I missed last night’s Venture Bros. special — From The Ladle To The Grave: The Story Of Shallow Gravy — but here’s Shallow Gravy’s “Jacket” video:
(Hat tip to io9.com.)
From The Ladle To The Grave
Monday, August 29th, 2011What’s it like to have your film flop at the box office?
Monday, August 29th, 2011When you work “above the line” on a movie (writer, director, actor, producer, etc.), Sean Hood says, watching it flop at the box office is devastating:
I had such an experience during the opening weekend of Conan the Barbarian 3D.
It’s hard to feel bad for someone who co-wrote the new Conan flick:
You make light of it, of course. You joke and shrug. But the blow to your ego and reputation can’t be brushed off. Reviewers, even when they were positive, mocked Conan The Barbarian for its lack of story, lack of characterization, and lack of wit. This doesn’t speak well of the screenwriting — and any filmmaker who tells you s/he “doesn’t read reviews” just doesn’t want to admit how much they sting.
Unfortunately, the work I do as a script doctor is hard to defend if the movie flops. I know that those who have read my Conan shooting script agree that much of the work I did on story and character never made it to screen. I myself know that given the difficulties of rewriting a script in the middle of production, I did work that I can be proud of. But its still much like doing great work on a losing campaign. All anyone in the general public knows, all anyone in the industry remembers, is the flop. A loss is a loss.
He says that a movie’s opening day is analogous to a political election night, and naturally another screenwriter knows exactly what that’s like:
Sean compared this to being a part of a losing Presidential campaign and as someone who has done both, I can say that that is exactly what it is like. I had the wonderful opportunity to work for John Kerry in 2004 and experience the horrific feeling that comes with losing to George W. Bush and actually believing in my candidate. Watching the election returns was like a never ending math test that just kept going for what seemed to be the purpose of dragging out my misery. I had the best possible outcome in 2008, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget the feeling that came with the 2004 election results.
Star Wars’ Computer Animation
Sunday, August 28th, 2011Dan O’Bannon made his name writing the screenplay for Alien, but before that he did some technical work on the computer animation for a little science-fiction film called Star Wars:
George Lucas had hired 24 year-old computer scientist Larry Cuba to create the (at the time) challenging wireframe and vector-based CGI work for the tactical briefing before the attack on the Death Star in Star Wars. Cuba worked out of the Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL) at the University of Illinois, and created the blueprints and graphics using the vector graphics scripting language GRASS (GRAphics Symbiosis System, created by Ohio State’s Tom DeFanti in 1974). EVL themselves take no particular credit for the sequence, but say “[Larry Cuba] stayed at our facility and used our equipment for many months in order to create the sequence.” Cuba created an instructional video about the sequence at the time of Star Wars, and EVL released it in 2008 as a well-viewed 10-minute video on their channel at YouTube.
Cuba used a Vector General CRT, DEC PDP-11 minicomputer to generate the images and recorded the frames by pointing a film camera at the monitor in an automated process which awaited each successive image to be rendered before triggering a frame exposure.
O’Bannon’s first task on Star Wars was to create the final section of the Death Star tactical simulation, wherein torpedoes are seen entering the shaft and descending to the core to cause a reactor explosion. For this O’Bannon made an effort to simulate Cuba’s style, with white lines on black, but added his signature ‘strobing’ at certain points. This end section of Star Wars’ one and only CGI sequence would have been an ambitious addition to the schedule, and Lucas decided that concluding it with animation was the quickest route to completing the scene.
Later Lucas returned to chat with O’Bannon about creating the remaining tactical and computer display animations for Star Wars. Lucas was shuttling between San Francisco and ILM’s facility in Van Nuys at the period, and would sit with O’Bannon sketching out rough diagrams for the tacticals on scrap paper.
Feedback from Lucas was minimal throughout the three-month period in which O’Bannon supervised the shots, though he notes that the director was concerned at one stage that some of the visuals were coming out too ‘colourful’. This is something O’Bannon says he could easily have remedied in advance if there had been more detailed discussion, but in the end the colour in some of the tactical shots was toned down for release.
