The Sherlockian’s Guide to Library Streaming (Kanopy and Hoopla)
(no cute dogs at the end, but there is some IMDB FAQ savagery)
“Predisposed to Violins: a Sherlock Holmes Adventure” opens April 6th. Tickets are now on sale for the “guided tour” version for socially distanced small groups. You’ll get some bonus content and some extra puzzles to solve as a group, and you won’t have to worry about maps.
In last week’s post, I thanked the Monroe County Public Library for helping me with my research. Today I’d like to share some specific programs I watched (FOR FREE) thanks to the MCPL. [If you’re not local, see what your own library subscribes to, you might be surprised at how much content you have access to.]
10 credits per month. Hardly any TV, but there’s films and videos from all sorts of places. I’ve watched everything from “Dial M for Murder” as well as a 40-minute documentary about “The Pram”, a short-lived Australian avant-garde theatre collective (and/or heroin cult?). My point is that there’s a range of content.
1. “The Secrets of Great Mystery and Suspense Fiction” from “The Great Courses”
36 half-hour lectures that cover the breadth and variety of a multifaceted genre. GREAT lecturer (David Schmid, PhD from the University at Buffalo). Spoilers abound, as he frequently has to talk about the books’ endings and major twists in order to make his points. In terms of the origins of mystery fiction, Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle are the first two major figures (that most people can agree on, at least), so Sherlock Holmes appears frequently in the series. I particularly enjoyed Episode 35, “Adapting the Multimedia Mystery”, which compared three screen adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes character (Basil Rathbone, Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr.). In fact, I’m going to quote Dr. Schmid from Ep.35 in my final blog post of this series.
If you’re a mystery fan looking to diversify or decolonize your bookshelf, Schmid has a handful of lectures specifically highlighting contributions from different parts of the world and different minority communities. Or if you’re specifically interested in a certain topic, you can pop in for a specific lecture (true crime, police procedurals, psychopaths, etc.).
SIDEBAR: Kanopy has a LOT of titles from “The Great Courses”. Not all, but dozens. So many that I’m surprised it’s not a separate category on Roku. So if you’ve finished watching “The Office” for the fifth time and want something different, try binge-watching some lectures on visual art, or personal finance, or debating, or history, or screenwriting, or even acting (it’s called “Stage Presence” and tries to be relevant for business presentations, but really it’s a jumble of actor training).
SIDEBAR PRO TIP: The Kanopy search function (at least on the Roku app) is a bit inconvenient for video series, in that if you stumble on an individual lecture you can’t easily navigate to the full series or class (but if you start with the full course title you see all the lectures). I recommend browsing the Great Courses website first, and then search the exact course title on Kanopy to see if it’s available. [I just realized this process is much simpler when browsing on the website. Once you find any course, just click on the publisher name.]
2. There’s also a Sherlock Holmes lecture in the Great Courses series “Heroes and Legends: The Most Influential Characters of Literature” that was nominally useful in exploring his staying power in modern culture. The lecturer goes off on a rather useless tangent at the end, but he’s got a delightful accent.
3. “Sherlock Holmes” - long-lost 1916 silent film, rediscovered in 2014
This silent movie stars William Gillette, based on the play he co-wrote in 1899 with Conan Doyle and toured for years. It’s a mostly original story, with some illogical choices by characters at certain points, but the primary value for me is how freely it picks up a few details from various stories and weaves them into the plot, which helped give me the courage to do the same. More specifically, there’s a big twist in my Episode 2 that I freely admit I ripped off from this script. Definitely not required viewing for casual Sherlock fans, but if you like silent film then Kanopy has quite a bit to offer you.
A warning for the purists regarding the Holmes’ batchelorhood (and this is absolutely a spoiler): the play debuted in what was still the age of melodrama, so of course it ends with a love match between Sherlock and the damsel in distress.
The story goes that Conan Doyle needed some money after killing off his detective in “The Final Problem” in 1893, so he wrote a five-act play and shopped it around. Gillette was brought in to adapt and star, and telegraphed Conan Doyle, “May I marry Holmes?” to which Doyle replied: “You may marry him, or murder or do what you like with him.”
FUN FACT: The original illustrations showed Holmes smoking a straight pipe, but Gillette was the first to use a curved pipe to more easily say his lines (and possibly to avoid blocking his face), which is now a famous prop for the character (look no further than the silhouette in Cardinal’s marketing images).
You can read the original 1899 play by clicking here. The “Diogenes Club” website design is hilariously old, but it’s quite a thorough resource. You can read most of the stories, much apocrypha/spoofs/parodies, the Poe detective stories that arguably launched the genre, and many other little essays and bits and bobs.
If you need a palate cleanser after reading the play, I’ll recommend another Diogenes Club offering, the short comedy “The Painful Predicament of Sherlock Holmes”. It’s a very funny sketch (built around a destructive/talkative client that doesn’t let Holmes get a word in) but is still faithful to the character.
Hoopla has a mix of popular, offbeat, and educational fare: from Steve Gutenberg in “Short Circuit” to “Venture Bros.” cartoons to a six-part miniseries on capitalism. It also has e-books (including a volume of the favorite Holmes stories chosen by the creators of BBC’s “Sherlock”), and quite a bit of British TV.
If you have kids, there’s a great selection of children’s books, narrated and “barely animated” (by which I mean mostly pan-and-scan of the illustrations, but a few times things do move). I highly recommend “Dragons Love Tacos”.
