My pitch for Space: 2099

We just passed the 25 anniversary of Breakaway Day, September 13, 1999, when 311 people on Moonbase Alpha were lost when the moon was blown out of Earth orbit by a nuclear explosion.

At least, that was what happened in the TV series Space: 1999.

Because of this (fictitious) anniversary, and seeing a panel about The Eagle Obsession, a documentary about Space: 1999, I’ve been thinking about this show quite a bit. Which is strange, because I never loved the show. I’m a fan of the Eagle transporter, but not a fan of the show.

I was never a fan because the characters couldn’t win. The moment the people on Moonbase Alpha found a home, that was the end of the show. This is not a format I’ve ever found appealing. And it is one that gets used a lot in science fiction. Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, The Time Tunnel, Battlestar Galactica (both versions), Land of the Lost, and Star Trek: Voyager, to name a few. At least the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Voyager got final episodes that tried to wrap things up, but shows almost never got proper conclusions in the 1970s.

The best the characters of Space: 1999 could hope for was to survive — to earn a temporary reprieve from execution by an uncaring universe. 

There has been talk time from time about rebooting the show. It’s mentioned in the panel. There were some plans that went so far as getting some promo material out. Space: 2099.

The tagline for Space: 2099: “Man’s giant leap was just a stumble in the dark.” It’s a good line, but it’s still pretty bleak.

So I was turning over in my mind about what a reboot would look like that I would actually enjoy. I thought, “Humans alone on a hostile alien environment, cut off from help… wait. That’s The Martian.” 

I enjoyed The Martian about as much as I did not enjoy Space: 1999. There were two key differences. The first was hope. This was clear in the poster tagline, “Bring him home.” Getting Watney back home was going to be almost impossible, but the story lives in the “almost.”

The second key difference was Mark Watney’s character, who might be described as “an excellent player playing excellently.” (I’ve heard the movie described as “competence porn.”) The audience pulled for him as he solved problem after problem.

I would like to imbue some of that more hopeful attitude into Moonbase Alpha. Something a little closer to The Martian or For All Mankind than Werner Herzog. 

If I were to pitch a Space: 2099 reboot:

A disaster cuts off Moonbase Alpha from Earth. But Moonbase Alpha is crewed not just by 300 random humans, but by 300 explorers. They are resilient. They are adaptable. They are highly skilled. They know they are in the most dangerous environment that any humans have ever been, but they will not. give. up. They will not settle for mere existence on an airless rock. They want to go home – but if they don’t, they are determined to create a base where they can thrive and live as richly as they did on Earth.

P.S.—I have one of the Eagle stories on The Eagle Obsession website! It’s submitted one of my old blog posts about why the Eagle is my favourite spaceship.

Related posts

Space: 1999 is now further in the past than it was set in the future 

My favourite spaceship (It’s the Eagle)

Eagles and Falcon

Banzai!

Yes, this post is a not too subtle acknowledgement of the fact that I be old, but I don’t care. Buckaroo Banzai is one of those movies that just shaped such a huge part of my mental furniture that I have to acknowledge that today is the 40th anniversary.

The attraction for me is the lead character. I wanted to grow up to be Buckaroo Banzai. Still do. I always loved the portrayal of someone smart and a willing to go full bore into pursing passions: science, music, and helping others. And maybe that I also had a name that evoked Japan increased my identification with the character a bit.

Just before he utters one of the film’s most famous lines, “No matter where you go...”, there’s another moment that underscores the character:

“Don’t be mean. We don’t have to be mean.”

It reminds me a lot of a line that is shared often around on acadamic social media: Lots of people are smart. Distinguish yourself by being kind.

How Godzilla movies reflect scientific research

I have a very specific memory of film critic Leonard Maltin on Entertainment Tonight reviewing Godzilla 1985 (the first American release of 1984’s Gojira or The Return of Godzilla). Maltin said something like, “Many remakes fail because they stray too far from the original. Godzilla 1985 doesn’t have that problem.”

“It’s still the same cheap Japanese monster movie.”

That stung so much that here I am remembering it almost 40 years later.

I can’t think of anything that summarized the attitude towards Godzilla for so long. 

So last night’s Oscar win for Godzilla Minus One feels like vindication for a lifelong fan like me. 

