{"id":80719,"date":"2014-12-10T15:40:40","date_gmt":"2014-12-10T20:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=80719"},"modified":"2014-12-10T15:40:40","modified_gmt":"2014-12-10T20:40:40","slug":"letters-from-the-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/10\/letters-from-the-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"Letters from the Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"mk\"<\/a>

A still from The Adventures of Mark Twain<\/i>, 1985.<\/p><\/div>\n

The Internet is filled with half truths, dead ends, and flat-out lies. But to my mind the single greatest disappointment is on YouTube: the video called \u201cMark Twain\u2019s Voice<\/a>.\u201d I\u2019ll admit, it\u2019s interesting in its own right. (And it does lead one to Val Kilmer\u2019s Mark Twain impression<\/a>, a service in itself.) But the title is, to say the least, misleading.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps the strangest of all Twain\u2019s many pop-cultural portrayals is his claymation iteration in 1985\u2019s\u00a0The Adventures of Mark Twain<\/em><\/a><\/em>.<\/em> If it\u2019s been a while, allow me to refresh your memory: A stop-motion Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher have to convince a suicidal, disillusioned Mark Twain not to ram his magical, time-traveling balloon into Halley\u2019s Comet. Along the way, there\u2019s history, some dramatizations of Twain\u2019s work, and more oddness than you could\u00a0possibly imagine. But you don\u2019t have to take my word for it!<\/p>\n

Its creator, Will Vinton, was apparently inspired by the quote in which Twain prophetically predicted the year of his death: <\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0I came in with Halley\u2019s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don\u2019t go out with Halley\u2019s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: \u2018Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.\u2019<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Personally, I love that this film exists. Did it terrify me as a child? Yes. (But what didn\u2019t? This was the era of Return to Oz<\/em> and The Black Cauldron<\/em>.) But it\u2019s also a respectful, albeit bizarre, introduction to the works of Twain that gives children a lot of credit. You wouldn\u2019t, maybe, want to use it as the basis for a paper\u2014that\u2019s why God made Val Kilmer\u2014but as a testament to the author\u2019s enduring appeal, it\u2019s noteworthy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Internet is filled with half truths, dead ends, and flat-out lies. But to my mind the single greatest disappointment is on YouTube: the video called \u201cMark Twain\u2019s Voice.\u201d I\u2019ll admit, it\u2019s interesting in its own right. (And it does lead one to Val Kilmer\u2019s Mark Twain impression, a service in itself.) But the title […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":178,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13115],"tags":[16333,3129,1766,16334,10463,1782],"class_list":["post-80719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-daily-correspondent","tag-childrens-movies","tag-claymation","tag-mark-twain","tag-the-adventures-of-mark-twain","tag-val-kilmer","tag-youtube"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Adventures of Mark Twain: Still Good, Thirty Years Later<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Sadie Stein reminisces about \u201cthe strangest of all Twain\u2019s many pop-cultural portrayals\u201d: his claymation turn in 1985\u2019s The Adventures of Mark Twain.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/10\/letters-from-the-earth\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Letters from the Earth by Sadie Stein\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 10, 2014 \u2013 The Internet is filled with half truths, dead ends, and flat-out lies. 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