So NOT creative

That title sounds like I am going to go off on AI again, but not this time. 

I've decided to get to my other three movie notes this week. I think it will lead me back into talking about the current political situation and dominator culture.

This first one also comes from distinct works with similar source material. Instead of Walter Mitty, it's P. T. Barnum.

Back in the day (it was 1989), my high school put on a production of Barnum! for the spring musical. Many of my friends were in it, so I saw it and heard them talking about it.

One thing I do remember is that some of them got together to watch the movie and were disappointed. I was surprised, because I had enjoyed their performance. One of them said that they did a great job with maybe not great material. I don't know if they had noticed an issue with the material before they saw someone else's version.

I also do not know whether they saw the stage performance led by Michael Crawford and filmed in London or the made-for-TV movie led by Burt Lancaster. I did not know there were multiple versions. I now know that both of those came out in 1986. They may have been part of why the drama department chose it, but the stage musical only debuted in 1980, so it may have still felt kind of new and exciting.

Having enjoyed it but learned that there could be disappointing versions, I was interested in what was going to happen with The Greatest Showman when it came out in 2017.

I did keep thinking of it at "Barnum!" but it was its own thing. Again, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It was one of the last movies I took my mother to see in the theater.

The thing I hated most about Barnum! was the subplot with his affair with Jenny Lind, that rat.

Except, he didn't. There are no indications that there was ever any romantic intrigue between Barnum and Lind. They ended their business agreement because she was somewhat uncomfortable with the relentless (perhaps crass) commercial promotion side; she wanted to be more about the art and philanthropy. 

I think the business relationship was beneficial for both, probably beyond the time it lasted. They parted amicably.

I mean, how can you write a splashy musical number about that? 

The credit I can give The Greatest Showman is that they did not make Barnum a cheater; they just made Lind a clingy, delusional mess.

They probably didn't think anyone would buy Hugh Jackman as someone who would leave his adored wife and the mother of his children for... never mind.

In The Greatest Showman it still caused marital discord because it reminded Charity of her husbands monumental self-absorption and selfishness. Of course he didn't love Jenny; he couldn't love anyone!

It's a good line, though I don't think accurate to either the real or the movie people.

I don't know that you can successfully make an accurate musical about anyone. We know Hamilton and Night and Day didn't... that list could go on and on.

It might be better to make fictional ones that remind you of real people but leave some room to maneuver. 

Mainly my frustration was the way the material goes to cheating over and over again. There can be so much conflict without that!

Then my other frustration, possibly connected, is that it's something that happens in real life so much too.  

Children's books for AAPI Heritage Month

Once you start one thing, it can always lead to other things.

As it happened, many of the ghostly children's picture books I read could fit in this category. 

Boy Dumplings: A Tasty Chinese Tale by Ying Chang Compestine and James Yamasaki 
Ghosts in the House by Kazuna Kahara
Gracie Meets a Ghost by Keiko Sena
So Not Ghoul by Karen Yin and Bonnie Liu

The most surprising for me was Boy Dumplings. 

A boy gets caught by a ghost who is going to eat him, but the boy convinces him that he should make a better meal. I thought that would go the route of the other ingredients being delicious enough that the boy was extraneous, but it was just that it took long enough for the sun to rise and the ghost to become trapped. 

There's more than one way to avoid becoming ghost food.

I used "could" fit into the category because there can always be questions about categorization.

For example, Keiko Sena was just Japanese, not Japanese-American. However, if I wanted to read more of her work and see her influence on children's books, she has about 100 other titles.

(This year I am worrying about tracking down origins a little less, though I will discuss that more when I get to the music.) 

Speaking of reading other books, Karen Yin has a book coming out that could apply, Nice to Eat You -- inspired by the story of Hansel and Gretel -- but it is not expected until July. I did read one of her other books:

Whole Whale, illustrated by Nelleke Verhoeff

That is mainly about all of the animal illustrations you can fit into a single book. So Not Ghoul is about the struggle to fit in at school and meet parental expectations, hard for a traditional ghost who looks vaguely like Samara from The Ring, except her long hair is in pigtails. Tradition versus assimilation, but with teenage ghosts.

Another book about tradition takes place at the Mid-Autumn Festival as a grandmother tells a story to two sisters.

The Shadow in the Moon: A Tale of the Mid-Autumn Festival by Christina Matula and Pearl Law

While the festival and moon cakes come up a lot, I had not read that particular story before. It was a little wordy, but I do like learning new lore.

