"And so I drown my sorrows in bread and lemonade, and I think I'll tell you that I loved you yesterday." -- Quiddity, Pass The Matches

Aruman? Really? (Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards)

Tonight’s foray into the land of life after the end of the world is the Ralph Bakshi animated classic “Wizards”. I was drawn to this movie largely because I’d heard how it ends (Which is awesome, by the way).
I knew of Bakshi, from his work on the animated version of “The Lord of the Rings” (Hence the title of this article, as Sarumon’s name was inexplicably changed in the Bakshi version), but that was sort of creepy, what with the weird rotoscoped fight scenes and just generally not very good, so it never occurred to me that Bakshi might be recognized as a great talent in the field of animation.
Wizards is the tale of two brothers, Avatar and Darth Vader, one good, one evil, set a million years in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
Yes. A million years in the future. Remember, this is literally decades before “Our world without us” was written, so, apparently anyone could guess anything they liked about how long it would take for all traces of human civilization to vanish.
Wizards
1977
Ralph Bakshi
Wizards starts off with a firm grip on this being the future-as-viewed-from-the-seventies. The opening credits use the MICR computer font. If you don’t know what the MICR computer font is, here’s a helpful hint: if you’re over 25, close your eyes and imagine what “computer text” looks like. Yes, that’s it.

The Future, Bitches See, back in the sixties, when computers were still new and fascinating and called “Electronic Brains”, General Electric invented this font which, when printed in magnetic ink, could be read by a device similar to a tape recorder. Because they were about the only ones with commercial use for computers back then this was snapped up by the banks, which is why it’s entirely possible that if you are still enough of a luddite to use paper checks, it may even today have your account number printed on it in MICR font. The big, blocky, funny-shaped letters became ingrained in the public consciousness as being all futuristic and stuff, so it pretty much appeared any time you wanted to indicate a high-technology future from about 1967 until about 1988.

The opening of the movie is, bizarrely, a “live action” scene. The reason for the scare quotes here are because, although this was filmed with a camera in what appears to be a real location out in the real world, there isn’t really any “action” or and “live”-ness. Rather. we see a desert, and the camera moves around to show us the first page of a book, which is helpfully also printed in the MICR font, which declares itself to be, “an illuminating history, bearing on the everlasting struggle for world supremacy fought between the powers of Magic and Technology.” Because, y’know, that’s the story of human history. The battle between magic and technology.
We then cut to a crude sketch of the globe, and then to a screen of solid, flickery red, as if they filmed a fire, but that wasn’t firey enough so they put a red filter over it too. Our narrator, a bored-sounding woman who I am going to pretend for the moment is Judy Collins, explains that some terrorists set off some atomic bombs, which led to a nuclear holocaust, which took two million years to clear up a bit, which led to most of humanity turning into horrible mutants, and also faeries and dwarves and hobbits and the like making a comeback.
This is illustrated with some uncolored sketches of what this might look like. We’re now about three minutes into our animated story, and nothing has actually been animated yet.
Avatar and BlackwolfIn the smurf village, the faeries are celebrating three-thousand years of uninterrupted good times, leading me to believe that this may be where Russell T Davies got his idea for how to cnvey a sense of scale by his choice of numbers. The elf queen senses something amis, and looks to the sky, where an evil looking cloud is played by a color effect on a real cloud — this movie is diligent about avoiding doing any actual animation. This storm causes the elf queen Delia to suddenly give birth to twins, who everyone immediately concludes are powerful wizards, because that is the name of this movie so they’d better get on with showing up.


Neonatal BlackwolfAs almost always happens in cases like this, one twin is born with a severe case of PURE EVIL. the good son is named “Avatar”, and the evil son is named “Blackwolf”, just to make sure that he doesn’t grow up confused over whether he’s the evil son or the good son. Avatar is a bit on the short side, whereas Darkseid is tall and sort of skeletal, what with his forearm being in two separate pieces with a visible hole between the bones.


USE THE PAIN OF LOSS!When Delia dies, Darth Vader is excited, we’re told, just to remind us that he’s evil. He thinks this means he’ll be allowed to rule the kingdom. Because he’s been such a dutiful son and all. Him and Avatar fight, and their battle takes the form of… yet more still frames of uncolored sketches with a creepy live-action VFX shot in the background. We’re now going on five minutes and no actual animation yet. Thanks to the fact that Avatar actually loved his mother, his pain at losing her enables him to become a Super-Saiyan and kick his brother’s ass.


OF COURSE!
Darth Vader is banished, but promises one day to return and TAKE OVER THE WORLD, and finally we get to see some actual animation. Some years later, an older Darth Vader dispatches three wacky looking monsterous folks to march off through what looks like the Paris Barricade from Les Miserables, with orders to kill. We follow Necron 99, who’s dressed in a sort of cross between those red full-body underwear suits you see associated with yokelness, with the flap in the back and all, and a World War I German uniform, and he rides a sort of giant anteater through the mutant Red Light District, scaring the bajeezus out of green, winged prostitutes and diminutive spade-tailed johns, as Joni Mitchel explains that he’s been sent out to kill everyone who believes in magic. Also, a semi-transparent dinosaur mills around in the background for no clear reason. Hey, it’s the future, that sort of thing happens.
The Future, Bitches
Seriously, there’s just a semi-transparent dinosaur turning around in a circle as Necron 99 rides through the wasteland. No one ever comments on it. I don’t know that it counts as a Big Lipped Alligator Moment, but it’s certainly a contender.


