title: New England Revolution

text: Liverpool great Steve Nicol was appointed as head coach on a full-time basis during the 2002 season. He had previously held the position of interim head coach during the 1999 and 2002 seasons. After taking over, Nicol guided the Revolution to a playoff berth for a league-record eight straight seasons, failing for the first time in 2010. The first six of those berths (from 2002 to 2007) resulted in an appearance in the conference final or better, including three consecutive MLS Cup finals from 2005 to 2007. From the 2008 season until 2013, the Revs failed to go further than the first round of the playoffs. Still, Nicol was respected as one of the best coaches in the league.


title: New England Revolution

text: In his first season in charge, Nicol guided the Revs to a first-place finish in the Eastern Conference. The team advanced through the playoffs to the MLS Cup final, where they lost to the Galaxy again, this time 1–0 on a golden goal by Carlos Ruiz. Held at Gillette Stadium, the Cup final was attended by 61,316 spectators, the largest figure for any MLS Cup until 2018.


title: New England Revolution

text: After losing in the conference finals in 2003 and 2004, the Revs repeated their 2002 feat finishing tops in the east and losing the cup final to Los Angeles 1–0 in extra time again in 2005. New England had a real chance to win their first MLS championship, in MLS Cup 2006, against the Houston Dynamo. After Taylor Twellman scored in the 113th minute, the Revs allowed an equalizing header from the Dynamo's Brian Ching less than a minute later that sent the game to penalty kicks, where the Revs lost 4–3.


title: New England Revolution

text: In the 2007 season, the Revs made it to two cup finals. The 2007 MLS Cup was a rematch from the previous year, though the result was the same as Houston defeated New England 2–1. The Revolution hold the record for most losses in MLS Cup games. Though they lost the 2007 MLS Cup, they defeated FC Dallas 3–2 to win their first-ever trophy: the 2007 U.S. Open Cup.


title: New England Revolution

text: Their 2002 MLS Cup appearance granted them a spot in the 2003 CONCACAF Champions Cup, but they lost their first match-up 5:3 on aggregate after playing two games on the road to LD Alajuelense. The Revolution again faced LD Alajuelense of Costa Rica in the home and away 2006 CONCACAF Champions' Cup. The "home" game was played February 22, 2006, in Bermuda despite some fans feeling that playing at Gillette Stadium in the adverse conditions of winter in New England could have been advantageous. The Revs failed to advance, as they drew 0–0 in Bermuda and lost 0–1 in Costa Rica.


title: New England Revolution

text: The 2007 U.S. Open Cup victory qualified the club for the preliminary round of the newly expanded CONCACAF Champions League. Additionally, their top-four finish qualified them for SuperLiga 2008. Therefore, the Revolution competed in four different competitions (MLS, Open Cup, Champions League, and SuperLiga) during the 2008 season. The Revolution had an excellent run at the beginning of the 2008 season. By mid-July, they were leading the overall MLS table and had finished as the number one overall seed in SuperLiga. The team won the tournament, defeating the Houston Dynamo on penalties to earn a small amount of revenge on for their successive MLS Cup defeats. That trophy, however, was the high point for the 2008 Revs. Fixture congestion led to a rash of injuries and general fatigue, and the team crashed out the Champions League with an embarrassing 4–0 home defeat to regional minnows Joe Public FC of Trinidad and Tobago (the tie ended 6–1 Joe Public on aggregate). The team also struggled in domestic play, limping to a third-place finish in the East and losing to the Chicago Fire in the first round of the playoffs. The Revs managed a semifinal appearance in the 2008 U.S. Open Cup, but lost to D.C. United.


title: New England Revolution

text: In 2009, the Revs continued the mediocrity that had plagued the second half of their 2008 season, losing to Chicago again in the first round of the playoffs. The team also lost to Chicago in the semifinals of the 2009 SuperLiga. 2010 started even more dismally than 2009, with the team failing to put together an unbeaten streak longer than three games until July. Despite the abysmal progress, this unbeaten streak coincided with the Revs' third consecutive SuperLiga appearance, and for the second time in three years, the team made the competition's final, but lost 2–1 to Monarcas Morelia of Liga MX.


title: New England Revolution

text: The team failed to make the playoffs in either 2010 or 2011, and at the end of the 2011 season, announced they had parted ways with manager Steve Nicol, who had managed the team for 10 years.


title: New England Revolution

text: In 2013, the team finished 3rd place in the Eastern Conference, making the playoffs for the first time since 2009 with the help of a budding Homegrown Player, Diego Fagundez.


title: New England Revolution

text: In the April 2014 issue of "Boston Magazine", journalist Kevin Alexander named the Kraft family as "the Worst Owners in the League" in an article that contrasted the family's sparkling reputation as NFL owners with their alleged lack of interest in MLS and the Revolution.


title: New England Revolution

text: The 2014 season brought success. The Revolution signed U.S. national team member Jermaine Jones in late August on a designated player contract. They then went on a 10–1–1 streak led by Jones and MVP candidate Lee Nguyen to finish in 2nd place in the regular season in the Eastern Conference. The Revolution breezed through the playoffs without losing a game, making it to their first MLS Cup Final since 2007. New England lost 2–1 to the LA Galaxy, marking their fifth MLS Cup loss in five MLS Cup appearances.


title: New England Revolution

text: On May 9, 2019, coach Brad Friedel was fired by the Revolution after a 12–21–13 career record and a 2–8–2 record to open the 2019 season. He was replaced by former D.C. United, LA Galaxy and USMNT coach Bruce Arena. Under Arena, the Revolution went eleven games undefeated until losing 2–0 to the Los Angeles FC on August 3, 2019. They were eliminated in the 1st Round of the 2019 Playoffs by Atlanta United FC, getting shut out 1–0. The Revolution lost to the Columbus Crew 1–0 in the Eastern Conference Finals in the 2020 Playoffs.


title: New England Revolution

text: The 2021 season saw the Revolution win their first Supporters' Shield in club history by having the best record in the regular season. New England set a new MLS record for points in a season (73), surpassing the previous mark of 72 set by Los Angeles FC in 2019. Goalkeeper Matt Turner won the MLS Goalkeeper of the Year Award, and Carles Gil won the MLS Most Valuable Player Award. In the MLS Quarterfinals, the Revolution lost to eventual MLS Cup finalist, New York City FC on penalties, ending their hopes to be the first MLS team to complete the league double (winning both the Supporters' Shield and MLS Cup) since 2017.


title: New England Revolution

text: The franchise's turnaround since May 2019 has been credited to head coach and sporting director Bruce Arena.


title: New England Revolution

text: The original club badge was stylized and based on the flag of the United States with some of the stars made into a soccer ball (similar to Adidas' ball for the UEFA Champions League), composed of six stars, representing the six New England states. The overall design mirrored the 1994 FIFA World Cup logo. The Revolution was the last founding team of the MLS to keep its original crest. In 2014, the flag and ball were retained while the name was dropped.


title: New England Revolution

text: In 2021, the club launched its new logo. They enlisted an independent third-party to conduct focus groups consisting of Boston sports fans to elicit feedback about what the re-branded badge should represent. It features an "R" sitting above a red strikethrough. The inner shape references traditional flag drapery which plays homage to the original Revolution logo. The "R"'s font references the Boston Tea Party mark and American Revolutionary era lettering. Red details around the logo itself are reminiscent of patriotic bunting and the strikethrough behind the logo is meant to symbolize defiance.


title: New England Revolution

text: Traditionally, the Revolution have worn all-navy at home, with the exception of red shorts during the club's first year in 1996. Since 2014, the club has worn white shorts at home. To mark the club and the league's 25th anniversary, the red shorts returned for the 2020 and 2021 seasons. The Revolution wore white secondary uniforms for their entire existence until 2015; that year club introduced a red away jersey with white and green accents in tribute to the flag of New England, and away uniforms demonstrated more design variation from there. The following is a partial list of the last nine kits worn by the Revolution.


title: New England Revolution

text: The Revolution play home matches at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts. At its inception, the Revolution played their games at Foxboro Stadium, alongside the American football team New England Patriots of the National Football League (NFL). In 2002, Robert Kraft financed a $350-million project as a replacement for Foxboro Stadium which would come to be known as Gillette Stadium. In 2007, Kraft began to develop the land around Gillette Stadium, creating a $375-million open-air shopping and entertainment center called Patriot Place.


title: New England Revolution

text: Gillette Stadium is a 66,000-seat stadium including luxury and box seating. The Revolution artificially limit the stadium's capacity for MLS matches, with certain seating sections covered with tarpaulins, or made inaccessible. However, the club does open the entire stadium for international matches and MLS Playoffs. On October 20, 2002, during the 2002 MLS Cup final a record was established when a crowd of 61,316 attended a Revolution 1–0 loss against the Los Angeles Galaxy. This was the largest stand-alone MLS post-season crowd on record until the 2018 MLS Cup in Atlanta at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.


title: New England Revolution

text: Although the Revolution have played on natural grass from 2002 to 2006, they currently play on FieldTurf which was upgraded in April 2014 to FieldTurf "Revolution" with "VersaTile" drainage system. Gillete Stadium's FieldTurf surface was certified by FIFA with a two-star quality rating, the highest possible rating. Kraft, however, announced that he would be willing to switch the stadium to a natural grass playing field as part of his stadium bid for 2026 FIFA World Cup.


title: New England Revolution

text: Kraft opened a new $35 million training center in 2019. The team's training facilities and offices are located in the wetlands behind Gillette Stadium. Despite these new facilities, Kraft claimed that he was still committed to building a new soccer-specific stadium closer to the city limits of Boston.


title: New England Revolution

text: On August 2, 2007, "The Boston Herald" reported that the city of Somerville and Revolution officials had held preliminary discussions about building a 50,000 to 55,000-seat stadium on a site off of Innerbelt Road near Interstate 93. The stadium could cost anywhere between $50 and $200 million based on other similar MLS soccer-specific stadiums. After a two-year hiatus, the Revolution renewed their plans to build a stadium in Somerville since the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority finalized its Green Line maintenance facility plans. In a July 2010 interview, Kraft said that over $1 million had been invested in finding a suitable site, preferably in the urban core.


