Long ago — after baseball but before MMA — there were the halcyon days of professional football (known in other countries as “do what now?”) This grand game, which rarely involves a foot or anything traditionally shaped like a ball, is played between two separate but equal units. The flashy, money-grubbing Offense and the flashy, money-grubbing Defense. But lurking in the shadows is nebulous third team, veiled in secrecy, neither flashy, nor money grubbing. The compete on the fringe, a squad of unique talents, a coherent group with the wildly inappropriate name of “The Special Team.”
The Special Team, if you are not aware, is the group of players who exist solely to give the ball back to the other team. In a sense, they are professional quitters.If these guys are so special, why not play the whole game with just the special team? Surely the special team is up to the task. Although it occurs to me that maybe they did not mean special in a good way. No, no, not Jackson. He’s on the “special” team.
The one exception is field goals. This is the rare chance for special team glory. Alas, even this is a bit insulting. Quarterbacks are always on the run, trying to throw a football to a pinpoint spot on the field, with crazy-fast defensive backs draped all over the receiver, who may or may not have good hands. The running back is always knifing through the gaps between 300-pound defensive linemen. But the kicker? Just go out there and see if you can manage to fit the ball through a 19-foot by 30-foot wide-open window. I guess we’ll give you three points if you can do it.
Although it's still only three pages long. The expanded edition does feature the woefully overused new play: Fake-field-goal-to-see-if-they'll bite-before-we-chicken-out-call-time-out-and-just-punt play.
The desert island: Perhaps the quintessential adventure setting. Used to it’s most famous effect in Daniel Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which we discussed earlier, but only slightly less well known is William Shakespeare’s Magnum Opus The Tempest, featuring the evil Caliban, The mysterious Prospero and many more of the bard’s most inscrutable names. However The Tempest is not the adventure we wish to discuss either. No instead we are talking about probably the third most well-known desert island adventure and number 60 on our countdown. William Golding’s required sixth grade reading classic, The Lord of the Flies.
This is William Golding. How he manages to build and distribute from his sleigh millions of toys to kids around the globe in just one night and still have time to be a prize winning novelist is a complete mystery.
William Golding’s first novel, The Lord of the Flies, is what the critics call a “tour de force” which roughly translates to “a tour of force” and is probably more than an idiom than an actual description of anything. In this case the force is a group of private school students who wash up on shore after their plane has crashed. They make vague references to an unspecified nuclear war that had caused them to flee England to begin with so in that sense, and if you want to grasp completely at straws, you could say that The Lord of the Flies is Science Fiction.
Fortunately that’s where the science ends and the fiction really takes off. The boys slowly begin to revert to animal paganism. When they first are deciding on who should be in charge, the two candidates are Ralph and Jack. Both are excellent leaders, but whereas one has a conscious, the other one completely spirals out of control and literally sets the island ablaze, probably because he was in the choir.
This is right before Jack and his band of hunters go after Ralph Macchio dressed as a shower.
I don’t want to spoil all the reversals so it’s best if you read it for yourself. Lord of the flies is often said by any number of English teachers to be an “allegory” for something. Also it was said that if you do not know what this allegory was, you would obtain a D minus in their class. Sigh. Such is the case with many assigned books. Teachers are often ruining them by handing out grades for reading them. However to placate my sixth grade English teacher, here is a quick run down of the various metaphors and their meanings:
The character of Piggy: Clearly a metaphor for intellectualism. Like most intellectuals, Piggy is later robbed and murdered.
Simon: a metaphor for spiritualism. Like many spiritual people Simon goes off by himself for days at a time and then comes back in the middle of the night just as your war dance is hitting it’s stride.
The Conch Shell: a metaphor for authority. Like all authority it is immediately abused and then smashed.
And finally, The Lord of the Flies himself: It’s actually a pig’s head on a stick but is meant by Golding to symbolize “the beast,” the evil within all of us. Fittingly Simon, the most spiritual one on the island, is also the only one who understands his own author’s metaphors and promptly tries to warn everyone of their impending D minus if they do not listen to him. Simon sees the pig head swarming with flies and thus we have the title of the book: The Lord of the Flies.
Despite all that, The Lord of the Flies, as depicted here, is actually kinda cute.
