Die drei ???

The what??? (See what I did there? 😁)
"Die drei ???" = "Die drei Fragezeichen" = "The Three Investigators".
"The Three Investigators" had been a big part of my life until I moved out from home.
At first, I got the books from the local library as a kid, but soon afterwards the scourge of my life made its way into my room, or should I say his way. I shared a room with my big brother, you know, and when he had moved out, I had to share with my little brother.
Why I call him the scourge of my life, you want to know?
Try listening to the same audio play several times in a row and repeat that evening after evening after evening ... and you too might be ready to try and sell your little brother 🤣
I'll have to explain that.

The book series around "The Three Investigators" was created by Robert Arthur Jr. who wrote the first nine and the eleventh book. After his death in 1969, other authors took over.
Arthur had worked with Alfred Hitchcock before and licensed the use of his name for the series until his death in 1980. Hitchcock never worked on any of the books himself, also not on "his" introductions, even if he is on the covers of the older editions.
The original series ran from 1964 to 1987, with a short revamp in 1989/90 called "Crimebuster Series". Legal disagreements prevented the publication of more books.
I hadn't even been aware of this before because that's not a problem we have in Germany where the Franckh-KOSMOS publishing house, just KOSMOS since 1997, holds license rights to the series. So when the original series was discontinued, a team of Austrian and German authors took over and there's no end in sight (although there were some rocky times, also over rights).

Who are "The Three Investigators"?
There's Jupiter Jones who lives with his uncle and aunt who own a salvage yard and have two helpers, Kenneth and Patrick. He's smart and very logical.
Peter Crenshaw is the sportsman among the three and not a fan of the dangerous situations Jupiter gets them into.
Bob Andrews is responsible for records and research, firstly because he's hindered by a leg brace in the early adventures, but also because he works part-time in a library (I loved those parts even as a kid which is also why Bob was always my favorite).
Their age is never mentioned, but from the contest they are probably around 13 or 14.

They have installed their detective office with workshop, darkroom, telephone, and more inside a house trailer in the salvage yard, meticulously hidden by scrap and accessible via multiple secret entries.
Their cases - with the first one being the search for a haunted house for Alfred Hitchcock - are solved with logic and research, no matter how mysterious or even supernatural they may seem at first.
I still own a few books myself, among them the first one "The Secret of Terror Castle" which is my favorite one as it explains the beginnings of the detective agency.

Now let's get back to the "scourge".
Germany didn't just have the books since 1968, you know. In 1979, the label EUROPA started a series of audio plays based on the books. My little brother loved them. Germany loved them. Germany loved them so much in fact that - except for a time period when there were, you probably guessed it, legal disagreements - the popularity of the plays has surpassed that of the books.
There have been live performances before thousands of people with the same radio actors who also still perform in the plays now, after more than 40 years!
The radio plays are published as cassettes (!), CDs, MP3, they can be streamed, but nothing feels like the old vinyl albums my little brother played until they almost fell apart.
If you wonder now who the audience for those is, well, many of them are people who have grown up with the books and plays.
Also there's so much more now, spin-offs like "Die drei ???" Kids for a younger audience or "Die drei !!!" with girl detectives, gadgets like experiment boxes for finger printing etc., graphic novels, computer games, audiobooks without cuts to the text, movies, even a few of the German books translated to English for those who want to practice.
I stopped at the "classics" myself and hadn't read any in a while. Only thanks to Liz who has several reviews of "The Three Investigators" books on her blog, I thought I could do some nostalgic reading and that's how I found out about differences between the American and the German versions for the first time.

Let's start with the names.
I don't know what the reason was in this case, but it's not unusual for characters in books, movies or comics to have different names in different countries. The same goes for "The Three Investigators", not just in Germany, but also other countries where the series was published.
Here Jupiter "Jupe" Jones became Justus "Just" Jonas, Peter "Pete" Crenshaw was Peter Shaw, and Bob Andrews was allowed to keep his name.
The chauffeur Worthington who's driving the boys around in a Rolls-Royce (temporarily after winning a contest, then permanently thanks to a grateful client) if they can't take their bikes is Morton in German.
The boys' nemesis E. Skinner "Skinny" Norris is simply Skinny Norris here.
Weird is that the Irish helpers Kenneth and Patrick have become Bavarians Hans and Konrad in the German books, it seems, names I also found on an American fan page, my old edition still calls them Kenneth and Patrick, though.

Not just names have been changed, the German translator also changed other things, like adding snippets "written by Alfred Hitchcock" which are not in the US books, here and there she leaves something out or translates it quite freely - I checked that on the first book in German and English and for some reason in the German book it's never mentioned if someone is British, Worthington/Morton for example (although he mentions having worked in an English castle). That's just one example.
Also in Germany the color assigned to Bob's question mark is red, not green as in the US, as you might have noticed on the cover. Also it's in the wrong spot.

