Comics Review: MY LITTLE PONY: FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC #25-26 (IDW Publishing, November and December 2014)

What is it about "Wild West" themes and the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic franchise that causes the best of creative intentions to result in something... um, less than optimal?  The TV show's two stabs at Western stories -- season one's "Over a Barrel" and season two's "The Last Roundup" -- are generally not that highly thought of, though, for my own part, I found their biggest sins to be ones of dullness.  Katie Cook and Andy Price sent Rarity and Applejack on the Equestrian equivalent of a "West Coast road swing" during FRIENDS FOREVER #8, during which the "odd couple" took a stagecoach ride and dispatched a bunch of would-be cattle rustlers in the process, but it's hard to separate that incident from the issue's somewhat questionable (in my mind, at least) characterizations of the two "mane" principals.  During that story, one of the defeated rustlers did the "fourth wall" thing with the reading audience, informing them that the gang would be back in a future issue.  Well, here they are, terrorizing and extorting from a small town, like the "bullies" that they literally are. Everything seems to be in place for a good, new-fashioned Western parody.  Instead, we get, by far, THE single worst story that has been dished up in ANY of the IDW MLP comics... and, yes, that includes even the weakest of the defunct MICRO-SERIES offerings.  From Cook and Price, the bellcows of the entire MLP comics franchise?!  Unfortunately, yes.

This failure is basically on Katie Cook, almost 100%.  There's nothing at all wrong with Price's artwork.  Cook, however, seems to have forgotten rule number one about dealing with well-established characters: Never let the desire to tell a particular story tempt you into pulling one of the characters completely OUT of character in order to achieve the goal.  The damage that Cook inflicts in her handling of Twilight Sparkle here, combined with the problems we saw with Rarity and Applejack in FF #8, have combined to make me a little apprehensive about future stories by this creative duo.  Why is Cook suddenly having so much difficulty getting the "Mane 6"'s characterizations right?  And make no mistake, this was a BAD misstep... so much so, in fact, that some people immediately declared that they'd NEVER buy the comics again if the comics could get things THIS wrong.

** SPOILERS **

Given her magical powers AND her status as an alicorn princess, you would think that Twilight would be well-equipped to help Applejack and her other friends handle an invasion of the tiny town of Canter Creek by the massive steer, Longhorn, and his beefy buddies.  Even if Twilight were too nice to get really rough with them, surely she could magically imprison them, or put a protective force field around the town and Applejack's Great Granduncle Chili Pepper's ranch, where the rustlers have squatted in Chili Pepper's absence.  Evidently, however, things are more... um, nuanced than that:

As I said before... there are many different ways in which Twilight could use her magic to neutralize the bad guys, none of which involve the use of lethal magical force.  For example, she could have tried flooding them out, using the same simple magic that she did when she and Rarity (!) knocked down a water tower in order to put out a barn fire that had been set by Longhorn and his meaty minions:

But, no... apparently, the rules for alicorns involve a liberal application of the old "Mutually Assured Destruction" doctrine from the Cold War years.  When it comes to using magic against either "sentient non-magical beings" or "Equestrian citizens" -- Cook doesn't seem to be certain as to which -- Twilight appears to think that there's no alternative between doing nothing and using overwhelming force.

The "logic" behind this... uh... operational paradigm is simply mind-boggling.  If you're a magically endowed villain, like Tirek in the season four finale "Twilight's Kingdom," then it's perfectly OK for Twilight to use any and all magical means to deter you, including... well, if there's a magical equivalent of advanced weaponry, then she certainly used it at some point during her battle with Tirek.

However, if you're a garden-variety, non-magical, "schemer/plotter" type villain, such as, say, The Phantom Blot... OK, I know that his "garden" is far more varied than most, but you get my point... then getting the best of Twilight and the other unicorns and alicorns of Equestria is cake.  Simply find some way to get yourself declared an Equestrian citizen, and then, violate laws with impunity.  St. Paul appealed to his Roman citizenship for a good cause, to demand a trial in Rome, so it would make perfect sense for a villain to use the same tactic for evil.  Actually, the Blot would probably go it one better and get himself attached to an embassy in Canterlot.  It's not as if he hasn't tried that before.

It would have been a simple matter for Cook to have written Twilight completely out of the story, letting her travel with Spike to the Pony Trek convention (now, there's one real-world Equestrian parallel that didn't need to exist...) and leaving Applejack to take the lead in fighting back against villains who have, after all, taken over HER relative's ranch.  In fact, that's what Applejack eventually does, picking up the defeated Sheriff Tumbleweed's discarded star at the end of MLP #25 and becoming the sheriff herself.  For AJ, this represents quite a nice bounceback from the "all ya gotta do to sell apples is sell apples" dumbitude that hamstrung her in FF #8.

The ponies' resulting plan to foil Longhorn, while it pleasantly brings to mind ideas from one of the most-beloved Western spoofs, isn't without its own share of nits.  It only works because Longhorn, having basically already won the battle, decides to figuratively "sweep around the telephone poles" and legally take control of Chili Pepper's ranch.  Uh, why?   Why do the "Mane 6" figure that it's all right to temporarily kidnap a clerk and impersonate a legal official in order to flummox Longhorn, right after Twilight had freaked out over the others trying to destroy Longhorn's (notarized) paperwork?  (Twilight definitely was schizophrenic in this story, wasn't she?)

At least Twilight puts her legalese where her magic normally is, when she zips off to Canterlot and returns with... no, not reinforcements, but a surefire legal way to allow her to finally use her magic against Longhorn.  (Of course, it requires Longhorn's unknowing cooperation, but that doesn't prove to be much of an obstacle.)  Alas, even the traditional "stroll into the sunset" doesn't work when the "Mane 6" exit without evincing any interest whatsoever in whatever happened to Chili Pepper.  

