Entertainment Values: How do we

Assess Entertainment and Why does it

Matter? 1st Edition Stephen Harrington
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://textbookfull.com/product/entertainment-values-how-do-we-assess-entertainme
nt-and-why-does-it-matter-1st-edition-stephen-harrington/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Coward Why We Get Anxious What We Can Do About It 1st

Edition Tim Clare

https://textbookfull.com/product/coward-why-we-get-anxious-what-
we-can-do-about-it-1st-edition-tim-clare/

Entertainment Science Thorsten Hennig-Thurau

https://textbookfull.com/product/entertainment-science-thorsten-
hennig-thurau/

Why Do Banks Fail and What to Do About It 1st Edition

Abidi

https://textbookfull.com/product/why-do-banks-fail-and-what-to-
do-about-it-1st-edition-abidi/

The Boy Crisis Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We
Can Do about It Warren Farrell

https://textbookfull.com/product/the-boy-crisis-why-our-boys-are-
struggling-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-warren-farrell/
What Do We Know and What Should We Do About Social
Mobility Lee Elliot Major Stephen Machin

https://textbookfull.com/product/what-do-we-know-and-what-should-
we-do-about-social-mobility-lee-elliot-major-stephen-machin/

Art and Entertainment: A Philosophical Exploration 1st

Edition Hamilton

https://textbookfull.com/product/art-and-entertainment-a-
philosophical-exploration-1st-edition-hamilton/

Science, Entertainment and Television Documentary 1st

Edition Vincent Campbell (Auth.)

https://textbookfull.com/product/science-entertainment-and-
television-documentary-1st-edition-vincent-campbell-auth/

Uninformed Why People Seem to Know So Little about

Politics and What We Can Do about It 1st Edition Arthur
Lupia

https://textbookfull.com/product/uninformed-why-people-seem-to-
know-so-little-about-politics-and-what-we-can-do-about-it-1st-
edition-arthur-lupia/

Fluke Chance Chaos and Why Everything We Do Matters

Brian Klaas

https://textbookfull.com/product/fluke-chance-chaos-and-why-
everything-we-do-matters-brian-klaas/
Palgrave Entertainment Industries

Series Editors
Christy Collis
Queensland University of Technology
Australia

Stephen Harrington
Queensland University of Technology
Australia

Alan McKee
University of Technology Sydney
Australia
Palgrave Entertainment Industries is the first series to take an empirical
multidisciplinary approach to the understanding of entertainment—defined
as “audience-centred culture”. The series understands the work of culture
by studying production (including distribution), texts and consumption
practices. While maintaining a sophisticated and reflective intellectual
stance, Palgrave Entertainment Industries leaves behind anti-empirical
“mass-culture” models of commercial culture in order to take an evidence-
based approach to entertainment as a cultural system.
Entertainment has been an integral component of everyday lives
throughout modernity, remaining remarkably consistent in its textual
features for over two hundred years. It is the form of most culture con-
sumed by the majority of citizens of Western countries. The entertainment
industries are diverse, encompassing sectors including film, radio and
sports, music, television, casinos and live events/festivals, and were esti-
mated to be worth more than US$2.2 trillion in 2012, in addition to
employing millions of people around the world.
This innovative new series will address the lack of academic attention
devoted to entertainment by examining the ways that entertainment as a
product, as an industry and as an activity can be understood in our society.

Series advisory board:

Jonathan Gray, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA, Henry Jenkins
III, USC Annenberg School for Communication and the USC School of
Cinematic Arts, USA, Shay Sayre, California State University, Fullerton,
USA, and Liesbet van Zoonen, Loughborough University, UK.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14706
 Stephen Harrington
Editor

Entertainment
Values
How do we Assess Entertainment
and Why does it Matter?
Editor
Stephen Harrington
Creative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane, Australia

Palgrave Entertainment Industries

ISBN 978-1-137-47289-2 ISBN 978-1-137-47290-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47290-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017948993

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher
nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains
neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: johnb / Stockimo / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
To Typhoon Kalmaegi: You were short lived, but your impact
was profound.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the efforts of a large
number of people, most of whom I will fail to mention by name in what
follows.
Firstly, to Felicity Plester and her team at Palgrave, I thank you not only
for believing in the merits of this book but also for believing that an entire
series devoted to Entertainment would be worthwhile. Special thanks, too,
to Sophie Auld, who remained patient and incredibly helpful.
My dear colleagues and friends Alan McKee and Christy Collis, thank
you for your contributions and intellectual leadership. It is an honour
working with you both, and I hope that this book does justice to continue
to forge ahead the discipline that you have both so tirelessly fought to
establish.
To all those who contributed to this book, I am sincerely grateful and
honoured to have worked with you all. I may not have been the most
punctual or organised editor, but I am extremely proud of the end result.
Your hard work made this happen.
Daniel Padua and Katherine Kirkwood, who helped me keep this pro-
ject on track, or get it back on track, at various stages of the production
process. You deserve a lot of credit for this.
And, once again, to Christy and the other members of my dear little flat
family. Thank you for loving me . . . just as I am.

vii
 CONTENTS

How Can We Value Entertainment? And, Why Does It Matter? 1

Stephen Harrington
Valuing Entertainment 2
Why Entertainment? 3
This Book 6
Notes 9
References 9

What Is Entertainment? The Value of Industry Definitions 11

Christy Collis
Academic and Policy Definitions 12
Industry Definitions 14
Entertainment as Audience-Centred Culture 16
Entertainment as Commercial Culture 19
Conclusion 20
References 21

From Toyetic to Toyesis: The Cultural Value of Merchandising 23

Jason Bainbridge
Toyetics and Paratextuality 24
A History of Toys 26
Toyetics to Toyesis 30
Conclusion 35

ix
x CONTENTS

Notes 37
References 38

Screaming on a Ride to Nowhere: What Roller Coasters Teach

Us About Being Human 41
Dana Anderson and Malcolm Burt
Can’t Buy a Thrill – or Can You? 43
Paying for Fear in the Era of Terror 46
It’s Coaster Time! 49
Conclusion: Why we Ride 53
Notes 55
References 56

Entertainment for the Mind, Body and Spirit 59

Tyrha M. Lindsey-Warren
The Roots of ‘Edu-Tainment’ 61
Narratives and Storytelling 63
A Typology of Health Edu-Tainment 63
Conclusion 67
References 68

Talking Miley: The Value of Celebrity Gossip 71

Toija Cinque and Sean Redmond
Research Methodology 76
Unruly Desire, Cathartic Affect and the Value
of Tweeting 76
The Face that Can’t be Tamed 82
Conclusion 87
References 88

MasterChef Australia: Educating and Empowering Through

Entertainment 91
Katherine Kirkwood
The Personalities: Judges, Celebrity Guests,
and the Contestants 93
Redefining Cooking Demonstration 100
The Travelling Advertisement 102
 CONTENTS xi

From the Raw to the Cooked 103

Conclusion 105
References 106

Public and Private Adolescent Lives: The Educational Value

of Entertainment 109
Pilar Lacasa, Laura Méndez and Sara Cortés
The Concept of Entertainment 110
Avatars, Cyber Drama, Simulation and Virtual Reality 112
Identity: Public and Private Lives 112
Methodology 114
The Workshop and the Required Data 116
Results: Analysis and Discussion 116
Simulating and Sharing the World Through an Avatar 117
Imaginary Worlds: Performing and Sharing Identity 122
Conclusion 125
Notes 128
References 128

From Moomba to the Dreaming: Indigenous Australia,

Popular Music and Reconciliation 131
Andrew King
The Moomba and Beyond – Aboriginal Musical Promotion
in the 1950s and 1960s 132
Beyond the Bush – ‘Settlement Bands’ of the 1980s 136
Tribal Voice to Mainstream Icons – 1990s World Music 140
Black and Deadly: Indigenous Vibes in the 2000s 142
Conclusion: Integrated Indigenous Promotion 145
Notes 146
References 146

