Lost Rod Serling video interview
Monday, August 30, 2010
A long-lost, 1970 interview with Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling. (Via SFSignal.com.)
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.
THE DELICIOUS
Thursday, August 26, 2010
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!)
Read more...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."
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.
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.
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.)
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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