title: New England Revolution

text: On November 18, 2014, "The Boston Globe" reported that the Kraft family had met with city and state officials over a stadium in South Boston on a public lot off Interstate 93. The proposed site is adjacent to an industrial site that has been identified for the main Olympic stadium by the organizing group for Boston's now-failed bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics, of which Robert Kraft was a member.


title: New England Revolution

text: On October 9, 2019, the club announced the formation of a reserve team, New England Revolution II, in USL League One that would begin play in the 2020 season and that they would play at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough. On November 25, 2019, the club announced its first manager, Clint Peay.


title: New England Revolution

text: The New England Revolution Academy is an elite youth development program fully-funded by the senior club and recognized by U.S. Soccer as one of the top 10 youth development programs in the country. Competing in MLS Next, a successor to the U.S. Soccer Development Academy, the Revolution Academy provides local players throughout Greater Boston and beyond (regardless of their financial situation) a pathway to a professional career.


title: New England Revolution

text: All Revolution youth team home matches are played at Gillette Stadium. However, due to scheduling conflicts, some home matches in the past have been hosted at the B.M.C. Durfee High School in Fall River, Massachusetts, and the Fruit Street Fields (located in Hopkinton, Massachusetts).


title: New England Revolution

text: Since 2010 when Diego Fagúndez became the Revolution's first ever MLS Homegrown Player Rule signing, the Revolution have promoted several other youth prospects from their academy team, including Scott Caldwell, Zachary Herivaux, Justin Rennicks, Noel Buck, and Damian Rivera.


title: New England Revolution

text: The team's supporter's clubs are called the "Midnight Riders" and "The Rebellion". The name 'Midnight Riders' is in honor of the famous rides of Paul Revere and William Dawes, who announced the departure of British troops from Boston to Concord at the beginning of the American Revolution. The two groups together occupy the north stand of the stadium, which they have nicknamed "The Fort". The Fort is a general admission section and draws its name from the revolutionary theme which runs through the team supporters. In the same theme, the Revolution also employ a corps known as the End Zone Militia, a group of American Revolutionary War reenactors founded in 1996 by Geoff Campbell. The reenactors wear authentic 18th century clothing including the iconic colonial tricorn hat, and carry flintlock black gunpowder muskets which are ceremoniously fired when the Revolution score a goal.


title: New England Revolution

text: The club's main rival is widely considered to be New York Red Bulls, due to the rivalry stemming from other Boston–New York rivalries in other professional sports such as the Knicks–Celtics rivalry in the NBA, the Jets–Patriots rivalry in the NFL and the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry in Major League Baseball. Beginning in 2002, the Revs had a 20 match undefeated streak against the Red Bulls for games at Gillette Stadium. This streak helped to intensify the rivalry between the teams. The streak came to an end on June 8, 2014, as the Red Bulls won 2–0 at Gillette Stadium.


title: New England Revolution

text: The Revolution have also built rivalries with fellow Eastern Conference teams D.C. United and Chicago Fire. These teams have faced each other on numerous occasions in the playoffs. In a 2009 poll on the club's official site, New England fans considered the Chicago Fire the Revs' most bitter rival as the clubs have clashed many times in the MLS playoffs and regular season.


title: New England Revolution

text: Since 2015 a rivalry has also developed with newcomer club New York City FC, due to the latter club's association with the Yankees and with Yankee Stadium being the club's incumbent home ground. To further fuel this rivalry, New York City FC knocked out the Revolution in the eastern conference semifinals of the 2021 MLS Cup Playoffs in a 2–2 tie that eventually went to penalties, despite the Revolution having the superior regular season record that year.


title: New England Revolution

text: From 2021 to 2022, all Revolution matches were televised locally in high definition on either WBZ-TV or WSBK-TV; nationally televised matches aired on ESPN, Fox Sports, and Univision. All matches are broadcast on radio by 98.5 The Sports Hub, but this is a simulcast of the TV feed. Brad Feldman served as the team's longtime play-by-play on both TV and radio, with former Revolution and USMNT player Charlie Davies doing color commentary. Prior to 2021, matches were aired locally on NBC Sports Boston.


title: New England Revolution

text: With every MLS game available on Apple TV via their rights deal in 2023, Revolution games will be broadcast almost exclusively on this service, with exceptions for certain national linear television broadcast partners.


title: New England Revolution

text: The club's current head coach and sporting director is Bruce Arena. The club's previous head coach was Mike Lapper, the interim replacement for Brad Friedel who was appointed the position on November 9, 2017, and subsequently fired on May 9, 2019. There have been eight permanent managers and four interim managers of the Revolution since the appointment of the club's first professional manager, Frank Stapleton in 1996. The club's longest-serving head coach, in terms of both length of tenure and number of games overseen, is Steve Nicol, who managed the club between 2002 and 2011.


title: Ellen Travolta

text: Ellen M. Travolta (born October 6, 1939) is an American actress known for playing Louisa Arcola Delvecchio in "Happy Days" and "Joanie Loves Chachi" as well as Lillian in "Charles in Charge" (1987-1990).


title: Ellen Travolta

text: Ellen M. Travolta was born on October 6, 1939, in Englewood, New Jersey to Salvatore ("Sam") Travolta and Helen Cecilia (née Burke) Travolta. Her father was a semi-professional football player before becoming a tire salesman and a partner in a Firestone franchise called Travolta Tires.


title: Ellen Travolta

text: Travolta attended Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, New Jersey and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.


title: Ellen Travolta

text: As an actress and singer, she appeared with "The Sunshine Sisters," a radio vocal group. She later became a drama coach, actress, and director of student productions.


title: Ellen Travolta

text: She is probably best known for her portrayal of Louisa Arcola Delvecchio, the aunt of Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and mother of Chachi Arcola (Scott Baio), in five episodes during the 1980s of the 1950s-era American sitcom "Happy Days" and in episodes of its spin-off "Joanie Loves Chachi". Travolta also played the mother of Baio's character on the syndicated comedy series "Charles in Charge" from 1987 to 1990.


title: Ellen Travolta

text: She had already portrayed Jimmy Baio's mother on a 1978 episode of "The Love Boat". Travolta played Mrs. Horshack-O'Hara in three episodes of "Welcome Back, Kotter", a comedy series on which her brother, actor John Travolta, starred as Vinnie Barbarino. She also appeared alongside her brother in the 1978 summer blockbuster "Grease". Later in the 1970s, she played Dorothy Manucci in the short-lived television series "Makin' It". She played Marion Keisker in John Carpenter's 1979 television film "Elvis".


title: Ellen Travolta

text: Travolta has been a longtime performer and supporter of the Coeur d'Alene Summer Theatre where she appeared in a production of "Hello, Dolly!" in the Coeur d'Alene Summer Theatre in 2000 and 2012 playing the star role opposite her husband's portrayal of Horace Vandergelder. The theatre is the beneficiary of the Helen Burke Travolta Memorial fund, established in honor of Travolta's mother. Travolta has stated, "My mother was the beginning of all of this for us. She loved the theater, and she was always involved with the community theater and she encouraged all of us to be in it."


title: Ellen Travolta

text: Travolta married James Fridley in May 1964. They had two children, a son, actor Tom Fridley and a daughter, Molly Allen Ritter.


title: Ellen Travolta

text: Travolta and Fridley divorced in 1977. She then married actor Jack Bannon on April 9, 1983. In 1994, the couple moved to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. They remained together until Bannon's death in 2017.


title: Keenan Wynn

text: Francis Xavier Aloysius James Jeremiah Keenan Wynn (July 27, 1916 – October 14, 1986) was an American character actor. His expressive face was his stock-in-trade; and though he rarely carried the lead role, he had prominent billing in most of his film and television roles.


title: Keenan Wynn

text: Wynn was born on July 27, 1916, in New York City, the son of vaudeville comedian Ed Wynn and his wife, the former Hilda Keenan. He took his stage name from his maternal grandfather, Frank Keenan, one of the first Broadway actors to star in Hollywood. His father was Jewish and his mother was of Irish Catholic background. Ed Wynn encouraged his son to become an actor, and to join The Lambs Club, which he did in 1937.


title: Keenan Wynn

text: Wynn began his career as a stage actor. He appeared in several plays on Broadway, including "Remember the Day" (1935), "Black Widow" (1936), "Hitch Your Wagon" (1937), "The Star Wagon" (1938), "One for the Money" (1939), "Two for the Show" (1940), and "The More the Merrier" (1941).


title: Keenan Wynn

text: Wynn starred in the radio show "The Amazing Mr. Smith" on Mutual Broadcasting System April 7 – June 30, 1941. He played the title role, "a carefree young man who runs into trouble galore and becomes an involuntary detective".


title: Keenan Wynn

text: Wynn appeared in hundreds of films and television series between 1934 and 1986. He was a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract player during the 1940s and 1950s. He had a brief role as a belligerent, unsympathetic drunk in the wartime romance "The Clock" (1945). Arguably his most dynamic performance was a small role in "The Hucksters" (1948) with Clark Gable. His early postwar credits include "The Three Musketeers" (1948), playing D'Artagnan's servant; "Annie Get Your Gun" (1950); "Royal Wedding" (1951); "Kiss Me, Kate" (1953); "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" (1956); "The Absent-Minded Professor" (1961); "The Americanization of Emily" (1964) and "Dr. Strangelove" (1964).


