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In Memoriam: Carmine Infantino

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August, 1978. I’m eight years old, only a month away from my ninth birthday and the start of another school year. But that’s still weeks in the future, an eternity in kid time. For now, it’s summer vacation, it’s hot, and my days are my own in a way they never will be again. I pedal my candy-apple-red Schwinn bicycle — the one with the upswept handle bars and the banana seat — to the old Riverton Drug Store. Inside the cool, air-conditioned hush of the store, near the big front windows that look out on the town’s main drag (such as it is), I jangle the change in my pocket as I peruse the latest arrivals. I turn the wire spin-rack slowly, giving myself time to search, and to savor the quest. My eyes slide past the run-of-the-mill stuff: Superman, Batman, Richie Rich, Bugs Bunny, Casper the Lame-O Ghost. Those books are all fine, in their own ways, and I’ll buy plenty of them on other days, but today I’m after something in particular. I’ve been hanging on the edge of a cliff for a month now, and I’ve got to know what happens next. There’s a civil war about to explode on the water-planet Drexel, and Han Solo and Luke Skywalker are right smack in the middle of it… on opposite sides, naturally… And there it is! Issue number 14, “The Sound of Armageddon!” I have no idea what “armageddon” means — I’ll look it up in the family dictionary later — but the cover takes my breath away. All my star-warrior heroes and friends reunited again after a long period of separate, parallel storylines… blasterfire, tension, action, whatever those funky reddish-pink ray things in the background are supposed to be! I can tell already that I’m looking at a 32-page, four-color epic! I make my purchase from the kindly man at the counter, roll up the comic, and stuff it in my back pocket. (This is long before we worried about whether or not something was “collectible,” and there was no easier way to carry a comic or a paperback around.) Then I race for home, pumping my legs madly, closing the distance in a some kind of record time — my own personal little Kessel Run. Dropping my bike on the back lawn, I dash for my treehouse, my sanctum, the one place on the whole Bennion Compound where I can be certain I’ll be uninterrupted for a while, and, with the drowsy sounds of a stifling summer day in Utah pressing against my ear drums, I settle in to read my way back to that galaxy far, far away…

The death of legendary comic-book artist Carmine Infantino two weeks ago today — the same day as Roger Ebert — wasn’t quite the gut-punch that Ebert’s passing was, but it definitely gave me pause. Another of the creative minds who contributed so much richness to the flavor of my childhood… gone.

The official obituaries (typical example here) all seemed to focus on Infantino’s role in kicking off the so-called Silver Age of comics with his reinvention of The Flash — a character created in 1940 who’d fallen into obscurity by the late ’50s — as well as his updating of the venerable Batman, which some credit with leading to the classic Batman television series of the 1960s. The Silver Age was, of course, an immensely significant time in comic-book history. As I understand it (which admittedly might not be fully, because I’ve always been a comics dilettante, as opposed to a true fan), comic books had been very popular throughout the Depression and World War II, but sales plummeted in the years after the war. The simplistic storytelling and often crude artwork of the Golden Age lost its appeal as Modernism took hold, and the form seemed to be on the verge of dying out. (It probably didn’t help that this was also the time period when the comics industry came under attack by anti-communist witch-hunters and prudes like Frederic Wertham.) But the work of Infantino and others brought a new level of relative sophistication to the medium, and changes in the business side of the industry reinvigorated sales, especially of superhero titles, setting the stage for the decades of success and evolution comics have enjoyed since. So, yeah, that’s a big deal, and it’s entirely proper that the obits lead with all that stuff.

But for me personally — and I’m sure this won’t be the slightest surprise to anyone reading this blog — what really matters was Carmine Infantino’s work on the Star Wars comics of the late 1970s.

