As a side project to our  American Gods Reread, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at all the various songs quoted and referenced throughout the novel. Every epic adventure deserves an epic soundtrack, after all, and Neil Gaiman knows a thing or two about great music, so: whenever a song pops up in the text, I’ll be here to discuss each track in the context of the novel and theorize wildly about the connections between song and story.

For the most part, I’m planning to stick with songs that actually appear in the book, but as we progress with the reread I’ll be keeping an ear out for tunes that fit too well to be ignored, and I’m hoping you’ll help me out with suggestions in the comments: if there’s a song or artist that needs to be added to the list, let me know! By the end of the novel, we’ll hopefully have created a divinely inspired mega-mix worthy of Wednesday himself, featuring everything from rock and roll and the blues to show tunes and karaoke standards....

As with the reread, all page numbers mentioned correspond to American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition (Author’s Preferred Text) and there are spoilers below the fold. Please feel free to pump up the volume.

[This week: Leadbelly, Dylan, vikings, demons, and the undead (including Elvis).]

Welcome to the second installment of our American Gods Reread, a rambling literary road trip through Neil Gaiman’s Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning novel (soon to be an HBO series). Each week we’ll be following the adventures and misadventures of Shadow Moon and his employer, the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday, through a landscape both familiar and deeply strange. Please be aware that there will be spoilers in the post and comments.

This week, we pick up with our protagonists just in time for one of them to get lucky, while the other endures the final hours of what just might be the harshest Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day in recent history....

[Strange things are afoot at the Motel America.]

In honor of Jim Henson's 76th birthday, please enjoy this tribute, slightly revised, originally published in 2011.

Today, September 24th, would have been Jim Henson’s 76th birthday, and that fact is making me feel awfully nostalgic. As a child of the eighties, I grew up in the Golden Age of Henson’s career, watching Sesame Street and reruns of The Muppet Show, Muppet movies, Muppet holiday specials (taped on VHS, of course), and completely, utterly obsessed with the darker fantasy work of his later career: The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, and the amazing StoryTeller series. My childhood was utterly infused with Henson’s humor, and the power of his imagination was a constant influence on my own, as it was for several generations of children (and plenty of adults, as well).

[Remembering Jim Henson]

As a side project to our newly launched American Gods Reread, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at all the various songs quoted and referenced throughout the novel. Every epic adventure deserves an epic soundtrack, after all, and Neil Gaiman knows a thing or two about great music, so: whenever a song pops up in the text, I’ll be here to discuss each track in the context of the novel and theorize wildly about the connections between song and story.

For the most part, I’m planning to stick with songs that actually appear in the book, but as we progress with the reread I’ll be keeping an ear out for tunes that fit too well to be ignored, and I’m hoping you’ll help me out with suggestions in the comments: if there’s a song or artist that needs to be added to the list, let me know! By the end of the novel, we’ll hopefully have created a divinely inspired mega-mix worthy of Wednesday himself, featuring everything from rock and roll and the blues to show tunes and karaoke standards....

As with the reread, all page numbers mentioned correspond to American Gods: The Tenth Anniversary Edition (Author’s Preferred Text) and there are spoilers below the fold. Please feel free to pump up the volume.

[An ex-con, a god, and a giant leprechaun walk into a bar...]

Welcome to the very first installment of our American Gods Reread, a rambling literary road trip through Neil Gaiman’s Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning novel (soon to be an HBO series). Each week we’ll be following the adventures and misadventures of Shadow Moon and his employer, the enigmatic Mr. Wednesday, through a landscape both familiar and deeply strange.

[Lowlifes, grifters and mead on the rocks...]

Since Lionsgate has announced that they’re officially expanding the Hunger Games trilogy into four movies by splitting the final book into two parts (echoing the treatment of the Twilight and Harry Potter film series), I’ve been attempting to figure out how to feel about the news. On one hand, I’m certainly a fan, so I suppose I should be happy about having an extra film to look forward to, and more Hunger Games to love. On the other hand, I’m curious about how the split is going to work in terms of the narrative, and how it will affect which elements of the series are foregrounded in the adaptation.

