Further evidence of that unsettling notion that celebrity deaths always come in threes: the completely out-of-the-blue demise of actress Brittany Murphy yesterday at the age of 32. I wasn’t exactly a fan — I’ve only seen one of her movies that I can recall, and my favorite role of hers was the voice of Hank Hill’s dimwitted-but-sweet trailer-trash niece on the animated TV series King of the Hill — but I always found her likable enough, and pretty in a normal, suburban kind of way. I’ve heard some accounts that she could be difficult to work with, which perhaps explains why she hasn’t had many film roles recently after being touted as the Next Big Thing only a few years ago, but I never got that impression from her in the occasional interviews I saw. Certainly she didn’t come across as one of the no-class, arrogant, boozy-floozy types that comprise Young Hollywood these days.
So far, it appears that her death was natural, if freakishly sudden. The LA Times obit is here, for any who may be interested.
More sad news for genre fans Of a Certain Age: Via SamuraiFrog, I’ve learned that writer, director, production designer, and occasional actor Dan O’Bannon has died at the still-too-young age of 63.
O’Bannon’s biggest claim to fame is, quite correctly, writing the screenplay for the landmark movie Alien, from a story by himself and Ron Shusett. (It was O’Bannon’s disturbing idea to have the monster gestate inside a human host, like certain wasps and other parasitical animals right here on Earth.) But he also had a hand in many other fondly remembered (if not particularly significant) sci-fi and horror films of the ’70s and ’80s. He wrote two of the best sequences in the animated anthology Heavy Metal — “Soft Landing” and “B-17,” both of which I discussed here — as well as John Badham’s super-helicopter movie Blue Thunder, which directly inspired the TV series Airwolf. (O’Bannon, always outspoken and quick to grumble about perceived slights, has long said that Badham dumbed down his highly political screenplay into a simplistic action flick.) He also penned a pair of cult-classic B-movies, both directed by horror icon Tobe Hooper: Lifeforce, about energy-sucking vampires from space, and the 1986 remake of Invaders from Mars. And he directed the horror spoof Return of the Living Dead, which introduced the pitiful cry of “Braaaaaiiiins…” to the zombie mythos.
O’Bannon claimed credit for about two-thirds of the Schwarzenegger-on-Mars flick Total Recall; his story is that co-writer Shusett jettisoned his final act and substituted the ridiculous mess that pissed me off back in 1990 and now just makes me roll my eyes the way you do when your harmlessly senile granny starts rambling about the little man who lives in her pantry. And, for you Lucasfilm fans out there, O’Bannon designed and animated most of the tactical computer displays in the original Star Wars film.
All of those achievements aside, though, my first thought when I heard the news of his passing was of Sergeant Pinback, the lovably hapless buffoon he played in John Carpenter’s first movie, Dark Star.
James Lileks, speaking of the Bedford Falls where George Bailey never existed:
I still think Pottersville would have been a great place to visit if you had a three-day pass from the Army.
Is it just me, or does our modern world far more resemble Pottersville than the quaint, well-mannered fantasy town in which George spends most of the movie?
I’m a bit chagrined at being a week late with this item, but then I still haven’t written anything for Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, or Patrick Swayze, so what’s a mere seven days for an actor few of my readers will probably recognize? Even so, I’ve gotten very tired of feeling like I’m constantly trying to catch up on things. This blog isn’t really intended to deal in up-to-the-minute news, but I would like to get back to some sense of being current, for my own sanity if nothing else. Maybe in 2010.
In any event, I learned from Evanier last Friday that the actor Gene Barry had died a couple days earlier. My initial reaction was surprise; I hadn’t realized he was even still with us, it’d been so long since I’d seen him in anything. This was followed by a wave of profound sadness, as Barry’s was one of those familiar faces it seems I’ve known my entire life. I don’t recall my exact age the first time I saw the 1953 version of The War of the Worlds, in which Barry starred, but I know I was very, very young. It was on the old Big Money Movie show that used to run weekday afternoons on one of my local TV stations, and I think that show was finished by the mid-70s, so I’m going to guess I was around five or six, tops. The movie made a huge, indelible impression on me, and Gene Barry’s performance as Dr. Clayton Forrester was one of the many reasons why.
