Author: Stieg Hedlund

Clan lords and intertubes (Interactive Storytelling, Part 3 Addendum)

In this series’ previous entry, there was another important element in the demise of the adventure genre I should have discussed: the advent of the internet.

When there was no internet, if you were playing Sam & Max Hit the Road, and got stuck, there weren’t a lot of options open to you. The main one was calling LucasArts’ Hint Line and paying 1.99 USD per minute for help.

The internet was opened to the public in 1991, and by 1993, it started actually being used as such. America Online’s carpet-bombing strategy of distributing free trial disks came the same year. Quake allowed multiplayer online matches via the internet in 1997, a year before Grim Fandango’s release.

The problems this posed for game companies working in the adventure genre were manifold: not only would there be game walkthroughs available online nearly as soon as someone solved them, but the revenue stream from tip lines also dried up. Most importantly, the genre was feeling long-in-the-tooth compared to other offerings and needed not just an evolution, but a revolution.

By the time I was designing quests like The Cairn Stones in Diablo II, I was very aware of the issue. It’s for this reason I used the procedural generation already used to generate dungeons, and many other elements. In the Cairn Stones quest, the order of both on the scroll and the stones are randomized. This means the solution to your stones won’t necessarily be the same as another player’s and a walkthrough will do you no good.

The much more elaborate puzzles in the adventure genre, however, did not lend themselves well to such design solutions. Escape from Monkey Island included the “Monkey Kombat” subgame, wherein “monkey words” each defeated two others in rock-paper-scissors fashion. Which defeated which was randomized, so requiring exploration to solve. But it felt tedious rather than fun and was one of the most hated elements of the game.

I felt actual puzzle gameplay was outside what made sense for Diablo II, so Cairn Stones was really just lock-and-key—get the scroll, have it translated, and use it on the stones. Even still, a player could just keep clicking the stones and hit on the solution fairly easily.

I did have to face actual puzzle gameplay in the internet age when I joined the strike team for WarCraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans (WCA).

In Blizzard’s parlance of the time, a strike team was a group from one studio tapped to look at another’s first playable, give feedback, and make recommendations. I did this for StarCraft, then joined the team to continue in this role right up to its successful launch. WCA was less fortunate.

While Diablo revitalized a supposedly dead genre, we did so by making significant changes to it, removing the P&PRPG cruft in favor of a quick-to-the-fun experience that still had a ton of depth to explore. WCA brought nothing new to the table. One reviewer of a leaked section of gameplay hit the nail on the head, calling it:¹²

[A] conventional, borderline dull point-and-click adventure [… that] doesn’t quite feel like Warcraft.

Despite Blizzard’s protests to the contrary, the playable really was that bad. I’d have enjoyed working in the genre and taking on the challenge of innovating it for the internet age. But it would have required a full reboot just to get to the level of a decent adventure game for the previous decade.

For these reasons, I lobbied hard for the game’s cancellation. I was pleased to have eventually convinced Blizzard’s leadership a mercy killing was the best course of action.

Read previous articles in the Interactive Storytelling series

Part 1: Lizzie’s Game

Part 2: Those Frumious Jaws

Part 3: Hijinx and Deconstruction

Notes

1. Wes Fenlon, “The inside story of Warcraft Adventures: Blizzard’s lost point-and-click adventure”, PC Gamer, December, 2016.

The strange origins and permutations of Aladdin (DeDisneyfication, Part 12)

Aladdin (علاء الدين, “Alāʼu d-Dīn”) isn’t merely the best-known of the tales of One Thousand and One Nights (أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, ʾAlf Laylah wa-Laylah, OTON hereafter), it’s emblematic of it to the point of being synecdochical.

And yet, if you consider the actual corpus of those tales, it’s an odd one. 

First, there’s the fact it’s set in China. This may seem surprising given the Middle Eastern associations of OTON, but many authors, translators, and scholars collected the work over many centuries from south and west Asia and north Africa.

Some tales trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian, and even Mesopotamian literature. Most tales, however, were originally folk stories from the Abbasid and Mamluk eras, while others, especially the frame story, come from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān (هزار افسان), and may ultimately be translations of still older Indian texts.

Additionally, to the original audience of the tale, China represented a distant, exotic land associated with wealth, mystery, and magnificence. While Chinese cities like Chang’an were widely renowned for their grandeur, ordinary people wouldn’t have access to the details. Instead, the names in the “China” of Aladdin are Arabic and Persian, and other cultural markers—the Sultan, the vizier, and the genie—similarly draw on Middle Eastern traditions.

In fact, Aladdin shares its origin with only 10 other tales in the original European publication of OTON. These can be traced to Hanna Diyab (اَنْطون يوسُف حَنّا دِياب), a Maronite Christian from Aleppo, who told the stories to French writer Antoine Galland in the early 18th century. Galland, who was translating OTON into French, included Aladdin in his translation despite the tale not being part of the original Arabic manuscript.

All three of the best-known tales of OTON are absent from the original canon. Of these, two can be traced to Diyab—Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (علي بابا والأربعون لصا, Ali Baba wal Arba’in Lisa), while Sindbad the Sailor (سندباد البحري, Sindibādu l-Bahriyy) is its own cycle apparently deriving from travellers’ tales of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258).

The other OTON tales transmitted directly to Galland by Diyab are:

• Alī Khawājā and the Merchant of Bagdad
• The Ten Viziers
• The Ebony Horse
• The Sultan of Samarkand and His Three Sons
• Khawājā Hasan al-Habbāl
• The Caliph’s Night Adventures
• Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Perī-Bānū
• Sīdī Nuʿmān
• The Two Sisters Who Envied Their Cadette
• Blind Man Bābā ʿAbdallāh

Following Galland’s inclusion of Aladdin in his version of OTON, the story gained immense popularity and underwent various adaptations, also being translated into Arabic and included in subsequent versions of OTON as if it had always been there.

Aladdin became a staple in Western literature, with numerous translations and retellings throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, eventually finding its way into the realm of theater and film. The 1924 film The Thief of Bagdad, while not a direct adaptation of Aladdin, drew heavily on its themes and aesthetics, influencing subsequent interpretations.

In 1992, Disney released its animated film Aladdin, falling just past the apex of the Disney Renaissance.

True to the Disney pattern, they chose a beloved tale with dozens of retellings to crib from. They threw out most of the plot apart from a few key elements—the lamp and the genie—and grafted on new characters and story elements. Where the original has Aladdin as a poor tailor’s idle son, the animation studio makes him a thief with a heart of gold. The strong-willed and independent Princess Jasmine is also reimagined from Princess Badroulboudour (بدر البدور Badru l-Budūr—full moon of full moons), whose key attribute is her beauty.

Agrabah, in fact, was intended to be Baghdad, the name being a near-anagram. This was almost certainly a legacy of The Thief of Baghdad. The film’s timing, however, between the Gulf Wars, rendered that location more toxic than exotic. But just as Diyab’s version of China was entirely imagined, so too was Disney’s version of Baghdad. The difference is Diyab projected his own culture onto a romanticized location, while Disney presented a vague amalgamation of Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures, freighting it with all the stereotyped, exoticized baggage of centuries of Western imperialism.

As is typical of Disney films, there is clear bad guy coding—ethnic accents, “foreign” features, in this case, large aquiline noses. The nose thing seems to have been so essential to the portrayal of villains in the film it inspired Jafar’s (Jonathan Freeman) henchman Iago (Gilbert Gottfried) being a parrot, so having a literal beak.

Notably, these two main baddies break the mold accent-wise. Jafar speaks in a posh English accent—another bad guy trait common across Disney films. Gottfried, of course, sounds like himself, but is there for comedic value, so it makes sense.

Of course, there is also good guy coding—American accents, Westernized features. For example, Aladdin’s (Scott Weinger) appearance and personality are modeled on Tom Cruise.¹

These elements, coupled with repeated references to chopping off various bits of people’s anatomy, seem to have slipped by the “number of Arab scholars and consultants” Disney consulted during production.² In turn, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee complained about the portrayal of their people in the film. The animation studio responded by Band-Aiding the video release with a two-line rewrite of “Arabian Nights”’ lyrics.

And, while Robin Williams’ performance as Genie was clearly a strength of the film, it gave rise to trends that are not so great. The first is the move toward using so-called named talent in animation.

The Golden Age of American Animation was populated with giants like Mel Blanc, who literally voiced most of the iconic Warner Bros. characters of the era, from Yosemite Sam to Tweety Bird. The Simpsons is a notable remaining bastion, with only six voice actors playing 30-odd main characters.

Williams, too, was a talented mimic capable of dozens of voices. He was respectful of the tradition of voice acting in animation as well, and was hesitant to accept the role, finally agreeing with the understanding his name would not be used in Aladdin’s marketing.

But studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, having already begun the named talent escalation, casting Vincent Price in The Great Mouse Detective, and Joey Lawrence, Billy Joel, Bette Midler, and Huey Lewis in Oliver & Company, couldn’t not exploit Williams’ box office draw. While not actually naming Williams in their advertising for the film, Disney used his voice and the Genie character in all of it, as well as for every manner of merchandise. There was little Williams could do:³

[He…] accused Disney executives of lying to him and breaching an agreement not to use his voice to merchandise products. The feud went on for a year, finally ending after Katzenberg left the studio and his replacement, Joe Roth, formally apologized.

