Mamoru Hosoda’s Belle and Densha Otoko’s Internet Dream

Belle is pretty comfortable in her provincial life in this version, animated with sheer beauty.

Belle is not the first Mamoru Hosoda film I have seen, I recall liking The Girl Who Leapt Through Time a lot when I was younger, but I missed out on Summer Wars and his other acclaimed features. I’ve heard his virtual worlds grate against the sensibilities of some people, yet I am not among these detractors, as Belle took me back to my teenage years trying to navigate the online open steppe where barbarous trolls reigned supreme and my unfortunately named Asperger’s Anime Blog (Hans Asperger was a Nazi, I’ll be seeing him in paranormal rehab if the Taoists are right about the afterlife) became a magnet to my ex-cyberstalker demanding that I return to the forum where our feud originated to apologise to him and his peers for my trying to pull a Densha Otoko by asking out some girl who looked like Yomiko Readman who I saw at the bookshop once. My imaginary girlfriend backup plan when she vanished into the ether of those shelves which used to house the manga volumes of Shonen Jump infuriated my ex-cyberstalker who dragged his heels about helping me until the girl in question was no longer there. I’ve learned a fair bit since then regarding the tendency for young anime fans to fetishise Asian women who are now being murdered by psychopaths in the United States, and I’m not proud of values I held when I still owned a trilby hat, but I kept Densha Otoko in my heart even though the dream of internet forums being a place where inept nerds could be given dating advice faded. My attempts to retrofit the values of Train Man onto message boards with pre-existing communities who were doing their own thing were met with either confusion or hostility. The translated 2chan threads have since been consigned to oblivion, but my paperback copy of Train Man I bought at Abbey Bookshop in Sydney remains as an eternal reminder of that phase in my life where I wanted to be a hero so bad. Even if I did get with that pretty Asian lady with glasses and a red tartan jacket who enchanted me from a glance, I would have rescued her from nothing. I had no Train Man leverage to warrant pursuing a relationship with this human being I projected my feelings onto, no fairy-tale romance where I saved her from a drunk on public transport. When I think of Train Man now, I think of his story as modern day folklore, a Robin Hood figure who may never have existed at all, but the idea he represented captured my imagination. It was a simple ethos, the idea that anyone, even a hopeless otaku in love, could be a hero when the situation required one.

Which brings me back to Belle, which is a retelling of Beauty and the Beast done in cyberspace. There’s no Angela Lansbury singing about tales as old as time, but the music in this film is top notch and drives the story forward with ballads of both joy and regret. Poor Suzu is a mousey schoolgirl whose mother sacrificed her life to save the child of a stranger when she was a kid, and she feels abandoned by her female parent through this fatal decision. Yet she gets hold of VR technology and becomes a new woman in the digital world of U, rendered in stunning animation which makes Facebook’s Metaverse look like the dog-shit that it is. U is a feast for the senses, a delight to behold, and even though it is populated by social media mavens and certain users faking their whole family with kids identity, it’s never a cess-pit of corruption like the real life 2chan is. Every Western iteration of 2chan multiplies by two like 8chan and strays further from Densha’s light, not to mention the Kiwi Farms and Onion Farms which documents the torment of Sonichu creator Christine Weston Chandler for the sick amusement of curious onlookers. Mamoru Hosoda instead treats us with a dazzling utopian dream of the future with no NFT scammers or “lolcow” bear-baiters to menace this PG rated wonderland. Sure, there’s a little bit of drama when an artist who tattoos himself with bruises (a red herring when trying to identify the mysterious beast) is called out by his apparent ex-girlfriend for faking her death for social media attention, but we are spared the worst of online horrors like SWAT-ing and revenge porn. In a world where mass shootings are live-streamed on Twitch, the charming fairy-tale of Belle may seem naive and divorced from harsh reality, but there is enough truth in the fiction to move audiences.

Suzu’s virtual concert is interrupted by both the Beast and the U version of Reddit moderators gate-crashing into her event where she would’ve sung on a CGI whale with speakers implanted in it, which provokes her curiosity as to who the Beast is. Like her, the Beast is an anonymous figure with both haters and defenders. Belle’s anonymity masks her deep anxiety rooted in the grief of losing her mother, whereas the Beast cloaks himself in the fugitive identity of a stranger to protect himself from the harshness of his home life. Suzu juggles her responsibilities as both an ordinary schoolgirl and a v-tuber sensation well, even though sudden online fame gives her panic attacks. Her friends at school are part of music programs or kayaking clubs, but when Suzu tries to express herself IRL she hides her voice from the shelter of a glockenspiel instrument she’s curled up in a ball behind. There is a popular girl who’s just as nervous as she is, despite being beautiful and good at saxophone. Everyone is going through their own struggle to survive, even a successful baseball player who bears the scars of childhood surgeries to save his life.

The Beast’s castle is a gorgeous digital treasure, decorated with roses and gothic architecture. There are pictures hung on the wall with shattered glass. The Lend Me Your Voice sequence apes the Disney Beauty and the Beast ballroom scene which is entrenched in Millennial childhood memory, but does its own thing when Belle leans in for a kiss only to be refused and be permitted to rest her face against this creature for comfort on its own terms. Unlike Densha Otoko where the plot hinges on a scruffy nerd going on a quest to earn the love of his fated Hermes (named after the designer teacups sent by the woman he adores in gratitude for being her saviour), there is not really a hint of romance between these two entwined digital personas. Suzu is cornered by mods looking for the Beast, and she refuses to snitch on her vulnerable companion. Somehow, Suzu gets hold of a live-stream where the Beast’s IRL counterpart and his brother are being verbally abused by his father. The Beast’s avatar cloak is covered in bruises, as the biometric data suggests his user has been hurt several times over. When Suzu tries to contact the Beast and her brother IRL, the Beast shuts her down with a speech about how everybody says they want to help, but they never do. I watched this scene with a bitter reflection of recognition of how my online shenanigans trying to be the shining white knight affected people back in the day, where I was being a real Don Quixote tilting at pre-bipolar disorder diagnosis windmills. Suzu then decides to earn the Beast’s trust by being unveiled by the moderators in front of everyone, which she does at the shock of her millions of fans. She’s just an ordinary schoolgirl with freckles underneath her attractive avatar, but her heroism is yet to reach its climax. The moderator subplot reminded me of the saga going on with popular anonymous Twitter account PR Guy, who was accused of conspiracies that he was working for Australian Labor Party figures like Dan Andrews, but he turned out to just be some dude who had negative opinions about Liberal Party policies. The people didn’t love him any less when they found out he was just an ordinary man with a Troy McClure avatar.

Unveiling herself as just some schoolgirl does not diminish Suzu’s power, as her fans sing along with her in unison. Which brings me back to old Densha Otoko, and the two times I have seen his internet dream in action, albeit modified to suit the times. I was in a Google Plus hangout once with some Japanese cartoonists who were drawing things suggested to them by the chat, at one point I brought up that Australia has Christmas in summer which lead to one of the Japanese mangaka saying “SURFIN’ SANTA?” and drawing that mental image. There was a translator, but I somehow managed to communicate to these artists the identities of the legendary creators Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy and Kimba) and Tatsuhiko Takimoto (Welcome to the NHK) through the device of holding up tiny LEGO men I had constructed of them. Just by looking at these tiny minifigures, the artists could identify my tribute to their men of culture. I then sung Alanis Morissette and Kenny Loggins songs to them through my iMac’s web-camera. My mother interrupted me in the middle of belting out “IT’S LIKE RAIIIINNNNN ON. YOUR WEDDING DAY…” and was mortified as to where she went wrong as a parent. Years later I would see Alanis herself in concert, and among the tragics I was accepted when the crowd began to castigate their collective ex-boyfriends shouting the lyrics of You Oughta Know with group intensity you’d expect from a Manowar show. I totally buy the idea of the world being united in song via a live-stream that transcends national boundaries, because I’ve lived it, and the second time I saw Densha’s dream fulfilled was when HBomberguy did a stream for the transgender charity Mermaids to spite the once respected TERF Graham Linehan. I don’t understand how someone who could create something as hilarious as Father Ted could sink so low as to spend his entire online clout bullying trans youth, but for some reason there was a mass-gathering of spite throwing money at trans charities while streaming Donkey Kong 64 for a worthy cause. It felt a bit mean-spirited at first, perhaps a diversion from what Densha Otoko intended, but in its own way it felt righteous for the Western internet to experience the Densha vibe while shitting on the legacy of a prominent transphobe with archaic video game software. In that moment, it felt like the internet shrugged off its cynicism to prove via Chuck Tingle’s involvement that love was indeed real, and we weren’t stupid for believing in ourselves. Densha would’ve been proud of us, wherever he is now.

Belle’s finale involves Suzu going on the train far away from the countryside she inhabits to Tokyo’s urban district to save the Beast from his abusive father, because social services won’t intervene fast enough, and when they are united IRL there’s a sense of relief that they both trust each other now. The awful asshole dad who mistreats them rears his head, and Suzu protects them with her own body as a shield. She is scratched on the cheek by his fingernails tearing and clawing at her, but she stares back into his empty soul with accusatory silence. Such a powerful moment of visual storytelling, in a film full of imagery which might make you dismiss it as style over substance. Suzu goes home physically and emotionally changed, regaining a sliver of her former confidence when her mother sacrificed herself for a stranger. The Beast’s brother said “You’re my hero” - a title only offered to his own sibling prior to this. She sacrifices the scar on her cheek to help a pair of siblings who grant her no reward except goodness of the heart, some real Girl Guides shit.

I remember the first time I met one of my dearest online friends in person, I was going interstate up to Queensland to catch a GoMA screening of Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards in 35MM. I didn’t really know what my buddy looked like prior to this, so when I met him at the airport with my father escorting me there, it was a surprise. He took me to an arcade bar where we played the X-Men cabinet and to Rocking Horse Records where I picked up disco LPs by The Village People and this obscure recording artist identified as Witch Queen. Our friendship grew ten-fold by the hour, and we saw the movie together. Even if my friend Rhys disliked the Bakshi film, I was glad I was there to see it before Disney locked up the print in their 20th Century Fox acquisition vault forever. We began our bond through mutual autism, and it continues with our fixation on antique media preservation. I made some of my best friends I’ve ever met online, and although I’ve been hurt in the past and have become shy about oversharing certain details of my lore to strangers, I am fortunate to exist in an era where technology has allowed such relationships to exist. Belle reminds us that the internet, with all its problems, doesn’t need to be ugly or cruel. It can be fabulous.

Emerging From The Darkness In Oz

Cathy Wilcox’s excellent political cartoon Out of the Dark is a beautiful work which requires almost a decade of Australian context to appreciate.

Imagine if you will, you lived in a country where for the past almost-decade, your country was run by a crew of conservative cronies whose corruption was not investigated by the complacent media who reinforced their power by giving them a free ride in the newspapers, and the opposition party leader kept getting cut off during TV interviews by biased reporters. It’s bad enough that the Sun King Rupert Murdoch is still meddling in our affairs from across the ocean through Foxtel, Sky News and his myriad tabloids, Channel 7 and Channel Nine are in lockstep with the conservatives as well, hence it’s difficult to hear any shred of a leftist message outside of social media which the powers that be want to regulate to our democracy’s disadvantage.

If you’re not Australian, the sudden relief washing over our nation at the moment doesn’t make any sense. Americans might be able to compare it to the pressure released once Joe Biden won against Trump, but then again American exceptionalism causes the yank mind to ignore what’s going on down under until another mass shooting happens and former prime minister John Howard is dragged out of the woodwork to argue for the success of the gun ban/buyback scheme. How soon we forget that for almost ten years, Australian politics has consisted of Question Time televising old men bellowing at each other and achieving very little to confront the major issues like climate change and housing affordability which affects multiple generations of our country’s population. 2013-2022 was a weird, awful time to be an Australian, where nothing was normal or okay. Tony Abbott ate a row onion, Barnaby Joyce cheated on his wife and had a kid with his mistress, Gladys Berejiklian threw taxpayer’s money at Wagga Wagga because she loved her boyfriend Daryl who let her down. You could take an afternoon nap, and have a different prime minister than the one you had before, because leadership spills were a constant threat to the stability of the two major parties.

And yet, after almost a decade of squabbling and in-fighting, the trash has been taken out and for once the adults seem to be in charge again. No more Scott Morrison photo ops where he tackled a child during a soccer match. No more having to sit through YouTube ads for Clive Palmer and Craig Kelly’s United Australia Party espousing conspiracy theories about the World Health Organisation and blaming the Labor Party for all manner of things. I couldn’t bear to watch the news at night during the election for the sake of my mental health, I had no faith Albo was gonna win this one, and I spent weeks depressed staring at the bedroom wall as I doom-scrolled on my phone for hints of hope. Jade Crypt of Wonders is a website which has an ideological slant towards Taoist philosophy and theology, so you can imagine my delight when the Liberal Party hammering war drums about China bit them in the arse regarding Chinese voters who didn’t appreciate their roots being demonised by the federal government. I might be a white guy who converted to Taoism because an art gallery gift shop sold me a copy of the Tao Te Ching, but I do not endorse this anti-Chinese rhetoric the Liberal Party has been dog-whistling to their hard right racist voters (as opposed to the moderate teals who left the Liberal Party for being sexist to women). My gods are Chinese now, Scott Morrison, I will choose them over you any day.

The election night did not turn into a hellish Don’s Party situation as I feared, Liberals lost seat after seat to Greens and Independent candidates, even in the stronghold of North Sydney they weren’t safe. Trent Zimmerman had his concession speech earlier on in the night, which led to the Josh Frydenberg concession speech where you could see his wife on the verge of tears because they hoped Josh would be Scott Morrison’s replacement as Liberal leader. When Scott Morrison conceded, there was joy in the room as me and my friends yelled insults at the television and bid farewell to one of the worst Prime Ministers Australia ever had. When Anthony Albanese did his victory speech, I was already home to my parents’ place but I was glued to the TV watching Albo reference the Uluru Statement as one of his first major issues he wished to tackle. There was mention of kindness, and governing for people no matter what religion they are. Well, Albo, I never thought you could do it, but you got my vote. Now close down Manus Island and Nauru pronto.

I’m not sure I can put into words, however I’ve tried here, how relieved I am at the election result. The threats against the NDIS funding my family relies on and Labor axing the Cashless Debit Card for Centrelink payments was a mighty weight off my mind. As a disabled person struggling with bipolar on top of autism spectrum disorder, my ability to pay rent to my parents through welfare makes me feel like less of a burden to my family and society at large. Even as a fan of Welcome to the NHK (both the anime and the light novel it’s based on), there’s a limit to the amount of hikikomori-ism I am willing to justify in my online behaviour.

2022 has been hard for me, I’ve had a few doctor’s appointments and now have to strap a CPAP machine to my face to treat my severe sleep apnea which my health insurance refused to pay for. I can’t say I sleep like a baby, but I don’t choke myself awake as often. Here’s hoping the rest of the year treats me better, and this election result is an omen of good things to come.

Graduating from the Class of Professor Monroe

TRIGGER WARNING: This essay discusses Cannibal Holocaust and something worse.

My journey into appreciating horror has had its ups and downs, from my first brush with the Friday the 13th franchise startled by Jason jumping out of the water, to watching the exhilarating chainsaw duel in Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy at the Hayden Orpheum, to being there when the 2018 Halloween direct sequel was in theatres - I haven’t seen everything the genre has to offer, I didn’t start out as a badass who’d buy a Blu-Ray of Martyrs and general admission Slayer tickets. I was a former wuss who avoided horror instead of becoming a friend of it, freaked out by Rail Chase at Sega World Sydney and hesitant to try anything too spooky. That changed of course, by the time I was in college I was seeking out banned exploitation movies like Caligula which I got an uncut copy of from EzyDVD Burwood when they still had a brick and mortar shop. I acquired Salo when it had been given an R-18+ certificate by the OFLC I despised, because they did not protect me well enough with their ratings advice when I needed them the most. More on that later. Then a little film called Cannibal Holocaust came to my attention, I’d seen the DVD stocked amongst the shelves at JB Hi-Fi where I bought most of my physical media, but until a now-cancelled filth elder I respected did a comedic review of the film I wasn’t game enough to touch it, let alone buy it for my personal collection of home video. The first time you watch a horror movie which is truly scary, there’s always the sense of dread of what could await you in the sections which film critics only hint at in their reviews for the sake of reducing risk of spoilers. Cannibal Holocaust shocks from the very title alone, it’s a film hard to defend due to its copious amounts of animal cruelty, because some absolute madman named Ruggero Deodato decided it was worth the risk of being pilloried for having made an alleged snuff film by blurring the lines of hyper-reality with graphic special effects and actual scenes of butchering a turtle to convince you that the rest of the violence is more than an “impaled” woman sitting on a bicycle seat with a piece of balsa wood in her mouth. I have at times gotten defensive when Cannibal Holocaust receives criticism for this unpleasant aspect baked into the celluloid of its being, and it’s hard for me to recommend Cannibal Holocaust as a work of cinematic genius when the process of its creation mutilated animals for entertainment. It’s also not the worst movie I’ve ever seen by a long-shot, but I’ll get to that.

I love how Riz Ortolani continues to inspire artists to reinterpret his beautiful music for video nasties, like this absolute chad H.M. Hammarin making Cannibal Holocaust sound romantic.

The reasons why I continue to defend Cannibal Holocaust transcend simple edge-lord shock-jockery, but to really delve into why Cannibal Holocaust changed my life we have to get a bit autobiographical. See, back when I was stuck in the trenches of my Pathways Program where I did my HSC over a number of years instead of all at once, I had an elective called Society and Culture which kept me sane. It was not available to previous students who abandoned me to graduate up to college, and this class was one of the few respites from clinical depression I had during this dismal period in my life. It was my first taste of anthropology proper, and with the help of my aptly named teacher Mr. Champion I fell in love with the social sciences. I did my Personal Interest Project comparing “masculinity in the movies”, contrasting Hollywood in Fight Club to Bollywood in Shah Rukh Khan’s classic Devdas. Unsurprising results ensued, teenagers from Queensland who shall remain anonymous thought the more openly emotional Shah Rukh Khan was a bit “gay” compared to Brad Pitt when I did a focus group with them.. These kids disrespected Shah Rukh Khan, icon and sex symbol in Bollywood, because they didn’t know any better and I wasn’t allowed to judge their ignorance of Indian cinema’s premium grade hunks, and if I reminded them of this hotness I would have been accused by them of being homosexual myself. I was very young then and didn’t know what to do about Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden being seen as a better role model than Shah Rukh Khan as a lower class Indian in love with a woman so much that he’s weeping over her. This focus group taught me a depressing lesson in Australian masculine ideals, and I suppose I should be grateful they provided their unfiltered opinions for the accuracy of my research.

I couldn’t find my Personal Interest Project (PIP) in the garage, but I found this old textbook as evidence of my academic curiosity instead. I didn’t even get this tome from high school, I was so hungry for knowledge about sociology, that I took it from a university clearance giveaway.

Mr. Champion gave me good marks for my Personal Interest Project, and he was a companion when I had few of those to go around. I appreciated this education in concepts like globalisation and cultural relativism, one of my assignments was covering the otaku subculture when I was obsessed with anime and still blogged about it often. My homework on Speed Racer kept me occupied and gave me something to talk about with the other students, I recall doing an assignment on the Amish with Harrison Ford starring in Witness as a featured text of study. I still have the mini-DVD discs in my storage boxes which I can never reveal to anyone because of the terms and conditions of my focus group study and the ethics involved. Society and Culture was a winner in my books, and at the tail end of my high school career I couldn’t have asked for a better source of academic comfort food. As an autistic adult I was now learning about how men talk to other men about stuff, and how masculinity functioned, long before the toxic prefix complicated everything in my mind about who I was and what I could be. I still owned a fedora (which I later donated to Vinnie’s to get that relic of my Sensitive New Age Guy phase out of my house), and I grew past adolescence prior to Jordan Peterson ruining the discourse of manhood by attacking Marxist thought and belly-aching about BIPOC feminists having problems with white straight men.

Society and Culture remains a hazy melange of pleasant memories from my secret past as someone that could’ve majored in anthropology, but I majored in Photomedia (now Media Arts on my Sydney College of the Arts diploma) instead, because I wanted to be around creative people and artistic ideas. Mr. Champion moulded me into a student who was eager to learn about the world around me, and I miss him a lot, but one day I would find his cinematic equivalent in the performance of Debbie Does Dallas porn star Robert Kerman. The Kerminator, who appeared in Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox and Eaten Alive (as well as a brief appearance in the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man film) exemplified all I had learned from Mr. Champion in my classes, a refusal to kowtow to racist imperialist thought, even if Mr. Champion didn’t have the porn-stache or a pipe like Professor Monroe did in Cannibal Holocaust the anti-imperialist ethos towards what we called “developing nations” instead of primitive was there. My autistic obsession with Robert Kerman’s Professor Monroe character wasn’t sexual in nature, I just saw a handsome guy who was wiser than the average American about places in the world that weren’t the United States. There was no fear that he was going to invade your country for oil in the name of freedom and liberty, he was just going to spill the straight facts about the situation. Every time I watch Cannibal Holocaust, he is the guiding light that leads me out of the darkness, and each viewing I can trust that Professor Monroe isn’t going to leave me behind.

Before we get to the Kerminator, we’re introduced to the exposition by this news reporter who calls the missing camera crew “children of the space age”, whatever the hell that means.

The actors in Cannibal Holocaust are all smiles now, but they won’t be grinning when an Italian tyrant with a camera holds them hostage deep in the rainforest working for mere pesos a day.

Cannibals munching on a human arm deep in the jungle, finger licking good!

Professor Monroe arrives by plane, landing on water and giving his greeting party a wave.

Professor Monroe gets a briefing for his expedition into the jungle from paramilitary dudes.

Professor Monroe is a rare breed in Western media, he is neither Willard from Apocalypse Now who carries the “savagery” of the jungle with him after killing Col. Kurtz, nor is he the stereotyped grave robber that Indiana Jones is as the poster child for archaeology and the imperialist theft that comes with that brand of pulp adventurer’s profession. I love Indiana Jones, but he’s concerned with the stuff created by world cultures rather than the people affected by the actions of imperial powers plundering from developing nations who have no say in where these priceless treasures end up. In an era where we’re decolonising our approach to stolen artefacts with The Unfiltered History Tour and initiatives like it, Indy is the hero who feels like the old relic who should be in a museum whilst Professor Monroe has yet to reveal his message to a mainstream audience. The unfortunate animal cruelty contributes to Cannibal Holocaust being overlooked, and Robert Kerman disowned the film over these sequences. Most people will avoid or seek out the animal cruelty-free cut of Cannibal Holocaust, and it’s sad that Robert Kerman’s excellent performance as one of the film’s few likeable characters gets saddled with the baggage of this explicit content. Cannibal Holocaust is disturbing to sit through for a lot of reasons, such as the dissonant soundtrack by Riz Ortolani whose opening theme sounds like a dying dream almost, but Kerman isn’t one of them. He lends this movie a gentle, poignant soul it wouldn’t otherwise have, and for evidence of that see other cannibal cycle movies from the time like Cannibal Ferox where subtlety is thrown out the window like so many dismembered genitals. I was bummed out when Umberto Lenzi died, I liked his The Man From Deep River a lot, but for my money Cannibal Holocaust aims to a higher purpose and Lenzi’s Ferox revels in the mutilation of both animals and human characters for a rather hollow moral about violence breeding more violence tacked on at the end. Cannibal Holocaust bothers to follow through with its satirical point, Professor Monroe is distinct from his other appearances in Eaten Alive as a somewhat cranky jungle explorer for hire, and Cannibal Ferox as Lt. Rizzo. He’s more of an academic thrust into the bush by what we find out to be tragic circumstances. He’s likeable, even though he sometimes vomits at what he sees, and condemns the drug use of his tracker guide Chaco and a captured villager doing cocaine. This scene progresses to the on-screen killing of a coatimundi by one of the tracking party members using a switchblade, mutilated by the actor who murders it in a less than humane fashion. I’ve never seen the animal cruelty free version for myself, subjecting myself to the full strength experience has always been my preferred viewing because that’s how I first saw it and not having those scenes there feels weird to me. It’s upsetting, and it should be, however I once showed this movie to a female Fijian-Indian friend and she was more disturbed by the fake rape scenes than the genuine animal cruelty. I’m non-binary, a he/they and I’m still learning about the parts of me that are woman, and I’ve figured out most women are afraid of being raped more than they are of anything else in horror movies. It’s a legit concern, on a primal level I don’t yet understand, and when I get asked to accompany female friends to the ride home so they don’t get attacked I have to process the terror they feel about the mere possibilities of rape culture and its consequences. Meanwhile, Cannibal Holocaust’s animal cruelty is reminiscent of how people kill and cook dinner in some parts of the world and Westerners are quite removed from the process of meat ending up on their plates. Ruggero Deodato shouldn’t have filmed animals getting butchered on camera, maybe he was trying to save money on gore effects, maybe he was just an asshole, but you can not get away with doing something like that today. When Jackass Forever has approval from the Humane Association despite its bear and bee stunts, you really have to gain perspective and realise how low the bar is to not be a monster when you’re directing a movie for wide distribution.

Chaco seems to have escaped from the 1983 Scarface central casting agency, given the way he talks and conducts himself. I do like him as a character despite his stereotypical accent.

The first half of the movie is straight out of a pulp adventure story, however modernised to sympathise with the natives that Monroe and company encounter. At the beginning, Monroe half expects to find Alan Yates and his camera crew alive, however that outcome’s likelihood diminishes the further they go into the jungle and find evidence of Western items that don’t belong in the jungle around the necks of the natives and clustered in makeshift shrines. I find the Adulteress’ Punishment sequence interesting because it demonstrates “cultural relativism” which I learned about in Society and Culture in action, and Ruggero Deodato stretches that concept to its limit as Professor Monroe has to be held back at knifepoint when shit gets too real for whitey to handle. This scene is quite disturbing, but due to the mud on a white woman to make her look native it’s somewhat diminished in realism - which other gnarly sequences in the film top in their unpleasantness. This woman is being executed for infidelity, and we are told the man doing her in must kill his wife or be killed himself by the tribespeople. After having her head caved in her body is floated off on the river, and the expedition trying to recover the film crew moves on to venture deeper into the jungle following the tribesman so his village can be located.

The Adulteress’ Punishment scene is shot voyeuristic and sinister, accompanied by Riz Ortolani’s track of the same name. It reminds me of the similar scene from Mad Max 2 where the Gyro Captain watches a rape of a woman by raiders through a telescope.

The expedition crew bunker down as they try to negotiate with the natives.

The crew member demonstrates his bravery by stripping naked, allowing the tribesmen to shoot darts at his feet in the mud.

When the expedition crew arrives at the village, it becomes clear that the cameramen left a mess. behind for Professor Monroe and company to deal with.

An expedition member pulls out a switch blade not to intimidate, but to teach.

One of the presumable tribal elders demonstrates the switchblade to much rejoicing.

The expedition crew are rewarded with a wholesome, non-cannibal dinner for their gift.

The phrase “cultural exchange” versus “cultural appropriation” is important to discuss with Harold Monroe’s arc in Cannibal Holocaust, he engages the various tribes he encounters on their own terms and bothers to draw a distinction between their cultures as actual people. Ruggero Deodato decided to not fictionalise the tribes’ names in an effort for realism, and it’s a rather unfortunate depiction of several ethnic groups to show them as cannibals. There’s a battle between these two tribes (the Shamatari and the Tree People) where rape is used as a weapon and stone tools cut open the bellies of the fallen, and the expedition crew intervenes by shooting their guns. They gain access to the Tree People’s hospitality for their assistance, but the tribe is still wary of the outsiders despite inviting them to see an execution of a criminal by mutilation. Professor Monroe narrates the difficulties of communication with the Yanamomo before deciding to swim naked as a gesture of goodwill towards the natives, which is quite poetic for this film:

“We weren’t able to get anything out of the Yanamomo, except for the wristwatch they gave to us as a token of their gratitude to an ally. An ally they continue to fear and mistrust. So I decided to try an experiment in psychology, to strip myself completely. Clothes, weapons, dog-tags, rings, everything. To become like them, naked and unfettered as Adam.”

The expedition crew violate the Star Trek Prime Directive and interrupt a turf war.

The Tree People watch on in silent suspicion, despite the gratitude shown by their tribe.

The expedition crew are gifted a wrist-watch, which is presumed to belong to the missing filmmakers. Not a good sign for bringing these white people home alive.

In order to gain the trust of the tribe, Professor Monroe swims with the women naked as Adam.

After putting on his pants, Professor Monroe is led by the women to the grisly discovery of the missing film-crew’s skeletal remains and their camera equipment.

Besides the switchblade gift scene, one sequence in particular stuck with me in the cultural exchange department, Professor Monroe narrates the situation he’s in with the film canisters:

“The Tree People would not let us bury the ghastly remains, they painted ochre, to drive away the evil spirits which the dead represented. Once again I ask myself what unspeakable crime could’ve called for such atrocious retribution. I know our lives are hanging by a thread, but I can’t turn back without at least trying to recover the footage that Alan Yates and the others paid for with their lives. I’m thinking of the enormous human and scientific interest this is going to contain. I must do something. Chaco and Miguel can’t possibly understand this, yet I must somehow gain the confidence of these savages. After all, they too have rules of conduct.”

Professor Monroe shoots a few rounds of ammunition at the sky, throwing his gun on the ground and lifting a cassette tape player like a boombox to the tribe he’s trying to negotiate with. He plays the recording of the tribe singing, and it gets a response by inviting them to dinner. Harold Monroe hesitates when he realises what’s on the menu, but part of that is due to the actor Robert Kerman being Jewish and biting on a piece of beef placed around the pork meat he was given by Ruggero Deodato to munch into. Like I said, this wasn’t the most ethical film shoot in the world, but at least Robert Kerman’s Jewishness was respected enough by the director to compromise on a prop food item. It’s interesting to note that a year prior in 1979, in the alternate ending to Apocalypse Now, John Milus intended to fire-bomb the Kurtz compound with the natives inside (which Francis Ford Coppola decided against to pursue his somewhat naive ending where war itself is meant to be interpreted as ending), but in Cannibal Holocaust released a year later in 1980… the natives aren’t shown to be subservient to whites nor are they shown as enemies to be slaughtered like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. They’re shown as cannibals, sure, but they are people with their own laws which they live by. Throughout the first half of this movie, it is clear that something has gone horribly wrong between the natives and the so-called civilised people who encountered them, and the suspense of finding that out drives the tension.

First, he fires the gun, and throws it onto the ground when he’s out of bullets.

Then he goes for the tape player, playing a recording of tribal songs.

The Tree People are into these phat beats, and start making a commotion.

The tribal shaman, tape recorder in hand, prepares to offer Professor Monroe food.

Professor Monroe bites into the flesh of what we can assume is human meat.

We then cut to the hanging film canisters, which the documentary crew left behind in death.

Professor Monroe is back in New York, explaining how he got the film canisters back.

The second half of the film contains the bulk of the found footage gimmick, and Professor Monroe becomes less of an academic turned jungle explorer than the voice of reason and/or ethics in media. He tells a news interviewer what he had to do to get the film canisters out of the jungle. They thought that because he was capable of capturing the human voice, that he was capable of capturing their spirit, and that the Yanomomo tribe had no idea what a movie was yet understood the great and terrible power of the film canisters which unleashed what we discover to be abominable violence. The idea of there being an exchange rather than plundering these recordings from the tribe who held them hostage is reinforced again as Professor Monroe enters his second arc of the film where he pieces together the truth of the narrative which the editors of a sensational and borderline exploitative documentary distorts. Professor Monroe hesitates when he is offered the opportunity to host the program which killed the film crew who shot it, because at this point none of the footage has been viewed, and nobody has any idea about what horrors this criminal evidence contains. The TV executives recommend the film crew’s bereaved parents and wives be the judge about whether to air the footage, and to further shoot themselves in the foot, Professor Monroe is then shown one of their previous mondo documentaries called The Last Road To Hell, in which executions are staged by paid soldiers. This sequence of executions marks the point of no return for Yates and his crew, where their ethics are compromised by exploitation of their subject matter. Monroe reacts as you may expect to this material, dreading the worst from what he has yet to preview from the canisters salvaged from the jungle.

The assortment of TV executives at the network try to convince Professor Monroe to be the host of The Green Inferno documentary when it airs, which might not be the best idea.

Professor Monroe is rather suspicious of the motives of these executives eager to air this footage. a cynicism which only grows stronger the more he gets involved with the execs.

The editors prepare to show Professor Monroe footage from The Last Road To Hell.

You’d think this is the start of a pleasant jungle documentary, but it’s not. It’s really not.

What’s sad is that Faye is the most “likeable” of this horrible group, soon she won’t be smiling.

The men of the group disrespect Faye by yanking her towel away from her nude torso.

This character, named Jack, films the frat-boy shenanigans on camera to Faye’s chagrin.

Cannibal Holocaust is a found-footage film in its structure, but it’s really a half-and-half use of this gimmick since we see footage that was not captured by the doomed director and his crew that gives the audience the idea “Maybe Alan Yates and company were not the most well-loved folks.” People who knew them don’t have much good to say about them, ranging from accusations that Alan Yates is a paranoid egomaniac who wanted blood to general dismissal of “My son was no good!”. Some are grief stricken, some seem to be glad they’re gone out of their lives, it’s nihilistic and rather sad when you think about it. When somebody dies, we all check Twitter for the digital Egyptian Weighing of the Heart ceremony that social media enables, and while some urge us all to have respect for the dead - this is often the time where mourning is interrupted by allegations of misconduct and myriad sins which death doesn’t always absolve. We saw this when Margaret Thatcher passed away and Britons responded with Ding Dong (The Witch Is Dead), and we’ll likely see it again when Henry Kissinger and Rupert Murdoch cark. I wouldn’t expect Ruggero Deodato to uphold the value of human life in his movies, however in his other film Cut and Run we get a much more sympathetic reaction to the death of a female character who’s been through the wringer. A simple “Did she suffer?” says so much in one line, and while Cannibal Holocaust isn’t going for that it does humanise the deceased cast a little before revealing the gut-punch of what has occurred. We get small morsels of details about their lives, how a wife thinks their husband was good in bed and not very bright, as well as whether she can get any bread out of this interview for her family. I like the scene with the nun talking about Faye while she tries to wrangle a class of children and a flute player wearing a beret is seen nearby, it’s some of the most compassionate treatment Faye receives in this movie.

“God have mercy on his soul, he was one ruthless son of a bitch!” says a former co-worker.

You know it’s the early eighties because in times of stress, everyone hits the tobacco.

This post-Vatican II nun reveals Faye’s real name was Tina, and she wanted to be an actress.

Elizabeth Anders says about her husband Jack that he was with her for four months of a two year marriage, and she tends to what we can assume is her child she’s left to raise on her own.

Mr Tomasso says “MY SON? MY SON IS NO GOOD!” and doesn’t want to be questioned further.

Well, there’s no turning back now, Cannibal Holocaust presents us with some of its worst flaws. Faye informs her cameraman that if she was in New York right now, she’d probably be out shopping, biting commentary on consumerism which is about to be reinforced by the film’s text. I’m not going to show you what happens to the animals in this segment, but I will describe it.

The turtle scene is among the more infamous sequences in the film, and I can’t blame people for being put off by it. It’s one of the most unappetising depictions of food preparation I’ve ever seen where they chop off the turtle’s head and play with its guts and assorted body parts before cooking the meat of this poor creature on a fire. The actress playing Faye Daniels, the female crew member, even sits near a log and vomits as the evil filmmakers tear this turtle apart, and I doubt she’s acting with that puke. The actors forced to commit these acts on camera were reportedly pissed that they were killing animals for real in a motion picture which would be accused of being a snuff film, and the animal cruelty aspect of the film warps reality enough for you to believe it. I then had to sit through the snakebite scene, where the guide Filipe is bitten by a snake (which is murdered with a machete) and has his leg amputated with what I presume is the same machete. The psychotic rationale behind this sequence has never sat right with me, as the amputation done wouldn’t help much against the venom spreading through the victim’s system. These idiots in the jungle film Faye while she’s trying to go to the toilet, and shoot a villager in the leg while they’re in the middle of eating delicious monkey brains.

Faye checks her watch and informs us it’s a Saturday in the jungle, a brief respite before hell.

Faye films the turtle scene, which again I will not show because I might get in trouble.

The actor portraying this character is probably considering firing his agent after this.

The Alan Yates crew gather around the campfire and eat the turtle together.

Even Faye is digging into that turtle meat, which supports Ruggero Deodato’s “justification” for the animal cruelty being necessary because they ate the animals as food afterwards.

The same cannot be said for the tarantula on Faye’s arm that gets machete’d.

Or this snake which also gets chopped in half, after it bites Felipe the guide.

Filipe’s dead body is covered in leaves and buried in the jungle.

Faye is filmed on the toilet, where she is harassed by the other Alan Yates crew members.

The Alan Yates crew shoot a Yacumo tribesman in the leg so they can follow him.

Professor Monroe remarks that it’s not the best way to establish relations with the Yacumo tribe, and he’s right; because we learn that the film crew have been sensationalising their footage by shooting a defenceless pig, terrorising villagers and setting their huts on fire. The contrast between Monroe’s expedition who negotiated rather than plundered from these tribespeople couldn’t be clearer, and the imperialistic evil of Alan Yates is revealed in found footage reels assembled in the editing room. Deodato wags the finger scolding the Jacopetti and Prosperi Mondo Cane movies he admired, and although the sentiment is admirable, employing similar filmmaking techniques to whom he’s criticising can leave a nasty taste in your mouth. I have watched Cannibal Holocaust several times, but I’ve never managed to make it through Africa Addio all the way through - the prominent animal cruelty is excessive and the imperialistic racism of Italians armed with movie cameras to document developing nations through their white European lens is just as disgusting there as it is in Goodbye Uncle Tom wherein black Haitians are commandeered into reenacting the indignities of the slave trade. Cannibal Holocaust somehow gets the moral high ground over these accursed cultural artefacts by virtue of how it is framed, with our sympathies urged toward the abused natives, rather than the virulent xenophobic degradation of the human subject matter on screen like Jacopetti and Prosperi did. Defending Cannibal Holocaust feels like defending the indefensible at times, even though it often accomplishes glimmers of brilliance, and critical discourse seems to be turning against it of late.

The Alan Yates crew storm the village with guns and camera equipment, hollering loud.

A native woman tends to the bullet wound inflicted by the Alan Yates crew.

Alan Yates justifies his cruelty with a speech about the “daily violence” in the jungle where it’s survival of the fittest and all about the strong overcoming the weak.

Alan Yates is setting up a supposed massacre of the Yacumo tribe for the cameras, it’s fake.

The Yacumo tribespeople are herded into the huts and burned alive by the crew.

Burning down the house, accompanied by beautiful Riz Ortolani music that’s disturbing here.

The grinning face of white imperialism as the village burns to ashes around him.

This might be supposed to be a dead body burning to a crisp, but I can’t really tell.

Alan Yates has sex with his fiancee Faye after slaughtering some cannibals, hot stuff!

The Yacumo tribespeople in the background are probably sitting there and judging them.

Professor Monroe sits on a bench with a TV executive, chatting about the shocking footage:

TV EXECUTIVE: Phew, I’m drained. You must admit it’s exceptional footage. I didn’t expect such impact, such authenticity!

MONROE: I don’t know. I don’t think exceptional is the right word.

TV EXECUTIVE: You don’t?

MONROE: No. I mean, what’s exceptional about a primitive tribe of Yacumo being terrorised and forced into doing something they don’t normally do?

TV EXECUTIVE: C’mon now Professor! Let’s be realistic! Who knows anything about the Yacumo civilisation? Today people want sensationalism. The more you rape their senses the happier they are!

MONROE: Ah, yes, that’s typical Western thought. Civilised, isn’t it? That’s what Alan thought, and that’s why he’s dead. The Yacumo Indian is a primitive, and he has to be respected as such. Y’know did you ever think of the Yacumo point of view, that we might be the ones who are savages?

TV EXECUTIVE: (Laughs) Well, I’ve never thought of it that way, but it’s an interesting idea.

MONROE: Yes, let’s say things were reversed, right? And the Yacumo attacked your house, defiled everything you held holy. Y’know that pig that was killed? That was food for those people. Now, what if somebody came into your house in your country and took a little food you had in the refrigerator and threw it down the toilet? Would you behave in a civilised way?

(Pause) Would you like people to make money off your misery?

It’'s a short dialogue scene, but it sets up the themes of Cannibal Holocaust so well, even if it is a bit on the nose. Robert Kerman portrays Monroe as an empathetic anthropologist (although his use of the word primitive isn’t the most progressive by today’s standards, it gets the point across for 1980 audiences watching this in the grindhouse theatres of 42nd Street. That’s what I like about horror movies, they address taboos right out in the open in ways few other genres can get away with. Robert Kerman lends his own humanity to this movie and the role he’s playing in it, in lesser hands this whole production could’ve been devoid of subtlety and poignancy. Ruggero Deodato is not the most sensitive artist out there, but I do think he pulled off something great in this movie.

Professor Monroe sits on a bench and lays the thematic core of Cannibal Holocaust down.

Meanwhile in the found footage segments of Cannibal Holocaust, the thematic assessment of Professor Monroe is complimented with a shot of one of the Alan Yates crew pissing into the Amazon River, as if to hammer home how disrespectful they’re being in someone else’s house. The crew find a diseased tribeswoman left out to die and be eaten by alligators, Alan Yates says “nothing goes to waste in the jungle” despite his reprehensible behaviour. They also witness a ritual abortion which they interrupt and interfere with, in complete violation of Star Trek’s Prime Directive. This is also the last part of this movie before shit really hits the fan, and all Alan Yates is concerned with is becoming famous off the footage he’s filming. Behold the prototypical douche-Tuber, rendered in all his narcissistic horror. Alan Yates shoves a shrunken head of a native warrior to the camera lens, boasting about how time stopped here in the stone age. We’ve seen plenty suggesting that Alan Yates is a sociopath who stages scenes for his atrocity exhibition, but until now we haven’t had confirmation that he’s in it for the acclaim and riches rather than the truth.

I admit this isn’t the most subtle piece of symbolism, but it is effective at what it’s saying.

