But before we go on, it appears that another one of my fine predictions (Jets win Superbowl, Colts win Superbowl ect...) is about to go by the wayside.
They might get it. They are acting as if they already have it. When the National Enquirer thinks it has something, it generally does. So sad, too bad and on with it. They do deserve it but... it is essentially coming in first at the Special Olympics.
Case in point, decline of the American Newsweekly is of course our pals at Newsweek. As readers of this rambling blog have no doubt known for some time, Newsweek is in a world of hurt and has been turning to tricks last seen only during the pulp magazine era. In fact, they seem to be running through them one at a time. Just when I thought they had used every obscure pulp cover trick (including the flippy book) they bust out the Elephants Gone Wild Theme.
The elephant is, of course, a wonderful visual element. It has a long history in pop art in the United States. dating back to the heyday of Circuses (just before the Civil War.) In a simple, more ignorant time, it was easy to play upon their size issues to make these otherwise gentle creatures ooze with menace.
(Note: Hil-Gle in no way is wishes to trivialize the deaths of those humans who have in the past or will in the future be killed by elephants. Laugh at, perhaps. Mock, certainly. But never trivialize. It is a noble spirit who ventures from his home with no real jobs skills and attempts to catch a gig with the circus, only to discover the truth about employment with such firms. And one can certainly understand the temptation to improve one's lot when one's lot has been cast to cleaning up after the elephant. I'm sure training the elephant seemed like a big improvement right up until the point the elephant picked you up and used you as a kleanex. Even then, I can understand one sticking it out right up until that inevitable long moment when the elephant realizes that if he kills you as he has sooo many others, that the likelihood of its demise is very little. And then, in that terror filled instant you know, KNOW, why there is always an opening for an elephant trainer. Ditto the demise of so many Indians, who just so happen to live amongst the elephants. I very much can understand the temptation to both enslave and then feed beer to these amazing creatures. And I'm sure it does seem like a fairly good idea, right up until the time that the elephant and his pals stage a drunken slave revolt and do something that we in the western world can enjoy on U-Tube, over and over again. But it must not be fun for you, the humble Indian who is just trying to make a buck in a world where back hoe operators and bar tenders to the wild kingdom are so scarce. Every time I wonder about the future position of the United States as a world power, I think of the BRICS, those rising teeming masses who are out to make our world so very flat, employment wise. I tremble in dread until I remember that one of the BRICS is India. And then I sleep soundly indeed. Not that China (no women for 20 million men and an inability to contain a problem caused by chickens coughing) and Russia (enough said) are really keeping me up, either. The last century was the American Century. And with the pace of the BRICS, we will run out of centuries before any are left for them.)
As we know from pulp magazines, however, any animal, no matter how tame it might be in the real world, can suddenly explode in violence when placed in the proper context.
The context of course being a lack of imagination and a sudden desire to drive sales using a time tested, if fabricated, visual element. This one gains kudos for the presence of a bare chested white man with a gun, a helpless African native and the word 'sex' placed in the middle of view.
Here we see all of the traditional elephant themes in a bunch, as was typical of the history pulps of the 1920s. (Which I have no inclination of rooting around for an image of, so I am using this cribbed one from the originality-free era of the 1950s.) We have the white hunter, his dismally clad turban wearing stereotype and the elephant being used in a whimsical manner seen only in safari movies of the 1930s. All it needs is a girl falling out of her dress.
For what it's worth, this may be the best elephant attack scene ever. Charlton Magazines wasn't known for much, other than having in a back door way contributed to the creation of the Watchmen, but they occasionally squat out a gem. And from our research, the word 'Gusto' was not invented by Budweiser as has been so widely reported. Charlton didn't think it up, either. It was in fairly widespread use a good ten years before the King of Beers decided to rip it from the public domain.
The Elephants Gone Wild theme itself is a part of the overall Man Vs. Nature theme often used in the pulps. The typical beast, not only in pulps but in cave drawings through the Roman era, was the bear.
This is pretty much the same composition as above, only our turban wearer is now black. The black man standing in for all stereotypes of what we in Star Trek call the red shirt sect was also fairly typical of pulp magazines.
Being somewhat man-like, the bear can be ascribed near human motivations, as we see here in this cover from Stag, a magazine with about as much credibility as what Newsweek is heading for.
In reality, a bear is just a dog, doing what dogs do when they get so large that they don't have to take crap from us. (Bears and dogs not only have a common ancestor, they are genetically closer to each other than man is to the apes--almost two branches of the same species.) Think about that the next time you walk your poodle.
Of course, just doing bears every month gets old. This is why stand-ins were sought, the elephant only being one of them.
Repetition is the key to establishing any stand in theme. Some themes, however, are never credible no matter how many times they are tried.
Some themes work instantly, no matter how far fetched, just on the basis of the creature's design. In a way, this scene is exactly the same as the Elephants Gone Wild theme. Both are equally plausible.
Coda
The Alex Hillman update is still chugging along. We may have a new update for the pages soon. And after that, a new Ajax Telegraph.
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