Regardless, the film was a massive BO smash, yielding 20× its budget; 504.1M USD. Nor did subsequent actors have the qualms Williams did about attaching their names to animated films. So, as film critic Lindsay Ellis notes:⁴

[L]essons were learned from the success of Aladdin. Cynical, cheap lessons. We saw it begin to some degree with The Lion King, and then more with Pocahontas (Mel Gibson was one of the biggest stars in the world at the time), but then after that, starting with the ones that were seriously in production after Aladdin was released, every Disney movie had a Genie knockoff featuring some extremely bankable comedic talent.

The other trend sparked by Williams’ portrayal of Genie came from his heavy use of contemporary pop-cultural references. While inherent to his comedic stylings, and even the reason for his success, Disney, and indeed Hollywood writ large’s takeaway was to copy and paste. Such references became a substitute for original humor, relying on the audience’s recognition of other media rather than creating jokes inherent to the story itself. Ellis describes the trend thus:⁵

[I]n a post-Shrek celebrity-driven animated feature world, well [this type of humor]’s not all there is, but in terms of sheer volume, it’s most of it.

One specific instance of this can be scrutinized: In Aladdin, Genie is playing chess with Carpet (yes, that’s the flying carpet’s name), who takes one of his pieces. Genie morphs into a caricature of Rodney Dangerfield complete with a necktie he loosens nervously, and delivers the line, also in an impression of the comedian:⁶

I can’t believe it—I’m losing to a rug!

Is it funny? Reasonably so: Dangerfield’s Borscht-Belt one-liners were characteristically self-deprecating, so this fits the pattern. Disney seems to have seen as a high-water mark there’s even a high-end official figurine called “I’m Losing to a Rug” capturing the scene. This apparently also led to a reprise of the gag four years on, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Hugo the gargoyle (Jason Alexander) is playing poker with a pigeon, and utters the immortal laff line:⁷

I’m losing to a bird!

Unlike its forebear, this has been broadly mocked. Apart from the Aladdin precedent, nothing about the gag makes sense. I’ve mentioned the gargoyles before. Ellis says of them:⁸

Most people’s post-mortem will agree that the centrality of these cartoonishly grotesque gargoyles in a dark and serious story did far more harm than good […].

Where Carpet is clearly sentient, there is no logic to a gargoyle and a pigeon playing poker—beyond them both existing at the top of the cathedral—let alone the pigeon winning. Giving Disney the benefit of the doubt, the link might be that George Costanza of Seinfeld, also played by Alexander, is a loserly character like Dangerfield’s comedy persona. Uncharitably, it’s just a poorly recycled gag.

Such recycled gags have become Disney’s stock-in-trade, signaling which is the case. To keep picking on Hunchback, here’s a far-from-complete list, just of gags in the film with references external to the film’s world:

• Belle walks down a street
• A Parisian has Carpet draped over his arm
• Clopin’s “Court of Miracles” dance refers to “L’apprenti sorcier” (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”)
• Esmeralda (Demi Moore) is presented essentially as an exotic dancer referring to the actress’ role in Striptease
• The gargoyles’ names refer to the book’s author and one of the Andrews sisters
• The Goofy yell is heard
• The entire “A Guy Like You” number—the gargoyles play with absurd props like neon signs, wedding cakes, and other modern paraphernalia throughout the song and Hugo strikes an Elvis Presley-esque pose
• Jafar’s old man disguise is used
• The crowd carries Pumbaa on a stick
• Quasi (Tom Hulce) trying on wigs makes reference to his role in Amadeus

Though obviously hyperbolic, one meme gif even cites Hugo as “the death of comedy” overall, not merely in Disney Animation Studio films.

The 1994 Aladdin sequel, Return of Jafar, marks the beginning of Disney’s direct-to-video strategy, and, according to media analyst Matthew Ball, the beginning of the end of the Disney Renaissance.⁹ Williams doesn’t appear in it, and it does nothing memorable with the world of Aladdin, but it was certainly effective monetarily.

Read previous articles in the DeDisneyfication Series

Part 1: Straightening out “Hunchback”

Part 2: Making over “Mulan”

Part 2 Addendum B: Your Western Wuxia Is Weak

Part 3A: “Hercules”: Myths and Mistakes

Part 3B: Doing Hera’s Work

Part 4: “Belle” Epoch

Part 4 Addendum: The Enchanted and the Postmodern

Part 5: Putting “Pocahontas” to Rest

Part 5 Addendum: Powhatan’s Mantle

Part 6: Trouble with “Tarzan”

Part 7A: The Wrong Rabbit Hole

Part 7A Addendum A: Curious Curation

Part 7A Addendum B: “Alice” in Revolt

Part 7A Addendum B: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan

Part 7B: Alice’s Adventures in the Cousins War

Part 8: Guerrillas and the “Jungle”

Part 9A: Through a Magic Mirror Marred

Part 9A Addendum: The Woods “Over the Wall”

Part 9B: The Sum of its Versions

Part 9C: The “Snow White” Studio

Part 9D: Snowhaus

Part 10: The Little Less-Than

Part 11: Batmouse 3D

Notes

1. David Koenig, Mouse under glass: secrets of Disney animation & theme parks, 1997.
2. John Evan Frook, “‘Aladdin’ lyrics altered”, Variety, July 1993.
3. Koenig, 1997.
4. Lindsay Ellis, “How Aladdin Changed Animation (by Screwing Over Robin Williams)”, Lindsay Ellis (YouTube), May 2019.
5. Ellis, 2019.
6. Aladdin, 1992.
7. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996.
8. Ellis, “The Case for Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, Lindsay Ellis (YouTube), October 2017.
9. Matthew Ball, “What Is an Entertainment Company in 2021 and Why Does the Answer Matter?”, MatthewBall.co, May 2021.

Surrealist threads in “La Belle et la Bête” (DeDisneyfication, Part 4 Addendum)

I wrote about Disney’s Beauty and the Beast some time back, and hadn’t planned to revisit it. However, I’ve recently been reading Nicholas Jubber’s The Fairy Tellers. The book discusses the originators of various well-known fairy tales, including Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve. Within this section on the author of “La Belle et la Bête” (the tale’s original name, “B&B” hereafter), Jubber claims the work contains “surreal elements”.¹

I’m not bothered by the apparent anachronism of applying a word coined in 1917 to describe a status quo-challenging movement to a fairy tale written in 1740. However, the term is too often over- or misused. In the fairy tale genre of folklore, you can expect to encounter magic, enchantments, and whimsical creatures. And in general use, surreal means dreamlike or fantastical, so there’s clear overlap there.

Some elements of “B&B” definitely belong in the realm of folktale and myth. When the father arrives at the Château de la Bête, food is laid out and invisible servants attend him. This is not surreal, but commonplace in these tales. We see it repeatedly in Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales.² Likewise, the super-swift horse conveying the father home and returning Belle to the castle. The transgression provoking the Beast’s wrath is picking a rose, which we see many corollaries to in myth: drinking from a sacred well, slaying an animal (often a deer), or even eating literal forbidden fruit.

Meanwhile, in the realm of art and culture, the surreal is more specifically defined. While there is an idea of giving expression to the unconscious, surprising juxtapositions are central to the movement. As André Breton, one of its leaders, stated in his manifesto:³

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.

The illogic and non sequitur of surrealism are indeed what Jubber is referring to. He says:⁴

[S]urreal elements in Gabrielle-Suzanne’s fiction reflect a class in trouble, squeezed between monarchical absolutism and the rise of the merchant class. The Beast, courting Belle with magical gifts but locked in the castle by a curse, echoes the real-world aristocracy, stupefying itself with flamboyant delights while real power trickled away.

And many elements of “B&B” go further than the usual wonderments of fairyland. While we expect enchanted objects and magical occurrences, de Villeneuve takes it to a different level with passages like:⁵

[T]he monkey Captain of the Guard, by the beak of his parrot Interpreter, announced the visit of some ladies.

Where earlier works in the Animal as Bridegroom motif feature mere animals, particularly bears, as in “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”,⁶ “B&B” has the actual Beast. In the urban environs of Enlightenment Paris (1715–1801), the terror of natural creatures had waned. Royal menageries were already well known and the city’s first zoo was only a few decades off.

Instead, de Villeneuve conjures her thoroughly chimerical Bête with his elephant’s trunk, enormous weight, and clanking scales, and who roars and howls.⁷ She gives these details, but few others, and with no attempt made to reconcile them into a whole. This allows the reader’s imagination to do the work—an excellent use of the Umberto Eco-esque open work.

Neither does she include the usual fairytale journey from poverty to riches, from rural to urban. Rather, Belle’s father is a merchant—a member of the bourgeoisie from “a great city wherein trade flourishes abundantly”.⁸ The family descends into poverty because of his speculation. He has invested in shipping, but rather than returning with goods to sell for a profit, the ships run afoul of storms and sink.

This seems an obvious reflection of actual issues de Villeneuve had to face. Widowed at 26, she found her husband had gambled away his wealth. Leaving her to:⁹

[…] parcel out the estate piece by piece, her property slipping away in “a succession of sales, attempts at recovery, contracts of retrocession, debtors’ seizures or standing requests”.

De Villeneuve drew on her knowledge of the noble classes she once belonged to for her tale. It’s clear Château de la Bête is really Versailles, with a hall of mirrors and a vast garden at which Belle’s “eyes were enchanted; they had never seen anything in nature so beautiful”, including:¹⁰

[…] groves […] ornamented with admirable statues and numberless fountains […].