Aside from Applejack and, yes, Rarity -- who flirts with multiple stallions, contributes more than her mite to the anti-Longhorn scheming, and gets to use her generally finesse-oriented magic to move houses, knock down water towers, and perform other intriguingly unladylike operations -- the rest of the gang walk through the story as if they're in a daze.  Twilight's deficiences here are manifest, but Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy contribute virtually nothing -- you would think that both of them, especially the former, would be hacked off at the sight of their friend Applejack getting knocked through a barn wall by Longhorn, but no joy -- and even Pinkie Pie is somewhat lacking here.  (A joke about a character eating a red-hot chili pepper, making faces, and then saying that they like it?  That has SO been done... and, therefore, it probably isn't worth wasting Pinkie on.)

So... yeah, a really bad one.  I'm not going to bail, of course -- Cook and Price are doing the very next arc in MLP #27-28, and I'll be interested in seeing how well they can bounce back.  There is some work to be done here, though... if nothing else, to reassure those who, like me, have been on board from the very start.

Book Review: FUNNYBOOKS by Michael Barrier (University of California Press, 2014)

What Michael Barrier did for the history of classic Hollywood studio animation in HOLLYWOOD CARTOONS, he does here for the golden years of Dell Comics and its most accomplished and historically significant creators -- Walt Kelly, John Stanley, and, above all, Carl Barks.  While devoting most of his critical attention to this trio of greats and the ways in which they helped shape the development of the American comic book into an art form with its own distinct verbal and visual language, Barrier also unearths facts and highlights overlooked personalities in a manner that is sure to surprise and delight even the most knowledgeable Dell/Western Publishing fan.

As was the case with HOLLYWOOD CARTOONS, FUNNYBOOKS had an extremely long gestation period, with Barrier using interview material from as far back as the 1960s to help craft his narrative.  Barrier also draws upon material used in his 1981 book-length study of Carl Barks, but he expands greatly upon that earlier work.  Perhaps his most important critical achievement here is his in-depth illumination of exactly how Barks, who famously worked in isolation and with minimal (at first) editorial interference, became one of the very first comics creators to "crack the code" and essentially discover how to tell effective stories in comic-book form.  Barks fans have always known of the Old Duck Man's mastery of narrative, but they will come away from this discussion with a newfound appreciation of the wider importance of his work.

Barrier pretty clearly considers Barks to be primus inter pares even among the "really good ones," but Kelly and Stanley get their due and then some.  Kelly's creation and development of the POGO characters is covered in detail, as is Stanley's work on LITTLE LULU, but Barrier brings their other notable comic-book works (e.g., Kelly's stories for OUR GANG and his fairy-tale and Christmas comics, Stanley's honing of his craft in NEW FUNNIES) under similar critical scrutiny.  As was made quite clear in HOLLYWOOD CARTOONS, Barrier is a very astringent analyst, and it takes quite a lot for a story to wring praise out of him.  Everyone who knows these creators will probably disagree with Barrier's assessments at some point -- for example, I think that he is much too harsh on Barks' more loosely-wound, but still immensely entertaining, UNCLE $CROOGE stories from the 1960s -- but he always has a well-considered reason for his opinions.

The "extra material" here is what really lifts FUNNYBOOKS to "instant classic" status.  Anyone who has ever wondered about the precise relationships between the various corporate subsidiaries and allies grouped under the spreadeagled "Western Publishing" umbrella -- Whitman, K.K. Publications, Dell, Gold Key -- will have any and all questions answered to their satisfaction here.  Interested in the early history of LOONEY TUNES AND MERRIE MELODIES, the Warner Bros. "answer" to WALT DISNEY'S COMICS AND STORIES, or in how Dell handled such significant "non-funny-animal" licensed properties as TARZAN and various movie cowboy heroes?  You'll learn about some of these comics' most accomplished writers and artists here.  Perhaps the biggest surprise is a brief discussion of "the Jim Davis shop," an association of artists who produced "funny-animal" challenges, of a sort, to Dell's humorous hegemony for the notorious comics entrepreneur Benjamin Sangor.  It's nice to see the exquisitely obscure characters that came out of this outfit get some recognition, even if Barrier's primary purpose for bringing them up is to demonstrate how their comics failed while the best of Dell's succeeded.

If I have a small nitpick here, it is with Barrier's comparatively brusque brushing-aside of the Gold Key era.  Yes, that era did see ill-considered format and price changes and increasing editorial restrictions, but there was a whole lot of high-quality material being produced at that time, as well.  (See Joe Torcivia's 50th Anniversary tribute for numerous examples.)  I fully realize that Barrier's intention was always to focus on the years before the Dell/Western split, but a few extra pages discussing some of the GK highlights couldn't have hurt.  Anyone want to pick up the bracketed torch (as opposed to fallen; it's not as if Barrier failed, after all) and try writing a sequel?

So, what are you waiting for?  If you care at all about the Dell Comics that truly WERE "Good Comics," or simply about the history of quality comics in general, FUNNYBOOKS virtually defines the term "MUST-GET."

Book Review: THE RETURN OF GEORGE WASHINGTON by Edward J. Larson (William Morrow/Harper-Collins, 2014)

"What?" the reader may ask upon reading the title of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Edward Larson's new book.  "How could George Washington have returned from anything?"  A good question, indeed... because, as Larson makes clear in this study of Washington's life and public works from the end of the Revolutionary War until he became America's first President under the new Constitution, Washington never truly stepped off the stage or shucked the role of America's "indispensable man," even after he shockingly resigned his commission and retired to Mount Vernon for what he hoped would be a pleasant retirement as a gentleman farmer and land speculator.  Indeed, his influence wound up being a -- Larson would no doubt say "the" -- deciding factor in persuading citizens to accept the paper version of an unprecedented form of popular government.  The belief that Washington would inevitably be the first President and could be trusted to set a good precedent for conduct in office was, of course, widespread, but Larson also reveals just how "hands-on" Washington was in aiding and abetting the Federalist cause "behind the scenes" during the ratification process. 