[Predictions, and some spoilers for Mockingjay below...]

I’ve never heard of animator Kevin Bapp before today, but now I want him to be my new best (super) friend forever. Bapp writes, “What happens when four superfriends retire and move to Miami to share a ranch style home? This is a pilot I’d like to propose to Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, if I knew anyone who worked there, and if all the licenses could be obtained.” For the love of Batman, secret SF icon Bea Arthur, cheesecake and the American Way, let’s make this thing happen. Right now.

Wall-E is generally referred to as a children’s film, and I’m not going to argue: it’s an excellent children’s film—a classic, absolutely. I also happen to think that it’s an even better movie for adults, for whom its lessons are more poignant, possibly more resonant, and more necessary. Pixar has a knack for producing films which consistently operate on two different levels: one which speaks to a young audience without condescension or pandering, and one which reflects adult experience, rather than just exploiting nostalgia for idealized conceptions of childhood or simply spiking the cinematic punch with snarky, Grown-Ups Only pop culture references and in-jokes.

Movies like Wall-E and Up deftly evoke complicated emotional responses in adults in a way that most children’s films don’t, speaking to adults on their own level through smart, subtle storytelling that’s often amazingly, heartbreakingly simple. Consider the opening sequence of Up, for example, which has the power to make grown men break down and sob as if they’ve just been kicked in the heart, but doesn’t seem particularly traumatic for small children at the same time; it’s not that kids don’t “get it”—they just don’t necessarily react to the sequence in the same way that adults, carrying a little more emotional baggage into the theater, tend to respond.

[Below the fold: Charlie Chaplin, Hello, Dolly! and the making of an animated manifesto]

Alien Resurrection had a lot going for it—released five years after Alien³, which received mixed reviews and garnered a fair amount of criticism for the decision to kill off several major characters, the fourth installment was an opportunity to give the franchise a fresh start. With Sigourney Weaver uninterested in resuming her role as Ellen Ripley, Fox brought in an up-and-coming screenwriter named Joss Whedon to craft a story around a cloned version of Newt, the traumatized young colonist introduced in Aliens. By all accounts, Whedon’s initial treatment was fantastic, but of course, we’ll never know how it would’ve turned out. When we started planning these rewatches, I wanted to revisit Alien Resurrection—I had a vague memory of the film being weird and messy, but maybe I hadn’t given it enough credit at the time. Even if it was a failure, given all the talented people involved, it would have to be an interesting failure, right? Sometimes an ambitious fiasco can be more interesting than a conventionally successful blockbuster…theoretically, at least.

[But sometimes movies are just as weird and messy 15 years later...]

Maurice Sendak, beloved author and illustrator, has passed away at the age of 83. Sendak’s career began at twelve, when he was inspired to become an artist after seeing Disney’s Fantasia. A successful illustrator of other authors’ work throughout the 1950s, Sendak rose to fame with the now-classic Where the Wild Things Are in 1963, a book which brought his distinctive voice to generations of children and adult readers.

Since then, Sendak has always been a unique presence in children’s literature—never afraid to delve into the darker side of life, he caused a fair amount of controversy in his career, while at the same time garnering awards ranging from the Caldecott to a National Book Award to the National Medal of the Arts. He refused to sentimentalize childhood in his work, or to “lie to children,” as he put it in a recent interview, but the harsher realities and dangers in his work were always balanced by the unconquerable vitality and resilience of his protagonists…

Brave, headstrong, sometimes downright bratty, Sendak’s characters evince his faith in the ability of children, and maybe even humanity as a whole, to deal with the looming perils and lurking absurdities of life. What his art lacked in sentimentality, it more than made up for in humor, intelligence and inspiration. He was a brilliant, complicated, hardheaded and sometimes curmudgeonly genius, and he was wonderful. Today the world is a little poorer, and a little grimmer, for his absence, but his faith in us remains—all we can do is try our best to live up to it.

