Further Assimilations

There's a "25 Things About Me" meme going around Facebook. Rather than just re-post it here, I was inspired by John Scalzi's column to write "20 Memories of Sci-Fi Movies of My Youth". Agreed, it's not quite a catchy a title, but I can live with that.

1) The first SF movie I saw in the theaters was "Star Wars", when I was seven. I remember seeing the commercials and thinking, "Meh, might be okay." Yeah, underestimated that one a bit. I do not remember "Episode 4" atop the opening crawl. The John Williams soundtrack spent long hours in the following months accompanying my pretending to blast TIE fighters from a laser gun turret.

2) The next one I recall seeing in the theaters was "Starcrash". This would only have been a good movie had I been old enough to enjoy Caroline Munro's outfit. I can't remember too much about it now, which may be a good thing, but I'm tempted to find a copy and enjoy the badness from a whole new perspective.

3) "Close Encounters" confused and frightened me, especially the part where Richard Dreyfuss starts losing his sanity. I didn't understand the ending at that age, either. In fact, to this day, there's a lot of unexplained bits having to do with the aliens, which is just as well; I suspect that any explanation from Spielberg would have been far lamer than the mystery.

4) While we're on such movies, I was mildly traumatized by the laser surgery and 'cannibal' robot in "Logan's Run", and I didn't understand the whole "Carousel" thing at all. That's another movie which is probably unwise to watch before puberty, especially in a midnight showing in a darkened house.

5) "Star Trek: The Motion Picture": Wow, new Klingon ships. Whoa whoa, new Klingons! Triple whoa: I am in love with the new Enterprise model! Okay, excellent, what's going to happen for the next ninety minutes? Oh. Not much. I'm glad I never took it in to my head to get myself one of that movie's uniforms.

( Fifteen more behind the cut )

So, that's a snapshot of my first 20 years of SF movie watching, and I am already remembering a bunch I left out. Maybe I'll hit this meme again if I remember anything interesting about the next bunch.

meiran posted this. It's silly, it's fanservice... and it's joyously wonderful.

Of course, the main reason that a Star Destroyer can blow the Enterprise to smithereens in a heartbeat is that while Trek pays lip service to power consumption realities, Star Wars doesn't even bother. It's fairly dubious that, with the given technology, a Next Gen shuttlepod could even manage orbital velocity (which they are seen to do several times in the series), but a similar-sized Star Wars vehicle is a hyperspace-capable deflector-shield-equipped combat craft. And the colossal power requirements of the Death Star are barely worth mentioning here.

Now, the high-tech of the Lucas universe is thousands of years older than that of Roddenberry's, so perhaps that's part of the explanation. But that just underscores the fact that we're comparing apples and oranges; the USS Dallas and Captain Nemo's Nautilus are both submarines, but I fear that our brilliant inventor is in for a tough time against computer-aided passive sonar and homing torpedoes.

Here be your over-analyzed geek argument of the day.

Everyone's been linking to this page, and it goes quite well with my uncontrollable urge to deeply analyze the underpinnings of the Star Wars movies. The page asks: which well-known movie character was the top field agent for the Rebellion between Episodes III and IV? It may not be who you'd think!

Eric Burns, of Websnark.com:

"I'd like to go into depth on the Jedi philosophy, on the core of Hubris that led to the Fall of the Jedi Order, on the nature of denial and of ossification, and on the ways that Qui Gon Jinn represented, thematically, a break from all that in his methodology which led step by step to the next three movies and the redemption of the Jedi in the Expanded Universe. I would. And I'd like to show how David Willis has highlighted this succinctly. I even accept that if I did so, I'd never, ever get laid again. Somehow, this thesis would cling to me like lack of hygiene and even geek grrls would pause upon seeing me, say "well, no. Not him," and move on."

Instead, he just points us to this "Shortpacked!" comic. Which is freaking hilarious.

Oh, and I've stumbled upon a site with more remixes of the Doctor Who theme than any sane soul would ever need.

Uggggh...

Brain is not working this morning. I am slow and stupid. Caffeine not helping. I just pray I get through the morning without embarassing myself too much.

I don't know what the problem is, I ate well yesterday and got 6 hours of sleep last night (okay, interrupted once or twice by the cat, but I thought I was used to that by now).

Failed to dodge a spoiler yesterday for "Revenge of the Sith", and it's disappointing. From all I hear, the movie's going to be quite good, but I'm disappointed that they chose to include this one little detail.

Last week's Enterprise, however, was all style, no substance, and yet it rocked. You don't need things to make sense when you're having this much fun. The last 6 minutes especially... oooh, nerdgasm. The 8-year-old fan in me was royally entertained. Can't wait to see tonight's; at least the show's going out fighting.

