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Author: Nick Ozment

Oz loves Godzilla, middle-school G.I. Joe (not old-school, not new-school; middle-school, spooky stories, trees, and really too many other things to list here.
Weird of Oz Revisits Fighting Fantasy

Weird of Oz Revisits Fighting Fantasy

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0426111757Rogue Blades Entertainment continues to put out fine new projects — though, I lament, with far less frequency than in days of yore.

Also in those days of yore (about two years ago, to be precise), for a brief, shining, halcyon period of time (a few months, to be precise), RBE hosted a website that ran regular blogs under the banner “Home of Heroics.” It was my good fortune to be invited into HoH’s stable of bloggers, and I made a couple contributions before that heroism-vaunting home vanished like the fabled city of Xanadu. I only got in two or three posts, mind you, because I was on a monthly rotation rather than the weekly slot I enjoy here on Black Gate.

One of those posts that I wanted eventually to follow up on was an account of my experience revisiting Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. My report touched off similar nostalgic reminiscences from several readers.

Since, as far as I can tell, the material that ran on HoH is no longer accessible, I’d like to use this St. Patrick’s Day edition of Weird of Oz to resurrect that post here — with an eye to reviewing other single-player gamebooks down the road.

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Weird of Oz: Scooby Meets Buffy (a Postscript)

Weird of Oz: Scooby Meets Buffy (a Postscript)

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scooby-dooLast week’s post was prompted by a term I used fleetingly in my review of the new Scooby-Doo series two weeks ago: “post-Buffy.” Rather than go off on a tangent explaining what I meant by that in the midst of discussing Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, I promised any interested readers that I would devote a whole column to this concept of “post-Buffy” in my next installment.

So last Sunday I posted “Weird of Oz Considers Postbuffyism,” primarily to reflect on how Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) influenced later television.

Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer_CoverartWhat caught me off guard was the pushback I got to my assessment of Buffy and its significance in television history. Of course, one or two people questioned the merits of the series itself — that’s okay; some people just don’t dig Buffy. Others asserted there were earlier series already using narrative innovations to weave multiple plot threads over several seasons, which I did acknowledge — my premise was not that Buffy was the first, only that it generally has been one of the most influential.

But then one commenter brought up a series that gave me pause: The X-Files. Here was a series to which much of what I said regarding Buffy could also apply, and which has arguably been as influential on genre television. This prompted me to formulate a response that itself grew into a post-script or a sequel to the original post, but before I get to that I’d like to take a moment to tie the last two posts more closely together: to explain why the new Scooby-Doo series got me to thinking about Buffy in the first place.

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Weird of Oz Considers Postbuffyism

Weird of Oz Considers Postbuffyism

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old battlestarBattlestar_Galactica_poster-HBObuffy

When discussing television series, especially genre shows (particularly horror, science fiction, and fantasy), my friends and I sometimes use a couple of adjectives that are pretty relevant and meaningful to us and may be of interest to readers of this blog: “pre-Buffy” and “post-Buffy.”

Most visitors to the Black Gate website will need no introduction to writer/director Joss Whedon and the “Whedonverse,” a term that encompasses all he has contributed to fantasy media over the past two decades in virtually every medium: television shows, comic books, webcasts, movies. Ranging from seminal shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly to comic-book continuations of those series as well as runs on other properties like The X-Men; from the hip web series Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog to a cult horror film like Cabin in the Woods to the third-highest-grossing film of all time (2012’s The Avengers): trust me, you’ve seen his work.

In this week’s informal musing, I’ll focus in on his first television show, Buffy, which ran seven seasons from 1997-2003 — not to discuss the series per se, but to explain what I mean when I use it as a benchmark in describing a television show as being “post-Buffy.”

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The Weird of Oz Locates Scooby-Doo

The Weird of Oz Locates Scooby-Doo

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scooby-doo“Scooby Dooby Doo, where are you?” is a question I’ve heard asked — or, rather, sung — ever since I was a child. For most of my life, I didn’t care where the hell he was. But things have changed.

Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Inc. gang have been unmasking criminal hoaxers longer than I’ve been around, having debuted three years before I was born. They belong to that collective mob of pop-culture figures that have just always been there and are still going strong performing their antics for new generations…Looney Tunes, Mickey Mouse and his club, the Muppets, the Peanuts Gang, Tom and Jerry. Others from my childhood have fallen by the wayside — Heckle and Jeckle, Woody Woodpecker — waiting to be re-launched or else forever consigned to the Old Toons Retirement Home.

