I have to say, I love the Borders Bookstore. There are a wide range of books on the most fascinating of subjects, the environment is comfortable for browsing, and in spite of the posh atmosphere no one looks at you askance when you walk in wearing a T-shirt and shorts. This morning, with some time to kill, I wandered in with my mother. Borders was fairly empty at the time, this being a working day. My mother made a beeline for the non-fiction, and found what she was looking for with a compact book about actors and actresses. This sort of thing doesn't interest me greatly, and I was about to move on to another section when I spotted The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons, now in its third edition. Intrigued, I flipped through it.
It was, as its name suggested, very much in the style of an encyclopedia. Various animated feature films, television specials and television cartoons were listed, with a short run-down of the voice actors and production crew, and a brief blurb. The text was relieved with the occasional greyscale cartoon screen capture, and a few pages of coloured images at the centre of the book.
I have often wondered about the relevance of such books in the age of the Internet, that endless repository of information on more subjects than any one person could possibly be aware of. What could be the purpose of purchasing a book when information can be so readily obtained with lesser cost to both the wallet and the environment? Perhaps the allure of a book is the promise of accuracy, and in the collection of information carefully prepared by the author. In order to read up about, say, Turbo Teen on the Internet, one must have first seen it mentioned somewhere. A book would have already done the necessary research, and presents the information in a clear and accurate manner, ready for consumption.
Digressions aside, I continued to scan through The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons, marvelling at the sheer number of animated features which have been created thus far. I stopped at a familiar name.
THE TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE
Ah, the 1986 classic which is much reviled by some fans and loved by others, and notable for its polarising decision to kill off most of its popular cast. I continued to read.
Set in 2005, the Transformers and their archenemies, the Decepticons...
The Transformers are actually a class of autonomous robots, of which the Decepticons are a single faction. A fairly common mistake, nothing too ser-
...are at war with one another when an Earthly group, the Autobots...
Wait, what?
...enters the picture and helps send the Decepticons into outer space.
I must have stared for sometime, re-reading the sentence to check if I had read it wrongly. When it became apparent that I hadn't, I had to clamp my mouth shut to hold in my giggles. Where on earth had the author gotten that information? The almost complete inaccuracy was astonishing. Not only were the Autobots erroneously listed as being a separate, "Earthly" group from the Transformers, but the blurb also stated the complete opposite of what happened at the beginning of the movie.
Then again, perhaps it I was being unfair. Mistakes are common, and surely I couldn't expect the author to have a complete understanding of all the subtleties in every cartoon he had listed in his book. Surely this was only a one-time error. I looked in the section on television cartoons.
TRANSFORMERS
The Autobots, residents of the planet Zorbitron...
At that moment I had to double over to keep my laughter, if not completely inaudible, at least at a low volume. Part of me doesn't want to know how "Cybertron" managed to end up so mangled, or where the author got "Zorbitron" from, but another part really, really wants to know!
But I think I'll stick to using the Internet as a source of information on cartoons. Especially since this encyclopedia of "animated cartoons" lists Walking with Dinosaurs, but not any of the Bionicle movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment