Go, Team Venture!

The recent complete failure of my aged computer to recognise the 'turn on' button as meaningful only serves to remind me how very little I know about everything.

Rather like sham scientist Dr. Thaddeus 'Rusty' Venture in the darkly comic adventure cartoon 'The Venture Brothers' now in its fourth season.

Dr. Venture's primary skill sets include snide remarks and alcoholic self-pity, all the more shameful in a former boy adventure hero now pushing 50. His deceased father Jonas' acheivements outstripped modern conventional science but are now crumbling away unused in the Venture compound.

Beset by hordes of admittedly low-grade supervilains, Venture and his upsettingly naive sons would surely be long dead if not for the protection of stoic and vicious bodyguard Brock Sampson, and the grudgling friendships formed with several oddball superheroes.

Although it's hard to pin this cartoon down by genre (Saturday-Morning Retro-Futuristic Cross-Genre Satire?) and it's in NO WAY for kids under... say 33, it IS really, really fun. I especially enjoyed the third season, with its decreased attention paid to the travails of the young title characters and more spent on backstories and side tales featuring the ludicrous secondary types.

Such as Jefferson, the vampire hunter who only hunts 'blackulas' (you're on your own against Caucasian vampires). Or the inept Monarch and his new missus- Dr. Mrs. The Monarch (formerly Dr. Fiancee, formerly Dr. Girlfriend). The evil duo are hamstrung in their arch-foe efforts by their budget, their thematic but impractical butterfly costumes, and the bylaws of the Guild of Calamitous Intent.

I especially enjoy Henchmen 21 and 24, who I recently spotted at a nerd convention.

Foul-mouthed, occasionally disturbing, and often somewhat mean-spirited, it is still much less repellant than 'Drawn Together' and certainly much funnier.

So watch out for were-odiles, shield your eyes at all times, and never count on a robot called HELPER for anything. Go, Team Venture!

The Hugos: Stranger in a Strange Land

Hello, and welcome to my 100th post! Aww, yeah, Titans!
Kids, you may recall that I like the novels of Robert Heinlein, and the 1961 Hugo winner is no exception. 'Stranger in a Strange Land' has the distinction of being the first Hugo winner I ever read, long before Bookmonkey inspired my Hugo-reading project.
In fact, I read it at 17, which was, roughly, 3 million years ago.
It's philosophical, innovative, disturbing, and amazing. As a seventeen year old I was only prepared to call it blasphemous, and I guess it still is. Among its ideas is that everyone and everything that exists- is God.
It's the story of Michael Smith, a man raised by Martians who more or less inspires a religious movement when he returns to Earth for the first time with his outsiders' view of humanity.
The book was beloved by hippies for its thoughts on free love, even prompting a real-world church in California. I know, I know, a new brand of sandwich spread would inspire a church in California. Just joshing, California!
Also from Heinlein, (the man who invented the waterbed) comes the term 'grok', the Martian word meaning a bunch of things, but roughly 'a complete love and understanding of something up to and including eating the item or person in question'.
In this Martian culture, there is so little to live on that the community eats their elders when they pass on, out of necessity. But the process is ritualized for added meaning. They make that person a part of themselves by understanding who he was and what he meant to them, and the dead guy expresses his love for his family and loved ones by sharing ALL that he was with them.
Maybe there's something or someone YOU love that much.
I personally will stick to chicken nuggets, myself, but I'm not the sort of person to stand in the way of true love in any form.
I grok you, humankind.
Thou art God.
And party on, dudes.

Book Review: The Green Hills of Earth

I have 142 unread books on my shelves. And that doesn't include comics.

I am not proud of this, I only mention it because with only one Hugo novel left on my agenda I'm now tucking in to what I estimate at three years to read my own modest library. Faster if TV continues to be its usual monotonous drivel. Thundercats, indeed!

What happened to the nearsighted, antisocial boy I was who devoured books like it was going out of style?

It's books for me from here on out, yessir!
(Don't mind me, TV, nothing to see here.)

First up from a favorite author of mine, was 'The Green Hills of Earth', copyright 1951, by Robert Heinlein, a collection of some of his short stories. It's a swell book, and in no danger of leaving my library for trade value or donation.

