Screen vs Screen: Catch-22

It probably would have been better if I'd done this before Memorial Day, but oh well.

Anyway, this week I watched Hulu's Catch-22 series.  Or since it's only 6 episodes maybe miniseries would be a better description.  I thought it was really good but then since I hadn't read the book in about 12 years I wasn't sitting around saying, "That wasn't how they did it in the book!  That's not what happened in the book!  That's not how he looked in the book!"  You know, as can happen if you're really familiar with a book when you watch a TV/movie adaptation.

The gist of the story is the same:  in 1944 there's a bombardier named John Yossarian who is deathly afraid of death.  He does just about anything to keep himself from going on bombing missions from making a liver ailment to poisoning his own squadron with soap flakes.  And yet his commanding officer, Colonel Cathcart, continues raising the number of missions before someone can be rotated back home.

A recurring theme in the Hulu version is that while he's trying so hard to escape death, Yossarian inadvertently causes many of those in his unit to die.  Early on a new guy named Mudd shows up and asks where the admin tent is; Yossarian tells him it's the 2nd tent on the right but too late realizes it's the 3rd tent on the right.  Mudd goes into the 2nd tent and gets pressed into a bombing mission in which he's killed.

Later Yossarian is on a mission but he and the navigator can't agree whether the bridge is the right bridge so he doesn't drop the bombs.  He has them go in for a second pass, during which they destroy the bridge but the plane is shot down and one of his friends is killed.

When Cathcart is determined to send the unit on a dangerous bombing run of the city of Bologna, Yossarian sneaks into the briefing room and out of spite moves the "bombing line" north of the city on the map.  To his surprise, Cathcart and the rest of the command staff wake up thinking the city was captured.  Instead of radioing headquarters to check this, Major de Coverley heads to the city to start obtaining quarters for the American soldiers only to find Nazis still occupying it.  He's never seen again.

Another time Yossarian sabotages the intercom on his plane and convinces the pilot, McWatt, to turn back.  That night Cathcart singles their crew out for punishment by not letting them have baked Alaska like the rest of the unit.  He dresses McWatt down in front of everyone, which prompts McWatt to steal a fighter the next day and do a little stunt flying.  But he flies too low and kills a guy named Kid Sampson.  Out of guilt, McWatt crashes the fighter into a mountain.

But what breaks Yossarian is the inadvertent death of a Private Snowden.  Since his friend Nately died in the rear gun turret, Yossarian tells Snowden to just sit to the side since there aren't any German fighters at this point anyway.  But the plane is hit and Snowden dies; had he been in the back turret he'd have been fine.  The terrible part is at first Yossarian thinks Snowden's only been hit in the leg.  He assures the young private it'll be fine after he puts a tourniquet on it.  Snowden keeps complaining he's cold--and then Yossarian realizes Snowden has been hit in the abdomen and there's nothing he can do to save the boy.

When the plane lands, Yossarian strips off his bloody clothes and refuses to put clothes on again, even to a medal ceremony with an important general, who just shrugs and pins the medal to Yossarian's hat.

Looking over the SparkNotes for the book, I saw that the miniseries actually rearranges some events.  Snowden's death was chronologically near the beginning, not the end in the book.  It's the event that gives Yossarian his fear of flying.  Whereas in the Hulu series it's used as the breaking point for Yossarian, when he no longer has the will to try to fight his fate.

Besides the Hulu series I also watched the 1970 movie on Amazon Prime.  The movie kept more closely to the order of events in the book.  Really between the movie and miniseries you get most everything that happens in the novel as the movie cuts out some things like Yossarian's training in America with Lieutenant Scheisskopf (German for "shithead") and sleeping with Scheisskopf's wife.  Major de Coverley is cut out entirely.  But the Hulu series cuts other things like Yossarian being stabbed by an Italian whore.

