Yearly Archives: 2009

More from Wiki about old Star Trek actors

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I’m working my way thru the second season.

In “The Omega Glory” there’s a big lug named Roy Jenson, “remembered by many as the first man beaten up by Caine on the television show Kung Fu (1972).” He also played pro football on the Alouettes, Montreal’s team.


The scientist who creates a mad computer on “The Ultimate Computer” was played by William Marshall, “best known for his title role in the 1972 blaxploitation classic Blacula and its sequel Scream Blacula Scream (1973), and as the ‘King of Cartoons’ on the 1980s television show Pee-wee’s Playhouse beginning with its second season.” But he also did Shakespeare: “His Othello … was called by Harold Hobson of the London Sunday Times ‘the best Othello of our time'” That’s pretty good.

The son of the man who “raised the alarm during the attack on Pearl Harbor” played a proconsul in “Bread and Circuses,” the show’s Roman episode.

In the same episode, the actor who played the oldest and most saintly of the “Followers of the Son” was also author of a book of poems called Forty-Four Scribbles and a Prayer. 

During the ’60s Terri Garr was a bit player in “nine Elvis Presley features. Her first speaking role was a one-line appearance as a damsel in distress in The Monkees film Head written by Jack Nicholson.”


 

Twisted Piece of Crap

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This essay originally ran in the Comics Journal.
__________________________

Metamorpho Year One
Dan Jurgens, Mike Norton, Jesse Delperdang
DC Comics
softcover/color
142 pages/$14.99
9 781401218034

One of the first comics I read was The Brave and the Bold #154, featuring Batman and Metamorpho. Metamorpho had hardly any face time, as it turned out, but his brief appearance made a decided impression. Bob Haney’s plot had the element man wearing jodhpurs and consorting with Turkish drug dealers while spouting supposedly hip but actually dadaesque lines like, “Wowee! Kaman kiddo wasn’t kidding!” Meanwhile, Jim Aparo drew that malleable body from all sorts of bizarre angles — an almost unreadable shot upward through telescoped metal legs; a vertiginous shot from above with Metamorpho’s mouth gaping open as a baddy shoots a flamethrower down his gullet. Both artist and writer were clearly having a blast, and their enthusiasm for the character was infectious. I wanted to read more about him.

I never did though. Oh, I read a fair number of comics featuring Metamorpho, but none of them had anything like the charge of that first meeting. Still, even with my expectations suitably lowered, Metamorpho: Year One is quite, quite bad. Jurgens and Norton switch off on the drawing chores, but neither of them takes any advantage of Metamorpho’s visual potential. Everything looks CGI, with limbs turning into smooth blades or smooth drills — it’s like Metamorpho’s a bottom basement Terminator. Nobody here can even draw mildly successful cheesecake. Sapphire Stagg, the Metamorpho mythos’ gratuitous sex bomb, has the requisite blond hair, big bazoongas, and lack-of-attire, but through the miracle of stiff poses, shaky anatomy, incompetent stylization, and godawful computer coloring, she still ends up looking as sensual as a hunk of plastic.

Dan Jurgens’ story is, if anything, even worse than the art. Rex Mason (the guy who turns into Metamorpho) has all the personality and gumption of a wilted houseplant. The evil Simon Stagg tries to kill him? He gets so mad that he…whines a little. The beautiful Sapphire Stagg doesn’t want him anymore because he’s all, like, ugly now? He gets so mad that he…whines a little. And when the Justice League tricks him into thinking he’s fighting a deadly super-villain and then brags about how clever they were, Metamorpho…tells them how super-heroic they are. Oh, yeah, and then he whines a little. Peter Parker had angst; Metamorpho has querulousness.

Still, I’m not in any position to whine myself, I suppose. To read a comic based on your affection for a character you first encountered 30 years ago is pretty much begging for disappointment. I guess I momentarily forgot that the whole point of super-hero comics these days is to sully the childhood memories of paunchy middle-aged fanboys. At that mission, at least, Metamorpho: Year One succeeds admirably.