It’s probably hard to remember (or imagine, depending on your age) what it was like back then, during that strange interregnum between Star Wars (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), when the world was not yet completely awash in Star Wars-branded merchandise and tie-in media. (You  know, that time when dinosaurs ruled the earth and we had to walk through the snow, uphill both ways, to get to school.) Back then, there was no Expanded Universe, no Internet forums or conventions, no animated spin-offs on TV. Darth Vader was not yet Luke Skywalker’s father (my own suspicion is that he wasn’t even Luke’s father in George Lucas’ mind, but that’s another blog entry). We knew next to nothing about the characters of Star Wars, or the Old Republic or the Jedi. Everything was open for speculation, because all we had to go on was a single, two-hour movie, which, let’s be honest, was pretty light on details. And we first-generation fanboys — girls too, although fannish tendencies in the ’70s were more pronounced in the male of the species than the female — were hungry for more. Hungry in a way I don’t think I’ve ever experienced since. We ached to know more about the backstory of our favorite movie, and to revisit the places and characters that had seized our young imaginations in a ferocious kung-fu grip. We wanted more Star Wars, more, more I say! More in any form we could get it… toys, games, posters… and most especially more stories. It was during this period that the Marvel Comics Group began publishing its officially licensed Star Wars monthly. For a long time, this was the only source of new SW adventures. Which means they loom very large in the memory and imagination of fans my age. Or at least in my memory and imagination.

The first six issues of the Marvel series were a straightforward adaptation of the movie, but starting with issue #7, the comics started offering up all-new storylines that saw our heroes swashbuckling their way through fantastic space-opera scenarios and settings. I’ve heard the Marvel writers were given no real guidelines on what they could or couldn’t do, other than a prohibition against Luke and Vader confronting each other directly (Lucas already knew that would have to happen in Empire). They were therefore free to invent pretty much anything they wanted… and they did, fleshing out a vast and diverse galactic civilization that, in retrospect, bears little resemblance to what we now understand as the Star Wars universe. But at the time, we star-kids accepted it all as gospel, from seven-foot-tall green humanoid rabbits to energy-sucking furrballs with human-sized intelligence and telepathic voices. I’ll be honest: even though the Marvel series has long been considered apocryphal by Lucasfilm and is generally dismissed as silly by modern fans, many of its details and events are every bit as “real” to me as anything we saw in the recent prequel movies.

The series endured until 1986, three years beyond the release of Return of the Jedi, and it eventually comprised 107 issues, plus three double-sized “annuals.” However, my own interest in it waned following the release of The Empire Strikes Back. The Marvel writers struggled to figure out how to handle Han Solo’s absence — remember, he was frozen in carbonite between the two movies, with an uncertain fate ahead of him — and the comics just weren’t the same without my favorite character in the mix. I never have gotten around to reading the later issues. But the issues published between the first two movies, in particular the story arcs involving the waterworld Drexel and a giant casino in space known as The Wheel, remain among my very favorite of all Star Wars stories. As it happens, this span coincides with the bulk of Carmine Infantino’s work on the series.

Infantino served as a penciler on the interior art, meaning he was responsible for the overall look of the comics he worked on. He also did quite a few of the covers, including the one pictured above, the one I remember being so excited about when I was eight. His style was somewhat peculiar — I remember one snarky letter-to-the-editor that asked if the artist used a T-square to draw everybody’s jawlines — but it was effective. His renditions of Our Heroes looked nothing like the actors who played them on screen,  but they did look like the characters, if that makes sense. At least they did to me. During that interminably long gap between the movies, his Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, and Princess Leia were more vividly those characters in my mind than Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher were. I owe him a tremendous debt for helping to make that delay tolerable… and for giving me so many great images that I still carry with me today.

I had a really great childhood, when I think about it.

For more information on Carmine Infantino’s career and an analysis of his art, see this excellent piece from the LA Times. And until next time… Make Mine Marvel!

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Refuse to Be Terrorized

Bruce Schneier is an acclaimed security expert whose commentary has informed much of my own thinking on what we ought to be doing in response to terrorism, and why much of what we have done has been pointless, if not downright harmful (e.g., the entire ridiculous kabuki act we have to endure to get on an airplane these days). He’s written an essay for The Atlantic in response to the Marathon bombings that I think ought to be required reading for everyone in the country. Definitely click the link and peruse the whole thing — don’t worry, it’s not very long — but here are the highlights:

Terrorism, even the terrorism of radical Islamists and right-wing extremists and lone actors all put together, is not an “existential threat” against our nation. Even the events of 9/11, as horrific as they were, didn’t do existential damage to our nation. Our society is more robust than it might seem from watching the news. We need to start acting that way. 

 

There are things we can do to make us safer, mostly around investigation, intelligence, and emergency response, but we will never be 100-percent safe from terrorism; we need to accept that. 