The movie has a far more hopeful ending than the Hulu series.  In the movie Yossarian hears his friend Orr, who crashed in the ocean and was presumed dead, has washed up in Sweden.  Yossarian sees a way to break the cycle by following Orr's example and running away to Sweden.  This is also the end in the book.  Whereas the Hulu series ends with Yossarian broken and naked in the nose of a bomber on yet another mission.  Neither ending is "happy" but obviously the movie/book ending is happier than the Hulu one.

Both the movie and miniseries are good in a way.  The movie is obviously shorter at 2 hours while the miniseries is about 4 1/2 hours altogether.  But I think the miniseries has a more easy to understand narrative as the movie's narrative, like the book, frequently uses flashbacks, especially to the death of Snowden.  Since the movie was made in 1970, the production values of the Hulu miniseries are a lot better.  And while Alan Arkin is a great, respected actor, I think Christopher Abbott's performance as Yossarian was better.  A little more subtle and realistic, I'd say.

No matter which you watch, there's still a lot left out from the book.   You should probably read that for the full experience.

Payoffs Big and Small

A couple of months ago a couple of newer Rifftrax movies provided a good object lesson on having payoffs for plot elements.  Sometimes those elements can be small or sometimes they can be much larger.

First up the 1995 horror movie Ice Cream Man where Clint Howard plays a crazy ice cream man who murders people for little to no reason before being killed by a kid he abducted.  The kid then carries on his legacy.  Or something.

Anyway, in the movie there's a group of local kids who call themselves "Rocketeers" because they have toy rockets that can launch from the front of their bikes.  Like what Chekhov (the author guy not the Star Trek guy) said about a gun, these rockets will have some use in the final act, right?  Nope.  The most they're used for is one kid accidentally shoots a cop car and is nearly killed.  Which contributes almost nothing to the plot--such as it is.

One of the "Rocketeers" is a girl whose father is British (played by David Warner, who you might remember from Star Trek V/VI and the "Four Lights" episode of Next Generation) and a minister.  At one point she comes home and he's psyched because her mom is foaming and speaking in tongues.  This is going to have some relevance to the plot, right?  Maybe she'll warn them about the ice cream man or something?  Nope.  It's never mentioned again and the next time we see the mother she's fine and dandy.  And why is her father British?  And why waste money on a recognizable actor like David Warner when they could have hired any community theater schlub for that tiny, unimportant part?

The same weekend I also watched a 1990 dystopian "thriller" called Omega Cop where a bland guy who looks like a cut-rate Ben Mendelssohn fights a gang of slavers and rescues three women while Adam West almost literally phones in his role as the guy's boss holed up in a bunker that's supposed to be the last vestige of civilization.

At the start of the movie the bland cop and a dispatcher in the bunker are bantering about retro music.  She left a tape in his Jeep that he puts in and it plays...some vague sorta doo-wop song.  Nothing recognizable like Elvis or the Beach Boys or Buddy Holly or something.  Pretty weak payoff for that bit.

But the longer-term plot that doesn't really have much of a payoff is at the beginning the bland cop's comrades are killed by the henchmen of some big dude called "Wraith."  A couple of times the bland cop even screams, "Wraith, it's not over yet!"

So at the end they're going to have an epic throw-down right?  Um, no.  Wraith and his goons invade Adam West's bunker and the bland cop blows up the bunker with him in it.  They never actually fight each other!  I mean, at the end the bunker blows up and then it shows bland cop jumping into a lake in Montana with his new girlfriends who I guess are going to repopulate the Earth now and it's like, wait, that's it?  That's it?!  He didn't even quip, "It's over now, Wraith."  Weak.

When editing stories sometimes I'll notice a character or plot thread that doesn't really have a payoff.  Maybe I forgot about it or maybe I decided to make some change to the plot and that got left behind.  But it's important to make sure whether it's something small like a gag about music or rockets of kids's bikes or something big like an end with no confrontation between hero and villain that you have some kind of payoff for your audience.  For the small things you can just delete them if your story is running long.  The big things are definitely something that you'll need to rework. 

