None Of The Above

posted by Tygrrius @ 10:13 AM

"Why is it when there's trouble we're the ones that get into it? I mean, there's a bar full of people and we're the only ones in jail."
--Monty Brewster (Brewster's Millions)

You know, I can probably trace my love of movies back to my grandmother. It must be something in the blood. When I was a kid, she worked the box office at the movie theater. Each summer, I'd get to see a few free movies when she'd let my little sister and I up into the balcony of the theater for a matinee show.

One of those movies was Brewster's Millions, starring Richard Pryor. This was 1985, so I already knew Pryor from Superman III a couple years before. In the movie, which also featured John Candy, Pryor had to spend $30 million in 30 days in order to inherit $300 million.

One of the ways he spent some of that money was by running a political campaign urging people to vote for "None of the above." The Film Frontier is all about escapism, so I usually try not to get too political here. However, the current slate of US Presidential candidates reminds me of Brewster's Millions again and again. "None of the above" sounds like a better and better choice.

Of course, theaters are totally different now. Balconies are gone, screens are smaller, and the teenie boppers at the box office are nothing like my grandmother. I miss her, and I miss those days.

* * *

I've kept up with the double-posting over to The Film Frontier's "Site B" backup blog. It's actually cool to see all of the news, reviews, and PGX postings intermingling instead of being on separate pages like they are on the main site. It doesn't take much to amuse me, though.

The backup blog currently only goes back as far as April 2008. I'm going to start filling in back-posts to Site B, though. It'll take awhile, as there are over 400 postings to cover, if you can believe that.

* * *

Speaking of the good old days, do you remember Little Debbie's Spice Cakes? They stopped making them years ago. They were always my favorite, which is probably why they had to stop production.

Because I'm just that kind of guy, I actually checked with McKee Foods, owner of Little Debbie, about their missing Spice Cakes not too long ago. They advised me that they were discontinued due to low sales and suggested I find another favorite Little Debbie snack. Sorry, that's not going to happen!

Maybe someday, McKee's marketing department will wake up and see the potential goldmine of a campaign based on bringing back Little Debbie's original snack cake - even if "for a limited time only."

I'd buy the stores out and freeze them for posterity ("I was saving that Spice Cake!"). Until then, my favorite will have to be "None of the above" as far as their current selections go.

Do You Remember This Saturday Morning Show?

posted by Tygrrius @ 8:49 AM

[3/25/2008, Update: I found it! See comments section.]

"The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time."
--Friedrich Nietzsche

Over a year ago, on this very blog, I posted some memories of Saturday morning cartoons. While I remember a lot of my favorites, today I'm stuck trying to remember one specific show. I've searched imdb and wiki, to no avail. I'm sure it's there; I'm just overlooking it.

Since I can't find it, I thought I'd send out the sketchy details that I remember to the brain trust and see if any of you out there in web land can help me.

Though it may have been produced earlier, I watched this Saturday morning show somewhere between 1982 and 1984. I believe it was a mix of both live action and animation. There may have been a kids-themed news segment to it.

The part I remember most, though, is an animated globe of the Earth with blue arms coming out of his sides and a face and big nose right on the globe. Or maybe he was supposed to actually be Earth and not a globe. In any event, he asked you to write in to join a pen pal group.

I actually did this and corresponded for about two letters with a blond-haired kid named Ray C. in some other state, possibly Minnesota. [I actually remember his full name after only two letters from him. I have a weird memory like that, though. Despite the fact that I can't remember the actual show!]

I know this isn't a lot to go on, but does anyone remember the name of this Saturday morning series that aired in the US? I figure the best clues to go on are the animated Earth/globe and the pen pals bit. Post a comment below or drop me an e-mail if you remember.

Of Movies And Cubes

posted by Tygrrius @ 5:02 PM

"Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information which is how I got a good job in journalism."
--Dave Barry (Dave Barry is from Mars and Venus)

I need a break from what I'm supposed to be working on right now, so I thought I'd come by and ramble on for a bit about nothing in particular.

It's funny, when this year started, I was most excited about seeing Star Trek XI, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Dark Knight, and Get Smart, in that order. Now, the list has almost turned upside down.

Star Trek XI was bumped to next year, so that's out of the running for now. The Indy IV teaser trailer seems to have deflated some of my enthusiasm for that movie. I'm still looking forward to it, just not as much for some reason. The death of Heath Ledger has dampened my enthusiasm for The Dark Knight.

That leaves Get Smart as my most anticipated movie for this year. All of the clips I've seen from this one, in both trailers, have looked fantastic. Both Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway seem to be taking the right approach to the characters. Who knows what I'll be doing three months from now, but I sure plan to find the time to have a seat in a theater that weekend to check this one out.

