Arthur 7/28/06

Here are cartoons from Arthur, King of Time and Space since last Friday. Fanfiction cartoons are on their annual summer hiatus.

( Including last Friday's, because it leads into Saturday's. )

If you're an AKOTAS reader who's ever looked fruitlessly for a PayPal donation button on the site, at this time I'd like you to know that I do have a PayPal account for scarfman@iglou.com and that uninterrupted service may be dependent on reader generosity. Thanks.

Thanks for reading.

Irving the Vampire Slayer

Irving Thalberg, the creative and business genius behind MGM Studios when the Marx Brothers were first there, had this analogy for screenwriting to a football game. A good story is like a football game when the home team slugs away at their opponents for most of four quarters and winds up six points down, without possession, on their own twenty-five yard line, at the two-minute warning; and then intercepts for a ninety-yard touchdown run and an extra point scored with a kick just before the gun. Joss Whedon seems to believe in the same plan, and it got on my nerves.

The fourth-season premiere of BVS was when I identified the trope: Buffy gets smacked down by the world and her friends in act one, Buffy gets smacked down by the world and her friends in act two, Buffy gets smacked down by the world and her friends in act three, Buffy gets ready to throw in the towel in act four, Buffy gets mad and kicks ass in act five. People argued with me about the episode; "That's what it's like when you go off to college. In high school you're used to having been top of the pecking order and Somebody Special, and then you go off to college and you're nobody." That's true, I remember it¹; but the episode still represented a formula I'd gotten my fill of². Notable later instances of this formula include the one when Giles got turned into a demon, and the one when the Watchers' Council came to test Buffy whether she was worthy to learn what they knew about Glory³.

I recently concluded that where season seven of BVS fails for me is that it's the same formula dragged out across the whole season.

¹ It may be why I only lasted at Northwestern a year.

² Same as I despised The Matrix because, and only because, I'd hit my tolerance point for adventure films where all the cast wears black leather. I've channel-flipped past The Matrix once or twice since then and I think I'd quite like it now if I saw it straight through.

³ One of those, though now I forget which, was even such a good execution of the formula that I enjoyed the episode before I noticed the formula was back.