Warp Section

If you’re like me, you have wonderful memories of lots of films and shows from your childhood that you loved. If you’re smart, you cherish those memories — and never watch those movies again, because you’ll mostly likely be disappointed. Surely the special effects weren’t that bad? And the dialog you remember was so much better!

Then again, sometimes those old favorites stand the test of time amazingly well. I’m happy to report that I love The Last Starfighter just as much as I ever did.

Released in 1984, The Last Starfighter tapped into a huge zeitgeist. This was the peak of the video arcade’s popularity. Games like Asteroids and Space Invaders had become icons, and early generation home systems like the Atari 2600 were taking over the world. So why not offer the video gaming geeks the ultimate fantasy? That innocuous video game is actually a recruitment tool for an interstellar league of fighter pilots. Your high score could win you a trip to space!

It’s a great idea (especially in 1984), and the movie fills that idea out with a solid story and likeable characters. Those are the things that help a movie stand the test of time. The special effects — very early CGI, all shiny surfaces and smooth angles — even hold up. They may not be realistic, but they’re pretty. What the movie really does is let us indulge that old video game fantasy: maybe, just maybe, there really is a battle for justice and freedom going on beyond the stars, and maybe, just maybe, we have a destiny to take part in something larger than an average life.

(And if you’re as much of an SF geek as I am, you can still recite the Starfighter game intro: “Greetings, Starfighter! You have been recruited by the star league…”)

The film lives on:

Sci Fi Channel has The Last Starfighter scheduled for Tuesday night.

In 2004, a musical version was staged Off Broadway. I really want to see this someday.

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…is kind of what I’m feeling after the third season finale. And it’s not just because of that nebula.

I remember the second season finale, when “One Year Later” flashed on screen. I immediately built a shrine to the writers because it was just so perfect. It threw everyone for a loop yet made sense. Just when we were getting a little tired of chasing and being chased by Cylons and dealing with Baltar’s intrigue, the show pulled the carpet out from under us and progressed the timeline along to an even more astonishing situation.

This season finale left me scratching my head. Here’s an interview with producer/creator Ron Moore about whether what we saw is really what we saw. The gist of the interview:

Interviewer: Did that really just happen?
Ron Moore: Why, that’s a very good question. You’ll just have to wait and see.

I wish I had posted predictions because I totally called the reappearance of Starbuck just before the end of the episode. Does it worry anyone else that BSG has become a mite predictable? And what of the discovery of four of the final five? All I can say is if Ron Moore expects me to buy that he’d better come up with a frakking good explanation.

Here’s mine: the fifth of the final five is Jimi Hendrix. It’s the only way.

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I could quibble about details, but that isn’t really why we love the Turtles. There’s two things we love the Turtles for:

• Turtle action
• Turtle humor

The new film has plenty of both. And the animation is tremendous. Dude, the steel bars have weld seams!

The other thing I got a kick out of: time has passed in the Turtle continuity. I’m convinced that they’re now Twenty-something Mutant Ninja Turtles. (Donatello working tech support?) And that’s kinda cute.

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This is a bit of an obsession of mine. I love this entire class of film. The more B-grade the better. You’ve got your blasted nuclear landscape (that usually looks suspiciously like southern California or the Australian Outback). You’ve got hordes of roaming mutants. Motorcycles, sawed-off shotguns, leather jackets and hotpants. And the 80’s hair! The cheesy pop ballads! I love it!

Mad Max, The Road Warrior
These are the granddaddies of them all, the films by which all others are measured and found lacking. Leather jackets, big guns, and souped-up cars. What else do you need?

Radioactive Dreams

When the bombs fall in 1996, two boys are stuck in a bomb shelter with nothing to read but 1940s hard-boiled detective novels. Fifteen years later, Phillip and Marlowe (get it?) dig their way out and emerge into a chaotic, barbarous world, where the various tribes of people are identified by the decade they stole their clothes from (there’s the punks, the greasers, the hippies…it’s actually kind of cute). Then they come into possession of the keys that will launch the last MX missile. As if one apocalypse weren’t enough. The main theme of the film: fedoras never go out of style.

This is where I confess that I had a huge crush on Michael Dudikoff (better known from the American Ninja films) when I was 15.

