Big Video Wednesday - The Zanti Misfits

I got a little burned out on low-budget, poorly written live 50's sci-fi, so decided to move on to an acclaimed series from the early 60's, The Outer Limits.


"The Zanti Misfits" was broadcast in 1963 and is mainly notable for some rare stop-motion effects by future animation wizard Jim Danforth, along with his Project Unlimited colleagues.

The episode opens with aliens telling a general over the radio that they are ready to land their ship, and will kill anyone who intrudes on their landing area. Then we see a black sedan crash through a gate, killing a military guard, and drive along a desert road as the alien spaceship descends above it.

Title sequence. "Do not adjust your set...." One of the most inspired title sequences of all time, I think, in concept if not in execution.

When the program resumes, we see the black sedan drive through a ghost town (ironically named Morgue) and pull to a stop in front of a building with a curiously modern door. A man gets out carrying a typewriter case, along with a soldier (okay, technically, he's not a soldier, he's an airman). What the?

As the program continues, the man, a historian named Grave, meets the Air Force general and they talk about the historic alien landing. Apparently, the aliens want to use Earth as Australia, a place to dump their criminals and undesirables, and the U.S. has gone along with the scheme to avoid pissing the aliens off and starting a war we would lose. But no mention is made of the dead guard, and by the end of the first act, we find out why. That's a different black sedan, and the sequence before the credits had been a scene from later in the show. Confusing.

So the car stops with steam billowing out of the hood. Inside are Olive Deering as some slutty chick who has ditched her husband, taking along her fur coat and a bunch of cash, to run away with this guy.


Bruce Dern, who only gives hints of the crazy that will be his hallmark later in his career, although he does do the bunny face a bit.


He spots the alien ship sitting among some very familiar rocks.


Unfortunately, he does not run into either Captain Kirk or a Gorn.


This formation, by the way, is known as the Vasquez Rocks, and you've seen it a lot, I'm sure.

So he climbs up to take a closer look, splitting his pants along the way. On a TV schedule and budget, there was no chance to reshoot.


As he examines the ship, a door pops open and out crawls a six-inch-long ant with a humanoid face.


These are the Zanti. They are a little creepy in close-up, because of the stop-motion and because they're just out of focus, but they never really do much. Bruce Dern jumps back, slides down some rocks, and then the Zanti crawls on him and he screams.

Meanwhile, the military folks are trying to assure the Zanti that the human intruders are there by accident, not a double-cross. They send Grave the historian out to negotiate.

As Grave is on his way, Ms. Slutty McFloozy climbs up the rocks to see what's taking Bruce Dern so long, taking off her high heels to help her with the climb. When she sees the Zanti, she freaks out and runs away, down the slope to ground level, where she's so tired, she has to lie down.


She hides in the car, but the Zanti leers at her through the windshield, so she runs away again, mincing along on her bare feet. She finally encounters Grave, who shouts at her to come to him, but she acts like she can't see him, even though he's only like 30 feet away in broad daylight. She runs the other way, then stops for another quick lie down.


Grave catches up to her, but she refuses to come along with him, giving some dopey melodramatic monologue about how she's wasted her life and just wants to die (which is why she's been running away from this thing for half the episode, natch). The Zanti appears, and Grave is the only guy in the whole show who acts like he's got a pair (including all the military men). He doesn't freak out at how big the ant is, he just grabs a rock and squishes it.

Then he grabs Slutty and drags her back to his jeep.

Meanwhile, we learn from a radio broadcast that the Zanti who has just been killed was like the prison guard on the ship and the bugs are making a break for it. They take off in the spaceship.

Grave takes Slutty to the ghost town HQ, where she has miraculously regenerated her high heels. The general is freaking out, because he's sure the Zanti will go to war over this affront. The escaped Zanti prisoners demonstrate that they're not too bright at this point, because instead of going to Vegas, they just land on the HQ's roof and attack the soldiers.

Hmmm, six-inch ants versus men armed with rifles and hand grenades. Who will win? I mean seriously, you don't really need rifles so much, just shoes.

Anyway, the soldiers kill the ants, and then they get a call from the Zanti homeworld stating there will be no war. The Zanti wanted the prisoners executed, turns out. They just didn't have the stomach to do it themselves and they knew we wouldn't be able to resist doing it, as long as we didn't know we were expected to. Humans are dumb and violent, you see.

Anyway, it's a decent enough episode, I guess, but far from the kind of brilliant jewel most old-school fans proclaim it to be. I've seen several episodes over the years, but the one I liked most and most want to see again is not available on Hulu. It's the episode "Demon With a Glass Hand," written by Harlan Ellison and starring Robert Culp.

Meanwhile, if you want to see the entire Zanti Misfits episode, here it is.

Quick Note

Have a job, at least tentatively. Unless the background check turns up something weird, which it shouldn't. It's seasonal help at a department store, minimum wage and temporary. Not a solution to my problem, more a stopgap, but I'll take it. And it shouldn't interfere with either my Monday night gaming or my Tuesday nights with The Girl (except for next Tuesday, when I have orientation).

Corinne Bohrer is relieved.

I may still throw up a Big Video Wednesday later. We'll see.

Metalord 2 Retires - Metalord 3 May Follow

Who is Metalord, you ask? Therein lies a story...

I used to play City of Heroes/City of Villains. My original City of Heroes character was Metatronic, an energy blaster. When I started playing City of Villains, I decided to make an evil version of Metatronic named Dark Meta.

But at some point, I decided to play a Mastermind character. In City of Villains, a Mastermind summoned henchmen to do his fighting for him. I decided to be a Robot Mastermind, and the name came to me: he was a Lord of Metal. A Metalord (which had the added bonus of being able to be read as Meta-Lord, thus continuing the Meta theme of my other characters).