Entering The Newsroom: The Sociocultural Value

of ‘Semi-Fictional’ Entertainment and Popular Communication 149
Chris Peters
Popular Entertainment as Catalyst for Political Critique 151
The Role of Journalism in Contemporary Society 154
xii CONTENTS

Cable News and The Newsroom as Semi-Fictional

Entertainment 156
Study Recap – The Newsroom and Public Reflections
on Journalism 158
Conclusion: Entertainment and Journalism Rethought 161
Notes 162
References 162

What If ‘Journalism’ Is the Problem?: Entertainment

and the ‘De-mediatization’ of Politics 165
Stephen Harrington
The ‘Death’ of Journalism 166
The Mediatization of Politics 167
‘De-mediatization’? 172
Conclusion 175
References 176

Spoof Videos: Entertainment and Alternative Memory in China 179

Henry Siling Li
Airbrushed Out of History 179
Memory and Power 180
China’s Memory Policy 181
Little Rabbit, Be Good and the Counter-Narrative 183
Grass-Mud Horse and the Subversion of Ideographs 188
The Political Value of Spoof Videos 191
Notes 191
References 192

Decoding Memes: Barthes’ Punctum, Feminist Standpoint

Theory, and the Political Significance of #YesAllWomen 195
Whitney Phillips and Ryan M Milner
#YesAllWomen and the Expansive Meme 196
Barthes’ Punctum and Memetic Resonance 202
Memetic Standpoint Theory 205
From #YesAllWomen to Popular Media Texts: Weaving
the Threads of the Political Punctum 207
References 209
 CONTENTS xiii

Why I Wasn’t Interested in Hitchcock Until I Turned 40:

Valuing Films as Entertainment 213
Alan McKee
Valuing Hitchcock as Entertainment 215
The Aesthetic System of Entertainment 216
Does It Have a Good Story? 217
Do I have an Emotional Reaction to It? 219
Do I Find the Ending to be Satisfying? 221
Is It Fun? 223
Conclusion: Rescuing Hitchcock the Entertainer 224
References 225

Fluff, Frivolity, and the Fabulous Samantha Jones:

Representations of Public Relations in Entertainment 229
Ella Chorazy and Stephen Harrington
The Cultural Contribution of Sex and The City 231
Industry and Professional Relationships 232
Work and Publicity 234
Ease and Lifestyle 236
Attitude, Acumen, and Character Complexity 239
Gender, Emotionality, and Sex 241
Stereotypes, Accuracy, and the Value of Entertainment 244
References 245

From Deep Throat to Don Jon: The Pornographication

of Cinematic Entertainment 251
Brian McNair
From ‘Men Only’ to Mass Entertainment: The Mainstreaming
of Pornography 252
The Pornographication of Entertainment 257
Porno Chic as Entertainment 260
Conclusion 265
Notes 265
Filmography 265
xiv CONTENTS

To Understand the Futures of Film-going, We Must

Know Its Histories 269
Henry Jenkins
History 1: The History of Exhibition 270
History 2: The History of Fandom 272
History 3: A History of Transmedia 275

Index 279
 LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1 A sign of the times: Scientific versus durational temporalities

at play in the ride queue 51
Fig. 2 Conceptual framework for health edu-tainment typology 65
Fig. 3 Tweets and retweets using #Bangerz (1 August 2014
to 14 August 2014) 80
Fig. 4 Tweets and retweets using the search term ‘MileyCyrus’
(1 August 2014 to 14 August 2014) 81
Fig. 5 The top retweeted user and the top tweeter 82
Fig. 6 Commercial video games, entertainment and education 111
Fig. 7 Identity construction in the workshop: public and private
worlds 118
Fig. 8 Interpretation synthesis 127
Fig. 9 Serve the rabbits, build a harmonious forest 186
Fig. 10 Top panel: The Kool-Aid Man – a corporate mascot known for
destructive entrances – smashes into a room from the outside
and declares to its inhabitants, ‘not all men’ 200

xv
 LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 Number of impressions using #MileyCyrus (1 August

to 14 August 2014) 77
Table 2 Main corpus of data includes a synthesis of the main data
focusing on the blog 117
Table 3 Allusions to real life events in China 185

xvii
 How Can We Value Entertainment?
And, Why Does It Matter?

Stephen Harrington

In the comment thread of a YouTube video called ‘Can Video Games Be a

Spiritual Experience?’ (PBS Game/Show 2014), a pseudonymous user,
‘00WARTHERAPY00’, shared the following story1:

Well, when i was 4, my dad bought a trusty XBox. you know, the first,
ruggedy, blocky one from 2001. we had tons and tons and tons of fun
playing all kinds of games together – until he died, when i was just 6.
i couldnt touch that console for 10 years.
but once i did, i noticed something.
we used to play a racing game, Rally Sports Challenge. actually pretty
awesome for the time it came.
and once i started meddling around . . . i found a GHOST.
literaly.
you know, when a time race happens, that the fastest lap so far gets recorded
as a ghost driver? yep, you guessed it – his ghost still rolls around the track
today.
and so i played and played, and played, untill i was almost able to beat the
ghost. until one day i got ahead of it, i surpassed it, and . . . ~
i stopped right in front of the finish line, just to ensure i wouldnt delete it.
Bliss.

S. Harrington (*)
Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane,
Queensland, Australia

© The Author(s) 2017 1

S. Harrington (ed.), Entertainment Values, Palgrave Entertainment
Industries, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47290-8_1
2 S. HARRINGTON

The comment has attracted, as of the time of writing, over 15 000 ‘likes’
(far more than the original video), a reasonable share of media attention
(Raven 2014, for example), and has since been adapted into a short film
called Player Two (Wikstrom 2014). Though the tale may be apocryphal –
indeed, 00WARTHERAPY00 has declined interviews in response to the
attention their comment received, although they do stand by the veracity
of the story in subsequent online discussions – it prompted a wave of
fellow gamers to share their own stories about how their memories of
departed loved-ones are deeply connected to (and potentially preserved
through) video gaming experiences. That single comment, and the con-
versations it ignited, highlight the incredibly powerful, sometimes unex-
pected, and oftentimes deeply meaningful role that entertainment plays in
our lives.

VALUING ENTERTAINMENT
Entertainment is everywhere. Not literally everywhere, of course, but it is
so pervasive in our culture that it is hard to fully appreciate just how
‘everywhere’ – indeed, mundane – it really is. We devote enormous
amount of our time, energy and disposable income to being entertained.
We seek it out on our phones when given just a spare few minutes, devote
entire rooms in our homes to its consumption, and now often expect it to
be a major element in our news, shopping experiences, or education. The
entertainment industries generate billions of dollars each year, and employ
hundreds of thousands of people. Although rolled into their statistics with
the more generic ‘media’ category as well, PwC estimated that the global
entertainment industries produced a combined revenue of US$1.74 tril-
lion in 2014, and that will rise to US$2.1 trillion in 2020 (PwC 2016).
Entertainment is highly accessible, and so takes up an important part of
our daily concerns and conversations, whether it be our opinion on the
latest Hollywood blockbuster, a new celebrity couple, or our concerns
over its place in the world of politics.
In short, entertainment is significant. And yet it has not received the
share of attention it therefore deserves within the academy, having often
been dismissed as a ‘mindless’, ‘lowbrow’, ‘corruptive’, ‘soulless’, even
‘dangerous’2 form of culture. Partly this is because mass communications
researchers have often sought to quantify the ‘effects’ of entertainment on
individual attitudes and behaviours, but paid less attention to its more
complex influences at the level of culture. Media and cultural studies
 HOW CAN WE VALUE ENTERTAINMENT? AND, WHY DOES IT MATTER? 3

researchers have been more attentive to the latter, but have tended to
focus their attention on their own areas of niche interest, rather on the
entertainment that has real impact on the bulk of consumers. As
S. Elizabeth Bird pointed out some years ago:

. . . there is a tendency to favor programs and genres that may be considered

edgy, avant garde, or attracting a ‘cult’ audience, such as the Star Trek
franchise. I recall, for example, an International Communication Association
meeting in which two whole sessions were devoted to the David Lynch
show, Twin Peaks, a critical but not popular success. I have rarely heard a
presentation about ‘middle-of-the-road’ offerings like Home Improvement
or Diagnosis Murder – and never from scholars who identified as fans. (Bird
2003: 121)

Entertainment Values takes a different approach, starting with a simple

question: How can we assess the value of various entertainment products
and forms?