The one shot where O’Bannon’s team employed computer technology was on the compositing work for the Death Star’s aspect for clearance to destroy the rebel moon Yavin IV. Here O’Bannon praised the great speed at which the Image West facility was able to take the elements that he brought and composite them with motion on an analogue computer. The system was known as Scanimate, and was created by Lee Harrison III, the founder of Chicago’s Computer Image. Scanimate would scan core imagery at twice the horizontal rate of NTSC or PAL and output the various elements composited onto a five-inch CRT screen, which was filmed in real-time with a conventional movie camera. If you’re interested in more detail on how Scanimate worked, check out this post at Siggraph.
Of all the visual effects produced for the original Star Wars, the contribution of O’Bannon’s team has been the least affected by the two ‘enhanced’ re-releases in 1997 and 2005, though we must note that Lucas did decide to change the written language on the Death Star’s tractor-beam generator (above) from English to…well, something else. O’Bannon joked that he was disappointed George Lucas had not taken the opportunity to revamp the screens for the special editions, and that something more interesting could have been done with newer technologies. On this, of course, we can’t fault Lucas; it would not only have removed O’Bannon’s work from the film but substituted a great deal of the original feeling and iconography of Star Wars. Good call!
Watching that how-to video, it seems like they would have been better off filming literal wire-frame models, which is what they more-or-less did for Escape from New York‘s computer displays. The (very different) scene from Heavy Metal, where Taarna rides her pteranodon over the desert landscape, was actually animated using a similar technique, with a physical model of the landscape painted with lines along its edges, so they could fly the movie camera over the terrain and then produce high-contrast photocopies of the film, which could then be painted for the final animation.
Alternate History
Saturday, August 27th, 2011Alternate history has moved beyond TV tropes and online forums and into the basic-cable mainstream with Spike’s Alternate History — which is pretty awful, particularly if you’ve swallowed the red pill.
For instance, the first episode’s what-if is the classic, What if Hitler had won the war?, and it doesn’t even mention Soviet Russia — or any other countries besides the US and Germany. So, how does Hitler win the war? By repulsing the D-Day invasion with his jet fighters, of course. That was easy.
So, he then consolidates his holdings in Europe, Asia, and Africa, right? Not sure. But we do know that he develops submarine-launched missiles with atomic warheads, destroys a couple American cities, and then takes over. It’s the obvious next step.
And that‘s the real point of the show, to depict America under the heel of evil white right-wingers who use smart-phones and tablets to track down Jews, Blacks, and “undesirables” for extermination.
Ah, but The People rise up and use social networks to Revolt and take back Power! I’m not sure who their NATO is though, providing air cover and covert operatives on the ground.
Into the Uncanny Valley of the Dark Crystal
Friday, August 26th, 2011Cult classic The Dark Crystal serves as a wonderful example of how to use pre-CGI puppetry in a film — and how not to, in the case of the two protagonists, the Gelflings:
I didn’t realize that the disturbingly zombie-like Gelflings were designed not by Brian Froud but by Wendy Froud, his wife. I also didn’t realize that the fantastic landscapes in much of Mr. Froud’s work look like the countryside of Dartmoor, where he lives.
It’s always funny to see Jim Henson or Frank Oz interviewed, because it’s the wrong face to go with the very familiar voice (of Kermit or Fozzie.)
(Hat tip to io9.com.)
121 Years of Sanity-Blasting
Wednesday, August 24th, 2011
This past Saturday would have been horror writer H.P. Lovecraft’s 121st birthday — had he made a deal with blasphemous otherworldly powers. Lovecraft’s influence has been wide, James Maliszewski notes, but superficial:
Every time a character in a story, movie, or roleplaying game encounters a blasphemous book, a slimy, tentacled horror, or teeters on the brink of insanity due to the horrible truths he has learned, we ultimately have HPL to thank.
Of course, many of these ideas predated Lovecraft or were further popularized by his imitators. Indeed, I think it likely that the vast majority of the stories and story elements deemed “Lovecraftian” are nothing of the sort, based as they are on very superficial readings of the Old Gent’s writings.This includes the Call of Cthulhu RPG, which, while a very fine game and one of my favorites, nevertheless owes an equal debt to August Derleth as it does to H.P. Lovecraft (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
I’m sure some of this superficiality stems from the intellectual laziness to which we all are prone, but I think most of it has its origin in the difficulty in really coming to grips with the philosophy and worldview that underlie Lovecraft’s stories. HPL is sometimes called a “nihilist” or a “pessimist,” but I don’t think either label is an accurate one. The alien entities Lovecraft describes are not malevolent. They may engage in activities detrimental to man, but it is not through any ill will toward him, or at least no more ill will than when man inadvertently destroys a nest of ants when building a skyscraper. Lovecraft takes no pleasure in this reality; he does not celebrate it. He is completely indifferent to it, presenting it simply as a brute fact, albeit one with far reaching implications for man’s self-image.
