Wesley Britton's Blog, page 42
October 24, 2016
A Tribute to The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne (Syfy Channel, 2000)
From June 18—Dec. 16, 2000, I was a devoted watcher of The Secret Adventures of Jules Verne on the SyFy Channel. I wasn’t alone. Should you stop by the show’s DVD listing at Amazon, other folks gave it a combined 4.9 rating. It was such an amazingly good show I remain astonished how short-lived it was and how little it’s talked about in sci fi circles.
Created by producer Gavin Scott in 1999, Secret Adventures was the first all-digitally produced television series ever made. Scott’s premise was that science fiction writer Jules Verne's classic tales were not created out of whole cloth from the writer's imagination, but were instead inspired by his own wild adventures as a youth, later fictionalized as stories.
Set in the 1860s, the young Bohemian writer Jules Verne (Chris Demetral) was drawn into the war against the League of Darkness, an aristocratic organization wishing to retain power for the rich and nobly born by stirring up wars because peace promotes democracy. Verne’s compatriots included the cynical gambler Phileas Fogg (Michael Praed), the son of Sir Boniface Fogg, the deceased creator of the British Secret Service. His cousin was Rebecca Fogg (Francesca Hunt), the very Emma Peel-like leather-clad first woman secret agent for the service. Rebecca idolized her late uncle, while Phileas remained angry his father sent his brother, Eurasmus, to his death on a secret mission. Phileas’ multi-talented manservant, Passeparcout (Michel Courtemanche), brought Verne’s scientific ideas to life in his lab on the fantastic airship, “Aurora.” Fogg won this dirigible in a Montreal card game rigged by the British government to have him involved in saving the Empire from various threats.
This group’s adventures included destroying a giant mole machine designed to assassinate Queen Victoria, defeating a madman’s attempt to take over the world with rocket-powered vampires, going back in time to reunite the Three Musketeers, helping the Union army during the Civil War, assisting a young Thomas Edison who’s invented a new tank, fighting Jesse James and his gang who’ve taken over the “Aurora,” and stopping the evil Count Gregory from stealing the Holy Grail in another dimension.
When production began, there were worries no American outlet would pick up the Montreal-based project until the 22 episodes were filmed and the SyFy channel took note. While the concept seemed unworkable on paper, the final product was fresh, unique in format and execution. Scott and his team created one of the world's largest production facilities to house the project called Angus Yards, a former train depot.
It was equipped with complete costume, prop and set design shops, computer graphics facilities, and the world's largest green screen. Costs were maintained by housing production and post-production in the same building, allowing for quick integration of special effects with live action.
While all involved with the series emphasized its science-fiction aspects, connections to the secret agent genre were evident on many levels. According to one producer, the show was “like The X-Files style of fantasy, where you believe it and it did really happen to those guys, only with the higher production values.” One connection to The Wild Wild West was the recurring adversary, Count Gregory (Rick Overton), the armor-clad, half-metal leader of an ageless cult. He evoked similar villains of WWW’s television and movie incarnations while representing the dark side of the 19th century Industrial Age.
Francesca Hunt’s Rebecca Fogg evoked The Avengers spirit as she alternated between coy demurness and aggressive fighting, being the central action figure in the series. Also like The Avengers, according to Hunt, a key element of the series was the ironic British sense of humor. She noted the difficulty of modern action adventure acting with new special-effects, claiming it takes a special ability to gawk at and speak to rockets or people that aren't there until the digital experts work with the film. Like honor Blackman, whose judo skills from her Avengers days made her the leading candidate to play Pussy Galore, Hunt performed her own stunts and employed her four years of training in dancing and swordplay, the latter a skill she never expected to use in her career.
Notable guest stars included Patrick Duffy, John Rhys-Davies, Michael Moriarty, Margot Kidder, Polly Draper, and David Warner. While plans were underway to film a second season, the project was dropped. While a DVD set is listed at Amazon, the site says it has no copies and doesn’t know when it will be available again. However, the show is listed for $24.95 at:
www.timesforgottendvd.com/secret-adve...
Created by producer Gavin Scott in 1999, Secret Adventures was the first all-digitally produced television series ever made. Scott’s premise was that science fiction writer Jules Verne's classic tales were not created out of whole cloth from the writer's imagination, but were instead inspired by his own wild adventures as a youth, later fictionalized as stories.
Set in the 1860s, the young Bohemian writer Jules Verne (Chris Demetral) was drawn into the war against the League of Darkness, an aristocratic organization wishing to retain power for the rich and nobly born by stirring up wars because peace promotes democracy. Verne’s compatriots included the cynical gambler Phileas Fogg (Michael Praed), the son of Sir Boniface Fogg, the deceased creator of the British Secret Service. His cousin was Rebecca Fogg (Francesca Hunt), the very Emma Peel-like leather-clad first woman secret agent for the service. Rebecca idolized her late uncle, while Phileas remained angry his father sent his brother, Eurasmus, to his death on a secret mission. Phileas’ multi-talented manservant, Passeparcout (Michel Courtemanche), brought Verne’s scientific ideas to life in his lab on the fantastic airship, “Aurora.” Fogg won this dirigible in a Montreal card game rigged by the British government to have him involved in saving the Empire from various threats.
This group’s adventures included destroying a giant mole machine designed to assassinate Queen Victoria, defeating a madman’s attempt to take over the world with rocket-powered vampires, going back in time to reunite the Three Musketeers, helping the Union army during the Civil War, assisting a young Thomas Edison who’s invented a new tank, fighting Jesse James and his gang who’ve taken over the “Aurora,” and stopping the evil Count Gregory from stealing the Holy Grail in another dimension.
When production began, there were worries no American outlet would pick up the Montreal-based project until the 22 episodes were filmed and the SyFy channel took note. While the concept seemed unworkable on paper, the final product was fresh, unique in format and execution. Scott and his team created one of the world's largest production facilities to house the project called Angus Yards, a former train depot.
It was equipped with complete costume, prop and set design shops, computer graphics facilities, and the world's largest green screen. Costs were maintained by housing production and post-production in the same building, allowing for quick integration of special effects with live action.
While all involved with the series emphasized its science-fiction aspects, connections to the secret agent genre were evident on many levels. According to one producer, the show was “like The X-Files style of fantasy, where you believe it and it did really happen to those guys, only with the higher production values.” One connection to The Wild Wild West was the recurring adversary, Count Gregory (Rick Overton), the armor-clad, half-metal leader of an ageless cult. He evoked similar villains of WWW’s television and movie incarnations while representing the dark side of the 19th century Industrial Age.
Francesca Hunt’s Rebecca Fogg evoked The Avengers spirit as she alternated between coy demurness and aggressive fighting, being the central action figure in the series. Also like The Avengers, according to Hunt, a key element of the series was the ironic British sense of humor. She noted the difficulty of modern action adventure acting with new special-effects, claiming it takes a special ability to gawk at and speak to rockets or people that aren't there until the digital experts work with the film. Like honor Blackman, whose judo skills from her Avengers days made her the leading candidate to play Pussy Galore, Hunt performed her own stunts and employed her four years of training in dancing and swordplay, the latter a skill she never expected to use in her career.
Notable guest stars included Patrick Duffy, John Rhys-Davies, Michael Moriarty, Margot Kidder, Polly Draper, and David Warner. While plans were underway to film a second season, the project was dropped. While a DVD set is listed at Amazon, the site says it has no copies and doesn’t know when it will be available again. However, the show is listed for $24.95 at:
www.timesforgottendvd.com/secret-adve...
October 19, 2016
Riverworld Revisited
Back in the ‘70s, I was among those dazzled by Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series. Several decades later, I was invited to write an article about it for a print encyclopedia that apparently no longer exists.
I recently found the article in my files and decided to revise it and post it here, the first online publication of it. My main goal is to whet the appetite of new readers who should not neglect this classic batch of books. Yes, there are spoilers below, but then again, the series has been out nearly 40 years. While the plot summary is pretty straightforward, even readers already knowledgeable with the series might pick up insights from the analysis.
RIVERWORLD SERIES
Series chronicles adventures of humanity reborn in future on distant planet where various characters seek the creators of Riverworld and answers to the meaning of their new existence
Author: Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009)
Time of plot: 2246-2307 A.D.
Location: Riverworld
First published: To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), The Fabulous Riverboat (1971), The Dark Design (1977), Riverworld and Other Stories (1979),The Magic Labyrinth (1980), Riverworld War: The Suppressed Fiction of Philip Jose Farmer (1980), The Gods of Riverworld (1983), River of Eternity (1983)
The Plot: The Riverworld series is set on a distant planet where all humans ever born are resurrected along a ten million mile river near mushroom-shaped grailstones that provide food and drugs. When humans die they are reborn again a day later at another location. Twelve unseen, ancient Ethicals oversee the system whose purpose and character is revealed throughout the series. A rebel Ethical called X chooses human agents to spoil the Ethicals' plans to limit humankind's chances "to go on" past terrestrial existence.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go focuses on nineteenth century explorer Richard Burton who awakens in a chamber, one of countless human bodies suspended in mysterious columns. He is put back to sleep, and then awakens on the shore of an endless river with scores of other humans from a variety of cultures and times. Burton gathers a group of friends including the alien Monat. Burton's group travels down the river encountering many warlike cultures in groups sixty percent from one Earth culture, thirty percent another, and ten percent random choices. Ex-Nazi Hermann Goring runs a slave state that captures Burton's band. Burton's group kills and overthrows Goring.
They learn that Ethicals, agents of their unseen overseers, disguise themselves as humans to monitor their activities. Burton learns mankind has been given a second chance and decides to follow the river to its source to find answers. He also learns the Ethicals seek him because of his memory of the pre-resurrection chamber. He repeatedly escapes his pursuers and comes close to the river's headwaters.
The Fabulous Riverboat begins ten years after Resurrection Day with Sam Clemens, alias Mark Twain, building a riverboat to sail to the Ethicals' Misty Tower. He learns he is a chosen agent of X. Clemens and King John Lackland of medieval England create a heavily armed, industrial state named Paralando. As the boat sets sail, King John steals the boat and throws Clemens' crew overboard.
The Dark Design chronicles three teams' attempts to reach the Misty Tower after resurrections have mysteriously ceased. Jul Gulbirra, a feminist aviator, comes to Parolando where Clemens has launched his new riverboat, the "Mark Twain." Fellow X agent Milton Firebrass supervises building two airships, one to fly to the Misty Tower, the other to destroy King John. Richard Burton's party travels north, and Burton learns that Monat and Peter Frigate are Ethical spies. They disappear before he can question them. A second Peter Frigate joins actor Tom Mix and author Jack London, both agents of X. The three build a balloon and fly toward the Tower.
One dirigible sails to the Misty Tower, lands, and explores the unyielding walls. On the return trip, an Ethical spy destroys the dirigible. Frigate's balloon also fails.
The Magic Labyrinth follows the travels of King John's "Rex Grandismus" and Clemens's renamed boat, the "Not For Hire." Burton's group joins King John before Clemens finds the "Rex," and an apocalyptic battle destroys both boats and their captains. Burton and eleven survivors from both boats join together and successfully reach the Tower. Inside, they find bones of dead Ethicals and meet Loga, the Ethical known as X. He reveals the resurrections stopped when Monat, an alien who helped design Riverworld, shut down the main computer. Burton's group helps Loga repair the computer, restore resurrections, and give humanity more time to spiritually evolve.
In Gods of Riverworld, an unknown Ethical traps Burton's group in the Tower, kills Loga, and overrides his computer commands, stopping the resurrections. Burton's band explores the vast Tower and kill the unknown Ethical. They unlock the secrets of the Ethicals' machines, and begin resurrecting people into the Tower. Corruption sets in, and an insane woman kills most of the humans and destroys the well containing the souls of all mankind. Loga returns, revealing the Tower troubles had been a test of Burton's group's worthiness to oversee the Tower before the ultimate exodus back to Earth. After resurrecting humanity on Riverworld, Burton's group decides to leave and explore new planets.