Of course, there is also the unexpected gift of Star Wars: The Clone Wars this year, but that animated movie just doesn't take the spotlight away from Get Smart for me. Besides Star Trek in 2009, a movie I'm really waiting for is the sequel to Superman Returns - maybe 2010.

* * *

Do you know that I have two, count them, two Rubik's cubes here on my desk? One is the standard version and the other is a miniature keychain version. Both share one thing in common, though: They are unsolved. They will likely remain that way, too, as the only reliable way I've found of solving a Rubik's cube is to disassemble and reassemble it. (Sure, you could take the stickers off and reapply them, but that's not a very elegant approach.) The only other way I've found is to work step-by-step through a solution book or site. It's a lot more efficient to just disassemble it, though.

I found that trick in a solution book I read when I was a kid. I also worked through the manual solution portion, but found the disassembly trick to be a lot more convenient. It all comes down to the fact that, when it comes to Rubik's cubes, I'm pretty much an idiot. I've never been able to beat the cube without cheating. I doubt that will change anytime soon. Maybe I should get one of those new 2x2 versions - but what if I can't even solve that? Better not to know.

How To Spend An Extra Day

posted by Tygrrius @ 11:05 AM

"The only thing worse than watching a bad movie is being in one."
--Elvis Presley

Finally, February is over and spring is almost here. Now that we've made it to another month, it's time for me to once again apologize for neglecting this section of The Film Frontier. I've had a hard enough time keeping up with all of the news lately, much less add in reviews and my idiosyncratic thoughts on life.

Though I'm no fan of February, it does have one redeeming factor: Leap Day. I spent part of 2008's extra day watching Superman Returns. February 29 is Superman's kinda-sorta birthday, after all. It's been nearly a year since I last watched this movie and I continue to be impressed by it. I hope that both Bryan Singer and Brandon Routh will return for a sequel within the next two or three years. I've seen rumors on both sides, but no confirmation either way.

I also watched some Star Trek episodes on Leap Day. No real connection there, I just felt like watching. I watched the original versions of "The Apple," "Mirror, Mirror," and "The Deadly Years." Turns out that "The Apple" is also this weekend's episode of Star Trek: Remastered. This means I won't be watching, though, because "The Apple" isn't an episode I could watch twice in the same weekend.

No Star Wars on Friday, but I did sneak in an Elvis movie - Harum Scarum. Definitely not one of his best, but interesting to me as an Elvis fan since I haven't watched it in a long time. Mary Ann Mobley sure made a beautiful princess in 1965. Earlier that same year, she had a smaller role in another Elvis movie, Girl Happy.

When I was a kid, the local UHF syndicated station seemed to show Elvis movie marathons nearly every Saturday afternoon. Coming from a family of Elvis fans, I spent a lot of time watching them. I won't lie to you and tell you that Elvis made the best movies, but most of them do have a quirky fun about them. He had a real gift for comedy that a lot of the mainstream really doesn't know about. Check out Viva Las Vegas, for instance.

Elvis made 31 movies as an actor, but some of them seemed to turn up on those Saturday afternoons more often than others. Harum Scarum and Easy Come, Easy Go, for instance received a lot more airplay back then than, say, Jailhouse Rock or Change of Habit.

When the UHF station wasn't playing Elvis movies, it filled Saturday afternoons with Godzilla and other monster movies instead. I watched a lot of those, too. My favorite of these was Godzilla vs. King Kong-mostly because of the epic nature of such a bout. Elvis never made any monster movies, but it sure would've been cool to see him take down Godzilla with a karate chop and then nurse the beast's wounds with a song in Elvis vs. Godzilla. You know, maybe I watched too much TV as a kid.

Hey, I wonder if Quantum Leap fans use Leap Day to celebrate their franchise? There's even an Elvis connection to Quantum Leap. The last episode before the series finale featured Sam leaping into the body of none other than Elvis Presley, on the brink of being discovered. Though filled with inaccuracies regarding Elvis, it's still a fun episode.

One neat bit of trivia is that when Sam looks in the mirror to see the face of the body into which he has leaped, Elvis is portrayed by Michael St. Gerard - who had also played him on the short-lived but excellent ABC television series Elvis. He also appeared as Elvis in the Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire. St. Gerard actually looks enough like Elvis that my local paper once accidentally put a small picture of him next to an article about the real Elvis, with the caption: "Presley."

Due to an unforeseen circumstance, I had the day off on Leap Day this year (though I probably would've requested it off anyway), but doesn't it seem that Leap Day should be a worldwide holiday for everyone?

Does your employer or school really deserve an extra day of your life? It's the perfect day to catch up on time, life, and movies. Let's start the Leap Day Holiday movement right here on The Film Frontier. We'll all work really hard on it - every four years or so.