title: Keenan Wynn

text: The Wynns, father and son, both appeared in the original 1956 "Playhouse 90" television production of Rod Serling's "Requiem for a Heavyweight". The son was returning the favor: according to radio historian Elizabeth McLeod, Keenan had helped his father overcome professional collapse, a harrowing divorce, and a nervous breakdown to return to work a decade earlier, and now helped convince Serling and producer Martin Manulis that the elder Wynn should play the wistful trainer. Both he and his father also appeared in a subsequent TV drama called "The Man in the Funny Suit" (1960), which detailed the problems they had experienced while working on that series. In it, the Wynns, Serling, and many of the cast and crew played themselves. Keenan also featured in another Rod Serling production, a "Twilight Zone" episode entitled, "A World of His Own" (1960) as playwright Gregory West, who uniquely caused series creator Rod Serling to disappear.


title: Keenan Wynn

text: On January 18, 1959, Wynn starred in S. J. Perelman's Hollywood satire, "Malice in Wonderland", broadcast on NBC's prestigious Sunday afternoon anthology series "Omnibus".


title: Keenan Wynn

text: In the 1959–1960 television season, Wynn co-starred with Bob Mathias in NBC's "The Troubleshooters", an adventure program about unusual events surrounding an international construction company. Wynn played the role of Kodiak, the "troubleshooter", for Mathias's Frank Dugan. He appeared in numerous television series, such as the ABC/Warner Bros. drama, "The Roaring 20s", "The Islanders", and the ABC Western series, "The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters".


title: Keenan Wynn

text: Wynn took a dramatic turn as Yost in the crime drama "Point Blank" (1967) with Lee Marvin. He had a leading role in the third "Beach Party" movie, "Bikini Beach" (1964) as a scheming newspaper publisher who wants to banish the local young people. Later he played Hezakiah in the comedy film "The Great Race" (1965). He was the voice of the Winter Warlock in "Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town" (1970) and appeared in several Disney films, including "Snowball Express" (1972), "Herbie Rides Again" (1974) and "The Shaggy D.A." (1976) (as a villain who learns Wilbur Daniels's secret and uses it against him). He appeared as villainous businessman Alonzo Hawk in three Disney films – "The Absent-Minded Professor", "Son of Flubber", and "Herbie Rides Again".


title: Keenan Wynn

text: He appeared in Francis Coppola's musical "Finian's Rainbow" (1968), Sergio Leone's epic western "Once Upon a Time in the West" (also 1968), and Robert Altman's "Nashville" (1975). During this time, his guest television roles included "Alias Smith and Jones" (1971–1972), "Emergency!" (1975), "Movin' On" (1975) and "The Bionic Woman" (1978). Wynn appeared in ten episodes of TV's "Dallas" during the 1979–1980 season, playing the role of former Ewing family partner-turned-enemy Digger Barnes. David Wayne, a friend of Wynn's, had played Digger Barnes in 1978 but was unable to continue with the role because of his co-starring role on the CBS series, "House Calls", starring Wayne Rogers.


title: Keenan Wynn

text: Wynn was initially cast in "Superman" (1978) to play Perry White (the boss of Clark Kent and Lois Lane at the "Daily Planet") in April 1977. By June (production had moved to Pinewood Studios in England), Wynn collapsed from exhaustion and was rushed to a hospital. He was replaced by Jackie Cooper. In 1983, he guest-starred in one of the last episodes of "Taxi" and "Quincy, M.E." In 1984, he starred in the television film "Call to Glory", which later became a weekly television series.


title: Keenan Wynn

text: Wynn was married to former stage actress Eve Lynn Abbott (1914–2004) until their divorce in 1947, whereupon Abbott married actor Van Johnson, one of the couple's closest friends. Abbott contended her marriage to Wynn was a happy one, but that her divorce and remarriage were engineered by MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer, who refused to renew Wynn's contract unless Abbott divorced him and married Johnson, who was the subject of rumors that he was homosexual. One son, actor and writer Ned Wynn (born Edmond Keenan Wynn), wrote the autobiographical memoir "We Will Always Live In Beverly Hills". His other son, Tracy Keenan Wynn, is a screenwriter whose credits include "The Longest Yard" and "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" (both 1974). His daughter Hilda was married to Paul Williams. He was an uncle by marriage to the Hudson Brothers. His granddaughter is actress Jessica Keenan Wynn.


title: Keenan Wynn

text: Wynn suffered from painful ear infections which resulted in him shouting in a loud voice, which he had no control over. (Source: MGM Stock Company.)


title: Keenan Wynn

text: In his later years, Wynn undertook a number of philanthropic endeavors and supported several charity groups. He was a long-standing active member of the Westwood Sertoma service club, in West Los Angeles.


title: Keenan Wynn

text: During his last years, Wynn suffered from pancreatic cancer, which caused his death on October 14, 1986. His ashes are interred in Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park in The Great Mausoleum, Daffodil Corridor, Columbarium of the Dawn, in a niche alongside his father Ed Wynn, his daughter Emily (February 13, 1960 – November 27, 1980), who died from lupus, and his aunt.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: In literature, the style originates with the 1857 publication of Charles Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du mal". The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire admired greatly and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated by a series of manifestos and attracted a generation of writers. The term "symbolist" was first applied by the critic Jean Moréas, who invented the term to distinguish the Symbolists from the related Decadents of literature and of art.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: The term "symbolism" is derived from the word "symbol" which derives from the Latin "symbolum", a symbol of faith, and "symbolus", a sign of recognition, in turn from classical Greek σύμβολον "symbolon", an object cut in half constituting a sign of recognition when the carriers were able to reassemble the two-halves. In ancient Greece, the "symbolon" was a shard of pottery which was inscribed and then broken into two pieces which were given to the ambassadors from two allied city states as a record of the alliance.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Symbolism was largely a reaction against naturalism and realism, anti-idealistic styles which were attempts to represent reality in its gritty particularity, and to elevate the humble and the ordinary over the ideal. Symbolism was a reaction in favour of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams. Some writers, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, began as naturalists before becoming symbolists; for Huysmans, this change represented his increasing interest in religion and spirituality. Certain of the characteristic subjects of the Decadents represent naturalist interest in sexuality and taboo topics, but in their case this was mixed with Byronic romanticism and the world-weariness characteristic of the "fin de siècle" period.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: The Symbolist poets have a more complex relationship with Parnassianism, a French literary style that immediately preceded it. While being influenced by hermeticism, allowing freer versification, and rejecting Parnassian clarity and objectivity, it retained Parnassianism's love of word play and concern for the musical qualities of verse. The Symbolists continued to admire Théophile Gautier's motto of "art for art's sake", and retained – and modified – Parnassianism's mood of ironic detachment. Many Symbolist poets, including Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine, published early works in "Le Parnasse contemporain", the poetry anthologies that gave Parnassianism its name. But Arthur Rimbaud publicly mocked prominent Parnassians and published scatological parodies of some of their main authors, including François Coppée – misattributed to Coppée himself – in "L'Album zutique".


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: One of Symbolism's most colourful promoters in Paris was art and literary critic (and occultist) Joséphin Péladan, who established the Salon de la Rose + Croix. The Salon hosted a series of six presentations of avant-garde art, writing and music during the 1890s, to give a presentation space for artists embracing spiritualism, mysticism, and idealism in their work. A number of Symbolists were associated with the Salon.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Jean Moréas published the Symbolist Manifesto ("Le Symbolisme") in "Le Figaro" on 18 September 1886 (see 1886 in poetry). The Symbolist Manifesto names Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine as the three leading poets of the movement. Moréas announced that symbolism was hostile to "plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description", and that its goal instead was to "clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form" whose "goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal."


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: In a nutshell, as Mallarmé writes in a letter to his friend Henri Cazalis, 'to depict not the thing but the effect it produces'.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: The symbolist poets wished to liberate techniques of versification in order to allow greater room for "fluidity", and as such were sympathetic with the trend toward free verse, as evident in the poems of Gustave Kahn and Ezra Pound. Symbolist poems were attempts to evoke, rather than primarily to describe; symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of the poet's soul. T. S. Eliot was influenced by the poets Jules Laforgue, Paul Valéry and Arthur Rimbaud who used the techniques of the Symbolist school, though it has also been said that 'Imagism' was the style to which both Pound and Eliot subscribed (see Pound's "Des Imagistes"). Synesthesia was a prized experience; poets sought to identify and confound the separate senses of scent, sound, and colour. In Baudelaire's poem "Correspondences" (which mentions "forêts de symboles" ("forests of symbols") and is considered the touchstone of French Symbolism):


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: – both poets seek to identify one sense experience with another. The earlier Romanticism of poetry used symbols, but these symbols were unique and privileged objects. The symbolists were more extreme, investing all things, even vowels and perfumes, with potential symbolic value. "The physical universe, then, is a kind of language that invites a privileged spectator to decipher it, although this does not yield a single message so much as a superior network of associations." Symbolist symbols are not allegories, intended to represent; they are instead intended to evoke particular states of mind. The nominal subject of Mallarmé's "Le cygne" ("The Swan") is of a swan trapped in a frozen lake. Significantly, in French, "cygne" is a homophone of "signe", a sign. The overall effect is of overwhelming whiteness; and the presentation of the narrative elements of the description is quite indirect:


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Of the several attempts at defining the essence of symbolism, perhaps none was more influential than Paul Verlaine's 1884 publication of a series of essays on Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Gérard de Nerval, and "Pauvre Lelian" ("Poor Lelian", an anagram of Paul Verlaine's own name), each of whom Verlaine numbered among the "poètes maudits", "accursed poets."


