The Hunchcast of Notre Dame

[Patrick] Welcome to "The Hunchcast," where we discuss all things "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." I'm Patrick.

[Leslie] And I'm Leslie. And today we're discussing Jean Delannoy's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," released in 1956, directed by Jean Delannoy, and starring Anthony Quinn, Gina Lollobrigida, and Alain Cuny. I am so excited to talk about this movie, which Guillermo del Toro famously called "one of the most misguided adaptations of the Victor Hugo classic," "The New York Times" called "oddly disjointed affairs that come half alive through a series of static vignettes," and "Variety" called "ponderous, often dull, and far over length."

Yikes. Do I agree with those takes? Eh, we'll see.

But I am excited to cover this movie because it is the only theatrically released adaptation of Victor Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris," a.k.a. "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," released in the last hundred years, that I myself had not seen prior to the last few weeks. Before we started "The Hunchcast," I had seen Universal's, RKO's, and Disney's movies quite a few times throughout my life, and we've already covered all three of those movies on this podcast. But for whatever reason, Delannoy's independent film totally missed me.

So, Pat, I'm coming into this completely blind as a new viewer, which I have not been able to do for any movie we've covered so far, so that's really exciting.

[Patrick] What's all this about "The Hunchback of Notre Dame"? I saw a movie called "Notre-Dame de Paris," and everyone was speaking French.

[Leslie] Well, I don't know what movie you watched, Patrick, but I watched a movie called "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" that also starred Anthony Quinn and Gina Lollobrigida, and in fact, everyone was speaking English. Was I watching a bootleg copy of this movie that was dubbed over?

[Patrick] No, but there's a lot of Korean bootlegs of this movie you can find on eBay, because it is not very easy to find the English-language version of this movie, at least in any official capacity. The last release was in 2001 by Miramax, which at the time was owned by Disney, and for the last 25 years or so, the movie has been out of print. But in Europe, especially in France and Italy, this movie is fairly well-regarded and well-known.

And I say this movie, we're really talking about two movies.

[Leslie] Yeah, listener, at the end of our previous episode, we teased a double feature. This is the double feature we're talking about. This movie was not just made in French and then dubbed over in English after the fact.

This movie was shot two different times in two different languages simultaneously.

[Patrick] Which might have been a complete waste of time, because if you watch the English-language version, 99% of the actors are dubbed over, oftentimes less than convincingly. But, you know, it's better than, say, your average Godzilla movie from the time.

[Leslie] Yeah, only the leading man, Anthony Quinn as Quasimodo, and the leading lady, Gina Lollobrigida as a fantastic Esmeralda, acted in two different languages in multiple takes of the same scene. And I wanted to ask you about that, Patrick. For today's Minute of History, was this common practice in the 1950s, to rather than shooting one version of one movie and dubbing it over after the fact, shooting multiple versions of the same movie simultaneously in multiple languages?

[Patrick] God no, that's an expensive waste of time. It was a big thing to do in the 1930s, however. When sound movies were first invented, it was really expensive to dub audio in.

So, you just had to rely on what you had from the microphones most of the time. And if you wanted to release a sound movie in a foreign market, well, you could try dubbing over the entire movie, but that would be cumbersome and expensive back then. So what studios would do, most famously Universal with their 1931 adaptation of "Dracula," was produce a movie in two languages.

A lot of times the way it would work is, during the day, you would have a crew of actors come in to film scenes in one language, and then when they clocked out, you would have a whole new crew and a whole new set of actors come in to film the same scenes on the same sets, in a different language. And most of the time, the non-English language versions of these movies turned out worse, but there are some exceptions where the foreign language production actually tried to outdo their English counterpart. "Dracula" is a perfect example.

The Spanish-language version of that movie is so much more interesting and cinematic than the popular English-language one.

[Leslie] Soy Dracula.

[Patrick] Now, by the 1950s, dubbing over foreign films was fairly common. A lot of the big so-called sword-and-sandal historical and biblical epics made in Italy during the 50s, those were just dubbed over, and those were fairly popular. But Americans have always struggled with watching foreign films.

We don't like subtitles, we don't like dubbed-over audio either. And I think that's why the producers pushed for at least the two main actors in the American version, Gina and Anthony, to speak in English. Which was not either of their native languages, by the way.

Gina was Italian, and Anthony Quinn was born in Mexico. And here they are, speaking two completely foreign languages to them.

[Leslie] Now, Patrick, you had mentioned that in the 30s it was common practice to bring in an entirely different cast and crew to shoot the same movie in a different language. That's not the case here, because we have the same actors and the same crew shooting the same scenes, or alternate versions of the same scenes, in two different languages. They didn't get a brand-new Quasimodo and a brand-new Esmeralda.

Gina and Anthony are speaking in two different languages.

[Patrick] Gina and Anthony were stars both in Hollywood and in Europe. Especially Gina, who was a huge celebrity in the 1950s.

[Leslie] Sex symbol with a capital S. If she was alive today, she would be dating Pete Davidson.

[Patrick] That's a small if, because she only died a couple years ago. She lived to be like a million. And I think she became a politician and knew even more languages and became a sculptor.

And learning all of this about her is actually really cool, because from an American perspective, Gina is mostly remembered as a 1950s pinup. Just a very remarkable lady who has a lot more going on than meets the eye. And those eyes would often meet her very prominent chest, which was a very important component of the marketing of this movie in America.

I have a broadsheet given to advertisers for the American version of this movie that literally talks about Gina's bust size.

[Leslie] Are you kidding me? They included the leading actor's cup size in marketing materials? You would never do something like that for a man.

Absolutely not. Imagine if the trailers for "Project Hail Mary" included Ryan Gosling's shoe size. "Come see Gina, she's got a rockin' pair of double D's."

I wonder what she thought about that. You know, Gina Lollobrigida, like you said, Patrick, she wasn't just boobs and a butt. She had a brain.

She was intelligent. She was comfortable advocating for herself and her colleagues in the face of very powerful men. And like you said, she had multiple careers after she retired from acting.

I am most familiar with her career as an internationally renowned sculptor. The piece I'm most familiar with of hers is a statue of herself as Esmeralda. It is a beautiful life-size statue.

It is on display in Tuscany. Seeing that thing in person is on my bucket list. It looks absolutely beautiful.

[Patrick] You mentioned that Gina advocated for her co-workers. That was certainly true of Anthony Quinn. Working with Quinn was one of the reasons why she agreed to do this movie in the first place.

And Quinn was almost not able to do the movie at all. Right before he was about to set sail to Europe to film the movie, because, yes, ladies and gentlemen, plane travel is really recent. Obviously, planes had been around since, like, 1903, but it was still really, really expensive and inconvenient to fly.

Even internationally recognized movie stars couldn't fly all the time.

[Leslie] It's also really expensive and inconvenient to shoot two different versions of the same movie in two different languages simultaneously, but it seems Jean Delannoy didn't want to go to every expense.

[Patrick] Well, but the producers wanted to go to a few expenses, because not only did they pay for Mr. Quinn's ticket, they also illegally smuggled him into France, because Quinn got horribly, horribly sick with some kind of food poisoning or some strange disease that really messed up the skin around his face. And he was so sick that the government was not going to let him into the country. Remember a couple months ago when everyone was really mad at that one cruise ship that had hantavirus?

They were like, "We gotta sink that thing!"

[Leslie] I don't blame the people who wanted to sink that cruise ship. You know, maybe that's callous of me, but I lived through one global pandemic. I'm not living through another.

[Patrick] I cannot live through another Celebrity Imagine music video.

[Leslie] Gina never would have agreed to that.

[Patrick] So Anthony Quinn is horribly ill, and he goes to the doctor and is like, "Doctor, I have to be in this movie. I'm playing Quasimodo. What do I do?"

And the doctor just looks at him all wise, like, "Well, now you know what it's like to be Quasimodo. Oh, by the way, just put some cream on your face and you'll be fine." So Anthony Quinn thinks about, like, deformity and ugliness, and I guess he forgets it, because Quasimodo just looks like a normal guy in this movie.

So anyway, while Anthony Quinn's pondering, he puts some cream on his face, and he's mostly fine by the time he wakes up. But he has to be snuck into the country by the producers, because the French government doesn't want this diseased guy coming into their country. And with all of the drama of, "Can Anthony Quinn get into the country?

Is he too ill? And will he have to be snuck in illegally?" They were considering recasting him.

There were even talks of putting Marlon Brando as Quasimodo.

[Leslie] That would have been a very interesting take on the character.

[Patrick] And when most people hear that, I bet they think, "Marlon Brando's one of the greatest actors of all time. That would have been really cool." That's kind of a weird choice, because he wasn't fat 1970s "Godfather," "Superman: The Movie" Marlon Brando.

He's 1950s mega-hunk Marlon Brando, right? The guy from "On the Waterfront" and "Julius Caesar," a heartthrob as Quasimodo. Maybe he would have done a good job, maybe he would have done a bad job.

We will never know, because Gina is advocating for Anthony Quinn. "If he's not in this movie, I'm not in this movie." And Gina is the main star of this movie.

No bones about it. So she had a lot of sway at the studio, and got her way. Quinn was smuggled in, and they were able to start shooting.

And once they start shooting, apparently Anthony Quinn had no idea that he was supposed to do both the English language version and the French language version. He does a scene, it goes well, then he steps aside and is wondering, "Okay, when are they going to do the French version?" Some guy goes up to him and says, "Right now, get out of your chair."

And Quinn is terrified, he's like, "I don't speak French." But he had to figure it out, and I think he does an okay job. I'm certainly not fluent in French by any means, but he's mostly comprehensible.

I think he might actually be a bit more articulate when he speaks French than when he speaks English in this movie.

[Leslie] Pat, what's your source on that story about Anthony Quinn having no idea that he was contractually obligated to make two movies in different languages?

[Patrick] Well, you know how I said the American version of this movie is kind of hard to find and not treated very well?

[Leslie] Yes, sir.

[Patrick] If you want to watch the American version legally, you've got to find a terrible DVD with a lousy transfer from 2001. The picture quality looks like it was ran over by a car. But the French version is fairly well regarded.

And on one of the releases of that movie, there was a Making of documentary where Anthony Quinn and a lot of the other stars and even the director, because Jean Delannoy lived to be like 100 years old, talked about their experiences making the movie. And there are similar stories about the Making of that I've gotten from various books and Anthony Quinn is a man who wrote, like, three autobiographies. There's a lot about this movie's production from his perspective, namely the same two stories that he tells, like, three times.

[Leslie] Well, celebrities like to exaggerate and fabricate stories for their autobiographies and memoirs all the time, so I don't know if I believe that he had no idea he was contractually obligated to make two movies. I mean, didn't he go through that agreement with his lawyer? On the other hand, though, he was quarantined for several weeks and couldn't get into the country because of his illness, so maybe there was a meeting about it while he was sick and he just missed it and somebody forgot to tell him.

I don't know, but that seems a little sketchy to me. But I digress.

[Patrick] Speaking of digressions, the filmmakers made a concerted effort to make this a more faithful adaptation of the source material. Delannoy and the screenwriter Jacques Prévert, who was a pretty famous absurdist poet who nonetheless still loved Victor Hugo and the romanticism of the 19th century, those guys really wanted to make an adaptation that was French and that was closer to the book. They looked disdainfully on those earlier Hollywood movies, despite frequently ripping them off in this film.

[Leslie] Yeah, I've got a quote written down here from Delannoy himself. He was being interviewed on an episode of this French TV show called "Cinépanorama." This was ahead of the film's release in 1956, and when he was asked about the prior film adaptations of Hugo's novel that the Americans had made, namely the Universal and RKO movies, he replied, and of course this has been translated into English, "It's obvious that these movies were based loosely on Hugo's work.

They were works imagined by the Americans. I don't think Hugo's poetry appealed to them. They thought, well yeah, we're making these things to talk to the Americans on their level.

We're going to put it in a pre-made mold, you see." Translation, the Americans suck, they don't understand Hugo's work, and the "Hunchback of Notre Dame" movies they made were dumbed down for American audiences.

[Patrick] So all of the people behind this film are making a concerted effort to be close to the source material. They want this to be darker and more violent and more openly sexual than the earlier film adaptations, as well as more poetic and medieval and lyrical, whatever the heck that's supposed to mean. And changing standards in the film industry allowed that to really be possible.

Because by the 1950s, a lot of these strict censorship standards had loosened for the most part. There are still some censorship concessions made to this movie, especially with the character of Claude Frollo in the American version. He's not much better in the French.

But this version does show parts of the story that are only implied in the 1923 and 1939 movies. You see the whip strike Quasimodo's back. You see Esmeralda's foot get crushed in that vice.

There's blood, there's cleavage, there's making out. And all of those elements help to sell tickets, because you couldn't see that sort of thing on television, which was this existential threat to the movie industry. In the 1930s, if you were bored and wanted entertainment, you could read a book, you could draw with a piece of chalk, you could listen to the radio if there was anything good, or you could go to a nice air-conditioned movie theater.

So people went to movie theaters, even though it was the heart of the Great Depression. The movie industry did great. But by the 1950s, even though Americans were more prosperous, they were spending less money at the movie theaters because a new technology came out that harnessed the power of being lazy.

That is television. "Why would I go to the movie theater and spend my hard-earned money on a ticket when I could just watch entertainment at home?"

[Leslie] "Mom, can we go to the movies?" "We have the movies at home."

[Patrick] But the point is, programming on TV was free. You didn't have to leave your house to watch "I Love Lucy" or "The Andy Griffith Show" or whatever. And movie studios were terrified by the rise of television because it ate up a lot of ticket sales.

So movie studios tried to get people to want to come to the theater. And aside from more sex and violence, there was also a big focus on new technology. This is the time when 3D movies were really popular.

You know, the ones where you have to put on the red and blue glasses and stuff pops out of you? This was also the era where color photography became more common. Now, color movies had been around really since the dawn of cinema.

