Alden Bates' Weblog

I was watching Superman: The Animated Series again recently and remembered something that always bothered me about one of the characters: Captain Maggie Sawyer of the Metropolis PD appears to be going pants-less. Witness:

Continue reading "Maggie Sawyer Has No Pants"

Right is a screen grab from the latest Amazon UK email to land in my inbox, suggesting I check out some of the "'70s & '80s classics" they have on offer. They, for some reason, have chosen to illustrate this with an image of BAYWATCH. Leaving aside the description here of Baywatch as "classic", Baywatch started in 1989 and ran eleven seasons, thus primarily making it a '90s series.

Can't they see how wrong this is?! Why couldn't they have picked something more representative of the '70s or '80s?

Although, I suppose, featuring as it does The Hoff, perhaps they think it deserves honorary '80s status. :P

Speaking of, when the heck are they going to release Automan on DVD?

Warning! Review may contain traces of spoilers.

On the weekend, I went to see Ghost Rider, the latest conversion of a Marvel comics hero to the big screen. I'm not really familiar with the comic version, so I don't know how comic-accurate the movie version was, but it was a pretty good film.

Johnny Blaze is a young stunt rider who's father has just been diagnosed with cancer. Enter Mephistopheles, who offers the fellow a deal - his father's health in return for Johnny's soul. Johnny signs the contract, the devil erases dad's cancer and tells Johnny not to make any long-term plans.

Fast foward twenty years or so, and son of Satan is roaming Earth looking for a lost contract which will bestow him with many souls. The Devil is not happy at this and wants the contract for himself, so he activates Johnny as the Ghost Rider in order to fight Satan Jr and his elemental-based henchmen.

I quite enjoyed this movie...

Continue reading "Review: Ghost Rider"

I say not. I mean, seriously, look at this image of Amanda Tapping from today's Stargate SG-1:

Need I say more?

I was watching a Knight Rider episode ("Knight of the Drones", to be precise, and as the following screen grabs will demonstrate, it provides proof that KITT is programmed in BASIC:

"KITT, give me a readout"

It prints out the sin, cos and tan of 30 random number between 0 and 9, then what looks like entries from Paramount picture's phone book (Mimi Soudan and C Gibson who were listed I found mentioned on this page. Other distinctive names from the list: John Sitcom (inventer of the sitcom??), Deke Miller, David Cazarus, Bill Busak, Chris Alsip, Dave Devlin.

Then after that there's what looks like the start of a news story: "What the heck? The jury decision to deny Mayor Smith his choice of-". The Mayor of LA (where the episode was filmed) in the 80s was Thomas Bradley, so what this was in reference to is a mystery...

Randomly, I was driven to look up info on the other Ghostbusters.

Back in 1975, long before the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, Filmation put out 15 episodes of a live action series titled "The Ghost Busters" (IMDB Wikipedia) which featured a team of three who investigated paranormal events. The three investigators were Jake Kong (Larry Storch), Eddie Spencer (Forrest Tucker), and Tracy the Ape (Bob Burns in a gorilla costume). 70s Live Action Kid Vid has a Ghost Busters page with some fascinating pictures.

Of course, in the 80s, a completely unrelated live action movie titled Ghostbusters came out. After some legal wrangling, Filmation put out a cartoon titled "Filmation's Ghostbusters" to more or less cash in on the movie's popularity. The cartoon, which ran for 65 episodes, featured the sons of the original Kong and Spencer (IMDB Wikipedia). Eddie Spencer's voice in the cartoon was provided by Peter "Optimus Prime" Cullen. :)

This also explains why the tie-in cartoon to the Ghostbusters movie was retitled "The Real Ghostbusters"...

Recently I got hold of and watched Star Trek: The Animated Series. Not only did it introduce such concepts as the Holodeck years before The Next Generation, but it also features some of the stiffest animation known to man. I also made many screen shots from some of which I constructed this panorama of the animated bridge:

I've also made some LiveJournal icons which will made available shortly in the Trek section of my LiveJournal Icons page.

From the infamous Pendragon "Not the Tom Cruise Version" of War of the Worlds comes a Martian:

Which looks sadly like some sort of sprouting root vegetable. Despite the spindly appearance of its tentacles, it can actually walk on them, although it prefers to stay within its war machine. Sadly, this is by no means the worst visual effect in this LSD-soaked three-hour torture (viewings have been banned under the Geneva convention), which I may some day demonstrate by posting screen shots of the "good" bits..

I thought it was about time I tried out the new Skycity cinemas in Queensgate (they're very big and they don't play 15 minutes of adverts before the movies like Hoyts does!) so I went to see DOA: Dead or Alive.

I haven't played the games the movie's based on, but I've seen enough of them to go in to it expecting lots of Mortal Kombat style fighting, with added T&A and a token plot, and that was pretty much exactly what I got. Robin Shou from the MK films even has a couple of cameos.

