Some Quick Great Mouse Detective/ACD Holmes Notes

[x_los]

Toby, the dog from the Great Mouse Detective film (which has a slightly different name, for the UK market), is based off the keen-nosed dog from The Sign of Four of the same name--he is probably intended to be this dog, but he's of a different breed. Holmes has apparently also taken to keeping the dog close at hand--in ACD canon, he lives with a

Comments

[elviaprose]

Interesting. Also interesting that Ratigan doesn't seem to have a Moran, now that I think about it.

until this, his attainment of full adulthood.

What do you mean? Is there a line I missed in GMD about this?

[x_los]

No just thinking about--how young Holmes is initially, and how he'd have to be, 4-10 years on, essentially an adult. It's part of a conversation I had w/ Anna over the weekend about when students bachelor life gets weird and they have to be heterosexually paired off or relegated to Eccentricity--at some point the dynamic has to change, because they go get older/it lingers on too long and it gets weird. I'm not sure /how/ old Holmes is initially, or Watson, but not THAT old--so Watson is there, bringing some influence to bear by being his best friend and defining him through writing about him, as he becomes a sort of fully-realized adult. There could be a sense in which Watson writes Sherlock as a codified, set being.

[elviaprose]

Yeah, that's definitely true about Holmes being young at the start.

Sooo, this comment originally said something different and more aimless. It's also now totally not related to what you're saying :/

I was just thinking...It might be interesting to think about how the serialized nature of the stories encourages a fanfictional reading of them. I think ACD ends up making a lot of fanfictional moves himself, actually, because of his form. I can never decide whether he left himself room to bring Holmes back intentionally or not. Holmes needs a brother, so he creates one, but where was he before? It takes work to read that back into the text, but we feel we should.

[x_los]

Not sure if you mean read back these material conditions of production, or read the later-established structures back into the canon as a whole, but either the Doylist or the Watsonian claim is valid and interesting

[aralias]

this is a very good post - very good thoughts about GMD, thoughts that have never been thought before!!! i assume. i guess people may have been keen in the olden days, maybe some holmes people. but they are nifty thoughts, and i think probably are indeed brand new.

i bet your mouse!mycroft would be thinking deep thoughts along this vein. maybe, if basil had been more of one to follow his human counterpart, he might have looked at watson and holmes's realtionship wistfully...

also - as we know, mices have much shorter lives, but you've assumed (i think you said before) that basically these mice... have human lifespans. which makes sense. given that they are anthromorphised.

also - in a way i think it's good tha tyou disliekd them as a child, because it means that you will only be delighted when you relisten now :)

[x_los]

I hope no one has ever been mad enough to think these thoughts before. Those poor, poor people, if they have.

I suppose you could have a Basil who'd gone through a period of obsession with the question of how like this other self he was, how it worked, why he didn't have a companion, etc. That could be interesting, even if not--something I'm necessarily drawn to.

Yeah, it's that or read stuff like 'sixty year reign' as some kind of mouse-years, which is a bit confusing, and also makes the thing untenable, stupidly Kes from Voyager. I'd have to ALWAYS think differently about the passage of time. And that's so much more SFnal/invested in its concept than the film itself bothers to be.

To clarify, I only disliked this *one*. I was quite fond of many of the others. :)