That most of us should recoil from this fact is not surprising, as it runs counter to long-held beliefs about the place of man in the cosmos. That’s why, I think, so few of the works called “Lovecraftian” nowadays really deserve the sobriquet. I can count on one hand the number of books, movies, or RPGs that really embrace a Lovecraftian worldview and, even then, that worldview is often tempered with an instinctive hope for human transcendence that, to HPL, is utterly unwarranted. It’s little wonder, then, that pop culture has chosen to defang Lovecraft, reducing his conceptions to catch phrases and nerd totems rather than grappling with the worrisome possibility that he just may be right.
Speaking of the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, Sandy Petersen, the creator, recently “reviewed” his own game:
I was such a fan of Runequest that I wrote to Greg Stafford, the president of Chaosium. Instead of putting me on the FBI stalker list, he encouraged me, and I published some articles and one book of monsters with him. Ultimately I proposed an expansion to Runequest in which the players could adventure in H. P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands. Greg wasn’t interested, because he already had a guy designing a Lovecraft game set in the real world. Ack! This was like the holy grail to me, because I had been a Lovecraft fan since the age of 8, literally. (You can draw your own conclusions about my childhood.) I begged to be allowed in on the project, and then Greg dropped another bombshell — the other guy was dragging his heels, so Greg wanted to drop the whole project in my lap. Excelsior! Greg never even sent me the other person’s notes and writings, so I had to do the whole thing from scratch.
I had previously worked on a game I called American Gothic, which was basically horror set in the modern world. It had not gotten too far along, and used its very own RPG system which was, admittedly, much inferior to Basic Role Playing, which is what Greg demanded. He also demanded that I set the game in the 1920s, which is when Lovecraft wrote the stories.
Why the 1920s?
To me, Lovecraft was never about the era. His characters used cutting-edge technology, such as submarines, airplanes, and recording devices, and interacted with cutting-edge events, such as the discovery of Pluto, and 20th-century population conflicts and pressures. So the way I saw it, if HPL had lived in 1980, he’d have written about Jimmy Carter (my dream is a 1980 HPL story where we find out it wasn’t a giant swimming *rabbit* after all).However, the good folks at Chaosium did not respect Lovecraft. Greg’s exact words were “HPL is a terrible writer.” That was mild, compared to some other Chaosium opinions. They were okay with having a fan like me design the game, because that way my love for Lovecraft would be in the rules. But on the other hand, the Chaosium folks wanted to enjoy playing the game I was going to design, and they wanted a “hook” to hang their fun onto. They chose the 1920s. In their games, they loved driving old cars, talking about zeppelins, flappers, the Weimar Republic and all that stuff. My own games usually didn’t reference the era at all, except peripherally. Yeah they were in the 1920s too, but they could just as easily have been set anywhere in the 20th century. A haunted house is a haunted house as far as I was concerned.
So Call of Cthulhu to this day is officially set in the 1920s, and has the big 1920s guidebook, with which I had little to do, except providing some monster stats (like for mummies and wolves and so forth). But that was the Chaosium thing.
Sanity
The central driving mechanic of Call of Cthulhu is Sanity. This stat starts pretty high, then deteriorates over time. Though there are methods of raising it, usually you can tell how long you’ve been playing a particular investigator by how low it’s dropped. Lots of folks have told me how ingenious and revolutionary this concept was, and I’ve seen it adapted to many other games under many different names.As such I’d like to take full credit for inventing it. But I can’t, alas. The original concept was published in an article for the Sorcerer’s Apprentice magazine, where the authors (whose names are published in other interviews of mine) suggested that the player be given a Willpower stat or some such thing, and if he saw something too scary, he could take a Willpower check, and a bad enough failure could reduce it permanently. Reduce it permanently?! This was what I hung my hat on. I took the fundamental idea, called it Sanity, made it the focus of the game, and instead of, on rare occasions, lowering this stat, I had almost every encounter and event reduce one’s Sanity, till player-characters could become gibbering wrecks, or even turn into GM-controlled monsters.