Mentioning the cover is a nice bridge to something else that is different in the German editions.
On one fan page it said they thought getting rid of the internal illustrations was one reason for US readers losing interest. We never even had any illustrations in Germany except for Hitchcock's face with the snippets mentioned above, so I'm not sure if I can agree. I think it's that the stories, like so often in long running series, just didn't get better.
Also the German covers are completely different. In each country where "The Three Investigators" were published, the covers showed the three boys. Not here.
The first two covers were done by Jochen Bartsch and the books were not very successful. That's when graphic artist Aiga Rasch approached the publisher with a design of her own saying she didn't want payment if the layout failed. It didn't fail.
Before her death, Rasch designed 88 covers for the regular books and also covers for some special volumes. Black covers for middle grade or YA books were unusual as such, but the biggest difference is that the often stylized images didn't show the boys at all. Rasch aimed for the reader to develop their own image of our main characters. Instead the covers hint at the plots without spoiling them.
Rasch's covers are wonderful and iconic, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who wouldn't be able to imagine "Die drei ???" without her style which is also why I wouldn't want to own other editions. I can be stubborn about things like that.
Anyhow, at least the publisher has been trying to stay true to her style.

While the fan base in Germany has always been going strong, it seems that interest in the USA has been growing again in the 2000s.
Actually, Robert Arthur's daughter Elizabeth has announced 26 new books written by her and her husband the first of which are to be published soon!

There would be so much more to tell, but the fan pages have done that much better already, I'm sure.

I think I'm going to stick to the classics myself and read one of those every, now and then. Maybe I'm even going to get myself one of the audio plays and relive old times. I doubt I'll be getting the same feeling from it, though, if my little brother isn't there 😉

Sources:
1. The Three Investigators ??? U.S. Editions Collector site
2. The Three Investigators on Wikipedia (there's a lot about the legal issues there)
3. The Salvage Yard - Elizabeth Arthur's Substack

Random Saturday - What's in a name?

I was one of "those" kids ... the kids who never found her name on a mug, on a keychain or on a sticker.
The story of my name - Catrin - goes like this. My sisters' names start with A and B which was coincidence, but with the third girl arriving a name with C sounded practically obligatory. My mother said she didn't want one of the usual names with C that were popular at the time, though.
A natural assumption would her having been influenced by Caterina Valente who was quite the star in Germany and was sometimes also called Catrin or Kathrin, the second being one of the common spellings back (the other was Katrin), but she said she wasn't. Maybe it was subconscious.

Anyhow, I always liked my name. Of all the Catrins I have met over the years, I was the oldest and it always felt a bit special although that of course doesn't mean I was the first one.
Yeah, so I had to correct people all the time and spell my name all the time (no problem, there are also different ways to spell my last name, so I had to do that, anyway). I really didn't mind.

All the forms of the name with C or K, with h or without, come from Katharina which is said to mean "The Pure" from the Ancient Greek "katharos" = "pure". Now I've seen pages saying the Romans misinterpreted the name as being derived from that word. I don't really mind one or the other way.
It was funny to read comments by women or girls with any spelling of the name, some older ones saying "it felt like a collective term for girls because there were so many" - not something I have experienced myself at all - others saying it sounds too hard or that people pronounced it incorrectly as Katren - again not something I have ever experienced. Some are very happy with it, some dislike it.

An American page informs me Catrin with C is commonly used in Germany and Wales and has a connection to ancient goddess Hekate (the only page claiming that, by the way) while German pages tell me that the C is rare in Germany and the name as such has been much more popular in the 60s and 70s than it is today.

But hey, wait, Wales? Actually I knew that and found out by way of a cataloging class - for a new system - at work many years ago. My class partner with whom I shared the computer put in my name as a joke and we were both very surprised to find the book "Catrin in Wales".
Being the kid who never saw her name anywhere unless it was a custom piece like the engraved pen my father gave me when I started school or the glass my friend had engraved when she visited Zwiesel and its glass makers, it was really weird to see my name printed like this, so I bought the book eventually. There's a happy ending, by the way.

Yes, Catrin is a name that has even been in the top 100 in Wales in 2010, and guess what, Ancestry tells me it derives from the Welsh language meaning "pure". What happened to the Greeks? Also most pages say it was originally a German name. In case of Ancestry, it could, however, have to do with "some content ... generated by an artificial intelligence model ...".
You want to know something else? Catrin has also been around in Sweden since the 60s although it seems they pronounce it differently.

