SamuraiFrog reminds us that today is Jim Henson's birthday... he would've been 72 if he were still here. Strange to think of him that old, even stranger to think he's been gone for nearly 20 years (according to the wikipedia, he died on May 16, 1990).
A few months ago, I stumbled across a blogger called Darth Mojo, who is an Emmy award-winning VFX artist for the remake version of Battlestar Galactica. My loyal readers know that I'm not a fan of Ron Moore's take on one of my favorite childhood TV shows -- I tried to like it, I really did, but in the end, it just wasn't for me. Nevertheless, Mojo is an engaging writer who loves all kind of sci-fi stuff and is rightfully proud of his work on several of the landmark SF series of the past couple of decades. I'm interested in visual effects and often find his behind-the-scenes perspective fascinating, especially when he's telling stories from the earlier days of his career when he worked on Babylon 5, among other shows. But the thing that really endears this guy to me is that, even though he's an integral part of the new Galactica, he unabashedly loves the old Galactica as well... so much so that he accepted his Emmy while wearing an original-series Colonial Warrior uniform. Now that's my kind of nerd.
Anyway, today Mojo reminds us that this is a very special date for his fellow geeky kids of the 1970s: on this date thirty years ago, September 17, 1978, the original Battlestar Galactica premiered on ABC-TV as a three-hour telefilm called "Saga of a Star World." (Don't ask, I'm a fan and I don't even know what that title means.) To celebrate, he's posted a really nifty downloadable image of the classic establishing shot so often seen on the old show, as re-created by his colleague Lee Stringer. (Stringer worked on the Neo-Galactica miniseries and first season of the regular series, and is, according to Mojo, "the second biggest Battlestar fan on the planet." I assume from the context that he's talking about the old series.)
Mojo also invites his readers to share their memories of the old series in the comments on his blog entry. I quickly dashed off something over there, but I'd like to expand a bit on those remarks:
Continue reading "Thirty Yahrens Aboard That Ragtag Fugitive Fleet" »
Like any other couple who have been together long enough to drop our camouflage shields and start showing our true, obnoxious selves, The Girlfriend and I tend to disagree pretty frequently on what constitutes good television. My picks tend toward PBS documentary series like Nova and The American Experience, old TV shows, and movies. Anne, on the other hand, is into all the do-it-yourself, makeover, and "slice of life" reality shows that clog up the basic cable channels. Which means that about nine times out of ten, when I show up at her apartment, the tube is set on TLC or The Food Network, and it's all I can do to keep from groaning out loud. (To be fair, she has much the same reaction when I run across an old Godzilla flick and settle in for a blissful evening of daikaiju silliness...)
Anyway, there is one basic-cable show that manages to cross party lines, appealing to both of us more or less equally with its mixture of travel, nostalgia, and greasy-spoon cuisine and culture, a Food Network program called Diners, Drive-ins and Dives. The set-up is that the host -- a boisterous Gen-Xer like ourselves called Guy Fieri -- drives around the country in a classic Camaro, stopping into, well, diners, drive-ins, and dives to sample regional food favorites and give a little history about the featured establishments. It's a fun show; a half-hour episode typically covers three quirky, mom-n-pop-style locations, and the eps are often themed in some way, like all family-owned diners, or places that are open 24/7.
The show's website includes a feature called "Tell Guy Where To Go," and not too long ago, The GF and I had some fun coming up with a list of our favorite Salt Lake-area places we thought the show ought to visit. We never got around to submitting our list, but it turns out we didn't have to: Guy was here last week, filming segments for the new season, and as it turns out, the places he visited match our list almost exactly:
Continue reading "Salt Lake's Diners, Drive-ins and Dives" »
Via Chris Roberson, here's an awesome piece of art by a guy named Dusty Abell that probably won't mean a damn thing to any of the younger folks out there in InternetLand, but ought to bring a smile to the faces of all us aging thirtysomethings.
In case you've forgotten (or never knew them), these are the heroes and villains of all those great live-action TV adventures that used to alternate with cartoons on Saturday mornings back in the '70s. Children's television back then was blissfully un-self-conscious, utterly lacking in the cynical sense of irony, marketing potential, and self-aware references to other pop culture that infest today's kidvid stuff. It was also incredibly low-budget, heartbreakingly earnest, and broadly (i.e., poorly) acted. But it was wonderful stuff anyhow. Mostly fantasy or science fiction in nature, it stretched the imaginations of many a wide-eyed young viewer, and I didn't realize how much I missed these shows until just now. I feel sorry for modern-day kids; Saturday mornings these days just suck.