See, as I keep trying to tell you, you can learn a lot from bad movies. 🙀

Art and Artless

When it comes to comic books I generally don't comment much on the artwork because I can't really draw more than stick figures.  But sometimes something is just obviously bad.

Around the time of the Captain Marvel movie Amazon added a bunch of the comics to Prime Reading so I borrowed some.  The first two volumes I read (or attempted to read) were from 2013-ish when I guess Carol Danvers was first taking the Captain Marvel name and the costume now familiar to lots of people.

The first few issues had what I'd call pretty good artwork.  This is from issue #4 when Carol is thrown back in time to 1943:

And later this is from issue #8 when Carol and former Captain Marvel Monica Rambeau are fighting a giant robot in New Orleans:

But then after that issue they used a different "artist" and it looked like complete garbage.  Take these pages from issue #10:

What the hell is that?  It looks like her face is made of wax that's melting.  Honestly it looks like the storyboard sketches an artist might make before actually drawing it for real.  But you're not supposed to turn those in as the final product!

It was so ugly that I just couldn't bring myself to actually read the rest of the book.  Since I only rented it it wasn't like I was out anything.  I'd have probably read it as quick as possible if I'd paid money for it.

I guess you can call it "artistic style" and whatever, but I think it's more a lack of style.  The first two aren't exactly Leonardo or Michelangelo (or one of the other Ninja Turtles) but it looks like someone actually took time and care to draw people who look mostly like people. 

Whereas the other two look rushed and sloppy.  It looks like someone who was having trouble meeting his deadline and just scribbled something real quick to turn in.

There is a parallel here for writers, especially self-publishing writers.  It's like if you have one author who edits his book (maybe without a $2000 editor but still), formats it properly, and puts together a decent cover.  And then you have that other author who doesn't know how to format or proofread and just slaps some text on an image with no thought or care.  Which one should you spend your money on?

We say we don't judge a book by its cover, but of course we do.  And sometimes we should.  Sometimes a cover--or the formatting inside--gives a clue as to how much effort the author put into the rest of the book.

It's a little different for comics because the author and illustrator are two different people.  (As well as the colorist and inker and cover illustrator in most cases.)

Book Snobbery and Basic Book Economics

Back in February I saw this Tweet liked by one of my "friends" that I was smart enough not to argue with on Twitter.  But let's go into the reasons that it's wrong.

First off, it's a pretty old-fashioned attitude.  Back in my day a book wasn't 27 pages!  That was back when all "books" were on paper.  It's as backwards as music groups who still put intro tracks and hidden tracks on albums like it's the 90s--looking at you, Coldplay!  Nowadays a "book" can be anything from 1 page to 100,000,000 pages.  Since it's online there's really no limit--minimum or maximum.  Though if you write a single word and tried to call it a book, probably no one would buy it and Amazon would probably pull it.

Bringing me to the next point:  supply and demand, old dude.  If no one bought these books, no one would write them.  But obviously people are buying them so they exist.  Most of my books are $2.99, though most of them are longer than 27 pages.  Some only a little bit longer like 40 pages but others are 50-100 pages.  Novels over 100 pages I usually charge $3.99 at first.

And of course the old guy is ignoring the most important factor here:  Amazon.  They're the ones who mandated that anything $2.99 or above would have a 70% royalty.  Authors didn't decide to do this.  Amazon did.  If Amazon allowed authors to get a 70% royalty on 99 cent books maybe those 27 page books would be 99 cents.  For the author you have to decide if you'll sell enough at 99 cents to make up for what you lose with the smaller royalty.

Since most of my competition also charges $2.99 or more, why should I be the one charging less?  Maybe if I think that'll get more people to buy.  Of course that's why I have free books so people will read those and then buy other ones.

The thing is, what do you consider a "book" these days?  Is 50 pages a book?  100 pages?  200 pages?  It's really up to the individual to decide.  But telling writers 27 pages is a chapter not a book and they need to "slow their roll" is just hidebound thinking.  Contemporize, man!