In Riverworld and Other Stories, "Riverworld" is the only tale connected to the series. Tom Mix escapes from Kramer, a sixteenth century Inquisitor. Mix and a despondent Jesus Christ join Stafford, leader of a neighboring colony at war with Kramer. Kramer captures both Mix and Christ, denouncing the latter as a fraud, and puts the pair to the stake.
River of Eternity is a 1953 version of the first Riverworld story. Richard Black and his possessive mate, Phyliss, learn of Joe Caveman, a Stone Age man who had been to the river's headwaters. Black, aided by Charbrass, fights a war with Murel, a neighboring dictator. Black, Charbrass, Caveman, Murel and Phyliss are killed.
The group is resurrected together and discovers Charbrass is an agent of the builders. They follow him into the white Grail Tower where Charbrass explains Riverworld's history and the powers of the Tower. Murel kills Charbrass and Caveman, is killed by Black and Phyliss, and Charbrass returns revealing the adventure was a test. He sends them to the Transition Planet for further growth.
Analysis: Farmer states in his various introductions that the series evolved and took on many forms, The River of Eternity the best published, self-contained version of the series' inception. The five "mainstream" novels, to use Farmer's term, depict his vision of mankind as essentially a proud, quarrelsome and warlike people with rare and seemingly futile attempts at spirituality or selflessness. This vision, seen through a variety of alternating perspectives, rises to a logical climax in The Magic Labyrinth, a novel originally part of the Dark Design but made into a separate book due to the adventures' length. But the series' themes, first and last seen through the eyes of Richard Burton, are underlined in The Gods of Riverworld in which Burton, who has seen and learned more than any other human, decides to continue adventuring rather than develop spiritually.
The Magic Labyrinth was intended to be the series final volume, but The Gods of Riverworld became the mainstream series culmination, emphasizing the added themes of the corrupting nature of power and the ultimate restlessness of the human spirit that is not satisfied even with all questions answered.
Overall, the impressive, cohesive series has earned critical praise for its wide scope of morality plays interspersed with adventure plots, and is considered as important as Isaac Asimov's Foundation series or Frank Herbert's Dune books. The series’ importance is indicated by the Hugo given for To Your Scattered Bodies Go and the publication of The Riverworld War and River of Eternity, both volumes published primarily for scholars and literary historians rather than entertainment for the general reader. Riverworld War: The Suppressed Fiction of Philip Jose Farmer, for example, contains battle scenes and lulls-in-the-action passages deleted from The Magic Labyrinth. This edition provides insights only for those interested in studying the changes in the text or for those curious about how Tom Mix and Jack London die in the riverboat battle.
Farmer's entire body of work is noted for his original and thought-provoking synthesis of history, science, philosophy, literature and, in his non-Riverworld stories, his use of popular culture, especially fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. Literary critics have made detailed explorations of various topics in Farmer's fiction, including his use of women. On Riverworld, female characters are often little more than prizes for men to fight over with occasional, exceptional, more developed characters such as Jul Gulbria in The Dark Design and Phyliss Black in River of Eternity. Other critics have explored Farmer's use of religion, perhaps the most important motif throughout the series, a subject giving the books much of their depth. Other scholars have been interested in Farmer's use of technology, noting the development and warlike uses mankind makes of available tools on primitive, "second-chance" Riverworld. For Farmer, industry begins and ends in armed human conflicts, the greatest accomplishments of Riverworld's industrial age mutually destroyed in the pointless, vindictive battle of the riverboats. Farmer’s interwoven storylines and detailed character development keep up reader interest, although some passages tend to digress and distract from the action. Readers knowledgeable about specific historical figures may question Farmer's depictions that do not reconcile with their actual biographies, notably Sam Clemens who is distinctly unliterary on Riverworld.
I recently found the article in my files and decided to revise it and post it here, the first online publication of it. My main goal is to whet the appetite of new readers who should not neglect this classic batch of books. Yes, there are spoilers below, but then again, the series has been out nearly 40 years. While the plot summary is pretty straightforward, even readers already knowledgeable with the series might pick up insights from the analysis.
RIVERWORLD SERIES
Series chronicles adventures of humanity reborn in future on distant planet where various characters seek the creators of Riverworld and answers to the meaning of their new existence
Author: Philip Jose Farmer (1918-2009)
Time of plot: 2246-2307 A.D.
Location: Riverworld
First published: To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), The Fabulous Riverboat (1971), The Dark Design (1977), Riverworld and Other Stories (1979),The Magic Labyrinth (1980), Riverworld War: The Suppressed Fiction of Philip Jose Farmer (1980), The Gods of Riverworld (1983), River of Eternity (1983)
The Plot: The Riverworld series is set on a distant planet where all humans ever born are resurrected along a ten million mile river near mushroom-shaped grailstones that provide food and drugs. When humans die they are reborn again a day later at another location. Twelve unseen, ancient Ethicals oversee the system whose purpose and character is revealed throughout the series. A rebel Ethical called X chooses human agents to spoil the Ethicals' plans to limit humankind's chances "to go on" past terrestrial existence.
To Your Scattered Bodies Go focuses on nineteenth century explorer Richard Burton who awakens in a chamber, one of countless human bodies suspended in mysterious columns. He is put back to sleep, and then awakens on the shore of an endless river with scores of other humans from a variety of cultures and times. Burton gathers a group of friends including the alien Monat. Burton's group travels down the river encountering many warlike cultures in groups sixty percent from one Earth culture, thirty percent another, and ten percent random choices. Ex-Nazi Hermann Goring runs a slave state that captures Burton's band. Burton's group kills and overthrows Goring.
They learn that Ethicals, agents of their unseen overseers, disguise themselves as humans to monitor their activities. Burton learns mankind has been given a second chance and decides to follow the river to its source to find answers. He also learns the Ethicals seek him because of his memory of the pre-resurrection chamber. He repeatedly escapes his pursuers and comes close to the river's headwaters.
The Fabulous Riverboat begins ten years after Resurrection Day with Sam Clemens, alias Mark Twain, building a riverboat to sail to the Ethicals' Misty Tower. He learns he is a chosen agent of X. Clemens and King John Lackland of medieval England create a heavily armed, industrial state named Paralando. As the boat sets sail, King John steals the boat and throws Clemens' crew overboard.
The Dark Design chronicles three teams' attempts to reach the Misty Tower after resurrections have mysteriously ceased. Jul Gulbirra, a feminist aviator, comes to Parolando where Clemens has launched his new riverboat, the "Mark Twain." Fellow X agent Milton Firebrass supervises building two airships, one to fly to the Misty Tower, the other to destroy King John. Richard Burton's party travels north, and Burton learns that Monat and Peter Frigate are Ethical spies. They disappear before he can question them. A second Peter Frigate joins actor Tom Mix and author Jack London, both agents of X. The three build a balloon and fly toward the Tower.
One dirigible sails to the Misty Tower, lands, and explores the unyielding walls. On the return trip, an Ethical spy destroys the dirigible. Frigate's balloon also fails.
The Magic Labyrinth follows the travels of King John's "Rex Grandismus" and Clemens's renamed boat, the "Not For Hire." Burton's group joins King John before Clemens finds the "Rex," and an apocalyptic battle destroys both boats and their captains. Burton and eleven survivors from both boats join together and successfully reach the Tower. Inside, they find bones of dead Ethicals and meet Loga, the Ethical known as X. He reveals the resurrections stopped when Monat, an alien who helped design Riverworld, shut down the main computer. Burton's group helps Loga repair the computer, restore resurrections, and give humanity more time to spiritually evolve.
In Gods of Riverworld, an unknown Ethical traps Burton's group in the Tower, kills Loga, and overrides his computer commands, stopping the resurrections. Burton's band explores the vast Tower and kill the unknown Ethical. They unlock the secrets of the Ethicals' machines, and begin resurrecting people into the Tower. Corruption sets in, and an insane woman kills most of the humans and destroys the well containing the souls of all mankind. Loga returns, revealing the Tower troubles had been a test of Burton's group's worthiness to oversee the Tower before the ultimate exodus back to Earth. After resurrecting humanity on Riverworld, Burton's group decides to leave and explore new planets.
In Riverworld and Other Stories, "Riverworld" is the only tale connected to the series. Tom Mix escapes from Kramer, a sixteenth century Inquisitor. Mix and a despondent Jesus Christ join Stafford, leader of a neighboring colony at war with Kramer. Kramer captures both Mix and Christ, denouncing the latter as a fraud, and puts the pair to the stake.
River of Eternity is a 1953 version of the first Riverworld story. Richard Black and his possessive mate, Phyliss, learn of Joe Caveman, a Stone Age man who had been to the river's headwaters. Black, aided by Charbrass, fights a war with Murel, a neighboring dictator. Black, Charbrass, Caveman, Murel and Phyliss are killed.
The group is resurrected together and discovers Charbrass is an agent of the builders. They follow him into the white Grail Tower where Charbrass explains Riverworld's history and the powers of the Tower. Murel kills Charbrass and Caveman, is killed by Black and Phyliss, and Charbrass returns revealing the adventure was a test. He sends them to the Transition Planet for further growth.
Analysis: Farmer states in his various introductions that the series evolved and took on many forms, The River of Eternity the best published, self-contained version of the series' inception. The five "mainstream" novels, to use Farmer's term, depict his vision of mankind as essentially a proud, quarrelsome and warlike people with rare and seemingly futile attempts at spirituality or selflessness. This vision, seen through a variety of alternating perspectives, rises to a logical climax in The Magic Labyrinth, a novel originally part of the Dark Design but made into a separate book due to the adventures' length. But the series' themes, first and last seen through the eyes of Richard Burton, are underlined in The Gods of Riverworld in which Burton, who has seen and learned more than any other human, decides to continue adventuring rather than develop spiritually.
The Magic Labyrinth was intended to be the series final volume, but The Gods of Riverworld became the mainstream series culmination, emphasizing the added themes of the corrupting nature of power and the ultimate restlessness of the human spirit that is not satisfied even with all questions answered.
Overall, the impressive, cohesive series has earned critical praise for its wide scope of morality plays interspersed with adventure plots, and is considered as important as Isaac Asimov's Foundation series or Frank Herbert's Dune books. The series’ importance is indicated by the Hugo given for To Your Scattered Bodies Go and the publication of The Riverworld War and River of Eternity, both volumes published primarily for scholars and literary historians rather than entertainment for the general reader. Riverworld War: The Suppressed Fiction of Philip Jose Farmer, for example, contains battle scenes and lulls-in-the-action passages deleted from The Magic Labyrinth. This edition provides insights only for those interested in studying the changes in the text or for those curious about how Tom Mix and Jack London die in the riverboat battle.
Farmer's entire body of work is noted for his original and thought-provoking synthesis of history, science, philosophy, literature and, in his non-Riverworld stories, his use of popular culture, especially fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. Literary critics have made detailed explorations of various topics in Farmer's fiction, including his use of women. On Riverworld, female characters are often little more than prizes for men to fight over with occasional, exceptional, more developed characters such as Jul Gulbria in The Dark Design and Phyliss Black in River of Eternity. Other critics have explored Farmer's use of religion, perhaps the most important motif throughout the series, a subject giving the books much of their depth. Other scholars have been interested in Farmer's use of technology, noting the development and warlike uses mankind makes of available tools on primitive, "second-chance" Riverworld. For Farmer, industry begins and ends in armed human conflicts, the greatest accomplishments of Riverworld's industrial age mutually destroyed in the pointless, vindictive battle of the riverboats. Farmer’s interwoven storylines and detailed character development keep up reader interest, although some passages tend to digress and distract from the action. Readers knowledgeable about specific historical figures may question Farmer's depictions that do not reconcile with their actual biographies, notably Sam Clemens who is distinctly unliterary on Riverworld.
