Fiction which is misrepresented in pop culture

Cafe Society
121

Agreed on the Moriarty business. He only appeared “onstage” (that is, seen by Watson and not filtered through other people talking about him) for all of a sentence or two in The Final Problem–and that was through a glimpse through a window at the train station!

Since the Lone Ranger is (sadly, rather notoriously) in the public eye at the moment, I’ll add my two cents on Tonto:

The common misconception of Tonto (as he was formerly presented) is of a dumb Indian stereotype who always got the short end of the stick and whom the Lone Ranger talked down to.

I haven’t heard enough of the radio series to comment on his portrayal there, but from what I have heard of the radio series and what I’ve seen of Jay Silverheels’ portrayal in the TV series, nothing could be further from the truth. Tonto was portrayed as a capable, levelheaded partner to the Ranger, always able to use his head and come through in a pinch. He showed a sly sense of humor at times. What’s more, the Ranger never, EVER talked down to him, and you got the feeling that if anyone mistreated Tonto in front of the Ranger it would be Katy bar the door.

Sometimes other Native American tribes were portrayed a little condescendingly in the series. But the interesting part is, in one of the movies starring Moore and Silverheels (The Lost City Of Gold), the subject of racism was touched on (Tonto called it a “sickness in the head”) and one of the characters was a half-breed doctor terrified that his Native American heritage would be revealed. Pretty daring for a B-movie matinee in the fifties.

The only real embarrassment was the broken English, which is why later portrayals iron that out. After all, even if Tonto did start out having a little trouble with English you’d think he’d improve by spending so much time with the Ranger.

122

Frees dubbed a lot of films – Rodan, Spartacus (he’s the guy making the announcement that the slaves should identify Spartacus at the end, just before they all say “I Am Spartacus”), Atlantis, the Lost Continent. He made a conscious decision to do voice work, and he’s all over films of the 50s and 60s. He was, of course, the voice of Ludwig von Drake, Boris Badenoff, The Undertaker (in Magoo’s Christmas Carol) and countless other cartoon voices (especially for Disney). He even got to sing (!) alongside Robert Goulet and Judy Garland in Gay Purr-ee.
He got on camera a couple of times, too. He was a TV announcer in Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and one of the scientists in the original version of The Thing.

What’s more interesting is that very young George Takei evidently also did some dubbing in Godzilla and Rodan.

123

Well, he’s not straight-up gay, as evident in his difficulty resisting the attentions of Mrs. Wade in The Long Goodbye, but combined with the complicated homosocial relationships in like the one in The Long Goodbye (he never seems to be as emotionally intimate with women) and a handful of moments in the various stories showing his physical attraction to male characters suggest that its worth considering that he’s got an eye for the males as well. With that in mind, his showy homophobia in The Big Sleep, where he pounds a guy for, among other things, being all faggy, can be read as protesting too much. I find his violent overreaction to the impression Carmen Sternwood made in his bed a little over-the-top. I mean, yeah, she got skank all over his bed, but I think the word that Carmen called him when he spurned her seduction, which Chandler does not actually commit to print but I’m pretty sure was ‘faggot’, had a lot to do with his state of mind.

It is, of course, quite possible for a person to be completely heterosexual but socially oriented toward one’s own gender, but I didn’t pull this suggestion out of my ass. I pulled it out of having read everything Chandler wrote and seeing a pattern.

124

Irene Adler has also been given far more importance than she had in the stories. She’s a major character in “A Scandal in Bohemia”, but is only briefly mentioned in a couple of later stories as one of the few people who’d managed to outwit Holmes.

Since she’s the only woman in the canon presented as being anywhere near an intellectual match for Holmes and also the only one who could plausibly be made into a love interest, she’s become more prominent in Holmes adaptations than she was in the stories. But in “Bohemia” Watson says that while Holmes has high regard for Adler, he never loved her and probably wasn’t even capable of loving her. Even if Watson is wrong about this, which is certainly possible, Adler herself shows no romantic interest in Holmes and the story ends with her happily married to another man.

125

I agree, but this is by no means a recent development. The William Gillette play Sherlock Holmes, of course, kicked it off by making Moriarty the main villain of the piece. I think ever since that people thought they needed a Major Villain to act as counterpoint to Holmes.

The second Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie (and the only one, besides the first, Hound of the Baskervilles, to be set in Victorian England - after that they unaccountably transported him to contemporary Britain) has Moriarty as the villain in a film that wasn’t derived from any Doyle story. I mention the Rathbone series in patrticular because of its high profile – other Sherlock Holmes movies of the 30s and 40s brought in Moriarty as a villain.

