Alden Bates' Weblog

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.

Having just watched Star Trek: Enterprise season 1 all the way through for the first time, I can safely summarise it thusly:

* NX-01 has joined #Starsystem37754
<NX-01> HIII! WE'RE FROM EARTH!
<BumpyForeheadRace35> WTF?
<NX-01> WE'RE CALLED HUMANS!
<BumpyForeheadRace35> That's nice...
<BumpyForeheadRace35> Caps lock?
<NX-01> WE WANT TO BE FRIENDS!
<BumpyForeheadRace35> ...
<BumpyForeheadRace35> FFS
* BumpyForeheadRace35 has left #Starsystem37754

* BumpyForeheadRace35 has joined #Starsystem37755
<BumpyForeheadRace36> Hey, what's up?
<BumpyForeheadRace35> There's some newbies running around, They say they're from Earth.
<BumpyForeheadRace36> Earth? Never heard of it.
<BumpyForeheadRace35> If they just turn up, just ignore them and maybe they'll go away.
* NX-01 has joined #Starsystem37755
<NX-01> HIII! WE'RE FROM EARTH!
<NX-01> HELLLLLLOOOOOO!
* NX-01 scans for life signs
* NX-01 has left #Starsystem37755
<BumpyForeheadRace35> Thank Roddenberry that worked.

* NX-01 has joined #Starsystem37756
<NX-01> HIII! WE'RE FROM EARTH!
<KlingonBirdOfPrey> P'TAK!
* KlingonBirdOfPrey sets mode: +b NX-01
* NX-01 was kicked by KlingonBirdOfPrey (GRE'THOR WILL BE PAVED WITH YOUR ASHES!)

And I thought a box set containing all 10 Star Trek movies was excessive, Amazon currently have listed The Ultimate Star Trek Collection, featuring: all ten movies, the original series, the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. A steal at only $2,499.99 (yes, that's American dollars).

I actually wondered how much the postage would be on that little lot to New Zealand. You'd think the postage on 212 DVDs would be astronomical, but Amazon calculated it for me as... *drumroll* $6.48. They might need to revise that figure..!

Of course, I'm not actually going to buy this - it's incomplete! They didn't include the animated series. ;)

From the very outer reaches of the Outer Limits comes a new fear! To be precise, I was watching an episode of The Outer Limits titled "Don't Open 'Til Doomsday". In the episode, people are sucked into a small box (it's bigger on the inside) by the alien within who seeks to destroy the world!

The alien looks like this:

I've got to hand it to the designer on that show for designing an actual literal crap monster. I'm not entirely sure why they chose to gave it that huge lopsided grin though - makes it look more like it's looking for a hug than seeking to annihilate the universe.

[Previously on Dodgy Alien Theatre: Thing]

This is the third of the War of the Worlds movies to be released this year. It's no Spielberg masterpiece but it's not technicolour puke either. It's the Asylum take. To the right you should see the cover, on which one of the walkers (they have six legs, not three) is doing an Independance Day impression with the White House. Like the picture on the back with walkers destroying the city, this doesn't occur in the movie.

The trailers which played when I stuck the disk in didn't really fill be with confidence, being full of bad acting and (unintentionally?) hilarious gore. But fortunately, the movie itself didn't plumb those depths.

George Herbert (astronomer) is seperated from his wife and kid at the start of the movie as mysterious objects plung from the skies. He approaches the crater with a group of people, only to be confronted by a huge six-legged machine which starts with the killing and the mayhem. The story swiftly gets to the action, with walkers stomping around heat-raying people and wiping out civilisation in the first half hour, while Mr Herbert attempts to make his way to the Lincoln Memorial to meet up with his wife.

The special effects vary a lot from average for a TV series to pretty good. Fortunately they show stuff sparingly and the movie benefits from it. I'm not big on gore, but this movie has it, and it seemed like about the right amount to me. This movie didn't have a huge budget, but by the looks they made more of it than Pendragon did. The pacing was a little odd at times...

Not a Hollywood masterpiece, but better than a B movie.

In 2007 will be released (hopefully!) yet another War of the Worlds movie, the completely CGI version based on Jeff Wayne's soundtrack...

I went to see Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. While the town is preparing for a vegetable contest, local inventor Wallace and Grommit have started a humane pest removal business named Anti-Pesto. After ridding Lady Tottington (Totty to her friends) of a rabbit infestation, Wallace comes up with a plan to make the bunnies harmless.

As with the previous Wallace and Grommit outings, half the fun is spotting the wee background details (Grommit graduated from Dogwarts) and the other half is the story itself and the characters who inhabit the minds of Nick Park and his fellow co-writers. The extra-long run time was much appreciated (though it meant an extra-long production time :( and overall it was fantastic! Go see it!

Before the movie there was a short featuring the penguins from Madagascar. Though being horribly out-of-season (twas a Christmas story...), it was terribly cute and the poodle ruled. One of the penguins sounds like Pinky of Pinky and the Brain.

I got the Alien vs Predator Extreme Edition DVD for my birthday. The first thing that happened when I popped it in to my DVD player was it played an anti-piracy advert at me. You may know the one: "You wouldn't steal a handbag... You wouldn't steal a car... You wouldn't steal candy from a baby..." Though given the apparent intelligence displayed by whoever came up with this idea, I think the last one is an accurate comparison.