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Verlaine argued that in their individual and very different ways, each of these hitherto neglected poets found genius a curse; it isolated them from their contemporaries, and as a result these poets were not at all concerned to avoid hermeticism and idiosyncratic writing styles. They were also portrayed as at odds with society, having tragic lives, and often given to self-destructive tendencies. These traits were not hindrances but consequences of their literary gifts. Verlaine's concept of the "poète maudit" in turn borrows from Baudelaire, who opened his collection "Les fleurs du mal" with the poem "Bénédiction", which describes a poet whose internal serenity remains undisturbed by the contempt of the people surrounding him.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: In this conception of genius and the role of the poet, Verlaine referred indirectly to the aesthetics of Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, who maintained that the purpose of art was to provide a temporary refuge from the world of strife of the will.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Schopenhauer's aesthetics represented shared concerns with the symbolist programme; they both tended to consider Art as a contemplative refuge from the world of strife and will. As a result of this desire for an artistic refuge, the symbolists used characteristic themes of mysticism and otherworldliness, a keen sense of mortality, and a sense of the malign power of sexuality, which Albert Samain termed a "fruit of death upon the tree of life." Mallarmé's poem "Les fenêtres" expresses all of these themes clearly. A dying man in a hospital bed, seeking escape from the pain and dreariness of his physical surroundings, turns toward his window but then turns away in disgust from


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: The symbolist style has frequently been confused with the Decadent movement, the name derived from French literary critics in the 1880s, suggesting the writers were self indulgent and obsessed with taboo subjects. While a few writers embraced the term, most avoided it. Jean Moréas' manifesto was largely a response to this polemic. By the late 1880s, the terms "symbolism" and "decadence" were understood to be almost synonymous. Though the aesthetics of the styles can be considered similar in some ways, the two remain distinct. The symbolists were those artists who emphasized dreams and ideals; the Decadents cultivated "précieux", ornamented, or hermetic styles, and morbid subject matters. The subject of the decadence of the Roman Empire was a frequent source of literary images and appears in the works of many poets of the period, regardless of which name they chose for their style, as in Verlaine's ""Langueur"":


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: A number of important literary publications were founded by symbolists or became associated with the style. The first was "La Vogue" initiated in April 1886. In October of that same year, Jean Moréas, Gustave Kahn, and Paul Adam began the periodical "Le Symboliste". One of the most important symbolist journals was "Mercure de France", edited by Alfred Vallette, which succeeded "La Pléiade"; founded in 1890, this periodical endured until 1965. Pierre Louÿs initiated "La conque", a periodical whose symbolist influences were alluded to by Jorge Luis Borges in his story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote". Other symbolist literary magazines included "La Revue blanche", "La Revue wagnérienne", "La Plume" and "La Wallonie".


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Rémy de Gourmont and Félix Fénéon were literary critics associated with symbolism. The symbolist and decadent literary styles were satirized by a book of poetry, "Les Déliquescences d'Adoré Floupette", published in 1885 by Henri Beauclair and Gabriel Vicaire.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Symbolism in literature is distinct from symbolism in art although the two were similar in many aspects. In painting, symbolism can be seen as a revival of some mystical tendencies in the Romantic tradition, and was close to the self-consciously morbid and private decadent movement.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: There were several rather dissimilar groups of Symbolist painters and visual artists, which included Paul Gauguin, Gustave Moreau, Gustav Klimt, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Jacek Malczewski, Odilon Redon, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Fantin-Latour, Gaston Bussière, Edvard Munch, Fernand Khnopff, Félicien Rops, and Jan Toorop. Symbolism in painting was even more widespread geographically than symbolism in poetry, affecting Mikhail Vrubel, Nicholas Roerich, Victor Borisov-Musatov, Martiros Saryan, Mikhail Nesterov, Léon Bakst, Elena Gorokhova in Russia, as well as Frida Kahlo in Mexico, Elihu Vedder, Remedios Varo, Morris Graves and David Chetlahe Paladin in the United States. Auguste Rodin is sometimes considered a symbolist sculptor.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: The symbolist painters used mythological and dream imagery. The symbols used by symbolism are not the familiar emblems of mainstream iconography but intensely personal, private, obscure and ambiguous references. More a philosophy than an actual style of art, symbolism in painting influenced the contemporary Art Nouveau style and Les Nabis.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Symbolism had some influence on music as well. Many symbolist writers and critics were early enthusiasts of the music of Richard Wagner, an avid reader of Schopenhauer.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: The symbolist aesthetic affected the works of Claude Debussy. His choices of "libretti", texts, and themes come almost exclusively from the symbolist canon. Compositions such as his settings of "Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire", various art songs on poems by Verlaine, the opera "Pelléas et Mélisande" with a libretto by Maurice Maeterlinck, and his unfinished sketches that illustrate two Poe stories, "The Devil in the Belfry" and "The Fall of the House of Usher", all indicate that Debussy was profoundly influenced by symbolist themes and tastes. His best known work, the "Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune", was inspired by Mallarmé's poem, "L'après-midi d'un faune".


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: The symbolist aesthetic also influenced Aleksandr Scriabin's compositions. Arnold Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" takes its text from German translations of the symbolist poems by Albert Giraud, showing an association between German expressionism and symbolism. Richard Strauss's 1905 opera "Salomé", based on the play by Oscar Wilde, uses a subject frequently depicted by symbolist artists.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Symbolism's style of the static and hieratic adapted less well to narrative fiction than it did to poetry. Joris-Karl Huysmans' 1884 novel "À rebours" (English title: "Against Nature" or "Against the Grain") explored many themes that became associated with the symbolist aesthetic. This novel, in which very little happens, catalogues the psychology of Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive antihero. Oscar Wilde was influenced by the novel as he wrote "Salome", and Huysman's book appears in "The Picture of Dorian Gray": the titular character becomes corrupted after reading the book.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Paul Adam was the most prolific and representative author of symbolist novels. "Les Demoiselles Goubert" (1886), co-written with Jean Moréas, is an important transitional work between naturalism and symbolism. Few symbolists used this form. One exception was Gustave Kahn, who published "Le Roi fou" in 1896. In 1892, Georges Rodenbach wrote the short novel "Bruges-la-morte", set in the Flemish town of Bruges, which Rodenbach described as a dying, medieval city of mourning and quiet contemplation: in a typically symbolist juxtaposition, the dead city contrasts with the diabolical re-awakening of sexual desire. The cynical, misanthropic, misogynistic fiction of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly is sometimes considered symbolist, as well. Gabriele d'Annunzio wrote his first novels in the symbolist manner.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: The characteristic emphasis on an internal life of dreams and fantasies have made symbolist theatre difficult to reconcile with more recent trends. Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's drama "Axël" (rev. ed. 1890) is a definitive symbolist play. In it, two Rosicrucian aristocrats become enamored of each other while trying to kill each other, only to agree to commit suicide mutually because nothing in life could equal their fantasies. From this play, Edmund Wilson adopted the title "Axel's Castle" for his influential study of the symbolist literary aftermath.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Maurice Maeterlinck, also a symbolist playwright, wrote "The Blind" (1890), "The Intruder" (1890), "Interior" (1891), "Pelléas and Mélisande" (1892), and "The Blue Bird" (1908).


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Eugénio de Castro is considered one of the introducers of Symbolism in the Iberian Peninsula. He wrote "Belkiss", "dramatic prose-poem" as he called it, about the doomed passion of Belkiss, The Queen of Sheba, to Solomon, depicting in an avant-garde and violent style the psychological tension and recreating very accurately the tenth century BC Israel. He also wrote "King Galaor" and "Polycrates' Ring", being one of the most prolific Symbolist theoriticians.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Lugné-Poe (1869–1940) was an actor, director, and theatre producer of the late nineteenth century. Lugné-Poe "sought to create a unified nonrealistic theatre of poetry and dreams through atmospheric staging and stylized acting". Upon learning about symbolist theatre, he never wanted to practice any other form. After beginning as an actor in the Théâtre Libre and Théâtre d'Art, Lugné-Poe grasped on to the symbolist movement and founded the Théâtre de l'Œuvre where he was manager from 1892 until 1929. Some of his greatest successes include opening his own symbolist theatre, producing the first staging of Alfred Jarry's "Ubu Roi" (1896), and introducing French theatregoers to playwrights such as Ibsen and Strindberg.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: The later works of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov have been identified by essayist Paul Schmidt as being much influenced by symbolist pessimism. Both Konstantin Stanislavski and Vsevolod Meyerhold experimented with symbolist modes of staging in their theatrical endeavors.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Drama by symbolist authors formed an important part of the repertoire of the "Théâtre de l'Œuvre" and the "Théâtre d'Art".


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Among English-speaking artists, the closest counterpart to symbolism was aestheticism. The Pre-Raphaelites were contemporaries of the earlier symbolists, and have much in common with them. Symbolism had a significant influence on modernism (Remy de Gourmont considered the Imagists were its descendants) and its traces can also be detected in the work of many modernist poets, including T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Conrad Aiken, Hart Crane, and W. B. Yeats in the anglophone tradition and Rubén Darío in Hispanic literature. The early poems of Guillaume Apollinaire have strong affinities with symbolism. Early Portuguese Modernism was heavily influenced by Symbolist poets, especially Camilo Pessanha; Fernando Pessoa had many affinities to Symbolism, such as mysticism, musical versification, subjectivism and transcendentalism.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Edmund Wilson's 1931 study "Axel's Castle" focuses on the continuity with symbolism and several important writers of the early twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on Yeats, Eliot, Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Wilson concluded that the symbolists represented a dreaming retreat into


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: things that are dying–the whole belle-lettristic tradition of Renaissance culture perhaps, compelled to specialize more and more, more and more driven in on itself, as industrialism and democratic education have come to press it closer and closer."