So did the TV movie Sherlock Holmes in New York in the 1970s (with John Huston as Moriarty!), the la Rosa play The Sign of Four: The Curse of the Timber Toe, bringing Moriarty into a story he originally had nothing to do with.

He was in Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven Per Cent Solution (and the movie derived from the book), of course, but not at all in his usual role. Meyer, at least, deserves some credit for going against the flow.

Even the John Haweswoth/Jeremy Brett BBC/WGBH series Sherlock Holmes is guilty of this. They brought in Moriarty in his proper place, of course, in The Final Problem, but they had him as the Menacing Presence Behind the Scenes in The Red-Headed League, where he really doesn’t belong. I suppose they wanted to foreshadow and to demonstrate that he really was the Spider That Sat at the Center of the Web.
Heck, Doyle himself is really responsible for this unwarranted invoking of Moriarty. What the hell is Moriarty doing in The Valley of Fear, a novel that doesn’t require his presence at all, and which doesn’t fit into the chronology of Holmes stories unless you make some blathering excuses and shoehorn it in sideways?

126

Uptown Sinclair’s The Jungle upset many people and quickly led to government restrictions at meat packing plants, the book was actually an attempt to show the plight of the working class and a call for socialism.

127

That Superman and Batman have some code against killing.

They didn’t kill very often but until the early 1950s, with the creation of the comic book code and pressure on the industry, they did.

In one famous sequence, a villain fires some bullets at Superman and Superman dodges the bullets, picks him up and throws him in front of the bullets.

128

That’s not a misrepresentation, it’s just an evolution of the characters. They didn’t have codes against killing when they were created, but they absolutely have such codes now.

129

I think Daigo means “#5.”

Yeah, I’ve noticed that some people miss that. This is presumably because they zoned out at some point during the episode. Short attention spans, up past their bedtime, whatever.

Yes, well, there are different ways to be ugly, and not all “ugly Americans” are references to Burdick. This far on, precious few are.

As for Watson, see Kate Beaton’s strips on that (they are short):

130

It does indeed. You are being presumptuous in assuming it was my language skills, rather than my memory, that was at fault.

131

More like a retcon. They supposedly always had this “code against killing”, which in fact was only due to political pressure against the comic book industry.

132

Is that his rapper name? :wink:

133

I presume no such thing. I didn’t recognize the name, so I was checking to see if that was (as I supposed) the notorious Bikini Atoll fishing boat, so I looked it up on Wikipedia, and they said “#5,” so then I reread the name and realized “go” is 5.

Anyway…

One thing I am bemused by is how many people assume that Wonder Woman is a female Superman with the same power set. They are rather superficially alike (super-strong flying mesomorphs with wavy black hair!) but no, Wondy does not shoot beams of heat–nor beams of anything–out of her eyes.

134

You certainly did. If not, you were injudicious in your choice of phrasing, because it reads like a dig. You should be more careful.

135

To get back on topic, a couple from Warner Brothers cartoons:

Foghorn Leghorn never said “I say, I say”. He only said “I say” once in a sentence, as in “Now hold on th–I say, hold on there a minute son!”

Porky pig didn’t say “Th-Th-Th-That’s all folks!”. Gabby Goat was the character who stuttered. Porky stammered. What he said at the end was more like "Uh-buh-dee uh-buh-da uh-buh-dee uh-buh-da uh-buh-That’s all, folks!’

136

Ayn Rand disagreed; she wrote a pamphlet titled “The Virtue of Selfishness.” She was committed enough to her views that she felt there was no sense in being euphemistic.

Re: the escalation in importance of Moriarty and Irene Adler in the Sherlock Holmes canon, this didn’t start only with adaptations. Players of “The Game” drew attention to them earlier. The Sherlockian canon otherwise consists of essentially four characters: Holmes, Watson, Mrs. Hudson, and LeStrade. I don’t blame adapters for grasping at straws.

137

I’ve always figured the line would be changed when performing the soliloquy as a solo audition/practice piece, where referring to a character who isn’t there would be confusing.

But Yorick the expert. :slight_smile:

138

I agree with the Holmes ones, especially Moriarty and Adler.

Moriarty was originally a one-off villain that Doyle created to off Holmes. In order to off Holmes, Doyle wished to create a villain that was Holmes’ intellectual equal, someone to make Holmes’ death appropriate. Otherwise, having Holmes hit by a [del]bus[/del] carriage would be totally unsatisfying.

Then there are few later references to try to back-justify where Moriarty had been in the background.