And feature-length color films had been around since the 30s with the rise of the Technicolor format. But color was and is expensive. And it was something you could really only get at the movies.

So a lot more movies were coming out in color. Now, yes, color TV did exist by the mid-1950s. But most people didn't own it.

It was really expensive. What, you bought a new TV set for hundreds of dollars which today would be thousands in, like, 1952. And by 1956, there's a new color model that comes out for twice the price.

No, I'm not buying that. Most people have black and white TVs until, like, the 70s and 80s. And even then, some black and white TVs lingered on until the 90s.

So most people couldn't get color at home. They couldn't get sex and violence at home. They also couldn't get widescreen photography at home.

So the aspect ratio, so the size of the picture of movies before widescreen came out was a square. It was a 4 by 3 ratio. And that's what TV shows were.

They were little squares. Well, by the 1950s, this new format comes out called widescreen. You get CinemaScope and formats like that that are literally a widescreen.

You go from a square shape to a rectangle shape. You can see more of the picture. It's more of an immersive and literally a cinematic experience.

And all these gimmicks are used by the big studios to get people to abandon their TVs and go to the movie theaters like they used to. This is the era of the biblical epic. Movies based on the Bible that would be, like, 4 hours long, be full of a ton of sex and violence, cool color photography, and big special effects.

Probably the most prominent one of these is Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments," which is 4 hours long, full of movie stars, a cast of thousands, crazy special effects, and all the buff dudes and sultry ladies you could lay your eyes on.

[Leslie] Yeah, listen, Patrick and I recently watched "The Ten Commandments," and we spent about 50% of that viewing time going, "Oh my god, that's so expensive."

[Patrick] Now, for every "Ten Commandments," you had a "Cleopatra." You know, "Ten Commandments" was a huge success. Other movies were not.

But the point is, this is the atmosphere when the 1956 adaptation is coming out. This era of bigger, better, more impressive. That's why this movie has big movie stars.

That's why this movie is a bit more graphic than the earlier adaptations. That's why this movie is filmed in CinemaScope, supposedly. At the very least, it's in widescreen.

That's why it's in color.

[Leslie] This is the first film adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel filmed in color. That's very significant.

[Patrick] Color and widescreen. But what are these colors painting upon this widescreen, Leslie?

[Leslie] I thought you'd never ask, Patrick. As the film begins, a narrator tells the audience about the French poet Victor Hugo, who once found the Greek word for fate carved into the wall of Notre Dame Cathedral and was inspired to write the following story, which takes place in Paris in the Year of Grace, 1482. The Parisians are celebrating the annual Feast of Fools by watching a play at the Palace of Justice titled "The Quest for Beauty."

Much to the disappointment of the playwright, Pierre Gringoire, played by Robert Hirsch, the crowd's interest is diverted by the appearance of the beautiful Romani dancer Esmeralda, played by Gina Lollobrigida, and they follow her into the street to watch her perform. Perhaps the most transfixed by Esmeralda is Gringoire's master, the alchemist Claude Frollo, played by Alain Cuny, who is accompanied by the loyal Quasimodo, the bell ringer of Notre Dame, played by Anthony Quinn, for protection. When the time comes for the Parisians to crown the King of Fools, Esmeralda spots Quasimodo and insists he be crowned the king.

He's given a cloak, a crown, and a whistle, and paraded through the streets until nightfall, at which time Frollo interrupts the procession and leads Quasimodo away. Frollo orders Quasimodo to abduct Esmeralda, and although Quasimodo was hesitant, he begrudgingly chases and grabs her. She screams for help, and the captain of the king's archers, Phoebus, played by Jean Danet, rescues her.

The two flirt with each other, and Phoebus takes Esmeralda to an inn. Hmm, not doing that on TV. After he pays for a room, the smitten Esmeralda playfully pulls a knife on him and laughs as she disappears into the streets.

Meanwhile, meandering Gringoire runs away from a group of beggars accosting him for money and stumbles into the Court of Miracles, the seedy neighborhood Paris's vagabonds call home. The court's kings put a noose around Gringoire's neck, saying, "Last week King Louis hanged a thief. Now we want to hang an honest man in return."

They explain that if any of the court's women agree to take Gringoire for a husband, he will be freed. To everyone's surprise, Esmeralda offers to marry him to save his life. In her chambers, Esmeralda gives Gringoire a meal, tells him she'll kill him if he touches her, and explains that his husbandly duties are to wash her goat.

That's not an innuendo, by the way. The next day, a disguised King Louis XI, played by Jean Tissier, visits Frollo in his chamber in Notre Dame, where Frollo is attempting to turn dross into gold. Though the king privately considers having Frollo burned at the stake for witchcraft, he sees potential in Frollo's experiments and encourages him to visit the Bastille.

The men watch from above as Quasimodo is publicly whipped for attempting to abduct Esmeralda. When the bell ringer cries out for water, only Esmeralda gives him a drink. Later, Frollo is scandalized when Gringoire tells him he has married Esmeralda, and even more scandalized when Esmeralda's pet goat Djali spells out the word Phoebus with alphabet blocks during a public performance.

Across the square, Phoebus spots Esmeralda from the balcony of his future mother-in-law's apartment, and in a fit of jealousy, his betrothed, the beautiful aristocrat Fleur-de-Lys, played by Danielle Dumont, demands he chase Esmeralda out of the square. Phoebus does so, but not before arranging to meet Esmeralda at the same inn he took her to the night they met. Frollo puts two and two together and realizes Phoebus is her man.

How's my Alain Cuny impression?

[Patrick] Good. In the French version he just says, "Phoebus." But in the American version he says, "Phoebus.

Her man."

[Leslie] And speaking of her man, that night Frollo approaches Phoebus and warns him not to meet Esmeralda, but Phoebus laughs Frollo off and goes anyway. Frollo stalks Phoebus to the inn and watches through a window as Esmeralda and Phoebus hold and kiss one another. Calling back to the night they met, Phoebus removes the knife from Esmeralda's hip and throws it out the window.

Frollo picks it up, stabs Phoebus in the back, and vanishes. Phoebus survives the stabbing, but Esmeralda is tried for attempted murder and witchcraft. The innkeeper, played by Marianne Oswald, testifies at the trial, saying she saw a man in black leap out the window after the captain was stabbed.

Frollo is among the men overseeing the trial, and though he initially attempts to clear Esmeralda's name by suggesting the man in black could have stabbed Phoebus, he walks back his argument when Esmeralda confesses she is in love with the captain. Esmeralda is sentenced to be executed after confessing to the stabbing under torture, but as she's brought before Notre Dame to do public penance, Quasimodo runs out of the cathedral, grabs her, and carries her inside, shouting, Up in the bell tower, Frollo attempts to force himself on Esmeralda after she realizes he was the man in black who stabbed Phoebus, and after she summons Quasimodo, Frollo leaves. Quasimodo and Esmeralda strike up a friendship, and he spends the next few days expressing his affection for her by ringing the bells in her honor and bringing her food and gifts. One day, Esmeralda spots Phoebus and implores Quasimodo to bring him to her.

Although Phoebus knows Esmeralda is alive and living in Notre Dame, he refuses to see her, and he leaves Paris to visit his fiancée at her country estate and apologize for being unfaithful to her.

[Patrick] What a nice guy.

[Leslie] Ah, we'll see. Meanwhile, Frollo visits the Bastille and convinces the king to revoke the right of sanctuary for a single day. That night, the vagabonds of the Court of Miracles take up arms and storm the cathedral to remove Esmeralda and bring her to safety, but Quasimodo misunderstands their intentions and fights them off by dropping logs, stones, and molten lead on them.

Esmeralda recognizes her friends and begs Quasimodo to stop, but he deliberately ignores her, even going as far as to kill Frollo's younger brother Jehan, played by Maurice Sarfati, who I keep forgetting is in this movie. I think the movie also keeps forgetting he's in this movie, but we'll get into that. As the sun rises, the vagabonds break down the door, and Esmeralda runs out of the cathedral and reunites with them.

At that moment, the king's archers fire into the mob, killing several, including Esmeralda herself. When Quasimodo sees Esmeralda's body being carried out of the square, he cries out in anguish and kills Frollo by throwing him off of Notre Dame. Later that day, Quasimodo finds Esmeralda's body and lays beside it.

The narrator explains that years later, two skeletons were found in that same spot, locked in a close embrace. When an attempt was made to separate them, they crumbled to dust. So, overall, I think this is a pretty good adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel.

You know, it's not perfect, but the script is all right. The costumes are gorgeous and so colorful. I mean, we are really going to every effort to pull people away from their TV sets and get them into movie theaters.

The actors all give pretty good performances, and in some aspects, and we'll get into this in a little bit, this is one of the most faithful adaptations of the novel I have ever seen, if not the most faithful. But my biggest problem with this movie is, even after watching it quite a few times within the span of a couple weeks, I still don't understand what this movie is trying to say. All movies exist, or all movies should exist, because someone had a point they wanted to make, and they chose to make that point through the medium of film.

Jean Delannoy chose to tell this particular story, at this particular moment in time, for a reason. But even after multiple viewings, I still can't tell what that reason is. What was it about this story that demanded to be retold in 1956?

What was it about the culture of the 1950s and the state of the world in the 1950s that demanded another "Hunchback of Notre Dame" movie? I don't think this movie answers that question, because every time I arrive at the end, I say, "Well, that was a beautiful adaptation of the novel. What was the point?

What was it trying to say, besides, Gina Lollobrigida is the most beautiful woman who has ever walked the face of the Earth?"

[Patrick] Well, if you ask the filmmakers, they would say the previous film adaptations had not done justice to Victor Hugo's story. They were the Hollywood versions. They were not true representations of the source material.

So there's reason one. And reason two might be all of the new technology available. You can make a new version in widescreen and in color.

You know, this Malibu Stacy comes with a new hat. "You need her, not the old one." But thematically, I don't think this movie has very much to say.

And while the movie is very faithful to Victor Hugo's plot, it's not as representative of the themes and ideas of the novel. Wow. They got the scene where King Louis XI shows up to Frollo's little wizard jail as Gossip Tourangeau, even though Frollo knows that he's the king.

But why do we have the details? What is this trying to say about the themes, beauty and ugliness? I don't think Jean Delannoy is a particularly capable director.

He worked for a long time. He lived to be like 100 years old. But this movie is shot in a very flat way.

Maybe that's because of the heavy color and CinemaScope cameras at the time. Maybe it's because he had to make two movies, one French, one English. But this movie is pretty flat.

You know, you compare it to some of the other big, epic, color widescreen historical films of the 50s, like "Ten Commandments," like "Solomon and Sheba," like any of them. This movie kind of falls flat visually. The sets are pretty, but they feel very constrained and small.

And Delannoy's direction is very flat. I feel like this guy has never met a medium shot he did not like. Whenever characters are talking, we get over-the-shoulder shot, reverse shot, rarely anything differently.

And there's only about two or three shots in this movie that I think are really interesting and worth looking at. There's that cool one where Esmeralda is reflected in the glass while Frollo's staring at her. There's like a low angle on Quasimodo when he's on the pillory and you see Notre Dame in the background.

Those are cool. But visually, I mean, the movie's in widescreen, the movie's in color. Those are things you couldn't really do on TV in the 50s.

But boy, is this shot like a TV show. It is paced like a TV show. Actually, not even.

I've seen episodes of, like, "The Twilight Zone," that are more cinematic than this movie.

[Leslie] Well, that's probably why this movie aired on TV so often throughout the ensuing decades. Earlier, I mentioned Guillermo del Toro's thoughts on this movie. He sat down with "Trailers from Hell" and talked about his experience watching this movie on TV when he was growing up and having very intense feelings for Gina Lollobrigida.

I don't blame him. I am a straight woman. I don't have a drop of homosexuality within me.

But my goodness, Miss Gina, I am available tonight. But I agree with you, Patrick. Even though there are some details from the novel that are represented in this movie that are not represented in any other film adaptation, such as Gringoire's play taking place at the Palace of Justice, such as the myth taken straight from the preface of the novel, we'll talk about that in a second, and I don't feel that this movie is justifying its existence in this particular time period when it was made. You know, the last film adaptation we talked about was RKO's film adaptation released in 1939. Yes, that movie is an adaptation of Hugo's novel, but that movie is also about the state of the world in the 1930s when Hitler was rising to power in Europe and the Great Depression was ravaging the global economy and one out of every four people in the United States were without a job.

And I'm not saying that this movie needs to make an overt philosophical statement about the state of planet Earth in 1956 or 1955 or whenever the heck they shot this movie, but I feel it does not justify its existence. It's a pretty movie. It was fun for me to watch.

I especially liked identifying those little details from the book as someone who absolutely loves Hugo's novel. Why did we make this movie in 1956? Why not 1960?

Why not 1950? Why did we have to make this movie at this specific time? I don't have an answer to that question.

And it's a shame because there are many parts of this movie that I really do like, especially the performances.

[Patrick] We've got the bones of Hugo's novel, but not the heart.

[Leslie] Not the soul. And as I mentioned, Delannoy was so focused on creating a faithful adaptation of Hugo's novel that understood Hugo's poetry and was not squeezed into a pre-made mold like those horrible simplistic American adaptations. Okay, if that was your intention, why are the American versions better?

[Patrick] I think the screenplay does a pretty decent job adapting Hugo's novel. You know, it's very faithful, but the parts where it diverges from the text are actually really smart and show an understanding of the book. For example, in Book 9, Quasimodo gives Esmeralda a whistle that is, aside from the bells, the only sound that he's capable of hearing.

And she uses that to call for him when Frollo attacks her. Where did he get that whistle? How did he figure out that that's a sound he can hear despite being deaf?

Well, this movie provides an explanation for that. It's a whistle that he was given to when he's crowned the King of Fools. At least in the American version.

Because in the French version, like in the book, Quasimodo is made the Pope of Fools.

[Leslie] Yeah, and another quick example of this film's tendency to fill in little plot holes that Victor Hugo didn't. And by the way, listener, we dedicated the first five episodes of this podcast to a comprehensive exploration of that novel. If you haven't listened to those yet, I highly encourage you to do so.