The token plot involves a dozen or so fighters being invited to an island to take part in a tournament. About halfway through, I realised that the mastermind controlling the competition was Eric "The Master" Roberts. This, plus the "plot twist", is all the plot you'll get. The movie is filled out with fight sequences and gratuitous T&A shots.

An entertaining if silly movie.

A couple of weekends ago, I had the pleasure(?!) of seeing the last story of the original 70s Tomorrow People series, titled War of the Empires. This brings me to...

Continue reading "Dodgy Aliens #3 and #4"

I had a voucher for the DVD of the Wallace and Grommit movie The Curse of the Were-Rabbit at Whitcoulls, so I ambled in this lunchtime to pick it up. Which I was grabbing it off the shelf, I noticed they had the complete animated series of Peter Chung's Aeon Flux, so I grabbed that too. Then when I got to the counter, I was told that there was a current special: buy Curse of the Were-Rabbit and get Chicken Run for $5. I have no resistence to that sort of thing. :)

But I did fill up my Whitcoulls DVD loyalty card, so my next DVD is free. But after that, I'm not allowed in Whitcoulls for the rest of the month. :)

As you've probably heard, Al Lewis who played Grandpa Munster sadly died yesterday. Coincidentally tonight I watched the Lost in Space episode "Rocket to Earth" which features Al Lewis as the wizard Zalto.

Jeff alerted me to a bizarre mystery involving Zalto. At one point during the episode he states that Neptune has three rings. Neptune does have three main rings. The only problem is that the rings appear to have been first discovered in the 80s (thinkquest.org says they were first detected in 1983) while "Rocket to Earth" was screened in 1967.

Presumably the only person who could shed light on how the rings came to be mentioned over a decade earlier than they were discovered is episode writer Barney Slater, but unfortunately he died in 1978, so the mystery remains...

(Unless my info about the year the rings were discovered is totally wrong, of course. :)

On a somewhat more advanced note than Lost in Space, today I watched the first four episodes of the recent Captain Scarlet remake.

In ther original, Captain Scarlet (member of elite security organisation SPECTRUM) was rendered invulnerable by the Mysterons. The Mysterons dwell in a city on Mars, and were provoked by humans into starting a war whereby they wish to destroy Earth and its inhabitants. The original show was done using puppets. The new show is done using CGI, and it's allowed the makers to do much more than could have been done int her original.

The updated Mysteron city looks gloriously like something from a movie rather than a TV series. In fact, all four of the episodes felt more like half-hour movies instead of episodes of a TV show. In the fourth episode, our heroes go to Mars to rescue some scientists, and the production all the way through feels more like a big-budget motion picture.

Seems to be the in-thing in Britain at the moment to do remakes that blow everything else out of the water. Excellent. :)

From the Lost in Space episode "The Golden Man", the title character Keema(Dennis Patrick) carries Judy Robinson(Marta Kristen) out from the centre of a mine field.

I have to say, I've never considered the idea of disguising mines as badly-inflated beach balls. It seems to me they'd be sorta easy to spot and avoid...

Also featured in this episode: Christmas Tree lights pretending to be barbed wire. CLASSIC!

If you were offended by the title of this post, that's probably a sign you won't like the rest of this post. :)

Recently I saw the Star Trek Enterprise episode "Fusion", in which Enterprise encountered a ship full of Vulcans who had embraced their emotions rather than suppressing them. The Vulcan ship had been in space for eight years. (Also, one of the Vulcans mind-raped T'Pol and gave her Vulcan AIDS, but that's irrelevant to this post).

I was also introduced to First TV Drama's Enterprise reviews, which point out the many inconsistencies in the episodes. I'm going to make specific reference to one bit of their review for "Fusion".

As Richard Whettestone points out about 2/3 of the way down that page, the ship has been out in space for 8 years. As we learned in the original series, male Vulcans get extremely horny every seven years, and it makes them go a wee bit insane. In the original series, this leads Spock to have a fight to the death with his best mate, Kirk. "If the Pon Farr makes a logical Vulcan go whacky, imagine what it does to emotional ones," says Richard.

It's my contention that Pon Farr would actually affect an overtly emotional Vulcan a lot less than the normal emotion-suppressing Vulcans.

Your normal everyday male Vulcan suppresses his emotions and is entirely logical. This means that logically he does not masturbate or have any sex as that would be illogical and a display of emotion. This leads to a gradual build up of sexual frustration, which the Vulcan routinely suppresses. When their seven years are up, the biologically-triggered Pon Farr causes a simultaneous release of all this pent-up sexual frustration, driving the poor fellow mad.

On the other hand, a Vulcan who has embraced his emotions would tend to have sex in his biological off-hours, as they were, or masturbate should he not be able to find a suitable partner. This means (a) no pent-up sexual tension, and (b) a better-adjusted Vulcan. Thus when they reach Pon Farr, the biological changes don't make as much difference to them.

In summary, Vulcans are not screwed up because they are wankers, but precisely because they are not.