Inspired by yesterday’s post on the literary significance of Choose Your Own Adventure novels, our own Mark Lee decided to revisit some significant historical adventures:

How about you, Overthinkers? Do you have a love of the classics and a copy of Photoshop? Submit your own Choose Your Overthought Adventure in one of the following ways:

• Upload it to your own image-hosting site (Flickr, Photobucket, your own site) and post the link in the comments; or
• E-mail it to the editors.

Join in the fun! Uncover the mystery! Choose from two possible endings!

Update: in lieu of a Photoshop cover, we will accept a (written) sample page from the book, with some appropriate choices of where to turn to at the end. But be creative!

[If anyone was hoping for another Cowboy Bebop post, don't worry - I haven't abandoned the series. But Choose Your Own Adventure came up on one of the podcasts a little while back, and I wanted to get this finished while it was still on my mind.]

In a few hundred years, when people get around to writing a really definitive history of avant-garde literature in the 20th century, I hope they pay enough attention to Choose Your Own Adventure.

I’m not even slightly kidding.  The Choose Your Own Adventure books (and the other gamebook series – Time Machine, Tunnels and Trolls, Fighting Fantasy, and so on) are a far more successful challenge to our received notions of what “reading” is about than any modernist novel I’ve encountered.

And everyone read Choose Your Own Adventure back in the day.  Two hundred and fifty million copies sold between 1979 and 1998, according to Wikipedia, and in 38 languages.  Astonishing.  I have no idea how to figure out how many copies of Finnegan’s Wake were sold during the same period, but I’m guessing less.  And while I hear you saying already that selling a lot of copies doesn’t actually make a literary work successful, it does matter in this case.  A challenge to standard narrative that doesn’t reach a mass audience is not really a challenge at all.  It doesn’t mean the niche stuff isn’t good or important, but to be a really viable alternative it needs to be, uh, viable.

Anyway, the CYOA books would have been pretty radical even if they hadn’t been lucrative.  The earliest gamebooks came out of the French experimental literature collective Oulipo:  in 1967, Raymond Queneau produced a short story in this format which you can still read here, assuming you speak French.  And the idea was in the air earlier than that… “One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with,” Flann O’Brien writes in At Swim-Two-Birds, which sure enough has three beginnings and three endings, if you’re not too careful about how you define the concept.  But I’m not here to try to rescue the artistic purity of reader-driven-narrative from servitude in the brothels of capitalism by pointing out that “serious” intellectuals did it first.  I’m here to talk about the CYOA books themselves, which deserve to be remembered for their own merits.  (But before we leave the topic of brothels, let me just point out that there are apparently a LOT of “adult” CYOA titles out there.  I knew about the one I linked to from working in a bookstore, but while googling it I found out that there are, like, way, waaaaay more than I expected.  And while I don’t get the feeling that all of these are actually pornographic, they’re all selling themselves on a winking hint of sexuality coupled with a healthy (unhealthy?) ladle of nostalgia, sort of like a “Sexy Smurfette” Halloween costume.  Gross.  But then, the cover art on Escape From Fire Island is just perfect.  And I bet no other book has ever had, or ever will have, the Amazon tags “Champagne Toast,” “The Meat Rack,” “lifeguard station,” “zombie epidemic,” and “The Golden Girls,” making Escape From Fire Island another one for the ‘ol ‘Unsurpassed and Unsurpassable’ file.

So, the radical things about Choose Your Own Adventure books.  (Or at least apparently radical.  We’ll get back to that.)

• First of all, although each book has a solitary beginning, they do have multiple endings, and in a way that surpasses anything Flann O’Brian came up with.  For all that At Swim-Two-Birds claims to have multiple endings, they appear in a fixed order, and even a perverse reader who purposely tackles them out of order will read one of them last, making that one the “real” ending.  CYOA books, on the other hand, may have dozens of endings spaced throughout the book, and each is an actual, definitive, end.  (Or not.  More on that later.)
• Second, to increase universal appeal, the protagonist (that is, “You”) has no gender, no race, no religion, no sexual orientation (21st century erotic repackagings of the concept notwithstanding).  No political opinions, no particular skill set… a total blank slate.  I do seem to recall that the protagonist was usually described as a child (the books being marketed to children), but that’s about it.  Eat your heart out, The Man Without Qualities.
• Third, the reader drives the action:  as the title of the series suggests, you get to choose how the story develops.  Just like you can choose whether or not to read the rest of this post.

Since 1908, Hollywood has been churning out adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Every portrayal detective in literature, film or television harkens back to 221B Baker St. (51° 31’25.50” N, 0° 09’30.89” W)* for those seemingly insignificant details, the flawed but determined investigator, and the big reveal at the end. Even medical shows are cheating off Doyle these days.

With examples ranging from the fabulous (Basil Rathbone, both on film and on the radio) to the awful (much of the Young Sherlock Holmes series), Holmes and his stories are well trodden territory, but there’s hope for tomorrow’s film will have something new. For the first time, we’ll get see Sherlock Holmes portrayed as a superhero by Robert Downey Jr., an actor who plays a good superhero.

A few times a generation, a book comes along that is so revered, so respected, that copies of it become heirlooms. The physical objects become mementos of joyful reads as well as signs of status and conversation pieces.  Many more times a generation, a book comes along that is so overprinted, so unnecessary, that copies of it are stashed in the corners of warehouses for a decade until they are donated in bulk to Goodwill.

On the Court with . . . Hakeem Olajuwon is one of those books.  Yeah, it’s one of the second kind of books.

So, when one of my friends managed to score five copies of it in a Yankee gift swap (along with matching Captain Picard and Commander Riker commemorative plates and three bags of Chocolate Reisen), it seemed doubtful anyone would read it. But here at Overthinking It, doubtful doesn’t stop us. We specialize in taking the doubtful and making the dubious.

Plus, there were those two words at the top: “Matt Christopher.”  If those words don’t make you cry out in joy, read on to find out what you’re missing.

More on the Dream Shake as rite of passage, the mid-90s perception of Islam, and the zombie Tom Clancy of Little League Baseball, after the jump!

So I was talking with my boyfriend recently about Bandit–a.k.a. the dog from Jonny Quest, and don’t ask—when I had a curious thought.  Why is it that we, as human TV-watchers and filmgoers, are perfectly fine with the fact that dogs in the media sometimes act like dogs and sometimes don’t?  Seriously, am I the only one who finds this strange?  Take Scooby Doo and Scrappy Doo, for example.  It was weird enough when there was only Scooby, the dog who sometimes acted like a dog and sometimes acted like a person.  This was a dude who would sometimes walk on four legs and sometimes on two, and we were fine with that.  This was a dog who could speak English—not like Bugs Bunny can speak English, mind you, but some kind of bizarre pidgin English as approximated by a semi-sentient dog.  And we were okay with this.  I know I was.

But then what happened?  Then, the geniuses behind the Scooby Doo machine threw a wrench into the cogs—and his name was Scrappy Doo.  We were led to believe that the show was set in a universe in which dogs could kinda-sorta talk and kinda-sorta walk on two legs, and then here comes this new dog who speaks perfect English, without some kind of off-the-wall speech impediment, and how not only can walk and run on two legs, but who can box like a pro.

You would think that we, the audience, would have a problem with this.  And some of us did.  But you know what?  I really didn’t.  I accepted this.  I never even justified it to myself by saying, “Oh, I see!  In this universe, dogs do talk and act like perfect, hairy little humans.  It’s just that Scooby is developmentally disabled.  It all makes sense now!”  No, I didn’t say anything like that at all when I was a child.  I just said, “Huh, Scrappy can talk and Scooby can’t.  I accept this without question!”

Well, I’m older now, and wiser, and I realize that not all TV dogs are made alike.  But is there a way we could possibly categorize these canine critters?  Like, say, in a chart?