Even if you've never read Victor Hugo's novel before, you will be able to follow along with us. We pointed out in Episode 1, it's unclear in the novel why Quasimodo is at the Feast of Fools. We establish in that novel that Quasimodo does not like going outside.

He does not like leaving the bell tower unless he absolutely has to. So why was he at the Feast of Fools? Well, this movie answers that question.

Claude Frollo was going to attend Gringoire's play at the Palace of Justice. Quasimodo went with him for physical protection. Quasimodo is kind of like Frollo's bodyguard here.

And there's a scene where Claude Frollo is being harassed right outside of Notre Dame. And he sicks Quasimodo on the people who are bothering him and giving him a hard time. I think that would have been very easy for Victor Hugo to include, but for some reason he doesn't.

However, there are other parts of this movie that remove details from Hugo's novel and create more plot holes. For example, when we see Pierre Gringoire wandering the streets of Paris and accidentally stumbling into the Court of Miracles, we don't know why he's out at 11 p.m. The novel does. The novel says he is broke.

He was not paid for the play that was produced at the Palace of Justice. Say that ten times fast. And because he can't pay his rent, he's got to stumble around the city trying to find a place to sleep.

For some reason, this movie takes out that detail, so when we run into Gringoire, he's just out for some reason, and we don't know why.

[Patrick] He's out for a leisurely stroll, like Quasimodo is when he kidnaps Esmeralda. He literally does a mild jog when he's trying to get her, because he doesn't want to run past the end of the set.

[Leslie] Yeah, it looks good, but it's way too small for the actors to give a compelling performance of a chase scene. Like you said, Quasimodo is not running after Esmeralda. He's just leisurely jogging.

[Patrick] The American trailer for this movie claimed that it was "filmed on the spot in Paris." There's no way.

[Leslie] No, the streets of Paris did not look like that in the 1950s. I don't even think they looked like that in the 1900s.

[Patrick] Yeah, you can thank Napoleon III for that. He helped to modernize the city during the 1800s.

[Leslie] Didn't he also drive Victor Hugo into exile?

[Patrick] Yeah, but he told people to make pretty buildings, which are pretty cool. This movie was filmed in Paris, but it was filmed at a movie studio. I mean, come on, there's no way they were going to let Anthony Quinn's obvious stunt double climb around on the architecture of Notre Dame.

And while Notre Dame might not have been considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site back in the 1950s, it would still probably be seen as disrespectful to run around swinging on it and breaking stuff.

[Leslie] You're right, Patrick, that stunt double is really obvious. During that one scene where Quasimodo is swinging on the gargoyles and jumping from gargoyle to gargoyle with his bare hands, yeah, that is not Anthony Quinn.

[Patrick] And it's extra obvious because Anthony Quinn barely has any makeup on in this movie.

[Leslie] Okay, aside from not comprehending the point of this movie, that is my second largest problem. This film's Quasimodo is barely disfigured. His eye is slightly askew, and he has a very minor spinal curvature.

I mean, there's something going on with his upper back, which we see in the whipping scene. Other than that, he just looks like a normal guy. I just saw someone who looked exactly like that at Stop & Shop this morning.

He is not disfigured in the slightest.

[Patrick] And the filmmakers did that intentionally. From their perspective, minimizing Quasimodo's deformities, which in the novel are severe, he's got a wart over one eye, his teeth are like the broken battlements of a fortress, his hands are horny and hairy, his nose is like a pyramid, he's got this red shock hair, he's a ginger, the worst deformity of all. The filmmakers wanted to make Quasimodo more quote-unquote human, and that comes from multiple sources, from Quinn, from the directors, and I have a lot of problems with that description.

First of all, they're trying to be close to Hugo, and their version of Quasimodo is just Anthony Quinn with a slouch.

[Leslie] The Americans don't understand Hugo's poetry. Neither do you, brother, because you clearly didn't read the part in book one where Hugo describes Quasimodo's deformities. I mean, if their intention was to create the most faithful adaptation to the novel, they really, really failed when it came to Quasimodo.

And I'm not saying Anthony Quinn's performance is bad. I'm saying he was dealt a bad hand in terms of that makeup job.

[Patrick] I got a bone to pick with the logic of saying that because he's less deformed, he's more human. Like, isn't that completely against the idea of Quasimodo as a character? He's the most human character in the book, and yet he looks like a monster.

Like, that's the most obvious theme from the novel, and they completely miss it. And what's this supposed to mean about people who do have disabilities? You know, I've seen people in real life who look fairly similar to Charles Laughton's Quasimodo, where they have an eye that's severely askew and severe kyphosis.

Those are real conditions, and while Hugo's Quasimodo is obviously an exaggerated romantic character, severely disfigured people are real, and they're human. And plus, by the 1950s, a lot of American audiences regarded this story as a horror story. There was a monster magazine that was all about Quasimodo called "Quasimodo's Monster Magazine."

And while Quasimodo is not a monster, audiences were expecting the hunchback of Notre Dame to at least look like the hunchback of Notre Dame. He just looks like Anthony Quinn in a sweatshirt. And he's not even that much of an outcast.

I get the impression that Quasimodo is more like the village idiot rather than someone that the people both laugh at and despise as a sorcerer and evil demon. He's out there, like, playing catch with little kids and, like, singing with people. What kind of outcast is that?

[Leslie] I'm glad we're on the same page about this, Patrick, because in the novel, Quasimodo is universally feared and despised. People accuse him of everything. They accuse him of inducing miscarriages.

They accuse him of leading to the birth of a kitten with six legs. They hate him. He is the local cryptid, in a sense.

But in this movie, like you said, Quasimodo is more like the village idiot. He's not hated, he's not feared. The only time people really jump from him is when he is running at people and barking at them in order to defend Claude Frollo or defend Esmeralda.

Other than that, people just like teasing him and singing little songs about him. And that's it. No one is overtly afraid of him, nobody despises him.

It's a very different take on the character than what we see in Hugo's novel and what we see in all of the adaptations we've covered on this podcast thus far. And I think I would be a little more comfortable with it if I didn't know that the filmmaker's intention was to create a more quote-unquote human take on the character. Are you saying disfigured and disabled individuals are less human than able-bodied individuals?

Because that is startlingly ableist.

[Patrick] Even Quasimodo in the Disney cartoon is more disfigured than this guy.

[Leslie] He might have Tom Hulce's beautiful singing voice and big puppy dog eyes but he's still feared and hated.

[Patrick] And I'm not just nitpicking here. I'm totally fine with doing something different with the character, especially after Charles Laughton and Lon Chaney had such iconic performances. You don't just want to be doing an imitation.

And Anthony Quinn does have a different take on his performance but he is really let down by the simplicity of the makeup. You know, there's a scene that's added to this movie that's not in the book. It's sort of ripped off from the 1939 movie, but we'll let that slide, where Esmeralda confronts Quasimodo in the bell tower and tries to talk to him.

And Quasimodo hides his face from Esmeralda. She dances for him and he becomes so delighted that he uncovers his face. He lets his hand slide down and we see the full extent of his deformity.

The problem is he just looks fine. It just falls flat a lot of the time. And the idea that making Quasimodo less deformed makes him more human?

That's problematic. Actually, come to think of it, a lot of the characters are softened compared to their novel counterpart. The filmmakers talk a big game, even in retrospective interviews, about how this is a more bold and provocative adaptation.

But not really in terms of the characterization. I mean, take a look at Claude Frollo.

[Leslie] He is not explicitly given a title. He practices alchemy in a chamber of Notre Dame. Why?

Why is he allowed to practice alchemy in a Catholic church? He's never described as a deacon or an archdeacon, as he is in Hugo's novel. He's never described as a priest or as filling a role that has anything even remotely to do with the clergy.

And yet, he's allowed to try to make gold up in the bell tower of Notre Dame. He has a, I wouldn't say master or father figure role over Quasimodo. Quasimodo's kind of his lackey and his bodyguard.

Why? How do they know each other? At some point, a background character says, of Frollo's relationship to Quasimodo — and I'm totally misrepresenting this quote — "Frollo tried to turn Quasimodo into a human being, but he failed."

What? Okay, so we're establishing that Claude Frollo is some kind of an alchemist or a scientist, and Quasimodo is one of his failed experiments. I think that's a really interesting angle, and during our episodes where we talked about the book, I suggested that as a potential reason why Claude Frollo adopted Quasimodo.

You know, maybe he saw Quasimodo as a little intellectual experiment. Here, it's called out explicitly, but it's in a throwaway line. We don't elaborate on how these characters came to be in each other's lives, and we're left wondering, who is Claude Frollo, really?

Is he a scientist? Okay, then why is he allowed to practice in Notre Dame? What is his relationship to the cathedral?

Is he a judge? He's seen presiding over Esmeralda's trial, but nobody ever calls him a judge or implies that he does any judge-like things.

[Patrick] He's like an expert witness. At some point, I think Jacques Charmolue says, "Continue, Master Frollo. As an expert on witchcraft, what is your opinion?"

At another point, somebody calls him the king's judge, but he's not a judge as his main role. He just sits on the legal board as one of, like, twelve guys. He's just some dude.

[Leslie] Also, if he is the king's judge and he has a working relationship with the king, why did the king feel the need to disguise himself and approach Frollo under a different name, under a pseudonym? It just doesn't make any sense. And critics, specifically American critics, took note of this as well.

In the "New York Times" review of this movie, they wrote, "An observer would have to have extrasensory powers to discover the reasons for his" — his being Frollo's — "obsessions." Yeah, I agree. I have no idea who this character is.

He's kind of just there. And if you've read Victor Hugo's novel, upon which this movie is based, or seen any other film adaptations of Victor Hugo's novel, you'll be pretty taken aback by Alain Cuny's appearance. He is a very handsome man.

He's got a full head of hair. The Frollo from Hugo's novel, and the Frollo from most adaptations of Hugo's novel, does not look like that at all. Yeah, he is 35 in the book, and it's interesting to see a Frollo played by a 35-year-old-ish guy, or at least a guy who looks like he could be in his mid-30s.

But Frollo is also described as looking much older than he actually is. He is described as the man with the bald brow. Alain Cuny doesn't have a bald brow.

He doesn't have a bald anything. He has a beautiful head of hair. He is so handsome.

I would argue he's even more handsome than Phoebus. Which is odd, considering that, in Hugo's novel, Claude Frollo's ugliness is one of the reasons, one of many reasons, actually, why Esmeralda does not like him and does not choose him over Phoebus. So having Frollo be played by a really handsome guy, I feel, softens his motivations and softens his characterization.

[Patrick] Now, I don't know if the character was ever supposed to be a priest in this adaptation, because it was designed from the ground up to appeal both to Americans and to European audiences. The producers were very anxious about what Jean Delannoy calls American Catholics. The United States, especially during the 50s, was a big religious society, and depicting a priest as a villain was a very taboo subject.

It had been done in some movies by the 1950s. A good example would be the Charles Laughton-directed film "The Night of the Hunter." That's about an evil preacher who's hunting down a couple of kids and their mother.

But it was very taboo. So I can understand why maybe Frollo wasn't depicted as a priest. He hadn't been depicted as a priest in any of the Hollywood adaptations so far.

But take a look at the 1939 movie. Even though Frollo is not a priest in that version, he still kind of acts like one, and he still has his central religious conflict. He might not have a vow of chastity, but it is clear in that movie that he considers Esmeralda a witch, and that he is very pious, or at the very least, very bigoted in his religious views.

Especially in the American version of this 1956 adaptation, Frollo is incredibly secular. I don't know what his role is. I don't know what he believes.

The French version does have a few more references to religion that seem to imply that maybe Frollo has some Christian views, but they're very, very thin. Probably the biggest example of this is when Frollo sees Esmeralda walking around after Quasimodo saves her from her execution. He turns away and crosses himself.

In the American version, Frollo covers his face. Now that's just a reference. And in the French version, there are a few other references, not any outright direct statements or subtle implications that Frollo has strong religious views.

Like in the novel, the king asks what Frollo believes in, and Frollo replies in Latin, "Credo in Deum," which means "I believe in God." But that doesn't really tell you anything. Okay, you believe in God.

Are you incredibly religious? Is that really important to you? Even the French version of this character, and while the French version of this character makes a couple references to religion, I really don't buy it.

I don't get a sense that he's a very principled man, at least in his own perspective. There's no psychology to this Frollo. He just kind of squints and scowls.

And that's probably why the producers cast Alain Cuny, because Alain Cuny is in a lot of old French movies where he squints and scowls. But I gotta say, I don't think color photography serves Alain Cuny well. He looks pretty spooky in black and white whenever he's doing his squinting and scowling and smoking a cigarette, as he did in so many films.

But in color, he's not really intimidating at all. He just looks sunburned. He does look sunburned.

And Frollo should be like a pale weirdo. Now, to their credit, the filmmakers did want to have Frollo have a tonsure, which is the same haircut that a monk has. So not full-on bald, but at least having a big bald spot.

And the producers were very much against that. They thought that would offend American audiences and imply that Frollo was a priest too heavily. But there is nothing in the movie, in the American version or the French version, that suggests that Frollo is a priest.

He's some guy that lives in Notre Dame who raised Quasimodo. I think the French version might imply that he took a vow of chastity or something. But I can't say that for certain.

Again, that's just a rough guess based on the scene where the king talks to Frollo and Charmolue in the upper gallery of the cathedral.

[Leslie] I think under the circumstances, Alain Cuny gives a pretty good performance. I mean, he delivers his lines very well. I just think that the odds were stacked against him by the writing and the characterization.

[Patrick] In the French version, Frollo gets a few extra scenes, and they are completely over-the-top and goofy. Most of these scenes are just Frollo scowling and yelling at the top of his lungs, like he's some kind of drunken pig. It's just completely embarrassing.

