Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 12: There Goes The Neighborhood

Today’s cartoon is another penned by series stalwart Eric Lewald. Is it his last contribution? Who knows? In another two weeks I should have a complete archive of everything there is to say about Popeye and Son at this link, though. Right now, let’s jump into the action and see what happened to the neighborhood.

The Plot: A family moves into the spooky haunted house you remember is up on the hill! Lon, the child, tries to fit in at school but dresses and acts all weird. When he shows up Tank’s bullying, though, Junior and his friends accept an invite to what turns out to be Lon’s birthday party. And his family are monsters! A frightened Tank gets his father to bring a torch-wielding mob against the family, setting their house on fire and threatening to kill most everyone. But Lon’s family saves the mob, and Junior uses the town water tank to save Lon’s family, and all’s well apart from Sweethaven not having a water supply for the duration.

The Thoughts: I do not like seeing J Wellington Wimpy near the head of a lynch mob. That’s not me imposing my headcanon idea of Our Heroes as flawless beings. It’s that a mob is, among other things, passion without reason. And Wimpy does not have passions outside eating, particularly hamburgers. Bluto, yes, that makes sense. Not Wimpy.

The premise of the weird new kid moves into the neighborhood is fine enough, although the cast of Popeye and Son is vague enough I’m not sure it can support even temporary new guys. Having it be a family of goofy monsters feels like the sort of thing a worn-out show mixes in its last season to spruce things up which … all right, I withdraw the objection, with reluctance.

There’s some kind of story about being nice to the new kid, and to the weird kid, and all. I appreciate that the storyline isn’t perfectly linear. Junior and his friends, hereafter the Good Kids, start out suspicious of the strange family, figure to give him a chance, think he’s weird after biting the Climb Rope in gym glass, figure he’s maybe okay when he shows up Tank and the subordinate bullies, then freak out when his home is a little too Munster. It avoids making the story too much one of “if you get a bad vibe off someone you’re the one who’s wrong”.

Lon’s talk about how this has happened so many times before leaves me wondering how bad that went that this is his best attempt to not freak out the kids at the new school. And I know, that’s me over-thinking the logic of the premise. The story has to be introduced, developed, and resolved in eleven minutes; Lon’s weirdness has to be established clearly and unmistakably in ways the kid audience will recognize. He has to dress like 1905 comic strip superstar Buster Brown and bite the gym class rope in his mouth even though a more realistic Lon would have noticed that makes him look like a weirdo. Or at least his parents, postgaming what went wrong, should have offered that advice. But if we do that we need way more time and animation than the show could have. (On the other hand, I keep reconsidering middle school and realizing that I could have been true to myself without being weird in ways that made me a target.)

Is … is that kid on the right off by himself supposed to be Oscar’s kid? Or does any scrawny-looking guy with buck teeth look faintly like the overlookable supporting castmember naturally?

That could be patched. I love the comedy creepy monster family, the more cornball the better. Always have, whether the Addamses, the Munsters, the Gruesomes (on the Flintstones less often than I remembered), Drak Pack, whatever. The more intensely they tried to understand things through a monster lens the more Lon’s bad game plan makes sense. I’d have liked to better understand the logic that leads them to have a birthday cake labelled ‘RIP’. Even if it’s goofy, like they meant it to be short for ‘R [for our] 1st Party’. Maybe especially so.

Given how most of the characters go in with good intentions I’m not sure I like that it takes the repeated threat of death to get the mob broken up. I totally buy Bluto leading the mob. It also feels … reasonable, that once the moment has passed Bluto realizes his son was playing him for a fool again, and we get another episode ending with Tank in trouble for his shenanigans. It’s also another episode where Bluto and Popeye don’t interact at all. The impression one gets is that this is a Bluto who has stuff in his life that doesn’t revolve around Popeye and I guess that’s good for him as a person, even if it leaves the show without a good built-in antagonist. Tank makes sense, especially for a kid-centered story like this, as the replacement antagonist, but he’s not as good at it as his father is.

The initial sequence, Junior’s dream, is an unusually good bit. There’s a strong opening-credits-to-Scooby-Doo vibe (I was disappointed not to have a zoom in on the eyes in the dark), aided by music that’s trying for spooky, at least at first. Music has been the weakest leg of this series, and a moment of it doing the work well shows how much the series was hobbled. I don’t know how much custom scoring the show could possibly have had — not much, I imagine — but I’m sorry they couldn’t get more spooky or suspenseful stock music for stories that needed it. The cranky-looking Eugene when Junior wakes up is also an unusually good bit of animation.

