THE MAGIC WEAPON

I’ve been reading The Seven Basic Plots by Christopher Booker.

In The Hero’s journey, he suggests something like – the hero (usually a man) stumbles on a situation where everything isn’t as it out to be: a town is threatened, a princess is distraught, etc.

There’s “the call”, where someone appeals to his conscience, his heart, lower down...

He decides to do something about the situation, and there is a honeymoon period where it seems he will be able to succeed without two much bother. (Bond discovers the bad guy’s lair, and tells Felix Leiter he has a fool-proof plan to destroy it).

Then things go wrong and the hero has to risk death to do what he set out to do. But he does.

Then there’s a moment of apparent victory, before the unexpected twist. (He’s rescued the love of his life – but then the volcano explodes and a falling rock destroys his escape vehicle.)

Everything’s up in the air again. Having given his all, he now has to dig deeper.

Eventually, of course, he succeeds. Stories where he doesn’t tend to be really disappointing. They survive. He wins the treasure, the princess, the kingdom...

Booker points out that the hero usually wins with a “magic weapon”. That might be a light-sabre, an amulet, something that someone said at the beginning of the story, a reel of thread to find his way back out of the maze.

Very often, the magic weapon is given to the hero by the princess.

The day after I read this, I was watching Andy’s Prehistoric Adventures on CBeebies, with my grandson.

The program story-arc goes like this – Andy is working in the museum. His smarter (prettier) co-worker will be setting up some new display. She will explain it all to Andy, thus fore-arming him with a little “magic weapon” that he will recall later.

Andy, clumsily, ruins some part of the display.

But he also has a “magic weapon” of his own, a time-travelling grandfather clock he found in the museum.

Using this, he travels back to the dinosaur days, where he sets out to find a replacement for what he broke. A simple mission turns dangerous. Then he remembers what his co-worker said.

Having struggled to find the object, he can claim victory.

But something else goes wrong. Perhaps he doesn’t have enough time to get back the clock before it leaves. So, he hitches a lift from a pterodactyl. Or whatever.

He gets back in the nick of time and places the object in the display. His co-worker comments admiringly on it, and Andy blushes. (It is children’s TV, after all!)

Just a random TV program, on children’s TV, but it fits the profile!

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Magic weapons. What was the last film or program you watched that included a magic weapon? Remember, it doesn’t need to be magic, and it doesn’t need to be a weapon.