Alan Yates’ crew never waste an opportunity to exploit the misery of other human beings.

The ritualised abortion scene, which doesn’t get as talked about because of YouTube censorship making it difficult to edit around the graphicness of the image shown.

The native girl is put to death by rocks being hit on her head.

One of the cameramen dismantles his equipment for potential repairs or upkeep.

Alan Yates dreams of greatness, boasting into his tape recorder about what he’s witnessing.

Okay, time to expunge some trauma by letting it bleed out of my pen. Cannibal Holocaust is not the worst film I have ever seen, nor is Jupiter Ascending or any number of box office bombs which have come out during my lifetime. I’m rather forgiving of bad movies as long as they don’t break me like the reigning champion of hurt did when my father found this… soul-scathing documentary on Islam to help me study for my Studies of Religion exams. This piece of shit started out on an ominous note, with ratings advice stating it would be disturbing to some viewers. Some viewers? Who wouldn’t be disturbed by this footage, Ed fucking Kemper? Anyway, I start watching this Islam documentary which is downright G-rated and covers helpful stuff which was on the exam like the five pillars that Muslims follow which I have since forgotten having data dumped this useful information due to HSC stress overclocking my brain. Nothing about this horrendous documentary seemed at all alarming or hinted that it would contain content which would scar me for life, until it swerved to footage of female genital mutilation. Even though it was subtitled, that little girl begging for her parents or the doctor not to cut her will haunt me until the day I die. It was a disgraceful lapse of documentary filmmaking which jettisoned its goal of making the viewer less afraid of Muslims by showing uncensored one of the most controversial practices associated with this world religion, and then it switched back to more innocuous facts about Islam. I was pissed the fuck off, and traumatised by this footage, a compassionate and sane father would’ve turned it off immediately and hugged me until the trembling stopped. This is not what my father did, he forced me to keep watching no matter what other nasty surprises were next. He did this because he thought he was helping, and maybe he was right because come exam time for HSC Studies of Religion comes this curve-ball question where you had to defend Islam against Richard Dawkins. I did not become an Islamophobe in the grand tradition of the New Atheist movement which had intimidated the clergy of my cathedral school enough to have a Jesus for Skeptics group set up to combat the godlessness of the time. I sat there, fuming at the gall of the question, and as if by automatic writing guided by the hand of Allah I aced the exam question when so many had their bell curve grades destroyed by it that I read about it in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper. The whole HSC exam question situation reminds me a lot about how in the movie Slumdog Millionaire, each of the questions the main character gets right is tied into a traumatic event in his past which forces him to remember when the pressure and stakes are high. Slumdog Millionaire had a pretty messed up premise, Danny Boyle really pushed the envelope of mainstream cinema by showing scenes where little kids are blinded so they can become better beggars and I don’t think people realise how dark that movie got, it’s been a while but certain elements stuck with me long after the Oscar buzz died down and everyone collectively wiped it from memory. I can forgive Danny Boyle, those kids were just acting.

After graduating high school, I thought I could put that unpleasantness behind me forever, until I caught a screening of Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph and all of a sudden the scene where Vanellope’s kart gets broken by Ralph triggers my PTSD of seeing and hearing that little Muslim girl getting her vagina cut (which is what Sarah Silverman’s crying sounded like to my ears). I have a Vanellope doll on my shelf because I relate to her disabled struggles, I’m very protective of her because she was the last plaything I bought from Toys R’ Us when it was still open. I chose to talk about my ‘Nam flashback i had in the Mandarin Center Hoyts cinema here instead of a critique of Wreck-it Ralph on its own because I refuse to inflict my trauma onto little kids who might enjoy analysis of Wreck-It Ralph without me being a stone cold bummer about how I’d use that movie to cry so I can prove to a federal judge I’m not a replicant. To be honest, Sgt. Calhoun’s arc in Wreck-It Ralph explained what was happening to me as I was triggered by Vanellope’s kart-breaking scene when I first saw it, prior to that I didn’t use think of myself of having a trigger for anything.

I also didn’t really have the vocabulary to express my seething fury about this accursed, nameless documentary I was damaged by, until Cannibal Holocaust came along granting me a perfect movie-speech to reply to trash of this nature:

“I’m not speaking as a scientist, but as a man on the street. This so-called documentary footage is offensive, it is dishonest, and above all, it is inhuman!”

If I had proper image editing software I’d make this into a macro meme of Monroe saying “Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear, I refuse to have anything to do with this material!”

I realised then upon watching this what had overcome me when I faced down the barrel of my HSC examiner. I had Kerman Rage, and it burned unstoppable. My reaction to what had traumatised me was given a name and a face to identify with, which I often struggle with as an autistic person who sees in pictures but doesn’t have the right picture yet; but that picture had never been clearer than when I saw Professor Monroe laying the smackdown on these corrupt TV executives who wanted to air the found footage from Cannibal Holocaust. To me these villains represented the absurdity of the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification, and how the system failed to protect me from FGM footage which was not given a sufficient warning for. I was disgusted with the OFLC refusing a classification certificate for Fallout 3 in ye olden days before we had an R-18+ for video games due to some drug references in the power-ups, heaven forbid gamers shoot up into their fictional veins, meanwhile showing some poor helpless Muslim girl having a doctor mutilate her with no anaesthesia is appropriate for Australian broadcasting. I wanted to burn down the OFLC to cinders, I was so angry. I bore a grudge against the OFLC ever since, and continue to be outraged by their stupid decisions like briefly banning Disco Elysium of all bloody things (oh, because THAT’S what gamers need protection from?) when shit like that so-called documentary which was inflicted on my mind exists and aired on TV with no problem. Let me remind you, Shocking Asia, a mondo documentary of the sort Cannibal Holocaust is satirising, doesn’t drop the ball when discussing the process of male to female transition surgery, and that thing is a pretty racist product of its exploitation cinematic moment. The idea that the disreputable horror-adjacent filmmakers do a better job tackling taboo subjects than the respectable middle-brow Oscar bait crowd is not a new concept, but it’s worth considering. Point is, you have to be careful how you depict world cultures and religions in documentaries, and the way the documentary I saw on Islam while I was taking notes for my exams represented a major faith ain’t it, chief. Cannibal Holocaust is disturbing as all hell, but I would rather watch it than FGM footage any day of the week. What makes me furious is that Westerners pretend FGM isn’t done by white people as well as Somalia and Sierra Leone, preferring instead to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment by ignoring how Christians are up to this blight on humanity as well. I will likely never watch another documentary about FGM as long as I live, nor will I check out The Green Inferno directed by Eli Roth because there’s a subplot which revolves around FGM in it. There’s apparently a gatekeeping problem in the horror community, which is terrible because Cannibal Holocaust’s devoted fanbase are often stereotyped as edge-lord contrarians on TikTok where the Gen-Z kids are starting to sour on this movie as well as other extreme cinema offerings like A Serbian Film. I’m not trying to win a prize for bravery, I’m just trying to live my life, and I have my own limits when it comes to stuff I’m willing to watch even if that gets me dismissed as a horror fan because of that. Again, I haven’t seen everything out there, but I did go see Midsommar which prompted me to warn an ex-girlfriend of my brother’s not to watch it because it starts with a murder-suicide and this woman had a family member die by their own hand. I won’t name her for privacy’s sake but I’m just letting you know I’m courteous about people who have triggers about transgressive films.

The TV executives and Professor Monroe file into the theatre screening room for the climax.

There’s an unsettling rape scene where Faye objects to wasting film canisters on in the final section of Cannibal Holocaust’s found footage narrative, and although this would be upsetting unto itself, the presence of a villager hiding just out of sight of the white men in the bushes prompts us to remember this is an invasion of native territory, and evil done in the jungle will be punished by its own people. The villager lies in wait, just out of shot, it’s a very effective device. The continued abuse of indigenous villagers by Alan Yates and his film crew leads to perhaps the most notorious scene in the movie, with the impaled girl who they raped stuck through the mouth with a sharp wooden pike. When I first saw this scene, I assumed life could never imitate art, but reality has a way of depressing me. I can’t help seeing parallels between Alan Yates coming across a dead body he films and Logan Paul doing the same except in the Japanese Aokigahara forest instead of the Amazon. Much like Ruggero Deodato’s other film Cut and Run, in which a news broadcast shows a beheading live on broadcast, incidents like the Christchurch mosque shootings being live-streamed prove to us that it’s Deodato’s world, and we’re living in it. Cannibal Holocaust may have been the first found-footage gimmick film, but much of it was ahead of its time, predating the success of The Blair Witch Project by a decade. The final sequence where the film troupe of Alan Yates is butchered by cannibals is distressing in its realism due to the handheld guerrilla filmmaking techniques and obscuring certain details as we see characters dragged off to their doom in the distance. Poor Faye is gang-raped and beheaded, another member of the crew is castrated, all of this is scored to Riz Ortolani’s haunting compositions. We see Alan Yates’ demise up close, as his bloodied head hits the ground and the film reel ends.

I never noticed the villager behind Faye until I watched Cannibal Holocaust again for this piece, it’s appropriate that Faye objects to the raping when we know they’re being watched.

The melancholy track titled Crucified Woman plays over the discovery of the impaled girl.

It’s ambiguous whether or not the tribe killed this girl, or Alan Yates killed her and stuck her on a pike for the sake of his sensationalist “documentary” in scare quotes.

A spear whizzes over Faye’s head as the tribesmen attack, in the camera crew’s last stand.

The last shred of found footage starts a tradition amongst filmmakers with tight budgets.

The climax of Cannibal Holocaust is a sombre one, with the television executives ordering the grim material documenting the demise of the film crew burned, and Professor Monroe goes outside smoking his pipe, remarking “I wonder who the real cannibals are?”. To top off this bleak sit of a movie, the end credits inform us that the footage was somehow distributed to someone who bought it for $250,000 and the projectionist was given a two-month suspended sentence for illegal appropriation of film footage. I know that seems tacked on at the end, but it builds upon the snuff film reputation that this movie had to shake at the request of a federal judge. I’ve seen this movie dozens of times, and to an extent I’m desensitised to it for reasons I cited earlier, but I reckon Cannibal Holocaust holds up now because of our current media landscape chasing down lurid tabloid true crime stories for profit. In universe, nobody would have cared about the mondo documentary Alan Yates was making if he didn’t die a horrible death whilst making it, and the TV executives might have shelved it if it was just another boring nature picture. For years I have been thinking about Cannibal Holocaust and the impact it left on me, most notably the way it inspired the short film I made for my BVA graduation show at Sydney College of the Arts.

One afternoon I saw some footage on YouTube of a protest that was going down on Sydney University campus, and even though the video was pretty disturbing, something felt familiar about it which struck my creative imagination. I had to work fast, downloading the video and in the space of about twenty-four hours I made a mashup of Robert Kerman’s Cannibal Holocaust clip reacting to how the students were being dragged away by cops like how the filmmakers in Cannibal Holocaust were dragged to their doom. I consulted my film school educated brother about how to time the clips, and within a day I had the mashup completed. It didn’t go viral like I thought such a provocative piece of mashup agitprop would do, but when I exhibited it in front of my Sydney College of the Arts teachers it was much better received because it was advocating for university staff who were having their pay cut. One of my teachers even felt nostalgic about being beaten by cops at a protest way back when, which is messed up as anything adjacent to Cannibal Holocaust can be. It was thrilling to see parents with children stopping by my exhibit to see clips of Robert Kerman condemning police brutality inflicted on students my age, some of these gallery audiences had never seen or heard of Ruggero Deodato’s infamous film but were intrigued by what I was laying down about what happened. I put my mashup on Vimeo and left it alone, after I gradated I didn’t really think it would make any more impact. But I was wrong.

Years later I’m on Twitter talking shit about The Sarkeesian Effect documentary at the height of #GamerGate tensions, using clips from Cannibal Holocaust I couldn’t find anywhere else than from my own mashup I made, and because I cited Robert Kerman by name in my reaction to this, he most likely name-searched himself and saw my student film. If I hadn’t mentioned his name, I doubt this would have happened, but I was rendered speechless by what happened next. Robert Kerman not only saw my mashup, but he liked it, sending me the following message on Twitter:

I remember I was screaming, my brain overtaken by dopamine and almost getting high off it, straight up screaming “AHHHHHGHHHHH!” with joy over this exchange. Professor Monroe himself assessed the quality of my school project and gave me the equivalent of an A+. It was probably the proudest moment of my long and hard academic career, I jumped ship without pursuing honours because it was clear that the foundational rug of Sydney College of the Arts was about to be pulled from under the teachers and students working on the offshoot campus in Balmain, far away from the main campus where I graduated from a sandstone university making my parents proud. I’m not sure my parents would be proud of me seeing a male porn star as a role model, an anchor of my ethical bedrock, but they wouldn’t understand why I love the Kerminator. He passed away, I heard it after the fact when a horror host by the name of Doctor Wolfula said so in his own review of Cannibal Holocaust, and although it sounds selfish, I wish Robert Kerman could have stuck around long enough to see that success he wished me. I don’t see these dead people as gone due to my Taoist beliefs, but I do notice their absence in the world around us and part of me wishes some of my favourite celebrities managed to see my novels published or stuff like that. It’s why even though Kanye West is a problematic figure, I always take his maxim “give them the roses while they can smell them” to heart. We don’t know how long we’ve got on this planet, but whenever I watch movies with dead people in them, it’s easy to forget they aren’t alive. Robert Kerman was a man with the soul of a poet, trapped in ugly exploitation cannibal movies, I wish he could have diversified his roles more in prestigious projects that would’ve made him happier than the sleazy ghetto he was confined to. Although I never met the man in person, I’ll miss him, before Ruth Bader Ginsburg died I had no clue what the protocol is when a Jewish icon dies, but Twitter taught me to use the phrase “May his memory be a blessing” regarding Robert Kerman. I’m glad any work I ever did had an impact on somebody else’s life, in the end all we can do is try to make the world a better place while we’re still here and leave behind something decent for people to remember us by. It’s hard to defend Cannibal Holocaust on those grounds, but I can always vouch for Professor Monroe and the lessons he taught me in college.

Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, blaze it for one of the realest adult stars in the game.

Mad Monster Party: The Rankin-Bass Halloween Special Time Forgot

It’s a Halloween themed hullabaloo with all your favourite monsters!

When I think about Halloween, it is a bittersweet feeling. As an Australian I got little candy for proselytising the pumpkin holiday because few outside the kids who saw American cartoons on TV knew what it was. The spooky season is upon us, and I have a substantial Blu-Ray collection of the classic Universal Monsters cycle to watch, but when I really want to celebrate I either choose Hocus Pocus or Mad Monster Party. I go to Starbucks down the road in Chatswood to drink a pumpkin spiced latte, and observe the attempts to make Halloween happen down at the local mall with latex masks and costume accessories on display. I’m not sure if COVID-19 will let Halloween happen this year as planned, but I sure see a lot of advertising trying to Australian-ise this holiday like one for Google Nest cameras showing children trick or treating. One of these days it’ll work, but Halloween always leaves me thinking “HOW DARE YOU COME TO ME NOW, WHEN I AM THIS?” like Molly Grue from The Last Unicorn.

Speaking of iconic Rankin-Bass productions, let’s talk about Mad Monster Party.

Released to theatres in 1967, this was Rankin-Bass taking on a Halloween themed project with some of the Universal Monsters branding filed off for copyright reasons, and what a film it is. This is made by the same people who brought you Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, with the pedigree of inviting Boris Karloff, and Forest Ackerman of Famous Monsters of Filmland fame. I’m plenty familiar with Boris Karloff as an Aussie, but Forest Ackerman is a bit of an obscure cult figure to me, and my research shows he’s a big deal in the American horror community. They also got MAD Magazine’s Harvey Kurtzman to write the script, with several MAD cartoonists designing the characters plus the sets, and Frank Frazetta drawing the movie’s poster.

So how is the movie itself? Well, as a stop-motion animation project it will always be in the shadow of Disney’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, the Tim Burton and Henry Selick collaboration which captured the hearts of a generation of goths and Hot Topic shoppers. Mad Monster Party is unique, and its jazzy score is neat, but it doesn’t have the ear-wormy Danny Elfman songs that The Nightmare Before Christmas does. Other than that, it’s a pretty neat little gem which despite its flaws deserves attention as a Halloween treat.

Baron Boris Von Frankenstein in his sinister lab on the Isle of Evil.

Baron Boris Von Frankenstein gloats at his latest achievement, a WMD.

It starts out with Boris Karloff’s character Baron Boris Von Frankenstein experimenting with vials of liquid and the infusion of energy. He’s showered in sparks from the heavens as he attempts to perform some experiment. He tests his concoction on a black bird which explodes when it lands on a branch, looking out at the resulting atomic mushroom cloud as Baron Boris quotes Edgar Allan Poe: “Quoth the Raven, never more!”. He has invented the means to destroy matter, and sends out invitations via bats to the other monsters who we see receiving them in the opening credits montage. The gang’s all here, from the Mummy to the Invisible Man to Quasimodo, even the Creature from the Black Lagoon gets one.

I really like this image of Mr. Hyde, they did a good cartoony design job on him.

We then see the clumsy Felix Flanken in a pharmacy fumbling over some glass jars containing pills, and his character design is distracting because he looks like the spitting image of me in high school. He’s not getting paid well for his job as he keeps having his salary garnished to reimburse his employer for constant mistakes, but he gets a curious item of mail inviting him to the Isle of Evil to witness his uncle’s scientific discovery. He wrecks the pharmacy on the way out, and his boss insists that this is his vacation from Felix’s shenanigans. Felix is an annoying main character who subsists off a bad Jimmy Stewart impression for the entire film, and this is one of the main flaws Mad Monster Party has as a Halloween ensemble.

Felix Flanken, the nephew of Baron Boris, picking up yet another of his accidents.

Frankenstein’s Monster “Fang” and his Bride make an appearance, as the Bride chastises her husband for having a roving eye looking at the beautiful red-headed assistant Francesca, resulting in an old Hollywood style musical number called You’re Different. Phyllis Diller voices the Monster’s Mate, and although I’m unfamiliar with her body of work she’s got a bit of Mae West going on here. The invitations have received their RSVPs from the various monsters, though a creature called It is banned from the Worldwide Organisation of Monsters gathering for making a mess of the wild boars on the island. Baron Boris is retiring from being the head of the Worldwide Organisation of Monsters, hoping that Felix - his only surviving heir born from his younger sister, will take over the family monster business. This is the main plot of the movie, the succession of head monster, and it looks like Felix is going to inherit the lot despite being an annoying milquetoast fellow who ruins everything with his clumsiness.

An endearing dance sequence between the Monster’s Mate and “Fang”.

Francesca enjoys a spot of tea with Baron Boris.

The S.S. Herring docks into the harbour, ready to take the Monsters to the Isle of Evil.

Quasimodo is among the first monsters to arrive for boarding.

Count Dracula appears at the docks for boarding, but he’s a bit skint when it comes to his wallet for the fare, so he turns into a bat and opts for flying instead.

Felix runs into the Wolf-Man as he boards his vessel bound for the Isle of Evil.

The Mummy climbs out of its coffin, for a jolly good scare.

I love the expression Rankin-Bass gave to this crewman when he’s frightened.

Mad Monster Party, like most Rankin-Bass stop-motion productions, is reliant on cheesy joke puns about the monsters in question, and for the most part this is campy fun. None of this is meant to be taken too seriously, and the grand scope of its ambitions to assemble a team of monsters for one party in a movie is a noble goal even if the humour is a bit dated by today’s standards. There’s an bit about Felix dropping his glasses and running into the Invisible Man and saying he can’t see a thing, stuff like that. Anyway, they get to the Isle of Evil where Baron Boris is running the show. Baron Boris has a team of usher zombies working for him, as well as this Peter Lorre looking dude called Yetch (who gets a bit handsy with Francesca in a gag that hasn’t aged well). The zombie henchmen are called up for duty to patrol the island in case It comes back, and we see Yetch cajoling them for behaving like ghosts instead of air pilots.

The zombie ushers, all gathered in a row on the Isle of Evil.

Francesca not appreciating the bad touch from Yelch, somebody call Ronan Farrow.

One of the zombie henchmen ready to fly the aeroplanes to patrol the island.

Baron Boris is playing the organ all creepy yet funky, and Francesca soon joins him.

We get a lot of mentions of It in hushed tones, that It is capable of anything, building the hype about this beast which we haven’t seen in the film up to this point. Baron Boris’ retirement party hasn’t had much of the movie’s titular party yet, but that’s about to change. The pacing of this film is a bit old-fashioned, and takes a while to get going like many motion pictures of the late sixties, but it’s a lot of fun if you stick with it. Dracula makes a joke that Francesca is just his type… O Negative. Oh boy, I wonder if Peter Steele ever saw this movie on videotape. The Monster’s Mate makes a joke about pickled salmon that I don’t get, regarding the food available at this maddest of monster parties. There’s better food brewing in the kitchen of Chef Machiavelli, for the main course. The monster-jokes are sometimes bad enough that they give the Groovy Ghoulies a run for their money, and it takes a while before the main event of the Worldwide Organisation of Monsters rivalry actually happens.

The Monster’s Mate and “Fang” dress to impress for the occasion.

Count Dracula arrives in good form, transforming from a bat to his usual self.

The Wolf-Man makes his appearance, howling on the balcony.

The Invisible Man shows up after the Monster’s Mate questions “How can you tell?”.

Quasimodo brings the Mummy down the stairs to meet and greet the crew.

Dr. Jekyll makes an appearance at the party, saving a drink of Mr. Hyde for the main event.

Francesca is still having none of Yelch’s advances, somebody gonna get cancelled.

Finally the Creature from the Black Lagoon appears, with a rad Rankin-Bass design.

Chef Machiavelli is working with zombies to prepare all this food for the party.

Yelch gets strangled by the octopus soup, and Chef Machiavelli has to intervene.

Yelch says there’s something missing from Chef Machiavelli’s hyena casserole, and gets knifed for his culinary criticism.

The actual Worldwide Organisation of Monsters festivities are about to begin!

Baron Boris gathers all the monsters to announce the discovery of his WMD.

Mad Monster Party seldom has a plot, per se, but it does have themes of succession and science gone awry with this atomic bomb recipe Baron Boris has cooked up. This sequence at the table has the machinations of the different monsters laid bare as they struggle for supremacy, and although it’s no Game of Thrones or Dune, the political intrigue here for the formula is exciting. However, as soon as the rivalries get heated, we’re subjected to another song number by Little Tibia and the Fibias, which is definitely dated to the era when the film was first released. Next we get some quality scheming from Count Dracula and Francesca, who plans to get rid of Felix even though Dracula has no idea that Felix is Baron Boris’ rightful heir. See, down from Felix, Francesca is next in line because Baron Boris built her. And that complicates things, leading to another song, this time in ragtime. Like most of the songs in this movie, and with Rankin-Bass’ track record with songs in general, it’s pretty hit or miss. The ragtime number I believe is one of the better ones in this movie, It’s Our Time To Shine slaps but I cannot forgive the shot of Dracula drinking wine. He does not drink… wine.

Count Dracula and the Wolf-Man start scheming for the formula and succession to the top.

Of course there’s a skeleton band to provide the evening’s entertainment!

The Monster’s Mate and the Mummy dancing, because this movie needs to get a groove on.

Dracula and Francesca on the balcony ready to plot and scheme together.

Francesca finds the Monster’s Mate hiding behind the drapes, and they have a cat-fight complete with cat yowling sound effects, which is just as sexist as that implies.

Frankenstein’s Monster accosts Dracula, with the Wolf-Man nipping at his heels.

Mr. Hyde attacks Yelch, succeeding at ripping his head off from behind as Dracula crashes onto the table across the dining room cutlery.

The Creature gets a pie in the face and The Invisible Man pours liquid on him.

Yelch gets a pig’s head put on top of his neck instead of a real one in the food fight.

And Count Dracula ends up being drenched in the punch-bowl.

So this succession plot gets thicker as more monsters are clued into Felix being the successor, and up until now he’s been depicted as a wuss for most of the movie. This perception of his character isn’t about to change, and now he’s back to impact the plot some more. You’d think a human wouldn’t be put in charge of the Worldwide Organisation of Monsters, but apparently humans are the worst out of all of them, so that tracks. Anyway, this plot involves some more scheming once Felix makes it to dry land, which is always welcome when the narrative is a bit slow. There’s a lot more visual gags in this section of the film, which I will detail as follows:

After Dr. Jekyll fights with the Creature for spitting water on him whilst he was trying to sleep, we find out most of the monsters like the Wolf-Man and The Invisible Man are still napping.

The Mummy is snoring, so Quasimodo wraps his bandages around his head to block the noise.

Felix is back in the picture, after annoying us in the first act, he’s skating on thin ice.

Felix looks back at the ship and wonders why the captain acted funny the whole trip.

Baron Boris and Francesca wave Felix down on the shore, waiting to take him in.

Now they’re all bundled together in a dragon boat headed to the castle.

Francesca schemes some more with Dracula, who has to stealth away from prying eyes.

Francesca plans the ambush on her map with Dracula, who is in cahoots with her now.

Felix is being shown around the jungle by Francesca, hopefully to his doom.

All of a sudden, Wolf-Man attacks, but Felix is still trying to be friendly.

The Mummy tries to ambush Felix as well, but to no avail.

Now Dracula tries to go for the kill, but he’s defeated by insect repellant.

Felix tries to choose a sandwich for his picnic, but Dracula again leans in for the throat.

Dracula does the long distance run like an Olympic athlete…

Only to get his fangs embedded in the tree-bark when he lands…

Mad Monster Party has a pretty sedate pace to it, and it’s kind of relaxing compared to more frantic modern animated features with high-energy action scenes. Rankin-Bass were working with what they had, and they’re best and delivering atmospheric stories rather than big blockbusters. The scenes with Felix being shown around the airplane hangar by Baron Boris Von Frankenstein is an example of exposition with charm and subtlety. Baron Boris feeds the various creatures in his lab before revealing to his nephew that he is the head of the World Organisation of Monsters, and he intends for him to take over when he retires. Warlocks, witches, demons, werewolves, the whole shebang! This scene goes on for a while, so I’ll summarise all the visual elements below:

I like this bit where the backstory of the airplanes and Felix’s uncles gets delivered.

“Being a man of science, you can understand…” says Baron Boris to his dear nephew.

This thing looks like one of the soot creatures from Spirited Away.

Felix says he may have the blood for the job, but he sure doesn’t have the stomach for it.

And then there’s another song when all these yokai looking creatures show up.

Stay One Step Ahead isn’t necessarily what I’d call a banger, but it is a nice song.

“Remember, this is a family business” is pretty much “Join me, and we will rule the galaxy together!” in non-Star Wars lingo. Baron Boris is getting sinister now.

“There’s a tradition to uphold!” says Baron Boris, accompanying his sales pitch with creepy paintings on the wall. “You may not like it at first, but after you’ve worked at it a while, I’m sure you’re going to love it as I have!”

Felix has been offered the job opportunity of a lifetime, control over all the monsters in the world, but will he accept this nobleman’s fate or will he reject this familial obligation? At this point in the movie we don’t know, but we do see how the other monsters are reacting to this heir apparent. There’s a double cross against Francesca because Dracula is about as trustworthy as Scott Morrison buying nuclear submarines behind the French’s back, now Fang and the Monster’s Mate want to get rid of Francesca to get Baron Boris’ secrets for themselves. The game is afoot!

“Three chances! Three!” argues Francesca as she rouses on Dracula.

“Francesca! What’s she doing here! We had an appointment!” scolds the Monster’s Mate.

Francesca is backed into a corner by the other monsters, it’s a treacherous situation.

“We must stop her before she tells the Baron! He’ll turn us into erector sets!”

Francesca escapes through a convenient trap-door, and lives to fight another day.

Francesca writes a note which will reveal the truth to Baron Boris about the betrayal.

“Fly my lovely…” says Francesca as she delivers her note by bat freight.

Meanwhile Felix has gone fishing, thinking about turning down Uncle Boris’ offer, whilst the Creature from the Black Lagoon is behind him. Gasp!

Of course a mouthful of fish prevents the Creature from attacking poor Felix.

Felix shudders at the thought of taking over the family business, saying he could never face that Board of Directors, citing his allergies as a reason he can’t do it. As a main protagonist he’s beyond annoying, because his constant complaining gets on the viewer’s nerves. Meanwhile the other characters are freaking out because Francesca has turned against the monsters and is searching for the secret formula to destroy matter so she can rule over the others. Dracula, the Monster’s Mate and “Fang” all go down the trap door Francesca used to find her in the laboratory.

Count Dracula plans on packing his coffin to get out of this situation ASAP.

Francesca searches for the secret formula amongst Baron Boris’s papers.

The other monsters spring on her through the trap door, planning a coup.

Francesca’s not going down without a fight, and she’s got a torch to burn with.

There’s a struggle over the torch and the wolfsbane, and then Francesca jumps out the window, leaving Dracula, the Monster’s Mate and “Fang” to quip about the crocodiles in the lagoon finishing her off. This movie’s not great at building a sense of tension, but I did want to know how Francesca was going to get herself out of this one, and it turns out Felix is waiting in the boat he was fishing in to save her. The Monster’s Mate makes another terrible joke about how they’re going to make the ballet from Swamp Lake, which is par for the course for this movie.

Looking like a James Bond opening credits sequence, Francesca is.

Felix retrieves Francesca from the lagoon in his fishing boat.

Phyllis Diller looks like she’s having lots of fun as the Monster’s Mate, laughing it up.

Francesca starts crying that everything was fine until Felix came to the Isle of Evil and starts yelling “I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU!” but Felix slaps her for being hysterical and that turns her around to not being able to resist him. Then a lot of Freudian symbology happens with crashing waves and lightning and trees falling down, it’s not a bit subtle. The pair are surrounded by an aura of light as they kiss, I assume this means they’re in love from now on. There’s a sultry song number from Francesca as she declares “there never was a love like mine” in the moonlight, and it’s probably one of the least irritating songs in the movie. Francesca picks a flower and dances with her new allergy-prone lover, and it’s rather sweet if you forget this started with a slap.

Rankin-Bass has a certain aesthetic with their stop motion productions which is distinctive to say the least, everything’s hand-made from fabric and plastic.

The plot thickens with this new romance, as Francesca informs Felix that they have to leave the island before something terrible and destructive shows up. Felix asks why they can’t say goodbye, but Francesca already has a boat hidden away for the purposes of a quick escape. Then we cut to the World Organisation of Monsters having a meeting without Felix to stage a mutiny against him, with Dracula being the ringleader of the operation. Yelch remains loyal to Baron Boris, but Dracula and the others are fuming over a human like Felix inheriting control of the World Organisation of Monsters from Von Frankenstein. We’re sixteen minutes away from the climax of the movie, and we still haven’t seen It show up yet. But we will in good time. I don’t like how Dracula says Francesca should have been Yelch’s instead of Felix’s, pitting an incel grudge against the heroes of our story for political gain. Yelch has been harassing Francesca for half the run-time so that’s no good. Meanwhile Francesca and Felix are out of breath in the jungle, and Felix is gulping down his allergy pills. A Venus Fly trap attacks and Felix saves the day, leading to Francesca making out with him some more as they escape through the jungle. Dracula cuts through the greenery with a machete, searching for the couple of love-birds to destroy Von Frankenstein’s successor. All the other monsters follow suit through the foliage. Felix gets some vines to carry Francesca who is worn out and tired (I like her line that she’s no easy pick-up), and he fights the Wolf-Man who grabs her. Francesca is captured and Felix’s glasses are punched off, how will he save her and get to the boat? Well, he happens to have the formula to destroy matter, and the monsters recoil from the dangerous liquid. All of a sudden It rises from the water as the newest threat to everyone’s survival, which brings us closer to the climax of this movie.

Dracula bangs his gavel on a spare human skull as he calls the other monsters to a meeting.

This is getting to The Nutty Professor levels of sixties nerd cliche tropes, get it together Felix!

Now Francesca gets attacked by a carnivorous Venus Fly Trap, Felix throws pills at it.

Dracula is going full Vietnam running through the jungle, where’s the Creedence?

Felix resorts to fisticuffs with the Wolf-Man in the heart of the Isle of Evil jungle.

Felix has the formula to destroy matter in his hand, but will he prevail?

It looms behind Felix as It begins to run amok, and Felix continues to wuss out.

It makes its way towards the castle, in a very King Kong sort of way.

It falls in love with a picture of Francesca, which is going precisely where you think it’s going.

It’s feet get bitten by crocodiles in the lagoon, and when enraged starts wrecking the Von Frankenstein castle. Francesca has been captured by Yelch and the Wolf-Man, tied to a stake. However, It flicks Yelch into the stratosphere with a finger, and because Felix is the weakest male lead I’ve seen outside of a harem anime he threatens to kill himself because he can’t save Francesca on his own. Then Baron Boris shows up with his secret formula and we’re gearing up for the finale soon, because It has also grabbed the other monsters in the crew. Frankenstein’s Monster starts crying for a bit, and in comes the air force of zombie bellhops to complete this King Kong homage. Baron Von Frankenstein calls out the jealousies and hatreds of the monsters who wanted to kill his nephew for power, and then pulls out his WMD to nuke the island.

Yetch doesn’t understand no means no, and he’s got Francesca captive in the worst way.

Now It has Francesca in its clutches, resulting in the King Kong climax we expected.

Baron Boris returns with a vial of the formula to destroy matter, preventing Felix’s suicide.

Apparently It has grabbed not just Francesca, but several of the other monsters.

In comes the airforce of zombie bellhops, twas beauty that killed the beast?

Baron Boris Von Frankenstein leads the charge of the air cavalry, will he defeat It?

The sorrowful ape It expresses its emotions through felt and puppetry.

It puts Francesca down, and proceeds to fight the airmen.

Felix finds the motor boat to make an escape in this exciting climax!

Francesca swims to the safety of her weak male lead as they abandon the Isle of Evil.

The Baron flies across the sea to perform his final mission.

Baron Von Frankenstein has his WMD ready to use, and he sacrifices himself for his nephew.

The Isle of Evil is nuked by Baron Boris Von Frankenstein, and the film comes near to its close.

As you can see, the formula to destroy matter has disintegrated the entire island.

Felix proposes marriage, but Francesca just cries as she tells him the truth, she’s a robot.

The climax is a bit of a downer ending, with the Isle of Evil destroyed and presumably the monsters with it, Felix and Francesca escape via the ocean and off to get married. But Francesca weeps, because where other women have organs, she has springs and a battery which will need replacing, and arms that will rust. Felix reveals he himself is a robot, in a homage to the ending of Some Like It Hot. It’s a grim, dark conclusion to what was at first a fun story about Halloween monsters, and Mad Monster Party has a bit of tone whiplash unique to the period which it was made with questions about the atomic bomb intermingled with horror icon shenanigans. I like Mad Monster Party quite a bit, but it is quite slow in parts where it should be fluid in its animated hijinks, although modern Laika stop-motion projects owe a great debt to the pioneers at Rankin-Bass for kick-starting an art-form with unique charms and hand-crafted magic to it. Overall I reckon Mad Monster Party deserves a place within the very few Halloween specials that exist, especially with the horror genre pedigree it possesses with huge gets like Boris Karloff. It ends a bit sad, however tragedy is forever intertwined with the fate of monsters, as the gothic tradition demands a few tears of sympathy to be shed for the creatures of the night.

The Pagemaster: An Overlooked Relic of the 90’s Which Encourages Reading

You’ve gotta love the wisps of cloud with that font, which begins the movie proper.

I heard on Twitter once that Millennials choose a mediocre children’s movie to base their entire personality around, and for a lot of them that movie happens to be Space Jam. Maybe it was the soundtrack album with Quad City DJs and R. Kelly on it (which in the latter case taints its legacy) that enraptured a generation, or the combination of live-action with animation, but I’ve seen plenty of people come out of the woodwork to defend Space Jam as a work of corporate pop-art. Some others, especially in the LGBT community, rally around Matilda which starred Mara Wilson and Danny Devito, and there is a convincing case to be made for Matilda as a Roald Dahl adaptation plus the literary credibility it carries along with its source material. Me on the other hand, I gravitated towards a little movie I rented on VHS called The Pagemaster. I even had the Where’s Wally knock-off activity book tie-in as a child, where you had to find certain characters from literary classics in the crowd of various scenes. The Pagemaster starred Macaulay Culkin and Christopher Lloyd, and came out in 1994 which was a prime era for this sort of kids entertainment. It seems to have slipped beneath the cracks post-Disney acquisition of the 20th Century Fox studio catalog, and whilst I imported a Blu-Ray of it years ago it seems like this film’s cult status is questionable given its lack of memes generated and tiny fanbase. The Pagemaster was also fraught with WGA problems as David Kirschner and David Casci duking it out for story credit, which is prominent in the film’s Wikipedia page as one of the most expensive WGA investigations of its kind back in the day, so it’s also notable for that mess. It was produced by Turner Animation which closed down after the failure of Cats Don’t Dance, and The Pagemaster got roasted by critics like Roger Ebert at the time of its release. Does The Pagemaster hold up as an example of Disney Renaissance era competition with its associated 2D animation, or is it just 90’s rubbish? I’d argue it can be both, and whilst its plot leaves a lot to be desired, its visuals are stunning for what it is and captivated my imagination long into adulthood. It’s not as cracked out as Captain Planet was with its overpopulation rhetoric and anti-drug PSAs as far as Turner Pictures association goes, as an advertisement for public libraries and reading you could do a whole lot worse.

The Pagemaster is the sort of children’s film they don’t make anymore, for various reasons, and it’s a shame that it hasn’t been rebooted to take advantage of the boom in YA novels as well as the resurgence of libraries. The opening credits along with its score is enchanting, inviting us into the word of the movie on a pleasant note where pirate ships and haunted houses form out of clouds, Its plot centres around a little boy named Richard Tyler who’s terrified of everything and cites statistics as an excuse not to do anything perilous. His bedroom is filled with safety equipment with warnings like HIGH VOLTAGE next to power points, as well as a NO SMOKING sign above the headboard of his bed. We see Richard startled by a thunderstorm, eavesdropping on his parents arguing about how afraid their son is about everything from mercury levels in tuna to getting hit on the head with a baseball and causing tumours.

Richard Tyler’s frustrated parents having a chat about their anxiety-prone son.

Richard Tyler, played by Macaulay Culkin, lurking with his flashlight outside their room.

The ominous treehouse in a tree Richard refuses to climb, sign-posted by thunderclap.

Richard’s beleaguered father attempts to build him a treehouse, which he won’t dare use, and he conks out his dad with a bucket of nails attached to a rope which he uses in lieu of the stepladder. Rich rattles off more statistics, but his father forces him to fetch a pound of more nails despite his heightened anxiety. My own father has forced me to do small errands like this over the years, and Richard Tyler comes off as a bit of a wuss given the tasks at hand. Of course the highlight of this sequence has to be Macaulay Culkin riding out on his high-vis safety bike ensemble with lights for visibility and a little basket on the back, as he embarks on his hardware store adventure.

Refusing the call to adventure is all part of the Hero’s Journey, or hack screenwriting.

Check out the nerd-mobile this kid is driving, even my dad doesn’t wear that much high-vis when he takes his electric bike off to the shops.

The cooler kids mock Richard Tyler’s get-up as they ride their bikes on the dangerous ramp care-free, I’m not sure they count as nineties movie bullies but they’re close.

Richard Tyler is confronted by an (in his mind) spooky tunnel whilst fleeing his mockery.

Then lightning strikes behind him and suddenly the tunnel route doesn’t seem so bad.

Y’know what, I don’t think Culkin’s gonna make it to the hardware store today.

The lightning effects make the library look like a spooky place to be, kinda off-message.

Lightning strikes a power line and the lights illuminate into sparks inside the tunnel, Culkin crashes his bike into a fallen tree branch and takes his helmet off to run inside the nearest building to take shelter from the storm. He’s spooked by the lion statue which makes a roaring noise in post-production, he gets inside the library and he’s greeted by Christopher Lloyd’s character wheeling some books down the hallway. This man is named Mr. Dewey, because like Garth Marenghi said, “I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards.”. Mr. Dewey proceeds to devour the scenery he’s in, because Christopher Lloyd’s gotta eat, and he’s hungry for ham. His dialogue here as he tries to guess which type of book Richard Tyler is looking for makes him come across as a stranger danger risk, as many critics of this film point out, but I doubt that’s what Christopher Lloyd was going for. I think Christopher Lloyd wanted to portray a librarian who was enthusiastic about his job, with just a hint of mystery as to how his library works and what you can do there. Lloyd does double duty as both Dewey and the titular Pagemaster, an illustrated book themed wizard who rules the library. Dewey is supposed to be a mere mortal, but the way he talks about books and the library blurs the line between fiction and reality - the way libraries work in our imagination. Christopher Lloyd’s bewildering rant introduces us to the three genres the movie will explore, Adventure, Horror and Fantasy, and while it does cross the line into weirdness when Dewey is grabbing at Richard Tyler’s shirt it is effective at setting the stage for what we’re in for later.

This is the first glimpse we get of Christopher Lloyd, heralded by thunder-claps.

That’s a look on a man’s face that says: “I’m going to chew the hell out of this scenery!”

Mr. Dewey, invading Richard Tyler’s personal space to an uncomfortable extent.

“Ah, Horror!” - Christopher Lloyd is putting his all into freaking out this ten-year old boy.

I like how Christopher Lloyd just whips out a library card like a magician’s trick.

“Is there a phone where I can call my parents?” asks Rich. “Through THERE!” answers Dewey.

Say what you will about the quality of The Pagemaster as a film, it has wonderful shots of this old library set, it makes me want to renew my library card and borrow some books.

Mr. Dewey tells Richard that if he gets lost, all he has to do is go towards the EXIT sign.

I love this shot where Richard Tyler walks into this part of the library and finds the rotunda.

He looks up at the ceiling, and finds this beautiful painting foreshadowing future events.

We cut back to Richard Tyler examining the rotunda’s beautiful artwork.

As Richard Tyler looks up, we get a closer look at the fire breathing dragon.

Then a closer look at the pirates, who are showing off their pistols.

Now we get a shot of Captain Ahab poking his harpoon at Moby Dick.

Next, we get Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, representing the Horror section of the library.