Fast forward to last year. I can no longer afford to play City of Villains, but a friend of mine has asked me to join n honest-to-goodness roleplaying group, which I have not played in for years. So we start playing this game, based loosely on Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu rules (which means tangentially related to Chaosium's old Superworld game, but not so much). My character has some kind of electrical powers, as well as magnetic powers. He can manipulate metal with his mind, and can even levitate himself and fly as long as he is wearing metal. So I decide I should wear some sort of metal armor as my costume.

But what kind of name should I use? Well, I'm the master of metal, and I wear armor like a noble knight, or lord... So yeah, why not bust out Metalord again?

So for a little over a year, I played this crazy Californian of Chinese descent, a computer programmer with delusions of grandeur who ended up developing an attraction to women who were very bad for him. I battled aliens and clones and volcano men (against whom I killed their king, thereby becoming in my own mind the new king of the volcano men, although I never actually claimed the throne). I died and came back as a robot that could transform into an airplane and a submarine, then had my mind transferred into a new, genetically engineered body in the far future, before coming back (at the controls of a rather phallic spaceship) with my teammates to save the world from a demented brain on the dark side of the moon.

And in what was probably my favorite adventure, when we were thrown back into the Old West, I stood atop a flying submarine (it was my own magnetic powers flying it, natch) like freaking Captain Harlock, zapping laser-shooting pterodactyls out of the sky as we assaulted a mad scientist's secret base inside an invisible mountain. When the scientist tried to shoot his death ray from the side of the mountain, I magnetically wrenched it off its moorings and yanked it out, then said, "You know what? I've changed my mind. You can have it back," and flung the giant weapon back into his control room.

It made a big mess. Heh.

You hadda be there, right? The point is that last night, we played our last game with those characters, at least for a while. Cole Chen, Metalord, King of the Volcano Men, Transforming Robot, Ace Pilot and Space Chauffeur, Consort to the Red Queen, is retired for the nonce. We'll be starting up a new game with new characters soon, where I'll be playing a Scottish engineer with absolutely NO resemblance to a certain other Scottish engineer.

That is, if I play at all. I'm interviewing for another job today, and there's always the chance that they'll want me to work on Monday evenings. And given the fact that I haven't worked in months, I'm not in a position to be picky about shifts right now.

But we'll worry about that if and when it happens. In the meantime, you're looking up at the title of this post and saying, "Okay, I understand Metalord and Metalord 2, but who the hell is Metalord 3?"

Short answer: I joined Facebook a while back, and started playing a Facebook game called Superhero City. And showing extreme lack of imagination, when I built my character for that game, I ended up giving him silver skin and calling him Metalord as well. The game was fun at first, but has recently become ridiculously difficult. Recently, I just spent days fighting a fucking door over and over, trying to get through.

And not just any door, no. This door had agility, you see, so that it could dodge my attacks. And I mean, some fights it dodged every attack I attempted. That's one ridiculously agile door! And I understand that you could interpret it in a meta-game-rule sense that the door is not actually dodging the attacks, but that the dodged attacks represent attacks that just bounce off the armor without damaging it at all or something.

Which I could accept, if it weren't for the fact that the game presents the battles as little animated vignettes, with you and your opponent squaring off atop a moving train, or on a rooftop, or in a subway station, with my character throwing lightning blasts at a door that leaps nimbly out of the way! Seriously stupid, and even stupider for the fact that the battle was so ridiculously hard that I had to fight the damn door like ten or fifteen times before I killed it.

So even though I finally won the Great Door War, I think I'm pretty much done with Superhero City. I was already losing interest, and the door thing has really left a bad taste in my mouth.

Movie Monday - Batman, 1943

So I finally decided to take the plunge here and start documenting all the movie Batman versions. First up, the Columbia serial Batman, which came out in 1943, just 4 years after Batman's first appearance in Detective Comics. Batman and Robin were played in this first serial by Lewis Wilson and Douglas Croft.

The serial consists of 15 chapters. Chapter 1, "The Electric Brain," opens with a shot of Batman sitting by himself in the Batcave, looking as lonely as the Maytag Repairman. Is a clean desk a sign of a well-ordered mind, or just a guy with nothing to do?

We see a montage of Batman and Robin fighting various bad guys before we see a car pull up to a police call box. Batman and Robin get out and use the box to call, not Commissioner Gordon, but "Captain Ah-nold." Apparently slavish dedication to the comic was not an issue. They leave two thugs handcuffed to a light pole with a very special calling card...

but not before receiving an ominous warning about Dr. Daka. Later, Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson go to meet Bruce's girlfriend Linda Page. Bruce plays up the lazy playboy angle a little too much for Linda's liking, leading Dick to ask Bruce why he doesn't confide in her. Bruce says, "On account of our special assignment from Uncle Sam, our success depends on our keeping our identity a secret." Which seems to imply that Bruce has become the Batman at the behest of the government, not in reaction to the death of his parents. Apparently even casual fidelity to the comic was not an issue.

Linda asks Bruce to take her to meet her uncle the next day. Her uncle, Martin Warren, has been in prison on what may have been a trumped-up charge, and he is being released after completing his sentence. However, before Linda arrives, Warren's old cellmate meets him and takes him away. Linda and Bruce give chase in Bruce's car, but the bad guys get away, thanks to a special gas that changes the color of their car.

The bad guys take Warren to a House of Horrors in Little Tokyo, which the narrator tells us is now practically a ghost town "since a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs." Oh yeah, this wasn't just released a few years after the comic debuted, but also during the height of World War II. Did I forget to mention?