There's a scene after Esmeralda is supposedly executed where he gets a room at an inn, and the innkeeper opens the door to see if he's in there. And then Frollo makes a big elaborate speech where he's growling and scowling and then disappears. The American version, Frollo retains his mostly flat affect, and he's very flat in the French version as well.

But every once in a while, he'll make a big nasally speech, and it's just completely ridiculous. I'm glad most of those scenes were cut from the American version.

[Leslie] I'm curious. I myself have not seen the French version of this film all the way through, but I have seen quite a few clips. And you're right, Patrick, there are some scenes that have different writing and different actors and a different intention than in the English version.

It's not just that, okay, we're going to film this scene in English and now we're going to film this scene in French. It's, okay, we're going to do the English version of this scene, and now we're going to film an additional scene for the French version that is not in the English version. Do you happen to know why they did that?

It feels like that would just be a big pain in the butt.

[Patrick] It's probably just a matter of taste. And there's actually a few scenes that are in the American version that are not in the French version. For example, in the American version, there's an extra scene where Jehan asks Claude Frollo if he wants to watch Esmeralda's execution, and Frollo blows him off.

It's a very funny and short scene that is a good bit of characterization, and Jehan has a very small part in this film, so I think changing that in the European version was a bit of a loss. In the French version, Frollo just walks alone and overhears some people saying horrible things. I think having his brother come up to him directly and say, "Oh, you're going the wrong way, my dear brother.

They're hanging a girl. Let's count the number of times her tiny feet twitch as they dangle in midair."

[Leslie] Yeah, except I felt like Jehan is in so little of this movie that by the time the audience registers that he is a character we should care about, he has run away, and we don't have time to process, "Wait, who is this person? Did he say he's Claude Frollo's brother? Wait, what?

Claude Frollo has a brother?" Jehan is in so little of this movie that we don't have time to say, "Okay, here is a character we're supposed to care about." Other characters care about him.

So that when he dies, we actually feel something. Seeing the way Claude reacts to his brother's death made me misty-eyed when I first read the book. Here, Jehan has so little screen time that when he dies and when we see a brief moment of Claude reacting to that death, I don't feel anything.

I go, "Okay, that guy who showed up so fast I couldn't even process that he was there was just flung out of Notre Dame and cracked his head on the pavement." His role is kind of like a hit and run.

[Patrick] I actually don't mind Jehan's role in this movie. I think he's in the movie a perfect amount. Where you get who he is and not too much more.

He could easily become too much. I think the actor does a very good job making a strong impression with his very little screen time. But I guess your mileage may vary on that.

[Leslie] No, I disagree with that. Although I do like that Jehan's death is completely accurate to the book. So one of those little details they decided to throw in.

[Patrick] I guess so, but it doesn't feel like the scene in the book. The scene in the book is dramatic and ironic and horrible.

[Leslie] And slow-paced.

[Patrick] Quasimodo hesitates for a moment, then he gets shot in the arm by Jehan. Then Quasimodo pins him down, crushes his armor, and takes off every piece. And then eventually throws Jehan off of the cathedral wall.

Jehan is singing a drinking song. It's very fitting, and all of that stuff happens in this scene. But it's just so flat.

We stay on the same camera shot. We get a little bit of camera motion. But it's not cinematic at all.

Whereas in the novel, that's such a vivid and dramatic scene. Could you at least have a close-up at some point? Could you cut from one angle to another?

It doesn't resonate the way it should. So the script might mention something interesting from the novel. But you don't understand the piece, cinematically.

It's the visual equivalent of telling and not showing. It's there, but why is it there?

[Leslie] Speaking of little details from the novel that are there, but why is it there, the story from the novel's preface appears at the beginning of the movie. An unseen narrator tells the audience, "Oh, the person who wrote this story once found the Greek word for fate or fatality carved into the wall of Notre Dame Cathedral." And he saw it and he wondered, "Oh, what poor soul could have carved this word into the wall?"

And it inspired him to write this novel. And we see a callback to that later in the movie. We see Claude Frollo carving that word into the wall of the bell tower.

I thought that was a really cool detail. And initially, when I saw that, I got really excited. I thought, "Oh my gosh, they're pulling in the story from the preface?"

Of course, if you've listened to episode one of this podcast, you know how we feel about that story from the preface. We think it's completely made up. But that excitement was quickly dashed because, yes, it's cool that they included that detail from the novel.

I didn't feel like it needed to be there. You know, at no point later in the story do the characters reference or lament fate outside of Claude Frollo carving that word into the side of Notre Dame. So, like you said, Patrick, yeah, it's cool that we have these details from the novel.

Why? I understand that you want to pay tribute to the story that you are adapting, but you're making a movie. All of the decisions you make have to be in service of the movie.

I felt that that choice wasn't.

[Patrick] I agree that it falls flat and you have the plot points, but you're not telling the story as an actual story. This movie's very meandering. It's edited in such a run-of-the-mill way.

Scenes end like they're chapters in a book, cut to black every time.

[Leslie] It feels like it was made to accommodate for commercial breaks.

[Patrick] And apparently this movie was aired a lot on TV in the 60s and 70s, so even though these kinds of movies were made to combat television, they ultimately belonged on television.

[Leslie] Absolutely. Oh, speaking of how vague Claude Frollo is, we don't know what Claude Frollo's relationship to Gringoire is. Gringoire refers to Claude Frollo as his master, and we see Claude Frollo going out of his way to see Gringoire's play at the Palace of Justice.

What does master actually mean? You know, is Claude Frollo also a playwright who mentored Gringoire? We don't know.

We don't even know what Claude Frollo does, so when Gringoire says, "Oh, master, I'm so glad you're here," that just makes me even more confused. Master? At what?

What has he taught you? He doesn't do anything.

[Patrick] Jack of no trades and also the master of no trades. In the novel, Frollo is Gringoire's mentor, who educates him and helps him be the absolute failure that he grows up to be. I think this version is trying to imply a similar relationship, but I don't get it.

Even in the French version where Gringoire has a few more scenes, I still don't get it. And really, I don't get Gringoire in general. Why is he in this movie?

He doesn't appear after the beggars leave to siege Notre Dame. He just disappears. So why do we spend all that time setting him up if he just vanishes from the film?

[Leslie] I agree with that point. I was just going to say, though, that if Gringoire had to be here, which I don't think he does, I don't mind this Gringoire. I think the actor does a very good job of playing a mousy, henpecked husband.

[Patrick] Wouldn't you be intimidated if you were married to a Gina Lollobrigida?

[Leslie] Yeah, but it would be like the hot kind of fear. Like when guys are like, "She's so hot, I want her to step on me." Like that kind of fear.

Yeah, Gina's Esmeralda is starkly different from Hugo's Esmeralda. Even though they go through the same motions and they hit the same plot points, Victor Hugo's Esmeralda is a 16-year-old girl. She's very naive.

She's very moony-eyed. I wouldn't characterize her as a damsel in distress at all. I mean, there are scenes in Hugo's novel where Esmeralda physically attacks people who are trying to hurt her just to defend herself.

But Gina's Esmeralda is a woman. She is strong. She is outspoken.

In Victor Hugo's novel, when Gringoire puts his hands on Esmeralda, she jumps back and whips out her knife. Here, Gina's Esmeralda doesn't have to do that, because she is so strong and outspoken and powerful. She can wilt you with just a look.

She looks at Gringoire and she says, "If you touch me, I'll kill you." And he doesn't need to see her knife to know, "Oh, crap, this woman is serious." That's the kind of power that she wields.

She is not a blushing 16-year-old by any means. She is a woman. And that's a lot closer to the way contemporary audiences conceive this character.

You know, Disney's Esmeralda is a lot like that. She is a woman. She is outspoken.

She is strong. Hugo's Esmeralda, and I think Universal's Esmeralda, and RKO's Esmeralda, lean into more of that girlish characterization. But I feel every incarnation of this character over time has gotten more strong and more hashtag girl boss.

And Gina's Esmeralda, I feel, was a turning point for Esmeralda's characterization. We didn't see an Esmeralda like this before. And I think this is the idea of Esmeralda that we see going forward.

I could be completely wrong. I haven't seen every adaptation of this novel. You know, I just watched this movie for the first time a couple weeks ago.

[Patrick] I think so much of that characterization comes out of Gina herself. Her persona in these old movies was, yeah, as a sex symbol, she was a beautiful woman. And this movie certainly shows that off in vivid detail, in full color, by the way.

But she wasn't known for just being a pretty face. She was known for being tough and strong and smart and having that kind of charisma about her. She was a force to be reckoned with.

Not just because apparently later in life she learned all these cool skills, but even at the height of her fame in the 1950s, she was a commanding force. She is on the cover of every magazine that comes out in France and everywhere else during this time. She is able to negotiate.

She has a lot of creative control over how her character is portrayed. But I find her portrayal of Esmeralda to be very different in the French version compared to the American version. In the French version, I get more of that Hugolian youth about her.

You know, there's a couple scenes of her joking and playing around that aren't in the American version. The American version portrays Esmeralda as more mature and tough and womanly. Whereas the French version does have a bit more of that playful, youthful girlishness about her.

I don't think one is inherently better than the other. But if I had to pick, I would go with the French Esmeralda just because some of those scenes of her joking around and teasing Gringoire in the Court of Miracles are really funny. There's an extra scene that's not in the American version where she tries to train Gringoire to be a robber.

And she has to do an imitation of, "Oh, you have to be like one-legged and one-eyed and rob people and kill them like this." And Gringoire is just totally mortified at the thought.

[Leslie] I could be completely wrong, but based on my own observations of my generation, I feel contemporary conception of women in the 1950s is that they were all quiet, repressed housewives. This was the baby boom. After all, women were popping out kids left and right.

I mean, my grandmother had four. But then you look at women like Gina and you look at these beautiful actresses in 1950s epic films, these femme fatales who wielded power and loved it. And you think, "Wait, this does not align with popular conception of 1950s women."

These women weren't silent, repressed housewives. They were powerful, commanding forces.

[Patrick] Yeah, these big epic movies from the 50s were some of the only outlets for women to have those kind of commanding roles. I mean, going back to Cecil B. DeMille's "Ten Commandments," so many of the characters in that movie are just strong, screen grabbing women.

[Leslie] Yeah, the women in that movie commit murder and they do it without a moment's hesitation.

[Patrick] Whereas I think popular films that took place in the modern day and weren't drawn from history or literature or biblical scriptures were less likely to depict women in a strong, commanding sense. Mrs. Cleaver was not walking around saying, "If you touch me, I'll kill you."

[Leslie] I mean, it's no wonder "The Feminine Mystique" was published just a couple of years later. Women probably looked at actresses like Gina and said, "Wow, she's so commanding. She's so powerful.

I want to be like her." Speaking of Esmeralda's gusto and power within this movie, is this the only adaptation of Hugo's novel where Esmeralda crowns Quasimodo the King of Fools? Because in the novel, by the time we meet Esmeralda, Quasimodo is already being paraded around the city as the King of Fools.

[Patrick] Well, she kind of does in the Disney movie.

[Leslie] Yeah, she tugs Quasimodo up onto the stage, not entirely against his will. You can see a smile on his face during that scene. And she enters him into the running to be considered for the King of Fools under the mistaken assumption that his face is a mask.

But here, Esmeralda is literally the one picking Quasimodo out and saying, "Wait, he should be the king." Like everyone else in this movie, Esmeralda is not afraid of Quasimodo. She sees him and rather than being disgusted or shocked or taken aback, her eyes light up and she goes, "No, no, no, wait.

I know we're about to crown this other guy, but this dude needs to be the king." And they already had a King of Fools picked out, or a Pope of Fools, in the French version. And they take the crown off of his head, a la Steve Harvey in the Miss Universe pageant, and they put it on Quasimodo.

That speaks volumes about how much people love and respect Esmeralda in this movie. I don't exactly know what her role is. I don't know if she's the queen of the Court of Miracles or the mascot or just some normal street performer.

I think it's the latter. But I'm really taken by how much power she wields over the Parisians in this movie. What do you think about Esmeralda's extended flamenco dance scene at the beginning of this movie during the Feast of Fools?

I think it's absolutely fantastic. I love that scene so much. I think not only was Gina a phenomenal singer, as we hear in this movie, and actor and sculptor and intellectual, she's also a fantastic dancer.

[Patrick] She was trained by one of the best dance instructors in the business who offered to take her to New York to start a new career. But she didn't want to leave acting because Gina knows what she wants. I think this is a great scene.

It is a bit indulgent. You know, she is dancing for a very long time. But I see that as, well, it could be just pandering to the male audience.

[Leslie] And pandering to me, a straight woman.

[Patrick] But I also see it as taking advantage of the technology. Earlier, you mentioned, why did they make this movie? If there is an honest answer, it's for scenes like this.

I think this is one of the only sequences where Delannoy, the director, is awake behind the camera. We get a lot of interesting angles. The crowd is positioned in a very strategic way where it seems like Esmeralda is dancing in a city.

In other scenes, the crowd is placed very poorly. And it seems like there's only like five people in all of Paris. In these early scenes, the frame is full.

Esmeralda and Gina are completely ravishing. And they catch your attention. She's wearing this dramatic bold red dress.

A great use of color against a big blue sky. It is an extravaganza sequence. Indulgent, though it may be.

It is cinematic. It is interesting. And it's something that we hadn't seen before in earlier adaptations.

Yes, in the 1939 movie, there's a couple dance sequences. Yes, in the 1923 movie, there's a dance sequence. But they're not as expansive or dramatic or flamboyant as what we have here.

This is one of the few examples in this movie where I feel, okay, this is why they made this movie. And interestingly, there are a few differences between the American version of this scene and the international version. In the American version, Esmeralda sings in English.

In the French version, she sings in Italian. Now, in the novel, Esmeralda sings in Spanish. But I guess Gina just didn't feel like doing Spanish or something?

[Leslie] And I love her friendship with Quasimodo. It's very sweet. Not all adaptations of Victor Hugo's novel show Quasimodo and Esmeralda really getting to know each other and fostering a friendship.

