Weekly Geekly Rundown for June 30, 2023

From Eggcorns to Hitchock, There's a lot Going On

Jun 30, 2023

How Many Of These Phrases Have You Been Saying Wrong?

I often use this first section to touch on an area where academics and pop culture intersect, often mathematically (insert Adventure Time meme here). This week’s highlighted connection doesn’t have anything to do with math, but it does have to do with how we think and look for patterns around us. I recently learned that there is a term for when you misstate a commonly used phrase in a way that retains a lot of the initial meaning, it’s called an eggcorn.

The video below is a very good presentation on the phenomenon and it contains a ton of eggcorns within it. I didn’t think I used many, or really any, at the beginning of the video but by the end of the video I noticed at least two that I’ve been getting wrong for years. It should be noted that an eggcorn isn’t the same as a malapropism. Those are often due to people attempting to sound smarter by using more sophisticated words and coming up short, something that my friend Danny Oppenheimer recommends that college students should avoid if they want academic success in an excellent academic paper I share with students every semester. While eggcorns may sound similar to the original phrase, in the same way that malapropisms do, they also tend to retain much of the same meaning. This is true even as they shift the phrase around. It’s a remarkable linguistic phenomenon.

Free Reign or Free Rein? The answer lies within.

Comic Book Editor Extraordinaire Roy Thomas Responds to Critics of the Latest Stan Lee Documentary

Disney+ recently released a hagiographic documentary about Stan Lee’s contributions to the comic book field. It’s a documentary that pokes at a very sensitive spot in my pop culture fandom. Stan Lee’s larger than life persona defined a lot of my childhood and contributed to a great deal of the joy I got from comic books and related media. I can still here his voice shouting Excelsior! every time I see the word. He brought tremendous amounts of enthusiasm to the medium and was undeniably its biggest promoter.

The first important historical figure essay my daughter “History” (her nickname not real name) wrote for school was a biography of Stan Lee and ever since she, her twin sister “Mystery,” and I have shared in the joy that is the superhero genre.

To say that I love Stan Lee for what he did is a vast understatement.

I’m also a HUGE advocate of Harlan Ellison’s dictum, “Pay the Artist!” and that is something that Stan Lee doesn’t have the best record on. I often promote and share David Barsalou’s vital analysis of Roy Lichtenstein’s art (Deconstructing Lichtenstein) and how he took far more credit for elevating comic book art to high art in his work. It seems that all Lichtenstein did was make it so that better artists got less credit than he did. While some argue that Lichtenstein’s use of comic art is tantamount to plagiarism, I don’t think criticisms need to go that far to show how unimpressive he really is. Just look at Russ Heath’s work and compare it to Lichtenstein’s. The line art is better. The understanding of the interaction of color and paper is better. The artists Lichtenstein “elevated” were better at the craft. They weren’t better at marketing themselves and I think it’s up to fans like Barsalou and me to show people how skilled those artists were and to help them capture some of the revenue their talent deserves.

As Joe Simon’s The Comic Book Makers points out, Lee is in some ways a Lichtenstein. Not in the sense that one could ever say he plagiarized from Kirby, Ditko, Simon, etc. Rather in the sense that he had far more marketing skill than they did and so his name looms larger.

This article by Roy Thomas in Hollywood Reporter was an absolute must read for me. Thomas is maybe my all-time favorite editor/author. His love of the Golden Age superheroes and his work on books that promoted them are central to my love of the medium, and that’s not even counting the time he spent as the author of the Conan comics. It was nice to see that Thomas was able to perfectly balance my two minds on the subject and come to the same conclusion that my heart and mind want to be the answer. That is that Lee really was central to Marvel’s success. He deserves all the praise he gets, but the artists need their praise and focus too. We as fans need to make the Kirby, Ditko, Buscema, Perez, Pini, Maguire, Liefeld, and so many more, documentaries in order to show how important these figures were in the growth of the medium.

Weekly Luke Y Thompson and Courtney Howard Film Article Cavalcade

Because I want to cover so much this week, this is going to be a list of reviews with minimal commentary.

Luke Y Thompson

Reviewed the new Criterion 4K of Time Bandits right here on the Geekerati Newsletter.
Reviewed the new Indiana Jones film for SuperheroHype.
On the toy beat, Luke checks out Mattel’s proposed Jurassic Park playset (crowdfunding near you).

Courtney Howard

Has been tweeting up a storm on all of the films she will be reviewing in the coming weeks and I cannot wait to read her Barbie review.