WHY ENTERTAINMENT?
This book deals with entertainment as a complex of industries, and as the
products, events, and experiences that those industries produce. But, why
make entertainment the starting point for this discussion? Why not stick
with the more traditional academic categories of ‘media’, or ‘popular
culture’?
The first reason for this approach is that ‘entertainment’ and ‘media’ are
not interchangeable terms. There is a lot of media that is not produced by
the entertainment industries, or is produced without aiming to entertain
an audience (such as C-SPAN, which is notionally devoted to being a
direct access to the U.S. Congress). Entertainment also comprises live
performance, and a third category of ‘experiential’ entertainment. As
Dana Anderson and Malcolm Burt discuss in Chapter 4, going to a
theme park and riding a roller coaster is a physically and emotionally
entertaining experience, and it is not best-, or even well-understood
from within the domain of media studies.
The second reason for using entertainment as a starting point is that it
slices culture horizontally, rather than vertically; it provides a medium-
neutral way of understanding a particular approach to production. That is,
entertainment has been examined before by academics – be it via film,
4 S. HARRINGTON

theatre, literary studies, or other disciplines – but this has taken place in a
non-systematic fashion. Yes, the work of Charles Dickens and Shakespeare
(who, people are fond of pointing out, were considered mass entertain-
ment ‘in their day’) are given endless scrutiny, but they are usually studied
within fairly rigid disciplinary frameworks that take the very same approach
to obscure work with, at best, marginal public impact.
Focussing on ‘Entertainment’ allows us to acknowledge that there are
almost certainly more similarities – in terms of both production processes
and cultural influence – between a video game and a Hollywood blockbus-
ter, than there is between a Hollywood blockbuster and an avant garde
film; between a reality TV show and a pop music album, than between a
pop album and a classical music album; between David Blaine and John
Grisham, than between John Grisham and J.M. Coetzee. It makes clear
that entertainment – with its hyper-attentiveness to audience tastes, and
intent to satisfy those tastes commercially – is very different to art, even if
they may emerge from the same ‘medium’. A stand-up comedian, for
example, may perform in the same venues as a performance poet, but
that does not mean that their creative process, the expectations of their
audiences or their business models are directly comparable.
From an academic perspective, employing the term entertainment allows
us to get beyond, as Jonathan Gray calls it, ‘a paralysing medium specificity’:

In short, the medium-specific labels of different [academic] fields often

appear to have outlived their usefulness. Entertainment studies is a term,
though, that encourages multimedia and transmedia analysis. If the task is to
study that which entertains, the term invites us to look beyond any franchise
or text’s specific iterations in a specific medium. (Gray 2010: 813)

I could well have put together a collection called ‘television values’, and
had people talk about how we can value television. But, that could then
exclude texts that are not television per se (such as content that is released
on YouTube), but which are produced and consumed in identical ways to
broadcast television, as well as the myriad of associated ‘paratexts’ (as
discussed in chapter 3).
In making similar arguments before, I have been criticised for putting
‘art’ and ‘entertainment’ into different categories3 and suggesting that
their significance in our culture is different. The two, so my detractors
claim, are effectively one and the same, and I must be making the distinc-
tion only because I know nothing about art. Turning now to Wikipedia
 HOW CAN WE VALUE ENTERTAINMENT? AND, WHY DOES IT MATTER? 5

for my defence may be seen as further evidence that I really don’t know
anything about art (although, it is worth noting that if art and entertain-
ment really are interchangeable terms, then I can claim to know an awful
lot about it), but it does provide a useful index of how we as a society think
about concepts, even if it does have well-established problems as a source
of official knowledge. Consider, then, the following definition of art:

Art is a diverse range of human activities in creating visual, auditory or

performing artifacts (artworks), expressing the author’s imaginative or tech-
nical skill, intended to be appreciated for their beauty or emotional power.
(Wikipedia n.d.-a)

Note here that the emphasis is on the author’s (or, artist’s) imaginative
abilities. It is about expression, and does not mention the viewer/audi-
ence. Indeed, the (separate) Wikipedia page for The Arts, describes it as ‘a
physical manifestation of the internal creative impulse’ (Wikipedia n.d.-b).
Conspicuously, the lead images on both pages focus on works of art.
Entertainment, on the other hand, is (according to the same site) ‘a
form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience, or
gives pleasure and delight’ (Wikipedia n.d.-c). And, as a key point of
contrast, the lead image on that page focusses on the audience, featuring
a large group of people gathered around a small television.4 This may be
why we typically think about, in most Western cultures at least, ‘artists’ as
quiet, serious, and introverted, and ‘entertainers’ as loud, fun, outgoing,
extroverted people.
Art is an inside – out process, where the artist seeks to express an idea
without substantial consideration of the audience.5 If they do care about
the opinion of others regarding their work, it is often of the ‘expert’ critic,
not the general public. The postmodern, conceptual turn in art caused a
shift from the quality of the artist’s ability, towards the quality of their
‘ideas’ which meant that the focus was not on technical ability, but on
conceptual originality. So, the value of art now is now determined by our
interpretation of the artist’s intended – though often highly obscured –
meaning, than our own pleasure, or the value of the piece to others. And,
because the meaning is so open to interpretation, we often cannot distin-
guish between what is art, and not art; where, for instance, someone can
leave their eye glasses on the floor of a gallery, only for visitors to then
assume it is another work for public appreciation (see Moreno 2016).
Entertainment is the opposite: an outside – in process where creators
6 S. HARRINGTON

understand what the audience might enjoy, and develop their work with
that clearly (though not solely) in mind.
A lot of people might not see the different between art and entertain-
ment because we can judge the value of entertainment by the criteria for
art (for example, think of what happens when a ‘film critic’ goes to see a
Michael Bay movie), and vice versa (such as when people walk into an art
gallery and say ‘I could have painted that’, or ‘that’s ugly’). And, it is
important to note that I am not suggesting that art and entertainment are
clear, discrete and mutually-exclusive categories – someone like Damien
Hirst, for example, quite obviously blurs them, and even many porn
directors have selfish aesthetic or cultural goals for their work – but the
reality is that entertainment is a distinctive form of culture, and needs to be
understood as such.

