League It Alone?

Are you ready for another take on Peter Pan?

No?

Okay, then, how about the Lost Boys?  No, not the vampire movie inspired by Barrie's tale.  The actual band of boys that followed Peter without question.  Well, they're being called into question themselves now.

Fox Television and Imagine TV are bringing The League of Pan to the small screen.  It'll be set in modern day and revolve around the Lost Boys ten years after they had left the Neverland.  It's a re-imaginaning, of course.  So I'm not going to point out that Barrie already told us about their lives and what happens to each of them in this instance.  For it's probably not relevant.  Unless time proves otherwise, this is a different lens entirely and not meant to be in cohesion with the original stories.

Could be fun.  Wonder if Pan will show up, no?  One report I read said that Wendy remains "snubbed and miffed" - whether that means she's an embittered character on the show or not, I don't know.  I'm just cuirous how it will work as a drama each week.  Do we really need to see "teenage"/young gent Lost Boys coping with modern day?  I don't now either.  Perhaps we should take heart, for Fox handled Barrie quite well in the past with Peter Pan & the Pirates.  This time around the idea is brought to us by writer Brian McCauley Johnson.

But Barrie's tale is indeed rich for so much to be developed around it, harnessing the theme of coping with thedreams and realities of the choices we make.  Let's hope this choice is a good one.

Pan Suit

I came across this when tangled up in the World Wide Web.

It's an original costume for Peter Pan.  As in the 1911 production.

I don't remember seeing it in my London travels  – my word is there SO much to see!  But I did see the original flying harness.

Special thanks to (Chris)Topher Clark, who posted it online amidst other great shots of his own London trip.  You can find that posting here.  Sir, should you find this post and wish me to delete it, just say the word and I will do so.  But I certainly hope you allow me to share your wonderful find/photo!

As Mr. Clark points out - it's not green.  Imagine that!  ;)

What I want to point out is the cape-like element of it.  Extra proof (not that it had been necessary) of part of my rationale for giving the eternal boy a "capelet" in Peter Pan's NeverWorld.  Have the Cape and Read It, Too

It's also interesting to me that Barrie changed it for the book so that Pan wears "skeleton leaves" for his outfit.  Just one of many alterations he crafted in the process of making the play into a novel.  There are definitely leaves at the top of it, though!

Hope you enjoyed seeing this bit of history, folks!

At first I had it listed as the 1904 suit as in THE original, but some named Persinette on the web corrected me in the comments.  Actually, Persinette corrected Mr. Clark, whose info I trusted and should have looked into further.   That's what I get for being too excited and kicking myself for not remembering seeing it.  Thanks, Persinette!  I thought the cape looked a little thin!  See here, which is a photo from the 1904.  Interesting, though - the cape possibly gets thinner as time went on, until it disappeared.  Of course, it also seems like it's attached to just the arms in this...

Gone, But Not Bury-ed

Another one of our Great Masters of Literature has turned his own page into the beyond.

I’m late reporting this, but I’d been unable post it until now.  But I didn't want to not pay my respect.

Ray Bradbury: a man with vision to spare, who gave us fantastic tales of science fiction. He’s surely one of the Fathers of the genre. He exited this plane of existence we assume is reality on June 6, 2012.

My favorite story of his is part of The Martian Chronicles called Usher II. In the story, all things of the imagination have been banned by the government. If it’s made up, it’s not valid. So one man decides to exact revenge - and funds the architectural construction of the Usher house - you know, from Edgar Allen Poe. He invites them all there and it’s filled with mechanistic and holographic (as I recall!) characters from across the span of Literarture - Mad Hatter right along with dragons - and they’re all out to get (as in kill) those responsible for the outrageous censorship. And yes, the House of Usher falls in the same manner as Poe wrote it with them inside.

I also have to mention The Veldt. Sunshine brought this one to my attention back in college. For in it the boy and girl are named Peter and Wendy. Yes, folks, that’s a reference to Barrie in this dark tale of kids with a nursery that is what we’d now call a “Virtual Reality” chamber. The children use it to make an African veldt and the lions eat up their parents, as per their plan it would seem.