October 17, 2016
Guest Post: Bruce Dettman believes 1950s sci fi actresses are much more than eye-candy
THOSE SCI-FI GALS
By Bruce Dettman
There exists a certain school of perception, culled mostly from early exposure to exaggerated pulp illustrations and further triggered by garish movie poster art, which suggests that women in science-fiction and horror cinema of the 1950s traditionally fell into two distinct categories -- that is to say beyond being physically attractive -- namely those either sacrificed to the predatory whims of the BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters), the walking dead or nature’s axe-wielding miscreants, or as intended victims usually saved in the much clichéd nick of time by the hero, usually her love interest. From such one-dimensional depictions little is suggested in these women in the way of character, intellect, stamina or independence. They are little more than curvaceous props, necessary plot-wise but hardly of great interest save in providing a physical allure. To a certain degree this was also true in the fantasy cinema of the 1930s and 40s when the designated female lead was seen to faint away while being carted off by Kharis the Mummy or shrieking at the sight of The Wolfman. But while this defenseless image was indeed extended into the next decades as far as promotional material was concerned -- fainting heroines, their bodies draped over a giant insect’s lethal mandibles or cowering from a fierce Martian -- the reality was a great deal different. In examining the main female characterizations in classic science-fiction films of the 1950s the majority of these characters, unlike so many of their counterparts in mainstream films of the same period, were nearly always portrayed as intelligent, courageous and usually the equal to, if not an improvement, over their brawny but often impulsive and rash male co-stars.
Having grown up in the 1950s where much of my pre-pubescent notion of femininity and womanhood was to a great degree influenced by film -- both old and new -- and television -- all new -- I was particularly attracted to horror, science fiction and fantasy themes. While the monsters and fantastic dilemmas were obviously the main attractions, I also took note of the women in these movies. These were the females I watched as a kid as they helped to wage battle against giant scorpions, vegetable invaders from another planet or pod people. These were the women I admired and who, to a certain degree, shaped, for better or worse, much of my nascent perspective of the opposite sex.
I immediately found much in these brave and resilient heroines to admire and take serious note of, even if I was hardly immune to the more overt and gaudier extremes of certain other showboating actresses. In the latter department there was Allison Hayes, her greatly enlarged -- and exceedingly impressive -- body straddled by strategically placed bed sheets in Attack of The 50 Foot Woman. There was the ultimate trashy vixen, Yvette Vickers, oozing hot sex like a manhole oozes steam and eventually sucked dry by the voracious title creatures of Attack of the Giant Leeches. There was the stupendous Shirley Kilpatrick as the Amazonian space invader in The Astounding She Monster, endowed not only with the sort of cone-shaped knockers that stretched nylon to its limits, but the touch of radioactive death as well (and who always moved backwards from the camera, a retreat made necessary due to a rip in the back of her costume and budgetary restrictions prevented the creation of a second outfit) all of whom certainly got my temporary attention. Still, it was the other women, the brainy, subtle and dependable ones, who in the long run captured my true and lasting interest.
While there are numerous examples of these sharp and resourceful ladies in science-fiction films of the period, I will limit the scope of this piece to just five particular favorites: Patricia Neal, Dana Wynter, Margaret Sheridan, Mara Corday and Faith Domergue.
Patricia Neal, who later in her career went on to numerous impressive features including her Academy Award role in Hud, appeared in Robert Wise’s 1951 classic The Day The Earth Stood Still opposite Michael Rennie’s space visitor Klaatu. In the film, Ms. Neal plays a war widow supporting herself and her small child (Billy Gray) in post World War II Washington D.C. Neal’s character, who Rennie eventually must turn to when his true interstellar identity is discovered, is the one of the few level-headed, non- hysterical figures in the entire film. She is intelligent, calm, and intellectually curious and unlike most of the paranoid soldiers, politicians and scientists around her refuses to panic despite the incredible situation she finds herself in. Even after she is brought to Klaatu’s spaceship by the alien visitor’s intimidating robot Gort, her composure, grace under fire and grasp of the situation shines through.
Dana Wynter, a brunette beauty born in England, in some ways might seem an odd choice for the part of all-American Becky Driscol, the small-town young woman who partners with Kevin McCarthy’s Dr. Miles Bennell to resist the invading pod people in director Don Seigel’s classic science-fiction film, the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. She is refined and poised, almost regally so, but the script explains that she has been living abroad for many years in an attempt to explain away her slight accent. While there is an undeniable delicacy about Ms. Wynter which might seem to work against her in a life and death situation requiring both physical and emotional stamina, she impressively and unequivocally rallies to the cause once the high stakes are placed before her. After the pods have been discovered and their terrifying purpose unveiled, Miles wants Becky to leave, to find safety, but she won’t hear of it. She not only remains with him, even helping with a well-targeted scissors when he is attacked by an altered chief of police, but because of her unflagging devotion and refusal to desert their cause, ultimately becomes a pod herself.
Lanky, slightly tomboyish Margaret Sheridan from producer Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World (1951) is probably the most modern of the heroines being discussed here. Her character Nikki, a typical Hawksian woman, is not only the equal of most of the men around her but often eclipses them in intellectual readiness and composure. It is she who comes up with the solution of how to deal with the invading and carnivorous extra-terrestrial, made out of plant-like material, when both the military led by Captain Hendry (Kenneth Toby) and lead egghead Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) are stymied.
“What do you do with a vegetable?” someone asks in frustration.
“Boil it,” she responds matter-of-factly.
It is the beginning of the invader’s downfall. Kerosene begets electricity.
All thanks to our Nikki.
Margaret Sheridan died young and did not leave much in the way of a memorable film career but if nothing else her work in The Thing established her as one of filmdom’s greatest and most impressive sci-fi heroines.
Mara Corday never had the opportunity of appearing in a quality science-fiction picture, certainly not the caliber of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Thing. She was a real beauty, a former model and pinup girl, but beneath the knockout exterior she managed to register strongly with a quiet, sometimes even brooding intelligence. This served her to good advantage in her three sci-fi outings, all of the giant critter variety. In The Black Scorpion she portrayed the no-nonsense and prairie-smart owner of a Mexican ranch smack dab in the middle of a nest of giant arachnids, a biologist assisting Leo G. Carroll in Tarantula and a female scientist in the notorious The Giant Claw helping drab hero Jeff Morrow eradicate the bloated buzzard whose appendage is referenced in the title. It is a testament to Ms. Corday’s ability as an actress that she manages to create an admirable and intelligent character in spite of being forced to react to what has been deservedly acclaimed as undeniably the worst overstuffed critter in the annuals of 1950s giant monster flicks. While audiences might have split guts laughing at the atrociously designed puppet, they never laughed at Mara. Here, I could see, was a woman with beauty and brains. Finding one of these in my grammar school play yard, of course, was quite another thing.
Faith Domergue was a dark-haired beauty who had been given the big buildup by millionaire producer Howard Hughes but whose much ballyhooed debut in the eccentric producer’s Vendetta proved to be a box office misfire failing to excite both audiences and critics alike. The doe-eyed Ms. Domergue persevered, however, and had a busy film and television career for a few years. She could project a kind of smoldering even dormant sexuality but also radiated a cool and detached intelligence, traits that served her well in her various horror science-fiction efforts. Probably best remembered as the scientist accompanying Rex Reason to the planet Metaluna in Universal’s 1955 This Island Earth, she projected intellect and a measured coolness. Still portraying a brainy and clinical scientist in Ray Harryhausen’s It Came From Beneath The Sea, she once again resonated with a nicely balanced persona of intellect and beauty. Despite going up against a cephalopod big enough to supply the entire Pacific coast with a year’s worth of calamari steaks, she remained steady and reliable, undaunted by the challenge although never totally abandoning her natural charms and undeniable sensuality. She also applied these same charms to a villainous character when she portrayed the snake woman in the routine Cult of the Cobra, her presence being the film’s only positive feature.
Taken as a whole, despite stereotypes that did not hold up under scrutiny that the women in 1950s horror and science-fiction were nothing more than ornamental offerings to a public expecting simplistic beauty and the beast scenarios and where the men vanquished the monsters and the women quivered and shook in the background, the very opposite was pretty much true. Compared to mainstream films of the same period -- from straight dramas to westerns -- where the distaff side was too often depicted as one-dimensional, weak and without substance other than devotion to their men --the women cited above -- and many others not referenced -- in the decade’s genre movies have stood the test of time, as some of the most emotionally sturdy, mentally adept and physically impressive that motion pictures have ever bestowed upon the movie-going public.
By Bruce Dettman
There exists a certain school of perception, culled mostly from early exposure to exaggerated pulp illustrations and further triggered by garish movie poster art, which suggests that women in science-fiction and horror cinema of the 1950s traditionally fell into two distinct categories -- that is to say beyond being physically attractive -- namely those either sacrificed to the predatory whims of the BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters), the walking dead or nature’s axe-wielding miscreants, or as intended victims usually saved in the much clichéd nick of time by the hero, usually her love interest. From such one-dimensional depictions little is suggested in these women in the way of character, intellect, stamina or independence. They are little more than curvaceous props, necessary plot-wise but hardly of great interest save in providing a physical allure. To a certain degree this was also true in the fantasy cinema of the 1930s and 40s when the designated female lead was seen to faint away while being carted off by Kharis the Mummy or shrieking at the sight of The Wolfman. But while this defenseless image was indeed extended into the next decades as far as promotional material was concerned -- fainting heroines, their bodies draped over a giant insect’s lethal mandibles or cowering from a fierce Martian -- the reality was a great deal different. In examining the main female characterizations in classic science-fiction films of the 1950s the majority of these characters, unlike so many of their counterparts in mainstream films of the same period, were nearly always portrayed as intelligent, courageous and usually the equal to, if not an improvement, over their brawny but often impulsive and rash male co-stars.
Having grown up in the 1950s where much of my pre-pubescent notion of femininity and womanhood was to a great degree influenced by film -- both old and new -- and television -- all new -- I was particularly attracted to horror, science fiction and fantasy themes. While the monsters and fantastic dilemmas were obviously the main attractions, I also took note of the women in these movies. These were the females I watched as a kid as they helped to wage battle against giant scorpions, vegetable invaders from another planet or pod people. These were the women I admired and who, to a certain degree, shaped, for better or worse, much of my nascent perspective of the opposite sex.
I immediately found much in these brave and resilient heroines to admire and take serious note of, even if I was hardly immune to the more overt and gaudier extremes of certain other showboating actresses. In the latter department there was Allison Hayes, her greatly enlarged -- and exceedingly impressive -- body straddled by strategically placed bed sheets in Attack of The 50 Foot Woman. There was the ultimate trashy vixen, Yvette Vickers, oozing hot sex like a manhole oozes steam and eventually sucked dry by the voracious title creatures of Attack of the Giant Leeches. There was the stupendous Shirley Kilpatrick as the Amazonian space invader in The Astounding She Monster, endowed not only with the sort of cone-shaped knockers that stretched nylon to its limits, but the touch of radioactive death as well (and who always moved backwards from the camera, a retreat made necessary due to a rip in the back of her costume and budgetary restrictions prevented the creation of a second outfit) all of whom certainly got my temporary attention. Still, it was the other women, the brainy, subtle and dependable ones, who in the long run captured my true and lasting interest.
While there are numerous examples of these sharp and resourceful ladies in science-fiction films of the period, I will limit the scope of this piece to just five particular favorites: Patricia Neal, Dana Wynter, Margaret Sheridan, Mara Corday and Faith Domergue.