For decades, Godzilla movies were the butt of jokes. And deservedly so, I have to say. As much as I count myself as a Godzilla fan, I have no desire to watch Son of Godzilla or All Monsters Attack (Godzilla’s Revenge) ever again. (Shudder.)

But fandom is a funny thing. You love the things you love and it still kind of stings when you you hear them derided.

But somewhere in the years after Maltin snubbed the 30th anniversary movie, something shifted in people’s attitude towards Godzilla.

Those of us who watched a few dubbed movies as kids remembered Godzilla as we grew up. I heard in the 1990s that there was a new “high tech” series of Godzilla movies being made in Japan. The Internet removed friction for finding out fannish stuff. You could find retrospectives about the making of the series in English.

And say what you will about the American Godzilla made in 1998, Hollywood wouldn’t have shelled out the cash to try to make that movie a big summer blockbuster if there wasn’t some sort of name recognition.

After all those years in the wilderness, what films could show was finally catching up with the visions of Godzilla that fans held in their heads.

And it occurred to me that this is sometimes how science works.

You have an idea. You get it out there. 

Maybe it’s derided as cheap and mostly dismissed. But you try again.

And other people pick up some aspect of it. And maybe sometimes the results are embarrassing, with the offshoots are not as good as the original was.

And sometimes, if you wait and keep trying, that original idea somehow stands the test of time. Other people come around and start to recognize that idea was a good idea. And you end up with something that gets better that you ever though.

Related posts

“Why do you love monsters?”

Space: 1999 is now further in the past than it was set in the future

Space: 1999 first aired on October 17, 1975. Unusually for a science fiction show, it gave a quite precise date for when its events started unfolding.

The first episode, “Breakaway,” is set on September 13, 1999. (September 13 is now known as “Breakaway Day” among series fans.)

That means, according to a handy duration calculator, that the first episode of Space: 1999 was set 23 years, 10 months, 27 days in the future. Or 8,732 days, if you prefer.

Today marks 8,732 days since September 13, 1999. 

The show is now officially more retro than it was ever futuristic.

Man, I’m old. But I still love the Eagle transporters, though.

Eagles and Falcon

 I’ve mentioned before that the Eagle from Space: 1999 is my favourite spaceship.

What I didn’t know what its role in my favourite space move, the first Star Wars. 

I knew the Milleneum Falcon went through several redesigns. The shots inside of the Falcon don’t always make sense relative to the exterior, because the Falcon was originally the ship that became the rebel blackade runner.

What I didn’t know was that a good part of the reason the design changed was that it looked just a little too much like the Eagle transporter.

Which, side by side, I can see.

External links

FAB Facts: Star Wars’ Millenium Falcon almost looked like a Space:1999 Eagle

The complete history of the Millenium Falcon

Three words that could use a rest in fandom

I have gotten tired of these three words (okay, two words and one phrase) in discussions of genre fiction.

1. “Plot hole.”
2. “Retcon.”
3. “Canon.”

First, those three give “realism about the fictional world” too much weight in judging artistic works. They make is sounds as though the best feature of any story is how well it mimics the consistency of reality.

You can see this same obsessive drive to try to find absolute perfect consistency in world-building in classic geek questions like, “Who’s stronger, Hulk or Thor?”, or “What is the speed of the White Star spaceships?” (I mention the last, because Joe Straczynski would reply, “They move at the speed of plot.” Which I imagine must have been a very frustrating answer for some fans. Flat out refusing to play the game.)

I remember loving technical manuals and handbooks that tried to list things like the height, weight, and eye colour of every character in the fictional world.

All of that is fun. But increasingly, I’m finding that discussions over story consistency overshadows analysis of character, emotion, humour, thoughtfulness, or any of the other myriad of things people might want to experience a story for.

Second, these three feed into a bad geek habit: always trying to show how smart you are. Watching a story becomes a protracted game of, “I’m smarter than the script writers, because I thought of this thing that they clearly didn’t.” Needing to show how smart you are is not an attractive part of nerd culture. (I say this as someone who has often been guilty of this bad habit.)

“Why do you love monsters?”

My wife asked me, “Why do you love monsters so much?”

