The landlords' son is going to be Robin Hood this Halloween. Their daughter is going to be some character from the Harry Potter books, which means I have really nothing more to say about that not having read the books. Robin Hood, I know, so he's getting all the copy this time out.

    It was sort of a surprising choice. Though my lack of television makes me somewhat less media savvy than your average bear, I haven't heard of any significant Robin Hood flicks, cartoons, or movies. Furthermore, the costume, which his mom has constructed as a sort of homage to Errol Flynn's Depression Era interpretation of the famous bandito, suggests that The Boy had no current, non-tights wearing model in mind when he proposed it.

    In fact, The Boy seems to be only vaguely familiar with the character of Robin Hood. He's been doing a lot of make-believe in the back yard (like a good character actor, The Boy feels you really need to inhabit your role, really live in the character to the extent that a six-year-old boy can). His Robin Hood spends an unusual amount of time diving away from exploding grenades, shooting robots, and foiling bank robbers. When he's feeling his oats, he'll combine all three: dodging grenades thrown by bank-robbing robots. Aside from the anachronistic villains, he's left out traditional alliterative elements such as the Merry Men and Maid Marion. He also shows little interest in Robin Hood's legendary wealth redistribution schemes.

    The solely reason I think The Boy picked Robin Hood has to do not with the fabled outlaw's liberal attitudes towards poor and the overreaching war powers of emergency interim governments, but with his parents liberal attitude towards war toys.

    The landlords, in a sort of social experiment to see they can raise their son in such a manner as to inspire both an innate aversion to militarism and an unusually high level of bully-administered beatings, have decided that he cannot have "army toys." Which, from what I can figure, means toys inspired by or modeled after military equipment or personnel from the 20th century on. Though the parents have never articulated it as such, the break seems to be the end of muzzle loading firearms. The swords and crossbows of his toy knights (off to slaughter their way to the toy Holy Land) and the blades and blunderbusses of his toy pirates (off to rape and pillage his sister's defenseless toys) are okay, but the government issued small arms of the toy members of the professional members of the United States armed forces are verboten.

    The ban also extends into future weapons, though the ban, like all weapons regulations, gets inconsistent and bizarre. Things that look like pistols or rifles are out: Han Solo's blaster has to go. Things that seem to be hand-to-hand weapons are okay: Luke Skywalker's light saber can stay. Things that fall somewhere in between are up for debate: after vigorous lobbying by the future weapons lobby, Chewy's crossbow/blaster/hybrid doohicky was legalized. Apparently, larger weapons platforms are also okay. Though the four-barreled weapons mounted on the Millennium Falcon are presumably more destructive than Han's blaster, they've been cleared. It is, it seems, okay to fly a death-machine so long as one does not have one strapped to your thigh.

    The ban hasn't really made The Boy more pacific as far as I can tell. It has made him and little expert on pre-firearm weaponry. The other day I was "treated" to a rambling and not terribly interesting discourse on which was cooler – the Euro-style straight blade sword of his toy crusading knights or the curved scimitar of his miniature Mohammedeans. When I mentioned the crusading knights of 1099 final made it within the walls of Jerusalem they slaughter every Jew and Muslim they could find, covering themselves from head to toe in gore and causing rivers of blood to flow down the streets, he said, as if in justification, that he thought the knights straight swords were cooler. The Boy explained that curved blades are often mistaken as cooler, but that's just cause you get straight blades all the time and you forget how cool they are. A sort of weaponized shock of the new.

    It has also caused an increase in the number of bludgeonings The Boy has delivered to his sister, play date guests, baby sisters, and so on. By allowing faux weapons modeled on swords and club and whatnot, the landlords have basically stocked their house with an armor of smacking implements.

    The Boy's interest in Robin Hood was, I believe, based solely on the idea that it might have been a good way to score a ranged weapon. He thought, under the non-militaristic guise of rigorous commitment to historical accuracy, that he might be able to con his way into a bow and arrows. It only half worked. Yesterday, his father and I carved him out a short longbow and some arrows. He spent the remains of the day trying to shoot it. Unaware of the mechanics of bows, he didn't seem to believe that we would have made him a non-functioning bow. At one point, convinced that his lack of kill-worthy targets was somehow dispiriting the weapon, The Boy attempted to lure one of the neighbor's cats – a particularly fat and stupid all-white creature we've dubbed Alice – in the backyard. The plan failed in the face of the beast's almost transcendent indifference to the desires and needs of humans.