The tribulations of the newly independent United States (plural emphasized) under the Articles of Confederation, like the fabled Corleones, kept pulling Washington back into public life even as he insisted that he was "out" for good.  A trip to his western landholdings convinced him that only a strong central government could preserve property rights, protect settlers, and encourage commerce in the back country.  (Washington's hope for a Potomac River canal never really materialized, but he certainly was on the right towpath.)  Interstate squabbles, the inability of Congress to convince states to monetarily support what central authority there was, "hyperdemocratic" and faction-riven state institutions such as the unicameral legislature of Pennsylvania, and, above all, the insurrection in Massachusetts that became known as Shays' Rebellion convinced Washington, and many other "like-minded" nationalists, that a proposed convention to "reform" the Articles of Confederation needed to literally start the process over from scratch, creating a governmental framework for a nation, as opposed to "the several states."

Always expressing his reluctance to be dragged into the world of politics, Washington nonetheless played a critical role as President of the Constitutional Convention, albeit one that hardly ever intersected with the actual debates taking place on the floor.  While both large- and small-state advocates got some of what they wanted in the final document, the sheer weight of Washington's presence -- and the delegates' inherent, and justified, trust in him to do the right thing by the country -- guaranteed that the primary influence would be nationalist/Federalist.  Indeed, Washington appears to have assumed something of a protective role towards the Constitution, believing it to be the only alternative to chaos, and he took a dimmer and dimmer view of the "Antifederalists" as the ratification debates proceeded.  Never to the point of literally trying to ram the Constitution down its opponents' throats, however; Washington realized that "Antifeds" had to have their say, that they would have to be part of the new nation, and that the debates should be conducted with what he called "moderation, candor & fairness."

I am an immense admirer of Washington and greatly appreciated this discussion of a (relatively) lightly examined period in the great man's life.  Larson's portrait of the general/statesman depicts a man with strong opinions, forcefully expressed, but whose modesty, character, and ethical sense kept him firmly grounded at all times, as he displayed conduct that all too few "revolutionary heroes" have imitated in the centuries since.

Book Review: ALL THE GREAT PRIZES by John Taliaferro (Simon and Schuster, 2013)

If an award for "The Most Interesting Man in the World" had existed circa 1900, then John Hay would surely have been a candidate for the honor.  Along with John Nicolay, he was at Abraham Lincoln's side during the Civil War, serving as a secretary and gathering the information that would ultimately lead to a legendary 10-volume biography of the great President.  He served with considerable distinction as a diplomat in several important European posts, including France and Spain.  He was an eminence grise and a conscience of the Republican Party during its first 50 years, when the party dominated the national government.  In the last several years of his life, he served William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt as Secretary of State, in which post he proposed the famous "Open Door" policy towards China and negotiated various treaties that led to the construction of the Panama Canal.  Socially, he was an eternally popular guest and raconteur; like our present-day "Most Interesting Man," he might even have been the life of parties he never actually attended. 

Remarkably, Taliaferro's major biography of Hay is the first such effort in some 70 years, and the result is an extremely entertaining read, albeit one that resembles a canoe with oarsmen in the bow and the stern and a small load in between the two of them.  Meaning, there's plenty of material at the beginning and the end of the book, but Taliaferro has to strain a bit to fill the middle of the tome.  Not that Hay didn't perform some useful services during that middle period, but, when an author has to devote paragraph upon paragraph to an infatuation and/or relationship that Hay may or may not have had with the beautiful wife of a rather dull Senator, the reader gets the sense that the author is "reaching" just a tad.

Refreshingly, Taliaferro sticks mostly to the facts, avoiding crude "presentism" about some of Hay's decisions and influences.  The "Open Door," meant to preserve Chinese territorial integrity during a period in which the European colonial powers would have been more than happy to simply carve up the rapidly decaying Empire as opposed to being granted fair dealings in one another's "spheres of influence," was an example of enlightened imperialism, but it was imperialism, nonetheless.  Likewise, the establishment of the Republic of Panama in 1903, which allowed the U.S. to start digging the canal there, involved some skullduggery that even "The Sharpie of the Culebra Cut" might have looked at with some disdain.  Taliaferro simply lays out what happened and basically leaves it to the reader to form his or her own conclusions about the consequences.

What I like about Hay is that, while he was a consummate cosmopolite, fluent in several languages and at home in the capitals of Europe, he never forgot his roots in Midwest America.  In that respect, he had much in common with a number of the expatriates who came to Paris during the 19th century.  Spending so much time with Lincoln surely gave Hay a sense of moral sureness and a respect for common American wisdom that he never lost, no matter how far afield he traveled.

ALL THE GREAT PRIZES is highly recommended for anyone with an interest in American history... or even just a very interesting man.

Book Review: THE AGE OF GOLD by H. W. Brands (Anchor, 2003)

My 900th post!

"They made their fortunes by being tougher than the toughies, smarter than the smarties, shiftier than the shifties, slyer than the sly-ies, luckier than the luckies... and they made it any shape they could!"

