Today is both Star Wars Day and Free Comic Book Day! So get yourself on that!
I have finished the first season of Warrior; it’s an odd sort of show, being both a martial arts and gang drama. Still, it is entertaining and focuses on a people and period often ignored by pop culture. I also finished Don Quixote, and am currently working on God Emperor of Dune (that may have been a mistake).
Unclear if we’ll have a Saturday Note next week! Sorry, folks!
Now let’s talk about The Spiderwick Chronicles.
On Roku’s The Spiderwick Chronicles
The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black and Tony Diterlizzi is a set of five chapter books–they’re sometimes called novels, but they’re so short I never do–about the Grace family, particularly the nine-year-old twins Jared and Simon, and their teenage sister Mallory. After their parents separate, their mother moves them into the old Victorian mansion in Maine that belonged to her great uncle Arthur Spiderwick before he mysteriously disappeared. The children soon find out that Arthur Spiderwick discovered that faeries are real, and created a guidebook to better understand them. Other faeries, including the evil ogre Mulgarath, want the Guide for themselves, and the Grace siblings find themselves pulled into adventures to keep the book away from malevolent faeries.
The series is a glorious love-letter to older stories; everything, from the character designs to the main Plot points, are allusions. The illustrations take heavy influence from Arthur Rackham; the faeries draw from folklore and literature, such as Lang’s Fairy Books, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, and Alice in Wonderland. Despite being so small, these books are brilliant, and they’re crafted with so much love.
The books were eventually adapted into a movie by Nickelodeon; the film tries to take on all five books, and as a result cut out much of the really cool stuff. That being said, it is a pretty good effort that gets most of the main Plot into the film, and also preserves a lot of the faeries’ designs from the books. Also Freddie Highmore plays both twins, which is kind of impressive (I remember a short interview in Boy’s Life talking about it). It’s not brilliant, but it’s not bad either!
The streaming series is… hngh… okay, I can do this…
Disney put the show into production for their streaming service, but after it was finished filming they actually canceled it, because this is the era of the Streaming Wars, when people make stuff and then not stream it because it makes them money. Roku saved it, though, and it premiered in April, becoming their biggest premiere.
I struggled for a while with how I thought about this series, trying to work out if it’s ‘bad’ or just very different. An adaptation that strays from the source material is frustrating, sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad show. Having finished the season, though, I think I can say: this show is bad. It’s not horrendous, by any means, and at times it’s entertaining; it’s just not good.
The Plot becomes less about finding the Guide and keeping it away from Mulgarath, and more, “Go out and find the pages of the Guide hidden by magic around the mansion and town.” You might think this sounds a lot like Locke & Key, and that’s because it shares the same showrunner; I found an interview somewhere where the guy was even a little hesitant about taking this project because he thought it was so similar in premise.
The results are obviously a completely different beast. Gone is the fairy tale feel of the original story, substituted for average urban fantasy that features teenagers. Jared and Simon have been aged up so that we can feel TEEN ANGST in all their interactions with every character. Most creatures, if there are creatures at all, show themselves in human form, probably for budgetary reasons.
[There’s a Goblin Market (something not present in the books, where goblins are toad-like creatures) in which there’s not a single goblin. Yes, really.]
In light of budget issues and other television limitations, some of the changes make sense: the focus on human characters and the surrounding town, unlike the books which mostly featured just the Grace family. Having Mulgarath spend so much time in human form. Aging the kids up so you don’t have to worry about child actors aging up.
Other decisions, though, are just bizarre. Why is this moved from Maine to Michigan of all places? Faeries can’t lie, except they can but it hurts them, or sometimes they can when the Plot needs it? Why is Mulgarath rambling about his motivations and plans all the time? And why does he have whatever powers he needs to make the Plot work?
[No lie, though, Christian Slater is obviously having a BALL playing Mulgarath, so I can’t even be mad about some of those decisions. He’s one of the highlights because he’s so much fun to watch.]
Characters make baffling decisions, too. At one point, Jared is convinced that one of his friends is secretly a faerie spy, so what does he do? Use one of the methods we’ve seen for telling if someone is a faerie? No, of course not! Instead he punches this kid!
And there is this really weird worldbuilding. The books stick almost entirely to European folklore with its creatures, but in the show there’s a scene where Simon meets a Chinese kitchen god. The implication is that other cultures’ mythologies are true, too, but then why are all the faeries in Michigan European-flavored, instead of from the actual culture that lived there? There’s a bit where it’s revealed that the indigenous people thought of Mulgarath as a wendigo, but he clearly thinks of himself as an ogre and runs on those rules. It just raises so many further questions.
Diversity is good! Poking holes in your worldbuilding is not.
Making the Grace family African American could have been used for something really cool! You could have had something like what they do with Aquaman, especially since you have Mallory’s whole thing with Bree, another girl in fencing who is clued into the supernatural world: have the magical world look down on these people as outsiders, only for them to come through. You have the subtext already written, the idea that these are people reclaiming a story, a fairy tale, that they’ve long been deliberately excluded from. And instead it’s just… I don’t know.
I don’t know what this show is going for. There are rare bits of cleverness, a lot of entertaining material, but actual quality writing? Good stories being told in clever ways? No. It’s not here. It’s like every other urban fantasy aimed at teens, but less original. Skip it.
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