Author: wdfyfe

Before WD called himself a writer, he worked at a number of different jobs from stacking lumber to interior design. He studied English at UBC and creative writing at ASU where one of his teachers, Rita Dove, taught him the importance of the tale. He has written for radio, magazines and newspapers, but never television. He’s published both fiction and nonfiction in Great Britain and the US. He reads French passably and speaks enough Spanish to get from A to B and find the toilet. He has interviewed John Cleese, Peter Ustinov, Margaret Drabble, Kenneth Branagh and enough other famous people to make him a hopeless name dropper. His not-so-secret passions are history and trivia, and he has never lost a game of Trivial Pursuit — although he did come 4th one drunken Quiz Night at the Uxbridge in Notting Hill. He lives on the Pacific Ocean, although, not close enough to see, so he spends his days looking at a computer screen. It’s a wonderful life and he has only one regret: he can’t type faster.

Comic Relief By Remote Control

remoteA certain acceptance comes with age.  As you get older, you realize that the world is not going to change that radically between now and the time The Grim Reaper takes your pulse.  Walmart is going to remain the mighty retail monolith it’s always been.   McDonald’s will sell more burgers than Africa has cows — despite the interesting fact that no one you know has ever eaten there.  And Microsoft, Google and Apple are going to continue to rule the world in an unholy triumvirate worthy of Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus.  However, just because you’ve accepted the inevitable doesn’t mean certain things don’t continue to drive you nuts.  Our world is loaded with stuff that simply doesn’t make any sense beyond material for a stand-up comedy routine.  For example, go to any store in the country and you’ll find the two-fisted gigantic bottle of Coke™ sells for 99 cents, the smaller (smaller!) bottle costs $1.50 and the bottle of water (that beverage you can get free out of any garden hose.) is $1.89.  Just let that sink in for a moment.  It makes you wonder what Dasani actually means — you just got robbed?

However, the single most ridiculous thing in our world that sends me loopy every time I think about it is the remote control.  This is the point and click device that revolutionized our society.  It changed us from a vigorous, dynamic people into lazy swine with the attention span of a hummingbird without its Ritalin.  It does everything but deliver the potato chips and chew them for us.  I swear, if you knew the correct sequence and pointed it at NASA, you could launch the Mars Rover.  I (the original techno-moron) have recorded Games of Thrones in my living room while lounging through Spaghetti alla Vongolese and a bottle of Amalfi Red (I had to fight to get that combination) on a rooftop in Rome.  It is the most important item, aside from the coffee pot, in any household.  So why, by all that’s holy, is every single one of those little bastards different?

We live in a homogenized world.  If, while you were sleeping, you were magically transported to a shopping mall in darkest Bavaria, when you opened your eyes, aside from The Gotterdammerung music playing in The Food Court, you would have no idea where you were.  You could be anywhere from Indonesia to Eau Claire, Wisconsin.  The utter sameness of most of our planet is worthy of Groundhog Day.  Yet, when your Blu-Ray player finally hits the wall of planned obsolescence and you have to buy a new one, you’re about to enter the undiscovered country.  You’re reduced to re-inventing the 21st century wheel becauseremote1 the brains of the operation, the remote, has changed its shape, its size, its colour and rearranged all of its buttons.  The first time you use it, you think you’ve paused Breaking Bad: the Teenage Years to go for the Orville Redenbacher’s and suddenly you’re recording a 24 hour marathon of Everybody Loves Friends, in HD, on a channel you haven’t even paid for – yet.  So, you start pushing buttons like a Rhesus monkey finding the food pellet in a primate behavioural study.  Six clicks later, you’ve selected the adult classic, Boob Chaser III, which Channel 531 casually informs you, has been “shared” with your Facebook friends.  “Thank you for choosing Pay Per View!”

And it’s no use trying to beat the system with one of those Universal control-everything-but-the-toaster jobbers.  That’s just madness.  First of all, you need an advanced understanding of the Da Vinci Code just to turn one of those babies on, and, more importantly, nothing less than a degree in binary engineering from M.I.T. is going to make them work.  By the end of the first hour, you’ve screwed up the set-up so badly the instructions are now in Hebrew and the one channel available for your viewing pleasure is The Weather Network from McMurdo Station, Antarctica.  Finally — $19.95 plus tax, poorer — you give up and go back to fighting with the original villain that came in the box.

I know that, in fifteen minutes any twelve-year-old can reconfigure my system so she can run it off the microwave, for God’s sake.  It’s not that technology is all that smart; it’s just that it’s smarter than me.  However, I don’t understand why, when all technology is basically the same, every piece of equipment is so utterly different from the last one that you need to channel Thomas Edison to figure it out.  I can’t be the only guy on this planet old enough to remember Ronald Reagan.  What’s wrong with one size fits all?

We have cars that can parallel park themselves, murderous drones that search and destroy across the wilds of Pakistan from a Wii™ system in Wiesbaden; we’re on the verge of creating electronic nanobots that literally eat disease.  Yet, when I want to watch an old episode of Arrested Development on Netflix, I still need six (different) little boxes to do it.  If this isn’t Comedy Central, I don’t know what is!remotes1

The Top Ten Best Sidekicks Ever

Last Tuesday, as part of a bad-mouthing of Disney’s The Lone Ranger, I touched on our society’s inability to understand the role of the “sidekick.”  For those of you who didn’t read it, what I said, in part, was

“The relationship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto is impossible for contemporary audiences to comprehend.  Sidekick just doesn’t translate into Oprahspeak.  In our relentless adherence to equality, anything less than a bromance between the two men is unacceptable.  We refuse to believe that Tonto has any dignity, being the lower man on the scrotum pole, even though it’s clear he does.”