Click on the image to blow it up large and see how many of these characters you can name. The complete roster is below the fold...
Oh, boy... what a conundrum...
You see, I loathe the "competitive reality show" phenomenon that has overtaken primetime television in recent years. Survivor and its highly contrived ilk long ago wore out their welcome for me and the American Idol-style talent shows alternately bore and irritate me. However, I reserve a particularly strong flame of hatred for the mind-numbingly stupid modern-day variants of the traditional quiz-show format. I think it's the way they all try to generate artificial suspense by having the contestants deliberate for ridiculously long periods of time (usually not very believably -- I mean, come on, how hard is it to answer the lowest difficulty level of these softball questions? Is the sky is blue or green? You honestly don't know that one? Well, then just pick one!) while ominous "the clock is ticking and which wire is Jack Bauer going to clip" music plays in the background. This technique was developed for Regis Philbin's thankfully deceased Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, but it endures in the even-more-annoying Deal or No Deal, in which contestants essentially play three-card monte by choosing from a range of metal attache cases in hopes that one of them will contain a cool million bucks. (The difference, of course, is that the contestants aren't betting their own money and so have nothing, really, to lose by just picking one, a scenario that makes the delayed-response thing even more obnoxious. It's not like Howie Mandel is pulling cash out of their wallets for every wrong choice they make!)
Needless to say, I don't watch Deal if I can possibly avoid it -- which is sometimes tricky, because my parents love the damn thing, so I have to be careful about when I choose to visit them -- but now an item on the Official Star Wars blog has piqued my curiosity... not to mention my prurient interests.
If you've never seen the show, part of Deal's schtick is that the attache cases that may or may not contain the million-dollar winnings (well, the cases actually contain cards with a dollar amount written on them) are held by 26 lovely female models, all wearing identical dresses (I believe they're usually red). But according to the Star Wars blog, an upcoming episode will have the Deal models dressed in the classic Princess Leia slave-girl outfit from Return of the Jedi, a.k.a., the "metal bikini." Can any loyal fanboy whose puberty was haunted by sail-barge fantasies resist that diabolical kind of lure? Especially when Vader, Chewie, R2-D2, and Carrie Fisher herself are also supposed to be on hand? I guess we'll find out...
(As an aside, I will admit that the idea of a Star Wars-themed episode did make me smile, even if I dislike the show, because it brings back a lot of fond memories of How Things Used to Be. Back in the late '70s, every variety show on the air, from The Muppet Show to Donny and Marie did an SW episode. It seems like strange timing to do one now, though; I've been thinking lately that SW in general, and the original trilogy in particular, is fading from the pop-cultural radar now that the prequels are complete. Perhaps Deal or No Deal skews heavily among people in my demographic?)
To my knowledge, I've never really had a genuine, honest-to-gosh nemesis, but I'm beginning to think it just might be Matthew McConaughey. Yes, that Matthew McConaughey, the naked-bongo-playing goodtime-funboy with the perfect six-pack abs and the spotty box-office record.
And why, you may ask, would I elevate this inoffensively goofy would-be movie star to the level of "nemesis"? Well, first, he brought his special kind of blandness to Dirk Pitt, the literary swashbuckler whose adventures I devoured as a youth. Now, according to ScreenRant.com, he may be in line to transform another of my puberty-era heroes into one of his signature sleepy-eyed slacker doofuses (doofi?): Thomas Magnum, a.k.a. Magnum, P.I., the Ferrari-driving, Hawaii-based TV detective played in the 1980s by Tom Selleck.
Sigh.
For my own tribute to The Greatest Thespian of Our Time -- and I'm only being somewhat facetious here, because I honestly do think William Shatner is much better than most people give him credit for, at least when he's really trying and not just collecting a paycheck -- I'd like to present some of his finest moments in front of the camera.
Ah, the awful work day is over. Let's talk about something a bit more uplifting, shall we? How about television?
The late, lamented Futurama has always been something of a conundrum for me. It's a show I really wanted to like: an animated science fiction/comedy series created by the guy who brought us The Simpsons, a spoof of and loving homage to all the futuristicky space crap I've always loved, a niche thing that appeals only to a particular elite (read: cult) who actually recognize all the subtle nods to the big SF films and TV of the last 40 years. Oh, and it features the voice talents of the lovely Katey Sagal, a.k.a. Peggy Bundy from Married with Children, one of my guilty pleasures for years. How could I not love Futurama?
