I'm Sorry to Play Grinch, But...

Today is the seventh day of Christmas, the day on which my true love gave me seven swans a-swimming. Did you know, however, that those swans represent the seven sacraments?

If you are Catholic, you may well have heard this story before. From the reign of Elizabeth I until the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829, Catholicism was supressed in England. During this time Catholics couldn't practice the faith openly so they couldn't openly teach the faith to their children. As a result of this they developed various coded ways of passing on the faith. This is where "The Twelve Days of Christmas" comes from, a coded way of passing on certain Catholic beliefs. So the true love represents God the Father and His gifts are various gifts of God to humanity, eg. the partridge represents Jesus, the two turtle doves represent and Old and New Testaments, all the way through to the twelve lords a-leapin' who represent the twelve articles of the Apostles' Creed.

So, what you may have thought was just a pretty childrens' song is both a source of rich theological symbolism and a link to our brave brothers and sister in Christ. It is, I think you will agree, a lovely story. There is, I fear, only one small problem; it isn't true.

Perhaps I should modify that last statement. I can't prove the story isn't true any more than I can prove for certain that there are no fairies at the bottom of my garden. What I can say is that the truth of the story and the existence of the fairies have about as much evidence in their favour.

The theory was first put forward in 1979 by Canadian hymnologist Hugh McKellar. McKellar later admitted that he had no evidence for his theory and that it was based on pure conjecture. Consider the following facts that stand against the theory:

* While we have evidence for the popularity of the song going back as far as 1870, almost 50 years prior to Catholic emancipation, we have no evidence of the song ever being more popular among English Catholics than among Protestants.

* There is no mention of the link in any of the many writing by, for, and/or about English Catholics in the decades following Catholic Emancipation. Indeed, nothing to suggest the link in any Catholic literature prior to McKellar putting forward the theory a century and a half afterwards.

* Of the supposed symbolic meaning, eleven of the twelve refer to beliefs which Catholics and Protestants share. The sole exception is the seven swans, which supposedly represent the sacraments. Aside from these, all eleven 'codes' refer to things that there would be no need for Catholics to teach secretly because the Anglican Church agreed with them. There is, for example, no mention of purgatory, Mary, the saints or the Papacy.

Now, I know some will say, as I've already had it said to me, that, even if this is right, I shouldn't be a spoil sport, if people get joy or comfort for believing this, what harm does it do? Well, I think it does do some harm. Don't misunderstand me, no, I don't think the sky is going to fall because people have a mistaken belief about the history of a Christmas carol. I do see, however, two bits of harm being done:

First, we Christians protest, rightly in my view, when myths about history are promoted by our opponents. When atheists, for example, promote rubbish about Jesus being only one of a long line of pagan deities whose mother was a virgin and who was born on December 25th, we object. Well, if we are going to object when our opponents do it, we need to not do it ourselves.

Second, God gave us intellects to follow the evidence and to know the truth. Believing something which goes against the evidence because that something sounds nice or makes us feel good helps to build the bad habit of misusing the intellect. It is a vice. It is, I will grant, a very small vice in the grand scheme of things, but still a vice.
 

Review: First Episode of "The Flash"

This afternoon I watched the first episode of "The Flash", the latest Super-Hero show from the CW, T.V. network. The show apparently premiered over in the US in October and we are just now getting to see it Down Under.

For those who may not be up with the world of Super Heroes, The Flash is one of the most popular of DC Comics' Heroes, a man with the gift of super-human speed. The comics world has seen a total of four 'Flashes', the most famous being Barry Allen whose 1958 debut is seen by some as inaugurating the "Silver Age" of comic books. This version, has Barry Allen (played by Grant Gustin) as a young science nerd granted his super speed by a freak accident.

What did I think of it? All up, I'd give it a B, maybe a B+. I plan to watch future episodes, but I don't see it taking a spot on my list of favourite shows.

