Lost Rod Serling video interview

Monday, August 30, 2010


A long-lost, 1970 interview with Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling. (Via SFSignal.com.)

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner revels in his Shatnerhood

Sunday, August 29, 2010


I think this clip is from an old episode of Saturday Night Live, but I'm not sure about that. The writing is kind of weak, but Shatner sure is having a ball. It's not too hard to imagine that he really starts his mornings like this.

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THE DELICIOUS

Thursday, August 26, 2010

The Delicious is a funny and haunting 15-minute short about a corporate drone whose busy, colorless life is turned upside down when he finds a red, polyester suit lurking at the back of his closet. He tries it on, and soon finds himself in the grips of a strange force, something he knows only as The Delicious.

What is The Delicious? It's been seen as an allegory for drugs, sexual deviance, mental illness and more, but according to filmmaker and star Scott Prendergast (who would go on to make the indie hit Kabluey), the short is a more universal statement about being a weirdo. When your own personal The Delicious calls to you, you can pursue it and live a misfit's life, or ignore it and spend your life never being true to yourself.

But the people who never find their own The Delicious? Those are the ones to truly feel sorry for.



(Via Metafilter)


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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Unicycle Loves You - MIRROR, MIRROR


The video for this sweet, jangly pop tune begins with a young hipster couple trying on silly clothes at a trendy vintage store... only to then take off in a very surprising direction when we meet the hipster girl's stalker ex.
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Urban planning as seen in sci-fi

Saturday, August 21, 2010

A very interesting article on the urban planning seen in Star Wars, Blade Runner and other sci-fi classics. Author Tony Chavira does a good job of examining what works, and doesn't work, in these various cityscapes. One aspect that I found a little strange was Chavira's assumption that there would be homeless people in all of these environments. Sure, there would be homeless folks in Star Wars' Mos Eisley or Futurama's New New York... But I have a hard time picturing people sleeping in alleys in the utopian world of The Jetsons. (Besides, they don't even have alleys!)

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The STAR GAZER has left the Earth to wander the universe


Jack Horkheimer, the unforgettable host of PBS' long-running Star Gazer (originally Star Hustler) has passed away. The clip above was apparently his final broadcast, and he seems as goofy about the stars as ever.

This fascinating article from 1982
reveals something of the sweet, complicated man behind the cheery Star Gazer persona. On his website, he provided his own epitaph:

"Keep Looking Up was my life's admonition,
I can do little else in my present position."

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Class of 2014

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Every year, Beloit College releases the "Mindset List," supposedly capturing the mindset of new college students. It's a very strange, rather masochistic annual tradition, where people all over America read these lists specifically so they can feel old and irrelevant.

The lists have never been a very accurate barometer of what kids know and don't know. (When I was a kid the lists kept saying I'd never heard of stuff like Watergate and Laugh In, like I'd grown up in a locked basement without a TV or something.) But this year's list seems particularly odd and out-of-touch. Check out number six:

6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High.

Okay, first: Buffy? That seems like kind of a dated reference. Aren't today's kids a lot more into Twilight and crap like that? Second, does whoever wrote this list realize that Buffy's story continued beyond the 1992 movie? In the movie she fought Lothos at Hemery High, but in the later, much more popular TV series, she attended Sunnydale High and Lothos played no part.

And then we get to this baffler at number nine:

9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend.

Hal 9000? From 2001: A Space Odyssey? According to 2010: The Year We Make Contact, in 2010 Hal is re-activated after murdering the Discovery crew in 2001, briefly assists the scientists aboard the Leonov and then sacrifices himself as part of all that weird "All these worlds are yours except Europa" stuff. So, where does Hal find time in all that to go to college? That's at least as baffling as anything Dave Bowman experienced before the aliens turned him into the floating star baby.

And then there's #53:

53. J.R. Ewing has always been dead and gone. Hasn’t he? 

Well, according to Wikipedia, J.R.'s not dead. He was last seen in some 1998 TV movie, alive and well and getting up to his usual mischief. If any of today's kids have even heard of J.R. Ewing, why would they assume he was dead?