Hail to thee, Mr. Bradbury. You’ve made the world a brighter place with your twisted (good sense) and dark lens which you used to caution, inform and entertain. We owe a great deal to you, sir. There is no way you’ll be forgotten, even without your amazing body of work.

Farewell, sir.  And thanks for the awe inspiring stories.

You think that's Tink?

Peter Pan is always with Tinker Bell, right?

Okay, he’s not in Peter Pan’s NeverWorld.  I didn’t see the need to ‘magically’ resurrect Tink when Barrie put in the extra sad touch of her ultimate demise.  After all, she’d already been saved from death once.   I gave Peter his own fairy, literally.

And thus, not counting my book or the final chapter (and whenever upon she ceased to be prior to his visit to grown-up Wendy), Peter Pan is never without Tink.  Right?

Perhaps not!  Two bits of Barrie leapt out at me when last going through the novel, which, in conjunction with each other, just might prove otherwise.

Among Peter’s visits to the Darling nursery (to hear the stories), we read:

He was accompanied by a strange light, no bigger than your fist, which darted about the room like a living thing and I think it must have been this light that wakened Mrs. Darling.

And later, having come back to fetch his shadow:

It was not really a light; it made this light by flashing about so quickly, but when it came to rest for a second you saw it was a fairy, no longer than your hand, but still growing.

We can say for certain that this second light/fairy is in fact Tink.  Why?  The next line, of course:

It was a girl called Tinker Bell...

All right, so Pan has a fairy with him both times.  Note, however, that Barrie doesn’t specify the first one as the popular Tink.  Granted, that doesn’t mean it isn’t her, and the natural assumption is to think it is.   But examination of what’s there yields the difference between a ‘fist’ and a ‘hand.’  Those are similar, yes, but not quite the same.  Try it.  Look at your fist rather than your hand - vastly dissimilar actually.  This alone might prove enough to question whether or not the fairy with him when Mrs. Darling encountered the boy is Tink.   But what really jarred me is the curious word ‘growing’ that Barrie wrote.   Why does it matter?  Well, only one week elapses between when Peter’s shadow had been torn off by the window and when he returns to fetch it. 

She decided to roll the shadow up and put it away carefully in a drawer, until a fitting opportunity came for telling her husband. Ah me!  The opportunity came a week later, on that never-to-be-forgotten Friday.

To think of Peter without his shadow for a whole week!   But in terms of the matter at wing, that’s not all that much time, really.  So are we to believe, then, that the first light had grown from a fist to hand size in just seven days?  And the fairy (Tink?) still growing?  If fairies kept getting bigger as such in as little time as a week, she’d be HUGE after the amount of time that the Darlings spent in the Neverland.  [Don’t believe me?  See this post.]  Unless, of course, she stopped growing after the week.  It’s entirely possible, given that a week seems to have some sort of magic property in the world of Pan. [i.e. Peter flew away from home in seven days (as per Narrator of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens) and the seven days of boys before they are ‘lost.’]  Possible, sure, but is it likely? 

You see, if it can be surmised that a fairy grows in a week, then isn’t also true that Tink is a new fairy?  Thus, she hadn’t been with Peter all that long [if any time at all!] before the Mrs. Darling encounter.

All right, then, if the fairy with Pan & Mrs. Darling is in fact not Tinker Bell, then it suggests that fairies are different sizes just as humans are!  And even if it is Tink then, she’s now another size it would seem.

A lot to think about, no? 

I’m not stating outright that the first fairy is not Tink.  Nor am I saying that it is.  I haven’t made a decision.  And right now I don’t have to do so, as I have no plans on writing stories with Tinker Bell in them.  So I don’t have to bang my head to figure it out just yet.

But it does raise an interesting notion - not only on fairy sizing, but as to whether or not Tinker Bell “always” accompanies Pan.