The Final 2 Episodes of The Orville Solidify Its Place as a Trek Cover Band

I wasn't really enthused about watching Season 2 of Fox's The Orville, but I did it anyway mostly on Hulu.  I actually saved up the last three episodes to watch all at once.  The last two were really disappointing because they were such obvious Star Trek: The Next Generation rip-offs.

The penultimate episode the Kaylon Isaac and chief engineer Lamar are dicking around with some kind of time machine thing Isaac has been working on when they hit a gravimetric wave or whatever technobabble that triggers the device shortly after First Officer Kelly Grayson had come into the lab.  Shortly thereafter a second Grayson from 7 years earlier appears.

And I'm thinking, Oh, hey, this is like that Next Generation where they found the duplicate Riker--Thomas Riker.  Only that was some bullshit with him being stored in a transporter buffer or something instead of time travel, which actually the transporter made more sense and a less messy story.

But for the most part it brought up a lot of the same issues:  the awkwardness of having two of the same person, the age and maturity differences, and the creepiness of the younger one wanting to rekindle a relationship with someone on the ship.  In the TNG episode it was Riker and Troi but in the Orville it was younger Grayson and the captain, Ed Mercer.  To the younger Grayson they had just gone out on their first date while to Mercer and the older one they had already been married and divorced.  At first Mercer thinks it's awesome to have a second chance, but then he realizes that he and this Grayson are not really as compatible as they were seven years ago.

Eventually through some technobabble they find a way to send the younger Grayson back to where she was.  But first the doctor gives her an injection to wipe her memory.  Except it doesn't work and when the Mercer of her time calls her for another date, she rejects him.  Which shouldn't be that big of a deal, right?

The next episode starts with two guys at a listening post on some snowy planet.  They're rummaging through the place to steal what looks like a microwave when they're attacked by Kaylons.  Even though the guys were wearing masks, I was thinking, come on this is Mercer and Gordon, the helmsman.  And I was right.  Then it goes all Empire Strikes Back as they fly their shuttle through an ice field to escape Kaylon ships tracking them.  Except they don't get swallowed by a giant space worm thing.

Anyway, Mercer and Gordon are looking scruffy and their ship is beat up and at first I wondered if it were a mirror universe kind of episode.  But then they meet up with Grayson and the rest of the crew on a freighter and are told that when Grayson rejected Mercer in the past it changed the timeline so Mercer never captained the Orville and the Kaylon destroyed Earth.

And then I thought, Oh, wait, this is "Yesterday's Enterprise!"  One of the better episodes of TNG and notable because it featured the return of Tasha Yar, the security officer who died in the first season.  In that episode the previous Enterprise, the Enterprise-C, had been fighting some Romulans to help some Klingons when it suddenly disappeared through a temporal rift.  That changed the timeline so that the Federation and Klingons were still at war, Worf was obviously not in the crew, the Enterprise-D was a warship instead of an exploratory vessel, and Yar was still alive.

Similarly the Orville episode brought back the security officer who left the show early in season 2, though only for a cameo that didn't do a lot.  Most of the episode has the crew going back to Earth to find the Orville and reactivate Isaac so they can recreate the time travel device and send the doctor back to wipe the younger Grayson's memory to put history right.

Here's where really we get to the crux of the problem.  The TNG episode was great because it involved Yar realizing she was supposed to be dead and then deciding to go back with the Enterprise-C to help them fight the Romulans and put the timeline right.  The rest of the Enterprise-C crew also had to sacrifice themselves to make things right, knowing full well they were going to die.  Whereas the Orville no one really sacrifices anything.  It's about as dramatic as Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.  They try to make an issue that Mercer hadn't been in command of anything in the revised timeline and now has to take command and...sit in a chair and shout a few orders.  Ooh, wow.  Real tough.

In music to cover a song is to rerecord an old song.  Usually what you want to do is put a new spin on it.  Like doing a country version of a pop song or vice versa.  I remember one time I heard some group do a cover of Don Henley's "Boys of Summer" and it really sucked because there was no real attempt to put any passion or thought into it; they just sang the words and played the tune as blandly as possible.  Why even bother with it?