Last of all, we get a close-up of the yet un-named Pagemaster, who resembles Christopher Lloyd. No prizes for guessing there must be a connection between the two.

Richard Tyler slips on his dripping wet shoes and knocks himself out, as we start leaving the live-action framing device and enter the dream sequence which is conveyed through animation. The animated segments of this movie are probably the most famous if you ask people who have seen this movie, and for me this aspect of the film was the main draw as a kid. Culkin runs away from paint dripping from the ceiling, and a subtle detail is that bookshelves splattered by the paint turn animated, which is a nice touch from the director. If you know anything about the production of this film, you’ll know former Disney animators worked on The Pagemaster and gave it a unique look compared to other 90’s children’s films at the time like Once Upon A Forest for example. The Pagemaster certainly utilises early CGI with live action to give it an imaginative flair, especially in this magic paint chase sequence which blew my mind when I first saw it because I hadn’t yet seen Who Framed Roger Rabbit or even Cool World (pity me, because I saw Cool World first and didn’t see Roger Rabbit until eons later). The animation isn’t as sophisticated as Disney films at the time, but it fits right in with FernGully: The Last Rainforest which 20th Century Fox also released.

I like this dragon hiding in the paint, foreshadowing the later encounter with the beast.

As you can see, shelves hit by the paint turn animated in this sequence, a nice touch.

Richard Tyler cowers from the paint in the middle of a compass, indicating his journey.

Richard Tyler examines his cartoon self, looking at his fingers.

Our first glimpse of the titular Pagemaster, who explains that Richard Tyler is an illustration.

“I am the Pagemaster, keeper of the books, guardian of the written word!”

“Fiction! A-Z, where all is possible! Where a boy’s imagination can take root, and grow to incredible heights!”

“Where a boy’s courage is a wind that moves him to discovery!”

The Pagemaster’s titular book themed wizard is a tad underrated as far as pre-Harry Potter wizards go in the Millennial pantheon of childhood fantasy. Before Dumbledore, we had Gandalf and Merlin and that was about it, plus when it comes to the Pagemaster you’ve gotta love a sorcerer with a gimmick. He’s all about books, and he conjures literature into boats and stuff. He tells Richard Tyler that to return home he must pass three tests, Horror, Adventure and Fantasy. Standard stuff for a hero’s journey and a wizard who helps him along. I think the vastness of the library in the animated sequences are impressive, hinting at how reading literature expands your imagination in-universe. The library almost becomes a character in the film unto itself, a magic place of wonders and enchantment with every book opened. When you’re a child, the selection of your local library seems massive and overwhelming, I recall looking up books about ancient Egypt at the Five Dock and Drummoyne libraries growing up. The picture books produced in the 1980s and 1990s were iconic to a certain time’s visual culture, like Possum Magic and The Rainbow Fish, plus Turramulli the Giant Quinkin which terrified many an Australian primary school student with its Indigenous folklore illustrated by the great Dick Roughsey. Primary school libraries were also where the Scholastic book fair set up, which exposed me to the brilliant My Girragundji about an Aboriginal boy who befriended a frog. These Scholastic book fairs at the school library also introduced me to the works of Paul Jennings and Morris Gleitzman, the former was responsible for the source material that became the classic TV series Round The Twist and the latter collaborated on projects like Wicked! and Deadly!. It was an era when young adult literature was yet to blossom into the publishing juggernaut it is today, and classrooms had bookshelves full of Goosebumps and Myth Men books (I didn’t read the Animorphs books but their cultural impact was massive, I watched the TV show based on them after school). Critics of The Pagemaster often complain that the movie only showcases public domain literature, but in a way this aspect of the movie has aged better than overt pop culture quipping children’s movies of yesteryear like Shrek. Because of the circumstances around the movie’s production pre-dating the internet, The Pagemaster is a time capsule of what libraries were like right before the turn of the millennium, cosy comfort food for bookworms like me who rented it on VHS from Civic Video. Nowadays, we have nerd-core rappers like Mega Ran teaming up with MC Lars to create library themed hip-hop albums such as The Dewey Decibel System to encourage young people to read, but back in the day we had to rely on Ted Turner cartoons to educate us. Captain Planet and the Planeteers may be Ted Turner’s magnum opus, but The Pagemaster could be a viable property to reboot for today’s audiences.

The Pagemaster sends Culkin on a library cart ride through the bookshelves.

The Pagemaster fades away into the aether once he’s nudged Richard Tyler on his quest.

Check out the vast hallways Culkin is careening down.

A flurry of loose paper flitters into the air as Culkin whooshes past.

Subtle use of CGI blended with 2D animation is neat here as the perspective shifts.

The background detail as Culkin rushes by adds to the sense of scale about the magic library.

He crashes into the telephone he was trying to call his parents on, informed by a prompt message that the phone lines are cut due to the storm.

The first themed book emerges from the pile, Adventure, angry with Richard Tyler.

Richard Tyler has had a nasty crash, now this pirate captain book is mad at him as well.

Richard Tyler shows Adventure his library card, to prove he’s not a book.

The three books of the film, Adventure, Horror and Fantasy, serve as companions to Richard Tyler on his journey, sentient tomes which represent their genres. Patrick Stewart voices the pirate captain Adventure, Whoopi Goldberg voices the purple feminine Fantasy, and Frank Welker voices the hunchbacked Horror. Each have different purposes, each can get a little annoying with their book puns, and the movie spends more time with them than with the titular Pagemaster. Adventure changes his tune regarding Richard Tyler when he finds out he’s a customer rather than a book, although Richard whines about how he needs to get home and how his parents will be worried sick about him. Adventure opens Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea onto the floor and the pair of heroes are attacked by a giant squid up the ladder. This library seems to have books available by plot convenience, as Richard Tyler is saved from dropping to his doom by Fantasy’s wings, located in the generic shelves which seem to have everything stacked next to each other. We’re also introduced to Fantasy in this scene, who also yells at Richard Tyler for grabbing her the way he did. Fantasy gets into an argument with Adventure, due to both of them wanting to be checked out of the library, but Richard just wants to go home. After being pursued by the jaws of the Baskerville hound, the gang find themselves exploring the Horror section.

This is one of the more memorable set-pieces from the film I can recall.

Richard Tyler has to jump for his life, and grabs hold of Fantasy by the spine.

Culkin is told off by Whoopi Goldberg’s wrath, notice she’s wearing glass fairy tale slippers.

Adventure finds a copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Richard Tyler is attacked once again by literacy, as the Hound of the Baskervilles barks.

Richard Tyler, Adventure and Fantasy are chased down the corridor by the Hound.

The gang escape being chewed up by a devil dog, exhausted by their pursuit.

Point me to the sky above, I can’t get there on my own, walk me to the graveyard, dig up her bones…

This library must be massive if it has expansive cemeteries in the Horror section.

I wasn’t exactly a fan of Horror as a little kid, Horrible Histories was as spooky as I was willing to go, however due to a variety of circumstances I learned I couldn’t avoid horror forever. The Pagemaster is kind of notorious for scaring children with its Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde sequence, a tale I read in a picture book version at the Tyalla school library and in Robert Lewis Stevenson’s original text through Penguin Classics as a teenager. There were a lot of picture book versions of horrific tales floating around libraries in the nineties, I remember a specific series dedicated to Dracula, Frankenstein, The Werewolf and The Mummy which had frightening covers which intrigued me enough to read them. They were really well-illustrated too, and condensed the high-brow narrative of Frankenstein to a grade level where I could understand the meat of the story at a young age. In The Pagemaster however, I doubt any child would be allowed to browse these shelves unattended by an adult, as it would be the most dangerous section of shelving to encounter. In a world where I wasn’t allowed to take out Jurassic Park out of the Older Readers section of my high school library without permission from an authority figure, Richard Tyler being allowed to explore the realm where Stephen King and Clive Barker reign supreme seems a bit far-fetched. The Pagemaster does capture the mood of a scaredy-cat confronted head on with this genre, however, and there’ll always be wusses that sneak a peek at horror fiction out of curiosity. Richard Tyler rings the bell of the haunted house, and down plummets Horror, the third sentient book of the team. Culkin must now make a literal friend of Horror, like Col. Kurtz said, as he guides the group through the haunted house of Mr. Hyde. This whole sequence with Hyde is compelling, even though it doesn’t do a very good job explaining the nature of Jekyll and Hyde to a presumed child audience. It is well animated in parts, especially the bit with the fallen chandelier.

Richard Tyler tries to make a break for the EXIT sign, but we all know it’s not time yet.

Of course the EXIT sign is above a giant haunted house, where evil lurks.

“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Must be a duplex…” quips Fantasy, examining the entrance.

Culkin catches Horror in his hands, a bit freaked out by the sight of him.

Horror in all his misshapen glory, apologising to Richard Tyler for scaring him.

Dr. Jekyll is played by Leonard Nimoy, who confronts the group with a lantern.

Richard Tyler and company explore the laboratory with test tubes and stuff.

Dr. Jekyll offers them a drink, which appears sinister and creepy.

Horror shoves Adventure, and the spilled cocktail burns a hole through the floor.

Dr. Jekyll drinks his infamous potion in front of Richard Tyler who begs him not to.

Dr. Jekyll throws his glass into the fireplace, producing green flame.

The team of books and the boy watches astonished in terror.

The terrible visage of Mr. Hyde, which isn’t really that scary as an adult.

Horror pleads “SANCTUARY” as his fallen chandelier is dragged down into the pit.

I reckon Hyde looks way creepier here in shadowed candlelight.

The urgency of Horror increases, repeating “SANCTUARY!” in desperation.

Fantasy rescues Horror from certain death with her wand’s blowtorch.

It’s neat that a book called Ghost Stories is incorporeal, but my eyes spy far more adult horror fiction on the walls like The Exorcist and The Haunting on the walls.

And so begins the assault by ghost stories, do they have Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark?

If the goal of this film is to encourage children to read, why spook them with books?

Richard Tyler just can’t catch a break, climbing down from the haunted house.

The next challenge is the Land of Adventure, which is full of pirate stories and swashbuckling. The Pagemaster may not have the most cohesive narrative in the world, but it has decent traditional animated sequences which are a marvel to look at. Adventure is a far brighter, colourful realm distinct from the muted gloomy tones of Horror, and the staircases are made to resemble books. This sequence is most famous for the Captain Ahab scene and the Treasure Island pirates, and again it doesn’t do a very good job establishing the nature of these characters so you’d want to read about them. Ahab’s ship gets totalled by the White Whale before you get to know him that well, whereas in the book he rambles about getting vengeance against that sea creature quite a lot. Whilst Horror had quite a few spooky scenes and built up atmosphere going for it in this movie, Adventure seems like it comes and goes, although it has its few quiet moments like Richard Tyler telling Adventure that he and the other books are the only friends he’s ever had. This part of the movie has a lot of character development and boosts Richard from a whiny protagonist to somebody who can put up a fight when he needs to, instead of crumbling at the first sign of conflict. I’ll summarise the plot the best I can with visual aids, to show off the pretty animation:

A beautiful sunset to transition from Horror to Adventure.

You can see a book staircase as part of the scenery here.

Adventure gets soaked in sea-spray, and Horror laughs at his expense.

Add this to One Less Than Perfect Shot on Twitter, the innuendo speaks for itself.

The crew of books and their boy sail out into the choppy waters, greeted by Ahab.

Captain Ahab is bathed in red light, like it’s a Rob Zombie video all of a sudden.

Moby Dick, the White Whale, chomps on the main characters’ boat and leaves them stranded.

Richard Tyler and Adventure are rescued from sharks by the Treasure Island pirates.

The pirates laugh it up in Richard Tyler and Adventure’s faces.

The massive pirate ship emerges out of the distance towards the small dingy.

And the ship flies the Jolly Roger, as the orchestra declares its menace.

Long John Silver captures Richard Tyler and Adventure, taking a good look at him.

Adventure and Richard Tyler are searched for hidden treasure, and Long John Silver throws away Culkin’s library card which Adventure needs to get checked out.

Of course the skull-ish Treasure Island is made out of stone books.

The pirates land and they start their trek towards the digging site.

The pirates are spooked by a skeleton in the sand, but Long John Silver isn’t having it.

The pirates stage a mutiny against Long John Silver because the treasure chest is empty.

After a scene of slapstick where Horror and Fantasy are reunited with Richard Tyler, Culkin faces off against Long John Silver with a nearby sword.

Richard Tyler succeeds at intimidating Long John Silver, who sings Dead Man’s Chest as he rows away, leaving Culkin and the books to plan their next stop on their journey.

There’s a scene where Adventure is mean to Horror, whose attempts at imitating him annoys him, and Horror sulks off on the beach alone and it’s rather sad.

TRULY ADVENTURE IS THE REAL MONSTER, WE STAN HORROR ON THIS WEBSITE.

Although Culkin is moping about how he’ll never get home because he lost his library card, Fantasy telling him sometimes you have to fight to make a wish come true is a good message.

After being a dick to Horror, Adventure finds Richard Tyler’s lost library card on his peg-leg.

At least Fantasy calls out Adventure for being mean-spirited to Horror, who he has insulted.

Horror has been captured by the Lilliputians from Gulliver’s Travels, as Adventure discovers.

I like how Adventure is drawn with regret in his eyes as he frees Horror from bondage.

Fantasy’s wand begins to blink, which means it’s time to head to the Fantasy section.

Alright, I should talk about the Fantasy segment of this movie. This film was made in 1994, and as a result you don’t get any big-name franchises like The Lord of the Rings appearing to entice kids to read about Gandalf. What we get is Fantasy in the Fantasy Glades sense, to borrow an analogy from obscure Australian theme park lore. Fantasy Glades was constructed with the influence of the Brothers Grimm rather than Tolkien in mind, and The Pagemaster shares similarities with that since what we’re greeted with is all public domain IPs like Mother Goose and Humpty Dumpty. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with eschewing more recognisable franchises in favour of doing its own thing with public domain books, however this is why I think The Pagemaster is ripe for a reboot which could be like Ready Player One for literature only substantial. I should also mention that Fantasy is also the segment of the movie where Whatever You Imagine appears as the big pop song on the soundtrack, and this portion of the film acts as a sort of animated music video for the song. It’s not a bad song, but it’s very of its time and quite cheesy. This is a segment which suggests Fantasy in its archetypical form rather than indicative of specific properties (with very few public domain exceptions like Arabian Nights and Alice In Wonderland), there’s no A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin or C.S. Lewis’ Narnia to be found but there is a dragon here otherwise the audience would riot. You gotta have a dragon in your Fantasy section, even if it’s not borrowed from The Dragonriders of Pern. There are rules about this. If they made this movie today there’d be Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman books referenced as long as their estates play ball, back in 1994 the capital F Fantasy genre was not as recognisable (or marketable) as it is now and thus we get these generic fantasy element in our sandbox filled with “whatever you imagine”. The Pagemaster as a film often struggles to express the meat of the classic literary tales being referenced so you’ll want to read them yourself, and Fantasy is perhaps the guiltiest sequence of all of these because it doesn’t tell you which storybooks have dragons and stuff like that in them, it just implies dragons can be found in the fiction section of your local library. I like The Pagemaster, I really do, but you’ve gotta admit when your appeal to the youth to read books is being outdone by the Danny Devito directed adaptation of Matilda - maybe your script needs a few rewrites.

We zoom through this spiderweb on our way to the world of Fantasy, enchantment awaits!

There’s a faun playing a pan pipe on a rock near some dandelions.

Mother Goose flies overhead as Richard Tyler and the books duck for cover.

Twinkling fairies up ahead of Richard Tyler, illuminating the sky, Fantasy calls them “my little babies”, which is interesting to say the least because it implies books can adopt kids.

One of the fairies prances about on Richard Tyler’s hand, its skeleton is electric I guess?

Two of the fairies steal Richard Tyler’s glasses, also, here’s Humpty Dumpty.

The Yellow Brick Road is a possible Oz reference, the boy and his books head to the cave.

Adventure enters the cave with trepidation, and Fantasy teases him about it.

Richard Tyler finds the EXIT sign at the top of this mountain, which looks ominous.

Adventure whacks his sword on the ceiling of the cave, waking the dragon up.

The dragon belches fire as Adventure flees the scene, this needs Ronnie James Dio music.

Richard Tyler clings to the nose-horn of the dragon, screaming his lungs out.

Fantasy tears out one of her pages labelled Arabian Nights and summons a magic carpet, which is one of the rare instances in this movie that non-Western fantasy is referenced.

Richard Tyler makes a narrow escape on the carpet from being Kentucky Fried Culkin.

Richard Tyler makes a quick dodge of the dragon’s fire as the beast chases them down.

Richard Tyler and his company of books fly away towards the EXIT on the magic carpet.

Fantasy’s wand is knocked to the ground by Horror’s fumbling, which means trouble.

The dragon scorches the magic carpet, which sends them hurtling towards the tower.

The EXIT sign is so close, yet so far away, and the gang is downed by the dragon.

As Culkin climbs out, let me remind you The Pagemaster has an Atlas Shrugged joke.

“C’mon guys! The EXIT!” yells Richard Tyler, rushing towards the finish.

The library book crew is tired out by their ordeal, unenthusiastic about further struggle.

Then the dragon breathes fire again and the library books have to retreat into a cave.

Culkin climbs to the top, only to find he’s left his book friend behind enemy lines.

Whilst hiding in a cranny from dragon danger, Adventure makes out with Fantasy.

“How would you like to curl up with a good book?” says Adventure before he’s booted out.

Adventure plans to fight the dragon himself so Richard Tyler can get away.

Adventure’s bravado is rewarded by being scorched by the dragon, and he falls over.

Richard Tyler steals the sword, shield and helmet off the fallen knight who crumbles to dust.

Culkin faces off against the dragon, sword and shield in hand, but alas this doesn’t last.

The dragon curls its tail around Culkin, removing his armour and eating him.

Culkin is now in the belly of the beast, and it seems there is no hope left for him.

The dragon also swallowed Fantasy’s wand, in case I didn’t make that clearer earlier.

The Pagemaster’s disembodied voice advises Culkin to look to the books, but he opens Alice In Wonderland and the Queen of Hearts yells “OFF WITH HIS HEAD!” at him.

He opens Jack and the Beanstalk and makes a break through it on the growing plant.

Culkin saves the books from the dragon and gives Fantasy her wand back.

Of course there’s a magic door that says Look To The Books on it, why wouldn’t there be?

They get to a weird portal as the orchestral theme swells, signalling the conclusion.

The Pagemaster rears his head again, after several scenes where his disembodied voice appears like Obi-Wan telling Luke Skywalker to turn off his targeting computer.

I like how the books are all reverent of the Pagemaster but Culkin is ready to cuss him out.

The Pagemaster is all whimsical like “TELL ME!”, unaware that Culkin is gonna have strong words after his opener of “Do you have any idea what I’ve been through?”

“I was nearly torn apart by a crazy doctor, then I was made a slave by some mangy pirates, and eaten, GOT THAT… EATEN, by a fire-breathing dragon! Not to mention being tossed, squashed, and scared practically to death!”

“And yet you stand before me.” says the Pagemaster. “Think, boy, what kind of adventure would you have had if I had brought you here with the turn of a page?”

I really like this mythic shot of the portal even if it’s accompanying the Pagemaster’s BS. There are accompanying visions of each of the villains Richard Tyler has faced on his quest.

Richard Tyler looks down at the non-animated Culkin, waiting to return home.

The Pagemaster sends Culkin and the books through the weird portal back to the library.

Culkin collides with his cartoon soul, and each of the three books plop on the ground with him.

The Pagemaster lives and dies on its animated sequences, so a return to the live-action world is a bit like Dorothy saying there’s no place like home, when her home is a miserable black and white farm. Nonetheless, Richard Tyler has his reasons for returning to his parents, namely that his peril with fire-breathing dragons and enslaving pirates is over. So begins the ending of this movie, where Richard Tyler has to apply the lessons he learned to the real world and starts reading something that isn’t a medical journal of statistics. I’ll get down to business explaining what happens in this film’s climax, but I would like to mention this movie’s end credits end with a cheesy nineties song called Dream Away which is on the soundtrack. I don’t really have much to say about this song other than I miss films ending with cheesy nineties ballads or adult contemporary covers of the hit single from the movie it’s promoting. I’ll also bring up that David Kirschner was also involved in producing the Halloween cult classic Hocus Pocus, so you can thank him for that childhood nostalgia as well. Whatever You Imagine comes back to serenade the end credits rolling, which I kinda prefer to Dream Away when I’m listening to the soundtrack CD.

The rotunda returns to its non-goopy form, with the Pagemaster staring down at Culkin.

Richard Tyler’s library card floats down to the ground, like a Hogwarts Acceptance letter.

This shot where Christopher Lloyd’s face is merged with the Pagemaster’s is something films like this never get credit for, setting up the implication that they’re one and the same.

Richard sees the EXIT sign and runs for it, but Mr. Dewey warns him “Careful, you’ll slip again!”

Culkin shows Mr. Dewey his library card, mentioning how he forgot his books, and Mr. Dewey says “You can only check out two.”

Culkin pleads with Mr. Dewey “Just this once…” and Mr Dewey allows it.

I admire the craftsmanship that went into the book props as Culkin takes them away.

Man, Christopher Lloyd is selling that whimsical children’s movie grin, you can’t hate it.

Now Richard Tyler rides home unburdened by cumbersome safety equipment which probably caused his bike crash rather than prevent it. Nice character beat here!

His character arc is completed by a sweet bike jump because it’s the nineties!

He rides away saying “Good, that was definitely good.” when he’s been saying “Not good.” half of the film, and the streetlights make a magic pixie dust sound when they turn on.

Richard Tyler’s parents worry about where he is and contemplate calling the police, but his bike signifies that he’s home.

Richard’s mother spots that there’s a light on in the treehouse.

Richard is sleeping in the treehouse tonight, and his parents tuck him in before leaving.

Fantasy switches the lantern back on with magic after Richard’s parents turn it off.

The silhouettes of Richard’s three book friends can be seen on the treehouse wall.

To wrap it up, The Pagemaster is both better and worse than I remember, a relic of a magical time when Ted Turner tried to educate us with cartoons like Captain Planet, and of the Disney Renaissance keeping 2D animation relevant in Hollywood long enough that their competitors also wanted a slice of the action. It seems to be well liked if not well remembered, and it persists in the lizard almond part of countless Millennial brains who rented this box office flop on VHS. Home video really gave this movie a new lease on life, I never saw it in the cinema and if Disney’s policy regarding screenings of the 20th Century Fox back catalogue continues I doubt I ever will. I got lucky catching a screening of Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards in 35MM at GoMa up in Queensland when they were screening a bunch of nuclear apocalypse films for a special exhibition, I doubt The Pagemaster will ever warrant curation of it by an art museum no matter how much nostalgia it holds in my heart. You could show far worse films to your children than this, even if it left very little pop culture impact, I’ll always treasure its ability to whisk me away to the early to mid nineties with one touch of a play button. Some argue this film scared people from entering libraries as a kid, which is hard to argue with what with each book containing monsters attacking. I liked it, Disney would do well with a TV series called The Pagemaster: Re-illustrated or something to keep this overlooked property alive with updated book references that include young adult franchises like Percy Jackson and Artemis Fowl or Warrior Cats. I’d tune in every week for new episodes., because I’m a pathetic bookworm who needs to be validated by visual media instead of it telling me that reading is for chumps. We at Jade Crypt of Wonders salute The Pagemaster and its nebulous goal of getting children to read by showing them frightening imagery at an impressionable age.

Puppy Shoes, Never Worn

This is partially about Kentaro Miura’s passing, I promise. But it’s about other stuff too, and I haven’t updated the blog in a while so I have to keep you up to date.

I try to avoid publishing something that’s either a bummer or connected to my mental health, but I kinda have to do both to express what has happened to me.

My twin brother was in the process of adopting a puppy, he bought absorbent training pads for it and everything, but out of the blue the puppy he was adopting drowned in a pool before he could bring it home. The Dachshund puppy was a girl, he named it Lady, and became attached to it fast. Apparently there was a woman near the pool but she had some trauma related to water and she couldn’t jump in to save it. I was looking forward to raising that puppy with my brother, and we were robbed of the opportunity to bring some light into our home. Being diagnosed with bipolar disorder on top of my high-functioning autism a while back was rough, and I’ve been recovering from a major manic episode which scared my family enough that they considered sending me to the psych ward if it got worse. Now I’m managing my condition with new medication that doesn’t make me want to die like the old stuff I was on. That puppy was going to be the first pet I would interact with since my black and white cat Gidget got put down because she got sick. My brother and I had plans, we even went to the pet store to get supplies for this new arrival. He got a whole box of training pads for housebreaking this animal, which now sits on his leather couch unused.

It all reminds me of that super-short story, attributed to Hemingway, “FOR SALE: baby shoes, never worn.” I wanted my brother to bring home the puppy he showed me pictures of so bad. It was going to change our lives, for better or worse. But the puppy drowned, and the next thing I know, my brother has invested in a scooter instead of a dog. He’s not ready to consider adopting any new puppies any time soon, and I respect his emotional distance from the subject. I couldn’t help laughing when I first heard the bad news, because it was so ludicrously sad, I couldn’t cry over it. There was a lengthy screening process for adopting this puppy, three prospective owners failed the test of the breeder, and my brother met the requirements only for the puppy to die before he could drive back to Wollongong to claim the creature. My belief system is perhaps different to most other people like atheists who don’t believe in a soul or that you go anywhere when you die,, my Taoism teaches that this poor puppy perished and is headed to a speedy reincarnation. I don’t cry like I should at funerals, because part of my brain feels these people aren’t truly gone, they’ve gone somewhere else and that’s not really sad to me. The absence of these people who die from their loved ones’ lives, that’s the sad part and even if I can’t cry over it I get the picture.

I have reasons for believing what I do, especially since dead people have appeared to me in dreams when I wasn’t having that manic episode where I was shouting at my gods through the ceiling and getting my parents all worried, when someone famous dies I always remember that dream where Cliff Burton appeared to me at Christmas and asked why metalheads treated him as some sort of god, when he’s just human. I told him, tears in my third eye, that he’s the reason we picked up bass as an instrument. But I was taken aback that even Cliff Burton admitted he’s no god. He was just a human, and a damn good bass player. Nothing more. That’s a cold fact that stuck with me, our heroes are just human instead of the deities of craft we imagine them to be.

Which brings me to the untimely demise of Kentaro Miura. I haven’t cried over him passing away due to aortic dissection, and I don’t think my tear ducts will co-operate with that unless I’m blasting the Guts theme from Susumu Hirasawa’s Berserk OST at three am when I’m emotionally vulnerable enough to cry just a little. I didn’t know Kentaro Miura personally, but I do know that had Twitter existed when Osamu Tezuka died we’d be awash in Astro Boy fan-art tributes and memes. As an anime fan who’s only seen maybe three episodes of the 1997 Berserk series, even I knew this man was legend because of his draftsmanship and gift for dark fantasy storytelling. Comparisons to George R. R. Martin both for the complexity of his fiction and his long hiatuses were made when Miura was alive (I won’t call him Kentaro because I wasn’t family to the man, as per Japanese custom), and I couldn’t help noticing that people stopped making as many Idolm@ster hiatus jokes at Miura’s expense once he left this world. He wasn’t regarded as the god of manga like Tezuka was, however it was clear that one of the greatest mangaka of all time had shuffled off his mortal coil. For days, my Twitter feed has been filled with Miura tributes. I never read a page the man drew until he was no longer with us, and even I know a titan of the manga industry has fallen.

We don’t get artists like Miura every day, and I’m humbled by what output he left behind while I struggle to revise my novel manuscripts with a goal towards professional publication. Writing novels is perceived as easier than drawing comics on the scale Miura did, especially given the demands of the manga industry unique to Japan’s culture of working yourself to death. I noticed people weren’t cracking jokes at the mangaka behind Hunter X Hunter either, because their own health problems are contributing to the delays in new chapters. We shouldn’t treat artists as monkeys who crank out content for us, we need to ensure they’re taking care of themselves.

At the moment, I’ve been marathoning the Shrek movies just because I’ve never seen all of them, I’m learning bass and classical guitar with help from my father teaching me music. You don’t know what an artist may be struggling with behind the scenes, and I sure struggled this past three years. It amuses me that fans of Berserk call themselves “strugglers” and encourage each other to “keep on struggling”. Various projects I’ve put on hold to take care of myself and my family like The Enchanting Existential Dread of Aussie Theme Parks are still part of my schedule, but that doesn’t mean I don’t take breaks and look at TikTok memes of cats I find cute or amusing. I might not be able to afford the deluxe editions of Berserk to remember Miura by, but I bought the Blu-Ray set of the 1997 anime and will watch it with my twin brother when he’s available to share that with. The epic tragedy of Berserk, although unfinished, will stand as a monument to fantasy fiction and someday we might even get a half-decent anime reboot with proper production values. A man can dream, can’t he? Kentaro Miura has left us with a wealth of visual storytelling to enjoy, and his legacy is felt across pop culture with video game franchises like the Dark Souls series which I’ve never played because I’m not that good at video games even though I’m interested in them as a medium. Miura wasn’t on my radar much when he was alive, and I respect his draftsmanship, but you can bet your bottom dollar the day Ralph Bakshi carks on us I’ll be even more saddened by it because of how familiar I am with Bakshi’s works compared to Berserk. I’ve heard people haven’t been this devastated by a death in the anime/manga family since Satoshi Kon, and I believe the hype, the weebs are in mourning and their enthusiasm for Berserk is endless. May we not have to deal with a loss of this magnitude too soon after this, may our heroes hold on here a bit longer. Keep on struggling, as the Berserk fans say, we’ve got lots to do on this planet yet.

The Enchanting Existential Dread of Aussie Theme Parks - Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire

ABC gets a sure-fire true crime hit with this three-part documentary series.

I’ll get around to reviewing Luna Park when it reopens and has a new Big Dipper constructed, because I want to experience the place in person rather than just reminiscing about its glorious past. But this year something happened that I couldn’t ignore both as a theme park fan and as a person whose extended family is tied into this debacle dating back to the seventies. When it comes to Sydney based theme parks, all paths lead past the King Cole face into the Big Top where the Ghost Train once stood, and any attempt to avoid this elephant in the room would be dishonest and even ahistorical. It’d be like writing a history of New York City and leaving out 9/11. On June 9th, 1979 the Ghost Train ride at Luna Park erupted into an inferno and claimed the lives of Damien, Craig, and John Godson; plus four young Waverley College students including Jonathan Billings, Michael Johnson, Richard Carroll and Seamus Rahilly. These seven deaths have cast a dark shadow over Luna Park Sydney for decades, with a lot of unanswered questions after the police blamed an electrical fault for the blaze whilst other witnesses to the fire blamed arson. It’s an old, old story in Sydney that’s tied up in political and police corruption, proof to many as to how rotten this city can get when real estate speculators get involved. The official line from the cops called it an accident, but Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire hints that it might’ve been murder. Police cleaned up the crime scene before evidence could be examined, and there is a prevailing feeling that justice has not been done. Interviews with bereaved family members who survived the Ghost Train fire are hard to sit through, and you get the impression these broken people still haven’t healed from the trauma of what happened that fateful night. Plenty of people have tackled the subject of the Ghost Train fire both in art with Martin Sharp’s Street of Dreams movie starring Tiny Tim of all entertainers, and in brilliant essays like Hellfire by Richard Cooke. When you approach the subject of the Ghost Train fire, it’s easy to get superstitious and read into the omens attached to the incident like that spread-by-tabloids photograph of the horned man next to one of the Godson children who died taken at Circular Quay. This haunting red herring distracts from the likelihood of organised crime being to blame rather than apparent occult activity where Moloch worship and child sacrifice is somehow responsible. Martin Sharp didn’t help his case when he started to believe funfairs like Luna Park were hotbeds for the demonic, his biography Sharp implies Martin thought Buddha wasn’t strong enough to ward off the dark forces of the King Cole face looming over Sydney. As a Taoist and ordained Dudeist priest, I know that Buddha has this buddy named Guan Yu, the Chinese god of war and literature who is feared and respected by the Triads. If any entity is capable of delivering Abe Saffron’s ghost a well-deserved supernatural ass-beating, it’s Guan Yu. However, my dabbling in Taoist witchcraft went awry and sooner or later I was then diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I saw unexplainable things which I couldn’t dismiss as coincidence when I was out of my gourd struggling with mental illness, perhaps in desperation I petitioned higher powers to solve this cold case forever because I lost faith in mere humans doing what was right. Those of us who are religious tend to cling to justice being done after death, which is unsatisfactory to hardline atheists who demand it being done on Earth because according to them you only get one life to live. Perhaps I should leave ghost-busting to the professionals, as my magic wasn’t strong enough to achieve the desired results, but something didn’t sit right with me when I found out the legendary thrash metal band Slayer performed at Luna Park in 2013. Slayer are known for serenading history’s monsters with their discography, however due to a variety of factors like Dave Lombardo jumping ship and Jeff Hanneman being about to die from spider-bite complications, they were unaware of the history of the haunted theme park they desecrated by accident by playing song after blasphemous song in a venue where children burned to death. I can’t imagine Slayer would cancel their gig if they knew what went down in the Big Top, they often joked about performing Angel of Death in Israel, however their lack of acknowledgement of the Ghost Train fire in live footage I’ve seen of that concert disturbs me because of how un-Slayer this predicament is. So they just played Bloodline and Hell Awaits as well as other hits such as Altar of Sacrifice like it was no big deal. I went to see Slayer live at Download Festival back in 2019 to prove to Jeff Hanneman’s ghost I wasn’t a poser, and I have no problem with Slayer performing these songs in any other venue, but this is the Luna Park Big Top we’re talking about here. People died in what is now that arena, and I doubt Slayer shredding their guitars singing about murder helped lay those departed souls to rest. It was very inappropriate of them to do that, but all they had on their minds was Dave Lombardo’s absence and Jeff Hanneman’s impending demise. Tom Araya probably would’ve recorded a song about Luna Park’s Ghost Train fire with Kerry King if he knew about the tragedy, which won’t happen now that Slayer is retired after their End of Days tour, I really hoped there was some way to bring the band back together before they called it quits.

In Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire we see footage of this guy dancing with the Folkloric Festival parade, whilst this guy was “never seen again”, you can chalk that up to the corrupt cops not wanting to look too deep into the cause of the fire in the first place.

Slayer’s original lineup, captured in the Reign In Blood era during better times.

Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire avoids the potential for paranormal investigation into the matter of the incident, sticking to Occam’s Razor and hard hitting investigative journalism based on facts rather than chasing spectres of the distant past with a ouija board. There is an argument to be made that the Big Top at Luna Park needs an exorcism pronto, however Caro Meldrum-Hanna is much more interested in talking to real survivors of the event and bringing justice for those left behind. I would definitely watch an ordained Catholic priest sprinkle holy water onto the Big Top stage to protect performers who wander into the venue unaware of what transpired in this place (I have particular issue with Luna Park Sydney allowing Slayer to perform song after blasphemous song inside a site where children burned to death back in 2013), but Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire isn’t that sort of program. It’s probably the most depressing work of documentary involving arson allegations I’ve seen since Until The Light Takes Us tackled the Norwegian black metal scene, it’s brutal to sit through. The first episode’s re-enactment of the Ghost Train fire is distressing to watch, more-so for the interviewees who have to revisit that chapter in their lives. The series opens with Ghost Train fire survivor Jason Holman walking in a cemetery full of graves, to give you an idea of the grim proceedings. True crime documentaries are often accused of sensationalising events rather than giving airtime to the victims, but Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire is a masterclass in doing the opposite of that. The series conveys the sense of loss suffered by the survivors and the bereaved parents who had to bury their kids. You hear about what sort of people the victims of the Ghost Train fire were when they were alive, who was a ladies-man, academic and sports achievements of the boys who perished.

Part of what makes this documentary so credible is the extensive use of the Martin Sharp Street of Dreams Trust archival material, hoarded away by Martin Sharp whilst he was still alive to expose the true cause of the fire. There’s a mountain of cassette tapes and newspaper clippings from yesteryear in Martin’s conspiracy room, and Caro Meldrum-Hanna makes the most of it by using it to contact eyewitnesses like Les Dowd, who says he was pressured by police to change his story when he was questioned for a statement. The section of the documentary where he mentions seeing bikies near the Ghost Train that night is well re-enacted just like the rest of those scenes, and illuminates the situation when so little footage of the night of the blaze is available.

The third part of the documentary really delves into the dirt regarding Jim Black, Bill Allen and their alleged mob connections to kingpin Abe Saffron, subjecting us to a cavalcade of corruption and shredded evidence, incriminating tapes are sunk to the bottom of the sea in a bag. This is by far the most depressing chapter of the series, as injustice reigns over the city of Sydney and corrupt deeds go unquestioned by officers of the law who knew better. The chain of command above detective Douglas Knight was rotten all the way to the top, receiving payment from Jack Rooklyn, and most of the crooked cops are long dead so people can finally break their silence. The Grundy Corporation was in the running to win the lease for Luna Park until new tenders were called by Harbourside Amusements who were meant to maintain the rides. The auctioning off of park memorabilia and rides like the carousel was sacrilege to the Friends of Luna Park who saw it as the looting of history, so much of Luna Park’s heart and soul was gone. Martin Sharp fought against the redevelopment of Luna Park by interested parties, including Abe Saffron who was at the time the kingpin behind King’s Cross’s strip joints and other sinful businesses. We see a lot of archived footage of Abe Saffron denying any criminal activity, despite his now obvious criminal underworld empire. He was known for blackmail, extortion and bribing of cops, as well as his use of fire for real estate purposes. As Sydney’s best known mafioso, his considerable influence had its tentacles all over the city and weakened the justice system. A string of arsons including that of a gay disco and ladies only restaurant are linked to Saffron’s involvement, and one of the most disturbing allegations link him to the deliberate lighting of the fire at Luna Park. Anne Buckingham stated “people weren’t meant to die” in that fire, implicating Saffron as the secret owner of Luna Park. His cousins Hal and Col Goldstein are accused by Martin Sharp’s tapes of acquiring the lease through criminal means. Sam Cowper, Abe Saffron’s nephew, was in control of Harbourside Amusements with a secret Saffron Trust managing the money. Saffron installed his own Arcadia game machines which funnelled profits back to Saffron’s personal trust.

The web of intrigue surrounding the Luna Park Ghost Train fire is Sydney urban legend at this point, up there with the Dismissal of Gough Whitlam and the disappearance of prime minister Harold Holt as one of Australia’s greatest conspiracies. Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire covers a lot of ground establishing how interconnected this mobster’s network of crime and fraud gets, helping the viewer at home understand the scope of this land grab heist on Luna Park. Powerful men wanted control of it for their nefarious purposes, and only when those men are dead are the tongues of the living allowed to talk. The cops didn’t investigate further because they were in the pocket of gangsters, and a whitewash of mounting evidence took place when a report was made. Carol Meldrum-Hanna interviews Rosemary Opitz, a former friend of Saffron’s, to get to the bottom of what life in his inner circle was like. Police commissioners like Bill Allen and politicians wined and dined with him, and the top of society associated with him. Abe Saffron and Jack Rooklyn were business associates, on the night of the fire a group of girls was told by one of their fathers that something was happening at Luna Park and they couldn’t go with the boys. The National Crime Authority said they found no evidence of bikies lighting the fire, despite eye-witness accounts. High Court Judge Lionel Murphy was having drinks with Saffron and his cronies, which wasn’t a good look and the inquiry probe into organised crime was shelved following Murphy’s death. NSW Premier Neville Wran is alleged to have colluded with Lionel Murphy to acquire the lease for Luna Park, and when Wran threatened to jail police involved in the Luna Park case, evidence tapes were destroyed by barbecue. There were apparently three “Humpty Dumptys” who could take a great fall if they were caught according to surviving police. Jason Holman has a final revelation where he was told by the leader of a bikie gang, off the phone so he wouldn’t be tapped, that Abe Saffron gave the order to burn Luna Park down. The conclusion of the series features Caro Meldrum-Hanna breaking the news of their investigation’s findings to the families of those children who died, it’s upsetting to reveal that Abe Saffron got away with it and there is a demand for a Royal Commission into the Ghost Train fire despite the length of time that has elapsed since 1979.

I watched the final episode when it aired with my Dad, who said that the documentary was quite sad, and we shared the moment together. Luna Park has always been a subject of interest for me and my extended family, and I’m glad Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire has called attention to the vast conspiracy behind the blaze. I met Martin Sharp before he died, at the Museum of Sydney where his art was being exhibited, and I shook his hand and said I enjoyed his Street of Dreams movie that was screening at the event. I can’t say I truly knew the man, but I was in his proximity for a brief glimmer, and he seemed haunted by the events of 1979 for the twilight chapter of his life. He left behind a legacy of both pop art and striving against police corruption to bring the truth into the light. As my parents’ generation passes away, the hippie dream of the sixties appears to erode with it even if places like Nimbin and Byron Bay keep it alive in their hearts. Luna Park Sydney is a shadow of its former self at present, but is currently being renovated to add new rides like the Big Dipper successor with the latest single rail technology. Its King Cole face remains grinning and defiant against the Abe Saffrons of Sydney’s property developers, laughing in the face of those who seek to destroy it. Whatever force or entity protecting it is very powerful indeed, and it should not be trifled with at any cost. Luna Park survived the extinction burst of arguably better theme parks like Sega World Sydney and Wonderland Sydney, the last funfair standing tall when so many others perished. It remains a monument to Martin Sharp’s dedication, even if very little of his vision is part of the amusement park’s current aesthetic, the fact it’s there at all is a small miracle.

The Tao Is Silent: Raymond Smullyan’s Introduction to Lao Tzu

“At all costs, the Christian must convince the heathen and the atheist that God exists, in order to save his soul. At all costs, the atheist must convince the Christian that the belief in God is but a childish and primitive superstition, doing enormous harm to the cause of true social progress. And so they battle and storm and battle away at each other. Meanwhile the Taoist Sage sits quietly by the stream, perhaps with a book of poems, a cup of wine, and some painting materials, enjoying the Tao to his heart’s content, without ever worrying if the Tao exists. The Sage has no need to affirm the Tao; he is far busy enjoying it!”

