When I send out my "News from Markworld" tomorrow, there sadly won't be any Favourite Quotes of the Month, mainly because I don't have any. Well, I do have this one from American Dad:
Klaus>> And they say, if you play it backwards, you can hear the voice of a dead kid!
Hayley>> Whoa! Wait, how do you play Monopoly backwards?
I'm often intrigued when I read something that's billed as "semi-autobiographical," or when an author says, "Well, I based the character largely on myself." I find it intriging because I think I'm going to some grand insight into what the author truly thinks of himself/herself. Case in point, Lauren Faust.
I've finally embraced the cartoon Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, the newest offering from Powerpuff Girls creator Craig McCracken. One of the chracters is Francis "Frankie" Foster. She's a 20-something punk rocker chick who is, for all intents and purposes, the manager of the foster home. Doing some reading online, I find that the chracter is largely based on Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends writer/producer (and McCracken's wife) Lauren Faust.
So, the other day, I was watching an episode called Frankie, My Dear, and I see "written by Lauren Faust; storyboarded by Lauren Faust," and my eyebrow raisd. It was a Frankie-centred episode, so I started thinking, "Hmmm, I wonder if this'll give me some insights into this Lauren Faust person."
The episode deals with everyone around Frankie falling in love with her, and thus her trying to let everyone down easy. I walked away going, "Well, this Lauren Faust certainly has a healthy ego!"
It happened again with an episode called Store Wars. Again, written and storyboarded by Lauren Faust. In this one, Frankie slowly freaks out as everyone around her just kind of does their own (damaging) thing. I walked away going, "Hmm, must have been a bad day at the office!"
Of course, I'm certain that most of this is just my own interpretation, as I've always been dubious of people who try to interpret creative works. Ever since those first poetry analysis classes in Junior High, I always looked at my teacher and thought, "Yeah, but how do you know that that's what the author meant?"
So how do I know that that's what the author meant?
Switching now to movie directors, I had this funny thought recently.
Mel Gibson is George Lucas!
With the release of Episode III, George Lucas said that now he can get back to pursuing his personal artistic endeavours, and making all kinds of weird, crazy art films. "I've made enough and I've earned enough that I can fail for the rest of my life," he said. Well, I don't think that he'll fail.... It's more like he's made enough and earned enough that he can do whatever he wants and not worry about what other people'll will think.
And I realized that Mel Gibson is at that point that Lucas has been aspiring to. Think about it. The Passion of the Christ was, essentially, a crazy little independent film that Gibson paid for out of his own pocket and just really, really wanted to make. We're going to get that again this summer with another Gibson writen and directed epic. It's called Apocolypto, and is Gibson's speculative take on the last days of the Mayan empire.
And these are films that Gibson can make because he's made enough and he's earned enough that he can do whatever he wants and not worry about what other people will think.
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