And all of the team was the same as always

[austin_dern]

Ooh. I didn't read the comics yesterday until after posting, so I didn't realize yesterday's four-panel Peanuts Classic featured a rare -- certainly one of the last -- appearances of 5. This kid was one of Charles Schulz's first novelty characters; his defining trait was his dad had been driven mad by all the numbers thrown on people in modern society and changed the family name to their Zip code, 95472. He got named 555 -- 5, for short -- his sisters, 3 and 4. (They're the girls in purple dresses with the weird sideways-head-dance in A Charlie Brown Christmas.) After about a week's worth of jokes on that premise he had nothing to do, and attempts to give him jokes just didn't work. Yet he hung around in the background for a mighty long time; that appearance was from 1969, and he even appears on the cover of 1975's book Peanuts Jubilee. He's kind of the Boba Fett of Peanuts.

Which raises the question; why do some utterly nothing characters -- one-joke folks like 5, or spear-carriers like Boba Fett (in the original Star Wars movies anyway; I've still not seen Revenge of the Sith, so please adjust spoilers to match) or Mister Leslie of Star Trek -- get this cachet of honestly undeserved popularity? Some of it's ironic fun, sure, but ... I'm honestly happy to spot 5, and I don't think all the Boba Fett fans were completely facetious.

Maybe some of it is Boba Fett got introduced as if he were important and the movies fail to follow up on that. 5 and Mister Leslie show up recognizably often enough to suggest there's a story there. They're close to the main characters and there's hints of things we don't get to see ... many people like drawing connections, and these marginal characters seem ready-made to be connected, somehow. Maybe that's it. I wonder when is 5's last verified appearance in the comic strip.

Trivia: Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Eastern suffered four mutinies during its working life. Source: The Uncyclopedia, Gideon Haigh.

Currently Reading: SF: Author's Choice, Edited by Harry Harrison.

Comments

[bluerain.livejournal.com]

I remember Boba Fett being, like, my favorite of my Star Wars action figures when I was a kid. I'm not sure I could even have told you that much about his role in the films, but he was cool-looking. I used to make "mountains" in my sandbox, position Boba Fett and various other action figures on them, then turn on the garden hose (deftly hidden inside the heap of sand) and watch them get washed away, screaming "nooooooooooo! Heeeeeeeelp uuuuuuuuuuuuus!"

Every kid does that, I think. We're fascinated by the futility of others' battles.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I never had Star Wars dolls of my own, but playing with friends during the summers at the beach (it wasn't a beach, but explaining it is too complicated) I had access to some, which I mostly remember using to put on the little white wood surfboards and then burying in liquid sand, which almost instantly dried up to a perfect little shell, so we could play dipping them in carbonite for storage. Actually, between that and elaborate liquid-drop castles, that was enough some summers.

[patchoblack.livejournal.com]

o/` But somehow or other, disaster struck at the baseball game. o/`

Ah, You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown!, a great little musical.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

That's the one. I'd thought some of 5's lines were transferred over to Linus or Schroeder in the play, but on a quick glance through it I don't see any. I think I was confused by the ``newspaper'' line, which started out with Charlie Brown and Linus to begin with.

[orv.livejournal.com]

Boba Fett is popular, I think, because he's clearly a badass. People like badasses. You see this in the scene where he's talking to Vader about Han Solo's fate; not only is he not afraid of Vader, he's not even impressed.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Boba Fett is quite obviously a major badass, plus he wears a really cool costume. You combine those two, and you've got a winner.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I was never convinced of his majority, actually, but then I saw Return of the Jedi before The Empire Strikes Back (don't ask me just how), so I didn't even connect the disposable bounty hunter character of the second film to the redshirt of the third.

Granted on the costume, but everybody except Luke and Leia had a really cool costume those days.

[bluerain.livejournal.com]

He meets kind of a stupid end, though, for a badass. He gets knocked into the Sarlac Pit by a blind Han Solo.