 

How well this attack succeeds depends much less on what happened in Boston than by our reactions in the coming weeks and months. Terrorism isn’t primarily a crime against people or property. It’s a crime against our minds, using the deaths of innocents and destruction of property as accomplices. When we react from fear, when we change our laws and policies to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed, even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we’re indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail, even if their attacks succeed. 

 

Don’t glorify the terrorists and their actions by calling this part of a “war on terror.” Wars involve two legitimate sides. There’s only one legitimate side here; those on the other are criminals. They should be found, arrested, and punished. But we need to be vigilant not to weaken the very freedoms and liberties that make this country great, meanwhile, just because we’re scared. 

In other words, as tiresome and cliche’d as the expression has become in the past few years, keep calm and carry on. It’s what I wish we’d collectively done 12 years ago instead of what we did do (the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, Gitmo, torture). It’s what we seem to be doing now. I hope I’m right…

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Boston

My first thoughts were of my old friend Andy and his wife Krickett. I met both of them during my Cinemark days, when I was working at that multiplex movie theater I reminisce about all the time. Andy was an usher, a skinny kid with hair so meticulously combed and gelled that we used to tease him about being an android (or, as the android character Bishop in Aliens dubs himself, an “artificial person”), because no natural human could possibly have had such perfect hair. Krickett was a candy girl. I imagine they probably call them “concessionists” or some other politely neutral term these days, and I’ve noticed there’s no longer a gender-based distinction in theater jobs as there was in my day, when boys were ushers and girls were behind the counter. But just keep in mind that my day was the Pleistocene, and all the way back then, in the dim mists of pre-history, we had candy girls. Anyway, Krickett was cute and vivacious and kinda-sorta resembled Julia Roberts, back when the whole world had a crush on Julia Roberts. She and Andy were almost immediately besotted with each other. Hopelessly besotted. They were also very young, just 16 I think, and being a wise old jaded cynic at the age of twentysomething, I honestly didn’t think they were going to last.

I lost track of Andy and Krickett for a long time after I finally left the projection booth for good, but of course I eventually came across the two of them on Facebook, as you inevitably do in the 21st century, and I was pleased to learn I’d been wrong about them. It turned out their teenage romance had had a happy ending after all. They got married, had some kids, and are still together and still happy after two decades. As it happens, Andy has become a long-distance runner in that time and — I’m sure you can see where this is going — he was in the Boston Marathon yesterday, fulfilling one of his “bucket list” goals. On his wife’s birthday, no less. So when news of the explosions came flashing across the InterWebs, my immediate reaction was to hope the two of them were safe.

They were, thankfully. Andy checked in with me later in the afternoon and reported that he had already completed the race and they were both back at their hotel when the bombs went off. I felt a surprising amount of relief, considering I haven’t actually seen either of them in the flesh since Jurassic Park was in theaters the first time.

I’m also relieved to see that, so far anyway, the country doesn’t seem to be going bananas over this. The Marathon bombings were an obvious act of terrorism, and in the minds of many people, that means Muslims. I read this morning that every major Muslim group in America has already issued press releases condemning the attack, essentially trying to pre-empt the hysteria that inevitably gets directed their way following a terrorist attack. It depresses me that these groups feel it necessary to do this, but I understand why they do. Personally, I think it’s just as likely what happened in Boston yesterday was perpetrated by some self-proclaimed “patriot,” a white, Christian, anti-government, Timothy McVeigh-type protesting against income taxes or something. (It strikes me as significant that yesterday was April 15, tax deadline day.) Or it could have been a nondescript nutbag with no particular cause at all, other than to hurt some people and create mayhem. We just don’t know yet. But regardless of who the eventual suspect(s) turn(s) out to be, it gladdens me that I’m not encountering a lot of paranoid, xenophobic, reactionary chatter online. In fact, other than pro bloggers and news sites, I’m not seeing a lot of chatter about the bombings at all. People are tweeting and blogging and Facebooking about the same old stuff… movies and hobbies and jobs and family, what they had for lunch and what funny things are happening to them. Normal life. Could it be that finally, twelve years after everything changed on 9/11, we’re finally beginning to heed the wisdom of that old slogan, “Keep calm and carry on?” Maybe so. (Of course, there could be lots of chatter happening that I’m not seeing due to what I personally choose to follow online. I prefer to think otherwise, though.)

