studio cards

Through the daisy-chains that bind us, I was astounded to find this superbly fun and classy curated gallery of vintage film animations in a blog called Nitrate Diva. Lovingly maintained and with a vast archive that spans from the Silent Era through the 1960s, I found it to be too remarkable not to share. Of course, these pictures have a separate, fossilized mythos of their own, but finding these clippings moving under their own power opens up a whole new strata of arresting scenes. One won’t regret the visit.

6x6

quinceañera: Wikipedia celebrates its fifteenth anniversary

you sank my lanthanide series: a parent has developed a period table of Battleship to teach chemistry

independent order of odd fellows: a look at the iconography of the secret societies of America, via the Everlasting Blort

that’s a bad boy: a Roman mosaic unearthed in Alexandria reveals that pet-shaming has been a phenomenon since ancient times

yosemite sam: accommodations and attractions of the US national park compelled to re-flag because of an unscrupulous naming-rights dispute

powwww: a studious and hilarious collection of expository BAT LABELS from the original Batman series

verisimilitude

One tool the storyteller has in his or her quiver of tropes to perhaps fend off a fading suspension of disbelief—when the audience is no longer transported into that fiction or fantasy and is growing unwilling to buy what’s improbable (the most treacherous area for an author or actor is delineated by the inconsistency in which the impossible drifts towards the merely unlikely)—is called the lampshade hanging technique. Accorded with the principle that anything is less glaring than a bare bulb, the narrator calls attention to the offending material and tries to move on—hoping that the audience identifies enough with the characters to accept that everyone is finding the situation incredulous.

If used craftily, one won’t notice it—naturally. The antithesis of deliberately calling out minor discrepancies is a more of an endemic problem to the industry (I don’t think that such a trope could be found in literature prior to film and television—except as primary transgressions, possibly) is a strange phenomenon called “genre blindness,” which is something pervasive and highly visible. Though I am not certain if much of modern theatrics are set in a Universe slightly parallel to our own, characters sometimes do seem separated and sheltered enough never to have seen a movie or a sitcom themselves. This plot device, which can present pretty monumental challenges maintaining that suspension of disbelief, accounts for all those instances where teens don’t blanch at the idea of wondering into the woods at night when zombies and werewolves are afoot, undying scepticism in the face of near irrefutable evidence to the contrary, Bond villains willing to indulge a creative death for their nemesis rather than dispense with him quickly and directly or—as some have wondered—whether the characters of the Star Wars saga were even paying attention to the previous episodes or never bullseyed womprats back home—they’re not much bigger than two metres. What are some other examples of “genre blindness” you can think of?

dance, magic dance

I was delighted to be informed that prior to her career as Medical Officer for the continuing voyages of the starship Enterprise, Cheryl “Gates” McFadden (Doctor Beverly Crusher) played a pivotal, creative backstage role in many Jim Henson productions as dance choreographer and puppet director.
She helped compose the musical numbers for Labyrinth, as well as wrangling the skeksis for Dark Crystal and puppeteer in several muppet capers. Dr. Crusher presently has an active teaching career and has hosted several acting workshops. Finding this out was nearly as serendipitous as the time, a long time ago, when we went to the lost luggage outlet in rural Alabama and finding that gatekeeper Hoggle rather sadly went unclaimed or was left at the wrong terminal with no welcoming party. Since more people have discovered this oubliette, the goblin I think has become a mascot for that proverbial spot where all orphaned socks and other things gone missing end up.