Author: Hank Aldridge

We’ve discussed this week about the concept of intertextuality and paratext. And as is painfully obvious with Hollywood these days, no fictional work is completely original; all fictional narratives of the past and present are in dialogue with each other, and any individual piece is defined by more than itself. How we perceive any given piece can changed – and therefore the piece itself can by further defined – by its advertising, its era, and even other movies/shows. What if I was to tell you that Die Hard was one of my favorite comedies ever made? No, I’m not talking about the Bob’s Burgers‘ Die Hard, I mean the actual, 1988, Bruce Willis movie Die Hard. Let me explain.

Now some of you may immediately think that I am going to bring up how Bruce Willis was known for being a sitcom actor at the time, and how people thought he was a strange choice to be cast in such a grounded, ultraviolent action thriller. All of that is completely valid and I’m sure has effect the viewing of this arguably genre defining classic for people of my parents’ generation, but in this case, I as well as surely many of you have known Bruce Willis all my life as an action star. That alone had no effect on my viewing experience. However, here’s a little tidbit that just might shock you: did you know Die Hard is actually based on a novel? It’s a relatively obscure novel called Nothing Lasts Forever. If you haven’t read the novel, don’t worry, I haven’t either. All you need to know about this book is that it is a sequel to the novel The Detective. All you need to know about that book is that it was adapted into a 1968 film of the same name. All you need to know about that film is that it starred Frank Sinatra – yes, that Frank Sinatra. Why is this important? Well if your parents thought Bruce Willis was an odd choice for Die Hard, take a gander at this: before going into production the studio was contractually obligated to ask Sinatra if he wanted to star in it.

POOF! Die Hard is now a comedy.

You’re Welcome

So this is just me going to be talking about an episode from a show I particularly like called Tales from the Crypt. It was a rather crude, raunchy anthology series in the late 1980s and early 1990s that was also a send up to pulp horror comics from the 50s, specifically of a magazine originally called The Vault of Horror which later was retitled – you guessed it – Tales From the Crypt. You’ll see why I bring up this bit of background knowledge later. As for the tv show, like I said it’s an anthology so the stories follow no continuity, but the one element that links them all together is that they are hosted by a Gollum looking fella with an appetite for horror related puns called the Crypt Keeper. What is interesting is that there is an episode called Lower Berth in which two circus attractions (a boy with literally two faces and an undead mummy) give birth to a child at the end and that child is the Crypt Keeper. This I can’t figure out which type but I do believe is some form of narrative complexity but by breaking the standards of the show’s own narrative, rather than the show’s general narrative breaking standards of television. You see, this is the only episode where the Crypt Keeper’s existence is acknowledge within the stories he presents to us. And at first I was going to say isn’t it crazy that they had this kind of narrative complexity from a comic book back in the 50s? But then it hit me. Wait a minute, the original comics did not have a host. But the Crypt Keeper shows the cover of the corresponding comic just like always at the beginning of Lower Berth, so this is based on an existing comic, but how random would it be for the writers of the comic to make up some character called the Crypt Keeper for this one issue and have that, a character no one’s ever heard of before, be the big twist at the end. So I did a little research and what I found was 1) No, the original comics had no host, let alone the Crypt Keeper 2) Yes, the original comic did end with baby Crypt Keeper (my new baby yoda btw) as the big twist HOWEVER 3) The Crypt Keeper was in fact around before this issue so die hard fans would have known who he was. Apparently he was not as strongly associated with the Tales from the Crypt comic series, but he did make occasional appearances and his first appearance was in a eerily similar named issue of a comic series called Crime Patrol: The Crypt of Terror. It’s interesting isn’t it how such a little change in an adaptation, an otherwise faithful one no less, of some preexisting work can lead to such drastic shifts in the nature of something like the narrative?

I want to semi-address a concept introduced (at least to me) by the Roseanne reading: the idea that a piece shown with different surrounding commercials is not the same piece. The reason I say semi address is because I recognize that what I am about to talk about is not exactly along the same point as the reading. The reading was more focused on what a piece of television might mean to people concerning the differences in the content surrounding it. I instead what to look at commercials less as a meta device and more as a narrative aspect and rather than discuss how two different commercials might result in different readings of the same episode, I instead want to illustrate how an episode is affected simply by whether it has commercials or not. I first remember thinking about this as a kid who was way into Ben 10 and when I first watched a Ben 10 episode on dvd, which of course had no commercials, it was the first time I actually noticed the commercial break. At first, being a dumbass kid, it took me a little while to figure out “Wait why do they keep cutting to black and then showing me the same three seconds I just saw?” Nowadays with all the streaming services we have, their original shows don’t have to account for this but I’m willing to guess a lot more 0f us have noticed when we go to watch an older show made in the golden age of network television that of course still has its commercial breaks. I bring this up because I encourage you to notice how this contributes to where an episode of any show has to leave a cliffhanger, has to leave you with that feeling of What’s gonna happen? In Ben 10, they can’t guarantee that the very next episode in this time slot is gonna be another Ben 10, and even if it is what are the chances it’s the next episode chronologically, so the commercials throughout the episode mark where the cliffhangers are. I’d even argue as much as I hated commercials as a kid, that’s probably because the cliffhangers were very well timed. I hated the commercials because they always came on when something big was about to happen, but I do think that forcing me to wait had me more engaged than when I watched them on dvd and I would find out what would happen in like a second. Shows like the DC Universe’s Harley Quinn series (check it out btw, criminally overlooked) will more consistently place cliffhangers at the end of each episode so that you can just binge it all at once.