Edgar Allan Poe is famous for many things, including marrying his 13-year-old cousin, contracting mysterious diseases, and dying young while in the midst of insanity. He also sometimes wrote stuff. He is best known for sappy chick-lit tales featuring disembodied hearts, black cats, ravens, mummies, and Usher.
Poe was very into R&B
Occasionally, he would confound his critics with unexpected bursts of grand adventure, full of mind-boggling puzzles, exotic locations, long-dead pirates, and buried treasure. Then he would go back to writing about handsome strangers with smoldering eyes and luscious hair. The Gold Bug is one such departure.
Nowadays we think of buried pirate treasure as an old fashioned sort of adventure plot, since all the pirates have been dead for more than 100 years. In Poe’s day, piracy was on the wane, but still relevant to its audience, sort of like how everyone still likes Die Hard.
Next Century's Classic Literature
What makes The Gold Bug so much fun is the way in which its hero finds the last stash of Captain Kidd. Basically he stumbles across an invisible treasure map while beachcombing. If you think it is difficult to stumble across something invisible, you’d be right, unless there was also a gold scarab beetle sitting nearby.
I have read the story many times and it is still unclear to me whether the scarab is a real beetle or a gold artifact. The characters in the story talk about it as if it is an actual insect with a strange coloration, which they capture by wrapping it in a scrap of parchment that they conveniently find nearby. It is only later, while studying the bug near the fire, that invisible ink on the paper is revealed.
Easily mistaken for a real insect
In fact, the Gold Bug itself plays virtually no role in the plot, other than that it also allows them to find the treasure map. Perhaps the title is one of those “symbolic” things that English teachers are so obsessed with. “Bug” as in “sickness.” The Virus of Greed and all that stuff.
The map contains a fiendish cryptogram, which the characters dissect in riveting fashion, while basically schooling the reader on how to solve those word puzzles in the newspaper. It translates to a riddle, which involves a trip to the seaside cliffs, the discovery of a particular tree, which happens to have a skull nailed to one of the branches high up.
Here they must solve one more puzzle in order to find the treasure’s location, and as to whether or not they succeed, I will leave to you to discover. It’s a short story and readily available online, so stop your complaining. It is best if you don’t think about the fact that trees tend to grow over time, so maybe Captain Kidd wasn’t as clever as he thought.
The story is oft-imitated. One can see its influence in dozens of works from popular culture, of which The DaVinci Code and National Treasure may be the most recent examples. It is also fascinating for its discussion of cryptography, which was a relatively new art to the literary public of Poe’s day, who up to that point had been sending secret messages using the Ovaltine decoder ring.
Poe himself seemed to have an obsession with cryptograms. He possessed an almost supernatural ability to decipher them. He once challenged a magazine’s readership to stump him with a code in any language with any character set, and despite many insane, complex submissions, not a single one could best him.
But he stunk at Sudoku
The story’s one deficiency is its glaring and blatant racism. It is definitely a product of its time, and it treats the lone black character as a ridiculous fool, complete with phonetically rendered speech and derogatory names. Were Hollywood ever to make The Gold Bug into a movie, I foresee a great many rewrites in which this character is changed to a bumbling robot played by Robin Williams.
In TV, it’s called The Other Darrin. See, back when Bewitched first hit the airwaves, the character of mild-mannered husband Darrin was played by a guy named Dick York. When York became sick after a couple seasons (presumably from illness, not from all the fetching nose wiggling), they swapped him out for a guy named Dick Sargent. Bewitched ran another three years, Dick York for another 20, giving him the last laugh.
Besides the random replacement of the lead actor, nothing strange ever happened on Bewitched.
Same character, blatantly different actor. It happens all the time. The internet is a little loose with this definition. They’ll count the fact that there have been four Batmans, or three Jack Ryans, or 403 different James Bonds. But usually those types of movies stand as individual films, with only incidental continuity needed between one film and the next.
On the other hand, occasionally you get movies that are obviously part of a larger story. When an actor bows out (or dies, or makes too many unreasonable demands), that’s when the craziness really heats up.
Here are my favorites.
Crazy Old Wizards
Harry Potter was originally planned as a 7-book series, and since one of the primary characters is a really old dude, the producers of the first movie had to be holding their breath at the thought of casting 973-year-old Richard Harris in the role of Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore.
Elizabeth Taylor loved him for the beard.
Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone went off with out a hitch, was a massive success, and Harris was signed for the sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. It would turn out to be his last film.