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: After the beginning of the 20th century, symbolism had a major effect on Russian poetry even as it became less popular in France. Russian symbolism, steeped in the doctrines of Eastern Orthodoxy and the spiritual ideas of Vladimir Solovyov, had little in common with the French style of the same name. It began the careers of several major poets such as Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Bely's novel "Petersburg" (1912) is considered the greatest example of Russian symbolist prose.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Primary influences on the style of Russian Symbolism were the irrationalistic and mystical poetry and philosophy of Fyodor Tyutchev and Solovyov, the novels of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the operas of Richard Wagner, the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, French symbolist and decadent poets (such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire), and the dramas of Henrik Ibsen.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: The style was largely inaugurated by Nikolai Minsky's article "The Ancient Debate" (1884) and Dmitry Merezhkovsky's book "On the Causes of the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature" (1892). Both writers promoted extreme individualism and the act of creation. Merezhkovsky was known for his poetry as well as a series of novels on "god-men", among whom he counted Christ, Joan of Arc, Dante, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, and (later) Hitler. His wife, Zinaida Gippius, also a major poet of early symbolism, opened a salon in St Petersburg, which came to be known as the "headquarters of Russian decadence". Andrei Bely's Petersburg (novel) a portrait of the social strata of the Russian capital, is frequently cited as a late example of Symbolism in 20th century Russian literature.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: In Romania, symbolists directly influenced by French poetry first gained influence during the 1880s, when Alexandru Macedonski reunited a group of young poets associated with his magazine "Literatorul". Polemicizing with the established "Junimea" and overshadowed by the influence of Mihai Eminescu, Romanian symbolism was recovered as an inspiration during and after the 1910s, when it was exampled by the works of Tudor Arghezi, Ion Minulescu, George Bacovia, Mateiu Caragiale, Tristan Tzara and Tudor Vianu, and praised by the modernist magazine "Sburătorul".


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: The symbolist painters were an important influence on expressionism and surrealism in painting, two movements which descend directly from symbolism proper. The harlequins, paupers, and clowns of Pablo Picasso's "Blue Period" show the influence of symbolism, and especially of Puvis de Chavannes. In Belgium, symbolism became so popular that it came to be known as a national style, particularly in landscape painting: the static strangeness of painters like René Magritte can be considered as a direct continuation of symbolism. The work of some symbolist visual artists, such as Jan Toorop, directly affected the curvilinear forms of art nouveau.


title: Symbolism (arts)

text: Many early motion pictures also employ symbolist visual imagery and themes in their staging, set designs, and imagery. The films of German expressionism owe a great deal to symbolist imagery. The virginal "good girls" seen in the cinema of D. W. Griffith, and the silent film "bad girls" portrayed by Theda Bara, both show the continuing influence of symbolism, as do the Babylonian scenes from Griffith's "Intolerance". Symbolist imagery lived on longest in horror film: as late as 1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer's "Vampyr" showed the obvious influence of symbolist imagery; parts of the film resemble "tableau vivant" re-creations of the early paintings of Edvard Munch.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Acts of Union () were two Acts of Parliament: the Union with Scotland Act 1706 passed by the Parliament of England, and the Union with England Act 1707 passed by the Parliament of Scotland. They put into effect the terms of the Treaty of Union that had been agreed on 22 July 1706, following negotiation between commissioners representing the parliaments of the two countries. By the two Acts, the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotlandwhich at the time were separate states with separate legislatures, but with the same monarchwere, in the words of the Treaty, "United into One Kingdom by the Name of Great Britain".


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The two countries had shared a monarch since the Union of the Crowns in 1603, when King James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne from his double first cousin twice removed, Queen Elizabeth I. Although described as a Union of Crowns, and in spite of James's acknowledgement of his accession to a single Crown, England and Scotland were officially separate Kingdoms until 1707 (as opposed to the implied creation of a single unified Kingdom, exemplified by the later Kingdom of Great Britain). Prior to the Acts of Union there had been three previous attempts (in 1606, 1667, and 1689) to unite the two countries by Acts of Parliament, but it was not until the early 18th century that both political establishments came to support the idea, albeit for different reasons.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Acts took effect on 1 May 1707. On this date, the Scottish Parliament and the English Parliament united to form the Parliament of Great Britain, based in the Palace of Westminster in London, the home of the English Parliament. Hence, the Acts are referred to as the Union of the Parliaments.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Prior to 1603, England and Scotland had different monarchs; as Elizabeth I never married, after 1567, her heir-presumptive became the Stuart king of Scotland, James VI, who was brought up as a Protestant. After her death, the two Crowns were held in personal union by James, as James I of England, and James VI of Scotland. He announced his intention to unite the two, using the royal prerogative to take the title "King of Great Britain", and give a British character to his court and person.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The 1603 Union of England and Scotland Act established a joint Commission to agree terms, but the English Parliament was concerned this would lead to the imposition of an absolutist structure similar to that of Scotland. James was forced to withdraw his proposals, and attempts to revive it in 1610 were met with hostility.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Instead, he set about creating a unified Church of Scotland and England, as the first step towards a centralised, Unionist state. However, despite both being nominally Episcopal in structure, the two were very different in doctrine; the Church of Scotland, or kirk, was Calvinist in doctrine, and viewed many Church of England practices as little better than Catholicism. As a result, attempts to impose religious policy by James and his son Charles I ultimately led to the 1639–1651 Wars of the Three Kingdoms.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The 1639–1640 Bishops' Wars confirmed the primacy of the kirk, and established a Covenanter government in Scotland. The Scots remained neutral when the First English Civil War began in 1642, before becoming concerned at the impact on Scotland of a Royalist victory. Presbyterian leaders like Argyll viewed union as a way to ensure free trade between England and Scotland, and preserve a Presbyterian kirk.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Under the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant, the Covenanters agreed to provide military support for the English Parliament, in return for religious union. Although the treaty referred repeatedly to 'union' between England, Scotland, and Ireland, political union had little support outside the Kirk Party. Even religious union was opposed by the Episcopalian majority in the Church of England, and Independents like Oliver Cromwell, who dominated the New Model Army.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Scots and English Presbyterians were political conservatives, who increasingly viewed the Independents, and associated radical groups like the Levellers, as a bigger threat than the Royalists. Both Royalists and Presbyterians agreed monarchy was divinely ordered, but disagreed on the nature and extent of Royal authority over the church. When Charles I surrendered in 1646, they allied with their former enemies to restore him to the English throne.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: After defeat in the 1647–1648 Second English Civil War, Scotland was occupied by English troops which were withdrawn once the so-called Engagers whom Cromwell held responsible for the war had been replaced by the Kirk Party. In December 1648, Pride's Purge confirmed Cromwell's political control in England by removing Presbyterian MPs from Parliament, and executing Charles in January 1649. Seeing this as sacrilege, the Kirk Party proclaimed Charles II King of Scotland and Great Britain, and agreed to restore him to the English throne.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Defeat in the 1649–1651 Third English Civil War or Anglo-Scottish War resulted in Scotland's incorporation into the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, largely driven by Cromwell's determination to break the power of the kirk, which he held responsible for the Anglo-Scottish War. The 1652 Tender of Union was followed on 12 April 1654 by "An Ordinance by the Protector for the Union of England and Scotland," creating the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. It was ratified by the Second Protectorate Parliament on 26 June 1657, creating a single Parliament in Westminster, with 30 representatives each from Scotland and Ireland added to the existing English members.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: While integration into the Commonwealth established free trade between Scotland and England, the economic benefits were diminished by the costs of military occupation. Both Scotland and England associated union with heavy taxes and military rule; it had little popular support in either country, and was dissolved after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Scottish economy was badly damaged by the English Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663 and England's wars with the Dutch Republic, Scotland's major export market. An Anglo-Scots Trade Commission was set up in January 1668 but the English had no interest in making concessions, as the Scots had little to offer in return. In 1669, Charles II revived talks on political union; his motives were to weaken Scotland's commercial and political links with the Dutch, still seen as an enemy and complete the work of his grandfather James I. Continued opposition meant these negotiations were abandoned by the end of 1669.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a Scottish Convention met in Edinburgh in April 1689 to agree a new constitutional settlement; during which the Scottish Bishops backed a proposed union in an attempt to preserve Episcopalian control of the kirk. William and Mary were supportive of the idea but it was opposed both by the Presbyterian majority in Scotland and the English Parliament. Episcopacy in Scotland was abolished in 1690, alienating a significant part of the political class; it was this element that later formed the bedrock of opposition to Union.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The 1690s were a time of economic hardship in Europe as a whole and Scotland in particular, a period now known as the Seven ill years which led to strained relations with England. In 1698, the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies received a charter to raise capital through public subscription. The Company invested in the Darién scheme, an ambitious plan funded almost entirely by Scottish investors to build a colony on the Isthmus of Panama for trade with East Asia. The scheme was a disaster; the losses of over £150,000 severely impacted the Scottish commercial system.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Acts of Union may be seen within a wider European context of increasing state centralisation during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, including the monarchies of France, Sweden, Denmark and Spain. While there were exceptions, such as the Dutch Republic or the Republic of Venice, the trend was clear.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The dangers of the monarch using one Parliament against the other first became apparent in 1647 and 1651. It resurfaced during the 1679 to 1681 Exclusion Crisis, caused by English resistance to the Catholic James II (of England, VII of Scotland) succeeding his brother Charles. James was sent to Edinburgh in 1681 as Lord High Commissioner; in August, the Scottish Parliament passed the Succession Act, confirming the divine right of kings, the rights of the natural heir "regardless of religion", the duty of all to swear allegiance to that king, and the independence of the Scottish Crown. It then went beyond ensuring James's succession to the Scottish throne by explicitly stating the aim was to make his exclusion from the English throne impossible without "the fatall and dreadfull consequences of a civil war".


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The issue reappeared during the 1688 Glorious Revolution. The English Parliament generally supported replacing James with his Protestant daughter Mary, but resisted making her Dutch husband William of Orange joint ruler. They gave way only when he threatened to return to the Netherlands, and Mary refused to rule without him.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: In Scotland, conflict over control of the kirk between Presbyterians and Episcopalians and William's position as a fellow Calvinist put him in a much stronger position. He originally insisted on retaining Episcopacy, and the Committee of the Articles, an unelected body that controlled what legislation Parliament could debate. Both would have given the Crown far greater control than in England but he withdrew his demands due to the 1689–1692 Jacobite Rising.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The English succession was provided for by the English Act of Settlement 1701, which ensured that the monarch of England would be a Protestant member of the House of Hanover. Until the Union of Parliaments, the Scottish throne might be inherited by a different successor after Queen Anne, who had said in her first speech to the English parliament that a Union was "very necessary". The Scottish Act of Security 1704, however, was passed after the English parliament, without consultation with Scotland, had designated Electoress Sophia of Hanover (granddaughter of James I and VI) as Anne's successor, if Anne died childless. The Act of Security granted the Parliament of Scotland, the three Estates, the right to choose a successor and explicitly required a choice different from the English monarch unless the English were to grant free trade and navigation. Next the Alien Act 1705 was passed in the English parliament designating Scots in England as "foreign nationals" and blocking about half of all Scottish trade by boycotting exports to England or its colonies, unless Scotland came back to negotiate a Union. To encourage a Union, "honours, appointments, pensions and even arrears of pay and other expenses were distributed to clinch support from Scottish peers and MPs".


