 |
| Liz is also easily distracted by squirrels |
A while back I read the book Rin Tin Tin: The Life and The Legend by Susan Orlean (recommended). The book is a biography/ history of how one American soldier on the front lines of World War I found a stray dog, and how that dog became, literally, the biggest movie star in the world.
There's a possibly apocryphal story that at the first Academy Awards they had to re-do nominations and/ or voting because Rin Tin Tin, a skinny German Shepherd, came up as "Best Actor" (everyone kinda thought the awards were a bit absurd at the time). But what is true is that dog was also one of the biggest box office draws in Hollywood for a few years there before the movies learned how to talk.
While the original Rin Tin Tin passed and was buried in France, various other dogs took on the name and role, and through the 1950's, Rin Tin Tin was still a major pop culture fixture - a sort of family-friendly action star, now re-imagined for television as living on the frontier and starring in his own cavalry-themed Western.
 |
| Lee Duncan and the first Rin Tin Tin |
It's not clear what happened to the bloodline of Rin Tin Tin, and/or who owns the name and rights. Nor is it clear anyone outside a miniscule handful of people cares, as the last produced Rin Tin Tin media I'm aware of is a very white-washed biopic from 2007.
But for a few decades, Rin Tin Tin was a household name and common reference point. By the 1970's, Rin Tin Tin was *maybe* something our parents would reference, but wasn't really part of the cultural conversation. I was aware of the dog star as a precursor to Lassie, and that was about it. In today's world - if one in 5000 kids had ever seen a picture of Rin Tin Tin or knew the name, I'd be a little surprised.
But, once upon a time, kids loved that dog. Heck, adults loved that dog. But time passes. Now there's this gravesite in France for a dog that was once beloved globally. But in a decade or two, will that grave be met by American tourists giggling at what a silly name it seems to be. And for a dog? Utterly unaware that at one point, that dog was the biggest thing movies had to offer.
Horizon Lines
We're constantly living on two horizon lines. The first one sits in front of us, and it's where the new and novel comes into view, bright and shiny. We need that glint of discovery, fresh ideas, characters and people. And then there's the horizon behind us where the things beloved by our parents and grandparents and their forebears disappear into some great beyond of forgotten lore. And that had been the norm for most of human history, minus myths and legends that have carried on, or been carved into stone.
Music styles come and go. Stories featuring favorite characters appear, survive a while, and then vanish. Whole genres and print types wind up in archives and basements. Movie stars shine brightly for a few years and then fade into obscurity. The sexy starlet of today becomes the granny character actor of tomorrow or forgotten within a decade of her retirement.
Some things come over the horizon line and pass fast as a meteor in the night sky. Some are a slow moving object, seemingly in geosynchronous orbit. But one day, those things will fade, too. A movie will always play one last time. A curtain comes down on an opera that will never rise again. Sometimes we'll know this is it, but most often, whatever we're thinking of will disappear, unremarked upon.
Our history of shared fan favorites surviving hundreds of years in any medium is slim. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was released in 1818, and Stoker's Dracula was 1897. Dickens' A Christmas Carol was published in 1843. Bronte's Jane Eyre was 1847. Pride and Prejudice saw print in 1813. Mozart's The Magic Flute was performed first in 1791. Hamlet was first staged around 1600.
These are considered classics at this point, and part of the cultural canon. For now. But what about work that isn't kept alive and preserved as part of academia and a sign of cultural literacy?
There's going to be fans who remember and try to keep the memory of their favorite characters and books and movies alive one way or another, but they'll be in an endless war with accountants who see no profit in the old materials, and those who refuse to look anywhere but at that first horizon line, insisting anything new is inherently of more value. But some folks only keep their eye on what's above and watch the things heading toward that sunset.
I don't think I really even knew I was following a Lassie fan page on facebook. Lord knows when I signed up for that or why, but it can't have been very active, or rarely pushed to my feed by the algorithm. On Monday I saw a post by the owner of the Lassie fan page stating they were closing down the account and removing their content. The community that had gathered there was kind of in mourning.
