Sixty-Two Magoo!

Today I'm sixty-two years old.

That don't seem possible. I'm still a young man I think and feel, but my adult daughters give the lie to that quickly enough. Getting old is something the world rejects because the next step is quite startling indeed. And in the last year I have had to give in to my physical infirmity resort to bifocals...sigh. My sight has been weakening for some time, but I fended off the inevitable with ever stronger reading glasses stashed all over my home and car and classroom and anywhere I was likely to turn up.

But finally it became all too much and I had to try bifocals again (I did it once and it was a disaster) and so far so fine. I've adapted to them pretty well, but without them my Magoo existence is still one of guesswork. I used to laugh at Mister Magoo, but now alas I can only laugh alongside him.

Here are some posters of Mister Magoo doing absurd things, but sadly they no longer seem quite as outlandish as they once did.

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The Lone Ranger And The Lost City Of Gold!

The Lone Ranger was a big hit on television and ran for many seasons and has never stopped running in re-runs over the decades. The Lone Ranger was born on radio and was a massive hit in the medium when it did more than play 70's rock songs and try to convince us all that bad is good. The Lone Ranger was a pretty big hit in comics, with a long-lasting series which spun off comics dedicated to Tonto and Silver. But on the big screen, the Lone Ranger has a very spotty history.

The 1956 movie The Lone Ranger was a very successful translation of the TV series to a broader colorful landscape. All the recognizable elements were present but larger in scale and in full blushing color when such things were not all that common. The follow-up movie, The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold feels like a more humble effort all around. The color is still there, but the settings which shifted as needed in the first movie, seemed localized into a distinctly Southwestern area and not really the fictional western territory the series was accustomed to. Maybe this was an attempt to inject some level of realism into the the  proceedings, but to my eye it doesn't work as well as the earlier effort.

We are of course talking about Cibola, one of the Seven Cities of Gold which the avaricious Spaniards sought so relentlessly for so long. Here we have a map to Cibola which has been distributed among many different Native American men, who don't really in most cases know what they have, and which is the sought by a greedy pair of villains. The baddies are pretty good in this one, a woman  who is used to using her sex to get her way and a violent man all too ready to kill. Up against them stand the Ranger and Tonto. The Ranger uses his disguises again and creates a refined Southern gentleman rogue who plays a large part in the story. This movie is a real showcase for Clayton Moore but otherwise doesn't find the magic all the much, at least for me.

There is quite a violent finale, but it seemed somewhat too small scale for the big screen. Maybe I'm being too harsh on the movie, as it's still a delightful adventure, just not a big-screen event.

The Lone Ranger would try again in 1981 and yet again a few years ago, with folks not really able or willing to understand what makes the Lone Ranger work, and that what we have is the relentless nobility of two men who have sacrificed what they might want personally to bring some sense of order and justice to a wild unsettled land. This is heroism of the highest order and sadly we in the modern world all too often find such efforts to be naive or foolish. We are the fools.

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The Lone Ranger!

If you forced me to pick just one from among all the forms of entertainment and all the many heroes who have been presented to the public over the countless decades, I might have to choose The Lone Ranger as portrayed by Clayton Moore as my all-time favorite. Along with Jay Silverheels as the incredibly loyal and reliable Tonto, the Lone Ranger patrolled the western frontier for no other purpose than to see that justice was meted out fairly and honorably. Now what justice means can well be argued and Tonto's servant-like role is a problem for certain, but given the parameters of the time the nobility of heroism have never been more acutely and vividly displayed in my humble estimation.

And that's all on display in buckets in The Lone Ranger, a feature film made with Moore and Silverheels building on the success of the television show. Here we see them doing what they do best, helping people who need help and protecting those who need protection. The Ranger and Tonto find a power-mad man who seeks to drive the Indians off their reservation to fulfill his greedy goals and without hesitation they step in between that villain and his victims, offering up their own bodies to forestall him.

On particular display in this color film are Clayton Moore's considerable skills as an actor. An incredibly handsome man, he fills out the role of "superhero" quite nicely but you really only get to enjoy him behind masks and disguises and nonetheless his charm comes through. Likewise with Tonto, who is often given thankless tasks, we see a man who will fight even when the odds are nigh impossible. Tonto's bravery is at the center of much of the action in this movie which has a bristling plot which moves with impressive momentum.