Well, when I first got into Kontakt with Americans - no, that's no typo, the German-American Friendship Club in town was called Kontakt - I quickly became a Cat, a nickname I was absolutely fine with as I'm obviously still today 😉
Germans don't usually call me that, though, and also don't use a nickname for me (my family does every, now and then).
There were some in the olden days a long, long time ago, but even then they were hardly used.
My father called me Caeterle which is a Swabian diminutive, very few brave ones called me Catrinchen which is the High German diminutive, usually just to annoy me. Only two people ever called me Catinka and I forgave them because I liked them, but I was glad no one else did because I don't think it fits me.

How about you?
Do you have a story about how you got your name, how you like it, write it, where it comes from? I'd love to hear from you!

Tackle that stash - Tears of the Jewel Dragon

Sometimes I'm surprised myself when checking for the age of things in my stash.
I still remember ordering two large dragon eyes very vividly because it was so hard to decide on the size and color. Back then I hadn't even given the faintest of interest to off loom beading or bead embroidery and didn't really know what to do with them, especially not with such big ones, but they looked so pretty I couldn't resist.
One of them ended up in a necklace for myself, the first of my very few split loom necklaces, quite early in my bead looming journey. I wouldn't do it like that anymore now, but the necklace has survived my regular "sessions of destruction" so far, instead it's hanging on my wall as a reminder of my first SLN experiment which I don't think I could repeat.
What really surprised me, though, when I looked it up in my purchase history was that I had bought the eyes on June 2, 2013 - the seller is still active, by the way, the price hasn't even gone up that much, but the postage sure has, no surprise there - and shared the finished necklace on my blog on June 28. That was pretty quick given the time the eyes would have taken to get to Germany from the US.

As you can tell, I was not so quick using the second eye which had to spent more than 11 1/2 years in my stash drawer!

For a Crafternoon - a virtual meeting with some blogger friends for chatting and crafting - I needed a project and spontaneously chose the dragon eye for bead embroidery.
To be on the safe side, I usually bead a bezel for my cabochons, so the start was easy.
Of course, I wasn't the only one to be reminded of Sauron's eye. The yellow is missing, but this wasn't the path I wanted to go down, anyway. Only what path it should be instead, was beyond me at the time.

For the next meeting two weeks later, I pulled it out again, bezel finished by now.
My favorite way to come up with an idea is to hold the cab up every, now and then and stare at it, sometimes over a few days, and then rummage through my stash drawers to see if anything is screaming at me - textures, shapes, but mostly colors first.
This time I came across my beloved hexagon beads and my first thought was "jewel dragon". Hex beads in a dark red, a silver-lined red and gold, and black AB for depth and contrast. Seed beads in similar colors for extra texture.
It would be so sparkly and shiny, not Sauron at all.

After I had filled about half of the space with beads, the piece screamed free form. I have no idea why bead embroidery is the one technique that makes me go free form the most. Maybe it depends on how I sew on the beads. If I let them flow into all directions without thinking about a pattern first, it seems to break up the strict boundaries of the cab's own shape and it feels wrong to restrict that flow by making it stay within the same shape as the cab. No rules, just vibes. Does that make sense or is that only in my head?
In that case I don't sew on the beads, cut the edges of the beading foundation, then put on the backing and cut around that edge.
Instead I start embroidering, eventually cut the foundation to a shape that speaks to me and then keep embroidering. Sometimes I even cut some more during the process if it feels right. No rules, just vibes.

It took me some days to get all the beads on, also because I couldn't resist holding the piece up to the light all the time to admire the sparkle which was even more beautiful than I had imagined. I wish I could capture that in the pictures.
With focals as big as this one, I usually prefer some kind of beaded rope, but after trying a few things, straps seemed to be working better in this case.

The necklace was finished, wasn't it? Ah, but those who have known me for a while also know that it's very hard for me to resist a dangle or a fringe, and an idea sneaked into my head.

Now the only question is why the Jewel Dragon is crying ...

Silent movies - The Lost World

In my childhood, we were just as crazy about dinosaurs as kids are today. We didn't have dinosaur toys that changed into vehicles, though, or from one dino to another. We had pictures in encyclopedias and had to walk to school 30 miles uphill through snow going up to our hips ... sorry, wrong record 🙃
Seriously, though, I mostly remember looking at or reading about dinosaurs in books at the library, and one of them was a novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Did you know that Doyle wrote a lot more than just Sherlock Holmes stories, in all kinds of genres? Essays, stories, plays, poems of genres from history over science-fiction to adventure, fantasy, and of course crime. He also drew and painted.
I got the Sherlock Holmes stories from the library more than once as a kid (and finally bought them in both German and English), and so I just grabbed the other book standing there as well - The Lost World which is the first one of the Professor Challenger series from 1912.