Patricia Neal, who later in her career went on to numerous impressive features including her Academy Award role in Hud, appeared in Robert Wise’s 1951 classic The Day The Earth Stood Still opposite Michael Rennie’s space visitor Klaatu. In the film, Ms. Neal plays a war widow supporting herself and her small child (Billy Gray) in post World War II Washington D.C. Neal’s character, who Rennie eventually must turn to when his true interstellar identity is discovered, is the one of the few level-headed, non- hysterical figures in the entire film. She is intelligent, calm, and intellectually curious and unlike most of the paranoid soldiers, politicians and scientists around her refuses to panic despite the incredible situation she finds herself in. Even after she is brought to Klaatu’s spaceship by the alien visitor’s intimidating robot Gort, her composure, grace under fire and grasp of the situation shines through.
Dana Wynter, a brunette beauty born in England, in some ways might seem an odd choice for the part of all-American Becky Driscol, the small-town young woman who partners with Kevin McCarthy’s Dr. Miles Bennell to resist the invading pod people in director Don Seigel’s classic science-fiction film, the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. She is refined and poised, almost regally so, but the script explains that she has been living abroad for many years in an attempt to explain away her slight accent. While there is an undeniable delicacy about Ms. Wynter which might seem to work against her in a life and death situation requiring both physical and emotional stamina, she impressively and unequivocally rallies to the cause once the high stakes are placed before her. After the pods have been discovered and their terrifying purpose unveiled, Miles wants Becky to leave, to find safety, but she won’t hear of it. She not only remains with him, even helping with a well-targeted scissors when he is attacked by an altered chief of police, but because of her unflagging devotion and refusal to desert their cause, ultimately becomes a pod herself.
Lanky, slightly tomboyish Margaret Sheridan from producer Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World (1951) is probably the most modern of the heroines being discussed here. Her character Nikki, a typical Hawksian woman, is not only the equal of most of the men around her but often eclipses them in intellectual readiness and composure. It is she who comes up with the solution of how to deal with the invading and carnivorous extra-terrestrial, made out of plant-like material, when both the military led by Captain Hendry (Kenneth Toby) and lead egghead Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) are stymied.
“What do you do with a vegetable?” someone asks in frustration.
“Boil it,” she responds matter-of-factly.
It is the beginning of the invader’s downfall. Kerosene begets electricity.
All thanks to our Nikki.
Margaret Sheridan died young and did not leave much in the way of a memorable film career but if nothing else her work in The Thing established her as one of filmdom’s greatest and most impressive sci-fi heroines.
Mara Corday never had the opportunity of appearing in a quality science-fiction picture, certainly not the caliber of Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Thing. She was a real beauty, a former model and pinup girl, but beneath the knockout exterior she managed to register strongly with a quiet, sometimes even brooding intelligence. This served her to good advantage in her three sci-fi outings, all of the giant critter variety. In The Black Scorpion she portrayed the no-nonsense and prairie-smart owner of a Mexican ranch smack dab in the middle of a nest of giant arachnids, a biologist assisting Leo G. Carroll in Tarantula and a female scientist in the notorious The Giant Claw helping drab hero Jeff Morrow eradicate the bloated buzzard whose appendage is referenced in the title. It is a testament to Ms. Corday’s ability as an actress that she manages to create an admirable and intelligent character in spite of being forced to react to what has been deservedly acclaimed as undeniably the worst overstuffed critter in the annuals of 1950s giant monster flicks. While audiences might have split guts laughing at the atrociously designed puppet, they never laughed at Mara. Here, I could see, was a woman with beauty and brains. Finding one of these in my grammar school play yard, of course, was quite another thing.
Faith Domergue was a dark-haired beauty who had been given the big buildup by millionaire producer Howard Hughes but whose much ballyhooed debut in the eccentric producer’s Vendetta proved to be a box office misfire failing to excite both audiences and critics alike. The doe-eyed Ms. Domergue persevered, however, and had a busy film and television career for a few years. She could project a kind of smoldering even dormant sexuality but also radiated a cool and detached intelligence, traits that served her well in her various horror science-fiction efforts. Probably best remembered as the scientist accompanying Rex Reason to the planet Metaluna in Universal’s 1955 This Island Earth, she projected intellect and a measured coolness. Still portraying a brainy and clinical scientist in Ray Harryhausen’s It Came From Beneath The Sea, she once again resonated with a nicely balanced persona of intellect and beauty. Despite going up against a cephalopod big enough to supply the entire Pacific coast with a year’s worth of calamari steaks, she remained steady and reliable, undaunted by the challenge although never totally abandoning her natural charms and undeniable sensuality. She also applied these same charms to a villainous character when she portrayed the snake woman in the routine Cult of the Cobra, her presence being the film’s only positive feature.
Taken as a whole, despite stereotypes that did not hold up under scrutiny that the women in 1950s horror and science-fiction were nothing more than ornamental offerings to a public expecting simplistic beauty and the beast scenarios and where the men vanquished the monsters and the women quivered and shook in the background, the very opposite was pretty much true. Compared to mainstream films of the same period -- from straight dramas to westerns -- where the distaff side was too often depicted as one-dimensional, weak and without substance other than devotion to their men --the women cited above -- and many others not referenced -- in the decade’s genre movies have stood the test of time, as some of the most emotionally sturdy, mentally adept and physically impressive that motion pictures have ever bestowed upon the movie-going public.
October 13, 2016
Book Review: A World Between by Robert Herzog
Most readers who pick up A World Between will know it’s about huge chunks of the Earth vanishing into nothingness. Beyond that idea, readers should come to the book with no expectations, no preconceptions whatsoever. For author Robert Herzog doesn’t tell a story that is predictable in either style or substance on any level.
For example, the book opens with several situations in Africa, China, and the U.S. where groups of witnesses encounter strange physical gaps in the world around them. Strangely, only these witnesses are aware of the phenomena. In particular, while one of the weird disappearances is of a beach about an hour from New York City, the press doesn’t seem to know about it. Law enforcement does, but isn’t too concerned. Another setting is one wall of the Grand Canyon gone into the void, but a congressional delegation is much more worried about skinny-dipping nudity on public park land than the loss of a canyon wall.
At first, there isn’t much urgency in the investigation into these disappearances, even though the UN takes jurisdiction as the situations are international in scope. The lady put in charge is Susan Corpora, a relief worker who has no science background whatsoever. For some time, she’s wrapped up in finding living space and a private computer headquarters in New York where she brings in physicist David Alta-force who, in turn, brings in colleague Driscol Sebastian for help. Another partner is police detective Sal Antifermo who has strong opinions about good wine.
For much of the book, we spend time with these four in their NYC apartment/computer lab where Susan runs reports over to the UN, sleeps with David and becomes his muse, and doesn’t do much else. Only once do they really take a field trip, in the most exciting scene in the book where their helicopter is nearly pulled into the Grand Canyon void. Mostly, Susan listens to David and Sebastian toss out concept after concept from theoretical physics as they try to figure out what’s going on. Some chapters, in fact, could be considered dramatized physics lectures on fractals, waves, and particles.
Herzog excels in two significant ways. First, he is gifted with descriptive writing, making all the settings, especially the streets and buildings of New York, vivid and clearly based on first-hand experience. Second, he is convincing when he describes the bureaucracy and the convoluted political processes that control the rather limited investigation into what you’ think would be addressed more like a crisis than a bizarre mystery or scientific riddle. It takes almost 100 pages for the scientists to dive into their computers in earnest, nearly a hundred more before they try any sort of experiment to probe a void. The final very philosophical third of the book is where the scope widens, deepens, and brings several plots to a head.
So A World Between is a low-key slow-burner with vivid characters who are multi-dimensional. The dialogue is mostly quite human in between the long speculative speeches about the make-up of the universe and what might account for lost pieces of our planet. No one is likely to anticipate the ending or the reasons for it all.
Certainly, there’s an audience for this breed of very “hard science” fiction, especially those with some background or knowledge of physics, analytical geometry, and other mathematical disciplines. If you’re into action-adventure, alien visitations, or explorations of dystopian futures, this isn’t a read for you. But it’s very worthwhile reading for those willing to let a cerebral story build and develop and go where human will, science, and suppressed emotions take us.
This review first appeared at BookPleasures.com on Oct. 13, 2016 at:
goo.gl/5wbR7v
Purchase A World Between at:
https://www.amazon.com/World-Between-...
For example, the book opens with several situations in Africa, China, and the U.S. where groups of witnesses encounter strange physical gaps in the world around them. Strangely, only these witnesses are aware of the phenomena. In particular, while one of the weird disappearances is of a beach about an hour from New York City, the press doesn’t seem to know about it. Law enforcement does, but isn’t too concerned. Another setting is one wall of the Grand Canyon gone into the void, but a congressional delegation is much more worried about skinny-dipping nudity on public park land than the loss of a canyon wall.
At first, there isn’t much urgency in the investigation into these disappearances, even though the UN takes jurisdiction as the situations are international in scope. The lady put in charge is Susan Corpora, a relief worker who has no science background whatsoever. For some time, she’s wrapped up in finding living space and a private computer headquarters in New York where she brings in physicist David Alta-force who, in turn, brings in colleague Driscol Sebastian for help. Another partner is police detective Sal Antifermo who has strong opinions about good wine.
For much of the book, we spend time with these four in their NYC apartment/computer lab where Susan runs reports over to the UN, sleeps with David and becomes his muse, and doesn’t do much else. Only once do they really take a field trip, in the most exciting scene in the book where their helicopter is nearly pulled into the Grand Canyon void. Mostly, Susan listens to David and Sebastian toss out concept after concept from theoretical physics as they try to figure out what’s going on. Some chapters, in fact, could be considered dramatized physics lectures on fractals, waves, and particles.
Herzog excels in two significant ways. First, he is gifted with descriptive writing, making all the settings, especially the streets and buildings of New York, vivid and clearly based on first-hand experience. Second, he is convincing when he describes the bureaucracy and the convoluted political processes that control the rather limited investigation into what you’ think would be addressed more like a crisis than a bizarre mystery or scientific riddle. It takes almost 100 pages for the scientists to dive into their computers in earnest, nearly a hundred more before they try any sort of experiment to probe a void. The final very philosophical third of the book is where the scope widens, deepens, and brings several plots to a head.
So A World Between is a low-key slow-burner with vivid characters who are multi-dimensional. The dialogue is mostly quite human in between the long speculative speeches about the make-up of the universe and what might account for lost pieces of our planet. No one is likely to anticipate the ending or the reasons for it all.
Certainly, there’s an audience for this breed of very “hard science” fiction, especially those with some background or knowledge of physics, analytical geometry, and other mathematical disciplines. If you’re into action-adventure, alien visitations, or explorations of dystopian futures, this isn’t a read for you. But it’s very worthwhile reading for those willing to let a cerebral story build and develop and go where human will, science, and suppressed emotions take us.
This review first appeared at BookPleasures.com on Oct. 13, 2016 at:
goo.gl/5wbR7v
Purchase A World Between at:
https://www.amazon.com/World-Between-...
October 11, 2016
Guest Post: Bruce Dettman appreciates 1950’s Rocketship X-M
ROCKETSHIP X-M
By Bruce Dettman
While accepted today as a legitimate and much respected part of mainstream cinema, there was a time, not so very long ago, when the science-fiction film was more often than not relegated to the arena of juvenile entertainment, when it was considered low-brow or at best adolescent fodder for the under twelve audience who in the 1950s flocked to Saturday afternoon kiddie matinees to gobble down Juicy Fruits, inhale Pixie Sticks and scream protests when the tasteless projectionist ran unwanted cartoons like Casper, The Friendly Ghost or Little Iodine instead of the much preferred Daffy Ducks and Bugs Bunnies. For this generation, science-fiction usually equated with Hollywood’s then penchant for rear projecting and enlarging as many animals and insects in the animal kingdom onto the big screen as could be conceived, from over-bloated arachnids (Tarantula), to ants (the exceptional Them) to grasshoppers (The Beginning of the End) to giant wasps and snails (Monster From Green Hell and The Monster That Challenged The World) and then unleash them on some vulnerable American metropolis -- from New York to San Francisco -- with only Peter Graves or Richard Denning or John Agar standing in their way. There were exceptions, of course, sci-fi based productions that were not only aimed at the pre-pubescent crowd but adult audiences as well, efforts such as Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World, Robert Wise’s The Day The Earth Stood Still, Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and George Pal’s War of the Worlds, but these groundbreaking pictures were rare and far apart, not that the kids of my generation cared all that much. Give us monsters and incredible situations and some good popcorn (not to mention no parents) and we were pretty much happy campers.
