Yearly Archives: 2009

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.
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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.


The Fae Will Take You On

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This review first appeared in the Comics Journal.
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Meatcake #17
Dame Darcy
Fantagraphics
24 pp (?)/ $3.95
B&W/softcover
ISBN: 9781560977957

Even when she’s not especially inspired, Dame Darcy creates superior goth comics: cheerfully mean-spirited, idiosyncratically stylish, and oozing with surreal ichor. Thus in this issue’s “Rockstar Romance,” we get to see rockstar Trixxie put paid to her stinking boyfriend Tex — the gross-out high point being a half-page panel in which Tex appears as a bulbous, weeping worm strangling itself with its own belt. “Spider-Silk Tropics” features Darcy regulars Effluvia (a mermaid) and Stega-Pez (a girl who speaks by spewing bloody, inscribed tablets from her throat) as they use their amorous wiles to bamboozle a spider-loving Duke. In both stories, Darcy indulges her goth tropes and her feminism: men are tormented, sisterhood is affirmed, and light-hearted squick is relished by all. And, as always, Darcy’s eccentric drawing is a joy, with perspective, proportion, and visual logic all flattened out to fit into geometrically obscure but oddly elegant patterns.

Again, I do have an effervescent attraction for these narratives. But I pledge my true and more hopeless passion to Darcy’s less tongue-in-cheek efforts. “We Are the Fae and There is No Death” forswears quirky hipster humor and jokey man-bashing alike. Instead, it simply tells a fairy tale; Oriana and her younger sister Hyacinth live in a castle ruled by their harsh father, a king whom we never see. Hyacinth wants to leave the castle and marry the forest ruler…but Oriana doesn’t believe there is any such person, and tries to stop her. As is the case in fairy tales, the plot takes numerous twists and turns, but has an eerie inevitability, pregnant with pain, love, death, and magic. The sisters do escape from the tyrant king, who is both abusive father, and, perhaps, life itself. But where do they end up?

Oriana answers in a remarkable poetic denouement, where she speaks for the first time directly to the reader — as if she has become unmoored from the story. Against a design of stars and flowers, she’s drawn with her hair down and in a transparent shift. “Am I alive or am I dead?” she asks. “It doesn’t matter in this place. Time does not run in a linear line as pronounced by man, but instead runs in an eternal spiral like the rings of a tree. My sister is in eternal holy union with a God.” A full page illustration shows two skeletons embracing; in the lower right of the panel, stylized but lovingly-patterned flowers contrast with the white bones. In the last panel, we see Hyacinth bathing in an idyllic pool, while Oriana sits beside it, head on her knees, butterfly wings sprouting from her back. Her expression is difficult to read; her face may be slightly smiling, or wistful, or perhaps just blank. “Now we are the fae,” the caption says, “and there is no death.”

This isn’t the retro-smirk of Jhonen Vasquez, or even, for that matter, of Edward Gorey. Instead, Darcy’s conclusion is reminiscent of the chillingly beautiful take on immortality at the end of Peter Pan…or of Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth.” “We Are the Fae …”, is in other words, not goth, but true gothic, in which queer doublings suggest a relationship between the human and the uncanny — or in which , indeed, the relationships are the uncanny. In Darcy’s other stories in this book, sisterly love triumphs, and evil men are destroyed. Here, in contrast, all love — between sisters, between parents and children, between men and women — seems to run together like dark water, where the self sinks and dissolves until all that’s left is a smiling, empty mask. All three of these stories end, more or less, with a “happily ever after,” but only in this one does it sound so resolutely inhuman.

Elisha Cook Jr., Earl Grant Titsworth, others; or, The Star Trek Wiki tour continues

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“Galileo VII.” 


…  There is a 1964 movie called Great Gettin’ Up Mornin’. … The black ensign guest-starred on Roddenberry’s first series, The Lieutenant. Nichelle Nichols also did a Lieutenant guest spot, and something tells me it was the same episode. The two definitely co-starred in Great Gettin’. Later he was a reg on Land of the Giants. … Celia Lovsky and Mark Lenard, who both played Vulcan elders on Star Trek, also appeared in The Greatest Story Ever Told. … The woman who played the yeoman in “Galileo VII” now “sells recreational vehicle lots in Palms Spring, California.” … One of the episode’s extras, a 35-ish blueshirt, died in a motorcycle accident two years later. His real name was Earl Grant Titsworth, but for credits he used “Grant Woods” and “Grant Lockwood.”


“Court Martial.”

… The base commander is the “first black actor to play a flag officer on Star Trek,” per Mem Channel. Afro-Portuguese, born in Montreal, the St.-Henri district. The actor, Percy Rodriguez, was a Peyton Place reg for the show’s last season: “A Doctor’s Role for Negro Actor,” the LA Times said in a headline. He narrated the trailer for Jaws, and when he was 89 he came out of retirement to narrate the trailer for a documentary about Jaws-the-phenomenon, The Shark Is Still Workin’. (Wiki says he was interviewed for the film and the interview was his last appearance.) … 

… Cogley the lawyer was Elisha Cook Jr., of course — Wilmer from The Maltese Falcon. To tell the truth, I didn’t think his Cogley was that good; he really did not sell the “Books, Captain! Books!” speech. But he does have a nice moment as the charges are being read out and he frowns down at his elbow in an impatient, manly way. (Here‘s Mem Alpha.)

From Wiki:  “He lived in Bishop, California, typically summering on Lake Sabrina in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.” Wiki quotes John Huston: “[Cook] lived alone up in the High Sierra, tied flies and caught golden trout between films. When he was wanted in Hollywood, they sent word up to his mountain cabin by courier. He would come down, do a picture, and then withdraw again to his retreat.” …

… Joan Marshall played the prosecutor/Kirk old flame. She did a lot of TV work from 1958 to the late ’60s, then married Hal Ashby. Her last film was Shampoo (1975), which Ashby directed, but her part doesn’t make the Wiki cast list. (Mem Channel here.)