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<B>Winners of the inaugural NBL Masters tournament with a 5-1-1 record</B> By “mummy movies” I include not only those films that have a living (or, rather, undead) mummy stalking about but that entire genre that uses a mythologized ancient Egypt as the foundation for stories of mystery, horror and romance. As a genre, these films are ordered by a series of common themes, expressed here as oppositions: <b>Life / Death</b>. The categories of life and death are confounded in mummy movies. The living mummy, the immortal king, the reincarnated princess, the possessing spirit all complicate and reconstitute the boundaries of life and death. <b>Past / Present</b>. Mummy movies create imagined worlds in which the past and the present exist in a tension. Lives (in the sense of reincarnations) and loves transcend time. In some films, the past is more real than the present – as in The Mummy’s Ghost where Amina becomes her “true” self, the princess Ananka, as she is carried into the swamp. <b>Ancient / Modern</b>. The ancient world of Egypt protrudes into the modern world through its architecture. It is not a coincidence that many of these films are set during the British colonial period. Pharaonic architecture gives the lie to the colonial assumption of the white man’s burden and demands to be answered. The mythology of the mummy films, as well as the racial stereotypes they employ, offer one set of answers to this dilemma. <b>Magic / Science</b>. Ancient Egypt is posited in these films a repository for “wisdom” – a gloss for magic. Modernity – particularly as represented by explorers, doctors, university professors, museum curators, librarians and so forth – is a repository for science. A central trend in these films is the scientific quest to colonize ancient wisdom by recuperating it and representing it and making it part of knowledge. In the process, however, the ancient wisdom proves not only resistant but dangerously alien and powerful. The battle to destroy the mummy is often a battle to exert science over magic. Interestingly, alternative “wisdoms” like Islam or Christianity have no utility or power in these films. Science is pragmatically real in these films, as is ancient wisdom. But the monotheistic religions are ineffective. <b>Us / Them</b>. These films are inevitably about transnational transgressions. Europeans and Americans enter into Egypt searching for treasures that bring them doom or avenging Egyptians (often members of Pharaonic cults that have survived the centuries) travel to England and America in an Orientalist revenge narrative that goes back at least to Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone. Ethnic stereotypes and other alterities abound in these films. One of the most interesting is the connection of past and present through the blood of Ancient peoples. Egyptians become repositories for their own distant past. Amina in the Mummy’s Ghost is a cosmopolitan, Western-educated woman yet her blood betrays her; instead of marrying the hero she becomes her ancient self, Ananka. The same is true not only of Helen/Ankhsenamun in The Mummy (1932) but of the Nubian servant in the same film; he is especially susceptible to Imhotep’s power because of “the ancient blood.” <b>Male / Female</b>. These are gendered films and complexly so. In general, they involve a single woman who is surrounded by a number of men who have various complex and overlapping relations toward her – fatherly, protector, seducer, manipulator, and so forth. One of the central motifs of all mummy films is the love/passion that lasts through the ages, that transcends time, space and even body. This motif is probably borrowed from H. Rider Haggard’s She (Ayesha herself was once a priestess of Isis) but the mummy movies have appropriated it and transformed it in many various ways. There is also common in these films that hypergamy that is expressed by nearly all Orientalist novels: the possibility for women but not men to marry up, across racial boundaries.

		For					Against
Opponent	Race	TV	SPP	Cas	Gold	Score	TV	SPP	Cas	Gold	Gate
Only Boys Need Block	Amazon	1000k	13	1/0/0	40k	2 - 0	1120k	11	0/1/1	50k	55k
Hobgoblin Superstars	Chaos Dwarf	1060k	16	4/0/0	80k	1 - 1	1160k	9	0/0/0	80k	72k
Be Lethal Or Cromm Kills	Orc	1170k	9	1/1/0	40k	0 - 1	1450k	12	2/0/0	40k	56k
Block Busters	Lizardmen	1220k	16	3/1/0	30k	1 - 1	1120k	17	1/3/1	50k	48k
Ramification	Khemri	1170k	21	3/1/1	80k	2 - 0	1250k	7	0/1/0	40k	63k
Ravenloft Lovelies	Necromantic	1290k	13	2/1/1	60k	0 - 0	1260k	8	1/0/0	60k	67k
Hobgoblin Superstars	Chaos Dwarf	1390k	15	2/3/0	60k	0 - 1	1620k	17	4/0/1	70k	84k
Deadly Pirates of Slaughter	Halfling	1190k	24	3/3/2	40k	1 - 1	1200k	15	2/1/0	50k	72k
Gobbo Blockno	Goblin	1280k	13	2/3/0	80k	0 - 1	1200k	15	2/2/0	90k	83k
A Time Before Block	Khemri	1390k	12	3/3/0	60k	0 - 2	1140k	19	2/1/2	70k	65k
Castigation	Ogre	1450k	17	4/0/1	70k	2 - 1	1260k	12	2/0/0	40k	59k
Be Lethal Or Cromm Kills	Orc	1420k	15	4/1/2	50k	0 - 2	1520k	15	0/1/1	90k	88k
BlockHeim	Ogre	1500k	12	1/1/1	80k	1 - 0	1790k	9	2/0/0	70k	87k
Blockless Blitzing Berserkers	Chaos	1610k	10	0/0/1	50k	1 - 0	1680k	8	0/1/0	50k	63k
Embrace the Wind	Amazon	1590k	15	2/1/1	30k	1 - 2	1590k	27	1/4/1	40k	85k
Dauntlessly Slaughtered	Dark Elf	1620k	12	2/1/0	40k	1 - 2	1460k	14	0/1/0	90k	80k
Unblockable	Dark Elf	1680k	17	4/1/1	70k	2 - 1	1740k	11	1/0/1	20k	80k
Blockless Blitzing Berserkers	Chaos	1780k	7	0/0/1	60k	0 - 2	1800k	26	3/2/1	20k	65k
Barney's Rubblemakers	Ogre	1860k	12	1/0/1	50k	1 - 0	1840k	11	2/3/0	40k	91k
Be Lethal Or Cromm Kills	Orc	1870k	14	3/0/0	40k	1 - 0	1570k	12	0/2/3	50k	103k
Revenge of BOB	Orc	1890k	19	2/1/1	20k	2 - 0	1810k	13	2/1/1	60k	65k
Deathwind	Necromantic	1820k	10	1/2/0	30k	1 - 1	1880k	10	2/1/1	80k	105k
Be Lethal Or Cromm Kills	Orc	1860k	10	0/1/1	30k	0 - 1	1720k	14	2/1/2	100k	115k