No, it doesn't stand for "Eerie Type of Adaptation".
Officially it's Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, but it's enough if you don't confuse him with Heinrich. Heinrich was the 19th Century psychiatrist whose stories inspired the Scissormen from Grant Morrison's tenure writing "Doom Patrol". E.T.A. Hoffman was the supernatural fantasist famous for writing "The Sandman", which in no way resembles the Neil Gaiman series. He's even more famous for two other works adapted for other media. One, "Tales of Hoffman", was a collection of stories that inspired an opera by Offenbach. The other, "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King", inspired a ballet by Tchaikovsky.
Earlier in this blog I mentioned Richard Sala's greatly increased visibility due to MTV's "Liquid Television" animation anthology series. Charles Burns also had segments on the show, but he had already been a known quantity in alternative comics for nearly a decade when it first aired. He was a contributor to the original RAW series and created two of the books on its tiny imprint. In retrospect, if the Mark Morris Dance Group wanted to relocate Hoffmann's creepy mix of the supernatural and social anxiety to a 20th Century suburb, Burns would be the perfect choice. But with the 1986 stage version (based on illustrations by Maurice Sendak) circulating on cable and VHS, getting people to watch this would be an uphill climb, although this would benefit from the contrast. It's not my favorite production. (Rotten Tomatoes has no score for it whatsoever; the 1986 version gets a 72%, which is about right. In both cases, the design is the strongest asset.) Filmed in 1992 as "The Hard Nut" and broadcast on PBS' "Great Performances" on December 16th of that year, Elektra/Nonesuch released it on VHS the following year and on DVD in October 2007. It does still occasionally get rebroadcast. I thought I saw it on one of the more adventurous commercial cable channels, but that might have been a feverish dream. Anyway, it does get nearly the love that the Nureyev version gets. Still, get a load of that Pee-Wee's-Playhouse-meets-Kafka version of the Nutcracker doll being held by Drosselmeyer on the production still:
If anybody sees one of those on Etsy, let me know. And that's actually the 2005 cast, not the cast on the video. I wonder if it's the same prop, or else... they might have produced multiple copies for road productions! Aw, man, now I want one. I don't know why, though. It's for the Mark Morris Dance Group, which means a hundred guys have already put their Mouse King in it. You know what? I'm good.
Now, being a comics oriented blog, I suppose I should make more of the whole Nutcracker/Pinocchio/AstroBoy lineage, but that would involve dragging in a lot more research material (and becoming more fluent in German, Italian and Japanese beyond ordering a meal and finding a hotel), so I'll just weasel out of it by saying that I want to stick as closely as possible to whatever is already in my collection. and there'll be another bit of it later this week.
Officially it's Ernst Theodor Wilhelm, but it's enough if you don't confuse him with Heinrich. Heinrich was the 19th Century psychiatrist whose stories inspired the Scissormen from Grant Morrison's tenure writing "Doom Patrol". E.T.A. Hoffman was the supernatural fantasist famous for writing "The Sandman", which in no way resembles the Neil Gaiman series. He's even more famous for two other works adapted for other media. One, "Tales of Hoffman", was a collection of stories that inspired an opera by Offenbach. The other, "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King", inspired a ballet by Tchaikovsky.
Earlier in this blog I mentioned Richard Sala's greatly increased visibility due to MTV's "Liquid Television" animation anthology series. Charles Burns also had segments on the show, but he had already been a known quantity in alternative comics for nearly a decade when it first aired. He was a contributor to the original RAW series and created two of the books on its tiny imprint. In retrospect, if the Mark Morris Dance Group wanted to relocate Hoffmann's creepy mix of the supernatural and social anxiety to a 20th Century suburb, Burns would be the perfect choice. But with the 1986 stage version (based on illustrations by Maurice Sendak) circulating on cable and VHS, getting people to watch this would be an uphill climb, although this would benefit from the contrast. It's not my favorite production. (Rotten Tomatoes has no score for it whatsoever; the 1986 version gets a 72%, which is about right. In both cases, the design is the strongest asset.) Filmed in 1992 as "The Hard Nut" and broadcast on PBS' "Great Performances" on December 16th of that year, Elektra/Nonesuch released it on VHS the following year and on DVD in October 2007. It does still occasionally get rebroadcast. I thought I saw it on one of the more adventurous commercial cable channels, but that might have been a feverish dream. Anyway, it does get nearly the love that the Nureyev version gets. Still, get a load of that Pee-Wee's-Playhouse-meets-Kafka version of the Nutcracker doll being held by Drosselmeyer on the production still:
If anybody sees one of those on Etsy, let me know. And that's actually the 2005 cast, not the cast on the video. I wonder if it's the same prop, or else... they might have produced multiple copies for road productions! Aw, man, now I want one. I don't know why, though. It's for the Mark Morris Dance Group, which means a hundred guys have already put their Mouse King in it. You know what? I'm good.
Now, being a comics oriented blog, I suppose I should make more of the whole Nutcracker/Pinocchio/AstroBoy lineage, but that would involve dragging in a lot more research material (and becoming more fluent in German, Italian and Japanese beyond ordering a meal and finding a hotel), so I'll just weasel out of it by saying that I want to stick as closely as possible to whatever is already in my collection. and there'll be another bit of it later this week.
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