Further, she:¹¹

[P]ortrays the Beast as the victim of an ancient and malignant fairy who cursed him when the handsome youth turned down her amorous advances. The story encrypts the corrupt and vicious intrigues of court life, of fortune-hunting and marriage-braking [sic], pandering and lust in the ancién regime […].

And in this regard, the surrealism borders on satire, for example, with the “monkeys”:¹²

[T]wo tall young apes, in court dresses […] advanced and placed themselves with great gravity beside her. Two sprightly little monkeys took up her train as her pages. A facetious baboon, dressed as a Spanish gentleman of the chamber, presented his paw to her, very neatly gloved […].

When it comes to the surreal and “B&B”, it’s obvious to point to the 1946 film of Jean Cocteau, a notable surrealist. Interestingly, however, he took an entirely different tack. We can assume he has full knowledge of the tenets of the movement, but he flips the script—going for a stylized realism and a realistic fantasy:¹³

To realism, I would oppose the simplified, formalized behavior of characters out of Molière […]. To fairyland as people usually see it, I would bring a kind of realism to banish the vague and misty nonsense now so completely outworn.

The juxtaposition of elements remains, of course, but becomes still more surprising. 

The biggest change from de Villeneuve’s version of “B&B” to Disney’s and other modern ones is the portrayal of the Beast.

De Villeneuve’s Belle never falls in love with la Bête. Rather, she directs her affections toward a man termed “the Unknown”, who appears in her dreams. She describes him as, “a young man, beautiful as Cupid is painted”.¹⁴ portrayed as perfect in all other ways as well. Belle’s final crisis is choosing between the Unknown and la Bête, and when she accepts the monster, he becomes the prince. Similarly, Disney intended their Beast to be hideous and their Prince to be beautiful. But the tubeosphere has widely expressed disappointment with their Prince Charming.

So what happened between de Villeneuve and Disney? Cocteau. He had this effect clearly in mind:¹⁵

My aim would be to make the Beast so human, so sympathetic, so superior to other men, that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty.

The other strategy he used to accomplish this was to twist his portrayal of the Prince:¹⁶

Slyly, and with much effort, I persuaded my cameraman [Henri] Alekan to shoot Jean Marais, as the Prince in as saccharine a style as possible.

And indeed, la Bête’s final transformation is parasitic—rather than returning to his true form, he steals the appearance of Belle’s human suitor, Avenant.

De Villeneuve innovated the animal bridegroom to instill new horror. She even employed the other meaning of bête, presenting him as stupid. Cocteau, on the other hand, wanted to subvert the standards of beauty he felt remained too narrow and conventional in his time, still hearkening back to these fairy tales. In the press book for the premiere of La Belle et la Bête in Los Angeles, he’s raw about how the film was received in France:¹⁷

There has never yet been an instance of something new not baffling the esthetes, the critics and the public, lazily accepting familiar formulas. The least challenge is apt to awaken a brutal and unpleasant response.

It seems this was just a slow burn. Just as Futurists like Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti expanded our notions of beauty to include the machine, Cocteau did so for the beast. As he relates poet Paul Eluard said:¹⁸

[T]o understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.

Read subsequent articles in the DeDisneyfication series

Part 5: Putting “Pocahontas” to Rest

Part 5 Addendum: Powhatan’s Mantle

Part 6: Trouble with “Tarzan”

Part 7A: The Wrong Rabbit Hole

Part 7A Addendum A: Curious Curation

Part 7A Addendum B: “Alice” in Revolt

Part 7A Addendum B: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan

Part 7B: Alice’s Adventures in the Cousins War

Part 8: Guerrillas and the “Jungle”

Part 9A: Through a Magic Mirror Marred

Part 9A Addendum: The Woods “Over the Wall”

Part 9B: The Sum of its Versions

Part 9C: The “Snow White” Studio

Part 9D: Snowhaus

Part 10: The Little Less-Than

Part 11: Batmouse 3D

Part 12: Mork & Scheherazade

Read previous articles in the DeDisneyfication series

Part 1: Straightening out “Hunchback”

Part 2: Making over “Mulan”

Part 2 Addendum B: Your Western Wuxia Is Weak

Part 3A: “Hercules”: Myths and Mistakes

Part 3B: Doing Hera’s Work

Part 4: “Belle” Epoch

Notes

1. Nicholas Jubber, The Fairy Tellers: A Journey Into the Secret History of Fairy Tales, 2022.
2. Italo Calvino, Fiabe italiane (Italian Folktales), 1956.
3. André Breton, “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 1924.
4. Jubber, 2022.
5. Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, “La Belle et La Bête”, 1740, translated in “The Story of Beauty and the Beast”, Four and Twenty Fairy Tales Selected from Those of Perrault, and Other Popular Writers, J. R Planché (trans.), 1858.
6. Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe, “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”, East of the Sun and West of the Moon: Old Tales from the North, 1914.
7. De Villeneuve, 1740.
8. Ibid.
9. Jubber, 2022.
10. De Villeneuve, 1740.
11. Marina Warner, “On beauties and their beasts”, Sight and Sound, 2021.
12. De Villeneuve, 1740. She uses the collective monkeys to include apes as well.
13. Jean Cocteau, “Once Upon a Time—French Poet Explains His Filming of Fairy Tale”, from the original press book for the U.S. premiere of La Belle et la Bête, 1946.
14. De Villeneuve, 1740.
15. Cocteau, 1946.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.

Irish language and resistance

Readers here will know that together with my work in games, I’ve dealt with narrative fiction of various kinds, and have discussed worldbuilding and dialogue, among other aspects of the craft. I’ve also been an editor, and acted in this capacity recently for the talented Mariah Torsney’s historical fiction novel, Roseleigh. It was fun to learn about the areas of history in the book that were new to me. In particular, I found her use of the Irish language and its relation to the country’s struggle for independence interesting.

I first encountered the Irish language when I was 11 and my mother purchased the Horslips record, Happy to Meet—Sorry to Part. She bought it because it looked like a concertina—a musical instrument she was learning at the time. I liked it because it friggin’ rocked. It’s generally counted as the first Celtic rock album, followed much later by other bands I’ve enjoyed, such as Big Country, The Pogues, Dropkick Murphys, and The Real McKenzies.

Among Happy to Meet—Sorry to Part’s 14 tracks, there were two, “An Bratach Bán”, and “Bím Istigh Ag Ól” whose names, and indeed lyrics, weren’t in English. Though having a familiar sound, it was completely incomprehensible to me. In those days before the internets, there was nowhere to turn to learn more, and even now, asking the tubes does little good—we only learn the titles translate to “The White Flag”, and “I’m Inside Drinking”, respectively.¹ Now as then, I accept these songs for their musical qualities, being unable to grasp their content.

In my widening studies of myths during my teen years, I encountered those of the Celts, learning a few words. When I visited Ireland for the first time, I saw with interest that the signage was bilingual. Also on that trip, while visiting his relatives near Killarney, Brendan, a friend of my brother’s, said he felt bad for not being able to understand the older couple’s thick accents. I could reassure him I had definitely heard Irish words.

At one time, the Irish language was in full retreat in its home country. While Ireland had been invaded several times previously, under Henry VIII, England’s thorough conquest began, culminating in 1603 with Hugh O’Neill’s surrender to James I. This reshaped the island into a feudal tributary and eventually part of Great Britain. Naturally, the English preferred their own language be used for administration, and even though the Irish almost unanimously refused conversion to the state religion of Anglicanism, the Catholic church in a perverse effort to show their flock as “civilized” promoted the use of English among them as well. Even as early as the late 1270s, Edward I was warned:²

Hybernica lingua vobis et vestris sit inimica.

Irish-speakers are enemies to you and yours.

Although in 1800 the majority of people spoke Irish, as bilingualism spread from the city centers, being a monolingual Irish speaker branded one a rustic peasant. The people themselves sought to shed this stigma, forcing their children to learn English:³

I have myself reported the fact that the anxiety of the people to learn English in parts of Ireland which I have visited is so intense that they have instituted a sort of police system over the children to prevent them uttering a single word of Irish—they themselves not knowing a single word of English—so that, under such circumstances, a child when he went home at night was a sort of dummy if he had not other children to communicate with. I saw in such cases that the intelligence of the children was positively stunted—that it dwindled away.

The so-called Potato Famine (1845–1852)—known in Irish as an Drochshaol, “the hard times”—of course landed hardest on those same Irish-speaking rural farmers. 1M people died, and another 1–1.5M emigrated, taking their language with them to mainland Britain, Australia or the Americas. By 1841, the census showed Irish speakers had dwindled to less than half the population.⁴ Monoglot speakers declined still more sharply: from 800,000 in 1800, 319,602 by mid-century, and only 16,873 in the early 20th century.⁵

However, as I’ve discussed in my posts on argots, language can be a form of resistance as well. In the case of Irish, in addition to being the native language of their land, it was completely incomprehensible to the British, and so, effectively, a secret language. This deviation from the official language and use of Irish was seen as subversive, banned by the British, in turn pushing the Irish further towards radicalism.

From the late 1800s to World War I, Europe experienced significant societal changes, many focused on language revival. In Ireland, this was twofold: a literary revival, led by W. B. Yeats and a linguistic revival whose most important writers were Peadar Ua Laoghaire and Pádraig Pearse. By 1884, the bilingual Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge (Gaelic Journal) began publication with a masthead announcing it was:

Exclusively devoted to the preservation and cultivation of the Irish Language

Of these, Pearse came to be one of the more important figures in Ireland’s fight for independence as well. At 16 he joined Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League), and by 23 he became the editor of the league’s newspaper, An Claidheamh Soluis (The Sword of Light, referring to a weapon of myth).