Reviewing _Popeye and Son_, Episode 9: Dr Junior and Mr Hyde

Back to the Popeye and Son walkthrough! Episode 1 has yet to reappear on King Features’s YouTube page, so I’ll instead resume with Episode 9, Cartoon 1, Dr Junior and Mr Hyde. This is another episode written by Eric Lewald, whose Internet Movie Database page needs to be corrected. Fellow deserves credit for what he does.

I’m not the one to do it, though; I haven’t made an IMDB edit since like 1995. If you want to, though, please feel free to use me as a reference. And feel free to use any of my Popeye and Son reviews as references to improve descriptions of these episodes. Just, you know, no AI wordwooze, thank you.

The Plot: a large, purple-and-pink monster haunts Sweethaven! Could it have something to do with Professor O G Wotasnozzle’s new potion that spilled into Junior or Woody’s milk? And can the right kid get the antidote before the monster causes property damage that would be really annoying in real life but seems about average for a Popeye cartoon? And is there a second monster?

The Thoughts: do you remember when you first learned the Jekyll-and-Hyde story? I can’t, myself. I only read the original after decades of remakes and riffs and spoofs and semi-spoofs. The original still has its thrills, as it should. But having a million riffs on it in my memory as I read the original does leave me waiting for people to figure it out already what is taking you so long? But it’s a story so culturally engrained that, as with A Christmas Carol, it’s amazing to think someone had to think it up first and we know specifically who.

Eric Lewald offers a twist that I do not remember seeing elsewhere and that’s just short of genius. There’s not just the one Hyde here, there’s two, and they don’t transform together. This is a great way of injecting mystery and even horror back into a premise I guess we’re born knowing. The Popeye universe is already one crammed with the magic and the strange and the alien; why does a Hyde monster have to have anything to do with anything? Especially if the two possible Jekylls can alibi one another?

My love for the twist makes me more disappointed with what happens afterward. Not so much that we the audience know there’s two monsters. I’m not sure you could set it up so the transformation serum is secret. Besides, it can be good suspense if we know the characters understand the situation wrong. But the interval between Wotasnozzle thinking there’s one monster and learning both kids need the antidote is barely anything, not enough to do anything that complicates the solution. And then the story collapses into how will you squirt antidote into two monster mouths, when all you have helping you is Popeye and spinach? Popeye for some reason splits the hose in two to squirt both at once. It’s flamboyant but, eh, it’s Popeye, what do you expect? (I wonder if there had been a draft where there was a deadline to give the antidote, so that they couldn’t just squirt one and then the other.)

They look like nothing Popeye’s ever seen before, in that they don’t have that Eugene the Jeep/Alice the Goon head!

I’m not sure about the logic of the Hyde transformations. Like, the original premise is that they reflect the rage we normally control. So Junior and Woody changing after accidents while bicycling through a stormy forest? Or when bullies (Tank, finally back in the series) are being themselves? Even when Junior’s sent to clean his room after his monster story gets written off as another story? Those make sense. (Also what are these tall tales Junior keeps telling off-screen?) The final change right before they go to the supermarket? Why that, and why then? Why be angry at Popeye bringing what he says is the cure? (Maybe if there was a deadline in a former draft, this reflected the change about to become permanent?)

While the cartoon didn’t live up to my hopes for the twist there was much I liked in it. Even besides the twist. Wimpy muttering to himself about ’tis meat, ’tis meat that makes the world go ’round? That’s finally getting his voice. Scolding Junior and Woody for being ‘so rude’ to his furniture too. Popeye using one of those old-time cartoon phones. Popeye trying to walk the monsters over and just making zero progress.

The Sweethaven grocery has a banner about being in its 37th year. I’m curious why 37. That would put their opening in 1950, a year of (as far as I know) no significance to the Popeye universe. Maybe it was somebody’s birthday.

The unknown ingredient in the antidote was absolutely spinach, right? I get that it’s a callback to Wotasnozzle’s cookies being made of seaweed and cod-liver oil, but the curing ingredient had to be spinach. I know this universe better than that.