Wallace Beery as Professor Challenger
By unknown author - J. Willis Sayre
Collection of Theatrical Photographs,
Public Domain

I absolutely loved this book and can't say how often I read it.
Although I enjoyed re-reading it again for this post, the topic today is not the book, but the silent movie "The Lost World" from 1925.
Let's talk about alternate versions first, though.
Early movies often have the problem that prints differ from one another because parts of the movie were cut out or got lost which can make it difficult to restore them true to the original. The same happened to "The Lost World" which could only be seen in a 60 minute version for a long time.
At the moment, there are different prints available, the Eastman House print, which is said to have better flow, and the David Shephard print stringing everything together that could be found, not always helping the flow.
I watched the 104 minute version which is also available on Blu-Ray (this is the Lobster Films/Flicker Alley restoration) and I think that is also the version I had watched on German-French channel ARTE before.
You can find the 92 minute version on YouTube.

The plot of the film - who cares about the plot? There are dinosaurs, isn't that all that matters? No? Ok then, if you insist.
Ed Malone, reporter with the "London Record-Journal", wants to marry, but Gladys, his chosen one, will only marry a man who has faced danger.
Ed's chance comes when he attends a talk at the Zoological Society where Professor Summerlee calls out eccentric Professor Challenger on his "lies" about a lost world where ancient beasts have survived. Challenger invites the audience to join an expedition to that lost world. Three men agree to come along - Summerlee, Malone, and Sir John Roxton, a huntsman and sportsman.

Meeting at Challenger's house, Malone gets introduced to Paula White, daughter and assistant to Maple White (!) who found the lost world, a plateau in Brazil, but got left behind there when his helpers got scared and took his sick daughter back to civilization with them. The expedition is not only meant to prove Challenger's statements, but also to be a search party for White.
The group travels to Brazil, bringing along Challenger's butler Austin, a black helper named Zambo (Warning: blackface which I guess had to be expected, but at least he's a positive character and important for ... you'll see that later), and a monkey named Jocko, and reach the base of the plateau which they plan to reach the same way as White, by felling a tree on the pinnacle next to it to use for a bridge.

Once on the plateau, they are fascinated to see all the prehistoric animals such as Brontosaurus, Allosaurus, Triceratops, Pterodactylus, and more. They experience their lifes, fights, and deaths.

They also find out that they are being watched by an Apeman they think could be the "missing link" and who has tried before to kill them by throwing a rock at them. For some reason he's always in the company of a chimpanzee.

Unfortunately, a feeding Brontosaurus knocks down the tree bridge, so the adventurers are trapped on the plateau and get ready to get settled in.

During all this, Paula keeps looking a lot like this, by the way. For a woman who followed her father into the jungle as an assistant and joined the search party, they painted her as quite the drama queen which I think is rather unfair even if not unusual for the times. At least her fellow expedition members aren't condescending towards her. I will tell you something about her later, though.

Ed and Paula discover their love for each other and want to ask Summerlee, who used to be a minister, to marry them (gotta stay decent even in the wild, you know).
While exploring, Roxton finds the remains of Paula's father and brings her back his watch. When he hears of the planned marriage, he hides his own love for Paula.

Then the volcano on the plateau erupts and all the animals and humans try to escape from the fire and lava.
By now, Austin and Zambo have made a plan, however, how to get the others down off the plateau. They have made a rope ladder and let Paula call for Jocko, so he can climb up and bring them the rope to pull up the ladder. I think he's the hero of the movie.

Ed is the last one to descend, but the Apeman starts pulling the ladder back up. Only a shot by Roxton can save Ed.
Now that they are back in their world, Paula calls off the marriage due to the promise Ed has given Gladys.

During one of the dinosaur fights, a Brontosaurus has fallen from the plateau into the river mud. They find it trapped but alive and with the help of a group from the Geodetic Survey who has turned up the plateau after seeing the eruption (very handy), they manage to put it on a ship and bring it home to London where Challenger wants to present it during another talk.
Things go wrong during the unloading, the Brontosaurus escapes and roams the streets of London until coming to Tower Bridge which collapses under its weight (am I the only one wondering what they fed him on the ship, by the way?).

Ed approaches Gladys who informs him that she hasn't been waiting for him, but married a store clerk instead, which means the way is open for his and Paula's love. Roxton congratulates them taking the loss like the sportsman he is.
Challenger, however, breaks down seeing his Brontosaurus swim off into the ocean.

I think it's easy to agree on the dinosaurs being the real stars of the film (although I have to say there was good acting both on the dinosaurs' and the humans' side).
Without them it would just have been a bunch of tough men heading out to do tough things, hacking their way through a jungle, impressing the world (there is definitely colonialism hanging in the air, also in the behavior towards the "inferior" Apeman who's really just defending his territory) - and women (that's for you, Ed, wasn't that a bit of a rash decision?).
How impressive would they have been without the dinosaurs, though? Not more than the guys of the Geodetic Survey who obviously had no problem to find the plateau, either.

