Fiction: Percy the Robot Cop takes a fall!

 I'm still careening through the last week of the year, and it turns out I don't have anything for today or tomorrow. While I sort this out, here's a little adventure of Percy the Robot Cop, which would have been toward the end of The Evil Possum Vs Eurypterids (see the massive link index). This was really what I had in mind all along for his adventures, still haven't decided if it would work.

The 250 meter building was tallest in the section of the city, though it would barely have been visible among the spires of the city center. What would have stood out even there was its strange shape, an inverted pyramid that rose from a hexagonal base up to a triangle top that hung over empty air. It was obvious that the building was residential, and further evident that it was meant for creatures that could climb or fly. Its features were less convenient for those that lived on the ground, as witnessed by crew struggling to extend the hydraulic ladder of a fire truck up to a middle tier of the building. They were just about to give up when Police Robot C pulled up, in the exact likeness of a Borgward Goliath.

 

“What’s going on?” Percy called out as he pulled up. Another officer with oddly colored hair turned, and he showed mild surprise to recognize her as Officer Chelsea O’Keefe.

“It’s a domestic,” the trainee said, sharply and calmly. “Two Woolies are going at it on the 35^th floor.  Several members of the family unit fled, and someone locked the door behind them. We called the landlord to open it, but he’s not getting here anytime soon.”

Nick climbed out of the passenger door. “How’s there a domestic disturbance at noon?” he said.

 

“That’s easy,” Percy said, “Woolies are nocturnal. It’s what makes them good workers… well, that and the obvious. They come home in the morning, right when their mates are putting the cubs to bed, and then they start talking about everything they didn’t settle the last night.”

“Do you have a plan?” Chelsea said.

“Naww,” Percy said, “but I can wing it…”

 

By the standards of their race, the Woolies were practically resting. They faced each other across a room of ruined furniture splashed with rusty orange blood, with their long, seemingly boneless arms hanging at their sides.  The combatant on the left had the miserable dingy gray common to the species, liberally streaked with orange. The other had a darker hue close to but not quite black, and had clearly fared better. The darker combatant took a step forward and slashed with one hand, in itself enough to span much of the distance, and drew back as its foe did the same. The gray Woolie gave a rattling growl, and the dark one answered with a hiss.  It was clear that both were readying to resume the fight, when there was a knock at the door to a tiny patio. They both froze, and then turned their heads, just in time to see Percy let himself in.

 

“Hey,” he said, “I’m Percy. The neighbors are saying you’re having some trouble.” He shut the spiderwebbed glass door behind him. “But I’m sure we can work something out…” He glanced at the lighter Woolie, and then at the darker one.

 

“You did a number on him, didn’t you?” Percy continued. He stepped closer to the dark Woolie. “Lots of people would say you’re both brutes, barely better than animals. Not me. You don’t go around cutting each other up left and right. But you come a long way, to live in a place like nothing you ever saw, and then they tell you you have to fit in one little box. Of course you’re gonna get mad…”

 

There was a low hiss behind him, and he paused, too late. A pair of gray paws stretched out and gripped his shoulders.  A very few moments later, Nick, the firemen and a growing crowd of onlookers saw a blurred shape come whirling through the patio door and into space. Percy’s voice came from overhead: “Frink, this is gonna-“ Then he hit.

 

For another moment, the Woolies stared at each other, suddenly perplexed and no longer the least bit angry. Then the door buzzed open. The dark Woolie turned his head in time to see a woman with blue-gray hair. A single plastoid slug to the face brought it down. “Hi,” Chelsea said.  “I’m Chelsea, it’s my first day…” The gray Woolie turned toward her, and its face seemed to dialate into a gaping maw lined with triangular teeth. It took three more shots to bring it down.

Chelsea came down in time to help finish putting Percy back together. “Someday,” he said as he finished attaching his right forearm, “I should tell you about my first day…”

Featured Creature: The one that starred an Ewok

 

Title: Willow

What Year?: 1982 (preproduction)/ 1988 (release)

Classification: Knockoff/ Mashup

Rating: That’s Good! (4/4)

 

As I write this, I’m approaching the end of my second year of hypergraphia on this blog, and one thing I decided I wanted to do was bring this feature to a full dozen reviews. As usual, I already had an ample backlog, and what I had really been wanting to get to was a specific time and genre, 1980s fantasy movies. I had already covered a fair number of entries, starting with Krull and coming most recently to (dear Logos, Bakshi's) Lord of the Rings. However, I still felt that a more in-depth survey was in order. Out of all the very promising examples I considered, there was one that stood out, as one of the very last, as the most influential to film history, and in certain lights as the very best. I present Willow, the George Lucas movie that maybe ripped off Tolkien.

Our story begins with a fast-paced introduction to a sword-and-sorcery world where a sorceress queen is fixated on destroying a baby that is prophesied to destroy her and become queen. The skullduggery ends with an iffy Biblical image of a baby floating downstream. The orphan ends up in the realm of a dwarfish race, where she is discovered by the family of an aspiring magician named Willow. Initially, he is opposed to getting involved, offering a line that will be prophetic in its own right, “Let’s push it downstream and forget we ever saw it.” When the agents of the queen Bavmorda arrive, however, he is convinced to return the infant safely to the humans, which the midgets refer to as dakini. When he emerges into the human realm, he finds himself in the midst of a war between the sorceress and an apparently free realm. He soon meets up with a sketchy but competent swordsman Madmartigan, who reluctantly joins a further quest to find a good sorceress who can aid them. A long and perilous journey still lies ahead, with the queen’s general and her own daughter close behind, and in the end, it is Willow who must face the queen to save the child’s life!