What’s Going On In Olive and Popeye? Who’s the guy capturing Popeye in a bubble? September – December 2023

Don’t know yet. Popeye and his gang arrived on an island, in search of Plaidfoot’s Treasure. The party’s arrival was noticed by the robots serving some mysterious, not-yet-seen figure. We haven’t seen their face or an obvious gimmick. It’s not just my lack here; from the comments others haven’t reached a consensus. The Grand Archivist is the only guess people have and this doesn’t feel like his vibe to me. And, we’ve seen, Randy Milholland is willing to draw on the entire roster of every Popeye villain ever in the comic strip, cartoons, or old time radio for his appearances. We’ll see.

So this should catch you up to early December 2023 in Emi Burdge and Randy Milholland’s Olive and Popeye. If you’re reading this after March 2024 there’s likely a more up-to-date plot recap here. You’ll also find all my recaps of the various Olive And Popeye strips there, as I try to become the world’s premiere Popeye blogger against maybe competition? Enjoy, please.

Olive and Popeye.

12 September – 5 December 2023.

Last time you’ll recall, Olive Oyl has decided to help the ghosts she now sees all over the world. It turns out there are a lot of ghosts around Sweethaven. And we spend a good bit of time chatting with ones who mostly met their ends in ridiculous ways.

This coincides with a series of the Olive strips drawn by Ryan Milholland. Milholland’s been drawing the Thursday, Popeye-focused strips, as well as the Sunday strips for Thimble Theatre Presents Popeye. But for the gap between Shadia Amin leaving — in late August, with Olive and company declaring they’re going on an adventure — and Emi Burdge taking over in early October Milholland drew both sides of the strip. (I don’t know how far ahead the scripts were written, or how they were coordinated during the transition.)

Emi Burdge’s Olive and Popeye for the 14th of November, 2023. I agree, this sure seems like it’s got to be Charon they’re talking about, and the character acknowledge as much today. But is it? … Probably something sillier than that. Does it have any link to Popeye and his adventure and the mysterious figure there? I don’t know. Seems imaginable, but I’m not sure how.

From talking with the many, many, many ghosts wanting her attention Olive finds a mystery: the “old boatman” who’d escort them to the other side has disappeared. And the ghosts are desperate. Also, Olive’s desperate for a night’s sleep. One sympathizes. Also along the way we the readers learn that Cylinda Oyl can see and talk to ghosts, something that Mae can’t. That or she’s just saying that every now and then and got lucky.

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Meanwhile on Popeye’s side of things. He and his fathers — Poopdeck Pappy and Whaler Joe — meet up with Pommy. Sir Pomeroy, 10th Earl of Vauxhall, I’m told by the Popeye wikia was a regular adventure partner back in the 1950s, when Ralph Stein wrote Thimble Theatre. He’s new to me too. Pommy’s investigating, first, a town rampaged by some kind of thing. Also the map to Plaidfoot’s Treasure. Plaidfoot the Pirate said it was a treasure sacred to a race of easily-fooled monsters he swiped it from.

So here’s where they’re noticed by that shadowy figure mentioned above. The figure knows who Popeye is and that he’ll ruin everything. Also the figure has Professor O G Wotasnozzle in captivity. And some of Wotasnozzle’s rather cute robots serving him. The figure sends the robots, who’ve captured Popeye in a bubble. And that’s where we stand, this week.

Next Week!

Journey through time, space, and history-warping insects with Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop … unless something happens to change the timeline and the schedule!

_Compu-Toon_ is being _Compu-Toon_ again, this time with oscilloscope monsters

People ask me whether Charles Boyce’s Compu-Toon is a real comic strip that exists for real, in reality, or whether it’s one of those comics that exist only for me to find baffling examples of.

I don’t know.

All I can say with Descartes-like confidence is that I keep reading it, and it keeps giving me Cow Tools moments more intense than any other comic strip ever does. For example, here’s today’s installment.

Charles Boyce’s Compu-Toon for the 17th of September, 2023. Thing is, clean up that monster a little and give him friendly eyes and you’ve got a good-looking imaginary friend. It’s not Dr Seuss levels of good, but it’s getting there and certainly usable for a daily comic strip. The last update of the Keypad Kid blogspot is a Christmas message from 2014.