Frankly this seems less like a list of stuff that today's kids think, and more like your grandpa's list of stuff that he thinks today's kids think.

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner on THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW

Sunday, August 15, 2010


Now here's a tall, cool glass of the 1970s: William Shatner (wearing a red velvet shirt that looks like something he bought at Hot Topic), Stiller and Mearra, and Kristy McNicol sit down for a chat on The Mike Douglas Show. Just when you think the whole thing can't possibly get any more Carter-era, they start discussing astrology.

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SMELLS LIKE ROCKIN' ROBIN

Friday, August 13, 2010


Nirvana collides with the Jackson 5 in an explosion of improbable awesomeness. (You know, cranky as he was, something tells me that Cobain would've approved.)

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Gary Kurtz dishes on why the STAR WARS franchise turned to crap

In a long and fascinating interview with the LA Times, Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz details his falling-out with George Lucas. As Kurtz explains it, post-Empire Strikes Back, Lucas started to build his plots around what would be good for Star Wars toy merchandising:

"I could see where things were headed. The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It's a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It's natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that's not the best thing for making quality films."

Kurtz says that Return of the Jedi was planned to be a much, much darker film, before Lucas filled it up with cuddly Ewoks.

"We had an outline, and George changed everything in it," the filmmaker said. "Instead of bittersweet and poignant, he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn't want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales, and that was a reason."

While that would've been a powerful, unforgettable ending, the kid in me is horrified by the idea of Han Solo dying and Luke going off to wander that galaxy as a lone jedi. The ending of Empire was traumatic enough!

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Kate Bosworth and Zoe Saldana are IDIOTS



Kate Bosworth, Zoe Saldana, Greg Grunberg and Janeane Garofalo star in this very strange, very funny short film.

(Via Sarah Lane.)

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MUSIC FROM SPACE: Patrice - AIN'T GOT NO (I GOT LIFE)


In Patrice's new music video, blurry naked people with shopping carts scurry around in various locations assembling piles of stereo speakers into giant, singing Patrice heads. Really.

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The Black Eyed Peas' I GOTTA FEELING as performed in American Sign Langauge

Wednesday, August 11, 2010


And I do mean performed.

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The Doctor in a "truly, truly outrageous" adventure


Rich Morris makes a habit of accomplishing the seemingly impossible. First he created a sprawling Doctor Who fan comic that featured all of the Doctor's first ten incarnations, telling a busy but exciting story while expertly capturing the particular character of each Doctor. That was impressive enough. Then he followed it up with Forever Janette, an adventure that had the Doctor's hapless eighth incarnation (the one from that poopy American TV movie) teaming up with the cast of the semi-forgotten Canadian vampire series, Forever Knight. It absolutely should not have worked, and yet it somehow did.

But Morris' latest Doctor Who comic is perhaps his most daring (and craziest) yet. It stars the sixth Doctor, the controversial, clownishly-attired incarnation that fans love to hate only slightly less than the eighth. It co-stars Melanie Bush, one of the least popular companions in all of the series' long history. And here's where things get truly nuts: the story teams the Doctor with the 1980s cartoon stars, Jem and the Holograms. (That clip up top should get you as acquainted with this cartoon as you'd ever need to be.)

The very idea of a crossover between Doctor Who and Jem is weird, random and wrong. If Morris can actually make this work, we'll be forced to conclude that he can team Doctor Who with anybody and make a decent comic out of it. What's next? Tom Baker and Jar-Jar Binks? Peter Davison and Lady Gaga? Anything's possible!

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MONSTROUS WILDLIFE - your guide to graboids

Monday, August 9, 2010


In this educational short film you'll learn about the graboids, the deadly creatures featured in Tremors. I wish they'd shown us this movie in elementary school, instead of wasting our time with all of that arithmetic stuff.

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Lando Calrissian is the BLACKSTAR WARRIOR


I really, really wish that this fan-made, blaxploitation Star Wars parody was a real movie. I would watch the living daylights out of it.