It worked like a charm. In the very first game I ever ran of Call of Cthulhu (long before the rules were finished), my players found a book which enabled them to summon up a Foul Thing From Otherwhere (a dimensional shambler) and decided to do so. At the moment they completed the spell, the players suddenly chimed in with comments like “I’m covering my eyes.” “Turning my back.” “Shielding my view so I don’t see the monster.” I had never seen this kind of activity in an RPG before — trying NOT to see the monster? What a concept. You may not credit it, but I had actually not realized that the Sanity stat, as I had written it, would lead to such behavior. To me it was serendipitous; emergent play. But I loved it. The players were actually acting like Lovecraft heroes instead of the mighty-thewed barbarian lunks of D&D.
I knew I was on to something and kept refining the Sanity mechanic, in conjunction with the people at Chaosium, until it reached its current state. One big change was that I had concluded that Sanity should only diminish, and never increase, and the folks at Chaosium thought that was too negative even for a game about Cthulhu. They were right, I feel. And after all, Sanity still trends downwards, so I got my way in the end. If anything it’s more agonizing for the players this way, because they are fooled into thinking they can work their Sanity back up. Ha ha.
The Monsters
Early reviews of the game took issue with my portrayal of the monsters and gods of the Cthulhu Mythos. (Well, at least T.E.D. Klein’s review did.) They wanted mysterious undescribed horrors, but I just wasn’t raised that way. Not after 7 years of D&D, anyhoo. So I wanted concrete stats and I got them. The biggest problem was that, of course, Lovecraft didn’t specify hardly any of his monsters. They had descriptors instead of names. “Hunting Horrors”, “Formless Spawn”, that sort of things. My response, pedestrian as it may sound, was to take those descriptors and turn them INTO names, plus adding a few extra monsters for good cheer. (Yes, the Dark Young are totally my invention. Now it can be told.) Turning the gods, like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth, into monsters went a little against the grain, but on the other hand, the wholly-materialistic Lovecraft kind of treated them LIKE big monsters. Cthulhu, for instance, isn’t really a god — he’s just a huge alien horror; high priest and ruler of his loathsome race. (And what is he a high priest OF? That’s never said.)
Speaking of superficial treatments of Lovecraft’s ideas, James Maliszewski actually recommends the new Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, which his kids have been watching:
I bring this all up because, in addition to its other fine qualities, many episodes of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated are loving homages to horror films or books, which makes them great fun to watch if you catch the references, as I do. A thoroughly delightful example of this was the episode entitled “The Shrieking Madness,” which concerns an octopus-headed creature known as Char Gar Gothakon, seen below.
Char Gar Gothakon is the creation of a professor at Darrow University by the name of H.P. Hatecraft, voiced by Jeffrey Combs.
Hatecraft claims that Char Gar Gothakon and his ilk are real entities that contact him in dreams and that he then spins into horror stories.
Some people scoff at this notion, including visiting lecturer Harlan Ellison (voiced by the author himself), deriding Hatecraft as a fraud.
This stance doesn’t find favor with one of Hatecraft’s biggest fans, a young man named Howard E. Roberts, whom Ellison humiliates at his appearance at Darrow University. Here’s Roberts, who looks nothing like any real world person, living or dead.
Char Gar Gothakon attacks the university several times, leading Hatecraft to eventually admit that Ellison is right and that he invented the monster with his own imagination rather than having been contacted by him. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop the beast from attacking Ellison in a parking lot and nearly carrying him off.
I won’t say any more about the plot of the episode, since I don’t want to spoil it for anyone, though I suspect anyone who’s watched even a single Scooby-Doo episode should have no trouble unraveling the mystery.
The episode has found its way online, if you’re interested.
OK Go and The Muppets
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011I thought I’d enjoy OK Go covering the Muppets theme song, but I didn’t — until they made a video:
Monsters University
Tuesday, August 23rd, 2011The upcoming sequel to Pixar’s Monsters, Inc., Monsters University, looks back at Mike and Sulley’s days as college roommates:
Scanlon explained that the animators went on several research trips to colleges like Harvard and Princeton to get the right look for the Monsters University campus — a necessity, he explained, because they were a bunch of art school grads who had no idea what actual colleges looked like.
Another key to the movie’s look is the new, younger designs for Mike and Sulley — Mike has picked up a set of braces that are either meant to make teeth straighter or more crooked (Scanlon wasn’t sure how braces would work for monsters) and Sulley is shaggier and thinner than he was in Monsters, Inc.