Lunchtime On Memory Lane

posted by Tygrrius @ 1:56 PM

The official Star Wars site recently ran a great article about the first Star Wars lunchbox, which hit store shelves 30 years ago. The metal lunchbox from Thermos was actually one of the first available pieces of Star Wars merchandise.

In 1977, I was still three years away from entering school, so I never owned the Star Wars lunchbox featured in the piece. Still, it brought back memories of those early school days. You see, I used to love "Back to School" shopping and one of the main reasons was selecting a new, metal lunchbox each year.

My very first lunchbox, for kindergarten, was Peanuts. This was 1980, though the design itself dates back to the 1960's. Here's the best picture I could find of one online. As far as I've been able to tell, the 1960's version had a predominantly yellow background on both sides of the box. A 1970's version had a predominantly red background on both sides of the box. If I recall correctly, mine had red on one side of the box and yellow on the other. The cartoons were the same, though, on all three variations.

I can actually remember my first lunch in kindergarten. I was all ready with my Snoopy lunchbox and thermos. I had already practiced eating out of it once at home. But the freshly prepared home lunch being placed into the lunchbox and then eaten immediately wasn't a true test, as I was about to find out.

I remember being quite disappointed on that first real lunch. My ham and cheese sandwich tasted funny (I had never eaten one at room temperature before). And my cherry Kool-Aid in my thermos was...ick...warm. As awesome as those lunchboxes were, the thermoses never seemed to be very good at keeping things cool.

I unfortunately don't remember all of my lunchboxes in order, but I'm pretty sure the next one was Popeye. I think it was for 1st grade, though it may have been for the second semester of kindergarten. Much like reading cereal boxes in the morning, these colorful lunchboxes provided much entertainment at lunchtime.

In 2nd grade, my lunchbox was The Muppet Show. I was catching this classic show in reruns and loved it. I had grown up watching Sesame Street, so The Muppet Show was a natural fit. Plus, I always hoped that I would see that episode with Luke Skywalker, Artoo, and Threepio again. (Incidentally, season 2 of The Muppet Show was recently released on DVD. The Star Wars episode was season 4.)

I've mentioned before that I loved video games, especially Pac-Man. Somewhere along the line, I had a Pac-Man lunchbox. If I had to guess, I would say 3rd grade. I even had a Pac-Man board game, which involved a lot of marbles but didn't waste as many quarters. Though it may sound like an anachronism, the Pac-Man board game was actually a lot of fun.

Remember Heathcliff? That other orange cat. I even had a Heathcliff lunchbox at some point. This was probably when I was watching the afternoon version of his cartoon. "Heathcliff just won't be outdone, playing pranks on everyone."

Incidentally, though a fan, I'm not a lunchbox collector or expert. For more information be sure to check out Lunch Box Pad, which appears to be the definitive online resource on the subject.

You may notice, that's five lunchboxes so far and no sign of Star Wars, Superman, or Star Trek. Those lunchboxes were elusive when I was a kid! I never found a Star Wars lunchbox until 3rd or 4th grade, a plastic one for Return of the Jedi.

Plastic really was the ruination of lunchboxes. By 4th grade, all of the metal ones were gone and replaced by their inferior, plastic counterparts. I can remember one more lunchbox before I started brown-bagging it, and it was plastic, too, for Masters of the Universe.

But a sticker slapped on the side of an otherwise generic plastic box just wasn't the same as the intricately detailed lunchboxes of the past. Another American art form was gone, and school lunches would never be the same.

How To Survive Nuclear Winter

posted by Tygrrius @ 12:01 AM

June 11, 2007. 2007. It still sounds so far in the future to me. Back in 1987, when I was about 12, I'm pretty sure I imagined we'd all have flying cars by now.

Space travel would be routine. Astronauts would have already visited Mars. Popular family vacation destinations would include an Earth-orbit space station and a moon base.

That is, assuming America and the Soviet Union had managed to avoid World War III. Nuclear war. Nuclear winter. I had no idea what these really were when I first heard the terms as a kid. I just knew they weren't good. And they were the only things that could rob us of the bright future promised by the 21st century, if we could just make it here alive.

It wasn't until high school in the 1990's that I really began to somewhat comprehend the enormous power of nuclear weapons. I took a semester-long 20th Century US History class. I still remember the teacher's description of the United States dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II.

"Boom. Big boom. Biggest boom ever," he began. He then went into minute detail of what happened to the people directly killed and those who died from the fallout.

That threat of nuclear war was part of the culture of growing up in the 1980's. In third or fourth grade, I remember a clamor among my friends to watch a controversial TV movie called The Day After. Like most of those friends, I wasn't allowed to watch it. Little did I know that the director of that movie had also been responsible for Star Trek II just a year before.

