Fairy Tale Spotlight: Oz Authors Favorites

Here is my final list of Oz authors from most favorite to least favorite.

*****

#1 Favorite: Rachel Cosgrove Payes

Ultimately Rachel just did the best at making characters seem alive and believable to me. It isn't just the Percy thing, although that is a major part of my decision. That said, I love all her stories completely and never found anything to complain about. They were perfect stories.

#2: Eric Shanower

An absolute genius in creating Oz stories. I liked some more than others, but the real kicker was the fact that he was able to take Oz into different forms of media. Truly masterful.

#3: L. Frank Baum

The creator of Oz. None of the things could have existed without him. He set the groundwork for all future authors to create.

#4: Jack Snow

A short lived but important author who showed us the beauty of Oz more than any other.

#5: Edward Einhorn

The man who showed us that all the continuity errors were a part of the experience. He also showed us that we can write our own Oz story, and it might end up being true.

#6: John R. Neill

He proved that Oz can be like a cartoon. He made us all laugh at his silliness.

#7: Sherwood Smith

She showed us the contrast between our world and Oz. This brought out why the Oz universe is so important to escapism fantasy.

#8: Gina Wickwar

#9: Dick Martin

#10: Elois Jarvis McGraw and Lauren Lynn McGraw

#11 Least Favorite: Ruth Plumly Thompson

Too many duds. Even though she did have some genuine hits, most of her stories were bad. Just seeing her name put a bad taste in my mouth. She just could not break out of her own formulas enough for me to like her. I also consider her best work to be "King Kojo" which doesn't even take place in Oz. It may be canon, but it's still not Oz. This is why she is last on the list.

*****

Okay, that's it!

This blog was written on May 3, 2024.

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Fairy Tale Spotlight: Hundreds of Beavers [Movie Review]

I really questioned whether or not I wanted to review this. I had to have a good think about it. I don't normally go into films, especially newer ones. Movies these days are stupid. I can't get into them. All they do is deliver meaningless popcorn entertainment or else they spend half the film trying to convince you of some dumb message. New movies suck. They just do.

But...

"Hundreds of Beavers" is a movie released in 2024, the very year I am writing this review. It just came out in April, and this is the very beginning of May that I am writing this. Yes, this movie is extremely fresh off the presses. Also its extremely good.

"Hundreds of Beavers" is a little hard to explain. It is filmed in a flurry of artistic ways. It combined various styles such as black and white media, silent film aspects, animation, puppetry, early cartoon physics and concepts, live action mixed with cartoons, puppets, people in animal costumes, and also certain aspects of video game mechanics. There is probably more that I forgot to mention, and that is likely because the movie is just so full of ideas.

First and foremost, the movie is mainly a comedy; it is there to make you laugh. However it's a bit of a mixed genre. In addition to being a comedy, it is also a survival story, a horror movie, and a romance. It mixes everything up pretty evenly with the comedy aspect happening throughout. As silly and goofy as this movie is, you will get invested in the main character by the end of the film. You'll want him to succeed.

Oh, and what even is this movie about?! It's about a man who originally produced applejack for a living, but he loses all of that, including his farm and everything. From there, he is left out in the cold trying to survive on his wits, something he isn't good at. Actually he is pretty miserable at it. He spends half the movie trying to figure out how survival in the cold actually works.

The man ultimately learns that there is a guy who is offering goods for animal furs, and if the main character can give him enough of them, he can have his daughter as a wife. The problem is that he wants beaver furs mainly, and the beavers are freaking organized. This is a task easier said than done.

I won't spoil anymore than that, but I do want to point out that all the animals in the movie are either puppets or people in animal costumes. It's the silliest thing in the world, but you do get used to it after a while. It's just how this world works. There are no actual animals in the entire film.

The movie also works by its own set of rules. These rules are very slowly delivered as the movie progresses. A lot of it is cartoon logic that does not really lean in favor of the main protagonist. Basically it's up to the protagonist to learn these rules so that they ultimately benefit him in the hunt. That's one of the reasons it's so easy to get invested in the movie. You begin to understand that the whole movie is a puzzle made up of cartoon logic, and, once you learn the rules, you can win the game.

This movie just freaking game out, and I absolutely recommend it. Do whatever you can to see this movie. I'll be trying to get my friends a copy if I can. I think everyone needs to see this brand new movie that is worth viewing. Remember, it may be a comedy, but you will get invested in the story. There is enough there to engage you. Give this one a watch if only to celebrate that a good movie was actually released in 2024.

This blog was written on May 3, 2024.

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Fairy Tale Spotlight: Tabby [Short Story Review]

[I spoil the entire story.]