[orv.livejournal.com]

There's that old saying that a soldier doesn't need to fear another professional soldier, because professionals are predictable. What he really needs to fear is a creative amateur.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Poker players, chess players, and teachers of all kinds have the same fears. You'd never believe what the amateur mathematician can come up with, given a chance. (I think here of James Harris, on sci.math, who invented a scheme for factoring integers so unwieldy and complex that it's honest-to-goodness funny, and I think funny even to people who have no idea of any math beyond arithmetic.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It is pathetic, and smacks of a rewrite to me, the way Lando also sort of disappears into the supporting players. (I think the original setup also was for Luke to sacrifice himself in some way, clearing the way for Han and Leia to get together without the interludes of eeeeeeeeew we got with the Luke-and-Leia-siblings scenes.) I'd like to see what the original outline was, if that can be reconstructed at this point.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Mm, maybe. I didn't get that feeling from Boba Fett while watching that scene, but I also saw the original trilogy out of order so I never actually had the experience of waiting to see what role he'd play.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

Well, on thing Lucas has done rather well with the Star Wars movies is making very minor characters seem interesting; Boba Fett, Wedge Antilles, Greedo, etc. He seems to have failed moreso in Episodes 4,5, 6.. I'm not sure why. If Jar Jar Binks had about. oh.. a quarter of the screen time in the first movie, he'd be one of those interesting background characters who the fans would fall for; Instead, he's overdosed on rapidly.

I think part of folks's like for fairly minimal characters (my personal glee whenever Rudy's father Randy shows up in K&K) is a cheer for the underdog, the little guy, on that note. But moreso than that, it's that people just simply like characters on sight, and wait for their reappearance- no matter how minor or major the character is. There's someone terribly dissapointed right this second that Boss Nass didn't have any appearances in Episode 2 or 3.

It's somewhat the same way with songs. I recall a musician saying that he has to enjoy every song he writes and sings, because it's guaranteed that song will be someone's favorite- and it might just become everyone's favorite. Someone will have a copy of Michael Jackson's Thriller album, and think 'Beat It' and 'Billie Jean' are very nice songs, yes, but 'The Lady In my life' is just the standout track, why did that song never make it to a single?

Everyone has a favorite, being the point. That favorite isn't always the prominent, or popular.

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Mm, interesting points. I remember a similar quote -- about every song being someone's favorite -- from, I think, Joe DiMaggio, that every game he played was somebody's first-ever baseball game, and someone's last-ever, and it was his responsibility to give those people the best games he possibly could.

You're probably right that Jar-Jar would have been more popular if there'd been less of him, and also that these glimpsed characters get some of their fascination just because people want to like characters. I'm just curious what makes the critical mass that turns a character like 5 or Boba Fett into something that, say, Molley Volley or Boss Nass never becomes.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

The Dimaggio quote sounds like that same professional attitude, indeed. It's somethig I strive for in my profession as well- making sure every dish I serve is the best it can be, even if it's those annoying people who show up at 10:55 when closing is 11.

If Jar-Jar had.. well.. Basically eliminate every appearance with him and Anakin Skywalker from Episode I, and you've got something workable.

Molley Volley?

--Chiaroscuro

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Molley Volley was Snoopy's tennis partner for several years in the early 80s, appearing for one or two weeks and then disappearing for a good long while again. She had a bit of an abrasive personality (nowhere as bad as Lucy, mind), and given the characters she had to play against, like Crybaby Boopsie, she actually showed remarkable patience. But she never had the faintest echo of popularity that 5 had, even though I think she may have had more decent jokes.

[spaceroo.livejournal.com]

Of course, the dirty little secret is that Boba Fett actually wasn't *introduced* in the movies. He was the heavy in the animated section of the "Star Wars Holiday Special".

http://www.bobafettmp.com/multimedia/images/holidayspecial/

An odd question just came to mind, actually... is his name ever actually spoken in "Empire Strikes Back"? (Original cut, of course, not dialog-hacked the special editions.) Solo says it shortly before knocking Fett into the Sarlaac in "Return of the Jedi", but other then that I'm pretty sure he remains nameless during his movie appearances.

Perhaps that's the *real* source of his geek appeal. You sort of had to be in the know to even know who he was during the "original" period of Star Wars fandom. Being a fan of "Boba Fett" was a great way to impress upon the lowly wannabes what a true, rabid, dyed-in-the-wool fanboy you really were.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Uhm ... good question. I don't know whether Boba Fett's name is even spoken during The Empire Strikes Back ... maybe it's in the credits somewhere, but in any case you would need to be a hardcore geek to notice it at all. Anyone can remember Darth Vader's and Yoda's names, since they're said about 400 times, but if Fett was named at all it wasn't more than once.

Maybe there is something of a nerd shibboleth in the fascination with marginal characters like that.