Monthly Archives: February 2013

Time and Distance

  • Reading time:5 mins read

With the recent shots of the rebuilt Hartnell-era sets for Mark Gatiss’ upcoming 50th anniversary biopic, the more conservative edges of Who fandom are bouncing off the (plywood and fiberglass) walls, demanding to know why the show’s current incarnation has changed anything at all. The way that the show was 50 years ago should be the way that it is now — never mind that the whole point of the show is change, and that it would never have survived this long without it.

A recent discussion turned to the final moments of Skyfall, which — not to spoil anything for the holdouts — bring the awesome return of a very, very familiar location from the early years of the series. When it becomes clear what’s happening, it feels like an epiphany. A chill goes up the spine. All of that jazz. Someone held out that moment as proof that they should never have changed anything about Doctor Who, because look at how right it all felt when they put things back the way they were supposed to be! Another faction came in to pooh-pooh overt calls to nostalgia, saying that anything alive needed to keep moving forward.

Which is, of course, true — but there’s a little more than nostalgia in Skyfall. All of the Daniel Craig Bond movies use the reboot in Casino Royale to make a point of building and exploring the myth of the character and the franchise. To those in the know the office isn’t just a point of nostalgia; it’s a mythic touchstone that seems to suggest deeper meaning by drawing on what we already know. When you see it, the intended reaction seems to be something along the lines of “Oh, so this is how we got there!” It draws from the past to build on it and make it feel significant in a new and vibrant way.

Generally I think the new series has done a pretty good job of following that path — particularly under Davies’ eye. When Moffat tries to inject meaning, it’s kind of… labored and metatextual (i.e. “Doctor WHOOOOOOO”; “The Doctor and the monsters; you can’t have one without the other!” and all). Compare that to the offhanded way that Davies harks back to The Edge of Destruction and (possibly) the McGann film in Eccleston’s last few episodes, or establishes any number of iconic elements from the classic series (Daleks, Time Lords, Sarah Jane, the Master) as ancient lore that carry a weight of significance as they trickle into the present.

Time and distance give the space for reflection; the images and concepts that persist form the basis of legend. For a new chapter to seize on those images and concepts and, without undue deference, to explore their place in the myth — that makes the whole thing seem coherent, it lends an apparent weight to the immediate events, and it lends a hint of consequence to previous instances of those images and concepts — as well as their immediate circumstances.

So. It’s a little more complicated, I think. It’s not that the office in Skyfall is how it should be; it’s that now it’s how it always was in the old days, and that this fact now carries a little more apparent meaning than it did — or than it would have, had things remained that way over the last several movies. Likewise it’s not a matter of nostalgia. Nostalgia is zombie thinking; the living death of the past, casting a pall on all that still thrives. These elements aren’t about stasis; they’re about a sense of consequence. Not what things are, but why they are that way — or at least how they came to be.

This is, to my mind, a really enthralling way to go about storytelling within an ancient and well-defined framework. Over the last decade reams of pop culture “reboots” and new adaptations have heavily pulled on this structure — Bond, Battlestar Galactica, Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, Nolan’s Batman series. Even Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland sequel (confusingly titled “Alice in Wonderland”) has a bunch to say about personal change, the differences in Victorian expectations of women versus young children, and the nature of Wonderland as an extended metaphor for Alice’s psyche, that lends new perspective to the original material.

Of all of these, I think that Davies’ Who is one of the bigger accomplishments. It draws heavily from and extrapolates from the classic series, attempting to lay extra layers of meaning onto what came before — yet it tends to avoid overt reverence. The result is both vital, in the sense that it is alive and does what it needs to do by the pragmatic demands of the present, and consequential in that the present and all that occurs within it occurs within eyesight of the looming weight, promise, and threat of the past.

This is of course just my interpretation.

Kenji Eno

  • Reading time:5 mins read

Man. This is making me feel a little weird.

If you’re reading this blog, you know how I am with videogames; this deep-seated ambivalence. I love what they can be, but I tend to hate what they are. There’s a small handful of designers out there who I think have the right ideas or the right attitude, that could actually make something of this form if people just listened to what they said.