A year or two later, CBS began airing The New Twilight Zone. We watched that one every week, and nuclear war played a pivotal part in the first episode's second segment.

An updated telling of the classic episode "A Kind of Stopwatch," "A Little Peace and Quiet" dealt with a woman who finds a necklace that can freeze time and affect everyone except her. She lives through an extremely loud life, so she uses this at first mostly to obtain some well-deserved quiet moments.

By the end, though, she begins to abuse this power. And anyone who's seen more than a few Twilight Zones knows that simply isn't allowed. When a couple of anti-nuke activists come to her door, she freezes time ("Shut up") , drags them outside, and lays them on their backs in the grass. She looks out the window, resumes time ("Start talking"), and laughs while they get up and run away in fright.

Later that night, war breaks out between the Soviets and the US. She stops time and walks outside to see a nuclear missile frozen overhead, waiting to unleash destruction as soon as she resumes time. By stopping time, she has finally obtained world peace. Lesson learned, in the Twilight Zone.

Anxiety over nuclear war was also part of the background of a children's novel I enjoyed back then called The Computer That Said "Steal Me." It was years before I had my own computer (courtesy of JS, as a matter of fact--look what you started, buddy), but I was always fascinated with them. In fact, by not having one, I had this misconception that they could do a lot more than they actually could, a la the series Whiz Kids.

Anyway, I remember being somewhat disappointed once I got into the novel to find that the "talking computer" was actually a computerized chess set. I remember one passage of the book describing jet fighter pilots who wore a patch over one eye so that if they were blinded by a nuclear flash, the other eye would still be usable.

The kid who stole the chess set used an elaborate method to pull off his scheme, involving a tape recorder alarm clock. His plan worked, but his guilty conscience caused him to try to secretly return the set. The return operation was poorly planned, though, and he is caught. Another lesson learned.

Of course, the nuclear threat was around long before the 1980's--that just happened to be the decade of my childhood. Even some episodes of the original Twilight Zone from the 1960's were obsessed with it. "Time Enough At Last" and "The Shelter" come to mind immediately, for instance, but there are plenty of others.

Now, the threat of nuclear war with Russia is not what it once was. Today's generations instead have the ongoing threats of terrorism, which can take many forms.

Hopefully, twenty years from now, someone will be writing about those crazy times in the 2000's when everyone was worried about terrorist attacks, a thing of the past. And hopefully, he or she will be doing so from the comfort of a talking, auto-piloted, flying car.

The All-New Challenge Of The Saturday Morning Cartoons

posted by Tygrrius @ 11:52 PM

Saturday mornings were some of the best times to be a kid. No school. No rush. And, most importantly, plenty of time for watching cartoons before starting the rest of the day.

Each Fall, a special about the new Saturday morning shows would air on a weeknight in prime time. Would last season's incarnation of Scooby-Doo be renewed? What arcade games would become cartoons this year? Would the Wonder Twins finally be replaced? These were the kinds of questions we worried about back then.

Though I enjoyed many Saturday morning shows, certain ones stand out amongst the others when I think back on those days. I've limited this Top Five list to Saturday morning cartoons that produced new episodes between 1977 and 1986, my main cartoon watching years. Well, okay, yeah, I still watch cartoons. But I watched them even more back then. Really.

#5: Pac-Man
I enjoyed this cartoon series almost as much as the video game itself. Unfortunately, the TV show is not one that really holds up over time. I still tend to visualize Pac-Man in this animated style, though. The game still holds up, at least. It is just as fun and frustrating as ever!

#4: Dungeons & Dragons
I was too young for this role-playing game at the peak of its popularity, but I do remember all of the fuss about it from certain adults at the time. The game was accused of being Satanic, and causing young people to separate from reality. This, of course, made for a great cartoon! I doubt it was very much like the game, but I definitely enjoyed the show.

#3: Smurfs
I seem to remember first becoming aware of the Smurfs through the tiny toys long before running across the cartoon. I know people make fun of it now, but I always loved this show. I even collected trading cards and other items from it, including a "Smurf Ahoy" game. A CGI movie version of Smurfs is apparently in the works.

#2: Jim Henson's Muppet Babies
Yes, the popularity of Muppet Babies led to such travesties as The Flintstone Kids, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, and Tom & Jerry Kids. But Muppet Babies itself was a great show, most noteworthy for its hilarious parodies of various movies, usually those of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. My favorite episode, of course, was one in which Kermit, Gonzo, Piggy, and the others make their own home video version of Star Wars.