In Hugo's novel, Esmeralda and Quasimodo never really get to know each other, because Esmeralda just cannot get past Quasimodo's appearance. Here, you know, Quasimodo isn't really disfigured. There's nothing to be afraid of.

Esmeralda and Quasimodo are able to develop a very sweet friendship. He rings the bells for her. She dances for him.

He brings her flowers. And he encourages her, when she's taking sanctuary in the cathedral, that the world outside is worse than the world in the cathedral, saying, "Down there, people are bad. Stay with me and the birds and the flowers up here."

[Patrick] I love that moment. And I especially love when Esmeralda asks sincerely, "Do you think we're going to stay here together all my life?" And all Quasimodo can say is, "Down there, they're bad."

[Leslie] Oh, sweetie. And of course Esmeralda can't stay with Quasimodo. She's already in love with another guy, Phoebus.

What do you think of this incarnation of Phoebus? I think he's a little less of a jerk than his novel counterpart. His novel counterpart kind of just wants to wham, bam, thank you, ma'am, and then forget all about Esmeralda.

[Patrick] I think the actor gives a fine performance, but I don't agree with the creative choices to soften this character, just like the movie softens Quasimodo's appearance, just like it softens Claude Frollo's cruel demeanor and religiosity. He really softens Phoebus, who is not even much of an antagonist. Here, he's more like a guy who made a bad mistake by getting involved with Esmeralda.

He realizes the error of his ways and tries to mature beyond his infidelity and be more faithful to his fiancée. In the novel, after he recovers from his stab wound, Phoebus goes back to his fiancée, Fleur-de-Lys, and swears that he'll be faithful to her and helps to get Esmeralda killed. But here, I don't think that Phoebus is returning to his fiancée out of cynical reasons like he does in the book.

In the novel, Phoebus is purely materialistic and selfish. He wants Fleur-de-Lys because she has money. He hates her mom.

He doesn't like her, have anything in common with her. But he wants that material wealth, which is why Phoebus sucks up to Fleur-de-Lys after his affair is exposed and he does not go back to Esmeralda. Here, Phoebus goes back to Fleur-de-Lys, almost all offscreen, by the way, out of what I can only describe as true love.

Her mother, Aloïse, mentions, like, "Oh, Phoebus, you're going to inherit, like, a cool estate." Great. But I feel that his feelings for Fleur-de-Lys are genuine in this version.

[Leslie] Yeah, I agree. During the scene where he's talking to her mother, he looks genuinely devastated about the fact that he has been unfaithful to her and she has fled the city to avoid him.

[Patrick] And that scene is a bit expanded in the French version, where Aloïse, Fleur's mother, is really emphasizing, "Oh, I can't believe they let Esmeralda, a pagan girl, be in Notre Dame. They should come and hang her." And Phoebus is a bit more sympathetic to her.

Like, "Oh, yes, you know, if we need to capture her, we will. But she's a wild creature. You know, it'll be fine."

[Leslie] That's interesting because Phoebus in the novel doesn't know that Esmeralda is alive by the end of the novel. He doesn't watch her execution during which Quasimodo rescues her. So he thinks that she's dead.

So it's interesting to see how Phoebus would react if he knew that Esmeralda was alive and living in Notre Dame.

[Patrick] I think that's a poor change because in the novel, Quasimodo is the one who informs Phoebus that Esmeralda is alive when he tries to get Phoebus to visit Esmeralda in the bell tower. And of course, it's kind of a funny scene because Phoebus thinks that Quasimodo is some kind of demon from the underworld, come to carry him off to hell.

[Leslie] And forgets that Quasimodo is a real person he has met before.

[Patrick] It's worth it for the gag. And here they do the same scene, but it falls flat because Phoebus is less cruel when he kicks Quasimodo aside. In the novel, Quasimodo is kicked away by Phoebus, who is pursuing his materialistic interest in Fleur-de-Lys and abandoning Esmeralda, who actually has romantic feelings for him.

Here, when Phoebus kicks Quasimodo away, he's off to visit his fiancée, who he genuinely loves and was unfaithful to and regrets deeply. He's less selfish and less cruel. And if this is supposedly the edgier, more provocative adaptation that the filmmakers are claiming it is, boy, does it not come across that way with the characterization of Phoebus, who's not that bad of a guy.

[Leslie] Personally, I think Fleur-de-Lys is edgier than her novel counterpart. In the novel, I found Fleur-de-Lys to be very scheming and conniving, but very two-faced. She buries her intentions under a sweet smile.

There's a scene in the novel where Phoebus is trying to go back inside Fleur-de-Lys' mother's apartment because he doesn't want to watch Esmeralda's execution. And Fleur-de-Lys says, "Oh no, let's stay here and watch until it's over." I interpreted that to mean Fleur-de-Lys knows that Phoebus was unfaithful to her with Esmeralda, and she is forcing him to watch Esmeralda's death as payback.

This is what happens when you cheat on me. Never do it again. But this version of Fleur-de-Lys is a lot less two-faced and more overt.

She explicitly tells Phoebus, "Oh, isn't that that dancer you rescued the other evening? I don't like her. Chase her out of the square."

Hugo's Fleur-de-Lys would never say something like that. She would wrap it up in pretty words.

[Patrick] But isn't that more interesting, though?

[Leslie] I think so, and that's my theory as to why her name is Fleur. I think it's a callback to "Macbeth." "Look like the innocent flower, be the serpent underneath it."

Which we know Victor Hugo read.

[Patrick] Fleur falls kind of flat for me in this version. She only has one real scene, but she is more one-note than the two-faced conniving version from the novel, who, yeah, is also a minor character. But I think her having the sweet facade and internally being very scheming is much more interesting than the more direct version of the character we have in this film.

Although there is one very wonderful addition that they add. After Phoebus chases Esmeralda out of the square and really just asks her on a date, Phoebus shows off to Fleur-de-Lys like, "Hey, look, I did it!" And Fleur is so excited like, "Oh, that means that he loves me!"

And then Fleur's mother is like, "Oh, just the way your father loved me." Which suggests that, oh, her mom was cheated on as well. This movie has a lot of great moments.

I just don't think they weave together all that well.

[Leslie] I think I would have appreciated Phoebus's role in this movie more if he had been the one to shoot Esmeralda at the end of the film. In this movie, Esmeralda dies by being shot by the King's archers. Okay, Phoebus is the captain of the King's archers.

Why not include him in that scene? Why not have him shoot Esmeralda? That would be a really fantastic and gut-wrenching layer of irony.

But Phoebus leaves the city before the siege even begins.

[Patrick] I didn't even think about that. He's the archer and he's not the guy who shoots the arrow.

[Leslie] I know.

[Patrick] I mean, the book literally has a chapter called "Châteaupers to the Rescue" where Phoebus shows up during the siege on Notre Dame to put an end to the riot. That is a missed opportunity. Phoebus disappears from this movie.

Gringoire disappears from this movie. And the other characters mostly fall flat as well.

[Leslie] Speaking of the end of this movie, Esmeralda is shot to death after successfully escaping from the cathedral herself. I like that. I think it's a better reflection of how strong and powerful this conception of the character is.

She dies, and then someone comes over and says, "She was sentenced to hang. Take her to the gallows anyway." What?

She's already dead. Why do we also have to hang her?

[Patrick] We don't even see her get hanged.

[Leslie] Quasimodo finds her body in the vault of Montfaucon. But we don't see her hang. We don't see her feet dangling.

We don't see anything like that. Why do you have to kill her twice? So you can be more faithful to the book?

No. You already blew your chance at being faithful to the book when you didn't make Quasimodo particularly disfigured.

[Patrick] I think it was just anxiety over, "Oh, we want to make sure this ends like the book. Oh, we had Esmeralda get shot instead of hung. Have her get hanged anyway."

And we see her dead body get dragged through the streets, which is pretty graphic for the 50s. It'll tug your heartstrings a little bit. But it's not the devastating moment that it is in the novel.

And while Anthony Quinn does a good performance when he cries out in agony seeing that Esmeralda is dead, it just isn't as effective as it could be. And that's really where I am with this movie. It's not what it should have been.

[Leslie] I'm on the same page. I think this should have been the best film adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel. I think the filmmakers went in with the correct intentions, saying, "We're going to do this justice.

We're going to focus on Hugo's poetry. We're going to make the most faithful adaptation of the novel we can." I don't understand where they lost that.

Also, speaking of the end of the movie, when Quasimodo throws Frollo off of Notre Dame, which is in the book, it's one of the book's most iconic scenes, Frollo doesn't struggle. He kind of just splays his arms out and accepts his fate, even though he has plenty of time to process what's happening and try to fight back. I don't understand why he kind of just lets it happen.

I kind of like that.

[Patrick] Maybe that is him accepting fate. Unlike in the novel where he's a firm believer in fate and talks about it a lot, and when he gets pushed off of Notre Dame, he tries his best to climb back up and just isn't strong enough, and then he like blows away and dies.

[Leslie] Ninety pounds soaking wet under that little black dress. I say this almost every episode. I'm going to keep saying it.

[Patrick] Frollo's not even wearing a black dress in this adaptation. He's got this weird, like, blue outfit. Like, what the hell is that?

Blue? Frollo should look like the Grim Reaper.

[Leslie] The Grim Reaper is in this movie. There's a scene during the Feast of Fools where Frollo's walking through the streets, and he gets accosted by someone dressed as love and someone dressed as death. I don't think that's a coincidence.

So props to Delannoy for being very intentional with his use of metaphors.

[Patrick] I would credit that more to the screenwriters than to Delannoy. I don't even know if he was awake while directing this movie. But apparently he was very passionate about the source material.

In that Making Of documentary, you can see Delannoy talking about how he was inspired by a very famous 1840 edition of Hugo's novel that was full of all these iconic illustrations. You know, that one illustration of Quasimodo upside down on the bell? That's where that comes from.

And the documentary contrasts some of the illustrations with scenes from the movie. Obviously trying to make the point that, "Oh, this movie was visually inspired by those illustrations." And man, every time you cut from an illustration to its parallel in the movie, the movie just looks lamer.

And not for nothing, the 1923 movie took a lot of visual inspiration from the illustrations of Gustave Brion. And it's both a lot closer to those illustrations and has a style of its own. So maybe Delannoy was passionate.

Maybe he loved the book. Maybe he wanted to make it look like that famous 1840 edition. But his direction really doesn't show it.

It's a very flatly directed film.

[Leslie] There is a detail, though, and I'm attributing this to the screenwriters, who I think really did the heavy lifting here, that I absolutely love and that we mentioned when we were covering the novel on this podcast. In the novel, Claude Frollo conspires with law enforcement to have Esmeralda hanged for witchcraft. And then he turns around and he conducts alchemical experiments in Notre Dame Cathedral.

Hypocrisy doesn't even begin to cover it. Here, Frollo's hypocrisy is explicitly called out by the king. He talks about knowing Frollo was conducting alchemical experiments, and he makes a reference to burning Frollo at the stake for witchcraft.

So I like that in this movie, Claude Frollo's hypocrisy does have a potential consequence. King Louis saying, "If this guy can't help me, we'll burn him." I really appreciate that detail.

[Patrick] Ah, but what about the massive change from the novel, where in the novel, the scene where the king visits Claude Frollo has him accompanied by his doctor, Jacques Coictier, whereas in the movie, it's another guy named Jacques, Jacques Charmolue.

[Leslie] I don't even care about that, because my favorite minor character from the novel, also a Jacques, is in this movie, which made me extremely excited when I turned the movie on. Jacques Coppenole, hosier of Ghent, a.k.a. my baby daddy, a.k.a. my toxic lifelong situationship. Although I am a little annoyed at him because he's behind on his child support payments, and he knows I'm not raising this kid by myself, so a little peeved that he's off making this movie instead of, you know, coming home to me, but whatever, I guess he's okay in this.

[Patrick] He's very orange.

[Leslie] He's very orange. He looks like the Annoying Orange. But he fills the same role that he does in the novel.

He is at the Palace of Justice to see Gringoire's play, which in this movie has a different name. In the novel, it's "The Good Judgment of Madame the Virgin." Here, it's "The Quest for Beauty."

I guess the writers wanted to allude to this film's themes of beauty and ugliness, even though Quasimodo is not ugly in this movie.

[Patrick] Or avoid a religious reference. In the French version, Gringoire's play has the same title as the book.

[Leslie] There you go. Jacques Coppenole, hosier of Ghent is there. He is part of the Cardinal's entourage, the Cardinal being the guest of honor, even though the play is dedicated to somebody else who is not even there, the Princess of Flanders.

Jacques Coppenole says hi to Clopin when Clopin interrupts the play, saying, "Hey, I met you at Antwerp, but in Antwerp, you didn't have any arms." And then Jacques Coppenole, hosier of Ghent, stands up and says, "Hey, what the heck are we all doing here? We've got to go elect the Pope of Fools," and everybody leaves.

So I do appreciate that detail from the book and that character that was included. Like you said, Patrick, we've got plot points. We don't necessarily have a story.

And that's a great transition into our overall thoughts segment. Patrick, what are your overall thoughts on Jean Delannoy's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," a.k.a. "Notre-Dame de Paris"?

[Patrick] Whether you watch "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" or whether you watch "Notre-Dame de Paris," you're more or less getting the same experience. This movie is a bit of a letdown, if I'm being honest with you. I like it, but I really only like the parts.

The sum of its parts are greater than the whole. I love a lot of individual scenes, like Quasimodo and Esmeralda in the bell tower. I like the portrayal of the vagabonds.

You know, this is the only portrayal of the character Guillaume Rousseau, the Emperor of Galilee, everyone's favorite character, that I can recall. I appreciate that it's faithful to the novel, but I'm left wanting more. I like this movie.

I'll put it on sometimes if I'm, like, cleaning the living room. I just want this movie to be more than what it is. It tries to be close to the novel.

It's in color. It's in widescreen. There are less restrictions on content than there were in earlier film adaptations.

