Book vs. Movie
Conan the Barbarian
By Russ Bickerstaff
August 24, 2011
In this corner: the Book. A collection of words that represent ideas when filtered through the lexical systems in a human brain. From clay tablets to bound collections of wood pulp to units of stored data, the book has been around in one format or another for some 3,800 years.
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Conan The Barbarian
In the early 1930s, Texas pulp fiction author Robert E. Howard invented a character for a series of fantasy stories that ended-up framing a whole new era in historical adventure fiction. With a series of stories about his barbarian hero Conan, Howard helped carve out the sword and sorcery subgenre of fantasy adventure fiction. (There are those who say he invented it.) Conan’s exploits had met with some commercial success prior to the author’s suicide at the age of 30 in 1936. It took some time for the dramatic potential of Conan to be recognized by Hollywood. Nearly half a century after the first stories saw print, a charismatic bodybuilder who had little talent for acting launched the more successful end of his screen acting career with a couple of successful Conan films in ’82 and ’84. Nearly a couple of decades later, the character is revisited for another big-budget film. How do the original stories compare with the films of the 1980s and the character’s latest cinematic incarnation?
The Original Stories
Robert E. Howard’s Conan predated Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, C.S. Lewis’ Narnia and even Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, While heroic fiction was actually pretty common at the time (some of the most prolific surviving work in that genre being Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stuff,) there really hadn’t been anything regularly produced for commercial consumption resembling sword and sorcery fantasy or epic historical fantasy. With so many towering figures in the genre being British, it seems pleasantly incongruous that the contemporary end of the heroic fantasy genre would’ve been popularized in the early ‘30s by a kid from Texas. Howard had grown-up fascinated by the works of Rudyard Kipling, Jack London and, perhaps most importantly, Thomas Bulfinch. A healthy interest in mythology and encouragement from teachers saw Howard embark on a career as a professional author.
Though Howard went on to create a number of characters, his most enduring and wildly popular is the barbarian Conan. Though he is envisioned as a warrior from the mists of ancient history, the character has a distinctly American disposition about him. He’s not some hero from ancient nobility, mortal, immortal or otherwise. Nor is he an ordinary person cast into an extraordinarily epic situation. True, he first appeared as a middle-aged king in a story The Phoenix and the Sword, but the story firmly establishes that he was a king who had been born a barbarian and claimed his title by killing the previous king. This was an old-fashioned hero who had come to greatness through good old-fashioned hard work and determination - a real up by his ragged fur-lined bootstraps kind of a guy.
That first story also establishes the mystical end of the character’s exploits as he is confronted by an otherworldly force inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft. With both sword and sorcery firmly in hand, Conan was a hit. That first story appeared in Weird Tales, a horror/fantasy anthology once referred to as, “the magazine that never dies.” (It continues to be published to this day long after most other anthologies have died off.)
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