#1: Super Friends
This one went by many titles over the years, but we always called it Super Friends. Featuring Superman, Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, and Aqua Man, this was by far my favorite cartoon. Despite its annoying aspects (Zan, Jayna, and Gleek), Super Friends embodied the best traits of the Justice League, the world's superheroes working together for the common good.

Honorable mentions
Other favorites included, in no particular order, Dragon's Lair, The All-New Popeye Hour, Pole Position, The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse, and Ewoks.

Yes, you read that right, I liked Ewoks. Much better than the Droids cartoon, anyway. And I didn't mind the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, either.

The places where they wore thin on even me were The Ewok Adventure: Caravan of Courage and Ewoks: The Battle for Endor, those really bad, live-action TV movies. And even in those movies, the Ewoks gave the most convincing acting performances.

Though not always a cartoon, I also must mention the ABC Weekend Specials series, hosted by Captain O.G. Readmore. One of my favorite episodes was "Homer and the Wacky Doughnut Machine," in which a boy soups up a doughnut machine at a diner and it won't stop making doughnuts. And a rich lady's diamond bracelet gets lost in one of them, which results in a contest to find it. Well, anyway, it was pretty good at the time. But I do, after all, like Ewoks. And Smurfs.

ABC Weekend Specials also featured Miss Switch the Witch, another favorite. Sure, lots of students may have suspected their teachers were witches, but Miss Switch really was one. Fortunately, she was a good witch--more like Glenda or Samantha Stevens than the Wicked Witch of the West.

Another favorite was "The Seven Wishes of Joanna Peabody" in which a girl from a poor family is granted seven wishes by a genie of sorts who lives inside her television. Of course, wishes never turn out quite like you expect. This was followed by a sequel, "The Seven Wishes of a Rich Kid," which was pretty much the same story except about a boy from a wealthy family. Not sure if that second one actually turned up on ABC Weekend Specials, but I remember seeing it somewhere along the line.

Yet another great ABC Weekend Special was The Mouse and The Motorcycle, the classic Beverly Cleary novel about Ralph S. Mouse. I could do a whole column on Cleary's books.

Okay, so maybe ABC Weekend Specials deservers more than just an honorable mention here. I'm going to bump it up to Grand Champion of Saturday Morning. Sorry, Super Friends.

A "Twilight Zone" Halloween

posted by Tygrrius @ 11:41 AM

Not exactly being a party animal, I’ve celebrated the last several Halloweens by watching horror movie marathons. I tend to stick with horror movies made in the 1950’s through the 1980’s.

A couple of the ones I’ve done in past years were a Nightmare on Elm Street marathon and a Vincent Price marathon (classics like House of Wax and House of Usher).

This year, though, I’m scaling it back a bit as far as time. In order to get the most bang in a two-hour timeframe, I’m going to have a Twilight Zone marathon instead. Here are the episodes I've selected.

"Nightmare at 20,000 Feet"
Aired: October 11, 1963
Written by Richard Matheson
Starring: William Shatner
Directed by Richard Donner

Recently recovered from a nervous breakdown and anxious about flying, a man sees a shadowy figure on a wing of the plane as it flies through a thunderstorm. The figure attempts to rip apart the engine and always moves out of sight before anyone else looks. Given his history, everyone begins to doubt his sanity.

"Tonight, he’s traveling all the way to his appointed destination which . . . happens to be in the darkest corner of the Twilight Zone."

This was William Shatner’s second and final journey into the Twilight Zone, three years before his Star Trek debut.

"Nightmare" was the first of a half dozen Twilight Zones for then 33-year-old television director Richard Donner. Donner, of course, later broke into feature films with 1976’s The Omen and 1978’s Superman.

Both Donner and Shatner’s talents shine in this episode, one of the scariest for the Twilight Zone. I first encountered this story as a remake in Twilight Zone: The Movie, but the original television version is much better.

"And When The Sky Was Opened"
Aired: December 11, 1959
Written by Rod Serling & Richard Matheson
Starring: Rod Taylor
Directed by Douglas Heyes

Three astronauts survive the crash of the X-20, an experimental spacecraft returning from her maiden voyage. Major Gart is hospitalized, but Colonel Forbes and Colonel Harrington are well enough to go out for a night of drinking.

Harrington gets a strange feeling and decides to call his parents. They tell him they have no son. He soon vanishes, and Forbes is the only person who can remember him. Even Gart remembers there only being two astronauts aboard the X-20. To his horror, Forbes realizes that now he has a strange feeling.

"If any of you have any questions concerning an aircraft and three men who flew her, speak softly of them and only in the Twilight Zone."

"And When The Sky..." was one of the first Twilight Zones I can remember watching. The idea that a person’s entire existence could be so completely erased is horrifying in that subtle way that only Twilight Zone could deliver.

