Jingle Jangle Jingle

I’m just going to admit it: Christmas can be tough.

As an adult with no kids and a cultural but not necessarily spiritual connection to this holiday, it’s one of the ones I have some trouble getting the hang of how to celebrate.  Halloween was easy, expectations were low.  Thanksgiving was a little tougher, but I managed.  Christmas is still a harder nut to crack.  Never mind the fact that the cultural expectations, early sunsets and cold weather (at least here in the Northern Hemisphere) can kind of conflict with the “merry” attitude that’s expected.

But it’s other things too.  Like how sometimes the message of the holiday and the trappings of it don’t quite match up.  Or they match on the outside but not the inside.

Take Christmas music for instance.  Christmas music can be weird.

Despite Christmas music’s reputation of being all warm, toasty songs about joy, giving and peace on Earth, some of them are decidedly not.  Take “Santa Baby” for instance.  It’s a song in which some gold digging adult makes exorbitant demands of a mythical figure who normally caters to children.  Some Christmas songs aren’t even about Christmas, they’re about winter (which must make absolutely zero sense to people in the Southern Hemisphere where Christmas happens during the summer).  There’s “Frosty the Snowman”, “Winter Wonderland” and “Sleigh Ride”, for example.  Some songs aren’t even all that positive about the winter experience.  Once you get past the first verse of “Jingle Bells”, it turns into a novelty song about how sleighing and just going out in the cold weather is kind of a pain in the butt.  I’ve heard some modern Christmas songs that just seem to list ephemera associated with the holiday (examples escape me).  And don’t even get me started on “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”!

You know what one of my favorite Christmas song is?  “Better Days” by The Goo Goo Dolls.

No, really.  Give it a listen and pay extra careful attention to the lyrics:

“You ask me what I want this year.  I try to make this calm but clear.  Just a chance that we’ll have better days.”

Sure sounds like it’s about Christmas.  Heck, it’s a message of hope during the holidays.  There’s even a reference to spiritual side of Christmas with the line about “one poor child who saved this world.”

But most people wouldn’t realize it’s a Christmas song because it doesn’t use the word “Christmas” and it sounds like a regular rock ballad.  You see, people like their Christmas songs to sound “Christmassy”.  What makes a song sound Christmassy?  Would you believe there are certain chords and progressions that result in that Christmassy sound?

Here’s another video.  It specifically uses Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” as an example, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it could apply to a lot of other songs too:

So, what point am I trying to make here?  Maybe that not everyone is going to get into that Christmas feeling the same way.  Some people may love the typical Christmas songs.  Others may think they ring a bit hollow unless they actually communicate a positive message to associate with the holiday.  Some may love Christmas displays with lots of lights, others may find them garish.  Some people may find that the spirit of the holiday is just in staying at home with family.  Others may have the need to go out and give to the less fortunate.

The point is that not everyone is going to keep a holiday that’s become such a major cultural phenomenon in the same way.  They shouldn’t have to.

So remember that and be good to each other.  Happy Holidays everyone!

Superhero Tokusatsu: The Henshin Obsession.

Time once again to look at something I love and, while maybe not explain it, look at its quirks, flaws and strengths and examine why I find it so interesting.

Today’s topic: superhero tokusatsu!

But first, some background and explanation.  The word “tokusatsu” is a general term in Japan that means “special effects”.  Any TV show that uses special effects in Japan would be considered a “tokusatsu” program.  Here in the USA though, it means a very special brand of Japanese effects programs.  I think you know the kinds of effects.  Giant rubber suit monsters and robots.  Acrobatic fight scenes.  Conveniently placed pyrotechnics.  Transformation sequences.  If the phrase “Power Rangers” is coming to mind right now, you’re close but not quite right.  I’ll explain a little further on.

Now, the programs I’m talking about are specifically certain superhero shows designed for children.  There are a great number of these including Ultraman and the various Metal Heroes shows.   

However, the ones I know best are Kamen Rider and Super Sentai.

There was even a Spider-Man tokusatsu show.