Cherry 2000

To find replacement parts for his beloved sex bot, Sam hires a tracker (Melanie Griffith, no less!) to guide him into The Zone, the apocalyptic wasteland where the old factory for the — as it turns out — obsolete android is located. Many adventures are had during which Sam realizes that maybe the real woman is better than the malfunctioning robot. Maybe.

Slipstream
This is a must-see in any case because Bill Paxton (”Game over, man!”) stars as the hero and Mark Hamill is his rival. This leaves us with no doubts that Mark Hamill plays awesome villains. Global climate change has caused massive, constant winds to sweep over the land. People use the slipstream to travel along canyons and valleys, where remnants of humanity cling to existence. The story is actually interesting: Paxton plays a scavenger, Hamill is a bounty hunter, and his prey is a mysterious man with a dark secret. The whole thing becomes a commentary, not only on whether humanity will survive, but how it ought to survive. What constitutes the new human culture?

Hardware
The only one of these films that isn’t a road trip. It’s also probably my favorite on the list. It’s about a lot of things — a nefarious government plot, a blasted landscape where a big part of the economy involves scavengers combing the desert for useful items they can sell. But it’s mostly about Jill and whether or not she’ll survive when her soldier boyfriend brings home a piece from a killer robot. The robot rebuilds itself, and chaos ensues. The story owes a debt to Ripley and Alien, of course. But that only means it borrowed from the best.

There are, of course, lots more films than this. These are just my favorites. You want to relive the culture anxieties of the 80’s when we all really were convinced that the bombs would drop tomorrow? This is the ticket.

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Why, at the local post office! It seems that to help celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, the US Postal Service has developed mail boxes that look like R2-D2. Check out the photos on TheForce.net.

Just remember, if you plan on acquiring one of these beauties for your very own, it’s a federal offense to tamper with the mail. And you wouldn’t want to be starring in the next episode of Troops, would you?

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We live in something of a golden age of information. The internet has made possible an explosion of sheer, raw data. Can’t remember the title of a book you read ten years ago? Type a description into a search engine, and you’ll probably find it. Is your favorite TV show of all time something that aired for ten episodes in 1976 and was never heard from again? Chances are, someone on the internet has copies available and you can relive those happy moments all over again, or at the very least find a forum or newsgroup dedicated to your own obscure corner of fandom.

In this day and age, you know something’s really obscure when it still manages to slip through the cracks in this glut of information. Which brings me to Probe. There’s not a whole lot out there on this very short-lived series, so my description is necessarily brief.

Probe lasted for seven episodes. It’s of interest to science fiction fans because the co-creator of the show was Isaac Asimov. Parker Stevenson played Austin James, a child prodigy grown into an isolated, antagonistic genius who works for a think tank. He starts to open up a bit when he hires bubbly, cheerful secretary, Mickey Castle (played by Ashley Crow). Together, they solve crimes. Baffling, high-tech crimes requiring intelligence and application of scientific principles to solve (in the spirit of Asimov’s own science fiction mysteries such as The Caves of Steel).

I haven’t seen it since it went off the air, so my memories are fuzzy. I liked the show. I liked hanging out with Austin and Mickey. It was clever, with lots of inside jokes (I remember Austin, just before smashing to bits a murderously malfunctioning supercomputer, shouting, “Sing ‘Daisy,’ computer!”). And that probably gives us a big clue as to why it was cancelled. Unfortunately, it didn’t last long enough to develop the kind of following that generates an internet footprint, so it will probably continue in its entrenched obscurity.

Probe on Wikipedia

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The current trend in fantasy literature (actually, it’s been a trend for over a decade now) is the very long, endless epic fantasy series. It’s mostly epitomized by Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, and perhaps brought to its apogee by George R. R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice series. They’re characterized by 1) a pseudo-medieval fantasy setting ala Tolkien and/or Dungeons and Dragons, 2) very thick books, 3) a very long wait between books, and 4) no end in sight.

I’m a tough sell on these. I’ve read the first volumes in both Jordan’s and Martin’s series. I haven’t continued on, primarily because I’m a slow reader and 800 page books daunt me. Ten 800 page books make me weep and gnash my teeth. I stick with writers like Robin McKinley and Patricia McKillip who write absolute gems that manage to finish a story in under 400 pages.

So imagine my surprise upon encountering the first book in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Nothing about this attracted me except the recommendation of a friend. (Usually all it takes for me to pass a book by is some variation of the phrase “Book X in the X-ity X Decology” typed on the cover.) But I read it.

