Mystery Incorporated

While I’ve been recovering from surgery for my prostate cancer, I took time to watch the entirety of the 2010-2013 series, Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated. As the series starts out, it appears to be a fairly straightforward follow-up to the 1969 original series. Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Velma Dinkley, and Shaggy Rogers are a group of teens who solve mysteries alongside their talking dog, Scooby-Doo. Those mysteries usually take the form of a haunting or a paranormal occurrence, which then turns out to be a cover for a villain in a costume committing crimes. At first glance, the show is mostly marked by slightly updated character designs, plus more backstory. We get to know their hometown of Crystal Cove. We meet their parents and a few of their classmates and teachers. We also open with a hint of a continuous narrative. An anonymous stranger who calls himself “Mister E” sends the gang notes, cluing them in on things to investigate.

The show is clearly set after the classic 1969 series. Velma’s mom runs a museum of Crystal Cove’s haunted attractions and we see many of the classic monsters from the original series on display. What’s more, the city itself has begun to cash in on its reputation as a haunted place. Fred’s dad is the mayor and he doesn’t always appreciate his son unmasking ghosts and monsters, removing a potential source of tourist revenue. The original series routinely showed the gang speaking to a sheriff or a deputy. Now we get to know Crystal Cove’s Sheriff Bronson Stone, voiced by none other than Patrick Warburton, who I met earlier this year at El Paso Comic Con. Mathew Lillard, who played Shaggy in the live action films reprises his part. Velma and Daphne are played by Mindy Cohn and Grey DeLisle respectively. Fred and Scooby-Doo are played by Frank Welker, who was also the original Fred back in 1969.

The ongoing narrative starts out largely by focusing on the interpersonal relationships of the gang. Daphne is clearly smitten by Fred, who is more interested in traps than anything else. Shaggy and Velma are a couple, but Shaggy has a hard time living up to Velma’s expectations and Scooby is extremely jealous. As the series progresses, it becomes clear that Mister E is leading Scooby and the gang on a quest for pieces of a long-lost artifact called the Planispheric Disc. Along the way, they learn they aren’t the first mystery solving group of young people in Crystal Cove. There was a similar group from around their parents’ generation who had a very articulate parrot named Mr. Pericles, voiced brilliantly by German actor Udo Kier. As someone who took lots of German in high school and college, it was great to hear some scenes where the character ad libs some very articulate German dialogue.

While hunting for the pieces of the Planispheric Disc, the gang discovers that a Spanish treasure galleon had run aground off Crystal Cove’s shores back in California’s colonial period. It seems that the Planispheric Disc is connected to that treasure. However, the gang also learns that truly dark and ancient forces might be involved. As this quest unfolds, they meet a character who is an homage to H.P. Lovecraft and they even meet science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, who voiced himself before he passed away in 2018.

Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated presents an extremely satisfying long form story arc that unfolds over 52 episodes. Unfortunately, the writers did have a tendency to latch on to some tropes like a pit bull, such as some of the romance tropes at the beginning of the series. Also, the characters teeter on the edge of being so one-note for the sake of humor at times that they almost lost me. Examples include Sheriff Bronson Stone’s buffoonery and Fred’s single-minded obsession with traps. Still, the humor works more often than it annoys me and as the series reached it’s conclusion, I better understood why they pursued the romance tropes they did. If you’re a Scooby-Doo fan or even if you would like a lighthearted take on the Lovecraftian horror genre, it’s worth checking out Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated.

I explore Lovecratian ideas, including scary creatures from other worlds in my Scarlet Order Vampire series. In fact, Fred Cleaver of The Denver Post compared my vampires favorably with the Scooby Gang. The Scarlet Order Vampire Daniel makes an appearance at Queen Titania’s Court today over at Deby Frederick’s blog, Wymflight: https://wyrmflight.wordpress.com/2024/06/25/ordeal-of-the-scarlet-order-queen-titanias-court/ Drop by, learn more about the series and read a short interview with me and Daniel. What’s more my very first publication was in a magazine that also featured a story by Harlan Ellison. My story from that magazine exists in standalone form. You can learn more here: http://davidleesummers.com/slayers.html

The Celestial Toymaker

While I’m recovering from surgery, I’m on strict limitations about how much weight I can lift and I am trying to strike a balance between moving around enough to restore my range of motion but stay calm and quiet enough that I allow myself to heal. Of course one of the best ways to get me to sit for a little while and take it easy is put on a good movie or TV show. By good fortune, the BBC released it’s BluRay of the Doctor Who episode “The Celestial Toymaker” on the day of my surgery. My wife kindly ran out and picked it up two days later. This episode goes all the way back to 1966, near the end of William Hartnell’s time portraying the Doctor. The Doctor’s companions are Steven Taylor played by Peter Purves and Dodo Chaplet played by Jackie Lane. The titular Toymaker was played by the legendary Michael Gough, who has portrayed characters ranging from Arthur Holmwood in Hammer’s Horror of Dracula to Alfred the Butler in the Tim Burton Batman films. This is one of the “lost” episodes. Only the fourth episode of the four-part serial exists in its entirety. So, the episode was recreated using 3-D animation from Shapeshifter Studios. On the BluRay set, you can watch it in full color or in black and white, as the episode would have been when originally aired.