That's what too many episodes of The Orville wind up doing.  They cover Star Trek episodes but they don't really put a new spin on it.  Worse, like the season finale, they seem to miss the point of what they're covering entirely.  Why even bother with it?

My brother and I agreed that the show really sucks when it comes to big episodes because they just wind up covering Trek--badly.  The smaller, character episodes work better.  Though even that sometimes backfires like with that penultimate episode.  Or one before that when Gordon fell in love with a 21st Century woman's iPhone.  (OK, a hologram made from the data in her phone, but still it was creepy as hell.)  I already lamented they had a good episode exploring a relationship between the doctor and Isaac but then blew that up by making the Kaylon evil.  And then the rest of the season they put Isaac on the sidelines, never exploring how he was adapting to being cut off from the other Kaylons, how the crew was accepting him after his betrayal, and so on.  It's like the writers forgot about him the rest of the season.

But the overall problem is still this is a show that can't decide if it wants to be a drama or comedy so it weaves around between the two.  I guess it got picked up for a third season so I guess it'll keep limping along for another year--whenever that happens.  I'll probably again just watch it on Hulu when I have nothing else to watch.

When it comes to writing they say there are no original ideas so to an extent everyone is covering someone else.  But the point is that you have to bring your own flavor to it.  Even if you're doing a straight-up adaptation of something like Shakespeare or Jane Austen you still want to put your own spin on it to make it yours.

Game of Thrones and Avengers Endgame Show How Real Life Affects Art

Last night was the finale of Game of Thrones--on TV--and just a couple of weeks before that was the finale of Marvel/Disney's first cycle of movies.  One ran for 9 years and another for 11 and what the end of both showed is how real life shapes art.

Avengers Endgame ended with Iron Man dying and Captain America retiring and passing the mantle on.  Why?  Because those actors had contracts expiring and they were getting too expensive (and in Downey Jr's case too old) to keep around anymore.  Hence they had to be written out.  The same probably applies to some extent for Scarlett Johannson even though she probably has a solo movie coming at some point.

As for Game of Thrones, the first five seasons built things up pretty slow.  Season 5 especially seemed pretty meandering.  All the sudden in season 6 and especially season 7 everything began picking up the pace.  Why?  Because a show like that is horribly expensive.  All those sets, costumes, weapons, boats, horses, and dragons are super expensive.  Plus like Avengers there's the cost of the main cast.  Even a show like GOT that killed a hell of a lot of people couldn't kill all of its main characters off, hence it can be costly to keep them around.

Besides these two properties this is an issue that's happened pretty much since the beginning of live entertainment.  Whether it's movies, TV, radio, vaudeville, theater, music, or whatever sometimes the art has to take a backseat to what's happening in the real world.  Often it's financial considerations, but other times it's personality conflicts or health issues or even death that necessitates changes in an act.

This was especially problematic with Game of Thrones as the intricate story that was established in 7 seasons felt especially rushed and sloppy in this final season.  Because this 8th season was to feature some major battles they shortened the number of episodes to only 6, though these episodes were mostly about 80 minutes, so you could consider each one a feature film.

Still it couldn't shake the feeling of being rushed.  After seven seasons the army of the dead finally arrived in Westeros, led by the Night King and his undead dragon.  But after all this time the army of the dead was dealt with in a single 80-minute episode.  There's a desperate battle, the Night King goes to kill Bran, and Arya jumps out of the trees to kill him.  As soon as she stabs him all the zombies die.  The end.  Well, that's pretty anticlimactic.

But wait, there's more anticlimacticness!  For 7 seasons Danerys had journeyed and gathered forces to her.  After she "wins" the battle against the dead, she turns her attention to King's Landing.  Though her forces decimate the Lannister forces and their allies, Danerys decides for...reasons to use her dragon to burn the whole city to the ground, slaughtering men, women, and children in the process.