It's not the end of Lassie or even Lassie fan pages, I'd guess. But someone who had cared enough to curate the community decided it was no longer worth the effort. The fan page had been a promotion for a Lassie fan magazine that had run its course, and now the owner wished to move on.
Lassie, that collie who helped make Elizabeth Taylor and Roddy McDowall movie stars, who was a TV staple in the first decades of TV, who survived in endless rerun during my youth... and was in a pretty good movie co-starring Helen Slater when I was in college... that poor dog's time seems to be running out.
So, yeah, it struck me that I was watching the sun setting just a bit more on another once enormous cultural touchstone. And while I hadn't been a part of the generation that loved Lassie as their childhood TV pal (and Lassie ran for 19 seasons, y'all, from 1954 to 1974) I was there right after all that ended.
Growing up in the 1980's, collies weren't ubiquitous, but you saw them a lot. I suspect because the adults around had been raised on the TV show and dreamed of a Lassie of their own, now they kept collies. But, I can't even remember the last time I saw a collie anywhere outside of a dog show on TV. And even the Lassie jokes of my youth have been turned into generic dog jokes. But I do recall "Lassie" having enough cache still in 1997 that when the pooch visited the mall where I worked, the line of kids and their parents was long enough that my plan to pop down and meet Lassie was thwarted.
But I think the last Lassie movie was made in 2005, and I'm not sure it made it to theaters in the US. Which is wild as the movie stars Peter O'Toole, Samantha Morton, Peter Dinklage, and even Kelly MacDonald is in it. Heck, there's a Redgrave in the cast.
 |
| you okay there, kid? One too many trips down the well? |
Resetting at the First Horizon
I'm sure some of the challenge of dealing with things like Lassie or Rin Tin Tin is that the legal entanglements become a bit much as heirs and companies fight. Who owned what becomes messy as mergers occur and years pass and heirs battle. And it's easier to not figure it out than sort it out.
Is the world poorer for one less movie about a dog barking at people until they pluck Timmy from the well?
But this isn't just about Lassie. What I am interested in is: where do these things go when they're past their time?
As I observed when working in archives - the best way to ensure the persistence of an object existing is not to lock it away, but to ensure its accessibility. After all, what good is it to have the Mona Lisa if you keep it in a safe where no one can see it? How will you know it needs care? Does it even really exist if it's out of sight? How long til it's forgotten in that crate? (cue the end of Raiders)
For a while, shows and movies were being printed to VHS and then DVD. If you wanted all twenty years of Lassie on VHS, you could maybe find it at Suncoast. But now folks are streaming. And streaming *should* be how *everything* is easily available. But good luck finding Lassie across the 1000 streaming services out there.
And, really, that availability is for nostalgia, and you can't count on nostalgia for keeping an audience that is... not always going to be alive. You need to keep your property evergreen.
While stories have always been handed down and books have remained in print, we live in maybe the first era in human history where there's profit to be made by returning those characters and properties to the first horizon line. IP-driven Corporations have managed to force their IP to exist well beyond the original shelf-life-expectancy, and well past the lifetimes of the character's creators. Those companies now work to make sure they can still squeeze a nickel out of as much as possible - and that's driven the extension of copyright, and manipulation of trademark to protect corporate assets. Mickey Mouse made his debut in 1928, almost a century ago, and is nearly as recognizable today as when The Mickey Mouse Club hit televisions in the 1950's and as important to Disney today in a way as he was then.
James Bond keeps returning, often with a different face behind the tuxedo. And simply to print money, a fictional world exists where no one seems to know they shouldn't keep going to Isla Nublar and not to poke dinosaurs.
There's other models. No matter their origins in novels or plays, the Universal Monsters are now more famous as icons than they are as movie characters. Each Halloween, we know we're getting commercials, advertising art, etc... with knock-offs of Universal's indelible Bela Lugosi Dracula, their Karloff Mummy and Frankenstein, their Elsa Lanchester Bride, Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man, Claude Rains' Invisible Man... That breakdancing swamp guy could be sue-able by Universal as a Gill-Man rip-off, but probably won't be. Because now that familiarity helps keep the monsters in the pop culture and can sell shirts, cups, hats and tote bags, and maybe some DVDs.
So successful has this been, there's a whole Universal Monsters land in a new amusement park in Florida. That's more than 90 years since Lugosi stared down some virgins. And I'd guess the overwhelming majority won't have ever watched a black and white monster movie from 1932.
But the real case has been something like Star Wars, which seemed to be fading out in the early 1990's becoming a series of popular sci-fi novels as the movies - hard to get access to - were fading into the edges of the cultural landscape. In the late 90's the movies were juiced up with CGI and re-released in theaters, proving the concept was still viable, and that success helped launch what's now been 25+ years of getting new Star Wars material shoved in our faces (something I long ago stopped trying to track).
Star Trek, meanwhile, came back in the late 70's thanks to Star Wars making sci-fi seem cool and profitable, and has been part of the media landscape, somewhat aggressively, ever since, across countless shows and movies.
My guy Superman has been rebooted as a movie three times since 2006, and had at least two TV series since 2000, and a handful of animated efforts.
To bring it back to our canine stars - word has it even Air Bud is shaking off the atrocity that was the Air Buddies concept, and a dog should be booping hoops again in theaters soon.
This isn't an argument that *everything* should exist in perpetuity, or even for decades after the initial popularity crests. That would be nuts. Not everything is James Bond, constantly reinventing itself for the flavor of the decade.
We're only 125 years into a world with motion pictures. I can't say if Star Wars will be around in another 125, or what that would even look like. Or how all of this will work.
But, yeah, one day - for all the movies and TV shows and toys and theme parks... one day, someone is going to see a Darth Vader mask and have no idea what that thing is. And no way of knowing.
Or Maybe Time is a Flat Circle
It's hard to conceive of all the stories and characters lost to time, that didn't crawl forward with the culture, year over year. Most of them were brief successes, fading quickly. And how many survived a few decades before vanishing?
Lassie was a novel first, released in 1940. And 85 years later, maybe that rough collie has had her last adventure. And for a long while, people loved the dog in many different media and forms. In twelve years, the book will enter public domain, and maybe something will happen. Maybe not.
An ever-diminishing number of people will have knowledge about the character and the media empire once founded on a collie and a boy. I don't know. Maybe someone out there is pitching Lassie 3000 about a dog in the future and a robot boy, and it'll breathe new life into the concept.
However, while writing this post, I was looking at some information and learned Europe seems to be trying to keep Lassie alive. Germany rebooted Lassie with Lassie, Come Home a few years ago and a whole-ass Lassie movie sequel that was released in 2024, neither of which I think made it to the states.
It's funny, that most North American of heroes, Zorro, is being kept alive with a Spanish television production (on Amazon Prime, recommended). Maybe the Lone Ranger will pop up in Norway.
In 2024, someone decided what we needed was an all-new Sam Spade mystery set in France.
It's possible the glut of streaming will keep these characters around in all new forms. A touch of pre-awareness and a sprinkle of fannish nerdiness by creators wanting to play in these sandboxes could keep that second horizon line far out.
Maybe it's something indelible about a kid and their dog that speaks to people, as much as the story of Luke Skywalker and pals spoke to a generation that we feel the need to keep these characters with us and pass them down.
And, yet, we watch things fade into the distance. For many Lassie fans, they may check out the new movies, but what they really want is to remember what Lassie meant to them on afternoons when they were nine years old, watching the dog on their TV screens. And that's great. We invented that phrase "My ____" to describe how we fell in love with a character. My Superman is Christopher Reeve. My Zorro is Duncan Regehr. My Wonder Woman is Lynda Carter.
And you can appreciate that the next generation has their own. And maybe Lassie will just keep on coming home. And who knows? Maybe under the right eyes, Rin Tin Tin will be back doing stunts and having adventures.
No comments:
Post a Comment