Brands' history of the particulars and aftereffects of the famed California Gold Rush plays out on an exceptionally broad canvas, though the true extent of the canvas does not become apparent until two-thirds of the way through.  The triggering event (the discover of gold near Sutter's Fort in early 1848), the logistics of getting to the gold fields by fair means or foul, the hardships the "argonauts" endured en route, and the increasingly elaborate ways in which the miners extracted the precious ore get a generous amount of space, to be sure.  But Brands is actually after bigger game.  He argues that the race for riches (of which, of course, this was only the first and the splashiest) gave birth to a new version of the "American Dream," one in which the old, Puritan-inflected method of "pursuing happiness" was roughly elbowed aside by the aggressive drive for instant wealth.  In this new paradigm, audacity, risk-taking, and a healthy measure of luck counted for more than the inculcation of steady and sober habits.  Brands contends -- and it is difficult to disagree with him -- that the Gold Rush provided the template for numerous booms to come, up to and including the dot.com boom of the 1990s.  With boom, of course, there often comes bust, and those who came to California (or were already there, but alert for the main chance) and provided the miners with supplies, equipment, and urban amenities in such jumping-off towns as San Francisco frequently enjoyed far more financial success than the majority of orediggers, who often found easy riches harder to come by than they'd imagined.

Once the mechanics of the Gold Rush are out of the way, Brands turns to some of the more immediate social and political fallout.  The vast influx of people to California made the huge territory ready for statehood even before it had truly been organized as a territory, and the Compromise of 1850 was constructed to find a common ground between North and South when the resulting fallout over slavery threatened the Union.  The notorious Kansas-Nebraska Act, which probably did more than any other measure to make the Civil War inevitable, had its roots in the desire to facilitate travel to California by transcontinental railroad.  California itself, despite being admitted as a free state, had a number of pro-slavery settlers, some of whom wanted to see the southern portion of the state secede, or to use the wealth of the state to finance the Confederate war effort.  The importance of the railroad wound up keeping California in the Union, but it was a closer-run thing than many people might think.  The development and "civilizing" of San Francisco and other California towns, and the impact of the mass migration on native Californians and Native American tribes, also get their due amount of attention.

You'll find many well-known figures discussed in these pages, but I found the stories of the more obscure (or obscure, but soon to be famous) people to be just as interesting, if not more so.  The narrative becomes a bit diffuse in its last third, as if Brands is trying to fit in as many ramifications of the Gold Rush as he can, but the quality of the prose remains high from beginning to end.  I could also have asked for more detailed maps of the gold fields.  Still, this is a story that everyone should know -- especially since the risk-taking individual entrepreneur, without which the "American Dream" still cannot survive, is at the core of the tale.

Book Review: THE PRESIDENTS' WAR by Chris DeRose (Lyons Press, 2014)

When Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860, five of his predecessors were still alive and active, a record that still stands.  As author DeRose reveals in this unusual look at the antebellum and Civil War eras, this was a decidedly mixed blessing.  Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan had all governed in the great Era of Compromise, in which effort after effort was made to hold the Union together in the face of the growing controversies over slavery.  Each had to make his own version of a "deal with the devil" to preserve the status quo.  The Lincoln years split the ex-Presidents asunder, just as the Civil War split the country as a whole.  Tyler joined the Confederate cause wholeheartedly, working to take Virginia out of the Union and serving in the Confederate congress for a time before his death.  Pierce became a Copperhead, or Peace Democrat.  The much-maligned Buchanan turned most of his attention to various attempts to salvage what remained of his reputation after his one disastrous term, which had ended with a number of states seceding.  Even Fillmore, who (at least in DeRose's telling) comes off better than any of his Democratic peers in terms of energy and ambition, broke angrily with Lincoln after the latter announced the Emancipation Proclamation and broadened the war's moral scope.  Perhaps symbolically, Van Buren, the oldest of the five and the one whose lifetime stretched back to the difficult Revolutionary War era, seems to have been the most uniformly supportive of Lincoln's policies, though he died before Emancipation became an issue.

DeRose does a decent job of weaving the actions and reactions of the ex-Presidents in and out of his narrative.  The main problem here is that the wartime narrative, in particular, gets too much attention.  The time spent reiterating the well-known results of various battles could have been better spent expanding upon the ex-Presidents' views.  The book also ends rather abruptly, at the end of the war, with three of the five exes still alive.  I would have liked to have seen an epilogue that discussed how their feelings towards Lincoln and the war effort may have changed (if, in fact, they did) and how they may have felt about the war's impact on their legacies.  I could also have done without some of DeRose's clunky grammar and troubles with dates (he has an annoying tendency to record days absent years).  Still, I appreciate his efforts here.  These may not have been America's best and/or brightest leaders, but it is useful to know what they thought and said about Lincoln and the war that forever sundered their time from the very different future that was to come.

Book Review: THE GREATER JOURNEY: AMERICANS IN PARIS by David McCullough (Simon & Schuster, 2011)

David McCullough's followup to JOHN ADAMS and 1776 -- both of which were immense best-sellers and critical favorites -- received critical hosannas which were, for the most part, deserved, but did not do nearly as well in terms of sales.  It's not hard to see why if you take a close look at McCullough's approach.  Here, he tells the story of various Americans -- writers, painters, medical students, inventors, etc. -- who traveled to, lived in, and worked in Paris during the period 1830 to 1900.  While certain figures get more time on the stage than others, so many individuals stroll past on the figurative "Champs Elysees of ideas" that the average reader probably can't be faulted for losing track of "who's who" on an occasion or two.  There's plenty of interesting and fascinating information to be found here, but be warned that considerable attention will have to be devoted to keeping one's mental "scorecard" updated.  The comparative lack of focus, culminating in an ending chapter and an epilogue that might best be described as a "fadeout" rather than a definitive conclusion, may help to explain why some readers found THE GREATER JOURNEY to be somewhat laborious going.