Schooled as a barrister, Pearse only tried one case, which became emblematic of the conjoined struggles for Irish independence and language. In defiance of a law requiring carts to bear the owner’s name in English, poet, author, and songwriter, Niall Mac Gioll Bhridé (Anglicized as Neil McBride) had on his, in Gaelic script, “N. MAC GIOLLA ḂRIĠDE FIOḊ-MÓR”. Mac Gioll Bhridé refused to pay the one-shilling fine a bobby demanded of him for displaying “illegible” writing and defended himself in court only to be fined another shilling. Pearse took on his appeal, and also lost, but brought publicity to the case, declaring:⁶

[I]t was in effect decided that Irish is a foreign language on the same level as Yiddish.

Although Conradh na Gaeilge was apolitical, Irish speakers at recruitment meetings were arrested and jailed for sedition. Some remained unsure of their language’s value. When Pearse spoke extolling Irish in one of the strongest remaining Irish-speaking areas in the country, his native South Connemara, one listener said:⁷

Ach cěn mhaith i nuair a théann tú thar An Teach Dóite.

Little good is it when you go beyond An Teach Dóite.

The small village of An Teach Dóite marked the eastern extent of An Gaeltacht—the Irish-speaking community at the time.

By the time of the Easter Rising, Pearse had become one of the highest-ranking leaders of both the Óglaigh na hÉireann (Irish Volunteers) and the Bráithreachas Phoblacht na hÉireann (Irish Republican Brotherhood). After the rebels stormed the General Post Office and made it the headquarters of the Rising, Pearse stood outside the building to read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.

After six days of fighting, Pearse was captured, court-martialled, and executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol, along with many others. Many of the organizations involved in the Gaelic Revival were banned in 1919, including Óglaigh na hÉireann, Sinn Féin, and Conradh na Gaeilge and Cumann na mBan (The Irishwomen’s Council). Senior British army officer ‌General Neville McCready, later admitted such bans only had the effect of turning moderates into extremists.⁸

Once Ireland finally achieved independence in 1921, the Irish language could be freely taught. Although there are few, if any monoglot Irish speakers today, nearly 25% of the populace have some knowledge of the language, spreading even to urban areas.

One thing Brendan’s relative told me about—partially through his wife, who spoke more English—was a pilgrimage site nearby. It’s Anglicized as Cahercrovdarrig, also sometimes called the “‘The City’ of Shrone”, but he named it Cathair Crobh Dearg. Crobh Dearg, meaning “Red Claw”, refers to a pagan figure, likely a local form of the triple goddess, the Morrígna, who later morphed into a Christian saint. Within the site, there is a ruin of what might be a megalithic tomb, an ogham stone, an earthen mound, a sacred well, and an altar stone. A Bealtaine ritual also became Christianized into a May Day event with adherents making circuits of the grounds reciting prayers.

The otherworld, according to the Irish, is only three feet away—even closer in places like Cathair Crobh Dearg. So too, apparently, is the Rebellion. In 1915, the site was used to test improvised explosive devices in preparation for the Easter Rising.⁸

Notes

1. “Happy to Meet—Sorry to Part”, Wikipedia, retrieved May 2024.
2. J. A. Watt, “Gaelic Polity and Cultural Identity”, New History of Ireland, A. Cosgrove (ed.), 1993.
3. P. J. Keenan, 1868, quoted in Diarmuid Ó Donnchadha, Costaran Taoide (The Tide Is Turning), 1995.
4. John O’Beirne Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland, 1994.
5. Iarfhlaith Watson & Máire Nic Ghiolla Phádraig, “Is there an educational advantage to speaking Irish? An investigation of the relationship between education and ability to speak Irish”, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2009.
6. Pádraig Pearse, An Claidheamh Soluis, June 1905.
7. Maureen Wall, “Decline of the Irish language”, A View of the Irish Language, Brian Ó Cuív (ed.), 1969.
8. Paraphrased in Helene O’Keeffe, “Banned! Why nationalist groups were driven underground in 1919”, Atlas of the Irish Revolution, April 2020.
9. noeldonnellon, “Cathair Crobh Dearg: An important pilgrimage site for pagans and early Christians, named for a Celtic goddess-turned-saint”, Atlas Obscura, November 2017.

The last of the adventure genre’s greats (Interactive Storytelling, Part 1)

When I wrote the previous article on so-called interactive storytelling, I was repeatedly reminded that while I had taken a year to finally look at Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, that work’s genre deconstruction had missed the boat by a quarter century. 1993 saw the release of two important entries into the adventure game genre: Sam & Max Hit the Road (S&MHtR) and Gadget: Invention, Travel, & Adventure (Gadget).

It’s worth mentioning Myst was also released in 1993. The game was a sales juggernaut, moving over 6.3M units worldwide. Despite this impressive market penetration, I am not alone in counting Myst a massive step backwards, not only for the genre, but for games as a whole. Next Generation magazine termed it “gaming’s bleakest hour”.¹ There’s some gatekeeping nonsense about how Myst’s fans aren’t real gamers, but the gist of the actual criticism runs:²

[B]ehind its slick graphics and enigmatic sense of mystery, Myst was hopelessly shallow. The entire game consisted of puzzles locked behind puzzles, and while those enigmatic riddles were devious, they were also limited.

The interaction consisted of things like going to one room, seeing a door that needs to be opened, backtracking to a different room, throwing a lever, returning to the first room and noting the result… over and over forever. And, as noted above, the payoff for solving a puzzle was yet another puzzle:³

The puzzles are based exclusively on trial and error: the epitome of poor game design. […] The designers were good at creating a facade of mystical nonsense: you weren’t stuck because the game was bad, but because you just didn’t “get it.”

So, from a gameplay standpoint, the game falls well short of elevating the genre. Even three years on, one critic said:⁴

Myst led many publishers to believe that pretty screens meant more than pace and logic. We’re still recovering.

Having lived through this era, I can confirm the wrong lessons were learned by management in the games biz. The success of Myst served to further amp up the usual focus on flashy trash.

Myst is even regarded as having negatively impacted the success of actually good games in the genre like S&MHtR.⁵

PC gamers who had cut their teeth on Myst found it difficult to switch mental gears from the funereal elegance of Cyan’s work to the cartoonish whimsy of Sam & Max Hit the Road.

S&MHtR continued the tradition of LucasArts’ SCUMM-engine games, of which The Secret of Monkey Island (1990) remains the best entry. I already mentioned some of the important gameplay improvements present in this series. Monkey Island even directly referenced lame genre tropes, for instance, having a literal Red Herring inventory item. To be clear, this refers to items that seem to be useful, but are not. Appropriately, in Monkey Island, the item goes to feed a troll.

I was a fan of Sam & Max from its first incarnation as a funny book during the indie comix explosion of the mid-’80s. It was a standout for originality, humor, and amazing art. These elements are carried through to the game, making it excellent as well.

The self-aware humor is amped up, with the protagonists taking every opportunity to reference being in an absurd video game. There are fourth wall-breaking moments aplenty, including one where repeatedly directing Sam to pick up an item results in him starting to cry, and Max addressing you directly:⁶

Max: Now you’ve done it! You’ve broken Sam’s spirit with your stupid attempts to pick up that silly object!

Still, I’ll admit the hijinx of Sam & Max aren’t for everyone. In fact, though they made it to the small screen in 1997, their animated adventures were canceled after a single season, retaining cult status.

But the best work deconstructing the interactive narrative form for my money is Gadget. Its gameplay is fairly standard to the genre, and if anything, is more linear as it doesn’t present the usual false choices.

Where the game really shines is in the atmosphere its discordant soundscape, deliberately uncanny-valley visuals, and rambling, sometimes incoherent dialogue creates:⁷

Each second of the game is filled with paranoia and dread. Every cryptic story about mind control, every abandoned and unexplorable railway station, and every allusion to an apocalyptic future builds on a suspenseful and overpowering darkness.

The reason for this is Shōno Haruhiko (庄野 晴彦) came at the whole project from a different direction:⁸

[T]he work’s emphasis was not on action or gameplay, but to give a strong sense of presence to the game world and its environment. With the oppressive atmosphere and the preservation of tension and mystique, I was aiming to derive a quiet catharsis, based heavily on an element of ambiguity.

I can make no claims as to Shōno’s awareness of Umberto Eco’s definition of the open work (opera aperta)—that’s not something we ever discussed—but he definitely hit on one of the important elements here.

Although Gadget failed to find a big audience outside Japan, its influence can still be felt. One of the game’s spinoffs was The Third Force: A Novel of Gadget, penned by Mark Laidlaw and eedited by yours truly. Laidlaw’s name might ring a bell if you’re familiar with the Half Life series which he went on to write for. I certainly detected some distinct Gadget flavor when I first played Half Life, and put two and two together when I read the credits.

Strangely, the game and its ancillary items, particularly the art book Inside Out With Gadget, found an eager audience in Hollywood, including directors Guillermo del Toro and David Lynch.⁹ Indeed, this is how I came to (briefly) work with the latter.