The understated detail that makes this really capture my baffled mind: the monster in the reflection’s chest looks like an oscilloscope to me. But every oscilloscope I’ve ever seen has the screen on the left and the controls on the right. I mean of horizontally-oriented oscilloscopes. I’m aware there are oscilloscopes where the screen is the center and the controls underneath. Please stop writing letters. I don’t claim to have seen a disproportionate number of oscilloscopes for a person of my age and work history, but I know this bit of business. And yes, sometimes there’s controls on the left of the screen, but there’s usually more controls on the right.

Where this gets relevant is the monster’s oscilloscope-like display has the screen on the right. This is exactly like what you’d see in the true reflection of an oscilloscope-chested creature.

Why, of the many elements of this comic — the shoe-store seat that Irving sits on, the corner plant that looks like the only other thing in an endless void of floor, the wall painting of Madrid’s subway system — did Boyce decide to go for authenticity in the control surfaces of his reflected monster?

On the Other Hand, When He Says ‘I See’, That Means a Lot

Sorry I’m late. I got very tired thinking of Argus, the ancient Greek monster with a thousand eyes. Particularly about how annoying it must be when he reaches the age where he needs contact lenses. But worse, not in every eye, just in something like a quarter of them. Think how hard it’d be remembering just which 250 eyes it is that need contacts, and the process of elimination testing the ones where it’s not clear they’re going bad versus the ones where they just haven’t woken up enough to see yet. And I know what you’re thinking, why not just have Lasik and get the eyes fixed? That’s because of the not-small risk that he’d get chronic dry eye afterwards. At that point, there’s no carrying around enough artificial tears for 250 eyes. He’d just have to start taking baths in saline solution and that’s going to hurt, especially if he has any little cuts or bruises. So you see why pondering this is more important than whatever I was supposed to be doing today.

What’s Going On In Eye Lie Popeye? Also, what is Eye Lie Popeye? October – December 2022

Eye Lie Popeye is another web comic about everyone’s favorite crusty sailor who isn’t Shipwreck from the 80s G.I.Joe cartoons. At least I’ve been treating it as a web comic, as Marcus Williams’s manga-style comic book’s been presented to us. It’s properly a comic book of at least twenty pages, available for preorder. One page has been shared roughly each week for the last couple months. We’ve had ten pages published online and I don’t know whether there’s going to be a continuation. They do want to sell the comics, after all.

One may ask: is this adventure canonical? One may answer: does that matter? If the story’s good does it matter whether it gets referenced anywhere else? But it probably is. Randy Milholland, who draws the new Popeye strips, and half of the Olive and Popeye side project, seems to have an inclusive view of what’s Popeye Canon. He’s tossed references to the radio series of the 1930s, to the Popeye’s Island Adventure short cartoons, to Bobby London’s run on the strip, and to characters created for the King Features cartoons of the 1960s into his tenure. If I had to put a bet I’d suppose some of this gets into the “official” strips. Heck, I’d be only a little surprised if Milholland worked in a reference to the bonkers pinball game backstory Python Anghelo wrote up.

So I can’t say whether there will ever be another of these What’s Going On In installments. But if there is, well, this should catch you up to the start of 2023. I’ll have all my Eye Lie Popeye essays arranged at this link. Thank you.

Eye Lie Popeye.

October – December 2022.

A shadowy, intimidating figure stands over a field of ruins, including an unconscious Bluto. Popeye struggles to find spinach which the figure warns is not to be found. Popeye’s stubbornness will kill him — and then we hear the Jeep, drawing the figure’s attention away from Popeye. I bet you’re wondering how Popeye got into this fix.

Panel from Marcus Williams’s Eye Lie Popeye, page one. The full page has many panels, in a fairly complicated pattern (that’s still easy to read), but this will give you a feel for the kind of technique to expect.

So we flash back to the start. Judy P’Tooty, reporter from the Puddleburg Splash, wants to write the story of how Popeye lost his eye. (The name Puddleburg Splash references a 1934 Popeye story. That story’s the source of a panel you might have seen where Popeye explains cartoonists are just like normal people except they’re crazy.) Olive Oyl intercepts her and promises to tell the story. We get a nice view of what looks like a classic (cartoon) adventure. A titanic mer-man sucker-punches Popeye and harasses Olive Oyl. Popeye eats his spinach, rockets in, and smashes the mer-man into cans of tuna. Only, this time, in the sucker-punching the monster knocked out his eye. I think the mer-man may be a representation of King Neptune, who appeared, among other places, in the 1939 story “Homeward Bound”. It’s the one going on in the Vintage Thimble Theatre run on Comics Kingdom right now.