Knowing that they still had at least five more movies to go – more if they could saw a few of them in half – the producers turned to British actor Michael Gambon to replace Harris. Gambon was a high school junior at the time, and they buried him in a mountain of old age make-up and goat fur to disguise the transition. Gambon, who 5 movies later is now 70, should make it through the end of the last Potter film.
Elizabeth Taylor loved him for the beard.
Superhero Sidekicks
Even though I just said that casting switcheroos in superhero movies don’t really bother me, it’s just weird when the hero remains the same but the people around him are different. It’s happened twice in recent memory.
My best friend, the Colonel
Terrence Howard played the long suffering Jim Rhodes character in the period romantic drama Iron Man, which surprisingly grossed $24 billion worldwide, one of the leading indicators that there will be a sequel.
When it came to film Iron Man 2: Back in the Habit, suddenly there was a falling out. The producers heard that Howard didn’t like them, then Howard said that he did like them, just not in that way, then the producers got snippy and said something mean to one of Howard’s friends, so then he prank called their mothers. Anyway, Howard wasn’t asked back.
A fun, less scowly Colonel than Terrence Howard
Fortunately Terrence Howard is black, and so the producers hit upon the ingenious method of casting another black guy, apparently because they think we can’t tell the difference. Don Cheadle was brought on board, and he got to fly around in the Iron Man suit in the sequel rather than just stand by shaking his head, thereby twisting the dagger in Howard’s back just a little more.
"… but, she doesn't look anything like me!"
Oh, and we all know the girlfriend role doesn’t matter in superhero movies, right? How else can you explain the character of Rachel Dawes, who began life in Batman Begins as the pretty form of Katie Holmes, but suddenly found herself in the sleepy-eyed, husky-voiced persona of Maggie Gyllenhaal for The Dark Knight? Maybe Katie had her hands full just trying to talk Tom down off the couch.
"Yes I do."
The Lambs Are Screaming
Jodie Foster won an Oscar for her portrayal of FBI super-agent Clarice Starling in the psycho-thriller The Silence of the Lambs, an accomplishment that sounds impressive, until you realize that pretty much every single person associated with Silence of the Lambs won at least one Oscar.
But the ID says "Julianne Moore"
When it came time for the sequel, Hannibal, Foster took one look at the script and decided that there was too much man-eating pig stuff and not enough Mel-Gibson-talking-to-a-beaver-puppet. She politely declined and went on to further her directing career.
This left the door open for Julianne Moore, who like Jodie Foster, is a flaming redhead with many Oscars on her mantel. Okay, not really. But she did just fine with her Southern accent. Still, it had to be a little disheartening that for the third Hannibal Lector movie, she was replaced by Edward Norton. Admittedly, he was playing a completely different character, but still.
Eerily, Jodie Foster also starred in the 1976 movie "Freaky Friday," about a girl who switches bodies with Julianne Moore.
Back to the Casting Couch
The Back to the Future series has one of the most confusing plots of all time, especially when it comes to the casting.
The movie initially hired a guy named Eric Stolz to play the part of Marty McFly, and as unbelievable as this is, they shot most of the movie this way. But after viewing dailies in which Stolz seemed to have all the comic timing of Al Gore at a funeral, he was sacked, and teen heartthrob Michael J. Fox was brought in, necessitating a reshoot of virtually everything.
Melora Hardin, best known today as Jan on The Office, was actually cast as McFly’s girlfriend Jennifer Parker, but at a staggering, Amazonian height of 5’7”, she towered over the diminutive Fox. She was let go in favor of Claudia Wells.
80s eyebrows are irresistible
When Back to the Future II rolled around, casting problems popped up again. Cripsin Glover, so excellent as Marty’s dad George McFly in the first movie, apparently demanded his own private country and a flight on the space shuttle. The producers balked and instead hired a look-alike, who would only appear in the background, as well as hanging upside down as “old George” in the scenes set in 2015.
The bigger problem turned out to be Jennifer Parker, who had a more substantial role in Part II. Claudia Wells was no longer available, due to an illness in the family. The producers searched high and low and finally decided on Adventurous Babysitter and Karate Kid girlfriend Elizabeth Shue.
Hair a little less big. Eyebrows a little less dark.
In order to sell Shue as the new Jennifer, Part II opens with a shot-for-shot recreation of the ending of Part I, with Shue instead of Wells. It can be fun to watch these two movies back to back, since in Part II, the performances by Fox and Christopher Lloyd (Doc) seem to be parodies of themselves.
