Book Review: IN THE HEART OF THE SEA by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking Penguin, 2000)

 

Philbrick, the author of MAYFLOWER, made his initial reputation with this brief but powerful tale of the Nantucket whaleship Essex's disastrous encounter with a sperm whale in the Pacific Ocean in 1820.  The 20-man crew, forced to take to three whaleboats as the Essex sank after it was rammed by the whale, faced a horrific three-month ordeal that included subsistence living on a coral island, hunger and thirst at sea, and ultimately cannibalism.  Remarkably, five men survived, and several of them committed the tale to paper.  Philbrick's account is partially inspired by new details uncovered in the memoirs of Thomas Nickerson, the Essex's cabin boy, which were only published in the 1980s.  It has long been known that Herman Melville's MOBY DICK was inspired, at least in part, by what happened to the Essex.  Philbrick gives us the whys and hows, and much more besides, in these densely packed 240 pages.  (Melville, who was not known for concision in his writing, is probably shaking his head somewhere and wondering how Philbrick was able to accomplish the feat.)  

Philbrick takes us through the history of Nantucket Island and the Quaker influences that shaped its culture, a description of the whaling industry of the 19th century, observations on the biology of whales, and, when the time comes, a rather gruesome (but necessary) discussion of the physiology of extreme hunger and thirst.  He also has important observations to make about the state of race relations among the Nantucket whalers (not as charitable as one might expect, given the Quakers' color-blind reputation) and the deep divisions between the "Nantucket men" and the off-islanders, or "coofs," who were brought in to fill out whaling crews as the demand for manpower grew.  These last are not mere sociological digressions; the first victims of the cannibalism were African-American, and the dispensation of the personnel in the whaleboats owed a lot to "in-group" and "out-group" dynamics.  Throughout, Philbrick knows just the right amount of detail to bring into his narrative without bogging it down.

At Stevenson University, we're currently using this book as a common reading in our Freshman Science Seminar sections.  Despite the somewhat grotesque subject matter and the occasional deployment of technical sailing terms and the like, this book is an excellent way to show students, as well as the general public, how science in the most "general" sense has intersected with other elements of American culture in the past, and is a good jumping-off point to discuss similar interactions of today.

Congrats to Cabrera

Congratulations to the Detroit Tigers' Miguel Cabrera on becoming the first winner of baseball's Triple Crown since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967... and, believe it or not, I'm going to link this historic feat to a DuckTales episode!  In fact, it's the very next episode I'm reviewing for my retrospective.  Neat, eh?

I've heard it said a lot of times over the years that we would never see another Triple Crown winner.  The usual reasons were trotted out:  players don't care about potential monetary rewards because they already make scads of money; players don't have enough of a sense of history to fully appreciate how remarkable such a feat is, etc., etc.  A more believable explanation is the one provided by Stephen Jay Gould for the disappearance of the .400 hitter: the quality of play in baseball has improved over time, the standard deviations of player performance levels have decreased, and it has become harder and harder for players to stand out from the crowd to such a massive extent.  The Triple Crown is arguably a tougher road to hoe because one must excel in more than one specific stat.  Even during the height of the Steroid Era, the Triple Crown seemed out of reach.    

In commenting upon the supposed "death" of great baseball feats, baseball commentators and fans have used language strangely similar to that used by Friend-of-this-Blog GeoX to describe the main theme of one of the very best DuckTales episodes.

Where have the .400 hitters gone?  This is a question that comes up from time to time among baseball fans who lament that the giants of yesteryear - Ty Cobb, Rogers Hornsby, and Ted Williams among them are long gone and that we'll never see their kind again. -- Dan Agonistes' Baseball Blog, August 4, 2004

This episode raises some important questions. Like: where have all the good men gone? Where are all the gods?  Where's the street-wise Hercules to fight the rising odds? -- GeoX's review for "Hero for Hire" (or were you quoting someone, Geo?)

Where have they gone, indeed?  Are they hanging out with Joe DiMaggio somewhere?  Or perhaps they're engaged in a costume change...