Now, while these sorts of shows have only been known here in the West since the 1990s (at least as a popular, mainstream thing), they’ve existed in their home country of Japan since 1966 with the original version of Ultraman.  The tokusatsu hero scene would expand in the early 1970s with Kamen Rider and a little later with Himitsu Sentai Goranger, both of which were created by manga artist Shotaro Ishinomori.  Both of these shows would create a long lineage.  You see, the way these shows work is that a single incarnation will exist for about 50 episodes or so before wrapping up the story.  Then, the next year, a new version with a new theme or motif will be released.  And the motifs can run the gamut.  For example, one season of Kamen Rider like Kamen Rider Fourze can be themed around things like space travel and high school while another like Kamen Rider Kiva is based around gothic horror and classical music.  The same goes for Super Sentai.  The series Gosei Sentai Dairanger is based on Chinese mythology and martial arts, while GouGou SentaiBoukenger is themed around pulp adventure and treasure hunting.  It’s not to say that the shows are all over the place.  There is a basic structure.  Kamen Rider, by and large is about a solo hero fighting for human freedom against an enemy that seeks to corrupt or transform humanity.  Kamen Rider antagonists tend to transform regular people into monsters.  Occasionally the main character will team up with other Kamen Riders who are either working at cross purposes or regard the main character as a rival.  There are also certain other things that carry over like motorcycles, large eyes on the Kamen Rider suit and the famous “Rider Kick” attack.  Super Sentai is generally about a team of multicolored heroes fighting against an inhuman foe that wants to destroy humanity and take over everything.  Some common things in Super Sentai are weapons that join together to make a bigger, more powerful weapon, monsters becoming giants at the end of every fight and giant combining robots.

The original Kamen Rider

Now, most people here in the US only know this stuff through Power Rangers.  Now, here’s the thing about Power Rangers: it’s a weird sort of hybrid thing.  What they do is take footage from Super Sentai, dub English-speaking voices over it and splice it together with new footage.  Generally speaking, all the action footage is Japanese, while the out of costume scenes are American-made.  That’s why whatever made-up city this year’s Power Rangers are in, be it Angel Grove, Mariner Bay, Blue Bay Harbor or even the space colony of Terra Venture, they all look an awful lot like Tokyo once the action starts.  Now, I’m not here to throw shade at Power Rangers.  They have had amazing success as a franchise, beyond what a lot of people thought they were going to have.  Twenty years later, the show is still going.  However, there’s something to be said for seeing the action footage in the context it was originally meant for rather than linked up with whatever story and characters the writers for Power Rangers came up with.

Now here’s the question: why do I like this stuff so much?  I mean, these are basically kids’ shows with what most people would think of as cheap special effects.

Well, most adult fans here in the U.S. would say that Super Sentai and Kamen Rider are more grown-up in comparison to Power Rangers.  This is true, but just by the barest of margins.  Due to cultural differences between the U.S. and Japan, Super Sentai seems a bit more grown-up and Kamen Rider seems more grown-up than that.  Compared to their American counterparts, these shows are more inclined to get into the more complicated aspects of subjects like love, family and sacrifice.  However, that’s mainly because the Japanese have different standards for what they think kids can handle and understand.  There are other parts of these shows that are in fact still juvenile.  They also tend to repeat a lot of motifs (dinosaurs, ninja, cars and animals, notably).  But that's something their target audience of young kids won't notice.

Well, I think it’s a lot of things.  The themes can be a bit grown-up while the shows are still unabashedly for kids.  And this is actually a nice thing.  Too often in the American superhero scene, things get too taken over by adult fans that insist the heroes grow up with them.  Kamen Rider and Super Sentai both work within formulas (as many pop culture properties do, if we’re being honest), but they own their formulas and do what they can to push boundaries, flex their muscles and explore new motifs within the formula.  As for the “bad” special effects, those become part of the charm.  After a while, it starts to feel less like a limitation and more like an aesthetic.  Superhero tokusatsu shows really wouldn’t feel quite so much like superhero tokusatsu shows if the effects were super realistic.  While the rubber suits for the various monsters and villains aren’t really believable, they are often heavily detailed and visually interesting.  The designs of the weapons and mecha are interesting in their own “designed to be a toy” way.  But perhaps the greatest thing about superhero tokusatsu’s relationship with its special effects is that the show’s creators don’t seem to feel hampered by them.  From what I’ve seen, they don’t seem to shy away from anything just because they can’t make it seem completely believable.  In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any “top” in Super Sentai or Kamen Rider.  By this I mean you can’t go “over the top” when there is no “top”.