Bluto has a different take. In Bluto’s telling, sure, Popeye was fighting a giant horned octopus. This series has not been short on fun monster designs. I’m not sure if this is meant to be any particular giant cephalopod from the rest of the Popeye universe; there’s a couple it might be. But it’s Bluto who stepped up to save the day, using Popeye as the impenetrable rock to beat the monster back. And in smashing Popeye against the monster the eye popped out. Popeye and Olive Oyl declare this story baloney, but P’Tooty is barely listening. She’s telling someone that she’s located and eliminated each stash — which she tells the gang is just her taking notes.

Marcus Williams’s Eye Lie Popeye page 8. This is my favorite of the pages we’ve had so far. The action’s great, Bill the De-Ming is nicely rendered in a way that’s cute and menacing at once, Wimpy looks great, and the narration feels like it’s got Wimpy’s voice; it’s rococo but for a purpose.

Wimpy has yet another take, in which he’s interrupted during a six-hamburger lunch. Popeye smashes through the window, battling another, this time winged, monster. This one’s called Bill and I believe it to be one of the underground demons, or De-Mings, from the final story Elzie Segar worked on before his death. This makes me suppose the other monsters are from other Thimble Theatre adventures. Bill targets Wimpy with a finger laser, as one will, and Popeye intercepts it, saving Wimpy’s life but losing his eye. Bluto calls this nonsense but Popeye acknowledges that this at least happened.

Meanwhile, P’Tooty has lost her patience. She declares this a waste of time and demands Popeye tell her where is the eye. And that she’s done with her cover story. She is, in truth, P’Tooty the Jade Witch. She’s sent by the Sea Hag. She’s eliminated all the spinach in the area, including the can Popeye keeps in his shirt collar. She wants to know where is the Bejeweled Eye of Haggery, and where is the Jeep. She dissolves into this huge inky goop, bubbling up from the sea, and it’s not hard to connect this to page one.

Marcus Williams’s Eye Lie Popeye page 10. Bluto might have the best line in the book so far, with this panel, but I’ve enjoyed the characterizations of everyone so far.

And that’s where we stand.

Oh, for the record. None of the flashback encounters we’ve seen can be perfectly true. Popeye was introduced, with his missing eye, before he ever met Olive Oyl, King Neptune, Bluto, Wimpy, or Bill the De-Ming. At least in the Thimble Theatre continuity. But you knew that. And there’s no limit to the number of continuities of Popeye except the willingness of people to hear the stories.

Next Week!

OK, now I’ve run out of Popeye web comics. I intend to get back to Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop next week. Promise.

And What I Find

Uhm … hi? I guess?

Oh. Oh, yeah, right. Monday. Mondays I usually spend telling people my mathematics blog did comic strips again. All right. My mathematics blog did comic strips again.

Why are you all looking at me like that?

Oh, sheesh, right. Yeah. Usually I have some kind of funny picture or a screen grab or something to put up and coax people into reading this anyway even though they’re not all that crazy about hearing about the thing they maybe already read. Where did I … um. I don’t know where I have one this week. No, Compu-Toon today parses too.

All right, I can work this. I’ve got like eighty thousand pictures, I just have to pick any of them and there’ll probably be something interesting going on. Let’s see.

The Clementi station on Singapore’s East-West subway line. The station is above ground because you know subways are complicated things anyway. Not depicted: the great mass of warm, muggy air that makes walking around outdoors in Singapore so much like swimming through a heap of down comforters.

There, see, that’s got … uh … I can point out how … well, anyone should be able to make a good joke about …

Oh, this is bad.

Wait a second.

Hold on.

Computer, enhance. Again. Enhance.

You never really appreciate at the time that but you take a photograph of some boring scene there’s going to be something not boring in it.

On the information screen there. That’s almost clearly some kind of giant monster-y creature sprawling across the whole highway. This means something. Send our agents out right away!

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped eight points in trading today. Investors had started to hope it would drop a clean ten points so they could joke about having scored a safety. The joke doesn’t quite make sense, but it won’t be usable at all until whenever football season gets started again in like July or August or whenever that is and they didn’t want to have to wait that long.