— The Tao is Silent

The Tao Is Silent is a lovely little book which serves as a Western introduction to what we might call philosophical Taoism, because it dispenses with the esoteric rituals and alchemical processes of magical Taoism and the deity temple offerings of religious Taoism. You will find dialogues and ramblings about the nature of the Tao within these pages, if you came here to learn about blasting chi with your mind you’re barking up the wrong tree - Smullyan is a stage magician rather than a Dragon Gate sorcerer and his framework is based in logic and mathematics. There’s a whole chapter where he rags on astrology, showing potential influence from James Randi there in his skepticism of it, however he is somewhat sympathetic to mystics.

Raymond Smullyan presents a very good case for the Westernised version of Taoism that doesn’t involve any altars to your gods, he advocates for an abstract force called the Tao and living in harmony with it. He’s amusing and rather adept at metaphors, despite the heavy ideas he’s laying down on you. He quotes Zen masters a lot, so there’s a bit of crossover between faiths as he explains the nitty-gritty of Taoist thought to the guailo set. It was originally published in the seventies, which probably blew some minds in the wake of Star Wars, and much of his discourse about the Tao feels ahead of its time in that Alan Watts vein. The way I practice Taoism in my daily life is somewhere in the middle, rooted somewhat in magical Taoism with prayers to deities but with a belief that the Tao is everywhere and you don’t need to confine your faith to a building to experience its benefits. I of course want to visit a Taoist temple someday, but until COVID blows over such a dream is difficult to achieve. Raymond Smullyan’s Taoism is abstract and vague, also not confined to a sacred building, which seems to be the default guailo-fication of Taoism when it comes to the West when you only read the Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi texts. There’s a brilliant scholarly essay by Russell Kirkland about the bizarre gulf between how Westerners practice Taoism versus how it’s practiced in China, and I found it an interesting read because even Ursula K Le Guin gets called out for removing parts of the Tao Te Ching text which didn’t appeal to her as a rational sci-fi writer. This scholarly essay calls out The Tao Of Pooh as Western psuedo-Taoist fluff, I can only imagine what rage The Tao Is Silent must inspire from dedicated Taoist scholars who understand both the philosophical and religious components of Taoist tradition from a Chinese perspective. On the other hand I read a beautiful article on Western Taoism and the different forms it might take called Along The Way: A Western Taoist Manifesto which makes a case for the spread of Taoist thought to Western shores. The Tao Is Silent is a Westernised take on Taoism, yet it is entertaining and humorous to read, focusing on the Lao Tzu and Zhuangzi as sources for this philosophical tome’s wit. To Raymond Smullyan, the semantics of what counts as traditional Taoism is less interesting to him than the wisdom it offers, and it’s a better book for it. If you’re starting out with the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi in your hand and need some commentary to help interpret it from a Western lens, Smullyan has got you covered, and this slim volume is rather unpretentious for what it is.

There’s a chapter in this book called Worship of the Buddha which helps Westerners understand whether or not the Buddha himself is worshipped as a deity by Buddhists (some do, some don’t), and this chapter contains a number of passages which illuminate where Smullyan is coming from as a Western author commenting on both Buddhism and Taoism, like this one here:

“It is absolutely amazing how people need to “deify” things and to bring in the occult, telepathic and supernatural into situations where they simply don’t belong. It is remarkable how many extremely intelligent people I have known - many of them outstanding scientists and mathematicians - who credit telepathic powers to magicians who do mind reading tricks. Now, I have been a professional magician and mind-reader (sic!) for many years, and here I know whereof I speak! I know the modus operandi of almost all mind-reading demonstrations, and know they are nothing more than extremely clever tricks. The most remarkable thing of all is that people have sometimes sworn to me that I must be telepathic and have refused to believe me when I swore to them I am not! I told them over and over again, “This is really a trick! It has a perfectly simple mechanical explanation, and any of you could do it yourself, if you knew the explanation (which professional ethics forbids me to disclose).” But they refused to believe me!

And so I think the reason some people insist on Buddha as a deity is their simple need to deify someone or something. And so they take it out on poor Buddha!”

— The Tao is Silent, pages 45-46

Raymond Smullyan is definitely taking on Taoism from the prism of Houdini stage magic skepticism applied to a living religion, drawing wisdom from the ancients yet only drawing from specific sources like the Tao Te Ching and Zhuangzi to the exclusion of other sacred texts which form the canon, when Taoism comes to the West it comes in translated form and certain religious aspects get muddled along the way to America or other Anglophone nations. Smullyan’s Taoism ignores deities like the Jade Emperor or Kuan Yin or Guan Yu and focuses on the basic philosophy as written down by Lao Tzu or Zhuangzi. This secularised aberration of Taoism is not rooted in the Chinese lineages but by Western interpretation of the translated text “as is”, a bare bones form of Taoism which isn’t focused on rituals or religious practices. This mutant form of Taoism certainly appealed to me coming from a Christian family where I was raised to fear God and accept Jesus into my heart, and it sure shook me a bit to learn that the Westernised abstract Tao which nurtures without seeking credit might not have as much theological standing as I thought. When it comes to Western texts reinterpreting the Tao, this is a definite example of the guailo-fication of the Taoist canon which focuses purely on what Lao Tzu or Zhuangzi say. A lot of the religious liturgy of Taoism came centuries later with the influence of Buddhism, so a stripped-down version of Taoism as taught by the New Age/Self Help section of the bookstore seems to be spreading under the impression that the abstract Tao is all there is to worry about, and disregards religious Taoism’s numerous hells which came with Buddhism’s influence in China as a package deal. The idea that you can abide in the Tao without having to perform rituals and such is very appealing to the Westerner who might not know any better, I even joined The Church of the Latter Day Dude which bases its teachings on The Big Lebowski and a stripped-down interpretation of Taoist dogma that gets rid of centuries of added baggage to the faith. Dudeism is a concrete example of Chinese living religion filtered through the needs and values of Westerners looking for a simpler way of life, and much of what Smullyan has to say is compatible with this Western lineage that cropped up through the New Age movement. I reckon at this stage of Western Taoism, the reform version of it that carves through all the complicated woo-woo in favour of the philosophical tenets themselves is just as valid as that reform synagogue I heard about from my Dad’s brother (Uncle John) which doesn’t believe in Moses’ teachings as a Jewish temple. Smullyan’s text embodies a specific moment in time (the seventies) in which the New Age movement experimented with different ideologies with mixed results, and one of those results was the secularised Tao which appeals to Western spiritual seekers who feel uncomfortable with a judgemental godhead deciding whether or not they deserve eternal torment in the afterlife.

Smullyan goes into great detail why he prefers the abstract, non-judgemental Tao (which is arguably supported by the text of the Tao Te Ching) in a chapter called The Tao Does Not Command:

“That is another thing so nice about the Tao; it is not bossy! It loves and nourishes all things but does not lord it over them. Thus the Tao is something purely helpful - never coercive!
In the Judeo-Christian notion of God, one thing that is so rigidly stressed is obedience to God! The great sins are “disobedience, rebellion against God, pride, self-will”, etc. The Christians are constantly stressing the infinite importance of “total surrender to God”. They say, “Let thy will, not mine, be done”.
How very different is the Taoist! He never speaks of “obedience” to the Tao but only of “being in harmony” with the Tao - which seems so much more attractive! And being in harmony with the Tao is not something “commanded”, nor something which is one’s “duty”, nor something demanded by “moral law”, nor something sought for future reward, but is something which is its own reward; it is in itself a state of spiritual tranquility. In this respect it does resemble the Judeo-Christian notion of “communion”.”

— The Tao is Silent, pages 37-38

Smullyan rags on Christianity a fair bit in this book, and his preference for Taoism as a valid alternative to being blackmailed by God with eternal damnation is seductive to say the least, even though religious scholars and theologians with experience in Taoist teachings would bring up how you still need to get right with the Jade Emperor and not abuse your cattle in this life to avoid punishment in the Diyu. Depending on who you ask, you might be confronted with theology about the Diyu, but my preferred source on the matter Eva Wong states in her book Taoism: An Essential Guide about the Taoist afterlife:

“The realm of the underworld is administered by celestial beings. This is quite different from the system in Buddhism, whereby the underworld is administered by those who dwell there. In some sects of Taoism, the T’ai-i T’ien-tsun is the chief administrator of all matters in the underworld. These include keeping the records of those who have died, those who are destined to be reincarnated, and those who need to be rehabilitated before reincarnation. The Taoist notion of the underworld, despite the influence of popular devotional Buddhism, is not a hell. It is not a place of punishment but a place of learning and rehabilitation. Dead souls who begrudge their fate and still cling to the mortal world are taught to accept the cycle of life and death and cease haunting the mortal realm. The duty of the T’ai-i T’ien-tsun is to educate dead souls so that they receive a speedy reincarnation.”

— Taoism: An Essential Guide, page 161

I like to think of Taoism’s paranormal rehab like Bad-Anon from Wreck-It Ralph.

Alright, so Smullyan is a bit of a guailo when it comes to Taoist theology which came centuries later, we’ve established that, but what does he have in this book which speaks to the soul of the reader? I liked the chapter On Not Wanting To Amount To Anything, which serves as a hippie-era New Age fable which I won’t post excerpts from here because it’s quite dense and long, but it has a lovely irony to it when the hippie who doesn’t want to amount to anything writes down his teachings and becomes a millionaire. There’s also another chapter, one of the longest in the book, called Is God A Taoist? where a dialogue between God and a mortal who wants his free will revoked because he doesn’t want to sin takes place.

Chapter 34, called On Making An Effort, has a stab at reconciling Wu-Wei with Western thought:

“All my life I have been intensely repelled by the idea of “making an effort”. I hate this idea as much as I did as a child. I don’t know why I hate it so much; I just do. It is perfectly possible that I have “made an effort” in life, I would have accomplished more than I have. (Who knows, I might have even “amounted to something”!) As I say, this may be possible, though I am far from knowing it to be true. If this were true, it would pose a horrible dilemma! On the one hand, it is great fun to amount to something (despite what anybody, including myself, might say to the contrary). On the other hand, it is horrible to make an effort. At least I find it so; if you don’t, then the dilemma I am discussing does not apply to you. So the problem is, how does one amount to something without making an effort?”

— The Tao Is Silent, page 155

Further along in the chapter, Smullyan cites the Taoist philosophers as an example to live up to:

“Take Laotse and Chuangtse for example. Surely, they amounted to something! Good heavens, to be avidly read through the ages - for twenty-six hundred years! If that is not amounting to something, what on earth is? Yes, they amounted to a great deal! In a way, they are like the hippie of my preceding tale. They philosophised about nonaction, nonassertiveness, the futility of seeking fame and of trying to amount to something, and they made great names for themselves in this very process! Their success delights me more than any other successes I know. Here is Taoism at its best! Their very success is a living proof of their philosophy.
The relevant question now is, Did they make an effort? This is a highly controversial and most subtle point. Indeed, to understand the answer correctly, is to penetrate to the very heart of the Tao itself! One of the main Taoistic principles is Wu-Wei - the doctrine of “action through inaction”. Did they merely preach this philosophy or did they actually live it? They must have lived it, or they couldn’t have written as they did.”

— The Tao Is Silent, page 157

All in all, The Tao Is Silent is an interesting book filled with Taoist and Zen wisdom pared down from a complex framework to meet the needs of a contemporary (nineteen-seventies) Western audience, and I can recommend it to people starting out with Taoism with the caveat that it’s aiming for a Western readership with all the guailo-fication that implies. It’s a short but dense text which rewards re-visiting as the Eastern philosophy reveals its meaning to the devout student. I quite enjoyed The Tao Is Silent and while some aspects of it are dated, others remain relevant just as the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu has remained a constant companion in my life. Raymond Smullyan is an interesting figure and a talented writer, I’d like to know more about him given his book The Tao Is Silent made a great first impression, and his take on Taoism is a rational sane one.

Reading Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl in 2021

I wasn’t expecting this to be the first post I’d make this year, but I figured there was no timelier moment to read the diary of Anne Frank than now. So much about this book resonated with me during quarantine, the overwhelming sense that nothing would be normal again, the crushing despair at being confined to a small space, and the flagrant return of fascism to our modern day hellscape makes The Diary of a Young Girl sobering reading.

I’ve heard it said that fascists like Varg Vikernes are created by reading certain books like Mein Kampf in the wrong order, and after reading The Diary of a Young Girl I can believe that, many edgelords try to read Mein Kampf first and it scrambles their brains. Reading The Diary of a Young Girl captures a lot of gradual changes as Amsterdam falls to fascism, the fact that Jews were all of a sudden not permitted to ride the tram or go to specific ice cream parlours, the forced yellow star wearing and rounding up of Jewish families who were sent to concentration camps. We hear rumours and whispers about the camps from the adults in Anne Frank’s life confined to the Secret Annexe, as Anne’s Jewish neighbours are captured and sent there, meanwhile the main focus of the Anne Frank diary is on her life in the Secret Annexe during her experiences in hiding. One of the small things that stuck with me is the diary entry where she had Chanukah with only ten minutes of candlelight because of a candle shortage, but because they were able to sing the song it didn’t matter. Most of all I was surprised that it was the black market coupons for butter and other groceries that stuck with me the most, occasionally a burglar steals them or the coupon book sellers are arrested by the cops, Anne Frank mentions she is happy when the supplier of her family’s coupon books are released from jail.

The Diary of a Young Girl is depressing, because you know this story doesn’t have a happy ending from the beginning thanks to the foreword, where Otto Frank is the sole survivor of the Holocaust in Anne’s family. There’s a fair bit of detail I wasn’t expecting like Anne mentioning she isn’t allowed to flush the lavatory lest the noise be detected from downstairs, in fact there’s a lot of disgusting toilet talk in this book which cements how desperate and trapped Anne is during her self-exile into the Secret Annexe. You read her hopes and dreams which will never come true, you see her develop feelings for a boy and when she has her first period, all part of growing up in occupied Holland. Radio broadcasts in German and Dutch inform her of the outside world and how the dictators of the day are trying to eradicate Jews like cockroaches from their countries, without the dogwhistles of modern despots to soften the blow of their anti-Semitism. The propaganda from the German front as Hitler interviews wounded soldiers is condemned by Anne for the misleading trash it is, Anne amuses herself by studying different languages and reading a variety of books which are made available to her such as a collection of Greek myths she’s rather attached to.

Anne Frank’s family had to uproot themselves from Germany to Amsterdam only to be confined there for the duration of the war (until they were discovered), hiding behind a bookcase upstairs from a business office where criminals often broke into the premises and stole things. There are plans made by the other members of the family which never come to fruition, wartime rationing weighs heavy on them and the diminished expectations of the Annexe makes life in lockdown in 2021 look like paradise in comparison. At least I can leave my house wearing a mask without the Gestapo carting me off to Auschwitz. Speaking of which, photographers captured an image of a man wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie at the Capitol building riot in America, reinforcing how important it is to remember the Holocaust as its dwindling survivors perish - leaving the maintenance of their memory up to us. Anne often wonders when it will be safe to be Jewish again, or when God’s chosen people will be chosen for something good instead of persecution. She never lived to see the end of the war, and she became a symbol for the Jewish people defying capture under deplorable conditions. Anne Frank is an icon of strength who we see as a normal teenage girl in these pages, obsessing over film stars from movies she isn’t able to see in her confinement. Certain names of classmates are left as initials to protect their identities, but I did laugh when Anne Frank dissed Rob Cohen as “an obnoxious, two-faces, lying, snivelling little twit” in one of the most famous published diaries of all time. Bet Rob Cohen feels embarrassed now! I laughed at times when Anne was disgusted at her father talking about farting and the lavatory, not everything in this diary paints a flattering picture of the Frank family and I can understand why certain passages were omitted for years. A few fragments of Anne Frank admiring the breasts of women in her art textbooks and longing for a girlfriend have been cited as evidence Anne Frank was bisexual at least, these confessions are a short passage but they sure made an impact on Tumblr. I expected Anne Frank to be presented to us as this untouchable saint, but the text displays her as a human being who is sometimes at breaking point.

She writes an unkind letter to her father, which he regards as one of the most hurtful things she has ever done, and threatens to throw it into the fireplace. The very idea of Anne Frank being a spoiled brat even despite her circumstances is quite hard to process, but she does act up sometimes in her Annexe and gets in trouble for being a chatterbox. It’s not called The Diary of a Mature, Patient Adult Woman after all, and we see her frustrations laid bare for good or ill. She yearns for the freedom to be a real teenage girl, a freedom that perhaps she never finds in the Annexe but achieves it in the pages of her diary. Rather than being forgotten by history, Anne Frank lives forever in these pages, published after the war ended to an international acclaim. She makes Popeye jokes about all the spinach she’s eating, remarks that Rin Tin Tin was a big hit with her friends and how she wanted to call her own dog that if she ever got one. Anne Frank is an inspiration to millions through her writings, which capture the best and worst of humanity in print, I enjoyed reading it even though there were mournful passages that were hard to get through.

I had a mental breakdown in 2019 which I’m still recovering from, where I was diagnosed with bipolar after a manic episode, and in the middle of that I was trying to review the movie Lords of Chaos based on the black metal biography of the same name. I struggled to articulate the merit of this movie weighed against the resurgence of fascism and the burning of churches which this new biopic inspired, and I was dismayed to see Varg Vikernes bragging about how he killed Euronymous was somehow allowed a platform on YouTube. Varg was a habitual line-stepper on his channel, laughing at the psychological evaluation paperwork forced onto him by the prison system in a video which has now been taken off the site. Hours of footage of this horrible man revelling in his fascist ideology swept away by YouTube’s terms of service agreement which I watched as research for my Lords of Chaos review I never got around to finishing wore on my soul, to an extent that I had to go to Red Eye Records in the city to buy Rick Moranis’ klezmer album My Mother’s Brisket to cleanse Varg’s fashy vibes from my home. Listening to My Mother’s Brisket bolstered my belief that these edge-lord fascists who continue to ponder “The Jewish Question” are trash who want to eliminate a people who have done little to earn such vitriol against them, by the sound of My Mother’s Brisket they seem like a lovely ethnic group who just want to eat kosher and live-blog the bris.. Anti-Semitism is a big problem in the metal community and although I do own a Burzum CD, I am mortified by the actions of Varg and his hateful views that were radicalising people like the Christchurch shooter. Reading Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl has radicalised me against fascism’s advocates in a sense, as it documents the slow creep of fascist rhetoric against Jews and how this abominable movement can spread fast over Europe. Anne Frank has given me the strength to try again with Lords of Chaos, now that I have additional historic context for what Varg is arguing for and how despicable his vision for the future truly is.

2021 was in many ways a perfect time to read Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl, as we’re all in lockdown at the moment and are horrified by the invasion of the Capitol by Q-Anon supporters who wear fur headdresses with Norse insignia tattoos, they beat up cops with an American flag. Anne Frank’s fearless spirit of defiance remains with us through her diary, there to motivate us to be better than we are at the moment and to stand strong against the brownshirts of today. Anne Frank is the hero we all need to be at this present time, and reading her diary is something I should have done a long time ago in school - although we read Peter Goldsworthy’s Maestro instead to learn about the Holocaust. I visited the Sydney Jewish Museum twice, and was greeted by two different Holocaust survivors, one male and one female. I was fortunate to meet such wise elder mentors before they passed on, and the Holocaust tour is a mandatory element of the Jewish Museum’s educational element. Thinking about Australia’s offshore detention makes me angry because it’s clear our current Liberal government has learned nothing from the Shoah except how to demonise refugees for political gain, we have no high ground to stand on. Anne Frank shall be remembered as brave throughout history, whereas the gutless politicians who sleepwalk into fascism will be remembered as cowards who enabled the worst xenophobic tendencies in our national character to fester out of control. May Anne’s memory be a blessing.

Streaming The Best, Worst and Weirdest Christmas Albums on Spotify

An embarrassment of riches for Christmas albums, poverty for the artists.

I get it, you’re suspicious of me writing this article, how can I - a convert to Taoism review Christmas albums with the authentic believer in the Christmas holiday miracle? Well, you’ve forgotten I was raised in a Christian household half my life and I’m mostly into the season for the elves. Gotta love those elves. Anyway, I have a fondness for Christmas music which transcends mere theological boundaries, if Jewish people can get away with recording Christmas music, a Taoist can get away with listening to it. And boy have I heard a lot of Christmas music over the years, both good and terrible. Spotify underpays artists a pittance for streaming on their platform, so when I find a good album I tend to buy it on CD or vinyl, but when it comes to Christmas releases I hesitate to throw money down unless they’re worth my time. I don’t have a large collection of Christmas albums, mostly the A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack and the Phil Spector Christmas album (which my family hates because they think the Silent Night track with Phil Spector’s voice on it sounds creepy), but I’ve tried to diversify this year and I’ll talk about that later on. For now, expect a whole lot of Yuletide dross I’ve sifted through to find the holiday gold. Much of the music churned out for Christmas is mediocre garbage, but I hope to spotlight my favourite obscurities in the so bad it’s good category as well as the better angels among the mainstream ones you can find circulated by Spotify for posterity’s sake if nothing else. I’m starting to understand why people hate Christmas music having listened to so many of these recordings which cover the same songs over and over, but I persevere for the culture. Pray for me as I plumb the depths of Christmas past, present and future..

Valhalleluja (Nanowar Of Steel)

An honourable mention as it is not an album proper, but a seven-inch single by Nanowar of Steel and Gloryhammer. Have you ever wanted a more pagan interpretation of the Christmas season, without worrying whether you’re giving money to Nordic fascists like Varg Vikernes? Well Nanowar of Steel have the holiday hit for you with Valhalleluja - a song which manages to blaspheme against multiple world religions at once (guess which ones!). Featuring Odin himself declaring he’s a gentle-god of IKEA furniture building because times have changed, it’s a hilarious gospel tinged viking Christmas classic with an even more ridiculous music video accompanying its release from Napalm Records. Apparently Nanowar of Steel is an Italian band who started out taking the piss out of fellow Italian metal act Rhapsody of Fire, and their back catalogue is full of silliness like this such as Barbie MILF Princess Of The Twilight and The Call Of Cthulhu off their album Stairway To Valhalla.

Christmas On Death Row (Various Artists)

This album is a fascinating slice of hip-hop Christmas cheer, in which rappers attempt to bring their genre’s urban gangsta flavour to the holiday. You’d expect from the opening track Santa Claus Goes Straight To The Ghetto that this is gonna be a thugged out Christmas LP, but in truth most of it has a pleasant R&B mood instead of the NWA-tier aggression I was expecting from this recording. I don’t have much to say about this one except that songs like I Wish combine chilled out raps with seasons greetings in a successful fusion. It’s enjoyable to listen to and presents a different style to numerous Christmas standards. Peaceful Christmas is the last thing I expected from an album titled Christmas On Death Row, but there remains a darker undertone just under the surface of the struggle in black communities peppered throughout the record which you wouldn’t find on a John Legend Christmas album for instance. There is mention of prayer on Peaceful Christmas, and a thankfulness for God sending his son Jesus, and on the track Christmas In The Ghetto there is a constant refrain of being thankful for what you’ve got when you don’t have much. The production on this album is clearly early nineties, but it holds up after so many years since its release.

All Star Christmas (Quad City DJs)

On the other side of the spectrum from Christmas On Death Row is All Star Christmas, which brings an aggressive and exhausting jock jams approach to the holiday season. The group responsible for this… thing… is Quad City DJs who my generation remembers as the composers of the Space Jam theme as well as their big hit C’Mon Ride The Train. This one is under-discussed in the canon of niche Christmas music, its lack of easy availability on CD has confined it to the dregs of iTunes or Spotify. The Intro presents us a scenario where Santa Claus has to take a gassed up convertible to deliver gifts because Rudolph is sick, and Mrs. Claus has left a cassette tape for Santa to bump in his ride on Christmas Eve. What You Want For Christmas is a fine opening for the album, however the next track Where Dey At Yo! chides men in the ghetto over not being decent fathers and providers to the children and women in their lives. Christmas songs from an African-American perspective often address themes of poverty and social commentary about living conditions in that community. Quad City DJs are definitely bringing those themes to the forefront here, Whatchugot4Xmas is a cheery relief from this type of heaviness where the singers list what gifts they got on December 25th. Alone is about a woman left all alone on Christmas, presumably by her baby-daddy, White Xmas is an R&B rendition of the classic standard, with a seductive edge in its reinterpretation, the latter half of the album is full of Christmas themed jock jams like Da Jam and the remix of The Little Drummer Boy called Lil Bass Boi. Lil Bass Boi is about a DJ dropping beats instead of drums. Christmas Time is another R&B flavoured number by Big Dave, and it fits right in with the rest of this album reconciling the hood with the holiday. It sounds like something you’d expect from Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas album or a track from a hypothetical Destiny’s Child holiday release. Worth listening to once just for the novelty of it.

A Twisted Christmas (Twisted Sister)

For some reason a recurring theme in Twisted Sister’s music videos is some stuck up snob or authority figure refusing to listen to Twisted Sister’s brand of hair metal, like the PMRC is still breathing down their necks after all these years. Released in the early two-thousands, this element of their legacy is still present even on their Christmas album, which isn’t half bad. I like metal music a lot, and seldom does its brutal realm and the world of Christmas albums meet. What you get here is a bunch of standards like Oh Come Oh Ye Faithful and I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus crooned by Dee Snider, it is often derided as one of the worst Christmas albums ever recorded, however I kinda dig its audacity to exist. It encapsulates everything Dee Snider is as a performer, lending his personality as a lead singer to over-familiar Christmas carols which needed a metal makeover to renew interest in them. Twisted Sister’s rendition of Let It Snow has a little bit of Black Sabbath in its grinding guitars accompanied by sleigh bells, it genuinely rules.

Christmas (Michael Buble)

I first heard Michael Buble through his cover of I’m Your Man by Leonard Cohen, which I listened to while I was being assaulted by a small child bashing my head with a plastic hammer - which I tolerated because I had lost the will to live. That’s a terrible first impression for Michael Buble to leave on me, so I figured checking out his Christmas album for free on Spotify couldn’t hurt because nobody respects Christmas music and he was leaving poor Leonard Cohen alone. The version of the album available on Spotify is the Deluxe Special Edition, which is a punishing hour and eight minutes in length. I don’t think I can handle that much Buble in one sitting, but I must for the purposes of this blog. This album escaped to plague an unsuspecting public in 2011, which feels so long ago, and Michael Buble’s bland white crooner shtick is no Christmas With The Rat Pack by any stretch, not even as a Shania Twain tragic could he win me over with a duet with her on the track White Christmas. Most egregious is Buble’s cover of Santa Baby, which wins the award for most no-homo vibes ever recorded on a Christmas album as he attempts to get a Rolex under the tree on the basis of being “buddies” with Santa. Say what you will about A Twisted Christmas, Dee Snider stamps his mark on Christmas classics which isn’t easy to forget, whereas whenever I hear Michael Buble I can’t distinguish him from most other white guys singing Christmas songs on the loudspeaker at the mall in December. There are much better renditions of these songs out there, by underrated artists who are dwarfed by the success of this middle of the road Christmas album, and this is somehow the version of these songs a lot of people have chosen to hear. Bah humbug!

A Holly Dolly Christmas (Dolly Parton)

One of the most recent entries in the Christmas album canon, which isn’t her first rodeo with Christmas albums (she collaborated with Kenny Rogers on one called Once Upon A Christmas in the eighties), Dolly Parton delivers a charming if cheesy LP for the holiday season amidst releasing a book and funding a vaccine for COVID-19. What can’t she do? As a Christmas record, this is among the best releases I’ve heard since John Legend’s A Legendary Christmas. It’s one of the less secular Christmas albums I’ve heard in a long time too, Dolly is unafraid to mention Jesus as the reason for the season on tracks like Mary, Did You Know? which closes the album out on a melancholy note. Cuddle Up, Cosy Down Christmas features my nemesis, Michael Buble, however I cannot dare to question the creative decisions of Dolly despite having a duet with Jimmy Fallon on All I Want For Christmas Is You. Christmas Is presents us with a sobering reminder that Christmas is a time for giving (it’s all about kindness according to Dolly), meanwhile Christmas On The Square is a country-flavoured good time, even if it was featured in the terrible Netflix musical of the same name isn’t enough to sour it for me. Dolly’s rendition of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus is a prime slice of cheese which no other artist could get away with in 2020, but Dolly Parton’s sincerity cleaves through any irony poisoning that would dismiss this record as too corny to match the grim mood of the times we’re in. I enjoyed A Holly Dolly Christmas a fair bit, silliness and all, and you can do so much worse.

Celestial (Rob Halford)

I went to see Judas Priest live at Download 2019, and Rob Halford came out on stage riding a big motorcycle, which might be one of my favourite concert moments of all time. Rob Halford’s voice is still carrying its usual shriek in his old age, and if you go into Celestial expecting Judas Priest’s front-man doing Christmas carols, you’re going to be in for a fun ride. It’s one of the less abrasive Christmas metal albums you can find, I loved the track Donner and Blitzen as well as God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen reinterpreted from the grandmaster of the Heavy Metal Parking Lot, it’s good fun and belongs on the metal Christmas list with Christopher Lee’s two holiday themed singles I used to own on iTunes. Away In A Manger and O Little Town Of Bethlehem are a little bit slower than I expected with a gentler guitar shred than his take on Deck The Halls, Morning Star is a standout track which provides Rob Halford an opportunity to perform without a row of Marshall stacks blowing out your speakers for a change. If you want a headbanger’s alternative to the saccharine Christmas music playlist from your Mariah Careys or your Michael Bubles I recommend you give this LP a listen for curiosity’s sake.

We Wish You A Metal Xmas And A Headbanging New Year (Various Artists)

This Christmas album can be seen as the metal equivalent to what Christmas On Death Row was to hip-hop, it’s notable for Ronnie James Dio singing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and Alice Cooper on Santa Claws Is Coming To Town is sinister fun. I’m not sure it’s as good as Rob Halford’s Celestial as a cohesive vision for a Christmas record, but its guest-list featuring metal icons like Lemmy Kilmister who are no longer with us makes it worth listening to at least once. Lemmy and Dave Grohl perform Run, Rudolph Run together and it’s charming. We Wish You A Metal Xmas also has vintage metal acts like the female fronted Girlschool performing Auld Lang Syne, I’m not sure I’d ever listen to this record which features a metal cover of Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer on it with my family in the living room as we exchange Christmas gifts but it is a unique collection of tracks reinterpreted through the metal lens for a Krampus edge. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever heard, especially when it comes to Christmas.

Friends for Christmas (John Farnham and Olivia Newton John)

I was first exposed to Olivia Newton John’s music career when I snatched up her Physical album up on vinyl for two dollars at Vinnies, so I know some of her deep cuts like The Dolphin Song, meanwhile I’m out of the loop regarding Australian mega-star John Farnham who I mainly remember from a false advertising controversy surrounding his The Last Time tour not marking his retirement. A Christmas album by these two juggernauts of Australian celebrity should be a slam dunk, and however incongruous it is to hear Australian accents singing about snow (the only frightful weather outside would be a heat wave, and in that case the fire would be far from delightful), this album fits comfortably into the retiree zeitgeist and there’s a good chance your mum or dad owns it on CD. The track-list contains Christmas songs you’ve heard a billion times before, and I was uncertain I wanted a version of Baby, It’s Cold Outside performed by John Farnham, I did need a break from two metal themed Christmas albums in a row and Olivia/John’s voices are pleasant to listen to. It’s one of the more basic bitch recordings you could have in your collection, but why fix what isn’t broken? Olivia and John have great chemistry on this LP. Inoffensive and cheerful, it’s a delight from a dynamic duo who’ve been cornerstones of the Australian music industry for decades. Serves its purpose well, and gives the people what they want here.

A Colt 45 Christmas (Afroman)

We’ve truly reached the bottom of the barrel when it comes to Christmas albums, from the artiste who gave us Because I Got High is this wretched collection of songs parodying Christmas classics with juvenile humour and dated homophobia on Frosty, this relic from 2006 encapsulates the worst elements of hip-hop flavoured Christmas recordings from yesteryear. It may or may not be worse than Easy-E’s contribution to Christmas music, Merry Muthafuckin’ Christmas, but I can assure you of the album’s bad taste. When Weird Al Yankovic parodies a song by an artist, there is mutual respect given between the two parties, but there is no such dignity here on A Colt 45 Christmas. Subjecting my ears to Afroman’s sleazy, sexual humour on Deck My Balls left an almost immediate bad aftertaste, Police Blow My Wad parodies Feliz Navidad poorly, 12 J’s of Christmas parodies the Twelve Days of Christmas with more anti-cop sentiments as expected from Afroman’s stoner aesthetic. Afroman Is Coming To Town features Afroman threatening to slap your grandma’s dentures out, and even more complaining about cops who take issue with drugs at his shows, which is understandable. Jobe Bells is a ghetto parody of Jingle Bells, boasting about having sex without a condom and anticipating he’ll be a baby-daddy in June, Let Her Blow is a parody of Let It Snow, which is about opting for oral sex when a woman is on her period. A Strainj Poem is a mess of a track with an assortment of vulgarity, I Wish You Would Roll A New Blunt parodies We Wish You A Merry Christmas with mediocre results - this album is mercifully short at twenty-six minutes and the final two tracks O Chronic Tree and Violent Night aren’t much better than the songs that proceeded it. Afroman trades in stoner cliches and worn out ghetto “satire” (in scare quotes) and if you decide to listen to this train wreck you should proceed with caution.

Only Santa Knows (Delta Goodrem)

A refreshing change of pace from Afroman’s A Colt 45 Christmas, Australian starlet Delta Goodrem’’s Only Santa Knows delivers a decent entry into 2020’s Christmas album slate which gave us A Holly Dolly Christmas and A Very Trainor Christmas. It stands alongside Olivia Newton John and John Farnham’s Friends for Christmas as a representative of its genre, and doesn’t have any nasty surprises. Only Santa Knows is a pleasant title track, comparisons to Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas album are inevitable but I’d still prefer this over Michael Buble any day. The absence of another cover of Baby, It’s Cold Outside is both welcome and notable, as well as no tired cover of Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime. Delta mostly sticks to the classics like Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer and Rocking Around The Christmas Tree, however she does distinguish herself on other presumable original tracks like River and Grown Up Christmas List. I haven’t paid much attention to Delta Goodrem when she dropped her most famous album Innocent Eyes, and checking up on her Christmas album confirmed she’s still got it as a pop diva. Only Santa Knows is worth streaming if you are unfamiliar with one of Australia’s treasures.

Christmas In The Heart (Bob Dylan)

Bob Dylan’s singing voice is divisive to say the least, and that definitely applies to this LP where his voice is front and centre on tracks like Must Be Santa (which is a banger). Bob Dylan takes a break from his counter-cultural experimentation to record Christmas songs for the holiday season. I admit Bob’s voice got some getting used to here, but when I got into the groove this was a rewarding entry in the Christmas album canon. I may not be the biggest Bob Dylan fan out there, but I sure as hell respect him, his cover of Do You Hear What I Hear? is at least memorable and interesting if a bit raspy. Here Comes Santa Claus is an enjoyable opening track, Winter Wonderland is delightful in Bob Dylan’s hands, his take on Hark The Herald Angels Sing is a bit abrasive for my taste. But I doubt Christmas In The Heart deserves to rot in the category of worst Christmas albums as I’ve seen on some listicles online. I’ll Be Home For Christmas demonstrates why some listeners might be put off, I’d still rather listen to Bob Dylan sing The Little Drummer Boy than endure an entire album of Michael Buble again. I know it sounds like I’m damning this thing with faint praise, but Christmas In The Heart deserves your attention as long as you accept the terms and conditions that it’s a Bob Dylan LP, not a polished pop star LP.

Christmas In The Stars (credited to Meco)

Considered one of the worst Christmas albums of all time by reputation, I’ve never sat down and listened to it from start to finish until now. Featuring the voice of Anthony Daniels as C-3PO and the first professional debut of Bon Jovi, it has a bit of star power behind it considering what this is as an LP. Scouring the dregs of Spotify sometimes yields so-bad-it’s-good treasures, but I’m not sure it’s truly as bad as people make it out to be. In a world of mediocre Christmas albums that don’t stand out due to how saccharine and overproduced they are, the slight disco tinged presentation of this Christmas In The Stars album gives this LP an identify entirely its own. Star Wars and Christmas collide in this baffling relic from the early eighties, back when The Empire Strikes Back was yet to blow everyone’s mind by revealing Darth Vader was Luke’s father. Christmas In The Stars and Bells, Bells, Bells open up the album and Anthony Daniels does a decent job singing on these tracks. The best known novelty song from this album is of course What Do You Get A Wookie For Christmas - When He Already Owns A Comb? which is the album’s signature single and one of the wacky highlights of this album. C-3PO mentioning things from Earth like Albert Einstein and the Magna Carta is weird to say the least, The Odds Against Christmas is a cheesy treat where he questions the statistics of Christmas happening at all. R2-D2 We Wish You A Merry Christmas is an original song and not a cover of We Wish You A Merry Christmas like I expected, it’s sappy but it’s fun and dripping with Christmas imagery like snow and sitting by the fire. This weird little album has been overshadowed by other bizarre Star Wars ephemera like The Star Wars Holiday Special which is more infamous due to George Lucas’ attempts to suppress it from being seen, whereas this thing is pretty well preserved by streaming services. I’m not sure I’d ever buy it on vinyl but its take on Sleigh Bells was pretty enjoyable. Merry, Merry Christmas follows on from What Would You Get A Wookie For Christmas by suggesting additional items for gift ideas, A Christmas Sighting - T’was The Night Before Christmas features a Star Wars themed reinterpretation of the famous poem read by C-3PO where he sees Santa Claus, and The Meaning Of Christmas closes out the album on a treacly sentimental note singing about peace and love. Now that I’ve heard the full album for myself, Christmas In The Stars is far from bottom of the barrel like Afroman’s A Colt 45 Christmas was for me, and it deserves a place in the Christmas canon due to sheer curiosity’s sake.

Holiday For Swing! (Seth MacFarlane)

Comparisons to Michael Buble are inevitable here, as Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy fame tries his hand at Christmas music in the tradition of Rat Pack performers before him. The song selection is solid enough for an album such as this, Christmas Dreaming is rather pleasant but I still can’t shake the fact that the creator of American Dad of all things is crooning Christmas staples whilst trying to sound like Frank Sinatra on I’ll Be Home For Christmas. The production on this record evokes nostalgic sixties Christmas tones, a real classy affair is what Seth’s going for here, and for the most part he succeeds despite his reputation for low-brow crass humour.. Little Jack Frost Get Lost is a charming duet with Norah Jones on a lesser known Christmas song, I kinda liked it and it’s accompanied by a big band sound. A Marshmallow World is a track I’m familiar with from the Phil Spector Christmas album, and I’ve gotta say I prefer the original better because I’m biased to that one due to over-familiarity, What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve? is one I’ve never heard before Seth’s take on it and thus I feel the reverse to it. Of course we’re subjected to Seth’s rendition of Baby, It’s Cold Outside - a song which has gotten controversial over the years and ever since I heard the Idina Menzel version I’ve been aware the male character in that song is rather pushy. Seth McFarlane’s take on Baby, It’s Cold Outside doesn’t break any new ground, but it does retain the “what’s in this drink?” line which some popular versions excise. I know I’m harping on this, but after you hear so many distinct versions of the same song I have gripes to share about individual recordings of it I guess. Mele Kalikimaka is an island themed track which Seth does his best old school crooner take on and you wouldn’t feel out of place hearing this one at your local sophisticated tiki bar. Warm In December is a jazzy little number which Seth lends his Rat Pack sensibilities to well, and compared to crap like A Colt 45 Christmas he’s downright bring home to mother material in terms of style and presentation. Hidden depth is the theme of this record, I never thought the mind behind KISS Saves Santa had an enjoyable take on Moonlight In Vermont in him, (Everybody’s Waitin’ For) The Man With The Bag ain’t bad either, Seth’s cohesive vision for this album overcomes the obstacle of taking MacFarlane’s non-cartoon side-projects seriously. The Christmas Song closes out the LP, at which point I wonder if Seth MacFarlane is trapped within a dude-bro prison of his own making via the television shows he makes. It’s a bit like hearing Disturbed cover The Sound of Silence and discovering David Dramian’s undiscovered talent emerge.

Holiday Wishes (Idina Menzel)

If you want the voice of Elsa from Disney’s Frozen lending her talents to holiday cheer, this is the album for you, with distinct Snow Queen-ish covers of classics like Do You Hear What I Hear? and Baby It’s Cold Outside (with my nemesis Michael Buble contributing to the awkwardness of this particular song showing up here), this album doesn’t reinvent the wheel and Broadway icon Idina Menzel is well-suited to Christmas songs which are beaten into the ground by their constant ubiquity. Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas is done justice here, for some reason When You Wish Upon A Star from Disney’s Pinocchio rears its head in a track list filled with stuff like All I Want For Christmas Is You - confirming Menzel’s gradual transformation from Elphaba to Elsa under Mickey Mouse’s thumb is now complete. December Prayer is a stand out track only Adele Dazeem herself could nail, allowing her to belt her heart out, which she also does on Silent Night and River.. If you’re obsessed with the minute details of Broadway divas’ careers and side projects, I suspect you’ll get a kick out of this one, meanwhile I’m still waiting for Patti LuPone to drop a Christmas album.

A Very Trainor Christmas (Meghan Trainor)

From the woman who inflicted All About That Bass and Dear Future Husband upon the world, Meghan Trainor sings Christmas songs in a calculated career move to conquer the Billboard Hot 100. This LP has pop-starlet vibes all over it, and it’s weird to find a collaboration with both Earth, Wind and Fire plus Seth MacFarlane on here. One of the most recent Christmas albums on this list, released in 2020, A Very Trainor Christmas contains some originals like My Kind Of Present and I Believe In Santa as well as worn-out standards everyone’s sick of due to overexposure. Her version of Last Christmas by George Michael is enjoyable, although I’ll always prefer the Pudding Mix original. This album isn’t as awful as I expected, however it fits right into the Christmas mall-core that plays incessant over the speakers at shopping centres. Whether or not you are capable of tolerating that type of music is up to you, but at least Meghan Trainor doesn’t cover Santa Baby and miss the point like the Leonard Cohen Jazz Police fugitive Michael Buble did. This record goes for fifty-four minutes, and that’s a lot to deal with when you’re dealing with Christmas songs especially if you’re mainlining Christmas albums for review purposes. Holidays is the Earth, Wind and Fire featured track which has their funky beat behind it even if it feels a bit processed, overexposed songs you expect to be here like Winter Wonderland (with ukulele instrumentation!) and White Christmas (where Seth MacFarlane rears his head) are here of course, but then you get Meghan Trainor originals like Christmas Party (which name drops an Amazon gift card), Christmas Got Me Blue, and Naughty List which aren’t classics on par with Mariah Carey’s iconic All I Want For Christmas Is You but are inoffensive and disposable. Meghan Trainor’s singing voice is suited for this project, even if this one doesn’t have me in its target demographic. I didn’t hate it, but I doubt I’ll remember any of it passing through my ears after I’ve listened to it.