I don't know, but somehow I don't. The overall design of the show -- the look of the environment, the Galaxy Express spaceship, the characters -- amuses me, and I occasionally snicker at the sociopathic robot Bender or the frankly bizarre Dr. Zoidberg, but I don't very often laugh deeply, not the way I do at The Simpsons or some other sitcoms. Hell, I find Two and a Half Men a lot funnier than Futurama. (I don't know if that says more about Futurama or me, though, and I don't know that it's something I ought to be admitting, either...).
I do, however, love Futurama's opening credits. Like the title sequence for The Simpsons, this sequence is a tour of the world in which the show takes place, set to a catchy, somewhat goofy theme song. Also like The Simpsons, the opening credits for Futurama feature a gag that changes every episode, in this case the text under the main title itself. Here's a typical example:
But's here's an interesting bit of trivia for you: that theme song is apparently based on a much older piece of music. Naturally, somebody out there on the InterWebs has tracked down that piece of music and made it available to the entire world... click through for more!
A couple years back, I devoted a pretty large chunk of copy to trying to explain what I thought was so cool about the late Johnny Carson.
Larry Aydlette sums it up in a single line:
There was something adult, sophisticated and boyishly wink-wink naughty all at the same time.
And he provides some video evidence of what he's talking about, too:
An appropriate thing to post at this time of night, no?
During the mid-90s, I was borderline obsessed with a television show called Highlander: The Series. Don't feel bad if you're not familiar with it. It was a low-budget syndicated spin-off from a relatively obscure movie, and it aired in the wee hours of the morning in many markets, so about the only regular viewers it ever had were insomniacs, night watchmen, and hardcore fanboys. (Actually there seem to be many more fangirls of this series, fairly unusual in sci-fi and fantasy fandom circles.)
One of these days, I'd like to do a detailed entry in which I attempt to explore why the 1986 Highlander film and the subsequent TV version appealed so strongly to me at that point in my life, but that's not really important right now. For the purposes of this entry, let me simply lay out a few important facts about the show:
Okay, have you got all that? Now let's consider a few things about a new series I caught for the first time tonight called New Amsterdam:
Chenopup already let the cat out of the bag in the comments to the previous entry, but in case you don't read those, here's a follow-up to the news about CBS.com streaming classic television episodes: NBC.com is doing the same thing with some its old shows, namely The A-Team, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, the original Battlestar Galactica, the disco-rific Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (mmmm, Erin Gray), Emergency!, Miami Vice, and Rod Serling's Night Gallery. (You trivia hounds may remember that Steven Spielberg's first job was directing Joan Crawford in an episode of Night Gallery...)
Well, enough of that nasty politics stuff. Let's get back to some hardcore geeking, shall we?
Courtesy of Michael May comes this interesting video clip, a mash-up of all the title sequences for the TV series Doctor Who. It's fairly long, and probably only of interest to fans, but I find it pretty fascinating to see how the music and title effects have evolved over 45 years while still remaining instantly recognizable. The biggest difference, really, is one of pacing; the newer sequences are visually and aurally much, much faster. And that is probably a fine commentary on our times, when you think about it...
I have a dysfunctional relationship with the TV series Lost.
It's like that girl you were crazy about back in high school, the one who had the wicked smile and knew exactly what effect those skin-tight designer jeans had on the young male of the species. The one who grooved on the power trip of getting you all hot and bothered under the bleachers and then saying "no" at the last second, not because she was afraid of the realness of it all or anything like that, but just because there was some nasty little part of her that liked screwing with your head. You remember her, right? And how you eventually got very bored and frustrated with her silly games, so you dropped her and found yourself a nice girl?
Well, that's about where I am with Lost. I've gotten tired of the tease, you see, and I'm impatient for this series to start explaining what the hell is going on. The producers keep assuring the fans that they know what they're doing, that it really is all leading up to something and this isn't just a repeat of The X Files's endless "mythology," but I'm still not sure I believe them, in spite of improvements toward the end of last season and in last night's Season 4 opener.
Frustration aside, though, I just keep coming back to Lost (just as I kept going back to old what's-her-name and her painted-on denim). Why do I torture myself this way? Why does my resolve crumble and I come walking back with my chin down and my hopes high that maybe this time I'll get what I no longer merely want but really damn need?
Wow... how is it possible that even with my vast collection of ephemera and miscellaneous junk, not to mention my insatiable appetite for trivia and an unceasing affection for the decade I most closely consider my Formative Years -- that would be the Awesome 80s, for those who haven't been paying attention -- how is it possible that I have only now discovered that our favorite imitation AI once recorded his very own smarmy Christmas tune? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "Merry Christmas, Santa Claus (You're a Lovely Guy)" by Max Headroom:
An immortal classic for sure, right up there with "What Can You Get a Wookiee for Christmas (When He Already Owns a Comb)." For the record, I found this fascinating little piece of pop-cultural flotsam here. And I promise this will be the last time I mention M-M-Max Headroom for a while-while-while.
I guess you can't avoid the ravages of age even when you're just a computerized simulacrum of a smart-alecky TV journalist from 20 minutes into a future that's now only a few seconds away:
Incidentally, why isn't the Max Headroom TV series on DVD yet? I know it was short-lived and firmly in the "cult classic" category, but surely a show as eerily prescient and ground-breaking as Max deserves its own shiny silver discs?
(And in case you're wondering what I mean by "prescient," the show predicted a lot of our current [then-future] society, including [just off the top of my head] "reality" TV, interactive programming, do-it-yourself video journalism, mindless consumption via credit cards and a form of online shopping, and even some of the stuff that guys like Ray Kurzweil believe is coming as part of "The Singularity", most notably the idea of downloading a human personality into a computer. Wow... now I really want to see Max again! It'd probably make a lot more sense now that it did in '85...)
Courtesy of John Rogers, a concise, easy-to-follow, and surprisingly entertaining explanation of why all your favorite shows are drifting into re-runs:
And in case you're wondering, yes, I support the WGA wholeheartedly in this matter. Writers don't typically get a lot of recognition or respect in the film and television industry, but they are, to my mind, the most important part of the process. If somebody doesn't write the story to begin with, the guy in the jodhpurs and riding boots has nothing to direct, and the "talent" have nothing to say. It's that simple. And in a business as flush as Hollywood, to say there isn't enough money to go around is disingenuous at best. The vast majority of WGA members really don't make much money for their efforts, and if they're trying to survive purely on screenwriting, their income is likely to be pretty sporadic. In my book, they deserve their modest cut of the residuals pie a lot more than the suits deserve another Gulfstream...
Joss Whedon, the revered creator of the cult-fave TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly, has been venting online about the way some in the press describe the ongoing writer's strike out in Hollywood. His comments are worth reading in their entirety, but I like the way he describes the act and art of writing (something I am not entirely unfamiliar with myself...):
Writing is largely not considered work. Art in general is not considered work. Work is a thing you physically labor at, or at the very least, hate. Art is fun. (And Hollywood writers are overpaid, scarf-wearing dainties.) It’s an easy argument to make. And a hard one to dispute.
...Writing is enjoyable and ephemeral. And it’s hard work.
It’s always hard. Not just dealing with obtuse, intrusive studio execs, temperamental stars and family-prohibiting hours. Those are producer issues as much as anything else. Not just trying to get your first script sold, or seen, or finished, when nobody around believes you can/will/should… the ACT of writing is hard. When Buffy was flowing at its flowingest, David Greenwalt [Ed. note: Greenwalt was a writer and producer on Buffy] used to turn to me at some point during every torturous story-breaking session and say “Why is it still hard? When do we just get to be good at it?” I’ll only bore you with one theory: because every good story needs to be completely personal (so there are no guidelines) and completely universal (so it’s all been done). It’s just never simple.
It’s necessary, though. We’re talking about story-telling, the most basic human need. Food? That’s an animal need. Shelter? That’s a luxury item that leads to social grouping, which leads directly to fancy scarves. But human awareness is all about story-telling. The selective narrative of your memory. The story of why the Sky Bully throws lightning at you. From the first, stories, even unspoken, separated us from the other, cooler beasts. And now we’re talking about the stories that define our nation’s popular culture – a huge part of its identity. These are the people that think those up. Working writers.
"Human awareness is all about story-telling." Nice.
So, I've been thinking all day about that Starfighter video game, specifically about how truly weird it is that somebody bothered to make one and that people -- at least a few people -- are moved to talk about it here in the year 2007, some 23 years down the road from the movie's release.
Look at this way: the guys who made that game, the bloggers who've posted about it, and the people who read those blogs are all using technologies that would've sounded almost as science-fictiony back in 1984, the year The Last Starfighter was released, as the idea of aliens recruiting Earth kids to fight in interstellar wars, which is that movie's premise. The Internet is arguably one of the most revolutionary gadgets our species has ever come up with, and what do we mostly use it for? Besides distributing pictures of naked girls, I mean? To commemorate, reproduce, disseminate, and obsess over pop-cultural artifacts that are two or three decades old. In other words, we're using this very futuristic tech to talk about stuff from the past. Does that strike anyone else as weird?
