"I've got some bad news," "Your daughter has lice," and "Don Bluth double feature" are good examples of four words you don't want to hear as a parent. But "tell me a story" was beginning to rank pretty high up there. As an inveterate lover of stories, admitting this is at least three types of cruel. I love love love stories, love telling them and love having receptive audiences for them. So this admission is me being broken, something straight out of the Ironic Torture department (last seen force-feeding Homer Simpsons donuts in a Treehouse of Horror).
This do-it-to-Julia attitude was the result of hundreds of hours telling stories to my two daughters. They love stories, too. If we had read a story I'd retell it. If we had seen a movie, I'd reenact the plot. Hand motions, voices, acting that would not be allowed in a Jewish deli – for the ham and cheese. This was a fun exercise for me: as someone who has read at least a dozen versions of The Little Mermaid to them, I've begun looking at retelling stories like a "Previously on 24" skill. How to condense ninety minutes of events into two without having anyone notice I'd cut something out? How to keep things moving? Whatever skills telling a story has, retelling one is an act of poetry.
My older daughter would sometimes help, telling me scary or boring parts she'd prefer I left out. I obliged. But then she'd request that same story a second time. And me, knowing that a good second draft is the first draft minus ten percent, would start the story off in media res, end it a little earlier, and plane away the unnecessary explanations and story beats.
"Daddy, you skipped it."
"Skipped what?"
"The part you said last time."
Nuts: she caught on. So I rewound the story, adding back in the excised material, and retold it. Except now the story seems purposefully overlong, fake, a Mad Magazine toupee with the price tag sticking out. Every subsequent time I tell it, I'm still doing my internal revising, but now it's like the file won't save. I'm in version control hell. She wants the one she heard the first time, the original analog master.
This was unfathomably flattering: she watches a masterful Pixar film, hears me try to fumble through telling it, and then wants my hasty sum-up of the story more than the story itself. And furthermore she wants the warts-and-all version, which I wouldn't even consider a first draft!
There is also the matter than, since I would tell stories at dinner, any appearance of food necessitated a story. Didn't matter if I was doing the dishes, eating next to her, at a restaurant, or sitting with 20 family members during Thanksgiving: when my daughter ate, she wanted a story. No one else was allowed to speak but me, and I was not allowed to leave anything out. This happened every meal for six months. That is why "tell me a story" was making me wince.
Like all the stories I'd been shanghaied into telling, this one has a happy ending. I found a stopgap solution: original stories. No fidelity problems, because there was no original to hold this tale up to for lightboxing. The story had to stay exactly the same each telling — I had "Robin and Batman" appear once, and every subsequent time said "Batman and Robin" and had my hand metaphorically slapped because, duh, it was Robin first. (Oh, yes, I told my two little girls superhero stories. My younger daughter knows the deep bench of Superman villains — not just Lex Luthor and Bizarro but Doomsday, Mongul, Mr. Mxyzptlk, and Darkseid.) The real fun has come recently, from a desperate gesture that ending up working incredibly well. One day while parenting, they asked for a story. My mind was too rattled to respond: the well was dry. Version control has crashed. So I looked to the wall of family DVDs, which every geek dad has. I picked up a DVD basically at random. Then I grabbed a second one.
"We're going to tell a mash-up story," I announced.
You, too, can tell a mash-up story. All you need is two DVDs. Or two books. Or a book and a DVD. The kids have a role in this story: they pick out what's getting mashed up. If you've got two or more kids, let each child pick one from the shelf. Encourage them to pick blindly: this will stop, say, 35 straight draws of Scooby Doo. Here's the great part: you'll be more excited for these stories than they will. Because it's new to you as well. They won't see that: all they'll see is Daddy doing the same thing that geek heroes like Joss Whedon and James Cameron do so exemplarily. And, in their eyes, doing it as well as them. (Even if, like me, you're often committing acts of Grand Theft Season-4-Buffy-Episode.)
Tonight's was Toy Story meets Jasmine. I decided to bench Woody and Buzz and have the Potato Heads get taken on vacation to Agrabah — where they went on honeymoon — where they meet a Jasmine doll. Bonnie takes the Jasmine home — and yes, I'm going with the post-Toy Story 3 continuity here, since I was yelled at for saying "Andy," who in their minds is as gone as Alderaan. Buzz finally had a potential love interest...but then Bonnie gets an Aladdin doll to go with Jasmine. (I prefer my Buzz as The Toy the World Hates. Woody gets too much screen time.)
There are some mash-up choices you'll make that seem predestined. When I mashed Goonies and Alice in Wonderland, I had the Goonies descend the Fratellis' hole in the fireplace and discover a bottle that said Drink Me and a cake that said Eat Me. You would, too: it fits like a jigsaw. I felt prouder for, when mashing the Muppets up with The Little Mermaid, I had Ariel meet Kermit... who convinces her to turn into not a person but a frog, at home in both land and water. (And that segues perfectly into a Princess and the Frog cameo.)
I've always had a strange respect for direct-to-DVD sequels. The budget is a tenth of the theatrical release, half the cast doesn't return, and the story by mandate must go over the same familiar beats: every film is Die Hard 2: Die Harder. But go watch Bambi II, or Cinderella III, or especially Hunchback 2 tha Life. (Or whatever it was called.) Yes, these movies were spawned from an Excel spreadsheet. Yes, they feature Dan Castellaneta instead of Robin Williams. Yes, they look like the Disney Afternoon. But the writing! The characterization! The conflicts! The resolutions! The advancements of theme to build upon the plot, grow the characters, but not too much so they're out of plumb with their originals. Assuming that these movies were going to be made, this is really the Panglossian best possible movie that could be made from the ingredients.
And I should know. I'm baking a soufflé right now based on Voyage of the Dawn Treader and Jumanji. You know that lion that jumps off the piano? Aslan. The world the board game sucks you into? Narnia. The evil hunter after the main character? Now the White Witch. I'll tell it to my two girls, over a meal I won't be as proud of as the story.
I look forward to those four words now. Tell you a story? I'd be happy to. How about... Willy Wonka meets The Incredibles?
[Jeff Ryan is the imaginary author of Peter Pan Meets Spy Kids 3, Thumbelina Meets Incredibles, Annie Meets Scooby Doo Meets the Harlem Globetrotters, and the real author of Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America. If you listen to Star Talk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, you may have heard Jeff in the Science of Videogames episode.]