I don’t have much else to say about this whole terrible event. What is there to say, really? Any remaining sentiments of mine were already better expressed by the comedian Patton Oswalt anyhow. The comments he posted on Facebook yesterday have already been disseminated far and wide, but they’re so eloquent, so on-target, that I’m going to repeat them here as well, just in case somebody reading this hasn’t seen them yet:

Boston. Fucking horrible.

 

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”

 

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

 

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. (Thanks FAKE Gallery founder and owner Paul Kozlowski for pointing this out to me). This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

 

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

 

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”

Amen, brother.

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Blue Sky

As part of the New and Improved Lifestyle I’ve tried to establish over the past year, I’ve been taking afternoon walks every day, workflow permitting. Most days I seem to end up wandering through the Avenues, one of Salt Lake’s oldest residential neighborhoods, which is little more than stone’s-throw from my office. It’s a lovely place for a stroll, with lots of big trees and an eclectic mix of housing styles: turreted Victorians, cozy bungalows, mid-century ramblers, even a few art-deco apartment buildings.

I was up there earlier today, in fact, walking through a steady rain with one hand jammed deep into my pocket and the other growing cold on my umbrella handle. I could smell the faint but distinctive odor given off by my leather jacket when it gets wet, and water was seeping through cracks in the soles of my worn-out sneakers. A pretty young thing on a bicycle smiled at me as she rolled past, a tiny diamond stud winking from the side of her nose while raindrops glittered in the thick, flat braid of chestnut hair that ran down the center of her back.

My iPod chose that moment to summon an Allman Brothers tune, one that sounds cheerful on the surface but always evokes an unaccountable bittersweet feeling in me, and it occurred to me that if I kept walking in this direction long enough, I’d end up on the campus of my alma mater, the University of Utah. And suddenly my head filled with half-remembered emotions and half-forgotten ambitions, the flavor of a time in my life 25 years past. I found myself thinking of other springtime rainstorms, of a girl who meant everything to me until the day she didn’t, of stories I’ve never written and places I haven’t gotten around to visiting.

Then I had the weirdest sensation that my younger self was nearby, not just metaphorically but in close physical proximity, as if he was walking along this same sidewalk, beneath these same trees, smelling and sensing all the things I was, but separated from me by some kind of membrane. Something permeable enough to detect a presence on the other side, but unbreakable. A time barrier, I suppose, if we want to get all Doctor Who-ish. I could feel his restlessness, his idealism, his curiosity about the world and his naive certainty that he’d someday get everything he wanted, just because he was him. I wondered if somehow he could feel me too, and what, specifically, of me he felt. My disappointments and regrets? My banal middle-aged anxieties about health and money and getting old too soon? Would he even recognize me as the person he was to become, or would I just seem like a stranger to him?

To be honest, sometimes, when I’m walking in the rain, I seem like a stranger to myself…

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China Beach: TV-on-DVD Done Right!

It’s been a loooooong time since I posted a TV Title Sequence. Here’s a cool one:

Mmmmm, young Marg Helgenberger… And Robert Picardo with hair! How weird is that?

I can’t recall if I ever actually watched China Beach, or if I was just aware of it through the Vietnam-obsessed zeitgeist of late ’80s television. Even so, I’m tempted to go ahead and spend the $200 Time Life wants for its exclusive release of this series, just to support the effort TL made to license all the original period music used in the show. Yes, that’s a lot of money for a four-season show that only totals 65 episodes, considering most TV series can be had for around $20 or $30 bucks a season these days. And it’s especially spendy for what amounts to a blind buy for me, since I don’t really remember the series. But there’s a principle at stake here that I firmly believe: TV shows that integrated “real” music into their storylines ought to be released intact, as they originally aired, or there’s no point in releasing them at all. Universal did it the right way with Miami Vice; the season sets of that one were a bit more money than other DVD sets, at least when they were first released (you can pick them up cheap now), but true Vice fans were willing to pay a premium to have the show done properly. Fox, on the other hand, dropped the ball badly on its first and only WKRP in Cincinnati release, when the set came out at an economical price point but practically every song had been replaced by generic music, or cut altogether. Even scenes when the characters themselves were singing got cut out. ‘KRP fans rightfully rejected this stillborn disaster, and Fox has declined to do anything else with the property, alas.

Getting back to China Beach, I like to commend Time Life for taking the trouble to pursue the licenses, and the gamble that fans will be willing to pay for. Now, is there anything you can do about The Wonder Years and/or acquiring the aforementioned WKRP from Fox for a second try?