Interest in releasing “The Celestial Toymaker” has been high, since the Toymaker’s return in Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary special “The Giggle,” this time with Neil Patrick Harris playing the Toymaker. That said, the Toymaker had originally been slated to appear in an episode with Colin Baker in the 1980s, but the episode was scrapped when the series went on hiatus. Fortunately, Big Finish adapted the script for audio and you can find “The Nightmare Fair” at: https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/doctor-who-the-nightmare-fair-421. My interest in the character came from seeing productions stills of the episode in a book about the series. The episode featured creepy clowns, surreal sets, living playing cards, and, of course, Michael Gough. I’d long wanted to see it.

The story’s premise is pretty straightforward. The Doctor’s TARDIS is pulled into a mysterious region of space controlled by the Toymaker, who offers the Doctor and his companions a challenge. If the Doctor and his companions succeed at a series of games, he’ll give them control of the TARDIS and they can leave. If they fail, they’ll essentially have to spend the rest of their lives in the Toymaker’s domain as his toys. The Doctor is given a complex logic puzzle called the Trilogic game, that he plays throughout the four episodes. In each of the four episodes, Steven and Dodo must play somewhat simpler games against the Toymaker’s toys. In the first episode they play Blind Man’s Bluff against a pair of clowns. In the second episode, they play against the king and queen of Hearts to find the one chair out of seven that won’t kill them. In episode three, they must find a key and find a way to dance across a floor of killer ballerinas to open door, and finally, in the fourth episode, they must play a game of hopscotch. The catch, if they step off the squares, they’ll die. At one point early in the first episode, the Doctor annoys the Toymaker and is turned invisible and mute. This actually allowed William Hartnell a two-week holiday during the episode’s filming. Interestingly, the production team had discussed making him return to visibility as a whole new actor, which would have made the regeneration narrative that ultimately was developed to explain actor changes a lot trickier down the road.

Because we do have one episode of the original and lots of still photos, we can get a sense of what the episode was like originally. The recurring toys were played by Carmen Silvera, Campbell Singer, and Peter Stephens, all popping up in new costumes each episode. The sets were fairly bare with just enough “dressing” to allow the actors to play the games. In the animated recreation, they went full-out and visualized twisting, large, surreal worlds. Blind-Man’s bluff was played on a gravity-defying stage where up and down, left and right changed depending on where in the game you were. The hopscotch game involved floating triangles and a misstep would mean a bad fall as well as electrocution. Overall, I thought the animation allowed the Toymaker’s world to come to wonderfully, creepy life. The character animation was quite good and fluid, and quite convincing in long shots. Animation allowed the toys to look like living toys rather than actors in fancy dress. My only real issue with the animation has to do with the way they chose to “paint” the characters. There were sharp tonal contrasts on the faces and hands with almost no gradient or blending between colors, giving the characters’ hands and faces a blotchy look. Shadows on faces sometimes made the characters look more like they needed a shave. Some characters looked like they had rather serious skin conditions on their hands. That noted, the contrasts work better in the black-and-white version than the full-color version.

One interesting historical aspect of this episode was the decision to dress the Toymaker in Traditional Chinese robes. Despite that, the makeup artists never gave Michael Gough the usual “yellowface” makeup that would have gone with a white actor playing an Asian role. At times, I felt like Gough was doing a very mild Asian accent. That said, Gough was actually born in Kuala Lumpur when Malaysia was a British Colony. So, now I’m even less certain he was doing anything deliberate with his accent or voice. I suspect the writers did literally mean “Celestial Toymaker” in the sense of a Toymaker with grand, cosmic powers. However, being the 1960’s, I wonder if the costume department thought “Celestial” in the sense of China as the “Celestial Empire” and brought over Chinese robes. Since money, time, and budgets were tight in those days, plus having a Toymaker who could literally wear whatever he imagined wearing, I suspect the filmmakers just rolled with it. A more problematic issue occurred in the second episode of the serial. At one point, the King of Hearts mutters the traditional “Eeenie Meenie Minie Mo” rhyme using a racist slur. In the new BluRay release, they seem to have wisely excised that part of the mumble. I don’t feel anything was lost with that.

If you like stories about great cosmic beings putting humans into surreal environments, you might also enjoy my novel Heirs of the New Earth. You can learn more about it at: http://davidleesummers.com/heirs_new_earth.html.