Maybe because I can’t remember ever a time I didn’t know about Godzilla. The name and image - the glowing fins, the roar, the strange look that was almost a hybrid between a tyrannosaur and a stegosaur – were imprinted on me that early.

The same was true of King Kong, and maybe the Universal monsters (the Karloff Frankenstein, the Lugosi Dracula, and particularly the Creature from the Black Lagoon). You absorb a lot of pop culture that was made before you were born in your early years.

But I certainly didn’t learn about Godzilla from being exposed to the movies, because I remember the first time I actually got to see a Godzilla movie. It was in Killarney, Manitoba, when it still had a sit-down theatre. There’s no mention of that movie theatre online now; I think it was the Roxy? (There was a drive-in, too, and I think it’s still open.)

The theatre showed a lot of re-released low budget movies, ostensibly for a young audience, on weekend nights. I remember watching King Kong Escapes (long before I saw the original classic 1933 King Kong), an early anime called Magic Boy, and the oddly titled Super Stooges vs. the Wonder Women.

One week they showed Godzilla vs. The Thing. I think they had this poster to advertise it.

Needless to say, “The Thing” turned out to be rather different than the poster implied. I was not expecting... a moth.

In retrospect, this was a colossal stroke of luck. I later learned that this was generally considered to be the best Godzilla movie via the cover article in Fangoria #1. (I read and reread that article, thinking of all the Godzilla movies I had yet to see and felt I might never see. You had to work hard to be a nerd in those days.) Even though many more Godzilla films have been released since that Fangoria retrospective, lots of fans still rank Godzilla vs. The Thing among the best.

That good initial experience probably helped cement me as a lifelong Godzilla fan. Even now, I can watch that first movie and appreciate it, albeit on a different level than I could when I was young.

I don’t know if my love for Godzilla would have survived if the first movie I had seen had been something like Godzilla vs. Megalon. Or Son of Godzilla. I think that was the last of the original series I saw, and... that suit. Ugh.

But being a Godzilla fan teaches you to value hope over experience. Because, if we’re being honest, there aren’t that many good Godzilla movies. Even for a Godzilla fan, young or old, some are just utterly tedious.

Being a Godzilla fan has also taught me to bide your time. Because so many of the Godzilla movies were bad, they always had a reputation as being “cheap Japanese monster movies” that were easily dismissed. But guess what? The stuff that was derided for years finally earned some respect.

People started to realize just how hard it was to create those special effects. I look at the final monster battle in Destroy All Monsters, knowing what I know now, and am in awe. How they got all those suit actors, and wire controlling monster parts, on film at all amazes me.

People began to write about how great the music of Akira Ifukube was. Composer Bear McReary noted that the only real competitor that Ifukube’s Godzilla theme has for longevity is the James Bond theme – and the Godzilla theme is older!

The original 1954 version of Godzilla got an art house run, with all the additional American footage with Raymond Burr removed. Key shots were returned and gone was the so-so dubbing, replaced with subtitles. It was a revelation. No longer was the original Godzilla a cheap Japanese monster movie. It was a haunting classic that evoked the horror of an atomic bomb attack.

I hope the new Godzilla movie I am going to see tonight is good. But as a fan, whether it’s good or bad as a whole is almost beside the point. There will probably be some moments, images, that linger on and impress you even if the movie as a whole doesn’t.

And maybe there will be some more kids who will grow up never remembering how or when they first learned about Godzilla.

P.S.—I bought the T-shirt pictured above last year, and I never wore it. I saved it specifically to wear to the opening night of Godzilla: King of the Monsters. That night is tonight! IMAX presentation and I’m very excited!

Tuesday Crustie: Space crabs

Man, I love vintage science fiction covers. The cover may be the best thing about the book, since the author’s work is described thus:

(T)wo sf novels remarkable for their clumsiness and their apparent ignorance of the basic laws of Physics.

Hat tip to Pulp Librarian and Miriam Goldstein.

Untitled post 2

Untitled post

And the cycle repeats

Today is the last day of class for the Spring semester, which kind of means it’s the end of the first regular academic year at UTRGV. Okay, sure, there is summer session, but really, most of us faculty have a nine month salary, so our pay stubs say this is the end.

