Dungeons and Dragons: Cartoon Edition

The complete Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series came out on DVD a few months ago. In comparison to other fantasy cartoons of the '80s, it holds up well. There's an over-arching plot, some effort made at internal consistency, puzzles are overcome with clever (though narratively convenient) solutions, and episodes advance at a Goonies-like pace, eschewing setup, dialogue, and continuity in editing in order to cram in as many monsters and set pieces as possible. For children without access to InuYasha, its appeal is forgivable.

The series departs from the source material in many ways. Magic in particular is handled very differently than any version of the D&D game up to this point. Presto pulls spells from his hat, the evil Venger shoots magic energy from his palms, and Merlin recites words from a giant book and boils spell components in a cauldron. There are no clerics. At the beginning of the series, each character is given a magic item that requires no charges (they only need to be powered up in the Hall of Bones every 300 years) and has different functions depending on the situation. Enemies that can raise ancient temples out of the desert seem to possess no magic resistance or saving throws against these weapons. The 5-headed dragon god Tiamat (a recurring threat, the crocodile to Venger's Captain Hook) can be fooled by an invisibility cloak. Talk about NPCs not using their magic items and innate powers.

Wait a minute.

The characters in the D&D cartoon come into the fantasy world via magical roller coaster, resulting in several anachronisms NPCs hardly bat an eye at. Dungeon Master, the gnome who sends the characters on their quests, is a combination of a stereotypical DM (when he says "when in darkness, seek the light" he means one instance in particular, all the other times you're in darkness and see light be damned) and an Elminster deus ex machinae NPC who is powerful enough to disappear on a whim and hand out magic items as if it were Halloween in Waterdeep, but doesn't feel like stopping the bad guys himself. There's a mad rush from one combat encounter to the next. The one character who suggests a course of action contrary to what the rest of the party or the DM wants them to do is shouted down, either for metagaming, because no one else likes him, or because that's not the direction the story's "supposed" to go.

There are two possibilities here. One, this is the way the game is "supposed" to be played. Two, the D&D cartoon is so hardwired into peoples' brains that it's nearly impossible to find a group of players who want to do something else with the system.

(Author's note: This was written after watching only 3 1/2 episode of the complete Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Oh, and "to be continued...")

Lost: Stranger In A Strange Land

Last episode, I concentrated on what made an episode of Lost work for everyone. Then they made an episode just for me. Getting Clancy Brown (Brother Justin from Carnivale) into the Lost mythos was cool enough, but introducing the chick who was too hot for Star Wars was completely unexpected. All J.J. Abrams needs to do now is get Baltar and any MST3K cast member into a flashback and this will officially become my favorite show evar. (I would also accept cameos by Dave Foley/Kevin McDonald, Tamlyn Tomita, and any one voice actor from Futurama, so they're partway there.)

I was looking for hidden details, but this episode appeared to be fairly on the surface. What worked for me: I like it when we learn answers to mysteries of minor/symbolic importance and when my conspiracy theories are disproven. This time out, we finally learned what Jack's tattoos meant. (If you weren't wondering about that, you don't spend enough time on teh Interweb.) To mix my genre examples and alienate the few people who I know read this site and have never seen either show, the "He walks among us, but is not one of us," satisfied my Jack and Sawyer Are the Two Halves of John Crichton theory. And although I was hoping that there were two competing groups of Others, one on the second island and a dirtier group on the main one, I like it when I'm wrong about the mystery. It gives me new stuff to speculate about.

For people who are not me, there was still a lot to like in this episode. The "current" timeline advanced by a day and a half. We aren't going to see Jack for awhile, and when we do, he might be in a place to ask some relevant questions (i.e. in The Other's backyard, cooking burgers on the grill). And the relation between the flashback and island storyline was more than superficially symbolic. It not only reiterated that Jack's a stubborn, self-destructive jerk (the guy's a doctor and yet he has sex with a woman he suspects of being a prostitute in Thailand?), but it dove-tailed with what we know of Juliet's history. She keeps getting involved with guys who want to control her actions and then asks someone to kill them. Good luck in the future, Jack.

The usual LOSTcasts shout-out goes to their episode title connection. Never having read Heinlein, I wouldn't have come up with it myself. But apparently if you know the plot of the novel, you'd begin to suspect that Jack will become the leader of The Others by the end of the season. Although as they point out in their podcast, having the power to decide whether Ben lives or dies, Jack's pretty much in control of their destiny already. Which begs the question all my non-spoiler sources are avoiding. Other than maybe being born on the island, what makes Ben so special?