Treasure Planet

 On my run yesterday, a song came on that hadn't ever made its way onto my Spotify playlist before.  It was a song called "I'm Still Here", by the Goo Goo Dolls.  When I looked down at my phone to look at the song cover art, this is what I saw:

The song was the theme track for the movie "Treasure Planet".  I've heard of this movie before, but I had never seen it.  When I looked at the picture I noticed a ship flying through the air, looking like it was in outer space, and a character holding what looked like a yellow glowing ball in his hand.

So I was suddenly interested.

Last night, knowing nothing about this movie, I started watching it.  I only made it part way through because a) I didn't have time to watch the whole thing and b) it is a pretty terrible movie, in my opinion.  

The plot basically takes Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and translates it to a space adventure.  So, rather than sailing the oceans, our characters are travelling through space.  And there are a bunch of aliens.

The parallels with my own efforts on this blog are pretty obvious.  I have taken the ocean voyages of the Jaredites and Lehites of the Book of Mormon and put them into space.  Similarly, I have envisioned the voyages of Earendil, the Numenoreans, and other characters from Tolkien's writings as they travel between lands as actually traversing space.

In reading Lehi's commentary of being led away from Jerusalem, he mentions "Isles", and that his party had been led to one.  His assumption was that other groups had been led away to other islands... he didn't know where they were, but there was at least two or more besides the one that he had been led to:

 

. . . we have been driven out of the land of our inheritance; but we have been led to a better land, for the Lord has made the sea our path, and we are upon an isle of the sea.

But great are the promises of the Lord unto them who are upon the isles of the sea; wherefore as it says isles, there must needs be more than this, and they are inhabited also by our brethren.

For behold, the Lord God has led away from time to time from the house of Israel, according to his will and pleasure. And now behold, the Lord remembereth all them who have been broken off, wherefore he remembereth us also.

Since rolling with this theory of interstellar travel in the Book of Mormon, I have read 'isles' here to mean the same thing as 'planets'.  With planets being analogous to islands in an ocean, but now just separated from other worlds by outer space, or in Tolkien-speak, the Outer Sea, or Ekkaia.  Quite literally islands, just on a much bigger scale.

This thought is actually captured in the conversion of both the title and the plot of Treasure Island to Treasure Planet.  In this change, what was once considered an island is now a planet.  Island = Planet.

Beyond that, in the little that I saw of the movie, there were a couple things that jumped out.

First of all, Treasure Planet is a world that looks like this:

X literally marks the spot again, with the bands around the world forming an X that centers on the world.  Now, given that it is a story where a ship is following a map to buried treasure, it isn't necessarily that random for the artists to envision or design a world that incorporates an X.  I just thought it was interesting to see the X show up again, particularly as it relates to a world.

The 'treasure map' takes the form of the gold ball that Jim comes into possession of.  This would be the shining ball that the character in that song cover art is holding in that first image above.  The ball itself contains a star-map, which points the way to Treasure Planet.

The parallel with the Anor Stone/ Liahona is also pretty clear here.

Surprisingly, it also was pretty similar to a dream I had back in 2021, which also involved a holographic star map being displayed once a pushed a button on what I thought was just some kind of arcade game.

Here is the video clip where Jim discovers the ball contains a map.  At about the 0:20 mark you will also hear Dr. Doppler refer to the ball as an "odd little sphere".  When I heard that, it reminded me of Nephi's description of the Liahona-Anor Stone as a "round ball of curious workmanship".  If you look up "curious" on Etymonline, you will see "solicitous, anxious, inquisitive; odd, strange".  

Anyway, just a couple things I saw and noticed in my partial viewing.

Here is the "I'm Still Here" song, also.