But the direction is so unimpressive that a lot of the movie falls flat for me. You know, movies like this were made in the 50s to combat the rise of television? Well, I think this movie was popular on TV in the 60s and 70s for a reason.

It's kind of paced like a TV special. There are built-in commercial breaks, you don't have to pay attention the entire time, and it's pretty leisurely. Even though it's two hours, it is a bit of a slog at times.

And while I have affection for this movie, I can appreciate certain things it does, the direction is what really lets me down. I want this movie to be great, but it just isn't. It's not a bad movie by any means.

You know, it's okay, and I think at times it's even pretty good. But I want it to be a classic, and it just isn't. Now, what are your thoughts, Leslie?

[Leslie] I'm in more or less the same boat. I think the filmmakers had the right intentions. Their heart was in the right place.

"We are going to make a uniquely European adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel." Who better to adapt the great Frenchman's story than a Frenchman? Someone who grew up reading Hugo's poetry, someone who probably studied the author and understands him fundamentally.

Their intention of, "Let's make the most faithful film adaptation of Hugo's novel, let's outdo the Americans," that gets me fired up. All right, yes, that is the adaptation I want to see. Include minor characters like Jacques Coppenole, hosier of Ghent, my baby daddy who's behind on his payments.

Include plot points like Quasimodo killing Jehan by throwing him off of the Gallery of the Kings. I want to see that on screen. But I'm missing, like you said, Patrick, the soul.

I'm missing the intention, why are we making this movie? Why is it so important to make the most faithful film adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel? And why are we making it now?

Why this year? Why 1956? Why not 1957?

Why not 1958? I am missing that driving force and that intention and the answer to the question, why? I agree with del Toro.

This is one of the most misguided adaptations of Victor Hugo's novel. But it shouldn't be. It doesn't have to be.

And even though I like it, and I'm looking forward to watching it again, I can't help but fixate on this film's shortcomings. It should have been great, and instead it's just a decent movie. It's not bad, but it's not outstanding.

Like Universal's movie. Like RKO's movie. Like Disney's movie.

You know, if you Google "Hunchback of Notre Dame" movie, this film is among the four that are going to come up on the first page of Google's search results. It should be on the same level as the other three theatrically released movies made in the past hundred or so years. Unfortunately, it's not, in my humble opinion.

[Patrick] That being said, I wish the movie was a bit more accessible. I wish there was a restored print of this movie available in English. I wish the French version was available for sale in the United States.

I have a Blu-ray of this movie. I can't watch it because it's not in an American region. I can't watch it on my American Blu-ray player.

[Leslie] If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing. Grab your flag with your skull and crossbones. We're hitting the sea, ladies and gentlemen.

Listener, just because Patrick and I are criticizing a particular Hunchback adaptation does not mean we're discouraging you from watching it yourself. I would encourage you to go see this movie. Please, come up with your own opinion.

If you think we're wrong about something or you think that we're misrepresenting a detail or we just got something incorrect and you want to share your own opinion with us, that's the reason we started this podcast. To start these conversations about these films. Go watch the movie yourself if you can.

You might not be able to, but, hey, there's always piracy. Now, Pat, before we close out here, it's time for our game we like to play at the end of every episode. So, out of everyone and everything we discussed today, who or what would you, A, meet at the inn, B, turn to dust with, and C, throw off of Notre Dame?

And, listener, play along with us. We love when you guys leave a comment or send us a DM on social media chiming in with your picks for In Dust Throw. Go ahead and do that.

We love reading them.

[Patrick] All right, so I'm going to take Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, to the inn. I barely mentioned him, but, man, he is the star of this movie, basically. His role has expanded considerably from the novel.

In the novel, he's such a minor character that he doesn't even appear in most adaptations. I can only find, like, one or two illustrations of the guy. But here, my God, he gets an expanded role.

He's one of the main judges in the Court of Miracles and really interrogates Gringoire, where in the novel he just kind of sits there. And he is temporarily crowned the King of Fools. He is considered ugly enough to be King of Anywhere by Mathias Hungadi, the Duke of Egypt.

But his crown is stolen and given to the unworthy Quasimodo. So I feel deeply for Guillaume Rousseau, Emperor of Galilee, who was betrayed. And I think he survives this movie?

I don't really know where he is by the end.

[Leslie] I don't know where half these people are by the end of this movie. Maybe they all got wiped out by the plague offscreen.

[Patrick] Probably hanging out with Gringoire and Phoebus.

[Leslie] Emphasis on hanging. Everyone probably dies at the end.

[Patrick] I will be turning to dust with this version of King Louis XI. And I can't choose. So I'll choose the version from both the American version and the French version.

The French version gives this character a few more scenes. And he's a bit more sassy when he's not being dubbed over. Whereas the American one is played a bit more straight.

But the dubbed lines for the American version of the character often have this unintentional, campy, sassy quality that I really like. I particularly like the line, "The pursuit of money is always troublesome." Which I understand.

So I'll be turning to dust with King Louis XI. I think we would have a lot in common, a lot to talk about over a lifetime of turning to dust. Now I am going to throw Alain Cuny off of Notre Dame.

[Leslie] Whoa! Plot twist!

[Patrick] Because I want to see if he will show a single emotion when he lands. His version of Frollo is so flat and uninteresting. I get that Frollo is stoic and severe.

But I get no sense of interiority from him. From the French version and especially from the American version. He is a nothing character.

So when I throw him off of Notre Dame, maybe there's going to be a sound. Maybe he'll say, "Ow." Maybe he'll frown.

Maybe I can get a sense of emotion out of the guy. That isn't just either that flat affect or his silly growling that he does in the French version. Like, is it going to make a hollow sound?

Am I going to sense that, "Oh wait, this guy actually has a personality"? I don't know. There's only one way to find out.

And that way is by chucking him off of the church. Now Leslie, where do you lie?

[Leslie] Alright, I might be reaching here. I'm going to meet Guillermo del Toro at the inn. Because even though he had nothing to do with this movie's production, I really resonate with his comments about this movie.

It is misguided. It should be great. I love that he is able to criticize this film while also explaining how much he loves it and how important it was to his childhood and his development as a director.

So yeah, I want to go out for drinks with Guillermo del Toro, we're going to talk about this movie, and we're going to talk about all of the other movies he grew up watching on TV. He seems like he would be a fun conversationalist, so I'm meeting del Toro at the inn. As for who I'm turning to dust with, I'm shocked you didn't pick this one, Patrick.

Gina Lollobrigida. She wasn't just a pretty face, although her face was definitely pretty, she was an intellectual, she was an artist, she was an outspoken person who was not afraid to stand up for her friends and her colleagues. I love that she had multiple careers, I love that she was a polymath, I love that she went into politics and learned all these languages and had an internationally renowned run as a sculptor.

And if I don't see that statue she made of herself as Esmeralda before I die, bring me back to life and kill me again, because I'll deserve it. I gotta get over there at some point. So I am turning to dust with Queen Gina.

As for who I'm throwing off of Notre Dame, we did not talk about this during this episode, but I'm gonna bring it up now at the 11th hour. The goat that plays Djali is the worst actor I have ever seen. That goat does not react to anything.

Most of the time the goat is looking away from the action in the shot and just chewing on something and doing its own thing. And you might be saying, "Leslie, it's an animal, of course it's not an actor." Au contraire, in the previous episode of this podcast, we talked about the "Wishbone" episode, "The Hunched Dog of Notre Dame," in which Quasimodo is played by a Jack Russell terrier.

That dog is, without a doubt, unironically, not making a joke, one of the best actors I've ever seen. In anything. Going right from the best animal actor who ever lived to this random goat they probably pulled off the street, who doesn't react to anything or contribute anything to the story, is pure whiplash.

I hate that goat. I hope they didn't insure that goat for any significant amount of money. I'm throwing the goat off of Notre Dame.

You animal rights activists can weep. Well, Patrick, we are still in the dog days of summer, and one of my favorite things to do over the summer is cool down by going to the library. I think we should head on over and pick out a book for our next episode.

What do you say?

[Patrick] Uh, yeah. Okay, what book were you thinking?

[Leslie] Well, you'll have to tune in next episode to find out. Thank you for listening to this episode of "The Hunchcast." Ring that notification bell to be automatically updated when new episodes are released.

If you liked this episode, please take a moment to give this podcast a 5-star rating or review. It really helps our show get in front of new people. For free bonus content, and to share your thoughts with us, follow us on Instagram, Tumblr, and TikTok at The Hunchcast.

[Leslie] Welcome to The Hunchcast, where we discuss all things "The Hunchback of Notre Dame". I'm Leslie.

[Patrick] And I'm Patrick. And today we're discussing "The Hunched Dog of Notre Dame". That's right folks, for tonight's performance the part of Quasimodo will be played by a Jack Russell Terrier.

[Leslie] And I wouldn't want it any other way. This is the 14th episode of the first season of the show "Wishbone." This episode premiered on PBS on October 26th, 1995, and stars Jordan Wall, Adam Springfield, Christie Abbott, and Soccer the Dog as Quasimodo.

[Patrick] PBS. For those of us outside of the United States, that is the Public Broadcasting Service, which was funded by the American government, but not explicitly run by the government. So whenever you see this little Jack Russell Terrier flipping about, just be comforted by the fact that those are your tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen.

[Leslie] And those of you who grew up in the 90s might remember the show "Wishbone," a show in which a Jack Russell Terrier named Wishbone imagines himself as the hero of a different classic novel every episode. Now, this might make our millennial listeners cringe, but admittedly, Wishbone was a little before our time. Pat, I don't know what your experience with Mr. Wishbone has been, but up until a few weeks ago when I started doing my research to prepare for recording this episode, I had never seen a single episode of Wishbone. How about you?

[Patrick] Okay, this show was before our time, but I did grow up with it, kind of. I was a big fan of the PBS show "Arthur" as a kid, and "Wishbone" was advertised on a lot of "Arthur" videotapes that I took from my local library, so I knew the show existed. But I didn't see a full episode until I was in third grade, when my third grade teacher showed me the episode "A Tail in Twain".

Get it? Twain? It was based on "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and it was a two-parter.

A double pun. Amazing. And ever since my third grade teacher showed me that episode, "Wishbone" was always in the back of my mind.

And when I was getting into "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" when I was about 11 going on 12, one of the first things I discovered was that there was an episode based on Victor Hugo's novel. And not only was there an episode based on "Notre-Dame de Paris", there was also a novelization, which I found at a local thrift store shortly after I saw the episode for the first time. And listener, the novelization does have added content.

[Leslie] See, I myself have not read the "Wishbone" novel that is adapted from this episode, so I'm interested to hear those differences for myself. But before we get into that, it's time for today's Minute of History. Patrick, a kid's show about a talking dog who imagines himself as the hero of different classic novels.

I think that is such a cute way to introduce classic literature to children.

[Patrick] Well, why would you want to introduce classic literature to children?

[Leslie] Cultural literacy.

[Patrick] Now, throughout the late 80s and early 90s, there was a real push to promote classic literature to kids. Now, there had always been people promoting this idea of a literary canon, a canon referring to classic literary works which are required reading for understanding a culture, the best that has been thought and said, in other words. But in the late 80s, there was a big push against classic literature in the universities, especially in the Ivy Leagues like Cornell, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Columbia.

Classic works of literature by authors like Shakespeare, Milton, and Geoffrey Chaucer were considered outdated, merely the products of dead white males. Students would chant, "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go." Forcing students to study history and read the great literary works of the past was considered to be a tool of oppression.

After all, who decides which works are worth preserving? It's rarely the ordinary public, but rather the elites of society. And that had always been the case since ancient times.

So as colleges and even high schools began to de-emphasize classic literature and history in their curriculums, there was a counter movement that argued, no, in fact, people should read Jane Austen and Shakespeare and authors of the past. They're not irrelevant to today's students. This was also a time of changing attitudes in American popular culture.

A lot of American popular culture was pretty destructive and negative. You know, this was the era of slasher films full of blood and guts. It was the era of video games.

It was the era of heavy metal rock music and punk. Being seen as an intellectual and caring about big words and sophisticated ideas was not only seen as being a tool of oppression, it was also seen as being lame in the eyes of popular culture. The first music video to play on MTV was "Video Killed the Radio Star", and I suppose you could say that television killed the star of reading in the hearts of many American youth.

So people are seeing the state of classic literature in both popular culture and in academia, and they're upset about the de-emphasis on the humanities. And while on the one hand you have this big move to take the literary canon outside of American culture, you have a sort of counter movement that's designed to do the opposite. We're saying, hey, maybe we should contextualize and understand and approach classic texts rather than just throwing them away as something evil.

And that's where you get the rise of a lot of these retellings of classic literature throughout the early to mid-90s. A bunch of big publishers would come together and simplify a list of classic novels and retell them in chapter book format, oftentimes sanitizing the material for kids. But not always.

You know, the first version of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" that I read as a kid was one of these retellings from the early 90s, and it kept all of the tragedy and violence intact. It just framed those elements in a way that's more approachable for a young kid. And the idea of exposing kids to these abridged versions of classic novels wasn't an attempt to dumb down great literature.

Kind of the opposite. It was done as a way to familiarize kids with the great stories of the past that they would hopefully read when they got older. And that idea falls perfectly in line with this idea that was going on in the world of education at the time.

Cultural literacy. Now, cultural literacy was an idea promoted by this guy called Dr. E.D. Hirsch. And from his perspective, he didn't necessarily care about an established canon as those being the greatest works that have ever been produced.

And his concern was more about the ideas contained within those texts. He famously said, "I don't care if you've read the original 'Romeo and Juliet,' I care if you understand what people are talking about when they mention 'Romeo and Juliet.'" From his perspective, being aware of certain stories and characters and ideas that are referenced in culture, both high and low, was a way of improving communication.

[Leslie] I think I understand what you're talking about, Patrick, because I myself have never read Romeo and Juliet or seen it in its entirety. But I know what it's about because when I was a kid, I read a retelling of Romeo and Juliet called Romeo and Druliet, which reimagined that classic play as being about a feud between cats and dogs. And it was a picture book, obviously geared toward a young audience.

