Hope your Memorial Day weekend was suitably therapeutic ( as holidays should be ). Our Victoria Day equivalent was last weekend and we had a few extra days with our daughter who had some year end make you shake your head tales of teaching at the University level, that made one ponder and sometimes cringe when considering into whose hands the future is being passed. More on that in a later entry.
Your recent mentions of watching an " Oldy but goody " replete with " cowboys, gunslinging, bad guys, the saloon concubine and the doc........ " sent me immediately back to what has to be the quintessential oldy but goody TV western - Gunsmoke. I remember it being on the tube in our household from forever, it seems. It wasn't must see TV - like The Jack Benny Show , Sid Ceasar's " Your Show of Shows" , Sgt. Bilko, Jackie Gleason and Ernie Kovacs were for me. It did, of course, prompt me to do the Google, You Tube and IMDB background check on this venerable series. It sure was a touchstone . One of the most interesting aspects was the number of later household names who cut some of their early acting teeth on one or more episodes. Ed Asner, Bruce Dern, Harrison Ford, Jodie Foster, Carroll O'Connor, Cloris Leachman, Dennis Hopper, Ted Knight, Mark Lenard, Martin Landau, Jack Lord, Lee Majors........... to name but a few.
Well before they were known for boldly going where no one had gone before, Kirk, Spock, Scotty and Bones from the original Star Trek each did a guest stint on Gunsmoke.
Burt Reynolds kept his irons in the fire regularly for three years on the series as beefcakesque blacksmith Quint Asper.
Apparently, I guess, a significant chunk of the fanbase felt that this was an impressive body of/at work....
While we're exploring humble beginnings - series star James Arness , the six foot six Marshall Dillon himself, got his big foot in the Hollywood door back in 1951, in part, by appearing in Howard Hawk's " The Thing". In 1952, about the time I got out of diapers, and a year after Arness did his "Thing" thing on the big screen, Gunsmoke appeared as a radio drama and ran, believe it or not, until 1961. In 1955 it first appeared on American television with James Arness as Marshall Dillon. Gunsmoke stayed on the small screen and in North American living rooms for two decades. Some insight into its longevity can be had from the Wikipedia entry which noted:
At the end of its run in 1975, Los Angeles Times columnist Cecil Smith wrote: "Gunsmoke was the dramatization of the American epic legend of the west. Our own Iliad and Odyssey, created from standard elements of the dime novel and the pulp western as romanticized by [Ned] Buntline, [Bret] Harte, and [Mark] Twain. It was ever the stuff of legend."[
I checked out some episodes online. First thing that struck me is that, compared to the jolt every half-minute pattern of current televised drama, things seem to move along at a glacial pace. Back then a half hour tv series had approximately 27 minutes to get its job done. Today it's closer to 22 so things do get compressed and hyped up in the process.
Do I wish for the older, kinder, gentler approach?
Not really and that may be in part because, for me at least, it was kinda like being in Mr. Rogers Mild West Neighbourhood. The term I first thought of was "schmaltzy" .It's an awfully nice and bucolic frontier, to be sure, yet I found myself waiting for some kind of cataclysmic occurrence to kick things up a few notches. Somehow, even the dramatic climax scenes seemed exceedingly warm and fuzzy.
It makes me think that in the decades since Matt Dillon et al left the airwaves I've become desensitized and weaned away from heartfelt and thought-provoking entertainment by the digital flash and hyperbolic glitter of what appears in media all around me every day. I've traded sincere for sensational or gone for the sizzle rather than the steak .
Anyhow, no full-tilt media-literacy rant here (much as I'd like to) since I also want to touch on the other item in your last blog that set me to thinking, Carolyn.
Steampunk is a term you've used more than thrice in the blog and I figured I should look at it a little more. I read " The Difference Engine" a number of years ago. It was okay, but I think I just wasn't into that kinda stuff at the time. I started coming around to it more with The Serpent Bearer series from awhile back here at Wormhole Electric Publishing. That was probably my first in-depth exposure to this genre. I enjoyed that series immensely. The characters were well-drawn and the story was airtight and there was something else about it that just gave some extra oomph.
I didn't quite realize why it resonated so well with me until I read in Wikipedia that Fritz Langs' Metropolis was seen as:
"... the single most important early film to represent Steampunk as an emerging stylistic genre."
On the screen or on the page I get the feeling that part of the Steampunk thing is the sheer visual appeal it conjures up at times. I get the same gratifying visual experience from watching Metropolis as I get from 2001. Lang and Kubrick just operate a few levels above the rest of us, in grey matter matters.
So maybe that's how Steampunk works- it serves up massive images of strength and power harnessed to do our bidding be it good or evil. Interstellar sensibilities somehow seem to meld seamlessly with sweaty, clanking machinery to heighten the experience. ( Kinda sounds like Quint Asper in space ) Even the name itself has a runaway locomotive thing going for it. At the moment it's one of those experiences that I can really appreciate but can't quite fully articulate, I guess.
Okay, this would be a good time to harken back to the steamboat era, and to someone whose already been noted in the Gunsmoke musings.
As Twain noted:
Get your facts first,
then you can distort
them as you please.
Catch ya next time,
Don
All images sourced from Google Images
Fig. 1 - classicflix.blogspot.com
Fig. 2 - www.hulu.com
Fig. 3 - www.autographwarehouse.com
Fig. 4 - www. weebly.com
Fig. 5 - www.nfsa.gov.au
Fig. 6 - io9.com
Fig. 7 - thestalkingmoon.com
Fig. 8 - www.kottke.org
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