When I saw Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods a week ago, I honestly wasn’t sure what to expect — I knew there was some sort of twist involved, and that the movie was intended to be a critique of ultraviolent slasher films, but I’d somehow avoided any major spoilers, going in. So, I spent at least half the movie desperately trying to guess how all the narrative pieces were going to fall into place, attempting to stay one step ahead of all the clever twists (and mostly failing) — and of course there’s a fair amount of pleasure to be had from all that frantic not-knowing.

The biggest surprise, though, occurred after I’d left the theater and started mulling the whole experience over, and realized that while I’d expected something smart, snarky, and fun, what The Cabin in the Woods delivers is much, much darker and more subversive than simply cleverness for its own sake. I never would have guessed how much time I’d spend thinking about just how well the film manages to illuminate the deeply weird cultural moment we find ourselves in, and how it all comes back to John Hughes…and how maybe all we really need to know we learned from Eighties movies. Or not.

[Contains spoilers for Cabin in the Woods, The Hunger Games, and also probably The Breakfast Club.]

Considering how nerdy the Tor.com offices is (we have a shrine to Dalen Quaice, for Cthulhu’s sake) we come to agreement on a bizarrely large number of things. But that’s by no means a guarantee, so when we find ourselves on opposite sides of a particular “issue,” we figure we’ll take it to you!

Today Bridget and Ryan are arguing about ThunderCats. Specifically, are they worth the nostalgic fuss? Read our arguments for and against, then join in!

[Read more]

In the folklore of various cultures and ancient civilizations, rabbits have represented a kind of Trickster figure; in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean mythology, rabbits live on the moon. The Aztecs worshipped a group of deities known as the Centzon Totochtin, a group of 400 hard-partying rabbits who were the gods of drunkenness, and in a slightly more recent mythos, bunnies were the bête noir of a certain thousand-year-old former vengeance demon.

As we head into the weekend, I’d like to take a minute to pay tribute to some of the more memorable bunnies and assorted rabbit-like creatures who have hopped, time-traveled, and occasionally slaughtered their way through science fiction and fantasy, beginning (in no particular order), with everybody’s favorite hard-drinking, invisible lagomorph….

[Follow me down the SFF rabbit hole]

The third installment of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series picks up a month after the events of Catching Fire, and it begins with Katniss sifting through the (literal) ashes of her former life. In the opening paragraph of the novel, surrounded by the burned and broken remains of District 12, she does her best to find a point of reference, a way of locating herself in the charred heap of rubble that used to be her house, asking “How else could I orient myself in this sea of gray?”

In a sense, that question sums up the central concern of Mockingjay, and of the entire series by extension, and I think that one of the major strengths of the Hunger Games trilogy lies in the fact that, in the end, it offers up no easy answers to the problem of how to deal with unspeakable trauma, and eventually find meaning in the wake of atrocities and the moral and ethical failures perpetrated on all sides of the struggle for Panem.

[Flashbacks, echoes, and the horrors of history repeating...]

Hodor! Hodor!!! Hodorhodorhodor, you guys!!!!!

Wait, sorry—I’m just really excited. Deep breaths. Let’s try this again: check out the newest trailer for the upcoming season of Game of Thrones, which premieres on Sunday, April 1st.  I don’t want to say anything too spoilerish, so let’s just all agree that that crazy is coming, and minds will be blown. IT IS KNOWN.

I’ve written about my abiding love for Labyrinth before, most recently during Muppet Week. Not much has changed since then (not counting this news about a new graphic novel prequel to the movie) — I still think the movie deserves to be taken seriously as a truly inspired, thoughtful, subversively feminist addition to the tradition of classic coming-of-age stories which are so lovingly, and cleverly, referenced throughout.

At the same time, taking the movie seriously shouldn’t mean pretending that it’s a particularly serious film — the screenplay was, after all, written by Monty Python’s Terry Jones. And it’s filled with muppets. And, well...the antagonist is a toddler-juggling, shape-shifting weirdo with a glitter fetish who dresses (and behaves) like the tarted-up bastard offspring of Cruella de Vil and Aunty Entity.