The Lone Ranger as much as any of the classic heroes seems to celebrate the nobility of the common man, the essence of democracy, that we are all worthy. Too many vintage hero epics thoughtlessly celebrate antique notions of nobility and no matter how splendid and exciting are sending a message that not all men (and women) were created equal. Some vintage sexism shows up in this movie, but it's mild by the temper of the times.

If you have seen this movie, I highly recommend it, along with its follow-up -- The Lone Ranger and the City of Gold. I'll take a closer look at the latter tomorrow.

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The JLA's Best Super Friend!

As it turns out the other Bill Finger award this summer at ComiCon is going to E. Nelson Bridwell, one of the true comic book maestros, a fan who brought an encyclopedic knowledge of all things DC to the halls of the Superman's ilk and who seemed to have the care and delicacy of a born librarian when it came to details and original sources. Bridwell was somewhat of a misfit when he first tagged in at DC, a man younger by a generation than most of his peers and often presented at a glorified coffee boy, the guy who does the chores no one else wants to do. Maybe that's why when DC finally got around to creating a comic book to take advantage of the success of Hanna-Barbera's Saturday morning cartoon The Super Friends, it was Bridwell who drew the straw. Whatever the reason it's a delight for us fans that he got the nod because he was ideally suited to the task of writing new but classic-feeling adventures for the Justice League, a League who in addition to saving the world on regular schedule, took time to train up and coming heroes like Wendy and Marvin and later the Wonder Twins. Some who want their comics lean, mean and totally relevant might sniff at the Super Friends, but in the hands of Bridwell and regular artist Ramona Fradon (the first two issues were drawn by Ric Estrada and many more by the painfully underrated Kurt Schaffenberger)  it was first class read month in and month out for several years. While heroes in most other joints got grim and gritty, the heroes in the Super Friends always seemed to have a smile on their faces. Bridwell created an alternate universe filled with a globe full of heroes to echo what was happening on the TV show, but also delighting in its own singular continuity. It wasn't the "Haneyverse", but it was nearly that, another version of a fictional world we loved to visit where the sun was sunnier and the kind were kinder. DC has reprinted these stories a few times, though never all of them I think. A new hardcover collection due out soon with the first eighteen issues and a few more things. Just in time for Bridwell's recognition -- it makes me smile.

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The Most Unusual JLA Stories Ever!

According to Mike Evanier over at his wonderful POV blog, the great Mike Friedrich is being recognized this summer at ComicCon with a Bill Finger Award. These are given to writers of comics of distinction and for this fanboy it's a pleasure to see Friedrich get get his due. I was the perfect age when I tumbled to his wacky spin on the Justice League of America, taking the helm of the book from Denny O'Neil who had done so after Gardner Fox. So as only the third regular writer of such a high-profile book it was incumbent on Friedrich not to shake the Earth too much, but he did anyway. The stories always drawn capably by Dick Dillin and Joe Giella (a team I underrated at the time) and often graced with dynamic covers by Neal Adams or Murphy Anderson, are peculiar and personal not one expects in a high-octane team book. The book touched on the issues of the time such as world hunger, pollution, and more. When it came time for the JLA and the JSA to team up they did so to help an alien boy and his dog, and there was Solomon Grundy as well. The book under Friedrich was not predictable and reading it still all these years later still feels personal, whimsical, and idealistic.

Here are the covers from Friedirich's run.

Looking at those covers again, I'm struck at how on almost all of them the League is downtrodden and shown in a moment of defeat. They recover of course, but it's an interesting way to draw in readers.

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Down The Lazy River!

One of the great novels if not the greatest novel of American literature is Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It's masterpiece of storytelling in many ways, but one aspect of the yarn which has always appealed to me is the peripatetic nature of the journey, the way life comes at Huck and Jim as they drift along the river on their humble raft finding this adventure and that situation. Although I doubt it's true, you almost get the sense that Twain himself allowed the saga to unfold, letting the focus shift from yarn to yarn as new vistas appeared around the bends of the mighty Mississippi the two heroes navigate along. It's a plan I want to employ this summer at the Dojo, or the lack of a plan really, just allowing each day to bring into view what that day will be about.

That doesn't mean there will be no known events, but look for odd shifts in topic and maybe even tone as my personal lazy summer voyage unfolds.  Some things I know are coming up (maybe) are some more reviews of Roger Corman movies. Truth told, I just stumbled into all of those in May as one led logically to another. Thee are several more to go.

And I've been slowly but steadily digesting the vast trove of Three Stooges films, both of the short and feature variety and I will sooner than later finish that mini-project and if so I will begin to report.You all are most welcome to drift along with me as the river of life flows along.

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