On 23rd Century Ganymede, a ’samesexer’ historian reminisces about a sobering incident in his world’s cultural past…

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During the 2130s, the Terran Federation was swept by a series of high-resolution CGI ‘recasts,’ in which one fed a past media product into a large capacity narrative augementation artificial-intelligence, leading to several consequences.

Some of the results were works of genius themselves. In Aunt Jemima’s Revenge, the Newafrikan version of the Gone With the Wind character shoots both Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, before running off with either Frederick Douglass (or Sojourner Truth in the blacklesbian version) to start a glorious slave revolution and destroy the South.

The trend wended its way throughout the Federation’s settled worlds, bypassing Io in the Gallilean Confederacy because its Hindi mining population already made a packet out of their “New Bollywood” musicals about life on the innermost ‘older’ Jovian satellite.  On Europa, its cybercetacean colony made a memorable classic of their own, Moby Dick: Elusive Pursuit, which told  Melville’s saga from the perspective of the title great white whale- in which we learn that he regarded the Pequod as the pursued and not the pursuers.

And then, the craze hit Ganymede. No, I’m not talking about those Sword and Sandal epics from the Northcapper Womensdomes, such as Amazon Hordes of Love Rescue  [insert strikingly independent female historical, mythical or media figure who should have known the love of women]. At least those have some merit as child entertainment in their juvenile formats.

I don’t know which presiding Empress of Dollywood, the dragqueen dome for couturiers and body arts suggested that someone remake the 20C classic thriller, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, but the results were cataclysmic. Seriously. All right, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (Reprise) had its own quirky charm when Joan Crawford’s alter egos, Vienna (Johnny Guitar), rescued Blanche from her crazed sister, and left the Bette Davis simulacra to hog the rest of the screen, resulting in the reclamation of Baby Jane Hudson’s earlier career (albeit in horror movies). It proved to be a worldwide Ganymede mediahit. Unfortunately, there were sequels…

The last three generations of Ganymedean film critics have persistently argued the merits of the first one, Baby Jane II: Encounter at Bates Motel, in which a showering Alfred Hitchcock is set upon by a revenge trio of Marion Crane, Baby Jane and Norma Bates, even if the ensuing plotline is lifted from Thelma and Louise. 

That said however, there can be no excuse whatsoever for the hideously mangled fare that was Baby Jane III: Escape from Spice-Planet, in which Baby Jane auditions for the position of a half-forgotten early 21C female pop group believed to have been called something like the Salt Girls, Pepper Girls or some other condiment. Of course, she’s rejected, but for some inexplicable reasons, the female pop group is trying to devastate the world’s deserts through immense wormlike creatures. And was that wanton desecration of the Beatles entire back catalogue really neccessary? This one was condemned for its violence.

In the fourth number of the increasingly dire franchise, Baby Jane IV: The Shat Strikes Back,  Baby Jane must fight a mortal enemy- classic late 20thC space-comedian  William Shatning. If the name sounds familiar, it’s probably because there’s a gas-giant in the Lallande 21185 planetary system named “Dennycrane” for one of the master comic’s greatest creations.

At that point, though, fate took a turn, as the Ganymede MultiMedia Consortium took the entire conga chain of Baby Janes to Cannes, where they caused nausea, vomiting and massive outrage to a gang of volatile neo-existentialist Parisian cinema theorists, who then attacked the entourage of Baby Jane lookalikes from Dollywood who’d come to promote the film.

That incident triggered off a small-scale cultural war, which ensued for the next decade and a half.  Hordes of amped up Parisian and satellite cinema theorists would descend upon any Earth, Luna, Sinomars or Asteroid Colonies settlement screenings of the Baby Jane series- usually to be met with equally militant and aggrieved Baby Jane aficionados from Ganymede’s Baby Jane Superstar Fan Club (Militant Tendency). Some of their stoushes were legendary, and it is to them that we owe terms like “pancaked” (with heavy makeup, usually involuntarily) and baguettez ses culs (placement of large French breadsticks into a particular anatomical orifice, often forcibly).

Little by little, the unfortunate period of aesthetic contention died into quiescence. The “Baby Jane Wars” were an artefact of Ganymede’s cultural adolescence, and let’s face it, we all know what teenagers have been like for the last four centuries or so, don’t we?

Original Publication:

O/Wilde 14.8 Iteration: “Drag Queens from Ganymede Happened to Baby Jane, That’s What” Ganymede Cultural Studies, C-58, 2208 CE.