As President Obama says, yes.  Yes, we can.

In 2008 and 2009, the zombies have taken over. From the multiplex to the classics of 10th grade literature, the shambling undead hordes have gnawed their way into America’s hearts and skulls since they first appeared in 1968.

But the real origins of today’s zombies don’t lie with George Romero or Dan O’Bannon. Nor do they come from the Voo-Doo mind-control zombie films of the 1940’s. No, the first zombies to invade our popular culture died 3700 years ago, appeared in popular American literature in 1868 and appeared on screen in 1932. They were called Mummies and it seems that they’ve been forgotten this Halloween.

The seasonal shelf at Barnes & Noble. Lots of zombies, several vampires, a couple of ghosts, a pack of Shechner's werewolves and a Frankenstein. Where my Mummies at?

The ancient Romans, the world’s first tourists, used to visit Egypt to see the pyramids and look at mummies because those things were old. 2,000 years ago, they were 2,000 years old. Like us and Madonna, the Romans believed that the ancients knew magical secrets that we have since forgotten. We look for those secrets in the page of Dan Brown novels, but the Romans only had Virgil, so they brought home real unearthed mummies instead. Either as souvenirs in an age before site-specific shot glasses or ground up and ingested as medicine, thousands of mummies made their way to Europe and into the public imagination as something powerful, mysterious and potentially sinister.

If Mummyx causes plague, boils, frogs or the death of your firstborn, stop taking Mummyx and consult your physician.

After the Arabs conquered Egypt, the trade dried up and the European fascination with Egypt didn’t return until the end of the 18th century when Napoleon’s archaeologists found the Rosetta Stone. The 19th century was simply giddy over Egyptology. (What other country should have its own ‘ology’? Sound off in the comments.) As the fine folks at the British Museum plundered every grave they could find, Western writers recognized the inherent creepiness of grave robbing and started writing books about it.

Three major mummy works of the 19th and early twentieth centuries were, in order of coolness, “The Mummy’s Foot” by Theophile Gautier (1847), Jewel of the Seven Stars by Bram Stoker (1903), and “Lost in the Pyramid, or The Mummy’s Curse” by Louisa May Alcott (1868). That’s right, in between Little Women and Little Men, Alcott wrote a short story about the undead.

The three stories basically follow the same plot: person comes into possession of a mummy or a piece thereof, mummy is not as dead as originally hoped, vaguely magical bad things happen until whatever is disturbing the mummy’s rest is put right. Moral of the story: stop robbing graves you sick bastards.

Ultimately, you’ve never heard of any of these. They’re not that good, whatever the New York Times says. Stoker’s plot cowers behind impenetrable prose, Gautier’s story focuses on his protagonist’s great taste in home décor (the titular mummy’s foot is a new paperweight), and Alcott’s most horrific moment involves deadly Egyptian flower seeds. In none of them is there an ancient, rotting corpse coming to get someone. That took the magic of cinema.

In 1922, Howard Carter discovered the previously un-grave-robbed tomb of King Tut and the world’s Egypt fetish hit an all time high. Why it took ten years to greenlight, we’ll never know, but in 1932, Boris Karloff first played an undead creature, shambling across the screen, bringing inevitable doom. He and director Karl Freund, who served as cinematographer on both Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and “I Love Lucy,” where he’s credited with developing the first three-camera sit-com, gave us many of the tropes that horror has come to rely on.

Mouth technology has come a long way since 1932.

Their story, most familiar to us from the once fun and now thoroughly unwatchable Brendan Fraser franchise, has Prince Imhotep cursed for all eternity for falling in love with the Pharaoh’s main squeeze, then killing the boss. Instead of just having him buried/eaten alive, they have him buried/eaten alive in a way that leaves open the possibility that he’ll come back with god-like powers. Say what you want about the American penal system, it has at least replaced apotheosis with a parole board.