Mild Spoilers Follow:

Things I loved about the show: it was structured in a way that drew me in and made me relate to the main character. The opening shows The Flash running at super speeds, a red blur on a map, while Barry Allen, in voice over, talks about believing in the impossible. We then get a cut-back to Barry as a kid and are then shown the great tragedy of a young Barry, his mother killed and his father, wrongly convicted for the murder.

I also think this was really well cast. For my money, the two picks of the cast so far are Danielle Panabaker and Jesse L. Martin. Martin is probably best remembered for his role as Det. Ed Green on Law Order. Here he is, once again, playing a police Detective and frankly, the role suits him like a glove. In the show, however, he has the additional role as Barry's quasi-foster father, I liked the obvious warmth he brought to the role. Panabaker plays a scientist with a tragic backstory (more on this later) but does so with a real strength, but humanity too.

I was a lot less thrilled with Gustin's performance as Allen/the Flash; don't get me wrong, Gustin can definitely act and he brings a real likeability to the role, in those moments when we are meant to feel sympathy for Barry I was moved. I was less convinced, however, during times when our hero was supposed to be resolved or persuasive. Quite frankly, a super hero, even a science-nerd  super-hero needs, in my opinion, a certain level of gravitas and Gustin just never showed me that Gravitas.

Less Mild Spoilers

As much as I enjoyed the episode, there were a few things about it I disliked. Mostly, a few tired clichés that the show insisted in using. Pannabaker's scientist, who lost her fiancée to the same accident that gave Barry his powers, is a mild example of this. The female scientist who is brilliant at her work but is all business and shows little emotion, frequently as a result of some past tragedy. Seen it before, although this is mitigated by the fact that, as I said, Panbaker does a great job playing the role.

Far worse  is Candice Patton as Barry's best/friend love interest. How many times has this been done? The shy, awkward science nerd guy whose best friend is a girl. He's in love with her, she feels platonic affection for him. She's also completely oblivious to how he feels, even though it's blindingly obvious. Maybe they are going somewhere with this, maybe, as the series goes on, they'll rework the trope into something we haven't seen before, but so far, every time those two characters are on screen together I groaned. To make things worse, they've given her the most stereotypical pretty-boy of a boy friend possible. As soon as that character appeared I saw exactly where they were going with him. *Big Sigh*

All in all, however, I liked the show. Well written, interesting story, likeable hero. Well worth a watch.

P.S. If anyone who has seen further episodes of the show reads this and wants to comment, please begin your post with a spoiler warning.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Hetherington!

I was all prepared to post something on a controversial topic today (don't worry, I have something prepared for tomorrow) but, while tracking down links for said post, I noticed the Doodle of the day on Google and discovered that today is the anniversary of the birth (he would have been ninety-three) of Norman Fredrick Hetherington. For those who do not know, Hetherington was creator, puppeteer and voice of Mr. Squiggle.

If you are one of the poor, benighted souls who grew up somewhere other than Australia, the name Mr. Squiggle may mean little to you and if you grew up relatively recently in Australia it may mean little more. For generations of Aussies, however, the name will immediately evoke happy memories of sitting in front of our T.V. shows, watching Mr. Squiggle drawing and trying to guess where his drawing was going.

Mr. Squiggle was a childrens' television show running for just over forty years on Australian television. Mr. Squiggle was also the name of the main character of said show, a man from the moon with a pencil for a nose, a playful sense of humour and a great love of using said nose to turn random squiggles, drawn by children, into creative works of art.

When I realised what today was, I tried to think of something to say that would encapsulate what Mr. Squiggle meant to me and to generations of young Australians. I tried to find words to verbalise how watching him turn those random lines into something clever would fire our young imaginations and creativity.... I got nothing. All I can say is, if you happen to have a spare, take that time to lay aside your adulthood and watch this episode.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Hetherington, may you rest in peace, and thank you for the memories.

 

High School Sucked

If you disagree with the above statement, this post is probably not for you.

