Culture, Trivia, History, etc.

Looking for a comic to return Wonder Woman to her bondage roots, and then redefine her feminist credentials? Final Crisis and Batman and Robin writer Grant Morrison claims to be working on that very book, just for you.

During his LA appearance with Clive Barker earlier this week, Morrison admitted that Wonder Woman had disappeared from Final Crisis midway through the series, although he had a good reason why:

[The ideas] went into a different project with Wonder Woman… The basics of Wonder Woman come from William Moulton Marston, a psychologist who created the lie detector, of all things. His idea was that a utopia would be achieved if men were placed in subjugation to women. So, Wonder Woman is a character where you imagine this very strange mélange of girl power, bondage, and a slightly disturbed sexuality. There is this bondage element; these extremely weird dark elements of Wonder Woman haven’t been adequately dealt with. Wonder Woman remains a really bizarre, untouchable character. She should represent women in the same way Superman represents men.

The project – all detail of which, including release date, format, artist and (most importantly) whether or not DC have greenlit it – has a simple mission statement, according to the author:

To make it work, to give [Wonder Woman] a sexuality that isn’t exploitive, because that’s too easy; but also to give her a [narrative] power.

Well, it’s definitely better than her calling men “sperm bank,” I guess.

Grant Morrison & Clive Barker Meltdown Hollywood [Comic Book Resources]

The Hunt for Gollum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H09xnhlCQU

Countless science fiction stories have asked the same question: What will America turn into next? The answers fall into three major categories, some more plausible than others.

Communist Amerika

Although the United States passionately feared a communist takeover, there is surprisingly little science fiction that imagines what the United States would be like under communism. During the Cold War, there were a lot of movies about communist spies and communist agents and communist invasions, but few stories tried to grapple with what the United States would look like in a long-term communist scenario. The propaganda movie Red Nightmare from 1962, with its grim portrait of small town commie USA, gestured at this idea a little bit. But it wasn’t really until the 1980s with the miniseries Amerika that we saw a fully-fledged communist USA. The miniseries imagines what the United States would be like 10 years after the Soviets invade in the late 1980s. Hint: It’s evil and must be stopped.

Two books from the 1990s offer slightly more plausible scenarios. In Maureen Mchugh’s China Mountain Zhang, the United States suffers an economic collapse in the 21st century, followed by a revolution led by Chinese communists. China has become an economic superpower, while America founders through its own cultural revolution. And in the British short story collection Back In The USSA, Theodore Roosevelt is reelected as a progressive candidate in 1912, thus setting in motion a series of events that lead to a people’s revolution in the United States in 1917. Russia, however, remains Czarist. It’s a fun thought experiment for people who like to geek out about early 20th century American progressive politics.

Could it happen?
It’s telling that Back In The USSA has to reach so far back in history to make its scenario plausible. And McHugh posits a future disaster. The point is that this scenario is an extreme deviation from the country’s current trajectory. Sure, anything could happen – there are always black swans. But this possibility feels more like a thought experiment than a genuine possibility.

Fascist Fragments

Americans have feared a fascist takeover perhaps as much as they have feared communism in the past. In fact, the two are often lumped together in political polemics. But in science fiction, Philip K Dick’s early 1960s novel The Man In The High Castle set the standard for fantasies of a fascist takeover. In Dick’s vision, FDR is assassinated early in his presidency, which results in a weak government that fails to pull the country out of the Depression. So the United States doesn’t have the economic or industrial capacity to aid the Allies, Germany conquers Europe, Japan conquers the Pacific, and the United States is broken up and divided among its conquerors. Parts of the nation remain free, parts go to Germany, and most of the West Coast goes to Japan.

Other fantasies about a fascist United States also imagine the country as having broken up. Even the recent television show Jericho depicts (at one point in the series) a post-nuclear apocalypse in the U.S. resulting in its fragmentation into small, authoritarian regions. Obviously there are some alternate histories that imagine a unified United States going fascist, but the idea of a fragmented country falling prey to authoritarians is a common one.

