Drink Wilkins Coffee... or else!

So here's a strange historical artifact: the Wilkins Coffee commercials produced by Jim Henson between 1957 and 1961 and they are a work of art.

The ads feature two characters: Wilkins (who, I kid you not, is the Kermit prototype puppet), whose job is to shill Wilkins Coffee, and Wontkins, who doesn't want it. Over the course of at least a couple of dozens commercials Wilkins tries to “persuade” Wontkins to try some. In pursuit of this goal Wontkins is repeatedly humiliated, threatened, stabbed, shot, run over, blown up, thrown out of aircraft and in various one-off indignities he is executed by electric chair, eaten by a whale and crushed by the Washington Monument.

Any number of these near or actually fatal humiliations are accompanied by Wilkins declaring “Things just happen to people who don't drink Wilkins Coffee.”. Hell, in one or two of them, after dispatching Wontkins, Wilkins even threatens the audience.

Its like the secret origin of The Muppet Show and you can watch it here. 

Extra History: the best thing on Youtube

I know I've whinged about this before but the myopia of history education in this country really annoys me. As a child, I hated history lessons because there were only ever four topics: vikings, Tudors and the two world wars. As an adult, I found I actually loved history through shows like The Mark Steel Lecture, which introduced me to a much wider field of history.

Which brings me to Extra History, definitely my favourite series on Youtube and maybe my favourite thing on the internet.

This is a series on the Extra Credits channel which tackles historical subjects voted for by Patreon supporters. The videos are about six to ten minutes long each with main series of four to six episodes plus one- or two-part specials. Obviously, they're only brief discussions to a subject but that makes them absolutely perfect for someone who wants to experience a great breadth of subject matter, which I do.

It was Walpole...

There are so many series that have been about people and things I've heard the names of but had no idea what they actually. I'd heard of the South Sea Bubble and knew it was something about economics but was completely unprepared for a) the startling reality of this mad confidence trick or b) the existence of Robert Walpole, a man so corrupt and yet so brilliant you can't help but like him. In fact, in future series, the running gag of how Walpole was connected to everything has lead to the writers of this series playing “Six Degrees of Walpole” to see how many different subjects they could connect him to (and that they managed it with the First Crusade and the Japanese Warring States Period tells you something about the guy).

All I knew about Catherine The Great was the (totally untrue) horse story but not only did I find her fascinating but also her (supposed) husband General Potemkin, who turns up in episode five of her series. The same holds true for Ned Kelly, Hiawatha or Justinian and Theodora. Even more fun, at least for me, are the series on subjects I'd never even heard of like the Brothers Gracchi, Kamehameha the Great, Admiral Yi (especially interesting, that series) or Suleiman the Magnificent (who had the most petty way of addressing the Holy Roman Emperor you can imagine).

The series that has just started is about The Bronze Age Collapse, an event I had never even heard of or even imagined that something on this sort of international scale would be part of the Bronze Age world.

My favourite thing about the series, though, is that each main series ends with an episode called Lies. Whilst the main episodes are narrated with still art, Lies is presented to camera by the writers. These are the episodes where the writers confess to all the places they editorialised, skipped details for time, or just plain screwed up and got told so by the comments section (there is a downright parodic history in the series of not getting the British flag right, not that I blame them as the history of our flag is a mess where every change is heralded by a law that always has the same name), and, of course, this is also where you get Six Degrees Of Walpole. The reason I love these episodes (aside from Walpole) is that they're not only a fantastic way to introduce extra context that would be a distraction in the main series but also that they demonstrate how important it is not to take any one source as gospel. They even point that out in the show, that no source should be trusted absolutely.

So, if you have an interest in history, go to the Extra Credits channel, examine the Extra History playlist and jump in on the first series that interests you. You won't be disappointed. 

Another great history fact...

I don't know if it is. I hope it is because this would be the best hook for a historical novel ever.

Apparently, in the seventeenth century, Mexico was absolutely crawling with unemployed mercenary samurai. Imagine it: Auf Wiedersehen, Pet with seventeenth century samurai! That's a fantastic hook, isn't it? 

Positive Things: Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work

You've got to love the work of a craftsman. I know some people like to maintain a distance between what they love and how those things are made but I grew up a Doctor Who fan in the '90s and so I grew up reading episode guides and Doctor Who Magazine interviews with classic cast and crew.

So when I see something like this it makes me re-evaluate the way I read comics since this set of panels is quite famous nowadays. I wish it were more famous, frankly, since as Wood says there are too many writers who treat their scripts like radio scripts, as if they don't have images to help tell the story.

