The cover for The Uncanny X-Men #141 is one of the most legendary in all of comics. Penciller John Byrne and inker Terry Austin (likely under the direction of their X-editor Louise Jones (Simonson)) created a grim masterpiece for part one of the two part future-set epic "Days Of Future Past."
For a while now I have been gathering once a week on the interwebs with friends I made on Twiter and we watch fun silly mostly '70s and '80s fare such as Buck Rogers In The 25the Century, UFO and Space: 1999, Star Trek TOS and TAS, Ultraman, Knight Rider and Automan. However there is one show that brought us all together that first time and from which our group's name was coined: Manimal.
Presented for your approval is my loving homage to the incredible Byrne and Austin cover of that X-Men title for the "ManimAlliance" and many of the wacky goofy television shows of yore we have enjoyed and skewered in friendship.
Uncanny X-Men #141 Copyright 2022 by Marvel Entertainment.
Viewers of a certain age may fondly recall the NBC sci fi series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century which ran for two season (1979 - 1981).
Created by the soon to be legendary Glen A. Larson, the first season was mostly a very watered down James Bond in Space, where Buck would woo the hottie of the week while fighting the bad guys, which wasted the charm and talents of the lovely Erin Gray as Col. Wilma Deering.
Network audiences weren't ready for a female in charge of things in the disco era so Wilma had less and less to do. It got so bad that in the second season, new producers junked the first season's template and tried to copy Star Trek by having Buck, Wilma, and Twiki team with some new friends on a mission to find lost Earthlings. Think of it as Battlestar Galactica (same producer) in reverse.
Remember I said they wasted Erin Gray. Look at this season two cast photo. They ditched the black and white military uniform (and pants) for what looks like a sailor suit or the person behind the counter at an ice cream shoppe. Baskin Rogers, anyone?
A giant (of course Ultraman) starfish -- excuse me, DOUBLE starfish with baby bat in the middle kaiju.
Some days I don't want to know what the Japanese are smoking/drinking/eating/imbibing to create such BIZARRO SHIT. And other days I'd like to MAINLINE IT STRAIGHT INTO MY EYEBALLS.
One day I would like to dress like this and walk into a restaurant at noon and see what goes down. Would I get a great table or one in the back near the bathrooms.
I think this picture is best viewed while listening to David Bowie's classic "Fashion."
Ultraman: Copyright and Trademark 2019 by its rights holder. No infringement of those rights is intended with this parody.
Let us start 2018 by looking back at "TV Show Endings That People Still Don't Understand" (from LOOPER).
This article includes series finales which confused (St. Elsewhere), confounded (The Sopranos), angered (Battlestar Galactica), and delighted (King of the Hill) us.
The TV series Black Mirror is The Twilight Zone of the iPhone era.
BrainPilot on YouTube helpfully posted a list of the 5 Most Powerful Moments from this series (through Nov 2016). SPOILERS, obviously, if you have not seen the show.
I got up at my normal time of oh-dark-thirty, but
since it's Saturday, I'm off. So I tuned into over the air station Heroes & Icons, and
The Green Hornet TV series was on. GH and Kato were in the Black Beauty chasing some
bad guys in an armored car down dusty studio back lot roads.
When
they cut to Green Hornet and Kato inside Black Beauty, and you see Kato
driving and GH in the backseat, it really hit me hard for some reason: the Green Hornet is a
superhero who has a chauffeur. A. Chauffeur. What. An. Asshole.
Batman didn't sit in the backseat and have Alfred or Robin drive him
around Gotham looking for supervillains and all-night Krispy Kreme
stores. Green Arrow (while he was still a Batman ripoff in his early
years) always had Speedy, his Robin-esque sidekick, sit beside him in
the Arrow Car. Hell, Hutch never sat in the back of the Grand Torino while Starsky tore down Bay City's mean streets chasing after the crooks and vampires (the John Saxon episode).
But the Green fucking Hornet has got to have a dude chauffeur his wealthy crime-fighting buns around town. And an Asian dude at that.
I also now wonder if Kato was from Alec Baldwin's Donald Trump's "Djhina."
On May 20, 2015, David Letterman is signing off the late night airwaves.
Between his 11 year stint at NBC hosting Late Night and his current gig leading The Late Show at CBS, Letterman has graced us nighthawks with 33 years of late evening entertainment. The pop culture landscape was graced with Stupid Pet Tricks, fast food drive thru hijinks, Top Ten Lists, Velcro suits, and all sorts of things thrown off the tops of buildings (from TVs and bowling balls to full paint cans and a zillion bouncy balls).
But all good things come to an end.
To celebrate and commemorate Letterman's long tenure of late night greatness, here's an interview he did with none other than Max Headroom. Yes, Max Headroom.
Fox is set on testing that adage by reviving the beloved once-cult-then-mainstream-hit series The X-Files by bringing it back to television as a limited event series in 2016.