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Scottish economy was severely impacted by privateers during the 1688–1697 Nine Years' War and the 1701 War of the Spanish Succession, with the Royal Navy focusing on protecting English ships. This compounded the economic pressure caused by the Darien scheme, and the seven ill years of the 1690s, when 5–15% of the population died of starvation. The Scottish Parliament was promised financial assistance, protection for its maritime trade, and an end to economic restrictions on trade with England.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The votes of the Court party, influenced by Queen Anne's favourite, the Duke of Queensberry, combined with the majority of the Squadrone Volante, were sufficient to ensure passage of the treaty. Article 15 granted £398,085 and ten shillings sterling to Scotland, a sum known as The Equivalent, to offset future liability towards the English national debt, which at the time was £18 million, but as Scotland had no national debt, most of the sum was used to compensate the investors in the Darien scheme, with 58.6% of the fund allocated to its shareholders and creditors.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The role played by bribery has long been debated; £20,000 was distributed by the Earl of Glasgow, of which 60% went to James Douglas, 2nd Duke of Queensberry, the Queen's Commissioner in Parliament. Another negotiator, Argyll was given an English peerage. Robert Burns is commonly quoted in support of the argument of corruption: "We're bought and sold for English Gold, Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation." As historian Christopher Whatley points out, this was actually a 17th-century Scots folk song; but he agrees money was paid, though suggests the economic benefits were supported by most Scots MPs, with the promises made for benefits to peers and MPs, even if it was reluctantly. Professor Sir Tom Devine agreed that promises of "favours, sinecures, pensions, offices and straightforward cash bribes became indispensable to secure government majorities". As for representation going forwards, Scotland was, in the new united parliament, only to get 45 MPs, one more than Cornwall, and only 16 (unelected) peers in the House of Lords.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Sir George Lockhart of Carnwath, the only Scottish negotiator to oppose Union, noted "the whole nation appears against (it)". Another negotiator, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, who was an ardent Unionist, observed it was "contrary to the inclinations of at least three-fourths of the Kingdom". As the seat of the Scottish Parliament, demonstrators in Edinburgh feared the impact of its loss on the local economy. Elsewhere, there was widespread concern about the independence of the kirk, and possible tax rises.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: As the Treaty passed through the Scottish Parliament, opposition was voiced by petitions from shires, burghs, presbyteries and parishes. The Convention of Royal Burghs claimed


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Not one petition in favour of Union was received by Parliament. On the day the treaty was signed, the carillonneur in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, rang the bells in the tune "Why should I be so sad on my wedding day?" Threats of widespread civil unrest resulted in Parliament imposing martial law.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Union was carried by members of the Scottish elite against the wishes of the great majority. The Scottish population was overwhelmingly against the union with England, and virtually all of the print discourses of 1699-1706 spoke against incorporating union, creating the conditions for wide spread rejection of the treaty in 1706 and 1707. Country party tracts condemned English influence within the existing framework of the Union of the Crowns and asserted the need to renegotiate this union. During this period, the Darien failure, the succession issue and the Worcester seizure all provided opportunities for Scottish writers to attack the Court Party as unpatriotic and reaffirm the need to fight for true interests of Scotland. According to Scottish historian William Ferguson, the Acts of Union were a 'political job' by England that was achieved by economic incentives, patronage and bribery to secure the passage of the Union treaty in the Scottish Parliament in order satisfy English political imperatives, with the union being unacceptable to the Scottish people including both the Jacobites and Covenanters. The differences between Scottish were "subsumed by the same sort of patriotism or nationalism that first appeared in the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320." Ferguson provides the well-timed payments of salary arrears to members of Parliament as proof of bribery and argues that the Scottish people had been betrayed by their Parliament.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Ireland, though a kingdom under the same crown, was not included in the union. It remained a separate kingdom, unrepresented in Parliament, and was legally subordinate to Great Britain until the Renunciation Act of 1783.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: In July 1707 each House of the Parliament of Ireland passed a congratulatory address to Queen Anne, praying that "May God put it in your royal heart to add greater strength and lustre to your crown, by a still more comprehensive Union". The British government did not respond to the invitation and an equal union between Great Britain and Ireland was out of consideration until the 1790s. The union with Ireland finally came about on 1 January 1801.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Deeper political integration had been a key policy of Queen Anne from the time she acceded to the throne in 1702. Under the aegis of the Queen and her ministers in both kingdoms, the parliaments of England and Scotland agreed to participate in fresh negotiations for a union treaty in 1705.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Both countries appointed 31 commissioners to conduct the negotiations. Most of the Scottish commissioners favoured union, and about half were government ministers and other officials. At the head of the list was Queensberry, and the Lord Chancellor of Scotland, the Earl of Seafield. The English commissioners included the Lord High Treasurer, the Earl of Godolphin, the Lord Keeper, Baron Cowper, and a large number of Whigs who supported union. Tories were not in favour of union and only one was represented among the commissioners.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Negotiations between the English and Scottish commissioners took place between 16 April and 22 July 1706 at the Cockpit in London. Each side had its own particular concerns. Within a few days, and with only one face to face meeting of all 62 commissioners, England had gained a guarantee that the Hanoverian dynasty would succeed Queen Anne to the Scottish crown, and Scotland received a guarantee of access to colonial markets, in the hope that they would be placed on an equal footing in terms of trade.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: After negotiations ended in July 1706, the acts had to be ratified by both Parliaments. In Scotland, about 100 of the 227 members of the Parliament of Scotland were supportive of the Court Party. For extra votes the pro-court side could rely on about 25 members of the Squadrone Volante, led by the Marquess of Montrose and the Duke of Roxburghe. Opponents of the court were generally known as the Country party, and included various factions and individuals such as the Duke of Hamilton, Lord Belhaven and Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, who spoke forcefully and passionately against the union, when the Scottish Parliament began its debate on the act on 3 October 1706, but the deal had already been done. The Court party enjoyed significant funding from England and the Treasury and included many who had accumulated debts following the Darien Disaster.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Act ratifying the Treaty of Union was finally carried in the Parliament of Scotland by 110 votes to 69 on 16 January 1707, with a number of key amendments. News of the ratification and of the amendments was received in Westminster, where the Act was passed quickly through both Houses and received the royal assent on 6 March. Though the English Act was later in date, it bore the year '1706' while Scotland's was '1707', as the legal year in England began only on 25 March.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: In Scotland, the Duke of Queensberry was largely responsible for the successful passage of the Union act by the Parliament of Scotland. In Scotland, he also received much criticism from local residents, but in England he was cheered for his action. He had personally received around half of the funding awarded by the Westminster Treasury for himself. In April 1707, he travelled to London to attend celebrations at the royal court, and was greeted by groups of noblemen and gentry lined along the road. From Barnet, the route was lined with crowds of cheering people, and once he reached London a huge crowd had formed. On 17 April, the Duke was gratefully received by the Queen at Kensington Palace.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Treaty of Union, agreed between representatives of the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland in 1706, consisted of 25 articles, 15 of which were economic in nature. In Scotland, each article was voted on separately and several clauses in articles were delegated to specialised subcommittees. Article 1 of the treaty was based on the political principle of an incorporating union and this was secured by a majority of 116 votes to 83 on 4 November 1706. To minimise the opposition of the Church of Scotland, an Act was also passed to secure the Presbyterian establishment of the Church, after which the Church stopped its open opposition, although hostility remained at lower levels of the clergy. The treaty as a whole was finally ratified on 16 January 1707 by a majority of 110 votes to 69.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The two Acts incorporated provisions for Scotland to send representative peers from the Peerage of Scotland to sit in the House of Lords. It guaranteed that the Church of Scotland would remain the established church in Scotland, that the Court of Session would "remain in all time coming within Scotland", and that Scots law would "remain in the same force as before". Other provisions included the restatement of the Act of Settlement 1701 and the ban on Roman Catholics from taking the throne. It also created a customs union and monetary union.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Act provided that any "laws and statutes" that were "contrary to or inconsistent with the terms" of the Act would "cease and become void".