A montage ensures, wherein Necron murders a family of snorks as their leader, Gandalf, reads them a story about how all technology is evil, and the other two assassins go to a pastiche fantasy medieval kingdom and gun down everyone there because Darth Vader does not approve of renaissance festivals. Their guns borrow the sound effect from the original Star Ship Enterprise firing torpedoes.
Don't cry, soulless killing machineNecron 99 is hunting a couple of elves, who are on their way to warn Avatar of the coming assassins. One of them buys it from Necron’s photon torpedo gun, but the other elf manages to headshot Necron’s bipedal anteater-horse-thing. Necron slouches off, looking really disturbingly sad for a soulless killing machine.


This picture is so gonna boost my google pagerank. Back in the Smurf Villiage, the years have turned Avatar into a creepy dwarf with a red ball nose whose face is entirely concealed by a red beard and moustache, with a Groucho cigar. He’s hanging out with the cast of an LSD-induced nightmare, including a slutty fairy and what looks like Goofy in a Guy Fawlkes mask.
Slutty McFairy teases Avatar about how the elves haven’t returned yet, and acts as if this is somehow tremendously funny. Avatar implies that if they never return, this will indicate great danger out on the Big Wide World, because, y’know, people are dead. They all enjoy a hearty laugh at the prospect of the horrible deaths of their friends.
Avatar and Guy Fawlkes debate the necessity of arming themselves against the IMPENDING DOOM, in order that Avatar can explain, in direct contradiction to the backstory, that the world has been peaceful for millions of years, since technology was outlawed. Guy Fawlkes threatens to banish Avatar, which makes Slutty giggle, but she points out that “Only Avatar can make me a full-fledged fairy.”


Does this remind you of anything?.Avatar concedes (Concedes what, I don’t know) and offers up some exposition, which he promptly hands over to Judy Collins, so that they don’t have to animate this bit. Before he does, though, we get a glimpse of Necron 99 climbing up to the top of Avatar’s penis-shaped tower. Blackwolf, Avatar and Judy explain, had spent five thousand years studying the dark arts, because this movie thinks that big numbers will impress us more than a timescale as realistic as The Legend of Ra and the Muggles


I've got to stop christmas from coming, but how?Darth Vader raises an army and tries to invade neighboring countries, but his troops, as exemplified by a strange “Oh my god, they killed Kenny!”-like scene, are retarded, and would tend to get distracted and confused, and just wander off home instead of actually conquering anything. Darth Vader was understandably upset, having gone to all the trouble of creating hideous mutant armies via magic and summoning all the forces of hell to serve as his generals, but, for reasons Avatar has not yet discovered, he finally made some kind of breakthrough, and discovered some piece of pre-holocaust technology that has turned the tide.
Guy Fawlkes, who I gather is also Slutty’s dad, starts bitching Avatar out for sending the elves from the previous scene out into danger based on his weird and vague theories, when Necron 99 shows up and pumps him full of lead photon torpedoes. Necron 99, the deadliest killing machine ever devised, however, falls down dead as a result of Avatar pointing a finger at him. Slutty starts uselessly clawing at the downed assassin when the elf guy shows up, and apologizes to Guy Fawlkes’s corpse for failing him. Turns out that Guy Fawlkes was the president of Smurf Village.
Back at Darth Vader’s base, an alarm goes off indicating that Necron 99 is broken. Vader interprets this to mean that Necron 99 has committed suicide after successfully killing the president. It seems that without the strong leadership of Guy Fawlkes, the other nations of the earth will basically crumble before his war machine. And then, in what would be subtle foreshadowing, if you were somehow mentally handicapped, he throws in an entirely random “Sieg Heil!” to punctuate just how evil he is. Really. Just like in Captain America.


Seriously, Bakshi? What The Fuck
About two minutes later, while a classic creepy Bakshi rotoscoped scene plays (Seriously, this is like nightmare fuel unleaded), Darth Vader rolls out his new magic weapon: a grainy 30s Nazi Propaganda film. Yes. His secret weapon is HITLER.
Elf-land and Fairly-Land unite and prepare for World War I style trench warfare, while a veteran of the last war recalls that the last time Darth Vader attacked, the elves easily slaughtered one million of the evil mutants. In this time of peace. Anyway, the point is to backstory and remind us that the mutants don’t really have anything to fight for, and therefore always end up retreating.
But this time, things are different, because this time, Blackwolf is armed with HITLER. He projects his Nazi propaganda film, and the elves are basically so entirely flummoxed by it that they just stand around in shellshocked horror and let the mutants slaughter them.


