The Trouble With Roy

My Dad Can Beat Up Your Dad exists to settle the age-old question “Who would win in a fight?”  :

I have to be very circumspect about this entry, because You-know-who has gone from “single mother who saved reading for a new generation” to “Multimedia overlord who will sue you into submission if you look at her cross-eyed.”

But that circumspection (that might be a word) is nothing new, because fantasy heroes always have to be careful when they talk about the evil that walks in their world. Have you ever noticed that? In every fantasy book everywhere, the villains have the power to know when someone mentions their name. So people can’t go around saying “Sauron” or “Satan” or “J.K…”

– oops. Almost slipped up there.–

because then the evil one will hear and will be talking about them. And somehow, these paragons of evil never think I should tune my evil powers to listen for when someone says “You-know-who.” That’s why they always lose.

Let’s just hope the secret powers that actually run the United States are a little smarter as they eavesdrop on all our cellphone calls and read all our emails. I’d hate to think that the terrorists just have to say “Mosama Bin Laden” to fool them.

So today’s matchup is between … a kid with glasses who does magic and Gandalf. Doesn’t hardly seem fair, does it?

Kid with glasses who does magic is, after all, a kid with glasses who is in the very early stages of learning how to be a wizard and is hampered by the fact that he’s got all kinds of crushes on girls and also his best friend is a nerd and his other best friend is a girl who while she knows a lot about magic, is also kind of a nag and also, regardless of her fate in the books that she may or may not be featured in, the sort of girl that will forever be single and will therefore be a fifth wheel at every social gathering you and your wizarding buddies have, the kind of girl who will say things like “Cats are better to have around than husbands.“

Kid with glasses who does magic in fact does very little magic. If I recall the books that he may or may not have appeared in since I’m talking about nobody in particular here, kid with glasses who does magic knows, like, three spells, and one of them is a spell that makes things drop out of your hands. So what can he do, fly a broom and be petulant?

So you’d expect Gandalf to wipe the floor with him in their wizarding battle (and, no, You-know-who does not have a trademark on wizarding battles, since T.H. White did it first), but on second thought, maybe not.

Because what magic did Gandalf ever do? I posed that question to a noted authority on The Lord of The Rings — The Boy, who is known for his logic – and he said that Gandalf’s powers include surviving when the Balrog attacked him, and getting Saruman out of Theoden’s head, and … that was it.

I’ve read The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings about 10 times in my life (that’s how you know I’m a cool guy) and I am hard pressed to say, offhand, what magic Gandalf actually does. Here’s what I remember: he makes his smoke rings change colors and chase around the dwarves smoke rings. Everything else really didn’t seem magical at all, did it? He used fireworks. He used ventriloquism to trick the trolls. He fell off a bridge and somehow came back — but we don’t know what happened there, really. And he could make his staff glow.

So this is a fairer fight than it seems.

How would the fight go? Kid with glasses who does magic and Gandalf would likely be fighting for dominance over the wizarding world (despite the fact that each of them is seemingly as qualified to rule over Wizards as, say, a secretary of education would be to lead the remnants of the human race on a cross-universe quest to find Earth) and would meet in some otherworldly train station or something to hash it out.

Kid with glasses would start things off; he’s hotheaded and Gandalf never wants to attack. But it would be some lame spell to try to disarm Gandalf, who would respond by throwing his voice and setting off some fireworks to distract Kid with glasses. It would, of course, work, because kid with glasses is naive. Gandalf could then make his staff glow really bright, or ride a horse, causing kid with glasses to use the only spell that ever really does anything, that one that makes a large deer or something run around. Since that’s the most powerful magic either of these two could do, Gandalf would be knocked into the void. And while he might come back from that, in the meantime, kid with glasses would solidify his stranglehold on the wizarding world through his army of red-haired minions.

Verdict:Kid with glasses wins, but almost by default.

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Number One
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brianefp

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