shady side of the moon

Alright! The next few episodes compose a disorganized excuse for a story arc where shobu beats a bunch of dudes and wins a junior championship; this'll get him in with the 'temple' who we have established are BAD GUYS and who hopefully have more threatening opponents than these guys.

Also, I'm switching critics ^-^ We're going with Umberto Eco now. We read an article from him about Casablanca explaining what makes a cult film. He explains the idea of a 'magic frame' or as he also calls is an intertextual archetype. A magic frame is a simple character type, or scene (or anything you can use in a story, really) that bypasses most of the brain and speaks directly to the viscera. In this way you can create something high and admirable even with such a fragmented film as Casablanca (and it is fragmented. It's almost like the writer's couldn't decide what genre they wanted to do... so they simply brought in all of them. And with so much magic jammed into one movie it couldn't help but become a cult object.)

Examples are abundant. The hero stands alone in a high place, staring into space as the wind blows: a powerful symbol of solitary strength (someone in class pointed out that this even gets used with the heroine in Pride and Prejudice.) The cornered and doomed army rallies one final time and charges into the thick of the enemy to die in a blaze of glory. The bitter, battle-hardened man finds hope and redemption in the love of a woman (this is the default plot for action movies.) And, taking one from Casablanca itself, the sly and world-weary hero redeems himself by giving up the chance to be with the woman he loves so that she can be happy. Or, if it's a line, I'll be endlessly quoted. Memes are about evenly divided into things than invoke this sort of magic and things that are just stupid-funny (the ultimate gesture of defiance in 300 being an example of the first, and the terrible line readings from Troll 2 being the second.)

All magic frames invoke a sort of deja vu in the viewer or reader. You've seen them a million times before, but what makes them magic rather than merely cliche is that, even if you'd never seen it happen, the scene would work. There's a good reason that the old stories are so old; they are a part of us.

Anyway now I attempt to apply this to a children's card game >.> The plot is largely preserved from the original japanese series and I suspect Eco will not be kind to it. I should mention that no matter how dumb the plot gets the dubbers have managed to keep the show entertaining by making fun of it and with clever announcer banter.

( I was right, he wasn't kind to it. )

Mikhail Bakhtin: a Russian literary critic. Disapproved of any organized system for interpreting literature. Very interested in forms of parody and the interaction/competition of languages and forms of languages. Once used the word 'seriolaughing.'

My evil plan is to use this fellow's theories on heteroglossy and satire to analyze a gag dub of a japanese tv show about a children's card game. But not that children's card game, a different one. This will be rambling and not pretty but it will be practise for lit class and kind of fun for me so oh well ^-^;

( CLICK AT OWN RISK )