Another arena explored during the early part of the 1950s was space travel. World War II had given the world the new potentially catastrophic double feature of crude missiles and the atom bomb, and people were becoming intrigued by the thought that man’s next frontier -- if he made it that far-- would be an interstellar one. While few science-fiction films were produced immediately after the war, science-fiction as a literary form had amassed a large and growing audience with writers such as Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Arthur C. Clark, Frederick Pohl, Robert Heinlein and many others skilled in speculative prose and regularly churning out highly inventive stories and novels that a lot of the public was gobbling up. The writing was not only on the printed page but on the wall as well and two particular Hollywood players were reading it, producers George Pal and Robert Lippert, the results being the former’s much heralded Destination Moon and the latter’s somewhat maligned and disrespected Rocketship X-M, both released in 1950.
Rocketship X-M was hurried into production with a very quick shooting schedule designed, it was said by everyone, to beat Destination Moon to the screen, something the decade’s later monster magazines would continually hammer into its adolescent readers when writing about the movie. It was more or less accepted that Rocketship was a rushed and much inferior job, that it paled next to George Pal’s bigger budgeted and widely publicized and celebrated film accomplishment and that everyone who was a legitimate and serious science-fiction fan should appreciate the fact and if not openly boycott it then at least approach it in a somewhat condescending manner. There was only one problem with all of this, at least for a lot of the kids into this sort of film during the 1950s. Destination Moon might have been more grounded in legitimate scientific principles. Its intent might have been more serious, its aspirations more lofty, its documentary-like execution more realistic. But it wasn’t half as entertaining or fun. It was in fact, well, dull.
Rocketship X-M, on the other hand, was a great ride in more ways than one. Unlike other later films of the period that dealt with space travel, duds like Cat Women of the Moon, Fire Maidens From Outer Space and Queen of Outer Space, Rocketship was a deadly earnest production, light on scientific logic perhaps, but heavy on drama, thrills and with a grim and emotionally charged scenario to present and a very capable director/writer (Kurt Neumann) and likable cast working with conviction to make this all come together.
The plot centers around a four man (plus one female) crew making the first flight to the moon. For the record, the group includes the brains behind the whole business, Dr. Karl Eckstrom (John Barrymore wannabe John Emery), his dedicated (and cold fish) assistant Lisa (Osa Massen), pilot Floyd (Lloyd Bridges), Engineer Bill (Noah Beery Jr.) and astronomer Harry (Hugh O’Brien) who also acts as the navigator.
This ground-breaking giant step for man gets off to a fast start with the crew engaged in a friendly chit chat session with some press representatives up to just five minutes before their scheduled takeoff (the countdown voice heard over the proceedings sounds suspiciously like Hugh O’Brien) where everyone delivers homey and humorous sound-bites for the few reporters assembled (including Judd Holdren, TV’s Commando Cody) until they bid good-bye to Dr. Flemming (Morris Ankrum, the figure holding down events at home) and board the X-M. This flight is so hush-hush that no one, not even the reporters, are aware of it until they are summoned, apparently unbriefed, to the takeoff site. Forget CNN and Wolfe Blitzer.
The RX-M is a nifty looking ship, the cabin festooned with all manner of metal cylinders fastened to the walls, portholes for convenient viewing and hammock-like bunk beds. One thing the designer left out was anything to hold onto in the middle of the ship should gravitational problems arise or even a chair for pilot Bridges. This would become a deciding factor as the story progresses.
Once the predictable liftoff is over and the crew experiences the painful effects of “G” forces on their vulnerable bodies (lots of predictable face grimacing here in a scene that would be repeated in nearly every space opera to follow) the soon to be cliché moments of meteor showers and zero gravity are eventually showcased. The real wrinkle of the story, however, is that things ultimately go very wrong with their thrusters and after following a cataclysmic accident where they are all rendered unconscious – remember the absence of those chairs (?) -- they wake not to find themselves approaching the Moon but rather Mars.
Remarkably, this staggering re-route doesn’t bother anyone too much. The group is initially surprised by this radical and unforeseen change in plans, but they soon grow accustomed to the idea and even excited (except Noah Beery’s folksy Texan who laments not being able to wear the sophisticated spacesuits deemed necessary by the moon’s unfriendly atmosphere; oxygen masks and leather jackets will do on the Red Planet) by the notion of being able to explore the alien surface.
In atmospheric footage, (tinted red and filmed in Red Rock Canyon, ), the crew, armed with one pistol and a hunting rifle, explore the inhospitable and stark terrain eventually realizing from buried artifacts and other signs of a dead civilization that Mars once supported intelligent life. In fact, it still supports life but no longer the intelligent sort, only human mutations, the result of what appears to have been an atomic war.
Eckstrom wants the people of the Earth to learn of this, a warning perhaps of what could also befall their own planet if mankind doesn’t wakeup and smell the plutonium, but Bill and he are killed by Martians while trying to get back to the ship. With a severely wounded Harry in a near comatose state, Floyd and Elsa manage a quick liftoff from the lunar surface leaving the devastated Martian throwbacks behind and with all a go to return to Earth except for one small but essential detail, they haven’t enough fuel for the return flight. Gadgets are checked and rechecked as are computations and calibrations. There’s just no way around it. They are going to crash. Yikes. In a 50s movie!!!!
This is where the film nose-dives a bit into hokey land. Lloyd Bridges, in a later interview, stated that he argued against the film’s contrived conclusion but director-writer Neumann would not budge and stuck with the unrealistic exchange between Floyd and Lisa (O’Brien is totally out of things by now) who, with only a few minutes to live before the R X-M crashes into the planet, divulge their great affection for each other. They aren’t frightened anymore, just secure in their new found love. As they embrace and the ship hurls to inevitable destruction Neumann’s dialog is admittedly pretty bad:
“We can say we’ve had years together”
“There’s not that much difference between the future and the past.”
“I’m not afraid anymore.”
Rocketship X-M can be forgiven this climatic pathos because until this point it’s a great roller coaster of a cinematic ride. Although lambasted almost from the get-go as a very bottom of the barrel production, it really does not come off as such, certainly when compared to later examples of the genre such as Flight To Mars or the aforementioned Fire Maidens from Outer Space. Director Neumann keeps things on an even keel with a nice balance between action sequences and the crew’s interaction even if the politically correct crowd will wince at some of the early dialog between Bridges and Massen:
“I suppose you think women should only cook and sew and have children?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
Ferde Grofe’ provides an effective musical score that anticipates future fantasy films with his use of the eerie Theremin, and director Neumann, who would later direct other genre films The Fly, Kronos and She Devil helms with a good feel for mounting tension and a pervasive sense of danger and mounting doom..
From a personal standpoint it was Rocketship X-M, not Destination Moon that made me turn the desk in my bedroom into a control panel using a forgotten go cart steering wheel and a lot of radios and gizmos from my father’s garage. It was Rocketship X-M that made me wonder about space and other worlds and got me reading science-fiction.
It was Robert Lippert’s little B picture Rocketship X-M that got me dreaming bigger things than I would have dreamed before.
And it is Rocketship X-M, not the take itself too seriously Destination Moon, that I still recall with greater appreciation and fondness.
By Bruce Dettman
While accepted today as a legitimate and much respected part of mainstream cinema, there was a time, not so very long ago, when the science-fiction film was more often than not relegated to the arena of juvenile entertainment, when it was considered low-brow or at best adolescent fodder for the under twelve audience who in the 1950s flocked to Saturday afternoon kiddie matinees to gobble down Juicy Fruits, inhale Pixie Sticks and scream protests when the tasteless projectionist ran unwanted cartoons like Casper, The Friendly Ghost or Little Iodine instead of the much preferred Daffy Ducks and Bugs Bunnies. For this generation, science-fiction usually equated with Hollywood’s then penchant for rear projecting and enlarging as many animals and insects in the animal kingdom onto the big screen as could be conceived, from over-bloated arachnids (Tarantula), to ants (the exceptional Them) to grasshoppers (The Beginning of the End) to giant wasps and snails (Monster From Green Hell and The Monster That Challenged The World) and then unleash them on some vulnerable American metropolis -- from New York to San Francisco -- with only Peter Graves or Richard Denning or John Agar standing in their way. There were exceptions, of course, sci-fi based productions that were not only aimed at the pre-pubescent crowd but adult audiences as well, efforts such as Howard Hawks’ The Thing From Another World, Robert Wise’s The Day The Earth Stood Still, Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and George Pal’s War of the Worlds, but these groundbreaking pictures were rare and far apart, not that the kids of my generation cared all that much. Give us monsters and incredible situations and some good popcorn (not to mention no parents) and we were pretty much happy campers.
Another arena explored during the early part of the 1950s was space travel. World War II had given the world the new potentially catastrophic double feature of crude missiles and the atom bomb, and people were becoming intrigued by the thought that man’s next frontier -- if he made it that far-- would be an interstellar one. While few science-fiction films were produced immediately after the war, science-fiction as a literary form had amassed a large and growing audience with writers such as Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Arthur C. Clark, Frederick Pohl, Robert Heinlein and many others skilled in speculative prose and regularly churning out highly inventive stories and novels that a lot of the public was gobbling up. The writing was not only on the printed page but on the wall as well and two particular Hollywood players were reading it, producers George Pal and Robert Lippert, the results being the former’s much heralded Destination Moon and the latter’s somewhat maligned and disrespected Rocketship X-M, both released in 1950.
Rocketship X-M was hurried into production with a very quick shooting schedule designed, it was said by everyone, to beat Destination Moon to the screen, something the decade’s later monster magazines would continually hammer into its adolescent readers when writing about the movie. It was more or less accepted that Rocketship was a rushed and much inferior job, that it paled next to George Pal’s bigger budgeted and widely publicized and celebrated film accomplishment and that everyone who was a legitimate and serious science-fiction fan should appreciate the fact and if not openly boycott it then at least approach it in a somewhat condescending manner. There was only one problem with all of this, at least for a lot of the kids into this sort of film during the 1950s. Destination Moon might have been more grounded in legitimate scientific principles. Its intent might have been more serious, its aspirations more lofty, its documentary-like execution more realistic. But it wasn’t half as entertaining or fun. It was in fact, well, dull.
Rocketship X-M, on the other hand, was a great ride in more ways than one. Unlike other later films of the period that dealt with space travel, duds like Cat Women of the Moon, Fire Maidens From Outer Space and Queen of Outer Space, Rocketship was a deadly earnest production, light on scientific logic perhaps, but heavy on drama, thrills and with a grim and emotionally charged scenario to present and a very capable director/writer (Kurt Neumann) and likable cast working with conviction to make this all come together.
The plot centers around a four man (plus one female) crew making the first flight to the moon. For the record, the group includes the brains behind the whole business, Dr. Karl Eckstrom (John Barrymore wannabe John Emery), his dedicated (and cold fish) assistant Lisa (Osa Massen), pilot Floyd (Lloyd Bridges), Engineer Bill (Noah Beery Jr.) and astronomer Harry (Hugh O’Brien) who also acts as the navigator.
This ground-breaking giant step for man gets off to a fast start with the crew engaged in a friendly chit chat session with some press representatives up to just five minutes before their scheduled takeoff (the countdown voice heard over the proceedings sounds suspiciously like Hugh O’Brien) where everyone delivers homey and humorous sound-bites for the few reporters assembled (including Judd Holdren, TV’s Commando Cody) until they bid good-bye to Dr. Flemming (Morris Ankrum, the figure holding down events at home) and board the X-M. This flight is so hush-hush that no one, not even the reporters, are aware of it until they are summoned, apparently unbriefed, to the takeoff site. Forget CNN and Wolfe Blitzer.
