Learning Day: Tomes And Talismans

Tomes And Talismans is an edutainment program teaching 1980s Mississippi children to use a library. It’s also a passionate work of outsider art combining science fiction, high fantasy, and dystopian doomsaying. Those two premises conflict.

Let’s say you’re a George Lucas type. You want to make a Star War. Bad news: in this hypothetical, you are not the California filmmaker George Lucas. You are a public television employee, in the mid-1980s, in the city of oh I don’t know let’s say Biloxi. You became a public television employee by answering a classified ad. You were either the only respondent, or the only respondent wearing a shirt and shoes. Are you imagining the full hypothetical I’ve presented? You are? Good. Now: in this hypothetical, are you the ideal creator in the ideal conditions to make a Star War? If you are rational, you answer “no”. If you are Mississippi Public Broadcasting, you answer “yes! And my Star War will also be a Lords Of The Ring! And its title card shall bear my runic sigil!”

I received a tip about this show from Hot Dog Discord user “XplosionXtreme1994”. I assume Tomes And Talismans is the cultural powder keg that xploded Mr. Xtreme94’s mind to kingdom come. I’d never heard of Tomes And Talismans before, because I’m from Illinois. It turns out Tomes And Talismans is a big deal in the U.S. Southeast. Episode 1’s YouTube comments indicate T&T tapes were a Southern classroom mainstay well into the 1990s. They were a big deal with kids in Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida, and other tinpot dictatorships. I can see why. Tomes And Talismans won the esteem all kids feel for “not school.” Tomes And Talismans occupies the same rarified air as “any movie” and “a snow day” and “Keith peed his desk chair and the desk chair is bolted to the desk so there’s no separating it so we all got Second Recess while The Janitor aired the room out good with a box fan, post-seat-scrub.” All the YouTube comments affirm this. There’s also a comment that’s a seven-year-old non-apology from Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

Those 47 replies include way too many replies from Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Why? MPB added the full Tomes And Talismans series to "Passport". Passport is the streaming service of British Period Drama Nerds who don’t know how to pirate and don’t trust Britbox with their debit card. MPB alerted viewers to this programming service update without deleting or adjusting their initial denial. They also lost track of how many times they posted that, and didn’t bother explaining their URL barrage with any commentary.

I approached Tomes And Talismans with trepidation. I feared loving it. On paper, I am the audience for Tomes And Talismans. I love libraries, wizards, space-dystopias, and foolhardy optimism. I also fear the inevitable day when I’ll go too far off the geek end. Someday I’ll be the worst. However, I still have a shred of tolerability. I do not love Tomes And Talismans. It’s a hard watch. Its makers combine passion with a total lack of craft. The only part that isn’t boring and alienating is the musical score. Every second of music in this show is original, inventive, noodly synths. That stuff is a siren song, to me. The random Tupelo resident who synth’d this show achieved the same vibe as A Clockwork Orange, in the best way. Mississippi Public Broadcasting can’t find their own [Southern slang for butt] with both [Southern slang for your hands]. Yet MPB still had the wisdom to upload the score (plus spooky laughter) on its own.

Marinate in that. Let that transport you. Much like the Star Wars prequels, Tomes And Talismans has a “too competent soundtrack” problem. Its quality sticks out. Every kid in Mississippi must’ve looked like the damn Maxell guy when the intro theme hits its key change.

What happens in the meaty middle of this show’s opening and closing synth sandwich? Too much happens. There’s so much canon. The canon begins in a terrifying voiceover, preceded by corny visuals. A paper Moon orbits a paper Earth. Four people beam up. A lady rediscovers a library bookmobile, in a shot that’s supposed to feel like a Planet Of The Apes plot twist but feels more like a library bookmobile got parked beside a tree.

Then a sleeping woman crossfades to a chortling mustache man. I’m curious if grade school kids found this a little scary. I’m also 100% on board with all of it because this is the section where our bayou synth genius hits his stride.

Then comes the title card. The title card is what I showed you before, with the runes. They get to it by opening the cover of this book.

I love this book cover beat. The cover appears to be leather-bound and hard. Then a hand reaches to open the book. The hand peels it open. Whoops. The titular Tome opens like a waiting room magazine. The cover appears to have the heft, texture, and carcino-smell of those roll-up mats they start you on in beginner Chess Club because too many kids fold the cardboard boards the wrong direction and split them in half.

Voiceover time: we are in the future. By the end of the 21st century, pollution ruined the Earth. As our ecology and society collapsed, an alien race called Wipers seized on that disorder to overwhelm us, colonize Earth, and do their favorite pastime (the destruction of all communication and data technology). Grim! Sad! And a wild choice for a teevee learn-em-up for grade schoolers. A significant portion of this show’s intended audience was so young they still slept with the lights on. They might not be tough enough for a partial ripoff of the setting of Parable Of The Sower.

