The Secret Is Out There

One Man's Poison Is Another Man's Historical TV Show Episode
Now that "24" is in the past, about six minutes in the past, I feel I've let enough time go by to share something that happened on the show 12 minutes before it was over.

You may first want to bear in mind that, unless my eyes deceived me, Kiefer Sutherland drove by me the day they announced the show was over (see my blog of that day); and the star of "House" drove by me a hundred miles from L.A. the day a USA Today article on "24" described one of the reasons given for ending the show was to have a better lead-in for "House" (see my blog of that day). Also, I've occasionally mentioned "24" in my blogs at various other times - to research, go to archive.org and find where I've posted several volumes of my collected blogs ("Jonathan D. Steinhoff's Sometimes Blog, Volume 1", etc.), and do a word search - or just rummage around here at Blogspot for the original blog postings.

It had recently occurred to me that, with this somewhat special "24" attention I was getting, it seemed a little out of the ordinary that so much time had gone by since they had made an inside-reference to my material. This made it seem more likely that they were waiting for the final episode. And sure enough, I have come to the objective conclusion that this is exactly what happened.

Twelve minutes before the end, as they were taking away that woman who was at CTU working on behalf of that former president who reminds me of Nixon, she said something that immediately brought to mind my 1978 CalArts video, "How Did The Future Learn To Play Monopoly," which I've also mentioned here and there in a few blogs. "Take your hands off of me," she shouted as they were leading her away in handcuffs. It was very close to the way the star of my video, Henry Golas (who was once Groucho Marx' right hand), intoned the words, "Take your grubby hands off of me," as they were leading him away to be tortured.

So I started to think. Because this is the exact kind of short-hand used to put my mind on track with something, which then leads me to something else, which they had waiting for me. It would not count as a reference in and of itself, that would be way too thin. Unless there was some other thing that belonged alongside it, so that, cumulatively, they would be revealed as having deliberately brought something in particular to mind.

But what? And then it became obvious, and clearly the point, and clearly one I had discovered through objective thought, rather than by some stretch.

In "How Did The Future Learn To Play Monopoly," we find a future scenario in which only one person alive still knows how to play Monopoly (trademark Parker Bros.). And so they must make him talk, they have to make him talk. They have the Monopoly board, the Monopoly pieces - it must be made to work. But he doesn't want to talk. In his words, "It's a terrible game! A horrible game!" He did not want the seed of the precepts of capitalism to reenter this future world through the gate of knowledge that was the rules of how to play Monopoly (trademark Parker Bros.), - at least, that is one take on the significance of his resolve not to release the secret. So they take him to a room and begin chanting over and over, "We wanna play Monopoly! We wanna play Monopoly!" Until finally, he cracks. "Alright! I'll teach you! Just stop torturing me!" he shouts. This is the one work of mine that contains an unmistakable parallel (semi-parallel) to the thing about "24" that has made that show so controversial.

That's My Story And They're Sticking To Something That's Not Entirely Different, At Least In Terms Of The Idea For The Title
In 1978 I gave a copy of "How Did The Future Learn To Play Monopoly" to then non-producer Sean Daniel, who was the first person who told me of the school I had just graduated from, CalArts. At the time he was Universal's spokesman for the first Robert Zemeckis movie, "I Wanna Hold Your Hand". When Zemeckis later made "Back To The Future," wherein the movie title camps up confusion of past and present tenses owing to "future" being in the title, I knew why it reminded me of, "How Did The Future Learn To Play Monopoly." But that's another story.