102

And Now For A Bit Of Fun

I know it’s been a rough … year … so let’s take a moment to relax. Here’s “Beauty And The Beast”, by Henry Kuttner, cover story for the April 1940 Thrilling Wonder Stories and it’s about a Venusian giant kangaroo-dinosaur monster that accidentally crashes his way through Washington, DC along the way to destroying the world although it’s not his fault. Um. Well, all right, how about this totally different story from the July 1940 Thrilling Wonder Stories about a gigantic reptilian monster that melts the ice caps and crashes through the New York harborfront and everybody acts like he’s the jerk?

Fortunately the US Army had just completed testing of its powerful “tickle string ray gun” and was able to handle the monster reasonably well. Image and story from Archive.org which is just magnificent for this sort of thing. Also, when are we going to stop mindlessly bringing alien eggs back from Venus and raising giant kangaroo-dinosaur monsters in the Capitol’s backyard?

Science fiction: the literature of pleasant escapism.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped one point on the debut of the rival Another Blog, Meanwhile index created by those dissatisfied traders I was talking about yesterday. We all thought they were bluffing, too. As it happens the alternate index dropped from its starting point of 100 also down to 99, which the alternate traders are saying is sheer coincidence and their index is going to take off like you never would believe. We shall see.

99

The Dustin Hoffman Question

My love and I got to thinking about Dustin Hoffman, as people will. We couldn’t think of what he might have been doing, acting-wise, ever since Sphere which came out in like … 1997? 1998? 1997 sounds plausible-ish. Let’s say that. We both are pretty sure we saw most of the movie, although in my case that’s just because there was this stretch from 2003 through 2006 when it was always on, at least up to the point where was that Samuel L Jackson stops reading 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.

Anyway, we were figuring that probably Hoffman isn’t still there, left on the set of Sphere, waiting to hear if there’s any more retakes to do or something like that. Wikipedia says he also did some voice acting for Kung Fu Panda and Kung Fu Panda 2, which both of which I think we saw, and The Tale Of Desperaux, which I know I saw because at one point in it a mouse fights a monster made of gourds and I didn’t make that up. Anyway, voice-acting you can do from anywhere so that doesn’t prove he isn’t still on the set of Sphere. So, does anyone know anyone who can check? Thanks kindly.

From The Evening’s Monster Report

I know I haven’t had many dream-world updates lately but that’s just how these things happen. There was a pretty detailed one this week, though. Apparently it was some sort of long-form documentary program about the differences between North American and Pacific Asian giant monsters. Turns out, it seems, that there’s a tendency for North American giant monsters to have many more sets of limbs and wings than their East Asian counterparts. And this apparently reflects longstanding cultural practices. Lest you think that’s an unchanging fact of life, though, apparently the Asian giant monsters are looking to add more sets of claws and wings to become more competitive in the world market. And somehow this documentary didn’t describe any of this as a new arms race.

It means something and I don’t know what.

What I Have Learned About Curing Werewolves And The Danes

First I should warn it was idle curiosity. My love and I were not looking up werewolf cures out of any need. We’ve had no trouble with the werewolves in the neighborhood. The ones down the block even took down a diseased tree before it could become an eyesore, never mind a menace. It’s left a sad unshaded spot on the street, and it’s enraged the squirrels who were still using the tree as a major traffic route. But it is responsible property management from the neighborhood werewolves. If all our neighbors were like this our neighborhood would be set for gentrification.

What we had done was start idly talking about werewolf remedies. Silver bullets, sure, everybody knows that. But what did people do before they had bullets? And there’s no way that’s a universal cure, because there isn’t even a universal treatment for vampirism. The thing to do with a vampire depends on what cultural tradition the vampire comes from. It had to be the same for werewolves. So I could find some dubiously-sourced, arguably grammar-based explanations I dashed off to Wikipedia. Well, not dashed, because I’m scared of making my back angry again. But off to Wikipedia and I wasn’t disappointed.

And, yes, the silver bullet thing is a modern movie-created thing. Of course it is. Stuff is never as old as you image. The concept of zombies is actually newer than the Battlestar Galactica reboot. The first-ever reporting of the Loch Ness Monster dates to six years after Rerun van Pelt was added to Peanuts. There are no references to the legendary “Jersey Devil” from before March of next year. Most of the spooky creatures of our imagination are the result of scenes padding out Rankin/Bass specials.