Christmas In Tha Dogghouse (Snoop Dogg Presents)

Snoop Dogg wills into being yet another contribution to the gangsta Christmas sub-genre, this time dragging various artists along with him to create this record similar to the previous Christmas On Death Row. The production on this thing is amazing, updated for the new millennium, and Snoop Dogg welcomes you to the album on Christmas Intro with class and prestige. Christmas In Tha Dogghouse promises from the get go to let you get your groove on, and it is a promise kept on tracks like Xmas On Soul and This Christmas. The album sets a tone of hip-hop togetherness with your homies, like most rap albums centred around Christmas there is the slightest dark undertone of the ghetto reality lurking beneath these beats but nothing too rough to give you emotional whiplash upon listening to it. A Gift That Keeps On Giving presents us with a hood Christmas vibe, thugged out for the holidays. A New Xmas continues that mood with a song about hustling and being your own Santa Claus, as well as rolling blunts and counting that paper. I Miss Them Days is a nostalgic look at Christmas parties of the past, which has a neat sample driving its momentum, A Very Special Christmas has an R&B flavour going on. Twas The Night Before Xmas has a twinge of social commentary about being from a poor family at Christmas time and being robbed by a crackhead stealing presents from under the tree, My Little Mama Trippin On Xmas is a tale about trying to get with a hot girl at school around Christmas, which has a twinkling melody. Just Like Xmas is built around a quality chorus, referencing “that old CD from the Row” as a throwback to past holiday albums Snoop Dogg has appeared on, plus thanking the Lord and being grateful is a virtue expressed here. Look Out is a song about poverty in the hood on Christmas, with a hint of social commentary about how your momma can be Santa Claus when you’re poor, that gets interrupted by bragging about popping bottles and sipping on the Christmas bong now that the narrator is an adult. When Was Jesus Born? contemplates the reason for the season over hip-hop beats, as well as momma paying the bills. Xmas Trees is about getting high from the Christmas bong, in addition to New Year’s Weed, I kinda liked this track about growing marijuana in your own nursery, Every Day Is Like Christmas To Me is a brag-rap about outgrowing Santa Claus and ballin’. Christmas In The Hood is a funky little jam about being trying to avoid being robbed by crackheads and spending December 24th in the county jail, The Grinch is about what you would expect from that title; a riff on the famous villainous Christmas character created by Dr. Seuss as “the Grinch who stole anything” boasts that he’ll rob Lil Wayne for his grill. The album’s final tracks include Landy In My Egg Nog and A Pimp’s Christmas Song, which are fine songs to go out on Looking back on this album it’s a product of its time (2008) but it’s a unique and enjoyable Christmas record which deserves your attention.

Death Metal Christmas (J.J. Hrubovcak)

A short but not sweet EP of desecrated Christmas carols, J.J. Hrubovcak transmogrifies God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen into Unrest for Melancholy Men and We Three Kings into Earthen Kings like a Chaos Space Marine putting spikes and chains and skulls onto a captured Imperium Predator tank. Complete with death metal reimagining of The Nutcracker Suite’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy and Greensleeves, this Death Metal Christmas album subtitled Hellish Renditions of Christmas Classics has something for every headbanger if Twisted Sister are too hair metal for you.

Christmas Songs (Bad Religion)

I’m not too familiar with Bad Religion outside of their inclusion on the Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 soundtrack, however I do know them by reputation as one of the best punk bands ever formed. They recorded an album of Christmas songs which consists of classic carols done in their ripping punk style, and to be honest I prefer their approach to Christmas songs over the Twisted Sister A Twisted Christmas album. I don’t have a lot to say about this one except that I enjoyed it a lot and it includes a remix of their biting satirical song American Jesus off Recipe For Hate - devastating in its inclusion here as an indictment of the American saviour who replaces the biblical one for the evangelical right wing. Un-ironic rocking out is to be had here, with enthusiastic recommendation.

Hung For The Holidays (William Hung)

I take back anything bad I might have said about A Twisted Christmas, this album here is truly awful, right down to the cheap Casio instrumentation on display. I have never heard of this William Hung guy, apparently he was a reality TV flame-out and I believe that. The fact Spotify keeps this album in circulation is a slight against the platform, I didn’t need to hear this guy butchering Silver Bells and The Little Drummer Boy even though such vital research was self-inflicted. Not a single song on this so-called album is good, and all of them are sung off-key by William Hung.. Afroman’s A Colt 45 Christmas was offensive for its dated humour, this is aesthetically offensive in its shoddy and chintzy production that drags down its quality to a nadir of Christmas music recordings. Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer gets slaughtered on this thing which was pressed to CD at some point, poor Winter Wonderland is abused in similar fashion. Not even worth the ironic consumption, William Hung’s mangling of We Are The Champions in a hidden track called Greetings: Hopes And Dreams makes me yearn for the dulcet tones of Seth MacFarlane.

A Very Spidey Christmas (Various Artists)

Released to promote Spider-Man: Enter The Spider-Verse, this EP titled A Very Spidey Christmas doesn’t overstay its welcome, with a version of Joy To The World and Spidey-Bells (A Hero’s Lament) being strong highlights as Chris Pine regrets his choices in life.. I like this EP a lot for what it is, a novelty Christmas record dedicated to Spider-Man-centric parodies of classic carols like Deck The Halls, it’s a lot more comedy focused than most Christmas albums out there, I suppose if you’re one of those people who hate all superheroes you probably won’t like this either but I dig it. The EP closes out on The Night Before Christmas 1967 (Spoken Word) and it’s filled with references to Spidey-senses. I suppose this is a fine EP to stop my retrospective on Christmas albums available on Spotify and I hope you all had fun as I close out this miserable year 2020. Have a Merry Christmas and a much happier New Year, I subjected my ears to a lot of crap doing this and I hope my delving into Spotify’s depths has entertained you these holidays.

The Enchanting Existential Dread of Aussie Theme Parks: Chapter Seven - The Also-Rans of Australia

Before The Crocodile Hunter, there were these two blokes entertaining us.

We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel tonight, as The Enchanting Existential Dread of Aussie Theme Parks examines the case of Leyland Brothers World, Magic Kingdom in Lansvale, and the notorious Wobbie’s World. I packed these altogether in the same article because I was worried I wouldn’t get enough material out of them on their own, so here goes. A lot of footage from my Old Sydney Town review originated from an archived television program called Ask The Leyland Brothers which has the same two blokes behind Leyland Brothers World going around Australia and recording what amounts to a prototype to the lifestyle programs of today like The Great Outdoors and Sydney Weekender. The Leyland Bros. had their own ill-fated theme park, not much evidence of it remains and I’ll briefly talk about it here because their documentation of New South Wales theme parks in their prime is invaluable. Leyland Brothers World which only lasted between 1990 and 1992 (even Sega World held on longer) got repurposed into The Great Aussie Bush Camp by the time I visited, and I remember the arcade machines plus spooky neglected Aboriginal art exhibits inside the main building which because of my fears stemming from Dot and the Kangaroo I never explored inside. A replica of Uluru dubbed The Rock Cafe stood as a petrol station for quite some time on that property, I wish I had more audiovisual resources to review Leyland Brothers World with but so little exists that I had to rely on an old episode of Australian Story off Aunty ABC to research what went down. It’s quite a bummer of an episode, Rise and Fall of the Leyland Brothers (2015), severe financial difficulty is quite triggering for me on a personal level for reasons I won’t get into and it sucks watching MBEs blow their retirement savings on what amounts to one of the biggest failed theme park enterprises New South Wales ever accommodated. The ruins of what was once Leyland Brothers World were like a layered fossil left behind for chuckleheads like me to make fun of, but this place wasn’t meant to be a joke - these guys were serious and Leyland Brothers World was a sincere if daggy tribute to Australian culture which Mike and Mal Leyland built in earnest. It presented a rather dated prism of what it meant to be Australian to the public, and to be honest the lack of Aboriginal consultation on their replica of Ayer’s Rock isn’t kosher by today’s indigenous advocacy standards. By the time Russell Coight’s All Aussie Adventures and The Crocodile Hunter starring Steve Irwin aired, the curation of Australian culture as done by the Leyland Brothers was antiquated and a bit old hat compared to the newer blokes on telly, plus Leyland Brothers World has aesthetics thoroughly rooted in what was acceptable graphic design in the late eighties. The Uluru replica was this fibreglass eyesore which bleached in the sun, rotting away in plain sight, emblematic of the well-intentioned yet ugly colonialism that spawned its creation. When people talk about Australian cultural cringe, The Rock Roadhouse is what springs to mind as it was a cheap facsimile of one of our nation’s natural wonders retro-fitted into a tourist trap. The Big Pineapple up in Queensland was classier than this hideous roadside attraction, The Big Prawn in Ballina had more dignity, what was once the centrepiece of a theme park’s mission statement became an accessory to a petrol station which served burgers to hungry drivers popping in for some stop-revive-survive sustenance. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the fetishisation of rural Australia by two white British ex-pats didn’t resonate with me, a city dweller who occupied his time with the Game Boy Advance, but even I mourned the loss of The Rock Roadhouse when it burned down in 2018. For Mal Leyland, when The Rock Roadhouse was scorched to ash, the dream had finally died even though Leyland Brothers World bit the dust in 1992. It was this final insult to injury, the cherry on top of this disaster of a theme park, the last nail in its tacky coffin. As a roadside attraction, The Rock Roadhouse will be missed, even if it didn’t beautify its surroundings much. May it rust in peace, Megadeth style.

Leyland Brothers World in its operational prime, with Bush Railway.

Tne entrance to Leyland Brothers World, leading inside The Rock.

Leyland Brothers World park mascots on display.

The interior of Leyland Brothers World was intended to resemble a country town.

The Rock Roadhouse as I remember it from the early 2000s.

A big fake skeleton of a giant lizard creature, at Leyland Brothers World.

The Mike and Mel Movie Museum, above panels courtesy of Australian Story.

The burnt out husk of what was once The Rock Roadhouse, in 2018.

Magic Kingdom in Lansvale almost needs no introduction, with its ads playing Magic by Pilot drilled into our memories through archival YouTube clips, but this place does need to be placed into the context of its era. See, back in the late eighties to early nineties, you could get away with erecting a bunch of cheap carny rides and calling that a suburban theme park experience. Magic Kingdom, with no affiliation with Disneyland or Disney World, was among one of these suburban theme parks with questionable merits - rivalling the infamous Wobbie’s World in terms of cultural penetration. There were rides, “characters” which were weird guys in suits that looked like deformed aliens, and a wide variety of activities you could expect from the fairground of the Sydney Royal Easter Show. Magic Kingdom was run by carnies much like most fairgrounds of its ilk, and apparently according to YouTube comments their vicious children would try and fight you. As a theme park experience it was akin to a lower rent Luna Park Sydney, with some of the rides alleged to have come from that place and starting rumours that Magic Kingdom was haunted by the ghosts of people who died in the Luna Park Ghost Train fire. I don’t take much stock in these haunted theme park stories apart from Luna Park Sydney itself, you hear rumours Fantasy Glades was haunted by a ghost too, I’ll leave that for the urban explorers to decide. Speaking of urban exploration, there’s plenty of videos where dumb people who don’t value their safety ride on the abandoned, rusty slides which are in danger of collapse. I don’t want to encourage such behaviour with my coverage, but I will document it if it happens. Anyway, Magic Kingdom exemplifies the suburban theme park in many of our minds because who doesn’t love off branded characters and font trademark infringement? The eighties and early nineties were full of these parks, which faded away as suburban sprawl creeped into their surroundings, and because of high demand for residential housing this gilded age of crappy theme parks may never return to our fatal shore that swept them away. I don’t have much to say about Magic Kingdom, Lansvale compared to the other also-ran parks like Leyland Brothers World because I wasn’t able to visit it in person and all I have to go by are the ads which I have to sift through with the keen eye of an archaeologist. A lot of what was shown in the ads apparently fell into disrepair by the end of it, and it’s a shame I didn’t get to experience any of this nonsense for myself. It kinda looks fun, from a distance, and who doesn’t love the unofficial theme song Magic by Pilot being used in the commercial?

The infamous ad for Magic Kingdom, Lansvale which played on Australian TV.

Video evidence of the waterslides in Magic Kingdom’s prime, the late eighties.

The Astrospin touted by Magic Kingdom, Lansvale’s advertising blitz.

The corrugated iron slide which everyone remembers from Magic Kingdom.

The train rides which were part of the main attraction at Magic Kingdom, Lansvale.

An alien looking “character” accompanying children on a trampoline.

A rare glimpse of the stage shows that went on at Magic Kingdom, Lansvale.

Another shot of the “characters” which look like extras from The Wicker Man.

I like how the mini-golf is advertised as “NEW GOLF” as if it’s a whole new thing.

The circular paddle boats available to ride at Magic Kingdom, Lansvale.

More paddle boats and a low, low price for entry at only six Australian dollars.

Oh, but of course the race cars and pony rides cost extra, there’s always a catch.

This place had group bookings available, like it was Luna Park or something.

Magic Kingdom really pushed their barbecues and picnics to their audience.

Lots of people paddling in their canoes at Magic Kingdom, Lansvale. (Above panels courtesy of Robert Pugsley)

We’ve saved the best of the worst for last, Wobbies World was a bewildering chapter in Australian theme park history, as few knew who was responsible for this hot mess of a theme park back in the day. An invaluable source for this article was The Abandoned Carousel, which was essential for my research as most coverage of Wobbies World as a theme park proper consists of Aussie comedians making fun of it rather than the deep lore and history of the park itself. I crack tons of jokes at the expense of crappy Australian theme parks myself, but it gets a bit frustrating when the history takes a back seat to the comedy when you’re researching stuff like “Who built it?” The auteur behind Wobbies World was Robin Laurie, who owned the playground area Wobbies World was built around. Apparently he was a nice bloke, however bewildering the theme park he created ended up being. Wobbies World was located in Melbourne, Australia, so I never got a chance to go there myself whilst it was still operational. Wobbies World is in many ways the archetypical bad Aussie theme park, because whilst the ads looked promising it was doomed to disappointment the moment you arrived, with many visitors feeling ripped off by the experience. If Wobbies World had a theme it all, it seemed to be transportation, as there were many vehicles available for children to ride in (including a Bren gun carrier tank from World War II). There were disused trams, and a stationary helicopter ride as well as a Whirly Bird ride which took you along a rail which rusted away in the skyline with jittery movements. It was pretty dismal, although the swan carousel was one of the less dangerous rides you could go on there. They had a Vickers Viscount aeroplane which was refitted to be a movie projector simulator, and a fire truck ride which took you past spraying water on the track. There were also four W2 class trams at Wobbies World, which could be ridden by visitors along interchanging rails. What remains of Wobbies World exists only in old vacation footage shot by tourists, as the different transportation vehicles have long been sold off to museums and dismantled for scrapyards. Much of Australian theme park fandom consists of archaeology trying to piece together snippets of our past through the wreckage left behind, and Wobbies World certainly exemplifies that as what precious footage left behind has been remixed into Jurassic Park parodies online. Wobbies World was a park built before my time, and I wasn’t located in the right state to enjoy it firsthand. I wish I could’ve gone there, though the apparent steep admission fees may have put off prospective parents like mine from taking their kids there. The Splashdown mini log ride seemed to be popular with kids who actually went, and I doubt Wobbies World existing did the reputation of Australian theme parks south of the Gold Coast any favours if you’re among those who regard theme parks as a legitimate art form. Wobbies World broke the mould when it was created, there’s nothing quite like it, for a reason. While other Aussie theme parks like Magic Kingdom had half-decent carny rides going for them, Wobbies World made bold choices like turning bobcat construction vehicles into bumper car-style attractions. It was crap, but it was unique crap, and Melbourne still waxes nostalgic for when it was still open because this park was bonkers enough to stick around from the eighties until the late nineties. I hesitate to say that Wobbies World has a “fanbase” up there with Wonderland Sydney, but the internet has engaged with Wobbies World through memes as I’ve already mentioned and the park earned an enduring legacy by inspiring the Pissweak World sketches on ABC’s The Late Show program. It may be gone now, but it isn’t forgotten by any stretch of the imagination, it dared to exist in a time when the suburban theme parks were on their way out and it’s sad to see it close. Compared to other ambitious Aussie theme parks like Fantasy Glades or Fox Studios Backlot it might not be impressive, but you’d be hard pressed not to get sucked into the retro ads for the place. Wobbies World represented the nadir of Aussie theme parks to many people, and although its reputation as a dodgy park was earned, I can’t help praising the audacity of the place and its grift which left its mark on our national consciousness through our popular culture. There will never be another Wobbies World, nor would it be recreated with its specific lens on past Australian transport on another part of the globe. All the departed suburban theme parks had a similar through-line going for them, they all wanted to create a space for families to spend time with their children cooking barbecues and having picnics together. The rides didn’t live up to the ads, but the family fun part was always present in the message they communicated to us, and a lot of these places were so bad that they were awesome. So many children shortchanged by them grew up into embittered adults dubious of the suburban theme park scam, a cottage industry which never recovered from the grandeur of its former self in the eighties and nineties. We haven’t seen new suburban theme parks spring up for nearly two decades, the devastating extinction burst of Aussie theme parks in the early two-thousands discouraged such innovation, and in the process we lost one of the best small theme parks ever constructed, Fantasy Glades. We’ll talk about that park next time.

The Vermont Tram backing into position at Wobbies World.

Ride-through footage of the Vermont Tram at Wobbies World.

Footage of the tram terminus at Wobbies World, see how rusted it is?

Some adult visitors try the slippery-dip at Wobbies World.

The infamous Whirly-Bird helicopter monorail ride, captured at its rattliest.

Another Whirly-Bird helicopter monorail vehicle, in better shape than the other one.

The ride-through footage demonstrates how rattly and unsafe the Whirly-Bird was.

You can see the pump-car ride below this rusted behemoth of the Whirly-Bird rail.

You can see the Vickers Viscount plane as well as the red fire truck from here.

Whirly-Bird helicopter monorail stopped at the docking bay for passenger exit.

Footage of the Bobcat ride at Wobbies World, one of the “better” attractions.

Footage of the pump-car ride at Wobbies World, this dude is into it.

Footage of the All-Terrain Vehicle ride at Wobbies World, launching off.

Ride-through footage of the All-Terrain Vehicle ride at Wobbies World.

A portion of the All-Terrain Vehicle track combining water with electricity. (Above panels source: tressteleg1)

Footage of the Swan Carousel ride at Wobbies World. (Source: Jen H)

The Last Days of Civic Video

It’s a humble Civic Video sign, but it’s lit like Cinema Paradiso to me, can’t believe it’s taken twenty years for me to notice its logo’s VHS-shaped.

I did something I haven’t done in years tonight, I set foot inside a Civic Video… because the handwritten sign outside proclaimed they were closing down mid-August. A mixed bag of bittersweet nostalgic emotions washed over me, I grew up with Civic Video which I visited often in Five Dock, seeing Civic Video’s Newtown location in such disrepair was alarming to say the least. A lot of Aussies preferred Video Ezy: due to the lack of decent parking spaces near Five Dock’s competitor, my family always rented from Civic Video, although we visited that Video Ezy once to buy a secondhand copy of The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time for Nintendo 64. I have way more emotional connection to Civic Video, they sold me my first booster pack of Pokemon trading cards and a Toy Story alien plushie, my handful of Crazy Bones I collected each week with pocket money ballooned into three complete sets kept in a cardboard shoebox. Civic Video’s bright neon signage remains etched into my memories since childhood because effort they put into their displays gave their video rental store an enchanting aesthetic identity I preferred to Video Ezy’s sterile orange lettering. Civic placed wooden cut-outs of Sonic The Hedgehog and Super Mario advertising the shelf-space where you could rent video game consoles, me and my twin brother rented Gex: Enter The Gecko enough times that we bought an ex-rental copy. The very first DVDs I ever purchased came from Five Dock Civic Video: Frankenstein (1931), The Blair Witch Project, and Zoolander were amongst early adoption technological leaps my family participated in over a decade ago. I remember struggling to make my father’s business laptop play DVDs of Mystery Men and Shrek because we couldn’t afford an actual DVD player plugged into our CRT television, I’d won my Playstation 3 in a Sydney Morning Herald blogging competition before I hoped to consider upgrading to Blu-Ray, which was my career-highlight Cinderella story unto itself. Civic Video served me well during our genteel poverty, back when I couldn’t pop into JB Hi-Fi and grab whatever complete series I desired. I have no un-ironic reasons to revisit Five Dock these days, its five-star skateboarding park was wasted on my Tony Hawk: Pro-Skater 2 face-planting self, I’d rather hang out in Anime At Abbotsford instead whenever I’m in the area for prescription errands. Prior to them occupying its slice of prime real estate, I recall this nothing-little-corner housing a tiny grocer and a hideous computer repair office which was always closed, then these two geniuses decided they’d open their anime gift boutique within walking distance from Abbotsford Public School, securing an evergreen source of customers who compete in regular Beyblade and Yu-Gi-Oh! tournaments. I’m ecstatic to see my old neighbourhood where I was educated from kindergarten onwards (besides a brief couple of grades spent in Tyalla, Coffs Harbour) prosper, Anime’s cosplay events granted my suburb relevance it hasn’t earned since commemorating Henry Lawson’s deathbed, I can’t express how different things were back when I was a little boy eating Bubble O’ Bill cowboy ice creams with chalky bubblegum noses at the Welcome Mart. I read my issues of Disney Adventures, K-Zone, Mad, and White Dwarf magazine at Five Dock’s newsagent where the only comics available were Archie and The Phantom. I attended Zone 3 laser-tag/arcadebirthday parties and church youth group gatherings at bowling allies we boarded a mini-van to access. Five Dock, at least back in my adolescence, was a wasteland of Taekwondo dojos and Vietnamese bakeries (plus that Samian Brotherhood building we thought was a sinister religious cult compound, when it was in fact a Hellenic club charity organisation). It wasn’t perfect by any means, but if you were willing to be lectured about Jesus each Friday, St. Alban’s pastors running the show let us play Halo: Combat Evolved on their original Xbox set up in the corner and took us all to mini-golf at Putt-Putt Ermington celebrating the end of school term. In 2014, Putt-Putt Ermington got sold to Chinese land-developer Aqualand, facing a miserable fate which several New South Wales theme parks shared after Sydney’s 2000 Olympic Games came and went. Much Boomer-pandering ballyhoo is made about us Millennials seeming glued to our phones, without considering our playgrounds have been bulldozed by real estate agents who’re erecting high-rise apartments atop our loiter-spots. The recession hit my generation hard, and thus due to us not being able to afford to start families, Toys R’ Us bit the dust before I could say goodbye like an estranged relative who didn’t tell you they were sick. Colourful embossed toy chest sculptures and orange giraffe mascot signs vanished overnight, the last remaining artefacts of nineties mall architecture were gone, even Games Workshop’s iconic yellow and red logo had been supplanted by a much blander Warhammer sign indistinguishable from Toni & Guy hairdressers next door. I miss Borders and Angus & Robinson bookshops a lot, it’s so creepy whenever a mall only represents literacy with Kmart and Target’s bookshelves, which might also disappear soon. They’ve always been sturdier than their American counterparts, yet I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re next in line for bankruptcy. Dymocks came back to Westfield Chatswood, but I’m still traumatised by my Broadway Shopping Centre visit where I surveyed the desecration of Collin’s Bookseller’s, gutted of what made it one of the classiest bookshops of its era to make room for JB Hi-Fi. As a dedicated Death Guard Chaos Space Marines player, I finally understood why sticking spikes and Chaos blasphemies onto the Imperium of Man’s Rhino tanks offended them, I’m glad Ray Bradbury wasn’t alive to see a beautiful bookseller cafe where I had afternoon tea with my mother repurposed into this crass purveyor of discount Kesha CDs and Entourage box sets. (I’m not inferring Kesha’s latest album Rainbow sucked, apart from Tik Tok, her early catalogue doesn’t appeal to me.) Not all retailers are created equal in how the presence of their absence contributes to Australia’s philistinism, Dr What! closing down is an excellent example of it, I visited them once on a routine trip to Borders at Bondi Junction, found a massive videocassette Aladdin’s cave of wonders sitting there. I recall the thrill of holding a clamshell VHS of AMIN: The Rise And Fall with an exposed nipple on its cover, grindhouse big boxes were exotic artefacts from a time before I was born, Dr. What! represented the last authentic Quentin Tarantino video store clerk experience in the Southern Hemisphere. I looked up what prestigious celebrity clientele Dr. What! attracted, Keanu Reeves dropped by on his motorcycle when he was filming The Matrix in Australia, can’t blame his curiosity when their selection of obscure cult classics was second to none. It saddens me that Dr. What! no longer rents videos to customers, nonetheless there’s a silver lining to this gloomy cloud: they’re teaching courses for audiovisual professionals in video-editing. I have a twin brother who works in this field of expertise: I appeared in one of his PSA short films about organ donor registration, his classmates were convinced I was an elaborate special effect until they’d met me themselves at Sydney Film School, Redfern.

Dr. What! deserved to be mourned by Aussies as an independent video shop, ghetto signage concealed an outstanding commitment to cinema.

I’ve seen plenty of local video rental stores go under, Lane Cove’s Blockbuster Video was a recent casualty which managed to hold its dignity together until the very end, I bought my DVD copy of Ninja Scroll there for twenty dollars new and never purchased anything else from them. I regretted not picking up the non-Harmony Gold tampered Macross and Rocky & Bullwinkle & Friends Volume 3, JB Hi-Fi rectified my urgent Robotech and Rocky & Bullwinklesituation after that Blockbuster Video store got redeveloped for commercial real estate it occupied. Main reason Lane Cove’s Blockbuster Video stayed open as long as it did, was its legitimate bargains and cool stuff EzyDVD’s brick-and-mortar vendors used to stock before JB Hi-FI drank their milkshake too. Meanwhile, Civic Video Newtown remains the shabbiest shell of a former video rental chain I’ve explored in my entire life, the vast magnitude of its bleak desolation is a gruesome spectacle I’d expect Dan Bell’s Dead Mall Series to scavenge.Civic Video store layouts, at least in my experience, tended to be one-level establishments. Newtown’s Civic Video has a foreboding ambience which follows you downstairs to a dank dungeon, reminiscent of seedy adult video stores you might’ve wandered into by mistake on your way here, because all ill-reputed massage parlours keep hiring the same architect. I’ll take you aboard my guided tour through an elephant graveyard of future gentrification,illustrated by the best photojournalism my primitive iPhone can deliver; whilst I waited for a friend at the train station I assisted an Aboriginal man whose mobile got mugged – he’d offered to buy my outdated iPhone off me, I allowed him to use it to ring his wife whom I spotted rushing around searching for her husband. I’m glad I resolved their crisis without having to name-drop my Aboriginal auntie, unless an Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander man knows your relative by name, citing aunts as a bargaining chip to negotiate trust is useless. My battery was half-dead, only one of the speakers still works, he must’ve been desperate if he surrendered his woman’s digits to a whitefella. Just another Friday evening in Newtown. I didn’t tell that story to flex, I’m communicating the raw environment you’ll be dealing with here, and the mindset I had taking shelter from further dangerous scenarios inside a Civic Video where the only familiar element was its logo. I attended Reclaim The Lanes 5 in 2013, and watched Aussie hip-hop acts perform raps about fighting enemies in KFC bathrooms, blasting beats on their gigantic subwoofers which gave me heart palpitations. Subsequent festivals toned down the KFC bathroom feud aspect, I drank full-strength Greek coffee and congregated near the Writer’s Tent set up by Better Dead Than Read, eating my fairy floss before buying a taijitu necklace from a New Age stall to make my Taoist conversion official. Newtown’s Eastern Flair sells plenty of Buddhist and Hindu merchandise most Westerners have no business appropriating, Taoists are underrepresented in the tat department aside from a pair of taijitu sun-stickers which reflect light, I had to buy my powdered bronze Lao Tzu statue from Amazon. My twin brother mocked me for blowing a hundred bucks (plus shipping) acquiring my graven idol of a spiritual leader who preached frugality, to which I responded: “I only need one!” My egregious online shopping habits didn’t stop there, my twin brother respected me for scoring a VHS tape of The Pagemaster for twelve dollars on eBay, a small price to pay for closure. I’d been scouring secondhand stores, roaming from Salvos to Vinnie’s trying to find an elusive The Pagemaster VHS like I did with Blade Runner, Highlander, Jurassic Park, The Iron Giant and Space Jam. Despite barely understanding the fanatical devotion Disney buffs have for collecting the original line of Disney Renaissance clamshell home videocassettes, I now own those titles on Diamond Edition Blu-Rays, I’ve learned to appreciate the VHS-era’s beautiful tackiness displayed in its aesthetic qualities. The Pagemaster means more to me than it probably should, and because I rented it from Civic Video Five Dock back when video rental stores were still relevant, it occupies a place in my heart the same way several other now-adult nineties kids cherished Drop Dead Fred. I had a dreadful string of consecutive stress-nightmares, until I’d received The Pagemastervideocassette in the post; upon the eve of its arrival I’d dreamt Christopher Lloyd’s titular wizard character dressed in blue started waving his hands, banishing said negative vibes. I’ll never get sick of looking at this thing, no matter how much Marcel Proust warned against repetitive nostalgia with his madeleine chapter from In Search Of Lost Time, VHS box covers carry a totemic significance regardless of DVDs and Blu-Ray replacing dusty black oblongs.

Macaulay Culkin is surfing on a book, sword-fighting a dragon, holding this 1996 video-cassette in my hands again comforted me a great deal.

The literal writing’s on the wall, like a red cross painted upon a door warning villagers of bubonic plague, late capitalism strikes again.

It’s strange seeing neon signage that doesn’t advertise Eat at Joe’s.

Cans of assorted bottles of water only a dollar each, that could help quench Newtown’s homeless beggars quench their thirst cheap.

The full extent of Civic Video’s collapse began as I turned the corner, entering its abattoir where ex-rental video game copies come to die.

Phat Moves could be yours, tear our television off the wall, grab a deal!

All members welcome to the Funko Pop! Vinyl bandwagon, ride or die Civic Video customers from Five Dock can pay their last respects here.

The M&Ms are always the first to know, doomsday’s coming mid-August.

This place has been pillaged beyond recognition, this keyboard’s past it.

Step right up folks, it’s the cheapest trash in town! Ten cents is the bleakest price tag you can slap on any landfill-bound clearance bin.

A rapid-action VHS rewinder, captured in the wild, an endangered species seldom found in the wild due to climate change.

Is it the fax machine, the chords, or the “study desks $20” sign tucked into that drawer what completes this magnificent depressing image?

Oh jeez, they’re flogging off the air conditioning units too? Drag.

Blue neon and hot pink staffroom looks barren and bare tonight.

I would’ve been listening to Cliff Martinez’s Drive soundtrack whilst I documented all this if I didn’t have my hands full, I suffer for my art.

Jesus Christ, they’re selling individual discs instead of complete sets, like organ harvesters who steal your kidneys and leave you in an ice bath.

I apologise for the blurred snapshot, this wasn’t for artistic effect, I was trying to run the jewels and get as many photos as I could before my battery went kaput. Recommended Viewing shelves have been raided.

The Bogan Hunters and Bogan Pride are next to Dumb and Dumberer, I’m not even bothered that Dumb and Dumberer doesn’t belong in TV series, that’s just perfect accidental social commentary.

Nothing rare or revelatory worth scavenging on the Documentary shelves, ex-rental DVDs are scuffed beyond repair by this stage.

Horror section looks pretty Spartan, although I’ve never heard of 7 Mummies, which got awarded a whopping 2.5 stars on iMDB. Yikes.

WAR! HGGN! GOOD GOD YA’LL, WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? ABSOLUTELY NOTHIN’, SING IT AGAIN, YEAH! WAR! HGGN!

The Old West was brought to an end by the railroads, Civic Video on the other hand was ended by Netflix. What’s Hitler’s SS doing there?

There was one aspect to Newtown’s Civic Video I felt I had to document for posterity above all other shelves, its Gay & Lesbian section, which has been supplanted by Netflix and SBS Viceland’s streaming LGBT content on demand. The historical weight this section held was palpable to me, even as a straight observer, because it was larger than both the War and Western genre sections combined. The men and women who rented these movies were out and proud, it’s poignant to see something which served a vital role in this bohemian district shut down not by Stonewall police raids or lobbyist bigots demanding a plebiscite on marriage equality, but by simple technological inconvenience. I’m about to poke fun at some of the silly titles these queer film festival highlights were bestowed by their directors, the whole “rent-boy” concept becomes somewhat literal when your local Civic Video allows you to rent boys with washboard abs on the box art, but from my experience the laughable titles LGBT classics tend to have doesn’t negate their legit subcultural importance. Prior to searching The Fabulous Flag Sisters on IMDB, I’d assumed this was another light, fluffy LGBT romantic comedy; but then I read the plot synopsis, and it’s a true story about three drag queens who entertained Italy during a very turbulent period of Red Brigades and terrorist attacks. Poking fun at the cover’s stereotypical glittery-disco-ball makes me sound like an insensitive jerk now, doesn’t it? While we’re on the subject of misleading marketing, Bret Easton Ellis’ novel The Rules Of Attraction got adapted into a movie which I bought on Blu-Ray, because I collect lesser-known adaptations of transgressive novelists’ B-side works. Maybe I do this so Irvine Welsh’s Filth will encourage me to keep writing books after my Trainspotting bestseller is far behind me as an author, Chuck Palahniuk must hate being Mr. Fight Club now that white nationalists co-adopted Tyler Durden. I loved Ellis’ American Psycho (both book and film), despite resting upon his edgelord laurels, I think The Rules Of Attraction demonstrated he’s got depth beneath his surface-level nihilism and more ideas than just Patrick Bateman rehashes like Luna Park. I dunno what Bret’s 1941 reference was trying to say, perhaps I’m too young to appreciate his “fatherhood book” when fatherhood feels out of reach, or I should watch my 1941 Blu-Ray that came in a Spielberg director’s set in order to decode this oblique message. Text Publishing rereleased an Aussie LGBT classic novel called Fairyland by Sumner Locke Elliot, I found it relatable on account of its narrative verbalising how multiple generations of young Australians gave up waiting for the future to arrive at quarantine, our brightest innovators emigrated overseas to escape our regressive prisoner island sabotaged by Canberra’s cronies. Of course, Donald Trump getting elected and Brexit closed the door on those exit strategies, we’d all have to fight our battles at home. Conservative rulers always took their fullest advantage of our parochial convict continent’s tyranny of distance, leaving South Australians begging Elon Musk on social media feeds to repair storm-damaged electricity grids in Adelaide. Once we’d heard online rumours about America’s Netflix experiment, The Genie From Down Under burst out of his opal, no matter how much protection money Rupert Murdoch demands it’s over for NewsCorp very soon. I attended a snap-Sydney marriage equality rally on Sunday, August 6th: one of the original Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras veterans, Peter Murphy was there to perform a speech. A few months ago I argued with some Yank on Twitter that Australians are “the Mardi Gras of Priscilla“, like an elder Republican boasting they were “the party of Lincoln” because he believed Sydney Mardi Gras had an all-Caucasian crowd devoid of Gaysians or queer POC. A cursory glance of our diverse attendance at this rally proved his ignorance, I’d seen more rhinestone jackets at this march than I’ve seen since their peak popularity in the seventies,plus I was granted permission to carry a violet spirit part of the rainbow flag which hurt my arm with an empathetic ache for these families fighting for their rights. Intersectionality is not my expertise, but it’s a strange coincidence that the iconic rainbow flag associated with LGBT activism shares its multicolour-scheme with the autistic spectrum infinity symbol flagchosen to replace the blue Autism Speaks puzzle-piece logo. When we’d finished marching from Town Hall to Oxford Street, I handed off my rainbow flag corner to a lesbian mother, proceeding back the way I came. I spent the rest of the afternoon browsing in Kinokuniya.

Gay/Lesbian, with a dash of pink and neon blue for A E S T H E T I C.

Latter Days? Wasn’t that the quirky Mormon romantic comedy which turns into a stone-cold bummer by the end? Better leave this alone…

Adam & Steve, Bent, Boystown, plus most of the Brotherhood movies. This shelf’s triggery-buzzkill-to-uplifting ratio was way more balanced.

Patrik, Age 1.5 seems like a gay Happy Madison flick on the surface, but as it turns out, is a provocative Swedish comedy about same-sex adoption. Pucchini for Beginners has adorable opera loving lesbians.

Hunk Boat Volumes 1 & 2? Rated MA-15+ for its frequent nudity. Hard Pill contains “strong sex scenes”, I hope so!

Psst, I think this movie has a gay agenda about marriage equality, film canisters forming same-sex wedding cakes might fly over naive heads.

“I know writers who use subtext, they’re all cowards.” - Garth Marenghi.

Gayby is a cute title for an LGBT comedy, Gay Sex in the 70’s sure is some gay sex in the seventies. That ass will be penetrated.

Queer Duck: The Movie might be the most circulated LGBT DVD in existence, I’ve seen this cartoon rear its head in retailers nationwide.

I can skip both Eating Out 1 and 2, because Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat will answer all my questions about this cinematic universe.

Holding an issue of REDFLAG, a socialist newspaper publication, I love its left-wing equivalent to a Rupert Murdoch Daily Telegraph headline.

Representing the Rob Halford metalheads with this Manowar themed placard. “And if we all were not brothers of metal, would we fall? NO!”

Carrying the rainbow flag into Oxford St. - whilst listening to Judas Priest’s British Steel album with Bose noise-cancelling headphones.

No profile of Civic Video’s range is complete without showcasing its modest Australian section, Civic’s noble attempt at stocking our domestic media products underneath one roof deserves a celebration even if its experiment in educating us about our own culture ended the way it did. Back when my mother rented me movies, Civic Video Five Dock’s VHS copy of The Godfather was an old worn out piece of junk no amount of delusion could call acceptable viewing conditions, no wonder Mum let me and my brother watch Rambo: First Blood – the videocassette transfer was so dark you couldn’t see its ultra-violent rampages. It seems mental now to think Tim Allen’s opus The Santa Clause of all bloody things had a six-month waiting list, Dad bought me a Mr. Bean VHS compilation which came with a Mr. Bean t-shirt for Christmas one year, that was considered a king’s ransom gift fit for royalty. Due to huge licensing issues many impatient children of the nineties didn’t understand yet, Dragon Ball Z and Pokemon videotapes were ubiquitous, but you could only watch Daria or Ren & Stimpy on a singular VHS release with a select number of episodes. My family owned the first season of The Simpsons on videotape, I’m uncertain who bequeathed that treasure to us, three videocassettes were packed into a prototype box set the size of a current DVD complete series. Umbrella Entertainment re-issued a bunch of seminal Ozsploitation films following the success of Not Quite Hollywood, the documentary about this era of Australian cinema which they’ve acquired the rights to, both End Play and Stork received much nicer cover art reflecting the material’s tone. Umbrella’s psychedelic graphic design and portrait of Bruce Spence does him better favours than presenting us with his off-putting visage as a gaping maw devouring most of the surface. I didn’t take photos of Civic Video Newtown’s Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome copy because let’s face it, if you’ve already seen Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome‘s movie poster, its DVD cover looks familiar. Thunderdome‘s poster is so iconic, they’ve been using it on home video releases for this movie since VHS: reminds me of how Hobo With A Shotgun‘s DVD and Blu-Ray releases didn’t bother hiring any design specialists, and slapped its movie poster on the cover, because why mess with perfection? I used to prefer Beyond Thunderdome to The Road Warrior as a kid, the lack of brutal rape in Beyond Thunderdome probably had something to do with it, plus Mad Max 2 had a creepy foreboding atmosphere and a few jump-scares that messed with my head. It’s weird to think in hindsight how Beyond Thunderdome used to be the capstone of the series, now Mad Max: Fury Road is beloved by critics and audiences alike, Thunderdome is once again the contentious Return Of The Jedi Ewok entry in the Mad Max franchise nobody agrees on. I went over to the Classics section and found myself an amusing treat, bestowed with one of the goofiest fonts I’ve seen plastered upon a DVD cover in quite some time: I Was A Male War Bride starring Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan. I looked up a synopsis on iMDB and wow does “zany gender-confusing antics follow” imply multitudes of meaning in our current era of marriage equality debates. By 1949 standards I Was A Male War Bride must’ve been zany, yet in our post-Chelsea Manning world, military recruits questioning their gender identity are almost mainstream. Grant looks silly wearing a woman’s wig, which I guess is the point.

You don’t need to over-emphasise how Australian and seventies End Play is, Civic Video, you can kinda tell just by looking at this picture.

Umbrella Entertainment’s alternative design for End Play uses a striking red backdrop, and an updated OFLC rating which is more legible.

Stork starring Bruce Spence (the Gyro-Captain from Mad Max 2) was presented by the Hexagon Tribute Collection in seventies-piss-yellow.

For comparison’s sake, here’s Umbrella Entertainment’s alternate Stork cover art, doesn’t that communicate the narrative with ease?

Richard Amsel really captures Tina Turner’s Aunty Entity hair on paper, I saw some child wielding a crossbow just like hers on the subway once.

Cary Grant and Ann Sheridan in I Was A Male War Bride, rated G!