Willow was a 1988 fantasy film produced by George Lucas and directed by Ron Howard, reportedly from a story Lucas had created in 1972. Warwick Davis, the actor who played the Ewok Wicket in Return of the Jedi (see Battle For Endor) was offered the lead role as early as 1982. The eventual film starred Warwick and Val Kilmer (see Island of Dr. Moreau) as Madmartigan, with Joanne Whalley as Sorsha and Jean Marsh as Queen Bavmorda. Effects were provided by ILM, including a “go-motion” monster by Phil Tippett (all hail Phil) and a transformation sequence created with CGI “morphing”. The soundtrack was composed by James Horner (see the Krull soundtrack review). A merchandise campaign included a novelization by Wayland Drew, who also wrote the Dragonslayer novel, and an NES game from Capcom. The film was a financial success, earning $137.6 million against a $35M budget, but failed to revive interest in the fantasy genre. Kilmer and Whalley were married from 1988 to 1995. The film was released on VHS and DVD in 2001, and on Blu Ray and digital formats in 2019.

For my experiences, this is the quite rare ‘80s movie that I definitely remember seeing in the theater. From all my recollections, I liked it well enough but wasn’t otherwise impressed, and I definitely suspected Lucas had copied Lord of the Rings as well as Star Wars. (As I was prepared to point out at greater length, no evidence has emerged that Lucas was concerned enough to reach out to Tolkien or his estate.) What I had no way to contextualize at the time was how few movies had even tried what Willow did. By my own estimation, the only films of the 1980s fantasy wave that were both original and successful as “straight” sword-and-sorcery were Dragonslayer and Krull, and I have already documented the price they paid literally and figuratively. The rest of the field, good or bad, is dominated by late entries in older properties (kind of including Conan), movies that really belong in satire or other genres (I count Princess Bride as the former and Dark Crystal as the latter, though I’m not sure what), and more or less intentional low-budget “camp” (see Adventures of Hercules, if anything). Willow was nothing less than the last stand for serious, big-budget high fantasy. What really drove me to that appraisal was the protracted delay getting the damn thing on Blu Ray, which pushed me to the point of trading jokes whether George Lucas wanted it to be seen. It was in those dire straits that I truly took in both the non-trivial flaws of the film and just how far it exceeded anything else up to its time.

Moving forward, it can first and foremost be reiterated that even considered as an LOTR knockoff, Willow is at a minimum as good as anything we got prior to the Peter Jackson trilogy. Even then, there really isn’t that much that is owed to Tolkien more than any other fantasy. The story and characters would be a checklist of cliches even in the early 1970s, yet Lucas succeeds in elevating this to likable and interesting characters in a fleshed-out world. Due credit must be given to the uniformly good cast and performances, perhaps especially Kilmer, who manages to balance entertaining and competent with every appearance of self-awareness. Then the obvious edge comes from the effects, which on consideration are deceptively limited. The one big “set piece” effect is the rampage of the nearly stationary two-headed dragon/ patchisaur and even that is balanced by the very low-tech trolls.  The rest of the action scenes are more about sword-swinging and punching than monsters and magic, while the effects are doled out when they are actually needed, to the point that some of the very best are relatively easy to miss. My personal favorite, which I first noticed on bootleg VHS, is a sort of incense burner that comes to life during the magicians’ duel of the finale. It lurches along in glorious go-motion for just a few moments before being disposed of, yet it makes a disconcerting foe while it lasts.

The part that’s difficult to explain or describe is that this all feels realistic. Part of this is that the villains, or at least their leaders, are dignified enough to be a convincing threat. But the other, almost counterintuitive side is that they are usually reasonably balanced against the heroes. For once, the forces of good include an actual army that seems no more or less capable than the hordes of evil, and have their own sorceress to boot. Willow and Madmartigan are correspondingly fallible, with the mage gradually emulating the warrior’s combination of arrogance and dirty tricks. What’s most impressive are the actual fights. This is neither stylized swordplay nor overchoreographed martial arts, but a series of brawls where blades are rammed efficiently into guts and even the sorceresses don’t hesitate to punch each other. The magic itself gets grim and gritty, as attested by the gruesome transformation of a troll into a gooey embryonic dragon. I wondered further if the demise of the villain somehow inspired the Toxo Warriors and their propensity to blow themselves up.

That leaves the “one scene”, and to me, the most memorable is the first encounter between Willow and Madmartigan. I’m sure I remember this from way back in the theater, though I’m sure I couldn’t have appreciated many of the layers of the scene. The party of midgets discover the warrior left to die in a cage. When Willow approaches, there’s a decent jump scare as the warrior grabs hold of him. Madmartigan quickly realizes some nuance in order when he demands water but has to let Willow go to get it. In the process, he refers to the little people as “peck”, clearly derogatory enough to compare to some familiar names, while they refer to him as “dakini” (an Asian term for anything between an ogre and a minor god), which obviously isn’t complimentary either. When he figures out they mostly just want to leave the baby and go home, he quickly offers to take care of her. Then there’s the part I certainly would have overlooked, as the warrior continues to refer to Willow as “peck”. When Willow takes explicit offense, he begins repeating the slur, notwithstanding Willow’s threat to turn him to stone. It’s an understated treatment of prejudice that becomes the beginning of a partnership, unfortunate only in that such subtlety has been lost in Lucas’s more recent work.

In closing, this is truly a case where I have said everything I wanted. It should be clear that I could have taken the rating down a notch, and there are certainly equal or better films I have treated more harshly. What brings it up is the time and genre context. As already outlined, 1980s fantasy was a trend that started marginal and went downhill from there. In that company, this might not be the “best”, yet it is strong enough that the films it can be compared to fairly (including most of those I mention above) are simply “different” rather than better or worse. What does set it apart is its transitional status, bridging the refined arts of stop-motion and practical effects with CGI, with a decent soundtrack from James Horner in the bargain. It’s more than enough to rate at least a little above the sum of its parts, especially for those who saw it back when. And with that, I’m done for another day.

Image credit Moby Games.

The Adventures of Sidekick Carl, Part 17!

 It's my day off, so I polished off another installment of Sidekick Carl and the Nine-Foot Woman, with more world-building nobody asked for. As usual, here's the links for the first and previous installments.

