Credits and Acknowledgements for The Possession of Dot MacPherson

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Credits & Acknowledgements

I have read plenty of fanfics on this site where a human dies and ends up in Equestria or ends up as a voice in a pony’s head. This is my attempt at the reverse.

The American animated series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic was developed by Lauren Faust for Hasbro based on the toy line created by Bonnie Zacherle, lasting for nine seasons. The Australian animated film Dot and the Kangaroo was directed and produced by Yoram Gross based on the children’s novel of the same name by Ethel Pedley, spawning eight sequels. From now on, assume that “Dot and the Kangaroo” refers to the movie rather than the book, unless otherwise stated. Also, the films can mostly be found for free on YouTube.

(Do I suggest you watch it? The Bunyip Song sequence? Absolutely. The whole movie? Hmm. I watched it as a kid, and I think it’s a good film for kids. As an adult, I can’t stop noticing the constant re-use of certain musical cues, and the fact that some animation sequences show up multiple times. If, unlike me, that sort of thing doesn’t drive you crazy, then sure, go ahead and watch it. The two main characters and their interactions are interesting, and the songs range from bearable to the earworm of “Ride in the Pouch of a Red Kangaroo”. And that bunyip song is pure nightmare fuel if you’re young enough, so I just have to recommend that.)

The one real-life individual obscure enough to list: Pieter Schuyler (founder of a family that dominated New York politics for centuries)

Original characters and locations: O’Shea and Beatrix Platt (the latter of whom had some faint inspiration in the MLP:FIM character of Trixie), Mr. “NYC” (who yes is quite obviously Donald Trump), the Van Der Boek family (a broken Dutch translation: “From the Book”), Miss Maud Hathaway, Billary, the unnamed murderer of Dot’s parents, Mr. Hernandez, the Lignite family (lignite being a type of coal), the Yellen family, the “famous” racehorse Wolderbolt, Orange Creamsicle, and Doctor Partridge and Nurse Melissa Cohl; Boekstead (“Booktown”) and Gouden Eiken (“Golden Oaks”)

Characters from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Pinkie Pie, Applejack, Fluttershy, Spike, the Pony of Shadows, Princesses Celestia and Luna, Shining Armor, Cadance, Pharynx and Thorax, Sombra, Discord (by reference) and Lyra; the Wonderbolts, the idea of a draconequus; Equestria, Hollow Shades, Ponyville. The comic book series by IDW contributed the characters of Gaffer and 8-Bit.

Characters from Dot and the Kangaroo: Dot and her parents (the names “Jesse” and “Frank” for the parents are from the novel; they went unnamed in the movies), the bunyip (which is to say that I used the movie’s conception of the mythical figure), the unnamed Kangaroo, and all of the animals in the “Council of Animals” (which itself also appeared in the film).

Characters from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Gandolf, Frodo, Samwise, Pippin and Merry, Arwen, Strider/Aragorn, Saruman, Gimli, Legolas, Elrond and Boromir. There are extensive quotes from the end of this movie in Chapter 2.

References for each chapter:

Chapter 1: There’s Something Wrong with Dot

* Dot MacPherson: Dot doesn’t have a last name, not in the book nor in any of the movies, so “MacPherson” is original to me. As for her character, I’d say that it’s closer to the Dot of Dot and the Whale rather than in Dot and the Kangaroo; the movie series had Dot develop from a girl who loved animals to a young woman who would fight fiercely for them. The former was silly, while the latter had a temper. Also, Dot in the movies has orange hair; I changed it to red in order to distinguish it from O’Shea’s orange hair.

* “The first sight to meet his eyes took his breath away.”: Just to be abundantly clear, this was Twilight Sparkle.

* The three types of imaginary friends: I think I got this from Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends. Either that, or I first came up with the idea during my failed attempt to write a fanfic for that series.

* “The giant spotted platypus? Or was it a bittern?”: This is from my own interpretation of the bunyip in Dot and the Kangaroo— the movie compares the creature to a platypus, and when the bitterns scare away the hunters they sound exactly like the bunyip.

