in the throat, locking him in a cage, and sentencing him to castration.  But along the way, Charlton (whose character is named Taylor) befriends some orangutan scientists (as well as the pretty gal in the next cell) and sets off to discover the true history of the planet.

    "Uh, I think I'd prefer the cosmetic testing."

    There is the obligatory chase scene, the showdown, the saving of the bad guy’s life, the return of the favor, and of course the discovery that humans were once dominant, but have fallen by the wayside, presumably because they did not scratch their armpits enough.

    The big finale contains one final shock, in which we find out that Rosebud was actually the name of Bruce Willis’s ghost (just kidding!  That ending would make no sense!).  Everyone on Earth knows this spoiler by now, but just in case you’re a monkey who only recently crash landed on our planet, I’ll let you in on the big twist.

    When trapped in quicksand, raise one arm while keeping the other close to your chest.

    The planet of the apes is actually Earth.  We know this because Charlton Heston stumbles onto the ruin of the Statue of Liberty lying on the beach (remember, it’s several thousand years in the future).  First time audience members always gasp in shock, partly because we don’t like the idea of Bubbles the Chimp running for Congress, but also because Taylor is apparently such a bad pilot that instead of exploring new solar systems, he flew in a giant circle before crashing our tax dollars into the desert.

    One has to admit that Bubbles is five times less creepy in this pose than Emmanuel Lewis.

    Next up, #93!

  • Gulliver’s Travels

    Extraordinary
    Adventure
    96

    One suspects that Lemuel Gulliver did not have great guidance counselors in high school. Here is a man who believes the only proper response to a failed business model is to become a sailor. It’s like if all those Enron guys had joined up on some random ship rather than going to prison. Preferably the Titanic.

    If the ancient seafarers thought that Jonah was such bad luck that he needed to be tossed over, imagine what they would have thought of Jonathan Swift’s titular hero. During his travels, Gulliver is shipwrecked, mutinied, or attacked by pirates no less than four times. The guy is a walking disaster. If Gulliver ever met Inspector Clouseau, the resulting explosion would be roughly equivalent to six hydrogen bombs.

    He may be tied down and surrounded by killer Smurfs, but he's still gracious enough to sit up and smile for the camera.

    But maybe it’s not all bad, because every time Gulliver ends up in the water, he usually washes ashore on some strange island that nobody has ever heard of (probably because it has an unpronounceable name like Brobdingnag or Houyhnhnm). Each island is roughly characterized by having people drastically different than Gulliver himself; i.e. their people do not run off and join the navy every time they bounce a check.

    Lilliput is the first island Gulliver “discovers,” as well as the most famous to those who are marginally familiar with the story. Lilliputians are tiny people who tie Gulliver down with thread when he is unconscious, and then proceed to starve themselves by bringing Gulliver all of their food. They also build a giant wagon for Gulliver to ride in as he goes to visit the king, which makes about as much sense as me having my dog tow me on a bicycle from the bedroom to the bathroom. They waste all this energy and food for the same reason any government wastes resources when presented with something strange and different: They want to weaponize it.

    The Lilliputians are at war with another race, and a giant who can stomp the enemy houses to pieces just by going for a morning jog figures to put them over the top. In this manner, Gulliver’s Travels is pretty much the Godzilla story told from the point of view of Godzilla. Maybe if the Japanese had stopped screaming and firing rockets, they might have learned that Godzilla was merely a failed businessman whose sailboat just happened to spring a leak.

    In the monster version of "Castaway," Godzilla is Tom Hanks and your apartment building is Wilson

    The reason for the war has something to do with a dispute on the right way to crack eggs. Hey, wars have been fought for more ridiculous reasons, such as control of Texas. I suspect this is some sort of satire on the part of Swift, but the symbolism got muddled right around the part where Gulliver is sentenced to death for putting out a house fire by peeing on it (I’m not making this up).

    Did I mention that Gulliver excels at vulgarity in his travels? After leaving Lilliput, he later finds himself on the island of Brobdingnag, in which Gulliver is tiny and everyone else is a giant, providing some insight into just how willing Jonathan Swift is to beat a good idea to death. Here Gulliver gets to frolic around on giant naked women and be disgusted by them. He is especially disturbed by their peeing. Maybe it will help him gain perspective on which hose to use the next time he sees a tiny house fire.

    Gulliver makes a few other random stops (and ruins several more boats) before his last adventure lands him on the island of Houyhnhnm, which as you might guess is populated by philosophic talking horses. As you might also guess, Gulliver fits right in. The horses teach him that all humans are idiots, and Gulliver apparently recognizes this in himself. He in turn teaches them the English Constitution, proving that philosophic talking horses and cursed English nincompoops are perhaps intellectually equivalent.

    A Houyhnhnm will never speak unless he has something to say.

    While Gulliver’s Travels is a well-known tale and has been adapted many times, it has never really found much success outside of the original book. Its reputation as a children’s story is a little ironic, given all the peeing (or maybe not so ironic after all). As fate would have it, there is a big budget movie coming out later this year. Like most Gulliver adaptations, it seems to focus exclusively on Lilliput, but since it stars Jack Black, it also bodes well for some good urine jokes.

    Already looks better than Nacho Libre

    Next up, number ninety-five!