“Marion, don’t look at it…”
July 23, 2012
Over the weekend I caught the last bit of Raiders of the Lost Ark and was reminded that it’s a nearly perfect action adventure movie. Sensible, well paced, funny when it’s appropriate, serious when appropriate. And OMG that scene with Indy and Marion on the boat is so damned sexy. I love that the mystery/magic of the Ark isn’t revealed until the very end, and when it is, holy cow. And the thing that saves Indy and Marion is faith — not any kind of religious faith, or faith in a particular religion, but faith that the stories are true, the stories are real. That’s where the bad guys fail — they used the stories without believing in them. It’s why The Last Crusade is the other great Indian Jones movie, because the climactic moment hangs on the same trait — Indy’s faith in the stories.
And that’s when I decided that the Indiana Jones stories (the three actual ones, that is) could very well be part of the same universe that the Kitty stories are in. They could be part of the same continuity. I try to ask the question, What happens if the stories are real? If the magic in them is real? Well, it means the Nazis went hunting for the Ark of the Covenant and Bad Things Happened ™. (I posted this on Facebook and someone asked if that meant Indy and Kitty could date. Well, no, because Kitty was just a little kid when Indy was in his 90′s. Continuity, guys!)
So I started thinking about what other movies might be part of the same universe as the Kitty stories. Ghostbusters? Maybe. The tone is certainly right (funny, but gets totally serious when the crap hits the fan). If the Ghostbusters existed in her world Kitty would totally want to interview them. But probably not, because they’re too public, and on Kitty’s timeline, everything’s still in the closet in 1984. Big Trouble in Little China? Hmm, very possibly, because none of the supernatural there becomes public. The Serpent and the Rainbow? Quite possibly indeed! Wraps the political and supernatural together, examines the line between folklore and science? Oh yes! Poltergeist? Again, quite possibly. In fact, Kitty’s already encountered Cheesman Park, one of the sources of inspiration for Poltergeist.
I could do this all day. Mind you, this doesn’t mean that I’m actually going to be writing any crossover stories, or even working anyone else’s stories into Kitty’s continuity. (I mean, I’m pretty sure some of these exist as movies in Kitty’s world.) But it’s an interesting thought experiment.
July 23, 2012 at 11:21 am
Would also probably be a major legal headache, if you wanted to actually write these. Still fun to speculate, though.
July 23, 2012 at 11:24 am
Maybe in the Kitty verse, the Blair Witch Project *really was* found footage and not artifice…
July 23, 2012 at 11:35 am
I love the way your mind works!!
Barb.
July 23, 2012 at 1:20 pm
Ha. Have you read “News From The Edge”? (Which was turned into the not-very-related “The Chronicle” which aired on SciFi before it turned into SyFy. And not to be confused with the excellent movie “Chronicle.” Anyway.) The schtick for NftE was that the rag really did have interviews with the bat boy and whatnot, but was so cheap that the pictures always came out looking fake.
So maybe that kind of thing is in the Kittyverse as well.
July 24, 2012 at 11:27 am
(the three actual ones, that is)
Hmmph. I still say the Indiana Jones universe is big enough to include extraterrestrials/interdimensional beings along with gods and monsters.
July 24, 2012 at 1:07 pm
But… it’s kind of a bad movie. And one of the things I don’t like about it is it breaks the pattern. There’s never a question of whether or not it’s real, like there is with the ark or the grail.
August 3, 2012 at 8:38 pm
The Serpent and the Rainbow was a non-fiction book; it actually happened in this world. How could the movie be require any supernatural stuff? [Looks in Wikipedia] … Oh. You don’t need to answer that question.