1970:
The trivia:
- Author Joe Klaas alleged that aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart had survived her attempted flight round the world in 1937 and changed her identity to Irene Craigmile Bolam, a New York banker. The book was only pulled when Bolam sued.
- When the Oregon Highway Division attempted to blow up a dead sperm whale that washed ashore using half a ton of dynamite, the resulting exlosion threw whale carcass over 800 feet away, crushing cars and narrowly missing onlookers.
- The Royal Navy only stopped serving daily rum rations on 31st July 1970. The last day was called "Black Tot Day" and was marked by mock funerals and black armbands.
The item:
The Phantom Tollbooth
Billed as an "Alphabeautiful, Mathemagical Musical", this film is based on the 1961 children's book of the same name by Norton Juster (which is apparently a modern American classic, although somehow I have never read it). It's predominately famous because it was co-written, produced and directed by animation legend Chuck Jones - the man who was responsible for some of the all-time great Warner Brother "Looney Tunes" featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Wile E. Coyote. It also featured the absolute cream of animations voice talent. Famous names such as "Man of a Thousand Voices" Mel Blanc (Bugs, Daffy, Sylvester the Cat, Barney Rubble), Daws Butler (Yogi Bear, Fred Flintstone, Huckleberry Hound) Hans Conried (Captain Hook) and June Foray (Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Tweety Pie's owner, Granny). It's also notable as the last animated film by MGM.
It's unlikely many people will have seen this film in recent years - and even less probably remember it - so I'm going to go through the story in some detail. It'll help when I get to the end, so please indulge me.
Milo (played by Butch Patrick from "The Munsters") lives and goes to school in San Francisco but just seems to dawdle through life not seeing what's around him. Everything is "a big waste of time". Spending another dull afternoon in his apartment on the phone to his friend Ralph, he suddenly notices a huge red and white striped parcel in his bedroom. Attached to the outside is an envelope which reads "For Milo, who has plenty of time". Opening it up he discovers a note which directs him to pull a tab if he is bored, which of course he does. The parcel transforms into a talking tollbooth and before he knows what is happening, Milo is seated inside a child-sized sports car. Told to pick a destination from a map, he asks for the "Castle in the Air" and as he drives through the tollbooth he finds himself transformed into a cartoon and transported via a swirling coloured vortex onto a twisting turning road.
Suddenly he is accosted by Officer Short Shrift, a tiny policeman riding about on one wheel . Shrift is a proto-Judge Dredd - possessing a huge chin with his upper face hidden by a helmet. He is cop, judge and jailer - believes everyone is guilty until proven innocent - and hands out excessive sentences for minor misdemeanours. Thankfully Milo gets off with just a short sentence for his "crimes" - a piece of paper with the words "I am".
Driving into the town of Expectations, Milo then meets the Whether Man, who never gives a straight answer and hates to make up his mind. Words have lost their meaning. He really gives no clear help before rising off into the sky attached to a number of balloons.
Continuing on the same road for what seems like hours, Milo starts to drift asleep and doesn't pay attention as he takes the wrong turn into "The Doldrums". Inside the dank caves live the amoeba-like ghostly Lethargians who never think and are happy doing anything as long as it's...nothing. They convince Milo that he should stay with them and slowly his car sinks into the mass of creatures as their comical grins turn nasty - they want to stop the boy doing anything at all - eating, sleeping or even breathing...
Milo is only saved from this fate by the arrival of Tock the watchdog who genuinely has a huge pocket watch in his stomach. Tock gets Milo to use his brain and think, which rebuilds the car and the pair are able to escape before a tidal wave of Lethargians engulfs them.
Tock believes that time is a gift and your friend and taking an hour to do something can change the world. He explains to Milo that he is in the Kingdom of Wisdom, which used to be a happy place until the death of the old king and it was split into two. This is now a land ruled by two warring brothers - King Azaz the Unabridged of Dictionopolis whose believes that words are more important than numbers, and the Mathemagician of Digitopolis, who holds the opposite view. Their refusal to agree on anything has led the kingdom into confusion and there are demons gathering in the Mountains of Ignorance just waiting to pounce.