Ed was lucky to have Paula instead of Gladys who couldn't even wait a year to marry a very un-adventurous man (I know that isn't a word), but you know ... spoiler alert, here's a quick look at the differences in the book, so don't read on now if you want to read the book!

Maple White didn't die on the plateau, but in a native village where Challenger found him and his diary. They later find the remains of an associate of White. There is no Paula, though. I guess they introduced her because movies needed some love interest with a happy ending at the time.

There isn't one Apeman living on the plateau, but two tribes - the big Apemen and a indigenous tribe of smaller humans who fear the others for their cruelty. The explorers save a few of the humans from their enemies, among them the chief's son who later helps them escape the plateau via a cave tunnel.
Yup, no Jocko, either.

Challenger doesn't bring home a Brontosaurus, but has Roxton catch him a young Pterodactylus which then escapes and flies through London.

Ed in fact does come home to a married Gladys, her husband is a solicitor's clerk.

Roxton reveals to his friends that he has found diamonds in the lost world and will of course share with them. Challenger wants to build a private museum, Summerlee wants to retire from teaching and classify chalk fossils.
Roxton assumes Ed will get married, but when he announces he wants to form an expedition to go back to the lost world himself, heartbroken Ed says he will join him.

It's a shame, but Zambo isn't mentioned anymore after the group gets back to England, a shame because he was the one holding out at the base of the plateau after the others of the crew (no Austin, by the way) left and climbing that pinnacle more than once as the outside contact. I thought he was an important part of the expedition.

There is definitely more action in the book than in the movie, but that's okay because, erm, have I mentioned we have cool dinosaurs in the movie?
For those we have to thank Willis "Obie" O'Brien whose employer had the film rights to Doyle's work. Obie was a special effects and stop-motion animation pioneer (whose protégé was Ray Harryhausen, by the way) and "The Lost World" was his first feature film after several shorts.
While his first models were made from clay, these dinosaurs were made with a rubber skin over metal armatures and had a bladder inside with which breathing could be simulated - one of my favorite effects.

In the sources I've added just a few of the blog posts and articles I read for you to see extra pictures from the film if you maybe need a little incentive to watch it. There are for example also more information about the prints or the new score from 2016 (which I had to turn down in volume because it was a bit overwhelming).
Again, keep in mind if you watch the movie that this was 100 years ago.

This is how the novel and the movie start and I think it says it all.
"I have wrought my simple plan
   If I give one hour of joy
To the boy who's half a man,
   Or the man who's half a boy."
Doyle liked to write adventure novels and the movie is an adventure. For boys.
And still I had my fun with it, too. Dinosaurs!

Sources:
1. Arthur Conan Doyle: The Lost World. 1912. On "Project Gutenberg"
2. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World" - a page with a lot of information around both the novel and movies and series and merchandise and more
3. Lea Stans: Thoughts On: "The Lost World" (1925). On "Silent-ology", September 9, 2019
4. Kristin Hunt: The 1925 Movie That Paved the Way for King Kong. On "JSTOR Daily", October 10, 2019
5. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell: THE LOST WORLD refound, piece by piece. On "David Bordwell's website on cinema. Observations on film art", October 2, 2017
6. Leonard Maltin: Before King Kong: A lost world found. On "Leonard Maltin", October 1, 2017

Nostalgia - Cassette tapes

Some years ago when I still did the "Finds of the week" posts, I had some called "I'm a collector" in which I shared vintage items. Over time my collections ... no, wait.
I'm not talking about a collection today, it's just something I still have.

I was born in the 60s. I grew up with vinyl records, my father's single collection - we even had one loner that was 78 RPM which was the standard into the 40s, but I don't remember if it was from shellac.
Compact cassettes - usually just called "Kassetten" here in Germany - had first come out in 1963, not long before I was born, and they took a bit to arrive in our household. My brother was the first one to have a cassette recorder with a microphone, my guess is that must have been in the early 70s.
I got my own recorder years later when a school friend gave me her old one for a gift, together with a bunch of home dubbed Beatles cassettes. I will never forget how it drove my mother nuts that I took an hour to dry the dishes, just because I mostly danced around in the kitchen singing along with the Beatles.
There were also cassettes with pre-recorded music - music cassettes, often just MC here in Germany - but I never had one of those myself as I preferred records.
Cassettes also became wildly popular for audio dramas for children, and although the cassette was more or less replaced by CDs and later MP3, it never went away completely and actually made a bit of comeback in the last few years.
You can buy recorders, blank tapes, yes, and even music cassettes. Long live retro! 😜

For "old" people like me, cassettes can of course hold a lot of emotional memories. They were magic because they let us do so many things so easily. They were easy to take along and share music with friends. You could copy music from one device to the other. They were easy to use even for small kids (which could be a disadvantage if you were visiting a friend and then a little dwarf marched in with her chunky yellow/orange recorder proudly making you listen to her latest Benjamin the Elephant story three times, yes, that really happened).

