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The meme is good.
The meme is good.
- Archie Ransom
- Archie Ransom
Archie Ransom (full name Archibald Enoch Ransom) was born in Provo, Utah in 1929. His father was a patriarch in the LDS Church and managed the Provo branch of the Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution (you know, the chain of LDS Church-owned department stores founded by Brigham Young). The family once had ties to the United Order of Enoch, a Mormon splinter sect with a communalist-egalitarian bent, though by the time Archie was growing up, they’d apparently made their peace with the acquisition of material objects.
Archie finished high school in 1947, did two years of missionary work abroad, then enlisted and served with the U.S. Army in Korea.¹ Archie’s unit was cut off and taken captive during the Chinese offensive in November 1950. He spent five months in a POW camp near the Yalu River, where he was tortured, held in solitary confinement, and compelled to make false confessions of waging biological warfare.²
Archie was always interested in puppets. As a kid, he’d been a devotee of radio ventriloquists like Edgar Bergen; in high school, he carved his own wooden puppets and spent his paper route savings on dodgy mail-order ventriloquism courses. In Korea, he encountered traditional Korean puppetry and was astonished by the sophistication of Chinese shadow puppets. During his captivity, Archie fashioned crude puppet companions out of sticks and mud and talked to them in order to stay (more or less) sane.
¹ Leaving the location of his missionary work unspecified for now in case something cool/useful comes up.
² Not sure if he was released, escaped, or, hell, sent back as a Manchurian candidate. Leaving that open for now.
When the Army declared him un-brainwashed, Archie returned to Provo and did his best to put Korea behind him. He married the girl he’d gone on mission with, got a degree from a two-year business college, and started a family at the ripe old age of 24. A natural salesman, he could have lived out his days selling kitchen appliances at the ZCMI, but the puppets kept calling to him. In 1955, he packed up his young family and moved to Hollywood.
His timing was good: television production was shifting from New York to Los Angeles and the new medium was booming. Archie bluffed his way into a gig as a puppeteer on Bob Clampett’s Time For Beany, and eventually got the chance to create his own kiddie show for KTLA Los Angeles. Ransom Roundup lasted less than a year; though kids seemed to love it, many adults found Archie’s puppets “troubling.” But the star of the show, the Ransom Kid (Archie’s signature puppet, a little boy who was also a cowboy sharpshooter), got signed as the spokespuppet for Sharp Cereal (maker of Sugar Sharps, 56% sugar by weight, whee!), and Archie’s career in advertising began.
Archie spent the next ten years or so transforming from a modestly-successful puppeteer into a highly-successful ad man. His weirdly-compelling puppets sold cereal, soft drinks, frozen foods, coffee, cigarettes, you name it. And Archie was good at it: Like all the best salesmen, he doesn’t seem like a salesman. He has a gentle, avuncular manner, like a Sunday School teacher, and a particular gift for connecting with, and selling to, children.
The ad industry in Los Angeles was always just a bit flakier than the white-shoe firms on Madison Avenue, and Archie became well-versed in motivational research, engineering consent, esmology, subliminals, all that Century of the Self hocus pocus. As he moved on up to the executive suite, he couldn’t really remain an active puppeteer, but he kept most of the Ransom Gang in their plush-lined hard-shell cases, and could sometimes be heard talking to them behind the door of his corner office; he always said they were his best “consultants.”
When Project SANDMAN first tried to recruit Archie in 1963, he laughed them out of his office. What he didn’t know is that, through cut-out clients, he had been indirectly crafting memes and enthrallments for SANDMAN for years. Then in 1965, Archie’s ten-year-old son Charlie died in some kind of tragic crime or accident.³ This loss, combined with the Kennedy assassination, the Watts Riots, the worsening quagmire in Vietnam, you name it, shook Archie’s faith in the rationality of the democratic mind and the inevitable triumph of the American way. When SANDMAN came round again a few years later, their cockamamie stories about an “idea war” for the hearts and minds of the next generation sounded a lot less cockamamie. Archie moved up the coast and joined the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory as an “applied anthropologist” in 1968, just in time for the many memetic catastrophes of that year.
³ Again, I'll leave the details of this vague until it matters or inspiration strikes.
By 1973, Archie is right in the thick of the meme war, with a high security clearance and a pretty solid faith that SANDMAN and the US of A are on the side of the angels. He takes a particular interest in the Indigo Children; he probably speaks Aulang (as does Hobo Stan, see below).
He wears a bow tie, smokes a pipe, looks like Richard Hofstadter and talks like Fred Rogers. He’s no longer active in the LDS Church but he hasn't formally left it. He’s still married to his mission sweetheart, Melanie Ransom (nee Gardner). Their daughter, Jane, is 17, their second son, Eddie, is 14. They appear happy enough, but the family never really recovered from Charlie’s death. Mostly, Archie pours himself into the work.
The Ransom Gang
The Ransom Gang
"I couldn't do ventriloquism. I don't have any interest in splitting myself in two, the way a ventriloquist does — half-himself, half the dummy on his knee."
"I couldn't do ventriloquism. I don't have any interest in splitting myself in two, the way a ventriloquist does — half-himself, half the dummy on his knee."
Jim Henson
Jim Henson
Archie still talks to his puppets.⁴
⁴ I’ll have to figure out how much I’m going to do this “on screen” — it might feel too silly in play and I don’t want to wreck the game’s tone. But in my mind, Archie still talks to his puppets, and it’s not entirely clear whether knows he is doing both sides of the conversation or really thinks they are talking back to him. Certainly they let him access parts of his personality and memories that are otherwise suppressed.
The Ransom Gang includes, among others:
The Ransom Kid
The Ransom Kid
The Ransom Kid was Archie’s signature puppet, a la Kermit to Jim Henson, a little boy cowboy sort of like Howdy Doody (though Howdy Doody was a marionette, and the Ransom Kid is a ventriloquist's dummy). Archie retired the Kid after his son Charlie died and never touches it now.
Dragon Lady⁵
Dragon Lady⁵
"I am an Empress from a Dynasty too sacred to be named, and by rights, this should be my show."
Dragon Lady is a Chinese-style rod puppet, a Chinese empress styled like a Peking Opera character. Haven’t nailed down her personality yet.
⁵ I know the name is problematic – it’s 1973!
Hobo Stan
Hobo Stan
"Yer darn tootin, kid! You caint trust nobody but yerself in this world."
Hobo Stan is a softer hand puppet with rod arms, more like an early Muppet. He claims to be the King of the Hoboes, and to know the secret language that names all things. He has a bit of a foul mouth (while Archie never swears).
Enki
Enki
Enki is some kind of monster, a weird looking soft puppet that could be a sea serpent or some kind of green goat, with extra legs on his thorax like a cockroach. He’s mostly friendly but gives bad advice.
Stoney
Stoney
"Repeat after me:
You have a MOLE, you FUCKING BOY SCOUT!"
Stoney is birdlike, with a long beak. Got some Sam the Eagle energy, some Uncle Deadly energy. He wears red-white-and-blue wizard robes and a stars-and-stripes stovepipe hat like Uncle Sam. He has beady eyes, kind of sinister looking, which Archie cannibalized from Count Shasta. Archie has invested Stoney with the emergent personality of "Sebastian Stone," the character he adopted for the live-action role-playing game he developed during the events at the St. Francis.
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