The Satan sequence.....
I saw this on T.V. recently after many years since the first time I watched it and that part where they meet Satan in the void is one of the most chilling thing's I've ever seen.
share*shivers* scared me too. I seriously think this movie should've been PG . good thing it's coming to DVD finally .
shareThe 'satan sequence' took some of the kid out of me. Powerful stuff to say the least. I was 5 when this came out and I think I must've seen it at about 6-8. Funny thing is, it grew scarier as I got older; when I could fully understand what he was talking about.
Don't you find that 'Injun Joe' (who is one scary mofo himelf), utterly pales in comparison when up against the sheer nihilism and detachment that is 'Satan'?
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"Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists save empty space..and you, and you..are but a thought.
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Indeed, extremley frightening for me when I was a child. Now I watched it last night after I bought it (im 25) and its still as creepy and scary as it ever was.
shareIndeed, its powerful filmmaking, though I think its pretty poorly placed in this otherwise mostly upbeat film. I honestly had trouble sleeping the night after I saw it.
I had seen an edited version on the Disney channel and they had removed "the Mysterious Stranger" ("the satan scene"). I'm actually glad I hadn't seen this version until I was older, otherwise I would have probably not liked this film as much.
What I didn't know until I looked it up, was that this was actually a book that Mark Twain had been working on until he died. The Vinton version is a pretty liberal departure from the actual story, but the message is the same. (yikes)
Yeah--I forgot how creepy this scene was. I had to leave the room when I saw it again.
"I can do no wrong...for I do not know what it is." Brrr....
it definitely made me shiver too, especially the end sequence which got you think about life and humanity.
shareWhat his message is is similar to what I think, but with more sense and evaluation-of-humanity thought to it. These have given these many questions, and after seeing the scene on youtube (type in 'creepy') I noticed he was a bit more negative. My evaluations are: (SOME ARE ANTI-RELIGOUS, SO CAUTION)
- all humans have a tendency to learn and gain knowledge with developed memories, which is how we became sapiens.
- what nearly all humans think about is simply unimportant matters regarding the life we have created here on this planet and been blinded by so only a handfull of people in the world would think of esoteric matters such as those I have mentioned.
- religion is only a handfull of stories passed down throughout humanity to give hope to humans with impossible deeds and to blind us from the truth.
- death IS the end, for souls do not exist; 'souls' are just minds of people binded with the ability of memory, which is caused by chemical reactions in your brain. Death is not when your 'soul' leaves your body; it is when your brain shuts down finally, and cannot control your body or allow you to remember any more. If there was life after death, then it goes against all scientific laws, and/or you cannot remember anything then because you need the physical brain and its chemicals to remember.
- because death is the end, it is best to live a good life because there is nothing after that. Everthing stops then and you will remember nothing, as if you never existed. I cannot elaborate enough to explain that there is absolutely NOTHING after dying. Don't ask how I know, but it wasn't through how I did with the others. I don't remember, maybe it has to do with the time I found out I can stop my heart (I fainted), which I will never do again because I didn't live long enough and I couldn't remember at all what happened when I could only see glimpses of what my eyes allowed me to see.
- We are just one race amoung millions of others on Earth, which is just one planet among millions of others in our galaxy, which is just one of thousands in our unknown universe. We may never find the answer to the universe. Heck, we all can die right now, and nothing will happen to the rest of the universe, but we have the human want which gives me the burning desire to see what would happen. But our existence has penalized and killed the world with our selfishness and our care for truthfully unimportant things like money, power, etc. And many out there are simply thinking that my thoughts are strang ones, when THEY are ones blind of what the real world is like. All in all, humanity doesn't deserve to continue existing.
- one thing that bugs me about movies like the newer version of 'The Day the Earth Stood Still' is that the ethereal beings let us live because of our supposed 'innocence'. Well, that is really all that humanity has; innocence, which is somewhat true and somewhat false because of humans' greed and jealousy and intolerance and prejudice of other humans who are just as normal as other humans.
And to be truthful, I am a thirteen-year-old who NO ONE understands but a few people. My method of putting these thoughts away from my mind is bearing with humanity for a little longer and then subsequently move to isolated parts of the world, trying to find the answer.
