David’s Forbidden Planet

I’ve been sick the past two days, so it was a good opportunity to stay in bed and on the couch and watch several hours of Star Wars Blu-ray collection bonus materials.

I have not watched the latest changes Mr. Lucas has made to the movies. I’m not sure I could handle them in my weakened condition!

Happy Surprises

• The complete missing scene of Luke viewing the space battle over Tatooine and telling his friends about it at Tosche Station. This scene with Luke’s friend Biggs was in the comics and story book version when I was a kid and I’ve only seen brief clips of it in documentaries and other extras over the years.
• The animated segment from the Star Wars Holiday Special is included as part of Boba Fett’s costume prototype in the Episode V Collection. The animation is low budget and has some odd character designs but shouldn’t be missed.
• Inclusion of some classic fan films in the Spoofs video including Star Wars Gangsta Rap SE and Troops.
• Several appearances of Star Wars in 70s and early 80s TV shows, including a song and dance number from the Donny & Marie show with Donny and Marie as Luke and Leia (strangely prophetic!), and Mark Hamill on The Muppet Show.
• I really enjoyed all of Dennis Muren‘s special effects commentary in the Interviews sections.
• There are some original episode documentaries that I’m sure were broadcast on television soon after the movies came out. I don’t quite remember seeing them but I got a warm fuzzy feeling while watching them. They’re an interesting contrast to many “making of” segments these days which often is more about selling you on seeing the movie than how the movie was really created.

Onto critiques and other observations…
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This week’s episode of The Talk Show included a review of Moonraker. The Talk Show is a weekly webacast where Dan Benjamin and John Gruber talk about Apple, Mac, iPhone and related topics. They’ve also been reviewing the James Bond movies starting with Dr. No for the past couple of months. These are honest and accurate reviews, citing the good and the bad of each film. Their review and analysis of Moonraker was par for the course, noting that the second half jumps off the logic train never to return (my summarized interpretation, not their words).

However, Moonraker holds a special place for me. I was a bit young and afraid of Darth Vader when Star Wars first came out so I missed it’s initial run in the theaters. Instead, I got to see all of the pretenders to the throne that came afterwards: Battlestar Galactica, Black Hole, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Battle Beyond the Stars and of course Moonraker. Don’t get me wrong. I love all these films and think they range from ok to modern classics but I’m pretty sure none would’ve made it to the theater without the success of Star Wars.

Moonraker was my introduction to James Bond. While The Talk Show pulls apart the lapses in logic compared to earlier Bond movies, to me as a child it was insane fun. Sure, as an adult I can wonder why would a mock funeral be staged just to kill James Bond and why his gondola becomes a hover craft, but as a kid it was just one insane techno-action sequence after another. A boat with mines and a hang glider for escapes? Yes! Fighting on a runaway cable car? Yes! Escaping death by rocket exhaust? Yes! Marines fighting in space with lasers? Yes! Exploding bolas? I had never seen regular bolas let alone ones that wrap around and explode. Yes!

Now, on reflecting on the movie, maybe it was all too much, but for a 6 year old at the time, it was pretty damn cool. The combination of gadgets, action and sci-fi was great. Does a kid care that elaborate assassination attempts during a funeral procession, while skeet shooting or getting pushed out of an airplane made no sense? Not really. I just took it for granted that was how things work in the James Bond universe. I didn’t see For Your Eyes Only and Octopussy had no impact on me (I think I blocked it out it was so unmemorable) when I saw it during summer camp several years later. Moonraker had cemented itself as my archetype of Bond for years to come and gave me inspiration of what to do with my many space shuttle plastic models beside launch them into space and deploy satellites. But that’s another story.

One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to blog more. It’s now about a quarter into the new year and I’ve not posted a thing! So, I’ve decided to try posting semi-regular commentary on comics I’ve been reading. Here goes with some quick commentary on FF #1, Ultimate Doom #4 and Ultimate Spider-Man #156. Beware of spoilers!
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It’s been a sad week with the passing of Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett and now Michael Jackson. I identify all three with different parts of my childhood. I feel the worst about Michael Jackson. His was a life that was derailed along the way, his childhood never quite fulfilled and an ongoing struggle for him to find his place in the world on his own terms. But, beyond his personal troubles, he was a singular entertainer and artist. There can be no doubt he’s one of the greats of pop music and entertainment.

Like pretty much everyone else in the world, I enjoyed his music. I’ll admit I never found the need to purchase any of his albums. He seemed so ubiquitous in the 80s it didn’t seem necessary to pester my parents for his music. Oddly, I did long for the over $100 “Beat It” jacket but settled for a much less expensive, nylon/polyester one that only evoked a feeling of being inspired by the original. By the time the 90s came and I had my own buying power, I had moved on. In our iTunes collection of over 5900 items (we have several hundred CDs as a starting point), there are just 3 songs with Michael Jackson singing: “Thriller,” “Billie Jean” and The Jacksons’ “Can You Feel It.”

