Someone Ought To Wean That Boy

Now why did he feel the need to say this…

HI, THIS IS MY PINNED POST !!

Here’s my playlist !! // and the cover photo I made, hoped you liked the banner video 😭🙏

A little treat this evening for you, folks. I’m always really put off by the comparisons of Norman Bates to Ed Gein - or more so, any overt suggestions that the character of Norman Bates and the entire plot of Psycho is ripped directly from the Ed Gein case. So let’s do a little digging for fun!

“But Mr Based!” I hear you cry, “the Wikipedia production segment for Psycho contradicts the first screenshot!”

Yeah, you’re right, it does. Sure, it says “loosely based”, but it’s giving a lot of wiggle room on what Bloch actually absorbed into his work. Let’s check out the sources on the production page for the film here.

So the sources are, some random click bait article that wants you to buy Amazon Prime and also has absolutely nothing of value to say on the topic, and this book that has only this statement:

Weird. And totally irrelevant.

The original source for the Bloch quote on the first screenshot that Wikipedia uses is this archived page, which itself claims it sources the quotations from Douglas Winter’s Faces of Fear 1985. This page more carefully suggests that Psycho was based only on the circumstances of the murders, not Gein himself as an individual.

If we pull up Faces of Fear, we can find this:

It seems I’ve ran out of links to add, but the book is readily available on the Internet Archive library. Unfortunately, this is the only paragraph in the book that mentions Ed Gein, and these quotes from the website, and which also appear on Wikipedia, aren’t present in the book at all.

So where the heck do they actually come from?

Well, it seems they come from Robert Bloch’s autobiography, Once Around the Bloch, 1993, which is also on the Internet Archive.

So what do I find?

And there you go! Norman Bates, at least Robert Bloch’s version of him, is not based on Ed Gein. The contextual influence of Gein’s crimes definitely contributed to the creation of the book, but all the coincidences that make the two topics seem so closely narratively intertwined are exactly that: Coincidences.

I would like to ask your opinion, as a leading Perkins scholar: Do you think Banjo ran that house?

1. You’re welcome! As it happens, not long after I uploaded it, someone else uploaded their copy in higher resolution, so I felt slightly snubbed 😅 still, my copy has a kangaroo on it, so can I really be that mad?

2. Absolutely. There isn’t a ton of info out there about Mr Banjo or really any of Tony’s pets (he had a handful of dogs over his lifetime as well, including Punky).

The photo of Banjo on Tony’s shoulder is from 1958, and the photo of him holding Banjo down is from 1967, so that’s at least 9 years, and since Banjo is clearly over a year old in the 1958 photo, he could’ve been 10 or 11 in 1967.

There isn’t any available documentation online (or in either of the two most popular biographies) on when Mr Banjo passed, so there’s a chance he lived into the seventies.

Still, with that estimate in mind, I would say Tony spent at least a decade of his life slaving to buy the best quality tinned mush for that cat. 🐈‍⬛