One of the top tier is Kenji Eno. He retired in a huff about 13 years ago. Since then I doubt a month has gone by when I haven’t wondered if he’s going to ever design another game. Every few years he has threatened to, and he very nearly did something for the Wii. (EDIT: Looks like he actually followed through, on a smaller scale.) His final game, D2, is sometimes my favorite game for the Dreamcast, which is in turn my favorite game system and the last bastion of progressive design in the mainstream industry.

The man was avant-garde in an era when videogames never ever were. He couldn’t follow a straight formula if his life depended on it. He’d get bored and depressed at the suggestion, and then go make a sound-only game for blind people, or… something like this:

1UP: What can you tell us about Short Warp, the wild minigame collection you made for 3DO?

KE: This was the funkiest game!

1UP: And it even came packaged with a free condom. Were you trying to get gamers to have more sex? Because when we see used copies in stores, the condom is always unused and unopened.

KE: That’s sad. [Laughs] This game was made when I was almost on the edge. My mental status was getting very unbalanced, so I wanted to balance myself back by creating a game like this. I was thinking, “If I’m going to create a game like this, I should do something really crazy.” And that’s how I came up with the idea of this game, and that’s why I included a condom. However, I had to make it limited because the packaging was expensive because it came packed with a condom, so the physical dimensions of the package got thicker, and there weren’t any packages like that. So the manufacturing fee jumped up, and condoms weren’t cheap either, so it was expensive to manufacture the games. If I manufactured too many units, I was going to be deep in the red. So that’s why I limited the units.

1UP: How many units did you make?

KE: 10,000, and I hand-numbered all of the packages myself.

The man was an auteur and a rock star, and the game industry didn’t know what to do with him. After a certain point he got fed up with the scene and returned to his first calling, music.

He was only 42 when he died. Which means he was 29 when he retired from game design. He was 20 when he got his start with the sound design to a Famicom prot of Altered Beast. He was 25 when he delivered his breakout game, D. His entire career spanned just a decade, from scutwork through superstardom to sidelining and burnout. In amongst there he met and influenced and was influenced by the likes of Goichi Suda and Fumito Ueda. And he also pissed people off — not without good reason, or fair warning.

I was very mad at Sony. When I released D on the PlayStation, Acclaim was to publish it. So the sales people gathered orders for a 100,000 units, but Sony had given their other titles manufacturing priority. So Sony told me that they had only manufactured 40,000 units, and I was very mad about that . . . . So I was talking to a guy at Sony, and this was toward the end of the year, and I said, “OK, I’m going to go to [Japanese electronics retailer] Bic Camera, and if I don’t see my game there, I’m going to punch you.” and they said, “No don’t worry about it. It’s going to be there.” And I went to Bic Camera and didn’t find it, so I actually did punch this guy — so that should tell you how mad I was.

And so now he’s dead. And an era is passed. Be that as it may, surely his effort must have had some effect. Fifteen years and a couple of abysmal console launches later, surely the field is changed somewhat?

Well. Look at that; a new PlayStation.

Here’s the short version.

Yoshida: What do you mean, people aren’t buying game consoles? People still buy consoles. All we have to do is bring people games that they want to play, and they will buy our console. That doesn’t mean original or exclusive games, and we certainly don’t need new voices or intend to publish anything too outside the norm — but I am confident that the games that happen to materialize on our system will make people want to own it.

…

So okay. He probably wouldn’t have made another game on the scale of what came before. And if he did, it would have made only a small impact — and far too late to turn this ship around. You can’t fight entropy. Not with a hundred Enos. It’s foolish, really. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, or hope.

It’s not his voice that I’ll miss; it’s the potential that he represented. It’s the fact that guys like Eno are out there in the world, and that just sometimes they have an effect — either directly or by proxy. And now there’s one fewer. And the world is poorer for it.

Thanks to Amandeep Jutla and Frank Cifaldi.

The Reign of Terror

  • Reading time:6 mins read

So the first season of classic Doctor Who is now complete on DVD — or as complete as it will get. The seven-part story Marco Polo is missing, and is represented on DVD by a half-hour cut-down photo reconstruction set to the surviving audio track. And then there is the case of the season finale, the six-part The Reign of Terror. As with Marco Polo it’s one of those early-era historicals, this time set during the French Revolution. For years the serial was missing, but in the 1980s four of its six parts were recovered from a film archive in Cyprus. Cypress should also have held copies of episodes four and five, but they were destroyed during a Turkish invasion in 1974. Such is the way of things.

