The Lindsay Brothers

Author: shanelindsay

Clash of the Titans

Extraordinary Adventure
76

In many ways, the quest for a sacred artifact is the most pure kind of adventure. It is usually housed in scary, dangerous places, surrounded by otherworldly beings and elaborate traps. Two sides fight to obtain it. One side will use it for good, the other side for evil.

And often times it doesn’t matter who wins, because the gods are gonna do what the gods are gonna do.

And sometimes it involves Swamp Thing

Clash of the Titans is a great melting pot of Greek mythology. There’s nary a story that doesn’t turn up in some shape or form. Flying horses, battling Olympians, sea monsters, people turning to stone, mechanical owls.

I believe it was Aristotle who first proposed mechanized robotic androids

Wha…? Yes, there is a mechanical owl named Bubo. He’s sort of like R2-D2, forever bailing the mighty Perseus out of trouble. Athena gave him to Perseus because Perseus lost his magical shield while fighting the gorgon Medusa, whose head is the aforementioned sacred artifact. Perseus needs the head because the kraken sea monster is coming to steal away Andromeda, because Perseus answered Andromeda’s riddle and won her hand away from the evil Calibos, who once tried to kill Pegasus, angering Zeus, who happens to be Perseus’s father.

If none of that makes much sense, don’t worry. You’re there for the giant scorpions.

Harryhausen's most famous creation: the limited edition overpriced maquette

Master animator Ray Harryhausen did his last, best work on Clash of the Titans. Harryhausen worked at a time when the only way to make a realistic sea monster was to sculpt it in minature, stuff a metal armiture inside it, and painstakingly pose it one frame at a time.

Animators revere Harryhausen, and with good reason. He took stop motion animation to new heights. We are spoiled with CGI today. We sometimes forget that it wasn’t until Jurassic Park that CGI finally cracked the mainstream for good.

The AT-AT Walkers in Empire Strikes Back? Stop motion.

Those demonic dogs in Ghostbusters? Stop motion.

"Okay, who brought the dog?"

The Terminator? Stop motion, with Cameron painstakingly posing Arnold one frame at a time.

Arnold was good at posing

Back to the melting pot thing… Clash of the Titans is a million myths rolled into one, all because Harryhausen wanted to try his hand at a believable flying horse, but didn’t want to be tied down to cavorting fauns. I’m not sure any of these scenes are direct descendants of actual Greek myths, but they sure feel like it. And I bet Theseus would have welcomed a mechanical owl when he was fumbling around in the minotaur’s labrynth.

Clash of the Titans is also known for its stunt casting. Sir Laurence Olivier plays Zeus. Bond girl Ursula Andress shows up as Aphrodite. Kenny Baker played Bubo. And none other than Harry Potter house leader Dame Maggie Smith shows up as sea goddess Thetis.

A hotter version of Professor McGonagall

When it finally came time to remake the movie in 2010, some of these same elements survived. Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes provided the stunt casting. CGI provided the effects. And Bubo became a snarky in-joke. The film could have used Harryhausen to breathe some life into Sam Worthington’s acting.

If only you spoke Hovitos.

Up next, #75…

January 20, 2011
Kidnapped

Extraordinary Adventure
78

A few hundred years ago, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a classic adventure caper called Kidnapped. This is admirable for two reasons:

1) He resisted the urge to add an exclamation point to the end of his title.

2) He boldly proceeded to give away the entire plot with the book’s subtitle.

Seriously, the subtitle runs on for 70 words, mentioning how the hero David Balfour is kidnapped, shipwrecked, trapped in the wild highlands, and suffered at the hands of his uncle Ebenezer. You could watch four or five Michael Bay movies in a row and not find that much adventure.

Actually, watching more than three Michael Bay movies in a row will likely kill you.

If this book makes you deathly afraid of your uncle, then it is probably with good reason. Uncles get a bad rap in literature. They are forever stealing your inheritance, murdering your parents, claiming your kingdom, or making unwanted romantic advances. And I will warn you: If you have an uncle named “Ebenezer” in your family, you might as well just accept that most of your life is going to be a living nightmare.

Fortunately my uncles have names like Dennis and Tim and Devon, and there’s a strong chance that they’d find it utterly inconvenient to dump me in the Scottish highlands. But I’m watching my back just in case.

David Balfour begins to suspect that his uncle is up to no good when he is sent to fetch a chest from the top of a tower in the middle of the night, without a light and sometimes with gaps in the staircase. This, I think, is a good indicator that someone wants to get rid of you.