Classic Roleplaying Game Recommendation

While Hasbro is deep in the middle of playtesting the 6th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and yes it’s a 6th edition given how much they are changing, in preparation of celebrating the game’s 50th birthday, it’s important to note that many games worth playing have been designed over the years. When it comes to rpgs, D&D is the Stan Lee of the field. It is responsible for promoting the hobby, and is a worthy entry in it, but it isn’t the only thing around and we should take a moment to check out some alternatives. That’s one reason I added this weekly classic rpg recommendation to the newsletter.

This week was an easy choice. With the new DUNC, I mean DUNE, trailer being released yesterday, this is the perfect time to praise and recommend Classic Traveller (and the pdf is free!).

Published in 1977, Traveller is one of the first role playing games ever published. It wasn’t the first science fiction role playing game to see print. That was Ken St. Andre’s gonzo 70s Starfaring, a game that is mechanically innovative but the setting of which oozes 70s culture and underground comics in a way that isn’t for everyone. Traveller, on the other hand, is hard science fiction inspired by Asimov’s Foundation novels, Gordon Dickson’s Dorsai tales, and Herbert’s Dune. It is a setting transportation technology (with the ability to jump between systems) has surpassed communication technology (limited to the speed of light) and where the dangers of the universe might lead a ship to find itself alone and drifting unable to communicate its distress in time to be saved. There’s no fixed setting in the core three books, but there is an implied one and it gets quickly developed in subsequent books.

In addition to being a hard science fiction game able to thematically emulate a wide swath of SF fiction, Traveller is a mechanically sound game that adds a couple of interesting innovations. While the terminology is firmly rooted in war gaming, the core mechanic is intuitive and simple. Roll 2 six-sided die and get higher than a target number (usually 8 or higher before modifiers) to succeed at a task. Skills add a bonus to the roll. Character creation is interesting in that after you roll dice for stats, you then roll dice for your career path before you started “adventuring” in the campaign. These initial lifepath rolls might lead to your character dying before a single session has begun. That’s right, you can die in character creation.

How old school is that?

Once your character is created, they are fairly set in stone. They have their skills and abilities, the primary character growth/advancement comes in equipment and adventure. There are some ways to improve skills, but they are a far cry from what D&D or Runequest players might be used to. Then again, a single +1 bonus in Traveller is a HUGE deal. Combat is lethal and “magic” is kept to a minimum, though there are psionics rules. These psionics rules, combined with the release of Star Wars in 1977, probably had more than a little to do with the game’s success at the time. The game is solid and even subsequent editions have largely kept the core mechanics the same. Check it out.

Classic Games Being Revisited

Atari’s classic game Haunted House is a fun experience that pushes the 1 MHz MOS Technology 6507 microprocessor to the limit in some interesting ways. Released in 1982, the game builds on the fetch quest game play of Adventure and adds some interesting graphic elements. I’ve always been fond of the way the eyes look in the game, which are far more evocative than the cursor hero of Adventure.

Atari recently announced that they are releasing an update of the game for modern platforms and it looks like a blast. It looks like the programmers were able to keep the feel of the original game while adding modern graphics capabilities and expanded puzzles. There also appear to be a number of Easter Eggs if the trailer is to be believed. Can’t wait to get it and I’ll very much be installing it on my new wave VCS.

Classic Music Recommendation

It’s always time to get your Led on. Over the Hills and Far Away is a signature Zeppelin tune that has distinct movements of various emotional beats that always captures my imagination. I can listen to this song on loop and Jimmy Page looks like he is having a blast playing it in this live performance.

Classic Film Recommendation

Those of you who have followed this newsletter since it started in November might have caught onto the fact that I am a fan of romantic comedies and that I’m a fan of Alfred Hitchcock. A film that perfectly combines these two elements is Hitchcock’s 1955 masterpiece To Catch a Thief. With a couple of exceptions (North by Northwest and Rear Window), I tend to prefer Hitchcock’s British films to his Hollywood entries. He attempts some interesting and innovative things with his Hollywood films, but they are also the films where I can most see the strings of his manipulation. The British films tend to be rawer and thus less formalized in their style.

To Catch a Thief, like the other two films I mentioned above, is an exception. It manages to synthesize the Hollywood gloss with the focus on story of the earlier films. It’s use of stardom is in some ways a commentary on Hollywood film and how stardom runs the risk of overwhelming narrative. It doesn’t do so in Thief, but the film seems to be commenting on how it could. The romance in the film is fun and witty. Not quite at the level of Stanley Donen’s Charade but still great. The plot is fairly simple and the reveal is not really a surprise, but though it isn’t a surprise that reveal captures the dynamics of generational conflict and how that interacts with legacy. Like most Hitchcock films, there is a discussion about society happening underneath the story. Okay, unless you’re watching Rope in which case the film is an overt discussion of society.

It’s just a lovely film. I’d say more but this is just a capsule review and not a full analysis.