The Lindsay Brothers

Month: May 2011

  • King Solomon’s Mines

    Extraordinary Adventure
    61

    There is so much adventure in this little bestseller that it’s hard to know where to start.  It’s rumored that this is the story that kicked off an entire genre of adventure quest novels, though it was itself written as a bet, to prove that its author, one Sir H. Rider Haggard, could write a story “half as good as Treasure Island.”  With a pure adventure pedigree name like “Sir H. Rider Haggard,” this hardly seems like a fair bet.

    King Solomon's Mines Movie Poster
    Sharon Stone starred in the movie, but did not star in Romancing the Stone, which is similar. Michael Douglas, however, did star in Romancing the Stone, and later starred with Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct. From which the world has never recovered.

    Let’s start with the hero, who himself has perhaps the best adventurer name in history, outside anyone not named after George Lucas’s dog.  Allan Quatermain has the respectable occupation of adventurer-slash-hunter, and apparently he’s darn good at it.  There are not too many people with this occupation today, probably because all the really good places have already been explored, and shooting wild African animals has taken on a bad connotation, akin to smoking cigarettes.

    Quatermain agrees to lead an expedition into the heart of Africa to find King Solomon’s Mines (King Solomon, of course, is the Biblical king famous for his love of seagulls)

    Finding Nemo Seagullls
    Mine! Mine! Mine!

    Here is what happens.  A wounded elephant kills one of their porters.  This actually is not all that relevant of a detail, except that it makes the story completely awesome.  There are far too few killer elephants in stories today.  In fact, elephants are usually the good guys and/or possess magical flying powers.  It is very rare for one of them to so much as scoff at a random extra, much less bust out of their high-voltage secure paddocks and eat lawyers off the jeep tour.

    Okay, so after the elephant murder (which presumably ends with Quatermain and the elephant having a duel on a log bridge across a raging waterfall), they stumble upon the 300-year-old frozen corpse of a Portugese explorer in an ice cave.  It was this same explorer who first wrote Quatermain’s mysterious map to the Mines.  Need I tell you that he wrote the map in his own blood?  And that he had to start over several times to get the scale right?

    Finally the band is captured by a ruthless tribe of natives, which has the obligatory violent king and the even more obligatory ancient evil shaman named Gagool.  There is some funny business where it turns out one of Quatermain’s porters is actually the rightful king in disguise, and of course everyone is sentenced to horrible deaths.  But they manage to pull a clever trick, by foretelling an eclipse.  The natives, of course, know nothing of astronomy and assume it’s magic.  Gagool is captured and forced to lead everyone to the mines.

    Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    Yet even with their vast astrological knowledge, they could not predict whether Bella would choose Jacob or Edward

    These mines are exactly as you imagine.  Full of diamonds and jewels and priceless modern art and piles of stock certificates and matching 401K contributions.  Gagool gives Quatermain the slip and as she escapes, she triggers a booby trap that locks everyone else in the mine for all eternity.  Until they realize that all fabulous mines have secret exits, on the off chance that some ancient evil shaman activates the booby trap.

    In a final bit of fortuitousness, they are all wearing cargo shorts, and so are able to smuggle out enough diamonds to make them fabulously wealthy for the rest of their lives.  At least until the sequel.

    Next up, #60!

  • Toy Story

    Extraordinary Adventure
    62

    It started out as just a pitch, an idea to expand the animated short “Tin Toy” into a Christmas special. The mad computer animation wizards in a company called Pixar Animation Wizards had decided to call it “A Tin Toy Christmas.” After many writers, and rewriters, and underwriters, and copywriters it eventually evolved into number 62 on our countdown. You may know it as Toy Story.

    This image is from the original short "Tin Toy" and may be the most terrifying thing ever produced by Pixar.

    It was the first film ever made completely with CGI, a process whereby tiny elves inside of a beige box with blinking lights are said to “generate imagery.” The film is filled with almost endless wonder. Green army men walk with their feet molded forever together at the base. And the aliens from Pizza Planet speak in hushed and reverent tones of something known only as “The Claw.” It is still the only Pixar movie to be released with just the Disney logo above its title (instead of both Disney AND Pixar logos). And quite surprisingly, it is Pixar’s least successful film at the box office. Of course it’s Pixar so that’s not really saying much.

    In fact, John Lassiter and Pixar were so adamant that they did not want to be a clone of Disney Feature Animation that they took many steps to avoid such a comparison. These steps included, but are not limited to: being creative, original, timeless, and touching. At the time, it was even considered bold and controversial when they insisted that Toy Story should not be a musical. There are many reasons behind this, but famed fan-boy screenwriter Joss Whedon, of fan-boy fame, who helped write the screenplay for the film, explains it this way:

    “It would have been a really bad musical, because it’s a buddy movie. It’s about people who won’t admit what they want, much less sing about it.”

    This is perhaps true, but does not explain why no other Pixar movies have been musicals either. The buddies Whedon speaks of are perhaps two of the best-known characters in modern cinema today: Buzz Lightyear and Woody Pride.

     

    I just hope the designers of this awesome shoe remembered to scrawl the name "ANDY" on the sole.

    Oh, and by the way … Woody’s last name? Yeah, it’s Pride. This goes pretty far back into development of the films and is actually very fitting considering how jealous Woody is of Buzz when he shows up in Andy’s Room. Named after Woody Strode, he was originally intended to be a ventriloquist dummy. However we find out later that Woody is nothing less than a singing cowboy. (But seriously, it’s not a musical). It’s always hard to say with buddy movies which is the main character, but in this one it’s clear, it is Woody. Because Woody is the main character, he has that sort of everyman quality that sometimes can be mistaken as no quality at all. Therefore he seems to pale in comparison to what is perhaps Pixar’s greatest creation.

    Buzz Lightyear does not know he’s a toy. He actually believes himself to be a Space Ranger. Probably because that’s what it says on the box that he came in. Which he believes to be a spaceship, and which he instantly begins to repair with scotch tape which he calls “unidirectional bonding strip.” Buzz is more flashy than woody. Literally flashier. He has red and green lights on his expandable wings that flash to indicate port and starboard. This attention to detail and Buzz’s six-foot-four, two-hundred-twenty pound, laser, rocket arm makes Woody believe that he will not be played with as much. It is for this reason that Woody is intent on proving to Buzz that he is a toy, and not on a “secret mission in uncharted space.” Woody is later redeemed by the fact that he does actually make a pretty strong case for the greater benefits of being a toy, but it would not be right to say that this noble purpose was his initial motivation throughout the film.

     

    Buzz as Tron: If this blog existed solely to provide you with this image, then it would not have been written in vain.

    Although Buzz is more modern, it actually took the animators longer to animate Woody because he was not as rigid and had more emotions that needed to be readable on his face. Again because Woody is the emotional center of the film he needed to be more expressive. Woody is voiced by Tom Hanks, the well-known director of such hits as “That Thing You Do,” … and many more! That being said, it’s actually the animators that win us over here. In fact, Toy Story is such watershed digital achievement that it’s almost stunning to realize that when it hit home video it was on VHS, which a brief trip to Wikipedia tells me was some sort of cassette or “cartridge” that one had to painstakingly rewind at the end of viewing its content.

    In an effort to offset this odd juxtaposition, Pixar later went back and added another camera to every frame of animation so that it could be re-released in 3D. Something Lassiter termed “digital archeology.” This is possibly the reason they never got around to making that Tin Toy Christmas special. Well, that and the terrifying baby thing.

    Next up … 61!