Heinlein drew up a timeline to keep all his sci-fi stories straight, and it's included with most of his works. Good old uncle Robert postulated the half century between 1950 & 2000 as interplanetary expansionist, with thriving human colonies on the moon, Mars, & Venus, pioneering the mighty void of space with courage despite many grave accidents and disasters.

His future world is one of personal helicopters for all, and women dressed in six ounces of fabric! All very well, but those two elements alone seem designed for trouble:
(helicopter engine): wuwbwuwbwuwb...
Jones: Zowie, Harriman, how 'bout the propellant tanks on her?
Harriman: Hoo, hoo! I bet a dame like that would... LOOK OUT!
(helicopter collides with 3 other helicopters, explodes): KRAKABOOM.

Speaking of women turning heads, the first story in the collection; 'Delilah and the Space Rigger' takes a light-headed look at sexism in the space workplace. I maintain that although space stations aren't as commonplace as Heinlein hoped, he knew a metric crapload about how people behaved and still behave today. He saw the sexual revolution coming a mile off, and either regarded it as a change in everyone's best interests or knew womenfolk are impossible to hold back. If our kind goes out there, it'll be two by two, or at least shoulder to shoulder.

In 'The Long Watch' and 'The Green Hills of Earth' brave spacemen die horrible and heroic deaths by radiation to save their fellows. So far, there hasn't been much of this outside sci-fi, either. No atomic-powered spaceships means no blind accordion playing space jockeys. Knock on wood. Also commercial space travel is 60 years behind Heinlein's projections and is still little more than a novelty for the ultra-rich. But on the bright side, we don't have indentured slaves dying of fungal infections in the swamps of Venus, either. Well, maybe NEXT century. As long as we engineer the fungus ourselves, and also bring the swamps and slaves with us.

'We Also Walk Dogs' featured a global interconnected telephonic company called General Services whose multitudinous employees offer nearly anything, at tremendous speed, for a price. It may not be organized and driven enough to provoke reclusive scientists into spontaneously generating anti-gravity (as in this tale), but we've got that very connective technology these days. And, who knows? Link enough blogs together, sift through the gibberish and the porn, and, just imagine what all of us might think of... together!
Just keep your eyes on the skies when you're flying your cars, brothers.

Toon Review: Thundercats

By the Eye of Thundera, Teletoon Retro is the final bastion of TV entertainment on Third Earth! Well, no, not really, but damn, do I love cartoons so. I recently saw 24 episodes of a Thundercats marathon. Not all in one sitting, but STILL. I apparently feel THIS is what I should do with my time. And now I get to waste yours, too! So be it!

Produced by Rankin/Bass in 1985 and for several years afterward, Thundercats is Saturday morning fantasy fare chronicling the adventures of a handful of humanoid felines; alien survivors of the crumbled planet Thundera. Perhaps fittingly for a cartoon about space cats, the head writer was Leo Starr. Well, I thought it was amusing. He also wrote Little Orphan Annie and Morbius the Living Vampire, apparently. Appropriate for a program that fluctuates in tone somewhere between sweet and horrifying.

Despite the bizarre premise, the episodes I saw were played almost entirely seriously, very rarely for laughs. Perhaps that was the only thing stopping this from becoming the mega-hit Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soon would be. Still... four seasons, Marvel comics, awe-inspiring Halloween costumes, a CGI movie caught in limbo- somebody probably made out like a Plun-Darian mutant bandit!

It may do them too much credit to call them "characters", since the principal cast, charitably, are probably what my buddy Ron means when he says 'cartoonish' as though it was a bad thing.

Our hero is Lion-O, orphaned twelve-year-old prince-ling in a grown-up body thanks to the failure of his suspension capsule. He inherited the mystic Sword of Omens & is psychically guided by the spirit of a wise deceased warrior/scientist called Jaga. In other words, Lion-O is Luke Skywalker with a shaggy mane. I should say shaggy RED mane. NOW you won't mix them up.