Civic Video Newtown’s candy bar was filled with discount lollies from various countries, I remained too skint to sample any of these treats deemed acceptable for consumption, the previous barrel of sugar I’d ingested was an awful Chinese gumball jar I have been told you should check for broken glass before you put it in your mouth. I was hoping I’d get Bubble O’ Bill-esque chalky bubblegum instead of the rough grey-textured gunk Kmart sold me, I won’t go into how this substance left my body, but it wasn’t pleasant. Civic Video never let me down in the lollies department, Wonka’s Redskins were pernicious yet delicious, I have very fond memories of Australia’s Yowie chocolates which were our Kinder Surprise eggs in the shape of mythical Aboriginal Dreamtime monsters with fun educational wildlife toys. My primary school librarian read Turramulli The Giant Quinkin to our class and terrified us all, so I reckon Millennials tearing the heads off chocolate Yowies was a subconscious way of coping. Fizzers often came in a Royal Easter Show-bag, they’re pretty much Laffy-Taffy with a much less off-putting name, I liked ’em. Reece’s Pieces Peanut Butter Cups are nice, but I take issue with imported Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Cream chocolate on account of Milky Bar Cookies & Cream being superior in every way imaginable. I’ve tasted American milk, it’s rubbish compared to Aussie milk due to our supply not having to travel as far across fewer states, Cadbury’s unfair dairy farm advantage over Hershey’s is seldom discussed by fans. PEZ dispensers are a love ’em or hate ’em candy toy, I’ve always loved how PEZ tastes, it’s chalky in the Bubble O’ Bill sense where you respect Vern from Stand By Me endorsing this product. I still have my Superman PEZ dispenser somewhere in storage, the staying power of a tiny plastic bust cast in the likeness of childhood characters is an evergreen concept. I only got to try Bubble Tape once because my mother refused to buy me any of it, Seriously Strawberry is preferable to Grape, I should buy some on my next stroll. Froot Loops are on the health watchdog’s hit-list at the moment, urging us to reclassify the cereal as a dessert, Toucan Sam might become an inevitable casualty of the diabetic age. My parents stopped buying me Pop Tarts two decades ago, Corn Pops and Frosted Flakes both disappeared off supermarket shelves overnight, amongst classic sugary cereals Froot Loops stands alone atop Mt. Kelloggs. If Arnott’s stop manufacturing Tim-Tams or Mint Slices, Iced Vo-Vos are next, packets of Tiny Teddies are getting smaller. I have heard chocolates in general may become scarce delicacies, which is bad news, what else am I gonna buy for Mother’s Day?

Scratch Removal Is Here! (at the Candy Bar, with confectionery less expired than that sign, plus some non-banned Kinder Surprise eggs)

Wanna feel old? This is what mobile phones used to look like when Civic Video was still relevant, Snake was Nokia’s best game.

The frown emoticon on this Fanta Icy Whirl™ machine is adorable.

New Releases, which won’t get to become Old Releases, farewell Civic.

In the Greek myth Orpheus & Eurydice, Hades requests Orpheus never look back upon the underworld as he carries his departed wife out of his realm, or else she will be taken back amongst the dead. I struck no such pact with Hades, hence there’s no harm in me having one last glimpse back at Civic Video, before I’d left to see Suspiria at the Hayden Orpheum. I overheard a lady settling neglected overdue late fees, her total amount she owed: a mere thirty dollars. The stoic clerk counting her money behind the register has no staff to share his burden, admiring her honesty, he does his Civic duty until his final shift. Can’t be easy working for an employer you’re aware has no future, knowing robots can steal everyone’s jobs like Astro Boy warned us they would, the gig economy offers few protections against predatory market forces. I made my exit, and as I climbed back out of that dungeon, two singlet-wearing yobbos from the upstairs gym proclaimed Civic’s demise as “End of an era!” – to which I’d replied: “What a legacy…” – the class divide just melted away in that moment, commiserating with two strangers I’d never met over something which meant a great deal to us closing down. I respect the vapourwave movement for recycling our retro capitalist detritus like the Kmart muzak tapes (someone who worked there for a decade uploaded them online) into dank remixed art projects and synth albums, creating an ironic pastiche of early Playstation CGI and Californian advertisements featuring valley girls frolicking in unsustainable splendour. I watched Cobain: Montage Of Heck‘s opening credits, the harsh, distorted grunge of Generation X represented by Nirvana’s music is juxtaposed with Leave It To Beaver sitcom footage. My generation’s counter-culture often borrows its malaise, the vapourwave dialectic tackles similar themes such as consumerism’s broken promises, the splintering of suburbia by global recession and the futility of resisting irreversible change. I’ve been stockpiling my physical media for my Turbo Kid-esque post-apocalyptic bunker, because I don’t trust streaming services to host permanent libraries after my twin brother was binge-watching Dawson’s Creek and found himself deprived of James Van Der Beek at random, when Netflix decided they can revoke access to archives. I never wanna be stuck in a nihilistic jam where my sibling says binge-watching Full House seems like a reasonable alternative to being bereft of entertainment options, that saxophone was stuck in my headfor a month, it was piping through his bedroom wall every lonely night. I joined him out of curiosity, misery loves company, we sympathised with Uncle Jesse struggling to make it as a musician. My brother’s been living in a Harry Potter cupboard, after he’d moved back into our parent’s place due to his previous rental agreement disintegrating with his financial security, our landlord requested we pack half the garage into storage boxes so he could install extra dormitories for his elderly Chinese relatives. Our Irish-Japanese neighbours were muscled out of their residence upstairs, I’d bought an Elsa Frozen and Tinker Bell birthday card for their two daughters at Kmart, plus I performed as a dishevelled party clown in my University of Sydney letterman jacket and they hugged me around my legs. I reckon online video streaming via Netflix (and its local competitor Stan, named after one of Eminem’s most bone-chilling tracks) taking off when it did, happened due in part to our housing affordability crisis forcing us Millennials into a nomadic lifestyle we didn’t choose. It’s difficult committing to rent our movies from a Civic Video, Hoyts or Redbox kiosk when our tenancy can be uprooted by the whims of an indifferent feudal lord evicting peasants.

Resist Records is so underground, I couldn’t find their shop entrance.

It’s easy to wallow in stagnation, clinging to nostalgia when everything’s falling apart. Dick Smith Electronics has fallen on hard times, however in its place now stands this delightful new bookseller called Harry Hartog at the Macquarie Centre, which pipes gentle folk music and has wooden model ships atop its shelves. Another blast from the distant nineties past emerged when a new Timezone arcade sprung out of nowhere beside Macquarie Centre’s JB Hi-Fi, bringing happiness to the children, especially two little girls playing Space Invaders: Frenzy. I wasn’t great at video games as a kid, many of my friends would gather round the telly playing Crash Bandicoot and I watched them vent their frustrations, never suspecting they were just as bad at finishing these games as I was. YouTube’s toxicity isn’t fantastic for long-term entertainers, but watching Let’s Players tackle games I thought were impossible showed me these difficult games could be beaten. I supplemented my morning meditation by practicing dying in Contra III: The Alien Wars so I wouldn’t get frustrated whenever I kept losing, today’s enlightenment requires today’s techniques, not only did my sore thumbs stop hurting but I reached Level Four in a game I’d never have the courage to play at age eight. During a routine trip to Abbotsford to obtain my prescription medication, my Dad decided we should go visit my primary school buddy David Harris whom we hadn’t seen since Prez Obama’s term, lo and behold he still lived at his old address. His mother Val answered the door, and invited me inside, where I reunited with a friend I’ve known since kindergarten like no time passed whatsoever. I informed him I pre-ordered the Super Nintendo Classic Edition so we can play Super Ghouls N’ Ghosts like the good-old-days on his couch, where we watched Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme action movies together. I spotted Dave posing next to a Margaritaville kiosk on Facebook, I inquired what it meant but Dave told me he was there for his sister’s wedding, he’s an uncle now and I’m very happy for him. He looked at my outfit and said: “You look like a dude from the seventies!” which sounded like a compliment from his perspective, I examined his couch sitting where it always sits. There was no Gamecube set up with TimeSplitters 2 ready to go, nor Super Nintendo with Dave’s brother Tim’s Mario Is Missing cartridge nearby as there had been back in 1997, but everything else was a time capsule which transported me to another much simpler epoch. I went to Civic Video many times with Dave, each expedition would yield a new bounty we carried over the threshold of our doors, nonetheless I’m glad our friendship has outlived the video rental industry’s glacial-paced decline now accelerated by man’s anthropocene. I can live without returning overdue tapes to Civic Video again, Dave not being Garth in our Wayne’s World duo is an unthinkable, intolerable proposition. Maybe things will get better by Christmas, maybe they won’t, the planet might get nuked by North Korea before I’ll unwrap my presents under the tree. I overthink the impermanence of arrogant institutions we take for granted, afraid I’ll die screaming while I’m wallowing in my sweatpants, unable to begin starting a family of my own if I get married or achieve real meaningful success outside this tawdry Tutankhamen’s tomb I’ve constructed for myself built using material possessions. I remain committed to my Taoist religion, I walked away from a rad fifty dollar katana at the mall’s Japan City retailer, my spirituality’s stronger than the siren-song of sword ownership.Certain sacrifices had to be made so I could become a better person, hope you all enjoyed my anxiety-disorder fuelled panic attack disguised as an article about a video rental chain.

The boys are back in town, ready for our reunion tour in 2017.

The Unexpected Bakshi Buyout of the Disney/20th Century Fox Merger

Perhaps the director of Fritz the Cat might have a bone to pick?

When you read news about the Disney/20th Century Fox merger, a couple of properties you care about come to mind first, Star Wars and X-Men. Nobody spares a thought for the granular details of nerd-franchises or corporate buyouts unrelated to those unless a woke celebrity on Twitter’s critiquing the senseless monopolistic tendencies Disney’s done with this very concerning deal, yes it’s bad that Rupert Murdoch now has billions of dollars to sink into the cash-devouring abyss News Corp. has become in recent years. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about Rupert Murdoch, because his vile meddling in Australian politics means I have to think about Rupert Murdoch more than I wished I had to, and whilst it sucks his tabloid press has been given an injection of funds he will likely use for evil purposes – when I first heard the news about Rupert Murdoch surrendering control of 20th Century Fox I sighed in relief because now I won’t have to feel culpable for his political machinations just because I saw Avatar or Logan in theatres. Nope, henceforth it’s Disney’s corporate meddling I’ll have to keep tabs on, at least Australians are closer to being freed from the shackles of Rupert’s Lich-King grasp forever. The second unintended consequence of corporate buyouts is how it may affect our film industry in Australia, Baz Luhrmann owes his career to 20th Century Fox distributing his early stuff which employed A-list Australian talent such as Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman, and once 20th Century Fox disappears – a lot of blue-collar demographic content which Australian stories are built upon also vanishes with a studio whose tarnished name is a liability in our current climate. It’s quite a head trip to contemplate how two of the most visionary franchises in science-fiction, Alien and Star Wars, were distributed by a media mogul who fled Australia because he was restricted by our strong consumer protection laws preventing him from buying as many television networks as he wanted. The Simpsons mocked Murdoch through its Mr. Burns character, parodying his Citizen Kane-esque newspaper baron origin story in classic episodes which re-defined what adult animation on television could be; revoking free-to-air syndicated Simpsons reruns at six-o’-clock each weeknight on Channel Ten was Rupert Murdoch’s final act of petty revenge against us rascal lefty Millennials who hated him for destroying the National Broadband Network that could’ve enabled Netflix streaming to supplant his Antipodean empire. I refuse to call 20th Century Fox anything other than its outdated name, rebranding it as 21st Century Fox wasn’t fooling anyone and Murdoch’s adamant to keep us trapped in the past he grew up in regardless of democratic process. Australians were hoping Disney’s corporate buy-out would relinquish Murdoch’s grip on our beloved nerd-franchises and dismantle his unelected junta piece by decrepit piece, whilst it’s disappointing that Bob Iger wasn’t able to tear Fox News apart the minute he’d purchased Donald Trump’s favourite channel, seeing Rupert Murdoch recognise his time is short was satisfying to read online. It’s worth worrying about Fox Searchlight’s outlet for indie movies about ordinary, poor average Joes, Australian cinema pretty much lives and dies on those, The Adventures Of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert and The Castle are classics. I still remember when Madman Entertainment took a little break from licensing anime and released Kenny, not since Super Mario Bros. has the struggle of the plumber been valorised on screen with such bold dedication. Meanwhile, George Miller’s trying to get Warner Bros. to cough up the funding for his Mad Max: Fury Road sequel, blockbusters are a harder sell. Australian tax laws changed after John Howard’s reign and superheroes seem marketable. With all that heavy political chat out of the way, let’s talk about the fun stuff you may have overlooked regarding this recent Disney buy-out. The Pagemaster being acquired as part of the 20th Century Fox library was first on my radar, of course as someone who named his website Pagemaster General that was a concern (the litigiousness is why General is a suffix there). Don Bluth’s Anastasia plus Titan A.E. provoked a lot of “Anastasia’s a Disney Princess now LOL” memes, as did Ferngully, but there is another property I never predicted would be included within this massive multi-media deal: Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards. This may require some explanation for the uninitiated: Ralph Bakshi, an underground Palestinian animator whose most famous works are his most unrepresentative of his appeal (Cool World and The Lord Of The Rings) made a children’s film in the seventies just to prove he could called Wizards. Unlike his other fantasy works in Bakshi canon such as Fire And Ice or his abridged The Lord Of The Rings adaptation, Wizards is an influential piece of Cold War hippie-era alt-history animation which borrows from various pulp sources, from Vaughn Bode to Phillipe Druillard to Mike Ploog (who drew the opening sequence’s illustrations). It’s the only film in Ralph Bakshi’s extensive filmography which he bothered to record an audio-commentary for, and it’s the Johnny Cash’s Hurt cover of DVD audio-commentaries that encapsulates both his passionate defending of animators and artists long dead, plus his actual beef with Walt Disney taking credit for motion pictures drawn by other people. Ralph Bakshi’s rants about Disney are often dismissed as the ramblings of an elder crank, but here his opinions regarding Pinocchio and how he runs his studio house style versus the restrictive method imposed by Disney on their productions is made crystal clear for any fan of animation who needs his final statement on the matter. Ralph Bakshi’s life-long ideological opposition to a shiny Magic Kingdom mentality is also why Disney’s sudden acquisition of one of his most popular movies is both hilarious and the most Bakshi turn of events which I’ve uncovered all year, his heroes often achieve their goals through subterfuge and grifting. The prospect of Princess Elinore’s skimpy low-cut dress and bountiful bosom scandalising soccer moms at Disneyland whose offspring meet her as a proper face character may never happen in reality, but a man can dream, can’t he? Cheers to Bakshiland, The Hippiest Place On Earth.

Princess Elinore from Wizards, in all her PG rated, animated glory.

If Anaheim won’t welcome you, Elinore, the cosplay circuit will crown you queen. Even Ralph Bakshi has more fans than Rupert Murdoch!

The Sacrament of AKIRA

Only when you see AKIRA in Dolby Surround do you recognise that tag-line’s truth in advertising, Neo-Tokyo explodes at peak volume.

I’ve heard rumours, through dubious internet sources, that seeing AKIRA on the big screen instead of your telly or computer screen is a borderline religious experience. I’m a weird heretic who does not recognise the Streamline dub, preferring the newer Pioneer AKIRAdub instead, and prior to tonight as of writing I haven’t really explored the pros and cons of the Japanese audio track’s fullest potential. My opinion about why the Japanese audio track has hidden arcane mystical properties changed the moment I heard it in its clearest quality possible – an anime cult movie screening at a Sydney multiplex set up for such an event. What I discovered about AKIRA tonight may shock you as it did me, I expected this urban legend surrounding AKIRA‘s theatrical exhibition to be disappointing as Dark Side Of The Rainbow not matching Pink Floyd lyrics as much as I hoped. I wanted to articulate why stories about having religious experiences during screenings of AKIRA keep circulating and what these claims entail or mean, so many of these purported religious experience stories about AKIRA begin and end with thirty-something hippie burnouts saying “AKIRA changed my life, MAAAAN~”, which doesn’t tell us much we can gather anthropological data from does it? Well, I’m here to inform you AKIRA‘s great and terrible power is legit, it’s just very rare to observe this same effect happen due to watching anime rather than hearing the Islamic call to prayer in Cairo Bazaar. AKIRA‘s killer-app which preserves its staying power is its immaculate symphonic sound-engineering, my autistic sensibilities struggle with DJs cranking set-lists way too loud at the club which makes sipping drinks there unpleasant, meanwhile AKIRA‘s sound mix calms the audience to the extent you almost forget about its rougher scenes like two dogs getting shot in front of a kid or Kaori’s shirt getting torn off during an attempted rape. Whenever the latter subject is discussed on Twitter, amnesiac otaku will stammer acting defensive trying to convince themselves those scenes weren’t part of the nostalgic version they saw, and now I’ve seen AKIRA in a theatrical presentation I understand why this phenomenon occurs. You’re so mesmerised by the spectacular awe of what you’re witnessing, that harsher elements present in AKIRA‘s narrative which would otherwise bother audience members if they attended the upcoming Ninja Scroll screening (also organised by Outta The Box Anime), don’t disturb or upset them in the slightest. I find it hilarious how AKIRA continues to attract both die-hard veteran otaku and highbrow art-house hipsters who wouldn’t be caught dead at anime screenings unless it’s Studio Ghibli, Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga adaptation of his bad bromance between Kaneda and Tetsuo is a paean to juvenile delinquency which somehow found an audience with MFA post-grads, uniting each disparate economic class better than your woke Marxist professor ever could. Speaking of student protests, the eighties historical/political aspect of AKIRA‘s context was made explicit by its subtitled presentation, adding profound dimensions to an animated sci-fi film often derided for its alleged nonsensical plot and central protagonists shrieking their names at each other ad-nauseam. Omnipresent graffiti arguing both for and against various in-universe labour strikes decorates AKIRA‘s meticulous background illustrations, seeing it all translated grants fresh poignancy to a film I’ve seen dozens of times already. I worried that the jokes wouldn’t translate well in subtitled form for the newbies with us, I was surprised that strangers seated next to me laughed at several punchlines I’d laughed at for years; Kaneda’s smooth pickup artistry and his buddy Kaisuke complaining why he can’t use his own bike instead of borrowing his to charge the laser cannon battery added comic relief. My favourite part shall always remain Kaneda breaking out his Blue Steel gaze at Kei, his line “You called me didn’t you? And I heard you…” confirms his status as one of the most underrated anime heartthrobs of the eighties, I ain’t afraid to say he’s a dreamboat! It boggles the mind how there aren’t any AKIRA AMVs centred around Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run, the way this film communicates fraternal love between Kaneda, Tetsuo and his fellow bikers rubbed off onto us when a man seated beside me whom I’d met tonight initiated first hug after I gestured to shake his hand. Metaphysical themes in anime are a dime a dozen, Neon Genesis Evangelion‘s cynical plundering of gnostic symbolism being a prominent example, yet I felt more spiritual energy in that room during AKIRA than I ever did when my Dad took me to see T.D. Jakes preaching at Hillsong’s stadium megachurch. Pentecostal Christianity has a reputation for charismatic speaking in tongues, flailing my arms in the air beckoning God’s Holy Spirit evoked bugger all, I guess literal rubbish bins on wheels repurposed as offering plates displeased Lord Jesus. As the late artist formerly known as Prince sang, there are thieves in the temple tonight. Whilst we’re all bewaring the sacrilege, my mother’s disappointment that she bought two tickets to see Spirited Away at Graphic Festival 2010 is unfounded, missing out on Regurgitator’s AKIRA Live At The Sydney Opera House was not a tragedy on par with Robert Crumb cancelling his appearance there fearing wowsers would assassinate him at the airport. I’m glad I waited seven years to see AKIRA awaken in its pure unadulterated form, Regurgitator weren’t bringing anywhere near the noise that Geinoh Yamashinogumi conjured up using gamelan folk instruments. Each explosion thunders and sizzles into place in AKIRA‘s original 1988 recorded symphonic mix, having a Swedish Gore-Grind band noodle on stage accompanying old trashy retro anime sounds cool in theory, until you remember they’re doing this to AKIRA and not better suited candidates like Mad Bull 34 or Wicked City. I omitted Violence Jack, due to its tasty riffs being impossible for any band to supplant with their own unique rescoring, let alone Gore-Grind. Rescoring films shouldn’t be a verboten concept, both Battleship Potempkin and Man With A Movie Camera have excellent alternative soundtracks, Tod Browning’s music-less Dracula is enjoyable with musical accompaniment composed by Phillip Glass. Giorgio Moroder’s pop-saturated rescoring of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis has its fans, however I’ll always choose Frank Strodel conducting the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra; slapping eighties Billboard chart hits onto this epic story about the mediator between the head and the heart after the fact undermines and cheapens the subtle retro-futurist monochrome splendour of Metropolisin direct proportion to how Guardians Of The Galaxy and its sequel Vol. 2 are enriched by a selection of seventies classic rock songs. It’s easy to mistake AKIRA as just another violent schlock anime relic from an embarrassing era of localisation where Westerners assumed Legend Of The Overfiend would condemn Japanese animation during Britain’s video nasties hysteria, if you strip away its unique orchestral score and argue the scenes showing Tetsuo Shima mutating into grotesque blobs of sentient goo are representative of its main appeal, I doubt we’d still be talking about Cannibal Holocaust at length without Ruggero Deodato’s fiendish juxtaposition of Riz Ortolani’s beautiful love theme against real animal cruelty and fake genocide. AKIRA manages to make the ridiculous prospect of a choir chanting “DAHN… DAHN… DAHN-DAHN!” sound ominous enough to haunt your nightmares for decades, teddy bears, bunny rabbits and toy cars advancing towards their target shouldn’t be this scary. I can’t help squirming each time I see that maggot-eaten rat float up towards the surface in the sewers when Kaneda and Kei have to duck underwater to dodge a hail of hover-bike bullets, adding tension to a scenario where our heroes are vulnerable and the penalty for failure is certain death. It’s ironic how the scientists and military leaders claim the scum of Neo-Tokyo’s decadent neon-pleasure paradise will soon be wiped out by a wind they call AKIRA, but it’s the gutter-punks and the biker gang members whose resilience allows them to live to see another tomorrow. Corrupt leaders like Mr. Nezu die clutching their suitcases full of stolen currency, choking on gobbled heart medication as he collapses gargling in an alleyway spooked by Ryu, persisting forward in his eerie zombie-gait despite having been shot. It’s not quite on par with Barefoot Gen‘s nuclear bomb victims shambling with shards of broken glass stuck in their flesh, but the fearful symmetry is too close for comfort, this is a film which opens on an atomic blast leaving a burnt crater the size of a city in its wake. Then again, this is also a film where the smaller explosions matter just as much as the big ones. My favourite comedic setup-and-payoff moment in cinema comes from AKIRA, when a political dissident detonates his grenade which fizzles out as a damp squib before he is tackled by police. Kaneda’s gang are released from being detained, thus Kaneda uses his freedom to flirt with Kei as he leaves. What follows is the crassest, transparent attempt at pickup-artistry I’ve seen since Will Smith macked on fly honeys in The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air. Kaneda’s flippancy towards the revolution Kei risks her life for betrays his lack of wokeness regarding their socio-political situation in Neo-Tokyo, she continues to reject his advances, culminating in Kaneda’s fist-pumping fuckboy tantrum as the dissident’s squib grenade we believed was harmless explodes in the top-right corner of the frame. The Pioneer-dubbed version makes Kaneda’s glib sexual frustration even funnier: “At least you could’ve told me your name, you cold bitch!” gets juxtaposed with unexpected peril when the police office he was detained in moments ago is blown up as a near-fatal consequence of terrorist activity. Anime got a lot less grim within my lifespan, I’d first encountered Pokémon and Dragon Ball Z on Cheez TV, my brother’s friend chastised me for still watching Bumpity Boo on Channel Seven. I was the only boy I knew who was startled by Rock The Dragon, hence I’d neglected Akira Toriyama’s opus until Dragon Ball Z Kai lured me back into fandom with Dragon Soul,SBS broadcasted Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue when I was up late watching that on Saturday night which traumatised my twelve-year-old self. Perfect Blue by the way is another anime contrarians love to disparage as an outdated relic of sleazier nineties exports compared to Satoshi Kon’s later work like Millenium Actress or Paprika, never mind how its key themes of misogynist cyberstalking and female celebrity obsession are more prescient now than they were twenty years ago. Welcome To The NHK was scoffed at by Wacky Japan™ think-pieces asserting the otaku’s malady known as hikikomori could never escape its Tokyo quarantine, now our social media feeds are crawling with #GamerGate’s anime Nazis, political pundits all shrugged wondering how nobody predicted 4chan’s image boards would turn toxic as 2chan’s nigh-identical forum which m00t copied for his Western anonymous posting site. After Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign enabled his egomaniac agitation of North Korea’s nuclear sabre-rattling, it’s obvious AKIRA‘s Cold War fable for a demographic who didn’t have to worry whether or not their gas-guzzling motorcycles were eco-friendly, remains relevant today. The eighties might be over, but those leather rebel jackets never go out of style, do they? I saw AKIRA with an audience who dressed to impress, like Kaneda-san would be embarrassed to be watched by otaku wallowing in sweatpants on the Sabbath, I didn’t catch a single cosplayer text-messaging during the movie. The profound reverence people had for AKIRA is astonishing, considering how many patrons whipped out their cell-phones when I saw Logan at my local Hoyts multiplex; George St. may not offer me recliner seating Chatswood’s upmarket theatres equip by default, but it’s nice to know classic films can earn the respect they deserve from the peanut gallery munching their butter popcorn. I’ve had two psychedelic experiences at the movies before, one was when my mother and her friend dragged me to see American Hustle regardless of how tired I was at the time due to studying for HSC exams, which prompted me to repeat this experiment with Guardians Of The Galaxy in IMAX 3D. My severe sleep deprivation comes in one of two flavours: either I’ll become cranky and mean or I’ll enter a blissful state where I shout “WOO!” a lot like Rick Flair, I got dealt the latter hand during my IMAX 3D Guardians Of The Galaxy screening. For two hours I morphed into The Dude from The Big Lebowski, tripping Gutterballs as my lack of sleep merged with my 3D glasses to create illusions of IMAX 4D or something superior. AKIRA has never offered me that kinda psychedelic experience, I’d be disappointed if that’s all it did, judging from the absence of skunk-weed in the lobby I don’t believe that’s what our audience who came to see it on the big screen for looking for. I’m glad I saw AKIRA as God intended, although I was skeptical, I can assert firsthand there’s a reproducible effect this film has on even its stone-cold sober spectators. Yet there was one detail which stood out to me this time around, a tiny little fragment that felt unimportant in the previous two dozen viewings… Kei is contacted via telepathy by Kiyoko (designated No. 25). I had to look up her name, like I said, it seemed so implausible for my conscious mind. The way Kiyoko spoke to Kei inside her head bore an uncanny resemblance to my bizarre lucid dreams I’d been having. Anti-nightmares, scary dreams which can’t stick the landing for whatever stupid reason, where anonymous voices spoon-fed me instructions I used to defend myself when the odds were stacked against me. Schizophrenic as it sounds, I survived each new danger I encountered by following these helpful instructions, if you’ve got a lengthy family history of mental illness every fibre of your being will be spooked by hearing voices who won’t tell you who they are in lucid-dreamland. Arrival‘s twist ending relies on similar sci-fi trappings, but AKIRA‘s exploration of ESP added another layer of immersion to my Saturday evening, unidentified humanoid entities cramming unsolicited advice that may or may not save the world into your noggin is indeed disturbing as this movie tells you it’s gonna be. Numerous repeat-viewings of AKIRA on Blu-Ray entertained me, its rare theatrical presentation came the closest to enlightening me, I felt for Kei’s predicament more than ever having walked a mile in her shoes. Who hasn’t been there, am I right? Film critics often lament how men fail to identify with female characters in fiction, yet here I am empathising with one of AKIRA‘s few women lucky to get out of this adaptation alive, transcending neurological limitations. I’ve seen news reports on telly about hippies who died overdosing on ayahuasca in Peru, trying to accomplish the same sacrament I’d found through AKIRA by complete accident, I stay away from hallucinogenic substances because my medications I take on a daily basis are strong enough to warrant an MRI scan checking my cerebral cortex for brain tumours. They shoved me into this tubular machine with a towel wrapped around my ears to muffle its noise whilst it scanned my brain, my doctor said I was well behaved but I coped with an ordeal she subjected me to by pretending I was Tetsuo or an Evangelion pilot, she showed me x-rays of my enlarged ventricles I thought were birth defects at first. It’s surreal seeing visual manifestations of your autism when you’re unused to perceiving legit neuroatypical differences, you’re not confined to a wheelchair, so it’s hard convincing others Asperger’s Syndrome isn’t a made-up disease with an unfortunate name trolls online loved to ridicule. Even though I’m not fantastic at playing video games, The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Timeresonated with me on a personal level with Link’s “boy without a fairy” storyline. AKIRA also hits close to home, but it took longer for me to put into words why an old anime about two motorcycle gang members whose friendship gets torn apart by mysterious psionic powers felt relatable for an anxious twenty-something adult, who couldn’t earn his driver’s license due to Dad teaching me lessons in an archaic Volkswagen Beetle which often broke down at intersections. I’ve been chased by emus riding bitch on the back of a motorcycle when we were visiting our rural relatives, although velociraptors gaining on kids in Jurassic Worldgave me ‘Nam flashbacks to this trauma, I will say being a passenger pursued by an emu attack with a steel horse between my legs was an unforgettable thrill-ride I’d recommend. My father loved motorcycles, he still does to the extent he can still identify any chopper he encounters on the road by sight. Upon recognising how Dad’s outlaw genetics manifested throughout my upbringing, our pedigree of counter-culture lawlessness grants my AKIRA obsession totemic significance, the generation gap between boomers and Millennials was thinnest between me and him when we talked about Jimi Hendrix’s Axis: Bold As Love CD I bought at JB Hi-Fi one afternoon. AKIRA opened up the possibility that maybe monotheism was holding me back, I explored alternative spirituality, lighting my first incense sticks last year. Weeaboos are renowned for our “mall ninja” behaviour, clinging to pig-iron katanas like basement dwelling samurai, yet I’ve observed the “mall sorcerer” variant class in the wild upon the weekend when a coven of witches gathered their resources to hex Donald Trump, two women inquired which gemstones they needed like Al Pacino planning a heist. I demonstrated an equal commitment to throw money down the millisecond I heard AKIRAwas playing near me, planning my anime Hajj pilgrimage weeks in advance, I had dinner at Hungry Jack’s and shivered with anticipation. Since I last saw an anime in a movie theatre, Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo to be precise, nerd-spheres all fractured into social media pockets with their own cliques and you were expected to conform to rules set by ostensible adults. I graduated from my SCA college campus, which sheltered me from the widespread decay of internet forums into radicalised warrens, my diploma left me better equipped for a new dawn scavenging the ruins of what was once referred to as the information superhighway. My boomer father also witnessed the mass curdling of his generation’s counter-culture, he said Easy Rider pissed off a group of bikers who’d come back from seeing it, we’d watched it together on DVD and his repressed memories returned with a vengeance. He told me a war story about his home town: “They make ’em tough in Bogan Gate…” – some farmer got shot in the stomach and crawled his way to the hospital through the outback, bloody hell! Only the toughest survived in Australia during his adolescence, my friend Rhys asked why he married my lawyer mother when he’s such a lawless hoodlum at heart. I responded: “I guess Mum wanted out of Parkes, and my Dad’s motorcycle seemed like her best option.” Growing up watching MTV’s Daria, that nineties cartoon felt like a documentary, Jake and Helen Morgendorfer’s relationship mirrored the spitting image of my flower child parents. I’ve never read Katsuhiro Otomo’s AKIRA manga, because I spent a king’s ransom acquiring twelve-inch Medicom Real Action Heroes toys depicting Kaneda and Tetsuo’s likeness. Sex And The City‘s cast could blow what those dolls cost on handbags and shoes each episode, I wasn’t so fortunate to date Mr. Big, I bumped some Playstation 3 games off my Christmas list to help Santa bring both Kaneda and Tetsuo together under the same roof. Whenever I gaze up at my two plastic sons on the bookshelf, I feel no pangs of regret, they’re my pride and joy. I couldn’t afford Kaneda’s expensive motorbike accessory in a bajillion years, not that I cared, now I had welcomed my bishies who meant everything to me into my home. AKIRA‘s manga-literate fanboys seem to have mixed reactions to the 1988 anime film, I’ve heard it’s an alleged botched adaptation, I’m the idiot who adored The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy even after I’d read the Douglas Adams novel so my opinions are dubious fluff. Part of me dreads discovering how unlikeable Tetsuo is in the manga compared to anime Tetsuo whom I sympathised with no matter how many times I’d seen it, then again I saw Scott Pilgrim Versus The World opening weekend and despised Scotty regardless of medium the moment I laid eyes on him. Good God, Edgar Wright pulled a Superman making movie Scott Pilgrim tolerable, transmuting its shite source material into gold Holy Mountain style is a Herculean task I wouldn’t wish upon Leni Riefenstahl. I can’t stay mad at Michael Cera for portraying the devil in denim jeans, The Lego Batman Movie redeemed him in my eyes when his role as Robin required him to sing It’s Raining Dads. I’ve pre-ordered this fancy new AKIRA box set on Amazon, presenting Otomo’s manga in beautiful hardcovers, which will go under my Christmas tree this year. I seldom trusted manga which wasn’t written by Osamu Tezuka’s pen, like I’ve said, AKIRA taught me monotheism might be holding me back. I grew up without sufficient cash to furnish my humble library with manga classics, moving house yet again caused me to question whether I could’ve dedicated an entire IKEA shelf to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. The intimidating scope of Shōnen Jump sagas scared me away from Naruto and One Piece, serialised epics with no foreseeable end in sight. Inio Asano’s Solanin was a one-and-done volume I cherished, small in scale yet devastating in its raw emotions. Borders stocked Speed Racer manga, I’ll always prefer those campy sixties-era stories in anime technicolour. Kiyohiko Azuma’s Azumanga Daioh and Yotsuba&! convinced me not every series had to be a gritty growl-fest like Lone Wolf And Cub or a dishonest ecchi rom-com like Love Hina to deserve a place on my shelf, I left behind three volumes of Love Hina behind at my previous address whereas Azumanga Daioh carries no guilt whatsoever. My retro anime DVD collection ballooned at an alarming rate thanks to Bennett The Sage’sAnime Abandon YouTube program, I’d stumbled across his Crying Freeman, Fist Of The North Star, and Venus Wars reviews at Channel Awesome. I made room for AKIRA in my life, it used to be this singular two-hour film I can switch on whenever I needed to nuke my negativity. Now it’s also this gargantuan Talmud which expands a faith I already believed in, granting new and revelatory guidance just as I began to worry AKIRA‘s like the madeleine moment from Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time, losing its potency with oft-repeated dosage. Chroniclestripped down AKIRA‘s motorbike window dressing to craft a bone-chilling character study of post-Columbine mass-shooters using fantastical metaphors of telekinetic fury, Disney’s Frozen fulfilled my monkey’s paw wish that poor Tetsuo got his happy ending for once, by letting Elsa thrive without surrendering her ice-magic which enchanted millions worldwide. I see AKIRA‘s imagination everywhere I travel: in Michael Jackson’s Thriller jacket, on Venice Beach, San Francisco’s Chinatown and its steep tram-hills, Egypt’s gridlocked metal ocean of honking road rage, the DMZ segregating Cyprus’ Greeks and Turkish citizens I’d walked through like a Warhammer 40,000 theme park. I’ll always appreciate new anime created by living artists, Maasaki Yuasa’s Kaiba, Mindgame and Ping-Pong all rule. Battle Of The Planets, Macross Plus and Star Blazers illustrate the glory of anime’s past, but I’m not a conservative crank who yearns for prelapsarian perfection. It will be thirty years since AKIRA‘s release in 2018, in those thirty years dictators fell, empires crumbled. AKIRA is timeless, it’s the best post-apocalyptic anime because our grandkids will still be watching it when we’re gone.

Weird how my father who looks this cool on a motorcycle didn’t live up to the deadbeat dad stereotype, his questionable parenting lay elsewhere.

Me and my brother at Universal Studios, riding the Terminator 2 bike.

Netflix Cringe-Watch: Neo-Yokio and Big Mouth

I deserved this Toblerone, because looking sad on a shopping mall bench while taking selfies is harder than Jaden Smith made it seem.

My twin brother let me borrow his Netflix password, and thus enabled my exploration into a realm of serialised entertainment which devoured several midnight hours I needed to kill right now, all my DVDs and books were packed away in plastic buckets because I’m moving house again. Things could be a lot worse, this time my father made a spreadsheet to track which bucket of my stuff contains what, and we don’t have to scramble for a place to live like most of the hurried house-movings I’ve experienced. The only actual downside this time is, my enormous Halloween article’s gonna be late as usual, guess it’s a recurring theme here at Pagemaster General. In order to provide you content instead of excuses, I decided I’d check out two of 2017’s most hyped animated disasters to hit Netflix, Neo Yokio and Big Mouth. I’d heard atrocious word of mouth about both these programs, although having sat through every episode of each show, I can now judge the merits (or lack thereof) either one with an informed perspective. If Ezra Koenig aims with his six episode Western anime Neo Yokio to ape the raw insanity of Mad Bull 34. he more or less succeeds without compromising his unique vision to suit the otaku who’re confused as to why The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air‘s son couldn’t spring for more expensive soundtrack options than George Friedrich Haendel’s Sarabande from Barry Lyndon. I suspect Jaden’s choice of classical music accompanying his vanity project is no accident, he is conveying to us his idea of the modern day gentleman, and within the context of a broader hip-hop milieu it’s an idea which has gained traction in the past decade or so. Kanye West’s Graduation was a landmark 2007 rap album sporting a cover by Superflat pop artist Takashi Murakami, closing the book on the gangsta posturing of 50 Cent’s Get Rich Or Die Tryin’, bringing us into an era where mainstream rappers you’d never expect had any passion for fashion began name-dropping Gucci and Louis Vuitton in their lyrics. Elder commentators who only know Kanye as that obnoxious braying jackass interrupting Taylor Swift at MTV’s 2009 Video Music Awards may not understand why he’s attracted such a loyal fanbase, despite his self-admitted crass materialism and his baffling behaviour, this man has had a profound impact on both music and its associated uniform. The music video for Stronger hinted at Kanye’s closeted anime fandom, hence if Wu-Tang Clan’s admiration of kung-fu cinema could manifest in RZA directing The Man With The Iron Fists, a brand new Japanese animation fan-fic catering to the sensibilities of Jaden Smith’s Twitter account seemed inevitable if you’ve been paying attention on Tumblr. Only in our post-Kanye world, does dialogue where a black American teenager exorcising demons by invoking Coco Chanel, with the same reverence as Sailor Moon‘s catch-phrase “In the name of the moon, I will punish you!” make any goddamn sense. It is quite unsettling to discover that as the New Willennium heralded by his father completes its astrological rotation, the Fresh Prince‘s heir apparent envisioned himself as a purple-haired Carlton Banks listening to Vivaldi like Uncle Phil would’ve wanted. If this show was about a rich white boy, it’d be insufferable, but with a wealthy black lead as its protagonist it’s rebellious and subversive in ways celebrity-centric cartoons seldom are. Granted, Neo Yokio‘s pandering to the sad boy subculture with such melodramatic lines as “I’m grieving the death of a relationship.” and “Win, lose… we’ll all be equal in the grave.” are a different flavour of insufferable than what I’m used to seeing over and over again on TV, but if Mr. How Can Mirrors Be Real If Our Eyes Aren’t Real? can keep me invested in Kaz Kaan’s adventures, I’ll endorse his hubris. Neo Yokio is a Netflix original show where Jaden Smith fights a demon-possessed Damien Hirst sculpture called For The Love Of God, between this and 50 Cent’s Blood On The Sand video game, I’ve noticed a diamond encrusted skull motif in at least two rappers’ vanity projects. Nonsense which makes the audience dumber for having watched it is a genuine drain on our intelligence, however nonsense that enriches the soul is underrated, and Neo Yokio is certainly that. I appreciated Stephen Fry uttering his immortal line: “What in the name of Shakespeare’s arse?” – as only an accomplished British thespian can. Product placement is also elevated to a new height of Space Jam pop artistry in Neo Yokio, the much touted “You don’t deserve this big Toblerone!” scene is brilliant not just because it’s quite successful at advertising a product, but the narrative significance of this big Toblerone confers a status symbol entrusted only those worthy enough to possess it. Kaz Kaan is born into a family of “rat-catchers” – a derogatory slur for sorcerer-exorcists who’ve protected the city for aeons yet are still discriminated against by old moneyed cliques, whose sons are evaluated upon a “Bachelor Board” where eligible bachelors compete against each other. His robot butler Charles, a recurring comic-relief character, has a hidden surprise inside him I won’t spoil here. We are introduced to this whimsical world via an informational video that samples the Thames logo chime familiar to nerds my age who grew up watching Danger Mouse or Count Duckula reruns on ABC Kids, weeaboo meets tea-a-boo, the underwater sea-palaces owned by the wealthy are either a commentary on climate change or a possible Bioshockreference. Kaz Kaan relaxes atop his own grave he built for himself, lecturing an old man spraying his dead wife’s favourite perfume onto her tombstone that “scents change with the times” – this tactless exchange would be awful if it didn’t lead him to discerning the source of his client’s demon-possession through an extended rant about youthful teen fashions demanding unique bespoke custom items. I kinda love how the philosophical duels between anime heroes are parodied via sparring with wisdom quoted from Karl Lagerfield, Richard Ayoade shouts “Kiss the woman, you magical bastard!” at Kaz, during a basketball game in the second episode where his nose bleeds upon getting smooched on Kiss Cam by the blue-haired pop diva Sailor Pellegrino. Anime has a habit of making niche hobbies seem more compelling to outsiders who are unfamiliar with their granular details, sports anime being a prolific example, but fashionista anime aren’t uncommon (Paradise Kiss is among the best) and Neo Yokio‘s supernatural soap-opera melodrama endears us with its silliness rather than detracting from the storytelling. It’s no Rose Of Versailles-tier comedy-of-manners, however I’m glad Neo Yokio isn’t a carbon copy of that masterpiece nor any specific anime classic which it’s homaging. First world problems like whether or not wearing a midnight blue tuxedo to a black and white ball is uncivilised, or working security on the evening of your platinum-seller pop star girlfriend’s date, are the stuff of earth-shattering importance in this show. The possibility raised by Helena and her teen fashion blog devotees that Neo Yokio‘s rich society is vapid and shallow in its opulence is raised several times over many of its six episodes, depicting her as a demon-sympathiser (this show’s Satanist equivalent) doesn’t confirm or deny the accusations of vain excess at expense of the poor, because in the last episode of Neo Yokio‘s first season we’re privy to how the other half lives when Kaz Kaan collides his racing car into dense populated slums. Soviets still exist in Neo Yokio‘s universe, I doubt this show’s target demographic were old enough (myself included) to remember why Soviet athletes often attempted to defect from communist regimes via the Olympic village throughout the Cold War, but in tankie-curious times it’s a sobering reminder of how much my parents’ generation feared Stalin’s Russia. Kaz’s Aunt Agatha (played by Susan Sarandon) forces her nephew to undertake expensive exorcist missions from prestigious clients so he can finance his baller Caprese Boy lifestyle, which leads to encounters with red herrings like a sophisticated music teacher suspected of demon-sympathy, who is in fact nothing more than a Gregorian house DJ’s boyfriend. I hesitate to claim Neo Yokio‘s LGBT representation is devoid of detractors, a controversial episode that entails Kaz Kaan repossessing a deceased uncle’s squalid Hamptons estate property from his cousin Geoffrey who hopes he’ll inherit a new bachelor pad received criticism for transphobia. I’ve never seen any of Ranma 1/2, from what I understand, Yu Yu Hakusho is the worse offender; but instead of telling actual transgender viewers how to feel about a comedy bit where Lexy falls into a magic pool and transforms into a busty woman, I’ll point out Neo Yokio‘s comedic laughs centred around Lexy lamenting “I came here to meet women, not become one! I’m really not enjoying the male gaze right now, B!” seem to ridicule his toxic masculinity more than the transgender community. I’ve heard worse on Eazy-E albums, Lexy getting clam-jammed by Kaz Kaan when he’s trying to make the best of a bad situation, interrupted before he can “smash one of the hottest lesbians in town” is framed as a violation of Bro Code instead of heteronormative gender identity. Kaz uses Lexy as a means to an end in a scheme to get back at his ex-girlfriend, with unwanted advances which expose Kaz’s manipulative scheming and his gross misogynist entitlement. Neo Yokio‘s conclusion spans over two episodes, Steve Buscemi’s Remembrancer character is a sinister agent of law and order who vapes, Kaz Kaan must choose between an alluring forbidden romance and loyalty to his family’s profession. I’ll miss Neo Yokio‘s technicolour dream of anime New York, its recursive ending brings to mind FLCL in wistful melancholy nostalgia, spiced with a tart dose of harsh skepticism for its designer brand worshipping ethos. The magic Kaz Kaan wields is effective, but the false gods he serves are long-dead fashion icons, whose luxury consumer products leave his soul feeling hollow and empty. You can’t go home again, said Marshall McLuhan, and neither can Kaz, burdened by hard-won consciousness of his beloved city’s corruptions. If Neo Yokio isn’t permitted to explode again, this disquieting ending is rather rebellious, condemning the bland status quo which prevents further experiments from another African-American auteur getting green-lit. I’ve always been fascinated with art that dares to exist, the shiny diamonds clogging the cultural landfill which nobody asked for, yet happened all the same. The question of whether Neo Yokio counts as an authentic anime, if Studio DEEN produced it, is less interesting than the immediate impact this show might have on black nerds among us who wear Dragon Ball Zt-shirts and get hyped over Marvel’s Black Panther teaser trailers. Kaz Kaan is an OC whose time has come, the anime OVAs of yore only had six episodes or less to wow us, and Neo Yokio continues that bonkers tradition which transcends rock-bottom expectations we’ve kept for celebrity cash-in cartoons since Hammerman jettisoned this sub-genre’s goodwill.