After that scary start, the next sentence of T&T’s voiceover plays over an unacceptable set of clips. Here is that combination:

That’s right: as Earth collapsed, scientists used (pretend) lasers to vaporize a (real) puppy. They did this “for solutions.” Our heroes are chaotic dystopian dog-killers. Alternatively, maybe they’re just coked-up? I am not just referencing cocaine because this is a 1980s show. The voiceover and characters seem to yearn for a Cocaine Galaxy. The very next VO describes humanity’s escape plan: from the year 2117 to the year 2123, Earth’s remaining rump governments evacuated their final humans to a new home. Their new home is in something called the “White Crystal Solar System”. T&T’s humans bring this up throughout the episode. Our main characters MUST get to The White Crystal Solar System. They MUST transplant themselves to an unnamed planet of The White Crystal Solar System. We GOTTA write your screenplay idea as SOON as we disembark on The Planet Miami.

The rest of the voiceover is a buzzkill. It turns out the VO was read aloud by a charisma-free maybe-robot. We’re forced to look at the maybe-robot as he intones his last information like a bored hostage. The maybe-robot’s shirt has a Future Collar, because dress shirts will change exactly one way in the next 137 years.

In Maybe-Robot’s final message, he tells us this show documents one of the final pockets of humans. The humans must something something something something in Earth’s final library, before leaving in the year 2123’s final evacuation wave. Then we cut to that library, and task viewers with remembering all this canon while also learning the Dewey Decimal System.

In “Chapter 1: Almost A Pun”, we meet four librarians. Their leader is Miss Bookhart. This name choice is like printing “Mister President” on a fictional President’s birth certificate. Miss Bookhart is an alienating gal to watch. She’s stiff. She’s flat. It feels like she’s thinking about something else the entire time. The something else is her accent. I think the performer playing Miss Bookhart is ashamed of her speaking voice. For most of the episode, she speaks in a drowsy version of the invented and “neutral” Mid-Atlantic Accent. She also gives muted reactions to plot points like “the Wipers stormed a live news broadcast and assaulted the anchorman” and “my vehicle died in the backwoods of a U.S. state that wasn’t all that safe to begin with.”

Her shame gets revealed in the episode’s brief explanation of dictionaries. Miss Bookhart says the dictionary is amazing. After all, this dictionary offers seven useful definitions of the word “CUH-LAH-YUD.”

Oh no. The Miss Bookhart actress missed one crucial word in her “obliterate your accent” Ludovico Method brainwashing. Turns out she’s the rural-est. Also, I love that? Her accent is the most interesting thing about her. Who ordered these people to drop that? Let them sound Southern! They’ll give performances that don’t feel clenched. They’ll also push back on the most pernicious stereotypes about Southern white people (“accent = dumb”). Push back on that by making your librarian hero talk like their real-world patrons. This lady is making a show by Mississippi, for Mississippi. Don’t make her fail to talk like Katharine Hepburn.

Miss Bookhart’s three subordinates wear orange jumpsuits with patches reading “EAM”. The three EAM librarian-archivist lackeys have distinct personalities, in the sense that “Lester” is male and “Dundee” is in her 40s and “Margaret” is The Nerdy One.

Shout-out to the actress playing Margaret for taking on that last stereotype. Playing the specifically-nerdy member of a group of science fiction librarians can’t be easy. I wish she had more strategies for achieving that. Her two strategies are “glasses” and “speak in a more grating voice than everyone else.”

Would you like to learn to find a book in a library? You can’t, yet. There is so much more Tomes And Talismans canon to explore. The librarians have two hours to go to the evacuation site. However, they cannot locate Volume 3 of a 3-volume set of hardbound books about the Wiper invasion and colonization of Earth. This is a problem. A problem that fills Miss Bookhart with her actress’s version of panic. After all, “That’s the volume which covers the capture and defection of the Singing River Wipers.” Because Wipers have subclasses or ethnicities or something, Miss Bookhart launches a two-pronged investigation into the missing book.

Prong One: Miss Bookhart will leave the safety of the bunker library and wander the streets, hoping to see or trip over the book. Prong Two: the other librarians will use the card catalog, to look up every other book in the entire library, and see if the missing book might be next to another book. You can tell this is a good show about how to use a library because neither of those strategies would ever work. Prong One suffers from the fact that a lost book is not a lost dog. You can’t shout its name on Main Street and make it come running. (Also, don’t tell these maniacs books are dogs. They’ll laser them.) Prong Two is a bigger mess. Lester and Margaret demonstrate one drawer of a card catalog. Did you know a Dewey Decimal System card catalog organizes information alphabetically, and also by subject? That information is useless in this made-up situation.