Before we see if creator Chris Carter can capture magic in a bottle (the last X-Files movie simply wasn't very good) next year, decider.com put together a fun list of X-episodes that were written by Vince Gilligan, of Breaking Bad fame. Yes, before he got Walter White hooked on the meth business, Gilligan was putting the screws to Mulder and Scully in inventive and often funny ways.
So join me in boning up on some great X-Files episodes in anticipation of discovering that "The Truth Is (Still) Out There."
Star Trek has lost three key figureheads in a very short span of time.
Major media outlets picked up the passing of Leonard Nimoy on February 27, but not much press was generated February 24 over the death at age 75 of Maurice Hurley, a producer/writer of Star Trek: The Next Generation during it first two seasons. Mr. Hurley will likely be remembered by Trek fans for his creation of the classic villains the Borg and co-creating Data's brother Lore.
If you watched sci fi TV in the 1970s, you owe a debt to producer/writer Harve Bennett, who passed away on March 4 at the age of 84. He worked on series such as The Invisible Man, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. But Star Trek fans owe Mr. Bennett a huge debt of gratitude for saving ST by producing 1982's Star Trek II, which is seen by many fans as the best of the ST feature films. The popularity of the Trek films overseen by Mr. Bennett (ST II - IV) led to ST's re-emergence on TV with ST: TNG in 1987.
Hey, Internet. Here's Earth Star Voyager, the failed TV movie pilot from The Wonderful World of Disney that aired in 1986. (I dare you to say Earth Star Voyager six times fast.)
The movie opens in outer space on a field of stars, so naturally the
on-screen card reads "Outer Space 2082." Disney wanted to make certain
you knew where this was taking place. Disney also seriously stretched
this thing out by running the credits first with the names of the
characters and their positions, then listing the actors afterward
instead of combining all that information, causing composer Lalo
Schifrin to pad out his snazzy synthesizer theme music.
This is one of those shows assembled from the Sci Fi Buffet: one part dismal Blade Runner-esque future where our heroes walk polluted rainy streets (shot in what looks like an indoor mall with a lot of mist and open umbrellas); one part Soylent Green's dwindling resources, crowded streets and rationed food supplies; but mostly several heaping helpings of Star Trek. Or rather, "Teen Star Trek", with young cadet types who range in age from 16 to 24 holding down the usual Enterprise bridge crew positions of captain, science officer, navigator, communications officer, and engineer. They are the crew of the titular spaceship Earth Star Voyager on one of those standard "Earth is falling apart, so we're looking for another planet to colonize" stories.
Writer Ed Spielman's script is very by the numbers with no surprises along the way. Instead of focusing on interesting character development it seems like Spielman spent more time coming up with the window dressing such as funny names for future food (veggie bio burger, nutra-shakes, thremo chips with amino sauce).
Despite being directed by veteran James Goldstone, who directed for the original Star Trek, and featuring the always engaging Duncan Regehr as a rogue space captain, this thing is a slog to get through: poorly acted by the pre-Disney Channel child stars, dull stock characters (some with goofy names like "Beanie" and "Huxley Welles"), and sub-par visual effects (that two foot long model spaceship shot in the dark at the beginning looks like a two foot long model spaceship shot in the dark). The main bridge set and several corridors look decent enough, so we know where they spent most of the budget.
Earth Star Voyager aired about four months after the syndicated premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and while the latter series certainly had its ups and downs in its first three years of production, the difference between the two shows is night and day. The Next Generation had better acting (none of these kids holds a space-candle to TNG's Wil Wheaton), more thoughtful stories, and a larger budget. Earth Star Voyager looks like a rebooted version of 1977's Saturday morning kid's show Space Academy compared to it.
Oh, and this cult gem has about the LONGEST plot write up I have ever seen on Wikipedia.
Star Trek 3 is getting a rocky liftoff from the launch pad.
First, novice director Roberto Orci, co-writer of the first two Trek films helmed by J.J. Abrams, was removed from the center seat due to "creative differences," only to be replaced by veteran Fast and Furious franchise director Justin Lin. Orci was also working on ST3's script with new writers Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne.
Now, word came down that neu-Scotty himself, Simon Pegg, will be co-writing Trek Tres with Doug Jung (writer of Confidence). We don't yet know if they are re-writing the Orci & company script or starting from scratch.
Pegg is a big fan of sci fi in general, and Star Trek in particular, so this hopefully is a step in the right direction. He did some fine work co-writing Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz with Edgar Wright (I wasn't too crazy about their capper to their Cornetto Trilogy, World's End). Pegg also co-created with Jennifer Stevenson the British cult series Spaced.
This just might be the bumpiest ride that a Star Trek film has taken to the big screen since all the sturm und drang of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. That film was rushed into production with an unfinished and constantly changing script. It made a ton of money at the box office and launched the film franchise, but it is not looked at fondly by the general public, or even most Trek fans. It's the only Trek film I own on DVD, so I'm in the minority that loves this movie, warts and all.
We'll find out how this all plays out in summer of 2016. This is the 50th Anniversary of the franchise - for Gorn's sake I hope they don't screw it up.