* Jabberwocky: Poem by Lewis Carroll.

* the illustration at the end: Notice which characters have cracks through their heads.

Chapter 2: There’s Something Wrong with Twilight

* The muzak link: “Strolling Around”, by Irving Martin, from 1981. Collected in the album More Sounds of the Department Store.

* “One Day When I Was Walking”: Bob Young, John Palmer and Marion Von Alderstein wrote the songs for Dot and the Kangaroo, and this is one of them. It has the feel of a spare song that was shoved in when nobody was looking: It’s sung by a couple of kangaroo mice to Dot, but the mice aren’t schoolchildren, and Dot doesn’t need her mood lifted. So, there’s no reason for this song to exist. I modified the lyrics to take out the problematic word “bushgirl” and to provide a proper ending; Tubby just fell into the lake in the original.

* The Uptown Theater: With the exception of Lawrence Lignite, this is a description of the actual Uptown Theater in Napa, California, USA. I grew up in that town during the era when it was completely run down, so I had no idea until quite recently that it used to be a notable location. The little Art Deco design I stuck in the text is from a photograph of the ceiling above the restored theater.

* “We also have air conditioning!”: Back in the 1930’s, movie theaters were about the only buildings open to the public with air conditioning, so they would advertise this feature heavily.

* ASPCA: The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals

* The Trial, by Franz Kafka is a novel about a man put on trial by a secret society, or maybe the government, for a crime that neither he, nor the reader, ever learn about.

* Cabaret: A musical about a hedonistic nightclub that’s a metaphor for the rise of the Nazi party in 1920’s Germany.

Chapter 3: Dot’s Trial

As a general explanation for those who haven’t seen the film, Dot and the Kangaroo is about a six-year old girl named Dot who lived on a farm at the border of the Bush (backwoods) of Australia. (The setting is supposedly the book’s one of 1899, but that is never explicitly stated.) One day she was out looking for food for the farm’s rabbits when she got lost. In her despair she was found by a kangaroo who had just lost his son (joey). The kangaroo gives Dot a magic root to eat that gives her the ability to understand animal speech. She then takes Dot to the Council of Animals, to help her find her way. They suggest seeing the platypus, who suggests finding a particular bird, and that bird points Dot to her home, where she is reunited with the parents who have been mourning/searching for her throughout the movie. The kangaroo then leaves, having still not recovered her joey.

The first sequel to Dot and the Kangaroo, Around the World with Dot (aka Dot and Santa Claus) is set in the present day, with this Dot being a girl who read Ethyl Pedley’s book. She is inspired by that book to go looking for Kangaroo’s joey, who was taken by a globe-trotting circus. The movie wasn’t very good. Perhaps for that reason the next film, Dot and the Bunny, pretends that the joey was in fact never found, and stops suggesting that Dot is anyone other than the main character from the first movie. That movie ends with Kangaroo knowingly adopting a lonely bunny that was pretending to be the lost joey. The kangaroo fades out of the series soon after, leaving just Dot as a character having adventures with various animals.

* “…from the smallest insect to the biggest whale”: In Dot and Keeto (movie #4), Dot accidentally eats the wrong magic root, and is shrunk to insect size, where she befriends the mosquito, Keeto. In Dot and the Whale (movie #5, and the best of the sequels, in my opinion), Dot learns how to hold her breath for hours at a time—another possibly magical ability—in order to seek Moby Dick’s help to convince a despondent whale named Tonga to not beach herself. In the continuity of my story, nothing after Dot and the Kangaroo ever happened, and even that story might have been only imagined (as suggested by Around the World with Dot).

* Ornithorhynchus paradoxus: There is a song sung by the two platypi about their scientific name in Dot and the Kangaroo, and this is the name they used.

Afterward: Loose Ends

* “Maxwell’s Siver Hammer”: A song by the Beatles. Maxwell used his hammer to kill people.

* The scene at the very end: This was the first scene I wrote.

* The “big machine”: This is a combination of a phoropter (the machine that is used to determine the strength of your eyeglasses) and a retinal camera. I didn’t want to complicate things by having Dot shuttled between devices.