DUCKTALES RETROSPECTIVE: Episode 12, "Maid of the Myth"

Let's clear up one contention about this episode right off the bat.  Yes, the notion of honest-to-goodness Vikings invading Duckburg does possess a distinct element of the "utterly cockamamie" (cf. GeoX).  This is especially true when no explanation is given (much less asked for) as to why these exotic outlanders have abruptly decided to pillage a large city, and with a mere three ships full of invaders at that.  But let's be honest, now:  how much more fanciful is writer Anthony Adams' confection than Carl Barks' own "take" on Viking lore?

Eschewing anything like Barks' somewhat heavy-handed satire, Adams turns this Viking DuckTale into more or less of a conventional action-thriller, with meaty supporting roles for Launchpad and the hitherto underused Mrs. Beakley and one absolute champion of a one-shot player in the comely chariot-driver Swanwhite (Tress MacNeille, who begins to cement her legend here as DuckTales' "go-to gal" for incidental female character voices).  Following an exciting and well-animated chariot race between Mrs.B. and the Viking champion, Thor (and yes, Adams did do his homework when choosing that name -- see below), the episode just sort of trails off; there's some mutual mumbling about the Vikings of the hidden island of Valhalla "learning to live in peace with the Outsiders," but you never get the impression that such promises will ever come to anything.  (Perhaps the ties would have seemed stronger if Scrooge had taken in a wild young Viking child and decided to raise him along with HD&L and Webby... On second thought, let's not go there.)  We also must tiptoe past a fair number of logical lapses on the way to the finish.  Despite all this, "Maid" remains a highly enjoyable entry on the distinguished roll of "myth-and-legend-based" DuckTales episodes.

GeoX complained about the use of the "operas are long and boring!" trope, but the ep actually gets off to a worse start than that.  Why are Scrooge and HD&L acting like such insensitive assholes, considering that Mrs. Beakley is performing on stage for a charitable cause?  They practically make a scene of being ostentatiously indifferent to the proceedings.  I mean, surely they could have gotten better seats simply by asking for them.  Perhaps they found it difficult to take seriously what appears to be a glorified "community theater" event, in which Gyro, Quacky McSlant, and Vacation van Honk are being pressed into service as unlikely Vikings.  

But wait, it gets worse.  Mrs. B., gallantly trying to make several bars from The Ride of the Valkyries stand in for ALL of the collected works of opera, has a mishap with a prop tree, and Scrooge and the boys join the rest of the audience in laughing themselves silly.  Where's the empathy, fellas?!

So on come the Vikings, who cut legitimately menacing figures as they ransack the docks, grab some plunder, and... find the contents of fizzing cans of soda disquietingly entertaining.  The soda gag is rerun several additional times during the episode, almost as if it's destined to play some sort of role at the climax... but, nope, it's just a throwaway (or should I say, recyclable) gag.  Had Barks thought up something as weird as this to use as a running joke, I suspect that he would probably have found a somewhat cleverer alternative use for it.

There is some legitimately wonderful animation in this opening sequence -- the Vikings walking onto the deck of Auric's ship with their plunder, Auric sweeping through the air to shanghai Mrs. Beakley.  Logic, however, hits the banana peel as the Ducks take to a speedboat to pursue the Vikings to Greenland.  I can understand the use of a watercraft to trail the Vikes' ships, but wouldn't a submarine have provided better protection against the Ducks' being spotted?  And why is Scrooge so slapdash in getting this little expedition outfitted?  No winter coats or (as Greg pointed out) life jackets for the Nephews, no apparent room on the speedboat for the necessary provisions... and no Webby, at least not until the Ducks get to Valhalla and she suddenly reappears on the scene.  No wonder the departing Nephews don't seem to like the direction in which this adventure is heading.

Speaking of directions, GeoX goes through all sorts of contortions trying to get the Vikings' trek to Duckburg to make some geographical sense:

Calisota, as we know, is on the west coast. So the Vikings either sailed all the way through Nunavut and the Northwest Territories (okay, it was just the Northwest Territories at the time), around Alaska, and all the way down the west coast of Canada; or all the way south past Tierra del Fuego and up the other side. Though granted, they could have cut that second route down substantially had they been able to get permission to use the Panama Canal. Or they could have gone aaaall the way over Asia and crossed the Pacific, but gimme a break--that would just be silly! 

