ICONIC PROPOSITIONS PT. 1

"The original King Kong has but one story, at the end of which he perishes, never to return, at least not at the hands of his creators. However, when the company that owned Kong leased him out to Toho Studios, Kong was revised in many respects-- most significantly, making him large enough that he could stand toe to toe with the Big G. This Kong is not really the original Kong, but there exists a sort of "crypto-continuity" between the two, so that I regard this crossover as a crossover of two Primes, simply because Kong II is meant to be a strong echo of the original icon." --A CONVOCATION OF CROSSOVERS PT. 2 (2021)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   "Lastly, a great deal of "icon emulation" relies on at least a superficial level of recognizability, even where that recognizability contradicts everything known about the icon's established history. For instance, the film BLOODRAYNE: DELIVERANCE pits its heroine against a vampire named Billy the Kid, ostensibly four hundred years old. If this version of Billy has been around that long, then clearly he has nothing to do with either the real or folkloric history of Billy the Kid, and the film-script makes no attempt to rationalize the discordances. But because the writer sought to make his villain recognizable, the film nevertheless delivers a "strong template deviation" type of crossover."" --THE DANCE OF THE NEW AND THE OLD (2022)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

 Since in 2021 I started assiduously pursuing the narrative pattern-analysis I *may* dub "crossology," I've struggled somewhat with trying to account for the situations described in the examples above. In both, some raconteur executes a version of an established icon that strongly deviates from previously established descriptions of the icon in one or more ways. In the case of Kong in KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, no change was more monumental than the idea that Kong II, unlike the Kong of the 1933 film, was alive. The script for the 1962 movie could have specified that this was a different Kong than the earlier one, just as the Godzilla of GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN is a different but essentially identical "Godzillasaurus" as the one in the 1954 original. But the writers of KING KONG VS GODZILLA did not make any such distinction. In my view the writers wanted to encourage the identification of Kong II with Kong I, the better to sell to audiences the mythic battle between the foremost kaiju of America with the pre-eminent monster-child of Nippon.                                                                                                       

The example of Billy the Kid in BLOODRAYNE DELIVERANCE is arguably more extreme: not only was this Billy a bloodsucking vampire, he didn't even originate in the era with which both the real William Bonney and his fictional congeners are associated: the Old West. Yet the writers of that movie also wanted more recognition-value out of associating "Vampire Billy" with the legendary outlaw, or else they too could have pursued the strategy I described for Kong II: just say it's some bloodsucker who came along and assumed the identity of a famed gunfighter. I tried to rationalize this narrative identification with phrases like "recognition of motifs" and "template deviations," and while those aren't precisely wrong, they may not get to the heart of the problems inherent in the process of icon emulation. My current solution will phase out the term "template deviations" in favor of a brand-new headscratcher, "variant propositions," which Part 2 will attempt to justify.