The RX-M is a nifty looking ship, the cabin festooned with all manner of metal cylinders fastened to the walls, portholes for convenient viewing and hammock-like bunk beds. One thing the designer left out was anything to hold onto in the middle of the ship should gravitational problems arise or even a chair for pilot Bridges. This would become a deciding factor as the story progresses.
Once the predictable liftoff is over and the crew experiences the painful effects of “G” forces on their vulnerable bodies (lots of predictable face grimacing here in a scene that would be repeated in nearly every space opera to follow) the soon to be cliché moments of meteor showers and zero gravity are eventually showcased. The real wrinkle of the story, however, is that things ultimately go very wrong with their thrusters and after following a cataclysmic accident where they are all rendered unconscious – remember the absence of those chairs (?) -- they wake not to find themselves approaching the Moon but rather Mars.
Remarkably, this staggering re-route doesn’t bother anyone too much. The group is initially surprised by this radical and unforeseen change in plans, but they soon grow accustomed to the idea and even excited (except Noah Beery’s folksy Texan who laments not being able to wear the sophisticated spacesuits deemed necessary by the moon’s unfriendly atmosphere; oxygen masks and leather jackets will do on the Red Planet) by the notion of being able to explore the alien surface.
In atmospheric footage, (tinted red and filmed in Red Rock Canyon, ), the crew, armed with one pistol and a hunting rifle, explore the inhospitable and stark terrain eventually realizing from buried artifacts and other signs of a dead civilization that Mars once supported intelligent life. In fact, it still supports life but no longer the intelligent sort, only human mutations, the result of what appears to have been an atomic war.
Eckstrom wants the people of the Earth to learn of this, a warning perhaps of what could also befall their own planet if mankind doesn’t wakeup and smell the plutonium, but Bill and he are killed by Martians while trying to get back to the ship. With a severely wounded Harry in a near comatose state, Floyd and Elsa manage a quick liftoff from the lunar surface leaving the devastated Martian throwbacks behind and with all a go to return to Earth except for one small but essential detail, they haven’t enough fuel for the return flight. Gadgets are checked and rechecked as are computations and calibrations. There’s just no way around it. They are going to crash. Yikes. In a 50s movie!!!!
This is where the film nose-dives a bit into hokey land. Lloyd Bridges, in a later interview, stated that he argued against the film’s contrived conclusion but director-writer Neumann would not budge and stuck with the unrealistic exchange between Floyd and Lisa (O’Brien is totally out of things by now) who, with only a few minutes to live before the R X-M crashes into the planet, divulge their great affection for each other. They aren’t frightened anymore, just secure in their new found love. As they embrace and the ship hurls to inevitable destruction Neumann’s dialog is admittedly pretty bad:
“We can say we’ve had years together”
“There’s not that much difference between the future and the past.”
“I’m not afraid anymore.”
Rocketship X-M can be forgiven this climatic pathos because until this point it’s a great roller coaster of a cinematic ride. Although lambasted almost from the get-go as a very bottom of the barrel production, it really does not come off as such, certainly when compared to later examples of the genre such as Flight To Mars or the aforementioned Fire Maidens from Outer Space. Director Neumann keeps things on an even keel with a nice balance between action sequences and the crew’s interaction even if the politically correct crowd will wince at some of the early dialog between Bridges and Massen:
“I suppose you think women should only cook and sew and have children?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
Ferde Grofe’ provides an effective musical score that anticipates future fantasy films with his use of the eerie Theremin, and director Neumann, who would later direct other genre films The Fly, Kronos and She Devil helms with a good feel for mounting tension and a pervasive sense of danger and mounting doom..
From a personal standpoint it was Rocketship X-M, not Destination Moon that made me turn the desk in my bedroom into a control panel using a forgotten go cart steering wheel and a lot of radios and gizmos from my father’s garage. It was Rocketship X-M that made me wonder about space and other worlds and got me reading science-fiction.
It was Robert Lippert’s little B picture Rocketship X-M that got me dreaming bigger things than I would have dreamed before.
And it is Rocketship X-M, not the take itself too seriously Destination Moon, that I still recall with greater appreciation and fondness.
October 9, 2016
Book Review: The Gemini Effect by Chuck Grossart
The Gemini Effect
Chuck Grossart
•
• https://www.amazon.com/Gemini-Effect-...
The opening pages of The Gemini Effect signal that this is a story full of horror, the sort of horror you will find when relentless mutant monsters are set loose on a mostly defenseless American mid-West. The hordes of first vampire/zombie rats, then affected humans, and finally killer birds create a terror that simply never relents in an extremely fast-paced thriller.
Chuck Grossart is very descriptive of the rather implausible events (how could thousands of killer creatures be created in such a short time period?), of the military equipment and personnel, and of the scientists seeking a solution to the expanding apocalypse.
He’s less successful when he interjects a second plotline, of third-generation Soviet sleeper agents with the power to immobilize the president of the United States. It’s as if two books were squeezed together which works on some levels, but the White House storyline is even more implausible than the hordes of seemingly unstoppable monsters transforming and replicating underground.
The author deserves major kudos for his storytelling style which makes this novel a page-turner that engages the reader for much of the novel. I admit, I never understood why the creature’s quickly established weakness of being unable to endure light was never developed into useable weapons and the nation’s leaders resort to other devastating options to kill the mutants. The final chapters are even more difficult to accept as the entire globe erupts into various wars completely unrelated to the American scourge. It would be unfair to describe the ending other than to say much of what happens doesn’t make much sense, considering the biological agent that accidently started it all shouldn’t have the clout to do what it does.
Still, I recommend The Gemini Effect for readers who like their reads fast and furious with little in the way of character development. For the record, the book is apparently a substantial revision of an earlier edition titled The Mengele Effect, a title that actually makes more logical sense. While the book seems to be a stand-alone effort, there are threads left dangling for at least one possible sequel.
This review was first published at BookPleasures.com at:
http://www.bookpleasures.com/websitep...
Chuck Grossart
•
• https://www.amazon.com/Gemini-Effect-...
The opening pages of The Gemini Effect signal that this is a story full of horror, the sort of horror you will find when relentless mutant monsters are set loose on a mostly defenseless American mid-West. The hordes of first vampire/zombie rats, then affected humans, and finally killer birds create a terror that simply never relents in an extremely fast-paced thriller.
Chuck Grossart is very descriptive of the rather implausible events (how could thousands of killer creatures be created in such a short time period?), of the military equipment and personnel, and of the scientists seeking a solution to the expanding apocalypse.
He’s less successful when he interjects a second plotline, of third-generation Soviet sleeper agents with the power to immobilize the president of the United States. It’s as if two books were squeezed together which works on some levels, but the White House storyline is even more implausible than the hordes of seemingly unstoppable monsters transforming and replicating underground.
The author deserves major kudos for his storytelling style which makes this novel a page-turner that engages the reader for much of the novel. I admit, I never understood why the creature’s quickly established weakness of being unable to endure light was never developed into useable weapons and the nation’s leaders resort to other devastating options to kill the mutants. The final chapters are even more difficult to accept as the entire globe erupts into various wars completely unrelated to the American scourge. It would be unfair to describe the ending other than to say much of what happens doesn’t make much sense, considering the biological agent that accidently started it all shouldn’t have the clout to do what it does.
Still, I recommend The Gemini Effect for readers who like their reads fast and furious with little in the way of character development. For the record, the book is apparently a substantial revision of an earlier edition titled The Mengele Effect, a title that actually makes more logical sense. While the book seems to be a stand-alone effort, there are threads left dangling for at least one possible sequel.
This review was first published at BookPleasures.com at:
http://www.bookpleasures.com/websitep...
October 6, 2016
Book Review: Janus Quadrifrons by Spark D' Ark
Janus Quadrifrons
Spark D' Ark
Publication Date: September 22, 2016
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
“Forget what you know about a storyline that has a starting point, something interesting after that and finally an epilogue.
[This book is] a mind game, an adventure to perception . . . Once you are certain of something, I will take that “something” away.
Remember. It’s a game and you are playing along with the characters.”
The opening to the “Prologue” to Janus Quadrifrons is a good set-up for the kaleidoscopic roller-coaster ride to follow. You might suspect, after reading that opening, trying to draft a synopsis of the trip to come would be near impossible and also rather unfair to new readers.
It doesn’t take many pages to realize that “Janus,” the narrator of the yarn, is never sure what is reality and what isn’t. Does he or she really have the power to get into other people’s minds and look through their eyes? Is she insane, her, or his, mental faculties distorted by brain cancer? Or is he the subject of mind-altering experiments using drugs and strange devices? Are the people Janus interacts with really there or pieces of his/her imagination, are they living or dead? Are their identities being manipulated in some unknown way? Is time being bent or reversed with blackouts robbing Janus of his memories? What is truth, is there such a thing, and what is illusion? Who are the hunters, who are the killers, and who is killed and who is hunted and why? How many times can one person die and return?
Author Spark D' Ark is all about posing questions with questionable answers and posing riddles with illusory solutions page after page. As her surreal stew comes to a boil, Spark stirs in the Prometheus virus which connects with mega-genes that open the memories of ancestors in the genetic code and clones pregnant with clones and the protagonists apparently trapped in time loops that return them to events decades ago when everything began. Or is it all a recurring dream?
The author dedicates her book to readers who don’t finish the book, apparently anticipating a readership who opt not to keep up with the game. I can sympathize with such an audience. Janus Quadrifrons isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea as it isn’t designed to meet most literary expectations, just as Spark signaled in her “Prologue.” On the other hand, other readers are likely to enjoy the psychological journey, especially those accustomed to the tricks of post-modern literature. In particular, no one should feel cheated by the “variant” endings in the payoffs in the final two chapters. Of course, there’s no shortage of sci fi yarns featuring characters dealing with shifting identities or manipulated consciousnesses.
For the record, Janus Quadrifrons seems crafted to be a stand-alone story, not the launch of a new series. As it happens, English is not the author’s first language—Greek is. Some of the character names have Greek roots and are used as archetypes for their symbolism. However, there are very few indications this book was written by someone using English as a second language. It’s not a long book, so come on in, bring no preconceptions with you, and go where no one has traveled before.
Order Janus Quadrifrons at:
https://www.amazon.com/Janus-Quadrifr...
This review was first published at BookPleasures.com at:
goo.gl/M4iP2R
Spark D' Ark
Publication Date: September 22, 2016
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
“Forget what you know about a storyline that has a starting point, something interesting after that and finally an epilogue.
[This book is] a mind game, an adventure to perception . . . Once you are certain of something, I will take that “something” away.
Remember. It’s a game and you are playing along with the characters.”
The opening to the “Prologue” to Janus Quadrifrons is a good set-up for the kaleidoscopic roller-coaster ride to follow. You might suspect, after reading that opening, trying to draft a synopsis of the trip to come would be near impossible and also rather unfair to new readers.
It doesn’t take many pages to realize that “Janus,” the narrator of the yarn, is never sure what is reality and what isn’t. Does he or she really have the power to get into other people’s minds and look through their eyes? Is she insane, her, or his, mental faculties distorted by brain cancer? Or is he the subject of mind-altering experiments using drugs and strange devices? Are the people Janus interacts with really there or pieces of his/her imagination, are they living or dead? Are their identities being manipulated in some unknown way? Is time being bent or reversed with blackouts robbing Janus of his memories? What is truth, is there such a thing, and what is illusion? Who are the hunters, who are the killers, and who is killed and who is hunted and why? How many times can one person die and return?
Author Spark D' Ark is all about posing questions with questionable answers and posing riddles with illusory solutions page after page. As her surreal stew comes to a boil, Spark stirs in the Prometheus virus which connects with mega-genes that open the memories of ancestors in the genetic code and clones pregnant with clones and the protagonists apparently trapped in time loops that return them to events decades ago when everything began. Or is it all a recurring dream?
