Lesson plan:

Magical agents

View Copy Cat

Discuss the function of the copy-cat hat in the story and link it to the tradition of magical agents in tales and films.
In what ways is the copy cat hat similar to traditional magical agents and in what ways does it differ (for example it makes people do silly things for comic purposes.)

Individual work

Students write their own tale incorporating such an agent. Older students may be able to spoof the function of such agents in stories much the same way as Copy Cat does.

Explore realism in film

View and discuss

View Next TIme Around. In Next Time Around and Copy Cat the characters do strange things against their will. The causes of their strange actions are different - in one it is hypnosis and in the other a Mongolian hat. Discuss with the class which cause they consider to be more real and why this is so.

Class discussion

Compare the Copy Cat episode with Next Time Around episode to explore some of the conventions of realism. The concept of realism is a complex one and at this level should be treated simply as a series of judgements we make based upon our cultural, life and media experiences. In other words we make judgements about probability and plausibility based on our experiences of everyday life and films and television shows with which we are familiar. Discuss some of these idea with the class to demonstrate the concept that the real depends greatly upon our expectations of the genre.

Prompt Questions:

• Why are laugh tracks acceptable in a situation comedy and not on the news?
• If all the news for the day is bad why doesn't the television station make up some good news for the evening broadcast?
• In some films people break into song in the middle of a sentence. Do people do this in real life?
• In documentaries shaky camera work looks real but we never see it in feature films. Why?
• People prefer fine weather to poor weather. Why doesn't the evening weather report always tell us that we can expect good weather.

Continuing narratives

Class discussion

Re-cap the story of Next Time Around. This episode opens with the continuing narrative of Bronson's resistance to his father's marriage plans. Discuss how this issue is established as a problem and how it is left unresolved in this episode. Ask students to suggest how this problem could be used as the basis for events and storylines in later episodes. What other stories could the writers get out of this issue?

Sexism

Class discussion

The episode Next Time Around also highlights another continuing theme throughout Round the Twist - Linda's rebellion against male chauvinism. Linda objects to the term "Birdman" (See also Know All and Icemaiden). Use this as an opportunity to draw attention to the gendered nature of English. Ask students to suggest other examples of gendered terms and discuss the appropriateness in each case.

Magical agents

The idea of a 'magical agent' able to convey fantastic powers to its owner is as old as storytelling itself. Vladimir Propp in his study of fairy tales found the magical agent to be a recurring motif in all tales regardless of where they come from (Propp, V (1868) Morphology of the Folk Tale University of Texas Press, Austin Texas). This idea of the magical agent with fantastic powers appears in many contemporary forms - spinach in Popeye stories, Jim Carrey's mask in The Mask, the light saber in Star Wars.