I've been gradually formulating an idea over the past several months, largely in response to all the recent remakes of movies that I loved as a kid, that popular culture seems to have frozen -- some would probably say "stagnated" -- somewhere around the end of the 1980s. Oh, sure, a lot of original work is still being produced, but the stuff that really gets people talking all stems from a roughly 25-year period -- let's say 1966-1989 -- that ended a generation ago.
I've been looking for some video from Salvage 1 to try and refresh my memory. I didn't find very much, but there is this:
Honestly, more of my circuits fired in response to the ABC Sunday Night Movie graphics than the footage from Salvage, the TV movie that became the series Salvage 1. Remember TV movies, kids? Or the days when feature films ran on regular network TV about a year after they'd been in the theaters, back in the dark days before home video rentals, cable TV, or "on-demand" anything? Can you believe there was once a time when you could make a movie about a homespun junk dealer with a preposterous notion about flying to the Moon in a rocket made out of a cement mixer and a tanker-truck trailer, and it would actually garner enough viewers to justify a weekly TV series (admittedly a short-lived one, but still...)
Yes, we were all a lot more innocent then...
I guess the old TV series Voyagers! must be selling reasonably well on DVD -- either that, or studio execs are running out of product to release and still have a bunch of blank discs they want to burn -- because the rumor mill says two more obscurities from the early '80s, Salvage 1 and Tales of the Gold Monkey, may be coming next year. Of the two, I'd say Gold Monkey is more likely, if for no other reason than the opportunity to ride the coattails of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and maybe make a few more bucks than this series would on its own. For me, it's also the more desirable of these two possibilities. (If you'll recall, I wrote about Gold Monkey a while back; I always loved that show.)
As for Salvage 1, I remember watching it and can easily recall the basic premise -- a post-Mayberry, pre-Matlock Andy Griffith builds a backyard rocket ship so he can go to the Moon and retrieve all the equipment left behind by the Apollo astronauts -- but the details have gotten pretty hazy. I didn't realize this show had enough of a fan base to support a DVD release, but I could be wrong.
The way things are going, I guess everything will become available for us crazy collector-types one of these days...
Finding that bizarre-o Budweiser commercial earlier got me thinking about some other '80s-vintage beer ads that made quite an impact on me: Michelob's "The Night Belongs To..." campaign comprised several atmospheric, one-minute-long masterpieces that featured music by actual rock stars instead of the usual generic advertising tracks. The best known of these was probably the one that featured Eric Clapton playing an updated version of his 1970 hit "After Midnight."
The Internet amazes me. Here we have a technology that is as revolutionary a means of storing and disseminating information as anything we've come up with in a couple of centuries, and what do we mostly use it for? Preserving the media detritus of our childhoods in the 1970s and '80s. Case in point: I mentioned pirates in the previous entry, which started me thinking about other pirate-y things I have loved in the past, which called up a dusty old file somewhere in the adolescent stratum of my personal wetware memory bank (that'd be my brain, kids). I did a bit of searching on Ye Olde YouTube, and behold, a Budweiser commercial that I saw at some point in high school and which has remained lodged in my head ever since:
As best I can recall, this ad only ran during Friday Night Videos and other late-night programs, and I don't remember that it ran for very long... a few weeks maybe. I've thought about it from time to time over the years, and tried to describe it to friends who have invariably responded with blank looks. But now, thanks to this wondrous, science-fiction thing we call the Internet, I can finally shout to the heavens, "You see? It did exist! I'm not mad! I'm not!"
Seriously, though, isn't that a weird commercial? I don't know about you guys, but it doesn't make me want to go for a Budweiser... maybe go plunder some booty or something, but not drink beer.
A good way to make fun of someone who loves the new, super-serious remake of Battlestar Galactica: tell them the show inherently makes no logical sense to you without Muffit, the robot dog. Sci-fi fans are so pissy and serious these days they become infuriated at the mention of anything cute.
Next time I'm called upon to defend my love of the old Battlestar and my utter indifference to the new one (which seems to happen fairly often, sadly enough), I'm going to give this strategy a try. If nothing else, it should be fun to watch those smug Neo-G fans splutter incoherently for a little while...
(Incidentally, if you decide to backtrack to the source of that quote, be warned that SamuraiFrog can get a little... off-color... at times. Not that there's anything wrong with that...)