Otherwise, there were two biographical and two that were a little less serious. The two biographical ones were both written by Songju Ma Daemicke and illustrated by Lin.

Grace Lee Boggs: Gardens of Hope
Tu Youyou's Discovery: Finding a Cure for Malaria

I had also read a book of Boggs' writings, which will come up later. It was one of two books in a short time period that dealt with dialectics as part of its philosophical underpinnings. Connections happen in all sorts of ways.

(Speaking of that, there is another pair that I am going to explore further next week.)

For the two less serious ones, both by A.N. Kang...

The Very Fluffy Kitty, Papillon
Papillon Goes to the Vet 

I thought they were very cute, but for me cats are an easy sell. 

Viewing nostalgia

One of the recent drivers of Twitter discourse was this post:

https://x.com/upstatefederlst/status/2047910544611430889 

People out here acting like 80s and 90s kids regularly watched movies from the 50s and 60s. 

He was responding to a post about the lack of film literacy -- and literacy of any kind is always going to bring lots of responses -- but in this case it became its own thing because, yes, we did.

Disney would periodically release classic films. I definitely saw Snow White and Alice in Wonderland in theaters, even though their original releases were long before my time. 

There were some films that were broadcast every year, like The Wizard of Oz and The Ten Commandments, where it was a big deal. This was before home video so you had to watch it then or you would miss it.

There were only three networks and usually one or two local channels; they played a lot of old movies on weekends.

(The three networks also meant that a lot of us watched the same current shows, even though there were choices.) 

My father did not always consider the appropriateness of the movies, so I remember being deeply disturbed by scenes from The Green Berets, Hang 'Em High, The Dirty Dozen, and A Fistful of Dollars. (Clint Eastwood is overly represented, it is true.)

To be fair, I often did not understand what was gong on in the films, but I saw them.

Even as the situations and availability started to change, it led to more watching of old movies, not less.

Once everyone had VCRs, in addition to finding random old tapes and checking them out, there was also a weekend ritual of going to the video store and seeing what looked interesting. Sure, sometimes it was a popular, recent title, but sometimes you discovered gems you could have easily missed.

Cable played a lot of old movies, but also a lot of old television series.

I was reluctant to go back to school after one summer when I had really started to enjoy watching The Addams Family. On a sick day I learned that it changed with the fall and they were showing The Munsters instead. Not that I haven't enjoyed episodes of both. 

Before cable we had somehow managed to watch a lot of I Love Lucy, but it was after cable that my family started watching a lot of The Jack Benny Show and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. (That was on a Christian channel, which was very obvious from the commercials.)

Even with the Disney Channel, which had plenty of Disney content, I remember being introduced to Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees and Ball of Fire and Dana Andrews in Ball of Fire and The Best Years of Our Lives.

(And of course, Danny Kaye: https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2026/04/three-lives-of-walter-mitty.html) 

There are other topics that come up with this, like how that forms collective thought and whether that is necessary. That may connect to the posts from Tuesday and Wednesday as well.

Today, though, I just wanted to enjoy the memories of good times, and also marvel in what a ridiculous assertion it was in the first place. 

You could potentially argue that kids in the 80s and 90s watched more films from the 40s and 70s than the 50s and 60s, but the idea upstatefederalist was trying to convey with disdainful certainty was just laughable.

Maybe it's because of Stranger Things showing kids roaming outside until dark, periodically stopping to drink from the garden hose. That happened too. I remember once arguing that it wasn't actually dark yet; it only looked dark because there were some clouds (the logic wasn't flawless). 

My youth did involve a lot of tag and hide and seek and swimming and biking, but it also involved a lot of watching television. Much of it was media made before I was born. That apparent dichotomy is just fact. 

I admit I have not seen anything from the French New Wave. 

Whom do we blame?

The ideas here come from Won't You Be My Neighbor (2018).

I have written about that movie twice before, but there was something I hadn't gotten to yet: conservatives bashing on him.

It's been a while since I have seen the film, but there were various conservative commentators (was one Limbaugh? possibly) blaming him for all of the weaklings that had grown up watching him.

Mr. Rogers may just be the anti-dominator culture personification, so people who want to rule through creating a hierarchy where we are all looking down on each other and accepting poor treatment of ourselves as long as we get to pay it downward to someone else... yeah, they're totally going to hate him. Maybe I can't remember the details now because they are all too much alike to stand out.

I saw the movie during the first Trump presidency, so that was going to resonate. However, the other thing that I wanted to get to was that it's kind of an old complaint.

