Parodying the Encyclopedia
Last month I had occasion to reread a couple of Encyclopedia Brown books, and realized that I was borrowing Donald J. Sobol’s vision of kid society for one of my current writing projects.
Each of the kids in Sobol’s books has his or (less often) her own idiosyncratic obsession: the boy who collects teeth, the kindergartner who publishes a newspaper even though he can’t read or write, the gallant ladies’ man, the rabid animal lover, the skinflint, and so on.
Of course, Encyclopedia is the same, a kid with a photographic memory sitting in his garage waiting for clients to come pay him a quarter. (He actually has some anxious moments in the first book, wondering if anyone will show up and validate him.)
In a way, Bugs Meany is the most rounded kid in Idaville: at least he’s willing to try a new scheme every couple of stories.
Do American kids today recognize such a world, where kids make their own fun instead of rushing from one scheduled activity to another? Or was Encyclopedia Brown< always secretly a parody of childhood?
In any event, it’s no surprise that such a delightfully mannered series has attracted more than its share of parodies. A selection for your entertainment:
- The Onion: "Idaville Detective 'Encyclopedia' Brown Found Dead In Library Dumpster"
- Running Leroy Brown for District Attorney.
- Georgia Tech’s “The Case of The Missing Teddy Bear,” by Matthew A. Cohen and Noel Rappin.
- Adam Cadre’s Wikipedia Brown and "The Case of the Captured Koala." (The real mystery: Why is this website registered through Ascension Island?)
- John Warner changed the name of his Encyclopedia Brown parodies to Wikipedia Jones after, I assume, some nudging from Donald Sobol’s lawyers about how parody works. See the Modern Humorist archive here. His book Encyclopedia Brown and the Mysterious Presidency of George W. Bush has been pulled from the market.
- The Stanford Chapparal preserves Ben Olding’s “Encyclopedia Brown and 1967 Yearbook Brown”.
- Sean Gleeson’s ”The Case of the Misbegotten Memos”.
7 comments:
I recently posted about Encyclopedia Brown and his connection to Law & Order: Criminal Intent.
Good times.
I had to exert my own powers of detection to find your link, but I took inspiration from Encyclopedia Brown, who always gets his man.
I, too, saw the 1989 HBO series, an exercise in surrealism. I recently read that the producer of the show pulled it after only a few episodes in an attempt to get more money from the network.
That producer still held some Encyclopedia Brown option in late 2005 when, to Donald J. Sobol’s disgust, he announced plans with Ridley Scott to use the characters in action-adventure movies.
Within a week, that producer's partners pulled out after learning he "had been convicted of immigration fraud in 2000, sentenced to three years in prison and...disbarred." I rather hoped a certain sixth-grader with a prodigious memory was behind that.
My apologies for not posting the direct link earlier.
My goodness. Glad that it didn't happen, then.
Yeah, the movie concept was a jaw-droppingly dumb idea: to take one of the most admirably cerebral characters in children's literature and turn him into an action-adventure hero? That's what Sally was there for!
In related classic sleuth news, I wonder how the upcoming Nancy Drew feature film will fare.
Why is Adam Cadre's website registered through Ascension? Because that makes the TLD .ac, as in Adam Cadre.
That's what I figured, but I may resent the lack of a .jlb possibility.
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