The bad guys take a ride through the House of Horrors, which features wax figures of Japanese soldiers torturing white men and menacing demure white women. Their car stops halfway through and they enter a secret door, which takes them into the secret headquarters of Dr. Daka (played by J. Carroll Naish). Daka is a spy for Hirohito, and introduces Warren to a group of fellow ex-cons/traitors to their country. Daka needs an industrialist, so he has recruited Warren.

However, Warren replies, "I'm an American, first and always, and no amount of torture conceived by your twisted Oriental brain will make me change my mind."

Daka, however, does not believe in torture and instead says he will turn Warren into an electro-zombie. But first he uses truth serum to determine the location of radium used by the Gotham City Foundation.

He needs the radium to power a ray gun. With the large amount of radium from the Foundation, he can construct a large enough ray gun to bring the U.S. to its knees. But first, his thugs must use the small ray gun to blow open the safe holding the radium.

Before they can make their escape, however, they are intercepted by Batman and Robin. There is a huge fight, and Batman is thrown off the roof of the building. Bad!

In Chapter 2, "The Bat's Cave," Batman lands on a handy painters' scaffold and climbs back up to the roof, just in time to capture one of the thugs as he is leaving with the ray gun. Batman and Robin bring him back to the Batcave. They threaten to leave him alone with the bats unless he talks, which he instantly does (cowardliest crook EVERRRR!).

Then they head up to the mansion, where they use the ray gun to scare the crap out of Alfred.

Because you know what radium-powered disintegrator beams are good for? Pranks!

Meanwhile, Dr. Daka (identified as Prince Daka in the previouslies) dismisses the Batman as a "bungling amateur" and is furious that the radium gun has been lost. It doesn't occur to him for a second, though, that Batman might have laid hands on it. Instead, he sends his thugs to capture Linda Page (who works at the Foundation) to see if she knows where the radium gun is. Bruce and Dick try to keep an eye on Linda, but she is captured as Dick is looking the other way.

So they follow up their only other lead, a boarding house named by their prisoner as a place where one of Daka's other thugs hangs out. Luckily, this is where Linda is being held. They attempt a rescue, but during the scuffle, a jar of acid is broken, and they must walk a tightwire to escape the fumes. Daka's thugs swing down a live electrical wire, causng the tightwire to burst into sparks as Batman is walking it. He falls.

See you next week with Chapter 3, "The Mark of the Zombies!"

(Read a summary of chapters 3-6 here)

(Read the summary of chapter 7-10 here)

Out of the Vault- Adventures Into the Unknown #117

Since Halloween is coming up, I figured I might do some horror comics. But since, as I've said before, there was no horror in horror comics back in the Code days, I figure I'll just expand the definition to show you comics featuring ghosts and monsters in decidedly unscary contexts.

First up, Adventures Into the Unknown #117, from 1960.

When I was a young teenager, there was a big recycling dumpster near my dad's house. And very occasionally, my stepbrother and I would dive in there to see if there was anything good. I think he might have been more interested in finding porn or something, but I came late to that particular pastime. I was more interested in finding comics.

And one day, we actually hit a pretty good stash. There was a Classics Illustrated, a Fantastic Four #55 (the return of the Silver Surfer!), and this comic, Adventures Into the Unknown #117, published by American Comics Group over two years before I was born. It was not in the greatest shape, having been rescued from a dumpster; I worried while scanning the few pics you see here that the worn cover would tear apart completely.

The banner at the top reads "Gripping Tales of Suspense!" right next to a freaking HUGE Comics Code Authority seal, which should tell you all you need to know about this book. The CCA--adopted in 1954 in the wake of Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent and the subsequent Kefauver hearings (yes, there were Senate hearings on comic books back in the day)--did not allow the use of the words "horror" or "terror" in titles, nor did it allow horror content. The code relaxed a bit in the early 70's, which was why you could have books like Swamp Thing and the Marvel monster heroes (including the Son of Satan!).

But in 1960, the closest you could get was "Suspense!" (cue the Suspense theme from the 40's radio show).

Two other quick notes about the cover before we dive inside: one, the artist is Ogden Whitney, who is lampooned here for frequently drawing covers featuring giant feet. And second, right next to the word "Unknown" on the cover is a small box that says "IND." I have no idea what this means, and I don't know if I have any other comics in my collection which bear it.

So what constitutes a gripping tale of "suspense" in a 1960 Code comic? Let's have a look.

The cover story is titled "The Spencer Special," and as you can see on the cover, it appears to feature a ghost (although the word "ghost" is never mentioned, of course). Let's see.

The story, illustrated by Ogden Whitney, is about champion racer Greg Morrison, who is drawn to a cardboard standee while visiting a racing museum. It depicts a beautiful woman standing next to an antique car. The museum curator says the car is the Spencer Special, which managed to hit 204 miles per hour. Greg is skeptical, so the curator tells him the story.

Dale Spencer, daughter of the car's builder, took the car out on country back roads to see just fast it would go. And so...



You get that? The curator had said the car "was clocked at 204 miles per hour," but now we see that Dale was alone in the car when it hit that speed, then immediately crashed and was "killed instantly." So how does anyone know how fast the car went?

Anyway, Greg is fascinated by the story and wants to see the original car. The curator then mentions that by incredible coincidence, the last member of the Spencer family has just died and they are auctioning off the estate that very day! What are the odds?

Morrison heads to the estate, thinking to buy the remains of the Special, but changes his mind when he learns that the estate is being sold in one big lot. He starts to leave but is lured back by a beautiful voice and the scent of patchouli (Miss Dale's favorite perfume).

So he buys the estate and wakes up one morning to find the plans detailing the construction of the Special on the floor. He rebuilds the car and takes it out to see what it can do, ignoring the butler's ominous warnings, and...



