[This column, which Greg posted on 30 August 2015, is about fans’ head-canon, so of course it got a lot of comments, which you can find at the original post, as ugly as it is. For such a nerdy topic, I don’t think I really have a “head canon” – I mean, I think the idea of James Bond being a title and not a single person is a good one, but I don’t really care all that much. If you have examples, feel free to sound off about them in the comments! Enjoy!]
Okay, this is kind of nerdy and silly, but apparently this dumb habit of mine is shared by enough other people that there’s actually a name for it now.
Mark Evanier had the BEST name for it, I think — he called it “Krypto-revisionism.” But that never really caught on. I gather that the current name for this phenomenon is “head-canon.”
But ever since me and my tiny posse of teenage nerds were arguing about James Bond or Star Trek or Batman or whatever in the English Center back in high school, our usual shorthand expression for this was ‘counting.’ That is to say, this one counts, that one doesn’t.
Because, as all long-time fans of comics — really, any long-term series fiction — are aware, sometimes, well, there are those things that we are all agreed never to speak of again. Like when the Blackhawks decided to put on super-suits.
Or when Hawkman was accidentally rebooted when he was supposed to be retconned.
Or the Mopee.
Or … well, you probably have a list of shame all your own.
This is different than Brian’s feature Abandoned an’ Forsaked. This is the stuff that we just collectively decided didn’t happen. Never mind the official version. Let them sort out their own mess. And usually the official version catches up.
For example, Denny O’Neil once thought that it would be a nifty idea, during the Zero Hour crossover or thereabouts, that the killer of Batman’s parents was never identified. That it wasn’t Joe Chill. So he decreed this to be the case. As editor, you’d think that would be sufficient.
Nope. Bullshit. Not so. Too many of us knew, knew in our bones, that it was Joe Chill that murdered Thomas and Martha Wayne.
Nobody bought into the ‘unknown killer’ idea. Including writers that followed, and then the Batman Begins movie made a big deal about Joe Chill and the whole idea of the killer being unknown just kind of went away. I think there was some sort of handwave over it during Infinite Crisis but we all had made up our minds on the matter by then. It was head-canon long before it was canon.
I don’t think it was ever officially ‘abandoned an’ forsaked,’ it just faded from our collective consciousness.
Although head-canon goes beyond just what counts and what doesn’t. It also makes connections that are never officially explicit.
Here’s an easy one. Most of us that were fans of Secret Agent, back in the day, are morally certain that it was in fact John Drake that was kidnapped and taken to The Village in The Prisoner.
In fact, this was so taken for granted that David McDaniel actually came out and said so in his licensed novel about The Prisoner, though he was the only writer connected with the show on any level to make the connection explicit. None of the other licensed novelists dared to go there.
Not as many of us are as sure of this, though I absolutely am, that the last episode of The Prisoner — “Fall Out” — was largely a hallucination Drake experienced as part of the drug-fueled interrogation the Village handlers inflicted on him, as postulated in the DC comics mini-series by Dean Motter and Mark Askwith.
I’m also completely certain that Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Time Tunnel took place in the same fictional universe …
… though I don’t think Land of the Giants or Lost in Space are included there. City Beneath the Sea is, though … and the President depicted in that film? That is totally an older Harriman Nelson sporting that ‘stache.
How do I know these things? I just do. It’s how my brain is wired. Same way I know that wasn’t the real Jim Phelps in the first Mission: Impossible movie with Tom Cruise, or that Star Trek Nemesis doesn’t count. Some things are just imprinted. Nerd-ROM.
The funny thing is, they’re different for everyone. Almost every fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The X-Files or Star Wars is adamant that only certain things count — but you’ll never get any two of us to agree on what that is.
(In our household, just FYI, Buffy ended at season five, The X-Files ran three and a half seasons and the first movie, and the only Star Wars out there is the original three movies — the first of which is called Star Wars, not “A New Hope.” And yes, we’re curmudgeons.)
I’ll bet you’ve got a list of your own. Feel free to sound off about a few of your continuity facts that you are morally certain of down below in the comments, and I’ll see you here next week.
Maintenance Note: Honestly, I never expected this many comments. For whatever reason, some of them are getting hung up in the queue; I am trying to keep an eye on this, so if your comment doesn’t go up right away, please be patient with us — don’t panic and post it three more times. It’ll get there.
I understand the desire to have the Wayne murder be unsolved. It’s a very TV series sort of idea, a wound that can’t be healed with drives Batman to fight all crime, thinking maybe one day he’ll catch his parent’s killer. But it’s also unnecessary to the character. I don’t really mind either way. Having it just be some shlub is better than having it be the Joker, anyway.
My opinion is that everything counts. I think it’s unfair to discount parts of a story you don’t like. The X-Files lost the overarching plot somewhere around the first movie, but there were plenty of good standalone episodes after that, which were the series’ real strength. And even if the UPN years weren’t as good, there’s still things to like in the later Buffy seasons. Especially the musical.