Lion-O's fellow colonists on the strange world of Third Earth are brave, noble, stock types. Panthro is the gruff mechanic. Tigrra is the dashing architect. Cheetara is the speedy lady cat who hits things with sticks. Wilykit & Wilykat are inquisitive kids. And old Snarf "The Fierce" is the truculent house cat/tiny bearded dragon. They seek to build a mighty empire on their adopted world of Third Earth. If they (mostly Tigrra for some reason) can keep from being bamboozled, drugged, or stumbling into nets and deadly danger.

Like the Third Earth, this cartoon seems to have been made of little bits of everything else.

Like Superman, they were rocketed from their dying planet, with advanced technology, an ancestral guide, and inhuman powers to help them. Plus a pesky mineral from their home planet that weakens them (Thundranium, in case you're wondering.)

Like He-Man, they have a barbarian harness-y mode of dress, a life of unending quest and combat, and a skeletal sorcerer arch-foe who lives in a creepy ruined castle with his beast-men armies. Plus, they're very 'toyetic'! Although I, personally, skipped right over Thundercats, never seeing their show at the time and graduating directly from He-Man toys to Ghostbusters toys, I did get a Snarf one Christmas. (Heh. That sounds dirty.)

And like Star Wars... well, everything. The first ally made by the Thundercats is the Ewoks, oh, sorry, I mean the Ro-Bear Berbils, an agrarian tribe of helpful teddy bear droids who build them their Cat's Lair and spending the rest of the season getting captured and needing to be rescued. Frankly, between you and me, if I was one of only four males of my species with only one grown female between us, I'd be more in the mood to rescue the native girls than the teddy bears. But that's neither here nor there.

The animation is a jumbled mix of the very deft and striking and the very rushed and recycled. But what else can you expect if you make 65 episodes in one season! Snarf me!

It's all very silly and inconsequential, but even after 24 episodes I can't say it was getting easier to predict. Any given episode they might be rescuing unicorns from cyborg Vikings or in an undersea frog-mecha battling giant eels, or roaming back in time through the astral plane to free imprisoned alien wizards. Whatever Third Earth was, there was a LOT of it! It's either endearingly eclectic or just dizzying and annoyingly erratic.

Take, for example, the episode where the Thundercats discovered a cave that caused rapid aging, and a fountain of youth that could cure it. Cheetara's fleet feet could navigate both without consequence. So... nothing. When the immediate threat was over, nobody suggests Lion-O try to restore his true age. But... you guys just found the fabled well of immortality! You could... oh, never mind, there's space bounty hunters chasing trolls beyond the River of Despair, you'd better go hit them with sticks.

Would YOU like it? Are you a twelve-year old kid?

Do I like it? Yes.

As Marshall said of Ted on 'How I Met Your Mother', my heart is both drunk AND a kid.