(you'll notice how these panels echo the ones above--not only that, but they even appear on the same parts of the page--nice structural touch that unfortunately required a bit of story padding to work). He crashes into the supermarket built on the site of the general store where the first Special crashed and awakes in 1902, where Dale has just had her own crash. Miraculously, she has survived, and they share a passionate kiss...

As they're zipping Greg into a body bag back in the real world (okay, they didn't use body bags then, apparently, but that's the way the scene would play today, like this--skip to the very end if you don't want to watch a 10 minute musical number). A heartwarming example of the "Death is actually a happy ending" genre of supernatural stories.

The second story is more typical of Code-era "horror" stories. The story is about a con man named Archer Prott, who seduces rich old ladies and swindles them out of their money, then leaves them cold. Archer contacts a woman named Ferenda through a lonely hearts ad, and soon begins receiving gifts from her in the mail (mail with stamps that glow mysteriously). He receives a ring that, once donned, won't come off. When he mentions he needs money to pay off some debts, he learns she has a big chest.


Yeah, that's right, uranium coins. Nothing strange about that. With the money in hand, Archer decides to give Ferenda the heave-ho, but then she shows up at his door. And wouldn't you know it? She's a green-skinned alien with Medusa hair who takes Archer back to her planet. What good is the money now, huh? Irony!

The only really interesting thing about this story is that it was illustrated by C.C. Beck and Pete Costanza, who had previously worked together on the Golden Age Captain Marvel.

The third story in the issue is another tale of ironic love, in which a boy named Bobby Foster was born under a bad star--actually a wandering star named Vera, which first appeared on the night he was born. Vera passes close to the Earth every year on Bobby's birthday, and every birthday, he has bad luck. Bobby consults an astrologer, who tells him that his astrological charts say Vera will continue to influence his life even after its destruction.

Next birthday, Vera is struck by a huge meteor and blown to pieces. Bobby rejoices, thinking his curse is over. He throws a party to celebrate on his next birthday, one year later, and as the guests are singing "For he's a jolly good fellow," a small chunk of rock crashes through the window and hits him in the head. The astrologer has the rock analyzed, and sure enough, it's a chunk of Vera. He visits Bobby in the hospital, to tell him how this vindicated his prediction, and Bobby introduces him to his fiancee, a nurse he met in the hospital--a nurse named Vera! GULP!

The final story is a throwaway about your typical rich old miser, bitter and mean to everyone, who decides to find the fountain of youth so he can be young and strong and enjoy his riches. Tired and thirsty after hours of trekking through a swamp, he finds a pool of water. A deer drinking from the pool turns young before his eyes, and when his cane gets wet, it sprouts leaves like a sapling. Triumphant, the old man drinks greedily, but overshoots his mark. He regresses back to infancy. This being a 1960's Code comic, he doesn't starve to death or get eaten by wolves; he is simply adopted by a passing farmer and spends his youth toiling in the fields while his mansion sits empty and forgotten. Irony again!

The comic isn't horrible, especially given what other publishers were putting out at the same time. After all, in 1960, Batman was still a fat guy being pestered by Bat-Mite and Bat-Woman, having imaginary stories about going off to fight aliens on other worlds. The Marvel revolution which would start with Fantastic Four #1 was still a year and a half away, which meant the entire Marvel line was given over to monster books, featuring creatures like Gomdulla, the Living Pharaoh!

But strangely enough for a suspense comic, nobody has a truly bad ending. Greg dies, but "lives" happily ever after with Dale in heaven or wherever. The worst fate is that of Archer Prott, and the worst thing he goes through is getting an ugly wife. And you never know, maybe she ended up being a great cook and the bomb in bed and he learned to love her eventually. Stranger things have happened.

Distractions

It has been a unique feeling for me, in the days since I finished the first draft, for me to have no interest in the manuscript whatsoever. The books I've finished before, I was on such a high after finishing that I couldn't wait to go back and start reading from the beginning, experience the whole thing in one big panorama.

I haven't done that this time. I actually started divorcing myself from the manuscript even before I finished it. After 32 or 33 days, I was sick of pushing myself, especially at the end when I could feel the failure pressing in on me. So I did the GIMP-shop that serves as my new profile photo. Then I made myself finish the manuscript, and instead of rereading it from the beginning as I formerly have, I didn't even think about it.

Instead, I started up another GIMP project. It was originally supposed to be a quick and dirty test of a concept for photoshopping a picture of a person into a superhero (and yes, I just used "photoshop" as a generic verb--if Adobe wants to sue me, they are welcome to learn just how broke I am). No, the character is not anyone you would have heard of. I just made her up as I went along, obviously ripping off the outfit from Mr. Incredible/the Flash, and going on from there.


As you can see, it eventually grew into something bigger, and is now the wallpaper on my desktop (this is a scaled-down version for web display).It's not perfect, but it's better than I expected it to turn out. If I were trying to sell this (I can't, because I have no rights to the model image I used), I'd spend a lot more time on details like making the boots and belt and bracers more realistic and improving the graphics spelling out Neutrina's name down the side.

On the other hand, the logo symbol I tossed off for the character looks pretty good, and the background, which was assembled as an afterthought, isn't horrible either. I learned some valuable lessons putting this together, and added some techniques to my toolbox, like layer modes. If I had the patience and inclination to do this all the time, I almost start to think I could make a living at it. Of course, you could say the same thing about writing, probably. Alas, I don't have the patience or inclination to become good enough at any one thing to make a living at it.

That would appear to be my doom.

