Tuesday, June 25, 2024

Bogeyland

In his comment to yesterday's post about bugbears, Jesse Smith connected bugbears to bogeymen, which awakened a forgotten memory of my childhood. During the Christmas season growing up, one of the local TV stations always broadcast March of the Wooden Soldiers, the abridged version of the 1934 Laurel and Hardy film, Babes in Toyland (itself loosely based on the 1903 operetta of the same name). The movie was a favorite mine and, in this era before videotapes made it possible to watch almost any movie whenever you wanted, I looked forward to its broadcast each year. 

The actual plot of March of the Wooden Soldiers isn't particularly important. It's a comedic fairytale film set in Toyland, with Laurel and Hardy playing two friends, Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee, who work for the Toymaker, who, in turn, supplies toys for Santa Claus. Also living in Toyland is Silas Barnaby, the Crooked Man, who is also the town's richest inhabitant. By duplicitous means, Barnaby frames Tom-Tom the Piper's Son for the kidnapping and probable murder of one of the Three Little Pigs, resulting in his banishment to Bogeyland.

In the movie, Stannie and Ollie talk about Bogeyland and its inhabitants, the Bogeymen:

STANNIE: What happens to you in Bogeyland?

OLLIE: Oh, it's a terrible place. Once you go there, you never come back.

STANNIE: Why?

OLLIE: Well, when the Bogeyman gets you, they eat you alive!

STANNIE: What do they look like?

OLLIE: Well, I've heard that they're half man, and half animal. With great big ears ... and great big mouths. And hair all over their body. And long claws that they catch you with.

For reference, this is what one of the Bogeymen looks like:

As you can see, it's a pretty simple costume – little more than a loose, furry bodysuit with a rubbery fright mask and wig. On one level, it's kind of ridiculous and not at all frightening. On another, though, it's surprisingly effective, precisely because it's so crude and obviously fake. There's something strangely off-putting about its look, something that both frightened and fascinated me as a child. 

Unsurprisingly, the Bogeymen left a deep impression on my imagination, so deep that, until I read Jesse Smith's comment on yesterday's post, I hadn't realized the extent to which my conception of D&D's various monstrous humanoids owed to them. The Bogeymen are vicious, bestial things who obviously hate goodness and delight in chaos. Later in the movie, Silas Barnaby rallies them to his side. He leads a horde of Bogeymen in an assault on Toyland, where they wreak havoc upon its buildings and inhabitants. 

The scene where they come pouring out of the caves of Bogeyland is another image burned into my brain. The combination of both their numbers and their malice is so great that, for a time, it appears as if Barnaby will be successful in his revenge plot against the people of Toyland. What he didn't count on were the titular wooden soldiers, oversized toys mistakenly made at 6 feet tall instead of 6 inches. Ollie and Stannie activate them and, with their help, they push back the Bogeymen back to their caves. It's a great battle for such a silly film. 

So, yeah, I can see a lot of appeal of imagining bugbears as bogeymen. Honestly, I'd love to see Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy RPGs take more inspiration from unusual sources like this. We need to make monsters monstrous again.

19 comments:

  1. I had forgotten about this holiday classic entirely until you brought memories back. It scared me so much when i was very small, i was not allowed to watch it again. After some years, it seemed to have disappeared from the tv seasonal rotation for my area, or perhaps i just ignored it. I would like to see it again now.

    My mom had been a big L+H fan when she was a kid…but my dad’s humor was much more Abbott + Costello. So that became the norm in my house. You and your goblin/bugbear/kobold/(troglodyte next?) investigations have brought a lot of memories back! Thanks James!
    —Anthony

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    1. I tend to forget that Laurel & Hardy did talkies. Indeed it surprised me to discover that they were not all that much older than Abbott & Costello. I think shifts in media tech (silent to talkies and then black-and-white to colour) give the impression of more time passing than is true.

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  2. There's a touch of Bakshi's orcs about those masks!

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    1. Indeed, though the influence, if any, would be the other way :)

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  3. "We need to make monsters monstrous again." Agreed! One way to promote that is to move away from humanoids, which look too much like us. Mix in more of the exotic, like the Bugs from Starship Troopers.