We got to see some concept art for the various denizens of the university, which includes your standard assortment of cool monsters, nerds, goths, as well as professors of every type, from stuffy English lit professors to artsy theater types to sports-obsessed coaches. If watching the “Homer Goes to College” episode of The Simpsons has taught me anything — and I’d like to think it’s taught me everything — then there better be a crusty dean somewhere around here.
The Children’s Illustrated Clausewitz
Saturday, August 20th, 2011Caitlin Fitz Gerald (@caidid) is (slowly) producing The Children’s Illustrated Clausewitz — or, in Spencer Ackerman’s terms, the Bible of Western War, now featuring cartoon animals.
I may have to brush up on my brush strokes before starting Sun-Tzu for Kids.
Jim Henson’s Fantastic World
Friday, August 19th, 2011The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens is showing the new “Jim Henson’s Fantastic World” exhibition, which looks back to his Mad Men days:
Cookie Monster evolved from the Wheel Stealer, one of several puppet creatures Henson invented who consume a family’s snacks in a 1960s television commercial. He later appeared on TV chomping an I.B.M. computer. According to the exhibition, Henson had hit on something that the era’s advertising mavens had hardly considered: Humor sells products.
“He was also making fun of Madison Avenue and the way things were sold, and yet he was very successful at it,” Karen Falk, the show’s curator, said in an interview. “He was much loved by the Madison Avenue executives. Maybe having it come from a puppet character made it O.K.”
Henson the subversive advertising genius is just one of the lesser-known identities the exhibition reveals. It also portrays Henson the graphic designer, Henson the product of the ’60s counterculture, Henson the experimental filmmaker and Henson the creative collaborator. The 3,500-square-foot show, consisting of more than 120 artifacts, has come to New York as its last stop on a four-year tour organized by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Tracing Henson’s development from his Mississippi childhood and Maryland high school and college years until his death from a bacterial infection in New York in 1990 (he was only 53), it comprises — along with a wealth of film and video — sketches, notes, photographs, television pitches, storyboards, and even doodles and office memos.
My Little Pony: The RPG
Friday, August 19th, 2011A few years back, as an April Fools joke, Wizards of the Coast, the folks behind Dungeons & Dragons, announced a My Little Pony roleplaying game.
This annoyed gamer-geek mxyzplk — because My Little Pony: The RPG was a great idea:
I put some thought into this when my daughter was younger. You could quite easily make a commodity RPG based on, for example, Dora the Explorer. Those episodes are very rote, the girl is on a quest and has to pass three different obstacles. You print up some “adventure sheets” with three to-do things, and a harried parent can “run the game” while doing housework. “Here, to get by the rhyming troll you have to write down a poem! Work one out together, Dora, Nora, and Whoever-you-are! Back in 5! Remember to play pretend!” It can be made appropriate down to a very young age. That article came out when my girl was 4 and I easily specced out some kid-compatible mechanics (who rolled higher on a d6 + arts & crafts!).
Of course, this is hard for most RPG companies to do. It’s not like they’re part of a huge corporation that owns the rights to a bunch of children’s properties! Oh, wait…
It’s pretty sad that we want to get a new generation into the hobby, but the most obvious and high value things that could do that are despised, and instead we think all we need is yet another 300 page rulebook slaughterfest game. Get a child psychologist, combine simple to-dos with pony figures, run a TV spot during the show (retask some of the money being flushed down the toiled advertising Green Lantern toys), and voila, the My Little Pony Adventure Game has more people playing it than every other extant RPG within weeks.
I knew that My Little Pony was back on toy-store shelves. I didn’t realize it had a new hit show:
The series had a reboot last year and is properly titled My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. While it is obviously a child’s cartoon, it is insanely well done: well-written, well-drawn, well-acted, with plenty of puns, sight gags, at least one Chuck Jones reference, and several very catchy songs.
To paraphrase the producer: “We knew parents would end up watching this show with their kids so we wanted to make it fun for them too. This includes male parents as well.” It worked! The series is now very popular with high school and college age students of both sexes.
It gets weirder:
Despite the target demographic of young girls, the show has gained a large following of predominately male teenagers and adults, calling themselves “bronies”. The appreciation of this unlikely audience is due to a combination of Faust’s direction and characterization, the expressive Flash based animation style, themes older audiences can appreciate, and a reciprocal relationship between the creators and fans. Elements of the show have become part of the remix culture and have formed the basis for a variety of Internet memes.