All of this speculation, of course, flows from the premise that Calisota is on the West Coast.  But here's the thing: several DuckTales eps provide explicit evidence that the DT version of Duckburg is on the EAST Coast.  In "Double-O-Duck," we even get some cartographical evidence:

Um, guys, seeing as how Duckburg is clearly situated on a body of water, I think that you might want to move that Duckburg dot at lower left a wee bit more to the right.  That would plant the DT Duckburg in the vicinity of "real-world" Norfolk and Hampton Roads, VA.  Several eps after "Double-O-Duck," in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. McDuck," detective Shedlock Jones refers to the "six-hour time difference" between London and Duckburg.  So, you see, it would be possible for the Vikings to reach this version of Duckburg... though I'm surprised that they went to the trouble of going that far, as opposed to invading the more easily reachable New York.  (Or would that be St. Canard?)

UPDATE (10/1/12):  I just remembered another episode that provides evidence of the Eastern location of Duckburg.  In "Top Duck," while recounting the story of his sad exile from The Flying McQuacks, Launchpad notes that the aerial acrobats had been doing a show "out on the coast" when LP screwed up his part of the "cattle rustle hustle."  Now, the phrase "out on the coast" may be used on the West Coast to refer to those of us back East, but it's generally taken to mean "out West."  Ergo, Duckburg must be in the East. 

Joe and I have speculated in the past that the hot-spring-heated island setting of Valhalla may have been inspired by the live-action Disney movie Island at the Top of the World (1974).  Other points of similarity include the plot being motivated by a search for a missing person and an "Outsider" enjoying a romance with a Viking maiden.  Of course, it is also possible that Adams was simply inspired by his love of myth and legend, as displayed in his fanciful rock opera An Eye in Each Head and, just perhaps, by his boyhood experiences of reading Barks stories.  In any event, I would certainly like to know a bit more about the genesis of this episode.

Adams may have done a bit of a "rethink" regarding the romantic self-confidence that Launchpad displayed in "Lost Crown of Genghis Khan."  Launchpad seems somewhat more competent than usual here -- he ultimately learns how to drive the ram-chariot, after all -- but he's clearly flustered by Swanwhite's considerable charms.  Of course, his romantic cause isn't helped by his attempt to maintain his disguise as a Viking.  (Given that Valhalla is such a closed community, I'm actually surprised that Swanwhite didn't realize that Launchpad wasn't a real Viking right off the bat.  Perhaps she lives apart from the rest of the clan; she certainly has much better "manners" and "tenderness" than they do.)  This is among the first of what will become numerous "costumed" roles for Launchpad, and it's actually one of the better, albeit lower-key, ones. 

For whatever reason, during my early viewings of "Maid," I had all sorts of problems picking up on the names of the Vikings.  It took me a long while to recognize "Swanwhite" because her name was only mentioned once, and Launchpad was hoarse when he mentioned it.  It was so bad that I originally thought that the name of Thor's partner in sabotage Snagnar was supposed to be the parodic "Snacbar."  Thor, of course, was no problem to pick up, and Adams isn't simply going for a cliched name in this case: the legendary Norse god is famous for traveling a chariot pulled by a pair of goats (not rams), and the DT Thor even mentions one of their names: Toothgnasher ("Tanngnjostr" in the Norse language).  Thankfully, DT saw fit not to recreate the part of the Thor legend in which Thor eats his rams and then resurrects them.  That would have gotten uncomfortably messy, I think.

The two main strands of the Valhalla plot -- Auric's queen Griselda's jealousy of Mrs. "Brunhilde" Beakley and the chariot race between the Duckburgian and Valhallian champions -- dovetail neatly when Griselda's potion causes Launchpad to lose his voice, obliging Mrs. Beakley to fill in for LP and thereby forcing the redoubtable nanny to brave Thor's attempted sabotage.  Scrooge, who plays a surprisingly minor role in the ep apart from challenging Auric to the "man-to-man" contest to decide the Ducks' fate, finally gets in his ration of work as he and Swanwhite try to stop Thor's henchVikes from collapsing the bridge.  Since Scrooge's interference caused the premature destruction of the bridge, giving Mrs. Beakly a chance to make everything turn out well in the end, I'd say that Scrooge made the most of his brief opportunity.  I'd certainly like to know where Mrs. B. learned how to drive a chariot -- this must be one of those "hidden talents" that she allows to escape from hiding on special occasions, the best-known occasion of which is "Jungle Duck" -- but there's very little to dislike about this well-mounted sequence.  I find this action-oriented approach far more enjoyable than Barks' rather sour and cynical use of similar material in "Mythtic Mystery."

