Before the Gyconi gets lost in this story the same way the real Gyconi got lost, it brings up an interesting thing. As is probably obvious by now, I’m fascinated by the overlap between fictional structure and reality. Why do we tell the same stories over and over, generation after generation? They’re slightly modded, localized, and updated, but they are the same stories.
My theory, and I won’t dwell on it, is that it’s because dramatic structures, like Joseph Campbell’s template, are modeled on real life, but amplified. Think of any story you tell about your life that comes out well. There’s a call to adventure, a refusal of a call, you cross the threshold, there are gatekeepers, mentors, etc. Next time you find yourself telling a story, analyze it. I think you’ll find it has all of the aspects of the heroic template.
I’m not Spider-Man, but if you lose the webs and the Green Goblin, my heroic stories are the same as his. And the real world is filled with all sorts of magical objects. We just don’t think of them that way. Long before I arrived at Ruby-Spears, there was an award known as the SS Eisenberg. It was an old battleship named after Jerry Eisenberg, a writer at Ruby-Spears. The SS Eisenberg was a model of a World War II ship, about eighteen inches long, that sat on a shelf. It was awarded to the writer or artist who had done the most to destroy their own career. For some reason, I won the Eisenberg in 1983. It’s not like there was a formal selection process; it was just presented to me. Seemed pretty unanimous. Truth is, I have no idea why. I left it in my office, or maybe gave it back to Buzz or Jack when I left Ruby-Spears for Lucasfilm, but that’s the interesting thing: Magical situations create magic objects. Weird things that exist for no reason and are ritualistically passed around.
Another one at Ruby-Spears was “The OJ,” which was my creation. When I was in sixth grade, I began the one and only collecting binge of my life. It was a contest Coca-Cola had. They printed pictures of the Chicago Bears players on bottle caps, and if you collected five sets (along with logos of all of the NFL teams) and took them to a Coca-Cola distributor, you got a free football. It was an obsession. I went to every bar in town and sifted through the bar trash, and it was a really big day was when I got a Gayle Sayers or a Mike Ditka. The hardest cap to find was the one with the New York Jets logo, and my mother drove me halfway across the North Shore to get one from a guy named Howie Sinker, who found one in his lunch Coke.
So I got a football signed by O. J. Simpson when he was still a running back. Somehow, the OJ ball traveled with me from Chicago to Carmel to Los Angeles to Ruby-Spears, and chucking the OJ became a thing. What an odd journey, and what an odd thing in a group of people who were not jocks. Everybody seemed to like chucking the OJ. Somewhere along the line, the OJ disappeared, as magic objects are wont to do. I wish I had it now, but it looms large.
You get the idea. Magic times come with strange magical objects that seem to travel through space and time with a destiny all their own and then magically disappear. If I had any of these things, I’d mount them and display them, and people would wonder why.