Where are we with UTRGV? Ugh. It’s still in beta testing. There are still many weird, unsettled (and unsettling) things going down for my liking. There’s an obsession with instant growth, and a lot of parachute candidates for administrative positions. Could it have been better? Sure. I suppose it could have been worse, though.

Meanwhile, speaking of education, Texas is set to review its science standards again. Slate has the story. Notably, author Zack Kopplin writes:

Via public records request, Slate obtained the full list of 545 applicants. Many seem up for the task, including the employees of the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, scientists from Houston’s energy industry, the president of the Micropaleontology Press, science-assessment specialists from the textbook publisher Pearson, and hundreds of K-12 science teachers or college professors.

I was one of those hundreds of educators who applied, by the way. I’ll let you know if I get picked, but I think the odds are long. As the article says:

Members of the Texas State Board have full discretion over whom they want to appoint to the review panels—and history shows they often pick creationists.

In other words, here we go again. At least because this is happening in summer, I should have time to blog about it.

And it’s also Star Wars day! I won this glass at the pub last night during trivia.Thanks, Grain to Glass! They made both Light Side and Dark side glasses. Only Dark Side glasses were left, but I would have picked that one anyway. I’m definitely a Sith.

I won it knowing what “AT-AT” stands for. (Gloss for the non-Star Wars fans: The AT-ATs were these things, introduced so memorably in The Empire Strikes Back.)

“AT-AT” stands for “All Terrain Armored Transport.”

External links

Scientist vs. Creationist: Who will get to update Texas’ science standards?

Today is the day and I just can’t wait!

Today is the day I will finish grading this last assignment I gave my neurobiology students! Just five left! I cannot remember the last time grading has taken so long and taken so much out of me. It’s been tough this semester.

Oh yeah, there’s also a sequel out to a movie that rocked my world some thirty odd years ago.

But apart from this blog post, I am staying off social media for a few days^* until I can submit my final grades and avoid all the trolls posting Star Wars spoilers!

^* Except maybe Google Plus. Because not much ever happens there, right?

Tuesday Crustie: Release the Kraken!

John Wyndham is actually a favourite author of mine. I’ve read his novel The Kraken Wakes. But I never visualized it quite like this artist behind this Italian edition...

Hat tip to Pulp Librarian and Paul Cornell.

Jurassic World is the dinosaur Blackfish

Now here’s the premise for a movie:

Large predatory animals, completely removed from their natural environment, reared up outside their normal social system, are trained by well-intentioned people to do tricks for the amusement of audiences. The company makes big profits, the audiences have a good time, and all seems well.

But the large, smart predators run amok, killing people in the park.

Jurassic World? Nope. I was thinking of Blackfish.

I should have got it.

There’s the title, for one. It’s not Jurassic Park 4.

There was this feeding scene in the trailer.

But it didn’t click for me until I saw the introduction of Owen (Chris Pratt’s character):

In this picture, he’s got a clicker in his left hand (right of frame here). He’s using it to train raptors. Exactly how the clicker is used to train the beasts is not explained, but it’s similar to other whistles and such I’ve seen animal trainers use. Some of his dialogue about animal behaviour is pretty good.

That’s when I realized, it was so obvious. The name of the park... feeding shows and splash zones... decent trainers doing their best to work with unpredictable predatory animals.... my god, this was Sea World. Except scaly.


Part of the subtext of Jurassic World, I argue, is that it is a commentary on the wisdom of using live animals as “attractions” for theme parks.

It’s an interesting shift of theme from the 1990s. Jurassic Park (both book and its film adaptation) was a cautionary tale about science and hubris: the usual Frankenstein elements that make up so much scientific storytelling. The second and third films downplayed those elements in favour of straight “nature wants to eat you” adventure stories.

This entry in the franchise movie has moved on from comments about basic, esoteric research. Now, it’s taken for granted that research is happening. The story is about turning that research into commodities, and the issues around making living things “attractions.”

Now that I think about it, the creation of a new hybrid dinosaur in the movie also plays off on the notion of making new organisms that can be the “intellectual property” of a corporation, mirroring some of the GMO debate, particularly over food. But this is not as developed as much as the film’s protrayal of the theme park experience.