I just realised that yesterday was the anniversary of the screening of the last ever episode of Buffy: the Vampire Slayer. For those unfamiliar with the show, the show's premise is that an ordinary Southern Californian high school girl discovered one day that she was the latest in a long line of mystic warriors, gifted with supernatural strength and skill with which to battle Vampires. If that sounds like a less than promising premise for great drama, I can't blame you, I was sceptical myself at first, myself. There's really not a lot I can say in response to this beyond "watch the show if you get the chance, let it shake your scepticism."

For its first three seasons, the show's protagonist, Buffy Summers and here friends were students at Sunnydale High School. The town of Sunnydale, and more specifically, its high school, and more specifically still, the high school library were built over a mystical vortex  leading to Hell. Dark, mystical energy was consistently being pumped up from this "hell mouth" attracting all kinds of evil into the area.

If, on reading the above description, you don't suspect that your high school was similarly situated, I can only say that your experience of high school was obviously very different to mine.

C.S. Lewis, in his discussion of the epic work of his friend J.R.R. Tolkien, wrote that, we have never seen humanity as we really are until we see that we are the like heroes of faery tales. Buffy, at its best, embodied this. It took the basic difficulties we all go through in high school: the struggles with classes, the conflicts with parents, the pressures to fit in and be popular, and raised them to level of a mythic struggle of good against evil.

It was an amazing show, I don't think television has really seen its like since.
 

Virtue is Magic

Mild Spoiler Alert

It's a little over a week now since the screening of "Twilight's Kingdom", the two part, season four finale of My Little Pony: Friendship: is Magic. I'm inclined to regard season four as the best season yet and I'll certainly go to the mattresses to defend the view that this was the best season finale so far.

Why do I love MLP;FiM? I could give a great many reasons: I love the witty dialogue, I love the animation, I love the songs. Having said all that, there is one reason, above all that I love this show. I love My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic because it is a show about virtue.

Virtue has, oddly enough, become a little bit of a dirty word in the modern world. For many, the word virtue suggests a world of chastity belts, repressed desires and people walking about looking po-faced and serious and never, ever doing anything fun. The ancient Greek Master, Aristotle, however, and the tradition following, him, took a different view of things. For Aristotle, and the tradition following him, virtue describes those habits which tend to lead to greater human flourishing. For the Aristotelian school, there is a happiness the properly follows from human nature lived to its fullest and the virtues are the habits which promote the best chance of that happiness.

This is, in my judgement at least, what MLP:FiM is all about. Throughout the series, the mane (misspelling deliberate per fan convention) six ponies (and their dragon sidekick) learn a variety of life lessons which lead to them developing those qualities of character which lead to a free, happy and fulfilled life. I have no idea whether any of the writers or producers of the show have actually read Aristotle or not, but, whether consciously or unconsciously, they have produced a profoundly Aristotelian parable for life.

So, what was so great about season four? To back track, at the beginning of the first season, the mane six discovered that harmony is maintained in their kingdom of Equestria through six "Elements of Harmony". Through various trials, each of these six becomes mystically linked to one of the six elements: Apple Jack to honesty, Fluttershy to kindness, Pinky Pie to laughter, Rainbow Dash to loyalty, Rarity to generosity and Twilight Sparkle (my personal favourite) to the element of magic.

At the beginning of season four, each of the ponies, to prevent Equestria being over-run by chaos, the ponies had to sacrifice their connection to the elements. In response to their sacrifice, a magical trunk with six key-holes was revealed. Over the course of the season, each of the six mane ponies faced a situation in which she was tempted to act contrary to the element to which she was formerly linked. In each case, the pony in question overcame the temptation, acted in accord with her element and learnt a valuable lesson about the nature of her element as well as a lesson about life more generally.

In the season finale, Equestria faces a new danger, worse than anything it has faced before. The solution to the crisis turns out to lie in the chest revealed at the beginning of the season and the keys to the chest turn out to be linked to the lessons each pony has learnt about her element.