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    1. Monsters are best when we can see ourselves in them. The horror of realizing we are one decision or accident away from becoming...whatever...is the sobering purpose of the monster. The hero is the one who is brave enough to look into the mirror and confront the darkness in the place where it lives...us.

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    2. I'm unconvinced. Different things work for different people, but the more alien something gets the more like it is to me to just be baffling rather than monstrous. I'm not all afraid of bugs (or Bugs) in general so SST doesn't do it for me in the least, but more chimerical humanoids (like the pig-headed orcs of old) exude a sense of wrongness that work just fine for me - possibly helped by the pig-masked killer of Motel Hell, which I saw as a young teen. A well described gnoll ought to be similarly horrifying - hyenas are truly unpleasant animals and making them seven feet tall and able to handle weapons doesn't improve things any.

      Also helps if you emphasize that your humanoids are enthusiastic anthrophages. It doesn't surprise anyone when a large D&D predator like a dire wolf or owlbear or tyrannosaur tries to eat your PC, but when it's something shaped like a human and they're still planning on snacking on your corpse it really adds to the creep factor. Different species or not, the fact that they share a basic body plan with us triggers the instinctive revulsion of cannibalism.

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  4. The term "bugbear" is actually etymologically related to the word "bogey", believed to be derived from "bugge", a middle English term for any scary thing.

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  5. For the readers delight ;-)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqRUiDy08Ao

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  6. Looks like the inspiration for Gibberlings!

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  7. That was pretty close to an annual movie throughout grade school for me too. Pretty creepy in spots, especially on a little B&W portable TV so the details weren't so clear.

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  8. Similarly, I have always been influenced by the minions of Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty, which is why, more than mere nostalgia, I have always preferred the pig-faced orc design. And that dragon!

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  9. Your recollection of this movie sounds to me as though it was a missing level of Gary's Greyhawk dungeon.

    On the last thread one the commenters mentioned that there was a link between bugbears and goats. Interestingly when I looked up the dictionary of the Scots tongue (dsl.ac.uk for those interested) there's a word from 14/15th century buge/bwge which pronounced boog-eh (eh being quite short) the meaning of which is given as a lambskin fur. It is not a big step to goat from there, especially since the native sheep breeds would've been smaller and hardier than today's (I'm thinking soay sheep).

    From there a bwge-man is a man dressed up in sheepskins, and there's a few old photos showing people going guiding dressed up in that way. Here's a link to the West Highlands Free Press newspaper. These costumes are more disturbing than any modern costume, certainly more monstrous in the way discussed above.

    https://www.whfp.com/2019/11/03/gisearachd-cabbage-stalks-and-egg-whites-halloweens-past-from-the-tobar-an-dualchais-kist-o-riches-archive/

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  10. My childhood scar came from "Day of the Triffids" and their shuffling man-eating plants. I remember being so terrified watching it as a small kid on a Saturday afternoon monster matinee at a friend's house that I ran outside to hide — only to realize I was surrounded by a yard of overgrown weeds that looked like triffids.

    Last year I stumble upon the flick on cable late one night and decided to confront my childhood fears. I was surprised by how the triffids were the least scary part of the movie, but also how — even though it didn't hold up well — the movie had clearly provided the template for every zombie movie to follow.

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  11. Quite often those primitive monster masks or suits disturb me in ways that photorealistic CGI never does. I think there's something about the way your suspension of disbelief translates an obviously artificial costume into the "reality" of the movie or TV show. But this might be generational; I'm not sure my kids have the same generosity towards older special effects.

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    1. It's called the Uncanny Valley... but don't use it as a model for everything or you might find out some terrible things about yourself.

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  12. Also a memorable watch from my childhood. One detail I wouldn't appreciate until I grew up and moved to England - at one point Stan and Ollie use a teeter-totter to serve up toy darts and bat them at the bogeys. This, actually, is a weaponization of an old pub-lawn game known as bat and trap.

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  13. I assume "Babes in Toyland" was the inspiration for this deathless "Simpsons" bit?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mug1B1hBt5k&t=29s&ab_channel=HighQualitySimpsons

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  14. The real funny part, of course, was where the canon reversed itself after it was loaded, and Laurel and Hardy got all their needles in their butt cheeks!

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