Here we have some catchy nerdrock with an adorably goofy video, casting the members of Low Water as a trio of nerdy scientists on the run from a rather listless dominatrix type and her rollerskating hench-ladies.
If some of the girls in this clip look familiar, you may remember them from Tech TV or the early days of G4 - Morgan Webb, Laura Swisher, Sarah Lane and Cat Schwartz are all on hand, circa 2004, to make you pine for the Attack of the Show and X-Play of days gone by. The clip ends with a bit too much footage of everybody just kind of hanging around having fun, but since when is watching people have fun a bad thing?
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is widely regarded as the worst of the Trek film series. But while that's arguably true (personally I much prefer it to that 2009 JJ Abrams reboot mess) there's no faulting director William Shatner for lack of ambition.
For his lone directorial effort in the Trek franchise, Shatner envisioned a grand tale of friend against friend, man against God, and Kirk against Rockman. He planned for the film to climax with Kirk's spectacular fight against five rock monsters, but they had to be cut to one Rockman for budget reasons and then the sequence ended up getting cut altogether. Too bad. As seen in the screen tests above, this had the potential to be an unforgettable sequence: two glowing eyes suddenly blink to life in the dark rock face, and then a great, jagged shape breaks free from the wall of stone and comes lumbering toward a terrified Kirk, the ground shaking with its every massive footstep. Sure, it would've been goofy as hell, but it would've been goofy in the most awesome, old school Trek way.
Lance Cardinal is an artist from Vancouver who built himself an absolutely insane model of the Muppet Show set, everything from the stage itself to the backstage area where Kermit would spend the whole show coping with diva pigs, exploding chickens and other common annoyances of the showbiz trade. Cardinal has done some stunning work here, and the rest of his site is also worth a long look. As a f'rinstance, just check out his Evil Dead mini cabin!
In the fan-made clip above - a mod based on the game Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force - you get to tour a Kirk-era Federation Starbase and see what all the redshirts got up to when they weren't being killed by dikironium cloud creatures or some damn thing. The bowling alley is no great shock, but some of their other forms of entertainment are a little more surprising.
Roz Chast is best known for her New Yorker cartoons, but she has a surprising sideline creating these crazy little egg things here. Click the picture to embiggify, or visit her website to see more.
Before he became a director, Terry Gilliam was an animator with a bizarre, instantly recognizable style. In his fantastic 1979 book Animations of Mortality, Gilliam offers up a lot of original artwork along with pages of full-color print adaptations of animated sequences he created for Monty Python's Flying Circus and other TV shows of the era. As a kid I re-read the book obsessively, aching to see Gilliam's titles for shows like The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine in motion. It only took a couple of decades, but now I can see this stuff on Youtube with but a few clicks of the mouse. It was worth the wait.
This month marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of scary movie great Vincent Price. Artist Zach Bellissimo (AKA "Seizuredemon") has honored Price by drawing 100 of the fiendish characters that the actor portrayed during his life. There are a few notable omissions, but most of the classics are here, from the Abominable Dr. Phibes to Egghead from Batman. To see the full tribute, click on over to Bellissimo's Deviant Art page.
Just for kicks, here's a 1984 intro segment from the PBS series Mystery!, featuring Price as host. (Man, Vincent Price hosting a show featuring a cartoon title sequence designed by Edward Gorey... PBS used to be awesome.)
Coming soon: Ricky Gervais' and Stephen Merchant's next sitcom Life's Too Short, starring Warwick Davis of Willow and Leprechaun fame. Davis will play a fictionalized version of himself in what Gervais describes as a comedy about "the life of a showbiz dwarf." According to Wikipedia, Gervais and Merchant met Davis when he appeared on Extras and they were quite taken with his blackly funny anecdotes: "Davis told the pair of the trials of life for a man of 3 feet 6 inches in height, such as having to use a broom handle to reach objects on the high shelves in supermarkets, and people touching him for luck as if he were a leprechaun."
Read more by Greg Stacy at GregStacy.com. Got a tip for Monsters and Rockets? Want to contribute to the site?Send us an email.
In George Orwell's 1941 essay on the "saucy seaside postcards" of the era, the 1984 author found something essential to the human spirit in the endless scenes of fat, shrewish wives nagging bitter, balding little men and what he described as the "mother-in-law, baby's nappy, policemen's boot type of joke." (Note that that link to Orwell's essay contains an offensive and possibly NSFW racial epithet, used in the context of describing the seaside minstrel acts that were still common in the '40s.)
"It will not do to condemn (the postcards) on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly," Orwell wrote. "That is exactly what they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed lowness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest hint of 'higher' influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the worm's-eye view of life, for the music-hall world where marriage is a dirty joke or a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind and the clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is always a crook and the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken, red-nosed husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them behind the front door, poker in hand."
The video for John Lydon's 1997 single Sun is a viciously cheeky little number featuring comic seaside postcards of the kind Orwell described, but here they're not just a bunch of random jokes. Using crude animation, the postcards tell the complete story of one man's wretched, joyless life, from sunburned trips to the beach as a child, to his loveless marriage, tedious job and beyond. Every now and again Lydon comes dancing into the frame like a cackling little demon, mocking the many failures of our hapless cartoon anti-hero.
The song comes from Lydon's uneven but fascinating CD Psycho's Path. Lydon played all the instruments himself, designed the CD cover, etc. This video serves as a kind of sequel to Holidays in the Sun, and it turned out to be pretty much the last great thing Lydon ever did. After this we lost him to listless Sex Pistols reunions, reality show gigs, et al, as he transformed from punk rock superhero to pop cultural irritant. But hey, the Idiot Dance was pretty great while it lasted.
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"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.