As noted above, the ending of the episode is rather flabby.  Apart from the mushy nature of the promise of future "peaceful" contacts, the ep doesn't even handle Mrs. Beakley's final flight of song properly.  Imagine if Mrs. B.'s climactic trill had caused, not a small shower of falling ice, but a semi-catastrophic landslide that accidentally sealed Valhalla off from the outside world?  After all, as we've just seen, her "C above high C" packs quite a destructive, ice-shattering punch.  How ironic would that ending have been?  And dark, as well, which is probably why DT wouldn't have dared to touch it.  Ah, well, what we did get was plenty good enough for my tastes. 

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"DuckBlurbs"

(GeoX)  Didn't even mention the good viking shepherdess or the bad viking queen--the latter especially makes essentially no impression; her purpose is questionable, aside from screwing up Launchpad's voice and requiring Beakley to race.

If Griselda made any impression at all -- and I think that she did, though not as large a one as did Swanwhite -- it was entirely due to Tress MacNeille's voicing.  Oddly enough, Tress seemed to have some trouble nailing the voice down.  In Griselda's first scene, the Viking queen's voice is somewhat huskier than in the scene in which she plots to ruin Mrs. Beakley's voice.  That latter effort sounds more like the "all-purpose villainous female" voice that MacNeille will later give to one-shot distaff players like Circe, Millionaira Vanderbucks, and Feathers Galore.  Had DT decided not to use June Foray's Natasha voice for Magica De Spell, it would have made a good voice for Magica, as well.

(Greg)  Louie notices that those [Viking] ships are real as we see the viking running down the street. I don't want to be the spoilsport around here; but doesn't someone notice that THE DOCKS ARE [ON] FIRE?!

Seeing as how the shot of the harbor area taken on the following morning doesn't show much, if any, damage, that couldn't have been TOO serious of a blaze.  TMS just animated it so well that it seemed more ferocious than it truly was.

(Greg)  We then see Thor and his Wingammo Toothgnashers rams whip from the west and stop near the short viking (Wait; shouldn't he be AT the feast? Logic break #2 for the episode.) as he is addressed as Ragoth...  Apparently; the viking near the tree is addressed as Snagnar (...he I think should be at the feast too at this time for logic break #3).

I suspect that "Economical Character Design Syndrome" was at play here.  There were certainly several "short Vikings" around, but it would have been tempting for TMS to cut a few corners and make them all look alike.

(Greg)  Mrs. Beakly as an opera star is funny and the Viking[s] I found really good although I didn't find Launchpad's lady man routine as funny as it was in Lost Crown Of Genghis Khan; although I did like Swanwhite and her sonic goats. And I would have liked them better if they dropped the ja like speech that they annoyed me with. 

So, you have a problem with "ja," eh?  Well, here bane my answer to that -- even though it involves the wrong kind of Scandinavian:

Next: Episode 13, "Hero for Hire."

We Are... Our Grandparents!

I shouldn't let September slip away without noting a remarkable (for the Barat family, that is) fact.  Our family has now possessed our home in north Wilmington, DE for 45 years.  As a four-year-old in September 1967, I literally saw the old manse built before my as-yet-uncorrected-for-myopia eyes.  My brother Andy and his family live there now.  What's remarkable about our family's longevity at this address is that now, we have lived there longer than my grandparents lived in their home in Worcester, MA.

     The Lee home, circa 2002

You know the old saying that time moves more slowly when you are a kid.  Well, when I was growing up and making regular visits to Worcester, I got the distinct vibe that my relatives had lived there FOREVER.  The house itself certainly seemed old enough to be a domicile that could house a certain group of people for an indeterminate length of time.  I can still smell the mildewed wood of the small "mud room" that one had to pass through in order to enter the house proper.  But, no, the Lee family was "only" there from 1945 until the end of the 1980s, when my grandfather, great-aunt, and aunt moved in with my uncle and aunt's family in New Hampshire.  The Barat estate in Wilmington has now been in the family longer. 

