AS SEEN ON TV: HUCKLEBERRY FINN

HUCK FINN

AS SEEN IN:

"Huckleberry Finn"

AS PLAYED BY:

Ron Howard

TV DIMENSION:

TBD

STATUS:

Recastaway

BASED ON:

"The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn"

WRITTEN BY:

Mark Twain

From Wikipedia:

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is a novel by Mark Twain, first published in England in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written in the vernacular, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, a friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels ("Tom Sawyer Abroad" and "Tom Sawyer, Detective"). It is a sequel to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer".

The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. Satirizing a Southern antebellum society that had ceased to exist about twenty years before the work was published, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism.

Perennially popular with readers, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has also been the continued object of study by serious literary critics since its publication. It was criticized upon release because of its coarse language and became even more controversial in the 20th century because of its perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its frequent use of the racial slur "nigger", despite strong arguments that the protagonist, and the tenor of the book, is in fact anti-racist.

From the source material:

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly -- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece -- all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round -- more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.

  

In Toobworld, many literary characters share the same world as the televersions of the authors who created them back in the real world. We've seen this with at least three of our previous showcase figures this year - Holmes & Watson with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (seen in, among other TV productions, 'The Murdoch Mysteries') and Hercule Poirot with Dame Agatha Christie (seen in the 'Doctor Who' episode "The Unicorn And The Wasp").

In such cases, those authors didn't create the characters within the reality of Toobworld; they chronicle their adventures for the public. (Although Conan Doyle didn't write the adventures of Sherlock Holmes; Dr. Watson did. Conan Doyle was just the literary agent. But apparently Holmes didn't mind as it helped remove him from the notice of the general public, who came to think of him as being fictional. I'm not sure how Dr. Watson felt about Conan Doyle taking the credit for his work.)

As seen with both examples listed above, sometimes those authors embellished the stories, making it sound as if they were indeed creating them out of whole cloth. But they were just adding fictional details to spice up the story. (Like Conan Doyle toying with the idea of changing the "true" location of the Baskerville case.)

So here we have Huck Finn existing in the same dimension as his "creator", Mark Twain.  (And for those of you who wouldn't know a good character actor if he bit you, Mark Twain was played by Royal Dano in this production.)

This would be in an alternate TV dimension, as there are plenty of televersions for Huck Finn (and Mark Twain as well!) to spread out among a plethora of other dimensions. (The first TV Huck Finn was played by Clifford Tatum, Jr. in 1953, as part of the anthology series 'Excursion', as pictured on the right......)

BCnU!