Overall, what I am saying is that EVERYONE is naive and do not know the Truth, and that science is all that is truth. I am just a single being who has evaluated humanity with the diminutive information we posess about the world. Had we never worried about this seemingly unimportant life, we perhaps would have found the answer. My thoughts may be wrong because of the mysteries of the world. Before I became a thinker, I used to think that "God" is really a wise being(s) that taught humanity how to build, farm, irrigate, write, etc. (and I bet many of you are rolling you're eyes at this, because this is really the issue that questions: "Are we alone in the universe?" which can be simplified down to "Aliens taught us stuff." Although a possibility, my first evaluation above points out that humans have a tendency to wonder, which is how we started to learn and continue to learn things... and now, continue to wonder about many things, if not most of us were blinded by selfishness and this life on Earth. So this means that how we learned to survive on Earth is through an unintentional "trial and error," which is why/how we have evolved from simpler species over a course of thousands of years).
Now, I'm sorry for offending anyone, but I just want to share my thoughts as long as no one is offended or as long as I am not thought to be attempting to plant these thoughts into anyone else. Religion is an important part of humanity because it gives us hope for the future.
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Count me in on the people who did not find it that scary (I'm more scarred by the Large Marge segment from Pee Wees Big Adventure).
I found it to be more philosophical, sure the claymation mask was unnerving, but this segment got me to thinking more than anything else. Notice how in this story, how much Satan resembles the old testament version of God. What I got from it was that life is what we make it, cherish it, and enjoy it as much as you possibly can, because 'we could merely be just a thought'. Like George Carlin once said, someday, the earth could just shake us all off like a bad case of fleas. If anything, it makes me want to treat my fellow man better. Look at all the violence, greed and pettiness in the world, it's terrible, yet all man-made.
Anyway, the whole segment felt like a social commentary. To those of you saying that this shouldn't be shown to children, I would be worried they would be freaked out by the mask thing, but overall, there's much scarrier, violent things going on in Looney Toons cartoons. People don't seem to so worried about children learning and reading the bible, and there are some pretty freaky things going on in there as well.
"I've been things and seen places"
Excellent post, greensweater. People seem to bend over backwards to miss the real message of this scene...it is an analogy to god himself. It cleverly depicts exactly what god is, without all of the pretty wrapping paper and the big bow that believers like to attach to the deity. This right here is the being that people worship and make excuses for as they ignore everything about the deity except what they want to hear...that he is all loving and great.
Someone above mentioned the scene being cut in some past airing. The reason it was cut is not because it was scary, but because it could be seen as insulting to religion. I say keep it in!
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Whose idea was it for the word "Lisp" to have an "S" in it?
@toaniletia~there is no way to prove either way,what happens after death.you cannot say for 100% sure that NOTHING happens after we die,just as you can't say SOMETHING does,either.you come off as having a lack of credibility when you use absolute terms like that in a discussion like this.you can think what you want,but stating as absolute fact:"NOTHING happens when you die" is a childish and immature statement at best.
"I think I smell mice!"
Not accurate, consciousness is defined by neuroscience as a purely physical body of information held stable by various chemical reactions.
It's childish and immature to even SUGGEST that there exists something after death. Why? Because it's a fairy tale. If you want to challenge science on that, be my guest. Go win the Nobel Prize for us by showing the possibility of an afterlife.
Until then, the afterlife is 100% impossible, by the standards of scientific reason. Nothing in science is 100%, but keep in mind I'm using '100%' in scientific terms, which isn't absolute but REASONABLY CERTAIN. Just like we're reasonably certain about the Earth's shape being an oblate spheroid.
Do you want to call me immature and childish for saying the Earth is 100% NOT flat? Please.
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YOUR FACE
Science cannot prove or disprove the existence of an afterlife - that doesn't mean it's impossible. Science doesn't work like that. There is more out there than what science can account for. Science is more constructive, not destructive. We use science to build upon and adapt what we know, but we never use it to rule out possibilities that we don't or cannot understand.
A single celled bacterium resting on your computer monitor, with all of it's energy and thought, could never comprehend the words on this screen - or the technical process within the computer that created them. The nature of our existence and our ability to comprehend it is like that, it is far beyond our scope of understanding. So it is pretty arrogant to believe that our science has figured it all out. Why? Because we have some understanding of the chemicals that effect and create our consciousness? If you understand how a DVD player works, then do you gain a deep understanding of how to make the movies that are put on DVDs? Science has not touched on the subject matter that deals with existence known as "Metaphysics". Do you know why it is called that, because it is "beyond physics". Science can only give us understanding of the perceivable physical world.
Understand what science tells us before you decide to use it as an elitism tool. Science is supposed to open your mind, not close it.