Big Video Wednesday - Ghost Writer

Yes, still with the 50's TV. "Ghost Writer" is from later in the series, and I noticed that the credits no longer mention the Science Fiction League of America, which may be a reason why the writing on this episode is so bad. The episode stars Leslie Nielsen, three years before his star turn on "Forbidden Planet." Actually, Nielsen was apparently a favorite of the show. He appeared in six episodes.

In "Ghost Writer," Nielsen plays Bert, a former ad agency man who has given up corporate life to try to be a writer. He's in the middle of a big novel that he is beginning to despair about ever finishing or whether it will be any good when he does (been there). He's worried about going broke while chasing his dream. His wife Joan tries to cheer him up, but there's a whiny quality to her voice that makes her sound insincere even when she means it. But then, she may be repressing. Maybe she's got her hands in her pockets to keep herself from strangling her husband.


Also, a fashion note: Joan has this weird (to me) thing she does with her pearls. Instead of wearing them like a normal necklace, she ties the string around her neck. She wants a pearl necktie!


Bert has answered an ad seeking a writer and gets a reply from one Lee Morton, an author who's seeking a collaborator. Joan doesn't think Bert should dilute his talent by working with someone else. She makes him promise not to work with Morton, then heads back to her job. Before she leaves, she gives him some money so he can buy something nice for himself. Bert, frustrated at being just a trophy husband, decides to visit Morton and make his own money.

When we see Lee Morton's home, the Ominous Mobile of Doom signals us that all is not well in Chez Morton.


Morton himself is even more ominous. You can tell he's up to no good, because he's got the Crazy Eyes.



The rest of the story is some nonsense where Morton turns out to be the Devil or Death or something. He pays Bert $500 per story to end stories for him. Bert does two stories and giddily shows his wife the $1000 he earned. She's upset that he went to Morton when he said he wouldn't and insists he give the money back. Because she's apparently making so much money at her job, which is hard to figure out. Nielsen says something about her working behind a cigar counter, but when we see the place, it looks more like a newsstand. Except that they also sell shirts. On the plus side, every shirt gets its own titty rub.


Seriously, if Dillard's had women doing this to every shirt they sell in Men's Clothing, they wouldn't be having to close so many stores. Especially if the women looked like, say, Sherilyn Fenn. Men would never shop anywhere else.


So anyway, blah-blah-blah, the stories Bert writes gruesome endings to come true in real life, Joan makes him promise to return the money, but Morton convinces him to do just one more, Joan finds out Bert has reneged on his promise and decides to go home to her parents in a cab which crashes, thereby making Bert's newest ending about a distraught wife dying in a car crash come true. Irony!

The story was pretty bad and made no sense in about twenty different ways. In fact, the most interesting thing about it, for me, was this.


That's a picture of big band leader Paul Whiteman, in a promo for his Saturday night show, TV Teen Club. But what's with the eagle?

Turns out that was ABC's logo at the time.


I'm guessing the eagle was to put the American in American Broadcasting Company. But I think it's kind of creepy and martial for a corporate logo, especially for the network that would someday give us Happy Days and Donny & Marie.

Here's the whole episode, if you want to watch.

Pounding It Out, Day 36

Success!

Finally.

53,000 words, give or take. It sucks, but it's done.

And maybe, once I've gotten some distance from it, I'll find out it doesn't suck as much as I think it does right now. Maybe it'll be worth fixing up and submitting to Hard Case Crime. That was my ultimate goal when I started this, and until I'm sure the book is hopeless, it's still my goal.

I'm still broke as hell, but I have some cigars left from back when I was solvent. I think I'll light one up tonight after I get back from seeing my daughter. I may even splurge on a cheap little champagne split or something. I haven't had anything worth celebrating in my life for a long time, so I want to make the most of this moment.

Corinne Bohrer wants to congratulate me in a very special way. If only.

Movie Monday - The Magic Sword

Saw that a friend of mine had this on his shelf and had to cover it. "The Magic Sword" was one of those movies that I caught halfway through on television as a little kid and never learned the name of until years later. It was produced and directed by Bert I. Gordon, who also did the special effects.

Like Harryhausen, Gordon was one of those guys who made movie after movie simply as showcases for his effects work, which mainly consisted of using miniature sets and optical compositing to make tiny things appear big, from "The Beginning of the End" (giant grasshoppers) to "The Amazing Colossal Man" to "Food of the Gods" (giant rats and chickens) to the cult classic with Joan Collins, "Empire of the Ants." Unlike Harryhausen, there aren't legions of fans praising Gordon's body of work.

In 1962, Gordon made "The Magic Sword," a fantasy film starring Basil Rathbone as the villainous Lodac, along with Estelle Winwood and Gary Lockwood (known to Star Trek TOS fans as the dude with the creepy silver eyes in the second pilot).

The film opens with Estelle Winwood as the goofy sorceress Sybil fretting over her wayward son, George, with a little exposition about how he's been mooning about lately. Her two-headed assistant says that George has been spending all his time at the magic pool watching the princess he loves.

Sure enough, George is there right now. He asks the magic pool to see if Princess Helene (played by Anne Helm) is in the throne room of her father's castle. He only sees a belly dancer entertaining the king as he plays with his scepter (seriously). Next, he asks to see the princess's pool, and sure enough, she's skinny-dipping while George secretly watches (although it can't be comfortable to watch everything all cockeyed like that).

It should be mentioned at this point that Helene has some tig ol' bitties.

George likes them a lot.

But suddenly, a mysterious spectral woman appears (played by Maila Nurmi, better known as Vampira)...


but then the pool loses reception. George runs to his mother's underground lair, where she decides to consult her magic mirror to see what's going on. Apparently, it's a really long distance from the magic pool to the lair, because exactly 50 seconds of screen time after the princess was abducted, we see Sir Branton telling the king that they have searched the entire palace grounds and the princess is nowhere to be found.