While thinking of sf/fantasy movies & TV today, it occurred to me that they're all more 'fun' if the fate of humanity hinges on the outcome. That's hard to do in episodic TV, of course, but Babylon 5 managed it, Deep Space Nine managed it, and Enterprise picked that up by its third season.

It's in all the fan favorites; The Original Series and The Next Generation didn't do it often, but when they did ("City On The Edge Of Forever", "Yesterday's Enterprise", "Best of Both Worlds') It was memorable. The best Trek movies did this: Khan had to be prevented from getting the Genesis Device; the Whale Probe had to be silenced; the Borg had to be prevented from disrupting First Contact).

Of course, the original Star Wars trilogy let us know practically from the opening crawl that 'humanity' (i.e., the Rebellion and a pair of leftover Jedi) was gambling everything on Anakin's twins; and in The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship knew that if they screwed this up, Middle-Earth was lost. Indeed, in SDF-Macross, the heroes almost blew it, and vast populations of human beings didn't live to see the end of the series.

This may have been part of the problem with the new Star Wars trilogy, and the first two seasons of Enterprise. There was just no urgency in what the characters did, since we knew, in broad strokes at least, what the eventual outcome was going to be. You can make up for that with compelling character drama, but we didn't get that either. (I know that Enterprise had a "Temporal Cold War" going on, but it was dull as dirt. We didn't care until the Xindi zapped Earth.) Voyager eventually became character-driven and somewhat interesting, but might have had far better legs in the beginning if it had tried the Space Battleship Yamato / B5: Crusade formula and had to deal with an urgent need to get home ASAP - whether or not their technology was initially up to it.

Perhaps that's something the writers of Trek Series 6 should think about. (I don't doubt there will be a Series 6, next year or 10 years from now.) Make us worried, maybe not from the first episode but before too long. Make us feel like the leads are fighting not just for themselves, but for us or our kids. Give us an investment.

I bet we fans will eat it up.

Yoda is clearly a much better teacher of the Jedi way than Obi-Wan Kenobi. One month with Luke, and Yoda had him ready to take out Darth Vader with a match-and-a-rematch; Obi-Wan had Anakin for, what, 7 or 8 years and never quite managed to teach him that "The vengeful destruction of entire communities is *bad*, dude."

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Spaceship engines I have invented (or helped invent):

The Noodle Drive - powered by the reaction between pasta and antipasto

The Arel Drive - twisting space by the efforts of anime fans and Nihonjin exchange students trying to get each other's consonants right

The Warped Drive - converting the libido of freshman college students to energy (still theoretical only, every piece of experimental equipment has melted or gotten icky)

Yes, most of these inventions did involve sleep deprivation.

KayLee is spending less time under my bed, and more time perched on the living room windowsill, or sitting at the sliding glass backyard door looking out. She still prefers to be curled tight against me when she can manage it. In fact, she loves it when I'm lying on my bed with my knees up, typing on my work laptop; she then slides under my raised knees and goes to sleep, effectively immobilizing me.

I have a working phone now. This is a major load off my mind, and a great savings to my cell phone bill.

I hear that they finally did fix Ben and Vader's lightsaber blades in the hangar bay fight of A New Hope. I'm going to end up doing what raininva wants to do with Dune: import all the versions into Final Cut Pro, and recut the thing myself. In an unrelated note, I hear that BitTorrent files of the old Original Edition laserdiscs are very hot right now for some reason.

Ben and Vader's: sounds like a light-side / dark-side ice cream.

Yeah, think I better have some lunch before my blood sugar drops any farther.

Well, I'm actually feeling a bit accomplished these days. This weekend, I shook the rust from my joints and did some serious database programming, teaching it how to build (static) webpages for manual upload. Today, I forced our server (which recently graduated from peer-to-peer file sharer to real server) to take an OS upgrade that it supposedly can't, getting better networking and filesystem performance from it.

( You had to 'force' it? )

Has anyone ever noticed that when a Jedi fights a lightsaber-wielding villain, things usually don't go well for the Jedi?
Ep.4 - Obi-Wan vs. Vader, ends with Obi-Wan dead.
Ep.5 - Luke vs. Vader, ends with everyone calling Luke 'lefty.'
Ep.6 - Luke vs. Vader, ends with Luke almost succumbing to the dark side, then lying on the floor sucking Sidious' energy bolts.
Ep.1 - Qui-Gon & Obi-Wan vs. Maul, ends with Qui-Gon dead and Obi-Wan having to train Anakin. (Yeah, that all works out well.)
Ep.2 - Obi-Wan & Anakin & Yoda vs. Dooku, ends with 'lefty' Anakin, injured Obi-Wan, defeated Yoda, and Dooku flying off in his ship cackling, pausing only briefly to skywrite "Surrender Dorothy" on his way out.

Okay, I exaggerate a bit, but if I were a Jedi, and saw the other guy light up a laser blade, I'd be pretty depressed about how things were going.