Well, my dad's dead, but I guess I could straddle you for a while.A quick perusal of Necron 99’s corpse (He’s a robot of some sort, but this is never actually spelled out, which is strange given their penchant for exposition) reveals Darth Vader’s plan to Avatar, and he promptly declares that the evil image-projecting maching MUST BE DESTROYED, and then goes to bed. Slutty insists that her father must be avenged, and threatens Avatar with her sword, but at no point does her tone ever sound anything other than airheaded and playful. Avatar suggests that she sit, stradling him on his bed with her breasts trying their darnedest to fall out of what passes for a top in Fairyland, but would probably class more as a sort of scarf in our pre-holocaust world, for a few hours and let him think up a plan. Slutty, taking a page out of Debbie Does Dallas, responds with a befuddled “Well… All right.”
The elf guy (whose name I still haven’t worked out) finds this scene as weird as I do and interrupts. Avatar renames Necron 99 “Peace”, or perhaps he meant to rename Slutty as “Piece”, but anyway, he sends the town whore and the mighty elf warrior off to pack while he “reasons” with Peace. This results in another non-animated segment, wherein I finally learn that Slutty’s real name is “Eleanor” and Elf Dude is “Weehauk.” Seriously? Isn’t that a town in New Jersey? “Weehauk”, “Avatar”, “Necron 99”, “Darkwolf” and “Eleanor”? Hm. If memory serves, this movie was made slightly before Lord of the Rings, so it’s really a coincidence that Ralph Bakshi will go on to make a movie whose major characters are named “Frodo”, “Aragorn”, “Gandalf”, “Smeagol” and “Sam”.
Avatar explains to the bound Peace that “This has been the biggest bummer of a trip I’ve ever been on,” which is really saying something since they haven’t left yet. Or maybe Avatar is talking about all the LSD used in the production of this movie. He makes some pretty devastatingly creepy threats about what he will do to Peace if he screws them over, explaining that it “will take twenty years to kill you, and you’ll be screaming within five seconds.” Our hero, ladies and gentlemen. Peace responds that “Peace wants love, wants free, will help.” Great. He’s going to be one of those “cute” talks-like-the-mentally-handicapped monsters. Avatar reassures his friends by doing some magic. Like all the other magic he’s done so far (summoning cigars and decanting wine), it’s stupid and frivolous (He levitates himself into his saddle on the back of the anteater-horse-thing), but he ends up facing the wrong way, prompting Slutty to point out, “He’s getting olda but not much bolda,” in what seems to be some kind of Blackspoitation heroine impersonation. Ah, the seventies.
Avatar demands a song from Slutty, because “That’s why we brought you.” Because, y’know, she’s a girl. So that whole “Avenge my father’s death” thing, yeah, we didn’t really give a damn about that. She hands off to Judy Collins to do the singing, which leads to a montage of the good and kindhearted freakish demihumans cowering and lamenting how their land is now in the grips of Darth Vader and his army, and that they have no hope of resisting them, because “They have weapons and technology; we only have love.” This leads to a scene with the gas-mask-wearing mentally handicapped soldiers in Vader’s army. They’re searching a church to find some priests, since Darth Vader believes you really need to have organized religion in order to be an evil empire.

Hitler Plus Jesus Equals World Domination.
Because Hitler Plus Jesus Equals World Domination

They find a couple of Obviously Jewish Stereotypes priests, who appear to worship the CBS Eye (Because it’s THE FUTURE, get it?), and explain that they’ve only got time for war, not for taking care of prisoners, and would the priests please find something to do with all the civilians they’ve captured. The priests procede todo a weird little song and dance prayer number which I think was intendedto be sort of pythonesque, but instead manage to just be sort of offensive to your relgious sensibilities, regardless of whether you’re christian, jewish, muslim, hindu, buddhist, or a worshiper of Whoops, the God of Serendipitous Calamity. Basically, if you could form a good analogue between religion and race, this would be the equivalent of a blackface minstrel show. The retarded soldiers get tired of waiting, or maybe have an attack of good taste, and blow up the church instead. For some reason. they don’t decide to exit it first.


Oh, right.Back at Mount Doom, it is revealed that Blackwolf’s about to be a daddy: he’s got a ridiculously hot wife who is very pregnant. A strange mutant with a ridiculously hot wife and plans to rule the world’s greatest power? How am I supposed to believe that sort of crap?
Here, Darth Vader explains that he wants to conquer the world so that Mutants will finally be free from having to live in the shadows as an oppressed sub-class just because they’re hideous, hideous freaks. This really humanizes Vader and makes him seem like one of those modern well-intentioned extremists, like Magneto or Poison Ivy or Michael Moore. Of course, it would be a lot more convincing if the whole rest of the movie didn’t establish the evil brother as having simply been born pure evil with a lust for evil and conquest. Also, he then finds out from his magi (Because he’s the brother who hates magic and believes in technology) that his son is destined to be a mutant, so he shrugs, says “Eh, the next one will be human,” and implies that he’s going to have the baby killed. Way to humanize the villain, movie.
We finally return to our heroes, who are approaching a faerie forest that Peace doesn’t like. It seems that Elves and Fairies don’t get along, and these particular faeries might be mischievous. Except that I thought that Slutty was a fairy. In fact, I’m quite sure she mentioned it explicitly at one point. But these faeries are tiny little naked things. I’d almost suspect that this was a translation issue, like the way that old Japanese imports often use the word “star” when they mean “planet”, except that English is this movie’s first language. Anyway, the faeries play with our heroes for a bit while Peace looks sad. Everyone’s laughing and having a good time, and then, out of nowhere, Avatar becomes finds this playfulness annoying and summons all the forces of hell to smite the faeries. Our hero, ladies and gentlemen.