Doctor Who is pretty notorious for headcanon as well– I could go on. I don’t love the Timeless Child retcon, but a re-retcon would be an even worse idea. Just move on and make good stories. (Okay, so in my headcanon, the Time Lords are evolved future humans who travel back to the dawn of time and set up rules to make sure their existence comes to pass, and the Doctor is subsconsciously drawn to Earth because of this. and the Doctor and the Master traveled the universe as companions back in the day and got into scrapes together until something split them apart. But also I’d never put this in an episode.)
“Same way I know that wasn’t the real Jim Phelps in the first Mission: Impossible movie with Tom Cruise,” I always thought when Antony Hopkins appeared in the second film he should have introduced himself as Jim Phelps. Ethan: “You’re not Jim.” “I’m the new Jim Phelps. I have documentation to prove it.”
I disagree with Greg’s definition. Head canon isn’t stuff we all agree is wrong, it’s the stuff maybe one or two people believes. For example Manly Wade Wellman’s idea that Mrs. Hudson was a young, sexy widow and Holmes’ lover.
By contrast “Mopee didn’t happen” is a nigh-universal belief. It’s not even fan canon as a subsequent letter column said “yeah, everyone hates it, it no longer happened.” Same with having a supervillain blow up Krypton or Marty Pasko’s idea Superman’s glasses hypnotize everyone into seeing Clark Kent as a skinny wimp.
Or “nobody knows who killed the Waynes” which I believe they returned to in the New 52, then dropped. I think it’s become one of those retcons and reboots that just pop up every so often, like “the Amazons have vanished” or “there are no other Kryptonians.”
Marty Pasko’s idea Superman’s glasses hypnotize everyone into seeing Clark Kent as a skinny wimp actually came from a reader called Al Schroeder III, a fan from Nashville, Tennessee who submitted an idea to DC for a story to explain away this “problem” which Pasko turned into the story in Superman #330
This I did not know, or if I ever knew, I forgot.
In my head canon, Chuck Cunningham was recruited into the CIA and all record of his existence was wiped out, right down to briefing his family to never speak of him again. Tragically, he was killed in Vietnam, while on a mission with one Sgt Theodore Cleaver, who everyone knows was killed in Vietnam.
Robert McCall of the Equalizer is David Callan, of the Callan series, after he has quit as Hunter and gone out on his own.
The Guy Doleman Number 2, from The Arrival,” in the Prisoner, is Col. Ross, from the Harry Palmer films and Palmer is unwittingly an agent of The Village, helping to identify and capture prisoners.
Cathy Gale went undercover as a flying circus troupe leader, to infiltrate an attempt to rob Ft Knox. She took the name Pussy Galore and worked her way into Auric Goldfinger’s inner circle, where she encounters MI-6 agent James Bond. Bond retires and is replaced by a new agent, using the “legend,” and he encounters Emma Peel, who is now actually widowed, after the death of Peter Peel, in a car accident and she is suffering from depression when she meets Bond. He stops her killing herself and then gets involved with her father, marc Ange Draco, who had previously masqueraded as industrialist Sir John Knght, and then faked his own death and returned to Corsica, as head of the Union Corse. Emma Peel, returning to the UK after her husband’s apparent death, in the Amazon, discovers John Steed poking around Knight industries and he reveals the truth of his activities. She then shuts down Knight Industries and joins Steed as a consulting agent. After she is reunited with Peter Peel, Steed sends her word that her father is alive, in Corsica and she tracks him down, confronts him and they have a fight and she storms off. Peter is racing after her, when his car hits the shoulder of a narrow mountain road and he is killed. Emma becomes distraught and suicidal with the death of her husband and the breach with her father and tries to kill herself, , but is stopped by the new, mysterious James Bond. The events of their courtship, battle with Blofeld and SPECTRE and marriage and her death then play out. Bond, unable to console himself, shoots himself, after a drunken binge. Old Bond is recruited by M to hunt down Blofeld and then picks up the Diamond mission. Afterward, he retires again, until he is brought back in, by M’s replacement, to deal with a returned Blofeld and his agent, Max Largo, who tries to carry out the same nuclear blackmail that SPECTRE tried before. After Old Bond re-retires, MI-6 recruits Simon Templar to masquerade as Bond, for the next decade, before training a new agent to take his place. That agent resigns after avenging his friends’ injury and murder and MI-6 recruits the mysterious con artist, who went by the name Remington Steele, who takes on the role, until he is ready to retire and a new Bond is trained, after he is recruited from the ranks of the underworld, where he pulled off a double-cross of a crime lord.
I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Jeff, but it’s official – you’re weird. 🙂
My favorite explanation for the events of _The Prisoner_ series is that it is the main character idly speculating on what will happen to him as he drives in to resign. Which is why the stories range from gritty spy thriller to pure fantasy.
Stickmaker, I agree to the extent that the show is partly about the power of the mind. I think McGoohan said in an interview something like “we are all Prisoners/we all keep prisons, in our own heads”.
Compare the saying in golf that it’s a deceptively difficult sport since you’re playing your toughest opponent: yourself.