Friday, December 13, 2019

TOOBWOLD DAY


From Wikipedia:

On 13 December 1795 a meteorite crashed on the outskirts of the village, landing within metres of ploughman John Shipley.  As a monument to this event there is a brick column bearing the inscription.  [See below.]


The meteorite is now housed in the Natural History Museum and the occurrence inspired the development of the body of science fiction literature known as the Wold Newton family by American author Philip José Farmer.

Today is Wold Newton Day, the day when the meteorite crashed near Wold Newton and its radioactive aura imbued over a dozen travelers who stopped by to examine the site.

From those people, whose DNA was affected by the radiation, came some of the greatest heroes and villains the world just outside the window has ever known. This was all chronicled initially by Philip Jose Farmer and later carried on by ardent archivists of connected material.

Earth Prime-Time is NOT Wold Newton, but several members of the WNU Family and other affiliated characters are part of Toobworld.  However, Toobworld only deals with their “televersions”, not their characterizations from the original sources or other adaptations… with some exceptions.

In “The Night Of The Dancing Death” from the first season of ‘The Wild Wild West’, Secret Service agent Artemus Gordon needed to create a diversion so that fellow agent James West could leave the ballroom in the Albanian embassy without notice.  In disguise as the Grand Elector of Saxony, Artemus instigated a fight with an elderly representative for Pomerania.


“Grand Elector”:
If I were the American Secretary, I should censure you for violating the Carpathian border.  After all, you had your gunboats fire on their coastlines, their ports.
Landgrave:
You presume to condemn?  For people in- in need of money, in need of friends?  Still much greater than Carpathia!
“Grand Elector”:
My father always said over and over and over again, you can never trust a land-hungry Pomeranian.

While there are the Carpathian Mountains and a small historic region in Central Europe known as Carpathian Ruthenia, this reference is to a fictional kingdom which served as the homeland for King Nicholas VIII.  The King, who inherited the crown on his mother's side, visited London in 1911 for the coronation of George V on June 22.  He was accompanied by his father Charles, the Prince Regent (as Nicholas is only sixteen years old), and by his maternal grandmother, the Dowager Queen of Carpathia.

Carpathia is the fictional Balkan kingdom in the 1957 film “The Prince and the Showgirl”, based on a play by Terence Rattigan.


As I mentioned earlier, Earth Prime-Time is not part of the Wold Newton Universe.  We do share the characters of Artemus Gordon and James West, but there are differences.

In the CU of Wold Newton, the archivists can draw upon other sources to enhance the biographies of the agents.  Toobworld only uses the TV series episodes and the two TV movies.  From that we also extrapolate “theories of relateeveety” to make the claims that both men are related to TV characters from other shows at different points in the Toobworld Timeline.

But we do stipulate certain details from the WNU to be in effect for Toobworld as well – their dates of birth for instance.

As for the theatrical film with Will Smith and Kevin Kline?  That’s right out!  That belongs in the meta-fictional universe of the movies, for which Craig Shaw Gardner coined the term “the Cineverse”.

But speaking of movies, there are times we absorb a film wholly into the TV Universe, knowing that it won’t affect the integrity of Toobworld.  Of course all of those movies spun off from TV shows and using the original casts – ‘Maverick’, ‘Batman 1966’, ‘Downton Abbey’, the first several ‘McHale’s Navy’ flicks and the ‘Star Trek’ franchise from “The Motion Picture” to the first fifteen minutes of the ‘Star Trek’ reboot from 2009 – only up until Spock entered the black hole.  For Toobworld, that marked the death of Spock.  (Everything after becomes a movie of 2009, fantasizing the rest of that future.)

So with “The Prince And The Showgirl”, having read through a synopsis of the plotline, I see no reason why it would upset the dynamics of Toobworld to bring it into the TV Universe.  And so it’s a crossover which at least works for the Toobworld Dynamic.

Happy Wold Newton Day, Toobworld-style!

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