"Tabby" is a short science fiction story written by Winston K. Marks. It was published in 1954. It is not a story about a cat. There are no cats mentioned in any manner whatsoever. Glad I could get that out of the way.

The story is about a bunch of marine researchers who are set up on an island. A flying saucer crash-lands into the the water, and, when the top opens up, it releases a bunch of flying insects into the air. Although they try to recover the spaceship, it ends up self-detonating shortly afterwards.

Already this looks like some form of alien attack, but the trick of the story has to do with figuring out what kind of attack it is. At once, the researchers switch from fish to insect research. The bug is a new species not indigenous to Earth. Although they do give it a new scientific name, the nickname for the bug is "tabby," which is where we get our title from. See? Not a cat.

Although the bugs do bite and are really annoying, there's no poison or anything. They are basically just a pest that breeds really fast. It turns out that the real problem are the spiders trying to feed on them. The flies end up upsetting the ecology on Earth and making the spiders go crazy trying to catch the things. Eventually the island ends up covered in webs that are thick enough to catch even birds.

At the end of it all, it is learned that these spaceships have been crashing all over Earth. The humans can't keep up with the breeding flies, and the spiders are going nuts covering everything is webs. The whole thing is horribly overwhelming.

And that's pretty much it. It looks like a successful attack by aliens who had done a little research about how the ecology on our planet was so perfectly balanced. All they had to do was upset one aspect of it and it caused a disaster. It reminds me a little how people in Japan began reintroducing wolves into their ecosystem and they began causing problems. So it's not entirely unrealistic... but it is a tad overexaggerated. It doesn't factor in the adaptability of our planet and its inhabitants.

I'm gonna mark this one off as a light "eco" story. Don't really like those in general, but this one really wasn't that bad. It's short, so I recommend it, but you can certainly find better scifi stories out there than this.

This blog was written on May 2, 2024.

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Fairy Tale Spotlight: Backlash [Short Story Review]

[I completely spoil this story.]

"Backlash" is a short science fiction story written by Winston K. Marks. It was published in 1954. I was originally not going to spoil this story, but I eventually made the tough decision to do so because I wanted to rant a little about the weird ending.

The story goes that an alien race called the Ollies crash-land on Earth, and the humans save and help the survivors. The Ollies seem to be an extremely friendly and even subservient race. They offer to pay back the humans by providing them with servant robots called Soths.

The Soths are big, hulking creatures who seem to be extremely good at doing the tasks given to them. The Ollies agree to manufacture them while the main character is basically in charge of selling them. As might be expected, the Soths are are hit and soon most of the humans around the world are not doing there own chores anymore, although I should mention that the wealthy people ended up getting to the front of the line. So everything sort of works out at first.

I had a similar opening to my book "The Fascinating Life of Animal Robots." Everything goes really good... until it doesn't. And in "Backlash," things go down hill in the worst way. For one, the cruelty of humanity comes out. Some of them begin just treating the Soths badly, even to the point of the robots having to protect themselves.

There was also a really creepy scene where the main character asks his wife to take off her clothing in front of the Soth to see how he will react. He makes her do this in front of a friend of theirs. Of course, the Soth leaves the room because he is being placed in a situation that is inappropriate, but I was more annoyed with the husband in this case. It reminded me a little of the husband from "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" to some extent. It was not a very nice thing to do, but it was also one of the things that made humanity not look so good in the story.

So after a bunch of controversial incidents with the Soth, the world goes into full riot about them. Many of them think they are defective or just plane evil. One woman even claims a Soth raped her, but that was unfounded. She was just trying to get attention. Basically, this whole thing turns into chaos really quickly, and soon the Soths turn on the humans.

The Soth owned by the main character explains that this happens all the time. They are given to the people of different planets as slaves, but soon the people turn on them or treat them badly. This then leads the Soths to flip the rolls on them, making the people the slaves with the Soths as the masters. Basically they invade planets and take control as a matter of righteous retaliation. The Ollies were already the slaves, but they were playing the roll of the masters because they had been ordered to.

So the ending is the whole reason why I wanted to spoil the story. This sort of came out of nowhere. The Soth that was owned by the main character announces that he requires a Sith (a female Soth) to breed with, but that it will take time for the Siths to arrive at Earth. Until then he is fine with using the husband's wife for his own pleasure. He calls for her, and she shows up looking like she is ready to go through with it.

Shockingly, the wife had secreted a hunting knife in her robes and kills the Soth dead. She basically gutted him right there in front of her stunned husband. Up until this point, she did not seem to be pitched as the type of woman to act like this. She even shoots another Soth in the head right before the book ends.

Now, the author wraps all this up in the concept that humans have simply risen above slavery, and his wife's actions are the fruits of this, but to me... it just seemed kind of forced. Maybe, he just liked the idea of a strong woman killing aliens or something. I'm okay with that, but there was no clue that she would act like that up until that point.

