Monday, April 8, 2013

Two Tiny Allusions to Shakespeare in Rango

Rango. Dir. Gore Verbinski. Perf. Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, and Timothy Olyphant. 2011. DVD. Paramount Pictures, 2011. 

I'd like to return to the blog's roots for the next few posts.

Bardfilm started as a microblog, offering short but informative posts about matters Shakespearean.

Briefly, then, the film Rango has two allusions to Shakespeare. In the first, one of the characters in our protagonist's active imagination is given the name Malvolio.  In the second, our protagonist advises a youngster to "Stay in school, eat your veggies, burn everything but Shakespeare."

Note: Thanks to @BardNews for pointing out that "Burn everything but Shakespeare" comes from the play The Skin of Our Teeth by Thorton Wilder. This article from SF Weekly says that the play 
mentions Shakespeare exactly three times. Mrs. Antrobus misquotes him; the housemaid Sabina remarks, "Ugh. Shakespeare"; and in Act 1, famously, Mr. Antrobus telegrams advice to his family on how to keep warm as the ice age closes in: "Burn everything except Shakespeare."
Here's a clip with both references:


Links: The Film at IMDB.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest