Edgar Allan Poe

  "Fool's Fire", a 1992 adaptation of Poe's short story "Hop Frog", I first saw as a college student. it was directed by Julie Taymor, who also designed some of set pieces for the stage adaptation of Disney's The Lion King .  I first encountered "Hop-Frog" in the junior high English textbook. It was not a reading assignment, but one of stories I read on my own during free time. The story is about a dwarf (someone affected by achondroplasia) with a crippled foot, which inspires his name, kidnapped from his home country, and forced to be a jester to a sadistic monarch of an unnamed country. Poe establishes that this king is fond of practical jokes, and delights in tormenting Hop-Frog my making the jester drink more wine than he is able to handle. Hop-Frog is severely sensitive to alcohol, and this ads to the "fun." When Hop-Frog's love interest, another kidnapped dwarf named Trippetta, implores the kind to spare her friend, the king...

George C. Scott's role as Auguste Dupin in the 1986 adaptation of Poe's "Murder in the Rue Morgue," was one I fondly remember. I considered it to be his finest role I had yet seen, second only to Scrooge in A Christmas  Carol , which he had done only two years earlier. It also stars Val Kilmer and Rebecca De Mornay.     "Rue Morgue" was the first E. A. Poe story I came in contact with. A selection of the work was printed in a book I had about--well, that would give away the end. I first read an abbreviated version of Poe's original in a junior high issue of either Scope or V.oice . The story was first printed in Graham magazine in 1941; I was certain it first saw print in  Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, but I was apparently wrong, as modern reprintings often include it within stories from that 1940 collection. Poe's detective Auguste Dupin, who would go on appear in "the Purloined Letter," may well have been a forerunner of the mor...