I was surprised and amused recently to learn that Galactica 1980 -- the abortive first effort to revive the Battlestar Galactica franchise, years before anyone ever heard of that Ron Moore fellow -- is coming to DVD. I was less amused when I got a look at the cover art and saw that some marketing genius somewhere has tagged the show as "The Original Battlestar Galactica's Final Season."
Come on, guys... hasn't the reputation of the original Galactica suffered enough in recent years? G80 was a spin-off of the original show, not another season, and I don't know of any fans of Classic BG who consider it to be "official" in any way. Mostly, we try to forget it ever happened. Saying that it's part of the original series is like claiming that you haven't seen every episode of M*A*S*H until you've seen AfterM*A*S*H, too. Or, as my buddy Dave put it when I IM'd him with this news:
Talk about spin in order to sell more DVDs. Let's face it, if they called it, "A really crap show that has almost no connection to the original series, and is so low budget they couldn't afford Cylon costumes, but it's cool if you're a fan of Cousin Oliver," I don't think many people would buy it.
Yeah, that about says it all...
This is getting into some very tall grass on the Plains of Geekiness, but I can't help it... I love this cheez-ball stuff:
The Bad Astronomer reminds us that today, September 13, would have been the eighth anniversary of the Moon blasting out of Earth orbit if the premise of Space: 1999 had come true.
(If you don't remember it -- and not a lot of people do -- Space: 1999 was a TV series back in the early '70s. It begins with a nuclear explosion -- a superimposed title informs us that the date is September 13, 1999 -- that sends the Moon hurtling into deep space, carrying with it the 300 or so inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, who then proceed to have various far-out adventures every week. Whoever was writing the show had a weaker grasp of basic science than my inbred, semi-feral pet cat, as common-sense things like the immense distance between star systems were routinely ignored -- not to mention the fact that Alpha apparently had an inexhaustible supply of its Eagle shuttlecraft, considering that one or two got wrecked every week -- but what the show lacked in sense, it made up for in style. The aforementioned Eagle, for instance, is still one of the coolest-looking spaceship designs ever put on film, in my humble opinion.)
It's strange, sometimes, being a science fiction fan in the 21st century; as all these iconic dates for made-up events that never occurred recede into the distance, it's hard not to feel an odd twinge of disappointment, of loss for what might have been. For instance, NASA did not launch the last of America's deep-space probes in 1987 with Captain William "Buck" Rogers at the controls... there were no Eugenics Wars in the mid-1990s that ended with a group of genetic "supermen" stealing an advanced DY-100 spacecraft and slipping away from Earth (that's a good thing, actually)... and the spaceship Discovery did not explore Jupiter and the secret of the black monoliths in 2001. The result is that our fictional worlds are now harder to believe in, if only for an hour or two's viewing time, and the real world just isn't as cool as we grew up thinking it would be. Consider, for example, the fact that we never see anything like this anywhere but our imaginations:
Sigh.
One of the charges that is frequently leveled at George Lucas by his detractors is that he cares only about expanding his already considerable (i.e., unbelievably immense) fortune. I've never believed that one, myself. Whatever his faults, however inscrutable his motivations, greed simply cannot be among them. If it were, he'd be a lot smarter about what he's trying to sell to his fans.
No, this isn't another rant about Uncle George's stubborn refusal to put out a decent DVD release of the pre-Special Edition Star Wars, although that is a good example of what I'm talking about, because you know he'd sell those by the truckload if he'd just relax a little.
I'm actually talking about the upcoming DVD release of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles... or, as the series has been retitled, The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones. (I told you he'd change the name, didn't I?)
Continue reading "Young Indy on DVD: What is George Thinking?" »
Couple of random quickies spotted in between this afternoon's proofing jobs:
Via SF Signal, Premiere magazine's Top 20 Big-Time Plot Twist movies:
[Ranty little editorial note: I modified this title, which Premiere has listed as Star Wars: Episode V -- The Empire Strikes Back. Perhaps I'm just showing my age, but I'll never get down with this episode numbering schtick. The first movie was Star Wars, and its sequels were Empire and Return of the Jedi. Call the prequels whatever you like, but I remember How Things Used to Be...]
It's a pretty good list, I think, although some of these -- Apes, Empire, Soylent Green, Kane -- have been so parodied, imitated, or otherwise talked about that they long ago lost their power to surprise anyone but the most sheltered media consumer. Still, I can attest from personal experience that Empire's big revelation was damn powerful when it was fresh, and I imagine Rosebud and the Statue of Liberty must've packed similar punches in the days before the Internet and home video made everyone into obsessive pop-cultural encyclopedias.