The Americans discussed here should not be confused with the "Lost Generation" who so famously came to Paris in the aftermath of World War I.  The earlier cohorts might be more accurately described as a "Finding Generation."  Leaving a much younger and rawer America, they sought enlightenment, polish, and education in one of the world's most cosmopolitan capitals.  Moreover, they did so without a trace of the world-weary rejection of American mores that so many members of the "Lost Generation" evinced.  The primary goal of such individuals as painter/inventor Samuel Morse, sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and medical student/writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was to use the knowledge and skills that they had gained in order to enrich their home country.  Some of them stayed in Paris for years, but they never stopped thinking of themselves as Americans first and foremost.  The interplay between the values that these individuals brought with them and the refinements that residence in Paris taught them provides much of the intellectual intrigue of the book (though, admittedly, certain figures, even some fairly famous ones, simply spend too little time in the spotlight to get full attention on that score).

Easily the most impressive part of the "bitty" narrative is the tale of Elihu Washburne, U.S. minister to France during the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, the subsequent siege and fall of Paris, and the short but bloody reign of the Paris Commune.  As the only diplomat from a major power to remain in Paris during the siege, Washburne did yeomanlike service in assisting stranded Americans and people of other nationalities to either escape the city or survive the effects of the siege.  This included protecting German nationals who had been trapped in the city and were in potential danger of being persecuted or killed by the locals.  McCullough makes heavy use of Washburne's diary to keep track of the day-by-day events, as well as Washburne's emotional state.  Significantly, this sequence is easily the most reminiscent of McCullough's sweeping narratives in his Revolutionary War books.

THE GREATER JOURNEY isn't McCullough at his very best, but even a McCullough at three-quarters speed beats the average ideology-bound academic historian every day of the week.  Highly recommended.

Book Review: THE GREATEST COMEBACK by Patrick J. Buchanan (Random House, 2014)

Say what you will about the trajectory of Pat Buchanan's political career; a narrative of how his career began was long overdue, and he has now finally given it to us.  Joining Richard Nixon as a researcher, speechwriter, and all-around gofer in 1965, Buchanan was on board for RN's tortuous climb out of the political abyss, culminating in his razor-thin victory in the election of 1968.  This set, and will probably remain, the standard for all political comebacks.  Drawing upon an extensive collection of memoranda, Buchanan walks us step-by-step through Nixon's resurrection.  The coverage of the '68 election campaign itself is a bit less compelling than that of the earlier years, and Buchanan (perhaps understandably) puffs up his own role in the process a bit, but there's enough new and interesting material here to intrigue even those like myself who have read other versions of this story before. 

Arguably the most poignant passage of the book concerns Nixon's foreign tour in 1967, which included several stops in Africa.  At the time, a number of promising African leaders seemed to be emerging, and they gave as good as they got in their conversations with Nixon.  Sadly, most of these individuals were fated to wind up exiled, dead, or both.  Who knows what might have happened had they survived and gained power.

Buchanan hints that a followup volume concerning Nixon's presidency may be on the way.  As a speechwriter's memoir, William Safire's BEFORE THE FALL will be a very tough act to follow, but Buchanan has the advantage of having been present through the end of RN's presidency, whereas Safire left before the Watergate scandal began to metastasize.  Here's hoping Pat follows through. 

DUCKTALES RETROSPECTIVE: Episode 84, "Bubba's Big Brainstorm"

Oh, it's bad, all right... but, with apologies (is that the right word?) to GeoX and Greg, it's not THE WORST, for several nontrivial reasons.  Hear me out, I promise to make this as painless as I can:

(1)  The plot is reasonably coherent and logical, at least until we get to the land of the Ancient Thinkas.  Bubba's technologically augmented brainpower, and other characters' reactions to it, are built up in a reasonably sound fashion.  There can be no comparison with, for example, the grab-bag of Barksian, pseudo-Barksian, and just plain wrong-headed anecdotes that constituted "Once Upon a Dime."  Nor is there any single aspect of the story that is as egregiously idiotic as the "Cancel every deal!" madness that fatally disfigured "Yuppy Ducks."

(2)  The idea of an advanced ancient civilization that fell victim to... well... excessive civilization is a first-rate one and would have made for a superb story-pivot in a better ep.  The Atlantis of Disney's ill-fated (and, in my view, seriously underrated) 2001 feature film isn't all that far removed from the Thinkas' degenerated realm, though the fine details in the former were worked out with more success than those in the latter.  It doesn't make sense, for one thing, that the Thinkas' descendants have completely forgotten everything related to the history of the "ancient ones" but still know how to use those laser spears, or electric cannons, or whatever they are.  (How lucky for them that the weapons didn't break down or malfunction during that degenerative interregnum, eh?)  For the Carl Barks enthusiasts in the audience, the cluelessness of the tech-garbed natives furnishes an amusing contrast to the spirited Cura de Coco primitives of "A Spicy Tale" (UNCLE $CROOGE #39, September 1962), who gleefully await the instructions from "Tutor Corpsman" Donald that will lift them out of ignorance and onto the lofty plinth of comprehending contemporary pop culture.

(3)  While the Nephews are poorly characterized here -- seriously, straight-A students one minute, unable to complete a simple picture puzzle the next? -- and their bilious kvetching about the super-smart Bubba gets real old real fast, they're not AS badly characterized as they were in "Yuppy Ducks."  Heck, HD&L fans should be positively ecstatic at the boys' report cards after the strong hint in "Raiders of the Lost Harp" that they were struggling in school.

