I’m not quite sure how I pulled it off, but I became a Ralph Bakshi fan at a fairly young age. My first introduction to him, as it probably was for most kids, was Bakshi’s failed children’s film Wizards. And by failed I mean totally awesome!

You see Bakshi was a bit of a novelty amongst American cartoonists in that he didn’t make animated films that pandered to children and their parents. He wasn’t much of a fan of Disney so when he made a children’s film about warring wizards in a post-apocalyptic world he made sure to include plenty of bloody violence, authentic Nazi war propaganda films and an assassin named Peace. Needless to say critics and parents were a bit bewildered by the film and it was soon relegated to obscurity.

From there I moved on next to Street Fight (aka Coonskin). Unlike Wizards, Street Fight was made specifically for adults as it was a parody of blaxploitation films and satirizes racist stereotypes. And as it was made for adults it came with an R rating attached. Now at the time I was around 13 years old, and the idea of an R rated cartoon seemed positively unthinkable, if not impossible to me. (Little did I know that Bakshi had already topped that rating with his first feature film Fritz the Cat, which had garnered an X rating.) Sure enough, like any blaxploitation film Street Fight was filled with violence, rampant cursing and even the occasional bit of nudity. Nudity in a cartoon? That’s unpossible!
(more…)

Everything Bad is Good For You

With the difficulty in modern literature finding an audience, it is no wonder that classic literature is having an even more difficult time connecting with readers. Results from marketing research performed by Orion Group publishing were “near-unanimous” in revealing that people thought classic literature to be “long, slow and repetitive” and “many respondents admitted to having an interest in the stories when they had come upon them in another way, like watching a TV adaptation or film that brought alive the story and characters.”

This lead to Orion to consider publishing condensed versions of classic literature:

“Literally, life is too short. Once you get to a certain place in your life, you realize that there is a finite number of books you’re going to be able to read,” [Malcom] Edwards [of Orion] says. He admits to “bouncing off” Moby Dick several times, even though the whaling, the quest and the biblical aspects of the book all sound appealing. Would he have had more success with a shorter, snappier version?

The condensing of classic literature can be seen as a beginning. How long will it be until modern literature is viewed as being slow or repetitive? Already English teachers are using film at some point “as a replacement for a long text, or as a supplement to a written text or thematic unit.” How long before teachers exclusively use movies as an alternative experience of the text, especially when taking into account the finite amount of classes and the seemingly infinite amount of available material? How long before the idea of the text becomes just as important – if not more – as the text itself? (more…)