Somewhere in the vast and dusty recesses of the fabulous Bennion Archives, I’ve got a cache of old Science Digest magazines from the early ’80s. I subscribed for a time in middle school, or, more accurately, my parents subscribed me, first as a birthday gift, I believe, and then for a few more years because I was actually reading the things and — apparently — getting something from them. To be honest, what I was mostly getting was the foundation for a lot of future disappointment when all the crazy-cool stuff promised by the speculative articles failed to materialize. No high-speed underground maglev trains whisking us from LA to New York in an hour. No gigantic cargo blimps full of consumer goods gliding serenely through the skies on silent electric motors. No manned missions to the moons of Jupiter. You get the idea. The standard “where’s my jetpack?” sort of thing.
But not all of the magazine’s predictions turned out to be bull, and every so often deja vu will strike like a zap of static electricity as it occurs to me that I first read about some aspect of modern life years and years ago in the pages of SD. Cell phones and prepaid phone cards come to mind, as well as DNA sequencing and growing replacement body parts in laboratories. These ideas were only two steps removed from science fiction 25 years ago, but they’re now commonplace, or soon to become so in the case of lab-grown organs. The really big ideas, though, the ones requiring some kind of monumental engineering project… those were all just poppycock, right?
Well, maybe not. I read this morning that a California company called the Solaren Corporation wants to orbit giant solar-power collectors and beam the energy back to Earth in the form of radio waves. I immediately recognized the proposal as yet another concept I first learned of while sitting crosslegged on the floor of my old treehouse in the heat of a far-off summer day, listening to the old car radio my dad rigged up to run on AC and thumbing through the pages of the latest Science Digest. I remember thinking back then that it was a cool idea, and I still like the sound of it. No doubt it would be an immensely expensive and complex undertaking, and it probably won’t work for all sorts of reasons, but the basic idea itself is so elegant, so… obvious. It’s something from the happier Buck Rogers future I always thought I would be living in, instead of the considerably less ambitious and less hopeful future we actually got, and I hope this Solaren company actually attempts it.
Who knows, if this orbital power station thing works, maybe I’ll still get my maglev train someday as well…
Well, this sucks: it seems the Orient Express, the famed Paris-to-Istanbul train that’s been the setting of so many fictional mysteries and thrillers, will cease operation as of this Monday. Like so many other relics of a more elegant age, it’s been made obsolete by faster and more convenient alternatives. I don’t question its obsolescence — as I recently commented on someone else’s blog, who has two days to go anywhere on a train when you can catch a plane and be there in a few hours? — but as a history buff, a romantic, and someone who wishes he had the kind of leisure time that makes train travel practical, I mourn its passing.
The Orient Express has long held a place on my “probably will never happen” goal list (as opposed to the list of goals that are within reason for a middle-aged guy of moderate income and limited vacation time). Like a lot of other people, I suppose, I was drawn to the glamour and promise of adventure that lived in the train’s very name. “Orient Express.” It’s wonderfully evocative, isn’t it? I realize, of course, that these qualities stem more from the pages of Agatha Christie than the vehicle itself, but then I understand Concorde wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, either, and I still wanted to take a flight aboard her. But now the irresistible forward march of progress has taken both options off the table. Ah, well… there’s still an African safari and a trip to Antarctica to consider. Assuming that global warming doesn’t destroy both continents before I manage to secure my fortunes and quit that pesky day job…
Incidentally, and just to avoid confusion, there is another European train service called the Orient Express. That one is a luxury (i.e., very expensive) tourist experience aboard refurbished 1930s-vintage railcars running (mostly) between London and Venice. Think of it as a cruise-by-rail, I guess. That Orient Express isn’t affected by this news; the train that’s shutting down is the original, historic Orient Express, the one on which Sean Connery “honeymooned” with Daniela Bianchi in From Russia, With Love (still my favorite of all the Bond movies).
When I was in San Francisco last year, I did what every tourist with the slightest literary pretension does in that town: I stopped by the famed City Lights Bookstore and bought a copy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. It’s one of those classics I’ve always heard the cool kids talking about and meant to read myself, but somehow never quite got around to it. Not until last winter, anyhow.
