Tin Man: I'd oil him any day

Does tin really rust? Do we really care? As a kid, I was pretty fascinated with this guy. He was my favorite character, and I loved that scene where Dorothy oiled up his arthritic joints and set him free.

The Wizard of Oz came on TV once a year, and everyone looked forward to it with rabid anticipation. Even though we had to watch the whole thing on a small screen in grainy black-and-white (in fact, I had no idea most of it was in color until decades later), the so-called-blase kids of the '60s clamoured for this kind of fantasy, which was already 25 years out of date.

What the hell WAS a "tin man" (or "tinman", as he was more properly called) anyway? A lion you can understand. Even a scarecrow. But here was this mysterious metallic guy, who rusted solid while trying to chop some wood in the rain. He made squeaky little sounds that only the Scarecrow (who was really smart: hehheheheheheheheh) could understand.

(Causing my brother to say, on at least one occasion, "He-e-e-e-e-y! The Scarecrow's not supposed to be smart!" Another time, he even said, "That guy was already on. At the start. You know, on the farm." Weird.)

But it gets stranger: in the original L. Frank Baum series of kids' books, he was called the Tin Woodman. Even more confusing for kids in a relatively high-tech era. I have to confess I am still not sure what a woodman is: someone who chops wood for a living, or lives in the woods, or is made of wood like Pinocchio (no, strike that)?

But listen: this isn't where it started, at all. Back when I was trying to find images to illustrate the Dylan Thomas poem, And Death Shall Have No Dominion, I found myself in strange and disturbing territory.


There are some pretty gruesome images in the poem of bones cracking and people getting stretched on a rack. (This must have been written during one of his rare sober periods.) So I found myself wandering into the dark territory of Medieval torture and the Spanish Inquisition.

No, I won't get into that Monty Python sketch (though I was tempted: but it's Monday, and it would be too much work. Another time.) But when you see these things - do I even need to tell you what they were for? - it's enough to put you off your breakfast.

(Hint: this one opens out like an umbrella.)

Right. So what's the connection to the Tin Woodman? Not much, except they all seem to be made out of metal (and rusty metal at that).


I can see one of the King's lackeys oiling up this head-smasher so it would work more efficiently, or perhaps take longer.

I cannot tell you what I saw in this picture at first glance: suffice it to say that I never knew Woodie was so well-endowed. Oops, that's his arm, isn't it?

There were a lot of early stage productions (and a few silent film versions) of this story before it became a bouncy, quirky MGM extravaganza in the 1930s. Here the Straw Man, somewhat resembling a chemo patient, greets the Tin Woodman with immense affection. The two share the common trait of being inanimate, after all.

The original illustrations by W. W. Denslow portay the Tin Man as a reasonably friendly figure (despite his lack of a heart). A little on the skinny side, but MGM got that empty barrel chest just right. (Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. . . "What an echo!")

But then I found this one, which looks more like something out of a Whitley Streiber book. Is that big-headed, obviously alien figure putting his heard in, or taking it out? The tin guy's immobile face reveals nothing.

And this one, well, shit, he's a ROBOT and couldn't be anything else. I don't know how you could warm up to him or even want to apply the oil can to his seized joints. He's all cogs and gears and iron-clad Uggs, and if you look closely, he has a moustache. A sort of oven door on his chest should bear the inscription, "Insert heart here."

People made out of tin. The Borg on Star Trek. That hideous moment at the end of The Fly (the one with Jeff Goldblum) where he fuses together with the teleporter and emerges dragging chunks of machinery.

I don't know what it all means either, but it's cool.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

How Wilma Flintstone invented agriculture

I have always had a horror of what I call "we-think". I tried to impress on my kids that it was crucial that they learn to think for themselves. This involves developing discernment and critical thinking, but to do so, you have to stand up to a tide of resistance: our culture now thinks that to be critical is "bad". It's "negative", and that's especially bad. Always.

In fact, lots of things are bad, and none worse than trying to control our reality. We constantly hear truisms like, "The only thing we can change is our attitude." (Which is the hardest thing to change: in fact it is practically impossible, for we are all deeply programmed by the culture we grew up in, and very few of us even know it). This is to drive away the panicked powerlessness that would probably subsume us if we really gave in to the truth.