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Full LOST epilogue online, for now

Sunday, August 8, 2010

That 12-minute Lost epilogue, The New Man in Charge, has now leaked online. ABC has been very aggressive about taking it down, but as I write this you can still see it (with Italian subtitles) here. If you want to see this thing, I strongly suggest you click on that link right now, because the video definitely won't be there for long.

(Spoilers ahead, kinda.) I have the feeling that the Lost producers basically sat down with a list of 25 or so "answers" that fans wouldn't shut up about, and they crammed them all into this short clip. It's more of an exposition dump than a proper story, really. (But it's still a little sad to watch this and think that this is probably the last time we'll ever see one of Dr. Chang's orientation videos.) And that ending is kind of cruel. The ambiguity of it and the big, tense music make it seem like a heck of a cliffhanger... But there's no resolution coming ever, this is it!

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Christmas with the Doctors


In this quick sketch from the UK series Dead Ringers, Doctor Who's tenth Doctor suffers through a rather tense Christmas with a few of his earlier incarnations. (The Tom Baker impersonator is so spot-on it's kind of eerie.)

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner on POLICE SQUAD


Back before Police Squad became a series of rather forgettable movies, it was a short-lived but pretty fun TV series. This clip from the show features 15 seconds of priceless Shatner goofery. (That's actually his entire "special guest star" appearance in the episode!)

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Upsetting UK commercial for Drench

Saturday, August 7, 2010


In this extremely disturbing English commercial, a gentleman suffering from Rubik's Cube Head attempts to unscramble his face. This ad doesn't make me want to drink Drench. Actually, it makes me associate Drench (a drink I've never heard of before) with people who have nightmarish, rotatable facial parts. It also makes me want to lock my computer monitor in a trunk and bury it in the yard so I'll never have to worry about it showing me something this terrifying again.

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New LOST epilogue clip!

Wednesday, August 4, 2010


Lost fans are having palpitations awaiting the upcoming, 11-minute Lost epilogue, The New Man in Charge. Well, here's something sweet to tide us over: the first minute - 12.1 percent of the finished episode! - featuring the all too brief return of Ben Linus as he visits a Dharma Initiative warehouse.

Micheal Emerson is going to be up against some serious typecasting in the years to come. Seriously, how can this guy ever be anybody but Ben Linus?

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George Lucas pledges half his wealth to charity

As much as George Lucas has disappointed me and ticked me off from The Phantom Menace onward, he has done two thing guaranteed to save his soul from perdition.

1. He created the original Star Wars trilogy.

2. He has just pledged half of his vast fortune to charity.

Oh, and he was the executive producer of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Labyrinth. And we can't forget American Graffiti and THX-1138. So, you add all of those great, great things together, and they cancel out the unmitigated horror of Jar-Jar Binks. But just barely.

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Big fat trailer for THE VENTURE BROTHERS' new season


A brand new, big, fat, spoiler-heavy trailer is online for season 5 (season 4.2?) of The Venture Brothers. Sweet lord, have I missed this crazy show.

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Interactive zombie comedy DELIVER ME TO HELL

Tuesday, August 3, 2010


New Zealand's Hell Pizza chain has sponsored Deliver Me to Hell, a funny, gross and NSFW interactive zombie comedy in which you control the actions of a fumbly pizza delivery man as he attempts to deliver a pizza in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. (Talk about job dedication! If this guy doesn't get his picture on the wall as Employee of the Month, there's no justice in this world.)

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SHATNER SUNDAY: Shatner chats with the D.C. sniper

Sunday, August 1, 2010


No, for real. In this clip William Shatner chats with Lee Malvo, the infamous D.C. sniper.

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About This Blog

"Science fiction plucks from within us our deepest fears and hopes, then shows them to us in rough disguise: the monster and the rocket." - W.H. Auden

Who is he, this one who is called "Greg Stacy"?

Greg Stacy began the MONSTERS AND ROCKETS blog in April of 2009. Prior to that, he was editor of the popular sci-fi/horror news website DARKWOLDS.COM. He has also written for LA WEEKLY, OC WEEKLY, UTNE READER and LOS ANGELES CITYBEAT. He always feels weird writing about himself in the third person.

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