    The Boy has, I think, finally come to terms with the fact that he cannot launch arrows as he'd hoped. What he does now is take the traditional archer's stance, shout TWNANGHA!, drop the bow, and then run with the arrow held out to his side. I'd assumed that, as he approached his target, The Boy would throw the arrow the remaining distance. Instead, The Boy's zen-like identification with arrow is so profound that he actually crashes into the target, arrow in hand.

Halloween Music

    In the spirit of the Christmas music list I offered you last holiday season, here's the CRwM Ten Tunes for Halloween List, in no particular order:

1. The Sonics, The Witch - The Seattle garage rock scene of the early 1960s was the closest America got to putting up a unified front against the British Invasion. The Sonics stand out as one of the most enduring products of the scene. Put this on your iPod for Halloween and you'll find it sticks on the playlist long after the jack-o-lantern has started growing green fuzz.
Halloween Music Clichés: wailing

2. The Revels, Midnight Stroll - polished, slinky soul number that takes music for the then popular Stroll dance craze and reworks it as a ghostly encounter the singers have while cutting through graveyard. There's actually a weird bit of a strange twist to it. The dead man they encounter apparently doesn't know he dead. The singers pity him for his ignorance only to realize, at the end of the song, they too are dead.
Halloween Music Clichés: crazed laughter, tower bells sounding

3. The Gruesomes, Jack the Ripper - Canadian garage rock revivalists, the Gruesomes, do proto-shock rocker Screaming Lord Sutch's signature tune. The Gruesomes' version, which is a fast paced and aggressively simple bit of rock, might actually be better than the long-winded original.
Halloween Music Clichés: crazed laughter, thunder, tower bells sounding, wailing

4. The Verdicts, The Verdicts - also-ran soulsters deliver on that most venerable of Halloween sub-genres: the monster party. Notably, this is the only song I can find that includes Norman Bates dead mother, "an old lady in a rocking chair," as one the attending monsters.
Halloween Music Clichés: Bela Lugosi impersonation, crazed laughter, name dropping famous monsters of film-land, monster party

4. The Jayhawks, The Creature (from Outer Space) - this revolving door doo-wop group had, for legal reasons, to bury the fact that this song's about the titular monster from the classic sci-fi/horror flick The Thing from Another Planet. The song clearly identifies the monster as "the Thing," despite the title (which also had to be changed to "Outer Space" to "Another Planet"). This is the silliest of Halloween novelties. Aside form the charmingly goofy doo-wop vocal performance the song includes a moment when "Satchmo" walks on, realizes he's in the wrong record, and splits.
Halloween Music Clichés: crazed laughter, name dropping famous monsters of film-land

6. John Zacherle, Coolest Little Monster - the television horror host Zacherle goofs his way through an Ogden Nash-like song about all the gifts he intends to send to the haunting honey. This is Halloween's answer to The Twelve Days of Christmas. Sample lyrics:
I'll send a small box of small pox,
A big tub of hubbub,
Your own noose for home use,
A crateful of hateful,
'Cause you’re the coolest little monster that ever put the spook on me.
Halloween Music Clichés: crazed laughter

7. Beat Happening, Zombie Limbo Time - influential lo-fi pop minimalists show their fun side with a Halloween novelty song about everybody's favorite monster. Because their own Dogme-like self-imposed restrictions fid them the sort of gimmicky production typical of Halloween novelty tunes, they make do with effects the can produce spontaneously. Song seems to contain references to the Evil Dead franchise.
Halloween Music Clichés: wailing

8. Round Robin, I'm the Wolfman - 60s DJ creates this raw bit of blues influenced garage rock that one could imagine as the spiritual predecessor to the sloppy retro-flavored noise rock of the Blues Explosion (who crafted their own wolfman tune for their Plastic Fangs album almost 40 years later).
Halloween Music Clichés: growling, wailing

9. Nu Trends, Spooksville - more treats from the fringes of American 60s soul music. This snappy tune is actually a little pop gem with doo-wop touches and a propulsive beat.
Halloween Music Clichés: crazed laughter, monster party

10. Lone Ranger, Barnabbas Collins - one of Studio One's stable of reggae and dancehall legends, the Lone Ranger was notable for his overt love of pop culture. Besides taking his name from the legendary Western hero of radio, comics, and television, he also produced this ode to Barnabbas Collins, vampire anti-hero of the 70s goth/soap Dark Shadows.
Halloween Music Clichés: Bela Lugosi impersonation, crazed laughter, name dropping famous monsters of film-land