Talking Dogs and Radio

As I’ve noted here at the Web Journal, I was just about three-years old when the iconic television series Scooby-Doo Where Are You first aired. My older daughter was just about three-years old when Warner Brothers released the direct-to-video movie Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island. The movie featured an impressive guest cast that included Mark Hamill and Adriane Barbeau. I had known Don Messick, the original voice of Scooby-Doo himself, had passed away in 1997, so I wasn’t surprised to see that a new actor voiced him. That actor was Scott Innes. Starting with Warner’s next direct-to-video Scooby-Doo movie, Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost, Innes voiced both Scooby and Shaggy. I continued to follow Innes’s work through the following Scooby-Doo movies and even the 2002 live action film, where he played Scooby’s feisty nephew Scrappy-Doo.

I finally had the chance to meet Scott Innes this year at El Paso Comic Con. He took time to visit with me and we discussed everything from voice acting, which I’ve done, though not at such a high-profile level, to day jobs. That’s when I learned that Innes is the morning show host for a country music station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. That blew my mind because my oldest daughter, who grew up with Scott’s voice on assorted home video and toys, went to college just down the road in New Orleans. On road trips from New Mexico to Louisiana, I used to dial through radio stations to get a sense of the local flavor. Unfortunately, I never caught Scott’s show. I think that was because our drives often put us in the range of Lafayette radio stations in the morning and we didn’t tend to pick up Baton Rouge until lunchtime. In the meantime, he asked me about my work at Kitt Peak and was fascinated by our projects studying exoplanets and mapping the known universe. Of course, he asked me what I thought about aliens, most people do, but it occurred to me this was the guy who voiced Scooby and Shaggy in Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders asking me about aliens!

I enjoyed my visit with Scott so much that I bought his autobiography, Cartoons and Country Music. The book is written for a young audience, but it was perfect for me while recovering from my prostate surgery. The book discussed Scott’s longtime love of cartoon characters and how he had gotten to know such incredible voice actors as Mel Blanc and Don Messick. Of course, the book told how he landed the job voicing Scooby in Zombie Island and became the official voice of Scooby for several years. The book also delved into his love of country music and radio. Although I’ve tended to drift away from country music, I listened frequently as a kid and still have a soft spot for many of the classic acts. One of the things that I always wondered about was why Billy Ray Cyrus sang the Scooby-Doo theme in Scooby-Doo and the Witch’s Ghost. It’s an awesome take on the song, but it came from around the time the only thing you heard from Cyrus was “Achy-Breaky Heart.” It turns out, this came from Scott making the suggestion to Warner Brothers and the studio following through.

Scott’s message in the Cartoons and Country Music is to find what you want to do, pursue your goals, meet the best people in the business and learn from them. His experiences with people like Mel Blanc, June Fornay, and Don Messick echo my own experiences with people in the science fiction world like Ray Bradbury, David Gerrold, and Jane Lindskold. Each of them have given me both encouragement and practical advice I’ve found invaluable. Scott has also given back to the community through work raising funds for Saint Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Admittedly I didn’t have cancer as a child, but I appreciate the work of anyone doing their part to end this horrible, devastating illness that brings misery to all. Now that I’ve had the chance to know Scott Innes better through his autobiography, I hope I get another chance to interact with him down the road. If you haven’t seen Warner’s direct-to-video Scooby movies, make sure to do so. They’re among the best work in the franchise and a lot of that is down to the voice talent of Scott Innes breathing life into Scooby and Shaggy.

Fighting the Battle

About the time this post goes live, I’ll be checking into the hospital for a radical prostatectomy to hopefully deal with my prostate cancer once and for all. Fighting prostate cancer was certainly not a battle I asked for, but I will fight using all the resources at my disposal. Thankfully I have terrific allies in the form of a great surgical team and my family. If all goes well, I’ll be back home and recovering tomorrow. I hope to share at least a short progress report on Saturday.

Given my impending battle, it’s probably appropriate that I spent some time in the world of the 1970s British science fiction series, Blake’s 7 this past week. For those who aren’t familiar with the series, it was created by Terry Nation, who also created Doctor Who’s Daleks. Airing on the BBC, the series was set in the distant future in a world not unlike Star Trek’s mirror universe with a totalitarian Federation dominating the galaxy. Our hero is Roj Blake, a freedom fighter who was captured and brainwashed by the Federation. Fortunately, he’s freed and overcomes his brainwashing, but he’s soon captured and placed on a prison transport. While on the prison transport, he assembles a ragtag group of allies including Jenna Stannis, a smuggler with amazing piloting skills, Vila Restal, a talented pickpocket and coward, Olag Gan, a gentle giant who killed a Federation officer, and Kerr Avon, a computer expert who often feels like Spock with more attitude, ambition, and a hidden agenda. Blake manages to break out of prison and steal a powerful alien warship called the Liberator. Over time, he builds his team up seven. The series was notable in that characters, including Blake himself, came and went. When a character died, the writers didn’t find a clever science fictional way to bring them back.

