And Gutenberg Lived Here: Have We Moved From ‘Bonanza’ To ‘Three’s Company’ To ‘Sex And The City’ Only To Get To Vampire Filk?

When your field of study was comparative lit,

your view of the world tends to be just a little different from most folks

(Not that everyone else’s isn’t-

Or have you ever tried to discuss a new film with a dentist?

Sorry all dentists out there.

Make that mathematicians.

Oops.

Mea Bobaqi, mea maxima Bobaqi.)

Well anyway,

recently I got in a lit discussion

with a very well read not my field type,

American,

and we ended up discussing the fact that in Bonanza,

the only females in the show who survived,

were horses and dogs.

(And maybe the carrots.)

And…

that we had two classical logical thinkers,

one gentle man of much action,

and one of pure emotion.

No single character with all three elements.

Unless it was Hop Sing???

So then, if it always was the classical three, way back in the fifties,

All male, like Bonanza,

or mixed,

like Beaver Cleaver and the gang,

when did we start to change?

And where did we go to?

Well….

in the beginning-

this is only an opinion-  my opinion,

first there were the classical Freudian three-

but not family members,

and with teeny hints of peek-a-boo sex,

and a man who was supposed to be gay, but wasn’t,

(Three’s Company)

Then there were, of course:

4 with emotion,

All in the family,

4 with no emotion,

Perry Mason and the procedural police and lawyer shows.

(Did he ever kiss his secretary? Even when she saved his life?)

And how about that Mrs Jessica Fletcher- the American Agatha Christie?

(Murder She Wrote)

(Does anyone else remember that before he wrote Jessica,

the author got his start in ‘The Case Of The Blood-stained Tea Cosy?)

Ah yes, Jessica.

Someone dead in her town every week,

(I wonder how much the local pathologist loved THAT woman)

and the only emotion visible is the comic relief sheriff,

who hasn’t a chance against her sharp wit-

(wasn’t there a scene like that with a policeman in Agatha Christie’s the mouse trap?)

Oh, but then there was that great tv writer,

Stephen J Cannell,

honorary member of the crime writers’ Sisters in Crime,

who went from solo Don Quixote, The Rockford Files,

to two, to three, four, all possible variations,

and was still developing-

including, at the end of his life, when he didn’t have a lot to lose,

tv shows about writers,

and their wish to kill off everyone who just plain won’t leave them alone to write.

Hmmm.

Which leads us, of course, to Sex and the City,

The three plus one balanced one(?) group.

Somehow, I could never really like a character who owns

the equivalent of a down-payment for an apartment

in several thousand pairs of shoes.

(Hasn’t the woman ever heard of K-mart?)

And now…

moving rapidly ‘from inner space to the final frontier,’

We have not only life on other planets,

we also have all four character types interacting-

across sex, regional backgrounds, educational backgrounds, religion,

and alien-terrestial issues,

with and without links to present day historical situations

(A Midsummer Night’s Dream In Nazi Germany?

Well, maybe the society at Shakespeare’s time WAS a little hide-bound.)

(And perhaps a bit like Big Brother House?)

But no matter how you look at the literature-based entertainment industry at the moment,

(and, as a musician, I really don’t even want to go into Goldoni, or various opera productions over here,

with real prostitutes on the stage,

and people throwing animal parts at each other)

you end up, in my opinion,

with a real attempt to expand, and experiment,

but no real knowledge of where to go.

So how about sitting down, and actually thinking about where we are going-

and where we could go,

instead of blindly writing the next phase-

all of the above, including the kitchen sink,

played against a background with the traditional elements-

of Vampire Filk.

Bah Humbug.

Sorry.

I think I’ll just go off somewhere

and start a sequel of a vampire

multiple-personality-type

Sherlock Holmes,

who speaks only ancient Celtic-based Klingon,

with subtitles,

and kills people

and then catches himself,

hangs himself,

and is reincarnated,

after traveling a century or two

backward o forward in time,

in a fast-flying fitness juicer,

to start the entire process over again.

Oh, by the way…

I just decided to copyright this idea,

so no one,

in our desperate entertainment world at the moment,

decides to actually try to write it.

Believe me.

It’s for the best.

Copyright Dunnasead.co 2017