[Below the fold: Humor, camp, diva antics and tight pants...]

I’m admittedly a bit of a soundtrack nerd; in so many cases, the right music can make or break a scene, while the wrong music can ruin the vibe faster than you can say “Ladyhawke/WangChung/GoNinjaGoNinjaGoooo.” (Though you should never actually say that, as it summons unspeakable evil).

Since we’re tackling so many Bowie albums and movies this week, I thought it might be fun to take a look how his music has been used in film and television over the years. It’s interesting to see how a scene can completely recontextualize a particular song, and the heightened emotional impact that music can bring to a moment (or even an entire series, in some cases), and so I’ve rounded up a few of my favorite examples of Bowie’s contributions to both big and small screen soundtracks. And just to make it interesting, I’m not focusing on original, made-to-order compositions, but tracks that existed independently and had a life of their own before Hollywood (or the Beeb) came calling.

[Get hooked to the silver screen...]

Over the course of Bowie Week, we’ll be focusing on many of David Bowie’s major film roles, including The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Hunger, Labyrinth, and his memorable portrayal of Nikola Tesla in The Prestige. In a career as fascinating and varied as his has been, though, the Greatest Hits approach doesn’t cover nearly enough ground. As an artist, Bowie has spent a lifetime blurring the lines between performer and stage persona: after all, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars was famously advertised with the slogan “David Bowie is Ziggy Stardust”…while, in smaller type, the words “Ziggy Stardust is David Bowie” ran across the bottom of the ad.

This confusion between creator and creation is something Bowie has played upon from the very beginning—and then there’s the fact that, over the last couple decades, he himself has become the direct inspiration for various fictional characters, from the Lucifer of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman to The Venture Bros. version of David Bowie, shapeshifting leader of The Guild of Calamitous Intent. So let’s take a look at a few of Bowie’s more interesting incarnations, both as an actor and as a character, the dreamer and the dream, beginning with his acting debut in the unsettling 1967 short film The Image.

[That’s pretty freaky, Bowie.]

Labyrinth was Jim Henson’s second collaboration with artist Brian Froud, following The Dark Crystal four years earlier. Labyrinth was clearly a very different, more expansive type of project; Henson and Froud were joined by George Lucas as executive producer, Monty Python’s Terry Jones wrote the screenplay, and rock demigod David Bowie signed on to star, as well as write and perform the movie’s soundtrack.

Whereas The Dark Crystal is often seen as Henson and Froud’s freewheeling homage to fantasy àla Tolkein, Labyrinth is much more structured and far more aware of its influences; it’s also wonderfully allusive and meta at points, filled with references to the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, Maurice Sendak, and Walt Disney. And yet the movie doesn’t limit itself to clever references — it’s very clearly participating in the classic tradition of works like The Wizard of Oz, the Alice books, and Where the Wild Things Are, in which a young protagonist escapes a humdrum existence into an exotic, sometimes threatening, alternative reality.

[Cue the owl attack, begin the goblin invasion, and get ready for some really tight pants...]

The Dark Crystal debuted in 1982, wedged somewhat oddly between The Great Muppet Caper and the premiere of Fraggle Rock in the Great Muppet Time Line. In terms of Jim Henson’s career, placing the film chronologically is easy; figuring out how it fits into his development as an artist is a bit more complicated.

The project that eventually became The Dark Crystal actually began several years earlier when Henson fell madly in love with the work of fantasy illustrator Brian Froud; they became friends, and Froud began collaborating with Henson and Frank Oz. With the help of David Odell, a former staff writer for The Muppet Show, they eventually produced the first live-action film to feature no human actors, only puppets and animatronic creatures.

The film was groundbreaking in many ways, and yet it was not considered a financial success upon release, and is often described as something of a “near classic” even by its fans. I’ve always harbored mixed feelings toward The Dark Crystal; even as a kid, I remember having the sense that there were so many aspects of the movie that worked…but somehow all those amazing parts never seemed to come together, in the end. And so, for the first time in years, I decided to take another look.

[“What was sundered and undone shall be whole—the two made one.”]