Update: I confused Star Sapphire and Sapphire Stagg in the original post. I bet they get that all the time.

Old actors in Wikipedia

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I’m reading Wiki entries on people who have been in old Star Trek episodes.


In “A Piece of the Action,” there’s a guy named Kalo who carries a tommy gun and is ordered around by the big mob boss (who is played by Anthony Caruso). The guy playing Kalo, his name is Lee Delano, studied dance with Martha Graham!

In “A Private Little War,” there’s a witch-temptress played by a woman who later married Zubin Mehta, conductor of the LA Philharmonic. The woman, Nancy Kovack, became a real-life Jackie Collins sort of character, a tv actress who has made it and is now wife of a celebrity jet setter. Kovack is an “ardent and strict” Christian Scientist, known among “Hollywood’s elder generation” for her views. Susan McDougal, a name from the Whitewater affair, worked as Kovack’s personal assistant for a while, and the two of them wound up going at it in court.

The same episode has a big lug in, I think, a white wig, and his name is Tyree. The guy, Michael Witney, who played him married Twiggy in 1977 and dropped dead of a heart attack in 1983.

A burning-eyed 35-ish guy plays the main villain in “Patterns of Force,” the Nazi episode. That was Skip Homeier, and “in 1943 and 1944 he played the role of Emil in the Broadway play Tomorrow the World. Cast as a child indoctrinated into Nazism who is brought to the United States from Germany following the death of his parents.” I never heard of that play. It sounds terrible but so in tune with its era you’d think it would have hit big enough for something of it to stick around in the public memory.

 There’s a John Wayne movie called The High and the Mighty, and a Joan Crawford film called The Damned Don’t Cry. Apparently someone in the Crawford film describes her character as “tough as a seventy-five cent steak.”

Barbara Bouchet played an alien called Kelinda in “By Any Other Name.” In 1970 she moved to Italy and began starring in erotic comedies and erotic thrillers.  “In 1985, she established a production company and started to produce a successful series of keep fit books and videos. In addition, she opened a fitness studio in Rome. … She lives with her family in Rome, where she is a set member of the city’s celebrity social life.“

Funny line

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Mark Kleiman on Lanny Davis, “who will never sell out because he’s always for rent.”


update, This year is a good example of shitty-August syndrome, by which I mean August usually makes for a shitty news month and this August has been especially bad. In the old days newspapers called this the silly season; now major-league public issues get dragged into the bullshit, things like whether we should invade another country or how we should reform health care. The point is to make a big noise about something dumb, preferably dumb and scary — like shark attacks, Saddam Hussein or government euthanasia — but dumb and truculent can also work, as with last year’s “Drill, baby, drill.”

Of course, last year events swung pretty well for Obama after August had passed, so we’ll see how he does this fall on health care. But so far, not good. 

Soooo Dreamy

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I’ve just started the fourth Twilight novel, now, and I have to say, I’m really pretty into them. I think the third was maybe the best one. There’s a pretty great conversation where Edward explains that he wants to wait to sleep with Bella until after their married because he’s worried about her soul…and, okay, I’m a big sap, but I thought that was really sweet. And then, at the end, there’s a pretty great moment where he says, more or less correctly, that his efforts to protect her have all gone horribly awry and he’s an idiot and they should just do whatever she wants to do. I don’t know; there are a bunch of moments like that. He starts to seem vulnerable for the first time in this book, and human, which makes their relationship more real.

I’m still processing it…but I definitely like it way more than Harry Potter…and, I mean, it kicks most of Marvel and DCs output all to hell. There’s not even a comparison there.

Cannibals as glamorous shadow caste

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It seems like somebody must have done this: the creatures with the high cheekbones and ageless skin aren’t vampires, they’re cannibals. That is, the shadowy caste of lovely, damned immortals isn’t made up of undead beings who suck blood; it’s made up of humans who have learned how to escape death and stay young by eating other humans. 

Thought of that because of a post at the Daily Dish.