The particular story I delved into was an audio production from Big Finish, produced nearly forty years after the original series ended called “Warship.” The story is set right at the end of the second season (or second series, as they’re known in the UK). In the story, an alien armada sits at the edge of Federation space, ready to invade. The problem for Blake and the crew of the Liberator is that these aliens have no goodwill toward humanity and are a worse enemy than the Federation. Of course, the Federation itself has declared martial law in response to the pending invasion. So, Liberator, being one of the strongest human-manned ships, stands ready to hold off the invasion until the Federation fleet can arrive. It’s a nice setup for exploring the question of what makes an ally versus what makes a friend, something the series explored quite a bit.

Not surprisingly, the television series Blake’s 7 looks a lot like 1970s era Doctor Who. The sets and the special effects are just about adequate to tell the story. The reason for watching the show has more to do with the great performances from folks like Paul Darrow as Avon and Jacqueline Pearce as Supreme Commander Servalan of the Federation. An audio Blake’s 7 story avoids the limitation of special effects. There’s a scene in the story where Liberator destroys an alien attack ship only to have a bunch of mines attach themselves to hull. Vila and Jenna have to go outside to get rid of them, only to discover these are actually the aliens themselves, burrowing into the hull. It’s an effective moment and I can imagine it much more effectively than it could have been portrayed on the screen back in the day.

The actors all fell right back into their familiar roles. The only thing that betrays the passage of time is that you can hear how some of the actors have aged. Still, the acting is so good that you soon forget that. What’s more, it’s wonderful they had the chance to produce this, since some of the actors, including Jacqueline Pearce and Gareth Thomas, who played Blake, are no longer with us. This production may not be the place to leap into the world of Blake’s 7 if you’ve never watched an episode, but it’s certainly worth giving it a listen if you have caught the series on BritBox.

The whole “band of misfits” dealing with large crises was one of the themes I explore throughout my Space Pirates’ Legacy Series, which you can learn more about at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#pirate_legacy. Why not give it a try and leave a review? Good reviews are one of the best ways to tell an author how appreciated their work is.

A Living Culture

I am fascinated by history and I love reading about discoveries made by archeologists who study artifacts humans left behind in the distant past. This is basically what led me to read E. Charles Adams’ The Origin and Development of the Pueblo Katsina Cult, which I discussed about a week and a half ago. However, I think it’s important to remember that pueblo culture is alive in the modern world. While I think it’s fascinating to read the story of changes that occurred in that culture some 500 years ago, I think it’s also fascinating to read what that culture is like today. In order to learn a little about modern pueblo culture, I turned to a writer who was born at Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, Simon J. Ortiz, and his short story collection Men on the Moon.

I picked this collection for a couple of reasons. Most importantly is that I met Ortiz several years ago when I worked with a local book festival in Las Cruces, New Mexico. At the time, I’d mostly been familiar with Ortiz’s poems, so I was interested in seeing some of his longer tales. Second, I have visited Acoma Pueblo and know the area as it is today. That said, while Ortiz brings his background as an Acoma native to these stories, only a few are actually set at Acoma and the stories aren’t focused exclusively on the “Acoma experience,” whatever that might be. Still, one thing Ortiz says in his preface to the book really resonated with me. “As human beings, we, as personal and social cultural entities, are conscious beings because of story, no other reason.” He talks about how stories have power and how that power is essential to our life. The stories in this collection are personal stories. They are stories of experiences Ortiz has had. They reflect his life and experience and they remind me that he is part of a living culture.

Although I’m curious about the subject after reading Adams’ book, little in this book provided a modern perspective on the katsina. In one story, a character is compared to the virile warrior Kahtzina, Payatyamo. In another story, Ortiz introduces us to a character named Kaiser. The elders tell him legends about the Kahtzina, Spider Old Woman. Later in the story, it’s mentioned that Kaiser always wore his special suit to the Kahtzina dances. Note, the word Kachina or Katsina is not standardized across the pueblos. As I understand, Kahtzina is the Acoma spelling. In a first-person story, Ortiz writes about meeting a man who says, “You see, I teach history, and sometimes I get the feeling my people think I’m giving away secrets. You know Hopi secrets.” The scene reminds us that in the living pueblo culture, many aspects of spiritual life are not for public display. They’re very much a personal thing.

A couple of years ago, my wife and I visited the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. While there, we saw a wonderful exhibit about the project that created a Navajo-language dub of the movie Star Wars. The exhibit discussed how much Star Wars resonated with Navajo culture. In particular, the exhibit highlighted Navajo stories of the Warrior Twins and how many Navajo people saw that echoed in the story of Luke and Leia. As I read, Men on the Moon, I also came to really understand Native Americans as a culture subject to an imperial, authoritarian government. Some of this is expressed in the draconian ways laws are enforced on Native lands. Some of this is the way in which Native people are drafted into the military. Some of this is in the way young people were taken from their homes and forced into “Indian Schools” where they had to learn English and American culture. It’s never easy to be confronted with these viewpoints, but confronting this viewpoints is important if we’re to understand a living culture.