Dogma and isms rule our lives, and hardly anyone is aware of it or even wants to be. Instead they regurgitate undigested mini-bites of unexamined philosophy to reassure each other that they're doing OK, that they're following all the (invisible) rules. If you follow these rules to the letter, you're "in". If you object or, worse, point out to others that you think they are in error, that they are merely following the herd without questioning its screwed-up non-values, generally speaking you are lambasted or even shunned. That is why, I think, people are such conformists.

We evolved to follow the herd (literally, herds of prey animals) in small tightly-knit bands, and woe betide anyone who was cast out of the band. They died slowly and horribly, or were simply eaten. Someone was always in charge, probably the largest and scariest male (no matter what feminists say about Amazon goddess-figures who ruled everything in deepest antiquity, like in that Star Trek episode).

Have we changed much? From what I know of evolution from all those anthropology courses I took, men's stone tools (which last forever and are still around) were always considered the hallmark of evolution and proof that "man" developed "technology" hundreds of thousands of years ago. But ancient human societies are described as hunter-gatherer. The meat source was highly prized but sporadic, and the rest of the time everyone subsisted and survived on nuts, berries, roots, etc. that the women gathered every day in leather pouches that quickly rotted away, leaving no trace of their contribution to human survival. (Women still carry them, no?)

Incredibly, for many decades anthropologists didn't even seem to see this contribution, assuming the nuts and berries just rolled into the caves all by themselves. After all, didn't their meals appear on the table (first from Mom, then from Wifey) in the same way? Obviously no work was involved.

Without those nifty little purses, you'd be looking at an empty screen because there wouldn't BE a screen because there wouldn't BE a human race, and thus there wouldn't be a you. None of it ever would've happened because Ugg and his gang of pinheaded proto-hominids didn't bring the musk-ox home in time and everybody would have starved to death.

But it didn't happen that way: the supply of nuts and seeds and berries always held, mainly because the women were on their hands and knees for ten hours a day scrounging them up even under the most dreadful conditions.  A baby in one pouch, the trail mix in the other. Eventually this led to women realizing that they could bury these nuts and seeds and have the plants grow wherever they wanted. Surprise of the day: Women invented agriculture! Not Fred Flintstone, but Wilma. But you will never hear about this in the anthropology books, cuz they're too busy postulating that it was just Ugg hankering after some radicchio to go with his braised shoulder of ox.

You mean you haven't heard this theory before? That's cuzzada-fact that you were too busy following the herd.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

You have GOT to read this!

Sent to me by Matt Paust, Hemingway of the Henhouse: so I don't have to write anything today!

http://open.salon.com/blog/con_chapman/2012/03/04/the_sylvia_plath_foreclosure_sale

Funny, funny. . . chicken gifs (they move!)

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

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Chapters/Indigo
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Poem of the Day

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;

When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;

Though they go mad they shall be sane,

Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea

They lying long shall not die windily;

Twisting on racks when sinews give way,

Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;

Faith in their hands shall snap in two,

And the unicorn evils run them through;

Split all ends up they shan't crack;

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.

No more may gulls cry at their ears

Or waves break loud on the seashores;

Where blew a flower may a flower no more

Lift its head to the blows of the rain;

Though they be mad and dead as nails,

Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;

Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,

And death shall have no dominion.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Apple's. . . NO WAY!

This clip proves, once and for all, that I did NOT hallucinate Apple's Way. It's just as smarmy as I remember it: the good little wife trotting out to the picnic table with a platter of fried chicken, grinning so hard she might split her face; the eager kids gathering around, Papa in a checked shirt at the head of the table, all that shit. Grandpa eating corn with a "mmmmm, MM!" sort of look on his face is. . . I won't make the obvious reference, but it's not "asparagus-y".

My favorite part (which you don't get in this version, but it's in the http://www.televisiontunes.com/ one I posted below) has at least one dog barking. Reminds me a bit of National Lampoon's Vacation.

I wonder what Apple's Way would be like brought up-to-date. The references to Apple are just too obvious, of course. Nobody knew what the hell a computer was in those days, except maybe a sinister force that took over the U. S. S. Enterprise or cut that poor astronaut loose in 2001. No, today George Apple would be just getting out of detox after embezzling money from his waterfall company (or was it an orchard?). His wife would reluctantly forgive him for having an affair with his secretary, Ronald Pear (a dwarf who runs his own pit bull escort service) until she finds him looking at homosexual porn when he's supposed to be creatively reworking the company's profits.