Our hero, smiting some playful faeries. It’s weird, like that tunnel scene in Willy Wonka, or that scary Yoda moment. Basically, it’s like when you’re playing with a cat, and the cat decides that it is done playing, and when you fail to intuit this, she explains it to you by defleshing your arm. Only he does it with ALL THE FORCES OF HELL. Fortunately, just as he draws back to smite, an especially fey faery summons a great feast, which instantly calms Avatar down. He explains that his name is Shawn, leader of the Knights of Stardust, a FABULOUS order of tiny little warriors. Avatar is still annoyed, but Slutty shoves his head between her boobs and this makes him happy. But then someone assumed to be Peace starts shooting the place up, and Slutty suddenly disappears into bondage high in the mountains.


Brokeback Wizards Weehauken falls into a pit which he has to fight and climg his way out of, which is entirely black and featureless, either because it makes it more dramatic, or because Bakshi got tired of drawing backgrounds, there he fights an invisible enemy because Bakshi also got tired of drawing enemies. The monster finally shows itself as a giant spider or possibly the hair monster from Looney Tunes. But Peace shows up and shoots it before he collapses for some reason. Weehauken then mounts him and falls asleep on top of him.


Pussy Power!Slutty is put on trial for bringing the evils of technology into Fairyland, and the resulting death of Shaun the Fey. She sort of giggles at the idea of being held responsible for her actions, and then heaves her breasts around a bit, which causes her to glow red and shoot an energy beam out of her crotch.
Pussy Power!Taking this to mean that she’s come fully into her powers, Slutty then animates a gargoyle, which immediately turns on her. Avatar shows up and fails to do anything about the gargoyle, but does protest his important cause. Then, for no clear reason, Darth Vader materializes, shouts, “He lies!” then vanishes. Which causes someone to shoot Avatar in the shoulder with a tiny little arrow. The fact that this did not prompt Avatar to go on a killing rampage is taken by the King of the Faeries to mean that he can be trusted, and lets them go.


I swear I had no idea I would get the chance to do this when I started this review



After getting lost in the mountains, Avatar and Slutty meet back up with Weehauken and his new boyfriend Peace, and then they meet up with some viking elves who are planning to attack Darth Vader, but Avatar objects to them just adding to the fighting, prompting some more backstory about how Avatar, in his younger days, roamed the earth, spreading the gospel of love and peace, and then they get attacked, in turn, by a giant evil cabbage, a bird, and a rotoscoped tank. In an utterly bizarre turn, Peace attacks the tank, and Slutty murders him, then jumps in the tank and rides off.
Avatar gets all mopey over Slutty’s betrayal, and Weehauken basically has to drag him through the next part of their mission, into the stronghold of Darth Vader and his band of Nazis, which means we get treated to a scene of a bunch of mutant Nazis intimidating a young foot-tall winged faery into removing her top to sate their perverse sexual desires:

!
Because Ralph Bakshi knows how to creep me the fuck out with animation.

Avatar gets increasingly melancholic as the violence increases, because he’s into love and peace and all that jazz, and then the viking elves attack. But because Bakshi doesn’t particularly care for animation, the animated elves fight mutants played by rotoscoped humans who hover above the backdrop and are seen only in this weird sort of lithographic style. For some reason, the mutants are attacking on horseback, despite the fact that (a) they have tanks, and (b) We’ve established that horses have been replaced by weird bipedal anteater things.
In the close shots, the mutants turn back into animated mutants with guns, and manage ot kill a lot of the viking elves, but it’s not at all clear to me who’s winning in any given scene, especially with the continual changes in the art style. As before, they roll out the World War II stock footage, and the elves just stand around flabbergasted as they’re blown to pieces. I’m not really sure what’s going on here, whether the projected images are meant to be magically able to actually kill the elves, or if it’s just a distraction.
Avatar sends Weehauken off the destroy the projector, and then plans his suicide, on account of Slutty’s betrayal. He finds Slutty and prepares to kill her, but Darth Vader’s Ridiculously Hot Wife stops him, and makes an incoherent, rambling speech about blood and death and fathers against sons and being fast with your blade, and this confuses Weehauken long enough for Slutty to explain that when she’d fondled Peace earlier, it had allowed Darth Vader to hypnotize her, because of Peace’s mental link to the forces of Evil.
Now, the climax of this movie is one of the more awesome twists I’ve ever seen, so I’m actually going to put it below the jump…

Continue reading Aruman? Really? (Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards)

What the Butter?