I bet a lot of people remember trying to get the perfect recording from radio hit countdowns and being angry when the presenter once again talked over part of a song you had been desperately waiting for. Some of those tapes were quite eclectic. The music industry, however, wasn't so happy about home dubbing.
Then there were the mix tapes people made for their girlfriends or boyfriends or, in my case, siblings. Actually, I still have one of those, too.
I'm sure I wasn't the only who sat in front of the TV and swore everyone to absolute silence (haha, that worked really well), so I could record a movie. We definitely had "The Wizard of Oz" and "Moby Dick" on tape.
Of course you always had to be careful not to tape over something that you might not be able to come across anytime soon. Or having someone else tape over it. That kind of accident did happen.
Also there was the curse of the tape eating recorders. If you were lucky and the tape wasn't too tangled and crinkled, you could wind it up using a pencil, but if it was, chances were high that the tape would be eaten again. I once had a tape whose crinkled end I had to cut off completely, and because the small plastic peg holding that end had jumped off, I used a bit of a toothpick to replace it. It was such a relief when that worked!

This is my own boombox - which has never been outside because darn, that thing is heavy! - and part of my cassettes. I tried out a few of them and although they are up to 40 years old, one or the other even older, they still worked even if everything is a bit dusty.
If you have a close look, you can see that the Play button is pressed, I listened while taking the picture.

There are a few cassettes that I didn't remember having at all, for example the one in the front saying "Grusel!" = "Creepy!" I listened in a bit and that's exactly what it is, creepy music as if for a movie background. I have never organized a Halloween party myself, no idea how this tape ended up with me, and I don't recognize the handwriting, either.
The one on the left, however, brought back a memory. It's labeled "Beatles (AFN)" and it was a documentary about the Beatles on AFN (Armed Forces Network) radio, probably in the early 80s after John Lennon died. I only recorded the songs because the cassette wouldn't have been long enough for the whole documentary. Yeah, weird, I know.

Do you have any cassette stories yourself?

Tackle that stash - Crystal Arrow

For those who don't know it yet, I'm (half) Swabian from Southwest Germany. Like all regions, we have our own stereotypes attached to us, one of them being that we don't like to part with our money.
Sometimes I have a bout of frugality myself about using up bits of stuff. Do you save thread, wire, bits of fabric etc.? Then you may able to understand what I'm talking about.
I don't really do it in an organized way, though. I sometimes save lengths of thread I know I will be able to use because that thread is not available in Germany and it's true I don't like to part with my money if it's for crazy postage fees ... and yes, postage has become more than crazy.
I also save beading foundation and backing if I think I will be able to do something with it. If it's a weird shape, that can even challenge me and be a lot of fun like the "Mod heart" pendant.

It can also be a challenge if it has a weird shape and is also quite small which brings me to today's stash tackler. It has been around for a while and it was high time to finish it.

The starting point of this piece was the shape of the beading foundation which reminded me of an arrow.
Being quite small, the arrow needed something to make it really pop, so I went through my stash and found a tube in which I had collected different beads, among them red crystals, some small and opaque, the others large, transparent, and very sparkly.

I don't usually wear red a lot myself although I like the color, but red in jewelry has something special. Not only does it pop off an outfit and can therefore set a stunning accent without being too overwhelming, but it always gives me that cool gothic vampire vibe that I love.
Black and red is a favorite color combination of mine and if Gundel weren't so strict about not wearing any costumes, I would love to give her a little black cloak with red satin lining 😼

For this piece's size, however, red and black seemed to be too much, so I chose one of my favorite seed bead reds instead. It's gorgeous, rich and dark with a beautiful luster. I used black thread to give it an even darker touch.
At first, I wanted to turn it into a necklace and maybe add a heart or something, but the arrow was too wide for that to work. I decided it had to shine on its own and the obvious choice was to make it into a brooch!
Can you imagine this on a black coat or jacket or another kind of top?

Silent movies - The Thief of Bagdad

As announced in this post , I have started my silent movie project now, quicker than even I had expected.

For my first movie, I chose "The Thief of Bagdad" starring Douglas Fairbanks sr, directed by Raoul Walsh.
When I wrote about the movie "Sinbad the Sailor" from 1947 with the junior, which is very much regarded a homage to his dad, I said I would watch the 1940 version of "The Thief of Bagdad" next (maybe for another post) and possibly the 1924 silent movie as well. That was before I decided to fight the decline of my attention span and include silent movies in the process. So the "maybe" became a "definitely" although my first attempt was quite feeble. It was a very tired day and I had to abort the mission after 20 minutes because I literally couldn't keep my eyes open to do anything at all except fall asleep within seconds.