The stage could have been at any convention center. Around the edges were tables for a banquet, and in the center was a round table with seats for a guest of honor. Audrey sat to one side, her golden pelt vibrant. On the stage, her two mates danced and sang karaoke to a song titled “Heartbeat”.  The one with the red pelt sang the verses, made even raunchier that the original, while her piebald mate pranced and leaped, at least twice his 3-foot height. They sang together on the chorus, which had been replaced with the refrain, “AUDREY!” As they sang her name, they descended from the stage back to her side. The crowd laughed and cheered, while Audrey herself literally sank down in embarrassment, her pointed ears flattened in embarrassment. The camera closed in, and it became clear she was quivering with stifled laugher.

Carl paused the video as Dana entered. She gave a smile as she slid in beside him on the dinette. “She hates that song,” he said. He pushed play. Then the camera followed the piebald mate through a backflip that carried him all the way back to the stage.

* * *

 

The figure could have been considered beautiful; there was no longer any question that it was female. She was tall, slender and very pale, with the beginnings of dark hair coming out of her scalp. Her body was encased in a form-fitting suit, that wasn’t quite transparent. John Carter showed no embarrassment as he examined her in full view of his wife. “It’s been two weeks,” he said. “Has she said anything?”

 

“Nothing of consequence,” Lauren said. “We have her ID, of course, not 100% but there’s no real doubt. We learned a little more. We tried telling her what we knew. She didn’t deny anything.”

“Don’t worry about that,” John Carter said. “What have you learned about her capabilities?”

 

“Without the suit we pulled her out of, nothing we can’t deal with,” she said. “Unusually dense muscle tissue with likely nanomotor enhancement, probably no more than 10 times baseline. Heavily enhanced bone structure, mostly where her immune system would have been. There’s a sort of drill in her right pointer finger we haven’t found a way to deactivate without taking the finger off, probably a few more surprises.”

“Can she escape?”

“The holding cell is a Grade 5 clean room,” Lauren said. “The real question is whether she’d survive if we let her out.”

John nodded, but frowned. “But that’s still not the real problem, is it?” he mused. “She came in with a plan that should have had no chance of working, and that’s par for the course. But then her chances of getting out were even worse… and she just didn’t care.”

Lauren smiled. “Do you think she’s waiting for someone to break her out?”

He frowned again. “No. It’s more like… like…” He looked at his wife, and said what he knew she could have told him herself.  “She feels safer here than anywhere else.”

* * *

The RV screen showed Audrey in a hospital room with her mates. The piebald mate waved from his hospital bed with a mechanical arm. “He might have regenerated the arm,” she said, “but there was too much cauterization from the plasma bolt.” The call went on with what was small talk for her and Carl. Then there was a call from Hombre Acero, who proved more subdued than his public persona yet still outgoing and talkative. At a cautious mention of the assassin who had killed one of his successors, he only shook his head and spoke of something else.

At the end of the calls, Carl turned back to Dana. “I’m really sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” Dana said. “I accepted the risks when we got together. So did you.”

The RV was in a wilderness area 1500 miles from the convention center where they had married. They had spent their honeymoon moving from place to place. There was no illusion that they remained incognito to the Agency, though John Carter insisted that there was no tracking device on the vehicle. It was about an hour later when he knocked at the door. He went straight to the latest information on the assassin.

“Her name is Jennifer Hartnell,” Carter said. “She was a researcher working on Spontaneous Immune Failure; picked up the virus that caused it in a lab accident. She had also worked with Dr. Hydro when he was still on the grid. There were rumors they were more than colleagues, but you know what the Doctor was like. She disappeared 15 years ago. It was ruled a likely suicide.”

Carl nodded. “Constructor knew about her,” he said. “He thought he might have kidnapped her. Now that I think about it, I wonder if he connected Borgus to Dr. Hydro. Is it his tech?”

“Yes,” Carter said. “There’s no question at all, though some of what we found was different or even improved. The core is the same, nanites inside a human host, protected by an airtight suit. In most ways, it’s intermediate between Dr. Hydro’s exosuit and your gear.”

“I heard she killed an Hombre Acero,” Dana cut in. “What happened there?”

Carter shook his head. “The one she fought was only in the armor because of what happened to the first two,” he said. “He only had limited training, and he was already sidelined for his temper. When she hijacked a ship with volatile cargo, he went out while we were still weighing our options. We still don’t know exactly what happened, but something lit up the cargo, and the whole ship blew in half. Odds are, it was the Hombre who made the mistake.”

“What about the Toxo Warriors?” Dana said.

Carter shook his head. “Still nothing,” he said. “For all we know, they might not have been involved at all. Not that I believe it.”

“Well,” Carl said, “at least you only needed a Class 5 team.”

“Oh, what we had was a Class 4 response at best,” Carter said. “We just got lucky.”

“Wait a minute,” Dana said. “What do you mean by `response’?” She gave a deeper frown. “You don’t really talk about the `Class’ thing, do you? So what does it really mean?”

Carter looked at Carl, then laughed. “Do you want to explain, or should I?” he said. Carl just shrugged. “Well, here’s the thing. We really don’t have a classification system, as such. Just think of the variety, and you’ll see why. There’s the Toxo Warriors, there’s the Hombres Aceros, there’s Tall People like you, there’s Basiliskus, Dr. Hydro, Captain Thunder, goddamn Abl C’Doen, and what do you really have in common? Nothing.  The only useful standard is what it would take to stop you.”