David doesn’t take the hint, so his uncle is forced to sell him into slavery, the titular “kidnapping” of the story. As with all slavery stories, this one has a happy ending: a shipwreck.

David survives in the wild along with another unfortunate companion, and eventually they come across Robin Oig, the son of famous Scottish renegade Rob Roy. Oig has great distaste for David’s companion, and it is clear that this can be settled in only one way.

A duel of bagpipes.

If we can have dueling banjos, why not?

I am not sure why we as a civilization have gotten away from settling our disputes with bagpipes, but I can see many advantages to it. Besides the obvious reduction in bloodshed, there’s a bundle of money to be saved (although I’m sure the defense contractors can find many ways to plaid the budget).

We could probably cut down on all those strip searches at the airport as well. If a terrorist wants to smuggle a bagpipe on the plane, what’s the worst that can happen? We have to listen to a few dozen variations of Amazing Grace? I guess if the guy really can’t play, that could be somewhat torturous, but it’s better than being x-rayed all the time or having my toothpaste confiscated.

The real question is, do any of these guys look young to enough to still be living with their uncle?

Eventually David makes his way back to his uncle and tricks Ebenezer into a confession that yes, he had arranged to have David kidnapped. This means that David now gets his rightful inheritance, which he promptly blows on video games and Red Bull.

Up next, #77…

January 13, 2011
The Gold Bug

Extraordinary
Adventure
80

Edgar Allan Poe is famous for many things, including marrying his 13-year-old cousin, contracting mysterious diseases, and dying young while in the midst of insanity. He also sometimes wrote stuff. He is best known for sappy chick-lit tales featuring disembodied hearts, black cats, ravens, mummies, and Usher.

Poe was very into R&B

Occasionally, he would confound his critics with unexpected bursts of grand adventure, full of mind-boggling puzzles, exotic locations, long-dead pirates, and buried treasure. Then he would go back to writing about handsome strangers with smoldering eyes and luscious hair. The Gold Bug is one such departure.

Nowadays we think of buried pirate treasure as an old fashioned sort of adventure plot, since all the pirates have been dead for more than 100 years. In Poe’s day, piracy was on the wane, but still relevant to its audience, sort of like how everyone still likes Die Hard.

Next Century's Classic Literature

What makes The Gold Bug so much fun is the way in which its hero finds the last stash of Captain Kidd. Basically he stumbles across an invisible treasure map while beachcombing. If you think it is difficult to stumble across something invisible, you’d be right, unless there was also a gold scarab beetle sitting nearby.

I have read the story many times and it is still unclear to me whether the scarab is a real beetle or a gold artifact. The characters in the story talk about it as if it is an actual insect with a strange coloration, which they capture by wrapping it in a scrap of parchment that they conveniently find nearby. It is only later, while studying the bug near the fire, that invisible ink on the paper is revealed.

Easily mistaken for a real insect

In fact, the Gold Bug itself plays virtually no role in the plot, other than that it also allows them to find the treasure map. Perhaps the title is one of those “symbolic” things that English teachers are so obsessed with. “Bug” as in “sickness.” The Virus of Greed and all that stuff.

The map contains a fiendish cryptogram, which the characters dissect in riveting fashion, while basically schooling the reader on how to solve those word puzzles in the newspaper. It translates to a riddle, which involves a trip to the seaside cliffs, the discovery of a particular tree, which happens to have a skull nailed to one of the branches high up.

Here they must solve one more puzzle in order to find the treasure’s location, and as to whether or not they succeed, I will leave to you to discover. It’s a short story and readily available online, so stop your complaining. It is best if you don’t think about the fact that trees tend to grow over time, so maybe Captain Kidd wasn’t as clever as he thought.

The story is oft-imitated. One can see its influence in dozens of works from popular culture, of which The DaVinci Code and National Treasure may be the most recent examples. It is also fascinating for its discussion of cryptography, which was a relatively new art to the literary public of Poe’s day, who up to that point had been sending secret messages using the Ovaltine decoder ring.

Poe himself seemed to have an obsession with cryptograms. He possessed an almost supernatural ability to decipher them. He once challenged a magazine’s readership to stump him with a code in any language with any character set, and despite many insane, complex submissions, not a single one could best him.

But he stunk at Sudoku

The story’s one deficiency is its glaring and blatant racism. It is definitely a product of its time, and it treats the lone black character as a ridiculous fool, complete with phonetically rendered speech and derogatory names. Were Hollywood ever to make The Gold Bug into a movie, I foresee a great many rewrites in which this character is changed to a bumbling robot played by Robin Williams.

Or something.

Next up, #79.

January 7, 2011