“A secret to be told, a gold chest to be bold…”

Hail to the king, baby. In an essay for the quarterly Coyote Wild, Scott Nokes of Unlocked Wordhoard sets the 1992 guy-with-a-chainsaw-for-an-arm movie Army of Darkness firmly in its Arthurian tradition. Scott argues—persuasively, I think—that the film is more faithful to the spirit of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee than other adaptations have been, largely because it’s less willing to congratulate the modern world on its supposed superiority and doesn’t automatically sneer at the medieval.

My only regret is that Scott isn’t an Americanist. Then he could shed some critical light on another terrific Sam Raimi-Bruce Campbell collaboration, the little-noted nor long-remembered Jack of All Trades. You’ve got to love any series that keeps manufacturing excuses to place on the same East Indian island such figures as Lewis and Clark, James Madison, the Marquis De Sade, and Napoleon (Verne “Mini-Me” Troyer, in the role he was born to play). I like to think that if the show had lasted another season, King Arthur might have washed ashore, too. Avalon, Schmavalon—that funeral barge had to land somewhere…