No show is perfect, though.  I do have some criticisms of them.  It’s the same criticism that’s leveled against a lot of action shows aimed at young boys.  They avoid or downplay female characters in heroic roles.  Female Kamen Riders are usually introduced in the back half of a series as antagonists.  Super Sentai teams usually only have one or two female members at most.  Right now, there’s a Super Sentai team, Uchuu Sentai Kyuuranger, that has its biggest roster yet.  It started with nine members and then expanded to twelve.  You’d think that would allow for some room to introduce a third woman onto the team.  Nope.  There are ten male members of the team and only two female.  A lot of this comes down to not only marketing and merchandising reasons but also cultural factors within Japan.  It’s still unfortunate, though.

The current Super Sentai: Uchuu Sentai Kyuuranger

The biggest problem with being a tokusatsu fan here in the U.S. is that it’s usually pretty hard to get your hands on any to watch.  Usually, the only way to get them is to download pirated versions that have been fansubbed (note: that means fans have translated the show and added subtitles).  Fansubbers are an odd bunch.  They tend to pirate material and subtitle it purely because they love the stuff and want other people to see it.  Then once an official release becomes available they take their fansubs down and actively encourage people to buy the official release.  This seems like a topic unto itself but I’d rather not discuss whether there’s honor among content thieves right now.  One good thing is that Shout! Factory, the same company that makes DVDs of Power Rangers has been making DVDs of the seasons of Super Sentai that were turned into Power Rangers for a few years now.  Right now, they're up to Megaranger which was turned into Power Rangers in Space.  It’s not perfect.  Odds are we’ll never see DVD releases of the seasons that became Power Rangers, but it is something.

Super Sentai shows released by Shout! Factory

So, that’s pretty much it.  Why superhero tokusatsu has appeal outside its demographic.  These shows aren’t for everyone, but I like them. 

Ghoul Days

Well, if the last two posts got you guys thinking that I’m some kind of classic monster purist, then boy are you in for a surprise.

Just like a lot of people, I grew up watching the goofier monster stuff too.  I recall watching reruns of The Munsters on TV and cartoons about vampire ducks.

But the one comedic/children’s entertainment monster trope I want to talk about right now is the “school for monsters”.  In a way, this post is a spiritual successor to the post I wrote on Fairy Tale Fandom about “fairy tale schools”.  There are a couple of differences, of course.  For one, I don’t have to write out a whole list of them because TV Tropes already composed a list that’s right HERE.  The other thing is that unlike all the fairy tale school properties that seemed to pop up over the last few years, the monster school trope has been around for decades.

Now, keep in mind, I specifically mean schools that are meant to cater to monsters (with maybe one or two human students as “fish out of water”).  This does not count situations where monster kids go to school with human kids, like in the Fifth Grade Monsters books I read as a kid.  It also doesn’t include other establishments for monsters.  I am aware of hotels for monsters, summer camps for monsters and farms full of monster animals, but they’re not taken into account here.

Before we go any further, I’d like to show you the variation of this trope I had when I was a kid.  Ladies and gentlemen, this is Rick Moranis in Gravedale High:

If there was ever a show that screamed “90s Saturday mornings” it’s probably this one.  It’s even one of those celebrity tie-in cartoons that were common back then.  Why someone thought the idea of Rick Moranis as a human teacher at a school for monsters was such a winning idea with kids, I’ll never know.  But still, it hit all the monster archetypes, all the high school stereotypes and then some.  There was Vinnie Stoker, a cool greaser vampire.  Reggie Moonshroud, a nerdy werewolf.  Duzer, a sort of valley girl gorgon.  Gill Waterman, a slacker/surfer swamp creature.  J.P. Gastly, a rich kid . . . um . . . um.  Honestly, I’m not sure what kind of monster J.P. was supposed to be, but he sounded kind of like Peter Lorre.  But yeah, they covered all the bases, sometimes twice.  I mean, between Frankentyke and Sid the Invisible Kid, they had two different takes on the “class clown” character.  Overall though, it was just a really average ‘90s kids cartoon that cribs from shows like Happy Days and Welcome Back Kotter  as well as the Universal and Hammer Studios monsters.  Though it does show some of the standard parts of this trope.  One is juxtaposing classic horror archetypes against everyday school stuff, showing that the monster students are “just like us” while also being very different from us.  The other is puns.  Lots and lots of monster-related puns.

I tell you though, I’ve seen practically every variation of this trope in researching this post.

I read Marc Sumerak’s graphic novel All Ghouls’ School.  It seems to be something of an underappreciated comic seeing as it ended on a cliff-hanger with no follow up.  However, it was pretty well-written and had some strong themes in regards to bullying.

I discovered that there’s a pre-school cartoon called Super Monsters on Netflix that uses the idea of a “pre-school for monsters” but adds a bit of a superhero twist.  The show plays up the idea that each monster kid has a “super-power” and even gives them a transformation sequence that happens when the sun goes down.  It’s a cute and harmless show.

I found an Australian live action puppet show for kids titled Li’l Horrors.  The show only seems to partially take place in a school.  The rest happens at the estate of an old horror movie starlet where a bunch of monster kids live.  This one has to be seen to be believed.  Largely because the puppets in this show seem to walk a very fine line between cute and creepy.  There are a couple of decent gags in it, though.  I love the one about how the zombie kid is constantly watching TV.

I’ve also long been aware of the variations aimed more at teens and adults like the webcomic Eerie Cuties and the manga Rosario+Vampire.   One notable thing about those is that they take advantage of their older audience to touch on more adult, often sexual, situations (both have had a succubi in their main casts of characters).

The main thing that comes up when looking at all this is the question of what makes a trope.  Or rather, what makes a trope seem so appealing that people will visit it over and over again?  And what makes any use of the trope popular enough that it can last for years on end?

Well, in terms of the former question, I think I can echo some of the same things I said with the “fairy tale school” post.  For a young audience, there’s a certain relatability connected to putting characters in a school setting.  However, the fairy tale school concept plays somewhat on the idea of school as a journey from “once upon a time” to “happily ever after”.  The monster school trope has an undertone that plays more on the idea of school being an ordeal.  To some extent, especially when adolescence is reached, there can be a certain amount of anxiety associated with school.  In other words, school can be a scary place.  So, why not play on the idea of school being “a living nightmare” in a tongue-in-cheek way by depicting it as literally being “a living nightmare”?  Who the nightmare is for changes depending on who is the viewpoint character for the series.  In All-Ghouls’ School, the main character is a normal girl named Becca Norman.  In that case, the anxiety is about her classmates and fitting into social situations.  In Gravedale High, the primary character is the human teacher Max Schneider.  While the students do have their own storylines and parts to play, the main source of anxiety seems to come from whether or not Mr. Schneider can help the misfit class of monster teenagers he’s been assigned.  You get the gist of what I’m talking about here.

As for the second question, for that I think we should look at probably the most successful take on the monster school trope: Mattel’s Monster High.