Perhaps my favorite moment in this collection occurs in the title story. Young people give their grandfather his first television and he watches one of the early moon landings. The young people tell the grandfather that they’ve gone to the moon to collect rocks and that they believed there’s no life on the moon. “Yet those men were trying to find knowledge on the moon. Faustin wondered if perhaps they had special tools with which they could find knowledge even if they believed there was no life on the moon.” In effect, the grandfather, Faustin, knows that knowledge comes from stories. However, stories come from life. If there is no life on the moon, there cannot be knowledge. It’s a moment that reminds us how important living culture really is.

Men on the Moon is available at: https://www.amazon.com/Men-Moon-Collected-Stories-Tracks-ebook/dp/B0B8T9YC18/

My research into the novella Breaking the Code involved reading and listening to numerous Navajo stories as well as stories from people who lived in Gallup, New Mexico near the beginning of World War II. You can find out more about my novella at: https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Code-Systema-Paradoxa-Book-ebook/dp/B08RW4CMR8/

The Three-Body Problem

The three-body problem is one of the more vexing problems of classical mechanics. In short, if you have a system of three objects that interact with each other, you can’t use classical Newtonian equations to predict their behavior. Effectively, you have a chaotic system. In astronomy, you might imagine three planets or three stars interacting gravitationally. I first encountered this idea in high school soon after reading how Percival Lowell began a search for a ninth planet in our solar system to account for unexplained perturbations in Neptune’s orbit. We knew the planets Uranus and Neptune pulled on each other, but it seemed like a third, similar-size planet must also be pulling on Neptune. This search ultimately resulted in Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto, which really proved too small to account for those orbital distortions. As it turned out, those orbital perturbations in Neptune’s orbit came down to measurement error. Still, I got to spend some time wrapping my thoughts around this challenging concept and even wrote a report on it.

One of my co-workers at Kitt Peak National Observatory recently suggested I check out Cixin Liu’s Hugo Award-winning novel The Three-Body Problem. In the novel, Wang Miao is researching nanomaterials when he starts seeing a countdown in the middle of his field of vision, no matter where he looks. The countdown even appears on photographs he takes. However, no one else sees the countdown and no one else takes photos with images of the countdown. His quest to solve this ultimately, leads him to a virtual reality game called “The Three-Body Problem.” In the game, he’s transported to a world which moves between nice predictable day/night cycles to long periods of night and even occasionally periods of searing heat. Fortunately, the people of this strange world can dehydrate themselves in order to survive the periods of environmental extremes. Unfortunately, they only make technological progress during the periods of relative environmental stability. Wang ultimately realizes this is a planet in a system with three approximately equal-size stars. The planet is being passed back and forth among the stars as they do their chaotic three-body dance. Cixin Liu found a fascinating way to allow readers to experience the complexity of the three-body problem.

The novel also tells the story of Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist who came of age during China’s Cultural Revolution. She’s ultimately pulled into China’s search for extraterrestrial life project and succeeds in making contact with another world. It turns out the world she’s contacted is same one Wang has been experiencing in the game. Those people from the chaotic system yearn for a world as stable as ours. What’s more, because of her experiences in the Cultural Revolution, Ye sees humanity as irredeemable and feels that humans would benefit from contact by the so-called Trisolarans. Through this plot, Cixin Liu explores the question of whether or not contact with aliens would benefit humanity. In the first novel, he provides no simple answers.

In the novel, it’s suggested the Trisolarans come from Alpha Centauri, which really is a three-star system. However, Alpha Centauri isn’t actually a chaotic system. That’s because two of the stars, Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, which are each about the size of our sun, orbit a common center as a nicely behaved two-body system. The third star, Proxima Centauri is only half the size of the other two and is in an orbit about 200-times more distant from the two stars than Pluto is from our sun. Because gravity falls off as the square of the distance, Proxima doesn’t induce much chaos in it’s two big brother suns. So, we have to suspend our disbelief for this part of the novel, or assume that the Trisolarans actually come from some other three-star system that just happens to be a little over four light years away.

The novel also presents some interesting thoughts about the so-called Fermi Paradox, which suggests that it’s strange that we haven’t yet found evidence of other advanced life, even though we suspect that advanced life should be common. I do think there are several possible reasons we haven’t found other intelligent life. Cixin Liu points to the shear size scales of the galaxy and the distances between stars as a factor. I think the vastness of the universe is truly hard to comprehend. This same vastness will make interstellar travel a challenge for any civilization and also becomes a factor when we imagine signals traveling out into space.