Either the captioner has lost his mind or Texas is even weirder than I imagined.
Fox News, in a piece on the Texas State Fair, reports that among the consumables at the fair are (I am not making this up) Deep Fried Coca Cola Syrup and (I wish I were making this up) Deep Fried Butter.
The captions reported that it is “Made with pure butter, then you inject labor.”, and then, and, I don’t know, maybe this is actually something they do in Texas, “Pure whipped daughter.”
Don’t mess with Texas. Or they whip, batter-dip, and deep fry your daughter.

Wait, wait, I got it: You don’t bury the doctor at the north pole because she’s his mother

Saw this bullet point attached to a news story:

Police say killer wasn’t among the dead, wasn’t one of the survivors

This is one of those brain-teasers, where it turns out that the killer is a zombie or something, isn’t it?

I’ve just remembered! (An Addendum to Tomes and Talismans)

In reference to my final analysis of Tomes and Talismans:
I have just now remembered the Economics-based educational series from about the same period. The one I mentioned not remembering aside from the fact that I didn’t like it. It was called — I swear I am not making this up — “Econ and Me”. It involved some kids and their magical imaginary friend Econ, who taught them about economics. And the theme song buggers the imagination (I realize that the expression is “beggars the imagination”. You haven’t heard this theme song. It is running through my head right now, sodomizing my corpus callosum). The refrain went something like “Econ! Let me tell ya ’bout Econ! Econ! And Me!”
This show was apparently so worthless that even YouTube has the good taste not to contain copies of it.
Which is a good thing, because I’d probably be strangely compelled to watch and recap it.

Space-Madness! (The Starlost, Episode 4)

Episode four of “The Starlost” introduces us to the crew of The Pices, one of the Ark’s little survey vessels. The crew has been away for ten years and has been out of contact, and is very surprised to learn that the crew are dead. Given that the crew have been dead for hundreds of years, I suspect that this episode is going to try to convince us that the crew of the Ark did not understand the concept of special relativity.
Everyone piles aboard the Pices and takes a spin around the ship to survey the damage. Then, for some reason, the captain and one of the hot chyk crewmen fall asleep. The other one babbles something incoherent about “space senility” and does the same.
The captain dismisses their claims that the accident happened hundreds of years earlier, since it’s coming from a bunch of Space Amish, but they also seem a little weird. “Time does funny things in space,” the captain explains, and implies that they’re tired because they’re old.
Eager to find their families, they rush back to the crew area, where they meet a small family who don’t know them, but after pushing the old folks a bit, they manage to drag out of them that they’d heard of a ship called the Pices, from a very long time ago.
On the trashed bridge, Anton La Vey explains the mission of the Pices (and for some reason gives its size in “Jewbic Meters”). Despite the captain’s admonishment, the cuter of the two bridge bunnies has the computer verify that they’ve been gone 400 years, and we finally get it explained: the captain had ignored some warnings about their trajectory, and they set off using some bad navigational data, which resulted in them experiencing more time dilation than they’d expected: once the Ark lost contact, they’d been unable to sync their clock to the Ark, and as a result, they’d accidentally accelerated to near the speed of light without noticing (Which is not nearly as ridiculous as it sounds. If you just lean on the gas in a space ship, and keep the pedal down for a few years, you’ll just keep accelerating, and once they lost sight of the Ark, they couldn’t calculate their speed relative to it).
The Pices crew gets increasingly morose about their predicament, though the more-hot chyk takes a shine to Garth, and the less-hot chyk does The Creepy Sci Fi thing where she speaks from a position of the gender views of the period that produced the show. So, 800 years in the future, a space pilot thinks that being a happy homemaker with no skills other than cooking, cleaning, and sewing is really a better life for a woman than hers. (Also, the captain’s wife is recognized by the computer as Mrs. (Captain’s full name).)
The captain has another episode, and Anton La Vey diagnoses him as space-senile: doomed to have his mental age rapidly increase due to the time dilation. They’ll promptly have the minds of 400-year-olds unless they return to their previous time dilation.
As they all have a cracking good party to enjoy their remaining time, they watch the Pices’s logs, and see “an unidentified class G solar star” — which turns out to be the star which the Ark is going to strike. I guess a “solar star” is different from the other kind. The bridge bunnies decide to steal the Pices and shoot Devon with a phaser set to “Gurn”.
They reckon that their best bet is to go back to Earth and hope that there’s some of it left. While the captain objects in principle, he also objects in the pragmatic sense that he doesn’t think they have enough power to go back to Earth. Devon distracts them for a minute and pulls out one of the Orange clipboards on the wall reactor cores in order to send the ship off balance. For some reason, the bridge bunnies become compliant after this, and happily pilot the ship back to the Ark.
They drop our heroes off and then decide to bugger off themselves, since a slow death in space beats space senility and the chance to help save the rest of humanity.
Good riddance, frankly.