Well spoken... Brilliantly written, you SPOKE my mind.
If one does not persist after death, then what is the point of "living a good life"? You know the answer to everything you've said, you're just too much of a coward to be a nihilist. You idiots hold on to "Atheism" as any other religion, and your phony "morality" sickens me.
shareThe point of living a good life is simply to have something satisfactory before you die, as this is your only life. If you waste it, well, then that's your call.
What's so sickening about an atheist morality? We strongly urge you to have a fun life so long as you refrain from harming others so they may live their lives as well. It's a morality based on empathy, which the more popular religions (Christianity and Islam) seem to ignore, instead claiming you should be good/bad only based on fear of a postmortem afterlife and/or hope of a postmortem reward. And that's even if that whole good/bad dichotomy is even accurate.
Thank heavens (not literally) the non-religious demographic is the third-largest group in the world and the fastest growing. People are finally opening their eyes to reality.
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We humans are capable of greatness.
Can it really be this hard to understand? If you're nothing in death, then your proposition about "having something satisfactory" is meaningless. I say this as someone who is not religious.
I care about the truth and not hiding from it, and the truth is that this world is not worth anything. Life is only about suffering, sorrow and despair. Nihilism is an inevitable reality for the honest.
Indeed, it does not matter to a dead person whether or not they have had a satisfactory life, as such beings are unable to think. In my recommendation for living a "full" life, I am recognizing that it has no objective meaning outside of that individual. However, so many people waste their lives planning for the afterlife, which makes me feel great pity for them. I understand that it is none of my business how other people live their lives, but I feel sympathy for my fellow ape, born into a universe without an instruction book. It's the curse of this particular type of ape to need instruction books and answers. And this universe didn't come with one, so we wrote our own and the problems started.
It basically goes back to empathy—my own sense of ethical practice, as I am a primate like everyone else; I am sentimental, and such sentimentality is basically what grants me my empathy toward others, as well as the joys I have in watching films, playing video games or writing ridiculous stories.
I only recommend having a satisfactory life because I want to share the possibilities of joy and fun with other people who may not be able to experience it otherwise, due to their superstitious beliefs. I don't think there's any good, objective reason to have a good life, but I have feelings (regardless of their irrationality) toward others, which is what allowed our species to survive thus far, even if such survival and existence is objectively meaningless.
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We humans are capable of greatness.
The Vinton version is a pretty liberal departure from the actual story, but the message is the same. (yikes)
Indeed, I believe the inner message, the message from Satan to the children, was more or less the same, though truncated. But I feel that the outer message, what Twain was trying say about life, reality, morality and such, is lost and skewed a bit if you're in the mind set that this Satan is the fallen Satan. The Satan in this story is the nephew of the first fallen angel of the same name. Now consider everything he says and does knowing that he's an actual unfallen angel who knows no sin!
"I can do no wrong...for I do not know what it is." Brrr....
Phrases like this take on a different meaning when put into context of Twain's explanation of the "Moral Sense" via Satan. A transcript of "The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance" can be found here:
http://web.archive.org/web/19980519013501/http://mmsysgrp.com/mtms.htm
or
http://www.shsu.edu/~eng_wpf/authors/Twain/Mysterious-Stranger.htm
and is the version as compiled and released by Twain's publisher, Albert Paine, after his death. I don't particularly like the tacked on ending that he chose, but the story as a whole is certainly a worthwhile read! share
As I pointed out in the comment on the TV version of Mysterious Stranger there are supposedly FIVE versions of this story: three actually written by Twain and two posthumously edits by Albert Bigelow Paine (1916) and University of California (1982)
The three main versions Twain actually wrote are called 'Chronicle of Young Satan' (set in 1590 Austria, abandoned in mid scene), 'Schoolhouse Hill'/Hannibal (set in Hannibal with Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer as Satan's (now called No. 44) companions, also incomplete), and 'No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger'/Print Shop (set in 1490 Austria and the only version to actually have an ending). (http://barney.gonzaga.edu/~kwillis/)
Thanks to modern scholarship it is now known the 1916 version was Paine trying to complete the 1590 Austria version with the 1490 Austria ending raising the question of how much is Twain and how much is Paine in that version.
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and yet people drill this fire and brimstone crap into kids mushy heads from the time theyre able to speak
shareI respectively disagree. The sequence was chilling, but it didn't affect me as a child. Children should learn about the dark side of humanity at an early age. The scene is scary, but nothing a child aged five years or older couldn't handle.
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