COMMENTARY : Can the Circus Still Compete With TV, Movies?

Blame it on big-budget, thriller-killer movies a la “Batman” or “Indiana Jones,” or reality-based tabloid TV, with its re-created moments of death-defying accidents and murder. Or lay it to the emotion-numbing, stark reality of daily hostage headlines in every newspaper in North America.

Whatever it is, the circus just doesn’t quite provide the thrill quotient it once did, if you’re fortysomething.

The 119th edition of Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth” (a registered trademark) remains spangled and spectacular in its own way and a bargain at $8 a head. Even the worst seats at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, where America’s preeminent traveling circus is currently making its annual 11-day stand, afford a terrific view of acrobats and clowns, bosomy showgirls and dancing bears.

But how does a trapeze artist’s “legendary triple somersault” or a lion tamer’s “dazzling defiance of danger” compete with Michael Keaton’s drubbing of the Joker or Harrison Ford’s rout of the entire Third Reich? How do run-of-the-mill dwarfs and giants compete with Geraldo’s panels of hermaphrodites and hookers? And how do the hanging Arnosi Duo compete with the apparent hanging of Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins on the nightly news?

Keeping pace with the main events and the sideshows offered up on the tube or the neighborhood cineplex is a tough, losing battle at best these days, particularly in the jaded eyes of adults.

The Ringling Brothers--or, rather, the marketing, sales and development staff of the multimillion-dollar, Washington, D.C.-based corporation that the circus has become--can thank the children of the world for keeping them in business. It’s the kiddies who still drag their moms and dads to the bleachers and pump them for cotton candy money. Even though the Dumbo days of pure big-top magic 30 years ago have given way to a slick, all-too-plastic environment in less-romantic venues such as basketball arenas, the pre-puberty crowd hasn’t been turned off completely by the mass media.

Yet.

The circus remains an introductory course in mesmerizing medieval morality plays for tots. The younger the years, the wider the eyes when live lions march out of their cages and snarl at the crowd. In all three rings for 2 1/2 hours a show, the opportunities for good to overcome evil and for life to defeat death pop up nonstop before their unblinking faces. The ringmaster’s superlatives still carry currency. The parade of wrinkled, prehistoric elephants still boggles their minds.

On opening night Wednesday, two young critics offered up these observations following the first hour of high-wire walking and tiger taming:

“I liked the acrobats best because they were daring and debonair,” said 9-year-old Kimber Thompson of Lakewood.

Her 10-year-old companion, Kate Michelle of Long Beach, was partial to the Flying Lunas, who swung through the air with the greatest of ease, losing their grip from time to time but, fortunately, landing in a net two stories beneath their trapeze swings.

“They’re exciting and thrilling,” she said in clipped, self-assured tones during intermission. Moments later, they both raced off to a clown kiosk where kids can get their faces painted and their parents can have Polaroid pictures shot of them for $6 apiece.

Children believe the purple alliteration that spews from the microphone at center ring (“ . . . death-defying display while executing spectacular stunts with awesome power, precision and poise. . . .”). And children don’t scoff when an aging animal tamer with the unlikely name of Gunther Gebel-Williams is touted as “the greatest living circus legend of our time.”

Looking like an albino Moammar Kadafi, Gebel-Williams is this year’s chief calling card for the circus. This is his last year on tour with the spectacle, and the live band even plays an original composition dedicated to Gebel-Williams at the close of the show. He’s a circus man, sings the ringmaster in a voice reminiscent of Bert Parks’ paeon to Miss America.

And, indeed, the 54-year-old veteran is a circus man. Whether the hype accorded him throughout the performance is warranted, Gebel-Williams seems to have paid his dues. According to the “Gunther Gebel-Williams Farewell Tour Special Collector’s Edition” of the $5 circus program, he has spent the past 20 years getting “smashed, trampled, bitten, slashed and clawed by fighting cats. His body is covered with over 500 stitches. . . .”

Where the stitches all are is open to speculation. His well-muscled and apparently unscarred arms, chest and legs are exposed at one time or another during the cat taming and elephant parade portions of the show. As one avuncular vendor selling Gunther Gebel-Williams pennants, T-shirts, commemorative mugs, baseball caps, souvenir pens, buttons and watches said at the close of the show, “I should look so good when I’m his age.”

But Gebel-Williams is also, quite correctly, symbolic of the very reason that the circus keeps drawing the crowds of kids year after year, despite the debatable wonders of television and movies in this age of entertainment one-upsmanship.

As he tap danced on the back of an elephant during the finale, Gebel-Williams dropped his deadly serious lion tamer’s expression for a moment and grinned wide enough to be seen from Loge 25, on the far side of the Sports Arena. The kid critics, back from the clown kiosk with white pancake makeup smeared from chin to brow, and red tipping each of their noses, grinned back. Then they both stood up, as did dozens of youngsters all over the arena, and did a little dance of triumph along with Gebel-Williams.

A death-defying dance.

Without stitches.

Without scars.

Without risk.

But with all the thrills that adults have forsaken for the fantasy of the network “Circus of the Stars,” the production values of “Ghostbusters II” or the ugly reality of the evening news.

Death-defying stunts and mind-blowing gymnastics may be better, cheaper and more accessible on the tube or at the local theater, but in the end they don’t match the aura of the circus, up close and personal . . . especially if you’re 10 years old.