Green Arrow and Drugs
Tuesday, August 16th, 2011
Green Arrow was originally developed as an archery-themed version of Batman, but in the late 1960s writer Denny O’Neil decided to emphasize another facet of the character’s Robin Hood inspiration and made him a left-wing crusader for social justice — in contrast to Green Lantern, who stood for law and order.
The comics moved into other adult themes, and Green Arrow’s sidekick, Speedy, became addicted to heroin. (You’d expect amphetamines, wouldn’t you?)
Anyway, the linked Let’s Be Friends Again comic strip has Oliver Queen facing sanctions for another kind of drug use.
It makes perfect sense, by the way, to assume that Batman, if he were real, would use performance-enhancing drugs — like many high-level athletes and special operators.
Muppets: The Green Album
Monday, August 15th, 2011Muppets: The Green Album collects classic Muppet tunes covered by modern hipster faves like OK Go, Weezer, The Fray, etc.
Now I have to go decide which are inspired and which are acts of apostasy.
Who’s civilized and who’s not
Sunday, August 14th, 2011Winchell Chung (@Nyrath) points to Jo Walton’s review of Piper’s Space Viking — a book from 1963 that sounds juvenile and isn’t at all literary but addresses some big questions:
Space Viking (1963) starts out looking like a story of vengeance among the neobarbarian remnants of a collapsed Galactic Empire, and then becomes a meditation on the benefits of civilization and how that is distinct from technology.
Many of the commenters seem perplexed by Piper’s anti-fascist yet not-at-all progressive views. Only Doug M. seems to “get” it — a bit:
Well, Piper was a romantic. He loved Great Men and heroic history. He adored the Confederate States, the British Empire, and ancient Rome. Empires were cool. Empire building was an inherently admirable activity. Democracy, well… “There’s something wrong with democracy. If there weren’t, it couldn’t be overthrown by people like Zaspar Makann, attacking it from within by democratic processes.”
There’s a scene in the book where the fascists (who of course call themselves the People’s Welfare Party) are rioting. Trask suggests mowing them down with gunfire.
“That may be the way you do things in the Sword-Worlds, Prince Trask. It’s not the way we do things here on Marduk. Our government does not propose to be guilty of shedding the blood of its people.”
He had it on the tip of his tongue to retort that if they didn’t, the people would end up shedding theirs. Instead, he said softly:
“I’m sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it’s too late now. You’ve torn down the gates; the barbarians are in.”
It’s not really surprising that Jerry ‘fill the stadium’ Pournelle was a huge admirer of Piper.
That said, Piper wasn’t a fascist, or even a particularly authoritarian conservative. He was a romantic individualist, and his reading of history was colored by that.
Protesters are always fighting against tyranny, right?
Secrets of the Secret Wars
Friday, August 12th, 2011Jim Shooter reveals the secrets of the Secret Wars:
The road that led to Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars actually began when Kenner Toys licensed the DC Universe for a boys’ action figure line. Their competitor, Mattel, already had their He-Man action figure line, which was doing very well, but wanted to hedge the bet in case comic book character action figures became the rage. So, they came to Marvel to talk about licensing our characters. One thing they demanded of us was an “event,” a special publication or series to help launch the toy line. I offered an idea that was suggested by a dozen or so correspondents — usually younger ones — in the fan mail every day: one big, epic story with all (or many) of the heroes and villains in it. Everyone agreed.
We went through a number of ideas for names for the toy line and series. Mattel’s focus group tests indicated that kids reacted positively to the words “wars” and “secret.” Okay.
Mattel had a number of other requirements. Doctor Doom, they said, looked too medieval. His armor would have to be made more high-tech. So would Iron Man’s, because their focus groups indicated that kids reacted positively… etc. Okay.
They also said there had to be new fortresses, vehicles and weapons because they wanted playsets, higher price point merchandise and additional play value. Okay.
[...]
Allowing any one of the writers to handle pretty much everyone else’s characters in Secret Wars, contemplated to be the biggest, most continuity-intensive crossover ever done, would have led to bloodshed in the hallowed halls.So, I wrote it. As Editor in Chief, by definition, I was the company’s designated Keeper of the Franchises, and the ordained Absolute Authority on the characters — all part of the job, at least back then.