Door-To-Door Hilarity
There is a kind of chase scene I always
associate with Scooby-Doo,
but I've seen it elsewhere, too (recently, often in parody, such as in the Doctor Who episode
"Love & Monsters"). That's where there's a shot down a hallway with many
doors on the side, and a pursuer is chasing the protagonists across the hall,
from one side to another, through one set of doors, then another. Often, the
order of the pursuer and pursued changes, or the order is otherwise mixed up.
Where did this kind of scene originate? I'd suspect slapstick comedians like
Chaplin, Keaton, or Laurel & Hardy, but I don't know enough about their
work to really know; nor do I know if this even starts with film. Can you help?
David
Partridge
Who's behind that door? Why, it's Noel Murray!
David, this is often referred to as "The Freleng
Door Gag," named for legendary Looney Tunes director Friz Freleng. Unlike his peer Tex Avery, who was known for wildly surreal
exaggeration, and Chuck Jones, who mastered facial expression and character
nuance, Freleng made brilliant use of static frames, letting characters run in
and out of the picture in order to build a joke. (My favorite example is "High
Wire Hare," in which Freleng holds on the ladder of a high-diving board and
lets the audience imagine what indignities Yosemite Sam is suffering up top
before he inevitably falls back down into a water tank.) For the door gag,
Freleng toyed with the audience's expectations by having characters run in and
out a set of doors, often emerging in impossible ways.
Pixar's Monsters Inc. climaxes with a terrific
homage to Freleng: a midair, mega-door-gag in which the good guys and bad guys
chase each other across a factory floor packed with dimensional doorways
strapped to conveyer belts. After Monsters Inc., no one need attempt
another door gag again—or at least not on so grand a scale.
Still A Fairly Dangerous Game
Hello! I hope you can
help me out with a literary mystery I've been trying to solve for a while now.
In 1996, I was in sixth grade and my homeroom teacher read a story to my class
that fascinated me because it was kind of an intense novel to read to
12-year-old kids. I was sick on the day she finished the novel, and ever since then I've
been curious about how it ends.
The novel was about a
young man who witnesses a rich, elderly man commit some sort of crime. I think it had to do
with poaching or perhaps accidentally killing someone on a hunting trip. The
young man goes to a nearby town to inform authorities, and it turns out that
the elderly man is a high-ranking official in the town. Of course, for his
meddling, the young man has to be punished, so the older man takes him out into
the desert and gives him a day's head start before the older man starts to hunt
the younger man. I remember two details about the chase very clearly: the young
man has to cook birds he kills on hot stones, and he has to bury himself in the
sand with a straw for a breathing tube.
In retrospect, it seems
that the novel wasn't written contemporaneously to 1996. It definitely isn't
the short story "The Most Dangerous Game," but there are certainly
similarities. Finally, the other novels that teacher read our class were quite
clearly young-adult fiction, but I got the impression that this novel wasn't
written for an audience of young adults. Maybe you can help? Thanks!
Erin
Tasha Robinson is also not for an audience of
young adults:
You're a bit off on some of the details, Erin,
particularly that last one—the book you're thinking of is actually a
young-adult novel, though 12-year-olds are arguably still too young to be
"young adults." (Amazon rates it for grades 7 through 12, so apparently your
teacher had high hopes for your class' maturity level.) But you remembered most
of it pretty clearly. The book is 1972's Deathwatch, by Robb White. It's an
award-winner (New York Times Book Of The Year, Edgar Award for the year's best
juvenile mystery, American Library Association "best of the best," etc.) and is
often considered a moderate classic in kid lit.
In the book, the younger man, Ben, is acting as a
guide for the rich older man, Madec, who's been granted a rare permit to shoot
a bighorn sheep. Instead, he shoots a prospector, then tries to talk Ben into
covering up the situation instead of reporting it. When Ben refuses, Madec
forces him into the desert at gunpoint, sans clothes, water, or food, then
follows him around, waiting for him to die of exposure. I haven't read the book
since I was a young adult myself, but I remember the story as being fairly
gripping, and worthy of periodic re-reads.
There was a
TV adaptation of the story in 1974, starring Andy Griffith as Madec,
though the character's name was changed. A young Sam Bottoms played Ben.
Unfortunately, it's pretty thoroughly unavailable. But the book's still in
print, and it's pretty easy to find. Most of White's other books aren't,
unfortunately, but it's easy to see his work in film: He and horror-film
gimmick-meister William Castle made a series of films together, including 13
Ghosts, House
On Haunted Hill,
and the infamous The Tingler.