Then I immediately rushed out to the bookstore to get the second one.

What the heck? I asked myself that through both volumes. (I think the second one was even better than the first, if possible.) This is going to sound really cheesy, but the experience of reading these is like playing in the very best session of the very best D&D campaign ever.

As in any good book, this rests on the characters. They’re competent, interesting, and real. I’d stopped noticing how often the plots of books are based on characters lucking into their successes and making completely irrational decisions every step of the way until I read a book where all the characters are functional human beings. I also had a shock when I realized most of the main characters are good people. I mean good people, not in the sense of good v. evil, but good in the sense that they will save a kitten from a tree. They will postpone their own adventure to save a kitten from a tree. Sure they have faults, but that doesn’t prevent them from doing good in the world. (It also doesn’t prevent them from failing, but at least their failures are their own.) Once again, I hadn’t realized how unpleasant the characters in so many books are until I read one in which people sometimes did nice things just for the sake of doing nice things.

Which is not to say these books are not utterly, fantastically, horrifically brutal, because they are. In fact, that’s part of what flipped the first book, Gardens of the Moon, from “well, I’ll try it,” to “OMG I love it.” The other thing I really like: magic is an integral part of this world, which means Erikson doesn’t spend any more time talking about it than Buffy the Vampire Slayer spends telling us how cars work. If you’re like me and bored by descriptions of wizards wielding their mystical energy beams, then read Erikson. He doesn’t describe the magic — he describes the effects. When the spell that activates the zombie galley slaves starts, you know it by the clicking of the oars in the oar locks, and because the eyes on the pile of severed heads have snapped open. Chilling.

Now, I’m off to find a copy of Memories of Ice…

Steven Erikson’s website is here.

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Forever Geek has their picks for the upcoming geek movie season:

This summer is going to be a HUGE movie season. There are tons and tons of geek-related flicks coming out this year…in fact, it might be hard to keep track of them all…but don’t worry, Forever Geek has got you covered with Forever Geek’s Summer Movie Round-up.
Source: Geek Summer Movie Round-up - Forever Geek

Me?  Spidey, Fantastic 4, and Harry Potter.  I’ll probably take the kids to Shrek 3.  Since going to the movies in a theatre is a big deal where I’m located, it’s gotta be really good to make the trip.

So what’s on your must-see list?

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Over on Comic Book Resources, there is a post about an upcoming episode of Heroes. Heavy spoilers!

Here is a snippet of the spoilers from the article:

Then Linderman drops a bombshell, literally and figuratively: the explosion is to be the catalyst for a better future. When Nathan wonders out aloud about the cost in lives, Linderman counters, “There’s six and a half billion people on the planet, that’s less than .07%. Come on, that’s an acceptable loss by anyone’s count.”

“It is your destiny, Nathan, to be the leader who uses this event to rally a city, a nation, a world,” Linderman continues. And to drive the point home, Linderman unveils a prophetic painting of Nathan Petrelli in the Oval Office, seemingly painted by Isaac Mendez.

If you can’t help yourself and want a bit more, check out Comic Book Resources.

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This is another of those films that must be seen to be believed. It’s also another one I hesitate to say too much about, because I don’t want to rob people of the joy and horror of discovering for themselves what this film is all about. I will say this much: it’s a modern tribute to a bygone aesthetic, a black and white world where the men were men and the monsters were rubber suits. It’s science fiction based on the principle that costumes can never have too much silver lamé. And you know what? That’s an excellent aesthetic.

Dr. Paul Armstrong and his wife Betty have traveled to a remote forest in search of atmospherium, a radioactive element that can generate untold power. The trouble is, other people are in search of atmospherium. Evil people. And aliens. Aliens with monsters. And evil scientists with evil skeletons. What chaos will ensue?

To really get the full effect, rent a double feature. First, watch Queen of Outer Space, a 1958 film starring Zsa Zsa Gabor. A group of red-blooded American astronauts land on Venus — a planet ruled entirely by women! Zsa Zsa and her beloved Earthman must defeat the evil Venusian queen who wants to destroy all men!

After Queen of Outer Space, the full glory of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra will become clear. And the quotes. Oh, the quotes you will quote. And that’s really the reason I want everyone to see this. The more people have seen it, the fewer people will look at me funny when I say, “Quickly! Fold yourself in the middle!”

I sleep now.

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