"Judgment Night"
Aired: December 4, 1959
Written by Rod Serling
Starring: Nehemiah Persoff
Directed by John Brahm

A man aboard a British sea freighter bound for New York during World War II is convinced it is about to be attacked by a German U-boat. At the precise time of his prediction, a U-boat surfaces for an attack and he is shocked to learn why he knew.

"This is judgment night in the Twilight Zone."

This is another one of the first episodes I ever saw. I suppose early exposures to the Twilight Zone tend to stick with you, and the conclusion of "Judgment Night" is definitely no exception.

"The Howling Man"
Aired: November 4, 1960
Written by Charles Beaumont
Starring: H.M. Wynant
Directed by Douglas Heyes

On foot through a terrible storm, a man seeks refuge in a monastery. The brothers turn him away but when he passes out, they allow him to stay the night. He is awakened by a loud howling that the brothers claim not to hear. He tracks it to a man, locked in a cell by the brothers. Though the man appears innocent, the brothers claim he is the devil and must not be freed.

"A man who knocked on a door seeking sanctuary found instead the outer edges of the Twilight Zone."

I first saw "The Howling Man" as a teenager, flipping through stations in the middle of the night. Since I had missed the beginning, I actually had no idea it was a Twilight Zone until Rod’s narration at the end. A very unusual episode that remains one of my all-time favorites.

"Living Doll"
Aired: November 1, 1963
Written by Jerry Sohl
Starring: Telly Savalas
Directed by Richard C. Sarafian

For whatever reason, I was afraid of dolls as a kid. I think it stems back to a dream I had about my older sister’s room where her dolls were all alive and staring at me.

At least, I think it was a dream.

With that being the case, this episode scared the @!#?@! out of me as a kid.

A man’s stepdaughter brings home a new doll that can talk: "My name is Talky Tina, and I love you very much." Sweet, except for the fact that she’s very expensive. He upsets the little girl over the cost and she runs off to her room. With no one else around (of course), he finds that the doll says quite different things to him, like "My name is Talky Tina, and I’m going to kill you."

"She is a most unwelcome addition to his household but without her, he’d never enter the Twilight Zone."

Of course, now, I’m no longer afraid of such things.

I have conquered my childish fears.

I just hope my wife doesn’t mind sleeping with the lights on Tuesday night.

GAME OVER, Insert Coins

posted by Tygrrius @ 9:35 PM

Before we get started, a quick programming note. Immediately after posting this entry, I’ll be on vacation from the site until October 12. Never fear. In the grand tradition of Lassie, Benji, and Paul Anka, JS the Wonder Dog will come to your rescue by keeping the site’s news and reviews up-to-date in my absence. I can’t imagine the Film Frontier in better hands . . . er, paws. And now, back to our story.

One of the cool things I enjoyed as a kid was playing arcade games at the theater before or after seeing a movie. In fact, I’m pretty sure the first video game I ever played was Pac-Man. I was probably five or six years old.

Okay, "played" is a bit too generous.

As Pac-Man appeared on the screen, I had no idea what to do. I don’t believe I ate a single dot before a ghost came by and swallowed me up.

For Pac-Man’s second life, I managed to use the joystick and eat an entire row of dots before another ghost consumed me.

After that, I started to catch on. My brother pointed out the magical qualities of the power pellets, so I ate one and gobbled up a ghost. Now, I understood! Eat the blue ones! This was fun!

Here comes another ghost and . . . oh no. For the first time, I saw those infamous words: GAME OVER.

Mixed with the disappointment, though, was something else: I had Pac-Man fever!

Another early favorite was Pole Position. I fared a little better on that one, as the concept was a lot more straightforward. Drive fast. Real fast. And don’t crash.

I’ve played a ton of race games since then, including fairly complicated and highly detailed simulations, but none of them have come close to the fun and excitement of Pole Position.

While I played Pac-Man at the movie theater, Pole Position was located at the bowling alley. I played in a youth league there in second grade. My first team was called the Jedi Knights. And, though you may not believe this, that name was not even my doing.

There was an older kid on the team, Ryan, who thought of the team name. I guess he was the captain. He told me that he saw Star Wars 14 times in the theater, or some other number that I found impossible to imagine at the time. In my mind, he might as well have been Yoda, the Jedi Master.

The only problem with a cool team name like the Jedi Knights was that the opposing team would really give you the business if they beat you. Fortunately, we didn’t lose often.

Another kid on the team, closer to my age, was Jimmy. Now, though he was a pretty good bowler, Jimmy mostly came for the french fries.

And while I certainly helped to lead the team to victory, I must admit I mostly came for the video games. You see, the bowling alley had the best arcade outside of Chuck E. Cheese’s Pizza Time Theatre.

And it was at the bowling alley, in 1983, that I first experienced the ultimate arcade game.

The arcade game to end all arcade games.

Of course, I’m talking about Atari’s Star Wars.

With cutting-edge vector graphics, the Star Wars arcade game actually gave a fairly decent illusion that you were Luke Skywalker, flying your X-Wing through the Death Star battle.

And this was a sit-down, cockpit version, too, which added to the effect. With the actual voice of Obi-Wan Kenobi urging you to use the Force, how could any eight-year-old resist the urge to fill the game with quarter after quarter?

I played it every week, intent on beating it. I was going to use the Force, blow up the Death Star, and finally beat an arcade game.

You see, I was an idiot back then. Yeah, I know that’s hard to believe, but it’s true. And I thought it was possible to beat an arcade game. I thought it was possible to win.

While my bowling average went up each week, my allowance savings steadily declined. But I was getting closer.

But first, I had to figure out how to use the Force.

Whenever Obi-Wan offered, helpfully, "Use the Force, Luke," I interpreted this to mean "Start firing wildly all over the screen with your eyes closed, Luke."

You can thank Luke’s lightsaber training against the remote aboard the Falcon for the eyes closed bit.

Luckily for me, Ryan/Yoda happened to watch me play one week. "Why do you close your eyes and start firing wildly all over the screen whenever Obi-Wan says to use the Force?" he asked.

"Isn’t that how you use the Force?" I replied.

"You must unlearn what you have learned, young one," he said.

Well, no, he didn’t really say that. He probably laughed. But he was nice enough to suggest that I try battling the Death Star with my eyes open next time.

Soon thereafter, I did it.

I destroyed the Death Star.

I waited, patiently, for the medal ceremony that was sure to follow. And I was pretty sure the folks at the bowling alley would want to give me a special trophy or something, too. I mean, if bowling a 110 earns a patch, surely blowing up the Death Star would warrant at least a nice plaque.

The screen refreshed. No medal ceremony. What was this?

It couldn’t be.

But it was true. On my screen was the Death Star again.

As my impending victory celebration faded away, I went in a bit half-heartedly against more and faster TIE fighters and was soon destroyed.

Weeks of waiting to find out what happens when I blow up the Death Star, and what do I get? Another Death Star! The screen might as well have said, "Be sure to drink your Ovaltine."

By the next week, though, I had made sense of this impossibility. Obviously, the second Death Star represented the one in that summer’s big movie, Return of the Jedi.

Of course, if the Rebels had to destroy two Death Stars, then so did I! How silly of me to think otherwise.

So I powered up my X-Wing with a shiny, new quarter, fought the TIE fighters, faced down the gun turret towers, and blew away the Death Star. Twice.

As Level 3 began, I realized that a third Death Star now had to be destroyed.

I finally mentioned my frustration to Ryan. "I’ve made it to Level 18 so far," he told me. "There’s always a new Death Star. It just keeps getting harder."

All along, I thought I was Luke Skywalker. But, as it turned out, I was actually Chewbacca. I wasn’t going to get a medal.

Maybe Jimmy had the right idea after all. Bowling wasn’t about the arcade games. It was all about the french fries.

Return of the Frontier

posted by Tygrrius @ 12:07 AM

Welcome to the first edition of Proverbial Galaxies, which will be an ongoing column of the Film Frontier. Proverbial Galaxies will feature my opinions and random thoughts on just about anything, but usually related to science fiction & fantasy adventures.

This raises a couple of questions. For starters, who am I? And why should you care about my opinions?

Who I Am

I'm just a fan of entertaining movies, probably not unlike you since you've found your way here. I'm in my early 30's (when did that happen?), which means I grew up in the late 70's and the 80's.

And as any American male from that time can tell you, this meant Star Wars was everywhere. Like everyone else, I played with the action figures, read the storybooks, listened to the records, and begged and pleaded to see the movies whenever they came out.

I was only two-years old, but I remember asking for the 1977 Star Wars action figure set for Christmas that year. That is, until my brother told me that it would just be an empty box. Not seeing the value of an empty box, I chose something else over what would eventually become one of the most sought-after Star Wars collectibles. I finally got my first Star Wars figures about three years later, for The Empire Strikes Back.

I also recall watching the 1978 Star Wars Christmas TV special. In fact, this special was the first Star Wars production I ever saw. Though I was "action figure-aware," I had not yet seen the actual movie. Since I was probably close to the target age-range of the special, I suppose it must've made a good impression in that I am still a Star Wars fan nearly thirty years later.

The first movie I ever saw at the theater was a re-release of The Jungle Book, but the second was Superman. By this time, I was already familiar with Superman from cartoons and reruns of The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves.