(4)  Frank Welker's riff on William F. Buckley, Jr. as the voice of genius Bubba is truly something special, even for that preternaturally gifted dialectician.  The use of Buckley as a voice-source bespeaks a certain level of faith in the sophistication of the audience (or at least its older contingent).  While Buckley was still very much in the public eye in the late 80s, he wasn't quite as prominent as he had been in the 60s and 70s, and his long-running PBS series Firing Line was winding down.  DuckTales deserves credit for eschewing the use of a generic "arrogant nerd" voice and going "full full-of-oneself" with this parody.  I've long since found that I don't have to enjoy what Buckley-Bubba is actually saying in order to mine a great deal of enjoyment out of this portrayal. 

 

(5)  There are one or two decent jokes scattered about here.  "You may now pass 'go' and collect 200 fish skins," for one, never fails to get a chuckle out of me.

The above being said -- or, should I say, being tremblingly brought forth for consideration by the "Brainstorm"-bashers -- there's no doubt that this ep does get a whole lot of things wrong, starting with the moral.  Ugh, that hideous moral.  DuckTales didn't partake of a whole lot of moralizing, and that was a very good thing at the time, since so many of the Smurfs-influenced "happy little get-along friends" cartoons of the 80s had well and truly put the stink on that approach to cartoon-making.  What morals DT did dispense tended to be innocuous, decaffeinated ones such as "be yourself," "have faith in your abilities," and "family is more important than money."  Up until "Brainstorm," the biggest mistake that the series had made with morals was plugging them into pre-existing stories where they frankly weren't needed, such as in "Down and Out in Duckburg."  "Brainstorm" blew such errors completely out of the water by getting its "intellectuals are all head and no heart" moral wrong.  Even had genius Bubba been portrayed as a thoroughly despicable character, this simplistic contention would have been a tough sell.  The problem is that Bubba is much more what Greg and other pro-wrestling enthusiasts would call a "tweener" than an out-and-out nogoodnik.  He does make with the egotistical comments, but, seriously, are they all THAT much more offensive than what we would later hear from Darkwing Duck?  As both Greg and GeoX point out, his ability to save the gang by solving various conundrums in the Thinka pyramid makes the negative reactions of HD&L, in particular, seem somewhat hypocritical.  The killing blow, so to speak, is the conversation between Scrooge and Bubba right before Bubba reverts back to his old self, during which Bubba (1) claims that his treasure-hunting efforts were only meant to please Scrooge and (2) voluntarily decides to murder his intellect for the immediate good.  The irony is that, were genius Bubba really as cold-hearted as Scrooge claims, he would never have decided to revert back in the first place (arguing that "the world can't be deprived of a genius like mine," or some such) and might even have decided to keep the treasure for himself (on the grounds that even Scrooge is too primitive-minded to make the very best of his gains).  There was no good way out of this emotional cul-de-sac.  In order to get out of the dilemma of dementalizing Bubba, the whole point of the episode had to be undercut... which means that the point probably shouldn't have been made in the first place.

The ep, of course, piles on its attempted moral (perhaps hoping that repetition will help to ram the point home) with the revelation of the "treasure," the book telling the story of the Thinkas' civilization.  The very existence of this artifact is extremely problematic unless one posits that a proverbial "last Thinka" was able to produce it before perishing, a la the "last Sobram" in the Lost in Space episode "The Flaming Planet."  The Sobram was more than willing to include the tidbit that his was a prideful warrior race whose demise was largely self-inflicted; I have a harder time accepting the notion that any Thinka would be quite so honest about his civilization's inability to combat "the monsters of [its] time."  (If the Thinkas really had become as heartless as the book claims, then wouldn't they have found it easier to lie about their past and make it seem as though their demise was less pathetic than it truly was?  Wouldn't such technologically advanced "hollow beings" have been just as likely to build "weapons of mass destruction" to ruthlessly obliterate their foes as they were to have quailed before them?)  The Ducks' decision to leave the book with the natives is, of course, supposed to "atone" for Scrooge's earlier, Bubba-influenced decision to take the treasure away from the "hopelessly backwards" locals, but it comes across as even more condescending than the original neo-colonialist sin.  How is learning about the Thinkas' fate going to lead to the descendants themselves reacquiring the knowledge and skills needed to plug back into civilization, even in a cursory sense?

I probably should have been on my guard about this ep's failings based on the opening scene, in which Scrooge declares himself incapable of deciphering the Thinkas' map.  I'm referring, of course, to the presence of mathematical symbols (one of which is clearly discernable, at least) in the upper right corner of the document.  Presumably, it is these markings which have Scrooge stumped.  I've learned through harsh experience NEVER to place complete faith in a pop-culture creation in which mathematics is equated with esoteric science -- unless, of course, the creator himself has significant scientific "street cred."

The revelation of Bubba's straight-Z report card isn't as surprising as the later discovery that these marks represent Bubba's first-grade grades.  If I were Julie Blurf, I don't know but what I'd be somewhat insulted by this.  In "Bubbeo and Juliet," Julie certainly didn't seem to be a first-grader; at a guess, I'd have thought that she would be around the Nephews' age and perhaps a little older than Webby.  Yet, there she was, taking art class with Bubba.

I'm not sure whether to classify Gyro's pressure-cooker "thinking cap" as a success or a failure.  I mean, it did its job, didn't it? -- it made Bubba smarter.  There's no indication that a design flaw in the "cap" caused the super-smart Bubba to become an obnoxious know-it-all, and Bubba's later self-adjustments of his cranial capacity -- the ones that caused his head to swell to a positively frightening extent -- weren't sanctioned by Gyro.   It's a shame that DuckTales didn't see fit to reproduce Gyro's "thinking cap" from the comics, but I can understand the DT creative staff wanting to avoid having to explain those birds in Gyro's belfry.

"Let's do the Beak Warp again!"  On second thought, let's not.