Now *That*’s a Baltar I can believe in! (The Starlost, Episode 3)

Episode Three finally grants us the John Collicos we’ve been waiting for. He plays a smarmy evil guy, which I know is a stretch for this actor.
Arriving in Omicron (a dome to which they got directed by the frozen guy), our heroes get captured by guards, who totally freak when they discover Rachel’s boobs: this is a society that did away with women centuries ago during a great catastrophe, and have had to subsist on artificial gestation ever since.
John Collicos, the local despot, explains that everyone thinks Rachel is the reincarnation of their goddess, and while he’s far too canny to buy into that, he does realize that it would be excellent political capital if he married her, especially since he’s a tyrant in the old-school sense of the word: he’s only allowed to rule so long as he kills anyone who challenges him to single combat (hint hint).
Unfortunately for Devon, what few books weren’t burned are now strictly limited to the local priestly caste, who won’t let them read, even though they do let him and Garth hide in their temple.
John Collicos makes his plans to marry Rachel. He quite likes this talk of “love” that she keeps going on about, but he wishes she wouldn’t say it around other people, what with it being a scary alien concept to their all male society.
The Original Baltar also has a weird homoerotic moment with the head priest when he says “A man who spends part of each day on his knees can’t be all bad.”
Though the priest has forbidden them to see the holy texts, one of the lesser priests can’t help showing off some of the work he’s done interpreting the writings, which makes Devon and Garth realize that a bunch of dense technical writing is sufficiently mystifying to a couple of Space Amish that even if they did get to study them.
The head priest manages to negotiate with Quinn The Renegade Alien to have Devon and Garth exiled instead of executed, but in return, he agrees not to prevent the marriage.
Collicos makes some smarmy stabs at convincing Rachel that he’s in love and can become a good person with the love of a good woman. She points out that she would totally challenge him for the throne if she were a man, and Collicos weirdly replies that she would be the man he feared most.
Fortunately, Devon and Garth storm in, having convinced the palace guard that their beloved governor is forcing the goddess into marriage. Unfortunately, John Collicos’s creepy homoerotic posing and shouting makes the captain of the guard wet ’em, and when they back down, Devon does the thing they’ve been telegraphing all episode in addition to showing in the pre-title teaser: he challenges John Collicos to single combat for rulership of Omicron. John Collicos is compelled by local law to accept, and they fight using the traditional Vulcan Omicron stick-with-weighted-ends weapons while the Kirk vs Spock Fight Music Starlost Fight Music plays.
Devon gets totally owned, because he is a simple farmer, while John Collicos is the tyrrant who rules by force, but then he for no clear reason just turns around and sort of grunts a bit, and Devon takes this opportunity to hit him in the head.
Under the code, Devon may now kill John Collicos by cutting his head off… With… The… Weighted… Stick. But, of course, Devon is a TV hero, and refuses to kill him, instead letting Collicos live, shamed by his defeat.
Instead of the governorship, Devon asks to see the writings and be allowed to leave in peace. John Collicos points out that he is entirely untrustworthy and will not keep to this agreement. But as he’s just been publicly shamed and shown to be entirely vincible, he’s probably going to be busy fighting off every Johnny-Come-Lately who wants to kill him.
The ancient writings turn out to be entirely indecipherable, but when Garth mentions the Ark, the priests remember some ancient legends they have about avoiding a firey demise by going to the nether-regions of the Ark. Devon, who has read the script, concludes that this indicates the existence of an auxilliary bridge, presumably in the ship’s ladyparts.
John Collicos, having reasserted his dominance, shows up to capture the heroes just as they make good their escape, but then for some reason lets them go: much to his surprise, he’s found that this whole “Love” thing is not entirely unpleasant, and, knowing that Rachel loves Devon and not him, doesn’t want to force her into marriage any more. Moreover, despite the fact that, logically, he must have just murdered half his palace guard, having been publicly shamed by Devon twice in one day has given him the idea that it might actually be fun to try a new style of governance which isn’t based on killing anyone who disagrees with you. Public shamings might work even better.
Much like the public shaming I feel now for having spent another hour of my life on this show.

Not even the Dewey Decimal System Can Save Us Now! (The Starlost: Episode 2)