The real Imhotep was one of the ancient world’s great architects. To someone from the Old Kingdom, these movies would be like us running from a reincarnated Frank Lloyd Wright.

Having endured that harsh/stupid form of punishment for thousands of years, Imhotep comes back, as Belinkie put it, as an ancient, bandage wrapped, unstoppable Terminator whose existence means certain death for someone. Unlike a zombie, the mummy takes things personally. If you spent much of your life and fortune preparing for the afterlife, had your viscera removed and your brain pulled out of your nose, then found out that eternal life meant millennia of dust and darkness followed by grave robbers screwing with you, you might take things personally too.

So this Halloween, go ahead and put on your zombie costume (or better yet, an Overthinking It “Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains” shirt) and have your fun. Just remember the wisdom of the ages, respect your elders and show the mummies some respect.

Order Up!

Sci-fi and fantasy elements of pop culture – movies, TV shows, books, etc – distinguish themselves from contemporary times through weirdness. People wear weird clothes, pilot weird vehicles, live in weird houses and interact with weird races. The weirder a common function of society is, the odder the landscape.

And what’s weirder than weird food?

“Fictional food” is up there with “alien sex” for producing the squirmiest reactions. We’re very self-conscious about how we look when we eat and what our choice of food says about us. And we defend our tastes very fiercely, to the point that treating the weird as normal freaks us out. The way we react to fictional food tells us about the fictional society being depicted, as well as … about ourselves.

Overthinkers – what is the Best Fictional Food?

(And stick around ’till the end for a verdict from our MYSTERY CELEBRITY JUDGE!)

If a man’s got talent and guts to buck society, he’s obviously above average. You want to hold on to him. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you’ve got left are the sheep.

- Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man

I’m a seamstress? That’s great. I come out of cryo-prison and I’m Betsy-fucking-Ross.

- Sylvester Stallone, Demolition Man

Who Are They?

The Demolished Man – or rather, the protagonist of Alfred Bester’s 1951 novel of that name – is Ben Reich, owner of interplanetary conglomerate Monarch Enterprises. Monarch has steadily lost business for the last decade to Reich’s rival, the D’Courtney Cartel. Already plagued by insanity, in the form of waking nightmares where a Man With No Face tries to murder him, Reich hatches a plot to murder Craye D’Courtney.

The only catch: the Espers Guild, a professional association of telepaths that occupy all levels of industrial society. No one has successfully committed a murder for over seventy years. But Reich, a man of singular genius and willpower, finds a way around their powers.

The Demolition Man is John Spartan, a cop from 1996 Los Angeles who doesn’t play by the rules but still gets results. When his takedown of longtime nemesis Simon Phoenix results in a massive number of civilian casualties, he and Phoenix are sent to the same cryo-prison. There they remain in suspended animation until 2032, when Spartan is revived to take Phoenix out.

Guess which group is LESS likely to get into college?

(NOTE: Mild spoilers for the Harry Potter series follow.)

First of all, let me make this clear: if you want to learn magic, there is no better place than Hogwarts. That may seem like faint praise, since your only other choices are Durmstrang, which is borderline evil, and Beauxbatons, which is French. But Hogwarts really does seem to turn out top-notch wizards and witches.

That being said, I wouldn’t send my kid there if you used the Cruciatus Curse on me. (Okay, maybe then.)

Please enjoy this guest post by Jared Bauer, looking at the literary and metaphysical origins of The Dark Knight. Like it? Then tell us in the comments!

Let’s assume for a second that everything the Joker says is nonsense. After all, he is the Joker. And what does the Joker do? Well, joke, of course. But why does he joke? Part of the reason that The Dark Knight has raised the bar for its genre is because, unlike its contemporaries, it dares to answer this question. Why did Jack Nicholson joke? Because the acid accident made him crazy. Why did Doc Ock go on a rampage to destroy New York? Because the mechanical tentacles made him crazy. Up until The Dark Knight, it generally just stopped there.