In professional wrestling there's something called the "heel turn" where a good guy suddenly becomes a bad guy.  Through the 80s Hulk Hogan was a good guy, but in the 90s he took the heel turn to become a bad guy.  Burning King's Landing was Dany's heel turn.

And like probably a lot of those in wrestling it was so sudden and disorienting that it was deeply unsatisfying.  Especially since it was the penultimate episode so while maybe in wrestling a heel can become a hero again, there wasn't really any time for Dany to redeem herself.  Nope, she's mad with power now.  The only explanation is that she's a Targarian and they just go mad.  Like instantly, apparently. 

The final episode they try to justify this by bringing up all the people she killed along the way.  But as Ahhh-nold said in True Lies to justify his murders, "But they were all bad."  It's not like any king or queen in Westeros hasn't murdered an enemy or two--or hundreds.  As Michael Offutt said there was something kind of sexist about it, like a woman would just naturally be so "emotional" that she'd do a one-eighty and snap.

I figured Jon was going to kill her, though I thought it'd be a little more dramatic.  I thought she'd sentence Tyrion to die (which she did) but maybe Jon would stand in front of the dragon and prove his Targarian heritage by not burning in the fire, protecting Tyrion in the process.

They actually went far more understated with Jon stabbing Dany while they kissed in the throne room.  Most of the drama was supplied by the dragon as it nudged Dany and then in a rage destroyed the Iron Throne before flying off with her body.

And then weeks later all the lords and ladies of Westeros meet and Tyrion challenges them to pick a new king.  There's some humor provided when Sam suggests democratically electing a new ruler, to which everyone just laughs at him.

Then of all the people present, Tyrion selects Brandon Stark as the Chosen One.  Which is just like, um, whaaaaat?  The kid who wasn't even in a full season of the show?  Who spent most of the series being dragged around by Hodor?  That's the guy who's going to wind up being the king?  Really?  I mean I could see him being an adviser to the king or queen but the actual king or queen?  Who's really going to respect him?

But maybe part of it is symbolic.  King's Landing is broken, the Iron Throne is broken, and a lot of other shit is broken so who better to lead than someone who is similarly broken?  So I guess it makes a slight bit of sense, but it's not really a satisfying ending.  The whole point of the series was Who Will Win the Iron Throne and then the throne is slagged and some secondary character becomes the high king?  Really?  Seems like kind of a fuck you to the audience after 9 years.  As Tyrion said it doesn't really please anyone so it must be a good compromise.

It's hard not to think if they'd had more time (and as a consequence of that more money) they probably would have done things differently.  They could have stretched out Dany's heel turn a little more to make it more justifiable for instance.  Or maybe found someone better than Bran to end up as the king.  Bran?  Bran?!  WTF?!

It didn't really make a lot of sense when Sansa and the North secede either.  They won't accept a new king...but the king is from the North.  Why wouldn't they accept a Stark?  They're really just trading one for another in the end.  It didn't make sense except that Sansa wanted to be queen of something.

The ending for Jon and Arya made a lot more sense.  Arya riding off into the unknown makes sense for her character.  Jon riding off with the Free Folk makes sense for him too.  He never really wanted to be a king and he was happy hanging around with the Free Folk.  When they first said they were sending him to Castle Black, I thought, Well, shit, just wait a few days and ride off to find the free people.  Yea, verily it came to pass.  I guess it made too much sense for even the showrunners to ignore.

Anyway, two major properties wrapping things up and neither was overly satisfying because of the demands of real life.  I suppose with books it can be easier to control that, but sometimes not even then.  Professional authors have deadlines and they can have conflicts with editors or publishers and they can have health problems--even death.  Like Sue Grafton dying before she could complete her whole alphabet mystery series.  We like to think we're the gods or goddesses of our little worlds but you know what they say, the best laid plans of mice and men.

#AtoZChallenge Bonus: The Shadow Chronicles: The Soft Reboot Gone Wrong

After almost 20 years without any new TV episodes or movies, in 2007 Harmony Gold came out with Robotech:  The Shadow Chronicles.  It was an attempt to unite the three previous generations into a new series.  For the first really original attempt by Harmony Gold to make a new Robotech movie it was...meh.

