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Noel Murray on Eerie Indiana
Jun. 8th, 2020 07:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
froodleWhen DC Comics decided to reboot Superman in the mid-’80s—the first of many reboots to come—editor Julius Schwartz agreed to let an eager Alan Moore write the last adventure of the “old” Superman, in a story called “Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow?” As a way of hedging their bets, Moore and DC dubbed it “an imaginary story,” reviving a concept DC writers often used in the ’50s and ’60s when they wanted to play around with the Superman mythology without wrecking continuity. But Moore threw a curveball in his opening caption, writing, “This is an Imaginary Story… aren’t they all?” This has become a well-quoted line, cited by anyone easily irritated by the way science-fiction/fantasy/adventure fans become preoccupied over what’s “real” or what isn’t in their favorite fictional universes. For some, though, when Alan Moore wrote that line, he committed a crime against fiction.
Do storytellers have an obligation to maintain suspension of disbelief? Some people love it when a creator reminds the audience that what they’re reading or watching is nothing more than an elaborate fake, while others feel betrayed by that kind of willful goofery, wondering why they should invest time and interest in characters and situations that even the authors don’t take seriously. Being flip is risky.
That probably explains why Joe Dante has had such a rocky career. Weaned on wiseass Warner Bros. cartoons and endearingly fakey B-movies, Dante has always been a proponent of gags over realism, pushing his tongue deeply into his cheek in movies like Piranha, Small Soldiers, and the Gremlins series. Check the credits of any TV anthology series produced after 1980, and chances are Dante directed an episode or two, usually taking on scripts with quirky or mind-bending aspects, such as the Amazing Stories episode “The Greibble,” in which a voracious Seussian children’s-book character comes to life and terrorizes a suburban home, or the Night Visions episode “The Occupant,” about a woman who thinks an intruder has been rearranging the furniture in her house, until she learns that it isn’t her house, and she’s the intruder.
In 1991, José Rivera and Karl Schaefer co-created Eerie, Indiana, a kid-friendly spin on Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone about a boy named Marshall Teller (played by Omri Katz) who lives with his family in a small town infested with monsters and unexplained phenomena. Joe Dante was brought in as a creative consultant and frequent director, since this kind of premise—wholesome Americana undercut by the bizarre—is Dante’s stock in trade. In the 18th episode of Eerie, Indiana’s lone 19-episode season, Dante also makes an appearance, playing himself: the harried director of an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
( Read more... )
Do storytellers have an obligation to maintain suspension of disbelief? Some people love it when a creator reminds the audience that what they’re reading or watching is nothing more than an elaborate fake, while others feel betrayed by that kind of willful goofery, wondering why they should invest time and interest in characters and situations that even the authors don’t take seriously. Being flip is risky.
That probably explains why Joe Dante has had such a rocky career. Weaned on wiseass Warner Bros. cartoons and endearingly fakey B-movies, Dante has always been a proponent of gags over realism, pushing his tongue deeply into his cheek in movies like Piranha, Small Soldiers, and the Gremlins series. Check the credits of any TV anthology series produced after 1980, and chances are Dante directed an episode or two, usually taking on scripts with quirky or mind-bending aspects, such as the Amazing Stories episode “The Greibble,” in which a voracious Seussian children’s-book character comes to life and terrorizes a suburban home, or the Night Visions episode “The Occupant,” about a woman who thinks an intruder has been rearranging the furniture in her house, until she learns that it isn’t her house, and she’s the intruder.
In 1991, José Rivera and Karl Schaefer co-created Eerie, Indiana, a kid-friendly spin on Twin Peaks and The Twilight Zone about a boy named Marshall Teller (played by Omri Katz) who lives with his family in a small town infested with monsters and unexplained phenomena. Joe Dante was brought in as a creative consultant and frequent director, since this kind of premise—wholesome Americana undercut by the bizarre—is Dante’s stock in trade. In the 18th episode of Eerie, Indiana’s lone 19-episode season, Dante also makes an appearance, playing himself: the harried director of an episode of Eerie, Indiana.
( Read more... )
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