Monster High started as a line of fashion doll line launched in 2010 (sidenote: For a 30-something guy with no kids, I seem to blog about fashion doll lines more than you’d expect).  Naturally, with the line’s runaway success, it also spawned a web cartoon, straight-to-DVD movies, books and other merchandise.  The line originally started with five characters: Frankie Stein (Frankenstein monster), Draculaura (vampire), Clawdeen Wolf (werewolf), Cleo DeNile (mummy), Lagoona Blue (sea monster) and Deuce Gorgon (gorgon).  Though, many, many more were eventually created.  Now, I have dabbled in watching some of the Monster High media through the magic of the internet.  It’s an interesting phenomenon if nothing else.  The idea of marketing monsters to little girls seems unusual and daring, especially as conventional (read as: kind of sexist) logic dictates that little girls don’t like things that are creepy.  It’s also probably the first line of dolls to embrace a slightly goth aesthetic.  It was one of the first toylines for girls that questioned exactly what young girls were into and would respond to.  After it proved successful, a number of other unconventional lines of dolls would be spawned.  And it seems that the line isn’t ready to stop anytime soon as it just got a fresh coat of paint this year with a reboot of sorts.  Before the reboot, the media associated with the line had much more of a “slice-of-life” slant.  This is probably because they were originally set in a world that was very monster-oriented, right down to there being monster versions of real places (Boo York, Boo Hexico, Scaris, etc).  The post-reboot Monster High seems to be a bit more adventure-oriented as Monster High is now located in the human world and a lot of the web cartoons seem to focus on seeking out and recruiting new monsters to go to the school.  But the one thing that’s consistent in both versions and the thing that I believe makes it so popular for seven years is a strong sense of theme.  And that theme is “self-acceptance”.  Basically, the line equates being a monster to being a flawed and unique human being.  The idea is that everyone feels like a monster sometimes.  Everyone feels strange or freaky or like their flaws are too great.  The theme is that that is a good thing.  It’s good to be a unique, flawed, dynamic human being.  In other words, it’s good to be a monster.  I think that is what kids respond to most and keep this property going.  It’s also what a lot of the other “monster school” properties lack and the reason that most of them didn’t last all that long.  I can’t speak for some of the foreign properties, but the American versions usually don’t have much of a shelf life.  The only one that I think comes close in terms of having as strong a theme is All-Ghouls School and I feel that one failed more because it couldn’t find an audience among comic book readers (it probably would have done better as a cartoon show).

I’m afraid that brings us to the end, though.  And now I’ve examined and dissected another facet of the “special school” storytelling trope.  The only other type that’s done nearly as much as fairy tales and monsters is the “school for superheroes”.  But that’s a post for another day.

Gorilla My Dreams: Universal Horror's Forgotten Franchise.

The thing about Universal’s output of horror films in the thirties and forties is that some stuff is likely to fall through the cracks.  Sure, most of the ones that were popular enough to spawn franchises became part of the Universal Monsters brand.  There is, however, one that didn’t.

I’m talking about Universal’s Ape Woman trilogy.

The movie Captive Wild Woman was released in 1943 starring Milburn Stone, John Carradine, Evelyn Ankers and Acquanetta.  The film extensively used footage from the Clyde Beatty circus film The Big Cage.  The film starts with Stone’s character of Fred Mason returning from a trapping expedition for the circus and meeting his girlfriend Beth Colman played by Ankers.  Mason then introduces Beth to a gorilla named Cheela that he brought back from Africa, which he claims is one of the most humanlike animals he’s ever seen.  Beth then tells Fred about her meeting with an acclaimed endocrinologist played by John Carradine.  The endocrinologist, Dr. Walters, is being called on to treat Colman’s sister for a rare glandular disorder.  He takes a rather keen interest when he finds out the Colman sisters both work for the circus.  Walters later visits the circus and takes an interest in Cheela.  Needless to say, Dr. Walters is a mad doctor with an interest in transforming some forms of life into other forms of life using glandular secretions.  He gets his hands on Cheela with the help of a disgruntled circus employee.  With glandular injections from Beth’s sister and a brain transplant from his own nurse, Walters manages to transform Cheela into a pretty human woman whom he dubs Paula Dupree (played by Acquanetta).  Paula isn’t quite human, though.  She has an uncanny way with animals, able to scare the daylights out of lions and tigers just by looking at them.  This nets Paula a job helping with an animal act, but things start to go pear-shaped when Paula develops an attraction to Fred Mason and starts to see Beth Colman as a rival.