Why those songs? I can’t speak of “Billie Jean” since that came as part of my wife’s music collection, but I can trace “Thriller” and “Can You Feel It” back to a birthday party in elementary school. Read the rest of this entry »

I know I have better things to do right now: pay bills, finish my taxes, take care of some chores that have been sitting incomplete for weeks. Still I have a need to take a minute to vent about [Adult Swim]. I haven’t posted in months and yet tonight’s showing of the awful, sad, depraved The Room was just the last straw. Maybe I needed Tom Servo and Crow to guide me while watching but I just didn’t get the April Fool’s joke here.

This isn’t the network I used to watch for a solid three hours every night. This isn’t even the network that I would tune into every now and then and be presently surprised to find something new on. I’m wondering if I’ve changed as I’ve grown older or has the staff of [Adult Swim] transformed over the years? They’ve been on what I view as a juvenile, downward spiral of low budget animation and cheap live action shows for a few years now. I know that money doesn’t make a show necessarily better but can we consistently have animation that doesn’t look like it was drawn by a three year old? Can we not attempt a parodies of old Krofft shows filmed in a garage with a green screen, annoying characters and inane plots? Half of the new shows over the last few years make me wonder if I need to be on something to fully enjoy them. Why? I expect better than internet quality programming on the TV, not worse.
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Ain’t It Cool News has some additional news on the Forbidden Planet remake. Not many details but sounds more like a remake than a sequel and they’re keeping a “retro” look and feel. Hopefully the project will be kept hot and this all isn’t another false start.

I normally don’t post straight news stories but this one’s special. After what seemed like forever without much news on the on-again/off-again remake of Forbidden Planet, the HollywoodReporter noted today that J. Michael Straczynski is now set to write the new version. This is great news.

Of course I watched B5 in the day and generally enjoyed the supernatural slant added to Spider-Man while JMS was writing ASM, so I’m confident that he will do FP right. Still not clear when the new FP will be out but hopefully this will help move things along.

I was also pleasantly surprised to see that JMS is also working on a Lensman project. Nifty!

I’ve posted the photos of Tokyo Game Show 2008. I can’t believe another year has come and gone. This time I was in Japan on vacation and, since I didn’t need to be there on a “business” day, I attended on the weekend when the cosplayers are out in force. It was a welcome change of pace, though traveling long distance with a family was new and challenging in its own right. I was on my own that day and took a little bit longer than usual to get going in the morning. By the time I got to Makuhari Messe, I had less than four hours to look around and take pictures before I needed to start heading back to Tokyo.

I’ve been looking at ways to improve my photo workflow. Though I’ve been actively taking digital photos for eight years now, I’m still just a part-time hobbyist and don’t really take time to tweak my photos. My current workflow is Adobe Bridge and PhotoShop CS2. It’s real basic usage: exposure tweaking, leveling, cropping and downsampling / sharpening for posting on the web. Occasionally I’ll need to do something more like try to correct the picture’s temperature or white balancing (typically if the home lights are too strong). I could probably get away with just GraphicConverter but I’ve been using PhotoShop since version 3 in college and it feels more natural. Since the majority of my photoshopping is so photo oriented, I’ve gotten trial versions of LightRoom 2 and Aperture 2 to play with.
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My first laptop was a PowerBook Duo. When I got it while I was in college and dabbling with a Newton 110. After living with no backlighting and problematic handwriting recognition, I decided that a laptop would be more productive than a PDA. Still, I didn’t really need one and I’m not sure why I even thought to bring it up to my parents who were gracious enough to help me buy it. I didn’t use it that much but I do have some great memories of Duo… I created my first complete set of Gunbuster web pages on it while down in L.A. for a week and the following year I brought it and a QuickTake to Anime America ’96.

I decided recently that I needed to recapture some of those memories by adding a Duo to household. You can read more about my PowerBook Duo 2300c auction win on my blog at RetroMacCast.

It’s been over a week since Comic-Con concluded and I’m still catching up on trying to do a write up. I finished sorting and posting my pics on Tuesday. The galleries are available under the San Diego Comic-Con category on my photo site. There weren’t that many pics this year since my schedule was split between parenting duties and show time. It’s certainly a different experience having a baby in tow this time around. In some ways it reminded me of my first attendance when I had poor time management and everything felt a bit rushed. Lessons (hopefully) learned for next year.

Content-wise, it was a really good year. After blowing most of Saturday last year, I decided to join in on a block of panels this year (with my mom in her first SDCC attendance!) including Futurama, The Simpsons, Dean Koontz, Dollhouse and BSG. Not knowing much about Dean Koontz’s novels, I found him to be the most surprising entertaining. I guess a good storyteller can both write stories as well as talk about them to an audience. Overall, Futurama was my favorite of the set of panels with the voice talents of John DiMaggio, Maurice Lamarche, Billy West and Katey Sagal on hand to liven things up.

In the exhibit hall, Paramount returned with their free t-shirts but added a collection of Star Trek items including posters, construction crew badges by email and drawings for goodies. Warner Bros. beefed up their bag selection, held the usual group autograph sessions and had a lifesize Watchmen Owlship on display. Fox had what was probably the most useful schwag: a poster tube with strap. Everyone was giving away bags but I think Fox had the lock on the popular poster tube. Now if only someone will start giving out art portfolios next year.

More convention notes after the jump…
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