#lord high executioner

[beardedmrbean]

[tribo-art]

(Haven't uploaded in a LOOOOONG time) I've been on a Goosebumps kick lately so here's the Lord High Executioner from Terror Tower.

[ravenpoefan]

Uhhhh sir? 👀

[tv-moments]

Dirty John

Season 1: The John Meehan Story, “Lord High Executioner“

Director: Jeffrey Reiner

DoP: Todd McMullen

[myepisodecalendar]

Dirty John Season 1 - Episode 5: Lord High Executioner AirDate: December 23rd, 2018, 10:00 PM

[mrpinniped]

Guys I don’t have very many rail cues in this show and I got bored and created this monstrosity.

I’m sure all of you really needed to see a shirtless Koko in tight purple pants posing ridiculously.

[dailycryptodrawings]

489: A Night in Terror Tower Who said it was classic executioner??

Full Episodes

Thank you again for another wonderful theme week!

[allieinarden]

Since I’m mentally on the subject now, IMPORTANT GILBERT AND SULLIVAN QUESTION: does Ko-Ko ever fall in love with Katisha?

A word of explanation. My mom was in The Mikado in high school--she used to play the CD a lot when we were kids--and here’s how she always explained the story to us: a couple of the characters, Ko-Ko among them, find themselves staring down a death sentence. For a number of hilarious and convoluted reasons, their only hope is for Ko-Ko to marry Nanki-Poo’s former betrothed Katisha, “a most unattractive old thing,” as Ko-Ko describes her, “with a caricature of a face.” However, he’s a duck bent on self-preservation (besides which, as the Lord High Executioner he’s been tasked with beheading himself and the word “awkward” doesn’t cut it), so he goes to Katisha and woos her by singing “On a tree by a river” (the song my younger self and everybody else knows as “Tit-Willow”). Plot twist, though: the two of them hit it off! They’re both a tad evil and they’re into the same weird scary stuff and they sing a whole musical number about it (“There is Beauty in the Bellow of the Blast”), and the stage is set for the glad grand finale number. 

I saw a production of the show when I was on the younger side and I don’t remember any glaring difference from the story as I knew it--though I can’t say I recall exactly how it was staged. A few years ago, though, I saw my friend in another staging and was immediately struck by how not into Katisha Ko-Ko was at any given moment. His attitude toward her didn’t change from the beginning of the play to the end: he was forced up the aisle with shaking knees, and the show ended with a dissatisfied Katisha, the honeymoon phase over, seizing hold of the enormous axe he’d been toting around the entire play and pursuing him with it while he yowled in horror, an apparent microcosm of married life. 

Much as I loathed to admit it, once I thought about it, I realized that this was probably the intended reading! Katisha is the one clearly taking the lead in “There is Beauty in the Bellow of the Blast,” with Ko-Ko simply assenting (probably with increasing horror) to her increasingly terrifying whims, and also he asks her “Do you think you are sufficiently decayed?” and there’s no way that’s not sarcastic (right? But this is Gilbert and Sullivan, after all). I haven’t seen a production since, but I’m guessing that this is the default way of playing it, and that the high-school staging my mother knew was a lighthearted anomaly. 

The thing is, though, besides being a shade more satisfying, I think my mother’s ending is actually funnier. It’s hilarious for some nervous wreck of an executioner who’s never even killed a guinea pig to fall for this lightning-loving nightmare lady over the course of a ridiculous musical number. It’s hilarious for him to seriously describe her as a “ruin that’s romantic.” It’s hilarious for him to then turn on her and tell her with smug assurance, “You’ve a very good bargain in me.” It’s so much sillier and better than a string of ball-and-chain jokes, I feel. Plus, Katisha is extremely sympathetic. Despite her comedic value as the pantomime Grande Dame (read: unattractive old crone), she gets what may be the only solemn aria in all of Gilbert and Sullivan, “Alone and Yet Alive,” in which she bemoans her sad fate (too old to be loved, too young to shuffle off this mortal coil) and asks, “May not a cheated maiden die?” You hold your breath, waiting for the joke, but there is no joke. It would seem deeply unfair to wrench this character from the socket of empty stereotype in this way, only to shove her back into it and reduce her again to a mere gag--the repulsive matrimonial prospect--without due compensation. 

So I ask: does this interpretation exist anywhere outside my mother’s high school memories and my own self-made mythology? Friends, enlighten me!