As a boy, I followed all of them at one time or another. This was largely determined by which programs the networks happened to be running during the hours just before or just after school (and, of course, that golden block of children’s programming: Saturday morning). It may be almost unfathomable to some of my younger readers, but there was a time not all that long ago when a latchkey kid getting home from school only had three or four channels to choose from, perhaps only one of which would be playing cartoons — two channels if you were lucky, in which case you might actually have a choice between, say, Care Bears or He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (and you can guess which one I chose). For us, the idea of six or seven channels playing cartoons 24/7 would seem about as far off as some of the far-out gadgetry on Star Trek.

Scooby-Doo is one of the franchises that has had real staying power, obviously. Unlike, say, The Flintstones, the live-action movies did not kill the franchise, which has gone through numerous new incarnations of TV series as well as dozens of made-for-TV or direct-to-video animated films.

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The Weird of Oz Recalls his First Visit to Barsoom

The Weird of Oz Recalls his First Visit to Barsoom

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warlord of marsBy the time I was in the third grade, I was reading a little bit of everything (still do). From Zorro to The Hardy Boys to Pippi Longstocking, I gave everything a try. But already I was being drawn more strongly to works of speculative fiction, especially heroic fantasy. The year before, I’d gotten hooked on C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

I often did my best bouts of reading after I’d been tucked into bed and the lights were out. I’d sneak down by the door, sprawl out on the carpet, and read by the narrow band of light coming in from the bathroom down the hall (my mother would leave it on as a nightlight). On one particular night, I chose an old hardcover that I’d taken off my Granddad’s shelf. Whatever dust jacket had once adorned its fraying red cloth was long since lost, and the pages were becoming yellow and brittle. I gently opened to the first page and read these words:

In the shadows of the forest that flanks the crimson plain by the side of the Lost Sea of Korus in the Valley Dor, beneath the hurtling moons of Mars, speeding their meteoric way close above the bosom of the dying planet, I crept stealthily along the trail of a shadowy form that hugged the darker places with a persistency that proclaimed the sinister nature of its errand.

These are the first words of The Warlord of Mars  (1919) by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

This happens to be the third book in the Barsoom series, so I had no idea what was going on. But “the shadows of the forest that flanks the crimson plain,” the “Lost Sea of Korus,” the “Valley Dor,” and the “dying planet” piqued a part of my brain that wanted to explore, as the voice at the beginning of Star Trek used to announce, “strange new worlds.” And then that sudden telescoping in on the “shadowy form” on a sinister errand…I was hooked.  I was on my way to Mars — or Barsoom, as its inhabitants called it.

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The Weird of Oz Talks to a Troll

The Weird of Oz Talks to a Troll

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brother word processorI got onto the World Wide Web relatively late in the game. Prior to 1999, I was still pounding away on a Brother word processor. It could play Tetris (all the shapes were a single color, orange, against a black screen). Connect to the Web it could not.

Then I got my first computer, modem, and dial-up service — just in time to enjoy the Y2K panic when we collectively feared our computers would crash and wipe out all our precious data as a special New Year’s Day surprise. That never came to pass; in fact, I still have a few old files from that floppy-disc-devouring dinosaur, dutifully transferred from one upgrade to another down the years. Though if I open them now, converting them from an ancient version of Wordperfect to Word 2007, the original text appears far down the page, embedded within dozens of lines of incoherent symbols, as if a foreword and postscript had been attached to my musings by an alien intelligence in an unknown tongue.

Most of us can probably recall what it was like when we first discovered the new vistas that were suddenly opened to us…The novelty of typing anything into a search engine and marveling at the thousands of possibilities that came cascading in response to our command. Text, visuals, audio, video — why, images moved and made noises on the virtual page before us! We were transformed into wizards, able to summon erudite knowledge or time-killing trifles (far too often the latter) with such ease that Prospero himself would be envious, and indeed might be tempted to trade in Ariel for a Dell.

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The Weird of Oz Gabs About Groundhog Day

The Weird of Oz Gabs About Groundhog Day

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groundhog dayIn this day-after-Groundhog-Day edition of “The Weird of Oz,” I’ll consider how — and why — the 1993 film Groundhog Day has quietly joined the ranks of American classics.

First, let me quickly situate this film with regard to how it warrants discussion on a website devoted to fantasy media (an interesting issue David E. Harris raised in his post of December 26, 2012). Although billed as a comedy, and by no means a traditional fantasy or supernatural tale, it does fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction.

Tolkien, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” noted that all imaginative fiction begins by posing a question: “What if?” He offers the example of someone imagining a green sun: “To make a Secondary World inside which the green sun will be credible, commanding Secondary Belief, will probably require labour and thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft.”*

How would the world be different given the changed variable(s)? The “what if” question puts the speculative into speculative fiction. What if ghosts are real? What if werewolves existed? What if a ghost, a werewolf, and a vampire shared a flat? What if corpses began rising from the dead? What if an alien lord traveled through time and space in a British police call box?

Groundhog Day’s premise is that the protagonist wakes one morning to discover the day he just lived is repeating itself. What if a person were caught in a time loop so that he kept living the same day over and over, never aging yet retaining all his memories?

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The Weird of Oz gabs about Antiheroes

The Weird of Oz gabs about Antiheroes

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100_0347Antihero. A problematic term to begin with, its overuse has further watered it down. Anti- typically means to be in opposition or even to be the opposite; the antithesis of a position is the oppositional position.

So, technically, one might interpret anti-hero to mean a villain. This is rarely, if ever, how the term is used; so what do we mean by an antihero?

Off the top of my head, without resorting to any dictionary definition, this is how I tend to picture an antihero: A person not serving any particular ideal or higher purpose, but generally self-serving, who, while going about his (or her) business in pursuit of fortune, power, pleasure, or whatever turns his crank, is suddenly confronted by a moral choice. And at that moment, not for any dogmatic or religious reasons, any creeds or codes, but simply because of some niggling inner compass — his conscience — he makes the choice that is least likely to offer personal gain, that involves self-sacrifice, that may in fact be fatal. He makes a heroic choice, the choice that allows us to continue to root for him as the hero-protagonist.

Think of the fallen samurai in The Seven Samurai or the lawless gunslingers in The Magnificent Seven. In both cases, when they learn that the threatened peasant village cannot really afford to pay them and that they are outnumbered five to one, they nevertheless decide to make a stand to protect the afflicted. No promise of financial reward and a very high probability of death — an option that the histories of these men would not suggest they would choose. They are neither knights nor saints. Yet they become heroes and, in some cases, martyrs. All appearances to the contrary, deep down they prove to be — when it really counts — good men. Or in that moment they become good men.

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Oz’s Alembic: A Brief Introduction

Oz’s Alembic: A Brief Introduction

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DSCN0009
Photo taken by author at House on the Rock in Spring Green, WI

Hello, fellow connoisseurs of fantasy and horror, and welcome to the first installment of my yet-to-be titled Sunday blog. In a much earlier time of my life (and sometimes it seems like another life altogether), I was a youth pastor with aspirations to be a full-time preacher (for those who know me and are chuckling right now: yes, believe it or not), so perhaps it’s fitting that I’m on Sunday; this is my Sunday sermon.

In coming weeks, I’ll be jawing about everything from obscure fantasy comics (e.g. Arak, Son of Thunder) to the origin of seminal Dungeons and Dragons monsters (rust monster, anyone?) to the latest Hollywood blockbusters. My interests, even when limited to the boundaries of the fantasy genre, are broad.

But for this first installment, I’d like to share the perspective I bring to these topics. I’ll also share — briefly — my credentials, but I’ll keep that short and sweet, because too often that can devolve into sounding like you’re tooting your own horn (as my wife would say), which is why — a little insider fact of the trade here — most authors’ bios are in third person even though they’re usually written by the author.

My tastes always have been rather eclectic, but with fantasy and horror consistently predominant. My imagination is attracted to the peculiar slant, the odd angle, the ghost lurking in the corner of the dusty room. J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were my early masters, and E.A. Poe and E.R. Burroughs. Later, H.P. Lovecraft pulled up a seat at the table, and R.E. Howard and T. Powers (all right, Tim. Enough with the initials!). And many others, from Hayao Miyazaki to Joss Whedon.

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