Come on! If someone's just forked out $40 to buy their crummy DVD, it should be obvious that they're not actively engaged in downloading movies from the Internet. I shouldn't need reminding that the MPAA is desperately broke and losing money hand over fist from people downloading movies en-mass... oh, wait, they aren't.

That said, pressing 'chapter forward' skipped to the FBI warning. HA! Take that, grossly misleading MPAA propaganda!

Y'know, I saw self-same ad recently as well. I went to look at the trailers on another DVD, and (rather than launching into the first trailer) the DVD started playing the self same advert at me. I ejected the disk and didn't bother watching the trailers. HA!

Today's rant brought to you by Fox Movies. Cheers, guys! I didn't think I'd have anything to write about today.

• MT 3.2 seems to have solved my problem with new entries showing entry #1 as the next link.
• Since the R4 run of Justice League: Starcrossed was frelled, I ordered the R1 version from Amazon - this turned out to be in the original movie format and have both widescreen and full screen versions. Much better than the R4 Justice League DVDs.
• As a side note to the whole Hotel experience, I saw the other week that Geri Halliwell's latest album has come out here, but I didn't buy it, because it had the same copy protection on it. Sorry, but I'm not paying $30 for a CD which may or may not work.
• Yahoo fixed the login issues with Yahoo mail not long after I complained about it. Both Briefcase issues are still there.
• LiveJournal still doesn't have trackback support, 8 months later.

The War of the Worlds

Sadly not the recent Spielburg/Cruise version, which is quite fab, but the Timothy Hines Pendragon version. To say this is an awful film is an understatement.

One scene near the start of the film has the main character stargazing with his wife, during what appears to be mid-day, with a starry sky laid in during post production. The design of the Martian tripods is fine, but subject to the worst CGI animation I've seen - they move so rapidly they look like they're at most a foot tall and actually looks at points like they've used bad stop motion. At one point a tripod crushes a woman beneath its foot, a sequence which would have been horrific had it not been so badly done. At times, it looks more like a computer game than a movie.

The picture is also highly colourful. Much use is made of coloured filters, and often the picture is so saturated it's almost painful to look at. A lot of the dialogue appears to have been layed on later, with completely inappropriate accoustics.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it makes Ed Wood look like Orson Welles, but it is dreadfully bad.

Above: The starship Voyager (from the episode Timeless) takes a short-cut through the space/time continuum.
Below: The TARDIS (from the Doctor Who title sequence) activates its Quantum Slipstream drive.

Tee hee hee! (Couple more pictures under the cut, the one from Doctor Who may be mildly spoilerly...)

Continue reading "Then and Now"

I bought the region 4 DVD of the Justice League episodes Starcrossed. Unfortunately episode 3 has the English soundtrack for episode 2 - the French and Hungarian soundtracks for that episode are correct. That doesn't help me much, as I don't speak French or Hungarian.

I attempted some web searches to see if anyone else had reported the problem yet, but can't find anything.

I'll try to find out who the Warner distributor is in NZ/Australia and see if I can get any information on whether this is a problem with all of the copies, and if so whether they're going to fix it. If not, I'll have to attempt to return it to Whitcoulls tomorrow (they're shut now...)

Ain't that just a bummer?

Edit: Warner's contact page is unhelpful. No email address - what is this? The 80s?

Edit2: I returned it to Whitcoulls. Unfortunately they didn't have another copy in stock, so I got my money back instead. Whitcoulls = Cool. I may try the Lower Hutt branch and see if they have a copy without the sound problem...

Edit3: Yup, looks like the whole printing is bad (see comments)

Occasionally you come across TV series which are of highly variable quality. Take the classic 1970s British series The Tomorrow People, about a group of youngsters who have developed such psychic powers as telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation (Though sadly not precognition, otherwise they could regularly save themselves a lot of hassle).

I thought I was safe, you see. I'd already seen A Man For Emily, which has to be the most insanely bad episode of any science fiction series ever, and the first two stories of season 6 were actually quite good, but then...

Continue reading "The Tomorrow People and Dodgy Special Effects"

Warner appears to have decided to make Looney Tunes more like Batman Beyond. Their new series has Buzz Bunny and his pals nipping around in the future. Sadly I had to fire up IE to play the video because MSN are a bunch of MS fascistsinsisted I had to use it.

I want to see an updated Tweety. He could be called the Tweetenator and carry a big-ass gun three times his size. Also upgraded Granny would be cool. FRYING PAN ATTACK!!! Or Matrix-style Yosemite Sam with a machine gun in each hand.

I wonder if they'll come up with Pinky and the Brain's descendants as futuristic supervillians.

Recently I've been watching Survivors, a 1970s British series created by Terry Nation. The premise is that 99% of humanity has been wiped out overnight by a biological weapon accidentally released. It follows a band of survivors as they struggle to become self-sufficent in a world where even the most basic of services no longer exist. It's very well written and realistic, and also very grim at times.

I also got to see Grave of the Fireflies, an anime film set in Japan during World War II. It made me realise that, unlike the war in Europe, I know very little about the US/Japan part of the war apart from Pearl Harbour and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I must see if I can find more information.