The elves in the film are portrayed as legendary beings known as the Vendequm. According to the Santa Claus: The Movie novelization written by science fiction/fantasy novelist Joan D. Vinge, the elves keep watch over all that happens in the world that borders their own magical realm.

Santa Claus: The Movie is a straightforward attempt to explore the mysteries of Santa Claus with the key objective being to answer some of the basic questions many children have about the Santa Claus mythos, such as how Santa’s reindeer fly, how he and his wife made it to the North Pole, how Santa ascends chimneys, among other things.

I have worked out that Charles Darwin could not be my father, because he died in 1882, but I am going to finish the book anyway.

aldous huxley on fanservice

Another author who preferred to tell the Whole Truth was Fielding. “Tom Jones” is one of the very few Odyssean books written in Europe between the time of Aeschylus and the present age; Odyssean, because never tragical; never—even when painful and disastrous, even when pathetic and beautiful things are happening. For they do happen; Fielding, like Homer, admits all the facts, shirks nothing. Indeed, it is precisely because these authors shirk nothing that their books are not tragical. For among the things they don’t shirk are the irrelevancies which, in actual life, always temper the situations and characters that writers of tragedy insist on keeping chemically, pure. Consider, for example, the case of Sophy Western, that most charming, most nearly perfect of young women. Fielding, it is obvious, adored her; (she is said to have been created in the image of his first, much-loved wife). But in spite of his adoration, he refused to turn her into one of those chemically pure and, as it were, focussed beings who do and suffer in the world of tragedy. That innkeeper who lifted the weary Sophia from her horse—what need had he to fall? In no tragedy would he (nay, could he) have collapsed beneath her weight. For, to begin with, in the tragical context weight is an irrelevance; heroines should be above the law of gravitation. But that is not all; let the reader now remember what were the results of his fall. Tumbling flat on his back, he pulled Sophia down on top of him—his belly was a cushion, so that happily she came to no bodily harm—pulled her down head first. But head first is necessarily legs last; there was a momentary display of the most ravishing charms; the bumpkins at the inn door grinned or guffawed; poor Sophia, when they picked her up, was blushing in an agony, of embarrassment and wounded modesty. There is nothing intrinsically improbable about this incident, which is stamped, indeed, with all the marks of literary truth. But however true, it is an incident which could never, never have happened to a heroine of tragedy. It would never have been allowed to happen. But Fielding refused to impose the tragedian’s veto; he shirked nothing—neither the intrusion of irrelevant absurdities into the midst of romance or disaster, nor any of life’s no less irrelevantly painful interruptions of the course of happiness. He did not want to be a tragedian. And, sure enough, that brief and pearly gleam of Sophia’s charming posterior was sufficient to scare the Muse of Tragedy out of “Tom Jones,” just as, more than five and twenty centuries before, the sight of stricken men first eating, then remembering to weep, then forgetting their tears in slumber had scared her out of the Odyssey.

(Aldous Huxley, “Tragedy and the Whole Truth”)

I pointed out that if she were thrown into a tank of man-eating sharks she would not think it morbid to consider the possibility of exit from the tank.

Julie scans a brain chart and intuits that Stu is trapped in a “nightmare loop.”

What’s the Grim Reaper doing here, besides nudging along the exposition and dropping ironic bon mots?

Ann‘Ev’, in a striking scene, shrinks to diminutive size, climbs into a reproduction of Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’, talks to some of the figures there represented, and emerges bearing some fruit.

Her two henchmen are the Bastard Marwenne, a giant, physically and priapically, and a sketchily-drawn trickster named Egg.

Staggering into the silence of the theater lobby after the ordeal was over, I found a big poster that was fresh off the presses with the quotes of junket blurbsters. “It will obliterate your senses!” reports David Gillin, who obviously writes autobiographically. “It will suck the air right out of your lungs!” vows Diane Kaminsky.