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Scottish Parliament also passed the Protestant Religion and Presbyterian Church Act 1707 guaranteeing the status of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. The English Parliament passed a similar Act, 6 Anne c.8.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Soon after the Union, the Act 6 Anne c.40later named the Union with Scotland (Amendment) Act 1707united the English and Scottish Privy Councils and decentralised Scottish administration by appointing justices of the peace in each shire to carry out administration. In effect it took the day-to-day government of Scotland out of the hands of politicians and into those of the College of Justice.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: On 18 December 1707 the Act for better Securing the Duties of East India Goods was passed which extended the monopoly of the East India Company to Scotland.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: In the year following the Union, the Treason Act 1708 abolished the Scottish law of and extended the corresponding English law across Great Britain.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Scotland benefited, says historian G.N. Clark, gaining "freedom of trade with England and the colonies" as well as "a great expansion of markets". The agreement guaranteed the permanent status of the Presbyterian church in Scotland, and the separate system of laws and courts in Scotland. Clark argued that in exchange for the financial benefits and bribes that England bestowed, what it gained was


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: of inestimable value. Scotland accepted the Hanoverian succession and gave up her power of threatening England's military security and complicating her commercial relations ... The sweeping successes of the eighteenth-century wars owed much to the new unity of the two nations.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: By the time Samuel Johnson and James Boswell made their tour in 1773, recorded in "A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland", Johnson noted that Scotland was "a nation of which the commerce is hourly extending, and the wealth increasing" and in particular that Glasgow had become one of the greatest cities of Britain.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: Scottish historian Christopher Smout notes that prior to the Union of the Crowns, the Scottish economy had been flourishing completely independently of the English one, with little to no interaction between each other. Developing a closer economic partnership with England was unsustainable, and Scotland's main trade partner was continental Europe, especially the Netherlands, where Scotland could trade its wool and fish for luxurious imports such as iron, spices or wine. Scotland and England were generally hostile to each other and were often at war, and the alliance with France gave Scotland privileges that further encouraged developing cultural and economic ties with the continent rather than England. The union of 1603 only served the political and dynastic ambitions of King James and was detrimental to Scotland economically – exports that Scotland offered were largely irrelevant to English economy, and while the Privy Council of Scotland did keep its ability to manage internal economic policy, the foreign policy of Scotland was not in hands of England. This limited Scotland's hitherto expansive trade with continental Europe, and forced it into English wars.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: While the Scottish economy already suffered because of English wars with France and Spain in 1620s, the civil wars in England had a particularly disastrous effect on Scotland and left it relatively impoverished as a result. The economy would slowly recover after that, but it came at the cost of being increasingly dependent on trade with England. A power struggle developed between Scotland and England in 1680s, as Scotland recovered from the political turmoil and set on its own economic ambitions, which London considered a threat to its dominant and well-established position. English wars with continental powers undermined Scottish trade with France and the Netherlands, countries that used to be the Scotland's main trade partners before the union, and the English Navigation Acts severely limited Scottish ability to trade by sea, and made the Scottish ambitions to expand the trade beyond Europe unachievable. Opinion in Scotland at the time was that England was sabotaging Scottish economic expansion.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The frustration caused by economic and political rivalry with England led to the Darien scheme - an unsuccessful to establish a Scottish colony in the Gulf of Darién. Christopher Smout argues that the scheme was successfully sabotaged by England in various ways - it was seen as a threat to the privileged position of the East India Company, and as such England did everything to ensure the plan's failure via political and diplomatic overtures to prevent the Netherlands and Hamburg from investing into the scheme while also refusing to assist the settlers in any way. Following the disastrous failure of the scheme, Scottish economy seemed to be on the brink of collapse, but ultimately Scotland was able to recover from it fairly quickly.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: By 1703, Scottish government was highly disillusioned and unsatisfied with the union, and many believed that the only way to let Scottish economy flourish was to separate from England. Fletcher of Saltoun called Scotland 'totally neglected, like a farm managed by servants not under the eye of the master', and the failure of the Darien Scheme was commonly attributed to English sabotage. Scottish parliament would try to establish its autonomy from England with 1704 Act of Security, which provoked a retaliation from England - Scottish ministers were bribed, and Alien Act 1705 was passed. According to the Alien Act, unless Scotland appointed commissioners to negotiate for union by Christmas, every Scot in England would be treated as an alien, leading to the confiscation of their English estates. Additionally, Scottish wares were to be banned from England. Christopher Smout notes that England desired to expand its influence by annexing Scotland:


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The act sparked vehement anti-English sentiment in Scotland, and made the already hostile Scottish public even more opposed to England:


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Scottish economy was now facing a crisis, and the parliament was polarised into a pro-union and anti-union factions, with the former led by Daniel Defoe. The unionists stressed how important trade with England is to the Scottish economy, and portrayed trade with continental Europe as not beneficial, or nowhere as profitable as trading with England. They argued that the Scottish economy could survive by trading with England, and sanctions that would result from the Alien Act would collapse the economy. For Defoe, joining the union would not only prevent the Alien Act, but would also remove additional limitations and regulations, which could lead Scotland to prosperity. Anti-unionists questioned the English goodwill and criticised the unionist faction for submitting to the English blackmail. They argued that Scotland could make a recovery by trading with the Netherlands, Spain and Norway, with the diverse European markets allowing Scotland to diversify its own industries as well. They noted that the union would make Scotland unable to conduct independent trade policy, meaning that any possibility to remove the flaws in Scottish economy would be gone forever, which would turn Scotland into a "mere satellite of the richer kingdom". Ultimately, Scottish ministers voted in favour of the union, which was against the public opinion, as the Scottish population at the time was overwhelmingly against any union with England. Many considered themselves betrayed by their own elite, and Smout argues that the union bill was only able to pass thanks to the English bribery.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: A commemorative two-pound coin was issued to mark the tercentennial—300th anniversary—of the Union, which occurred two days before the Scottish Parliament general election on 3 May 2007.


title: Acts of Union 1707

text: The Scottish Government held a number of commemorative events through the year including an education project led by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, an exhibition of Union-related objects and documents at the National Museums of Scotland and an exhibition of portraits of people associated with the Union at the National Galleries of Scotland.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: Monsters vs. Aliens is a 2009 American 3D computer-animated monster comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The film was directed by Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman from a screenplay written by Letterman, Maya Forbes, Wallace Wolodarsky, and the writing team of Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger. It stars the voices of Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen, Hugh Laurie, Will Arnett, Kiefer Sutherland, Rainn Wilson, Paul Rudd, and Stephen Colbert. The film involves a group of misfit monsters hired by the United States Armed Forces to stop the invasion of an extraterrestrial villain and save the world in exchange for freedom.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: It was DreamWorks Animation's first feature film to be directly produced in a stereoscopic 3-D format instead of being converted into 3-D after completion, which added $15 million to the film's budget.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: "Monsters vs. Aliens" was released on March 27, 2009 in the United States in 2-D, RealD 3D, IMAX 3D, and 4DX. The film received generally positive reviews from critics and grossed $381 million worldwide on a $175 million budget. Although not successful enough to be followed by a sequel, the film started a franchise consisting of a short film, "B.O.B.'s Big Break", two television specials, "" and "Night of the Living Carrots", and a television series premiered in 2013 on Nickelodeon.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: In Modesto, California, Susan Murphy is going to be married to weatherman Derek Dietl. Just before the ceremony, a meteorite from a destroyed planet strikes her and its radiation is absorbed into her body. Though she appears unharmed at first, during the ceremony, the energy causes Susan's hair to turn white, and turn her into a 50 foot-tall giantess, destroying Modesto's Church in the process. Soon, a U.S. military detachment tranquilizes and captures her. Susan awakens in a top-secret government facility that houses monsters. She meets General W.R. Monger, the Army officer in charge of the facility and her fellow monster inmates: Dr. Cockroach Ph.D., a scientist who became half-human, half-cockroach after an experiment gone wrong; B.O.B. (Benzoate Ostylezene Bicarbonate), a brainless and living indestructible mass of blue goo that is a result of a food flavoring mutation; Insectosaurus, a massive bug mutated by nuclear radiation standing 350 feet in height that attacked Tokyo; and the Missing Link, a prehistoric 20,000-year-old macho fish-ape hybrid who was thawed from deep ice by scientists. Susan is renamed “Ginormica" by the government and is forbidden any contact with her friends and family.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: Meanwhile, on a mysterious spaceship, a squid-like extraterrestrial overlord named Gallaxhar is alerted to the presence of a powerful substance known as "quantonium", and sends a gigantic robotic probe to retrieve it. The probe lands on Earth, where the President of the United States attempts to make first contact by playing it "Axel F", but the probe goes on a destructive attack, heading straight for San Francisco, despite unsuccessful attempts by the U.S. Armed Forces to destroy it. Monger convinces the President to grant the monsters their freedom if they can stop the probe. In San Francisco, the robot detects the quantonium within Ginormica's body and targets her. At the Golden Gate Bridge, the monsters manage to destroy the giant robot by using parts of the bridge itself.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: Gallaxhar sets a course for Earth to obtain the quantonium himself while the now-free Ginormica returns home with her new friends and reunites with her family. However, her companions alienate themselves from Ginormica's family due to their inexperience with the real world, while Derek breaks off his engagement with Ginormica by claiming that he cannot marry someone who would overshadow him and his career. Initially heartbroken, Ginormica finally realizes that her life was even better as a monster and she promises the other monsters to never underestimate herself again. Suddenly, Ginormica is pulled into Gallaxhar's ship by a tractor beam. Insectosaurus tries to save her, but is shot down by the ship and seemingly killed.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: Onboard the ship, Ginormica furiously breaks free from her prison cell and chases down Gallaxhar, only to be trapped by a machine that extracts the quantonium from her body, shrinking her back to her original size. Gallaxhar then uses the extracted quantonium to create clones of himself in order to launch a full-scale invasion of Earth. Monger manages to get the other monsters on board the ship, where they rescue Ginormica and make their way to the main power core where Dr. Cockroach sets the ship to self-destruct to prevent the invasion. Ginormica personally confronts Gallaxhar on the bridge. With time running out, she sends the ball of stored quantonium down on herself, restoring her monstrous size and strength. After rescuing her friends, they flee the ship and are rescued by Monger and Insectosaurus, who has metamorphosed into a giant butterfly. The ship then self-destructs, killing Gallaxhar and his army.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: Returning to Modesto, Ginormica, B.O.B, Dr. Cockroach, the Missing Link, and Insectosaurus receive a hero's welcome. Hoping to take advantage of Ginormica’s fame for his own career, Derek tries to get back together with her and gain an interview, but she rejects and humiliates him live on camera. Monger then arrives to inform the monsters that a new monstrous snail called "Escargantua" is slowly making its way to Paris, France after it fell into a French nuclear reactor, resulting in the heroes taking off to confront the new menace.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: The film started as an adaptation of a horror comic book, "Rex Havoc", in which a monster hunter Rex and his team of experts called "Ass-Kickers of the Fantastic" fight against ghouls, ghosts and other creatures. The earliest development goes back to 2002, when DreamWorks first filed for a "Rex Havoc" trademark. In a plot synopsis revealed in 2005, Rex was to assemble a team of monsters, including Ick!, Dr. Cockroach, the 50,000 Pound Woman and Insectosaurus, to fight aliens for disrupting cable TV service. In the following years, the film's story diverged away from the original "Rex Havoc", with directors Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman finally creating the storyline from scratch.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: Production designer David James stated that the film is "a return to what made us nerds in the first place," getting classic movie monsters and relaunching them in a contemporary setting. Director Conrad Vernon added that he found it would be a great idea to take hideous monsters and giving them personalities and satirizing the archetypes. Each of the five monsters has traits traceable to sci-fi/horror B movies from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, although none is a mere copy of an older character. Susan, who grows to be 49 feet 11 inches tall into Ginormica, was inspired by "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman". Dr. Cockroach represents "The Fly" and "The Curse of Frankenstein", while B.O.B. is an amalgam of slithering and slimy characters that were featured in the films, including "The Blob" and "The Crawling Eye". Insectosaurus, a 350-foot-tall monster, is a nod to the 1961 Kaiju film "Mothra". According to Vernon, the Missing Link has no direct inspiration. He "just represents anything prehistoric that comes back to life and terrorizes people." For the San Francisco sequence, the producers researched many films and photographs for an accurate depiction of the city, and filmed animator Line Andersen, who had a similar body type to Ginormica—tall, thin, and athletic-looking—walking alongside a scale model of San Francisco, to capture better how a person not comfortable with being too big with an environment would walk around it.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: Ed Leonard, CTO of DreamWorks Animation, says it took approximately 45.6 million computing hours to make "Monsters vs. Aliens", more than eight times as many as the original "Shrek". Several hundred Hewlett-Packard xw8600 workstations were used, along with a 'render farm' of HP ProLiant blade servers with over 9,000 server processor cores, to process the animation sequence. Animators used 120 terabytes of data to complete the film. They used 6 TB for an explosion scene.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: Starting with "Monsters vs. Aliens", all feature films released by DreamWorks Animation were produced in a stereoscopic 3D format, using Intel's InTru3D technology. 2D, RealD 3D, IMAX 3D, and 4DX versions were released.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: To promote the 3D technology that is used in "Monsters vs. Aliens", DreamWorks ran a 3D trailer before halftime in the U.S. broadcast of Super Bowl XLIII on February 1, 2009. Due to the limitations of television technology at the time, ColorCode 3-D glasses were distributed at SoBe stands at major national grocers. The Monsters, except Ginormica and Insectosaurus, also appeared in a 3D SoBe commercial airing after the trailer. Bank of America gave away vouchers that covered the cost of an upgrade to a 3D theatrical viewing of the film for its customers.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: "Monsters vs. Aliens" was released to DVD and Blu-ray in the United States and Canada on September 29, 2009 and on October 26, 2009, in the United Kingdom. The home release for both the DVD and Blu-ray format only contain the 2D version of the movie. However, the release is packaged with a new short, "B.O.B.'s Big Break", which is the more traditional 3D that required green and magenta glasses. Also included are four pairs of 3D glasses. On January 6, 2010, it was announced that a 3D version would be released on Blu-ray. On February 24, a tentative March release date was set for the United Kingdom, where anyone who buys a Samsung 3D TV or 3D Blu-ray player will get a copy. On March 8, it was reported that the 3D Blu-ray would be released in the United States, also with Samsung 3D products, on March 21. As of February 2011, 9.0 million home entertainment units were sold worldwide. In July 2014, the film's distribution rights were purchased by DreamWorks Animation from Paramount Pictures and transferred to 20th Century Fox; the rights are now owned by Universal Pictures.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: On its opening weekend, the film opened at number 1, grossing $59.3 million in 4,104 theaters. Of that total, the film grossed an estimated $5.2 million in IMAX 3D theatres, becoming the fifth-highest-grossing IMAX 3D debut, behind "Star Trek", "", "The Dark Knight", and "Watchmen". The film grossed $198.4 million in the United States and Canada, making it the second-highest-grossing animated movie of the year in these regions behind "Up". Worldwide, it is the third highest-grossing animated film of 2009 with a total of $381.5 million behind "Up" and "". It was the highest-grossing film worldwide in Witherspoon's career until "Sing" overtook it in 2017.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: Based on reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, "Monsters vs. Aliens" has an overall approval rating from critics of and an average score of . The critical consensus reads: "Though it doesn't approach the depth of the best animated films, "Monsters vs. Aliens" has enough humor and special effects to entertain moviegoers of all ages." On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating from mainstream critics, the film has received a score of 56 out of 100 based on 35 reviews, which indicates "mixed reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an A- grade, on an A+ to F scale.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave the film two and a half stars out of four, writing, "I suppose kids will like this movie", though he "didn't find [it] rich with humor". Peter Travers of "Rolling Stone" gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that ""WALL-E" had more charm, more soul, more everything. But there's enough merry mischief here to satisfy, even if you're way past puberty."


