Monthly Archives: August 2009

Wiki Trek: “The Alternative Factor”

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“… the 1971-1972 syndicated sea adventure series Primus,” whose lead character was named Carter Primus.

… Incredibly a pilot was shot of a series that would be about a Swede and an Irishman who immigrate to the U.S., God knows when it was set, but the series had William Shatner as the Swede. His Swedish accent exists out there someplace and we’ll never hear it. Remember, there is also an episode of Mission: Impossible that is called “Cocaine” and features Shatner. The mind reels at the possibilities.
The actor in question for this episode replaced John Barrymore Jr. at the last minute because Barrymore flaked. The incident is described in Inside Star Trek. Barrymore was Drew Barrymore’s fucked-up father.
What a dreadful beard on that poor guest lead. The optic effects in this episode are also a drag, the big light blobs or inflamed trip-adelic screen transformations or whatever. This is one of the episodes I have trouble remembering, even now that I’ve gone back to watch it a second time. The show goes beyond being a snooze and starts hazing you. You get so many recurring reasons not to look at the screen.
The beard:

… as Lazarus

Wiki Trek: “Arena”

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… A 1970s tv movie called The Alpha Caper had Leonard Nimoy, Victor Taback, and James Sikking.

Also this guy, who in “Arena” plays an ensign. He gets offed or put out of commission early on. I think he gets to talk, has some sort of moment where he croaks out a warning or a few words, but basically he’s this close to being screen Kleneex, someone there to be got rid of. Meanwhile, offscreen, he was writing and putting on a stage adaptation of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman.

The guy’s wife was “a singer/comedienne” in the court of Lucille Ball, a “close friend and protege” of Ball’s, and he had studied with Uta Hagen, so you get a collision of different show-biz worlds there. Also, the Lucy connection probably helped get him the “Arena” part, since Desilu still owned the series at that point.

He had a career, Wiki says, with him and his wife doing a lot of plays, presumably in LA because they were “jointly honored with the 2002 L.A. Ovation Award for Career Achievements.” Seems all right. LA is a good-size city and I bet it’s doing all right for theater.

Here he is:

 

Wiki Trek: “Squire of Gothos”

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William Campbell was “the first actor to sing with Elvis Presley in a film,” Mem Alpha says. Campbell played the alien/little kid Trelane, who was “in part a parody of Liberace,” Wiki says. The resemblance does seem obvious when pointed out. Also Wiki: Campbell “married Judith Exner.” That bowled me over, because Exner was the woman who slept with Sam Giancana and John Kennedy. Campbell was the lead in Coppola’s first feature, Dementia 13. Apparently he was never much for the Trek convention circuit, couldn’t be bothered, so I guess he managed to save some money along the way. 

To look at him, Campbell seemed like a second-hand Tony Curtis, the way the woman in “Catspaw” seemed like a second-hand Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe these hand-me-down types still show up among tv actors. When you’re watching the old shows, they’re not hard to spot: a guy who looks like Brando but isn’t, or like Tony Curtis but isn’t.

Campbell’s Trelane (the child-alien) is one of the few really good, spirited performances by a Star Trek guest star. The guy had pizzazz. Then again it helped that the role had pizzazz: Anthony Caruso and Victor Tayback were good too in “A Piece of the Action.”

There’s an embarrassing moment in “Tribbles,” where Campbell played the chief Klingon, where he turns on his heel and struts to the door and you see his plump buttocks bouncing. He was in his 40s by then and men of the time didn’t expect to keep their figures, a fact that shows up often enough in old tv shows.

Campbell became pals with Roddenberry and Doohan, who was also a Roddenberry pal, and the three of them played poker.

And here he is:


“


Another movie title: The Gallant Hours (1960). … And Never Steal Anything Wet, the variant title of “the ’60s beach movie Catalina Caper.“

The actress who played the yeoman who dances with Trelane “was queen of the 1962 May Festival in Orange, California. Later that year, she was named Miss Orange County Press Club. In 1967, she appeared on the cover of the July issue of Playboy. Wolf abandoned her acting career after her 1968 marriage to Lawrence Taylor Tatman III, aka Skip Taylor. Taylor was co-manager of The Kaleidoscope, a short-lived LA psychedelic nightclub.” Venita Wolf, another great name.

Wiki Trek: “Shore Leave”

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… TV series of the late ’50s and early ’60s: The Man from Blackhawk, Sam Benedict, The Farmer’s Daughter. One from the late ’60s, a favorite title of mine: Bracken’s World. A boy who had a regular role on that show killed himself, something that shows up in What Really Happened to the Class of ’65.


… Jubilee Trail, a Western from the 1950s. Here’s another: Drum Beat.
Ensign Rodriguez, the young fellow with the girlfriend, was also Lt. Escobar in Chinatown. … Kirk’s long-lost love interest starred in an attempt to make a sitcom of My Sister Eileen. I like the earrings, which I assume William Theiss hunted down somewhere.

… as Ruth
The man who played Don Juan was named James Gruzal, which just hits me as an unusual name to have.

Synthetic Sugar Rush

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This review first appeared in the Comics Journal.
______________

SCUD The Disposable Assassin: The Whole Shebang
Rob Schrab
Image Comics
paperback
black and white/$29.99
978-1-58240-685-5

SCUD is a pulpy cyberpunk romp. The main character, SCUD, is a robot assassin who comes out of a vending machine; put a coin in, tell him who the target is, set his contempt level to determine how much extreme prejudice he employs, and let him rip. Scud’s supposed to self-destruct after completing his assignment, but a loophole allows him to prolong his life and his career of mayhem. Over the course of 24 issues he fights a monster with a plug on its head, a squid on its face, and mouths on its knees; a werewolf who switches arms with him and then turns into a black hole; a bull with chainsaws for horns; and the severed head of Jayne Mansfield. Allies, on the other hand, include British astronauts who all have backgrounds on the Shakespearean stage; a cute child made out of drywall, zippers, and interdimensional portals; and a sexy bounty-hunter with a kink for robot sex named, of all things, Sussudio.