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers." -- Socrates

I remember seeing this quote in Dear Abby. I guess it would have been in the 80s. I believe it was a response to complaints about "kids these days", making the point that despairing of the rising generation is nothing new.

Actually, the quote is questionable. It got cited a lot in the '60s after being used in a book from 1953, but that caused scholars to try and track it down and they couldn't. 

https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/respectfully-quoted/socrates-469399-b-c/ 

As it was, even then it was attributed to Socrates by Plato, who was fairly comfortable putting words in Socrates' mouth. 

That particular quote may not matter so much on its own; it's popularity was a result of lots of complaints about the youth of the 60s by the generation before them. That is a longstanding tradition.

(This is not a great page, but you can find more quotes here: https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-about-the-younger-generation/) 

I suppose some of it is a generation gap and some of it is ordinary change, but we have to be honest with ourselves about what is happening. Sometimes the issue may be balance or lack of thought.

I have developed a great appreciation for Fred Rogers. To the extent I get annoyed with anything in relation to him now, it's when adults retreat to "Look for the helpers." 

That's for children. When you're grown, sure, look around and take encouragement from people doing good, but also, become a helper! Children need to know that there are people who will try and make things better, but actually making that be true is on the adults.  

In fact, there may be people whose understanding stopped at "I like you just the way you are," without understanding that it goes for everyone else too, and that -- even though we will make mistakes and people should still love us despite that -- we still have a responsibility to be kind.

I'm just saying that for people who only got the first part of the message and stayed trapped there, it's not Mr. Rogers' fault. 

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2022/10/what-mr-rogers-said.html  

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2022/11/mr-rogers-again.html 

Whom do we credit?

I'm going to spend a bit more time on movies that I saw a while ago, though I am not going to spend as much time on any of them as I did on Walter Mitty. To be fair, that was two movies and a short story.

Let's start with Dunkirk, a 2017 film by Christopher Nolan celebrating the Dunkirk evacuation, where more than 338,000 Allied soldiers were evacuated from the beaches and harbor there.

(I did write a little about Dunkirk in reference to something else last year: https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-commandeered-past.html) 

Because of the harbor size, large ships could not get close; a lot of the evacuation was done by smaller boats, including many civilian vessels.

The movie does a good job of covering a lot of the historical factors while still being cinematic.

I think it's mostly true.

The overall theme of it is common people rising to the occasion with limited means and saving the day. That is something that happened.

A petty argument you could make is that some of the boats were taken without the owners' knowledge or consent; it was not all a volunteer force. There were still many civilian volunteers, even under direct navy command. It's hard to imagine a successful evacuation without them, based on the time constraints and the number of troops needing rescue.

Something else that I don't remember the movie treating (except for Tom Holland's pilot character) is that for every seven men rescued, one became a German prisoner of war. Some of those did not make it back. That's a lot of people, but all of them captured or killed would be worse. 

Remember, war is Hell.

None of that is actually why I kept it in my notes. It was an article that I read back then, about how it was part of changing attitudes about the war.

Apparently a lot of Brits were against engagement in WWII. Maybe they thought if Germany left them alone, it didn't matter what else happened, but it's hard to find praise for Neville Chamberlain nowadays.

Of course, Germany did not leave England alone, which I am sure was a factor. Apparently a lot of the changing attitudes came from Churchill's speeches where he lauded the patience and heroism of ordinary Brits, telling them how good they were and how important their patient support was.

The Wikipedia article mentions an ideological division between liberal and conservative, but that was more a matter of focusing on the ordinary people rallying and "the people's war" versus focusing on the military might.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkirk_evacuation 

Eventually the ordinary people version won, possibly because it's a better story, but there are lots of good stories without storytellers promoting them. So that, and "Keep calm and carry on," ... a lot of the credit for that seems to belong to Churchill. 

That may have been the best thing that could happen under the circumstances for people getting through the Blitz and rising to the occasion. Good.

My concern with it is then that if we remember ourselves better than we were, will that cause other problems? 

Because remembering ourselves as better than we were happens a lot on this side of the pond. 

Graphic novels & short works on internment: AAPI Heritage Month 2026

This section is kind of random, but sometimes those paths are important.

I have been working my way through two articles about underappreciated or different comics, most of which have been disappointing. 

These three are all from those lists, but were better than some of the others: 

Mech Cadets by Greg Pak and Takeshi Miyazawa
Everyday Hero Machine Boy by Irma Kniivila and Tri Vuong 
Umma's Table by Yeon-Sik Hong 

When we get to the internment books, they are mainly shorter and designed for middle readers. These first two books could also very much be for middle readers, with robots and adventure.

