Via Cheno, here’s a highly entertaining music video featuring Christopher Walken dancing to Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice.” Sure, you’ve probably seen it before, but watch it again. It’ll make you smile:
You know, it’s really a shame that Walken is so often typecast as a violent loon, or otherwise freaky characters, because he really is wonderfully charismatic and funny when he’s given a chance to be. And, as this clip demonstrates, he can dance. If someone were to attempt to revive the old-fashioned Fred Astaire-style song-and-dance picture, I can totally see him starring…
I was surprised and amused recently to learn that Galactica 1980 — the abortive first effort to revive the Battlestar Galactica franchise, years before anyone ever heard of that Ron Moore fellow — is coming to DVD. I was less amused when I got a look at the cover art and saw that some marketing genius somewhere has tagged the show as “The Original Battlestar Galactica‘s Final Season.”
Come on, guys… hasn’t the reputation of the original Galactica suffered enough in recent years? G80 was a spin-off of the original show, not another season, and I don’t know of any fans of Classic BG who consider it to be “official” in any way. Mostly, we try to forget it ever happened. Saying that it’s part of the original series is like claiming that you haven’t seen every episode of M*A*S*H until you’ve seen AfterM*A*S*H, too. Or, as my buddy Dave put it when I IM’d him with this news:
Talk about spin in order to sell more DVDs. Let’s face it, if they called it, “A really crap show that has almost no connection to the original series, and is so low budget they couldn’t afford Cylon costumes, but it’s cool if you’re a fan of Cousin Oliver,” I don’t think many people would buy it.
I still haven’t made much progress on that entry I mentioned the other day, the one about the events of last weekend. (Sorry to be so oblique here — it really isn’t any big secret or anything. I went to my 20-year high school reunion and want to give it a good write-up. But I haven’t had time for good, hence all the lameness that carried us through last week.) In its place, here’s a compendium of random net crap that’s caught my eyes recently:
Writing about Space: 1999 earlier reminded me that I haven’t posted a TV series opener for awhile. So, without further ado…
This was a typical opening sequence for the show’s first season. (It ran two years, but was pretty thoroughly retooled in the second year, including a whole new title sequence; this is the opener I remember, however, especially that shot of the Eagle falling out of the sky and exploding… man, that stuck in my mind for years, even during the long, hazy period before DVDs and the Internet enabled me to refresh my memories.) Space used a rather unorthodox technique of showing part of the current week’s episode in the titles, as a kind of teaser, I suppose. (This particular opener is from an episode called “Black Sun,” if you’re interested.) The end result was that the title sequence was just a little bit different every week. I’m not aware of any other show that ever did that.
Watching it now, the music strikes me as over-the-top melodrama and bombast that didn’t entirely represent the tone of the series — which was very brooding and cerebral in the first year — but it’s catchy. Just try getting it out of your head. Go on, try.
This is getting into some very tall grass on the Plains of Geekiness, but I can’t help it… I love this cheez-ball stuff: The Bad Astronomerreminds us that today, September 13, would have been the eighth anniversary of the Moon blasting out of Earth orbit if the premise of Space: 1999 had come true.
(If you don’t remember it — and not a lot of people do — Space: 1999 was a TV series back in the early ’70s. It begins with a nuclear explosion — a superimposed title informs us that the date is September 13, 1999 — that sends the Moon hurtling into deep space, carrying with it the 300 or so inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha, who then proceed to have various far-out adventures every week. Whoever was writing the show had a weaker grasp of basic science than my inbred, semi-feral pet cat, as common-sense things like the immense distance between star systems were routinely ignored — not to mention the fact that Alpha apparently had an inexhaustible supply of its Eagle shuttlecraft, considering that one or two got wrecked every week — but what the show lacked in sense, it made up for in style. The aforementioned Eagle, for instance, is still one of the coolest-looking spaceship designs ever put on film, in my humble opinion.)