THIS BOOK
Though we might think about entertainment in simple terms, its role is
complex, and it is a role we ought to better understand. The economic
value of the entertainment industries are well-understood, thanks to
industry research such as those noted earlier (produced by PwC), and
business academics. However, that is a relatively one-dimensional way of
understanding the value of entertainment. We need more nuanced ways of
assessing the value (or values) of entertainment, and to more fulsomely
appreciate the multifarious ways that entertainment matters to (and in)
our culture.
With its ground-breaking Entertainment Industries department and, thus,
international locus of entertainment scholarship, a number of the contributors
to this collection are from my own institution, the Queensland University of
Technology in Australia. However, this book does not have an intentional
Australian focus, and includes the work of many other scholars – both emer-
gent and eminent – from around the world, and deals very consciously with
global themes. Each chapter aims to better understand what entertainment is,
and why we should take it seriously.
In Chapter 2, Christy Collis draws on her research with producers to
further develop a definition of ‘entertainment’. Within the industry, Collis
notes, entertainment is defined and characterised by its audience-centred,
commercial nature, rather than by its content, its genre, its audience, or
the kind of emotional response it may or may not elicit from its consumers.
 HOW CAN WE VALUE ENTERTAINMENT? AND, WHY DOES IT MATTER? 7

Jason Bainbridge explores the cultural value of ‘toyetics’ – a media

property suitable to be merchandised across a range of licensed tie-ins –
in Chapter 3, noting that merchandising is now regularly used to extend
and enrich media narratives. Toys themselves are becoming content pro-
viders for new screen franchises, and Bainbridge therefore introduces the
term ‘toyesis’ to describe the increasingly common situation in convergent
media where a text’s origins become almost entirely invisible.
Dana Anderson and Malcolm Burt, in Chapter 4, examine roller-coast-
ers, and their value for those who ride them. They are paradoxical, they
argue, because although they’re notionally labelled ‘thrill rides’, they’re
incredibly safe, manufactured thrills. So, why are they so popular? As they
argue, these highly constructed experiences – and the seemingly disposa-
ble thrills they deliver – may also tell us something profound about the
nature of human experience.
Tyrha M. Lindsey-Warren explores the value of entertainment in the
promotion of health messages in Chapter 5. She looks closely at the
features and impact of health ‘edu-tainment’ in the United States, and
its ability to promote healthy lifestyle choices in a non-didactic manner.
Through a social media case study of Miley Cyrus, Toija Cinque and Sean
Redmond examine the value of celebrity gossip for young teenage women in
Chapter 6. Celebrity gossip is often panned as the trashiest of all entertain-
ment culture and yet it plays, they argue, an important role in how young
women understand and process issues of gender identity and relationships in
their everyday lives.
In Chapter 7, Katherine Kirkwood looks at how the way we eat, and the way
we think about food as a culture, is shaped to a significant degree by entertain-
ment. Through an analysis of the programme MasterChef Australia, she high-
lights how the show democratises and popularises highbrow food culture
through combining elements of the cooking show genre and entertainment.
Pilar Lacasa, Laura Méndez and Sara Cortés focus their chapter (Chap. 8)
on the educational value of entertainment, paying particular attention to how
video games help young people to build and express their identity, in virtual
and real worlds, in public and private.
In Chapter 9, Andrew King looks at mainstream music in Australia, and
the extent to which Indigenous pop stars have gained global popularity
and recognition. King’s analysis of the history of Indigenous popular
music shows how individual performers and performances are a useful
means for mainstream audiences to engage with Indigenous reconciliation
in Australia.
8 S. HARRINGTON

Chris Peters, in Chapter 10, looks at how HBO’s The Newsroom func-
tioned as a kind of meta-commentary on the state of journalism, arguing that
its sociocultural value as entertainment programming lies not in its content as
popular communication per se, but in the audience response to the show. The
Newsroom, Peters argues, helps cultivate valuable discussion on journalism
and, moreover, prompts political talk on many contemporary issues beyond.
In Chapter 11, I argue that journalism’s homogeneity, its dedication to
objectivity, timeliness, brevity and dependency on ‘access’ to political
actors, have left it highly vulnerable to exploitation by political strategists.
Factual entertainment which breaks from the journalistic mould can,
therefore, do a much better job of scrutinising political power than it is
typically given credit for.
Henry Siling Li, focussing on the role of ‘spoof videos’ in China, looks
– in Chapter 12 – at how entertainment allows citizens to bypass state
censorship, and how dissidence works in this online form. The chapter
concludes that these playful models of political participation may lead to
networked forms of collective identity and social action.
In Chapter 13, Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner look at memes as
a form of entertainment, and the political role that they serve. The chapter
focuses specifically on the #YesAllWomen and ‘not all men’ memes popu-
larised in 2013, which illustrate memes’ ability to spur meaningful con-
versation, as well as the inescapably political standpoint of participants.
Challenging how academic disciplines look at certain texts and auteurs,
Alan McKee argues we can understand Hitchcock films as entertainment,
rather than as works of art, in Chapter 14. Using the case study of Dial M
for Murder, McKee argues that film studies has largely missed one of the
most fundamental characteristics of Hitchcock’s work – it is fun.
In Chapter 15, Ella Chorazy and I look at the value of entertainment in the
representation of Public Relations (PR). Using Sex and The City (the character
of Samantha Jones in particular) as a case study, we argue fictional entertain-
ment provides critical insight into PR as a profession and as a practice.
In Chapter 16, Brian McNair seeks to understand the role that sexually-
explicit entertainment (that is, pornography), and films about pornogra-
phy, play in our culture. He examines how cinematic entertainment has
grappled with current debates on the societal impact of pornographica-
tion, such as the sex selfie/DIY sex tape phenomenon, and porn
addiction.
And, finally, in Chapter 17 Henry Jenkins argues – around the medium
of film, in particular – that if we want to understand how audiences will
 HOW CAN WE VALUE ENTERTAINMENT? AND, WHY DOES IT MATTER? 9

value entertainment in the future, it is useful to look at the past, tracing

multiple histories of exhibition and reception to do so.
This book is not a complete guide to how we can value entertainment,
nor can it be; it covers only a selection of perspectives, industries, texts,
genres and aspects. What it aims to do, however, is push back to some
extent on the arguments that still run amok in part parts of academia that
entertainment is inherently bad. Some of it may be truly awful, but to focus
on that is to overlook the growing body of evidence (demonstrated by the
work presented in this book) that a significant amount of entertainment is
powerful, important and incredibly valuable. Most of all, I hope that this
book provides compelling evidence, to anyone who still needs it, that
entertainment matters, and is absolutely worthy of our extensive analysis.

NOTES
1. I have preserved the original spelling, punctuation and line breaks here for
the sake of accuracy.
2. I do not use this term flippantly or only for rhetorical effect. In a faculty
forum to discuss the introduction of an Entertainment Industries degree at
the university where I work, one colleague vocalised ethical concerns
because, in their view, entertainment is effectively ‘brainwashing’ people.
3. Alan McKee (2013) has demonstrated that there exist well-documented
histories of the divergence of art and entertainment as cultural forms in
the course of the nineteenth century.
4. Though the caption to this image tells us what they’re watching – a game of
cricket – that that is not apparent in the image itself demonstrates even
further that the defining characteristic is not the content, but its orientation
towards, and impact on, those consuming it.
5. My favourite exemplar of this mindset is British novelist Martin Amis who
once said (in Page 2011) that ‘the idea of being conscious of who you’re
directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is
freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable’.

REFERENCES
Bird, S. E. (2003) The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World,
Routledge: London.
Gray, J. (2010) ‘Entertainment and Media/Cultural/Communication/Etc.
Studies’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. 24, no. 6,
pp. 811–817.
10 S. HARRINGTON

McKee, A. (2013) ‘The Power of Art, the Power of Entertainment’, Media,

Culture and Society, Vol. 35, no. 6, pp. 759–770.
Moreno, J. (2016) ‘This Teen Pulled Off the Ultimate Joke at an Art Gallery’,
Buzzfeed News, 26 May, https://www.buzzfeed.com/javiermoreno/people-
are-loving-this-teens-art-gallery-prank.
Page, B. (2011) ‘Martin Amis: Only Brain Injury Could Make Me Write for
Children’, The Guardian, 11 February, https://www.theguardian.com/
books/2011/feb/11/martin-amis-brain-injury-write-children.
PBS Game/Show (2014) ‘Can Video Games Be a Spiritual Experience?’,
YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK91LAiMOio.
PwC (2016) ‘Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2016–2020’, http://
www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/entertainment-media/outlook.html
Raven, D. (2014) ‘Teenager Who Found Dead Father’s “Ghost” on Racing Video
Game Tells Moving Story’, Mirror Online, 26 August, http://www.mirror.co.
uk/news/technology-science/technology/teenager-who-found-dead-fathers-
4111514.
Wikipedia (n.d.-a) ‘Art’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art.
Wikipedia (n.d.-b) ‘The Arts’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_arts.
Wikipedia (n.d.-c) ‘Entertainment’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Entertainment.
Wikstrom, J. (2014) ‘Player Two’, Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/162531355.

