Future Zed

OK Hollywood, here's another idea.
A zombie outbreak occurs & the way people deal with it, due to mamby poamby liberal meddling, the zed are cryogenically frozen so a future society can figure it out or a time machine is created so they can be sent into the future, again, hoping the future society can figure it out.
The future could be any sort of place, you could even go Planet of the Apes & have a future society of intelligent zombies who would have to contend with the influx of savage "refugee" zombies.
Heck, it could even be a society of robots who only use humans for batteries. They would have to protect their wetware from the voracious zed.
Sci Fi, Zombies, Time Machines? Robots?
you're welcome

Don't Give Fox Another Chance

It appears Fox TV wants the rights to The X-Men.
Comic book super heroes are science fiction. Science fiction requires $$$ to produce. It takes time to develop the characters & universe. It would take less if you just used what was already developed but Hollywood knows better. But Fox wants instant results and has killed science fiction shows too many times.
Let somebody else develop comic book TV. Fox isn't mature enough & will just ruin franchises for other companies to produce. The X-Files came along when Fox had nothing. It would never have lasted a season nowadays.
Fox, step away from the art boards...

They Walk Among Us

Sunnydale? Bon Temps? Add Springfield, Ohio to the list. Once a quaint happy town where everybody knew one another and everybody had a smile for one another.
Now it's overrun with vampires, werewolves & such. Fortunately we've got some middle aged guy & a couple teenage girls fighting to defend us with their Slayer Covenant.
The Daily Mail reports on a middle aged man who took his fantasy world seriously & enlisted teenage girls to join him.
It's kinda strange. I'm into a lot of the crazy science fiction, supernatural stuff Mr Edwards is into and, as such, frequently find myself in contact with young people & even kids online.
A. I keep my fantasy world out of the real world.
B. When I am dealing with yunguns, I am very guarded in what I say & frequently don't say anything. I sure as hell don't recruit kids.
In one of Edwards' videos he talks about how monsters exist. I think he got that right.

The Springfield Noose-Son version

HT to Losantville

Hey Hollywood !

Everybody knows it. Everybody is thinking it. But nobody will say it.
OK, I will. Hollywood should put Aztec Ace on the big screen. A guy from the 23rd century with a penchant for jazz & Coca Cola, who lives in an ancient Aztec pyramid who goes globe trotting & time traveling with his girlfriend Bridget & the floating, disembodied head of Sigmund Freud in an effort to save the space time continuum couldn't not be a success.
But, Quimbob, doesn't Hollywood fuck up everything it touches?
Well, yeah….
oh well...

More on Ace

KAHN !

A Star Trek Maverick

Started watching Star Trek Deep Space Nine recently. It was my favorite Star Trek series. While the first series was described as a TV western, about the only western adventure it compared to was the Lewis & Clark expedition which hasn't been a smash hit on prime time TV. Most of the old westerns that were popular were of people dealing with their turf - The Big Valley, Bonanza, Gunsmoke…
And that's what STDS9 was about - people staking their claim in the frontier, putting down roots & making a home. Since the cast wasn't off galavanting all over the cosmos, it also shared more insight into how the civilized galaxy was being run. By exploring the foundation of the Star Trek universe, it expanded that universe like Tolkien did with the Hobbit series & Lee did in the 60s Marvel universe.
There was another popular wester called Maverick, about a hustler with a heart of gold who wandered the west looking to score whatever he could. 2 other 60s era shows had a similar premise of wandering young mer, Route 66 and Then Came Bronson, although those guys weren't swindlers & the shows, in general were not comedies. About the closest TV science fiction has come to Maverick was the ill fated Firefly but even that used an ensemble cast while Maverick, Bronson & Route 66 relied on only 1 or 2 strong recurring characters but featured at least 1 strong guest character per show.
I think this would be an excellent model for a new Star Trek TV series. The airwaves have been Trekless too long. Maybe Will Wheaton dropping out of Star Fleet Academy to bum around on a Harley space bike? Unfortunately, it would take a lot stronger actor to pull it off & we seem to be stuck with soap opera type ensemble shows for awhile.