Then Basil Rathbone, playing the sorcerer Lodac, strides into the throne room and channels his inner Maleficent as he proclaims that the princess will be devoured by a dragon in seven days' time. Sir Branton says he will rescue the princess, but Lodac places seven curses on the road to his palace. Then he departs by turning into a raven and then teleporting! Show-off...

George wants to rush off and save the princess, but overprotective Sybil will have none of it. George is only a mortal, adopted by Sybil as an infant after his royal parents died, and she wants no harm to come to him. To cheer him up, she tries turning into a panther (or what looks like a cougar painted black), but it doesn't help. So she shows him the presents she's saving for his 21st birthday: a magic horse, magic armor and shield, and a magic sword.


George tricks Sybil into a trap, then takes the magic items, along with 6 knights newly restored from petrification, to save the princess.

So George horns in on Sir Branton's quest. The first curse is a giant crippled ogre, who kills two of George's knights before George slays him. Meanwhile, Helene watches two other princesses get fed to the dragon (Lodac does this a lot, apparently) before being menaced by two dwarves who threaten to tickle her severely. Then Lodac shows her Sir George in a magic vision, and she, too, learns the joys of remote stalking.

Next the knights encounter Dry Ice Swamp, where George almost falls victim to treachery by Sir Branton. The bubbling pool reduces one of his knights to a skeleton (oogy)...

but George manages to get out with his sword's help.

Meanwhile back at home, Sybil breaks free, then dithers about the house, wondering what to do about George. She tries to watch him in her magic mirror, but Lodac interrupts to berate her about her inferior magic-fu, then cuts off her cable, so her magic mirror dissolves into static (really).

We next learn that Sir Branton is actually in league with Lodac. He and Lodac have set this entire charade up. Branton has a magical ring that Lodac "stupidly lost," which he has offered to trade in exchange for getting to "rescue" the princess and marry her, thus inheriting the kingdom.

Meanwhile, the suspicious French knight has followed Sir Branton, but got sidetracked by a passing French decolletage (actually one of Lodac's twisted followers). George saves the Frenchman from his own libido with his magic shield. They rejoin Sir Branton and continue on their way.

Back at home, Sybil decides to mix up a wacky potion to double George's magical powers, only to have it backfire and take away all his magic. That Sybil!

Unfortunately, George has just encountered the next curse, a blinding wave of heat that turns two more of his knights into blistered monstrosities before dissolving them altogether. George, Sir Branton and the last remaining knight ride madly for the shelter of a cave. Sir Branton then informs the others that this is a trap, and he leaves them sealed up in the cave. And George's now-non-magic sword won't save them. And then they're attacked by squeaky banshees! Doom!

But the last knight, as he is possessed by a banshee, manages to open the entrance to the cave in his dying moments and George is free. George proceeds to the palace, where he encounters zero resistance in finding his way to Helene's cell, guided by the magic of the sixth curse, according to Lodac.

Okay, so the ogre was first, and the swamp was second, and the heat makes three. But does the French hag count as a curse, seeing as how she was just there to throw off the Frenchman? And the banshee cave wasn't on the path to the castle, but was a trap that Branton led them into. But they have to be counted to get to five curses.

Oh well, it's not a movie about math, is it? George and Helene try to escape, but are trapped by Lodac's army of coneheads and mutants. Sir Branton gives Lodac the ring in exchange for Helene and is promptly betrayed and killed and his head mounted on the wall. Helene is scheduled to be eaten again, and George is thrown in the dungeon.

Wacky Sybil decides she needs to go to Lodac's castle to save George, while trying to remember the words to that spell she messed up. She turns into a dove, but doesn't teleport away. Amateur.

George is freed from the dungeon by some escaped mini-men and rides to Helene's rescue just in time to confront the two-headed, fire-breathing dragon. And not the worst dragon I've seen in a pre-ILM movie, I must say.


Sybil arrives to help, but Lodac casually ignores her. Sybil finally remembers the words to her spell and restores George's magic in time for him to slay the dragon.

Lodac is pissed. He then goes all Maleficent again, declaring that he is the seventh and final curse, and that he will destroy George with the power of his incredible ring!

The ring that wacky Sybil stole off his finger just now, that is.

Lodac's all "Wha?"

But he decides he doesn't need the ring, and starts to pronounce the curse to end all curses on George when wacky ol' Sybil decides she's bored, so she does that turning-into-a-panther trick again and KILLS THE FUCK OUT OF LODAC! Where the hell did that come from?

Poor Basil Rathbone. He was a dignified guy, a brilliant heavy and an excellent fencer. But by 1962, his career had fallen far. He had gone from leading man as Sherlock Holmes to a heavy in his climactic duel with Tyrone Power in "The Mark of Zorro" (one of the best swordfights on film) to being out-fenced by Danny Kaye in "The Court Jester" to being killed off by the comic relief old lady in this film. It might have been a relief for him when the fangs finally pierced his throat. Alas, his career ultimately ended on an even lower note in 1967, in "Hillbillys in a Haunted House."

So George is happy to marry Helene, and Helene is happy to marry George, and the six dead knights have been brought back by the power of the ring, which Sybil now wears, and am I the only one that thinks she's kind of scary now?

As kid's fantasy movies go, it's not the worst one out there. Far too many "fantasy" movies had miniscule effects budgets and held back on the magic and monsters. "The Magic Sword," for all its cheapness and stiff acting, has magical effects in abundance (including make-up by Academy Award nominee Dan Striepeke) , cheesecake for the dads, and gore for the teens. A film the entire family can love! It's no "Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," but it's only 80 minutes long, and it's in the public domain, so you can watch it free.

See it here at Internet Archive.