Travelling towards Dictionopolis the new friends come across the mad Doctor Kakofonous A. Dischord, who loves loud objectionable sounds and wants to encourage Milo to stop hearing pleasant noises ever again, thanks to a bottle of medicine and the help of his cloud-like accomplice, the Awful Dynne. While the doctor is distracted by the terrible noise he is making, they sneak out of his larger-on-the-inside caravan and Tock grabs a vial of Laughter tonic.
Arriving in Dictionopolis they enter the Marketplace of Words and encounter The Spelling Bee (who can spell any word in any language from anywhere) and The Humbug, an ignorant schyster who loves the sound of his own voice. When the pair of insects war of words escalates into a duel which wrecks the market, Officer Short Shrift puts in an appearance and sentences everyone to the dungeons for six million years.
Inside the dungeon they find the no-so-wicked Which, Faintly Macabre, sister of the Whether Man and she tells Milo the secret history of the kingdom and how the twin princesses Rhyme and Reason were banished to the Castle in the Air after they told Azaz and the Mathemagician that words and numbers were equal.
Milo and his new friends are suddenly taken to the court of King Azaz for a banquet where they literally have to eat their own words. Listening to the King bemoan the fact that life means nothing anymore, Milo convinces the monarch to let him rescue Rhyme and Reason and Tock and The Humbug will accompany him. Before he leaves, Azaz gives Milo a huge bag of words which contains all the ideas anyone can think of.
Beginning their quest, the trio follow the road until it is blocked by a stone doorway leading into the Numbers Mine, where gem-like numerals are dug from the rock. Above the entrance they spot The Dodecahedron, who wears twelve different faces displaying twelve different emotions. He helps Milo break down the door by encouraging him to use mathematics. Inside the mine they finally meet the Mathemagician and it's clear that he is the exact double of King Azaz, just with an opposing opinion. Leading the adventurers to his highly computerised workshop, he reveals that he blames Azaz for nothing making sense anymore (sound familiar?), but when Milo makes him realise that at least the pair agree to disagree, he sends them on with their journey - but not before giving Milo a magic pencil..
Heading towards the Mountains of Ignorance, Milo, Tock and Humbug come across Chroma, the last sane man in the world who conducts the sunrises and sunsets. When Humbug eggs Milo on to have a go at directing the sunrise, it ends in disaster and the sky becomes a constant battleground between the Sun and the Moon. Running from their mistake they are stopped in their tracks by the Senses Taker, an information obsessed paper pusher who wants to remove all their senses. Tock uses the vial he took from Doctor Dischord to engulf the weasely man in fits of giggles. After all, no one can take away your sense of humour.
Climbing the mountains, they have to face a number of even more bizarre obstacles. First is the Terrible Trivium - a faceless, bowler hatted man with detached body parts. He is the demon of petty tasks and wants to delay them with things like picking up grains of sand. Running away, all three fall into a trap created by what sounds like a terrible monstrous creature, only to find it is really just a pathetic ball of fur with a loud voice - the Demon of Insincerity. Finally the dim-witted Gelatinous Giant is defeated by that unusual bag of ideas and just melts away into sludge.
Almost at the doors of the Castle in the Air, they are blocked by the hordes of the Demons of Ignorance - which include the Horrible Hopping Hindsight, the Gorgons of Hate and Malice, the Threadbare Excuse and worst of all the Overbearing Know-It-All. Using the magic pencil and the the bag of words together, Milo forces them back, drawing every weapon he needs and loading them with physical words. The demons merge to form a giant monster but the power of the word "Truth" disperses them into their component parts. Sadly Tock's pocket watch is damaged in the battle and Milo has to leave him and Humbug behind.
Ascending the invisible steps to the Castle, Milo finally meets the Princesses and learns they were the ones who sent for him because only a boy that was so bored he would do anything would be able to rescue them. Unable to get down, Milo spies the Whether Man and uses his balloons to get back to his friends, while Rhyme and Reason transform the kingdom back to the beautiful place it once was. Tock is repaired, Officer Shrift now thinks everyone is innocent and the Doctor is a student of harmony not discord. Even the sky is fixed.