(I'm not just talking about Chris Claremont, but he is sort of the ur-example here.) 

What links Batman and WW1 propaganda?

Giant pennies...

… the key to victory. 

Japanese War Tubas

They existed. Here's photographic evidence. They were an acoustic, pre-radar form of aircraft detection. The operator wore earphones attached to the giant tuba horn.

Yeah, I'm just not up to anything more complicated than this today. 

Extra History and the GOOD side of the internet

The internet is a shitty, shitty place at times. Just this week controversy over a character beat in Avengers: Age Of Ultron somehow snowballed over social media into Joss Whedon receiving death threats and shutting down his Twitter account. That controversy is certainly worth discussing because that discussion could take in a lot of larger issues of female representation in film and also works as a good case study in why we shouldn't put creators on a political pedestal that they'll inevitably fall from because they're human and unable to consider every socio-political angle of their work.

But, of course, this is the internet and so a section of this debate gave in to the human tendency towards extremism and starting screaming threats. This, however, is a discussion for another day, in my case preferably a day when Whedon has released more details about what was said to him and when I've viewed the scene in question more than once.

Today I want to cheer myself up by talking about something good on the internet, something educational that gives me faith that the average person on the net isn't just there to make themselves feel big by screaming their views at the top of their capslocks with zero critical thought applied to themselves.

I want to talk about a little Youtube series called Extra History.

I've written in the past that I believe strongly in populist history. Not dumbed down history, not inaccurate history (though small inaccuracies are sometimes a necessary evil which we'll get to later) but presenting history in an accessible way.

I love history but the history I love isn't the history I was ever taught at school. History at school was very dry, a list of facts that create a very clean and ordered narrative leading from A to B to, about 70% of the time, a World War. The other 30% of the time we were doing the later Tudor monarchs. We didn't get much context outside of the big facts we'd need to know for the exam.

So that's why I love populist history series like The Mark Steel Lectures and the series we're talking today: Extra History.

Let's take one of the subjects I allegedly “learnt” about at school: the outbreak of the First World War. As far as my teachers and, sadly, I was concerned how it went was Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand was shot in a way presented as a sort of dress rehearsal for Dallas 1963 and a few weeks later the war began. We were given no context, no details of the politics that led to the assassination. All we were told, all we were judged to need, was that Ferdinand's death was categorically the spark that ignited the war. I don't even think it was a whole lesson.

A couple days ago Youtube threw Extra History at me in my recommendations and they had a series of five videos called World War I: The Seminal Tragedy. Two things were important about these videos. The first was that it covered the assassination of Ferdinand and the other events leading into the Great War in greater detail than I'd ever heard. They presented the story as grand tragedy, which it obviously is but which school failed to fully clue me in on. The players are presented briefly but concisely and I was startled by the fact that several attempts to kill Ferdinand that day failed and how he eventually died only through a startling coincidence.

The second thing that was good about the series was the final video, subtitled simply “Lies” in which the series writer James Portnow corrects some artistic mistakes (anachronistic flags), common mistakes he made (saying “Moscow” instead of “St. Petersburg” in reference to the Russian capital of the day), confessing that some incidents in the video were based on common readings of events rather than absolute facts and offering some extra context that couldn't fit in the previous episodes due to time considerations. Portnow gains great respect from me for then saying “don't trust us […] don't trust any one source”, which is one of the most important things to learnt about history.

I actually took the fact about Britain's national debt in yesterday's post from the Extra History series on the South Sea Bubble, something I'd heard the name of but had absolutely no idea what it was even though it continues to affect our country's economy. I did make sure to do a little reading before citing it and, though some details were glossed over in the video, the fact was sound enough to use as the basis of a post.

I guess this brings us to the “necessary evil” of small inaccuracies, which Portnow admits to in that one episode. First off these videos are made by a staff of three people and he's the sole writer so there are going to be things he misses. Second is, as he says, its good practice to check you've been told the truth or if there are other interpretations, which the day before a general election I think is a lesson worth teaching for a lot of other aspects of our lives.

But why does this restore a little of my faith in humanity after the Whedon thing? Because Extra History started off as a marketing thing: a series on the Punic Wars paid for by the makers of Rome: Total War but now its paid for, and the subjects voted for, by Extra Credits' Patreon backers. Those backers voted for the South Sea Bubble over the campaigns of Julius Ceasar. They chose an obscure event over one they would have known to be flashy and exciting. Its a decision that was considered and driven in the majority of cases by a genuine desire to be educated. That version of the internet, a tool for education used by people who want to be educated, is one I wish I had more examples to crow about.

[Extra History is hosted on the Extra Credits Youtube channel here.]