From The Enchantingly Slanted Dept.
I heard a song once, and I am 90 percent sure
it was a song by Pavement which was released on a single. The chorus was
something about gangsters and LSD. It has haunted me for the past 12 years.
Please tell me I have not been imagining this song. I have not found it on any
Pavement LP or EP I have. I have all of the Pavement LPs and Watery Domestic and the
B-sides from the re-release of Slanted & Enchanted. I know that is not
much to go on, but I am hoping The A.V. Club has a Pavement fan who would
instantly recognize the song from the meager clues.
Casey Brown
The A.V. Club has a Pavement fan in
Josh Modell:
The song you seek is "Gangsters & Pranksters,"
which was originally released on the limited-edition Pacific Trim EP, and later re-released
as part of the two-disc Wowee Zowee Sordid Sentinels set. The lyrics, as
grabbed from the Interweb, are below. It used to be tough to track down all
that Pavement, but the band is making it easier with each deluxe two-disc
reissue.
Donnybrook between two gangsters
And a bunch of merry pranksters
Two against a .22,
Well who d'ya think is gonna win
That… fight… fight?
Ten ta one it's the gangsters,
Those pranksters they can't even fight!
Gangsters like their knuckles bloody
Pranksters spike the drinks of their buddies
Gangsters treat their ladies right
And pranksters curse their chickless plight
(Aw man, there's no dames)
I'VE GOT ALL THIS HARVARD LSD
WHY WON'T ANYONE FUCK ME?!?
Night Terrors
As a child, I saw two things on
television that terrified me. I only recall moments of each, but you might be
able to help me figure out what they're from so that I may better understand
these bizarre memories. I saw them both somewhere between '80 and '83.
1) I'm guessing it was either a Night Gallery
or Ray Bradbury Presents that had this episode. I think it's about
an evil vacuum cleaner that sucks a person to death by putting its nozzle over
his or her nose and mouth. The scene that plays in my head is where there are
two children huddled in a closet trying to be quiet while the machine kills
their mom.
2) This one I'm even more vague on
specifics. I think it might be British. The plot involves a milkman who poisons
people's milk. I believe he puts the poison on the glass bottles' green foil
tops. There's one shot where you see an entire family slumped dead over their
breakfast. The whole concept of a cheerful humming man delivering these killer
bottles freaked me out and made me realize that there are horrible people in
the world.
Thank you very much for your time
and consideration. Hopefully you can at least give me a better idea of the
actual plots versus what my young mind might have concocted.
Rebecca
Tasha Robinson again:
I'm not sure you need help with the plots,
Rebecca—you're doing pretty good on your own. You just need a little help
with the sourcing. Item #1 up above isn't from Night Gallery or Ray Bradbury
Presents,
it's from season four of Tales From The Darkside. The
name of the episode is "Hush," and it's closely based on a sublimely
creepy short story of the same name by Zenna Henderson, a largely (and
unjustly) out-of-print science-fiction author who was most active in the '60s.
You can find it in her (out of print, but generally easy to find) anthology The
Anything Box,
a book I highly recommend. Tales From The Darkside, alas, isn't available on
DVD, so it'll be harder to actually re-watch the episode. It was on YouTube
recently enough to show up on Google searches, but it's since been
pulled—unlike many other Tales episodes. Maybe it'll turn up again eventually.
The second one is a bit harder to track. While
there was a Tales From The Darkside episode about a weird wish-granting killer
milkman ("The Milkman Cometh," from season three), I watched that on YouTube,
and it doesn't have anything like the image you remember, though it does have a
younger-but-still-craggy Robert Forster to recommend it. It seems more likely
that one of the many Twilight Zone-derived twist-story series of the '80s partially
adapted Stephen King's "Morning Deliveries" from his anthology Skeleton Crew. It's a vignette pulled
from a scrapped novel, about a cheerfully whistling milkman making his rounds,
dropping off cream at one home, poison gas and tarantulas in milk bottles at
the next. It sounds very similar to what you're describing. Unfortunately, the
IMDB doesn't list any such adaptation, and Google searches came to nothing.
Anyone out there know whether "Morning Deliveries" perhaps made it across the
pond and turned up on TV there, or whether Rebecca is remembering something else entirely?
Next week: A sacrificial company and some
reasons we aren't pimps. Send your questions to [email protected].