He reopened a laptop and opened up a chart. “Classes 1 to 3, even 4 are pretty much high normal,” he said. “They might be smarter, stronger, or just hear voices in their head that are usually right. Still, they can be met one-on-one or even defeated hand to hand, with skill and a lot of luck.  Class 5 is where things get harder. It really means multiple abnormalities, like strength and a healing factor. They can be defeated, especially by an attack in great numbers, but it’s a lot harder. At Class 6, it takes a paramilitary team with heavy weapons to do real damage. That’s where Constructor was rated, but he was really more like 5 or even the high end of Class 4. By Class 7, even that won’t do much good if you can’t find a magic-bullet weakness. That’s where most of the heavy hitters leveled off, including Basiliskus and Captain Thunder. Class 8, you could still probably kill them with conventional weapons, but the kind that would level a good chunk of a city. By the way, that’s where we put Dr. Hydro and Carl.”

Dana gasped and turned to Carl. “They put you 2 classes higher than Constructor?”

“Yeah,” Carl said reluctantly, “but only because of how hard it is to kill me.”

“That’s enough to put you high on our index, believe me,” Carter said. “Most places in the world, you could walk in and make people take orders by the time they ran out of ammo. You’re just too nice a guy to try it.”

Dana turned back to Carter. “Are there higher classes?” she pressed.

“You bet,” the agent said. “But it’s mostly theoretical, or hypothetical. By Class 9, you’re in gods and demons territory. Galaxarian got the rating, Gravatar came close. Look at the old stories of the demigods, and you’ll have the type. Nearly invulnerable, ageless, but still enough in our world to be seen and touched. At class 10, even that’s not a given; you’re dealing with interdimensional, paranormal, what have you. The only confirmed example is Abl C’Doen. They would be no different from a Class 1’s hallucinations, if we didn’t have sightings by multiple people at once.”

He sighed. “What we can’t take into account is personality. The supervillains that were Class 8 and up mostly just got themselves killed before Carl got started. They were powerful enough to take on the world, except they never waited to make their move. But the Toxo Warriors were barely at the threshold between 1 and 2, and we barely managed to prove they exist. Then with Constructor, the biggest real strength he had was that he didn’t look like a superhuman. I’m sure Carl could tell you, how many times people were looking for him and then just walked right past him. And when you get up to 9 and up, the real question is if they want to be found. You either have a demigod fighting an armor division in the suburbs of Old DC, or you’ve got myths, legends and ghosts nobody can pin down. Almost all the leads we ever ran down were like that, stories from far away and long ago. Most of them turned out to be mid-class superhumans who went native, if we could find them at all.”

Carl nodded, then asked cautiously, “Do you think there’s a chance C’Doen could come back?”

Carter just laughed. “The one good thing about `him’, he started at the top. If he does turn up, we’ll know.” Carl nodded again, and managed a laugh.

Just then, the video phone uplink rang. When the picture came up, it showed Dana, looking mildly surprised. “Carl!” she said. “I’m so glad I got through! Oh, and John? Well, I guess this is for you, too…”

They exchanged peasantries while she composed herself. It was still bare minutes before she got to her point. “’I just found out something new,” she said. “I really should have a long ago, but I never took the time because, well, it didn’t seem important.” She took another breath, and said, “I know who the Toxo Warriors were.”

The Rerun Review: The one with George C. Scott

 

Title: A Christmas Carol

What Year?: 1984

Classification: Weird Sequel

Rating: Pretty Good! (5/5)

 

As I write this, I’m going into the final week of my second year with this blog, and confronted with the fact that I still haven’t turned any of this into things that would either reach a wider audience or earn actual money. Still, because OCD tendencies are the only reason I get anything done, I want to get in one more full week before I withdraw and reevaluate. In the process, I decided it was time to get back to something I had previously considered as a feature, with a name that actually made sense. Here is the reboot of Space 1999, which in turn was the abortive spinoff to Space 1979, and the first up is my favorite version of the most overadapted work in the history of modern media. I present A Christmas Carol, the George C. Scott edition, which a lot of people seem to forget was originally a TV movie.

Our story begins with the familiar figure of Scrooge, meaner and more rightwing than usual as he abuses his employees and refuses charity to his fellow man. Things take a turn for the odd when his former partner Jacob Marley appears, and as the introduction reminds us, Marley is dead (though he still uses the door). Marley warns Scrooge that his miserly ways have earned the sentence of existentialist damnation, wandering the Earth burdened by the chains of his ill-used wealth. Yet the unspecified forces of the universe have given him one chance for redemption; he is to be visited by three spirits that will show him the past, present and a bleak possible future. We all know the ending, but it’s all in the journey as Scrooge learns the price of greed and the power of Christmas!

A Christmas Carol was a 1984 film directed by Clive Donner, a veteran British filmmaker who had previously worked on the 1951 Alistair Sims adaptation Scrooge. The production was made by Entertainment Partners Limited and aired by CBS, with sponsorship from IBM; Fox subsidiary 20^th Century Studios was credited as distributor. The film starred the late George C. Scott as Scrooge and Time Bandits’ David Warner as Bob Cratchit, with Nigel Davenport (see… Phase IV?) as Scrooge’s father and Edward Woodward (d. 2009) as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Much of the filming took place on location in the English town of Shrewsbury. The film aired to very positive reviews, and received numerous further TV airings as well as VHS and later DVD releases. The rights to the film were retained by George C. Scott and later his estate, which reportedly limited its TV distribution to syndication on local stations prior to its first airing by AMC in 2009. The rights are believed to be currently held by Disney (make your own joke). The movie is currently available on Blu Ray and in digital format.

For my experiences, my strongest memory is that even as a kid, I was getting tired of it. I had been exposed to the original Dickens text, and loved it. I had seen what was then the “classic” treatment starring Sims, and had no complaints. I was already starting to be influenced by it in my interests and my own fiction. But there were so many other mediocre and flat-out bad treatments, especially in media supposedly for kids, that I found the tale as much of a humbug as Scrooge did Christmas. As far as I can further recall, I encountered the present version at a fairly late date in the middling 1990s, and in hindsight, I think this was what redeemed the story for me. As I have seen its stature grow greatly in the years since, I’ve come to suspect that the viewing public went through the same cycle. The current generation may not remember just how oversaturated the market was by my time (and I’ll give further credit to the Muppets adaptation as a “kids’” version that doesn’t insult the source material or the kids’ intelligence), but this movie still remains as one that stood the test of time better than many lesser and some equal treatments of the same story.