Armed with no clues, Lester and Margaret find nothing. They use the card catalog to look up, and then walk over to, every book in the entire library. They spot-check each book using the power of staring at the shelf and following alphabetical order. They do this at the speed of Steve From Blue’s Clues teaching you that the letter B comes after the letter A.

Miss Bookhart also finds nothing. She returns to chat with Dundee, who is stacking boxes that look like the fancy bar soap packaging at an Anthropologie. I admit the boxes might make sense, and have something to do with microfilm. I know very little about microfilm. Microfilm was on the verge of obsolescence when this was made. I was born after that. Still, Dundee demonstrates the power of microfilm by showing us several more paragraphs of sad canon.

Dundee suggests an idea: why doesn’t Miss Bookhart look up the library’s checkout records? Maybe someone used a library card to check out the missing library book. Miss Bookhart shuts down this pointless suggestion. Miss Bookhart says that would never work, because the library stopped all check-outs and check-ins weeks ago, due to the Earth succumbing to alien invader apocalypse. This is a thrilling reveal. Tomes And Talismans is edutainment about how to use a library, but they’re demonstrating those principles in a defunct library. Also, Miss Bookhart shares that reveal during another fun reveal, which is that the production crew left an entire camera and tripod in the frame.

Miss Bookhart ventures back into the Wastelands, to keep shouting “BOOK” or whatever. The other librarians remain indoors, to find more nothing. Miss Bookhart runs out of fuel and loses radio contact. The other librarians go to the evacuation site at the appointed time. To do that, they leave Miss Bookhart to die or whatever, because nobody is more prompt than a librarian.

Miss Bookhart walks back into the library after her “friends” left. With only a minute left in the episode, a hooded mystery figure apparates into the room, giving Miss Bookhart a rohypnol dusting. Suddenly this dystopian eco-horror story is a magic/fantasy story.

The being’s speech includes the phrase “Tomes And Talismans”. I’d forgotten Tomes And Talismans was the title of the show, because every book in this is too modern to be a “tome” and “talismans” never come up. After that little speech about the show title, the being vanishes. Miss Bookhart sleeps. The other librarians wait their turn to teleport and–

Indefensible. You cannot cliffhanger an edutainment VHS tape. It’s hard for kids to remember anything, much less the boring and convoluted “previously on” from a previous tape. A cliffhanger also hogs long-term memory space that kids are supposed to devote to library systems. Worst of all, schoolteachers don’t play videos in a consistent way. VHS tapes are hangover aids. The tapes also get lost or swapped around as that cart with a TV seatbelted to it rolls from class to class. I promise you the majority of Tomes And Talismans’s audience saw these 13 episodes out of order, or with gaps, or repetitively. My grade school had a total of 1 VHS tape to show us on the days recess got rained out. The tape was The Never-Ending Story. Our lunch monitor staff refused to maintain continuity. They also held draconian Catholic values about the importance of rewinding. As a result, every time we had “Indoor Recess”, I watched the same first 33 minutes of The Never-Ending Story. To this day I’ve literally never seen its ending. So I refuse to believe any public school screened the correct version of a baker’s dozen episodes of Twin Peaks: Library Walk With Marge. Half the kids probably saw this episode and nothing further. If they stopped there, they only learned the Earth’s going to die of pollution, attempting to find any library book is a snipe hunt, and Margaret and Lester might have a thing going on that only Margaret’s invested in. At one point they celebrate a card catalog insight, and Margaret feels up Lester’s shoulders a little too much, and Lester keeps his eyes on the info thank you very much.

That’s Tomes And Talismans for you. I’m not going to watch the rest. I’m too busy reviewing a different bad accidentally-sexual edutainment show, and that show is 104 episodes long. Still, I’m pleased to have learned something from this. Passion is important. Passion is what makes the world go round, art-wise. But you don’t have to respect passion for its own sake. Mississippi Public Broadcasting didn’t love libraries as much as they love Blade Runner and Heavy Metal and never writing a second draft. They got wrapped up in their own sci-fi/fantasy arcana. They lost track of their actual job. And they wasted a lot of the budget of the least-funded school system in America. Tomes And Talismans never should’ve existed. Ironically it’s a pretty good argument for the Wipers’ mindset of erring on the side of deleting stuff. And if you’re out there, Miss Bookhart, I wish you comfort with yourself. Use your real speaking voice. It sends me to Cuh-lah-yud Nine.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Elizabeth Shope, who respects librarians too much to let this happen again.

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