Pounding It Out, Day 34

Well, I passed the 50,000 word mark yesterday, but the draft's not done yet. I'm in the climactic scene, though, so it should only be a day or two now. The big problem that has been slowing me down: I did a little research that convinced me my final scene was completely improbable, location-wise. So I'm completely replotting it on the fly, which is going very slowly.

My other big problem: I had decided to write a book with a main character who was a remorseless killing machine. However, I find I'm having trouble making him be that. And I'm having second thoughts about the ending I'm heading toward. I don't know if it will be satisfying, to readers or to me. And as often happens in my writing, I've engaged in some self-sabotage, writing scenes that are disturbing. Which is weird, because I know lots of people who write similar stuff that's worse and seem to have great success, yet when I try it, it always seems to misfire.

But the questions will only last at most for a couple more thousand words and then I'll be done. For the nonce.

Out of the Vault- Firestorm, the Nuclear Man #1

In the 70's, DC Comics was trying desperately to recover lost market share from Marvel. The company lurched from one stunt to another, from the rash of characters losing their powers and costumes (which I want to cover, but most of my example issues are still in the Vault), to hiring Jack Kirby away from Marvel, to the Dollar Comic experiment, to a flood of new titles published in the mid- to late-70's.

And in 1978, about a year after A Man Called Nova debuted from Marvel, DC introduced its own new teenage superhero in a strange little book titled Firestorm, the Nuclear Man, which illustrates much of what was wrong with the company at the time.

Firestorm was created by Gerry Conway and Al Milgrom. Conway had written lots of comics for both Marvel and DC by that time, including the run of Spider-man that culminated in the deaths of Gwen Stacy and the Green Goblin (the storyline that inspired the plot of the first "Spider-man" movie). Milgrom had been an artist at Marvel for a couple of years, working on Captain Marvel and Marvel Presents. The first issue of Firestorm, cover-dated March, 1978, shows just how much influence Marvel was having over its old rival.

The story in the first issue, titled "Make Way For Firestorm," opens with Firestorm flying over New York City. Yes, New York City--not Gotham, not Metropolis, not Central City, nor Star City, nor any of the other fictional burgs where DC's comics usually took place. Stan Lee had made it a point since the first issue of Fantastic Four to have his comics take place in the same real world the readers lived in, and that influence worked its way into DC's titles eventually.

Firestorm saves a man from being hit by a cab by turning said cab into two tons of water--Firestorm possesses the power to alter atoms, you see--and flies through a news helicopter before he is interrupted by some sort of telepathic message from a mysterious "Professor" who instructs him to stop wasting time. Hmmm, teenage hero instructed by mysterious telepathic professor? No Marvel influence here. Moving on...

Firestorm, whose name is Raymond, turns west toward New Jersey to stop some "first-class jerk named Eddie Earhart," who is attempting to blow up a nuclear power plant. This issue of Firestorm is brimming with alliterative names, another Marvel influence, as we'll see when Firestorm flashes back to his origin.

Turns out "Ronald" was Ronnie Raymond, a talented high school athlete who had just transferred to a new school. In a twist on the Spider-man/Nova formula, Ronnie is a good-hearted insecure jock who is bullied by a mean smart kid, Clifford Carmichael. You can tell he's smart, apparently, by the way he insults Raymond with a desperately unfunny "wisecrack":


Ronnie would just wipe up the floor with Cliff, but he wants to impress pretty Doreen Day (who doesn't need impressing, since she latched onto Ronnie as soon as he caught a touchdown pass in a game of playground football) and has been traumatized by a life of wandering around the world as a military brat. Ah, the trials of being tall and athletic and handsome...

Meanwhile, Professor Martin Stein is getting ready to bring his new "fully automated, fail-safe nuclear generating plant" on-line. There is a crowd of protesters outside that is powerless to stop the plant's operations, but then in comes former assistant Danton Black, along with two cops to formally keep the plant from going on-line. Black had been fired by Stein for stealing equipment, but has retaliated by suing Stein for intellectual theft; Black claims that the designs for the plant are his. However, these being the most inept cops ever in the history of inept comic book cops, they don't make Stein leave and lock down the building, so Stein decides to take the plant on-line anyway.

As this is going on, Ronnie is at home watching the news, where a familiar-looking reporter is interviewing Eddie Earhart, leader of the Coalition to Resist Atomic Power (a very rare touch of subtlety in a book that is subtle in no other way--Conway never gets around to pointing out that the group's acronym is C.R.A.P.).


This was over a year before "The China Syndrome" and the Three Mile Island disaster, so you could get away with calling nuclear protesters names back then.

Ronnie decides the way to impress Doreen is not to continue doing the same things that got her attention in the first place, e.g. feats of athletic prowess, but to demonstrate his social awareness by joining the protest at the nuclear plant. Not that he gives a C.R.A.P. about nuclear energy or pollution, but chicks dig activists or something.

So Earhart and his cronies drag Ronnie along as they break into Professor Stein's nuclear plant (and it's not mentioned, but I wonder if Earhart's thugs aren't actually union personnel, since Stein's "fully-automated" plant will eliminate a lot of jobs if it works as advertised). Earhart plans to blow up the plant and make Ronnie the fall guy. So he knocks out Ronnie and the Professor, leaving them both in a room with about fifty sticks of dynamite (unsure here how Earhart plans to make Raymond the fall guy for anything by blowing him into a fine paste, but it's a comic book, right? It gets dumber). Earhart takes off, bragging that they're headed to blow up another power plant in Jersey.

Ronnie wakes up in time to hear this boast, as Danton Black is sneaking into the supposedly deserted plant to steal Stein's computer designs. Ronnie tries to stop the bomb, but fails.


