@fcw: What the chart is doing is categorizing movies we've done by the nature of their "magic beans," or "story-enabling unrealistic element," as I was defining it at the time. (And for the purposes of this post, that will be what I mean when I say "magic bean.") I did this for fun, it's not particularly useful for anything but an amusing way to collate data.
I started by thinking about the various types of magic beans that seem to be the most fundamental, boiling it down to as few divisions as possible, and played with that for a while as I started putting movies into categories. A couple times I stopped and restarted because I came up with a slight alteration, or a better way to divide them, etc., but what I ultimately came up with is what you see...which could be expressed thusly: "when someone writes a story with a magic bean, what they're basically doing is writing a story with a magic character, or magic technology, or magic circumstances, or a magic event."
I got that far and started really swapping movies around, trying to place everything. To give you an example of how that went, here's my thought process for Mystery Men.
"Alright, it's...well, the universe is basically reliable, it's not a Wonderland, so it's one of these...I guess the universe is generally fantasy, but more importantly this story doesn't happen without these characters who think they're superheroes, and that's the biggest stretch of the movie, all these characters, good guys and bad guys, who think they're superheroes. And one of them even has a bowling ball that is voodoo magic, it couldn't possibly happen in our world, so between characters that are highly unrealistic because of their shared delusion, in addition to the bowling ball thing, the magic bean of this movie is characters more than setting."
And it goes under "Magic Characters." Again, the definition of "magic" I was using is "story-enabling unrealistic element," these are unrealistic people, you would not walk outside and find these guys at the gas station right now, they're an indulgence on the part of the writer so he can tell his funny story about people learning that they're special and teamwork and friendship and blah blah blah naked black guy.
But then for each of those main categories, I realized there were two or three varieties of each. Magic Characters...actual, singular participants in the story that you couldn't or wouldn't ever meet? Well, some are humans imbued with a super power, for instance The Bowler (or Captain Barbossa or Erik Draven from The Crow), and then some are non-human creatures, like Edward Cullen or Optimus Prime. They're all magic, unrealistic characters - you're not gonna meet a cursed pirate any sooner than you're gonna meet Optimus Prime - but they're not the same. So I broke up Magic Characters into "Power" and "Alien."
Magic Technology was actually the hardest to do, because most of them have a relationship with Magic Circumstances -> Fictional History, and figuring out whether it operated on the presence of technology, or the presence of an alternate society, was tricky. (And frankly, all of these movies are pretty debatable.) The best example of what this category does is Iron Man - add magic arc reactor technology to our universe, and you can have the story of Iron Man. Add Surrogates to our universe, and you can get the story of Surrogates. Add dino-clonery, and you can have Jurassic Park, etc..
But then, aha, if you put God in a box, you can have Raiders of the Lost Ark. This time, the distinction was easy to find: some of these are science fiction technologies, and some of them are - no offense to anyone - best described as "voodoo." Just random, superstitious bullshit the writer could get away with. Ark of the Covenant, magic lamp, a mask possessed by Loki, etc..
Magic Circumstances was interesting and sort of enlightening, when I started to think about it. First, there are some movies in Magic Circumstances that this next thing doesn't apply to, but...for the most part, this category consists of movies that have both Magic Characters and Magic Technology. This category is for movies where the main difference is in the world, somehow. As you can see, it's divided up into Fictional History, Fictional Sentience, and Fantasy Universe.
Fictional History movies require little more than that we're in another point on our reasonable, realistic timeline. Pitch Black, which is not in this category - sure, it takes place in the future, but it doesn't really matter to the story. What matters is the technology - spaceships that crash land, surgeries that increase Riddick's visual ability, weapons, etc.. Fictional History is movies that more or less JUST require that we're a bit in the future, or a bit in the past - and allows for slight evolutionary changes in the society, if it's the future. For instance, in the near future (with the to-be-expected ten years of tech development, but no, like, Replicants) human babies stop being born. In the near future, Britain slides into fascism and someone plots to overturn the government. That kind of thing.
In a Fictional Sentience movie, the main difference between its world an ours is that in its world, there's a whole magic "civilization" or "society" or, at the very least, "existence" that the story requires. The Frighteners, ghosts/heaven. Legion, angels/heaven. TRON, sentient programs on the grid. So on.
And here's a good example of how this chart doesn't work. Starship Troopers is listed here, as opposed to Magic Technology->Science or Magic Circumstances->Fictional History because...well, most inherently, it's the existence of the bugs that drives the story. But as a movie like Starship Troopers handily indicates, sometimes a movie doesn't squarely fit into any one category. Just gotta stick to arbitrary rules and figure out the most unusual thing about the reality of the movie, and put it there. It was trying to figure out where Starship Troopers goes that it occurred to me I'd need to cross-link movies after categorizing them, which I'll get to in a minute.
Fantasy universe refers to a lot of things, but as a matter of shorthand - heh - well, this one includes Magic Characters, Magic Technology, AND the other two subcategories of Magic Circumstances - Fictional History and Fictional Sentience. Star Wars, Up, Hook and The Fifth Element all contain magic characters, magic tech, fictional histories and fictional sentiences. (Princess Bride is here too, but it doesn't require a fictional sentience.) Cool, huh? Next time someone asks you what a fantasy is, that might be a handy basis of argument.
Finally, Magic Events. "Oh shit something is happening" movies. Pretty straightforward, boils down to something falling apart here on Earth, or something coming to Earth. Again, sure, Independence Day could fall under "Fictional Sentience," but that's not what's driving the story, is it? What drives the story is the invasion. Thusly, it goes here and not there. (Like I've stressed, there's a lot of arguability in this list, but it'd be fun argument.)
But for that very reason, I decided, after the categories and subcategories and lists had been fully compiled to cross-reference movies with other magic beans they invoke. This doesn't mean they have multiple magic beans, so much as it flavors the most-important magic bean a bit. Mystery Men is a movie that REQUIRES Magic Characters, but spiced up a bit with a Fantasy Universe. Jurassic Park REQUIRES dino-clonery tech, but hey, once we've done that, we get some Magic Characters. And so on.
End of line.
Writing this post I've been referring to the chart a lot, and would make these corrections if possible:
Pan's Labyrinth is listed under "Power," that's an error, it should be under "Alien." The Fawn ain't a guy with a special power, he's a mythological creature come to life.
Orgazmo operates on the presence of the Orgazmorator, his gun that shoots orgasms into people. As bullshit as technology can be, but not voodoo. Should be under Science.
Teague Chrystie
I have a tendency to fix your typos.