RIP Michael Rye

Greg Weagle reports that veteran radio actor and voice artist Michael Rye died last week at the age of 94.  We WDTVA die-hards know him best as the voice of Duke Igthorn and King Gregor on Gummi Bears.  He also played supporting roles in the DuckTales episode "Once Upon a Dime" (alas!) and the TaleSpin episode "The Road to Macadamia" (not so much!).

Rye also voiced The Lone Ranger -- perhaps his best-known role in animation outside the "kingdom limits" of Dunwyn -- and enjoyed a radio career that spanned several decades.  As Rye Billsbury, he was the "genial Mr. First Nighter" on the popular Broadway anthology show The First Nighter Program from 1945 to 1953.  Give a listen to him here.

Wing Doesn't Need a Prayer

So, have you had the opportunity to read Eric Wing's fine article commemorating DuckTales' 25th birthday?  If not, go ahead.  I can wait.

Let me take on a few of Eric's points:

(1)  To be completely fair, Eric, some DuckTales merchandise DID manage to get into the stores.  It even merited several TV commercials.  Artful, however, the spots generally weren't, even when measured by the modest standards of the medium.

Quack-quack.  Right. To make matters worse, the narrator seems to assume that the term "DuckTales" referred to the group of characters featured on the show.  (More painful even than this was the fact that the misbegotten Marvel-Disney DISNEY AFTERNOON comic-book title once used the phrase "DuckTales in..." to introduce a DT story.)

Several items produced during the original run of the series -- the Panini sticker album, a number of the figurines, and particularly the well-received video games -- have achieved semi-legendary status.  Unfortunately, there weren't enough of these to sustain the long-term interest of the "civilian" population as the 1990s wore on.  It would have helped, I think, if the DT-based comic books had been regularly plugged during broadcasts of the show.  But then, you can say exactly the same thing about all of the other series produced during the "Golden Age" of WDTVA.  Next to the video division's ham-fisted, unimaginative handling of the DVD releases, the refusal to partake of what would seem to be a straightforward opportunity to exploit "synergy" is the most infuriatingly puzzling aspect of Disney's superintendence of this marvelous product. 

(2)  As for the troubling question of why DT has not sustained more of a legacy, over and above the "mere" lack of enough store-buyable baubles, I addressed this question at some length a couple of years ago in "Free DuckTales!", a piece I wrote as part of my RICHVILLE RUMINATIONS column in Mark Arnold's THE HARVEYVILLE FUN TIMES!.  I identified the following potential reasons:

• Duck fans were divided on the question of the series' viability from the very beginning, and so the show lacked the solid phalanx of fans that helped perpetuate interest in, say, Chip and Dale's Rescue Rangers.
• The comic books were of uneven, aesthetically confused quality, which made it easier for some to write off the DT concept as inferior.
• A number of the new characters had as many detractors as they had boosters -- and some had more of the former than the latter (see Duck, Bubba).
• The series lived a more or less "natural" lifespan of 100 episodes, and it was easy for Duck fans to go back to reading the "standard" comics after it was all over.  Rescue Rangers and TaleSpin, by contrast, gained a second wind because they were taken out of production "before their time."
• The era of TV animation that DT ignited has ended, and we're living in a different aesthetic world today.

To this list, I'd now add:

• Disney DVD's treatment of the DVD releases as throwaway product has helped to obscure the true historical and aesthetic significance of the series.

(3)  If I were as comprehensive an authority on DT as Eric seems to think me to be, then I'd certainly know a lot more behind-the-scenes information about the series' production history.  I do know that the show was officially put into development in 1985, as indicated in the copyright notice below:

Also, episode voice tracks were being recorded as early as the Spring of 1986.  I have a news article noting the recording of the track for "Micro Ducks from Outer Space" as taking place during April of that year.  The production order of the eps as a whole, I've gleaned from a couple of sources.  But "inside infor"?  I wish.