And I'm sorry to interrupt this climactic moment, because I understand comic book science is purposely stupid. Gamma radiation doesn't turn people green and super-strong, and a high-school kid can't manufacture artificial spider-silk in his bedroom. But usually, comics make an effort. The hero's powers are caused by some mysterious confluence of events--a one-in-a-trillion lightning strike on a rack full of chemicals, for instance.

But dynamite? The captions tells us that this has something to do with the radiation from the nuclear plant, but Ronnie is clearly shown just twenty feet or so from a big-ass pile of dynamite when it goes off. There wouldn't have been enough left of him for the radiation to affect.

Oh well, whatever. The mysterious radioactive blast causes Ronnie and the professor to fuse into one being--Firestorm. In issue two, Danton Black (caught in the same blast) will also demonstrate atomic powers, by splitting into two superpowered beings known collectively as Multiplex, the Duplicate Villain. Get it? Firestorm is a result of nuclear fusion, while Multiplex is the result of nuclear fission. Who says comic book science is stupid?*

Firestorm can see and change the atomic structure of anything. So he reseals the nuclear pile by changing air into lead or something, then makes himself a garish costume and flies away to stop Earhart's gang. He also discovers that, while his conscious identity is that of Ronnie Raymond, Professor Stein is lurking in his subconscious and can communicate with him.

So now we're back from the flashback as Firestorm confronts the forces of C.R.A.P. He makes short work of the thugs, but Earhart manages to set off the dynamite (turns out Earhart has an inferiority complex, and is willing to commit suicide if it means he'll get noticed or something). Unluckily for him, Firestorm absorbs the blast and all the attention.

As a character and as a comic, Firestorm was mediocre. On the one hand, his flaming hair made him one of the most visually distinctive heroes out there, and his powers were cool, if not very visual (most fights involved Firestorm gesturing at the ground or something while describing what he was changing the atoms into). Conway's writing and Milgrom's art were nothing to write home about: functional, but not exciting.

Issue two featured a Superman cameo, in which Superman investigates Firestorm to see if he's Justice League material. Superman follows Firestorm around as he battles Multiplex, but doesn't lift one finger to help, because Superman is a dick.

Firestorm hung on for five issues, then was cancelled in the great DC implosion. However, the character didn't disappear, because Conway was writing Justice League at the time, so Firestorm joined the League. Four years later, he got his own book again.

The character is still around, although apparently Ronnie Raymond is now not only dead, but resurrected as a Black Lantern (don't ask).

*Me, still.

Random TV Roundup

So Heroes is back and The Office is back. I've stopped having any hopes for Heroes; it goes in too many inconsistent directions. This season doesn't seem as bold as last season's Villains arc, but that also means it isn't as weird and stupid as last season's Villains arc. The Office is hitting that point in a show's lifespan where it feels like it has said everything new it was going to say, and now it's just continuing because people are still making a salary and they don't want to be unemployed. I mean, I like the characters, and I still laugh, but it feels sort of tired and obligatory so far this season.

I'm watching a few new shows as well. Glee is fun, although I have trouble suspending disbelief on this show a lot. I understand that the musical numbers are supposed to be communicating "emotional reality" rather than "real reality," so that's not so much my problem. It's more stuff like the extreme disconnect between the cartoonish aspects of the comedy followed by an attempt to make you feel some real emotion for the characters. The comedy is so extreme that it undercuts the drama, I think. Or maybe it's just me getting old. But the music and singing are good.

Of course, my bigger problem is with the basic premise of the show. Glee takes place in a high school where Glee Club singers are looked down upon as the lowest of social pariahs. And I understand that social stratification in high school may not make a whole lot of sense. But seriously, in a world where American Idol draws tens of thousands of hopeful applicants a season and huge ratings, is there anybody who buys the idea of a school where singing is basically despised by all but a few freaks and talented singers are shunned as pariahs? Really?

I finally got around to watching Flashforward last night. If you don't know, the premise is that everyone in the world blacks out at the exact same time for 2 minutes, 17 seconds. And during that time, they experience a vision of life six months in the future. Joseph Fiennes stars as an FBI agent whose vision was of himself investigating the cause of the flashforward, leading to his being hunted down by mysterious assassins in masks. So of course, he starts up the investigation.

It was an intriguing premise well handled. But one weird little detail jumped out at me from out of nowhere. Fiennes's wife is played by Sonya Walger, who plays Penelope Widmore on Lost. In Walger's flashforward, she saw herself cheating on her husband with another man, who is revealed to be Jack Davenport, who played Norrington in the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies.

But here's the thing that jumped out at me. Before Davenport played Norrington, he played a character named Steve Taylor on a British sitcom titled Coupling. And before Walger played Penelope, she played a character named Sally Harper on the American version of Coupling. Now the two of them are going to do a little coupling of their own on a new show. Easter egg.

There's a new sitcom on NBC titled Community, about an oddball group of students at a community college who initially come together to study Spanish. The show is pretty good, but still trying to find its footing. However, this bit from the end credits of the second episode is gold. These guys are partners who were supposed to come up with a simple conversation using sample phrases in Spanish, such as "Donde esta la bibliotheca." People get loopy while studying. Click and enjoy.

Pounding It Out, Day 31

Failure!

And yet not.

I did not make my arbitrary deadline of 30 days. But I did not end up far off either. At midnight, I was at 47,500 and heading into the final confrontation. So on the one hand, yes, I failed. But on the other hand, I am very close and almost assured of finishing a first draft very soon. The first half drags, and the second half lurches and the climax is probably going to be entirely too short and vague, but it will be something I can build on and fix.

So "encouraging failure," like "good rejection," is not something to be sneezed at in this business.