This is why I love this show. At the end of the day, it's show that send the message that the world can be saved and we can all live happy lives by following the path of virtue. Nothing else compares.

 

Talking About Ponies

Hi, my name is Jason, I’m 37, I’m male and I’m a passionate fan of a show targeted at pre-teen girls. About two years ago, friends of mine, told me that I really needed to watch the cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I was, skeptical at first, but they were insistent and I decided I should at least give it a try. Within a month I had joined the growing tribe of the Bronies (a portmanteau of bro and pony).

To give background, My Little Pony is a range of toy ponies made by Hasbro Toys. They first appeared in the 1980s and have since gone through four major incarnations (known as “generations” by the fans.) The cartoons which accompanied the third generation ponies have been widely derided as essentially just extended infomercials for the toys with boring stories and nothing resembling character development (the one gen three episode I could bring myself to watch certainly supported this conclusion.) When, in 2010, Hasbro released the fourth generation of ponies, they took the radical step of hiring people, most notably Lauren Faust, of Power Puff Girls fame, with actual experience making quality children’s television. The result has been a show which not only charmed its target audience but won for its self a wide number of fans of all ages and given rise to talk to “the Brony Phenomenon.”

Season Three Spoiler Warning. All of this is background to this article by blogger Amanda Duncil. Ms. Duncil criticizes the conclusion to season three as well as the soon to be released Equestria Girls spin-off movie and related toy line.

Concerning the conclusion to season three, in which mane (misspelling intentional per fan convention) character Twilight Sparkles becomes a Princess, Ms. Duncil writes:

I didn't know that the ultimate end goal of learning was to suddenly become royalty. I'm still somewhat concerned that it sends mixed messages to little girls. Implying that all girls want to grow up to become princesses is destructive… I was under the impression that My Little Pony wanted to shake gender barriers, not reinforce them.

I can see where she is coming from, but I think her concern here is a bit misplaced. Twilight doesn’t become a Princess through the standard means of marrying a Prince (actually, that trope is reversed; her brother becomes a Prince by marrying a princess who earned her royal title.) nor by the other fairytale means of discovering that she is a king’s long lost daughter. Twilight’s royal title is bestowed up on, not by any pony laws but by reality itself. Actually, for someone unfamiliar with the show, the term “princess” is misleading. In Equestria, royalty is apparently not a matter of blood or even of purely political authority. When a Pony reaches a sufficient level of virtue and magical ability she transformed into an alicorn, a pony with pegasus wings, a unicorn horn and enhanced mystical control over reality. The Princesses of Equestria are not merely political rulers; they are responsible for such tasks as ensuring the sun and moon rise and set. What happened to Twilight, while it is called “becoming a princess” would more accurately be described as a sort of quasi-deification. (So, Jason, how do you, as a Catholic, feel about such obviously pagan themes in children’s entertainment? I’m fine with them, but that’s another post.)

I feel much more sympathy with the concerns which Ms. Duncil raises over the upcoming Equestria Girls movie. I’m looking forward to the movie and expect it to be fun, but I think it’s reasonable to feel uneasy about the images of the mane characters which we have seen thus far. I’m particularly unhappy about the look of Rainbow Dash. For those unfamiliar with the show, Rainbow is a tom-boy, indeed, the ultimate tomboy. Take a look at the Equestria Girls picture linked on Ms. Duncil’s page, I’m not seeing anything remotely suggestive of the personality I’ve come to know and love.

I’m still hopeful the movie will be worth watching, but I agree this raises cause for concern.

Movie Review: Epic (which actually is)

This past Saturday, I saw Epic, the new movie from Blue Sky Studios. First off, in case there is any confusion, this is a movie marketed at kids. I am a firm believer in C.S. Lewis' dictum that a children's story which can't be enjoyed by adults is a bad children's movie. Second, everyone should read this review, by Stephen Greydanus; I don't agree with everything he says, but he says a number of things rather well.