So I think that counts as a wishbone adjacent telling. But yes, I do know what you're talking about.

[Patrick] Cultural literacy is less about worshipping tradition for tradition's sake and instead understanding that traditional information is understood by a lot of people. And understanding that information allows you to communicate with others more effectively. For example, to someone like Dr. E.D. Hirsch, it really doesn't matter if you've read Victor Hugo's "Notre-Dame de Paris". Now, of course, if you ask me, you're poorer off if you've never read that novel.

[Leslie] And if you haven't, you can listen to the first five episodes of this podcast in which we conducted a comprehensive exploration of Hugo's original novel.

[Patrick] And I happen to have a copy of E.D. Hirsch's "Dictionary of Cultural Literacy". And according to that book, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" is a historical novel by Victor Hugo. Set in the Middle Ages, it tells the story of Quasimodo, a grotesquely deformed bell ringer at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, who falls in love with a beautiful gypsy girl.

Now, Leslie, would you consider that an adequate definition of Victor Hugo's novel?

[Leslie] At the very least, I think someone studying to go on "Jeopardy" would find that a very adequate explanation of what the book is about. But I understand where Dr. Hirsch is coming from. You know, you don't need to understand, for example, that Esmeralda is associated with bird imagery in Victor Hugo's novel in order to be able to keep up with people when they bring up the novel in conversation.

That's what cultural literacy is all about. You don't have to actually have read the novel and studied it to the extent that we have in order to understand what we're talking about and keep up with us in conversation when, let's say, we're at a dinner party and it comes up.

[Patrick] I'm sure that E.D. Hirsch and the whole cultural literacy crowd would have been very happy to see all of those chapter books based on Hugo's novel that popped up in the early 90s, and especially the rise of a TV program like Wishbone. Kids are watching too much TV rather than reading in the 90s. Well, meet them where they're at.

Put the books on TV. "Wishbone" was designed to introduce these classic stories to a new generation of kids so that hopefully they grow up and borrow the book from their local library and get exposed to the original. But how much does this retelling of Hugo's novel compare to the source material?

Will you become culturally literate of "Notre-Dame de Paris" after watching it? Lay it on me, Leslie.

[Leslie] Oh, well, I'm not sure because it starts off in the United States in the mid-1990s. And Victor Hugo's novel is set in 1482, and at that time Europeans didn't even know that the Americas were there.

[Patrick] There's even a joke about this in the novel. When Gringoire is watching Esmeralda dance, he reaches in his pocket for money. Of course, being broke, he has no money.

And the narrator says something like, "If Gringoire had all of Peru in his pocket, he would have given it to the dancer. But alas, Gringoire did not have Peru in his pocket, and America had not yet been discovered."

[Leslie] Our story begins in the United States in the mid-1990s. Wishbone the dog watches as his owner Joe and Joe's friends David and Sam play floor hockey with their classmates. When the time comes to divide the group into teams, no one wants to play with clumsy Nathaniel.

Kind-hearted Sam includes Nathaniel on her team and commits to teaching him how to be a better hockey player. The situation reminds Wishbone of the novel "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" by Victor Hugo, and he reimagines the story with himself as the titular character. The year is 1482, and the citizens of medieval Paris are celebrating the Feast of Fools, at which Casimodo, yes that's how they pronounce it in the episode, the bell ringer of Notre Dame, who just so happens to be a dog, but don't think too hard about the logistics of that, has been crowned the Prince of Fools.

As he's being paraded through the city, Casimodo becomes taken with the beautiful Romani dancer Esmeralda, but when she sees him, she runs away in horror. The parade comes to an end when Casimodo's master, Dom Cloud Froyo, yes I'm repeating the pronunciation from the episode, don't get mad at me, listener, removes his crown and takes him away. Froyo expresses his desire for Esmeralda, and tells Casimodo, "You will get her for me, or else."

As Esmeralda walks through the city streets that evening, Wishbone approaches her and distracts her while Froyo sneaks up behind her and grabs her. Esmeralda faints and Froyo runs away just as the city guards appear and arrest Casimodo. Accused of a crime he didn't commit, Casimodo is chained to a pillory and taunted by the Parisians.

Esmeralda approaches, and in spite of the Parisians' warnings, she gives Casimodo some water. Back in the real world, Nathaniel and Wishbone visit Sam's home, where Nathaniel and Sam bond over being children of divorce. A treasured family heirloom tumbles from its spot and goes flying through the air, and Nathaniel catches it perfectly, which gives Sam an idea.

Back in 1480s France, Esmeralda is being led to her execution. Wishbone explains to the viewer that Froyo stabbed Esmeralda's boyfriend and framed her for the crime. Froyo approaches Esmeralda and tells her, "This is your last chance.

I alone can save you." When Esmeralda rejects him, he replies, "Die then." Which is a line taken right from the book.

Up in the bell tower of Notre Dame, Casimodo laments that he wasn't made of stone like the cathedral's statues, which in this episode are little basset hounds, it's very cute. Then he realizes, "I'm not a statue. I can actually do something."

Casimodo jumps down into the square, disowns his master, and frees Esmeralda. Once he has led her to safety, Esmeralda tells him, "At this moment, Casimodo, you truly are beautiful." Again, paraphrased from the book.

Back in the real world, Joe and David question Sam's decision to include Nathaniel on their team, to which she replies, "Appearances can be deceiving." Get it? It turns out Nathaniel is an excellent goalie, and his newly discovered skills help his team win the game.

Sam, David, Joe, Nathaniel, and Wishbone cheer, and the credits roll. Pat, I'm really craving frozen yogurt right now. Because here I am saying fro-yo this and fro-yo that, and all I can think about is vanilla frozen yogurt with chocolate sprinkles.

What is going on with that pronunciation? I mean, I understand pronouncing Quasimodo as Casimodo, we've mentioned in previous episodes that that is technically the correct French pronunciation of that name, but what's going on with pronouncing Fro-lo as Fro-yo?

[Patrick] Well, this show was made in Texas, and all the actors were sourced from Texas community theaters. It was a very local production, and you can definitely hear the occasional Texas accent, even when those accents are filtered by an attempt to do a British accent on top of it.

[Leslie] Brother, my boss is from Texas. If I get fired tomorrow, I'm blaming you. Anyway, I admire that this entire show was a local production.

I mean, just a couple weeks ago, a documentary about the making of the show was released on Apple TV+, I think is what they're calling it now? And that documentary, which is very well made, by the way, goes into detail about the origins of the Wishbone show, how they made a handful of episodes, sent them into PBS, and then PBS said, okay, we're greenlighting this, you guys need to send us like 40 more episodes by this day at this time. So they were constantly under deadlines.

They were making a new "Wishbone" episode every single week, which required casting new actors, making new costumes, especially for the dog to wear, building brand new sets. You want to talk about crunch time, my goodness, these people were under intense deadlines, and a lot of them were very, very young. The showrunner of Wishbone had never been a showrunner before.

She hadn't read most of the classic novels that she had to adapt from week to week. She just called in a bunch of her college friends from New York and said, "Hey, you want to come down to Texas and write a couple episodes of a PBS show?" For example, Jack Wesley, the guy who is credited as having written this episode, has no other credits on IMDb.

This is his only credit. And by the way, on IMDb, both Jack Wesley and Victor Hugo are credited as this episode's writers, which I think is absolutely adorable.

[Patrick] I think the production values are pretty good. Honestly, this feels more like Victor Hugo's Paris, where the streets are full of people and they're all sweaty and on top of each other, than some of the big budget adaptations that we'll cover on this show in the future. I mean, for a TV production especially, I think they did a pretty good job.

[Leslie] I completely agree. I think the set looks really fantastic. I think the costumes look awesome.

Maybe they're marginally better than the level of a community college theater department, but for a PBS show from 1995 that was producing episodes every single week and airing a new episode every single day, this is fantastic.

[Patrick] Listener, we've said a lot of positive things so far, but the recreation scenes are only half of this episode. The other half are boring, boring, boring, boring scenes of kids playing hockey and nothing happening.

[Leslie] It's also only half of Victor Hugo's source material. Phoebus isn't in this episode. We end the classic literature plotline right after the execution scene.

I mean, Victor Hugo's novel has, what, 150 more pages to get through after that? Maybe 200 pages? We end pretty early here.

Probably because the good people at PBS did not feel comfortable showing what happens at the end of Victor Hugo's novel. Spoiler alert, everybody dies.

[Patrick] I don't know. There were some episodes that did have a tragic ending. For example, there's an episode based on "The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc", which is a novel about Joan of Arc by Mark Twain, a guy who wasn't fond of Catholics or the French, but yet he wrote a novel about a Catholic French girl.

Anyhow, in that novel, as in history, Joan of Arc is burned at the stake at the end. And just like that novel, just like history, at the end of the "Wishbone" episode, Joan of Arc dies.

[Leslie] Yeah, it ends with her looking up toward heaven as she's being burned at the stake. My goodness.

[Patrick] See, they could have done something similar to Esmeralda. I just think they ran out of time and didn't want to get into it. You know, this adaptation has no Gringoire.

It only mentions Phoebus by name. You don't have Clopin. You don't have Louis XI.

You don't have Jacques Coppenole, Hosier of Ghent. Your cast is very limited. This is a ultra pared-down version of Victor Hugo's story.

With a dog.

[Leslie] You only see Quasimodo, Frollo, and Esmeralda. Oh, sorry. Quasimodo, Dom Cloud Frollo.

I wonder if that's a new frozen yogurt shop opening down the street. And Esmeralda.

[Patrick] Well, you know, a lot of the missing elements from Victor Hugo's novel do factor into the novelization, which came out like two years later in 97, and it features some amazing crosshatched illustrations. There's not a ton of differences between the episode and this novelization, but the main ones are that there's a lot more Phoebus, in the sense that you kind of see Esmeralda meet up with him, and he's like an outline and an illustration. And the story continues beyond Quasimodo's rescue of Esmeralda.

We see a little bit of them in the bell tower, and we even have a scene similar to the novel where Frollo attacks Esmeralda when she's in the sanctuary, and Quasimodo defends her. Now, in the novel, at the end of the story, Quasimodo pushes Frollo to his doom. And here, Wishbone just kind of watches as Dom Cloud Frollo just sort of falls over.

And he makes some goofy 90s quip like, "Ooh, that's gotta hurt," or "Whoops." Listen, PBS did not rely on commercial advertising to generate revenue. Instead, they relied on your tax dollars and your donations from the kindness of your heart.

So they didn't have a bunch of commercials running, and as a result, their shows were allowed to be longer than shows on regular networks. Instead of being like 20 minutes long, "The Hunched Dog of Notre Dame" is 28 minutes long. And I gotta be honest, maybe they should have pitched Wishbone to a sellout cable network like Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, because maybe that would have forced them, through the necessity of commercial advertising, to cut down some of these dang floor hockey scenes.

I get it. Nathaniel sucks. He's not that good.

He's your Quasimodo analog. Do you have to show nine kajillion hours of these kids playing floor hockey? And if we must, can we balance them with a scene of, like, Quasimodo as a dog ringing the bells?

I don't understand the logistics of how that would work. Maybe he would tug on the rope. But it'll be more interesting than watching this dang hockey game.

Has a single soul played floor hockey in this century?

[Leslie] Yeah, I totally agree. And for those of you at home who aren't familiar with "Wishbone," this is more or less the format of every "Wishbone" episode. We start with some kind of conflict in the quote-unquote real world that Wishbone's owner Joe or Joe's friends Sam or David are undergoing.

And then Wishbone is inspired by that and sees a connection between what's happening with his owner and his friends and what has happened in a classic novel. And we bounce back and forth between the quote-unquote real world and the world of whatever novel Wishbone has been inspired to think about. How this Jack Russell Terrier became so familiar with classic literature, it's not really clear.

You know, Joe's mother is a librarian, so maybe that's how? Maybe she's read these novels to him? I think that's a cute headcanon.

Also, speaking of the real world scenes, this show was ahead of its time by showing people bringing dogs into indoor public spaces for absolutely no reason. I mean, Soccer is just hanging out on the sidelines while these kids play floor hockey. But like I said up until a few weeks ago, I had not seen a single episode of Wishbone, and watching "The Hunched Dog of Notre Dame" inspired me to watch a few more.

And number one, I am a "Wishbone" fan. Maybe I'm 30 years too late. I don't care.

All of the episodes are on YouTube for free. I'm gonna link to this one in the show notes, listener. Number two, out of all the "Wishbone" episodes I've watched in the past few weeks, "The Hunched Dog of Notre Dame" is the weakest.

And that's because A, so much of Hugo's novel is cut out, and B, those floor hockey scenes go on forever. Especially the opening floor hockey scene where we cut from the kids skating around the gymnasium to Wishbone saying a couple quippy one-liners every so often, like, "Oh, that girl is totally popular," or stuff like that. It reads as very Nickelodeon to me.

[Patrick] I'm in the same boat, Leslie. I like this episode fine, but I think it's the weakest "Wishbone" episode I've seen, and I've seen quite a few. You know, if you want a good one, check out the one they did about "Ivanhoe".

In that novel, there's a big medieval tournament. So the modern day story is kids competing for a spelling bee. I think that's a better parallel, for one.

And two, it's more interesting, because you get to see the kids training for the spelling bee. You get to see the competition itself.

[Leslie] See, that's cute. I like that.

[Patrick] You know, there's a lot more going on than just kids spelling. Whereas the hockey scenes in "The Hunched Dog of Notre Dame" are almost always just kids playing hockey.

[Leslie] Why did they have to play hockey inside? Why couldn't they play street hockey? I feel like that's a little more visually interesting.

And honestly, I don't see a one-to-one comparison between Quasimodo and this clumsy kid Nathaniel. You know, I understand that the point they're trying to make is that here's someone who is being publicly humiliated because he's different from other people, just like Quasimodo is, and then that triggers Wishbone's fantasy. But just being bad at a single sport is not at all comparable to being physically disfigured or disabled in any way and being completely ostracized from society.