Stephen Harrington is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Communication at the

Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He has published widely on the
transforming relationships between politics, journalism, and popular media, is the
author of Australian TV News: New Forms, Functions, and Futures (Intellect, 2013)
and current Chair of the International Communication Association’s Popular
Communication division.
 What Is Entertainment? The Value of
Industry Definitions

Christy Collis

This chapter starts with a seemingly basic definitional question: what is

entertainment? There is no doubt that something called entertainment
exists: there are sections of newspapers dedicated to it, television shows
about it, and professional associations for it. Entertainment is not an
obscure term for a niche genre. It is a multi-billion dollar global industry
with whose products a significant portion of the world’s population
engages deeply and regularly. As such, it requires substantial analysis,
investigation, and explanation. This analysis is the task of the Palgrave
Entertainment Industries series, of which this book and this chapter are a
part. Despite the size and cultural penetration of entertainment, to date,
the depth and volume of academic investigations of entertainment remain
surprisingly insubstantial: ‘there is simply no positive correlation between
the amount of entertainment that is consumed and the amount of scho-
larly research in the field of entertainment’ (Bosshart and Macconi 1998:
3). Academic analyses of entertainment exist, but they are scattered among
disciplines, lumped into the much broader categories of ‘media studies’ or
‘popular culture’, or focussed on a single subsector such as television or
music. This chapter contributes to a better understanding of entertain-
ment as a complex cultural system. As with Bates and Ferri’s work, this

C. Collis (*)
Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane,
Queensland, Australia

© The Author(s) 2017 11

S. Harrington (ed.), Entertainment Values, Palgrave Entertainment
Industries, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47290-8_2
12 C. COLLIS

chapter is grounded on the premise that ‘the development of a more

objective definition can help unify and advance the field of entertainment
studies’ (2010: 2). This effort involves investigating how entertainment
works as an industry, how its products circulate, and how it is understood.

ACADEMIC AND POLICY DEFINITIONS

A first, obvious task in this project is simply defining the term under
investigation: entertainment. However, what initially seems like a simple
definitional task, as it turns out, is a complicated one: entertainment
seems to mean different things to different key groups. Some circulating
understandings of the term include high art while others do not; some
understandings include leisure activities such as dance classes while
others do not.
Bates and Ferri’s (2010) article, ‘What’s Entertainment’ provides a
useful starting point for working towards a clear definition of entertain-
ment. They differentiate entertainment from two related academic and
cultural fields: leisure and popular culture. Leisure may include consuming
entertainment, but leisure as a government industry classification and as an
academic field of study comprises numerous activities that are not com-
monly understood as entertainment. Leisure, for example, includes play-
ing sports or an instrument, gardening, and gambling. While
acknowledging that many forms of entertainment entail some level of
physically active audience engagement (such as attending a music festival,
or playing a computer game), Bates and Ferri propose that entertainment
differs from leisure in that it is ‘an experience of spectatorship more than
[physical] participation’ (2010: 15). A major league baseball game, they
note, is entertainment, but playing a baseball game, or partaking in base-
ball fan rituals such as attending a baseball game and singing the team
song or wearing a team cap, is leisure (2010: 15). They similarly differ-
entiate entertainment from the much broader field of popular culture,
which, in its academic form, encompasses all elements of mainstream
culture, including cooking, religion, architecture, and automobile culture,
to name a few of the areas included on the Popular Culture Association/
American Culture Association’s website (PCA/ACA n.d.). Having nar-
rowed the definitional field by differentiating entertainment from the
broader categories of leisure and popular culture, Bates and Ferri propose
a definition of entertainment: they state that entertainment ‘involves some
sort of communication between an audience and a text, defined broadly’
 WHAT IS ENTERTAINMENT? THE VALUE OF INDUSTRY DEFINITIONS 13

(2010: 11); that a ‘principal goal of entertainment is to provide pleasure’

(2010: 13); and that entertainment cannot be defined on the basis of its
content (11). Bates and Ferri also argue that entertainment is not neces-
sarily profitable to its producers (2010: 12), and that elite forms of high art
qualify as entertainment because ‘they provide communication-pleasure to
some members of the audience’ (2010: 12).
Entertainment economist Harold Vogel (1998) provides a less cultu-
rally oriented definition of entertainment than do Bates and Ferri. Bates
and Ferri’s definition focusses on a specific relationship between audiences
and texts. Vogel, on the other hand, takes an industry approach to his
definition, stating that ‘entertainment [a subset of recreation] is that
which produces a pleasurable and satisfying experience’ (4), and which
can be identified through ‘enterprises or organisations of significant size
that have similar technological structures or production and that produce
or supply goods, services, or sources of income that are substitutable’
(Vogel 1998: xviii). Vogel’s definition takes almost no account of enter-
tainment content or of audience, but rather uses an objective set of
criteria: an entertainment organisation is different from a candy company,
for example, because entertainment industry organisations are structured
and operate in specific ways. Economists Andersson and Andersson
(2006) similarly use the entertainment’s specific business models as the
term’s defining feature.
A third cluster of academic definitions of entertainment derives from
the field of psychology. Psychological definitions focus on the effect that
entertainment has on people, positioning entertainment as a specific type
of effect-generator. These definitions state that entertainment is that
which either evokes specific types of emotional response from audiences
(Zillman and Bryant 1994), or that address specific audience needs
(Bosshart and Macconi 1998) such as the need for distraction from every-
day concern. As a non-psychologist, I will not expend significant time here
on further discussion of psychological definitions of entertainment; the
key point to note is that numerous definitions circulate within academia,
and the concept remains fragmented among very different disciplines and
approaches.
These definitions are useful, but are only partial. This is because all of
these definitions derive from a single type of source: academics.
Academics’ definitions are certainly evidence-based and rigorous, but
academics are only one of the broader group of people who use and
understand the term ‘entertainment’. I have attended elsewhere to the
14 C. COLLIS

understanding of ‘entertainment’ by other key stakeholders in the cultural

system of entertainment: government policymakers, trade publications,
and mainstream media (McKee et al. 2012, 2014). As those publications
discuss, government policy has an ambivalent stance in relation to a
possible difference between ‘entertainment’ and ‘art’. For example, the
Australia Council for the Arts’s 2015 report, ‘Arts Nation: an overview of
Australian art’ aims to demonstrate the widespread nature of arts uptake
by Australians; rock music festivals, musicals, and popular novels are
included in the definition of ‘art’. However, when it comes to government
funding for the arts, none of these entertainment subcategories tends to
attract funding. The lack of clarity around the definition of entertainment
in government cultural policy is cause for concern: ‘there must be a strong
theoretical basis for any definition used for public policy purposes, not
least because this has important consequences for how we measure these
industries, and the type of interventions we adopt’ (Galloway and Dunlop
2007: 17). Cultural policy analysis is not the focus of this chapter; the
purposes of mentioning it here is to demonstrate the definitional ambi-
guity surrounding the term ‘entertainment’ as it is used by some of its key
stakeholders.

INDUSTRY DEFINITIONS
This chapter attends to a final major stakeholder group in defining and
understanding entertainment: entertainment industry professionals. As
with the definitions discussed above, entertainment industry professionals’
definitions of entertainment have no more validity than academics’ or
trade publications’; they represent another one of the key strands for
understanding the field. To be clear: this chapter is not an attempt to
advance one group’s definition over another’s. Analysing entertainment
industry professionals’ understandings of the term ‘entertainment’ means
adding another key group’s usage to the definitional field. In an academic
publication such as this book, it also means adding the voices of a group
that is muted in academic analysis: while there exist numerous academic
studies of media workers’ and journalists’ professional self-definitions and
industry understandings (see, for example, Von Rimscha and Siegert
2011; Curtin and Sanson 2016), there are fewer which attend to those
who identify as entertainment industry professionals. As von Rimscha and
Siegert note in their study of TV producers and commissioners, ‘little
work has been done investigating the actual producers and commissioners
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of One touch of
Terra
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: One touch of Terra

Author: Hannes Bok

Release date: November 19, 2023 [eBook #72173]

Language: English

Original publication: New York, NY: King-Size Publications, Inc, 1956

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ONE TOUCH

OF TERRA ***
 one touch of terra

By HANNES BOK

Maybe they had been bad mannered—accepting things

of her—but who was to guess the Martian would interfere?

