Date: Mon, 18 Sep 1995 15:44:43 -0400 From: [g--l--n] at [bgnet.bgsu.edu] (Metroplex) Subject: FtP 538 ==== FIT TO PRINT by cathrine yronwode for the week of September 11, 1995 THIS IS FIT TO PRINT NUMBER 538: I don't claim to be terribly knowledgeable about Casper the Friendly Ghost, but it sure seems to me that Russell Harvey's impassioned condemnation of the Casper movie in CBG # 1127 (June 23, 1995) was on target. When i was a kid, the Harvey titles left me cold (especially Richie Rich-which was understandable, seeing as how my mother was a registered member of the Socialist party), but like most kids, i read every comic book in sight so, although i preferred Uncle $crooge and Little Lulu, i was exposed to a lot of Casper and i came to know the character. Faint though my admiration for Casper's vaunted "friendliness" may be, i am in complete sympathy with Russell Harvey. What Steven Spielberg did to the character is nothing less than cruel, and for no purpose that i can see, for Spielberg was said to be a fan of Casper himself and his desecration did not produce theaters filled with happy children or bankbooks filled with money. It's as if Spielberg lost track of Casper the Friendly Ghost but somehow recalled Marv Wolfman's old parody, "Casper the Dead Baby" and decided to accept the latter as his plot premise. But why? Why? Why? I've been asking "why?" since Hank Pym was rewritten as a wife-beater, since Tony Stark became an alcoholic, since Hal Jordan ah, but let's skip the depressing litany; we all know that the death-fixation recently grafted onto Casper is just the latest manifestation of something has been going on for several years now and shows no sign of letting up. Enumerating examples does not address the question of why wholesale cynicism and deliberate character sabotage are considered legitimate-even desirable-story spring-boards in the first place. So instead of asking "why" again, allow me to try out two hypothetical "becauses" and see how each leads to a different future: Let's postulate first that the continuing demolition of upbeat childhood heroes is a symptom of the mid-life crises of a generation of baby-boomer scripters and screen writers. In this model, the trend will be self-limiting, as the boomers enter their contented dotage, although we still have a few years to run with it, for the last boomers were born in 1961 and they will be hitting their messed up mid-40s early next century. If what we are witnessing is a collective mid-life boomer crisis played out as fiction, the situation will stabilize around the year 2010. By that time there will be no more happy 1950s-1960s heroes to rewrite and the mid-life angst of the gen x scripters and screenwriters will be forced to find an outlet in turning the bitter anti-heroes of their youths into retro-altruistic do-gooders. For a contrary viewpoint, let's postulate that the skewering of happy youthful icons reflects a deep socio-cultural malaise caused by overpopulation, contaminated drinking water, or the Bruce effect (that's the one where the rats rebreathe air containing rat pheromones until they go crazy due to hypertrophy of the adrenal glands). If this is the case, then unless our environment is repaired, the trend toward darker fiction will not be self-limiting. It will continue long past the last baby boomer's demise, marking the descent of civilization to barbarism and/or the end of all life on this planet. If these increasingly destructive fictions are a reflection of the breakdown of culture or of mammalian life, then, after the last of the upbeat heroes has been defiled, the genre will enter a "vicious cycle" phase in which characters initially conceived as grim will become even grimmer. Imagine a rewrite of Spawn's origin that would make him more downbeat than he is now-so much more so that adult fans who were in their teens when he was created will send letters to the CBG complaining about how their "beloved Hellspawn of the alleyways," is now "unrecognizably violent." That's a scary thought, isn't it? Are we looking at a fluctuating steady state fictional universe that varies between cynicism and altruism or at an entropic fictional universe that leads ever downward into gloom? I don't know. I'm still collecting data. Let's compare notes in 15 years, okay?. ==== Fit to Print appears in print each week in Comics Buyers Guide and is available via e-mail. Tell your friends! To subscribe to Fit to Print via e-mail send a request with the words "Subscribe FtP" in the subject header and your address in the body of the message to [g--l--n] at [bgnet.bgsu.edu.] You will be added to the list and receive the next available issue. Back issues are available. FTP to cerebus.acusd.edu and look in the Comics/About Comics/Comics News/Fit to Print directory. FtP is also available on the World Wide Web at http://www.scar.utoronto.ca/~91mithra. Responses are welcome and should be directed to [g--l--n] at [bgnet.bgsu.edu.] Fit to Print is Copyright Cathrine Yronwode. All rights reserved.