The author dedicates her book to readers who don’t finish the book, apparently anticipating a readership who opt not to keep up with the game. I can sympathize with such an audience. Janus Quadrifrons isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea as it isn’t designed to meet most literary expectations, just as Spark signaled in her “Prologue.” On the other hand, other readers are likely to enjoy the psychological journey, especially those accustomed to the tricks of post-modern literature. In particular, no one should feel cheated by the “variant” endings in the payoffs in the final two chapters. Of course, there’s no shortage of sci fi yarns featuring characters dealing with shifting identities or manipulated consciousnesses.
For the record, Janus Quadrifrons seems crafted to be a stand-alone story, not the launch of a new series. As it happens, English is not the author’s first language—Greek is. Some of the character names have Greek roots and are used as archetypes for their symbolism. However, there are very few indications this book was written by someone using English as a second language. It’s not a long book, so come on in, bring no preconceptions with you, and go where no one has traveled before.
Order Janus Quadrifrons at:
https://www.amazon.com/Janus-Quadrifr...
This review was first published at BookPleasures.com at:
goo.gl/M4iP2R
October 5, 2016
More Notes on The Invisible Man
After my Monday post on David McCallum’s The Invisible Man, I revisited my discussion of the show in my 2003 Spy Television and found some points I didn’t include earlier. So here’s a bit more on the show:
According to Melinda Fee, who played Kate Weston, "The pilot was geared more to the lurking Feds scrambling to steal the formula of invisibility. It had the proverbial car chase, ending in a huge crash-and-burn sequence. The series centered on the relationship of Daniel and Kate."
Newcomer Fee was excited by her role, later claiming Kate Westin came along about the same time as women’s liberation. “She represented what women were striving for, separate professions, equality, recognition of intelligence and education.” But most U.N.C.L.E. fans, seeing a new vehicle for McCallum at last, found the attempt a missed opportunity. From the beginning, producers Bochco, Harve Bennett, Leslie Stephens, and Robert O’Neill admitted they were imitating The Six Million Dollar Man. As a result, more effort went into the gimmicks than the characters or stories. Fee’s most difficult job was playing to an invisible husband, which at that time wasn't as easy as it would become with improved special effects in subsequent decades. Shooting a simple scene in which a hypodermic needle was passed from hand to hand could take half a day to film. It was difficult for an unseen agent to express emotion. To let viewers know where he was, The Invisible Man bumped into pots and furniture so often, he seemed the clumsiest man on earth.
Ironically, like U.N.C.L.E. before it, the show quickly fell into comedy, only in a considerably shorter time. According to Robert O’Neill, "The Invisible Man was really a one-joke show. The minute you've taken the wrapping off his head, you've seen the joke.” Creator Harve Bennett had a different take. "By today's standards it was very crude, but in 1975 it allowed us tremendous opportunities. It was a very noble experiment, and I'm very proud of the series."
Some of the less satisfactory outings included McCallum going undercover for a cleaning woman, and one effort had him Held in a hick town by a corrupt sheriff for bogus traffic violations. The nadir of the series was one episode titled “Pin Money” featuring bank robbers with Frankenstein monster masks. The writer, James Parriott, admitted he was asked to write the script in the mold of the Six Million Dollar Man.
In this climate, commentators were reduced to speculating about the sexual possibilities for the couple. As the invisible man had to be naked to be unseen, he was often shivering and complained about freezing in public. Twenty-five years later, one fan recalled an episode in which Weston rode on a bicycle through a town, no doubt a most uncomfortable experience. One odd controversy arose when representatives from America's Bible-Belt in the mid-West complained that the show was obscene because it featured a naked, if unseen, man on TV. Writers tried to build sympathy for the characters by having Fee forced to seduce enemies as her husband looked on.
For most observers, the format simply didn’t jell and some attempted to rest the blame on McCallum. Harv Bennett noted networks were still uneasy about British leads on American television, and some felt McCallum was better suited to a supporting “color” character like Illya Kuryakin rather than a straight lead. Most believed the Tuesday night time-slot was McCallum’s No. 1 adversary, as MTM’s double-shot of Rhoda and Phyllis were ratings champions. Whatever the case, the show enjoyed great popularity in Europe, especially England, where the ratings soared after the cancellation.
According to Melinda Fee, who played Kate Weston, "The pilot was geared more to the lurking Feds scrambling to steal the formula of invisibility. It had the proverbial car chase, ending in a huge crash-and-burn sequence. The series centered on the relationship of Daniel and Kate."
Newcomer Fee was excited by her role, later claiming Kate Westin came along about the same time as women’s liberation. “She represented what women were striving for, separate professions, equality, recognition of intelligence and education.” But most U.N.C.L.E. fans, seeing a new vehicle for McCallum at last, found the attempt a missed opportunity. From the beginning, producers Bochco, Harve Bennett, Leslie Stephens, and Robert O’Neill admitted they were imitating The Six Million Dollar Man. As a result, more effort went into the gimmicks than the characters or stories. Fee’s most difficult job was playing to an invisible husband, which at that time wasn't as easy as it would become with improved special effects in subsequent decades. Shooting a simple scene in which a hypodermic needle was passed from hand to hand could take half a day to film. It was difficult for an unseen agent to express emotion. To let viewers know where he was, The Invisible Man bumped into pots and furniture so often, he seemed the clumsiest man on earth.
Ironically, like U.N.C.L.E. before it, the show quickly fell into comedy, only in a considerably shorter time. According to Robert O’Neill, "The Invisible Man was really a one-joke show. The minute you've taken the wrapping off his head, you've seen the joke.” Creator Harve Bennett had a different take. "By today's standards it was very crude, but in 1975 it allowed us tremendous opportunities. It was a very noble experiment, and I'm very proud of the series."
Some of the less satisfactory outings included McCallum going undercover for a cleaning woman, and one effort had him Held in a hick town by a corrupt sheriff for bogus traffic violations. The nadir of the series was one episode titled “Pin Money” featuring bank robbers with Frankenstein monster masks. The writer, James Parriott, admitted he was asked to write the script in the mold of the Six Million Dollar Man.
In this climate, commentators were reduced to speculating about the sexual possibilities for the couple. As the invisible man had to be naked to be unseen, he was often shivering and complained about freezing in public. Twenty-five years later, one fan recalled an episode in which Weston rode on a bicycle through a town, no doubt a most uncomfortable experience. One odd controversy arose when representatives from America's Bible-Belt in the mid-West complained that the show was obscene because it featured a naked, if unseen, man on TV. Writers tried to build sympathy for the characters by having Fee forced to seduce enemies as her husband looked on.
For most observers, the format simply didn’t jell and some attempted to rest the blame on McCallum. Harv Bennett noted networks were still uneasy about British leads on American television, and some felt McCallum was better suited to a supporting “color” character like Illya Kuryakin rather than a straight lead. Most believed the Tuesday night time-slot was McCallum’s No. 1 adversary, as MTM’s double-shot of Rhoda and Phyllis were ratings champions. Whatever the case, the show enjoyed great popularity in Europe, especially England, where the ratings soared after the cancellation.
Remembering VR.5 and Virtual Reality
After my post on David McCallum’s Invisible Man on Monday, several folks let me know they appreciated the short reference to another “Spy-Fi” series, VR.5. Because of their interest, I decided to dive into my files and share my notes on that show:
VR.5
(Fox) March 10--May 12, 1995
For Samoset Productions, John Sacret Young and Jeannine Renshaw created VR.5, a “Spy-fi” series crafted for adult audiences. The depth of the show has been compared with that of The Prisoner, notably the themes of mind-games and deceptive realities.
The central character was Sydney Bloom (Lori Singer), a telephone lines operator and computer hacker drawn into the convoluted and conflicting games of the secret “Committee” when she discovered how to enter and manipulate the subconscious dream-world of virtual reality. Sydney could type out a desired destination on her screen, use her phone to call someone she wanted to take along on a journey to another dimension, and when the caller answered, she slammed the phone into the computer modem. A swooch of special effects sent them into the fifth realm of virtual reality. In the dream-like VR5 world, Bloom could alter physical reality, the halfway point to VR.10 where mental powers wouldn’t need computers.
In the early episodes, Bloom believed her father, Dr. Joseph Bloom (David McCallum), a neurobiolotist pioneer, and her twin-sister were killed in a car accident. The mysterious circumstances left her mother (Louise Fletcher) in a catatonic state. Sydney was counseled by childhood friend Duncan (Michael Easton) who draws from Zen and other philosophical systems to help ground Sydney as she explored her abilities.
For the first four episodes, Sydney was also helped by VR guru Dr. Frank Morgan (Will Patton). But after Sydney attracted the interest of the invisible security organization called "the Committee," Morgan disappeared and Oliver Sampson (Anthony Head) was assigned to be her controller. He became a manipulative love interest in a relationship similar to that of Nikita and Michael in Le Femme Nikita.
Eventually Sydney learned her father and sister were alive and under the power of one faction of the “Committee” who'd placed false memories of the accident in her mind. In the end, she learned her father achieved VR.8 consciousness with The ability to transplant or implant personalities from one mind to another.
The creative team was noted for its then cutting-edge high-quality special-effects as in digitally altering colors when scenes took place inside the virtual reality system. But this process took four weeks to complete at a cost of up to $1.5 million per episode. For this reason, a poor time-slot, and apparently considerable behind-the-scenes arguing among the participants, the uneasy network only ordered ten episodes and only broadcast nine before dropping a show with minimal ratings.
It can be said VR5 was The Prisoner of the 1990s. “The Committee” is similar to the watchers of Number Six, omnipresent and frightening, using the alternating guises of toughness and tenderness. Like one episode of The Prisoner in which Number Six endured a personality transfer from one body to another, Sydney’s father had apparently done the same. Nods to other earlier spy dramas were evident in details such as the names of Sydney’s goldfish--Steed and Mrs. Peel. Drawing explicit connections to the popularity of The X-Files, executive producer Thania St. John stated that "VR will try to capture that same, creepy feeling."
VR5 had a second-life on the Sci-Fi channel in 1997 including first airings of three episodes not broadcast on the original Fox run. Because of the show’s focus on mind-games, secret governmental duplicity, and alternate realities, the show gained a fan base generating detailed WebPages, notably Virtual Storm, a group dedicated to keeping VR.5 alive. For a short time, this group raised interest in having a two-hour movie produced based on the series, but production never took place.
The series was broadcast on CBS Drama in Europe in early 2014.
Here’s alink to the opening credits:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fXK8...
Also at Youtube, the pilot episode is at the same link.
Here’s the Amazon link to purchase the show on DVD:
https://www.amazon.com/VR-5-1995-Seri...
And here’s a 2011 review of the series, from a “looking back to the ‘90s” perspective:
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/20799/...
VR.5
(Fox) March 10--May 12, 1995
For Samoset Productions, John Sacret Young and Jeannine Renshaw created VR.5, a “Spy-fi” series crafted for adult audiences. The depth of the show has been compared with that of The Prisoner, notably the themes of mind-games and deceptive realities.
The central character was Sydney Bloom (Lori Singer), a telephone lines operator and computer hacker drawn into the convoluted and conflicting games of the secret “Committee” when she discovered how to enter and manipulate the subconscious dream-world of virtual reality. Sydney could type out a desired destination on her screen, use her phone to call someone she wanted to take along on a journey to another dimension, and when the caller answered, she slammed the phone into the computer modem. A swooch of special effects sent them into the fifth realm of virtual reality. In the dream-like VR5 world, Bloom could alter physical reality, the halfway point to VR.10 where mental powers wouldn’t need computers.
In the early episodes, Bloom believed her father, Dr. Joseph Bloom (David McCallum), a neurobiolotist pioneer, and her twin-sister were killed in a car accident. The mysterious circumstances left her mother (Louise Fletcher) in a catatonic state. Sydney was counseled by childhood friend Duncan (Michael Easton) who draws from Zen and other philosophical systems to help ground Sydney as she explored her abilities.