Moving forward, one thing more I will say is that I got in the viewing for this one as a Christmas Eve “tradition” with an old tape, so I was adapting to kaka off the bat. What really stands out from the start is that this by all means “looks” like a TV movie, though the shots and production values are certainly well above average. I have to say, if one were to judge by the opening sequence, one would easily expect a very mediocre treatment among many. The music in particular is solidly in sentimental, second-hand nostalgia territory, and it will not get better. What merit there is comes from the genuine English town and the impressively somber weather. This will remain representative of the movie’s relative strengths and weaknesses, most noticeably in the visions of Christmas Past. There is power and authenticity here, straining against the familiarity of nostalgia several generations removed.

Meanwhile, the obvious driving force is Scrooge, suitably matched by the ghosts. Scott’s performance is so fierce as not to need further comment, beyond the particular emphasis on the deliberate references to Malthus and Spencer, truly the fascists and pseudoprogressives of Dickens’ day (see ZPG for my representative rant). What gets the story in gear and keeps it strong is the spirits. We get an early highlight with Marley, played to the hilt by Albert Finlay; I find it particularly amusing to compare his entrance with the very odd revenants of An American Werewolf In London. The Ghost of Christmas Present (played by Angela Pleasance, the daughter of Donald) remains strong through a sequence that otherwise slows things down a bit, while Woodward fully holds his own as the middle ghost. The finale reaches a point where many adaptations either excel or start to grind the gears, with the almost science-fictional/ dystopian vision of the future.  (Am I the only person to think the Ghost of Christmas Future and the Terminator are kind of the same thing?) Here, in my assessment, the story just holds its momentum, which is more than good enough. The ghost itself is vaguely cliched, though the counterpart that stands out the most to me is the obviously far later Witch King of Lord of the Rings (see my review/ rant on the cartoon). What keeps things moving is Scott, acting surely far more oblivious than the character really is as he is brought face to face with his fate.

That already brings me to the “one scene”, and I’m going to go with the savage high point of the vision of Christmas Present. We’re already well into the fine and forceful performance by Woodward, evidently a stage and actor and musician who extended his talents to a career as a TV/ character actor. His contribution is aided throughout by a strong physical presence, which gets unsettling if you try to figure out of there’s some practical effect trick to his height. (Apparently, he and Scott were about the same height.) In the midst of the Cratchits’ merry Christmas dinner, Scrooge asks the spirit if Tiny Tim will live. When the spirit matter-of-factly prophecies that Tim will not live to see another Christmas, Scrooge is clearly moved and distressed, incidentally showing that he isn’t entirely without emotion or empathy. The Ghost counters with his own Malthusian line about surplus population. Then he gets as in-your-face as a political comedian as he warns the rich man about judging who is “surplus”, with a line I can picture coming straight from the Evil Possum: “It may be that in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less deserving of life than millions like this poor man’s child!”

In closing, what I really come back to is the impact of the story on my own writings, and whether I’ve been in the camp that Scrooge represents. A major part of the story’s “point” is that even before his redemption, Scrooge is not so monstrous as to let his social-Darwinist leanings suppress empathy for humanity. But then the flipside is that short-term charity and half-hearted liberalism are as destructive as any philosophy that would oppose them; in short, it is a polemic against hypocrisy. For myself, I conceived the tales of the Evil Possum and the exotroopers as anti-war and anti-eugenics, whether or not they succeeded as such. (I don’t know if I could recreate or even reconstruct how sadistic, banal and utterly terrible the Possum’s original enemies were.) But then, I did all of it while voting straight Republican right up to relatively recent developments. Maybe I’ve changed, maybe I’ve just gotten less apologetic about being complicated, and my further self-defense is that the old-time eugenicists and modern-day reactionaries both hardly cared about consistency or coherence in their ideas or actions. At least it can be said that people do indeed change, for better or for worse, even if few if any do so as totally as Scrooge. And with that, I’m done for another day.

Image credit Countdown Until Christmas.

Rogues' Roundup: Christmas robot toys!

 

It's time for yet another Christmas post, and as you might guess, I have a big backlog of junk I could use. The big surprise is that a lot of this is stuff people just give to me, or at least things I got in "white elephant" exchanges. For this post, I also did some maintenance and even took a bit of video. To kick things off, here's the central exhibit and I believe the first one I got, a jazz reindeer!

Legalize it! Mistletoe, that is...

For the history, I think I got this in 2016 or so. When I got him, he would play "Jingle Bells" and do a sort of dance. The tag that would give the usual date and manufacturer's info appears to have been deliberately removed. To my further recollection, there was some extra stuff tacked on that I removed. However, I never seriously doubted that the saxophone came with the figure, though at this point, it's only securely attached to his mouth, which makes it look like an oversized pipe. He proved to pose the most issues when I tried to get him to work, something I'll get to further in. For now, here's one more pic with generic Godzilla. The big guy's taller, but not by a lot.

"Oh yeah, I was tripping every frame of Godzilla vs. Hedorah..."

Next up, we have the most elaborate gimmick of the group. It's a regular dancing reindeer, except it also has a light-up fan that spells out a holiday message. I got it in a box I lost track of. A tag says "Newtoys", but doesn't give a date. Here's the toy.

And here's the other two. The first is a more or less realistic dog that "sings" and rolls around. A tag gives the company name Kids For America and the date 2007. The other is a more cartoony character that swings his head around to the tune. A tag on one ear gives the product name Puppy Precious, and advertises that it plays 10 songs, but I can find no other info. Both make a barking sound tuned to the music. Another common denominator is that they are very overpowered, which I will get to. Here's a couple pics, with a Marx Soviet soldier for reference, because we haven't had giant Marx lately.