We may never get a second season of Neo-Yokio, but it found its audience online, who are devoted to this weird little oddity show.

I was prepared to give Big Mouth a miss, but all you cartoon reviewers started acting like this show’s the second coming of Chris Hansen, once I’d processed the fact it received an R-18+ certificate from our Office of Film and Literature Classification… I’d have to binge the season. Watching ten episodes might tell me something about what the OFLC is willing to sacrifice its prudish principles for, because after this they have no standards and no soul. I remember when Pasolini’s Saló was refused classification until I was old enough to vote, A Serbian Film was gonna get a censored DVD release with its “NEWBORN PORN!” sequence cut out, but it got scrapped at the last minute. Bill Henson’s photography exhibition was raided back in 2008, depicting underage nymphs in your work can get artists into serious trouble down under. Robert Crumb cancelled his Sydney Opera House Graphic festival gig,fearing reprisal from wowsers at the airport, maybe he’ll pay us another visit if Big Mouthslipped through the cracks. Nick Kroll’s newest Netflix animated program for adults is my first impression of his work, I hope he realises my exasperated weary reaction to his latest project isn’t so much a personal attack, as it is a lament that South Park video games have been censored in Australia over far less than anything edgy Big Mouth brings to the table. Its maligned scene from the trailer where a middle school girl talks to her vagina through a hand mirror is never mentioned again once it’s run its due course, because the Hormone Monster/Monstress gimmick that replaces this pointless narrative arc renders potential for Chatterbox-style talking vagina shenanigans obsolete, like a Happy Madison clone of Pixar’s Inside Out where Riley’s stuck on her horniest setting. Puberty Blues this show ain’t. Most of the gripes I have with Big Mouth as an animated adult program have nothing to do with little boy penises, and everything to do with the fact said little boy penises are flashed full frontal at the spirits of Elizabeth Taylor, Prince, Richard Burton, and Whitney Houston. I recognise not all of my readers are superstitious as I am about hipster-ironic resurrection men who’d make Burke and Hare blush forcing deceased celebrities into cheap unsolicited celebrity cameos, especially if they’ve swag-jacked many likenesses of prominent gay icons for one of the least sincere LGBT anthems in television history, but I wrote a terrible fan-fic about Oscar Wilde endorsing gay marriage and his pitiless laughter still haunts me after I’d woken up from that drive-by shaming in my dreams. It’s irresponsible enough to make an enemy of one dead person, let alone several at the same time, dabble in glib postmodernism at your peril. Jordan Peele voices Duke Ellington’s ghost, I cannot take anything this hateful cartoon stated about his biography (or anyone else’s) at face value due to the fact a Family Guy writer is involved; I’ve been listening to The History Of Jazz on Audible a lot and none of Duke Ellington’s alleged abandoned pregnant girlfriends were mentioned, because Duke Ellington’s varied “cutting contests” with other jazz artists which invented the modern day rap battle were more important to the historical narrative being explored by the narrator. Big Mouth‘s musician jokes aren’t all winners, however the running gag about Jessi Glaser’s father being a burnout deadbeat, signified by his fondness for Rusted Root and Sublime at least establishes character traits for this man whose wife leaves him for another woman. It would be devastating to watch, if this gay parent plot-point was executed with Moral Orel‘s abrasive brutality across multiple seasons, but Big Mouth‘s ambitions are much lower and unclear. No adult I’ve ever met talks to their own children the way Nick Birch’s parents do, because if they did my lawyer mother would be seeing them in her family court, and I’d be eating my dinner on the couch again due to their divorce papers spread across my living room. Big Mouth‘s violent video game parody of Grand Theft Auto got a few sleep-deprived delirious chuckles out of me when it was revealed the goal is to murder hookers and steal their souls escaping from their corpses, it’s pretty much the idea of what Grand Theft Autois to conservative congressmen who’ve never played it and don’t understand there’s a lot of driving missions and fetch-questing in-between committing your homicide against sex workers. This show tends to throw surrealist imagery like that at you every so often, I’d be nodding off if it weren’t for the occasional penises-playing-basketball sequence: for each Girls Get Horny Too which tackles female sexuality there’s a painful slog through another three superfluous filler episodes revolving around the Hormone Monster encouraging regrettable decisions or Jay the Hispanic magician fornicating with his grandma’s pillow. Stereotypical as Jay is, Big Mouth managed to give me a rare blast from the past I wasn’t expecting, because I befriended someone of Latin extraction who looked and acted a lot like Jay back in primary school. I never got embroiled in a game of soggy biscuit, fighting for a VHS tape of The Italian Stallion, but I reckon everybody regardless of geographical location encounters their Jay equivalent sooner or later. In an era where Agro’s Cartoon Connection got interrupted by a news broadcast where Bill Clinton denied having sexual relations with that woman, the Jay in my life was all too happy to explain to me what Bill’s specific sexual relations entailed. John Waters refers to these fellows as “filth elders” – yet the Jay your son will meet on the playground performs the exact same function that the moniker implies: they provide forbidden knowledge young men need to survive puberty. It is no accident Jay is portrayed as a card magician in Big Mouth, he’s a shaman whose card illusions are flim-flam, but his initiation of male peers into adulthood is a necessary evil. I outgrew my Spanish BFF’s Scarface-poster ethos as I got older, but I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t miss the guy, even if he always ganged up on me in GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64. In Big Mouth‘s season finale, our dull voyage of the damned concludes with an Apocalypse Now parody inside the “Pornscape” wherein Andrew plays the role of our Col. Kurtz, who builds his fortress inside a literal Heart Of Darkness resembling the science museum exhibit where he met his first girlfriend. I’d be impressed by the reference if I wasn’t so cranky that it took ten episodes to get to its main thesis about internet pornography. Welcome To The NHK took a harsh cracked-mirror-of-regret approach to the same topic long ago, and if you asked me which show was funnier, I’d say Tatsuhiro Sato trying to cure his lolicon vices by Yamazaki photographing him creeping on schoolgirls wins over Big Mouth‘s rushed subplot hands down. Weeaboo biases aside, speaking as Australia’s sole Ralph Bakshi apologist, I believe Western comedy animation doesn’t have to be Disneyland face-character pretty if it delivers laughs. Dan Vs. aired on the same network as My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, vengeance-fuelled humour served the story, because the visuals complimented its cruel anti-hero’s unpleasantness by contrasting his jerk behaviour with a nicer world than him. Ugly Americans often lived up to its name, but its unique EC Comics vibe and observational jokes about social security bureaucracies helped it stand out. Drawn Together‘s let’s-offend-everyone mean-spirited writing hasn’t aged fantastic, however when I first saw it airing in-between Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law reruns on SBS, the technical marvel of multiple animation history eras colliding for a Big Brother-esque reality show contest felt refreshing. Big Mouth suffers from a lot of Drawn Together‘s worst detriments, if this bold concept was executed by either a different creative team or a different philosophy behind its messages, we’d have something else worth praising up there with Bojack Horseman or Bob’s Burgers. I am not keen on Big Mouth‘s Seth McFarlane-meets-Brickleberry aesthetic, say what you will about Ralph Bakshi’s reliance on rotoscoping, at least his socialist politics give me food for thought. Pearl-clutching YouTubers comparing Big Mouth to Jimmy ScreamerClauz’s Where The Dead Go To Die remind me of the teenage girls who fled my local multiplex screening of Darren Aronofsky’s mother! – the first ten minutes of Where The Dead Go To Die‘s CGI abyss are more extreme than all of Big Mouth‘s ten episodes combined, you’re grown men acting like showing footage from its official trailers risks potential jail-time for cartoon reviewers. Big Mouth never shoots the moon into Australia’s Refused Classification stratosphere like Violence Jack‘s notorious Evil Town OVA once did in Manga Entertainment’s prime, nor does its creator push boundaries anywhere near as provocative as OZ Magazine’s “School-Kids Issue” which published Rupert Bear hentai decades before FurAffinity was established. I once attended a university lecture with Bill Henson, seating was packed to the gills when I encouraged him from the front row because he needed support from fellow Australians then, the disgusting parochialism on display from the OFLC giving Big Mouth a certificate just because it’s made by some foreign interloper whose creative freedoms are protected by America’s Bill of Rights (which we don’t have for ourselves) is profound in its hypocrisy. Big Mouth is no Caligula by any stretch, I’m not surprised the OFLC found it too boring to ban, nonetheless I shall cite this show’s rating as my alibi in a court of law if any of my own creative endeavours are stifled by our classification board: “You objected to the televised adaptation of my satirical cybergothic horror novel where my hero named Ichi: Grandson Of The SS burns the OFLC to the ground, as I Am A Viking by Yngwie Malmsteen plays on a boombox, but let me remind you that Big Mouth got an R-18+ rating in 2017. Case closed.”

Netflix renewed Big Mouth for a second season, but I took advantage of its thumbs-down button so my binge-watch wasn’t an endorsement.

The Usborne Book of the Haunted World: An Underrated Spooky Gem from the Nineties

Looks like it’s party time at King Diamond’s house!

This Halloween I decided to give you something fun, a cherished relic from my nineties childhood that not many of you know about, as it was overshadowed by the impact of the more popular World of the Unknown series of Monsters, Ghosts and UFOs. The Usborne Book of the Haunted World might be one of the scariest things I brought home from a Dymocks bookseller back in the day, and some of its illustrations gave little me a few nightmares to go along with it. Usborne put out a lot of supernatural themed publishing materials in the past, and this is one of the overlooked gems in their catalogue that I haven’t seen much love for from bibliophiles online, it’s a beauty and its slim volume contains a ton of horrors from around the globe. The first thing you notice about The Usborne Book of the Haunted World is its cover, illustrated by Graham Humphreys, that draws the eye on any bookshelf for a young child. Spectres lurk behind a tattered map of the haunted planet Earth, with gothic candle holders dripping wax down their iron stems. A demonic bat looms over the proceedings, as a great header image for the book, which should be studied by publishing as a great example of book design. The makers of this tome know when to use scale and image placement with text to intrigue the reader. The illustration style is more sophisticated than the janky retro tone of The World of the Unknown - the drawings are well drafted and easy to identify as the thing you’re looking at. I particularly like the table of contents illustrations which encircle the text in a tasteful manner, giving you a sneak preview of the spookiness yet to come. The border placement is elegant and clean.

Stephen Wright did a terrific job designing this publishing marvel.

The Usborne Book of the Haunted World begins with a question, “What is the supernatural?” and proceeds to answer that question with a map full of the world’s mythic terrors. The book claims the supernatural is a broad umbrella beyond just sightings of ghosts or spirits to include strange powers and the unexplained. The book aims to fully explore the eponymous haunted world…. explaining to a target audience of children the different ways we interact with the supernatural using technology as sophisticated as cameras and pseudo-scientific as seances. Many abridged legends are collected between its covers, and for a book this slim they cover a lot of ground. The book has a large format to better accomodate its illustrations which have tiny details to really amp up the fridge-horror of it all, something you barely notice has teeth that sink into your mind long after the book is closed. You get a better look at the Amityville house later, but it’s a great introductory illustration for North America. Spook activity and mysterious events which can’t be explained around the world is what this book aims to communicate, I think it succeeds at its goals for a forty-eight page book.

The first of a double page spread which encapsulates the Haunted World.

The rest of the non-Eurocentric world countries get representation here.

The concept of haunted houses is easy enough for children to understand, although in hindsight I feel discussion of the Amityville murders is a bit heavy for a kid’s book from the nineties, it’s one of those details that stuck with me like the illustrations of ghosts that look like angry apes in the windows of the Amityville house. The cloven-hoof-marks leading across the page is a nice touch of book design, you can still read the text despite its interruption. More houses are covered, like the story of the Borley Rectory and its nun-ghost haunting, I’m pretty sure half of these hauntings have been used as the foundation of The Conjuring universe horror flicks already. I like the way the pages are arranged with smaller illustrations like the nun at the window peeking over a world map of similar hauntings. In the Haunted isles chapter there’s a thrilling tale of baby-murder where a douchebag named William Darrell seduced a maid and slaughtered the resulting infant as soon as it was born by throwing it into a fire. This is one of the darkest tales in the book, especially for small children, it sticks with you as an adult. At least douchebag Darrell was startled on his horse later on and broke his neck. Phantom animals are discussed in this book, with a story from France of a cat which appeared in photographs after it had died. I liked the bit about the French boy continuing to feed his invisible dead kitten, refusing to believe it had gone. A famous French ghost photographer captured evidence that it still lingered, which is a neat ending for this haunting. Stories of black dogs of doom follow this one, appearing before members of the Vaughn family died, On the opposite page spread we get a map of werewolves, with mini-stories including a magic belt that gave its wearer the ability to transform. This section includes a tale of a monster cat in Ireland that had to be exorcised by a priest.

Seriously, those ape-spirits in the window creeped me out as a kid.

The Usborne Book of the Haunted World likes using maps for effect.

The tale of the infamous Winchester house is rendered in exquisite detail here.

The Haunted isles section of the book has a great banshee illustration on the right.

Phantom in the photograph was one of my favourite stories in this.

World map of lycanthropy tells short stories about were-animals.

Ghosts of North America is where this book really starts feeling metal, with illustrations of bloody axes and will-o-wisp lightning over graves. Canada is also covered under its umbrella of happenings, there’s a neat story about a man who fell into Niagara Falls being saved by his dead dad, but as a kid I was always distracted by the rad imagery splashed across the page like the blood and candles accompanying a story about a haunted house that was disturbed when the new tenant threw out some bones to his peril. “North American ghouls can be particularly nasty” - that pretty much sums it up. The double spread page also has some brutal imagery like ESTHER burned into walls with matches and a spooky cat accompanying a story of the Bell Witch who poisoned it. There’s also a story about a hitchhiking ghost who leaves the jacket she borrowed from the driver folded on her grave. The ESTHER story from 1889 is pretty creepy, with a woman named Esther Cox haunted by a paranormal spectre dropping lit matches on her bed and writing threatening messages on the walls. It’s possible she faked it, says the book, but it’s pretty alarming. So far it’s been a stroll through kids’ nightmare fuel, yet The Usborne Book of the Haunted World isn’t done rustling our jimmies with scares.

This two page spread perfectly complements each side of its contents, I like it!

South America has a lot of spooky goings-on that the book also covers, including the first appearance of UFOs in the selection of scary stuff. The book explains to children what a shaman is, tribal priests who claim to communicate with spirits. There’s also the Nazca plateau’s alleged signs to spaceships which I learned about from watching Ancient Aliens, and the story of mysterious moving coffins in Haiti. On the other page we get the story of La Llorona who is called the lady in black here but the gist is still the same, she’s a weeping woman in eternal search of her children. We also get the story of a gaucho who neglects his family and his work to weave ponchos, only for a giant bird to tear into his flesh and curse him to wander the wilderness forever. Deadbeat dads are common instigators for scary stories in South America it seems. Poltergeist action is reported in Alien force, which ends with a family fleeing a spectre who scalds a woman’s arm with a boiling kettle, never to be heard from again.

Smaller details like the weeping woman among the cactuses are appreciated.

No spooky storybook is complete without some vampire stories, and The Usborne Book of the Haunted World delivers some obscure little known vampire tales among more famous ones like historical figures Vlad the Impaler being the inspiration for Dracula and Countess Elizabeth Bathory bathing in the blood of virgins. The tale of Arnold Paole is told in four panels, he was a Serbian man attacked by a vampire in Greece, he dies when a farm cart falls on him in Hungary, and he is seen haunting the village as a vampire. Over twenty vampires that Arnold killed are dismembered and burnt. In China, the tale of the headless teacher murdered by a vampire whilst his wife was imprisoned as a suspect is told, and once the head of Liu is found in the coffin grasped by the vampire, the widow is set free. Not exactly chilling to the bone as an adult, but the illustration of the vampire clutching Liu’s head in his coffin is gruesome.

Vlad the Impaler is illustrated to perfection here, probably my fave picture of him.

I always liked the details on these maps like the skeleton hand and the bat.

The Usborne Book of the Haunted World covers a lot of ground regarding the different types of spooks our titular Haunted World contains, like when Lutheran Church founder Martin Luther threw a pot of ink at a shadow of the Devil himself. Yet again the use of maps and the book design of having hands loom over the tattered parchment on the Haunted Europe page. Haunted seas and More sea ghosts explore a ton of maritime hauntings, which are brief yet chilling paragraph short stories illustrated by eye-ball commanding pictures. One story about the Octavius tells a story about a crew who were discovered freezing to death in the lower decks. The Bermuda Triangle makes its brief appearance in this book, a token nod to its mysterious naval disappearances. The tale of the Mary Celeste ends with its crew disappeared and boiled egg breakfast still on the table, I’ve never heard this story outside of this book and it was nice to hear.

I like the skeleton in the bottom left corner, he’s like a @dasharezone resident.

This section of the book covers ghost ships like the Flying Dutchman.

I adored this illustration in the bottom left of a sailor frozen solid on his ship.

This page covers the Bermuda Triangle, but I’m here for the illustration of the boat covered in ghosts in the right corner, which stuck with me as a kid reading it.

When I was a kid, there was one thing from this book that chilled me to the bone, the terrifying Chi’ang Schich, which was this walking corpse from China which had long fingernails. I later found out from the movie Mr. Vampire that this horrifying thing is called a Jiangshi and the book mistranslated the name just like how it mistranslated the word for onryo as “goryo”. The China and Japan section was the first exposure I had to these J-horror and Chinese horror concepts, before I saw The Grudge in my mid-twenties when I started seeking out horror movies instead of avoiding them. The Usborne Book of the Haunted World isn’t really scary to the eyes of an adult however it serves the purpose of introducing children to different parts of the world and their respective supernatural monsters. I was creeped out by the “Chi’ang Schich” or the Jiangshi because it was described as this hulking corpse which killed you if it breathes on you, and in the story detailed in the book you could escape if it got its long finger-nails stuck in a tree. There’s educational merit in teaching kids the different ways the Chinese and Japanese engage with their spirits, and about dragon-paths guiding the construction of pagodas. There’s another story about a haunted well where this grief-stricken husband tries to communicate with his dead wife, who is reborn as a baby daughter of a nearby farmer, and when the child turns eighteen they marry. The focus is on the half of a coin he threw into the well, but creepy age differences are creepy.

This story in the bottom of the page is a rare male onryo story in media.

This thing, the Ch’iang Schich, horrified me with just an illustration of its shadow.

The section on Battle ghosts is lavishly illustrated with a map and skulls with candles burning on them, and a spider crawling among some bloody daggers. Replayed raid tells the story of vikings doing a rerun of their raid on a Scotland abbey. What got my attention as a kid was the tale of the Nagual - which is this bird spirit thing which the Spanish fought when they were busy conquering the Aztecs. The Nagual died and the chief of the Aztecs also died without a wound on him, implying a spiritual link to this spirit creature. The map shows a variety of battle ghosts around the world, and each site is marked with little logos representing sightings of spectres where they happen.

I like the determined expression on the soldier’s face as he fights the Nagual.

The mysterious East chapter of The Usborne Book of the Haunted World is one of my favourite chapters, as it is one of the best illustrated ones, there’s so much going on in here that it’s hard to concentrate on just one story. One of the first tells children about reincarnation and the Dalai Lama, who can remember past lives to an extent where he recalls where his predecessor put his false teeth. There’s another story where a boy has a long scar on his neck, a sign of being murdered in his previous reincarnation. The tale of the tulpa is quite interesting, a being summoned from intense meditation, a French journalist took months to think him away again when he became a nuisance - but the creepiest one is the story of the ayah who haunted British ex-pats as a witch strangling a woman in her bed unless one dared to tell it to go away. There’s also this tale about a leper who got revenge against a hunter who left a blind leper sorcerer to die, returning as a tiger to maul the face of his son and caused him to die of leprosy.

Check out the guy’s scream reflected in the dagger, that’s great illustration!

This is one of the busiest pages in the book, with a lot of story packed into it.

Pyramids and pharaohs is a section of The Usborne Book of the Haunted World devoted to just that, pyramids and pharaohs. As a kid who had an Ancient Egypt obsession, later visiting the pyramids of Giza and the sphinx in my lifetime, this chapter of the book told me a lot I already knew like the story of Tutankhamen’s tomb, except for the tale of the mummy’s hand cut off by her father and reunited with the ghost of the woman it belonged to. It’s one of those old colonialism stories where a white person gets an old artefact and has to return it with magic from The Book of the Dead, there were a lot of mummies being bought and sold in the nineteenth century. I first heard this story from an old Horrible Histories book about the Egyptians, it scared me then too because it’s genuinely creepy. Another story I didn’t pay much attention to as a kid was about Dorothy Eady, who claimed to have visited Egypt in her past life being advised by Seti I, uncovering details in hieroglyphics which baffled experts.

Until I could visit Egypt firsthand, I had to get my fix through books like this.

Travel tales and Tales from the North are sections of The Usborne Book of the Haunted World I remember well, the story of Princess Amen-Ra is particularly alarming due to it being another of the book’s colonialism stories which ends badly for people who buy Egyptian artefacts. A museum bought Princess Amen-Ra’s mummy and anyone who went near it died, then some idiot thought it was a good idea to take it with him on the Titanic of all ships. How in the hell he got it into storage on one of the worst maritime disasters of all time is beyond me, but it’s especially disturbing to wonder if a mummy curse had something to do with the Titanic sinking the way it did. Tales from the North features an illustration of a dragon creature called a Lindorn to kick things up a notch, there’s a story called Mystery guest which tells the story of a party that was visited by the ghost of a woman who died in an air raid, hence her outdated clothes. Rasputin makes his appearance in The Usborne Book of the Haunted World, somebody’s gotta teach the kids about him if the grown ups won’t play their kids Boney M’s song about him. Like Vlad the Impaler’s profile, the sensational details of him being poisoned and surviving are the focus here, but this does mention his Russian political machinations.

The page with the Titanic sinking tells of people cancelling their ticket after seeing it sink in their dreams, which is a little spooky, not as spooky as most of this book.

I love the skeletons behind the map playing with trains and aeroplanes.

I like the rad disco attire of the Mystery guest story and the skulls emerging from the tape recorder, I am a simple man with simple taste in the paranormal.

The section on Spirits of Africa and Arabia is fairly text heavy, leaving much to the imagination when telling some of these stories. It covers the concept of a witch doctor, and the power they wield over their tribespeople as healers and divination practitioners. Old Man Baboon is mentioned as an evil spirit controlled by a burglar as revenge for his imprisonment. Genies are discussed in very brief detail, saying some are good and some are bad spirits, and that they appear in Aladdin. It also mentions that some genies are quite stupid and can be tricked into entering a tiny lamp. We get a neat vampire story on the next page from Arabia, where some poor sod named Abul-Hassan marries the Middle Eastern equivalent of a Nosferatu. It’s told in three panels next to a block of text, illustrating the bride Nadilla hanging out in a graveyard and rising up from her bed to drink her husband’s blood. There’s also an extended tale of living dinosaurs found in Central Africa, which aren’t really spirits as much as they are crypto-zoological phenomena. This picture bewildered me as to whether this dinosaur was supposed to be a herbivore or a carnivore, the illustrator drew it as both.

Whoever illustrated this long-necked dinosaur decided to give it fangs.

The section on Australia and New Zealand creeped me out as a kid because as an Aussie I was closer to that action than the other parts of the world mentioned in this book, the illustration of the fabled bunyip in particular haunted me. There’s no mention of Turramulli, the Giant Quinkin in this book, the scariest Dreamtime creature of all time in my opinion, but we do get a hairyman’s shadow with glowing eyes with the illustrated map of Australia and New Zealand. This chapter haunted me for years and when I got myself a new copy of The Usborne Book of the Haunted World, it was one of the first chapters I took a look at in case it still held the power to frighten. Of course my adult eyes didn't find this chapter all that frightening, besides, how scary could ghost settlers who look like Slim Dusty be? I have heard some stories from farmers about the phantom carriages that go through their house past midnight, I stayed up all night for a glimpse of such phenomena and got bugger all for my trouble, nonetheless tales of Aboriginal ghosts wandering through the kitchen at night at my mum’s friend’s place kept me from staying too late at a Halloween party just in case. Australia’s ability to scare the living daylights out of people is underrated, we’ve come up with such terrors as The Babadook to terrify on the world stage. Coupled with New Zealand we’re quite adept at coming up with either fearsome creatures or backpacker murderers torn from the headlines like Ivan Milat inspiring Wolf Creek. Of course the scariest thing about Australia at the moment is how cruel we are to refugees, locking them up in offshore detention centres like Manus Island and Nauru, whilst New Zealand gives our mistreated immigration applicants shelter from our punitive system. We’re ashamed.

That hairy-man illustration really holds up as one of the books subtler scares.

Four panels of Australian farmer horror greet you at the bottom of this page.

I won’t showcase the rest of the entire book, but I will showcase some of the more unique illustrations of The Usborne Book of the Haunted World for you readers at home. The book is long out of print and hard to get hold of in good condition, I was lucky to snag myself a hardcover copy at Abebooks for my personal library, and I cherish it as part of my childhood literary upbringing. The last few chapters, Royal and famous ghosts, Ghosts in film and fiction, and Talking to ghosts cover well-trodden ground most aficionados of the macabre are already well familiar with, although I admit being exposed to seances in a book for children leaned dangerously close to the occult which my parents forbade me from exploring - even throwing out an issue of MAD magazine which had a paper Hairbutt the Hippo ouija board inside. Henry VIII’s bloody reign is something I’m well versed in thanks to Horrible Histories, the hit musical Six explores a feminist perspective on his multiple wives during his reign including the ones he beheaded. Monster movies explores the impact of the Universal Monsters cycle, up to today's horrors with Poltergeist and Ghostbusters, for little kids that this book is aimed at it’s a decent if basic introduction to the genre. When I first read this book, I didn't go near horror movies because I thought they were too scary, but in the passage of time I’ve grown to appreciate them, as well as the holiday of Halloween. As an Australian I seldom got the lollies I was trick or treating for, but kids like me formed the foundation of Halloween in the antipodes today. I can now go see R-rated horror movies like Midsommar without getting carded for ID due to my receding hairline, and I can thank The Usborne Book of the Haunted World for getting me started with my interest in all things paranormal. I wouldn’t be the aspiring wizard I am today without this book, not everything in it frightens the same way it did when I was eight, but I can respect the high quality of illustrations it brought to the table and the premium book design Usborne put into the end product. It may be overlooked compared to the trilogy of The World of the Unknown series Usborne put out in the seventies, but this spooky gem from the nineties remains one of my favourites to dip into this spooky season. I hope you have a happy Halloween under quarantine this year, and hope you don’t disappoint any trick or treaters who have the decency to wear a mask. Peace.

The picture of ghosts hurtling out of a round globe is a bit silly to my adult eyes.

This reminds me, I still have to watch Poltergeist all the way through.

This reminds me of that excellent seance scene from The Changeling.

The Enchanting Existential Dread of Aussie Theme Parks: Chapter Six - History Comes Alive

Postcard from Old Sydney Town, in its prime.

Old Sydney Town is one of those relics of school excursions which isn’t easy to forget, it was a massive part of a lot of our childhoods, and along with Bathurst Goldfields this place was on the list of rites of passage like Wonderland Sydney which all children of the nineties went through. It was a peculiar blend of theme park and living museum, sort of like Synecdoche New York meets The Proposition - and for the most part it was successful for many decades until it wasn’t. It was created by a bunch of uni students for their grad thesis, along with government endorsements from Prime Minister Gough Whitlam back in the late seventies. I quite enjoyed Old Sydney Town for what it was when I went around nineteen-ninety-seven-or-eight, although I was quite spooked by the time tunnel which simulated the long convict voyage to Australia. Something about the sobbing mannequin who didn’t want to be here alarmed me, and the dreary tone of the tunnel wasn’t really replicated in the park itself. I recall being taught how to write old fashioned S’s with a slate of chalkboard at Old Sydney Town, as well as the spectacle of convicts being whipped, the procession of redcoat soldiers keeping law and order on the colonial streets under control. It was sometimes rather violent considering the target demographic was schoolchildren here to learn about Australia’s penal colony past, with criminals getting shot for stealing shingles by police on sight. An early lesson in ACAB I guess. All manner of old timey living exhibits existed such as the candlemaker and the blacksmith, showing how valuable goods were manufactured in the settler colonies, although other living museums like Ballarat Goldfields let you pan for gold in the creek and that was fun. Yeah, that’s the thing about Old Sydney Town, it was competing against both Wonderland Sydney and other living museums at the same time, and somehow it prospered on its own terms until the game changed all of a sudden in 2003. I wasn’t quite sure why Old Sydney Town closed until I was an adult with a more cynical eye toward theme parks once every theme park south of Queensland was calling it quits. What happened to it? How did such an iconic fixture deteriorate into a fading memory for schoolchildren of a certain age, in tandem with plenty of other theme parks who were also struggling? Well, it focused on a very specific umbrella of history, if foreigners (especially yanks) know anything about Australia besides A DINGO ATE MY BABY, they know we used to be a penal colony - a fact reinforced by the backstory of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street where Benjamin Barker got transported to Australia. To white people of a certain age, having convict ancestry was a proud part of their ethnic identity, and speaking of musicals - learning that a lot of us are descendants of Bill Sykes from Oliver! is a common experience for Aussies. My uncle did one of those Ancestry dot com tests and discovered my mother’s side of the family is descended from some prostitute who went down with the whole ship and after giving birth to a trick-baby, was hanged on Australia’s fatal shore for her wanton sluttery. This of course is a bit much for the intended family and primary schooler audience, so Old Sydney Town’s sharper teeth mainly stuck to the Terry Deary Horrible Histories type of facts about our illustrious past. Australia doesn’t have a violent revolution defining its identity besides the Eureka Stockade rebellion over mining licenses (other living museums existed besides Old Sydney Town to teach the kiddies about that), and for the most part it makes sense to theme park-ify the early convict settlers period as an easy starting point to construct a theme park around. The opportunity to populate a park with interesting characters from convict times is a rich and fertile foundation for entertaining families, even though no Aboriginal face characters were included among the cast. Old Sydney Town did have signage acknowledging Aborigines’ role in early settlement, but they weren’t really represented in the park proper with tangible presence. It’s one thing Old Sydney Town really dropped the ball on, missing the opportunity to cast an Aboriginal person as a tracker as was common employment for indigenous people at the time. One factoid which may interest you is that Old Sydney Town was used to represent colonial Angel Grove in a three part episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers back in 1994/1995, and the site has also been used in countless film productions since even if the theme park is no longer operating now.

Ask The Leyland Brothers always provided a helpful map of their locations.

The gloomy entrance to Old Sydney Town, featured in Ask The Leyland Brothers.

Old Sydney Town with its cottages and stagecoach caravans.

Thatched cottages were constructed with building materials of the time.

A vendor of lucky horseshoes wanders the streets of Old Sydney Town.

The candlemaker demonstrates her process for the park guests.

Redcoats arresting a troublemaker at Old Sydney Town.

Redcoats on the march at Old Sydney Town, with police wagon.

A neer-do-well, shot by the redcoats for stealing shingles.

A kangaroo court hearing at Old Sydney Town, complete with wigs.

The audience, full of perplexed children, watch on at the courtroom drama.

The accused pleads their case in front of the court in the stand.

A prisoner is flogged in front of hundreds of spectators, just like the olden days.

Each of the buildings house a type of character who works at the park.

The tin-smith makes wares that are then sold to tourists at Old Sydney Town.

Street musicians encourage dancing among the guests.

A grandmother takes a snapshot of the action with her camera.

All aboard the shipyard, carrying supplies from Britain to the isolated colonies.

Somebody pick-sawing large pieces of wood for the entertainment of guests.

The underdog, pulling the downward stroke of the pick-saw.

A replica of an observatory at Old Sydney Town.

Inside the Old Sydney Town observatory, with interaction from guests.

A quadrant, used for taking star altitude readings at Old Sydney Town.

The roof of the observatory rotates with cannonball-bearings to stargaze.

The cemetery of Old Sydney Town, a grim reminder of death in the colonies.

More street musicians playing a tune, above panels courtesy of Viewlorium.

Old Sydney Town was a different beast to most Australian theme parks of the time, without any thrill rides to attract people like Wonderland Sydney or Sega World had. It was unique and for the most part didn’t have to rely on cheap gimmicks to get people through the gates, it was history coming alive and that was all you needed. Of course, once you’d experienced it, there was little incentive to come back to the park. Ask The Leyland Brothers recorded crucial footage of the park in its peak operation, with soldiers and convicts galore interacting with the environment. I think Ask The Leyland Brothers did a fantastic job selling both the educational focus of the park they were promoting with their footage and the family fun angle the park was known for. They weren’t shy about demonstrating the darker side of the park for kids, nor did they sanitise the violence of colonial Australia for the viewers at home. Old Sydney Town for all its glorious family entertainment and attention to historical detail closed in 2003, with significant financial losses of $600,000 a year during the first five years of its debut according to PocketOz Pocket Guide to Sydney, before a Labor government’s attempt to inject some cash into the doomed errand was thwarted by the Liberals in 1975. Warwick Amusements weren’t able to rescue the place either, their 1987 bid came too little too late. The entire enterprise seemed like an insatiable money pit, park management also blamed “the instant gratification generation” for not appreciating a quiet stroll through Australian history’s unflattering pages - which might be one of the first instances of blaming millennials for killing an industry recorded down under. History in the making indeed! There’s a quote about Old Sydney Town from author of The Fatal Shore and art critic Robert Hughes that I found on Wikipedia originating from a documentary Hughes was in called Australia: Beyond the Fatal Shore (2000); where he said Old Sydney Town was “the only theme park in the world devoted to punishment and repression”. I’m pretty sure those Buddhist hell parks in Asia would beg to differ but Hughes has a point. It’s pretty fucked up that colonial history was being turned into an aspiring funfair with some really harsh edges I doubt helped the theme park’s case.

If this comment posted underneath the Reviewtyme YouTube video is true, I feel worried about the impact Old Sydney Town had on bodies of its grunt workers who got frequent whippings.

All the mock hangings and duels over disrespecting each other’s wives were brought to a halt as the park ceased operation, which is a shame because Old Sydney Town offered something no other Australian theme park at the time could. Promises by the management were made for an eighteen hole golf course, an amusement park with planned ghost train according to one rumour weren’t kept, and in 2014 the Heritage Hall complete with artefacts was destroyed by fire. Many plans for redeveloping the site are underway, with rezoning of the abandoned site still happening as late as 2019. The future of Old Sydney Town is perhaps even more uncertain than that of the proposed Wonderland Sydney revival, and the abandoned theme park rots away in disrepair with urban explorers and drone footage galore of its deterioration. Old Sydney Town lives now only in our memories, as other living museums in Ballarat continue its legacy as a component of the fragile Australian theme park ecosystem. It was too niche to live, too rare to die.

The Enchanting Existential Dread of Aussie Theme Parks: Chapter Five - It’s Scary, But Nobody Cares

Bondi Aquarium, courtesy of the Powerhouse Museum.

Jurassic Park warned us about combining all the problems of a theme park with maintaining a major zoo, and Australian theme parks in particular seem to have bad luck with that balancing act. Let’s look at about three of those and find out why mixing animals with carnival rides is a terrible game plan for most of the suburban parks who attempt such a thing. First, let’s look at Bondi Aquarium, one of the earliest Sydney theme parks and a precursor to Luna Park Sydney. I had no idea this place once existed, save for a mural painted on the wall at Bondi which I saw as a kid, dunno if it’s still there. I want to attribute my sources I used for this section, there’s the Waverley Council Fact Sheet, and Bondi Banter. I found the alleged Airem Scarem picture on Pinterest but I cannot confirm if this is an actual picture of the ride so I left it there as a speculative image of what it might have looked like. But I could be wrong. I used Powerhouse Museum as a source in a previous version of this piece but they lost the rights to the opening photograph and their detailed list of Bondi Aquarium attractions is gone. So I’m rebooting this review with updated information to give a greater amount of context and history to the Bondi Aquarium and the Wonderland City amusement park that spawned from it. For starters, I want to point out that Australian circus and carnival performers hate being called “carnies”, to the extent that Norma Brophy titled her memoir about circus life Don’t Call Us Carnies: We Are Showies And Damn Proud Of It. So I’m not gonna call any of these vaudeville performers and clowns “carnies”. This will come back into play when we have to address the circus workers involved in the other animal attraction based parks. The Don’t Call Us Carnies book starts with a description of a drunken boxing bout that reminds me of the fight in Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso, it’s a good read. But back to Bondi Aquarium. It started off with profound success, with a variety of non-animal attractions to go along with the Aquarium aspect of the park’s many tourist trap gimmicks:

Sydney’s first coastal amusement park, The Royal Aquarium and Pleasure Grounds was nestled into Fletcher’s Glen at Tamarama Beach. An extension to the existing tramway to service the amusement park was built in August 1887. Popularly known as the Bondi Aquarium, it opened on October 1, 1887. The opening day saw a grand military band, merry-go-rounds, swings, a shooting gallery, water boats, Camera Obscura, Punch and Judy shows and dancing in the grand hall.

Crowds flocked to the park, not just for the rides and vaudeville acts, but for the aquarium creatures as well. Marine life swimming in the tanks included catfish, bream, whiting, mullet, lobsters, stingrays, porcupine fish, turtles, a wobbegong shark and a tiger shark. The most interesting and entertaining of the inhabitants were the seals, who shared the pond with a solitary penguin.

- Waverley Library, 2022

Considering that the local government was capable of servicing Bondi Aquarium with regular public transport, it’s easy to forget how big of a draw it was. Luna Park Sydney didn’t exist yet, and the humble origins of Bondi Aquarium didn’t stop expansion of the amusement park elements to keep expanding. Waverley Library also reveals there were a bunch of more ambitious park attractions funnelling tourists to the area:

Another popular attraction was the Switchback Railway, an exciting, diving, plunging rollercoaster ride above the sands of Tamarama Beach. Two roller skating rinks were “illuminated by the electric light”. Pain’s Grand Fireworks exploded every Wednesday, and there were Sacred and Classical Concerts each Sunday.

Feats of skill and daring were a special drawcard and included dangerous mounted sword contests, tightrope walkers, and parachuting. Alexander, touted as the Australian Blondin (a famed French funambulist) walked a wire from cliff to cliff. Captain George Drevar floated on a ‘cask raft’ through the pounding surf, and a “Grand Balloon Ascent and Parachute Descent” rounded out the show. Headliners from the Tivoli Theatre also performed on the Aquarium circuit.