So far, the “meta” discussions that I’ve seen about Jurassic World have been about the portrayal of women in the film, and the scientific accuracy of the dinosaurs and prehistoric reptiles (mososaurs, name notwithstanding, were not dinosaurs). I haven’t seen anyone discussing this movie as the dinosaur Blackfish.

Update, 16 June 2015: Ah, I was not the only one! David Steen picked up on this, too.

I made a thing

You know how sometimes an idea gets in your head and the only way to get rid of it is to do it?

Over the weekend, I watched the first few episodes of this:

For which this is the opening theme:


Something about the twangy guitar combined with the people who are not normal plotlines reminded me of this:

And its opening theme:


And I thought, “I wonder how well the Alphas theme would play to the True Blood opening?”

Pretty well, if I say so myself.

Tuesday Crustie: But wait, I’ve got a better plan...

... to catch this big red...

Watched a lot of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea after school when I was very young. So much so that I don’t remember much of it besides my enjoyment, and thinking that the Seaview was one very cool design for a submarine. And alas, I don’t remember Victor Lundin’s protrayal of the title character of this episode:

Tuesday Crustie: Yeti crab crushes Kremlin!

It’s fair to say I’m a fan of yeti crabs, since I’ve had the yeti crabs on this feature a few times before. (And then there’s the dancing yeti crabs playlist...)

I’m also a big fan of the SyFy series FaceOff, which has its season finale tonight. Last week, make-up artist Cig got into the finals with this kaiju creation:

Cig had never seen a yeti crab before, and decided to make something decidedly more simian than crustacean, keeping in the giant monster tradition started by King Kong.

While I did enjoy Cig’s take on the yeti crab, I have to confess that I am pulling for Dina tonight! She captured my attention with this creation on episode 1 of this season.

And she’s held it ever since. I particularly loved her aquatic Aphrodite (middle row, third from left):

From the vault: I•Con 2 logo

I•Con was a fan run science fiction convention in Victoria, British Columbia. There are several SF conventions with that name, but in this case, “I” was supposed to stand for “Island”, as in Vancouver Island.

There were two iterations of I•Con, and I was involved in organizing the second one, in October 1991. I was the art show director, helped get Barry Beyerstein invited as a science guest, and did miscellaneous other things, including designing the logo you see above.

This logo was initially designed on a Radio Shack Color Computer 3, with software called CoCo Max 2 (I think). You can tell the age of the software from the “spray can” pixels that make up the “2”.

The shape of the “2” was inspired by the Lethal Weapon 2 logo. I’m still a little surprised by that, because I’d hated Lethal Weapon 2 so much that I am surprised that I would life anything at all from that.

I used the Roman numerals because I liked the repetition of the shape of the “I” in I•Con and the “II” in the numerals.

When I made it, I considered this a success because it was about 90% of what I envisioned in my head.

Looking at it now, there is a little too much going on in the logo. Having both the Arabic and Roamn numerals is a little bit of overkill. It probably does not need the horizontal line between the word and the number.

But you know what? I still like it.

Related posts

Oh, no.

External links

A life of service

Meet the voice cast of Sharknado 2!

My parents are Sharknado 2: The Second One.

Sharknado 2 ran a crowdfunding campaign to finance a scene. I initially kicked in because a fraction of the money would go to support shark research by the Abess Center at the University of Miami, who treated me nice during my #SciFund expedition.

One of the incentives was “Scream like you mean it!”, which gave people a chance to become a sound effect in the movie. I got that for my dad’s birthday.

I was initially a bit worried, because my parents are not into horror movies at all. They’re not even into sharks.

But then I got this email from my mom:

Dad did his screaming and emailed it (after trials to see if we could figure out how to email an audio file :). Just an hour or so ago received an email back that the sound was distorted and could he do it again. So probably in the morning we will try again. THIS IS QUITE HILARIOUS.....best laugh I have had in a while - watching your Dad practice screaming !!! His facial expressions are so funny and the first practise sounded more like a moan.

And after they had finally perfected the recording and submitted an acceptable one:

I think we had more laughs with this gift than anything else in years. It was great fun... who would have thought at 74 years old ha! ha!

Since they’d had so much fun recording my dad’s scream, it only made sense that when Mother’s Day rolled around... yes, my mom got to scream for Sharknado 2 as a Mother’s Day present! (Unfortunately, after making so much fun of my dad’s experience, my mother was a bit more demure. She did not allow pictures to be taken.)