Could it happen?
The United States has sometimes flirted with authoritarianism. Presidents like FDR and Richard Nixon consolidated so much power that many historians would call them proto-fascist. The fact that the United States does not have a parliamentary democracy often makes it appear to resemble nations whose leadership is confined to a small cadre. However, the country also has a history of correcting itself when power is too closely tied to one group. Term limits were set for presidents after FDR died, and the Watergate scandal destroyed Nixon’s regime. The question is, would this self-correcting mechanism remain healthy if the country fragmented into smaller pieces? The Man In The High Castle, even after all these years, still makes a persuasive case that a divided America could become fascist.

Corporate Feudalism

Many cyberpunk stories are predicated on the idea that in the near future the United States will be ruled by corporations who are more powerful than governments. This is the premise in William Gibson’s classic Neuromancer, Marge Piercy’s post-cyberpunk He, She, and It, and is even an important idea in the TV show Fringe. Although a shell of the U.S. Government might remain intact in these scenarios, true power is held by multinationals. Neal Stephenson does a terrific job showing what this would be like in his novel The Diamond Age. Corporations create enclaves with their own cultural norms that function as city-states. (One such enclave adopts Victorian social values and fashions, for example.)

This situation leads to a scenario like feudalism because the corporations become like kingdoms, with an executive class serving as aristocrats and workers as serfs. The world is fragmented economically and culturally, but in many versions of this story the governments remain the same. Still, these governments are more ceremonial than anything else. The world is run by capitalists, not politicians.

Could it really happen?
As we see in the TV show Fringe, corporate feudalism seems as if it has already happened. Although the show is not set in the future, the corporation Massive Dynamic clearly has as much power as the government, if not more. Wealthy companies like Google and Microsoft have more money than many nations. If Google merged with Northrop Grumman and bought Blackwater, could they take over the U.S. Government? Sounds a helluva lot more plausible than a communist revolution.

Disney isn’t always the Happiest Place on Earth. The parks sometimes harbor deep, dark secrets – and we’re not talking the Haunted Mansion or the Tower of Terror. Below are a few sinister secrets Mickey doesn’t want you to know about.

Deaths

We’ve all heard the rumors that no one has ever died at a Disney park because Disney has paid officials to refrain from declaring injured or ill people dead until they hit a hospital outside of Disney property. But it’s not true. There are several incidents where the victims were reported to have died at the scene.

In 2007, a Spanish teenager died while she was riding the Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster at Disneyland Paris. Her friends noticed she was unconscious when the ride stopped, according to the BBC, and park medics immediately rushed to the scene. There was nothing they could do, though, and she was pronounced dead by the time an ambulance could get there. Photo from DLPInfo.

In June of both 1973 and 1983, 18-year-old boys drowned in the Rivers of America. Both had stayed in the area when they weren’t supposed to – the incident in ‘73 occurred when a boy and his brother decided to stay in the park after closing and the ‘83 incident happened when a boy capsized a rubber emergency raft he had stolen from a cast-only section of the park.

In 1984, Dollie Young was riding the Matterhorn Bobsleds at Disneyland when her seatbelt became unbuckled. To this day, it’s not known how Dollie fell out of her car, but she did. She fell to the track and was hit by another car, then caught under its wheels and dragged for a bit before the ride came to a stop. She was pronounced dead at the scene due to massive head and chest injuries.

And, of course, there was the infamous “America Sings” death of 1974. An employee named Debbi Stone was working as the hostess to the show one evening when her fellow cast members were alerted to the fact that she was missing. Some reports say they noticed at some point during the evening; other reports say a guest heard Debbi’s screams and immediately told cast members. Either way, by the time she was found, Debbi had been crushed to death between a rotating theater wall and a permanent theater wall; she definitely didn’t make it to a hospital first. Photo from Yesterland.