My plan to blog my reactions to the book that defined an influential subculture never quite materialized, naturally, and given how mushy my memory seems to have become lately, I no longer recall many specifics about it. I do remember liking it in general, although Kerouac’s style gave me some problems. The narrative occasionally slips into stream-of-consciousness — never a technique I’ve liked very much — and the beatnik slang peppered throughout is sometimes, well, laughable. (I recognize, of course, that this is an unfortunate result of time, and that when On the Road was originally published in 1957, the language must’ve been fresh and exciting. Sadly, though, it’s been so parodied over the past 50 years that it’s nearly impossible to encounter it today without thinking of silly stereotypes like Maynard G. Krebs — the “G” is for “Walter” — or a hundred cartoons featuring skinny men in black turtlenecks, sunglasses, and berets who snap their fingers a lot.) On the positive side, however, the book has a genuine verisimilitude, and the reader gets the sense of being privileged to experience an unknown subculture through the eyes of an insider, without any filters or censorship. And Kerouac really captures the restless, hungry-to-see-and-do-it-all energy that consumes many (if not all) young people.
Anyway, I bring this up now because I was sifting through a stack of junk on my desk this afternoon, came across my copy of On the Road (which has been sitting there since, oh, February or thereabouts), and saw that it still had all the sticky-tabs I’d placed on passages I found particularly striking. I thought I’d post some of them here, for my own amusement if no one else’s…
Over on his Atomic Pulp blog, Christopher Mills reminds us that Tales of the Gold Monkey wasn’t the only high-adventure series set in the 1930s that ran during the ’82-83 television season. CBS wanted in on the post-Raiders of the Lost Ark action as well (Gold Monkey was on NBC), so they offered up Bring ‘Em Back Alive, starring Bruce Boxleitner as big-game hunter Frank Buck.
Buck was a real guy, a celebrity of the ’30s and ’40s who’d found fame by capturing exotic animals unharmed during a time period when people were a whole lot less sensitive about shooting things, even rare and beautiful things. He wrote a book about his experiences, from which the TV series took its title, and eventually parlayed his celebrity into starring roles in the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus and a whole string of jungle movies, including an Abbott and Costello comedy (Africa Screams) and a 15-part cliffhanger serial. Now, I’ll be honest and admit that I don’t remember too much about Bring ‘Em Back Alive, but I think it’s probably a fair bet that Boxleitner’s version of Frank Buck didn’t have too much to do with the actual man.
Christopher Mills says that, while Gold Monkey was largely character-driven, BEBA was “more like old Republic adventure serials, with exciting stunts, a likable, two-fisted swashbuckling lead, and action-packed stories.” My memory of it is far less precise, as I said. I mostly recall thinking that Gold Monkey was the better of the two, with higher production values and a cool old airplane to boot (old airplanes being an immediate “value-add” in my book, even when I was 12). Weirdly enough, though, I have always remembered the show’s opening theme, which went a little something like this:
You see, for a couple of years I was recording TV themes by holding my old SoundDesign clock-radio with the built-in cassette deck up to the television speaker and trying not to make too much noise as I depressed the clunky “Play” and “Record” buttons. I must’ve taped several dozen themes from that general time period, all on the same cassette. I can only imagine it would make for an incredible time capsule now. Sadly, and rather unexpectedly given how much crap I’ve managed to hold onto over the years, that particular tape went MIA long ago. But I know that it had the theme for Bring ‘Em Back Alive on it, along with Gold Monkey, Magnum PI, Simon and Simon, Shogun, and a lot of other jaunty tunes that were just perfect for listening to on my Walkman as I rode around town on my old red Schwinn with the banana seat… damn, I wish I still had that tape.
Incidentally, you may have noticed Boxleitner’s co-star in BEBA, Cindy Morgan. She’s probably best known for playing the delectable Lacey Underall in Caddyshack, but she also appeared with Boxleitner in Tron the very same year that Bring ‘Em Back Alive debuted on television. Boxleitner was, of course, the title character, and like him, Morgan played a double role: Lora, the girlfriend of Tron’s User Alan in the real world, and Tron’s girl Yori in the computer realm. Hollywood must’ve been a truly small town back in the day. Morgan is still a lovely woman, judging from the photos on her official web site. It features a pretty nifty collection of photos from all three of her major works, Caddyshack, Tron, and Bring ‘Em Back Alive; the BEBA gallery is here.
