Godzookie went to Hollywood, an agent to the stars

[austin_dern]

I was watching a bit of The Little Mermaid, the formerly Saturday morning cartoon. I don't have much reason except there's not a lot going on some times of the day and Deep Space Nine hadn't started yet. It may also be that I'll watch pretty near anything animated as long as it isn't trying at all to be hip or ``adult''. Anyway, I watched it some back when I was in Troy. Many of the episodes were reasonably entertaining, often with Ariel and Triton fighting over the issues of trust, independence, and protection which had they been settled like the episodes suggested would have prevented the movie from taking place. But people often will avoid learning lessons as long as they have any choice.

Anyway, this episode featured the discovery of frozen dinosaurs in the polar icecap which Ariel, naturally, manages to free, on the grounds that Flounder didn't much like being frozen in ice and would the dinosaurs like it any better? But while the dinosaurs do seem glad to not be frozen in blocks of ice, they're not very grateful, going on a short little rampage until Ariel's daddy can, once again, show up and whip up a little hot-spring-fueled lost continent for them to inhabit away from everyone. That is to say, yes, they managed to get a Godzilla story in on The Little Mermaid.

Idle question: has there ever been the discovery of ice-frozen prehistoric animals, in fiction, which didn't result in their prompt unfreezing and going on a rampage? It was even one of the plots for a Fleischer Superman short. Conversely, when did that idea became de rigeur for frozen animals ? I imagine it dates to the discovery of preserved woolly mammoths, since who'd believe well-preserved corpses otherwise, but then where did it come from? There's a missing piece in my cultural knowledge of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, which seems like it might be important, but I've been generally less than enthusiastic about reading Doyle, and the TV adaptations of The Lost World I've seen have made it so ponderous that I drift off to anything where I don't have to get behind the plot and push. There was a Sci-Fi Channel ``radio'' adaptation a few years back, which demonstrated mostly that they had no idea how real old-time radio drama could establish setting with a few seconds of foley and a well-chosen bit of dialogue. They might fall overboard in using dialogue as a tactical exposition delivery system (``Julie! Neither my trustworthy photographer Archier nor I would expect to see my ex-fiancee at a cocktail party to introduce our scientific expedition to the press thrown by Walter, my much-maligned and struggling expedition's sole financier!'') but they got the story moving in the first six hours.

Trivia: Benedict Arnold was made a General (for the Colonists) on 10 January 1776. Source: The First American Army, Bruce Chadwick.

Currently Reading: The Essence of Style, Joan DeJean.

Comments

[patchoblack.livejournal.com]

Hmm...I've noticed that a lot of cartoons that say they want an "adult" audience tend to use immature behavior....

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, they do that too, but there's immature and then there's childlike playfulness.

Ice 0, Monsters 1

[lexomatic.livejournal.com]

:::Has there ever been the discovery of ice-frozen prehistoric animals, in fiction, which didn't result in their prompt unfreezing and going on a rampage?

You mean, one in which they're thawed, and promptly do nothing more than stink? Which would be, I suppose, because the long-frozen microscopic animals have gone on a rampage. --Oh, fine; bacteria are prokaryotes, not animals. But the same principle applies; remember the silicon-based Antarctic fungus from that early episode of "The X-Files"?

There's a scene in the Charles Sheffield novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow in which the main character awakens after a long, long, incredibly long cryonic suspension; the aliens that found him managed his revival, but cumulative radiation damage caused him to die shortly thereafter, quickly and horribly. Oops, there go his lungs.

Different question: how long has this motif been used? I remember one of the 1941 Fleischer Superman shorts using it -- scientists find oversized tyrannosaurid in ice, bring it to the Metropolis natural history museum (one boggles at the size of its loading dock), and somebody turns off the refrigeration coils.

One of the William Hartnell Doctor Who stories -- The Keys of Marinus, c.1964 -- had frozen warriors emerge from ice. The heroes were merely trying to retrieve the Key that had been stored between them.

Re: Ice 0, Monsters 1

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the Fleischer Superman is the oldest story I know that features unfrozen ancient monsters coming back to life, but I'd be mighty surprised if that were the original story. There were lost-worlds-of-dinosaurs stories before then, and somebody must have thought of frozen mammoths and put two and two together. (Those old Zorome stories got the idea of being frozen for millions of years and brought back to life, but going into the future, rather than from the past.)

I'm siding with Roger Ebert on this one. At least once I'd like to see Godzilla tamed and put to useful purposes, like laying trans-oceanic cables or pushing stuck cars out of subterranean tunnels or the like. There've got to be reasonable giant prehistoric creatures out there somewhere.