Another possible answer to the Fermi Paradox is that alien intelligence is so alien that we have a difficult time recognizing it as intelligence. It could be that not all intelligent beings build tools and send out electromagnetic signals. Even if an advanced civilization has expanded to a few star systems and communicates using electromagnetic signals we could detect, it’s also possible that they’ve found a way to deliberately cloak those signals for either benevolent or hostile reasons. I explore a few of these ideas in my novel The Solar Sea and in my Space Pirates’ Legacy novels. You can learn about them all at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html

Encountering the Katsina

One of the pleasures of attending graduation at Northern Arizona University a couple of weeks ago was the opportunity to meet some of Verity’s friends, including a young Navajo man who graduated with a history degree and shared Verity’s love of Monty Python. We spent the afternoon after graduation with this young man. He gave Verity and my wife, Kumie, katsina dolls as gifts. Traditionally, Hopi people created katsina dolls as a way of instructing young girls and women about the katsinam, spirit beings who bring rain and act as intermediaries between the mortal world and the spiritual world. What’s more, many of the pueblos in the southwest have katsina rituals where masked dancers take on the roles of different katsina. Historically, the word has been spelled kachina, but “katsina” is closer to the correct Hopi pronunciation. Having grown up in the southwest, I’ve long been fascinated by katsina dolls and the concept of the katsina. I decided to learn more and dove into a non-fiction book called The Origin and Development of the Pueblo Katsina Cult by E. Charles Adams.

It’s worth noting, Adams uses the word “cult” in the more archaeological or anthropological sense, meaning a system of beliefs and ritual, not the more modern sense of a group of people following a charismatic or unorthodox leader. Also, Adams approached this issue very much as an archaeologist. He didn’t spend a lot of time trying to explain or characterize the katsina belief and ritual system, but rather looked at how it came to be a ritual system shared among peoples living within many of the southwestern pueblos. So, the book is concerned with tracing the beginnings and spread of masked figures in rock art at or near both inhabited and abandoned pueblos along with the development of the architectural structures, namely the enclosed plazas, where katsina dances are held. According to Adams, the katsina rituals seemed to appear in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, around the time the Anasazi began abandoning their large dwellings in places like New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. Evidence suggests that was a period of drought in the southwest and it’s long been suspected that the Anasazi left their lands in response to such a hardship. Adams suggests that the katsina rituals developed as a way to help integrate newcomers into certain pueblos and help them learn the beliefs and become part of the community.

Years ago, right after getting married, my wife and I visited Chaco Canyon. At the time, many archaeologists still referred to the disappearance of the Anasazi as a mystery. Yet, the Hopi and other pueblo people maintained that the Anasazi were their ancestors. This book seems to indicate that archaeological evidence has come to support what Native people have long insisted.

Large portions of my Scarlet Order vampire novels are set in the American southwest and there are beings referred to as “kachina.” On the whole, these are beings from other worlds who see themselves as superior to humans and present themselves as gods or other powerful beings. Like many explorers and colonizers of history, these beings have an elevated sense of themselves and are often misguided. In part, I use the old spelling precisely because these beings are not meant to literally be the katsinam of the Hopi or spirit beings recognized by any native people. They’re arrogant, powerful beings who have adopted a role, much as they adopted the role of being angels in European countries. You can lean more about my Scarlet Order novels by visiting http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order

The Dark Deception

At this point, I’m less than a month away from my cancer surgery and I’m deep in the throes of getting pre-operative clearance from my primary care doctor and cardiologist. As a result, it feels like I’m spending a lot of time in waiting rooms, either waiting for doctor’s appointments, or for tests. To me, the best way to spend that kind of time is with a good book. To distract myself from dwelling too long and hard on the forthcoming surgery, I picked a fun book based on one of my favorite childhood cartoons. It helps that this particular book was the sequel to one I read recently and truly enjoyed. The book I read was The Dark Deception, which is the second book in the Daphne and Velma young adult series. The author was Morgan Baden, who I’m pretty certain also authored book 1, The Vanishing Girl. The first book’s author was listed as Josephine Ruby, which seems like it must have been a pen-name picked to honor Scooby-Doo co-creator Joe Ruby.

At the end of The Vanishing Girl, Daphne’s friend Marcy suggests that Shaggy Rogers is hiding a deep, dark secret. The Dark Deception opens with Daphne and Velma trailing Shaggy, trying to figure out what that secret actually is. Just as they begin to get their first clues, a batch of crystals suddenly wash up on Crystal Cove’s beach. The town has a history of disappearances being tied to a mysterious crystal. That same crystal happens to be in the possession of Shaggy’s father, who is descended from the original settlers. The town also has a long history of paranormal occurrences, or at least occurrences the populace attribute to paranormal causes. One of the old paranormal stories involved a mysterious figure known as the Lady Vampire of the Bay and people have begun to see her lurking around town. Daphne and Velma begin to think the crystals must somehow be tied to whatever secret Shaggy is keeping. What’s more, Daphne now has a summer job as an intern for Crystal Cove’s newspaper and her boss has her out looking for clues to whatever is going on with the mysterious crystals.