"Gaahh! Capitalist consumerist killer robot attack dog!"

With this lineup in places the real question was if I could get them to work. I set up a work area on the Couch Mark 2, got out a bunch of batteries, and set things up to upload to my misbegotten Youtube channel. As alluded above, the big reindeer required the most work. At the start, he would play a few notes of music without doing anything else. With a change of batteries, he would play music again, but didn't move. I turned the neck and joints, and gave it a few more tries, and eventually he did start dancing again. Unfortunately, he's very prone to falling over, an issue I had noted previously. Here's the before and after.

The reindeer with the fan posed a different kind of problem. A change of batteries got it to play and light up. The real difficulty is that the head isn't clear of the fan. To get a good recording, I had to adjust the head to keep the fan from snagging. Here's the Youtube clip.

Singing Reindeer with LED fan! - YouTube

The kaiju dog proved to be the easiest to deal with. The Dogzilla is billed as singing and dancing, but he really just swings the giant head back and forth like he's shaking a rat. Here is his big moment.

Then for the finale, I had the rolling dog. I had him working before the others, with just a change of batteries. Most if not all the action is from the massive tail and what must be a very powerful motor. I quickly learned not to hold onto the toy during a demonstration, because getting your hand in the way borders on painful and certainly can't be good for the toy. For this post, I set up a squad of the giant Marx figures for a little fun. The humanity...

Vintage Marx figures vs. Christmas robot dog! - YouTube

And with that, I'm done for today. Merry Christmas; life and light; and praise to the Logos made flesh. That's all for now, more to come!

Animation Defenestration: The one that rotoscoped Tolkien

 

Title: The Lord Of The Rings

What Year?: 1978

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity

Rating: For Crying Out Loud!!! (1/4)

 

In the course of my reviews, I have mentioned occasionally my one actual “rule”: Every film I review gets one viewing within 3 days of when I write the review. This has in fact had a significant impact on the lineup of my reviews, as there have been more times that I finally punted on a movie because the alternative was watching the whole damn thing again. What might seem counterintuitive is that I haven’t pushed the limits that often, especially with movies I planned to review in advance. By the time I get to the point where I’m outright fudging, I usually find even my recollections start to get hazy around the edges. Once in a while, however, a little time is just enough to give me some distance to reflect. With the present review, I have a case and point, a movie I had long been familiar with but didn’t expect to get hold of as soon as I did. I present The Lord of the Rings, the animated version, from none other than my arch enemy Ralph Bakshi. Or, BAAAKSHIII!!!

Our story begins with an introduction with what will be for anyone in this blog’s demographic the familiar story of Middle Earth, the war of elves and men with the evil Sauron, and the adventure of Bilbo Baggins. As the story gets in gear, Gandalf reveals that the overpowered plot device of The Hobbit is really the One Ring, an artifact that concentrates the evil powers of Sauron in one package. It falls to Bilbo’s nephew Frodo to destroy the Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, and the dawning realization for the viewer will be that they’re really going to try to tell a good chunk of the trilogy. In the process, we will see the invincible Ring Wraiths, various orcs, the Balrog, the Ents (or one of them), and the Riders of Rohan, all brought to life with Bakshi’s trademark blend of odd character animation and freaked-out rotoscoping. But all you really need to know is that even though this ends with a whole book still to go, it does not tease a sequel!

The Lord of the Rings was the fifth film by Ralph Bakshi, based on the first two books of the series by J.R.R. Tolkien, from a script by fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle. The film was released a year after the fantasy film Wizards, though both films would have been in production by 1976. It was not related to The Hobbit and Return of the King, both made for television by Rankin Bass. Like Wizards, Lord of the Rings was made with a combination of animation, live-action and rotoscoping. It was one of the most expensive animated films, with a budget estimated at up to or over $8 million. The voice cast included Christopher Guard as Frodo, John Hurt (see The Plague Dogs) as Aragorn and  Anthony Daniels as Legolas. The film was undisputedly profitable, but was controversial among critics and fans. Plans for one or more additional films were cancelled, and specifically left unmentioned in the film and contemporary advertising. An action figure line was produced by Knickerbocker, with only 8 figures; the line suffered from limited distribution among other issues, with a significant part of their distribution apparently coming from mail order offers in comic books. The film has remained available on home video.

For my experiences, I grew up with Tolkien long before the Jackson trilogy came out (enough to model Zaratustra on the Witch King), and in hindsight, the art from sources like A Tolkien Bestiary had a greater impact on me than the books themselves. In my further recollections, I indelibly visualized the books as paintings and animation rather than flesh-and-blood “live action”, right up to reading the trilogy in college shortly before the first Jackson movie (see… Dead Alive???) came out. What’s striking as I think about it now is that the present movie had little if anything to do with it, though I’m sure I saw at least a small part of it at a very early age. What this further cements in my mind is that Bakshi was simply the wrong person for the job, for reasons that go far beyond my issues with his work. It’s the same problem I have considered regarding Tolkien and C.S. Lewis (especially after the Narnia movies came out); you don’t have to argue which one is “better” to see that asking either one continuing the other’s work would be an obviously and epically disastrous idea. (I’ll say this once: Lewis did not do “epic”.)

With that out of the way off the bat, I will be the first to admit that Bakshi handles this far better than he had any right to. To begin with, it’s astonishing how much of the books gets in here, and not just by passing mention. It clearly would have been better if he had been allowed to spread it out over two or three movies to flesh things out. As it stands, at the pace Bakshi manages (presumably with Beagle’s help), we could conceivably have gotten the whole damn thing done in the running time of a Peter Jackson extended edition. What’s downright unsettling is how well his style works, especially for the battles. The part that’s counterintuitive is that the rotoscoping and shadow-play silhouettes fall even further short of “realism” than conventional animation would have. What it provides instead, to very good effect, is an especially grim sort of stylization that would be almost inconceivable with more “modern” methods (the same rant I made in my Conan reviews). What was vaguely psychedelic in Wizards is a somber nightmare here, with bestial orcs shown nearly in monochrome except for their red eyes and purplish blood. (Honorable mention goes to the troll, seen only as a gnarly limb.) The high point is the Balrog, which I’m sure I remember from back when somehow. In cold blood, it’s underwhelming at best, but the presentation, the setting, and the buildup are every bit as valid as Jackson’s CGI monster.