Sexy Logic
This last switch is my favorite, only because it seems so arbitrary. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the character of Saavik is one of two major new characters that are not part of the original Enterprise crew (the other, of course, is Khan).
Saavik, played by future Cheers waitress Kirstie Alley, is a Vulcan Starfleet officer in training who finds herself aboard the Enterprise while it is under attack by genetic superhuman Khan. Throughout the movie, she comes to learn from Captain Kirk and even from Mr. Spock himself that Vulcan logic and Starfleet regulations must sometimes take a back seat to outwitting wrathful, bare-chested TV icons with a doomsday weapon built by Kirk’s son.
Logic says that I shouldn't date Sam Malone.
Star Trek II kicked off the only real “trilogy” of the Star Trek movies, and Saavik would appear in both Star Trek III The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV The Voyage Home. Kirstie Alley, however, would not.
Robin Curtis replaced Alley in the Search for Spock, and was again a major character. She spends most of the movie falling in love with Kirk’s son David as they explore the Genesis planet, which has resurrected her fallen mentor, Spock. The truly odd thing about this is that Robin Curtis does not look remotely like Kirstie Alley. Her performance, while appropriately Vulcanish, lacks the inner turmoil at work in Alley’s. Their appearance and performances are so dissimilar that when I saw Star Trek III in my youth, I did not even realize it was the same character.
Loving Claudia Wells's eyebrows
By Star Trek IV, the Klingons had managed to kill off Kirk’s son, leaving Saavik heartbroken — or, as Robin Curtis plays her, bored. Saavik makes a token appearance on the planet Vulcan, wishing Kirk and the crew a safe trip back to Earth, and promptly exits the series.
In the film Mary Poppins, Dick Van Dyke has a classic scene as a one-man band. He plays the drums and the accordion and the cymbals all by himself, and it comes out to a quaint little song. He charms the ladies and impresses the kiddies with his musical abilities and it almost seems possible that this could really be done. Rambo II is just like that, except for instead of Dick Van Dyke, it’s Sylvester Stallone, and instead of drums, it’s rocket launchers. A few of us may remember First Blood and some will even argue that it is a better movie. That is not our business. Our business is adventure and taking that into account (if I could get a tad intellectual here) First Blood is wholly and completely pwned by Rambo: First Blood: Part Deux.
Not many people want to accept the fact that Dick Van Dyke was an expert in guerilla warfare — a man who's the best, with guns, with knives, with his bare hands. A man who's been trained to ignore pain, ignore weather, to live off the land, to eat things that would make a billy goat puke. I mean literally part of the training was watching a billy goat puke and then eating whatever it was that made the goat do so.
There was a lot of discussion in the 1980s about who was a better action star. In one corner you have Sylvester Stallone and in the other you have Arnold Schwarzenegger. It is maybe not complete luck that Arnold seems to have won, but the reason that there was a discussion at all is due almost entirely to Rambo. The Rocky films, good as they might be (and some of them are), are not the all-out bullet-eating fight fest that Rambo is. The thing about Stallone is that he always wanted to position himself as some sort of intellectual. Not without merit mind you. I remember my high school French teacher was sort of baffled when she learned that in France he has actually achieved the status of an intellectual. She said that she didn’t associate books and literature with … well with Rocky. Until I reminded her that Sylvester Stallone WROTE Rocky.
Quite obviously this is a picture of Donald, Julie and two other people.
Because he has a little bit more emotional depth, Stallone is probably better suited to Rambo 1 than Arnold. But truthfully either one of them could have done well with Rambo 2. That is because the real star of Rambo 2 is the action. And while it is actually true that Stallone wrote Rocky, it is also equally true that he did not write Rambo II. No, that honor goes to none other than James T. Cameron of Titanic fame. Now some of our younger readers might not know this, but before Cameron became a romance writer and the author of such sweeping tearjerker movies as Avatar and Titanic, he was actually pretty good at thinking up reasons to have things explode. There is a rumor (I suspect generated by Cameron himself) that he really only wrote the action and not the story for Rambo II. And I accept this rumor as fact because the action is by far the best part.
Merely the goofiest picture of James Cameron I could find.
Let me make this clear, though, because by now we have had a lot of gory stories make our list: I do not condone violence. Unless fictional people are pretending to be tortured by plastic knives in a movie from the eighties and Rambo is there and has the power to stop them. In which case I condone it. Besides, Rambo II only has a body count of 58. This is much lower than Rambo 4, which had 83.