For the record, I've seen all but six of these movies. The ones I've missed (assuming anyone cares) are The Usual Suspects, Oldboy (which I've never heard of prior to seeing this list), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Wicker Man, Angel Heart, and The Game.
And moving right along, Michael Hinman at SyFy Portal says the "reimagined" Flash Gordon isn't long for this or any other world. Not a big surprise, based on the reactions I've been reading (which range from tepid to loathing). I'm still morbidly curious about it, though; maybe it'll get a DVD release so I can at least rent it...
Speaking of remakes, I've run across a potentially interesting LiveJournal that, aside from one entry on the new Flash Gordon series, seems to be predicated around a defense of the original Battlestar Galactica and a denunciation of the "reimagined" version that's attracted so much love the last couple years. So far, Countess Baltar (as the LJ author is calling herself) hasn't made an argument in her own words, preferring instead to let carefully selected quotations from Ron Moore, Glen Larson, and various literary critics make her points for her. It's an interesting approach, although I would like to hear more from the Countess herself as to what, specifically, she dislikes about the remake.
Despite giving the new series a grudging thumbs-up after seeing a few episodes, I have to admit that I've never warmed to it, and indeed I've never watched more than just those first few installments. I can't deny that the series appeared to be well-made and intelligent, but it simply didn't appeal to me. It wasn't my Battlestar, and those weren't my Apollo, Starbuck, and Adama. The reimagined versions of those characters may have shared the same names as characters played by Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, and Lorne Greene -- well, sort of, since these exotic monikers have been turned into "call signs" in the new show, rather than actual names -- but there was very little else about them I found familiar.
Whatever Countess Baltar's specific gripes -- and I look forward to finding out more about those -- I certainly echo her concise statement of opinion in the "about me" sidebar:
Battlestar Galactica (1978)?:
YesBattlestar Galactica (2003)?:
NoStarbuck (male)?:
YesStarbuck (female)?:
NoBaltar, Count?:
YesBaltar, Gaius?:
Hell, no!
As best I can recall, my introduction to the medium of comic books came when I was six years old. I was home from school, sick in bed with a bad cold or the flu or something. My dad went to the local drugstore to get some medicine, and when he returned, he also had with him a little treat that he hoped would cheer me up, or at least distract me in between puking sessions: a pair of what he called "funnybooks." Which confused me, because they weren't funny. But that's beside the point. One was a collection of stories about Superman and his various friends, cousins, and pets. The other (which I found much more appealing, probably due to the semi-lurid cover art) was an issue of a series called Marvel Team-Up.
As the title suggests, the premise of this series was to combine two or more characters who wouldn't have ordinarily crossed paths in their own titles, and then send them off on an adventure together. In the issue my dad got for me -- which somehow is the only one of this series I've ever read -- the action was played straight. Apparently, however, not every issue was so serious:
Spider-Man and the cast of Saturday Night Live? Wow, I've got to track that one down... that's got to be a hoot. Especially if you read it drunk, which is probably how it was written. Click the pic to go to the image source and a synopsis.
Incidentally, I understand that most issues of Marvel Team-Up were self-contained stories. Naturally, that lone issue my dad got me, the only one I've ever read -- which, to no one's surprise I'm sure, I still have -- was one of the rare two-parters. To this day, I have idea how Spidey manages to free the Scarlet Witch from Cotton Mather's foul mind-controlling cross-power...
Well, the Sci Fi Channel's new Flash Gordon series premiered over the weekend. I didn't see it myself -- I don't have cable, because I'm too cheap to pay a monthly fee for another hundred channels of The Same Old Crap™ just so I can catch the occasional novelty -- but from what I'm finding on the web this morning, I gather it wasn't good. One fellow is even calling for a "jihad against the Sci Fi Channel" before it can "reimagine" any other older properties. (Someone should've thought of that following the crappy Dune miniseries a few years ago -- arg! It still burns!)
I'm reserving final judgment on the show until I manage to see it for myself, but based on what I've been reading, I think it's pretty unlikely I'll approve of it any more than anyone I linked above. I can't say I'm surprised, given the Sci Fi Channel's spotty record and poor reputation among its target audience, but I am disappointed. While I tend to oppose remakes in general, I think Flash Gordon is a hero that can (and perhaps should) be revived and reinterpreted for each new generation, just as Batman and Superman have been revisited many times; as the premiere has inched closer, I've honestly been looking forward to a 21st Century take on what's been called "the original space adventure."
