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The Eugenics Doctor
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On a jury-rigged surgery table in front of the hotel water service, The Eugenics Doctor removes "antisocial" lobes from the brain of a female patient, probably the lunatic Carry Nation. The player is probably Paul Blaylock at the original run. |
Bucher had a lot of queer ideas which he put into the game. I don't suppose they struck anyone as so very unusual at the time, but he had read a lot of Gobineaeu and had some firm ideas on the ascendancy of white race that got written pretty heavily into his plots in the game. His characters are pretty indicative of this. I think a lot of them got cut in the subsequent runs, though they didn't really cut most of them for the 1918 run or change most of the plots. You'd think that, but you have to remember that war wasn't with the Nazis and it wasn't over racism. I think in 1918 most Americans thought those plots were just fine or if they were a little eccentric just kind of conservative. The Yellow Peril thing was a screaming success, and is really King's only good work, and where Bucher's characters were tied into the game, they were tied into that. His Eugenics plots certainly didn't raise the eyebrows in 1918 or even in subsequent years I think Mikhail Jung cut those plots - he may have been a little more progressive and sensitive about that sort of thing but he also cut almost all of Bucher's characters. |
Really he cut or really re wrote almost all of the characters except for Marsden's, and a couple of Walker's, but the fact that none of Bucher's characters survived with one exception - "the General" - and that one highly changed, is notable I don't think that Jung and Bucher ever met but one can assume they might not have liked each other very much. Jung had nothing of the military man about him and was Austrian and Russian and there was some blood between those groups and the Prussians.
I don't know how far the Eugenics plots ever really got. I know that in a review of the game back before the war Todd Hopkins called Bucher's characters "a virtual vade mecum of the unplayable or destructive character types." It certainly wasn't one of those plots that you have a lot of people signing up for, saying make me about Eugenics. It was just something you had in games back then it was a good sciences plot because it was interactive. One problem with science plots was how to make them sort of action oriented. With Eugenics, you dealt with the other characters and had some actions. Now admittedly you dealt with other people mostly in terms of trying to waylay them in combat and strap them to tables and remove parts or organs of their brain. But you had a reason to form alliances in order to jump other characters for the good of the game.
Still playing your Eugenics character was going to cause a lot of trouble in combat. The Eugenics doctor was about capturing players. I think sometimes he was let to get a few, but he had precious little else to do. Of course the Alienist was set up to oppose him. Really it was a very disruptive character type. Paul Blalock played the first Eugenicist and that character is sort of worked in with of Frankenstein's monster plots. I think those characters may have been blended later on.
I think what plot there was in the Eugenics Doctor ended up in the Dr. Frankenstein sheet in the Jung rewrite. Frankenstein was a good character because the rights were already in the public domain. A lot of the other sources that they were writing had to be thinly disguised because after all it was still under copyright. I don't think they ever got challenged by Stoker but his estate blocked the American release of Nosferatu a few years later around the time of Jung's first run of Clarence. I know that in various versions the vampire plot references Polidori and Varney both of which were out of copyright by then. Horatio King was particularly careful about copyrights and of course Blucher backed him up on that. Henrietta was a law and order sort but only when it didn't pertain to her.
- Louise Kramer, 1885 - 1953, Harris, Beatrice, Interview for WPA LARP History Project, 1932