As with the Patrick Troughton serial The Invasion, the serials two missing episodes have been animated for DVD release. New pictures are set to the existing audio, and bingo; we have a completed episode. Whereas The Invasion was animated by famed British studio Cosgrove Hall (responsible for Danger Mouse and Count Duckula, among other series), The Reign of Terror was primarily animated by a guy off of the Internet who calls himself Otaking.

The results are, shall we say, mixed. The discussion that I have seen has focused on the rapid cutting in episode four, which goes against the directorial style of the existing episodes (and indeed most 1960s TV). People have also singled out lots of weird touches like candles that cast shadows of themselves on the wall, or an odd cutaway to a character’s crotch as he rose from a chair. The animation definitely has its problems, but I wouldn’t consider any of that a major issue.

The biggest thing that stands out to me, to the extent that I find the animation hard to watch, is a drastic difference in character models from one shot to the next. In one scene it took me a while before I realized that two separate shots depicted the same character, as the geometry and shading looked so completely different. I just thought there was another unspecified character in the room.

The other problem, which ties into the above confusion, has to do with dialogue. Due to various decisions it often takes some concentration on my part to work out who is talking, and to whom. Although I understand the impulse to avoid as much lipsync as possible, as it is very time-consuming and tedious work, there seems to be little attention here to the flow of the script. Halfway through a sentence we will cut to a shot of the character standing up with his mouth closed. Sometimes a character barely opens his mouth before we switch to an extended reaction shot. This is particularly evident in conversations involving Hartnell; it seems whenever another character is talking all we see is close-ups of Hartnell’s face. A couple of times — and this is almost cute — the moment a character begins to talk, the top of another character’s head passes in front of his mouth.

To make it stranger all of this is contrasted with sudden jump cuts to an extreme blow-up of a character’s mouth. That… still doesn’t help me follow the discussion. It just makes me feel like I’m being jerked around.

The thing that confuses me about the character models is that there are only limited drawings for each character. Then the animators apply a morphing effect to the portraits to add lipsync and generally make them less static. I can understand the model shifting if we’re talking about hundreds, or even dozens, of frames of animation. Here it’s just a few individual drawings. Seriously? You can’t draw six pictures of William Hartnell with the same general facial geometry? And then once you have the pictures you can’t be bothered to animate a complete sentence?

As I say, I don’t so much care about the specific editorial choices. So the editing jumps around more than it should from a historical perspective; okay, whatever. So long as the cutting doesn’t interfere with my moment-to-moment comprehension, I’ll accept the stylization. The visuals are a new product, and you have to give them some creative leeway to do what the animator feels they need to do. What bothers me about the above two issues is the extent to which they interfere with my comprehension, and generally make the viewing experience more work than it should be.

When I watch The Invasion, I almost feel a twinge of disappointment when the animation ends. I’ve shown it to a couple of people, and they were enthralled with episode one — and then totally lost interest when it hit episode two and switched to a live-action archive TV show. The animation was that good, on its own merits. Here, I was relieved when the animation ended and I could relax my attention. I don’t think I would show this to someone who wasn’t already invested in the era, as I don’t think it reflects well on the series. It’s better than recons or the narrated episodes, in that I do feel that I can follow the story now — but I still have to work at it.

Maybe I could accept that better in the middle of a more interesting story. As it is, this is a simple and rather uneventful tale — so all the while that I’m focusing, I can’t help but wonder if it’s worth the effort. By no means is this a poor story, and I’ll take even a slightly dull Hartnell over great swaths of the show’s history. What rankles me is the juxtaposition. If Reign were to swap animation teams with The Invasion, I think I could handle things a little better; a story as still and simple as The Reign of Terror demands the clarity of a Cosgrove Hall, while a story as jumbled as The Invasion could withstand a little more shaking.

To my understanding the animation team here underwent several changes in procedure as the project went along, and to be sure the end of episode five is much steadier than the start of episode four — but the above problems persist to the end. Previously, on the basis of the Invasion animations, I was eager to see their work on the remaining missing episodes. Now I approach the prospect with more caution.