Ashes

Even when people aren’t dying at Disney, they want their mortal remains to be forever interred at the Happiest Place on Earth. Disney doesn’t like to talk about it, obviously, but sometimes cast members spill the beans to inquiring reporters. David Koenig, author of Mouse Tales: A Behind-the-Ears Look at Disneyland, says that the Haunted Mansion has definitely been the site of a quickie memorial service at least once. A cast member told him that she had been working the ride when a group requested extra time on the ride to say a quick goodbye to a little boy who had died and loved the Haunted Mansion. She agreed, but then spotted one of the guests emptying grey ash out onto the ride. The ride was shut down so it could be cleaned up.

In 2007, a guest alerted cast members at the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction that she had seen another woman sprinkling some sort of a powdery substance into the water, and the Los Angeles Times reports that the ride was shut down the same year when a group of people managed to leave a pile of ashes in the Captain’s Quarters section of the ride.

Hidden Messages

I’ve done it, and I bet a lot of you have done it as well: pausing and rewinding and going frame-by-frame to catch hidden messages or images in certain Disney films. Some of them are really there and some of them are just products of our active imaginations. Here’s the lowdown:

Aladdin does not tell children to take off their clothes in Aladdin. It’s a scene where “Prince Ali” is trying to get up to Princess Jasmine’s room to talk to her when he comes across her tiger, Rajah. The tiger growls at him menacingly, and Aladdin says, “C’mon… good kitty. Take off and go!” while shooing the feline away with his turban. The captioning supports this argument. However, the line is whispered and not enunciated well, and in addition, it seems to be edited poorly. Snopes http://www.snopes.com/disney/films/aladdin.asp says that the same bit of dialogue seems to have been inserted twice, so the whispered line is doubly garbled. Because it was so close on the heels of The Little Mermaid controversy, people heard what they wanted to.

Speaking of which, The Little Mermaid did not contain any sexual images on purpose. There were two issues that concerned the public: first, that artwork for the movie contained a phallic images as part of a castle in the background, and second, that the priest officiating over the wedding scene near the end of the movie seems to get an erection right in the middle of the ceremony. Neither is true, according to Snopes. The phallic image was unintentional and was not drawn in by a disgruntled employee who had recently gotten laid off (the artist didn’t even work for Disney) and the “erection” is actually the priest’s knees.

So what is true? Well, there’s definitely an image of a topless woman in the 1977 movie The Rescuers. And Disney fully admits it. In fact, the image – which is a photograph, not an animated bit, and was clearly intentionally placed in the movie – was basically pointed out to the public by Disney themselves. The image occurs so fast in two single, non-consecutive frames, that a viewer would have to know exactly where to pause the movie in order to even see it. The movie was recalled in 1999 after Disney discovered the image was there; they claimed it must have been inserted in post-production. Photo from Snopes.

One that’s maybe true: Jessica Rabbit going commando in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. There’s a scene in the movie where Jessica and Eddie Valiant are thrown from a car, causing her dress to flip up very briefly. It goes fast, but people who have slowed the movie to frame-by-frame say that the way the coloring was done suggests that mischievous animators may have drawn Jessica without any undergarments. However, the coloring, which is darker than the rest of Jessica’s skin, may also suggest underwear.

And here’s a not-so-hidden image you can check out for yourself the next time you’re at Disney World – there’s a Nazi “hidden” in plain sight in a mural at the Grand Floridian resort. In the book Sabotage in the American Workplace, the artist who painted the piece says that Disney hired him to create a Great Gatsby-esque mural for the ballroom in the upscale hotel. He decided to paint a Nazi in the background of the mural to “comment on what was happening in the rest of the world while the Great Gatsbys where whittling away their hours with cocktails.” Photo from Snopes.
There are definitely more dark Disney tales – in fact, we could probably turn this into a series! What weird and/or disturbing rumors have you heard about the House of Mouse?