Having saved the day, Milo gets to go home back through the tollbooth, which folds itself up and flies out of the window. With a newfound enjoyment of life and all its little pleasures, Milo discovers that only five minutes has past and Ralph is still on the phone, although... what's that strange red and white striped box that has just turned up in his bedroom?...
As you can tell from the synopsis above, the story is full of irony, double entendre, puns and wordplay. It might be billed as an animated action adventure but it has a hugely educational and moral message. Not only does Milo gain a new love of learning and practically apply the things from school that he previously thought were dull, he also rediscovers a love of life. It's also a commentary on the need for common sense and for rules (without Rhyme or Reason, the Kingdom of Wisdom descends into anarchy) and about learning from ones own mistakes. But it never descends into heavy-handed preaching
Of course the film can be compared to "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" since both feature a child thrust into a world of absurd logic. The Whether Man's ramblings could be the Cheshire Cat and Officer Short Shrift's extreme justice is similar to that of the Queen of Hearts (although with more jail-time and less head chopping). The film has elements of "The Wizard of Oz", but parts (especially Chroma, the conductor of sunsets) also reminded me of the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" segment. from Disney's "Fantasia".
The animation is a curious mish-mash of styles. There are some classic wonderful Chuck Jones creations with the lead characters and Milo himself has those big eyes from Pepe Le Pew, Elsewhere some of the monsters seem almost half finished - just outlines with no real definition as if they are not really there. Maybe that was deliberate. The backgrounds are also a mix of detailed buildings, half rendered shapes and abstract squiggles, perhaps representing the fluidity of the Kingdom as it flounders without any rules.
Now you might think that I've got amazing recall about a film I watched as a kid, but the truth is as part of writing this I watched it for the first time in over thirty years just this afternoon - and I still found it as psychedelic and magical and entertaining as ever. The thing is, I principally remember this film because as much as I enjoyed the inventive animation and the sheer artistry on display, it actually scared me enough to cause a few nights of lost sleep. The Lethargians in the green slime of the region of "The Doldrums" - those fluid, amorphous shapes that split and reform as they ooze around their domain with a wet sucking sound? - as a child I found them terrifying. Even their song, "Don't Say There's Nothing To Do In the Doldrums" was spooky.
These evil denizens haunted my sleeping hours. I dreamt I was being sucked under the surface, their beady eyes and reedy voices laughing as they piled their sludge on top of me, trapping me forever. I remember waking up with a loud scream - convinced that I was lost in the Doldrums. Even now all these decades later, if I have strange or unpleasant dreams, I wake myself up by shouting - much to the concern of my ever so patient wife. (oh and trust me, I do dream a *lot* - I should write a book about my weird nocturnal imaginings!).
At the end of the day it may not be up there with the all time famous animated movies and some might find the moralising message laid on too thick, but you can't fault the imagination of the source material and the wonderful way that Chuck Jones adapted it to the big screen. It's a bit of a lost classic really. The book's author may have hated it (especially when it was well reviewed) but for me the characters have always been part of a really strong vivid memory, and that's why it deserves a place on this list.
Honourable mentions:
So I've decided to add this section to just acknowledge other things that were important to me and came out in this specific year, but won't get a full entry - at least not in this strand. Some might have been written about already or will be covered elsewhere at a later date. If I have the time I will go back and add this to the first three years.
- Dougal and the Blue Cat - the feature length story with the characters from the hugely popular classic "Magic Roundabout" series. I've already talked abut the soundtrack album here but one day I'll get round to the episodes and movie itself.
- The Goodies - I adored the madcap adventures of Grahame Garden, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie. Although the show debuted in 1970, the golden age is really in 1972 through to 1975 with "Kitten Kong", "The Goodies and the Beanstalk", "Kung-Fu Kapers","The Movies" and "Gunfight at the OK Tearooms". It was a travesty that only a handful of episodes were available to buy...until 2019 that is - now every surviving episode is on shiny DVD and I can revel in the trio that "do anything - anytime"...
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