08 December, 2008

Golden nerd alert!

You know you've been watching too much Mysterious Cities of Gold when you start to think Mendoza (left) is pretty hot. C'mon, you have to admit there's something there. You should see him doing dashing things with his blue cape on.

So I finished watching the series today, having received the DVD boxed set for my birthday (it was a long road - not only was my birthday in May, I had to tell my friend what to buy, where to get it and print out a 40% off voucher for her as an incentive...). It was worth the trip down memory lane. I feel like I should do a thesis or something, I'm so fanatic about the series right now.

One particular theme I'm caught up in is the fact that the three children all talk about missing their fathers (there's no mention of anyone's mother except when Esteban learns that his mother dies because of an apparent curse). Tao knows his father has died, Zia spends a large part of the series searching for her father, a priest, and finds him in a village near the end of their journey, just before he dies. Esteban's reasons for following Mendoza to the New World is the possibility that his father may still be alive. But in a turn of dramatic irony, Esteban meets his father, high priest of the Mysterious Cities of Gold, but does not realise it. It is Mendoza who figures out the true relationship between the high priest and the child of the sun. And then the priest dies while saving the world from destruction without Esteban ever knowing his true identity.

Anyway, I am interested in the ongoing notion of fatherhood in the series because much of it gets moved along by various wise men and a lot of the motivation (for the children) for finding the Mysterious Cities of Gold comes from their respective fathers' legacies, rather than the promise of riches. In an interesting twist, Mendoza morphs from a greedy Spaniard to a father figure as the adventure wears on. In the beginning he is the children's main protector because he realises how valuable they are as tools to discover the city, but towards the end he admits to Sancho and Pedro (his greedy sidekicks) that he has grown fond of them and eschews a chance to set off for the city at the earliest possibility to fight on their behalf.

But Mendoza never becomes like a father in the truest sense. He protects and defends them, and eventually earns their trust and respect, but they never love him as a father and vice versa. The relationship they build during their adventures together is like that of equals in a team.

It is further of interest to note that although Mendoza is intelligent, brave and shows leadership, he is not the leader (Esteban fulfils this role), nor the 'vizier' (which is Tao). Neither does he show any particular friendship toward Sancho and Pedro compared with how they treat each other and how the children treat each other. Rather, he is the maverick, an individual who allows himself to get too close to the trinity and embroiled in their affairs.

Anyway, enough rumination on Mendoza as father figure. I found out by watching one of the DVD extras - an interview with the voice actors for Mendoza, Esteban, Tao and Zia - that the guy who did the voice of Mendoza got the part by accident. Howard Ryshpan was actually the director of the English version and they were about to send the tapes to France so the producers could pick the voices they wanted. One of Ryshpan's colleagues discovered they were short a Mendoza (they only had three Mendozas for the four tapes) and as it was 2am in the morning, Ryshpan just laid down a track and they made their recommendations for one of the other three actors to take the part. But the producers chose Ryshpan.

Another funny thing I found out was that the voice actors were sourced from Canada because the series was to be dubbed for both the American and UK markets and the Americans couldn't understand Brit accents and the Brits didn't like heavy American accents. Considering the voices that ended up on tape, they did a really good job picking quite neutral accents. They don't even sound Canadian.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll make my way through all the DVD extras. It has been more than 20 years, but it was worth the wait!

01 December, 2008

The Memory Box

It was baking hot outside, just like those other sticky summer days gone by that I remember from my childhood. My memories of school, of holidays, of riding around the house on my pink Malvern Star with the spokey-dokes, were all blooming with the smell of cut grass, dusty heat, then the sharp sting of rain on concrete from the summer storms.

Inside the house it was cool and quiet. My parents would be back in just over a week, returning from their three-month overseas jaunt where they saw their first grandchild grow up just a little. It must be exciting to see someone grow so quickly. In the time since they've been gone, I doubt I've grown as a person very much at all.

There used to be cardboard boxes filled with photograph albums on the top shelf in my parents' walk-in wardrobe. Now they're kept in a trundle box on the floor behind my mother's collection of designer handbags. Much manoeuvring and the box trundles free, out into the open where I can examine it more closely. It's a sizeable box, but it contains the entire collection of my family's life in pictures. Considering that, it seems diminutive.

The top layer depresses me. They are all small albums, one photo to a sleeve, from pre-digital Malaysian photo shops filled with photo after photo of people in black at various funerals I never attended. My grandfather, my aunt, my uncle, my cousin... I'm not sufficiently intrigued to follow that morbid path, so I put those books aside.

The next layer looks newer and yields albums with flip up sleeves that lie like fallen dominoes on each other. I rush through time, trying to guess my age. I'm always eight, until I find a picture of myself on my seventh birthday. But seven is too odd a number to guess.

There are half-recalled aunties and uncles - friends of my parents - at backyard parties, day trips to anonymous towns and all our birthdays, bad fashion, teased hair and big earrings.

The books get older as the box goes deeper. Some creak open, having not seen light for over a decade. These albums are inevitably brown and dusty-looking. The pictures are sepia-toned and the pages of the album fold out like shutters to reveal others behind them. These are the really early years. There's my mother in her training nurse outfit with some girls I don't recognise. There she is again with Nanny, her house mother in Australia, a lady who has always been ancient in my time. In this one she's wearing a crocheted dress and looks groovy. And there she is at the seaside with a younger version of my brother, posing in a purple bikini.

I jump back a bit in time for the next album. My brother, over six years my senior, being cradled, newly born. And suddenly he's a toddler playing in English snow with my dad. I put the collection down in favour of another, which I know contains traces of me. In a series of photos I am grumpy and serious while my mother, her mother, and my brother wear the grins for me. Then suddenly there's a break in the cloudy photos, a gurgle escapes my lips when I am nine weeks. Maybe I'm cute after all?

Then there's the hi-fi baby pose, losing myself in the sound. What am I listening to? Maybe it's The Muppet Show on record. Or maybe it's a lullaby, a ploy to get me to sleep.

Two and a half years later my sister comes along with her doll face and deep eyes. We're photographically inseparable as I lead her unsteady feet across the vinyl floor in our old kitchen, make her laugh uproariously by blowing a party horn, perch beside her in front of the camel enclosure at Taronga Zoo. We'd already seen the giant pandas that day, just she, my dad and me.

So there it is, a memory box full of images from my family life that are as clear in my mind as the translucent plastic of the trundle box. I don't know what I thought I would find when I opened this box - myself? I borrow some photos, pulling them free of their crusty plastic sleeves, just to try and remember what it was like when I was eight. Seven.