The Hugos: A Canticle for Leibowitz

A tenderhearted pair of my co-workers rescued an abandoned young rabbit on the street today, which may be why Thumper's advice is ringing in my ears as I try to make this review: "If you can't say nothin' nice...don't say nothin' at all."
Sorry, rabbit. The sixties are underway and 1961's Hugo Winner by Walter M. Miller Jr. was not and never will be a favorite book of mine.
It concerns three events, each 600 years further into a very unfortunate possible future of war, atomic mutation, mass illiteracy, tribal conflict and suchlike. The events feature monks of the order of St. Leibowitz, copying, illuminating, embellishing, and preserving the personal effects, blueprints, relics, and grocery lists of the long-dead soldier Isaac Edward Leibowitz, debating their canonical value, reinventing the tech implied within, and eventually expanding the order's mandate to the preservation of all knowledge against human forces bent on self-eradication.
Today I bumped it up from the petulant 'no stars' I had written in my notes at the time, to one star out of four, still my most negative opinion of a Hugo so far. Yes, sadly, there's worse to come and I needed the 'no stars' rating for some others down the line.
'A C for L' is a classic. It is beloved. By other people. I admit this freely: You won't win me over by making me read Latin. Or by, seemingly, having a very low opinion of humanity.
What's worse is 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' seems like it might have inspired a sequence in my favorite episode of Babylon 5's fourth season ''The Deconstruction of Falling Stars". J. Michael Straczynski noticed that similarity halfway through writing it, I guess, thought about taking the bit with the undercover monk out or changing it, and left it in anyway. I'm glad he did. It was awesome and, unfortunately, said everything 'Canticle's' first two thirds said, only MUCH faster and less pretentiously.
I admire scholars. I do. My dearest friend is a librarian who probably fantasizes about working tirelessly in a post-nuke ivory tower, preserving the lone light of knowledge for the day the grubby masses will appreciate it once again. Probably. More likely his fantasies would make juicier reading than 'Canticle'. Maybe they'd have some romance and/or some zombie hordes.
I may have this unfounded hate on for classics of literature, which I know makes my reviews VERY suspect, but I'm damn thankful for people who write stuff down and work to preserve literacy. So, the scholar types in 'Canticle' who give their lives for over a thousand years are admirable, even if I didn't really like any of them. (Probably they were just too church-y for me.)
And, of course, unlike in Babylon 5, the overwhelmingly stupid bulk of the human race (or 'Simpletons', as many of them proudly call themselves after 'The Flame Deluge') never gets any better or smarter, finally using the technical knowledge the monks preserved to continue bombing each other to bits, alongside a REALLY AMAZINGLY DEPRESSING treatise on assisted suicide for a mutant woman with two heads.
Author Miller apparently did himself in just before the sequel came out in 1997. I don't plan to read it. It's probably a classic, too.
Old Misery-Guts Miller was one hundred percent a smarty pants. He deserved his Hugo. Especially in the 1960's. Anti-nuke fiction was a good idea. Still is. I'm all for not being nuked. So we should probably KEEP NOT NUKING EACH OTHER.
But until the human race stops doing kind-hearted things on the sly, like when I saw Kim and Rhianna caring for a lost rabbit this morning, I'm not going to give up on our species.

My Favourite Characters: Mysterious & Machiavellian

My tastes are simple. I enjoy sci-fi and superheroes. And other stuff, too, but outside of the fantasy genres I tend to get bored pretty fast. This is just who I am: realistic drama and drawn-out mysteries have to work extra hard to reach me, to allow me to identify with a character. My buddy Ron says I'm not hooked up right. I'm not unconvinced of that diagnosis.

And moreover, I like morally simplistic characters. All good. All bad. Like Superman or Darkseid. I'm oversimplifying this a bit, but I generally do have a hard time liking fictional characters of a more ambivalent kind.

So mad props to Robert Carlyle, for his portrayal of insane genius Dr. Nicolas Rush in SyFy's Stargate: Universe. This is a great new show, (o.k., it's no Defying Gravity so far, but then what is?) which my otherwise Stargate-loving friend Anthony was not won over by.

In tone, Stargate Universe is rather like the recent Battlestar Galactica, stark and relatively humorless in comparison to the earlier SG-1 or Stargate: Atlantis. Of course, it needn't stay that way indefinitely, the first half of the season has been a near-constant man vs nature struggle for survival. (With time-outs for Quantum Leap-style body swapping with less endangered Earth-type folks) I maintain that SGU could develop in various interesting ways, and I'm hopeful that it will not descend to the wrist-slitting tedious misery of Battleglum, or worse, Caprica. Well, I'm hopeful, anyway. It's good to hope things. It sure ain't as upbeat as Star Trek. But you never know.

Particularly desperate for a new sci-fi show to enjoy, with Doctor Who sparsely available in 2009, I latched onto Stargate Universe tentatively at first, but then when I FINALLY managed to see the pilot I was hooked. Granted, my favorite character was Eli. How could I not like Eli? (Pudgy, affable, computer gamer shown at right.)

But Rush is my favorite DUBIOUS character. My favorite SKETCHY character. I recently racked my brain for a guy who was neither a black hat, nor a white hat, but who I still really enjoy watching. And Rush is at the tippy-top of the list. No offense, Dr. House. Maybe if Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital was on Neptune's moon Triton you'd garner more of my minuscule attention span...