In the future (or at least during the annual New York Comic-Con) everyone will be world famous for 15 minutes.
Just ask a man named Robert Franzese, who in his own words: "I'm like a nobody—I have a nobody job, making nobody pay—but I go to New
York Comic-Con...I'm freakin'
Brad Pitt. It makes me feel like a million bucks."
Well, he's not exactly Brad Pitt, but Franzese does don a white dress shirt, green pants and round eyeglasses to dress up as Family Guy head of the household Peter Griffin, complete with a voice impression that would do creator/star Seth MacFarlane proud.
Franzese looks to be having a great time, and the crowds genuinely seem to love him.
Do you want to watch the acclaimed TV series Buffy The Vampire Slayer in High Definition? It is 2014, after all, well into the 21st century, so why not?
Well, according to this article, titled "What's Wrong With Buffy's HD?" you might want to stick with your old standard definition DVDs.
Apparently the cable channel Pivot has been airing a much-maligned HD version of creator Joss Whedon's Buffy in 16:9 format, so it fills up the whole rectangular screen. Trouble is, Buffy, which premiered in 1997, was shot in the TV standard-of-the-time 4:3 closer-to-a-square ratio.
Just as wide-screen theatrical movies have long been bastardized when they aired on old square TVs in chopped up, panned and scanned versions, now the same thing is happening with TV shows being converted to HD screens.
Good grief. Just slap some black bars on the sides and give me the WHOLE remastered HD picture. Don't do this bad, often silly, re-framing and cropping; to illustrate what the issue is, just have a little five second intro showing WHY reformatting 4:3 images to the full 16:9 screen is a bad idea (visually, aesthetically, artistically). I would hope viewers today would be more informed of this kind of thing. Maybe not.
If you grew up in the 1970s and 80s and watched TV, you owe a big debt to writer/producer Glen A. Larson.
He created series such as Alias Smith and Jones, Quincy, M.E., Magnum, P.I (co-created with Donald Bellisario), The Fall Guy, Knight Rider, Automan, Manimal, Buck Rogers and the original Battlestar Galactica. He also produced series such as The Six Million Dollar Man and The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries.
Mr. Larson seemingly defined American television in those periods.
As a huge Star Trek fan you'd think I'd have a ton of Trek-related toys, figures, statues, games, books, movies, merchandise, swag, what-have-you. I do have some of that stuff, but not nearly as much as I might want. Plus, I simply have no space to properly display things like that if I even had it.
One of the things I have unfortunately had to stay away from is Star Trek action figures. I am so picky about likenesses, details and such, that I have none of that stuff in my "collection" save for an awesome Mego Gorn figure sent to me by a good friend.
The Road Warrior (1982) is one of my all-time favorite movies. The bleak, desolate world created and brought to life by director/co-writer George Miller, actor Mel Gibson and their amazing team of filmmakers, artists, craftspeople and, lest we not forget, stunt drivers feels so real, you want to shake the dust out of your clothes after watching the movie.
Road Warrior, or Mad Max 2 as it was known in its native Australia and other parts of the world, was so influential that to this day, over 30 years after it was first released, cheap knockoffs are still made that ape aspects of the movie - mainly its football shoulder pad, leather-clad fashions.
I'm always drawn to characters like Max. A wounded man who just wanted to be left alone after the tragedy he suffered, but who did the right thing when no one else did, or could do. That fits the mold of many a classic Western film character too (and more than a few characters from Samurai films).
Now, finally, MAD MAX IS BACK.
Mad Max: Fury Road, scheduled for released May 2015, puts George Miller back in command, with Tom Hardy donning the weathered and tattered Main Force Police uniform of Max Rockatansky. Academy Award-winner Charlize Theron, sporting a very cool mechanical arm, co-stars.
Start revving your engines. The chase is about to begin...again.
Well, kids, Halloween is right around the corner. One of my favorite movies to get me into that Halloween spirit is Ed Wood, directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp as the "worst director of all time."
It's an amazing film, featuring lush black and white photography and a great cast, with Martin Landau winning an Oscar for his moving portrayal of the legendary horror film icon Bela Lugosi.
I have it on good authority that the 2013 indie movie Coherence is a smart, engaging work of sci fi. The story concerns the strange events that unfold among a group of friends gathered for a dinner party after a comet is sighted.
It's got a big idea in a small package, with a feel reminiscent of the best of the original Twilight Zone TV series. The film was shot largely at director/co-writer James Ward Byrkit's home; the main cast of eight worked with a loose script and improvised their dialogue. If you recall, this was how The Blair Witch Project was done, and also the way the great Christopher Guest shoots his improv comedies like Best In Show and A Mighty Wind.
I've heard so many great things about the BBC America series ORPHAN BLACK - the incredible acting from lead Tatiana Maslany, the premise - but I've yet to catch the show.
This visual effects clip of the "clone dance party" makes me want to watch it even more.