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
(Anton Grot)

New day, new luck.
There are several versions of the movie on YouTube, restored, unrestored, different resolutions, different music. At first, I chose randomly and ended up with a kind of ethereal and repetitive music which may not have helped me fighting my eyelids.
The second time I had a look around and chose this one with the original Mortimer Wilson score.

2 1/2 hours and much to my own surprise I didn't struggle with it although I'm going to say from the start that the movie didn't need to be that long in my opinion.
I had to take one little break because the cats were at the brink of starving and got very dramatic about it. They would have done great at silent movies (they rarely get really talkative and as they were about to be dying on the spot, their voices had gone completely).
Right after the movie, a short video with Leonard Maltin, well-known and respected film critic, popped up. He said: "'The Thief of Bagdad' is just a glorious film, but sometimes misunderstood because Douglas Fairbanks plays it so big. His gestures are so big that people sometimes laugh at him, and I say 'no no, don't laugh at him, laugh with him, he's doing it on purpose, he's doing it like ballet. ... But everything about that movie is big. The other reason he thought of doing it that way was that he didn't want to be eclipsed by the sets and the special effects. He still wanted it to be a Douglas Fairbanks movie."
That had been my thought. It was like a ballet on screen with Fairbanks as the main dancer who seemed to enjoy himself a lot.

The plot of "The Thief of Bagdad" may sound familiar to you in parts.
Fairbanks is Ahmed, a thief in Bagdad (didn't expect that, did you?) together with a friend. With the help of a magic rope he has stolen in the marketplace, he enters the palace of the Caliph of Bagdad to steal a treasure from there, but when he lays his eyes on the Caliph's sleeping daughter, he falls in love and leaves the palace only with her shoe for a souvenir.
His friend is confused about the shoe at first, but then understands what has happened.

My favorite intertitle.
I wonder what people are going to think if I add
that to my repertoire, maybe for a work meeting -
Nizzy noodle! No idea what it means.

So he tells Ahmed the story of a princess who got "stolen" from a palace after being drowsed (not cool, guys).
To gather entry to the palace, Ahmed and his friend - in stolen finery - join a group of three princes, the Prince of the Indies, the Prince of Persia, and the Prince of the Mongols who really wants to conquer Bagdad. The Princess is supposed to choose a husband among them. Of course it's love at first sight for her when he rides into town.
He climbs up to her room, but finds he loves her too much to go through with the plan and take her away. Before he and his friend can leave the palace, though, the princes are summoned to learn that the Princess chose Ahmed.
Unfortunately, the Princess' Mongol slave recognizes him as the thief from the night before, and understandably being on the Prince of the Mongols' side, she lets him know, just when Ahmed has confessed to the Princess. Ahmed is flogged and supposed to be killed by an ape, but the Princess bribes the guards to let him go.
To delay the wedding with one of the three princes, she has her father send them out and the one bringing the rarest treasure will be her husband.
Ahmed, too, hears of this and sets out himself. With the help of a hermit during his dangerous travel - fire, the deep sea and monsters - he finds a winged horse taking him to a place where a magic chest is hidden under a cloak of invisibility.
The Prince of Persia finds a magic carpet, the Prince of the Indies a magic crystal, and the Prince of the Mongols a magic apple which can heal. He has ordered the slave girl to poison the Princess, so he can heal her and thus win her hand and the throne. To be on the safe side, he has managed to station 20,000 of his men inside the town.
When the princes see in the crystal that the Princess is near death, they take the magic carpet to get to Bagdad where the apple heals her just in time.
Just when the Mongol Prince has taken the throne thanks to his army and orders the wedding to take place immediately, Ahmed reaches Bagdad and uses the magic chest to create an even bigger army which makes the Mongols flee.
Before their prince can escape on the flying carpet with the Princess as suggested by the slave, however, Ahmed, invisible thanks to the cloak, rescues her.
In the end, they fly away together on the carpet.

This is a fairy tale (the subtitle "An Arabian Nights Fantasy" could have hinted it that). So I didn't quite get one review saying it left the viewer lukewarm because she's not a fairy tale person. To be honest, I think if I wasn't, I wouldn't even have tried to watch this.
Then there is of course the question of Orientalism which was to be expected for a story inspired by "Arabian Nights" and made in these times.
In fact there were protests when Fairbanks and his wife Mary Pickford visited Shanghai on a world tour in 1929, due to the controversy about the portrayal of the Mongol Prince (not the only film of the time seen as controversial in China), which then led to Fairbanks declining public receptions.
Here is an interesting article about a collection of "film posters creating an Orientalist fantasy", by the way. This post led me from one big rabbit hole to the next.

