I am working on something a bit more substantive, but for now I couldn’t resist grabbing the “Alphabet of Obscure Science Fiction Classics” Meme from SF Signal. Here are the rules:
“You know the drill. Copy the list and make titles for movies you’ve seen appear in bold.”
And now for the list, with my boldings and a few comments:
I’ve read in a couple different places this morning that the venerable magazine Starlog — which is for sci-fi fans something like Rolling Stone is to music lovers — has ceased publication. The official announcement calls it a “temporary” cessation while the publishers re-evaluate and revamp, and they apparently intend to continue producing digital content for their website, but I think we know what this move really means. For all intents and purposes, after 33 years and 374 issues, Starlog is finished. It may live on in a diminished form as some kind of blog or genre-centric website, but there are thousands, if not millions, of those already, and Starlog.com is going to have a hard time differentiating itself from, say, io9. The most public and respectable face of science-fiction film and television fandom — our only honest-to-god, widely distributed, often-seen-on-regular-newsstands magazine — is dead.
How awesome is this headline that just came across my newsfeed?
I find myself imagining these guys facing off against these guys in a battle royale like the world has never seen. (Personally, my money’s on Connery kicking Keith Richards’ butt up and down the beach.)
Since writing about the Warner Archive DVD-on-demand service the other day, I’ve been thinking about which currently MIA movies I’d most like to own in the form of a shiny silver disc. A few of them are pretty obscure, a couple are somewhat less so (i.e., I’m willing to bet my readers have at least heard of them), and four of them are beloved classics that simply have no good reason to be unavailable, aside from intransigence and the nonsense that so often just seems to happen in Hollywood.
In no particular order:
For all the thousands of movies that are available on DVD, there are many more that languish in the studio vaults, mostly forgotten or “smaller” films that are deemed too obscure to justify mass production. In other words, the studios don’t want to take the chance of getting stuck with a bunch of unsold discs because there wasn’t enough demand for a particular title. That’s business, and it’s completely understandable.
Still, it seems that just about every movie ever made has somebody who loves it, and it’s a real drag when something you love has been consigned to the Memory Hole because of brute economics. Bootlegging is an option, and I’ll admit to having occasionally resorted to it myself in certain cases. But I’ve always been somewhat less than comfortable with bootlegs, for various reasons. I’d prefer to have the real deal, i.e., a legitimate, professionally made DVD, if only one were available.
I’ve just learned that at least one movie studio has finally come up with a workable solution for this problem. Jaime over at Something Old, Nothing New has pointed me to The Warner Archive, a new service that allows you to special-order catalog films which are then manufactured on demand. There are more details here, but the bottom line is that for only $19.95 each, you can get these obscurities on a genuine, professionally made DVD with a presentation quality equal to any other Warner Bros. title.
Jaime notes that:
Most of the titles they have at the moment can be described as minor films of major stars: lots of not-yet-on-DVD movies by popular stars with huge filmographies, like Cary Grant, Norma Shearer, Clark Gable. There are a bunch of films that were released on VHS but never made it to DVD, and some real curios…
In other words, stuff that’s not likely to appeal to the average consumer. However, browsing through the 137 titles currently available (I understand there are more coming), I see at least four movies that I might be interested in owning: Countdown, a space-race drama starring a young James Caan; The Rain People, which was Francis Ford Coppola’s first movie; Oxford Blues, an early-80s Rob Lowe vehicle that was filmed on location in Oxford, England, and helped fuel my own interest in traveling to England; and Wisdom, another ’80s trifle with Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore. None of these are great movies (well, I haven’t seen The Rain People, but I’m guessing there’s a reason why it more widely known), but they do have their pleasures, and I’m delighted that they’re finally going to be available for psycho collectors like myself. I hope the other studios launch their own versions of this service as well…
Here’s something fun for your St. Patty’s Day, a trio of ads for a New Zealand TV network’s upcoming airing of the execrable movie Alien vs. Predator (not to be confused with the excellent four-part comic-book miniseries Aliens versus Predator, which was published in the early ’90s). The movie stinks, but I love the clever ads, especially this one:
As always, click to embiggenate.
Via the Bad Astronomer, who dubbed the campaign “beyond awesome.” Total agreement here.
An acquaintance of mine told me a few days ago that he had no interest in watching the Academy Awards because it was always the same old thing. Or, as he more colorfully described it, “Guy in tux wins something, gives awkward speech; next actor and actress come up and awkwardly recite some boilerplate stuff before announcing next winner. Lather, rinse, repeat.” Another guy I know boycotted the show this year because the nominees “never reflect the tastes of real people.” (He was pissed that The Dark Knight wasn’t up for Best Picture. Little tip for the uninitiated: The Return of the King notwithstanding, science fiction, fantasy, superhero, and horror flicks have no chance of ever winning in the “major” categories. They’re just not taken seriously enough by enough people. I suspect the reason ROTK won was less a recognition of its quality than of the sheer massive effort that went into filming the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. And of course I’ll never forget or forgive tedious and unfunny Annie Hall beating Star Wars back in ’77. Grr.)
Personally, I like the Oscars, even in those years when I haven’t seen many of the nominated films. Actually, I think I might enjoy them a little more when I don’t have a horse in the race, so to speak, because then I’m not feeling competitive and I’m free to simply enjoy the self-indulgent spectacle. That doesn’t mean, of course, that I like every year’s show equally. Some years, they just don’t work very well…
And now for the cinematic/video portion of tonight’s program:
I’m having one of those “too busy to go to the bathroom, let alone write anything that means anything” days, so why don’t we just take a moment to push back from our desks, breathe slowly, and gaze upon an image of two lovely people:
If you haven’t figured it out from the available evidence, this is Tyrone Power and Maureen O’Hara, starring here in an old pirate movie called The Black Swan, which I have to admit I’ve never seen. I’ve only seen a couple of Tyrone Power movies, actually — off the top of my head, all I can think of are his take on Zorro and Brigham Young — so I don’t really have a strong mental picture that immediately leaps to mind when I hear his name. Am I crazy, or does he look rather like 1970s-vintage Sean Connery in this shot?
Credit where it’s due: I ganked the photo from Lileks, who, incidentally, has finally converted his Bleat into a genuine blog (i.e., he’s now publishing it with WordPress instead of the hand-built labor of love he’s been creating day by day for the last umpteen years; on the positive side, he’s finally got a reliable RSS feed so I can include him in my aggregator instead of having to remember to click over to his site). And why did I steal this particular image, a screengrab from something Lileks was watching on DVD the other night? No reason, really — I just like looking at attractive people in Technicolor. And there is that Sean Connery thing. That’s just… weird…
I can’t believe I’m about to admit this publicly, but one of my all-time favorite guilty-pleasure movies is The Sword and the Sorcerer, a quickie knock-off of Conan the Barbarian and one of a whole raft of fantasy flicks that emerged in the early ’80s. (If you want to get really technical, both Sword and Conan belong to a sub-category I like to call “barechested warrior” flicks. See also The Beastmaster and — if you can force yourself to sit through it — Yor: The Hunter from the Future.)