Her

This movie about a guy falling in love with the home secretary computer system thinagamabob has got Glenn Beck in a tizzy. I guess it's just one more of Glenn's harbingers of the apocalypse when a geek falls in love with an annoying voice. Probably would have been better made in Bollywood.
Being a fan of the Star Trek TV shows, I must point out that while I had nominal nominal crush on Nurse Chapel, I never had a crush on the computer voice. Now, Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda was a different story altogether.A much better robot love story would probably be Donna Matrix, a story about a love droid whose programming gets hacked with some military programming to suit the needs of a pathetic masochist but results in a lethal dominatrix / terminator kinda robot that terrorizes the city & requires the military to put down. This would make a great movie in the hands of Robert Rodriguez.Now, when can we expect a Him movie?

A Bakers Dozen of the Hottest Star Trek Chicks
As I promised, I am going to do more pointless lists this year. This list isn't so pointless, however since nobody seems to have done a list on this particular subject. With only 10 movies and 5 series with over 700 episodes, it was pretty easy to narrow it down.
In no particular order…..
Leah Brahms

A hologram the blind engineer concocted to figure out some stuff he couldn't. She had died a long rime ago so she wouldn't have been up to speed on modern stuff and he could only program what he already knew so, it didn't make much sense but she saved the day & was easy on the eyes even if you were wearing a chrome beret over your face.


The Duras SistersLursa & B'etor

Klingon chicks plotting, fighting and drinking blood wine into the wee hours? Be still my heart.


Vash

Piccard's nemesis, an Indiana Jones type chick in space. yow


Losira

Lee Meriwether telling you she's "for you"? Who cares if you die?


B'Elanna Torres

Klingon chicks…..
even if half human...


Marta

Batgirl goes green!


Ro Laren

argh The feisty Bajoran who ditched her role to languish in obscurity til she could turn Bon Temps on it's head. If Sisco only knew….


Yeoman Janice Rand

oh, man, she didn't do much but in the late 60s, who cared?


Jadzia Dax

Hot but with that staid librarian freak thing going on. Add to that she had a symbiote in her that used to be a cantankerous old gut. Seriously mixed messages for a geeky teenage boy.


Kira Nerys

The feisty little Bajoran rebel who had problems playing by the rules. The good bad girl or the bad good girl, whateever….


Lieutenant Nyota Uhura

Do I really need to say anything?


Seska

A traitorous alien spy - does it get any hotter?


Alice & Alice

ahhhh, the Alices, Harry Mudd couldn't make too many…..

If you see a pattern here, yeah, I do too. scary….
Anyway apologies to Elinor Donahue, Sally Kellerman, the chick with the competitive chef show, the young T'Pol, the chick doing the Weight Watcher ads, Joan Collins, Terri Garr, Marina Sirtis, The various Borg Queens, the chick who played a zombie, the historian chick who sold out the crew to Kahn, Sisko's girlfriend, the hot Romulan commander chick, Engineer O'Brien's wife & a gazillion others.

Let's Aim Higher

My latest dive into TV Science Fiction history has been Irwin Allen's Time Tunnel featuring the incomparable Lee Merriwether. In the first episode a grouchy little Senator wants to see what the taxpayer's $7.5B had returned. This got me thinking, if a time machine costs that much, why should we stop at $3.5B for a plain old bridge over the Ohio River at I-75? Why not put a little more into it and create a time traveling bridge! Sure, $7.5B in 1966 dollars is more like $500B today but it likely wouldn't be so expensive as computer junk is way faster & cheaper nowadays. Heck, you could probably run the whole thing on an iPad, today. Further, think how popular a bridge that could get you there yesterday would be. Would people pay tolls? You betcha! Would they complain about going over the bridge one at a time? Of course they would but the back up would be meaningless since you would come out on the other end before you started waiting to enter!
This is the way to go folks - and if there's a glitch here or there? Well 33,000 traffic fatalities a year doesn't seem to deter anybody from the road.
Also - a remake of Time Tunnel with Lee Merriwether as the cranky politician would be too cool.

Science Fiction Fun in Cincinnati
or
神圣的睾丸

whew!, there's some good free sci fi this week in Porkopolis. First off, on July 26 at MoBo, is Serenity @ 9PM. The New York Dolls will be at Shake It Records @ 5PM, so you'll probably just want to make a night of it in hot sticky Northside Tuesday. Maybe grab a burrito with the liberals at The Comet @ 7:30
The next night, the 27th, at the Mercantile Library will be 2001: A Space Odyssey (or as VegasAnt called it, "the movie about the funky magnet") @ 7P (reservations requested.
Beam me up, daddyo!

BARSOOM !