I don't know if the reason is that it is a fairy tale, but to me it was not as extreme as for example Gunga Din or The Sun Never Sets.
The villain was Mongol, yes, and I don't know why they chose those three countries for the princes or if they even gave it much thought at all, but he was a conqueror who wanted Bagdad, and real life white conquerors have shown us they could do much worse, so the movie certainly didn't make me think of him and all Mongols as the epitome of evilness afterwards.

Let's go back to talking about "big ballet".
As I said, Fairbanks was the main dancer and acrobat and if you are able to take this as a fairy tale ballet and can get over the expressive overacting of a silent movie - something I had to learn first myself - it's really enjoyable to watch his big arm gestures and "dancing".
So he may have been too old for the part at 41, but without looking at his face you wouldn't have guessed it seeing him jump and climb his way through the movie and through the first part of it even without a shirt (I much preferred his look to huge muscles).

Can you imagine what it must have been like to watch something like this back then? It must have been magical, even to Fairbanks himself whose favorite it was according to his son.
There are reviewers who find the movie aged. I get that silent movies are not everyone's cup of tea, but how can you even compare them to new/er ones?
Another one lets us know that it's obvious all the monsters are fake. Seriously?! So glad he told me!
People, that movie is 100 years old. Of course it's aged and has obviously fake monsters (show me a movie that has real ones, doh) and still it's able to enchant a lot of people, me included.
There was some fine acting, for example from Anna May Wong as the slave - better than the Princess who mostly had to swoon over Ahmed a lot - and Sôjin Kamiyama as the Mongol Prince.
Could the monster fights have been a bit longer and the love-birding a good deal shorter? Yes. Could the army scenes have been a bit shorter? Yes. Even if I know not everyone agrees, - rabbit hole - the movie still didn't put me to sleep, not even Ahmed's inevitable transformation from thief to good person to prove himself worthy for the Princess.
Is it a movie I will want to watch over and over again? No. Do I see myself watching it again at all sometime? Absolutely.

Now let's get to the other big star.
The movie may have been a critical success, but it was not a commercial one because of the costs.
It was one of the largest and most expensive movies made until then costing the incredible sum of $1,135,654.65. I wonder what the 65 cents were for 😉
That is really not that surprising if you look at the sets. They are huge and you wouldn't know that just two years before they started out as Nottingham Castle in "Robin Hood" before production designer William Cameron Menzies transformed them to Bagdad by massively extending them.
You have to see it yourself to get an idea.
I found myself wondering how they made the fabric for the long curtains in the palace and how you wash something like it. I also noticed being fascinated by some of the costumes (possibly not the ones you are thinking of now).

Also there are of course the special effects - not just the fake monsters. I loved the scene with the sea spider, the flying carpet, the little "whirlwind" indicating the invisibility cloak, the effects were so good for that time. I would have loved to be in an audience back then to see the reactions.
Of course you already know that I'm old-fashioned and sometimes prefer those effects to today's super effects even if some come across as a bit ridiculous.

I almost forgot to say something about the music. As mentioned, I chose the version with the original score. Fairbanks had already worked with Wilson on "The Mark of Zorro" and therefore commissioned him to write a score for "The Thief of Bagdad" with the instruction to "make your score as artistic as you can".
In the 80s, the movie was shown with a musical score by Carl Davis based on compositions of Rimsky-Korsakov and you can also find this version on YouTube, but I really liked the original music a lot and I like the idea that this was what the original audience got to hear.

You are probably more tired now from reading this than I was from watching the movie.
So yes, if you are ever game to watch a silent movie, why not try this one?
In the sources I have collected some more articles and reviews on this if you haven't read enough yet and I made it a mix of positive and not so positive ones. In the end, you always have to make up your own mind, anyway.

I also hope you are not scared now to follow me to my next silent movie adventure. The list is growing slowly ...

Sources:
1. Jeffrey Vance: The Thief of Bagdad. An essay on "San Francisco Silent Film Festival" 2013
2. Darragh O'Donoghue: The Thief of Bagdad. On "Senses of Cinema", issue 84, September 2017
3. Kirsten O'Regan: Aladdin to Thief of Baghdad: How film posters created an Orientalist fantasy. On "Middle East Eye", May 15, 2019
4. Reviews of "The Thief of Bagdad" on Letterboxd
5. Kage Baker: Ancient Rockets: The Thief of Bagdad. On "Reactor", August 10, 2009
6. Craig Lysy: The Thief of Bagdad - Mortimer Wilson. On "Movie Music UK", August 8, 2022