Umma's Table is not. (It was from a different article than the other two.) It is about a young family dealing with aging parents and budgets. There were things that frustrated me with some of the protagonist's choices, but I could never not feel a sense of understanding that it is hard. 

Stone Fruit by Lee Lai is also very adult. 

There are still fractured families. That is largely due to issues of gender and sexuality, at least for Bron. For Ray, sometimes resentment and frustration builds between siblings and takes effort to unravel.

It is not so much about aging, but the times they share with Ray's niece Nessie act as a reminder of how much complication comes with maturity. 

It Rhymes With Takei by George Takei, Harmony Becker, Steven Scott, Justin Eisinger 

I continue keeping up with George Takei:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2024/09/spotlight-on-george-takei-apahm-2024.html 

This book fills in a lot of the blanks from his previous bio, To the Stars. 

From it, I have to assume Josie (whom I worried about) knew he was gay all along and was fine with it. There is no assurance that she got her own happy ending, but I see a strong tendency to protect others' privacy. I respect that.

Takei's family's internment is not treated as much here; that was covered in They Called Us Enemy, which will be the selection for this year's #OneBookOneCoast:

https://lacounty.gov/2026/02/25/coming-this-spring-one-book-one-coast-unites-140-libraries-for-the-west-coasts-largest-book-club-featuring-george-takei/ 

It was really well done, and important to remember. That brings us to some other not quite children's books on that topic: 

The Children of Topaz: The Story of a Japanese-American Internment Camp by Michael O. Tunnel and George W. Chilcoat

 I am an American: A True Story of Japanese Internment by Jerry Stanley 

The Children of Topaz focuses more on a class, with I am an American focusing more on a person. 

It's important to remember things that were done so recently that people who experienced them are still alive. It's important to keep that perspective, because we keep doing things like this over and over again.

Which leads to one other thing...

Sylvia & Aki by Winifred Conkling

In my long study of award-winning works related to Latin American heritage, I happened to read this one just last night. 

I had already read a children's book about the Mendez vs Winchester case about school segregation. What I had not picked up on is that the reason the Mendez family was near a school they were not allowed to attend was that they were renting the farm of an interned Japanese family. The Munemitsu children had been allowed to attend the school.

Our racism isn't always logical or consistent. It is always wrong.

We can do better, but it will take facing the past and the present with honesty.

Laying Walter to rest

I intend to finish with Walter Mitty today, but first, what have we learned?

I keep coming back to something that I saw on the Wikipedia entry for the character (so not the author nor the story nor either movie):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Mitty 

"the reader meets well-meaning but insensitive strangers who inadvertently rob Mitty of some of his remaining dignity."

That's a conclusion, not a quote from anywhere, so I don't know who phrased it that way. I question how much dignity there actually was.

That same paragraph refers earlier to the more tragic interpretation, where his last fantasy is going to a firing squad.

I had pointed out earlier that the character himself doesn't seem overly invested in any specific daydream, switching easily to the next one. The details that he retains, like the "ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa" sound changes from cylinders on a plane to medical machinery to flame throwers. The important thing is that others admire him, even if they are going to execute him.

It wouldn't take much to be different.

Someone who was really into WWII or planes might keep returning to the cockpit and imagining different dogfights, enriched by reading and research.

That Walter Mitty might still not be a hero, but he's at least more interesting, and probably more gratified.

Someone who was present in his life might be too much to hope for, but trying to be present allows the opportunity for improvement. Maybe he needs to switch jobs. That could be a frightening prospect, but perhaps there is a different department in the same company that would suit him better.

Presumably he proposed to his wife for some reason; perhaps he could try and remember that and enjoy her company. Okay, she reminds him that he needs overshoes and gloves because he is getting older; that can be taken as a sign of caring.

If getting older is the problem, that happens. It might be best to face that one head-on.

Naturally, over the course of writing about this I have seen many examples of misogyny and racism and other things, but there are correlations in the lack of self-examination. There are things that can be improved where the responsibility can only be yours.

It may be easier to disconnect and blame others, but it doesn't make things better, for the blamer or the blamed.

There is nothing unusual about wanting to be a hero, nor in feeling like there aren't really opportunities for heroism.  

It just works out that petulantly withdrawing from that dissatisfaction is a short path to mediocrity, and maybe even to villainy. 

Or would the villainy be good because it's exciting?