I have accepted the fact that Hollywood is incapable of original thought. Remakes of remakes of adaptations seems to be the best they can do. That they don't even pick good crap to adapt.....
Hugo Chavez bringing up the topic of life on Mars on World Water Day made me think of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter on Mars pulp series & why the hell doesn't anybody do that on film (or pixels).
Lo & behold! A film adaptation is due in 2012 which will mark the 100th anniversary of the character's introduction to the pulp world.
It will probably suck but you would need today's special effects tech to do the story.

HT to The Pagan Temple for Chavez' latest lunacy.

Top 10 Robo-Cyborg-Android Chicks

Because chicks that whir, click, buzz, beep & clank are just HOT!
If I really thought about it I would probably re-order these listings. If I was a Forbes editor I would throw darts in the dark.
#10

Tekla
Tekla from the Mainframe animated series Shadow Raiders Played a main role in the first episode & spent most of the rest of the series lying around circling the drain.



#9

Jocasta
Jocasta was created by Ultron who was created by Hank Pym (Goliath / Ant Man) using Janet van Dyne's (The Wasp & Hank Pym's wife) brain waves to be used to attack Pym. Pym re-programmed her & brought her back to life & she joined The Avengers only to turn on them when Ultron triggered her old programming with a remote control and and and
She was a Marvel character, what can I say?
I love the riveted garter!



#8

The Bionic Woman
The original - Lindsay Wagner. With her bionic legs & arm she could easily lift a small car. So why didn't her non bionic spine snap like a twig? Praise Wolverton.



#7

Motoko Kusanagi
From Ghost in the Shell 1 & 2, Motoko has to wrestle with her mechanical & personal sides while running around shooting bad guys and jumping off skyscrapers in teeming Japanese metropolises. YAY!



#6

The Mudd Twins
Harcourt Fenton Mudd lands on a planet full of androids & creates Alices 1-250 & 250 - 500 played by twins Alyce anh Rhae Andrece.



#5

Aphrodite IX
Aphrodite IX is an android hit woman who isn't too keen on her job & wrestles with her mechanical & personal sides while running around killing people & jumping through windows & such.



#4

7 of 9
The Borg chick who gets adopted by The Voyager crew & gradually becomes a regular Jane. While the Borg mantra was, "Resistance is futile", 7's was "I will not comply".



#3

The Machine Girl
The Machine Girl gets beaten and mutilated after her brother is killed by a gang & garage mechanics fit her up with a prosthetic gatling gun for her amputated forearm. Talk about lemonade outta lemons.



#2

Parody
The mother of all hot robot chicks, Rotwang globbed the features of Maria on her & messed her all up. Trivia tid - the actress who played Maria also played the robot.



#1

The Borg Queen
OK, I'll admit it, the whole cyborg / zombie thing just really works for me. Add in the interchangeable parts & it's like George Romero meets Eli Whitney.
And of course I have to tip my hat to all of H.R. Giger's crazy ass alien zombie robo mamas and Sorayama's scrawny chrome gynoids, too.

Ohio SB 243

Thoth


Ohio Senate Bill 243 proposes ban on human-animal hybridizations.
Why?
Steve Buehrer (R Delta), introduced the legislation originally in a broad way that made no distinction between therapy for serious illness & handicaps and super hero breeding.
The use of these "hybrids" is due to the shortage of donated human eggs in doing "stem-cell" research that can help people with any number of crippling health problems. For more on the background, check out BioNews.
The bill has passed the Senate & is going to the House.
As a comic book / science fiction fan, my first thoughts are of characters like Spider-Man, who not a hybrid at birth, gained spider like powers after being bitten by a radio-active spider. One of my favorite characters along this line was Oedi, the cat man from the Dreadstar comics. A far off galactic empire created a race of cat men to blend the ferocious fighting skills, coordination & hunting ability of a cat with a human who could fit the uniform. The result? A race of hybrids who liked to sleep a lot. They later found that the beings could farm pretty well, too. Oedi's combat skills didn't manifest til the galactic empire slaughtered his wife.
How would our society deal with a culture of "sub-human" human constructs? This is famously explored in Philip K. Dick's Blade Runner.
Currently, most plans for these hybrids are to make therapeutic goo.
Try as I might, the only arguments I can find in favor of this legislation always grind down to religionist opinion. It invariably winds up with quoting Christian scripture & frequently citations of Ohio being a Christian state.
Ohio's Christian Taliban set is tittering with glee at the thought of kneecapping scientific & medical progress.
In pre-Christian days people had gods who were part goat, bull, elephant, ibis, jackal... Ma'at had wings. It differentiated them from the gods. There have been any number of hybrid creatures like centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, flying dragons & such frequently tasked with protecting us.

