The Mysterious Stranger
“The Mysterious Stranger” was a dark and melancholy segment featured in Will Vinton’s 1985 Claymation animated film “The Adventures of Mark Twain” (a nod to the author's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn & Tom Sawyer"). The movie was an ambitious undertaking that connected several iconic Twain stories through a single narrative involving Twain and his own literary characters seeking to meet Halley's Comet on its cosmic return to Earth.
The segment mentioned was based on the author’s unfinished final novel of the same name, which had gone through several revisions before his death in 1910. It was eventually published sometime after his death amidst controversy regarding the story's anti-religious content and the editing of Twain's original manuscripts. The book itself is one of Twain's best and the cartoon does it great service as well. Even though the sequence is based on just one scene from the book it nevertheless maintains the consequential morality and philosophical themes the author had been particularly invested in towards the end of his life.
The well made segment is dramatic, disturbing, and unnerving as well. It made me feel uncomfortable when I first saw the sequence. The design and voice of Satan I believed played a big role in how successful it was. His appearance was inspired by a jester holding his face on a stick. The voice was actually a combination of a man and woman speaking the lines, with the latter being provided by Vinton, in order to give the character a creepily androgynous voice. I think it worked perfectly to their advantage. I always thought for a long time that the film was never shown on TV because of the darkness and subject matter of the piece, but I was wrong. As it turns out the scene was never banned from TV. In fact, Will Vinton said the main goal of the scene along with the entire film was to get a PG rating to make the movie stand out from what he called the "Kiddie Ghetto" that dominated the animation market in the 1980's. After the film received a G rating from the MPAA they almost appealed the decision because they believed the rating would hurt them. In the end the film failed at the box office because of the confusion over whether the film was really a kiddie film or a movie aimed at both adults and children.