Action, gore, and outlandish character designs abound. Rob Schrab’s visual imagination is both voracious and unstoppable. His pages are a mess of panels spilling into and over one another, sound effects, motion lines, and outlandish details. He work reminds me of a cartoonier Pushead, or of some of Keith Giffen’s loonier moments as an artist. Inevitably, in all the chaos, the narrative becomes at times incomprehensible — but so what? You’re not here to watch the hero foil evil and get the girl. You’re here to watch the three-way fight between an imitation shogun warrior, zombie dinosaurs, and the mob.

Unfortunately, as the series goes along, Schrab and his co-writer Don Harmon start to move away from violent nuttiness for its own sake, and begin to try to Say Something Meaningful. Bad move.

Many creators do, of course, imbue their punky future dystopias with bite — Tank Girl comes to mind, as, to some extent, does Adam Warren’s Dirty Pair. Alas, SCUD’s bad attitude is as prefabricated as its hero. Schrab makes fun of God and angels and casually has Ben Franklin murder a nun. But it’s all in the name of jovial fratboy crassness, not out of actual misanthropy or bile. I wasn’t surprised to see in the author blurb at the back that Schrab had done time as a stand-up comic.

When he tries to give the narrative a point, therefore, Schrab goes, not for satire, but for melodrama. The end of the story devolves into tragic backstories, doomed heroes whining, and a saccharine and unmotivated quest for true love. The series officially jumps the shark when it is suggested that Sussudio has a robot kink not for the goofy reasons originally propounded (something to do with a malprogrammed robot maid), but instead because her parents didn’t pay enough attention to her. The initial joke was rather funny; the attempt to make us take it seriously, however, starts to border on tasteless. Vending machines are great for a callow rush of sugar. But when they try to sell real food — say, an egg-salad sandwich— the results are invariably repulsive.

Update: Fixed embarrassing error. Sigh.

Photobucket Is Holding Me Hostage

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If you look around the site you may notice that some of my pictures are not visible. I apparently exceeded my bandwidth. I then paid to upgrade because I care about you, my blog user…but, of course, the pictures still aren’t showing. I contacted photoshop to see what the deal was…so hopefully some day they will fix it. We’ll see….

Susan Oliver and others: more Star Trek Wiki

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“Menagerie,” 1 and 2. … Vina the dancing girl, who was painted green and caused other green-skinned women to pop up thru decades of Trek continuity, was played by Susan Oliver. Oliver’s last role appears to have been in 1988 on Freddie’s Nightmares, which was a syndicated horror anthology spun off from the Elm Street films. She appears as “a mysteriously gloomy maid who arrives at the young title character’s home and reveals herself to Judy as seemingly her own gray-haired future self. In Oliver’s final scene, she turns away from Judy and leaves the house, disappearing into the fog.” From green dancing girl to “gray-haired future self”: Hollywood has a brutal life cycle.


Memory Alpha says: “Oliver was also a passionate pilot, winner of the 1970 Powder Puff Derby air race and the fourth woman to fly a single-engined aircraft solo across the Atlantic. She attempted to become the first woman to fly a single-engine plane from the United States to Moscow; she made it as far as Denmark but was denied entry into Soviet airspace. ” …    

…  A ’60s film called Codename: Heraclitus, Ricardo Montalban in the cast. 

… There’s an episode of Time Tunnel with Machiavelli “lost in time at the Battle of Gettysburg.”

 … Clint Reynolds was going to play Two Face in the campy ’60s Batman show! But it never happened. 

The episode uses footage from Trek‘s first pilot, when the cast was all different. For instance, the medical officer was John Hoyt, who went to Yale and joined Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater. Memory Alpha: “Perhaps Hoyt’s best-remembered TV role, however, is that of Grandpa Stanley Kanisky on the Nell Carter series Gimme a Break! Hoyt joined the cast of this series in its second season in 1982 and stayed with it until its cancellation in 1987, after which he retired from acting. He passed away just four years later.”

… There’s a play called Absence of a Cello, which sounds like it could be a Peter Cook line (“The problem, glaringly,  is that no cello would appear to be involved in the operations of your string quartet.”)

Laurel Goodwin played the first of three cute yeomen whom Gene Roddenberry shoved into the series; they were meant as a starship captain’s equivalent of a good-looking secretary. The first two were rather Bambi-ish; the third (Grace Lee Whitney as Yeoman Rand) was older and not played as a dipsy-doo, but she got written out pretty fast. Anyway, Goodwin quit acting at 29, and years later she and her husband somehow wound up producing a wheels-and-beer movie that starred Burt Reynolds. Wiki says the film, Stroker Ace (1983), was “a commercial and critical bomb.” To do the film Reynolds turned down the drunken-old-astronaut part Jack Nicholson took in Terms of Endearment, the role that made Nicholson a star again.

… There was a 1953 version of The Jazz Singer!

One of the aliens (“Talosians”) in the episode’s first-pilot footage also played Cousin Itt in The Addams Family. … Here’s a guy who played a spare Starfleet officer. I think his face looks like it was drawn in the manner of Dan Clowes’s Lloyd Llewellyn, retro-’50s phase.