Ganesha


In Christian thought it is believed that God made man in his image. Hence the human form is something kind of sacred. It's this differentiation from other species that gave the Christian domain over everything else. You can see how this belief could be skewed to give European Christians dominion over sub-Saharan Africans, Indians & Asians practicing their own religions. You can see how it could lead to denying inter-racial marriage with a mindset that inter-racial = inter-species. Couple that with the concept of these sub-species being "soulless" & you got a real recipe for, well, everything bad in modern western civilization.
Do we need to perpetuate this?
If the Republicans who support this legislation were real libertarian, free marketers they would condemn it in a minute. What about the jobs that will be lost by hamstringing our research industry? Unfortunately, when sex is involved these clowns do a 180 & go all Stalin Hitler Taliban on us. Do we want these people legislating along religious lines and leave a group of people handicapped by disease only to then label them a burden on society and bemoan the tax dollars spent on warehousing them? Think they won't eventually come up with a Final Solution?
This is wrong headed and un-American legislation.
~ cheap shots deleted ~

Go on, you know you want to !
"SCARIEST living sensation of the CENTURY! An ABSOLUTE "MUST" if you get your kicks from the STRANGE and MYSTERIOUS' See 2 eerie botanical MONSTERS in 6 glowing colors, actually GROW real green "hair"!"
"In ADDITION to these TWO HAIR RAISING MONSTERS, we will send you a fantastic "ASTRONARIUM" greenhouse! This professional piece of equipment is disguised to look like a spooky SPACE GROTTO or CAVE, complete with 3-D spacemen figure: Looks JUST LIKE the SURFACE OF ANOTHER PLANET! Inside this Astronarium is a CONCEALED HYDROPONIC TANK"
"You ALSO get a CRYSTAL PLASlIC HYDRO-ABSORPTION UNIT which completes the CAPILLARY CYCLE OF LIFE which begins as soon as you plant a MONSTER!"

Star Trek
v
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
I have been watching Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. A comparison to Star Trek is inevitable. What's amazing about these shows is their 180 degree approaches and the fact that they overlapped each other in TV history. Voyage ran from 64 to 68 while Trek ran from 66 - 69.
The Enterprise was well armed but it's mission was exploration while the Seaview was promoted as a research vessel but was "really" secret weapon. The enemies in Voyage were bald, bearded foreigners who smoked pipes or used cigarette holders. The Seaview crew was 100% white male Americans. The only ethnic character was Kowalski who was probably from exotic Cleveland. In Trek the enemies frequently weren't enemies & the drama was frequently more of an inner turmoil thing. The crew, just on the bridge, was American, Russian, Japanese, Scottish, African & even a friggin alien. Well, semi alien with a half breed Vulcan. The African was a chick to boot.
Star Trek took place around 2260 while Voyage was placed in the far off futuristic realm of the late 1970s.
Home for both shows was in SoCal, Trek in San Francisco & Voyage in Santa Barbara.
The biggest difference is the attitude. Voyage has a heavy ominous feel with danger lurking at every turn while Trek is a hopeful adventure with new worlds & new civilizations. Voyage seems more topical, nowadays with it's themes of terrorism & nationalist paranoia. Star Trek's fluffy optimism seems almost quaint. I think I like the Star Trek universe a little more than Voyages. FWIW, as paranoid as the Seaview crowd are, their security sucks. In the first episode the new captain sneaks onboard through a door hangin' wide open on the Seaview. Forget security, isn't making sure the doors are shut a priority on a submarine? I was laughing at the smoking going on in the sub but, poking around, I found smoking actually has been allowed on subs. So, how come 300 years later you can't have open flames on the Enterprise? Unless you are a half breed Vulcan, of course.
Both the Seaview & the Enterprise are ridiculously huge! I have been on the USS Cleveland. It is not a place for the claustrophobic.
So, ultimately, one has to ask, who'd win in a fight? While the Seaview might be able to elude the Enterprise, it certainly couldn't win with it's antique tech, although the Flying Sub might give the Galileo a run for it's money. A better match up would be Lee Crane v James Kirk. So, given equal vessels who would win? Poll at top right.