In episode 2, The Head of Anton La Vey directs our heroes to the medical section, where the lose Garth when attacked by some Wipers. Rachel and Devon find out from another La Vey head that the medical section houses cryonically suspended engineering teams. Rachel thinks that the chair-activated La Vey head is the funniest thing she’s ever seen. Now, the La Vey head is very funny. Not the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, but then, I’m not Space-Amish.
They wake up the first engineer they can find, and then discover that he’s dying of “a radiation virus”. Garth tells the Wipers all about Cypress Corners, which impresses them so much that their leader, Burgess Meredeth, wanders off to think on the viability of taking it over.
The engineer comes to terms with his impending death and the semi-doomed situation the Ark is in, and then reveals that he’s entirely the wrong sort of engineer, being in communications.
The Wipers attack sickbay, and under the engineer’s instruction Devon and Rachel incapacitate them using sedative vials from the first aid kit. This works because in the future, sedative vials all have a self-destruct feature.
Meanwhile, the engineer asks La Vey if his wife is in suspended animation. He doesn’t know, but has a “videotape” recording for him. La Vey demands an access code, and the engineer doesn’t know it, but then discovers that it’s written on his shirt. When he does, La Vey reads him some numbers to type into the keyboard. Yes. He has to take dictation from the computer. And the La Vey computer head even gets impatient with him when he fumbles the numbers.
The code makes La Vey’s Interrociter show a video tape of his sad wife explaining that she wanted to join him in suspended animation, but couldn’t get tickets, but she’s sure that they’ll find a cure eventually and thaw him out.
She’s wrong, of course, but hey. He finds this sufficiently disappointing that he just sits down and prepares to die. Before they refreeze him, he explains that “There are books and stuff all over the ark. Find some.” Thanks. This may be useless advice, but hey, they woke him up, brought him to death’s door, and told him that his wife was dead. He owes these jokers nothing.
He does propose that the Wipers might be the degenerate descendants of the guards who used to patrol the corridors and suggests that they persuade the Wipers to move into a disused dome nearby, as they might find it to be a real nice place, and therefore not be total douchebags.
The big dumb Wiper shoots their leader with Garth’s crossbow. Possibly on purpose, I can’t tell. But Devon re-enacts the story of Androcles and the Lion, and patches Burgess Meredeth up, which in turn makes him receptive to their suggestion of moving to somewhere nice and agricultural. They show them a nice matte painting of a prairie, and the Wipers all wave a happy good-bye as Devon locks them in.
NB: This episode had less than the promised quantity of John Collicos. He’s in next week’s preview too.

Stephanie Meyer, give vampires back their balls.

This movie.
This phenomenon.
It fucking blows.
Twilight
You’re not going to get my usual detailed recap, because this movie just fucking sucks and I feel bad for just watching it. But I know I should watch the whole thing so that I am properly qualified when I go off on insane rants elsewhere on the internet about how much this movie sucks. So you’re just going to get some highlights.
Below the fold…

Continue reading Stephanie Meyer, give vampires back their balls.

Amish… In… Space…. (The Starlost: Episode 1

Fresh from my experiences with Tomes and Talismans, I decided to Netflix a series I had never heard of until it cropped up in a cross-reference to a wikipedia article I was reading.
The series is, I believe, a post-apocalyptic Canadian space opera from the seventies. The internet tells me such talent as Harlan Ellison, A.E. Van Vogt, Frank Herbert, Joanna Russ, Thomas M. Disch, Alexei Panshin, Phillip K. Dick, and Ursula K. Le Guin were contracted to write storylines for the series. No one knows why they did this, because the series is a complete piece of shit. Sixteen episodes were produced, in which many of the expansive and amazing space sets were inserted via greenscreen rather than actually building any sets, a technique later to be adopted by shitty Star Trek Fan Films. (Fun fact: Several first season episodes of Star Trek: Hidden Frontier pulled the episode’s entire dialogue from episodes of The West Wing with the phrase “Mr. President” replaced by “Captain” and “The Senate” replaced by “The Romulans”.)
The creepiest thing about the show is how clean all the footage is. The soft focus of degraded VHS and NTSC color bleeding really do a lot to play down the terribleness of (a) cheap visual effects, (b) old video tape cameras that had no depth of field whatever, and (c) that is it is the 1970s. This is clear, crisp, and makes me remember why I can’t always tell the difference between Escatology and Scatology.
The first episode’s narration sets up the premise: Earth got destroyed eight hundred years ago. Humanity had buggered off on the Battlestar Galactica Ark, but th bridge got blown up, and now the Ark is gonna drift into a star unless our heroes can re-establish flight control.
That said, the bulk of the episode is a flashback triggered by our three heroes looking out a window at the vastness of space.
Seems these three are Space Amish, from the town of Cypress Creek. Only these Space Amish have zippers and a computer. So Space Mennonites I guess. Devon wants to marry Rachel, but Rachel is promised to his best friend Garth. Garth isn’t interested in Rachel, but he’s a respectful sort who will do as the elders order, unlike Devon, who has previously been censured for daring to ask questions like “Why does the sun come up in the morning and set at night?” and “Where does the water come from?” and “What’s Vietnam?”
The elder asks the magic 8-ball, some kind of computer terminal, just to make sure, and the computer announces that no, Devon and Rachel are not a genetically optimal match, and that the previously proposed marriage should take place.
Devon isn’t happy about this, and spies on the elders later, whereupon he discovers that the Magic Eight Ball, which the Elders introduce as the voice of the creator, isn’t actually making these pronouncements on its own volition: the elder inserts a microcassette recorder tape, tells the Magic Eight Ball what to say, and then orders it to translate from fakey archaic English (“Thou hast spake against the will of ye creator, and thou must pay with thy life”) into technobabble (“Genetic profile is incompatible with optimal conditions. Nonconforming element must be eliminated to return system to equilibrium”). Devon reacts by shouting to everyone that the ELders are faking it, without any evidence. So then he has to run away from the angry mob, through the DOOR TO THE FORBIDDEN ZONE. This leads to a crappy chromakey effect of him falling down a long tunnel, whereupon he finds an Interrociter from which the face of Anton La Vey appears as a computer program to answer all his questions, only in vague terms that don’t really explain much.
The Ark, it turns out, was designed to keep all these habitats isolated in order to preserve various aspects of Earth culture. Also, the whole “About to fly into the sun” thing. Anton La Vey can’t communicate with the bridge for a data update, so he orders Devon to.
Devon, instead, goes back to Cypress Corners, where he is decried as a witch, especially when he tries to explain what he’s seen to everyone else. The Eight Ball orders Devon’s execution, and the Elder thinks it would be a good idea to order Rachel to throw the first stone.
But Garth decides to bust Devon out of jail, on condition that he leave and never come back. Devon does, but Rachel goes with him. We’re told. She has like three lines on-screen. The crazy old guy who sits by the door out of the pod explains that, now that someone has been outside and come back safely, the evil elder’s total control over the village can’t last.
Garth decides he’s going to go out of the pod, kill Devon, and bring Rachel back. Because Devon is his best friend, and he doesn’t actually want to marry Rachel, and she clearly wanted to go. And also because most of the writers quit before production started.
While Garth tumbles down the bad special effect tunnel, Devon and Rachel pass through the giant oscilloscope toward the bridge. Garth catches up with them and demands that Rachel come back with him, on the assumption that she doesn’t want to be there. She says she does, but Garth doesn’t agree.
Since the other option is shooting them with his crossbow, Garth decides to tag along to keep Rachel safe until he can take her back to Cypress Corners and marry her against either of their will. The oscilloscope, which is a security checkpoint, lets him pass in spite of the crossbow, leading to me concluding that the whole security checkpoint thing was just a waste of our time inserted to show off the shitty oscillosope effect.
They reach the bridge, saving the ship, and ending the series. Well, not quite, but they do reach the bridge, which isn’t so much “destroyed” as “roughed up a little bit”. As they stand in front of a chromakey matte painting of the bridge and look out at a chromakey matte painting of the vastness of the Ark and space beyond it, the scene from which this flashback began, they are awestruck and get to see a star approach so rapidly that there is no reasonable way that the ship will not be immolated in the very next episode. Though it then stops and hovers off the starboard beam to give them at least a season to sort it all out.
The continuity announcer makes some dishonest promises of excitement and adventure to come, which appears to include a guest appearance by John Colicos.
I. Can’t. Wait.
(Disclaimer: I can totally wait.)