From a fiction standpoint, when trying to come up with later stories, especially for long-running series, writers have 2 needs. One, they need sufficient challenge for Holmes. One place to find that is exploring Moriarty. Second, they might wish to explore the romantic angle. But there’s very little territory there. Adler can only be graced with the role of romantic interest because she’s the only woman who Holmes shows any interest in beyond gentlemanly concern. Nevermind there’s no romantic involvement, and Scandal ends with Irene Adler running off to marry another man, and thus while she bests Holmes, he can surrender because he accomplishes the intent if not the deed of his job - preventing the exposure of the scandalous pictures to protect his client’s reputation and impending marriage.

It’s also worth noting that there are several police detectives that Holmes interacts with besides Lestrade. In fact, he arguably interacts with Gregson more, especially early on. Gregson is much more the arrogant blusterer who thinks Holmes is a glory hound and also takes credit for Holmes’ work. However, I can see how a series might wish to simplify Holmes’ interactions with police to one individual.

And the gay thing is silly projection to foster a cause, slashfic. Holmes and Watson share “rooms” early on to save expenses. At the beginning of their interactions, Watson is a pensioner from the army with an injury and in need of rest, trying to start his business. He’s got nothing to draw upon yet. And Holmes is puttering around without an identifiable career, not yet earning much because he’s not yet gained a reputation to draw in the cases. They’re both a little light on funds, and share expenses. They take rooms in a boarding house, sharing rent to the landlady. There is a common sitting room they share with a kitchen area, and then they have separate bedrooms. Later, Watson marries and moves out, but by then Holmes is making sufficient money that it is no longer a concern, so he doesn’t need to take in another roommate. He’d prefer his privacy by then. Also, he’d probably be a nightmare to find anyone else willing to share with him. Being messy and loud and keeping odd hours is bad enough, shooting his pistol in the sitting room is quite too much.

139

Has Holmes ever actually been depicted as gay in pop culture? I know of some works that have played around with the idea that he might seem gay, but not any where he really is gay. In The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) Holmes claims to be gay, but he’s lying – he’s trying to let a woman down gently. In the Sherlock series other people keep assuming that 21st century Holmes and Watson are a couple, but again it isn’t true.

I suspect one reason why Irene Adler became more prominent in Holmes adaptations was due to concern that without an obvious female love interest Holmes would come across as gay to modern audiences. He presumably didn’t seem that way to Victorian readers and I don’t think it’s plausible that Doyle intended for him to be homosexual, but by the late 20th century a lot of people were going to assume that a man with no apparent interest in women must be interested in men instead.

140

Bumping up with something Halloweeny…

I’ve had a bit of Dracula on the brain since Halloween has just been here. It’s occurred to me that so many Dracula spin-offs of the last few years or so have had Dracula and Mina Harker having a consensual sexual relationship. For example, there have been no less than three sequel novels (Dracula The Un-Dead by a descendant of Bram Stoker’s,* Dracula In Love *and Dracula, My Love) that have taken this and run with it. It seems, from what I’ve heard, that the new NBC series has the whole Mina-as-reincarnation-of-Dracula’s-lost-love that the Francis Ford Coppola movie had. And the Frank Langella version (which, as some versions do, played musical names with Mina and Lucy–Lucy was the hero’s love interest, and Mina was the one who died, came back, and was staked–and was Van Helsing’s daughter to boot) had Lucy willingly giving into Dracula.

But that is NOT the case in Stoker’s novel. Mina and her fiancé-turned-husband Jonathan are very much in love, and she shows no interest in anyone else. Her encounter with Dracula was portrayed as a metaphorical RAPE–brutal, horrifying, and very much against Mina’s will. The implications of turning this into a consensual encounter are a little squicky.

The reincarnation-of-a-dead-wife business didn’t even really start with Coppola–the Jack Palance version, one of the first to portray Dracula as tortured and sympathetic, had Lucy Westenra as the reincarnation instead of Mina.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Francis Ford Coppola movie despite its flaws and excesses–and the backstory of Dracula’s dead wife was actually taken from a supposedly true story about the first wife of Vlad The Impaler. But it just seems to me that poor Jonathan always gets the short end of the stick in adaptations–and a really terrific couple from the novel always gets screwed over in the process.

Oh, and the aforementioned Dracula The Un-Dead by Dacre Stoker? I was turned off it just reading the summary and the reviews, because it seems that the author just trampled on all the happiness that the characters had worked so hard for by the end of the original. Mina and Jonathan were unhappy, Van Helsing was disgraced professionally, Seward was a morphine addict, and Arthur’s marriage was loveless (when the epilogue of the novel revealed that both he and Seward entered happy marriages some years after the events of the novel). In fact, what with the Mina/Dracula pairing and Seward’s drug use, it seems to have been more of a sequel to the Coppola movie than to the Stoker novel! I won’t go into one of the major twists that Dacre came up with toward the end involving a major character.