I’ll spoil Gadget’s ending—it’s a 21-year-old game, so get over it. It’s one of the best twists I’ve ever encountered in a game. In games, and particularly adventure games, as a player, you generally need to buy into their premise, no matter how far-fetched. When you follow all the clues and reach the final scene in Gadget, you learn you are the 13th patient, and the mind-control experiment performed on you is declared successful. Of course, this is only my reading, as it’s ambiguous.

Five years later came the absolute death knell of the adventure game in the form of Grim Fandango (GF). A critical darling bedecked with accolades, it bombed so hard commercially, not only LucasArts, but their main rival Sierra Online—of which Blizzard was a subsidiary when I worked there—canceled their planned offerings in the genre.¹⁰ Indeed, lacking the knowhow to retool for other game types, these giants would walk the earth no more.

GF’s reviewers praised the characters, setting, and story, but weren’t so accepting of the actual mechanics:¹¹

Charming as the characters are, I found “Grim Fandango’s” gameplay intermittently grating. Some of the puzzles in the game are so idiosyncratic that they seem predicated less on the deployment of practical reasoning than on the achievement of a mystical mind-meld with the game’s project lead, Tim Schafer […] I sometimes found myself mashing the interact button while Manny patrolled a tiny area searching for the appropriate pixels.

While Gadget’s linearity and limited interactivity compared to that of GF might seem to make for a worse game, it doesn’t. The level of gameplay in Gadget is consistent with the rest of the game, and the elements work together to create the type of experience Shōno was interested in. As for GF, players may have taken issue with the inconsistency between its gameplay and the sophistication of its other elements.

Read previous articles in the Interactive Storytelling series

Part 1: Lizzie’s Game

Part 2: Those Frumious Jaws

Notes

1. “Crib Sheet”, Next Generation, November 1996.
2. Jeremy Parrish, “When SCUMM Ruled the Earth”, 1UP.com, June 2011.
3. Next Generation, 1996
4. Ibid.
5. Parrish, 2011.
6. Sam & Max Hit the Road, 1993.
7. Phil Salvador, “GADGET: Invention, Travel, & Adventure”, The Obscuritory (website),
8. Dieubussy, “Haruhiko Shono: A Prophet of the Digital Age”, Sorrel Tilley, trans.,  CoreGamer, January 2009.
9. Salvador, 2014.
10. “Adventure Series: Part III Feature”, The Next Level. November 28, 2005.
11. Christopher Byrd, “Grim Fandango Remastered review: A witty but tedious classic”, Washington Post, February 2015.

Syncretized gods and borrowed celestial omens (The continuity of Magic from East to West, Part 6)

Herodotus was known for his tendency toward fanciful accounts and exaggerated language. The Greeks in general could be quite exoticist, as I noted in the previous Part. We can definitely see both at work in this line from Histories:¹

σχεδον δε και πάντων τα οὐνόματα τῶν θεῶν ἐξ Αἰγύπτου ἐλήλυθε ἐς την Ἑλλάδα. διότι μεν γαρ ἐκ τῶν βαρβάρων ἥκει, πυνθανόμενος οὕτω εὑρίσκω ἐόν: δοκέω δ᾽ ὦν μάλιστα ἀπ᾽ Αἰγύπτου ἀπῖχθαι. […] τῶν ἄλλων θεῶν Αἰγυπτίοισι αἰεί κοτε τα οὐνόματα ἐστι ἐν τῇ χώρῃ.

[T]he names of nearly all the gods came to Hellas [i.e. Greece] from Egypt. For I am convinced by inquiry that they have come from foreign parts, and I believe that they came chiefly from Egypt. [With a few exceptions] the names of all the gods have always existed in Egypt.

Herodotus seems to be under the impression Greeks and Egyptians had only recently met in his time, whereas these cultures had already mutually influenced each other centuries before, during the Bronze Age. The effect must’ve been similar to when, with increasing contact between Europe and India in the 16th century, scholars like Thomas Stephens began to detect similarities between the languages of the Subcontinent and Greek and Latin.

In fact, Herodotos establishes some of the earliest equivalences between the Egyptian and Greek deities, such as Jaˈmanuw (Amun) and Ζεύς (Zeus), Asar (Osiris) and Διόνυσος (Dionysos), and Pitah (Ptah) and Ἥφαιστος (Hephaistos). These were to be used through to Hellenistic times (323–31 BCE), continuing to be expanded by others, into what came to be known as the interpretatio graeca. This discourse was a roadmap for understanding not only of the Egyptian gods but the deities of various cultures as having traits in common with Greek ones.

However, as Herodotus does above, it also opens the door to a more literal conflation of the gods of different peoples. When this happens, native beliefs are erased, as with many of the Roman gods. For instance, very little is left of Iuppiter because it was decided he was the same as Zeus and all the myths and iconography surrounding the Greek god were transferred to him. 

And Fortuna, far from just being Τύχη (Tyche) under a different name, actually came to the Romans with the Etruscan rulers during the kingdom period (753–509 BCE). Some vestiges of the original deity remain, such as a depiction from her sanctuary at Praeneste (modern Palestrina) showing her as the mother of Iuppiter and Iuno. Obviously, because of the succession myth the Greeks got from the Hurro-Hittite Kumarbi Cycle, Zeus has to be the eldest of the current hierarchy, and Tyche, therefore, his daughter. Later Roman depictions made this “correction”.

So while it’s dangerous to say with Herodotus everything in Graeco-Roman myth and magic was borrowed from the ancient Near East (ANE), let’s take a look at what may be the final area I’ll discuss in which that influence can be clearly seen: astrology. Together with haruspicy, astrology was a major means of interpreting the will of the gods in the ANE.²

[Mesopotamian s]cholars’ references to the celestial phenomena as “heavenly writing” (šiṭir šamê) or “writing of the firmament” (šiṭir burūmê), […] are indicative of this perspective [i.e. the gods expressed cosmic truths and their will as to human affairs through the stars (among other things)].

Otto Neugebauer, scholar of the history of science, adds some color as to both the date and volume of the literature involved in this praxis:³

Important events in the life of the state were correlated with important celestial phenomena […]. Thus we find already in this early period the first signs of a development which would lead centuries later to judicial astrology and, finally, to the personal or horoscopic astrology of the Hellenistic age. It is difficult to say just when and how celestial omens developed. The existing texts are part of a large series of texts, the most important one called “Enūma Anu Enlil” […]. This series contained at least 70 numbered tablets with a total of about 7000 omens. The canonization of this enormous mass of omens must have extended over several centuries and reached its final form perhaps around 1000 B.C.

As I’ve noted of both cookbooks and wisdom literature, there does tend to be an oral tradition only later compiled in written form, just as Neugebauer suggests. The 12 zodiacal asterisms of horoscopic astrology were built over time, beginning with four from the Sumerians by ca. 3200 BCE. These represent the cardinal points on the ecliptic, also corresponding to the solstices and equinoxes.

Professor of astrology and astrophysics Bradley Schaefer theorizes a “database” of stars made by an Assyrian observer around 1100 BCE. The transfer of their asterisms to the Greeks took place much later, even after the Orientalizing period (ca. mid-eighth–mid-seventh centuries BCE):⁴

[I]t is reasonable to conclude that sometime after then and before the existence of Eudoxus’s book [i.e. Phaenomena] (366 B.C.), the Greeks received the Mesopotamian star groups. The lack of any evidence for the Greek constellations (other than the Bear and Orion mentioned in Homer) before 500 B.C. suggests that most of the transfer happened after that time. We know from textual evidence that the Babylonian system came to Greece around 400 B.C.

The main body of wisdom literature about the stars in the ANE is known as the MUL.APIN (𒀯𒀳). It lists all the zodiacal houses we are familiar with today, most of them even retaining the same names in translation:

• Kukalanna/ Alû (𒀯𒄞𒀭𒈾) “The Bull of Heaven”, Taurus, the vernal equinox
• Mashtappa Kal/ Māšu (𒀯𒈦𒋰𒁀𒃲) “The Great Twins”, Gemini
• Allu/ Alluttu (𒀯𒀠𒇻) “The Crab”, Cancer
• Urkula/ Urgulû (𒀯𒌨) “The Lion”, Leo, the summer solstice
• Abpsin/ Absinnu (𒀯𒀳) “The Furrow”, (Virgo)
• Zibānītu (𒀯𒄑𒂟) “The Scales”, Libra
• Ngirta/ Zuqaqīpu (𒀯𒄈𒋰) “The Scorpion”, Scorpius, the autumnal equinox
• P’apilsang (𒀯𒉺𒉋𒊕) (Bow-Armed Warrior), Sagittarius
• Sukhurmash/ Suhurmāšu (𒀯𒋦𒈧𒄩) “The Goat-Fish”, Capricornus
• Kula/ Ṣinundu (𒀯𒄖𒆷) “The Great One” (Enk’i/ Ea), (Aquarius), the winter solstice
• Zibbātu (𒀯𒆲𒎌) “The Tail of the Swallow”, (Pisces)
• Agru (𒀯𒇽𒂠𒂷) “The Hired Man”, (Aries)

Again, it’s difficult to know for sure, but it seems there may have been some native Greek asterisms and others of unknown origin, possibly from Minoan sources. These won out over those in the MUL.APIN. There is but one more element needed to make Graeco-Roman horoscopy nearly completely recognizable as that used in modernity: the Egyptian concept of partitioning the zodiac into 36 decans, each spanning ten degrees, which was added in the late second or early first century BCE. Only a few minor refinements came from the Islamic Empire during medieval times.