But, seriously: I'm fascinated by this guy. Did he endanger 80-odd lives and strand them on a ramshackle barge on an endless drop into outer darkness just to further his career? Is he on a quest to better humankind and has just grown too obsessed to care about other people? What of his research into the Ancients of Earth, and their ability to ascend into a bodiless, immortal state?
Could he be suicidal, desperate and distracted over the death of his wife? Is he just in a prolonged state of coffee withdrawl? WHAT'S HIS DEAL?
Maybe this is how people enjoy Lost. The MYSTERY and DRAMA hook them. They get to ponder oblique motivations and discuss amongst their friends. They didn't need the rustling in the trees that first night on the island to be immediately revealed as a dinosaur or they'd get bored (like I did). They aren't afraid that 6 years of questions will end abruptly without satisfying conclusions. Or maybe they are. I sure was. But I don't need to wonder anymore. Now I have a Lost of my own... in space. Oh, that sounds terrible. Maybe Anthony was right all along.

I hate Glee! I don't see its appeal at all!

So spoke Community's Jeff Winger, weeping from his efforts to enjoy Glee, the Fox musical-comedy-drama mega-hit. As usual, I laughed very hard during Community, with complete sympathy and affection for its splendid cast of zany misfits. But THAT line made me laugh till I cried. Because I completely agreed with Jeff.

I TRIED. I tried so bloody hard. I really wanted to like this show. Know some things about me first, they might be relevant: I'm a guy. I'm straight. And I ADORE musicals, comedies, and musical comedies. It's just GLEE I can't abide.

I think it's called 'Glee' because 'Despicable Me' was already taken. Not very Gleeful. Try Hateful, hollow, and horrifying.

Executive producer and show-runner Ryan Murphy told Rolling Stone '[Glee is] four acts of darkness and two acts of sweetness'. Did my PVR cut off the last two acts? Where was the sweetness? I think he means the wearyingly repetitive slushies-thrown-in-faces gag. Slushies are sweet, right? I think Murphy may have some trouble identifying sweetness: these characters are too deeply cynical to be high-schoolers. And why are they so unattractive? I know, I know, subjective impressions of physical appearance aside: the men are doe-eyed, 'aw, shucks' goofball victims or total douche-hats, and the women are manipulative, evil shrews or crazier than shit-house rats. It's off-putting! I'd rather hang out with Sil from 'Species' than any girl on Glee. Who WAS I supposed to identify with or, god forbid, LIKE?

Now, to be fair, I remember the emotions were real-esque once when the gay kid's dad subverted my expectations by not freaking when his son came out. That actually seemed like a GENUINE moment of human feeling. And I'm told that when Will's horrible wife revealed she wasn't pregnant and had been stringing him along his reaction was VERY realistic, with shades of domestic abuse. Well, coin a phrase, duh! Screw a guy over in the most primitive possible way and watch the laughs keep on comin'!

It turns out people don't like discovering they've been lied to. Take me, for instance. Glee's pilot sold me on a premise: high school schlubs make good in glee club. Yay! Sounds like fine fare, musical comedy fun. I RAVED about that pilot. I looked FORWARD to it. I ENCOURAGED people to check it out when it returned. Then I let it slap my face for 10 episodes until I gave up.

There was no character development. No plot. Just miserable, auto-tuned, stereotypes unable to connect with my life experiences as an uncaring universe heaps torment and humiliation upon them. Whee!

'Glee' pretends to care about humanity, the pain of growing up, and the blight of high school, but I cannot feel its tacky happy endings. "Freaks and Geeks" was painful to watch, too, but at least it seemed more honest. I actually cared about THOSE characters and when bad things happened to them, I felt bad for them. That's how drama's supposed to work. I think. Or is there some way to loathe everything the characters stand for and just enjoy the juiciness as they stab each other?
It worries me how many viewers are probably doing just that. Glee oozes with all the shallow, soul-soiling unpleasantness of reality TV only somebody HAD TO MAKE THIS UP!

I know you love it. Plenty of people that I love, love 'Glee'. And now NPH and Joss Whedon are going to be stopping by, too. I LOVE THEM!

Sigh. I really wish I could start believin' again.

But I have the feeling Glee will continue to leave me as cold as a slushy and as heartless at that new ass-banjo Jesse St. James. Here's hoping!