So this is a mixed bag. It's really a cool story! I even recommend it. But the business with the wife is a bit of a stretch. What do you think? Did he drop the ball at the end?

This blog was written on May 1, 2024.

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Fairy Tale Spotlight: ...So They Baked a Cake [Short Story Review]

[I spoil the entire story.]

"...So They Baked a Cake" is a short science fiction story written by Winston K. Marks. It was published in 1954.

So at this point we found a way to travel faster than light. We are going to try and colonize a planet in Alpha Centauri. The main character is a reporter who has become cynical. He wants to leave Earth just to get away from humanity.

The problems with faster-than-light travel is that it somehow causes time travel. Meaning that Earth will rapidly age within a very short time while you are traveling through space. I never fully understood why this happens, but I have always heard about it. It's a very common space problem.

In the story, the ship ends up going faster than they thought it would. They'll end up at their destination in a matter of days which means that Earth would be completely different when they returned. But something weird happens when they get to Alpha Centauri. They get a message from one of the planets, and it's in English.

As it turns out, Earth saw that their ship was doing okay and immediately made an even better one which basically outran them, bringing with them some barely-aged humans that formed a colony before they even got there. This was actually a very happy ending, since they did not really have to do any of the work themselves. The cake referenced in the title was real. The colonists make a giant cake to welcome them with when they landed on "New Columbia."

I liked this story, and I do recommend it. I expected something depressing and cynical but ended up with something that made me smile. And this, if you think on it, was the whole point of the story: not getting what you expect.

This blog was written on April 26, 2024.

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Fairy Tale Spotlight: Bramble: The Mountain King [Video Game Review]

[This blog spoils some aspects of the game.]

A fairy tale game!

"Bramble: The Mountain King" is a video game developed by Dimfrost Studio. It was released in 2023. It is heavily inspired by Nordic fairy tales. In fact, this game lets you experience them first hand.

The story goes that a little boy named Olle is looking for his older sister. In his attempt to find her, they both end up in the fairyland of that realm. At first, it looks very cute and playful. You got the little gnomes with the pointy hats and such. This is incredibly misleading though.

The playful opening of the game does not represent what's coming. You see... the problem with Nordic fairy tales is that.... there is a preponderance of bad things that absolutely love to murder and eat little children, and this game does not pull its punches.

This game has every horror you can imagine. Nothing is good. It's all bad. Everything's trying to either stab you, cut you in half, eat you up, drown you, and the game has no problems in showing a little child meet a gory, horrible end. And you will see these things happen often, since the game has a fair bit of difficulty to it.

Most of the horrors in this game are too large for you to actually fight. You do have to fight them sometimes though. You have a single weapon which is a glowing rock. You can flash it at some things, and very rarely it can turn into a sword. But most of the time you are hiding or running away from giant hags, ogres, and zombies. Yeah, there's zombies in their lore. It's nuts.

Another thing the game does not pull its punches on is the terrible aspect of killing babies. This game goes into a sort of fairy cult where people are murdering babies by drowning them. You have to deal with this for a long time in the game and it will make you sick to your stomach, if you're like me. It's rough, but they actually did a good job at it. It's just another reason we should not be entertaining creatures like this.

Honestly, I think the baby thing was the worst of it for me. I was really upset over that entire plotline. And I am not upset with the developers at all. They gave me a legitimate look at how terrifying their fairy tales really were. They censored nothing.

Another thing that happens a lot in this game is that you will go through a dark period that is scary, such as a cave or just night time, and then breech out into the daylight. In most games, that means that you are getting a brief reprieve, but all too often in this game that is not the case. Daylight will just come with more problems. It almost never lets up. Bad things just keep coming from one thing or another.

What was even the more surprising was that this game actually has a satisfying ending. I won't go into what it was, but it was very good and worth the journey to the end. And with that, I am going to recommend this game. They did me proud with this one. If you want to see how absolutely terrifying fairy tales can get, then this is the game for you. If you are easily squeamish though, you might want to avoid it.

This blog was written on April 26, 2024.

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Fairy Tale Spotlight: Unbegotten Child [Short Story Review]

[I spoil the entire story.]

"Unbegotten Child" is a short science fiction story written by Winston K. Marks. It was published in 1953. This story reeks of evolution, but this is the muddy waters I have to often tread when I read early science fiction stories. I'm not saying I am excusing it. It's just something I have decided to endure in the name of finding all those hidden gems I am always looking for.

The idea here is that a woman shows up at a doctor's office, and she is clearly pregnant, but she is convinced that it's a tumor and wants the doctor to remove it. The doctor is alternatively convinced that it is, in fact, a baby inside her. But the woman is absolutely sure that she is a virgin. She never had sex.