Those who lived and died by ephemerides—books of astrological portents—were common enough in ancient Rome Juvenal saw fit to satirize them thus:

illius occursus etiam uitare memento,
in cuius manibus ceu pinguia sucina tritas
cernis ephemeridas, quae nullum consulit et iam
consulitur, quae castra uiro patriamque petente
non ibit pariter numeris reuocata Thrasylli
ad primum lapidem uectari cum placet, hora
sumitur ex libro; si prurit frictus ocelli
angulus, inspecta genesi collyria poscit;
aegra licet iaceat, capiendo nulla uidetur
aptior hora cibo nisi quam dederit Petosiris.
si mediocris erit, spatium lustrabit utrimque
metarum et sortes ducet frontemque manumque
praebebit uati crebrum poppysma roganti.

Remember always to avoid encountering the kind of woman
With a dog-eared almanac [ephemeris] in her hands, as if it were an amber
Worry-bead, who no longer seeks consultations but gives them,
Who won’t follow her husband to camp, or back home again,
If Thrasyllus the astrologer’s calculations advise against it.
When she wishes to take a ride to the first milestone, she’ll find
The best time to travel in her book; if her eye-corner itches
When rubbed, she checks her horoscope before seeking relief;
If she’s lying in bed ill, the hour appropriate for taking food,
It seems, must be one prescribed by that Egyptian, Petosiris.

Read subsequent articles in the Continuity of Magic from East to West series

Part 8: No Ewoks, Only the Dead

Read previous articles in the Continuity of Magic from East to West series

Part 1: The Griffin and the Phoenix

Part 2A: Hark, a Haruspex!

Part 2B: Go West, Young Mantis

Part 3A: Coda Etrusca

Part 3B: Devoted More Than All Others

Part 4A: Romancing the Hellenes

Part 4B: The Chthonian Connection

Part 5: Hellenism, Schmellenism

Part 6: Myth and Magic in the Cultural Koiné

Notes

1. Ἡρόδοτος (Herodotus), Ἱστορίαι (Histories), 2.50.1–2, ca. 430 BCE. Translation by A. D. Godley, 1920.
2. Alan Lenzi, “Revisiting Biblical Prophecy, Revealed Knowledge Pertaining to Ritual, and Secrecy in Light of Ancient Mesopotamian Prophetic Texts”, Divination, Politics, and Ancient Near Eastern Empires, 2014.
3. Otto Neugebauer, The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, 1951.
4. Bradley E. Schaefer, “The Origin of the Greek Constellations”, Scientific American, November 2006.
5. Decimus Junius Juvenalis (Juvenal), Satirae (Satires), VI.569–584, ca. 100–127 CE; trans. A. S. Kline, 2001; emphasis mine.

The much-hyped inscription revealed! (Logic of Forgeries, Part 3 Addendum/ Late Bronze Age Collapse, Part 3 Addendum)

The Sea Peoples were various groups of Middle and Late Bronze Age cultures, with which western Asia Minor teemed. They were allied with the Trojans in their war against the Greeks and fought as mercenaries alongside the Hittites at the battle of Kadesh, only to be defeated by Agamemnon and Ramesses II, respectively. But they rose again, attacking many cities along the eastern Mediterranean coast, and helping to bring about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (LBAC).

Or maybe that’s a collection of magical thinking and leaps of logic propped up with just enough fact to seem plausible.

The Institute for Luwian Studies launched campaigns of sensationalism back in 2016 and 2017. At the end of the latter year, they delivered the inscription they claimed solved the LBAC. I was recently doing an editing pass on my post on the topic—since, as Jorge Luis Borges notes, “The concept of the ‘definitive text’ corresponds only to religion or exhaustion”¹—when I noticed it was past due for a follow-up.

Eberhard Zangger and Fred Woudhuizen revealed the inscription they had teased in their article, “Rediscovered Luwian Hieroglyphic Inscriptions from Western Asia Minor”. They term it “Beyköy 2” and give it the following significance: It was composed in western Asia Minor, an area that has produced little documentary evidence so far. Beyköy 2 dates to a time at the end of the Bronze Age (BA) after Hittite rule had collapsed, which is also not well documented. It was ordered by a great king named Kupantakurantas at the beginning of the 12th century BCE, revealing the existence of his kingdom in western Asia Minor. The inscription records his achievements at home and abroad.²

But there’s still the small matter of Beyköy 2’s provenance. As the paper itself notes:³

The announcement, earlier this year, of the publication of a monumental Luwian hieroglyphical inscription […] immediately triggered a lively debate among luwologists and many others. The debate soon mainly focused on the surmised falsification of the drawings […].

This “surmised falsification” is based on the reputation of the man in whose possession the inscription had supposedly been languishing for decades, James Mellaart. It’s worth noting while the original hype said the inscription was “newly deciphered,” Zangger and Woudhuizen’s article indicates Professor U. Bahadır Alkım actually did this in 1980. However:⁴

J. David Hawkins had known about the document since 1989, and Mark Weeden since 2012. Both scholars, we learnt, were convinced that Beyköy 2 was a forgery produced by Mellaart.

The former is a scholar of Hittite and Luwian language and history credited with much of our current understanding of these fields, and the latter is an expert in Anatolian hieroglyphs and cuneiform.

As for Mellaart, in a more recent article, Zangger describes his initial contact with the pseudoarchaeologist, and their common desire for more BA archaeology in western Asia Minor. They shared a belief in the region’s importance and a feeling it couldn’t have been populated only by “[…] uncivilized nomads roaming across the country in yurts [sic] and possessing no knowledge of writing”:⁵

[W]e shared a common conviction. Independently of each other, we had both arrived at the conclusion that western Turkey must contain numerous, still-hidden Middle and Late Bronze Age sites. We both also believed that a large part of the Sea Peoples had their home in this region. Their attacks on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean shortly after 1200 BC contributed to the downfall of the Bronze Age cultures of the heroic era. Some of the mercenaries who supported the Hittite king Muwatalli (c. 1295–1272 BC) in 1274 at the Battle of Kadesh came from western Anatolia. The same names then appear in the Sea People inscriptions known from Upper Egypt, and are also found again in Homer’s Iliad among the allies of the Trojans during the Trojan War. The western part of modern Turkey must therefore have been densely populated around 1200 BC.

We can see Zangger and Mellaart share the bad science of starting from a desired endpoint, then look for evidence to support it. Conveniently, Beyköy 2 speaks directly to much of what they believed. Giving Zangger the benefit of the doubt, his convictions led to his confirmation bias for the evidence Mellaart provided. It also led him to link Troy directly to Atlantis, declaring Plato’s description of the island nation, “a distorted recollection of the Trojan War”.⁶ One irony-impaired Atlantis conspiracy theorist defended Zangger’s book The Flood from Heaven, thus:⁷

The reactions of established academia on Zangger’s Atlantis hypothesis were characterised by a wholesale and dogmatic rejection. The counter arguments put forward were almost all superficial, outdated, or wrong. Above all, they were reckless and mocking, and aimed at undermining Eberhard Zangger’s reputation.

In Mellaart’s case, he perpetrated hoaxes to verify his version of history. In a more recent article, after a thorough look through Mellaart’s materials, Zangger brands him a packrat, forger, and possibly a prankster. He declares the original Beyköy Text (a different one from Beyköy 2) one such forgery, even putting it in scare quotes:⁸

[W]e came across an extensive collection of handwritten drafts of the “Beyköy Text.” Mellaart had placed the items he claimed to be the unpublished translations of Late Bronze Age tablets at the entrance to his study, clearly visible and appropriately labeled. The kits he had used to fabricate these documents, however, were kept well hidden. But not only that: I also found pieces of slate with pictorial carvings that were obviously sketches that Mellaart had published as reconstructed murals from Çatalhöyük. By this point there was no longer any doubt that Mellaart was a forger. The fact that he had carefully hidden the drafts hints at a sense of wrongdoing […].

Still, Zangger insists, despite clear evidence of Mellaart’s predilections and methods, somehow Beyköy 2 is real. Diether Schürr, scholar of Anatolian languages, is less sanguine, noting:⁹

[T]he drawings of the inscriptions, as well as the translations of the longest ones, are by James Mellaart, not only an important archaeologist but an unscrupulous inventor of artifacts like the Treasure of Dorak and kilim-like wall paintings at Çatal Hüyük, all of which exist only in his drawings. As early as 1954, he had published a drawing of a seal impression with the hieroglyphic Luwian name of a king’s son, the writing and reading of which evidently came from himself. He used a large amount of information in the inscription drawings he left behind. In form they imitate the inscription of Yalburt, in content he combined the names of kings and countries known from Hittite sources with names of Sea Peoples (Pulasati, Luka, Sakarasa), later documented city names and also the fables attributed to Xanthos, whereby he equated Mopsos alias Moxos with the name Muksus (written Mu-uk-šu-uš) recorded in a Bronze Age Hittite text or the name Mu-ka-sa- recorded in the Iron Age hieroglyphic Luwian double inscription from Karatepe in Cilicia, as others had done long before him.