You’ll already have guessed that there’s a big “con” coming, and it is simply this: The conventionally animated characters are awful and ugly, to a degree I neither expected nor can easily account for. The easy targets are the ones that don’t even look like the  books, egregiously Saruman, who goes through his one real scene in what looks like a Santa Claus suit. But there are many more that don’t depart from the books yet still look hideous, including virtually all the hobbits. Possibly worse are Aragorn, who just looks lumpish and seedy, and Gollum, who doesn’t get any favors from an excessively English voice performance. The absolute low point, however, are the Ring Wraiths, and this is where things get mindboggling. The Nazgul as described in the books could be animated with South Park construction paper cutouts and still be terrifying. These look as threatening as deliverymen and move like boys trying to sneak into a naughty movie (Fritz the Cat?). Things only get more frustrating when the rotoscoping is applied; it’s predictably and vastly better, yet still heavy on overcomplicated helmets and other details that are distractingly odd rather than threatening.

That still leaves the “one scene”, and even at the outer limit of the time I allow myself, there was one moment that stood out and still stays with me. In turn, it goes along with a deeper long-running vent. To me, the orcs of Tolkien are possibly the greatest “goons” in all media, rivaled only by the devils of Inferno and the gangsters of Robocop. What I find other adaptations and even casual synopses get wrong is that they are really very smart, often too much for their own good. At any rate, in the midst of a battle between the orcs and the Riders of Rohan, we get one good moment that captures this. While the orcs are being handily routed, one of the more clever specimens drags away their two hobbit captives. Only then, because there is never a situation that the orcs can’t actually make worse by thinking for themselves, does he finally try to figure out if they actually have the One Ring. The hobbits play this up by imitating Gollum (who they haven’t actually met) and muttering about the Precious. It’s enough to get the orc interested, but after just a few moments of this, the orc gets suspicious or irritated enough that he (?) justifiably decides to just kill them. It’s a good moment more faithful to the books than many more acclaimed scenes, but it’s already too little, too late.

In closing, what I come back to is a question I was pondering long ago, was there ever a time or a crew that could have made a “good” animated treatment of Lord of the Rings? I have already nominated Nepenthe, the crew behind Watership Down and Plague Dogs. Bill Tytla, the animator behind “Night On Bald Mountain” in Fantasia, might have done it if Disney could have brought him back from the grave. Other prospects would be into continental or eastern Europe, perhaps a freaky Czech like Svankmajer. (A stop-motion Gollum, possibly made from taxidermied remains? Don’t bother to run, you’ll just look like food…) In the end, the honest answer is that even in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, the era of animation that could tell an epic tale like Tolkien’s was passing, as demonstrated by the mess that was The Black Cauldron. To try it again now would mean a fresh start, perhaps in the style of Secret of Kells or The Red Turtle, ideally with a few more years of distance from Peter Jackson’s series. It still might happen, but then, we’re already in an oversaturated reboot market. The best tribute now would be something original yet in the spirit of Tolkien, which is what we kind of got with Willow. (I will definitely get to it.) The positive takeaway is that anyone can dream, and some will always find a way to make it reality. And with that, I’m done with this damn movie, and boy, am I glad.

Fiction: The Evil Possum prologue/ demo and adventure index

 Because I'm really bad at followup, I've just been getting around to editing the Evil Possum adventure that started this blog. In the process, I decided to write out something I had thought of before, a quick prologue to introduce the character, setting, and plot point or two I cut from my first draft because I didn't want to take extra space explaining them. (I had trouble enough already...) Here's the vignette that resulted, in case it wasn't clear enough this was supposed to be a spaghetti western. While I'm at it, there's links at the end.

The scene could be timeless, except for the shape of the participants. Four figures crouch around a table, peering intently at the cards in their hands and the crudely stamped coins on the table. Their whiskers gleam in the sunlight, and their tails twitch behind them. The cards are quite large, bigger than paperback novels in proportion to their clawed hands, and the printing is all black. After a moment, one of them squeaks in triumph. He reveals his hand to the other players, briefly silencing their chittering. But then, as he leans in to scoop up the pot, a card pops out of his vest. Teeth and red eyes flash. In a moment, the table is upended and the other patrons are engulfed in the brawl. When the door opens, the rest turn on the newcomer as a matter of instinct.

It took just a few busy moments for the newcomer to reach the counter, where a pair of the more grizzled patrons still sat on their barstools. The others mostly lay sprawled about the saloon floor. Two had departed through the windows. Another had exited through the door, without opening it in the process. The bartender looked up almost calmly at the figure before him. The newcomer stood a third again his height, topped by saucer-like ears and a slicked back mane that did not quite conceal a very high forehead. His right arm ended in a hook, the other was thickly muscled. The bartender was calm enough to further note that his clothes were made from the hides and pelts of creatures larger than even himself.

“I am looking for a town called Ninguna Parte,” the newcomer said. “Is there anyone here who can give me directions?”

It was one of the patrons at the bar who spoke up first. “Say, I know who you are,” he said. “I ‘eard you were ‘alfway across the Oldlands. They say you’re one of a kind, maybe the only one that ever was.” He started to rise, but his companion restrained him.

The bartender spoke up. “No, that’s not right,” he said, nose twitching. “There were others. Once.” Only then did he address the newcomer. “I know who you are. What you are, too. I’ll help you, any way I can.”

“Very well,” the newcomer said. “Then tell me, is there a town called Ninguna Parte? And if there is, how do I get there?”