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The Third Millenium Looks a Lot Like 1985

I spotted the following over at Boing Boing today. It’s an old TV commercial from the ’80s that I’d completely forgotten until I saw the first five seconds or so of it again, whereupon it all came flooding back. I used to think this spot was so completely awesome; it would grab my attention whenever it came on, no matter what I was doing, and keep me riveted for the next minute:

So what was it about this I thought was so neat? Damned if I know… probably that it had a sci-fi premise and turned on the idea of loud rock-n-roll setting you free, or something.

Of course, the comments over at Boing Boing are flooded with Damn Kids(tm) making fun of the feathered hair and the obsolete technology and the whole Duran Duran music video vibe. Well, I say screw them. They weren’t there, and they didn’t live through it, so they don’t understand that that stuff used to be cool. We weren’t deluded or lame for wearing that stuff; we were in step with the times. As far as I’m concerned, the ’80s was the last decade that displayed the slightest bit of style or glamour. Yeah, it all looks pretty ridiculous now, but we were at least trying, man, instead of endlessly recycling and recombining what everybody wore in previous decades. And we were having fun. Everything now is so… uniform.

I’m happy to see at least one of those commenters gets it:

You know, screw all that SCA/RenFaire/Steampunk BS. I’m going to start cosplaying as someone from a retrofuturistic 80’s timeline.

Now wouldn’t that be fun?

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In Memoriam: Roger Ebert

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When I heard Wednesday that Roger Ebert’s cancer had returned and he was being forced to curtail his activities, I figured he probably wasn’t going to beat it this time. But I didn’t expect to hear of his passing the very next day. Especially considering that he was still talking about writing and various other ventures in what turned out to be his final blog entry:

My intent is to continue to write selected reviews [for his website, rogerebert.com] but to leave the rest to a talented team of writers handpicked and greatly admired by me. What’s more, I’ll be able at last to do what I’ve always fantasized about doing: reviewing only the movies I want to review. … And I continue to cooperate with the talented filmmaker Steve James on the bio-documentary he, Steve Zaillian and Martin Scorsese are making about my life. I am humbled that anyone would even think to do it, but I am also grateful. …

 

At this point in my life, in addition to writing about movies, I may write about what it’s like to cope with health challenges and the limitations they can force upon you. It really stinks that the cancer has returned and that I have spent too many days in the hospital. So on bad days I may write about the vulnerability that accompanies illness. On good days, I may wax ecstatic about a movie so good it transports me beyond illness.

 

I’ll also be able to review classics for my “Great Movies” collection, which has produced three books and could justify a fourth.

 

For now, I am throwing myself into Ebert Digital and the redesigned, highly interactive and searchable Rogerebert.com.

Those don’t sound to me like the words of a man who expects to die within the week. Perhaps he was in denial. Or perhaps, like so many of the rest of us, he just figured there was still time, at least a little more time, enough to do at least some of what he wanted. And then quite suddenly, there wasn’t. Dream’s little sister came calling sooner than anyone expected.

I often have emotional reactions upon hearing of the death of some celebrity that I admire… a sense of loss, a momentary twinge of sadness. But right now I’m feeling like I’ve just been punched in the gut. I don’t think I realized until about 20 minutes ago what a hero this pudgy, pugnacious, erudite, eloquent man was to me. I can’t recall feeling this degree of shock and, yes, actual pain over the loss of a public figure since DeForest Kelley became the first member of the original Star Trek cast to die way back in 1999.

***TEXT MISSING***

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We Are Who We Are, From the Very Beginning

I shared my train ride into work this morning with a platoon of third-graders on a field trip from their suburban elementary school to the Clark Planetarium downtown. Normally, any scenario in which I’m shut up inside a metal box with 60 excitedly chattering eight-year-olds would leave me huddled in a corner, rocking back and forth, and muttering nonstop profanities aimed at a universe that could be so cruel and indifferent. Today’s experience, however, wasn’t that bad. Today my irritation was offset by amusement at one particular little boy and girl sitting across the aisle from me.

