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Jul
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Posted by Christopher Waldrop
July 25, 2008 |
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You die a few years before you are born.
Since my copy of The Cave of Time by Edward Packard is long gone I may not have the
quote exactly right, but I still remember the chills I got when I read that line. I was the hero of the story, and it was a poignant end to that particular adventure. It was one of several books in the Choose Your Own Adventure Series which I devoured as a kid, and which, oddly enough, I’d forgotten. When a very funny, very smart blogger named Andrea said, “I was thinking my boy would like the Choose Your Own Adventure series. Remember those? Remember how much they rocked?” oh, how the memories came back. Yes, they did rock. Naturally I started with R.A. Montgomery’s Journey Under The Sea, but quickly moved on to others in the series, including Space And Beyond. I also remember By Balloon To The Sahara, Your Code Name Is Jonah, and The Abominable Snowman. The only book I never really enjoyed was Who Killed Harlowe Thrombey, but then somehow a murder mystery didn’t seem right for an adventure series. The books were an amazingly simple but brilliant idea: written in the second-person, there’d be brief passages that would end with choices. Each choice had a corresponding page number. I’d wasted hours in math class because whoever had had the book the year before me (or maybe even years before that since the book was so old all the problems were in Roman numerals) had written in the corner of a page, “Turn to page 317″. At page 317 there’d be a note that said, “Turn to page 128″. From page 128 I was directed to page 12, and so on, sometimes going through as many as thirty pages before finally getting to one page where they’d written, “YOUR DUMB!” That someone had actually taken this idea and turned it into a really fun series of books was amazing to me, although the inspiration didn’t really come from textbooks.
Strictly speaking it was really Raymond Queneau who started the genre with his 1967 “A Story As You Like It”, but with options like, “Do you wish to hear the story of the three alert peas? If yes, go to 4; if no, go to 2″ it’s not surprising the idea didn’t catch on until it was aimed at children. One night in 1969 Manhattan lawyer Edward Packard was telling his daughters a bedtime story and asked them to made decisions about how the story would go. The idea evolved into a book, The Adventure of You on Sugar Cane Island, and, with partner Ray Montgomery, Packard started writing and publishing the Choose Your Own Adventure series. Aside from making the reader the hero, though, there’s a subtle and profound message in the books: the choices you make have consequences. For kids at least part of the appeal had to be the power, the ability to make decisions that would affect the outcome of major events. There never was a simplistic moral to them, though; the decisions were often ambiguous, or morally neutral. It would have spoiled the fun if there were always clear “good” and “bad” decisions that led to either happiness or death. In fact one of the books, Inside UFO 54-40, was so memorable precisely because the best outcome, a paradise called Ultima, couldn’t be found by making decisions. I read that one at least ten times, going through ten endings, before I finally figured it out. Some of my friends would look ahead a few pages to test a decision they were about to make, but I was so enthralled (and more than a little obsessive compulsive) that I’d follow every decision to the end and then start over again from the beginning.
I don’t remember parents being at all concerned about the potential effects of these books, although apparently that wasn’t the case in Britain, where the Fighting Fantasy series was extremely popular in the early 1980’s. The publishers celebrated the 25th anniversary of the series by reissuing its first title, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, but the series apparently caused fear and even hysteria among parents. As the Times reported in July 2007, ” Critics scorned it as dumb and regressive. Child psychologists fretted that its wanton violence would derail youthful morals.” The same article adds,
It seems quaint to picture adults up in arms at a spot of imaginary orc bashing: parents today would be so grateful that their 11-year-old son was actually reading a book rather than practising Grand Theft Auto hit-and-runs, downloading porn onto his iPhone or instant-messaging death-row inmates that they wouldn’t give two hoots whether it was Fighting Fantasy or Harry Potter or The 120 Days of Sodom.
Actually I do remember more than a little outcry about Harry Potter, with a satirical story about children being drawn into Satanism by the books actually being passed around by people who thought it was true. The Times article also mentions an adult “do-over” novel, Pretty Little Mistakes by Heather McElhatton, “with 150 possible ‘real-life’ endings, in which you might end up a phone sex operator or running an award-winning B&B.” I’m not surprised the idea hasn’t caught on.
While I don’t think the Fighting Fantasy series caught on over on this side of the pond, after I’d outgrown the original
Choose Your Own Adventure books my cousin did introduce me to Steve Jackson’s Sorcery! series, starting with The Shamutanti Hills. Sometimes offering as many as six choices, these were hardcore fantasy with roleplaying that wasn’t far from Dungeons & Dragons. My cousin, even more obsessive compulsive than I was, showed me how to fill pages of notebook paper with my statistics and game notes, made me memorize the spellbook, and then breathed down my neck while I went through the first two books, occasionally telling me, “No, don’t do that.” When he finally left and I picked up the third book, The Seven Serpents, I was more than a little surprised to find that, with a more relaxed attitude about the rules (meaning I threw away the notebook), the books were seriously fun.
It’s a little sad to me that, instead of remaining just books the Choose Your Own Adventure Series has been picked up by new technology. A DVD version of The Abominable Snowman is now available with the voices of William H. Macy and Frankie Muniz. (Do kids really care that the guy who starred in Fargo is lending his voice to this?). Unfortunately the art looks a little too, well, immature. Instead of Paul Granger’s detailed drawings the characters look more like Kim Possible, or maybe that cartoon woman from the Esurance commercials. The original series was appealing because it wasn’t like anything else on the market. Now, with almost every DVD that comes out either having “alternate endings” or a “director’s cut” version a DVD that offers options doesn’t seem all that innovative. And, more recently, the series has moved even away from old-fashioned DVDs to the iPod. Downloadable from the Choose Your Own Adventure web site, the selections are narrated by series co-founder and author R.A. Montgomery, who said, “‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ when it came out [was] basically a computer program in a book. Maybe this is the book’s natural format.” This isn’t exactly a new idea, either. As early as
2002, one of Strong Bad’s emails featured a choose your own adventure theme. (Personally I like to “take it in a bit of a different direction”.)
Maybe I’m old fashioned for thinking the natural format of the books is a paper and glue book, something you interact with using mostly your imagination. Besides, with a DVD or iPod download you can’t skip ahead a few pages to see where your decision will lead you. You’re forced to start over each time you want to change course, forcing kids to be obsessive-compulsive.
Comments
Glad to see I inspired such a cool post! And I didn’t even know about those other books so now I get to track down those too.
Thanks for the kind words
OH I REMEMBER THESE, they were fantastic!! Thank you for bringing back a great memory!