I remember not being able to see a whole lot because the people sitting in front of me were much taller than I was. Who am I kidding, pretty much everyone in the world was much taller than I was back then. Thinking back on Superman is a reminder of how frustrating it could be to see movies in the theater as a little kid. Luckily for me, my brother held me up a few times so that I could see over their heads. One of those times was during Jor-El and Lara's scene on Krypton, which is actually my most vivid memory of seeing the movie that afternoon. After seeing Christopher Reeve's Superman, he became my favorite super hero.

While Superman and, eventually, Star Wars dominated my early movie-going experiences, one of the highlights of TV when I was young was watching reruns of Star Trek. As far as the Trek movies went, though, I actually missed seeing the first two in the theater. Didn't my family realize they were depriving me of research and anecdotes for my future website?

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was the first Trek movie I saw in the theater. In addition to the larger scale of the story compared to the episodes, I was awed by how incredible the Enterprise looked. By that time, I had managed to see at least Star Trek: The Motion Picture on TV and most likely Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan as well. There was no comparison between seeing the refit Enterprise on a small TV screen versus a gigantic movie screen.

However, it was the debut of the Enterprise-A in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home a couple of years later that solidified my status as a huge fan of the Star Trek movies.

For each of these movies, I read all the material I could get my hands on. Initially, I accomplished this through borrowing books and magazines from the library. Later, I slowly grew a collection of my own. No single volume told the whole story of each movie's production, but I realized that bits and pieces from each one could be woven together to form a more complete tapestry.

The First Frontier

In 1997, I opened the first version of this website, which was then called "Star Trek: The Film Frontier." I spent that entire summer compiling information and quotes from dozens of sources and assembling them together for each of the first eight Trek movies.

Though this site now looks completely different than it did back then, many of those same Production Notes are still in use. You may even run into them on other sites as well, but they were here first.

A New Frontier

After a hiatus, I decided to bring the site back earlier this year. This new version is a bit different from previous incarnations. Rather than focus exclusively on Star Trek, I am expanding it to include Superman and Star Wars—those other classics of my childhood. To reflect the change, the site is now known simply as "The Film Frontier."

Putting Superman aside, how can Star Trek and Star Wars coexist on the same fan site? Don't Star Trek fans hate Star Wars, and vice-versa?

Through this site and this column, I'll show that it doesn't have to be that way. Why limit yourself to only one universe when there's plenty of fun to be had in each of them?

While news coverage has begun for all three topics, only the Star Trek movie section is currently online. You can expect the beginnings of the Star Wars and Superman movie sections to arrive later this year.

Questions and Answers

What a year of news it has already been for Superman, Star Wars, and Star Trek.

For Superman, the biggest question of the year has already been answered: Will Superman Returns be any good?

We are only weeks away from answering the Star Wars question of the year as well: Will the Star Wars: Unaltered DVDs be worth buying? Elsewhere, you've probably read vehement complaints about them having poor picture quality and being non-anamorphic. As far as I'm concerned, though, the jury is still out until the DVDs arrive.

As we approach the 40th anniversary of the debut of Star Trek, 2006 is turning out to be a very important year for a movie series many thought dead. With Paramount's announcement that J.J. Abrams is writing and producing the next movie, the biggest Trek question is: What kind of movie will Abrams make? As tightlipped as he and others on the project are being, that may very well be the Trek question for next year as well. I have a feeling Abrams will make some kind of announcement by the end of this year, though.

This is an exciting time to be a fan of these franchises. I'm looking forward to covering these and many other stories for you in the months and years to come.

So, there you have it. That's who I am, or part of me anyway.

But wait, I still haven't told you why you should care about my opinion on anything.

Why You Should Care

In the end, I'm just one voice among many competing for your attention. The blessing and the curse of the web are that it's full of opinions. Anyone with access to a computer can pound some keys to form words and publish them within seconds. The sometimes hateful rantings of "fans" on many Star Trek and Star Wars sites seemingly rival some of the most heated political rhetoric.

With the Film Frontier, my goal is to always keep everything within a certain perspective, that perspective being that I have a genuine affection for these movies. Even the "bad" ones. That's not to say I'll sugarcoat reality or avoid being critical. I'll continue to call them as I see them, but you won't see "George Lucas ruined my childhood!" or similar muck here. My childhood memories are safe and secure.

I hope that you'll find something of value here. Maybe you'll be reminded of yourself, or you'll see new ways to look at seemingly old things. Perhaps something on this site will make you think. But don't think too hard. These are just kids movies, after all. And the whole point of these movies and, ultimately, this site, is to have fun.

Thanks for joining me in my little hobby. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.