Watch on your Roku or laptop, or put the app on your phone. I believe you get 12 credits/month, but once you start watching something you only have 3 days to finish (Kanopy doesn’t set a deadline). Hoopla also limits the total number of items a particular library can check out in a particular day. Usually this isn't a problem, but if it’s early in the month and you are browsing late in the evening, you might be frozen out until tomorrow.
1. “The Real Sherlock Holmes”
2. “How Sherlock Changed the World” (2 parts)
I’m listing these two documentaries together because they covered similar ground and kind of blurred together in my memory. Both were very useful in tracing the impact of Sherlock Holmes on modern crime-solving, forensic science, medicine, pop culture, even espionage (that last one a bit of a stretch). I even considered adapting for my plot one of the modern cases they discuss (gradual thallium poisoning, the timeline was traced through the victim’s hair), but decided against it.
I think #2 was more interesting. #1 (I believe) leaned a little more on the character’s impact on popular culture (showing how Batman and James Bond both share DNA with Holmes, for example), while #2 mostly stayed in the real world.
SIDE NOTE: These two Hoopla documentaries were a part of my writing process regarding time period. I was initially nervous about doing a Victorian-era Sherlock Holmes, given I’ve only lived in Bloomington since 2015 and would have to do a good deal of research into what the town and IU were like back then. The two Hoopla documentaries, however, made me briefly second-guess my plan for a modern Sherlock. They show how part of what makes Sherlock seem so amazing in the original stories is that he’s ahead of his time. There aren’t any crime labs in Victorian London, mostly it’s just cops beating confessions out of “the usual suspects”. Would a modern Sherlock be less “special” in the era of DNA testing and multiple “CSI” spinoffs?
<<Click the green button, I dare you<<
Fortunately, I’d already watched several episodes of BBC’s “Sherlock” by then, which reassured me about Holmes’ value in the modern era. His powers of observation (and his specific knowledge that helps him realize the value of what he’s seeing) can astonish in any age.
I ended up setting my story in 1992. Partly because of a historical event I tied into a character’s backstory, but also because it felt easier for my Sherlock to impress others in the pre-cell phone era (the BBC series is present-day, of course, but TV has more options to keep things visually compelling while ol’ Benedict is texting or looking up the weather in Wales).
3. “Sherlock Holmes: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - The Real Sherlock Holmes, A Documentary”
If I remember correctly, this was a kind of “dual biography” dealing with both Arthur Conan Doyle as well as his most famous creation. Its chief point of interest for me was the section on Dr. Joseph Bell, the med school professor who was the direct inspiration for Holmes.
4. “The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes”
An uninteresting and cheaply done clip show mentioning all the major actors who have portrayed Holmes on stage, radio, film and TV. There’s no ranking, no conclusion or thesis beyond “hey wow a whole bunch of actors have played Sherlock Holmes”.
Hosted by Christopher Lee, who isn’t trying very hard but I can’t blame him. Skip it.
5. BONUS REVIEW: “And Then There Were None”
This wasn’t research for Sherlock Holmes, but I have to mention it because this 3-part miniseries (3 parts=3 Hoopla credits) is a GREAT adaptation of Agatha Christie’s worldwide best-seller. The acting, writing and direction all get high marks. I’ve never read the novel (which originally had a very racist title, unfortunately), but this took me right back to playing Judge Wargrave on stage in 12th grade. In a full leg cast, no less! (I wasn’t thinking about my acting career when I chose a cast that glowed in the dark, but it was mostly covered by my costume at least.)
6. If that’s not enough for you, there’s other Sherlock content that I didn’t have time for:
~the cartoon “Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century”,
~some Basil Rathbone movies (more on those later),
~a John Barrymore (silent?) movie,
~Buster Keaton in “Sherlock Jr.”,
~some children’s cartoon adaptations (starring Peter O’Toole!),
~a BBC thing with Rupert Everett,
and
~”Sherlock Bones: Undercover Dog”* (Not gonna lie, I might still watch this one.)
But one of these needs special mention:
6a. “Sherlock Holmes” (2010, full title “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes”)
This is from “The Asylum”, known for the “Sharknado” film series, as well as their string of low-budget straight-to-video “mockbusters” that coincidentally have similar titles/premises/release dates as major motion pictures (causing them to get sued rather more frequently than the industry average). This one was released barely a month after the Guy Ritchie blockbuster.
I have not watched this, and I will not watch it. But since I have friends that deliberately choose to watch terrible movies**, I shall share some information as a public service. First, the Hoopla blurb:
“Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective faces the ultimate challenge when enormous monsters attack London.”
You’re either stoked by that blurb, or you aren’t. Either way, the Wikipedia page needs you to know that one critic described Ben Syder’s Holmes as
“punchable”
Gareth David-Lloyd and Dominic Keating also star (apparently their performances are less worthy of fisticuffs).
Now for the trailer, which at 240p is too fuzzy to see half of what’s going on:
Thanks for reading! Next time, we'll look at some non-library streaming options. (Bring some graham crackers, marshmallows and Hershey bars so we can make s’mores after we ROAST Robert Downey Jr.)
*Not to be confused with Furlock Bones, the mascot for the Figgis Detective Agency in “Archer” Season 7:
**Although I did spend a Hoopla credit over the holidays on “A Very Corgi Christmas”, so I guess I should climb down off my high horse regarding bad movies. Based on screen time, it should instead have been titled “A Mildly Corgi Christmas”. Watching it made me dumber and a little angry that someone got paid to write it. BUT I DIGRESS.