It’s a fun little movie.  The use of other footage is done really well.  Acquanetta puts in a good pantomime performance as Paula Dupree.  And the Ape Woman make-up for the times when Paula is changing between ape and human forms is done by industry legend Jack Pierce and is very well done.  There are a couple of holes.  For example, the brain transplant that’s supposed to deal with Cheela’s animal instincts don’t seem to do much of anything besides show that Dr. Walters was willing to kill his nurse.

And that would just be the end of it in most cases.  A fun, obscure monster movie.  Except that this movie has two sequels.

The sequel, Jungle Woman, was released the next year.  This film finds the body of Cheela who seemingly was killed at the end of Captive Wild Woman acquired by a doctor by the name of Carl Fletcher.  Fletcher finds out that Cheela is still alive and revives her.  Fascinated by the work of Dr. Walters, Dr. Fletcher purchases the sanitarium where he worked so he can look over his papers and equipment.  One day, Cheela disappears only for Paula to appear on the grounds.  Trouble follows though, when Paula develops another romantic fixation.  This time on Bob Whitney, the fiancée of Dr. Fletcher’s daughter.  This movie adds a couple of things to the “myth” of the Ape Woman.  First of all, the idea that Paula is incredibly strong even when in human form.  Second, the idea that the natives of Africa have stories about a strange doctor changing humans into animals to explain Cheela’s human-like intelligence.  What this does is adds a bit of ambiguity and mystery to Paula’s story.  It blurs the line between human and animal so you’re never sure if Paula is more human or more ape.  One big point against this movie though, is that Paula develops the ability to speak.  The real issue is Acquanetta’s line delivery.  A great number of her lines come across as flat and emotionless.

The third Ape Woman movie, The Jungle Captive,  came out in 1945 (boy, they put these movies out fast).  Paula’s body once again finds itself into the hands of a mad doctor.  This time, Paula is played by Vicky Lane.  The doctor, Mr. Stendahl (Otto Krueger), with the help of his hulking assistant Moloch (Rondo Hatton) once again manage to revive Paula only to find that her mind has reverted completely to a bestial state.  Stendahl decides that another brain transplant is necessary and has decided one of his female lab assistants from the university is the unwilling donor.  The movie isn’t as much about Paula as it is about the mad doctor who wants to operate on her and the lab assistants who find themselves wrapped up in the whole thing.

But still, there it is, a whole trilogy of Ape Woman films.  It’s as many films as The Creature from the Black Lagoon got.  Heck, it’s more than The Wolf Man got.  After his first outing, he had to share billing with other characters.

So, why has the Ape Woman faded into obscurity.  Well, a good part of it is probably because the racial and sexual politics of these films is more than a little dated.  The actress Acquanetta, real name Mildred Davenport, was known for being rather cagey about her ethnicity.  At the time of these films, people used to speculate on her race.  Some claim that she was at least partially African-American.  Others claimed she was from Venezuela, nicknaming her “The Venezuelan Volcano”.  Others claimed she was a Native American of Arapaho descent.  Overall though, these movies doubled down on the idea of her as being this racially ambiguous “exotic” jungle woman.  It’s something that would have been seen as alluring at the time but insensitive now.  The resulting films though, are entertaining.  The thing about Universal being the undisputed kings of horror during the ‘40s is that even their films that weren’t ground-breaking or genre-defining were still rather watchable.  Though, you can tell they were really running out of steam by 1945 when The Jungle Captive came along.  It is too bad these movies and the Ape Woman never became as iconic as the other Universal Monsters, though.   I mean, there aren’t really any other female monsters that aren’t defined by their relationship to another character (like The Bride of Frankenstein or Dracula’s Daughter).  The concept certainly has potential.  It’s kind of like being able to narrowly focus on one of the beast-people from H.G. Wells’s novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.  But these movies are still out there on DVD for those who want to see them.  Captive Wild Woman is available on the Universal Horror Classic Movie Archive set.  Jungle Woman was released as part of the Universal Vault Series.  The Jungle Captive has not been released on DVD, but I did notice that there’s a copy taken from an old VHS tape that’s been uploaded to YouTube if people really want to see it.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to hidden gems from the Universal Horror catalog, but those are a subject for another day.