The rest of a longish Act One follows the subsequent blossoming of Bubba's intellect (and ego), culminating in his cracking of the Thinka map mystery.  It's unfortunate that the ep didn't make more of this latter achievement.  Hearing Bubba explaining exactly how he deciphered the mathematical symbols on the map would certainly have been more interesting than having him spout and scribble various forms of quantitative nonsense in a lazy effort to convince the audience that, yes, folks, he REALLY IS THAT SMART.  ("Pi squared to the 27th degree," my ass.  I can accept "fifth-grader" Huey not knowing what pi is, but Bubba's line is sheer gibberish.)  It's not just those with a mathematical calling who should feel vaguely insulted here; I was unaware, for one thing, that sectioning a pie chart and drawing a sine curve, among other actions, constituted coming up with great "business ideas."

It goes without saying that HD&L don't exactly cover themselves with glory here, for all of Bubba's gloating egotism goading them into acting like jealous jerks.  The HD&L I know might have taken Bubba's intellectual pretensions as a challenge and tried to match him in brainpower (probably with the help of the Junior Woodchuck Guidebook) while demonstrating that one doesn't have to be "all head and no heart."  Instead, they take the easy road and blow him off, even when a failure of his intellect (such as when he has trouble figuring out the ancient computer) might mean their doom.  At least the lads aren't presented as dolts the better to contrast with genius Bubba, that painful inability to solve the puzzle aside.

I'd have to agree with Greg that the inclusion of Launchpad as pilot here would have made the experience more enjoyable.   LP's reactions to the brainy Bubba would surely have been more entertaining than HD&L's, since he is perfectly aware of his own intellectual limitations and has no real problem with them.  Since "Brainstorm" counts as one of the few legitimate adventures (OK, quasi-adventures; we probably don't spend quite enough time in the Thinkas' realm to make that particular cut) of the Bubba-Fenton era, it's a shame that Launchpad couldn't come along for the ride.  Lastly, I fully agree with HD&L; LP would have found some way to fly a plane without wings.  I also think that he would have produced a more interesting crash than the relatively bland one we wound up with here.

While it does have its share of moments to shine, Act Three, the big Thinka payoff, is where this ep really falls down, starting with that first native encounter.  The degenerated locals aren't offensive so much as they are incoherently characterized.  They wear the remnants of the Thinkas' civilization as clothing and jewelry and still know how to operate the laser weapons... right.  The chief can barely speak one minute ("Uhhh... What you doin' here?") and is capable of speaking reasonably coherent sentences the next.  Worst of all, even a "primitive mind" would have realized that the arrival of "someone as smart as the ancient ones" represents a golden opportunity to recover the Thinkas' treasure.  Instead, the natives throw the "trespassing" Ducks into the pyramid... which just happens to be where the treasure is located?!  If you're going to do that, then why not ask the visitors to help find the treasure in the first place?  There are bits and pieces of a clever concept here, but writers Mark Seidenberg and Evelyn Gabai evidently couldn't be bothered to construct a medium in which to set them.

The booby traps set by the Thinkas to protect the treasure vault are reasonably clever, with one hideous, cawing, badly-designed exception.  Since the vault is intact, I presume that no Thinka descendant ever made an effort to dope out the musical tones on the ancient computer that neutralized the self-destruct operation (you'd think that some venturesome soul would have tried it, back when the natives weren't quite as bad off as they are now...), or to outwit the "riddle box."  The really peculiar thing about this sequence is the mere fact that the natives follow the Ducks into the vault after having tossed them there.  What motivated them to do that?  Was it the sound of the earth shaking when the self-destruct countdown was activated?  And, if it were, why should the natives even care that some "trespassers" are crushed?  The setup seems like a convenient way to have the natives on hand for the denouement, but the same effect would have been achieved had the natives stayed outside the vault and the Ducks had come out to give them the book in the end.  At the very least, Greg wouldn't have been driven crazy by the idea that the natives couldn't follow the Ducks when the former reached the three-way "fork in the tunnel."  (In truth, based on the visual evidence, I think it was entirely possible that the natives didn't see the Ducks take the center route.)

The appearance of the cockatrice marks a truly painful visual moment.  The design, the animation, the "voice"... all are simply dreadful.  Even the monster of "Ali Bubba's Cave" was well thought out compared to this.  The effect, of course, is to make what is supposed to be a terrifying foe (presumably, similar to the ones that destroyed the Thinkas in earlier times -- though how the Thinkas managed to train this one to be a guardian is beyond me) seem positively ludicrous.  The wonderful, eerily-lit shot of the Nephews and Tootsie trapped inside the crevice is completely neutralized, as is the restored Bubba's ultimate "clubba-ring" of the hilariously homely beastie.  You also have to wonder what happened to the cockatrice after it was thrown into the midst of the natives and subsequently literally backed out of the scene.  I hardly think that it was the type of creature to graciously retreat and allow the characters to dispense a moral that had already been made more than perfectly clear.

In the end, even one of Frank Welker's most memorable performances can't save this badly-conceived production from itself.  It's not the Spawn-of-Hell, "F*** you, DuckTales" travesty that some have made it out to be -- as I've said before, I'm convinced that this sort of fiery reaction is primarily ideologically driven, and there is a difference between disliking an episode because of poor writing and characterization and disliking an episode because you don't happen to agree with the philosophical point it's trying to make -- but the negative portrayal of intellectualism is certainly annoying enough without ladling left-wing animus on top of it.  For me, the saddest thing about "Brainstorm" is its tacit admission that Bubba, as a character in and of himself, is fatally lacking, and that you need to give the character a complete makeover in order to make him remotely interesting.  This is as good as a confession that the inclusion of Bubba in the DuckTales cast was a mistake.  Bubba will be a decidedly minor player in the series from now on, and I don't think that it's a coincidence.

