Meme! aka This post brought to you by the letter P...
loneraven is doing one of those memes where you have to get somebody's attention to participate - this one is a "talk about five fictional characters beginning with a given letter" thing - and since I was lucky enough to actually get a letter from her (this is an Unusual Occurrence in my online life), I am now yattering about five some fictional characters beginning with the letter P!
...I really don't think I can come up with five. Wow.
Um - Peregrin Took! Otherwise known as Pippin. I should mention that I tend to be a bit books-only about LOTR, even though (or perhaps because) my birthday parties for four years straight involved watching the theatrical, extended, or both versions of the films as they came out, and a good deal of that is because I don't feel Pippin or Merry was done justice to in the films.
Yes, Pippin starts out as something of a ditz, but he is only 29 - and by the end of the trilogy, although he has admittedly got drunk in the Prancing Pony, woken up the Balrog, stolen the Palantir, and sworn allegiance to Denethor (okay, it was the right choice in the circumstances, but I still think it was dumb), he's also grown up a lot, helped get the Ents involved in dealing with Saruman, saved Faramir's life, saved Beregond's life, and gone on a dangerous ride across the needing-scoured!Shire to fetch his dad's militia from Tuckborough. (Although, as I can't remember exactly what effect that had on the ending of the Scouring, it is clearly time for a re-read! hee! I can't actually re-read this book anymore, I start skipping the bits I can recite along with and wind up skipping the book. And the Rob Inglis audiobook INSERTS CONTRACTIONS where they aren't. *scowls*)
Don't even get me started on what they did to Merry in the films...
Mary Poppins. Good grief, I'm floundering. Okay, Mary Poppins is exactly the opposite - I like her so much better in the movie that I tend to quietly ignore the existence of the books! I think Julie Andrews (and the screenwriters and especially the Sherman brothers) did an amazing job of handling the fantasy/normal balance in the film, dialing down Mary Poppins's (I simply cannot shorten that name) starchiness and habit of Denying The Magic Afterwards to a level that made her seem like less of a... snob.
(Also, full disclosure, I first saw this movie when I wasn't even toddling yet, and together with Peter Pan and the Narnia Chronicles it did very permanent things to me. I cannot dislike any part of it - I even like Dick Van Dyke's accent. *shame*)
...okay, is there anyone reading this who recognizes the names Elizabeth Enright or Gone-Away Lake without googling? (Well, probably some of y'all - I do wind up among the bibliophiles! *g*)
Okay, short version: Elizabeth Enright was an American kidlit author who took well-deserved Newbery and Newbery Honor medals for her stories about everyday life in mid-20th-century America. Her special talent was Not Being Boring Or Sappy on said topic - okay, I snark, but she's really fantastic at writing normal realistic everyday life instead of the much more common Worship Of Normalcy 1950s caricatures thereof. (And her turns of phrase are pretty awesome too; sadly I have not the book handy, or I would quote it at y'all.)
Gone-Away Lake, one of my favorites (well, they're all favorites, but I actually own this one), is - like all her books - really hard to summarize without losing the awesome. Basically... "it's about this pre-teen girl and her guy cousin in 1950-odd who discover a bunch of mostly abandoned Victorian vacation homes next to a swamp that used to be a lake. They make friends with the two elderly people who still/again live there (a brother and sister) and have a perfectly normal summer full of small adventures. And then there is a sequel." Ack, I'm totally turning into a reviewer - "small adventures" - but there is really no other way to describe it!
(Actually, there is, sort of: primsong, if you have not read these books yet, you REALLY, REALLY should. She's got your love for outdoorsness and flowers and purring cats and daisiest daisies and such like, and something of your sense of humor as well.)
Er. I was supposed to talk about the characters beginning with P, wasn't I? Okay. Portia Blake is the pre-teen girl I mentioned. She's... very much an average normal girl-person, and I mean that in the best way possible. If you sort of imagine Beezus without the Weltschmerz, that's Portia. Tan hair and tan eyes and braces, likes pink but not dresses, feels sorry for the ants that get into her sandwich. She's the only realistic female character from the 1950s that I can think of right off the bat.
Pindar Payton, aka "Uncle Pin" by the end of the first book (btw, the second is titled, aptly enough, Return to Gone-Away), is the elderly guy who lives in one of the old abandoned vacation homes. His sister, Minnehaha Cheever (she got married, Mr Cheever died), lives in another one. He keeps goats and bees and a cat; she keeps chickens and ducks, and a rosebush. (Sorry. Small joke.) She wears all her family's old Victorian clothes that still fit her, and he wears blue jeans and tweed and suspenders, and drives a ridiculous old rattletrap of a car called The Machine. And they both tell the kids stories about when they were children at not-yet-Gone-Away (it was called Lake Tarrigo), and help them put together a clubhouse in the attic of one of the still-abandoned houses, and it is ALL SORT OF EPIC in the way that is more about having fun with friends than saving the world. And then, as I say, there is a sequel! :D
(Also? The Internet is being Quite Unhelpful with pictures atm, but in the original illustrations by Beth and Joe Krush, Uncle Pin is totally played by René Auberjonois circa 2002. With the beard and mustache and the eyes and everything. Which is slightly mind-boggling, as those pictures were drawn when Mr Auberjonois was about seventeen! O_O)
...you know what? It's past 8 o'clock, and I've got four out of five anyway. (And if I go on too much longer I shall exceed the post length limit.) TL;DR: Pippin was shortchanged in the LOTR movies; Mary Poppins is cooler in the movie than in the books; everybody that likes kidlit ought to read Gone-Away Lake and Return to Gone-Away if they haven't already. Or re-read it. Goodness knows I'm on my umpty-zillionth reread. ;D
...I really don't think I can come up with five. Wow.