If you want to try to listen for my dad during Sharknado 2, listen for this:

Save the Day essays #7: How the Doctor made me better

The man who makes people better. How sanctimonious is that?

– The Master, “The Sound of Drums,” Doctor Who, 2007

Doctor Who helped make me become a scientist.

True, I might have been a scientist if I never watched Doctor Who. I had a lot of personality traits that helped pushed me towards being some sort of technical career. I was always inclined to science as a kid (dinosaurs and spaceships littered my rooms), I consumed a lot of science fiction, and I was a “smart kid” who got good grades in school.

But there’s a big difference between things that you do when you’re playing as a kid, and sticking out a long haul in graduate school to make science your life’s work. Grad school is tough. It has a high attrition rate. Lots of people do not make it. To make it, you need something to look forward to that can keep you going.

When I introduce myself to students, I joke that, “I went to grad school so I could be called Doctor Zen, and sound like the villain from a bad kung fu movie.” That gets a laugh, but it’s not true. (Though I am prouder than you know that “Doctor Zen” is a role-playing game villain; see here and here.)

The truth is that one of the things that kept me going in grad school was that if I made it, I could be called, “Doctor.” Just a little bit like one of my heroes.

Doctor Who made the title conferred by a Ph.D. important to me in a way that nothing else ever did.

For most people, “doctor” means “physician.” I never, ever, had any interest in going into the health professions. Of all the other scientific characters that I loved from science fiction, none of them really brought the title to the fore. Spock from Star Trek was always, “Mr. Spock” (I guess Spock only ever finished his master’s). Buckaroo Banzai was just, well, Buckaroo Banzai.

Doctor Who made me want to be a doctor. So I could be called “Doctor Zen.”

I didn’t have direct inspiration from the TV series when I was in grad school.

“Survival,” the last episode of the classic series (above) aired the year I started grad school. A series of books (“The New Doctor Who Adventures”) rarely satisfied me. The TV movie (right) aired after I defended my dissertation. I became a doctor when the Doctor was missing.

I wrote back in 2003 when the show’s rebirth was announced:

The Doctor represented so much of what I thought a scientist should be. Adept in solving problems of all sorts, whether it be preventing a Dalek invasion or patching a piece of broken equipment. That “Renaissance man” aspect in particular is one I love... . Not taking the word of authority ... Traveling the universe. Good companions. .. And it’s one reason why I sometimes suggest people call me “Doctor Zen” – it has the sort of same slightly cool ring as “Doctor Who.” At least it does to my vain ears.

It’s not just me:

I see so many children in schools who, because of their love of this silly old show, want to act, write, record music, sing or become scientists.

And it’s not just Doctor Who. Jacquelyn Gill wrote:

Watching The X-Files again reminds me of how big of an inspiration Scully was to me. Bigger role model than any living scientist.

I mentioned Spock before. The actor who created the character, Leonard Nimoy, has met lots of scientists that trace their lineage back to him.

(B)ecause Mr. Spock and Star Trek have inspired so many young viewers to become scientists, researchers who meet him are always desperate to give him lab tours and explain the projects they’re pursuing in peer-to-peer terms. Mr. Nimoy nods sagely and intones to each one, “Well, it certainly looks like you’re headed in the right direction.”

There is a lot of concern in the scientific community to provide scientists with role models and mentors. Those are important. But let’s never forget how many people are inspired by heroes from fiction. Dare I say, those made up characters might matter more in making decisions about what kind of person we want to become.

We tell the tale of heroes to remind ourselves that we also can be great.

- Tao of Shinsei

The Doctor is one of my heroes. I have yet to fight monsters or save the day, but I do love that in my job, I get to imagine and discover new things. The Doctor taught me that there’s a whole universe out there to explore.

Come on. We’ve got work to do!

Save the Day essays

Save the Day essays #1: Restoration
Save the Day essays #2: Recovery
Save the Day essays #3: Family
Save the Day essays #4: Rewatching the rebirth
Save the Day essays #5: Playing favourites
Save the Day essays #6: Anarchy in the U.K.

Related posts

A role model returns
Titles
Nerdcore

External links

Carrying the torch – Doctor Who at 50