It was the second patron who spoke. “’Tisn’t no town,” he said. “But there’s a place by that name, not too far off. If you follow the road that brought you here, if’n you came from the north and not the east, you’ll find an abandoned road. Go east on that, all the way to Hell’n’ gone, you’ll find the way to Ninguna Parte.”

The bartender nodded. “That’s right, as far as I know,” he said. “I’ve never been that way myself, but I’ve served people who were going there. Some of them came back.”

That was when the first patron did rise. “See, there’s something I can’t help thinking,” he said as he rounded the corner of the bar. “They say you’re the only one of your kind, and then they say nobody ever beat you. So it seems to me, whoever takes you down is Number One for all time…”

The next moment, the newcomer lowered a booted foot. The patron had departed, leaving a hole in the wall behind him. The newcomer surveyed the other patrons. “Leave,” he said. It took bare moments for them all to comply, or haul away those who couldn’t. He turned wearily to the bartender. His hook sank abruptly into the countertop. “How often do you open a bottle of poison in the presence of your guests?”

The bartender backed away. Then, belatedly, he held up a very small bottle. “It’s insurance,” he said. “Same as you have. Only if you wouldn’t leave.” His eyes darted to a revolver at the newcomer’s hip.

“Fair enough,” the newcomer said. “Have you used it before?”

“I opened it once before,” the bartender said. “For Long John Raeder. I suppose you know about him. Then you’ll know why I didn’t have to use it.”

The newcomer nodded. “Show me,” he said succinctly. The bartender put a stopper in the bottle and handed it over. “It would not have harmed me,” he said, then amended, “Not in a quantity I could not taste.” He set it on the counter.

“I will go now,” the newcomer said. “I suggest you return to the north. This place does not suit you.”

Within a day, the bar would be sold, for a tidy profit. For the remainder of his career, everyone would say the bartender was the most fearless of all in his line of work. The only time anyone asked, he just said that he had met the Unconquered King, and the questioner never came to his establishment again.

And here's the full link list for the 1st draft of the adventure:

Part 1 The original intro.

Part 2 The overlong exposition, introducing a vehicle I would have cut just to tow something else.

Part 3  The 127 Hours homage, so tasteful you might not figure out on your own.

Part 4 The least read chapter!

Part 5 The most read chapter after the intro, where the Possum crashes a human church!

Part 6 The final showdown, in a drainpipe under a church

Part 7 The twist ending I assumed was obvious, if anyone read it!

And why not the "sequel", the Evil Possum Vs. The Eurypterids, which is kind of a Die Hard knockoff?

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6 

Part 7

Finale!

The Legion of Silly Dinosaurs: Sketchy MPC reissue/ bootlegs?

 

It's the weekend, and since I already did a movie review, it's time for another dino blog! This time, I have a new acquisition that I still had backlogged a little while. About a month ago, I put the only bid on a lot that looked a little too good to be true. What I got for the money was the most suspicious thing since my Zombi/ Dawn of the Dead Blu Ray, yet still unquestionably good. Since we haven't had many Timmee sightings lately, here's a lineup of the lot with the Battle Mountain!

The backstory here is that this was offered as a mixed lot of MPC and Marx dinos, without a lot of specifics about provenance. My order arrived in what proved to be a sealed bag. I quickly confirmed the majority were indeed MPC sculpts (see the Odds and Ends post), many of them based on Marx designs. (The Dinosaur Toys Collectors Guide overview is as good a resource as any.) Here's the largest of the actual dinos, a parasauralophus with a kind of kung fu pose and a clear knockoff of the Marx second-version T. rex.

There's really not a lot to say about these. The hadrosaur is dated yet elegant, and still mostly makes sense. The rex, on the other hand, just looks goofy, like a Cretaceous redneck uncle. But it serves as a further horrifying reminder that the Marx rex was also the basis of the patchi Hideous Abomination, previously sighted (but I just remembered never given my head-canon name) in the original patchisaur post and the Marx clones followup. Here's a lineup of the new guy and my matched Abomination pair. Note the irony that this looks even less realistic than the infamous freaky creatures the patch crew just made up. And... holy kaka... the patchi is bigger???

"Kill... me...." "No, me first!"

Then there's the main group, which also doesn't need a lot of comment. The Dimetrodons are clearly copies of the Marx non-dinosaur dino, which I've said plenty about; note that the plastic and casting still look consistent with a single manufacturer. The prosauropods are equally clearly based on the MPC plateosaur. Then there's the pterosaur, which I regret not having for my dedicated ptero post. It's nice to see a reconstruction of a pterosaur on the ground, and the pose is still plausible. The execution, however... just no.

And here's a hideous closeup.... 

"As a bonus, you can use my head as a pick ax to dig for fossils!"

Meanwhile, the most interesting things to come from this lot are from after the dinosaurs. The most promising are not one but two ground sloths, clearly copied from Marx. The main difference is that the chest is caved in instead of filled out, a cost-cutting measure previously seen with the Galaxy Laser Team turtle alien. There's also more subtle reduction of detail on the inside of the arms. Here's a couple pics with the Marx original.

Oo, the shiny!!!

Then there's one more thing, a sabertooth that apparently really was originally made by MPC. It stood out first and foremost as the only one that really looks like it was made separately from the rest of these. For overall quality, it's a mixed bag. It's big and decently detailed, and certainly an improvement on others (see the Timmee dino post). On the other hand, it's still unaccountably odd, which is really a common denominator with sabertooth reconstructions at all levels. The sabertooths didn't simply look like lions or tigers with bigger teeth (covered when I featured Homotherium in the Sidekick Carl adventures), but it's easy to go too far trying to make them look "different". On that scale, this feels like too much and not enough. Here's a pic with my best MPC acquisition before this, a diatryma, and one more closeup.

"What do you mean, I look like a giant beaver? Have you ever had to kill a giant beaver??!!"

And here's one more pic...

"Just remember the pledge; `I'm bootleg, and that's not bad...'"

That's all for now; more to come!