Please listen to our menu options as they have recently changed

When I was in school, being caught on-campus with a cell phone was serious trouble. By which I mean not “They’d take it away,” or “You’d get detention,” but rather, “They would call the police and you would be arrested.” This rule, which seemed stupid even at the time, was a product of what was even then an earlier age, when pagers and cellular phones were possessed only by medical doctors, high-powered businessmen, and drug dealers. Since high school students did not fall into the first two categories, the law felt it was safe to assume they fell into the third.
Now, rules this simple sadly do not work anymore, if they’d ever worked in the first place, which they do not. As our civilization changes, the rules have to get increasingly complex. Even in my time, the existing rule of “Do not bring a cell phone or pager onto school grounds,” was problematic: there was a surprising population of seniors who were registered as volunteer firemen, and while they didn’t need pagers at the school proper, they did need to have them in their trucks, which were parked on school grounds, and they might reasonably need to carry them to afterschool activiites.
There’s a balance that needs to be stuck. There are uses of phones that plainly ought be allowed: “Hi, this is your father. I need you to call your mother and tell her that I’m okay but the plant just exploded*.” “Mom, help, the teacher just spontaneously combusted,” and those which plainly ought not be: “What’s the answer to number 5?” “Hey, want to see some naughty pictures of me?**”, but between these two extremes is a large gray siberia-like wasteland.
In the land of Kalamazoo, as reported by mlive.com, for instance, they have ot grapple with nagging parents who call during the school day to check up on their spawn, in what I can only assume is an attempt to publically shame them by having mommy call in the middle of shaking down a freshman for his lunch money.
This is a hard problem for any school, and you might be compelled to feel heartfelt sympathy for them, but fortunately, the teacher’s union helps out by saying one of those things that reminds you that schools are basically run like a combination supermax prison and third world dictatorship:

Cell phones also can “lead to behavior and school-climate issues,” Lambert said. “You can have an incident at one end of the building and it gets instantly communicated to people on the other side of the building, which can just add to the turmoil and exacerbate the problem. That can be a real distraction.”

Because nothing is more antithetical to the scholastic process than the free flow of information, and nothing is more essential to smooth school operations than to assert total control over all routes of communication. I mean, why even bother censoring the school newspaper and banning blogs if the students are just going to text each other whenever something bad happens?


* Incidentally, the day I received this call, I checked the news sites on the internet. The first one to pick up the story noted that there were no indications that this was a terrorist attack.
** I am not entirely sure that this use plainly ought to be verboten, but I think it might be safer to err on the side of restricting it to outside of school hours.