Let’s get one thing straight: We love, love, love Rube Goldberg. The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, author, engineer, and inventor is probably best remembered to a certain age group for his ingenious drawings of maniacally complicated labor-saving devices such as this self-operating napkin which was appropriated by fan Tim Burton for Pee Wee’s Big Adventure (variations on similar rude, meal-time mechanicals appeared in Charles Chaplin‘s Modern Times and Woody Allen‘s Sleeper.
Goldberg also invented the über-cool board game Mouse Trap and, as if that weren’t enough to ensure his permanent position in the pantheon of people who, thank god, never bothered to grow up, he also scripted the great Three Stooges feature Soup to Nuts, and deeply influenced both Chuck Jones‘s Wile E. Coyote ‘toons and Antonio Prohias‘s classic Mad Magazine comic series Spy vs. Spy. It’s like Goldberg cornered the cool market and then redesigned it to fit his own wonderfully complex worldview. The guy even had his own United States postage stamp, for Chrissakes!
Today, however, Goldberg’s enormously imaginative impact on popular culture has boiled down to one thing: you may have never heard the Goldberg name, but his influence is all over the James Wan/Leigh Whannell Saw franchise. The series, with its increasingly gruesome but always clever build-a-better-death trap style, could just as easily have been attributed to “Rude Goreberg,” but WGA rules are byzantine when it comes to crediting deceased cartoonists, so there you go.
The upcoming home-invasion freakout The Collector, written and directed by Saw and Feast screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan, respectively, is chocablock with Goldbergian mayhem, albeit minus the toast. You’ll have to wait to read our full review of The Collector, but suffice it to say somewhere, some industrious film critic and/or horror fan is at this moment inventing a mind-bogglingly complex marvel of engineering that will ensure that filmgoers (and horror fans) will no more have to endure cinematic nightmares involving endless trip wires, bloc and tackle-based instruments of death, and spring-loaded exsanguination confabulations. Go for it, pal, we’re all behind you. With tiny, piano-wire garrottes lashed to our unsuspecting ankles and a chandelier of knives teetering precariously over our collective noggins, as it were.
Rube Goldberg? Except no substitutions, and while you’re at it, why not go make your own over-engineered bit of Goldbergiana? Purdue University would love to see it.
This article appears in July 17 • 2009.