Perhaps the cheesiest episode ever of the old 70s-vintage Buck Rogers TV show -- which is saying a lot, considering how that entire series was one long block of yummy, yummy fromage -- was "Space Rockers," wherein evil Jerry Orbach wants to control the minds of the galaxy's youth via subliminal signals embedded in truly awful music. Actually, it probably wasn't such a bad idea for a story, at least not back then, when people still believed there were backmasked Satanic messages underlying "Stairway to Heaven." The way it was executed, however... oy. I thought it was embarrassing even when I was a kid and Buck was don't-miss-viewing.
Part of what made it so dippy was the appearance of the "rock" band Orbach was secretly using for his nefarious scheme. Leaving aside their cringe-inducing costumes -- which consisted of body stockings and rope lights -- their "playing" looked really, well, goofy. The series was set in the 25th Century, so everything had to be electronic and futuristic-looking, right? That meant that the "guitar" had no strings and Bonzo played his "drum kit" by tapping plastic rods with a pencil. But the most ridiculous item was the synthesizer/keyboard doohickey: it was just a table with colored circles on it, which was the musician "played" by passing his hands (or, in an over-the-top eruption of Velveeta, his leg) over them. Have a look at the video, if you dare.
Silly, right? Well, maybe not. Via Scalzi comes word of a new electronic musical instrument called the ReacTable, and I'll be damned if it isn't highly reminiscent of that old Buck Rogers prop:
Wired.com has an article about this new instrument here.
You know, if something from Buck Rogers had to developed out here in the real world, I think I'd have chosen those spandex jumpsuits that Erin Gray always wore. Maybe there's still hope for those...
This is kind of fun for people who are fully comfortable with the depths of their geekiness: it's a video compilation of the entire 36-year run of the original Doctor Who series (including the 1999 TV movie that aired on Fox) condensed into a little over five minutes.
(Via)
Fascinating to see how the visual tone of the series (not to mention the production values!) changes over the years...
Courtesy of Eric D. Snider, a former Utahn who now snarks at movies for a living in Portland, Oregon, comes a manifesto written by this guy, a radio DJ from the Pacific Northwest. With only a few minor tweaks, it could've just as easily been written by myself:
What a geek believes
According to Rick EmersonI believe that Han shot first. I believe that Ally Sheedy was hotter before Molly Ringwald cleaned her up. I believe in miniatures, models, claymation, and not revealing the shark until you absolutely have to. I believe that George Lucas, for better or for worse, change[d] the way we see the world, each other, and ourselves. And I believe that we will someday reach those stars that he himself made visible. I believe that George Lucas is also a narrow-minded, money-grubbing, pig-headed slave to the now, who ought to be locked away from his own creations, lest he do them further harm. I believe that Jean-Luc Picard is the better Starship Captain, but I also believe that James Tiberius Kirk is infinitely cooler. I believe that a child standing in line to buy a book at midnight is fantastic; I believe that reading makes you smart — it’s schools that make you dumb. I believe that any episode of Futurama is better than any program featuring a precocious teenager who’s wise beyond their years. I also believe Buffy the Vampire Slayer to be the sole exception that proves this rule. I believe that comic books are an art form, and will someday be recognized as such. I believe that good shows die too young; and crap shows last too long. I believe that Eddie Izzard is the funniest man alive, and I don’t care whether you’ve ever heard of him or not — it’s still true. I believe that a girl who likes movies about zombies is hotter than whoever is on the cover of Maxim this month. I believe that Belloch ate that fly, I swear to God that I heard Luke call Leia “Carrie,” and I believe that Samwise Gamgee never quite got the credit he really deserved. I believe in magic, I believe in dreams, I believe in the power of music, movies, and the untold worlds inside an everyday library card. And I do not believe that geeks will inherit the earth; I believe that we already have.
So, did you catch all the references? If you're wondering about those tweaks I mentioned, they're after the fold:
Okay, last week I was obsessing over Flash Gordon, and now this week I keep going on about The Wonder Years. So I'm a fanboy, sue me. Well, no, on second thought, don't do that. I'll be nice...
If you're interested, Wired has just posted an interview with Danica McKellar about her new book and "why being a math whiz and a girly girl are not mutually exclusive." It's a pretty interesting read, and it even includes a link to McKellar's published proof, Percolation and Gibbs states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin–Teller models on Z2.
No, I don't know what that means. And neither do you, so stop trying to show off...
