Why Isn’t The Phantom Tollbooth a Movie?

One of the great joys in my life is reading to my son before bed. I know there will only be so many years that this can continue, and I still have to get through Bridge to Terabitha, Great Expectations, all of the Harry Potters, and so many more. But of all the great books of my (and others’) youth, The Phantom Tollbooth (to my knowledge) has never been made into a live-action film.

Yes – there was the semi-live/animated version from 1970, and indeed I watched this endlessly growing up. But it was abridged, and the animation was second-rate.

What I’m talking about is a genuine, live-action epic that traces Milo’s adventures through the lands beyond. I read Lord of the Rings with Miles, and we then watched the superb movies. We read Treasure Island, and then watched (okay, I’ll admit it) Muppet Treasure Island (surprisingly accurate, actually). But why not The Phantom Tollbooth?

Should such an endeavor be attempted, here’s what it would need to be.

  1. A Tim Burton movie. There really is no discussion here.
  2. Live. This doesn’t mean no CGI, but certainly no cartoons.
  3. The complete story. Don’t chicken out at Dictionopolis and miss the whole point of the book. We need to see the Mountains of Ignorance, complete with Demons, and even some great flashback battles as the Prince of Wisdom first arrives in the Land of Null.
  4. Featuring a new child actor.
  5. Faithful to the dialogue of the book. Nearly every idiom in the English language appears somewhere in this book, and are the source of one of the main joys I got out of it. Only now, as an adult, do I understand the whimsical humor of Milo eating his own words.

It’s quite likely that if and when The Phantom Tollbooth is made into a movie, it will not be a good one. It will probably not be directed by Tim Burton, and it will probably not be faithful to the book. The trailer for Bridge to Terabitha looked so damningly awful I never went to see it. I would hate to see another of my childhood favorites butchered, but the sad truth is that it’s more than likely. Nonetheless, I will probably go to see it, and Miles and I at least will enjoy it.

Update: It turns out The Phantom Tollbooth may be made into a movie after all. Wikipedia says it will come out in 2013, though I can’t say I’ll be thrilled to see Gary Ross direct it. Eh.

What happens to the first post when the second one is made?

One of the things that intrigues me about WordPress is discovering how it works and what it does. I certainly don’t find it as intuitive as I might hope, yet sadly no less intuitive than the multitude of other blogging and social networking sites that I’ve come across before. Facebook is mystifyingly cumbersome to me, and so far on Twitter I haven’t found anything remotely interesting to follow (never mind tweet).

At the very least, WordPress seems to at least follow the misshapen logic of most domain registration sites, wherein lots of friendly colors and chunky buttons help to conceal their functions’ ambiguity. What do we have under appearance? Strange talk of banners and headers. What do I have surrounding this box I’m typing in? Well, as a starting point, vast amounts of text. Interesting, that on a site where my writing is purportedly the most important thing, I am faced insurmountably by someone else’s words.

I fail to see why simple design becomes so difficult. I picked the WordPress theme you see here (Chateau, I believe it’s called), because of its wide spaces, pleasant use of a mildly interesting serif font, and the simple contrast of black, and gray, and red. I wasn’t looking for digital wood panelling to prop my blog posts as though they were back issues of National Geographic on a decaying library shelf (though I’m sure I am no more read than they).

I seem unable even to remove some of the less desirable elements from the page. Why on earth would anyone want to subscribe to an RSS feed of my blog’s comments? I suppose I can understand the need for an archive, and I may eventually come to use categories (thought I doubt my ‘readers’ will find browsing them of much use).

Even my handle – satis – was mysteriously taken, though by whom I can’t tell (satis.wordpress.com is abandoned, so why, I wonder, can’t I have it?). The double-line between the post and the ‘sidebar’ is nice touch.

I will admit, however, that it could be worse. WordPress could have asked my to worry about HTML (ha, I laugh in the face of danger); they could have asked me to submit my site to search engines myself (ha, even louder). They even seem to autosave my draft every time I stop to think about what to write next (how do they know…?).

In short, I could be doing this on a web-building application on my computer.

The proliferation of the blog and the tweet has all but destroyed the personal website, and in some ways it’s about time. If you want a personal website, the information you share on it could like as not be shared in an email to the people you actually know. If you want a ‘personal’ website that actually acts as a public showcase of your own banality, well hey – there’s Facebook and Twitter. And if you want a professional website, there’s always the old-fashioned way: get someone to do it for you.

In any case, I can’t say I’ve spent a huge amount of time exploring exactly what WordPress has to offer, but I will continue to play, in the hopes that one day someone other than myself might read it.

Now I’m off to find out what happened to my last post.