CSotD: Raised on a diet of free samples
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I'm purposely choosing to ignore one aspect of today's The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee to focus on the other.
The issue of Facebook privacy gets a bit of a shrug from me because, well, in the language of the law, I have no reasonable expectation of privacy.
And there are ways to insulate yourself to some extent: To start with, the Facebook rule against fake names is obviously unenforced. There are plenty of ways to keep a few steps between your public and private personas before we even get into turning off cookies and doing other techie kinds of things that defeat some fun aspects of your online experience.
Which are also options, if you really care.
But don't flatter yourself too much. Nestled in a cardboard banker box on a pallette next to the Lost Ark in that huge warehouse of filed-and-forgotten items is possibly a manila folder with my name on it, and with almost certainly only one sheet of paper in it, listing a number of larger files from the 60s/70s in each of which my name appears on a list headed "also seen at this location."
You're the star of your own movie, absolutely, and you should never ever forget it.
But that doesn't mean Big Brother gives a damn about you, except in the aggregate.
No, what I find interesting about the strip is how casually he talks about writing "a new Hardy Boys book."
Edison is growing up in a world in which the concept of originality is moribund and the distinction between thinking up something new and simply riffing on someone else's work is insignificant.
Now, granted, there has always been an element of this: Tennyson and others retold Arthurian legends, Hawthorne and others created their own versions of Greek and Roman mythology, and many of Shakespeare's plays can be traced to earlier sources.
And the copies are not always inferior. The classic 1941 film, "The Maltese Falcon," with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor, is a remake of a perfectly serviceable 1931 version with Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Daniels, which, in turn, was based on Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel.
Hammett also penned "The Thin Man," which inspired a movie so successful that it spawned four sequels. Self-parody in the name of commercial success is nothing new.
It should also be noted that there is a difference between "inspiring" and "spawning," and that what we considered "classical literature" has been winnowed from a large pile of often-commercially-successful chaff: I don't think anyone today would remember Paul de Kock if Molly Bloom hadn't read his novels (and been amused by his name), but he likely outsold Flaubert in their time.
That said, it certainly seems like we've got more things-based-on-things than we need: A new kids' book based on "Wind in the Willows," for instance, and a whole new kids' series based on "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," (the original of which was written by an author who was pretty good at writing his own derivative series for grown-ups, once the first one had struck paydirt.)
But "his own" is the key. Mark Twain brought back Tom and Huck, and Thomas Hughes wrote a sequel to "Tom Brown's Schooldays," and Faulkner penned a series of books about the same family with some measure of success, so there is nothing to be despised in an author deciding he has more to say, particularly if, as in those cases, he does.
And I'd carve out an exception for someone who wants to re-imagine a monumental work by somone else in order to genuinely challenge it, as Alice Randall did with "Gone With the Wind."
But that's quite different from "fan fiction," as explained in this discussion of the legalities and ethics of fan fiction on a recent On The Media. (Only 5:40 and well worth the listen.)
I guess my take on all this aping and shadowing and extending and adapting is that it's fine as long as it is only seen as fun and not art.
I love the Thin Man movies, but (A) there was a point where even that fine series kind of jumped the shark, and (B) I don't mistake any of the Thin Man films, even the first, for "8 1/2" or "Chloe in the Afternoon" or "Citizen Kane" or "Ikiru."
And, to that extent, Edison's choice of a series to ripoff is wonderful: The Hardy Boys were pure escapist pulp from the start, a product of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, which threw mind-bogglingly enormous buckets of mud at the wall at the beginning of the 20th century, most of which appropriately slopped off to the ground.
It was perfectly dreadful, insipid, predictable stuff cranked out by anonymous hacks, under names that included "Franklin W. Dixon" for the Hardy Boys, which certainly struck gold, as did the Nancy Drew series, by "Carolyn Keene," along with Tom Swift and the Bobbsey Twins.
Yes, it's good that these books got kids reading. It's equally good that many of those kids outgrew them and moved on to more deserving works, and somewhat sad — though hardly Stratemeyer's fault — that so many did not.
(Also worth pointing out that Stratemeyer would have gone into conniptions at the punchline of today's strip, making little Edison's "reimagining" even funnier.)
But here's the twist to tie it all together: I suspect that a lot of the people who defend derivative works not as plagiarism and the theft of intellectual property but as a new form of art are also the people who are so concerned that Facebook and other on-line sites are creating a new form of marketing based on watching what they do.
Why should Gene Roddenberry's thoughts, or J.K. Rowling's, or Suzanne Collins's, be fair game for appropriation, while dipping into yours is a violation of some sort? (And, in your answer, do try not to sound like the fellow in the Fred Pegram cartoon above.)
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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