The boy was bending the ear of an adult woman — a teacher maybe, or perhaps a PTA mom, but definitely someone with the group who shared some level of intimacy with the boy — holding forth in a very intense manner about all the things he does not eat. First on the list were peanuts, which his sister is allergic to. If she were to eat one, her throat would close up and she would most likely die within seconds (this is a pretty close approximation of the boy’s actual words, incidentally; in addition to being terribly solemn and intense for his age, he was also surprisingly eloquent). Because of this danger, there are no peanuts in his home, and that is fine by him, because he does not like them. (He virtually spat out the words describing his distaste for the humble but potentially sororicidal goober.) He then went on to enumerate numerous other foods which do not pass his personal muster, spelling out in great detail exactly what he dislikes about each, then pausing after each mini-rant to let the steam rebuild before launching himself anew.

As I eavesdropped on this overwhelmingly one-sided conversation, I had a sudden, very clear impression of this boy as a crotchety old man, leaning on his cane, maybe slapping a Formica table-top (or whatever synthetic surface they’re using on tables 70 years from now) for emphasis, haranguing some poor waitress or nursing-home aide with exactly the same opinions he was spewing today. I am certain I saw exactly what this boy will someday be like, and it was exactly what he is right now.

That vision made me smirk a bit. But what really pulled a smile out of me was the little girl sitting beside him. While the grown-up woman was nodding and saying encouraging but vaguely disconnected things like “uh-huh” — as you do when a child is babbling at you and you’re really not paying attention — the boy’s classmate was making a supreme effort to ignore him, staring out the window with the intensity of a hawk on a telephone pole watching for a kangaroo rat. However, she couldn’t block him out entirely, and would occasionally glance at him as if to try and determine if he was finished yet. Then he’d start complaining again and she’d turn back to the scenery. On one of these occasions, I saw her make an impatient little hand gesture and roll her eyes, and I could practically hear her thinking to herself, “oh, please.” And I saw then exactly what she was going to be like as an old woman.

People never really change that much, in my opinion. It seems to me that our basic temperament and personality is locked in pretty early, and even though we do change and grow over time, there is a core part of us that is what it is. Sometimes, when you look at a child, you can see it. You know what the eight-year-old will be like when they’re eighty. And sometimes, when you look at an eighty-year-old, you see the eight-year-old they must’ve once been.

Those two kids are probably going to end up married, you know.

 

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All Right, Now You’re Overacting…

You want to know why fans of the original Star Trek such as myself love William Shatner so much? It’s because of stuff like this:

This has been making the rounds today and I found myself laughing as hard on the sixth viewing as the first. You don’t see Patrick Stewart doing this sort of thing. I’m just sayin’.

(Actually, from what I know about him, Stewart probably would do a good-natured, self-deprecating advertisement like this. It’s just that his show — Star Trek: The Next Generation, for my non-Trekkie Loyal Readers — never produced a scene as iconic — or, admittedly, as corny to modern eyes — as the legendary Kirk vs. Gorn confrontation from the original-series episode “Arena.” Which, incidentally, is one of my favorites, despite the obvious shortcomings. Great message and, in context, surprisingly tense storytelling.)

But you know what’s really cool about Shatner doing this ad? Besides his willingness to poke fun at his age, I mean? The game he’s shilling for isn’t even based on his version of Trek. The characters and scenery are obviously modeled on the Abrams reboot. And unlike his costar Leonard Nimoy, Shatner didn’t even have a cameo in the reboot flick. (It probably says something about Abrams-Trek that an ad for a tie-in game is trying to cash in on the good will fans have toward the original Star Trek, rather than using actors or scenes from the rebooted series. Or am I just being churlish?)

Finally, speaking of Shatner’s age, does he look great for a man of 82 or what? We should all age so gracefully…

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Surely… the Best of Times

Coming hot on the heels of his co-star and partner-in-nerdy-fame William Shatner’s eighty-second birthday, Leonard Nimoy hits 82 himself today. To celebrate, here’s a photo of him with a little kitty:

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In the Shatner entry the other day, I said something about the influence he and Nimoy have exerted on me over the years. Here’s another example for you: some of the technical material I’ve been proofreading at work lately uses the word “sensor” fairly liberally. Every time I see that word in the copy, I don’t hear it in my mind the way most people say it, i.e., “sens-er.” Instead, I hear it in Nimoy’s voice, with his somewhat idiosyncratic way of saying the word in countless episodes of Star Trek, “sens-orrrrr.” I find that amusing. So happy birthday, Leonard… thanks for the pronunciation!

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