Hannes Bok, who has been part of the

world of Science Fiction and Fantasy
for so many years, tells the touching
story of Trixie and her dandelions, in
the little mining camp on Venus, and
how one of them th'ar Martians tried
to do her—and the citizens of
Finchburg—wrong.... Of course
Goreck was just giving Trixie the
runaround. All he was really after was
her dandelions ... as you would have
been....

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Fantastic Universe December 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"Listen, Elmer!" Horseface Smith told his gwip. "What's that racket
ahead—yellin', shootin', or both?"
Elmer obediently stopped and cocked his duck-head in the direction
of Finchburg, then nodded sagely, if somewhat ambiguously. He was
a pack animal of the sort commonly used by psithium-prospectors on
Venus, now that interplanetary travel was commonplace, and he was
almost as intelligent as a human.
Despite his size—he was nearly as large as a terrestrial horse—he
must have had a dash of flying-squirrel blood, since when in a hurry
gwips were apt to bound off the ground, flattening their plump bodies
in a flying-squirrel glide which took them thirty to fifty feet per jump.
But at present Elmer wasn't able to do any bounding. His saddle-
bags were sagging with samples of ore, and he had all he could do
just to walk.
Horseface clunked his heels on Elmer's sides, urging him up the
stony hillside. They gained the summit and craned down at
Finchburg, only half a mile below. Like most of the mining-
settlements scattered sparsely over the vast Venus deserts, it
consisted of scarcely a dozen buildings, none of them new, but all in
reasonably good repair. If it is true that a town speaks for its
inhabitants, Finchburg plainly declared that while its people might be
down on their luck, but they hadn't lost hope.
"Looks like Trixie is blowing her jets," Horseface speculated, and
Elmer dipped his broad bill in agreement. "Wonder what's eating
her? She ain't acted human for months!"
Elmer cocked an inquiring eye on his master as if asking whether
Trixie's behavior could possibly be considered gwippish. He decided
not, and clucked sympathetically. He knew all about Trixie's
idiosyncrasies. But then, who—or what—didn't?
Trixie O'Neill was the only woman within a thousand miles of the
Venus Flats, and furthermore, the only terrestrial woman. She wasn't
young nor beautiful. She was in her middle fifties, gaunt, coarse, and
had a wooden leg.
She'd come to Finchburg thirty years ago at the height of the
psithium rush. She'd been young and pretty then, and desperately in
love with her prospector-spouse Mike O'Neill. Mike had been a
roistering giant, but he hadn't lasted long on Venus. The acid dust
had eaten his lungs away, and in less than a year he'd been laid to
rest down in an abandoned mine.
Almost immediately the veins of psithium had petered out. The mine-
owners closed the shafts and took away their expensive equipment
imported nut-by-bolt by rocket from Earth. Finchburg became a
ghost-town. All the miners except for die-hards like Horseface had
moved far away to the more promising strikes of Satterlee, Guzil
Banks and Storington.
But Trixie remained at Finchburg. "My Mike's buried here, ain't he?
Awright—where he stays, I stay!"
And she went on doggedly doing Mike's work until a cave-in crushed
one of her legs, after which she set up a hostelry which was a one-
woman service-bureau—she washed the miners' clothes, served
their meals, kept their books, sold supplies to them and most of all
kept up their morale. She provided the woman's touch, and the men
adored her.
But the touch which they worshiped abjectly was of Terra itself—half
of a blistered blast-tube filled with Terrestrial soil and growing
genuine Terrestrial dandelions, rather scrubby and colorless ones,
but from good old Terra just the same.
When you thought you'd choke on one more whiff of the bitter
Venus-dust, when you remembered the green lushness of Terra and
wished you were back there, knowing you could never find enough
psithium to pay your passage—then you went to Trixie's place,
looked at her dandelions and maybe touched your finger to the dirt in
which they grew—and you went away feeling better somehow. You'd
been home again for a little while.
And if anybody saw a tear in your eye, he looked the other way.
Because maybe tomorrow he'd be doing the same.
Why, there hadn't been a Mercurian in camp for years. They were
afraid to come here ever since the earthmen had run out of town that
one who'd got drunk on vhubi, upset the tube and tried to trample the
plants.
No man, you didn't treat Trixie or her dandelions lightly. They were
sacred.