As Daphne and Velma investigate the case, they discover several red herrings. They also have to navigate some real teen challenges such as attractive peers who might make potential romantic partners, challenging friendships, relationships with parents, and building an honest yet positive self-image. Over the years I’ve known numerous people who have wondered why Velma didn’t just get contacts when she was so blind without her glasses. The book does a nice job of allowing Velma to experiment with contacts only to discover they aren’t for her. I was glad to see the journey since it echoed elements of my own experiments with contact lenses several years ago. As I’ve indicated, Shaggy is a much more integral part of this novel and we can see the core group of “meddling kids” starting to bond as a unit. Fred still largely exists as a side character, but he takes a more important role here in the second book. Scooby still acts more like a real dog than a talking cartoon dog, but it works in this novel-length exploration of the characters. The Dark Deception is published by Scholastic Books and is available wherever fine books and ebooks are sold.

As I mentioned in my look back at The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, I thought one of the missed opportunities of the various Scooby-Doo series was to show how dangerous real criminals could be compared to the ghosts and monsters they pretended to be. The Dark Deception gave us a taste of that and did show how a desperate human might actually be scarier than any ghost or vampire. My Scarlet Order Vampire novels also look at how humans motivated by greed and power can sometimes be scarier than so-called monsters. You can learn more about those novels by visiting http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order.

The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo

The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo was the iteration of the long-running Scooby-Doo franchise that ran, fittingly enough, for thirteen episodes in the fall of 1985. I would have been starting my sophomore year of college then. That was the year I first met Ross Lomanitz, who studied under Oppenheimer. It’s also when I first started getting to know the woman who would be my wife, though it would still be a few years before we would begin dating. Needless to say, I had other things on my mind than Saturday morning cartoons. Still, I was enough a fan of Scooby-Doo to be aware of it. I’d heard that Vincent Price was in it. I turned it on long enough to see that Scrappy-Doo was in it and that there were some silly-looking ghosts and went back to studying physics.

Years later, my kids would discover the series and they watched it. However, I still gave it a pass. A few weeks ago, though, I happened to discover that a sequel movie had been made that claimed to actually finish the story. The premise of The 13-Ghosts of Scooby-Doo is that while on a holiday with Daphne, Shaggy and Scooby are duped into entering an ancient Himalayan fortress and opening a chest which contained thirteen demons. The first episode involves releasing the demons. The subsequent twelve involve capturing the demons and putting them back in the chest. So, in the run of the series, the thirteenth demon is never captured. The direct-to-video movie The Curse of the 13th Ghost serves as a series finale … of a sort. My wife wanted to see the movie and talked me into watching the series first.

The silly ghosts I saw when I first caught a portion of The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo are Bogle and Weerd voiced by Howard Morris and Arte Johnson respectively. They’re the ones that duped Shaggy and Scooby into opening the chest in the first place because they hope the demons will be grateful and help them become full-fledged demons. While I know this was made as a kids show, I didn’t care for their design, which made them look like refugees from Casper the Friendly Ghost. This is especially notable since a lot of the actual demons from the chest are given much more effective and creepy designs. Some work better than others, but generally I could see how younger kids especially might find the series honestly frightening.

Although Scrappy-Doo, Scooby’s nephew who is full of vim, vigor and irritating catchphrases, is part of the series, he’s actually far less annoying in this than he was in earlier iterations where he appeared. Some of that has to do with him not being the center of attention and getting relatively little screen time, but I think it also helps that they introduced a new character, a young con artist named Flim-Flam. Basically, Flim-Flam and Scrappy become a fast-talking, take-action team that nicely counterpoint Scooby and Shaggy’s preference to hide and find a good snack. Daphne ends up taking the lead as the one who holds everything together. She even has her own red Mystery Machine stocked full of state-of-the-art computer equipment.

By far the high point of the series is Vincent Price as the voice of Vincent Van Ghoul. He’s portrayed as a wizard who was guarding the chest and he helps direct Scooby and the gang to the location of the next ghost and serves as a mentor. As always, Price’s work is excellent and he continues to do a great job of walking the line between camp and horror. Some of his best moments are as the long-suffering mentor to a band of hapless teenagers.