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: In 2009, the film was nominated for four Annie Awards, including "Voice Acting in a Feature Production" for Hugh Laurie. Reese Witherspoon and Seth Rogen were both nominated for best voice actor and actress at the 2010 Kids' Choice Awards for voicing Ginormica and B.O.B, but lost to Jim Carrey for "Disney's A Christmas Carol". "Monsters vs. Aliens" was also nominated for Best Animated film but lost to "Pixar"'s "Up". On June 24, 2009, the film won the Saturn Award for Best Animated Film.


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: Despite its success in the United States market, DreamWorks Animation's CEO, Jeffrey Katzenberg was quoted in the "Los Angeles Times" that a sequel would not be made because of the film's weak performance in some key international markets. "There was enough of a consensus from our distribution and marketing folks in certain parts of the world that 'doing a sequel' would be pushing a boulder up a hill." After the release of "Megamind", Katzenberg commented about "Shark Tale", "Monsters vs. Aliens", and "Megamind": "All shared an approach and tone and idea of parody, and did not travel well internationally. We don't have anything like that coming on our schedule now."


title: Monsters vs. Aliens

text: Despite not being followed by a sequel, the film started a franchise with a video game, a short film titled "B.O.B.'s Big Break" and two television specials titled "" and "Night of the Living Carrots", respectively. A television series based on the film also started airing on Nickelodeon on March 23, 2013, which was cancelled after one season due to low ratings, poor reviews and the network's desire to refocus on making the more "Nickish" shows.


title: Emilie de Ravin

text: Emilie de Ravin (; born 27 December 1981) is an Australian actress. She starred as Tess Harding on "Roswell" (2000–2002), Claire Littleton on the ABC drama "Lost" (2004–2008, 2010), and as Belle on the ABC drama "Once Upon a Time" (2011–2018). De Ravin's film credits include "Santa's Slay" (2005), "The Hills Have Eyes" (2006) and "Ball Don't Lie" (2008). She starred as Emily, the heroin-addicted ex-girlfriend of Brendan Frye, in the neo-noir film "Brick" (2005). She had a cameo in "Public Enemies" (2009) and starred as Ally in "Remember Me" (2010). De Ravin has appeared on "Maxim"s 'Hot 100' list three times.


title: Emilie de Ravin

text: De Ravin was born in Mount Eliza, Victoria, Australia, an outer southeastern suburb of Melbourne. She has French ancestry. Having studied ballet since the age of nine at Christa Cameron School of Ballet in Melbourne, and being home schooled by her mother, she was accepted into the Australian Ballet School at fifteen, where she performed in productions with The Australian Ballet as well as Danceworld 301.


title: Emilie de Ravin

text: She studied acting at Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art, and with the Prime Time Actors Studio in Los Angeles.


title: Emilie de Ravin

text: De Ravin's first major role was a recurring part as Curupira in the TV series "Beastmaster". She went on to appear as alien/human hybrid Tess Harding in the teen television series, "Roswell". She landed this role one month after moving to Los Angeles at the age of 18.


title: Emilie de Ravin

text: In 2004, De Ravin was cast to portray Claire Littleton on the hit ABC drama "Lost." Speaking about the success of "Lost", she said: "It's sort of hard to say. You read something and have a good feeling about it, it sounds great, ties nicely together and then shooting something, editing it, the music, the actors involved, everything sort of plays a huge part. Everyone involved had a great feeling towards it, but you never really know." De Ravin was a series regular for the first four seasons and the sixth and final season. She was not a regular in season five but was under a holding contract with ABC Network.


title: Emilie de Ravin

text: In 2005, De Ravin was cast to portray Emily Kostich, the heroin-addicted ex-girlfriend of Brendan Frye (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), in the neo-noir film "Brick". In an interview about the film, Ravin told that she was attracted by the script because it was original and the teens in the film are very deep and emotional for their age.


title: Emilie de Ravin

text: A year later, De Ravin had a lead role and was cast as Brenda Carter in the remake of "The Hills Have Eyes". The film performed well at the box office. In 2007, "Variety" reported that she would be starring in the film "Ball Don't Lie," which premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, which arrived in cinemas early 2009. De Ravin appeared in William Dear's "The Perfect Game", and appeared in the 2009 film "Public Enemies" as a bank teller named Barbara Patzke.


title: Emilie de Ravin

text: De Ravin was cast in the movie adaption of the video game "Onimusha", but due to producer Samuel Hadida's other project "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus", and star Heath Ledger's death, Hadida was forced to push back the release date of the film. "Onimusha" is postponed for an unknown amount of time and there is not any confirmation if De Ravin will continue the project. De Ravin filmed "Remember Me" in the summer of 2009. The film received its wide release on 12 March 2010.


title: Emilie de Ravin

text: In 2012 she guest-starred as Belle on the ABC fantasy drama, "Once Upon a Time". After sporadic appearances in the first season, she was promoted to a series regular in the second. In May 2017, it was announced that De Ravin would be departing the series after six seasons along with her co-stars Ginnifer Goodwin, Josh Dallas, Jared S. Gilmore and Rebecca Mader. Two months later, it was reported that De Ravin would be guest-starring in at least one episode of the series's seventh season. That episode turned out to be the season's fourth, "Beauty". De Ravin also returned as Belle for the series finale, "Leaving Storybrooke".