"Hey," Horseface asked Elmer, "is that a rocket down there? A rocket
—in Finchburg?"
Elmer peered forward and said, "Wak, wak!" in a meshed-gears
voice, meaning yes.
"A rocket!" Horseface marvelled. "Maybe it's visitors from Terra! Or
maybe it's news of a new strike! Gee-jup, Elmer! Time's a-jettin'!"
They started down the hillside's hairpin turns. The shouting grew
more strident, and at times Horseface heard the raucous yowl of
blaster-guns.
Celebration!
"Yippity!" Horseface bellowed, firing his own gun in the air.
But it turned out to be anything but a celebration. Horseface rushed
Elmer into the community stable, unhooked the saddle-bags,
dropped the stall-bar, and ran toward Trixie's place, "The Pride of
Terra".
Every man in the camp was waiting at the door, and waiting
vociferously. The comments mingled into an indistinguishable
babble. A few miners were loitering around the rocket, a small two-
seater, like mice cagily inspecting a new and baffling trap. Horseface
recognized it by the device emblazoned on one of its doors—a
yellow sunburst on a grey square, the insignia of United Mars.
The rocket belonged to Thurd Goreck, the Martian. Goreck hadn't
been in town for years. He and his fellows had their diggings over at
Saturday Wells, "Saturday" for short, in the west. What, Horseface
wondered, possibly could have brought him here?
Since Horseface was a little below average height, he couldn't see
over the heads of the crowd. He raced up the steps of an old ruin
opposite Trixie's establishment. A shrieking beam from a blast-gun
fired at random just missed him and scorched the wood overhead.
He heard Trixie's bark: "Stop it, boys, do you hear me? Somebody's
likely to get hurt!"
She was standing in her doorway, a big sculpturesque woman with
her feet planted solidly wide and her red fists on her broad hips. Her
face was square and rough-hewn as a man's, the skin leathery from
years of weathering. She'd thrown her blue lace scarf around her
shoulders, the scarf that Mike O'Neill had given her on their first
anniversary. Her crystal earrings dangled under her cottony hair—a
bad sign. Trixie never put on her shawl and earrings unless thinking
of leaving town.
Thurd Goreck lounged against the door-frame beside her. Like most
Martians, he was tall and spindle-legged, large-chested, big-nosed
and equipped with almost elephantine ears. He displayed quite a
paternal solicitude whenever he looked at Trixie, but he sneered
openly at the yelping crowd.
"Don't do it, Trix!" somebody roared above the din.
"You'll be sorry!" another warned.
Still another wanted to know, "Have you forgotten Mike?"
Then Horseface noticed that the other Martians from Goreck's
settlement were ranged on either side of Trixie and Goreck, holding
off the Finchburgers. It was they who were doing most of the firing—
warning blasts over the crowd's heads.
"No," Trixie yelled, "I ain't forgotten Mike. He was a better man than
the lot of you put together!"
Horseface whistled to Candy Derain, who turned and edged toward
him. "What's up, Candy?"
"Man!" Candy reached at him. "You're just the one we need—Trixie's
running away! You got to do something quick!"
"She's—huh?"
"Goreck's been lazing around town almost ever since you went out
nugget hunting. He's taking Trixie to Saturday—going to set her up
there in a new place. He was smart and waited till you weren't
around, 'cause he knows you cut a lot of ice with Trix. You got to stop
her—"
A roar from the crowd cut him short. It sounded as if all the men
simultaneously had been jabbed with ice picks.
"Look!"
"No!"
"They're stealing our Terra!"
"Trixie, you can't do this to us—you can't!"
"Ain't you got no heart at all?"
Horseface goggled, and groaned. Trixie and Goreck had stepped
aside, making room for those Martians who were coming out with the
blast-tube and its dandelions.
"Howling Gizzlesteins!" Horseface moaned. Then determinedly, "One
side, Candy!"
He launched into the mob, shouldering, prodding and elbowing room
for himself until he was out in front. A Martian significantly poked a
blaster in his ribs.
"Trixie!" Horseface bawled, "what do you think you're doing?"
She scowled more fiercely than ever. "You!" she thundered, pointing
a muscular arm for emphasis. "You're a fine one, asking me that! I'm
clearing out of here, that's what. I'm sick and tired of all you useless
loafers preying on my good nature! Ain't it so, Goreck?"
The Martian nodded, grinning.
"For years and years," Trixie cried on, "you've been bleeding me dry!
Trixie will you do this for me? Trixie will you do that? And I been
doing it 'cause I felt sorry for you hopeless free-loaders, like as if
maybe you was my own Mike. But now I'm through with you—and
why? 'Cause you never treated me like no lady, that's why! You don't
deserve a woman's kindness, Goreck says, and he's right!"
The uproar was dying down, no doubt keeping the miners' spirits
company.
"Maybe I ain't no raving beauty," Trixie continued, "but that don't
mean I ain't no lady, see?" In her next remark she used questionable
words of interstellar origin—it is doubtful if they could have been said
to have enriched any language. "Why, you frownzley glorfels, you
even swear in front of me! So I'm clearing out. I've more than paid
my debt to Mike, Lord rest him."
As the groans began, she gestured airily. "Put the flowers in the
rocket, lads!"
"But Trixie!" Horseface called, pushing a step ahead. The Martian's
gun dug a trifle deeper into his side.
"Eassy doess it," the Martian admonished in his whistling accent.
Horseface cried, "We're your own people, Trixie! You can't ditch us
for Martians!"
"My people are the people treating me with respect!" she retorted,
and Horseface's long visage fell several inches longer.
Goreck's Martians slid the dandelion-container into the rocket's
baggage compartment and stood back, forming a lane down which
Goreck assisted Trixie with exaggerated politeness. Surely she
should have seen that his smirk was purely one of triumph!
But she didn't. She swung along on her wooden leg, thrilled to the
core, beaming coyly at Goreck and actually blushing. He handed her
into the rocket, let her arrange herself comfortably, then went to the
other side of the flyer and swung aboard.
He slammed the door shut and reached for the controls. He treated
the assemblage to one last sneer so poisonous that even a coral
snake would have flinched from it. Trixie leaned across him to thumb
her nose—after all, Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt had been dead
for a century.
The Martian with his gun in Horseface's midriff stepped back and
away. Horseface would have rushed after him, but Mouse Digby
caught him from behind.
"Hold it, Horseface!" And more softly, "We been up to something—"
Goreck pulled the rocket's power-lever with a grand flourish. Nothing
happened. He smiled sweetly at Trixie, shrugged and dragged on
the lever again. Nothing happened. On the third try he nearly
wrenched the stick from its socket. From one of the rocket's jets, as
though torn from its very heart, came two feeble sparks and a
mournful burp.
"We busted their feed-line!" Digby chuckled.

Goreck, having gone thus far, was not minded to stop now. He
sprang from the rocket, called something in Martian to his men, and
several of them raced away. The miners cheered perhaps a shade
precipitately and bore down on the rest. The gun-toting Martians
filled the air with frantic warning blasts and were swept down before
they could turn their weapons to more practical use. The miners
reeled around the rocket, swaying it as they clubbed the Martians
with their own guns.
Goreck backed them away with well-laced blasts near their toes—
what was known as "the quick hotfoot" since it turned the ground
molten. He maneuvered himself with his back to his ship, his men
breaking free and joining him.
Trixie clambered out seething with wrath. "You brakking chadouzes!"
she howled, brandishing a brawny fist. The men subsided sheepishly
silent. She was accustomed to having her way, and they were
accustomed to letting her have it. It had proved the best policy in the
long run.
"Look at you, brawling and trying to keep me from having the one
thing I want more than anything else—being treated lady-like! You
think I got any sympathy for you when you act like this? You can't
keep me here no longer, and you might as well realize it—and leave
me go!"
They muttered angrily, but there was nothing to do except surrender.
Horseface didn't bother to sheathe his gun—he threw it down in the
dust. Mouse Digby, who'd been so elated over the stalling of the
rocket, turned away and burst into tears.
The men were driven farther back as Trixie's supply-jeep snorted up
to the rocket, driven by those Martians to whom Goreck earlier had
shouted. They leaped down and assisted their fellow in transferring
the dandelions from the rocket to the jeep.
"Dissable my sship, will you?" Goreck asked, grinning foxily. "Well,
as we Martians say, there are plenty of ways to cook a gnorph!"
He snapped his fingers to one of his big-eared breed. "Phorey, you
drive the jeep over to Ssaturday." Trixie started toward the jeep and
he halted her—very courteously, of course. "No, my dear lady, we
will let the jeep go firsst. Then we can be certain that nobody
followss after it to rob you of your lovely flowerss. We will leave
later."
The jeep chugged away. Trixie was very red-faced and unable to
look at her erst-while Finchburg admirers. Perhaps, Horseface
hoped, she was relenting. But if she were, Goreck knew how to
prevent it.
"Ssuch clods, to sstare sso at a lady!" he purred, and Trixie glared
relentlessly at the men who had adored her so long—and apparently,
so vainly.
Since Goreck's rocket was damaged beyond immediate repair, he
rode off with Trixie on the town borer, a community-owned tractor
equipped with a giant blaster and used in boring mine-tunnels. It was
not intended for general travel and rumbled away very slowly, kicking
up a great deal of dust. The other Martians had come on gwips,
which they now mounted, then made off in a hurry.
"You'll get your borer back when I get my rocket back!" Goreck called
from the wake of dust.
The Finchburgers stayed as they were, every spine an S of
dejection.
"With Trixie gone," Candy Derain mourned, "there ain't no use our
staying here. We'll all starve!"
Baldy Dunn said, "Maybe we was bad-mannered accepting things off
of her, but I always meant to pay her back as soon as I found me
some psithium. If I'd of thought—"
Horseface said, "Of course Goreck is just giving Trixie the
runaround. All he's really after is her dandelions, 'cause he knows
what they mean to us. He'll keep 'em till we go to his diggings to
work for him, that's what! He'll charge us real money every time we
want to touch 'em—and where are we going to get money? It's like
he's holding 'em for ransom!"
He set his jaw. "Well, we ain't going to let him get away with it! When
Trixie finds out what a nopper he is, she'll be sorry, sure—but she
won't never come back here on account of she's too proud! She'll
just stay in Saturday being Goreck's slave, her poor heart
meanwhiles busting—and I ain't going to let her!"
He started briskly for the stable, the others hesitantly trailing along.
"I'm getting on Elmer and going after her. Dandelions be
desubricated, I'm going to save Trixie in spite of herself!"
But it seemed that everybody was having that identical idea at once.
Not all of them owned gwips, so the party of rescuers set off on a
peculiar assortment of vehicles—Candy on his vacuum-cup bicycle
meant for scaling precipices, Baldy Dunn and several others on pick-
wielding ore-cars, some on the psithium-detectors, and Digby on the
mowing-machine which cut and baled grasses for the feeding of the
gwips. About a third of the expedition had to go afoot.
In no time at all, Horseface and the other gwip-riders had far
outstripped the clumsy machines and the pedestrians. As Elmer
soared toward Saturday in forty-foot bounds, Horseface called to the
rider abreast of him:
"Wasn't that Martian driving Trixe's jeep Phorey Yakkermunn? Yeah?
Kind of thought so! Remembered him from way back when the rush
was on," he mumbled to himself. "Seemed a little crazy even then,
and guess he had to be, to go and turn against us what used to be
his buddies. Elmer, for the love of Pete, space your jumps—you're
beating the breath out of me!"
He came to a fork in the road and turned left, following the borer's
tracks. Then he halted, letting the other gwips overtake him. They
had started after Trixie too late. A swathe of sip-flowers had moved
in across the road.
"Might as well try to swim through space to Terra!" Horseface
lamented. "Blast them zips!"