It’s strange, sometimes, being a science fiction fan in the 21st century; as all these iconic dates for made-up events that never occurred recede into the distance, it’s hard not to feel an odd twinge of disappointment, of loss for what might have been. For instance, NASA did not launch the last of America’s deep-space probes in 1987 with Captain William “Buck” Rogers at the controls… there were noEugenics Wars in the mid-1990s that ended with a group of genetic “supermen” stealing an advanced DY-100 spacecraft and slipping away from Earth (that’s a good thing, actually)… and the spaceship Discovery did not explore Jupiter and the secret of the black monoliths in 2001. The result is that our fictional worlds are now harder to believe in, if only for an hour or two’s viewing time, and the real world just isn’t as cool as we grew up thinking it would be. Consider, for example, the fact that we never see anything like this anywhere but our imaginations:
Here’s another in our ongoing series of Random Factoids About Me™: I like swords.
I think they’re beautiful objects, and there are few things as thrilling as seeing one wielded by someone who knows what they’re doing. (I’m speaking, of course, of seeing them used for demonstration purposes only; seeing one put to the use for which they were actually designed would be… unnerving.)
Of all the different types of swords produced by nearly every culture on the planet, however, none has acquired a greater reputation than the Japanese katana. There are stories of master swordmakers testing their newest creations by seeing how many condemned men the blade would slice through on a single stroke. According to legend, katanas routinely shattered brittle European broadswords. And according to the movies, the damn things were only one step away from acting like lightsabers, capable of just about anything.
In that spirit, allow me to present the following video, which is apparently a clip from a Japanese television show that set out to see if a katana could, in fact, split a bullet like you often see in anime and martial-arts flicks:
Pretty impressive, no? Well, it looks good anyway… I guess if you think about it, it’s really no surprise that a tempered steel edge could slice through a soft lead slug. And, as the boys at Boing Boing pointed out in the post I ganked this from, this ability wouldn’t really be of much use, since you’d end up with two pieces of fast-moving metal coming in your general direction instead of only one. Still… it’s a sword slicing a bullet, man! As the kiddies say, that’s kewl…
Hey, remember a while back when I expounded on my experience of wearing a beard? No? Well, that’s okay, because I’ll just remind you of the salient bit, which is the little poem by George Carlin that I ended the entry with:
Here’s my beard.
Ain’t it wierd?
Don’t be sceered,
It’s just a beard.
Andrew Sullivan, a fellow bearded man, posted another poem today that makes essentially the same point, but a little more elegantly:
Abundant hair hangs over my fierce face
and shoulders, shading me, just like a grove;
but don’t think me unsightly just because
I am completely covered in dense bristles:
unsightly is the tree that has no leaves,
the horse without a mane; birds have their plumage
and sheep are most attractive in their wool,
so facial hair and a full body beard
are really most becoming in a man.
–Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XIII (trans. Charles Martin)
I may have posted about this site before — it seems like I did, but I can’t find the entry now. Still, it’s always fun to play with silly Internet toys, and, according to this one, it would appear that I have a relatively unique name.
Cool. I know one of these other Jason Bennions is a minor-league baseball player who, oddly enough, comes from Taylorsville, Utah, just a few miles up the road from my house. Of the third JB, I haven’t a clue… although there is a Welsh painter who share the name as well.
Of course, there is a downside to this: should Skynet decide to send a Terminator after me, it won’t take long for it to work its way down the list…
I’ve got a much longer entry in the works about what I did over the weekend, but I’m in the middle of a crushingly busy week, so I don’t know when I’ll be able to finish it. In the meantime, here’s a quick note about yesterday’s big announcement. If you didn’t hear, Shia LaBeouf revealed the title of the upcoming fourth Indiana Jones movie at the MTV Video Music Awards. It is — are you ready? — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
The reactions I’ve heard thus far have been luke-warm at best, with many people saying that the title is too long. I’ll admit, it’s a bit ungainly — it would be better if Uncle George shortened it to Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull — but I’m generally fine with it. It has an appropriately pulpish sound, and crystal skulls — which do exist and have long been rumored to possess occult or mystical powers — are far more the sort of thing you’d expect an Indiana Jones story to pivot around than Area 51 and the Roswell aliens. (One of the rumored plotlines from a couple years ago had our favorite fedora-wearing whipcracker uncovering the truth that Mulder never seemed to get to the bottom of, an utterly ridiculous idea that would make a disastrous movie, in my not-so-humble opinion.)
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think I like the title. I’m starting to think that maybe George, Steven, and Harrison might be making a for-real Indy movie, instead of the lame and pointless mess that everyone fears…