Interestingly the name Lord of the Flies comes from the bible. It is the literal translation of the name Beelzebub, but Lord of the Flies is not without it’s Christ imagery either. William Golding was knighted and actually won the Nobel Prize for a later novel that nobody has heard of. Though in all likelihood it was to make up for missing him on this, his first go round. Among other things The Lord of the Flies is also the inspiration for Stephen King’s fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine. Castle Rock being the place on the island that the hunter kids called their headquarters.
It started out as just a pitch, an idea to expand the animated short “Tin Toy” into a Christmas special. The mad computer animation wizards in a company called Pixar Animation Wizards had decided to call it “A Tin Toy Christmas.” After many writers, and rewriters, and underwriters, and copywriters it eventually evolved into number 62 on our countdown. You may know it as Toy Story.
This image is from the original short "Tin Toy" and may be the most terrifying thing ever produced by Pixar.
It was the first film ever made completely with CGI, a process whereby tiny elves inside of a beige box with blinking lights are said to “generate imagery.” The film is filled with almost endless wonder. Green army men walk with their feet molded forever together at the base. And the aliens from Pizza Planet speak in hushed and reverent tones of something known only as “The Claw.” It is still the only Pixar movie to be released with just the Disney logo above its title (instead of both Disney AND Pixar logos). And quite surprisingly, it is Pixar’s least successful film at the box office. Of course it’s Pixar so that’s not really saying much.
In fact, John Lassiter and Pixar were so adamant that they did not want to be a clone of Disney Feature Animation that they took many steps to avoid such a comparison. These steps included, but are not limited to: being creative, original, timeless, and touching. At the time, it was even considered bold and controversial when they insisted that Toy Story should not be a musical. There are many reasons behind this, but famed fan-boy screenwriter Joss Whedon, of fan-boy fame, who helped write the screenplay for the film, explains it this way:
“It would have been a really bad musical, because it’s a buddy movie. It’s about people who won’t admit what they want, much less sing about it.”
This is perhaps true, but does not explain why no other Pixar movies have been musicals either. The buddies Whedon speaks of are perhaps two of the best-known characters in modern cinema today: Buzz Lightyear and Woody Pride.
I just hope the designers of this awesome shoe remembered to scrawl the name "ANDY" on the sole.
Oh, and by the way … Woody’s last name? Yeah, it’s Pride. This goes pretty far back into development of the films and is actually very fitting considering how jealous Woody is of Buzz when he shows up in Andy’s Room. Named after Woody Strode, he was originally intended to be a ventriloquist dummy. However we find out later that Woody is nothing less than a singing cowboy. (But seriously, it’s not a musical). It’s always hard to say with buddy movies which is the main character, but in this one it’s clear, it is Woody. Because Woody is the main character, he has that sort of everyman quality that sometimes can be mistaken as no quality at all. Therefore he seems to pale in comparison to what is perhaps Pixar’s greatest creation.
Buzz Lightyear does not know he’s a toy. He actually believes himself to be a Space Ranger. Probably because that’s what it says on the box that he came in. Which he believes to be a spaceship, and which he instantly begins to repair with scotch tape which he calls “unidirectional bonding strip.” Buzz is more flashy than woody. Literally flashier. He has red and green lights on his expandable wings that flash to indicate port and starboard. This attention to detail and Buzz’s six-foot-four, two-hundred-twenty pound, laser, rocket arm makes Woody believe that he will not be played with as much. It is for this reason that Woody is intent on proving to Buzz that he is a toy, and not on a “secret mission in uncharted space.” Woody is later redeemed by the fact that he does actually make a pretty strong case for the greater benefits of being a toy, but it would not be right to say that this noble purpose was his initial motivation throughout the film.
Buzz as Tron: If this blog existed solely to provide you with this image, then it would not have been written in vain.
Although Buzz is more modern, it actually took the animators longer to animate Woody because he was not as rigid and had more emotions that needed to be readable on his face. Again because Woody is the emotional center of the film he needed to be more expressive. Woody is voiced by Tom Hanks, the well-known director of such hits as “That Thing You Do,” … and many more! That being said, it’s actually the animators that win us over here. In fact, Toy Story is such watershed digital achievement that it’s almost stunning to realize that when it hit home video it was on VHS, which a brief trip to Wikipedia tells me was some sort of cassette or “cartridge” that one had to painstakingly rewind at the end of viewing its content.
In an effort to offset this odd juxtaposition, Pixar later went back and added another camera to every frame of animation so that it could be re-released in 3D. Something Lassiter termed “digital archeology.” This is possibly the reason they never got around to making that Tin Toy Christmas special. Well, that and the terrifying baby thing.