But it wouldn't have done him much good if he had blasted them.
The zips were pretty things, something like Terrestrial tiger-lilies—
brilliant orange cups on tall green stems. They grew very thickly and
had been named because of their incredibly swift life-cycle. In five
seconds they would zip up from the ground as sprouts, attain full
green growth, blossom, produce seed, fall withering and scatter the
seed which in another five seconds would do the same thing over
again.
Nobody possibly could wedge through their rank masses. If anyone
tried, and were somehow to reach their midst, he would find himself
being tossed up and down at five-second intervals as though being
hazed on a blanket.
The zips traveled whichever way the wind carried their seeds—which
happened right now to be away from Saturday. If the salt plains and
chains of vertical peaks had not checked them, they might have
choked the whole of Venus centuries ago.
Horseface blinked at them, dismayed. The other men also blinked,
since the continual change from bare earth to green stems to orange
blooms and back to bare earth again took place in five snaps of the
fingers, like the winking of an illuminated sign.
Elmer helpfully tried to eat them, but they vanished in decay even as
his beak closed over them. And they stretched for miles and miles.
"Awrk!" He spat them out and shrugged discouragedly, almost
hurling Horseface off the saddle.
"Guess we got to detour," Horseface sighed. They skirted the
encroaching zips and ran smack into a sheerly perpendicular cliff.
While they were wondering what to do next, Candy purred up on his
vacuum-cup bicycle.
"At least I can ride up and over," he said, switching gear. He shot up
the cliff and out of sight, the suction-cups popping like a string of fire-
crackers.
"You fool, come back here!" Horseface bawled, but Candy was out of
earshot by then. "He's forgot there's nothing but rock-spires for miles
and miles on the other side. He'll ride up and down for hours and get
no farther forward than a hundred yards!"
He thumped his heels on Elmer's sides. "Gee-jup, Elmer—we'll have
to try the other end of the zips."
Digby hailed him from the mower. "Should I try cutting a path through
'em?"
"How can you, when they die before your blade turns, and grow up
before it can turn again? They'll bounce you to butter and shake the
mower to bits."
"But we got to do something!"
By now the men on the detectors and ore-cars had caught up with
the gwips, and the men on foot were within hailing distance.
"We're licked," Horseface mourned. "Ain't nothing we can do, except
try the other end of the zips—and that's miles away. We're finished."
But they weren't. Elmer sneezed, exclaimed, "Yuk, yuk!" and jabbed
his bill to indicate the cliffs.
Horseface sniffed. "Smells like rock-dust. If I didn't know better, I'd
say somebody's been boring through the rock—hey! Trix and Goreck
were riding on the borer! The zips must have cut them off the road
like us! Come on, boys, look for the hole they made—boring a tunnel
to cut past the zips!"
He didn't need to nudge Elmer. The gwip leaped toward the rocks,
found the hole and slowed to a crouching walk into it. The passage
was eight feet in diameter and reeking of blasted rock. After about a
hundred yards it emerged into daylight but encountered zips en
masse and so returned inward for several hundred yards more.
"That means Goreck wasted a lot of time tunneling," Horseface said
happily. "Maybe we ain't so terrible far behind after all."
There was a shriek from the rear, and he reined Elmer. "What's
that?"
"Dunno," the next man said, turning to look back.
They waited. One of the pedestrians came sprinting. "Hey, the
detectors found a whopping vein of psithium—bigger than the one
that started the old-time rush!"
"Huh, is that all?" Horseface demanded. "Forget it! We got to save
Trixie!"

The borer had traveled faster than Horseface had imagined. He

didn't come in sight of it until the party reached Saturday. It was just
stopping in front of Goreck's tavern, "The Martian's Fancy". Goreck
was handing Trixie down from it.
Saturday was a lot less of a ghost-town than Finchburg. Maybe there
were weeds in its main street, but every house had its occupants,
and some had coats of paint besides.
Elmer braked at the borer, his claws deeply furrowing the dust.
Horseface called, "Trix, come on back! We come to save you in spite
of yourself!"
Goreck whistled, and a flock of his boys materialised on the porch of
"The Martian's Fancy".
"Trouble, boyss! Sstand ready!"
Then he smiled at Horseface and the other Finchburgers. It was a
masterpiece of insult. "I don't like blast-play or dangerouss fighting,
but if necessary, I'll resort to it. You've no authority to argue, sso go
before you get hurt. Trixie iss here because she wants to be here—
no, my dear?"
He nudged her. She jumped, looked as though she was about to bat
him one, then gulped and nodded. She couldn't look in the eyes of
Horseface and his party.
Horseface laid his hand on his blaster-butt. "It don't make no particle
of difference. Maybe you fooled Trix, but you ain't fooled us, so hand
her over, see?"
Goreck twinkled jovially at his men in front of "The Martian's Fancy".
He said, "Horseface, I warn you—get back, and take your hand off
your gun. As long as I have the dandelionss ssafe inside my
headquarterss, I'm quite ssure that you won't dare try anything
reckless—"
"Boss! Psst!" One of the Martians was beckoning nervously.
"What is it?" Goreck demanded testily. "Sspeak up! There'ss nothing
to fear—we've got the whip hand."
"But, boss—"
Goreck dropped his own hand to his own gun. The Martian hastily
piped, "The dandelionss! They didn't get here!"
"I—what—ulp!" Goreck spluttered, which made beautiful sense even
if it wasn't coherent. He dived behind Trixie as though behind a rock,
and whipped out his gun.
"Looking klambits!" Mouse Digby moaned. "The zips! They got
Phorey and the jeep and the dandelions! Shook 'em to pieces!"
He pressed his mouth into a slit and started grimly forward. But
Trixie's scream checked him.
"My dandelions! Gone! All gone! Just 'cause I wanted to be treated
nice—"
Horseface said, "You see? That's what you get for being so foolish.
And ain't us coming to fetch you kind of a compliment? It's sure took
us a lot more effort than Goreck's sweet-talking did. You, Goreck, get
out from behind a woman's skirts! That ain't no way for a gentleman
to act!"
"Trixie, back up to the Fancy," Goreck snapped. "Hide me. Boyss,"
he squeaked, gesturing wildly, "let 'em have it!"
"No you don't! You ain't going to shoot my old pardners!" Trixie
fumed, even as a number of rays from Martian blasters sang past.
The Finchburgers ducked, not daring to shoot while Trixie was so
near their targets.
She turned, swooped and had Goreck off the ground, high over her
head and squawking. He didn't dare shoot her since she was his
only hope of salvation, and the Martians didn't either.
They just stopped fighting.
Trixie walked Goreck over to Horseface and thumped him down on
the dust. The rest of the Martians held a quick exchange of ideas
limited strictly to gestures, and began to melt away from the scene.
"Fortune hunter! Deceiver!" Trixie bawled at Goreck who was already
wretched enough with blasters poked in his face. "You promised me
you'd do it all peaceful, and still you wanted to shoot my pardners!