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Bumper #19: "Doughbegon"

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"DuckBlurbs"

(GeoX)  The whole thing resembles some sort of crazed, nationalist rant about intellectuals sapping our National Vigor. And they can't even get that rant right; we're supposed to hold Bubba in contempt for being too cowardly to beat a monster with a club, but wholly unremarked is the fact that, just minutes ago, they would all have been horribly crushed to death if smart-Bubba hadn't been able to correctly answer a series of riddles.

See my point above about HD&L's hypocrisy. 

(GeoX)  As Bubba ineffectually tries to decide which passage to take: "Louie's coin-toss is never wrong, Bubba! We go right!" Yeah! Your élitist commie faggot book learnin' is no match for our good old-fashioned common-sense salt-of-the-earth, uh, blind luck! Christ, guys…

It isn't even as common-sensical as all that.  Why would you use a two-sided coin to choose which of THREE paths to take? 

(GeoX) Also, note the way it's made quite clear that Bubba isn't just smart-Bubba; he's a completely different person (as explicitly evinced by the way he says "goodbye" and "I'm back!" when changing back to "normal"). We don't even want to suggest that Bubba could even potentially have something of the Evil Intellectual in him. God forbid.

That last bit doesn't bother me so much as the mere fact that the "recovered" Bubba is aware of what has happened to him.  That seems more troubling, in a sense, than smart Bubba's dismissal of his "primitive" past life. 

(GeoX) "How long is a piece of string?" "[It's] Twice the distance from the center to either end!" So the answer is "twice as long as half a piece of string?" And only the genius could figure that out? Ducktales' idea of relative intelligence is kind of terrifying.

Hey, at least that was more imaginative than the nursery-school riddles that made up the remainder of the trap-quelling trilogy. 

(Greg) ...Bubba proclaims that he has ideas to boost [Scrooge's] profits as shown on his notepad. Scrooge loves this and offers [to let him] stay in the mansion as a reward. Okay; I got to admit, they booked this scene right since Scrooge loves Bubba as this because it benefits him. And Bubba seems to have no trouble with Scrooge anymore. It doesn't save the rest of this episode; but this scene doesn't insult me like the rest of it.

Scrooge's characterization in this episode is not without its own share of problems.  One can easily imagine him falling in love with the super-smart, business-savvy Bubba, or even agreeing with Bubba that the natives don't "deserve" to keep the treasure (Scrooge has a knack for justifying such actions to himself without any outside assistance).  But blowing off the "appointment-less" Nephews when they come to the "Think Tank" and want to play with Bubba?  That seems rather harsh.  Needless to say, Scrooge is quick to recover his senses when his family members are in danger, the better to provide a contrast to the dismissive Bubba.

(Greg) Scrooge can smell the treasure; Dewey only smells trouble as the walls pop up surrounding them and they then for some reason push right towards them. I'm not going to point out the obvious logic break here because it is such a waste of my time...CLIMB OUT YOU F***S~!

"Climb out?  Why, I, I wouldn't know where to begin."

(Greg) Yeah; apparently; the ancient thinkers were so smart that they used picture books instead of complex words with no pictures in it. UGH!

Actually, I don't have a problem with this.  The Thinkas might have reasoned that those who came after them would be less advanced than they were, so why not tell the story in a simple a manner as possible?


Next: Episode 85, "Dough Ray Me."

Book Review: JOHN WAYNE, THE LIFE AND LEGEND by Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster, 2014)

Just when Scott Eyman though he was out, "they" pulled him back in!  "They," of course, being the Old Hollywood Right.  Eyman follows up his fine biographies of Louis B. Mayer and Cecil B. DeMille with an equally enjoyable book-length treatment of "The Duke."  In truth, as Eyman himself admits in the afterword, this effort is actually more of a spin-off of his biography of John Ford (not to mention his encounter and interview with Wayne in the early 1970s) than a conscious decision to continue a "listening to starboard" trend.

You'll arguably find more detail about Wayne's life and movies in Randy Roberts' and James Olson's 1995 biography JOHN WAYNE: AMERICAN, but Eyman is a better writer than those gentlemen.  He also does a more thorough job of analyzing Wayne's later (i.e., post-True Grit) movies, which isn't an easy task, given that most of them, save for the mournfully summative The Shootist, essentially coasted on Wayne's already-set-in-concrete reputation.  I already knew that Wayne turned down the chance to play the title role in Dirty Harry, but I was shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that Mel Brooks considered him for the role of the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles.  It is positively frightening to consider how an appearance in that film might have affected Wayne's enduring reputation.  Among other things, it would have made it harder for his numerous artistic (by which I truly mean, political) critics to dismiss him as a relic of a bygone age.  I imagine, though, that Wayne, who learned early on the importance of maintaining a certain aura and being circumspect about the roles he took, was simply not temperamentally ready to feature in such a raunchy sendup of a genre that he always treated with utmost respect.

There are any number of movie fans who wistfully wish that "The Duke," or someone like him, were still with us.  A good deal of that nostalgia is certainly political in nature, but I think that the more pertinent point is that Wayne, who famously punched through a decade's worth of B movies before finally breaking through in the original Stagecoach, treated all those who worked with him with dignity and respect, a commendable personality trait that Eyman relates through numerous ancedotes.  To the very end of his career, Wayne's standard of professionalism remained high.  Studying Wayne's approach to his work wouldn't be the worst thing that a promising young thespian could do.

I was a little disappointed to see that Eyman cribbed a discussion of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance directly from his Ford biography.  Apart from that gaucherie, Eyman maintains the high standards of his earlier biographies here.  Roberts and Olsen will certainly stay on my shelf, but Eyman's work will now repose right next to it (in theory -- I actually bought the Kindle version of the book).