I mean, I would buy the quote-unquote real-world storyline if instead of just being bad at floor hockey, Nathaniel was disabled either intellectually or physically or, you know, maybe he was on crutches or just something to that effect. But just being bad at floor hockey, to me, feels like a little bit of a stretch in terms of comparable storylines to "The Hunchback of Notre Dame".

[Patrick] "The Hunched Dog of Notre Dame" is a "Wishbone" episode in which an athletically challenged teenager called Nathaniel overcomes his appalling handicap of being bad at floor hockey.

[Leslie] Mr. Graham Robb, eat your heart out. Can we please try to get Graham Robb on the Hunchcast? I want to interview him so bad.

[Patrick] I'd love to interview the voice of Wishbone. He seems like he's having a good time here, even if he is kind of annoying.

[Leslie] Oh, Larry Brantley was one of the producers of the "Wishbone" documentary. He loved working on this show. And he talks about his initial audition in the "Wishbone" documentary.

It was actually pretty interesting. He went in in front of the casting directors to meet the dog who played Wishbone, Soccer the Dog. And right before his audition was supposed to begin, Soccer's trainer said, "Oh, guys, he needs a break," and just started playing with him, you know, giving him a little break to get his energy out.

And Larry just started improvising lines based on what Soccer was doing in that moment. And then after Soccer was done playing, he turned to the casting directors and said, "Okay, is it time for the audition?" And their jaws were on the floor and their eyes were full of stars.

And they said, "Oh, we got the audition." So that's how Larry was cast as Wishbone.

[Patrick] I will admit, Larry Brantley does have a lot of groaner lines here.

[Leslie] Yeah, the first time I watched this episode, my initial reaction was, why does the dog need to talk? You know, the only real purpose of the dog's dialogue is to force in some cheesy Nickelodeon-esque lines like, as I said, "Oh, she's totally popular." And "Oh, maybe I could have wheels too."

Yippee. But watching other episodes of the show has made me realize, oh no, the dog needs to talk. The dog is actually pretty cute and funny when the dog speaks.

It's just this episode, I hate to admit, is so weak compared to other "Wishbone" episodes.

[Patrick] So listener, if you watch this episode, I'd recommend fast-forwarding through a lot of the hockey scenes, You're Not Missing Much, and just skipping to the recreations of Victor Hugo's book. There's a lot of fun to be had. I also love that in Victor Hugo's novel, when Quasimodo is given water by Esmeralda on the pillory, she gives him water out of a little gourd tied around her belt.

Here, Esmeralda gives him water by having Wishbone drink out of her hand and lapping it up. I think that's adorable. Now, I'm not a dog person in the slightest.

However, I'm willing to make an exception for Soccer the Dog. Certainly, he is a good boy.

[Leslie] Soccer the Dog is one of the best actors I have ever seen in my life, and I am not even joking a little bit. That dog can act. That is the most expressive dog I have ever seen on screen.

He is absolutely phenomenal. And fun fact, when Soccer the Dog passed away, he was buried on the ranch in Texas where "Wishbone" was filmed. So, there you go, a little bittersweet full circle moment.

[Patrick] Wait, Wishbone is dead?

[Leslie] What do you mean Wishbone is dead? The show aired 30 years ago!

[Patrick] Well, Methuselah got to be like 900 in the Bible.

[Leslie] I was just thinking about Methuselah, actually. I was like, how do I make a Methuselah joke? And then you jumped in.

[Patrick] Sam and Nathaniel are able to bond not only on Nathaniel being terrible at hockey, but also on their mutual status as the children of divorce. Now, this could just be an addition by the writer, but I think it's something that PBS executives demanded. There was a big push in the 90s, especially on channels like PBS, to have kids shows tackle real world issues like divorce or drug addiction.

And I think Wishbone is trying to do something similar here, but I don't see the divorce plot point as being just an aspect of the story that brings the characters together. I see it as an attempt to represent a lot of the quote unquote real world problems that many American children are facing in the 90s.

[Leslie] I'd love to talk about the way Victor Hugo's characters are portrayed in this episode, specifically regarding Lanell Pena's performance as Esmeralda. I really, really like this Esmeralda. Even though she's only in a fraction of the episode, I thought that she nailed a perfect balance between Victor Hugo's Esmeralda, who is very naive, you know, she is a 16 year old girl, she's very moony eyed, and perhaps conceptions of the character closer to Maureen O'Hara's Esmeralda in RKO's film from 1939, who is very mature and very worldly and has a very good head on her shoulders.

I think this Esmeralda is the closest balance between those two incarnations of the character that I myself have seen. Again, she's only in a few minutes of this episode, but to me, she steals the show. She is both sweet and kind and innocent, and also very mature and very worldly.

[Patrick] Wait, did you say something about red lentil pasta? Anyway, I agree. I love the performance as Esmeralda.

I love her face. I love her hair. I love her outfit.

I love her attitude. Strange as it may sound, she really represents my mental image of Esmeralda from the book.

[Leslie] Even though she's only in a couple minutes of a TV show episode that aired on PBS 30 years ago. Yeah, I agree. She's an absolutely fantastic Esmeralda.

I love the way she dances during the Feast of Fools scene. I love the ribbons in her hair. That is such a cute detail.

I don't think that appears in Victor Hugo's novel. If it does, I have forgotten about it. But putting these little ribbons in Esmeralda's hair, I think, is such a sweet choice that captures just how gentle and kind this character is.

Even though it was probably a last-minute decision by costuming. The director probably said, "Uh, she doesn't look special enough. Do something with her hair."

And the costumer was like, "Oh my gosh, we only have like two minutes before we start shooting. Okay, fine. Uh, here are some ribbons.

Like, put them in your hair or something."

[Patrick] Well, maybe the wardrobe department was busy dealing with that huge humungo mole that is on Dom Cloud Froyo's face.

[Leslie] Yeah, that mole takes up like at least 50% of the screen. Or that's what it seemed like to me. That's the only thing I could really look at.

[Patrick] Well, there's actually not much more to look at because this Frollo really chews the scenery and it's all gone. But I don't think that's a bad thing that he chews the scenery and it's a little over the top because he definitely has a menace. You know, he's very obviously a bad guy, but for a kid's TV show, I don't think that's a bad thing.

There's a reason why the production staff of "Wishbone" hired theater actors and not your TV stars. One, they work cheap. And two, they can be over the top for characters like Hugo's Frollo, who are a bit exaggerated.

When he talks about Esmeralda's legs moving like the spokes of a spinning wheel, ew, that's not even an image from the book, but it feels exactly like something Victor Hugo would have written. Again, you're watching a kid's retelling of a classic novel with a Jack Russell Terrier. I think you have a bit of license to be over the top and a bit goofy.

[Leslie] Speaking of Frollo, during the Feast of Fools scene where Dom Cloud Frollo takes Quasimodo's crown or jester hat off and forcefully puts a rope around his neck and, you know, drags him to the ground, Frollo starts using sign language. That's taken right from Victor Hugo's novel. At this time, sign language as we know it today had not been invented yet, but Victor Hugo makes a point to mention that Frollo developed his own form of sign language that Quasimodo could use to communicate with him after Quasimodo went deaf from ringing the bells.

I like that this episode incorporates that detail. This is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel for only showing the first three-fifths of the book.

[Patrick] I'd say so. Maybe more respectful of the source material than some feature film adaptations that we'll be covering on this show.

[Leslie] Stay tuned, listener. Yeah, I think his performance is absolutely fantastic.

[Patrick] But of course, no performance is going to rival that of Soccer the Dog, whose masterful characterization of Quasimodo rivals anything by Charles Laughton or Lon Chaney. He really is the definitive hunchback of Notre Dame.

[Leslie] I know you're saying that as a joke. I don't think it's a joke. I think Soccer the Dog is one of the best actors we have seen in any adaptation of Hugo's novel that we have covered on this podcast thus far.

That dog was born to be an actor. Which is a sentence I never thought I would say in my entire life. Listener, I apologize in advance.

I am not a dog person. I would hang out with Soccer any day of the week. I've been going back and forth on how I feel about the fact that the wart that appears on Quasimodo's face, as described by Victor Hugo, does not appear on Soccer the Dog.

The only inkling you get of his deformity is the fact that there is probably a little pillow stuffed under his shirt to represent the hump. But within the world of this story, I think that's completely fine. I think the implication is supposed to be that these Parisians have never seen a dog before and they're just treating Quasimodo like some kind of a monster, even though he's just a dog with a hump on his back.

I actually really like that. I like that the quote-unquote deformity is the fact that he is a different species than the rest of these people. Funny enough, I think that actually helps his characterization.

He feels like a different species than the Parisians in Victor Hugo's novel. Here, he literally is a different species than the Parisians.

[Patrick] He's as wicked as he is ugly.

[Leslie] Like, dude, chill. Haven't you seen a puppy before? All right, Pat, before we wrap here, what are your overall thoughts on "The Hunched Dog of Notre Dame"?

[Patrick] Well, Hot Dog, I think this is a pretty cute little episode. I enjoyed it, but it's probably my least favorite "Wishbone" episode that I've seen, and I've seen probably like a dozen by now. It's a guilty pleasure.

If you're a fan of classic literature and 90s kids TV, it's worth checking out. "The Hunched Dog of Notre Dame" is my least favorite "Wishbone" that I've seen so far, and it's not because of the recreation scenes of Victor Hugo's novel. I think they're so cute and funny, but those dang floor hockey scenes make the plot drag like crazy.

If you watch this either alone or with your kids, I'm not going to blame you for fast-forwarding through those scenes, especially during the first 10 minutes. I like this episode. If I had kids, I would be happy to show it to them.

I think it's a good way to become culturally literate about Victor Hugo's great novel, and it's entertaining in its own right for what it is, but it's definitely no masterpiece, and it's definitely not the best Wishbone you can see. What are your thoughts, Leslie?

[Leslie] I totally agree. I think of the "Wishbone" episodes that I have seen as a 26-year-old woman, it's by far the weakest of the bunch. It's really bogged down by the quote-unquote real-world drama of those hockey scenes.

Again, I don't think that that is an apt comparison to the plight of Quasimodo in Victor Hugo's masterpiece. I think they could have come up with a better plotline, but again, these episodes were made in one week's time by people who either had to skim these novels over the weekend if they had the chance to read them at all. I think the writers did the best with what they had.

I am quite grateful to this episode for introducing Victor Hugo's masterpiece to a new generation of children. I wish shows like this were still on the air today. I think, you know, according to certain studies, the average American reads at a sixth grade level.

Media literacy and cultural literacy is quite low nowadays, so I think it's time to bring back, if not "Wishbone," then a "Wishbone"-type show in order to demonstrate to kids that reading is cool. Reading is fun. Hanging out in the library is awesome.

Go do it. Special props to Soccer the Dog's trainer, who just took a dog who was already naturally an actor and refined his craft, and to Lanell Pena, I think I'm pronouncing her name right, who played honestly one of my favorite Esmeraldas thus far. I was not expecting this character to steal my heart as much as she did, given the fact that she's only in a few minutes of this episode, but here we are.

All right, Patrick, before we wrap here, it's time to play our game that we like to play at the end of every episode. So, out of everyone and everything we discussed today, who or what would you A, meet at the inn, B, turn to dust with, and C, throw off of Notre Dame? I don't know why I delivered that like a game show announcer, but here we go.

Maybe I've been watching too much "The Price Is Right".

[Patrick] Well, I've been watching a lot of "Jeopardy" myself. I'll be taking Lanell Pena to the inn. She seems like such a sweet, charming person, and if she's anything like her characterization of Esmeralda, she's going to be a good time to hang out with.

And who else is there to turn to dust with but Soccer the Dog, the man, the pup, the legend, a true Olivier, delivering a more compelling "Why was I not made of stone like thee?" than even Charles Laughton, perhaps. Now, who am I throwing off of Notre Dame? All right, we didn't mention him by name, but I think that weird bully kid who's extra mean to Nathaniel.

Now, Nathaniel kind of deserves it. He's a dumb nerd, and he's not good at hockey, but this bully goes way too far. I don't like seeing him pick on that guy so much, and while he does get his comeuppance at the end, I don't like him.

Throw him off of Notre Dame. What about you, Leslie? How do you stack up?

[Leslie] I'm going to meet Soccer the Dog's trainer at the inn. She is very heavily featured in the documentary, "What's the Story, Wishbone?", named after the first line of the "Wishbone" theme song. I would love to buy her a drink, sit her down, and grill her on how she was able to train a dog to be an actor and to follow traditional direction.

I mean, my goodness, that documentary includes some really great behind-the-scenes shots of Wishbone's trainer giving him cues and leading him around the set. "Okay, come on, Soccer! Come on, Soccer!

Jump! Jump! Spin around!

Yay! Good boy!" How do you do that?

How do you get a dog to follow dozens of different combinations of tricks every single day and in those tight, probably itchy, uncomfortable costumes? My goodness. Soccer's trainer is heaven sent.

I'm going to the inn with her. I'm going to turn to dust with Sam. We didn't really talk about her much, but in the "Wishbone" series, Sam is the token girl character in this trio of main human characters, Joe, David, and Sam.

I like Sam a lot. Sam is very sweet. She is very intelligent.

She always does the right thing, even when it's difficult, and I admire that she went out of her way to try to befriend this ostracized kid and teach him how to skate, even if those skating scenes are a little bit cumbersome. And speaking of those skating scenes, I am going to throw rollerblades off of Notre Dame. After watching this episode, I don't want to see a single rollerblade as long as I live.

I've gotten my fill for life.

[Patrick] Well, listener, summer is upon us, and one of my favorite things to do in the summer is head over to the drive-in for a double feature. And that's exactly what we're going to do with next episode. But it's not exactly drive-in fare that we're going to be checking out.

[Leslie] Ooh, appropriately mysterious and enticing. I'll catch you next time, listener.

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