For the first four episodes, Sydney was also helped by VR guru Dr. Frank Morgan (Will Patton). But after Sydney attracted the interest of the invisible security organization called "the Committee," Morgan disappeared and Oliver Sampson (Anthony Head) was assigned to be her controller. He became a manipulative love interest in a relationship similar to that of Nikita and Michael in Le Femme Nikita.
Eventually Sydney learned her father and sister were alive and under the power of one faction of the “Committee” who'd placed false memories of the accident in her mind. In the end, she learned her father achieved VR.8 consciousness with The ability to transplant or implant personalities from one mind to another.
The creative team was noted for its then cutting-edge high-quality special-effects as in digitally altering colors when scenes took place inside the virtual reality system. But this process took four weeks to complete at a cost of up to $1.5 million per episode. For this reason, a poor time-slot, and apparently considerable behind-the-scenes arguing among the participants, the uneasy network only ordered ten episodes and only broadcast nine before dropping a show with minimal ratings.
It can be said VR5 was The Prisoner of the 1990s. “The Committee” is similar to the watchers of Number Six, omnipresent and frightening, using the alternating guises of toughness and tenderness. Like one episode of The Prisoner in which Number Six endured a personality transfer from one body to another, Sydney’s father had apparently done the same. Nods to other earlier spy dramas were evident in details such as the names of Sydney’s goldfish--Steed and Mrs. Peel. Drawing explicit connections to the popularity of The X-Files, executive producer Thania St. John stated that "VR will try to capture that same, creepy feeling."
VR5 had a second-life on the Sci-Fi channel in 1997 including first airings of three episodes not broadcast on the original Fox run. Because of the show’s focus on mind-games, secret governmental duplicity, and alternate realities, the show gained a fan base generating detailed WebPages, notably Virtual Storm, a group dedicated to keeping VR.5 alive. For a short time, this group raised interest in having a two-hour movie produced based on the series, but production never took place.
The series was broadcast on CBS Drama in Europe in early 2014.
Here’s alink to the opening credits:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fXK8...
Also at Youtube, the pilot episode is at the same link.
Here’s the Amazon link to purchase the show on DVD:
https://www.amazon.com/VR-5-1995-Seri...
And here’s a 2011 review of the series, from a “looking back to the ‘90s” perspective:
http://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/20799/...
October 3, 2016
David McCallum's Invisible Man
If you watched much TV in the 1960s, you undoubtedly watched The Man From U.N.C.L.E.. If you were a female viewer of the show, perhaps you too were enamored with teenage heartthrob David McCallum’s portrayal of Russian agent, Illya Kuryakin, noted for popularizing black turtlenecks and being the “blond Beatle.”
But you don’t have to be a Baby Boomer to be a fan of NCIS, the popular CBS drama airing Tuesday nights since Sept. 23, 2003. For 14 seasons now, David McCallum has played Donald "Ducky" Mallard, the team’s chief medical officer spending most of his time with the bodies of murder victims, his character full of esoteric trivia.
In between these two successful shows, did you know McCallum had a short try as a leading man in one of many TV versions of The Invisible Man that ran on NBC from Sept. 8, 1975--Jan. 19, 1976?
The story went like this:
In May 1975, NBC aired a 90-minute movie written by Robert Bochco starring David McCallum as scientist Daniel Westin. Researching molecular reduction and transformation in laser experiments for a West Coast think tank called the Klae Corporation, Westin discovered the secret of invisibility. After using himself as a guinea pig, Westin learned visibility could occur at any time without advance warning. Westin was idealistic and naïve, becoming horrified when his discovery was financed and controlled by the military. Destroying his lab, Westin went underground but ultimately agreed to work as a secret agent with his wife, Dr. Kate Westin (Melinda Fee) in exchange for the Klae Corporations agreement to help him find a cure for his condition. Walter Carlson (Jackie Cooper(, the head of the sinister Klae Corp., provided Westin with gloves and a special mask of his old face so both viewers and cast members could see Westin when not on duty.
The film was a ratings success, so that fall 12 episodes followed. At first, according to McCallum, the idea of the character was total fantasy, a fusion of Superman, Mission: Impossible, and Claude Rains (the first movie invisible man). Later, he said he'd signed on to do The Fugitive and ended up doing "Topper." From the beginning, producers Bochco, Harve Bennett, Leslie Stephens, and Robert O’Neill admitted they were imitating The Six Million Dollar Man. As a result, more effort went into the gimmicks than the characters or stories. To make the series lighter than the film, Jackie Cooper was replaced by father-figure Craig Stevens, the former Peter Gunn. He gave the Klae Corporation a more benevolent flair than in Botchco’s concept.
According to Fee, the series centered on the relationship of Daniel and Kate, and that Kate Westin came along about the same time as women’s liberation. Fee’s most difficult job was playing to an invisible husband, which at that time wasn't as easy as it would become with improved special effects in subsequent decades. Shooting a simple scene in which a hypodermic needle was passed from hand to hand could take half a day to film. It was difficult for an unseen agent to express emotion. To let viewers know where he was, The Invisible Man bumped into pots and furniture so often, he seemed the clumsiest man on earth.
Despite the talent involved, including a theme by legendary composer Henry Mancini, producer O’Neill admitted, "The Invisible Man was really a one-joke show. The minute you’ve taken the wrapping off his head, you've seen the joke.” Other jokes included McCallum going undercover for a cleaning woman, and one effort had him Held in a hick town by a corrupt sheriff for bogus traffic violations. The nadir of the series was one episode titled “Pin Money” featuring bank robbers with Frankenstein monster masks. The writer, James Parriott, admitted he was asked to write the script in the mold of the Six Million Dollar Man.
In this climate, commentators were reduced to speculating about the sexual possibilities for the couple. As the invisible man had to be naked to be unseen, he was often shivering and complained about freezing in public. One odd controversy arose when representatives from America's Bible-Belt in the mid-West complained that the show was obscene because it featured a naked, if unseen, man on TV.
For most observers, the format simply didn’t jell and Harv Bennett noted networks were still uneasy about British leads on American television. Some felt McCallum was better suited to a supporting “color” character like Illya Kuryakin rather than a straight lead. More importantly, few shows could compete in the Tuesday night time-slot against MTM’s double-shot of Rhoda and Phyllis. Whatever the case, the show enjoyed great popularity in Europe, especially England, where the ratings soared after the cancellation. NBC thought enough of the concept to revamp it with an American lead, which became the equally short-lived Gemini Man.
As a quick coda, McCallum also played a supporting character in the late, lamented 1995 VR.5, playing Dr. Joseph Bloom, a neurobiolotist pioneer. In 2006, McCallum lent his voice to the gadget-laden robot car, C.A.R.T.E.R., for the Disney Channel’s cartoon, The Replacements.
In a Sept. 2006 interview, “TV's Original Invisible Man Takes On Heroes' Newcomer,”
McCallum compared his role with that of the invisible character in Heroes.
http://www.tvguide.com/news/tvs-origi...
Wes Britton’s review of McCallum’s 2016 novel, Once a Crooked man, is posted at:
goo.gl/M9HZBt
But you don’t have to be a Baby Boomer to be a fan of NCIS, the popular CBS drama airing Tuesday nights since Sept. 23, 2003. For 14 seasons now, David McCallum has played Donald "Ducky" Mallard, the team’s chief medical officer spending most of his time with the bodies of murder victims, his character full of esoteric trivia.
In between these two successful shows, did you know McCallum had a short try as a leading man in one of many TV versions of The Invisible Man that ran on NBC from Sept. 8, 1975--Jan. 19, 1976?
The story went like this:
In May 1975, NBC aired a 90-minute movie written by Robert Bochco starring David McCallum as scientist Daniel Westin. Researching molecular reduction and transformation in laser experiments for a West Coast think tank called the Klae Corporation, Westin discovered the secret of invisibility. After using himself as a guinea pig, Westin learned visibility could occur at any time without advance warning. Westin was idealistic and naïve, becoming horrified when his discovery was financed and controlled by the military. Destroying his lab, Westin went underground but ultimately agreed to work as a secret agent with his wife, Dr. Kate Westin (Melinda Fee) in exchange for the Klae Corporations agreement to help him find a cure for his condition. Walter Carlson (Jackie Cooper(, the head of the sinister Klae Corp., provided Westin with gloves and a special mask of his old face so both viewers and cast members could see Westin when not on duty.
The film was a ratings success, so that fall 12 episodes followed. At first, according to McCallum, the idea of the character was total fantasy, a fusion of Superman, Mission: Impossible, and Claude Rains (the first movie invisible man). Later, he said he'd signed on to do The Fugitive and ended up doing "Topper." From the beginning, producers Bochco, Harve Bennett, Leslie Stephens, and Robert O’Neill admitted they were imitating The Six Million Dollar Man. As a result, more effort went into the gimmicks than the characters or stories. To make the series lighter than the film, Jackie Cooper was replaced by father-figure Craig Stevens, the former Peter Gunn. He gave the Klae Corporation a more benevolent flair than in Botchco’s concept.
According to Fee, the series centered on the relationship of Daniel and Kate, and that Kate Westin came along about the same time as women’s liberation. Fee’s most difficult job was playing to an invisible husband, which at that time wasn't as easy as it would become with improved special effects in subsequent decades. Shooting a simple scene in which a hypodermic needle was passed from hand to hand could take half a day to film. It was difficult for an unseen agent to express emotion. To let viewers know where he was, The Invisible Man bumped into pots and furniture so often, he seemed the clumsiest man on earth.
Despite the talent involved, including a theme by legendary composer Henry Mancini, producer O’Neill admitted, "The Invisible Man was really a one-joke show. The minute you’ve taken the wrapping off his head, you've seen the joke.” Other jokes included McCallum going undercover for a cleaning woman, and one effort had him Held in a hick town by a corrupt sheriff for bogus traffic violations. The nadir of the series was one episode titled “Pin Money” featuring bank robbers with Frankenstein monster masks. The writer, James Parriott, admitted he was asked to write the script in the mold of the Six Million Dollar Man.
In this climate, commentators were reduced to speculating about the sexual possibilities for the couple. As the invisible man had to be naked to be unseen, he was often shivering and complained about freezing in public. One odd controversy arose when representatives from America's Bible-Belt in the mid-West complained that the show was obscene because it featured a naked, if unseen, man on TV.
For most observers, the format simply didn’t jell and Harv Bennett noted networks were still uneasy about British leads on American television. Some felt McCallum was better suited to a supporting “color” character like Illya Kuryakin rather than a straight lead. More importantly, few shows could compete in the Tuesday night time-slot against MTM’s double-shot of Rhoda and Phyllis. Whatever the case, the show enjoyed great popularity in Europe, especially England, where the ratings soared after the cancellation. NBC thought enough of the concept to revamp it with an American lead, which became the equally short-lived Gemini Man.
As a quick coda, McCallum also played a supporting character in the late, lamented 1995 VR.5, playing Dr. Joseph Bloom, a neurobiolotist pioneer. In 2006, McCallum lent his voice to the gadget-laden robot car, C.A.R.T.E.R., for the Disney Channel’s cartoon, The Replacements.
In a Sept. 2006 interview, “TV's Original Invisible Man Takes On Heroes' Newcomer,”
McCallum compared his role with that of the invisible character in Heroes.
http://www.tvguide.com/news/tvs-origi...
Wes Britton’s review of McCallum’s 2016 novel, Once a Crooked man, is posted at:
goo.gl/M9HZBt
Wesley Britton's Blog
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“The Blind Alien is a story with a highly original concept, fascinating characters, and not-too-subtle but truthful allegories. Don’t let the ...more
“The Blind Alien is a story with a highly original concept, fascinating characters, and not-too-subtle but truthful allegories. Don’t let the ...more
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