The provenance of Beyköy 2 is presented by Zangger and Woudhuizen with no footnotes as to its historicity, so I assume it to be part and parcel of Mellaart’s fabrication. It’s quite a yarn:¹⁰

In 1878, news arrived at the Department of Antiquities in Constantinople that peasants in the hamlet of Beyköy, about 34 kilometers north of Afyonkarahisar in western Turkey, had found a large number of stone blocks with hieroglyphic inscriptions resembling those from Hama. The government commissioned the French archaeologist Georges Perrot, who had visited and carefully documented the ruins in Boğazköy in 1862 and was visiting Turkey at that time, to travel to Beyköy to produce drawings of the stone inscriptions and, if possible, to even photograph them. […] The archaeologist was successful—he proceeded from Beyköy directly to Edremit to record the inscription that had been found there and was stored in a public park. Perrot returned with copies whose quality satisfied the requirements he had been set. Realizing the potential significance of the finds, the Turkish government then ordered the stones from Beyköy to be secured. But nothing happened. So, the Director of the Department of Antiquities ultimately went to Beyköy himself, only to find that the stones had already been built into the foundations of a new mosque.

After all this, Mellaart came by copies of Perrot’s drawings and had a translator sent by the Turkish government. These layers of obfuscation are a great way for Mellaart to deny it’s even his work—he’s just presenting it. I’m inescapably reminded of a similar metafictional device, Miguel de Cervantes’ narrative of how he came upon the second part of Don Quixote. He relates he encountered a boy selling pamphlets in Arabic, which he couldn’t read. He found a Morisco who could, and:¹¹

When I heard Dulcinea del Toboso named, I was struck with surprise and amazement, for it occurred to me at once that these pamphlets contained the history of Don Quixote. With this idea I pressed him to read the beginning, and doing so, turning the Arabic offhand into Castilian, he told me it meant, “History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by Cid Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian.” It required great caution to hide the joy I felt when the title of the book reached my ears, and snatching it from the silk mercer, I bought all the papers and pamphlets from the boy for half a real; and if he had had his wits about him and had known how eager I was for them, he might have safely calculated on making more than six reals by the bargain. I withdrew at once with the Morisco into the cloister of the cathedral, and begged him to turn all these pamphlets that related to Don Quixote into the Castilian tongue, without omitting or adding anything to them, offering him whatever payment he pleased. He was satisfied with two arrobas of raisins and two bushels of wheat, and promised to translate them faithfully and with all despatch; but to make the matter easier, and not to let such a precious find out of my hands, I took him to my house, where in little more than a month and a half he translated the whole just as it is set down here.

Even if we squintingly accept the inscription’s origins, there are still issues. As noted by Schürr, one of the central elements of “proof” offered by Mellaart and Zangger is the connection of a prince called Mu-uk-šu-uš in the Hittite and Luwian inscriptions (Muksus, also seen as Mu-ku-susa and Mu-ka-sa) with the Ancient Greek (AG) Mόψος.¹²

Kupantakuruntas states that this maritime campaign to southeastern Anatolia and the Levant was conducted not by himself but by four great princes: Muksus, Kulanamuwas, Tuwatas, and Piyakuruntas. Of these, Muksus is the most prominent, as his name is singled out by the determinative of personal names and more sections are dedicated to him. Bearing a Phrygian type of name, he was seated in Apassawa or Apaisos on the Dardanelles. The memory of the conquest of Ashkelon by Muksus has been preserved in the legendary tales of Mopsos in Greek historical tradition.

In order for this to be the case, they cite another Woudhuizen work in their footnotes, stating:¹³

Muksus is of origin a Phrygian type name, cf. Linear B mo-qo-so “Mopsos”

Mόψος is indeed attested in Linear B as mo-qo-so. However, although a confessed amateur, I’d differ with this reading. As I’ve noted elsewhere, Linear B is a defective script for Mycenaean Greek (MG), so ⟨q-⟩ does the work of a few different consonants: /ɡʷ/, /kʷ/, and /kʷʰ/. So how can we tell which is meant? By back-forming from AG. When we see ⟨ψ⟩, we can confidently say it developed from MG /ɡʷ/, so the name there was likely Mogwos, but definitely not Muksus as Woudhuizen and Zangger would have it. Furthermore, in MG Moξος would have been Modjos and rendered as *mo-zo-so in Linear B, so that alternation doesn’t work either. And not only have they made this consonantal leap, but they’ve also seen fit to alter the vowels as well, where Linear B’s vowel store contains a perfectly serviceable set in ⟨-u⟩.

Again, I’d say the articles I write, while sometimes exploring obscure realms, qualify only as popular history in that my object is to entertain rather than submit for peer review—although, I should note, I’m always happy to be set straight if I’ve gone astray. Even so, the Woozling involved in referring to your own work is something I instinctively steer away from. I’ve gone so far as to revisit an article of mine when I saw Wikipedia referenced it to find and cite my source. I have quoted my own articles, but only where I’ve said something whose accuracy is not debatable and well and concisely put.

Schürr agrees with my linguistic conclusion, further stating:¹⁴

[…] Muksus could be connected to the Graeco-Lydian Moξος and Mukasa- on Karatepe, especially a ca. 740 BCE Phrygian example of Muksos in Gordion has been known since 2009, which noticeably changes the picture of name distribution. Because this mediates between Lydia and Cilicia, the name may have wandered across Anatolia in the Iron Age—instead of a Greek seer or a Lydian king in the dim past. Above all, the other evidence of the name Muksos, which dates from about the same time, suggests the Karatepe [inscription] actually reads [Muksa-].

What Zangger, Woudhuizen, and Mellaart are trying to do here is to establish a large and influential Greek presence in western Asia Minor prior to the LBAC. They are led to do so by Ancient Greek accounts, including those of Homer and Plato, and indeed others motivated by their own political interests, as ancient historian Robin Lane Fox notes:¹⁵

Later Greek writers place actual Greek settlements [in the Cilician plain] and even claim that mythical Greek heroes in the legendary past once founded the important towns. False claims to a Greek origin became notorious in the plain in later centuries, arising when non-Greeks wished to compete for status in the later Greek-speaking age.

It shouldn’t have surprised me to learn Zangger has a history of Atlanteanism. Though he seems to have backed away from it, it’s problematic in the same way as his and Woudhuizen’s paper. Both argue a European culture is responsible for technological advances among non-European ones because they couldn’t possibly be capable of such advances on their own.

Read subsequent articles in the Logic of Lies series

Part 4: Romancing the Hellenes

Part 5: Descent into the Absurd

Part 5 Addendum: The Ironclad Test Oath and Why It Doesn’t Work

Read previous articles in the Logic of Lies series

Part 1: The Fakes that Launched a Thousand Ships

Part 2: It’s Fascinating What One Can Deduce about a Man Just by Knowing his Name

Part 3: The Luwian Menace

Read previous articles in the Late Bronze Age Collapse series

Part 1: Apocalypse BCE

Part 2: Whither the Wanax?

Part 3: The Luwian Menace

Notes

1. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Homeric Versions” (“Las versiones homéricas”), 1932, collected in English in On Writing, Suzanne Jill Levine, ed., 2010.
2. Eberhard Zangger and Fred Woudhuizen, “Rediscovered Luwian Hieroglyphic Inscriptions from Western Asia Minor”, Talanta, December 2017.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Eberhard Zangger, “James Mellaart: Pioneer… and Forger”, Popular Archaeology, October 2019.
6. See Eberhard Zangger, The Flood from Heaven: Deciphering the Atlantis Legend, 1992, “Plato’s Atlantis Account—A Distorted Recollection of the Trojan War”, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 1993, Ein neuer Kampf um Troia: Archäologie in der Krise (A New Battle for Troy: Archeology in Crisis), 1994.
7. Thorwald C. Franke, “Eberhard Zangger: Atlantis = Troy: Atlantis brought down from heaven to earth”, Atlantis Scout, March 2017.
8. Zangger, 2019.
9. Diether Schürr, “Ein Königssohn, der Mops hieß (oder Mucks?): von Phantasie-Inschriften, antiken Fabeleien und Namenbelegen zwischen Pylos und Karatepe” (“A King’s Son Whose Name Was Mops (Or Mucks?): Of Fantasy Inscriptions, Ancient Fables and Names Between Pylos and Karatepe”), Gephyra, 2019. My mediocre translation.
10. Zangger and Woudhuizen, 2017.
11. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote, John Ormsby, trans., 2004.
12. Zangger and Woudhuizen, 2017.
13. Woudhuizen, Documents in Minoan Luwian, Semitic, and Pelasgian, 2016, referenced in Zangger and Woudhuizen, 2017.
14. Schürr, 2019.
15. Robin Lane Fox, Travelling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer, 2009.

Hits and misses of “The Great Mouse Detective” (DeDisneyfication, Part 11)

Recently, my attention was drawn to The Great Mouse Detective (GMD). I didn’t see this film when it came out; in fact, I don’t even remember it coming out. Regardless, it was both critically acclaimed and financially successful, with the worldwide box office for its original 1986 release reaching over 50M USD, more than three-and-a-half times its budget.

Many point to the film as, if not the first film in the Disney renaissance, at least preparing the way for it. According to Disney itself, it laid the groundwork for the runaway blockbusters to come in three key ways:¹

[I]t had great music, utter commitment to its concept, and a willingness to innovate technologically.