Werewolves aren’t so completely new, though, if you believe Wikipedia. I choose to accept what Wikipedia says because that’s easier than doing research. I’m not disappointed.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans, allegedly, “believed in the power of exhaustion in curing people of lycanthropy”. Apparently, if you just put them to a lot of effort the werewolf would conclude it was too much work to go on being a werewolf and they’d go back to human. Or maybe they’d go to wolf, if that’s what they were better at being. I don’t know if the Ancient Greeks and Romans would be fine with a werewolf who stuck to being a wolf. I suspect so. I mean, yes, humans have always gone off hunting and persecuting wolves. But they’ve always gone off hunting and persecuting humans, too. Someone who won’t commit to being human or wolf must be particularly ire-raising. If they’d settle to one thing or another then society would know what to persecute them for.

But exhaustion as a way of curing lycanthropy. It suggests society could handle an invasion by werewolf hordes just by setting them to raking the leaves and painting the houses. We could save society and raise the property values all down the street. Of course I don’t know that the Ancient Greeks and Romans cared about raking the leaves. They got into some weird things, all the weirder when Pythagoras got involved. And now I’m sorry that I don’t know anything Pythagoras said about werewolves. It would surely have been among the ten funniest things humanity has ever expressed.

Wikipedia keeps delivering imagination-capturing data, though. I started reading: “In the German lowland of Schleswig-Holstein” and right there I stop and say, “The German lowland? I wonder what Danish Wikipedia has to say about that! I certainly recognize the territory Otto von Bismarck used as a cats-paw to manipulate Austria out of German unification! Nor have I forgot how the Schleswig-Holstein plebiscite Prussia agreed to hold following the 1866 war with Austria got repeatedly postponed until after World War I!” I’m not a history major. I’m not Danish. I’m not Austrian. I’m a mathematician. I took exactly six credits of history in college and that was all United States history. I have absolutely no reason to care about Schleswig or Holstein. I admit having enjoyed some products of the latter territory’s cows. This is why I wasn’t cool enough to get into the Dungeons and Dragons circle back in middle school.

Anyway. Back to stuff that does not make people want to slug me. Allegedly, a Schleswig-Holsteinian werewolf can be cured “if one were to simply address it three times by its Christian name”. And “one Danish belief holds that simply scolding a werewolf will cure it.” That can’t be all there is to it, can it? Or maybe Danish scolding is particularly chilling. But how are Danish werewolf parents supposed to keep their children in line?

“Jaan Damian Tage, you get in here right — oh, now he’s not a werewolf! Honey, run to the store and get some Lycanthrope Powder.”

“What, Jael?”

“I said, run to the store — ”

“I’m upstairs, Jael, I can’t hear you.”

“Run to the store — ”

“Let me get downstairs, Jael.”

“Oh, now we need a double case! Oh, Radolf, Radolf, Radolf, what are we ever going to — ooop!”

Anyway. I guess this all is why I don’t know any Danish werewolves. I can’t say I’m any wiser for all this, but it’s good to know.

Meanwhile, On A Bad Star Trek: Voyager Episode

Screen capture from “Threshold”, which is a legendarily awful Star Trek: Voyager episode, and shut up, fans can too tell. And yeah, it’s pretty bad, but in its defense, it’s gloriously bad instead of being just boring.

Mutated Lizard-Man Tom Paris ponders, “You know, I thought this would make me happy for sure.”

Maybe We Should Just Skip To Second Contacts

The cover to _Wonder Stories Quarterly_, Summer 1930, provided by PeterPulp of DeviantArt

The Peter Pulp account over on DeviantArt put up this cover, from the Summer 1930 issue of Wonder Stories Quarterly, and I guess it just shows how poorly we all handled First Contact back in the day. Obviously, I don’t know who started the fight, whether the wide-hipped spacemen with the guns or the alligator-cyclops, but as things stand now, the brave spacemen of tomorrow have to figure out a way to carry on their mission despite the near-complete destruction of their Bounce House. I don’t envy them their task. I’ve never been able to recover from more than a goat-hydra chewing on the restraint bar of my Tilt-a-Whirl car.

You know, I am guilty of assuming this is a matter of the alligator-cyclops throwing rocks at the Bounce House. But from just the still scene I don’t know if he’s actually busy removing rocks from it. He might be the hero of this scene, freeing trapped spacekids within, and what is he getting for his trouble? All the bullets he can eat. I bet that’s what happened; isn’t it always like that when you try helping spacemen with Bounce Houses, in your experience?