Um - Peregrin Took! Otherwise known as Pippin. I should mention that I tend to be a bit books-only about LOTR, even though (or perhaps because) my birthday parties for four years straight involved watching the theatrical, extended, or both versions of the films as they came out, and a good deal of that is because I don't feel Pippin or Merry was done justice to in the films.
Yes, Pippin starts out as something of a ditz, but he is only 29 - and by the end of the trilogy, although he has admittedly got drunk in the Prancing Pony, woken up the Balrog, stolen the Palantir, and sworn allegiance to Denethor (okay, it was the right choice in the circumstances, but I still think it was dumb), he's also grown up a lot, helped get the Ents involved in dealing with Saruman, saved Faramir's life, saved Beregond's life, and gone on a dangerous ride across the needing-scoured!Shire to fetch his dad's militia from Tuckborough. (Although, as I can't remember exactly what effect that had on the ending of the Scouring, it is clearly time for a re-read! hee! I can't actually re-read this book anymore, I start skipping the bits I can recite along with and wind up skipping the book. And the Rob Inglis audiobook INSERTS CONTRACTIONS where they aren't. *scowls*)
Don't even get me started on what they did to Merry in the films...
Mary Poppins. Good grief, I'm floundering. Okay, Mary Poppins is exactly the opposite - I like her so much better in the movie that I tend to quietly ignore the existence of the books! I think Julie Andrews (and the screenwriters and especially the Sherman brothers) did an amazing job of handling the fantasy/normal balance in the film, dialing down Mary Poppins's (I simply cannot shorten that name) starchiness and habit of Denying The Magic Afterwards to a level that made her seem like less of a... snob.
(Also, full disclosure, I first saw this movie when I wasn't even toddling yet, and together with Peter Pan and the Narnia Chronicles it did very permanent things to me. I cannot dislike any part of it - I even like Dick Van Dyke's accent. *shame*)
...okay, is there anyone reading this who recognizes the names Elizabeth Enright or Gone-Away Lake without googling? (Well, probably some of y'all - I do wind up among the bibliophiles! *g*)
Okay, short version: Elizabeth Enright was an American kidlit author who took well-deserved Newbery and Newbery Honor medals for her stories about everyday life in mid-20th-century America. Her special talent was Not Being Boring Or Sappy on said topic - okay, I snark, but she's really fantastic at writing normal realistic everyday life instead of the much more common Worship Of Normalcy 1950s caricatures thereof. (And her turns of phrase are pretty awesome too; sadly I have not the book handy, or I would quote it at y'all.)
Gone-Away Lake, one of my favorites (well, they're all favorites, but I actually own this one), is - like all her books - really hard to summarize without losing the awesome. Basically... "it's about this pre-teen girl and her guy cousin in 1950-odd who discover a bunch of mostly abandoned Victorian vacation homes next to a swamp that used to be a lake. They make friends with the two elderly people who still/again live there (a brother and sister) and have a perfectly normal summer full of small adventures. And then there is a sequel." Ack, I'm totally turning into a reviewer - "small adventures" - but there is really no other way to describe it!
(Actually, there is, sort of: primsong, if you have not read these books yet, you REALLY, REALLY should. She's got your love for outdoorsness and flowers and purring cats and daisiest daisies and such like, and something of your sense of humor as well.)
Er. I was supposed to talk about the characters beginning with P, wasn't I? Okay. Portia Blake is the pre-teen girl I mentioned. She's... very much an average normal girl-person, and I mean that in the best way possible. If you sort of imagine Beezus without the Weltschmerz, that's Portia. Tan hair and tan eyes and braces, likes pink but not dresses, feels sorry for the ants that get into her sandwich. She's the only realistic female character from the 1950s that I can think of right off the bat.
Pindar Payton, aka "Uncle Pin" by the end of the first book (btw, the second is titled, aptly enough, Return to Gone-Away), is the elderly guy who lives in one of the old abandoned vacation homes. His sister, Minnehaha Cheever (she got married, Mr Cheever died), lives in another one. He keeps goats and bees and a cat; she keeps chickens and ducks, and a rosebush. (Sorry. Small joke.) She wears all her family's old Victorian clothes that still fit her, and he wears blue jeans and tweed and suspenders, and drives a ridiculous old rattletrap of a car called The Machine. And they both tell the kids stories about when they were children at not-yet-Gone-Away (it was called Lake Tarrigo), and help them put together a clubhouse in the attic of one of the still-abandoned houses, and it is ALL SORT OF EPIC in the way that is more about having fun with friends than saving the world. And then, as I say, there is a sequel! :D
(Also? The Internet is being Quite Unhelpful with pictures atm, but in the original illustrations by Beth and Joe Krush, Uncle Pin is totally played by René Auberjonois circa 2002. With the beard and mustache and the eyes and everything. Which is slightly mind-boggling, as those pictures were drawn when Mr Auberjonois was about seventeen! O_O)
...you know what? It's past 8 o'clock, and I've got four out of five anyway. (And if I go on too much longer I shall exceed the post length limit.) TL;DR: Pippin was shortchanged in the LOTR movies; Mary Poppins is cooler in the movie than in the books; everybody that likes kidlit ought to read Gone-Away Lake and Return to Gone-Away if they haven't already. Or re-read it. Goodness knows I'm on my umpty-zillionth reread. ;D