I have to say, on the whole, I loved this movie. On the other hand, there were a few things I hated, including one which bordered on unforgivable.

Mild Spoilers from here on: The basic story: a forest is the seen of an on-going epic struggle between the heroic leaf-men (a bit like a cross between the Jedi and Tolkien's rangers) who seek to preserve the life of the forest, and the boggans, who seek to lay the forest to waste. Humans are unaware of this partly because sides take care to conceal themselves from “stompers” as they call us and also because both sides are only inches tall.

Near the forest lives an eccentric professor who has destroyed his career and his marriage with his monomaniacal determination to prove these creatures exist. His ex-wife has just died, and his teenage daughter Mary Katherine (she prefers MK) is coming to live with him. On the relationship between the two, I have nothing to say, read Mr. Greydanus, he says it all.

The leaf-men are servants of a Queen Tara, the source of life in the forest, without the Queen, the leaf-men can't do there jobs and the forest is doomed. Tara is beautifully animated and drawn and there are a number of scenes which show her the centre of a wonderful pageantry. She is the perfect embodiment of what the queen of a mystic realm should be... until she opens her mouth, at which point I begin to wonder if anything could be more seriously deficient in gravitas. There is one scene when the (oddly named) leaf-man general Ronin kneels before her, every inch the archetype of the valiant, yet humble warrior, the queens response is to make fun of him. Modern Hollywood, it seems, can not to hierarchy or gravitas.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, there is an ambush, involving boggans, M.K. Who happens to be passing by, is mystically shrunk to the size of a leaf-man and, next thing we know, M.K., Ronin, a young leaf-man name Nob and two comic-relief gastropods are on an epic quest to save the life of the forest.

Mr. Greydanus, and a number of other critics, have criticised what they see as the lack of individuality in the main characters. I feel I must disagree. It's true, these are not the deepest or most well-rounded characters I've seen, Mr. Greydanus' phrase is “generic archetypes”, but, here;s the thing. I think they are such good, solid, realisations of their archetypes. Ronin (aside from his name) is the embodiment of what a brave, loyal warrior ought to be, Nob captures both a wonderful free-spirit and the journey of a boy reluctantly embracing the duties of man-hood. M.K. Is harder to describe in archetypal terms, but her banter with Nob frequently reminded of similar banter between Han and Leia.

Slightly less mild spoilers. I said earlier that, when Tara spoke, I wondered if anything could be more deficient in gravitas; unfortunately, the movie answered my question. About midway through the film, we come to the house of Nim Gallu. Nim is,the librarian who keeps the scrolls of knowledge which record, in full, the history and wisdom of the forest. I was prepared for such a character to be eccentric, even for him to be played for a certain amount of comedy. What we got, however, was just awful; a jazz singing glow-worm played by Stephen Tyler. Seriously; memo to the script-writers, the keeper of wisdom is an archetypal figure deserving of way more respect than this.

Heavy Spoilers: The film climaxes in an appropriately epic battler in which M.K., with some help from her dad, manages to save the day. I have to say, however, I was annoyed by one thing. Ronin, who had earlier sacrificed himself to enable the others to get away, and was left fighting for his life against impossible odds, suddenly turns up at the last minute to battle the head boggan. This was vaguely reminiscent of Gandalf in Moria, but there Gandlaf's sacrifice and return had a fundamentally transforming effect on him, as well on those around him, here it just seemed mindlessly deus ex machina. I was especially annoyed because, when Ronin seemed dead, I thought it a bold move for such a central and likeable character to be killed that way. I know, I know, this is a kid's film, but I think a battle of this magnitude needed causalities on the good side as well as the bad.

The movie had some real faults, typical really of the culture in which it was made, but I still liked it. If the story-telling doesn't exactly break new ground it was, for me, a reaffirmation of the value of traditional themes in storytelling.