As it turns out, she had run away from a French doctor who had been kind of obsessing over her condition. He too believes that she is pregnant, but that her pregnancy was the result of a change in human evolution. He thinks that humans are changing to become asexual reproducers. That basically means that people are evolving to just get pregnant without needing sex. He even suggested that men would also suddenly get pregnant.

I'm sighing a lot while I write this. Pinching the bridge of my nose. Trying to just... move on with this review.

Anyways, the French doctor ends up being correct. She ends up having a beautiful baby girl. At first, the doctor thinks it must have all just been a misunderstanding. Maybe she just had sex and didn't remember it or something. This is until he is pointed to the fact that the baby has no navel. Basically humans are just going to grow inside people like tumors now. Yeah. That's evolution for ya.

I don't recommend the story. It was stupid.

This blog was written on April 26, 2024.

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Fairy Tale Spotlight: Looney Tunes: Sheep Raider [Video Game Review]

"Looney Tunes: Sheep Raider" is a video game for the PlayStation released in 2001. I actually only found this game about a year ago and it got me hooked.

The whole idea of this game comes from those old cartoons where Ralph the Wolf and Sam the Sheepdog go at it. Ralph the Wolf is actually Wile E. Coyote but with a red nose. Other than that, they look almost identical.

Ralph would always try to come up with clever ways to steal Sam's sheep and always end up getting bested by Sam who would beat him up. The funny thing about the cartoons were that they would punch out at a timeclock at the end of the episode and just go home... and of course come back to do it all again the next day. Those cartoons are the whole reason this game exists.

In the game, Daffy Duck shows up and introduces Ralph to a gameshow where he might actually have a chance to steal the sheep from Sam as long as he is clever enough. Most of the levels have you using various cartoon tricks that are very familiar to us over the many years of watching Loony Tunes. My favorite in the game is the big rubber band which can actually be used in a couple different ways. You can bungie down from a cliff and try to grab the sheep from below, or you can tie it two two trees and use it like a stretchy catapult.

The difficulty of the game just comes from figuring out the correct series of actions needed to first remove the sheep from Sam's surveillance and then to get said sheep to the goal ring. As the game progresses, both of these tasks can become very, VERY difficult to figure out. It's basically a stealth game crossed with a puzzle platformer.

The animation of the characters seems inspired from the cartoons themselves. Even though the PlayStation graphics are dated, you can see the special care that the animators put into it. Everything looks really good, and I loved all the cute little expressions everyone made. Also the death scenes are hilarious.

I also want to mention the dash mechanic. If you jab really fast on the Triangle button, Ralph will run super fast, so fast it's actually hard to get him to stop. If you happen to run off of a cliffside, he will actually run in midair for a bit before he realizes he is in trouble. He will also slam into a wall if he can't stop in time. This is one of the many aspects of the game that make you feel like you're controlling a cartoon character. It's brilliantly crafted. I can tell that the developers had fun making it.

If you can get ahold of this game, I do recommend it. Just keep in mind that it is a very challenging game. You'll end up dying a lot. However, dying is actually very entertaining and just helps you realize that you should probably just be trying something different. That's the whole point. Keep trying different things and eventually you'll figure out what the game wants you to do. It's a good and solidly made game, and it's really too bad it's not better known these days.

This blog was written on April 26, 2024.

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Fairy Tale Spotlight: The Water Eater [Short Story Review]

[I completely spoil this story.]

"The Water Eater" is a science fiction short story written by Winston K. Marks. It was published in 1953.

The story is about a beer-delivery man who is also an amateur scientist. By "amateur" I mean that he reads science magazines. While attempting to clean his wife's roaster oven, he combines a bunch of cleaning chemicals and accidently creates a blob that absolutely eats all water that comes in contact with it.

His wife is naturally terrified of this possibly living creature, but the problem is that the husband gets obsessed over it. All other projects, including his job, fall to the side so he can experiment on this strange water-absorbing blob.

Now, this thing as actually dangerous. It would try and take the water out of your body. And yes, that would kill you. But the thing of it was that the story was written in the first-person which assured that the main character would somehow live through it. That, however, was kind of a trick. The real reason this story is a horror has to do with something the story doesn't even show.

After the man realizes that this thing is potentially dangerous, he uses a blowtorch to completely destroy it. However he happens to remember that some of it did manage to make it down into the drain. This drain would ultimately lead into the ocean where the creature would have all the water in the world to grow. The story ends here, leaving you with that fun little thought. Not bad, and kind of morbidly funny.

Good story, if not a bit goofy. I do recommend it. I've been having a lot of water problems at my house. Might not have been bad to have this creature as a pet!

This blog was written on April 24, 2024.

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