But certain things would remain the same: she'd do all the housework, and they'd have at least one dog.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

You have GOT to try this!

http://www.televisiontunes.com/

Your very own time machine!  This site has EVERY  TV theme song ever written, from Donna Reed and Perry Mason right up to current hit sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory (in case you think I was born in the Cretaceous Period. I was, but never mind.) It even has Apple's Way, a series from some time in the '70s that I thought I had hallucinated.

I remember only one scene from Apple's Way, and I don't know why. George Apple, played by Phgkdlslslmbbkb (who cares?), is the loving patriarch of a family that runs some sort of waterfall company, or maybe makes apples. The family is facing an aching crisis like Betty Jane losing her Brownie uniform. We see George and his wife (played by Blfhdkdkdk) in the bedroom. She's sitting up in bed with an angst-ridden look on her face, her brow puckered. George brings her a cup of tea. There follows a bit of dialogue that will be with me until the day I die:

Wife: How come you always know just what to do when things are not-so-good?

George: Isn't that what it's all about?

I  swear, I remember nothing else from the series, but that was enough.

http://www.televisiontunes.com/Apples_Way.html

                                                                                

  

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The Wizard of Oz as you never wanted to see it

j


It was very strange to see these again. This is a bizarre take on The Wizard of Oz, with everything turned upside-down: Rusty the Tin Man really is heartless and nasty; Socrates the Straw Man (straw man? Just what IS a straw man, anyway? Sounds like something out of The Wasteland: "We are the hollow men, head-piece filled with straw") is really brainless; Dandy the Lion (an interior decorator who has definite "tendencies") is scared shitless of everything. So the weird twist in the original, i. e. that the characters already possessed the things they wanted, is twisted the other way. Nobody has any good qualities at all. The result is. . . pretty twisted.

You can find virtually pristine-quality videos of this 1961 series on YouTube, but for some reason the opening and ending sequences have been cut. When I look at them, it's very strange: I originally watched them on a grainy b & w set, so seeing them looking so brand-new and vividly, even garishly coloured is disconcerting. Almost hallucinogenic. Were the animators dabbling in exotic '60s substances, I wonder?

I wanted to include those opening and closing sequences, so I had to use this faded, slightly blurred cartoon as an example, even though it doesn't include all the characters (i.e. the Wicked Witch, who has a voice that could shred steel). There are other oddities, such as teardrop-shaped munchkins that seem completely expendable (i.e. they are casually killed in nearly every episode), a Wizard that talks like W. C. Fields, a dragon that pops up now and again (scaring the shit out of Dandy), and a land where everything is upside-down.

I can't find any one cartoon that gets all this across, so I chose this one where the main three characters demonstrate their "special" qualities. When I was about seven and watching these for the first time, I just sucked it all in like Jell-o or Junket or Cream of Wheat, without analyzing it. It's only now that I see how very strange and even disturbing it all is.

(Post-script: someone posted a comment on YouTube claiming that these cartoons were made in Canada, and I wondered: could it be? They were produced by an American animation giant, Rankin-Bass, best known for their cheesy-but-beloved Christmas specials with stop-action figures that reminded me of that annoying little Alka-Seltzer guy.  (And Davy and Goliath? We'll get into that later.) This series isn't stop-action, in fact it falls under the category of hallucinogenic art. But when I began to probe, some familiar names popped up. This series was apparently created by the '60s entertainment impresario Budge Crawley. Among the voice actors were Bernard Cowan and Carl Bana: I remember Cowan as an announcer on game shows or something. All Toronto guys. Well, why not: Spiderman was voiced by Paul Soles, a veteran Canadian jack-of-all-trades actor and entertainer, and where would we be without catch-phrases like "Walloping web-snappers!" and "My spidey-sense is tingling." There's just something about Canadians. Strange people.)

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

The best TV theme song of all time!

No doubt about it. Superchicken has it all over Quick Draw McGraw and Deputy Dawg and even Cool McCool for great theme songs, summing up all that was super-cool about that era in animation.

"That" era being the '60s, which immediately gives away my age. Good thing I don't give a rip about it.

It's not just the lightning-fast delivery, it's the split-second montage of images - not equalled or even approached until The Big Bang Theory - that makes this theme song memorable.

I found a clip of Jerry Seinfeld singing it once. I can't, but it's still fun to watch.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm