Deep Ice: We can find out about their optics (Magic Lantern Episode 20: The War of the Worlds)

Just when I thought I was out, you pull me back in.

You guys. Seriously, you guys. Come on. I mean come on.

It is, I can hardly believe I am saying this, September 15, 2017. It is so recent that I will tell you what is on my DVR from that week which I haven’t gotten around to watching yet:

• Noah Antwiler’s livestream of “The Testament of Sherlock Holmes”
• Power Rangers Ninja Steel episode 14, “The Royal Rival”.
• Five episodes of Late Night With Stephen Colbert including his second anniversary special.
• Adam Ruins Everything 2×09 “Adam Ruins His Vacation”
• An episode of The Great Space Coaster, which actually aired in 1981, but I saved a copy because it was mentioned in a blog post I read and I wanted to see if it was one of the shows I half-remember from early childhood.
• Ana Mardoll’s Let’s Play of 2064: Read Only Memories

Metroid: Samus Returns, a remake of Metroid II: Return of Samus, comes out for the Nintendo 3DS. Out in theaters are Mother!, Molly’s Game, The Lego Ninjago Movie, and Kingsman: The Golden Circle. Starship Troopers, A Fish Called Wanda, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Wonder Woman all get new high-definition home video releases.

I could spend all day sharing the parade of horrors that is the news these days, but I’ll keep it to just a few things. The space probe Cassini-Huygens throws itself into Saturn. Toys ‘R’ Us files for bankruptcy. Donald Trump tells the UN he might destroy North Korea. 29 are injured in London in a bombing at Parsons Green Station. Harry Dean Stanton dies.

I near the end of the purgatory that is Howard Koch’s War of the Worlds II, and begin my treatment of Robert Carlyle’s first season playing the lead in Doctor Who because real Doctor Who finished up months ago and the ill-fated spin-off Class won’t start for a few more weeks.

Taylor Swift dominates the Billboard Hot 100 with “Look What You Made Me Do”, and I recognize almost a third of the other songs. Including Shawn Mendes’s “There’s Nothing Holding Me Back” only because last week Dylan told me he didn’t like the Kidz Bop version of it because they changed the line “just picture everybody naked” to “just picture everybody smiling”.

I don’t really have much to say about this. It just popped up while I was trying to google some background for something else. But how could I pass this up?

I couldn’t find out too much about Kedoo. They’re some sort of new media distribution outfit, probably Russian. They’re described as a competitor to Vevo by industry info sites. They’ve got their own app.

At least one branch of their bread-and-butter seems to be low-end computer-animated shorts for children. Which brings us to Magic Lantern. Near as I can tell, the framing story is this: two big-headed 3D animated children tell each other stories very loosely adapted from works of literature, accompanied by 2D still images projected by the titular “magic lantern”. They refer to it as a slide show, but it’s pretty clearly a filmstrip projector.

I have an unreasoning love of the various obsolete formats of home media that abounded in the ’70s and ’80s and early ’90s. Filmstrip. Super-8. Slides. Laser Disc. CVD. Fisher Price Movie Viewer. It’s just amazing that there were so many different ways of bringing the magic of movies into the home for children, and that entire market sector vanished into thin air because of DVD and then streaming video and DLP projectors. I mean, filmstrips, man. Filmstrips were basically Read-A-Long books for classrooms. It was basically a reel of 35mm film that carried positive images instead of negatives, and you’d use a filmstrip projector to shine it on the wall, and there’d be an accompanying tape that would narrate, and it would go “bing” when it was time to advance the frame, only the teacher almost always missed one, so you’d always be off at some point. Most of them were educational short films, and I assume they’d originally been shot as actual films and then decimated down to one frame a minute because 35mm film projectors were outside the budget of most grade schools.

I could easily believe that the backstory of this series could be “Grandma’s a retired Kindergarten teacher, and she took the old projector and a pile of filmstrips home with her when the school was getting rid of it and one day the kids found it and are making up stories to go along with the old filmstrips because neither one of them knows what an audio cassette is.

But I’m probably complicating things too much. In this episode, little brother is playing a video game about invading Martians, and this prompts big sister to tell him the story of the War of the Worlds… Sorta.

Their adaptation is super simple, but it’s also super cute. In keeping with, tradition, the protagonist is named “Herbert”. He likes space, and radios out messages inviting Martians to come have tea with him.

One day, a Martian takes him up on the offer. The little brother is disappointed that the Martian is a purple octopus instead of a little green man.

Anyway, the plan hits a snag when it turns out the alien thinks Herbert is on the menu. Fortunately, when Herbert looks for a weapon to defend himself, all he finds are some biscuits, which he flings at the Martian in desperation.

Turns out Martians find biscuits delicious, so the visitor changes his dinner plans and has tea with Herbert instead. The alien departs peaceably, with a few cases of biscuits strapped to the roof rack of his flying saucer, and Herbert resolves never to summon eldritch horrors from space again.

I gotta tell you: I love the gall of this adaptation. This is… It’s like the Kidz Bop version of War of the Worlds. I keep asking myself just how far you can deviate from the source material and still count as an adaptation, and the world just keeps finding new ways to answer, “No, farther than that.”

I also love how cynical the little brother is. First he complains about the alien not being little, green, or a man. Then he complains about tea with milk being disgusting, and he challenges the whole idea of Herbert and the Martian becoming friends over a nice cuppa, given that one of them is interested in eating the other one.

War of the Worlds has not, unless I’ve completely forgotten something, ever been cute in adaptation before. And it probably shouldn’t be. But after the horrors I’ve put myself through, it’s kinda nice to take a little break and experience a bit of cuteness.

Cuteness that probably won’t sue me for including screenshots.

Plus, it’s pretty rare that I can just say, “Here, watch the whole thing for yourself”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWB6f8OEoVA