It’s been just over two years since I noted a rumor that the old TV series Tales of the Gold Monkey might be headed for DVD, and now — finally! — it looks like it’s actually happening. TV Shows on DVD.com reports that the series is now available in the UK and Australia, and an American release is planned for sometime in the spring of 2010. Even better — and quite surprising, given that this series lasted only a single year and is nothing more than a cult classic at best — it’s going to include an all-new retrospective documentary and recent interviews with the series’ stars, Stephen Collins and Caitlin O’Heaney, and there may be some other special features from the European release as well.
I can’t tell you all how happy this makes me. As I’ve explained before, Gold Monkey made a huge impression on me back in the day. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a good old-fashioned adventure story about a dashing American cargo pilot and a cast of eccentric characters who live and work in the exotic South Pacific of the late 1930s. Coming on the heels of Raiders of the Lost Ark, which had been released the previous year, the series was marketed (rather inaccurately, in my opinion) and dismissed (rather unfairly, I think) as nothing more than an Indiana Jones knock-off, but it was a fun show in its own right and deserved more of an audience than it got. I picked up a VHS bootleg of the series several years ago and was very pleased at how enjoyable it still was. You always run the risk when revisiting childhood favorites of discovering that they weren’t what you remember them being; happily, Gold Monkey was pretty much exactly what I remembered. The bootlegs, however, weren’t worth the tape they were recorded on. They appeared to be 10th-generation copies with such a bad picture that I often couldn’t tell what I was looking at, so I imagine viewing a nice clean DVD version is going to be like seeing the show for the first time. I can’t wait…
In a somewhat related note, I see that the ’80s detective series Matt Houston, in which Lee Horsley of The Sword and the Sorcerer played a Texas oil millionaire who solved mysteries as a hobby, may also be coming soon. Which means that pretty much every TV series that’s ever mattered to me is or shortly will be available for me to own, except for The Wonder Years and the originally aired version of WKRP in Cincinnati, both MIA because of costly music licensing issues. Oh, and The Six Million Dollar Man; I have no idea what’s holding that one up. I have to admit, it’s a strange thing to consider, so much of my childhood being out there on the market now. It’s kind of sad in a way, like a long quest is at last coming to an end…
As a bit of an Anglophile and an unrepentant nostalgic, I’ve been bummed in recent years to learn that the iconic red telephone box is fast disappearing from the British landscape. The culprit is, of course, advancing technology — who needs a public phone anymore when everyone is carrying a personal one in their pockets? American phone booths are an endangered species as well, but they don’t carry the same weight of cultural symbolism as their UK counterparts; I doubt anyone identifies an American-style booth with America itself, while, to many people around the world, the red phone box fairly shouts “Great Britain.”
One of the many highlights of my visit to England in 1993 — one of the experiences that drove home the fact that, yes, I was really there, in another country for the first time in my life — was encountering one of those familiar boxes I’d seen so many times in movies and television programs, seeing it standing there on the street fulfilling its function, not a tourist attraction but simply a part of somebody’s everyday life. The thought of them heading for the scrapheap of history brings an inevitable pang.
Fortunately, there are efforts afoot to save at least some of them. British Telecom (BT) has instituted an “adopt-a-kiosk” program that allows communities to buy the boxes for a nominal sum (all of one pound) and then use them for whatever purpose they wish. Some towns elect to keep them functional, with a working pay phone; others have turned them into “street art” or touristy photo spots. But the best idea I’ve run across yet was one small village’s inspired decision to repurpose their local phone box as a tiny lending library. As I understand it, it’s an informal, community-driven operation in which the residents donate books they have read and take ones they haven’t, so the inventory is constantly changing. (I guess it would actually be more accurate to call it a book exchange, rather than a library.) The box has room for about 100 books, as well as CDs and DVDs. The village now has a valuable community resource, the citizens are fully involved, and a little bit of history is still standing. And that’s what I call cool.
Wish this sort of thing happened more often here at home.
Credit where it’s due: I first read about this on Boing Boing. And there’s a more detailed article about the Adopt-a-Kiosk program here.