Still, similar to Wordle, GMD is more or less a copy of a copy of a copy. The film was based on the Basil of Baker Street book series by Eve Titus. The movie was meant to use that same title until a fairly strange decision was handed down to change it. Story artist Ed Gombert lampooned the move with a memo suggesting renamings for Disney’s other animated classics:²

• Seven Little Men Help a Girl
• The Wooden Boy Who Became Real
• Color and Music
• The Wonderful Elephant Who Could Really Fly
• The Little Deer Who Grew Up
• The Girl With the See-Through Shoes
• The Girl In the Imaginary World
• The Amazing Flying Children
• Two Dogs Fall In Love
• The Girl Who Seemed To Die
• Puppies Taken Away
• The Boy Who Would Be King
• A Boy, a Bear and a Big Black Cat
• Aristocats
• Robin Hood with Animals
• Two Mice Save a Girl
• A Fox and a Hound Are Friends
• The Evil Bonehead

Apparently, the directive came from Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose takeaway from the box-office flopping of Amblin’s Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) was the fictional detective’s draw wasn’t so great.

This type of arbitrary-feeling decision making mirrors my own experience with the infamous marketing department at Sega. One of my games, The Ooze, featured innovative gameplay and a unique look and feel, but its sales were unquestionably hurt by the hideous cover art and terrible tagline—“Yuck, what a slob!”—they attached to it. Mark Cerny, who ran my studio, Sega Technical Institute (STI), prior to my arrival relates a similar tale of Sonic the Hedgehog:³

[N]o feedback had arrived from Sega of America’s marketing group, so I asked if they had any comments for the team. I heard, I kid you not, that the characters were “unsalvageable,” that this was a “disaster,” and that “procedures would be put in place to make sure that this sort of thing would never happen again.” These “procedures” included a proposed “top ten list of dos and don’ts” to follow when making products for the American market. Additionally, I was told that the marketing group would be contacting a known character designer (I won’t reveal the name, but it made me cringe at the time) to make a character that showed exactly what the American market needed. Needless to say, this character designer would have been totally inappropriate for the Japanese market. Not that great for the American market either, I suspect.

In the case of GMD, it’s hard to tell what effect the name change had. The source series had run to five books by the time of the film, with a further three by a different author, Cathy Hapka, in more recent years, the latest in 2020, so there certainly must be a fanbase. Objectively, the original name has more flavor, making Gombert’s genericized parody names well-aimed, also pissing Katzenberg off mightily. And while the box-office performance of the film was good, it pales in comparison with The Little Mermaid.

I’ve already spoiled the reveal, but of course the books themselves reference Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. The name Basil alludes both to an alias Holmes used in some of the original tales, as well as to Basil Rathbone, probably still the detective’s most famous portrayer in the West with a series running to 14 films.⁴

Backing up yet another step, even Doyle acknowledges his works were strongly influenced by Edgar Allen Poe’s stories of C. Auguste Dupin, beginning with The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Doyle remarked of Poe’s detective tales:⁵

[E]ach is a root from which a whole literature has developed…. Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?

To be clear, the answer is nowhere. Poe literally invented the genre. Dupin’s techniques of careful observation and analysis, termed ratiocination, strongly influence those of Holmes, and some of his personality quirks do as well. In addition, as one of Poe’s biographers noted:⁶

Poe’s detective stories use several devices that are now so familiar that they are taken for granted. […] The stories are told in the first person, not by Dupin, but by an unnamed narrator who lacks the brilliant detective’s ratiocinative abilities. […] Another of Poe’s devices comes at the end of the tales, when Dupin announces his surprising solution and then explains the reasoning leading to it.

Disney, predictably, does nothing with this legacy. GMD is, in fact, not a proper detective tale at all. In order to track Fidget (Candy Candido), Professor Ratigan’s (Vincent Price) henchman, they use Holmes’ dog Toby rather than following any clues. And it’s probably better that way, as in the subsequent sequence, Ratigan’s lair is pinpointed partly using chemical analysis as the only place in London there’s a bar where the sewer meets the saltwater Thames river. Anyone casual observer of the siting of pubs in London will attest there are dozens on the river. As to salinity, near the Thames Estuary, it’s brackish, but not very. Particular during the Victorian Era portrayed in GMD, raw sewage would probably be the most detectable element of the water.

The reason Ratigan kidnaps Mr. Flaversham (Alan Young), a toymaker, and gathers tools, gears, and toy soldier uniforms provides a tiny bit of mystery. But there isn’t ever a real crime to solve apart from the abduction and there’s only ever one suspect, Ratigan—an obvious analog of Professor Moriarty of the Holmes tales, who they even term “the Napoleon of Crime”. An actual detective story using the same elements would have started with the Queen’s (Eve Brenner) announcement of Ratigan as her royal consort, and then had Basil (Barrie Ingham) follow clues to figure out why. Instead, we see all the steps and the crime occurs an hour into the movie.

Disney, and its fluffy critics say GMD draws more from Bond film tropes. I agree, but in more of a classic Batman TV show realization thereof. We get an archvillain with a bevy of henchmen of whom he demands total loyalty, enforced with the threat of being fed to a cat. Basil and Dawson (Val Bettin) fall into Ratigan’s clutches and he leaves them immobilized in a Rube Goldberg contraption, from which they narrowly escape with their lives. His excessively complex master plan is foiled by Basil at the last minute. There follows a chase scene, which ultimately sees Basil triumphant and Ratigan dead.

In the area of technological innovation, I’d say Disney’s claim is a bit hyperbolic. True this is the first film to make extensive use of CGI and traditional animation together—The Black Cauldron only used it for some visual effects—but the way it’s used leaves a lot to be desired.

The whole sequence in GMD is only one minute, 20 seconds long. Obviously, CGI, especially in those very early days, was costly, so limiting it to one scene makes sense. Michael Eisner also cut the film’s budget from 24M to 10M USD, together with a compressed timeline.

The tech was pretty difficult to work with, with measurements carefully taken at Big Ben, then typed into computers, cameras and animations added using rotational data, then left to render, sometimes overnight.

I can relate having worked on Die Hard Arcade, STI’s first foray into 3D. 10 years on from GMD the technology was certainly better—we could use mice as input devices, for example—but as the game used run-time animation rather than pre-rendered, there were still a lot of limitations. Even though we built the characters using SoftImage on pretty fancy Silicon Graphics boxes, we had to check the vertex data by reading through big strings of numbers to ensure each polygon was a quadrilateral, as anything else would make the game’s renderer fail. We also relied on rotational data among the body parts of characters to animate them, which proved tricky for a robot character I built with an attack where its arm was designed to shoot straight out.

In any case, GMD’s use of 3D is also completely out of keeping with the film’s overall aesthetic. The other backgrounds in the film feature a dark and smoggy palette in keeping with the setting of Victorian London, and the surfaces are worn and pockmarked and fade into one another. By contrast, the clockwork elements of the CGI scene are cell shaded like the foreground characters: thick outlines and solid colors within. 

GMD is also a semi-musical as there are only three songs in the film. Two of them are quite odd, “Goodbye So Soon” plays on the phonograph that’s essentially the timer for Ratigan’s fiendishly overcomplicated death trap and “Let Me Be Good To You” is a song accompanying a burlesque performance by a character who appears only for the purpose. The villain song, however, is great. Not only is it the first of what was to become a whole genre, Price’s performance makes it.

The film’s biggest failing is in meeting Disney’s goal of providing whole-family entertainment. The mystery and thriller elements are barely good enough for an audience of children, while several grisly deaths are implied and even take place on screen, and of course, the burlesque performance is definitely not for the kiddos.

Since GMD’s corollaries to Batman are obvious, they might’ve followed that model more closely as having successfully cracked this code. The show was charmingly campy to adults but with the action and panache to please younger viewers.

Read subsequent articles in the DeDisneyfication series

Part 12: Mork & Scheherazade

Read previous articles in the DeDisneyfication series

Part 1: Straightening out “Hunchback”

Part 2: Making over “Mulan”

Part 2 Addendum B: Your Western Wuxia Is Weak

Part 3A: “Hercules”: Myths and Mistakes

Part 3B: Doing Hera’s Work

Part 4: “Belle” Epoch

Part 4 Addendum: The Enchanted and the Postmodern

Part 5: Putting “Pocahontas” to Rest

Part 5 Addendum: Powhatan’s Mantle

Part 6: Trouble with “Tarzan”

Part 7A: The Wrong Rabbit Hole

Part 7A Addendum A: Curious Curation

Part 7A Addendum B: “Alice” in Revolt

Part 7A Addendum C: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan

Part 7B: Alice’s Adventures in the Cousins War

Part 8: Guerrillas and the “Jungle”

Part 9A: Through a Magic Mirror Marred

Part 9A Addendum: The Woods “Over the Wall”

Part 9B: The Sum of its Versions

Part 9C: The “Snow White” Studio

Part 9D: Snowhaus

Part 10: The Little Less-Than

Notes

1. “How ‘The Great Mouse Detective’ Kick-Started the Disney Renaissance”, Oh My Disney (website), September 2015.
2. Steve Hulett, “‘Mouse in Transition’: Basil or Mouse Detective?” (Chapter 19), Cartoon Brew, April 2015.
3. Ken Horowitz, “Interview: Mark Cerny”, Sega-16, 2006.
4. In the former Soviet Union, the 11 Приключения Шерлока Холмса и доктора Ватсона (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson) films 1979–1986 are their own cultural phenomenon.
5. “The Poe Centenary”, London Times, March 1909, quoted in Frederick S. Frank and Tony Magistrale, The Poe Encyclopedia, 1997.
6. Kay Cornelius, “Biography of Edgar Allan Poe”, Harold Bloom, ed., Bloom’s BioCritiques: Edgar Allan Poe, 2002.