My point is that “sidekick’ is a complicated idea.  It takes as its starting point the concept of Master and Man, an abstract which our society refuses to acknowledge.  The very words trigger deep prejudices within us, and we invariably rebel against the connotation of inequality, no matter how beneficial it might be.  Thus, with no frame of reference, it is impossible to explain the relationship between Tonto and the Lone Ranger (or any other fictional duo) to a 21st century audience.  The problem is, however, since the sidekick format is alien to, us we tend to adjust the stories to fit our current perceptions, by either changing the relationship or explaining it away.  Unfortunately, this detracts from the original tale, written to rely on the sidekick as an integral part of narrative.  In a nutshell, Sherlock Holmes would not exist without Watson, and when we renovate Watson to accommodate our current sensibilities, we inadvertently damage the character of Holmes.

So, rather than trying to explain the concept of the sidekick, here is a list of some of the best Sidekicks in Fiction.  They can explain their existence far better than I can.  And rather than provoke a future argument, they are in no particular order.

lone ranger tonto first still

Tonto and the Lone Ranger

sidekick8

Samwise Gamgee and Frodo

sidekick10

The Merrie Men and Robin Hood

sidekick4

The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy

sidekicks1

Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk

sidekick5

Robin and Batman

sidekick2

Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes

sidekick7

Sancho Panza and Don Quixote

sidekicks

Tinkerbell and Peter Pan

sidekick9

Donkey and Shrek

The Lone Ranger Rides Again … Almost!

rangerI haven’t seen The Lone Ranger and I’m not going to see it any time soon.  Word around the campfire is it sucks.  So rather than waste my time — and pay Disney and Cineplex for the privilege — I’ll wait and let Movie Central do it to me for free.  At the end of the day, I’m not curious enough to rush into two hours of Johnny Depp with a dead bird on his head.  But I digress — and I haven’t even started yet.

Disney thought they had a guaranteed homerun with Lone when Bruckheimer, Verbinski and Depp (late of Pirates of the Caribbean) stepped up to the plate.  They even packed the movie with promises of a sequel (read “franchise.”)  Unfortunately, the dynamic trio hit into a disastrous double play.   (I’m assuming Bob Iger is still torturing people in the dungeons of the Magic Kingdom over the John Carter debacle.)  So instead of laughing all the way to the bank, Mickey Mouse is busy pointing fingers.  (Ironically, he only has three.)  However, the problem is not only Bruckheimer, Verbinski and Depp; the problem is the Lone Ranger himself and his buddy Tonto.

The legend of the Lone Ranger is not a story for the 21st century.  There are simply too many nuances for our unsophisticated tastes.

First of all, it’s a morality tale.  Lone is the good guy.  Those other fellows over there, in the black hats, are the bad guys.  They do nasty things (normally motivated by greed.)  Lone points himself in their direction and tries to thwart their evil schemes — full stop.  He is not an on-the-spot vigilante.  He leaves justice to the proper authorities.  Contemporary audiences don’t appreciate this subtlety.  However, because of it, Lone is not ambivalent about his purpose or his methods.  He knows he’s the good guy.  He’s not consumed with angst.  Our society doesn’t understand this interplay between good and evil.  We want our heroes to question it, mainly because we don’t really think it exists.

Secondly, the relationship between the Lone Ranger and Tonto is impossible for contemporary audiences to comprehend.THE LONE RANGER, Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels  “Sidekick” just doesn’t translate into Oprahspeak.  In our relentless adherence to equality, anything less than a bromance between the two men is unacceptable.  We refuse to believe that Tonto has any dignity being the lower man on the scrotum pole, even though it’s clear he does.  (It’s too complicated to explain, but suffice it to say Tonto can hit the trail any time he wants to, but he doesn’t.)  Plus, our simplistic view is amplified by our aversion to actual ethnic diversity in film.  Minorities may be everywhere in the movies but, remarkably, for the most part, they dress, walk, look and talk stereotypically like the homogenized white guy standing beside them.

Finally, The Lone Ranger is a western.  This isn’t a bad problem until you try and tell the tale to kids.  In our world, there isn’t a Hovermom west, east, north or south of the Pecos who’s going to permit that.  Agrarian Workers and Native Americans (Cowboys and Indians) are personae non grata in today’s playgrounds.  Our children can zap aliens with death rays and mega-fry entire civilizations with video game warheads, but there is no way in hell little Bryce or Morgan will ever be allowed to strap on a toy pistol and go looking for bad guys.  It just isn’t done.  The demographics of The Lone Ranger’s first week in the theatre bear this out: ticket buyers were overwhelmingly white men over twenty-five.  This is not a bad group but clearly not the one Disney was aiming at.  Despite the advertising and the action figures, The Lone Ranger is not actually a kid movie — or at least not one parents are going to let their kids go see.

It’s too bad Disney missed the point and The Lone Ranger is a flop.  I grew up with Lone and Tonto, and I think, with a little creativity, they could have been retrofit into our brave new world.  In fact, their story is good enough that I still believe they should be.  After all, despite his being one of the deadliest pistolaros of the Old West-ern, in all the episodes of The Lone Ranger I saw, I don’t remember that he ever actually killed anybody.  That alone would be a welcome change from the carnage we see in most action/adventure films these days.  Unfortunately, now that Disney has bit the silver bullet, it’s going to be a long time before anyone else will return “to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when from out of the past came [sic] the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver! [and] The Lone Ranger rides again!”