The movie Curse of the 13th Ghost brings most of the original gang into the action. Scrappy is not there, though and the one time he’s mentioned, it’s written as though Fred and Velma don’t know who he is. I thought this was a bit of a shame, actually. Even though I’m not a Scrappy fan, I would have liked to have seen this sequel acknowledge his part in the series a little more. Likewise, we have no sign of the ghosts Bogel and Weerd. Since the movie was made in 2019, they couldn’t bring Vincent Price back, but Maurice LaMarche does a credible job as Vincent Van Ghoul. Flim-Flam does appear, now much more grown up even though they claim this is no more than a couple of years after the series. As the movie opens, Fred sells the classic green, flowered Mystery Machine, which gives them an excuse to bring the red Mystery Machine back, which was a fun touch.

I thought the animation and designs in the movie were great. I liked how Velma and Fred are skeptical that Daphne and Shaggy encountered real ghosts. The movie also does a great job of sidestepping whether there was a real thirteenth ghost or not. I’m one of those people who liked how Scooby and the gang kept discovering that the monsters and ghosts weren’t real, but criminals. Also, some of the direct-to-video films like Zombie Island and The Witch’s Ghost did a great job of giving us the gang confronting real supernatural threats. However, I always thought there were two missed opportunities. One was dealing with the issue that criminals in masks might actually be more dangerous than supernatural opponents. The other is that Scooby is well situated to tell X-Files-like stories where you’re never quite sure what’s real and what’s not. Curse of the 13th Ghost managed to tell something close to that kind of story. I just wish the movie had acknowledged Scrappy’s existence and maybe was set a little later in time, with a premise more like Zombie Island where the gang are now adults. This would have better justified the older Flim-Flam.

All in all, it was fun go back and visit this series from 1985 and it’s 2019 sequel. If you want to read my story of a group of rational people confronting ghosts and monsters, why not check out The Astronomer’s Crypt. You can see a cinematic video trailer and learn more about the movie at http://davidleesummers.com/Astronomers-Crypt.html

Bride of the Monster

I just learned 2024 is the centenary of Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s birth. I first learned about Wood from a book called The Golden Turkey Awards by critics Harry and Michael Medved. The book named Wood’s film Plan 9 From Outer Space as the worst movie of all time and Wood himself was named worst director of all time.

The reason I owned the book was that I’d always enjoyed so-called B-movies and, I have to admit, I enjoyed the Medveds’ somewhat snarky look at bad cinema. To their credit, they didn’t limit their critiques to low-budget films. They criticized big budget movies as well. Still, Plan 9 From Outer Space became sort of a holy grail for me. I wanted to see what made it the worst movie of all. I eventually did find a copy around a decade later, soon after my wife and I were married in 1990, as I recall. Yes, I found myself laughing at some of the cheap sets and shaking my head at the clunky acting and even clunkier writing. Still, after watching the film, my reaction was, “that was kind of fun.” Four years later, Tim Burton made his biopic of Wood, which only made me want to watch more of his movies. The next one I would see out, was Bride of the Monster.

The movie opens on a dark and stormy night. Two hunters are out in the woods. They seek shelter at an old house. The door opens and they’re confronted by none other than Bela Lugosi in the last speaking role of his career. Lugosi sends the hunters away. They’re convinced when his henchman named Lobo, played by wrestler Tor Johnson shows up. The hunters run away, thinking Lobo is the monster they’ve been hearing about. Soon the hunters stumble over some bushes. One tumbles into a lake to be eaten by a giant octopus. The other is captured by Lobo and brought back to the lab to be experimented on by Bela Lugosi, who plays an atomic scientist named Dr. Eric Vornoff. It turns out, Vornoff has devised a way to create atomic powered supermen. Unfortunately, the hunter Lobo brings back dies when Vornoff tries to convert him.

Meanwhile, back in town, we learn reporter Janet Laughton is on the trail of the monster and her boyfriend, police Lieutenant Dick Craig, is trying to solve the mystery of the disappearances by the old lake. It should be no surprise they find their way out to Vornoff’s house. However, they aren’t the only ones trying to figure out what’s going on. A monster hunter named Strowski has turned up, but it turns out he may know more about Vornoff than he let on. I won’t spoil the movie for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but it all ends with a big atomic blast. No question this is a movie of the 1950s, when atomic power could do anything. In many ways, the fear and promise of the atom then isn’t too different from the fear and promises of AI today and maybe nanotechnology will in the future.

As I reached the end of the film, I realized that sure, Lugosi’s delivery is sometimes uneven, but the fun he has playing that role is infectious. Sure, when it’s not stock footage, the octopus in the lake looks a little limp. Sure, some of the sets look like painted plywood or even cardboard. However, never once during the film was I bored. It’s a glance back at the hopes and fears for the atom, including how agents from other countries might wield its powers. I’ve already watched the movie multiple times since that first time. There are many “better” movies that don’t engage me enough to back for a second much less a third or fourth viewing.

Mad scientists trying to unlock terrible secrets and monstrous henchmen are also a part of my latest novel, Ordeal of the Scarlet Order. You can learn more about it at http://davidleesummers.com/OSO.html