- Waverley Library, 2022

At the time that Bondi Aquarium was at its peak, the crossover between theme parks and showies had never been stronger. It wasn’t unusual for showies from various disciplines to be hand picked to perform at Bondi Aquarium and tourist traps like it. I’m going to quote from Norma Brophy recounting her earliest memories in 1936 to give you an idea of how the showie economy functioned outside of permanent fixtures like the Bondi Aquarium, because even if it’s not about the Bondi Aquarium it applies to how this ecosystem functioned before and after it closed:

For the general public, ‘the Show’ was always a rare and special event. But for us showies, it felt like it was every day. We breathed and moved as a group. I grew up feeling connected with everybody around me in our community. We all felt that. It was something the locals might have found hard to understand. We showies had a true sense of belonging, by banding together. Some of the travelling show people were from circus families, others from vaudeville entertainment and some from the carnivals, rodeos and agricultural shows. Most of the circuses had carnivals on the outside of the huge marquees, which operated before and during interval. Some even travelled the rodeo circuit. All the businesses and families overlapped like a giant puzzle. Every man, woman and child was prepared to work long hours in all kinds of weather so that the show could go on. It wasn’t just a cliche. The show people were, and still are, survivors. There was no room for complainers or hypochondriacs in the outdoor entertainment industry. If you were ill you went to hospital, got treated and went back to work.

- Don’t Call Us Carnies, Norma Brophy with Wendy Stuart, Affirm Press, 2022.

The Bondi Aquarium met an unfortunate end, one that was unexpected by the management:

On the evening of July 11th, 1891, fire destroyed the aquarium and pavillion. but it was rebuilt within months. Rising from the ashes in September 1891, the park continued to entertain Sydney’s populace. The last official concert held at the Aquarium was a fund raiser for the Waverley Benevolent Society in July 1906.

Ownership and management of the park changed several times throughout its history, until the site was finally sold by Mrs. Margaret J Lachaume in 1906 to William Anderson. Anderson went on to transform the amusement park, renaming it Wonderland City.

- Waverley Library, 2022.

New management has almost killed as many Australian theme parks as suburban sprawl and real estate speculation has, chances are if a rich guy with no taste buys your theme park it’s not long for this world, as we saw with Sunway’s acquisition of Wonderland Sydney. If your theme park is adjacent to a popular tourist spot like a beach, that’ll cause a bunch of problems too, which Wonderland City did. There’s only so much carnival ride bullshit local residents will put up with, especially if the ridiculous theme park rides block people’s access to a perfectly good beach that was fine before William Anderson put obnoxious attractions like the Airem Scarem into the mix. What kind of steampunk monstrosity is this thing? It looks like it belongs in a Final Fantasy game, not a summer destination for swimmers who are trying to avoid riptides as it is without this thing endangering everyone in its path. Wonderland City had a lot of things its predecessor had, the showies performing daredevil stunts as they did before, except now people were asking questions:

The conflict with local swimmers and the wire fence incident soured the public image of Wonderland, as did complaints that the animals were being poorly housed and mistreated. The occasional breakdown of the Airem Scarem airship above the dangerous surf caused accusations of safety breaches and resident opposition to the weekend revellers at Wonderland grew. The crowd numbers dropped but Williams Anderson fought back bringing in famous entertainers and more daring acts from his national touring circuit to perform at the King’s Theatre. Anderson responded with more elaborate public exhibitions, but the public was tiring of Wonderland and the crowds dropped. It struggled on from March 1908 to December 1910 with poor crowds and low revenue, finally closing in 1911. William Anderson is said to have lost £15,000 on Wonderland City.

- Lost Sydney: Wonderland City, published online by https://www.visitsydneyaustralia.com.au/lost-theme-wondercity.html

Let me make myself clear, the showies survived the demise of Wonderland City and went back to their usual Royal Easter Show and rodeo jobs, after this ill-advised theme park built in a place that was even more doomed than the Bondi Aquarium before it. William Anderson’s mismanagement is documented in far more detail than Bondi Aquarium’s shortcomings, which either means no-one lived long enough to blow the whistle on Bondi Aquarium or that William Anderson was so incompetent at running a successful theme park which had been sold to him that history paints him in an unflattering light. Circus people are gonna get a reckoning when I have to deal with the two major lion parks in this piece, but even by their messed up standards I think William Anderson is not the greatest business mogul involved in the tapestry that is defunct Aussie theme parks. I can’t find many sources online that indicate this man did much for Bondi Aquarium except ruin what he inherited from far more talented builders when he bought it. The uncomfortable animal cruelty allegations don’t surprise me, the early nineteen hundreds killed Topsy the elephant with electricity, so I’m guessing Australian endangered animal conservation wasn’t a top priority. The end of Wonderland City marked the beginning of a new era for both showies and theme parks, one where beaches were soon allowed to be actual beaches and not the dumping ground for a ton of Coney Island inspired carnival paraphernalia. As far as I can tell, no visitors died at Bondi Aquarium or Wonderland City, which is more than what I can say for the two circus lion parks.

Alleged picture of the Airem Scareum attraction at Wonderland City. (Source: Pinterest)

African Lion Safari is perhaps the most infamous of the Aussie suburban theme parks because of its reputation for escaped animals and human casualties it accumulated over the years, it was started by a circus ringmaster named Stafford Bullen who needed a home base for his menagerie at Warragamba Dam. and Bullen’s Animal World served that necessity for him for the period in which African Lion Safari was operating. Most of the information I got from this article about Stafford Bullen’s life and business enterprises came from an obituary for Stafford Bullen written by Jenny Tabakoff in 2001, as well as various articles and podcasts sourced from Australia’s public broadcaster ABC. Without these sources to rely on, this article couldn’t have been written. Bullen came from the circus world, and with that mindset came a certain approach to his animal attractions which doesn’t meet the standards of an Australia Zoo or Dreamworld’s Tiger Island. I know we’re all thinking it, but Stafford Bullen is more of a pulp adventure hero than a proto-Joe Exotic, and his contributions to nature preservation through his breeding program should be noted even if he made a few mistakes breaching government regulations along the way. In the perspective of circus worker history, he belongs in the middle between P.T. Barnum and WWE owner Vince McMahon, neither a racist monster who wanted to exhibit Aboriginal people like P.T. Barnum nor the sophisticated and slick corporate sports entertainment CEO that McMahon is today. I’m willing to guess Vince McMahon can’t juggle or do trapeze acts, and Stafford Bullen’s obituary paints him is a far more compassionate light than Vince is gonna get from wrestling’s superstars when he finally carks. Bullen was beloved by his crew and earned that. I know nobody trusts circus ringmasters in 2023, after we all saw Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio on Netflix, even Osamu Tezuka gave circus ringmasters a hard time in Astro Boy’s manga and anime adaptations. The Greatest Showman might’ve tried to rehabilitate P.T. Barnum as a progressive version of his freak show touting persona, but most of us weren’t buying that version of Barnum for a second. For all the human flaws Stafford Bullen had as a product of his controversial industry, I’m not here to rubbish the guy as an antagonist in his own story. He made questionable choices, because he was a human being raised in the environment that produced him. Jenny Tabakoff introduces him thus:

“Some small boys run away from home to join a circus. I was born into it and see no other way of life.” So said Stafford Bullen, who has died in Sydney aged 76.

Stafford Leslie Bullen was born in Bathurst, where the circus his parents founded happened to be performing. As a nine-year-old, Stafford’s father, Arthur Percival Bullen, had declared his intention to establish the greatest circus in Australia. In 1920, he founded Bullen’s Circus with his wife, Lilian.

Bullen’s Circus vied with Wirth’s, Perry’s, Sole Brothers and Ashton’s. Its 16 wagons criss-crossed Australia, with Stafford, his three younger brothers and sisters in the entourage. He described his childhood as “marvellous and exciting”. His circus career began at four: soon he was working as a contortionist, tumbler, clown, wire-walker, bare-back rider, juggler, trainer of horses and elephants, and eventually ringmaster.

“As a small child, I was filled with the wonder of it - the animals who became my friends, the big-hearted performers, the hard work.” he said. “There was a lot of laughter and comradeship you would never find in any other profession.”

- Jenny Tabakoff, “Stafford Bullen”, Sydney Morning Herald, 12th January 2001.

One story from the obituary about Stafford Bullen involves him surviving a train crashing into his truck and having his trusty elephant Gandhi pulling him free from the wreckage, that’s classic Indiana Jones-tier badassery, right? I like that his dad wanted to establish the greatest circus in Australia, which is a goal no amount of tall poppy syndrome could suppress. It’s kind of a low bar to set your sights on “best in Australia” when it comes to circuses, when Europe and Asia are doing such impressive work at the same time Bullen’s Circus was going strong. Stafford Bullen seems so awesome, like an Australian folklore hero Banjo Paterson would write poems about. I’m going to have to cover his business dealings next, which is an interesting part of his circus legacy:

Stafford and Ken Bullen ran the business after their mother died in 1965. Lilian Bullen, a remarkable character, had run the circus since retiring from the ring. In later life, she developed a habit of hoarding cash on Bullen properties. In 1959, schoolboys found a £40,000 hoard in Five Dock: her estate successfully fought for its return. In 1971, another cache was found in Yeppoon.

In the early 1960s, conscious of the threat television posed, the business began to diversify. In 1965, Bullen helped the Edgley organisation to bring the Great Moscow Circus to Australia, and later shows like Disney on Parade, The Greatest Show on Earth, the Monte Carlo Circus and the Moscow Circus on Ice. In 1968, the African Lion Safari opened at Warragamba. (The marketing for the park opening included the release of a promotional single of the song The Lion Sleeps Tonight, produced by Pat Aulton and performed by an anonymous studio group called The Love Machine, which was actually Sydney band Tymepiece.) With its drive-through exotic animal area and miniature safari railway, it attracted up to 200,000 visitors a year.

In 1969, the travelling circus closed and Bullen’s Animal World, with a permanent circus, opened at Wallacia. Within three years, Bullen was chairman and manager of six animal parks in Australia and another in Auckland. By 1977 Bullen, who was breeding animals for export, estimated he had 360 lions.

- Jenny Tabakoff, “Stafford Bullen”, Sydney Morning Herald, 12th January 2001.

So begins the journey of one of Australia’s longest running animal parks, you can almost hear “Push It To The Limit” from the Scarface soundtrack, can’t you? It’s hard to look at African Lion Safari with fresh eyes, the advertisements bombarded you with so many different activities than just having lions and tigers climb onto your family sedan, there were dolphins and seals as well as cockatoos to marvel at (thanks to Bullen's circus origins his parks were well stocked with a vast menagerie of creatures), and the playground equipment would’ve been fun for rural kids to clamber about on. The outrageous, unregulated fun continued as the decades went on. The TV adverts sang “It’s scary, but nobody cares!”, however somebody should’ve cared because people died. It wasn’t just a one-trick pony of a park, it was an experience at Warragamba Dam which was well stocked with the kinds of attractions you’d expect from The Big Pineapple up in Queensland, complete with a train for tourists to hop onto across the property. Lest we forget that African Lion Safari stayed open until the late eighties to early nineties, it was a success in its day which outlived other parks of its ilk like Bacchus Marsh Lion Park in Victoria. There was a lot to see and do here for a small range amusement park slash zoo, and its affordable entertainment must’ve been quite an event for kiddies who would’ve delighted at the chance to get up close to those great cats. Out of all the suburban theme parks, this one seems to be one of Australia’s least lame, the one which delivered on what the adverts promised (unlike Wobbie’s World).

Apparently the park’s tenure was not without its accidents, I’m going to have to trust the radio station Triple M as a source on this one, which is difficult for me since they inflicted NIckelback and Creed onto the Australian masses during the 2000s. Triple M said this about African Lion Safari:

Many workers admitted they had been bitten by hyenas and clawed at by tigers. In 1973, an attendant was dragged off by lions and killed in front of a family sitting in their car.

In 1982, a male guest got out of his car and walked right into a pride of lions. It was ruled as suicide.

- Triple M, The eventful history of Bullen’s African Lion Safari Park in Yatala, 16th July 2018

Bullen’s business ventures came into sharper focus the more I investigated, with this tidbit from Stafford Bullen’s obituary going in a surprising direction regarding where his money was going. In between maintaining the stronghold of opulence and tiger cubs he had, Stafford Bullen attempted to buy not one, but two of Australia’s most popular television stations. Keep in mind, this was before Rupert Murdoch’s son got outbid by CBS for Channel 10. The alternate universe where the Murdoch empire might’ve been scrapping with the Bullens over who gets to own one of the major TV broadcasters in the country would’ve been fascinating. But alas, it all comes back to the animal parks. And oh boy, do the animal parks become a liability in several ways.

Bullen became bigger than circuses: apart from the animal parks, he bred lions and tigers for circuses and zoos. Other business interests included property development, the travel and entertainment industries, British casinos and attempts to buy into Channel 9 in Brisbane and Channel 10 in Sydney. He said he “found the discipline of circus training invaluable in business”. In 1985, he based himself on the Isle of Man, travelling Europe with his son Craig to stock a zoo in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

By then, the animal park business was becoming less attractive. As Sydney sprawled, Bullen complained about stringent regulations on keeping exotic animals. The difficulties of the increasingly suburban setting became apparent when an escaped lioness mauled a family’s dog. In addition, animal liberationists made Bullen a target. He staunchly defended his record and the importance of his breeding program (although he was, by his own admission, convicted of cruelty to a monkey whose chain had become embedded in the flesh of the neck).

- Jenny Tabakoff, “Stafford Bullen”, Sydney Morning Herald, 12th January 2001.

We’ve reached the “raptors in the kitchen” moment for African Lion Safari, the incident which is the most sandblasted onto people’s minds when the park is mentioned. It’s time to talk about the lion escape which didn’t kill anybody save a civilian’s dog. The park closed in 1991, and by 1995 the animals were still kept on property even if you could no longer drive amongst the big cats.

A few weeks before the lioness escaped, Adam—not his real name—had been at the local bike jumps, playing with a friend.

They ran alongside a tall fence at the border of the old lion park. Adam and his young mate were primary schoolers at the time.

Local kids had seen non-threatening buffalo at the park's fence-line as a regular event.

"You could poke them with a stick," Adam recalled.

They were also accustomed to hearing lions being fed in distant cages as they sat down to their own family dinners. It was all part of living next to the old park.

Adam remembered it as being "cool".

- Timothy Nicastri, for The Real Thing, ABC RN, “How a boy’s adventure helped a lion escape from a defunct safari park in Warragamba”, 20th September 2016.

The boys entered through a stormwater pipe and kicked in the grate to enter the defunct lion park’s property with the intention to go yabbie fishing, and they had no idea that this exercise in Ian Malcolm chaos theory would release a lioness into the local community. They felt no guilt over their role in the escape being so young at the time, but this incident conflicted with Stafford Bullen’s claim would have to break through two fences to get out. Young boys could get away with adventures in trespassing back in the mid-nineties, but the demands of exotic animal care were much harsher in penalty to Stafford Bullen, whose responsibility for his lions weighed on his shoulders.

Late one night in August 1995, Ian Berry and Detective Sergeant Fran Ralph received a call to attend a "lion wandering the streets", the pair had an initial reaction of disbelief.

"I got the radio call, and I said: 'Is there a pink elephant with it?'" Mr Berry said.

They arrived at Marsh Road in Silverdale, convinced they had been called out for no reason.

"Then of course, this lion just slowly walked out in front of our police car. To be honest, I almost had a heart attack," Detective Sergeant Ralph remembered.

Mr Berry called for assistance: "Radio, can you get Brenton Bullen here ASAP."

- Timothy Nicastri, for The Real Thing, ABC RN, “How a boy’s adventure helped a lion escape from a defunct safari park in Warragamba”, 20th September 2016.

It could be argued that incidents like this one that ringmaster Bullen was involved in had caused wider restrictions on exotic animal ownership for everyone else in the circus industry. It would not be the only animal escape Stafford Bullen had been liable for either, as an escaped bear is mentioned in the court documents of“Legislative Questions and Answers, #34”, parliament.gov.nsw.au. Parliament of New South Wales, 5th May 1998. Keep in mind, this bear escape happened close to the Port Arthur mass gun buyback scheme, so the rural residents who shot the bear were lucky they kept hold of their loaded weapons or else this could’ve gotten real ugly - or at least uglier than it ended up being. The legislative council proceedings from 1998 grills Stafford Bullen about details like the Non-Indigenous Animals Act 1987, where Bullen was facing very serious charges of negligence in the escape of these creatures if he violated these laws. But in the end it was decided the problem was that he didn’t sign paperwork to move the bears he’d been holding in captivity, which were later sold. In “Legislative Questions and Answers. #34”, you can read about government preparations for Y2K of all things amongst the stuff being discussed, which indicated a shift in how much of an antiquated relic Stafford Bullen seemed when the same council interrogating him were moving onto tackling technological problems which would impact computer users on a mass scale. Stafford Bullen died a smidge into the twenty-first century, and in a way that’s fitting for a guy who had been ringmaster of a family owned circus for so long. The contemporary environment didn’t respond well to how he was managing his animals, and while other circuses like the Stardust Circus that I saw in Coffs Harbour when I was a kid (round about 1997 if I can recall), by the new millennium the animal welfare brigade stained these institutions’' reputations beyond repair. Showies kept on being showies, but the circus wouldn’t be the same.

A car amongst the lions at African Lion Safari.

A snapshot from African Lion Safari, stating “Trespassers Will Be EATEN”.

A parrot pushing a lever at African Lion Safari in its advertisement.

A dolphin being fed its meal at African Lion Safari.

A tiger roaming the road at African Lion Safari, from the advert.

Lions walking on the pathway at African Lion Safari in the advert.

Playground equipment featured at African Lion Safari in adverts.

Water feature at African Lion Safari, excerpted from the advert.

Aerial shot from the African Lion Safari ad with dolphinarium visible.

Blurry shot of a bear at African Lion Safari from the advert.

More playground equipment at African Lion Safari, from the advert.

Monkey bars at the African Lion Safari park, from the advert.

A dolphin jumping at the aquatic animal show at African Lion Safari.

Slippery dip at African Lion Safari, from the advert.

Seals balancing a ball at the African Lion Safari aquatic animal show

Cockatoo riding a scooter at African Lion Safari, from the advert.

The African Lion Safari train line, featured with pride in the adverts.

“Take a helicopter joy-ride!” - only available on Sundays and public holidays.

Picnic area with self serve cafe and restaurants, at African Lion Safari.

The final shot of the African Lion Safari advert. Footage courtesy of GrubcoTV3.

The pipe through which the pregnant lioness escaped.

Bacchus Marsh Lion Park isn’t as famous as African Lion Safari, but it was operated by Stafford Bullen’s main rival, Ashton’s Circus. My father’s first experience with the circus came from Ashton’s, he recalls there was a man with a gun to take control in case the lions escaped. Until recently I found it difficult to obtain information about Bacchus Marsh, however the popularity of Netflix’s blockbuster Tiger King documentary has led to zookeepers who worked at the Bacchus Marsh Lion Park which operated in Western Victoria. Ron Prendergast’s son Darcy has been working on a documentary about the lion park called Strange Beasts which got funding from Screen Australia. It was similar to the African Lion Safari at Warragamba Dam, in that it also had a drive-in tourist trap where you could steer your vehicle amongst the animals, and various incidents forced the park to have higher restrictions which caused it to close down. Prendergast is a fascinating figure, he was inspired by a television show called Cowboy from Africa to work with animals, however if you’re aware of the shortcomings of Bullen’s Animal World you can guess the Bacchus Lion and Tiger Safari had similar problems. You could still drive around big cats in your car, and it was just as unregulated. According to the ABC, two significant deaths happened at Bacchus Lion and Tiger Safari, as reported by OnlyMelbourne.com: It was surprising that I had to resort to tourism website lore to confirm this:

A 12 year old boy was mauled by a lion at the park in 1978 and an 18 year old in 1979. Also in 1979, a tiger smashed through a partly opened window and pulled a woman from the car, killing her.

- OnlyMelbourne.com, Bacchus Marsh Lion Safari

How did this happen? Was anyone paying attention? Some people involved on staff grew concerned. Doug Ashton, who inherited the Ashton’s Circus family business, died at age 92, and his involvement in Bacchus Marsh Lion and Tiger Safari can be summed up by this paragraph in his obituary in The West Australian:

As the circus master, Mr. Ashton’s family said he had a policy of never turning down anyone who wanted a job, even during the Great Depression.

The pay packet was slim and the work hard, so even the hungriest, often didn’t last long as a roustabout. But he would never deny those with a gift for it, a chance to live the life he loved.

At the circus’ peak, about 80 people worked on Mr. Ashton’s payroll, including 38 family members.

In the 70s, he opened up and ran a series of exotic animal safari parks in QLD, NSW and VIC.

- Joseph Catanzaro, “Ashton Circus patriarch dies”, The West Australian, 3 November 2011.

Oh. I see how it is now. Much like Bullen’s Animal World, Bacchus Lion and Tiger Safari was just one of many animal parks he owned. The amount of family members on the payroll sounds like they were the circus equivalent of the Kardashian dynasty. This headcount is putting the Mormons to shame, the grandkid round up from Encanto has less characters. Is it possible that Doug Ashton’s inability to turn down someone for a job led to him hiring inexperienced rookies? Perhaps I’ll quote Ron Prendergast on the matter and let you decide:

“Nobody they employed had animal skills, unless they had come out of the circus.

“Here we’ve got people working with large, dangerous animals that haven’t got any skill, they’re just learning on the ground.”

- Ron Prendergast, interviewed by Evan Morgan Grahame for ABC Ballarat, Saturday 20th June, 2020.

Circuses since the late nineties have tried to go animal-free, following the example of Circus Oz and other contemporary circuses like Gravity and Other Myths have shaken the stigma of the archaic way of doing things. I witnessed the Stardust Circus in Coffs Harbour in the late nineties which had lions and tigers jumping through hoops, which is wonderful when you’re a kid but borderline illegal when you’re an adult. Both African Lion Safari and Bacchus Lion and Tiger Park were emblematic of that same kind of mindset, they seem a bit surreal in hindsight and a bit suss when examined closer with the scrutiny of our red-tape covered epoch. They were irresponsible relics of the big top’s showie roots which couldn’t adapt to the changing environment for both circuses and suburban theme parks, yet it is a bit sad that their laissez-faire attitude to residential zoning permits means its kind of afternoon family entertainment is gone for good.

The wilder side of nature deserves to stay wild, and as Coyote Peterson once said, it’s best to appreciate the dangerous parts of nature from a safe distance.

Photographer captured at the top of his jeep hiding from a curious lion.

Ron Prendergast among his collection of animal specimens.

Ron Prendergast cozying up to a tiger at Bacchus Marsh.

Ron Pendergast at age 17, caring for jungle creatures.

One of the Bacchus Marsh tigers feeding on their meal.

The Enchanting Existential Dread of Aussie Theme Parks: Chapter Four - Wouldn’t It Be Wonderful

Wouldn’t it be wonderful, for every boy, girl, woman and man?

Wonderland Sydney was my favourite park in Sydney, hands down, I only visited twice but I enjoyed every minute I spent there. Compared to the abrasive indoor Sega World Sydney, Wonderland Sydney was more akin to my type of park I want to spend my time in. It was outdoors, it was charming, and there was a plethora of things to see and do and plenty of rides which I could’ve listed as my favourites. Wonderland Sydney is sorely missed, perhaps the greatest theme park Sydney ever had south of Queensland, and the sad story of its decline continues to dismay my generation whenever it is mentioned. It was the closest thing we had to Disneyland growing up, and losing it left a gaping wound in New South Wales which may never truly heal. I loved Wonderland despite my brief, beautiful interaction with what it had to offer, I remember the gift shop with Johnny Bravo and The Powerpuff Girls plushies that I couldn’t afford, they had a lot of Hanna-Barbera merch on sale in fact, befitting the themed land those characters got to themselves. I remember waking up early to watch The Powerpuff Girls on Agro’s Cartoon Connection, rumour has it there was a stage show with them at Wonderland Sydney that I never saw. Chances are it would’ve been as cheesy as Sonic Live In Sydney but I could be wrong.

The Hanna-Barbera gang’s all here at Wonderland Sydney.

Wonderland Sydney was a complex creature as Australian theme parks go, it had an area called The Beach which featured Fred Flintstone in his swimming gear on signage, it was attached to the Australian Wildlife Park as a bonus. My favourite rides were spread across the park, with Bounty’s Revenge in Old Botany Bay serving as an introduction to what Wonderland was all about. It was your standard swinging pirate ship ride, I boarded the beautiful antique ship and strapped in for adventure I hadn't dared explore beforehand until I arrived there. Whilst I was too chicken to ride the Demon whilst it was still operating, I was determined to reclaim my masculinity after the Sega World incident by riding two thrill ride attractions called Space Probe 7 and The Bush Beast, they were E-ticket attractions which all paths led to if you sought out adrenaline pumping action. Space Probe 7 resided near the Transylvania area with its spooky Halloween pumpkin gate, I rode Wizard’s Fury there and enjoyed being spun around by the proverbial cranky sorcerer’s rage through a house which may or may not have been supposed to be haunted. Transylvania housed most of the park’s best remembered thrill rides, with the Beastie catering to kids not yet ready to ride The Bush Beast in the Gold Rush area. I liked the Beastie a lot, and you would go through the gateway into a pre-show Scooby Doo house with a vulture sitting atop it as you boarded the mini-coaster. It wasn’t too scary nor too tame for most kids, an excellent compromise between the fiercer, more rattly attractions. Wonderland Sydney’s origins came from Paramount Kings’ Island, unbeknownst to us at the time, which is why The Bush Beast bore a strong resemblance to The Beast rollercoaster in America, I believe the Demon rollercoaster was a Wonderland Sydney original though. The park was a rite of passage akin to Old Sydney Town for holiday seekers and bored daycare children who descended upon its turnstiles with excitement that’s hard to put into words, which makes the absence of the park in our current ecosystem all the sadder because I’ll never get to drag my own children to Wonderland. You won’t find many contrarian hot-takes against this beloved institution online, and since its closure there have been articles eulogising the place all over the internet. Wonderland History seeks to preserve whatever is left of the park’s tangible remains and photographs depicting the attractions, which is what most bloggers and videographers covering Wonderland often use as a primary source. Wonderland’s among one of the most documented of all defunct Australian theme parks, with audio-visual material readily available for research purposes, which you can’t really say about many Aussie parks where few ride-through uploads exist compared to the American parks.

The rainbow gateway to Hanna-Barbera Land at Wonderland Sydney.

The notorious Demon rollercoaster, with its double loops in Transylvania.

The gate to the Demon rollercoaster in its nineties splendour.

The mighty Space Probe 7 pictured next to the Demon coaster.

The iconic Bounty’s Revenge swinging pirate ship attraction.

The loud whirr of the Wizard’s Fury ride kept us spinning.

The Bush Beast as it stood in all its wooden glory, circa 2000.

A TV special was produced for the Space Probe 7 ride, featuring the cast of Australian Gladiators braving the tall drop ride’s dizzying heights, and watching it takes me back to when I first rode it, I was around eight or eleven years old when I queued up in the Transylvania section of the park eager to prove my courage, I walked through the space tunnel with its spooky atmosphere and strapped myself into the chair. Once lifted to the drop zone, there was a ten second countdown to the launch, and the anticipation was tense for a lad like me. Drop tower rides aren’t really my thing, but having ridden one of the tallest in the world at the time put metaphorical hairs on my chest. Transylvania was the newest land addition to Wonderland Sydney at the time when I went there, and for many it was their favourite with the spooky pumpkins and eerie sound effects greeting you at its entrance. It was atmospheric and creepy for a little kid, and although I was growing into a bigger kid I admit this area fascinated my morbid curiosity. Plenty of fun was to be had at the crossroads between Hanna-Barbera Land and Transylvania, such as the Zodiac ride which I never managed to experience for myself sadly, as I must’ve preferred getting another turn on the Beastie. Fred Flintstone’s Splashdown was another fun ride which I never got the chance to try, it was a flume boat attraction based on The Flintstones characters that lots of people loved back in the day. Fred Flintstone showed up in a lot of water-based attractions like The Beach water park as well, you couldn’t get away from the guy at Wonderland. I never went on the water slides at The Beach because I didn’t bring a towel and a change of clothes both times I went to Wonderland, which is a shame because from what I saw it was a pretty rad source of waterslides almost up there with Wet N’ Wild.

The TV special based on the making of Space Probe 7’s commercial.

Cheeta and Commando greet lifestyle TV presenters at Wonderland.

The Australian Gladiators decide to ride the Demon before tackling Space Probe 7.

David Wardfear in a rare interview about the construction of Space Probe 7.

Roger Cammeron dishes on the special effects that created Space Probe 7.

Colin Timms explains the sound design aspect for the viewers at home. (Above six panels, courtesy of ellyandjools)

The pumpkin-y entrance to Transylvania, the horror themed Wonderland zone.

The Zodiac ride in Hanna-Barbera Land, long may it twirl in our memories.

Fred Flintstone’s Splashdown operating in its prime at Wonderland.

Tragedy struck when the Wonderland Sydney park was sold to Sunway Group, who in my opinion are one of the worst Australian villains of the nineties and early two-thousands up there with the Summer Bay Stalker on Home and Away, Pauline Hanson and Steve Vizard. Sunway Group murdered the dreams of millions when they purchased Wonderland and ran it into the ground - only interested in acquiring the real estate on which the park stood. They blamed various misfortunes for the closure of the park, including SARS and September 11th, 2001, but the fault for the death of poor Wonderland Sydney was blood on their hands. Like a cranky landlord turfing out their tenants, their alleged neglect of the animals in the Australian Wildlife Park section caused personnel employed by the sanctuary to break into the premises and rescue the creatures either starving or cooking in the summer heat. Losing Wonderland hurt me way more than the previous loss of Sega World Sydney did, yet the loss of both the Sega World and Wonderland Sydney parks within a five year timespan marked the end of an era for the New South Wales infrastructure around us. The optimism of the Sydney 2000 Olympics curdled into urban mediocrity and lack of imagination both in politics and our environment. Children of the nineties who are now adults miss the excitement that permeated the early two-thousands as the millennium bug bit us all, only to bring us an era of disappointment when our theme parks south of Queensland disappeared. Never again would the New South Wales parks rival the Gold Coast, and the grief inflicted by their closure would haunt my generation as suburban sprawl made resurrecting Wonderland Sydney seem like an impossibility. Occasional hope sprouts for a redevelopment of Wonderland Sydney, trumpeted by some real estate agent who used to work at Wonderland, sometimes gets printed in the media but I’m not holding out hope it’ll ever be rebuilt at half the splendour of its former incarnation. Old Sydney Town would fall around the same time, a historic theme park trapped by its niche identity, and the loss of that particular park coincided with the two titans of New South Wales parks closing down forever. Being an Australian theme park fan involves a lot of heartache, and Wonderland Sydney is one of the cruellest examples of why that is, gutted of its attractions by a corporate buyout and neglected by the new owners who refused to maintain what they had purchased. It wouldn’t be so bad if we got something neat to replace it, such as Luna Park Sydney doing the heavy lifting once Wonderland Sydney closed, but even Luna Park is a bit skint in the attractions compared to how it was in the nineties before noise complaints killed the Big Dipper. Australians had something to be proud of in our parks back then, and having it taken away all of a sudden when we weren’t done enjoying it was a harsh reality to face as children - now bitter adults bludgeoned by two separate once-in-a-lifetime recessions. The Millennials had so much hope for the twenty-first century until the war on terror snatched that away too, there was no escape for us left when the parks were shut. There’s a certain miasma to Sydney at the moment, lacking vision or inspiration, swallowed by corporate towers and grey drab vistas greeting the eyes of tourists unfortunate to have missed Sydney in its prime when the government was willing to spend lots of money beautifying Darling Harbour for the Olympic visitors. The last hope of Australian theme parks’ viability would remain at the Gold Coast for the next decade or two, and to date nothing close to Queensland has emerged besides Adventure World in Perth. To this day the signage from Wonderland sits in a junkyard rusting away in limbo like the Sega World Sonic statues before it, as a reminder of Sydney’s lost glory. Wonderland could’ve stuck around if it was managed better by owners who cared about more than how much money they could get for flogging it off. According to my friend Reena, the early two-thousands weren’t kind to poor Wonderland at all and the park was very run down compared to when I visited. Such is life, I guess, and Wonderland Sydney lives now only in my memories like I’m the Feral Kid from Mad Max 2. There’s never going to be another park like it in my lifetime, even if they do get approval to rebuild that planned pipe dream version it’s just not going to be the same. Nostalgia intermingled with ceaseless anger at the betrayal of Sunway seems to sum up the mood whenever Wonderland is discussed amongst Aussie theme park fans, and sometimes we get too sad to even talk about the park because talking about it means acknowledging it’s gone. And it’s been gone almost half of my adult life, nothing can bring it back and I can never go home again. Disney fans sometimes call Disneyland “home” but Wonderland was our home before we all got evicted by Sunway’s lust for real estate. I often get depressed and furious having to think about Wonderland’s decline because it didn’t need to happen. Greedy land developers have killed so many of our country's parks that it’s ridiculous, and it’s a recurring theme with why New South Wales couldn’t keep up with Queensland’s Gold Coast. We’ll talk about one of the more infamous suburban parks next time, peace.

Londonderry’s junkyard retains the Wonderland Sydney Marvel signage.

The Regrettable Death of Hype Lobster

He was an anomaly both ahead of and behind his time, dressed in a snapback hat and jeans centuries before that was in fashion. Hype Lobster embodied the party animal of the Chinese nobility but also the college frat pledge of the modern era, a Taoist sorcerer educated in the classics of longevity with a taste for fine wine and elixir lean which would become his downfall.

Hype Lobster came from the Dragon Skulls lineage of magicians in ancient China, he had been around at the beginning of the Complete Reality School’s founding and had heard Zhuangzi speak in person. He had mastered his control of the breath and meditation for hours at a time, opening the Dragon Gate with his occult knowledge when he was only sixteen. He had watched emperors grow old and die as he remained youthful and stupid as the day he took his alchemical pill in secret. With his practitioners sword he drew a circle in the sand of the temple and conjured a drink which he became addicted to, and it is said you were only meant to sip this beverage once in a lifetime.

He attained the rank of Grandmaster Hype Lobster, the great sorcerer of the Dragon Skulls lineage when he turned a hundred years old, amassing wealth and wisdom along the way which he shared with his dozens of students. His yearning for partying rivalled that of contemporary rock musician Andrew W.K. long before that man was even born, his sigil was a lobster with a yin-yang hexagram drawn onto its shell. The I-Ching came as naturally to him as a fish to water, yet even Hype Lobster couldn’t see his excess would bring his immortality to an early grave.

Many rock-eating alchemists had died trying to achieve what Hype Lobster accomplished, however he couldn’t let well enough alone, continuing to sip his elixir lean with the other hype-beasts of the community. One of the key ingredients was said to be mercury, and whilst we now know that to be a toxic chemical, the sorcerers of old were driven to madness with their obsession with the liquid. Internal alchemy was all the rage when Hype Lobster was two hundred years young, partying with thousands of maidens and noblemen in the Imperial High Court to the detriment of the taxpayer. Far was this way of life from the simplicity of Lao Tzu’s teachings or the Analects, utterly lacking frugality and sincerity. He had a pet tiger imported from India, becoming the Joe Exotic of his day amassing underfed and unhappy jungle animals in his garden of delights, he had no reason to stop because he felt in his heart because he had taken the alchemical pill in its liquid form that he was invincible. Immortal, yes. Invincible? No.

The mess left by his partying and orgies left a wake of trash behind Hype Lobster that he was loathe to pick up after himself. Travelling to Rome at the height of its empire purely for partying reasons, he helped Caligula ruin the GDP of Italy as well, all this money for partying had to come from somewhere, and the gold stolen from Africa and other places paid in full for this egregious lifestyle. Hype Lobster was now a man of the world, backpacking to the richest bohemian salons and falling out with donors whose girlfriends he helped cheat on them kept betraying their lovers for his unique philosophy of the boudoir. His pet tigers ate a cuckolded spouse chasing after him and the evidence was thrown into a meat grinder to prevent suspicion.

His magic allowed him to conjure a device from the future called an iPhone, which he filled with tracks from the douche-baggiest artists of the modern epoch, such as Chris Brown and Lil Wayne, these hoes ain’t loyal was tattooed onto his chest as a mantra. In immortality, he had ceased to care whose feelings he hurt in the process of getting that next buzz of endorphins, and like Rasputin learned once he entered the weird mystic game, being outrageous and drunk all the time could earn you a few enemies. Hype Lobster’s past was bound to catch up with him, as infidelity to his own polyamorous partners earned him a reputation as a proto-Casanova within the circles of high society. His pet elephants lay neglected in a filthy private zoo where he underpaid the maidens in charge of tending to the creatures in his menagerie, having no fear of retribution in his afterlife had transformed him into a swaggering douche without a portrait of Dorian Gray to hold him accountable. In Germany he had caught wind of a new philosophy antithetical to his Taoism spoken of by Nietzche called nihilism, which interested him since he felt dead inside ever since the fifteenth century. He read De Sade and other such noblemen of naughtiness, depraving himself as any future casualty of the #MeToo movement would do if he thought he was untouchable.

Elixir lean and booze flowed through his veins faster than his blood could, and one day he heard a song which moved his tortured soul: Can’t Stop Partying by Weezer and Lil Wayne. This song which also had a heartbreaking acoustic version shook him to the core, reminding him of the possibility of partying so hard that death could claim him in his ignorance. He made the song his ringtone as a morbid memento mori gesture. There were certain parties he now avoided, such as the ones at Jeffrey Epstein’s house, which was probably for the best. Hollywood in its moral emptiness shocked Hype Lobster as he wandered the streets in search of a younger generation of partygoer, he was the eternal old guy at the club and it was his own fault for making himself immortal.

All of a sudden, he was far too old to be picking up chicks at the bar, and the music the youths listened to was too loud and alienated him with its EDM doof-doof. Hype Lobster spent the final chapters of his long life trying to make himself feel less alone. Addicted to various drugs like heroin and cocaine, unable to die from the krokodil and bath salts and meth he had tried to see the appeal of, he wandered the earth as a mystery to those around him, eventually he grew tired of the allure of fame or celebrity and just wanted to feel the buzz which elixir lean used to give him.

Combining elixir lean with various contemporary drugs seemed to stimulate him like before, then the charm wore off and he was numb again. He would have to experiment with darker magic to feel that rush of youth he yearned for, drinking in demons and witches brews seemed to work.

Chaos magicians such as Grant Morrison taught him that everything was permitted, and nothing was true. He was old enough now to believe in such things, wise enough to know this dangerous new path might lead him astray in a meaningful rather than empty way.

At 3am he stumbled through the bodegas in search of elephant juice to make some elixir lean, all of the shops were closed, but the covens on the beaches were wide open. Witchcraft had become in vogue again with the current generation, although the pretty teenage witches were wary of an older man trying to hang out with them late at night.

“Ew, he’s three thousand year old!” protested Myrtle, the hedge-witch who hung out in the Hot Topic. “He looks gross and fuckboy-ish.” - they weren’t wrong, he had indeed been like this since he met Caligula, and the welcome was wearing itself out. The women of today professed a newer philosophy he neglected to research, called feminism, wherein young women refused to be treated like objects. Compared to these young maidens casting hexes in the light of the moon, Hype Lobster was old hat.

The teenage girls at the beach wanted nothing to do with him, and shooed him away from their cauldron citing reasons of “necessary shadow work”. He was a decrepit ruin of a man, a coelacanth living fossil who didn’t belong. Hype Lobster wandered off to the pier to do some more heroin which he could brew in his magical spoon, only to be spotted by LA cops who arrested him on drugs charges. He was in the slammer for fifteen years, getting buff in jail and left prison with more tattoos. In America, he wasn’t allowed to vote as a felon, but he was too high on elixir lean to care. Conjuring King Paimon on his camel mount, he asked for a draught of elixir lean which would make the gods themselves crunk as Lil Jon. King Paimon granted the request and brewed him an amount of elixir lean mixed with cough syrup which would kill a mortal man. 

Taking up the challenge, he drank his lean to the last drop and felt the buzz of demon seed down his throat. Hype Lobster was hyped about something for the first time in decades, now he was out of jail he was free to travel the world looking for new trouble to get himself into.

King Paimon warned Hype Lobster that this new recipe for elixir lean was best enjoyed in moderation, however it had such a potent effect on him that Paimon’s pleas were ignored. Hype Lobster travelled to Paris, France for the first time in an eternity, sipping his elixir lean on the steps of Notre Dame cathedral. He went to the club to get turnt up and was confronted with the French house music which boomed in his brain at a volume which gave him heart palpitations.

To his error, Hype Lobster decided to drink some more of the Paimon elixir lean as the bass boomed on the dance floor. He felt his heart attack strike him in agony, though that did not kill him, he continued to dance until the break of dawn although the pain wracked his entire body. His soul was starting to disintegrate, and all the demons he was drinking down spilt out of his gullet as his mortal coil ceased to be. There would be no promise of an afterlife for Hype Lobster, only oblivion due to his foolishness. The funeral was held in China, after what was left of him was shipped to Shanghai, to have a Buddhist funeral like Taoist scoundrels who die in disgrace are known to do. It was a humble, simple ceremony, devoid of the excesses of his life, no funeral strippers or expensive caskets wheeled through the streets in a hearse.

Perhaps oblivion was a kinder fate to Hype Lobster than to face the various Chinese hells, his soul was broken into a billion pieces by his meddling in dark sorcery for a quick buzz of feeling. Twenty mourners dressed in white chanted sutras as his body was laid to rest, cremated to ashes and interred at the Dragon Skulls catacombs in the Jade Crypt of Wonders where the dead magicians were buried.

The regrettable death of Hype Lobster wasn’t supposed to happen at all, but his ridiculous life lived to excess was lived at compound interest. His name was whispered as a warning to younger adepts, who shitposted quasi-ironic tributes like “mourn ya till I join ya” online as Hype Lobster would’ve wanted. There would never be another sorcerer like him, for good reason.

Copyright © Jacob Martin 2020, All Rights Reserved.