Saturday 16 February 2013

Disney and the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal

Twice in the last week I've been perplexed by things not being even vaguely as I remember. I read 'The Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy' and I watched Disney's 'Alice In Wonderland' from 1951. They were both far more deranged than I remembered, especially the Disney. This is very strange to me as I usually remember things well. So what is going on? My personal theory is that I reached a natural intersection in chaotic madness and lunatic creativity and skipped into another dimension. Has there ever been another apparently so natural combination of mad hatted franchises which never have come together as Disney and Hitchhiker? If Walt had been around, and remember that this was man behind the madness of Alice, Fantasia and Dumbo, he would not have hesitated.

Ironically the film of that legendary book/radio show/television series/thing was made distributed by Touchstone which I found out recently was part of Disney and is used for producing movies that aren't family oriented enough for Disney mainline. We needed a mainline Disney animated movie from the people who made 'Basil the Great Mouse Detective' or 'Aladdin'. It would have been a majestic and possibly catastrophic business but how can you imagine the Bugblatter Beast as visualised by anyone not from the Disney stable?

Serious, oh so serious. Stranger things have happened. 'Batman Returns' happened. That was strange.

Early Disney movies are mad, utterly barmy and crazy, five sheets to the wind, possibly chemically augmented, and in no way connected to rational thought. That's why they're frustrating on many levels. You can watch 'Dumbo' and think it's really good and then get hit around the head by the Pink Elephants sequence, which is pure evidence of someone having fallen off the sanity wagon a little too far. It's abruptly lunatic, and potentially a cross-cultural conflict of the ninth degree. At any rate it breaks the flow a little. It can be explained though because those movies are very old, which we forget because they're in colour. Animated movies could be in colour long before live action ones could be. Early Disney movies are contemporaries to the Marx Brothers and musicals, in a time when movies felt obliged to break the stream to have a little song and dance, or dreary romantic interlude from the guest stars in the Marx Brothers case. They were just fitting in. Strangely, Disney movies have maintained the musical interlude through all these decades. It's amazing, and it gave us Ratigan so we should be grateful.

Oh, the Marx Brothers. Never has chaotic lunacy been sabotaged so much by the forced interruption of a romantic tryst...

The Marx Brothers didn't achieve what Sherlock Holmes achieved; they arguably didn't become icons. Something happens if you're constantly in the public eye for more than fifty years and maintain popularity. Sherlock has been around for more than a hundred years and still sells books - despite being public domain! 'Doctor Who' is about to break the fifty year barrier, which means that it's passing into that whole different status. It's slightly more debatable, but I think 'Star Trek' will do it too because the original series is so ingrained that they've become part of the furniture. Kirk, Spock and McCoy are together an icon. What does it mean when you last so long and remain so popular that a craze becomes a legend? Maybe that's something to talk about tomorrow?

Don't forget your towel.
O.

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