I recently rewatched it on Crackle, where you can watch it for free.  It's also on Amazon Prime. I'm not sure if it's on Netflix but it's not on Hulu.

Anyway, almost the first third is actually a redo of the final battle at Reflex Point from the third series.  Other than Scott Bernard and Ariel/Marlene it cuts out all of the other characters from that series.  It also changes the ending where the REF fleet was destroyed when the Invid Regess left the planet in a massive phoenix of light.  (Or the REF fleet was absorbed into her, depending how you look at it.)

In this version much of the fleet survives but they're running low on Protoculture.  Meanwhile Vince Grant, brother of Claudia Grant from the first series, takes a ship with Dr. Louie Nichols from the second series to answer a distress call from Rick Hunter and the SDF-3.  Grant and Nichols find that the SDF-3 is gone and rescue the android Janice Em from another ship.  She says there's a big problem with the Neutron-S missiles they were testing--and that were destroyed over Earth by the Regess.

Meanwhile Scott and Marlene go to the moon with the REF.  Eventually there's an attack on the deep space station Liberty by mysterious attackers.  But as Scott, Marlene, Grant, and Nichols show up they realize that the attackers are the Haydonites who helped create most of the REF technology.  They've embedded "Trojan horses" in most of this so that they can blow up the REF ships and fighters almost instantly.

The only way to fight back is to get ships not using the Haydonite "Shadow" technology.  So our heroes get some fighters that haven't had this installed an an old "colony ship" and manage to drive the Haydonites off.

It was supposed to be the first salvo in the war.  But there was never a sequel despite that sales were supposedly not that bad.

That's probably for the best because it wasn't really that good.  As a fan it kind of sucked that they basically rewrote the end of the third series.  Imagine if the first half hour of The Force Awakens had been a reshoot of the battle over Endor only this time they change it so Vader lives?  It'd be pretty fucking ridiculous because for almost 30 years you've thought one thing and all the sudden they want you to believe something else.

Which in a way they still kind of did because for almost 30 years there were all those books about what happened after the Empire's defeat at Endor.  Then Disney told us those were no longer canon to make room for their new movies.  Though to be honest most of those books were crap anyway so no big loss.

But in this case they wanted us to disbelieve what we saw on the TV screen.  I mean you can see in the last episode that the REF fleet is destroyed.  The commander of the fleet, General Reinhardt, is dead.  Scott flies away into space, not to a ship in orbit.  (Since the Japanese show had them coming from Mars I presume he was going back there.)  Reinhardt is suddenly alive?  Basically you're saying that the actual canon material (the TV series) is no longer canon.  It's pretty outrageous.

For fans of the books like me, and I guess maybe some comics and stuff, there were also a lot of changes.  There was already a whole novel, The End of the Circle, that dealt with what happened after the Invid left.  And the Sentinels series that already introduced the Haydonites as not evil; a couple of them were allies of Rick Hunter and the Sentinels.

But like with Star Wars I can understand saying stuff that only happened in books or comics was no longer canon.  It's just another thing when it's the actual show you're rewriting.

In some ways though it was an improvement over the novel.  There's a lot more space battle action in the movie than The End of the Circle, which was more like an episode of Star Trek with the SDF-3 and Ark Angel crews exploring a new dimensional realm.  I can see where that wouldn't make for a really exciting movie.

But it wasn't really necessary to change so much.  They could have still left the REF fleet destroyed and just had the Ark Angel (or Icarus) show up afterwards and then they could have gone back to Tirol where the rest of the REF is.  The rest could have pretty much been the same.

They also didn't have to make the Haydonites suddenly hiding an evil agenda.  Again imagine if in The Force Awakens it were revealed that all the sudden Admiral Ackbar and the Mon Calamaris were secretly bad guys?

Again it would seem like a slap in the face after so long.  In The End of the Circle the Haydonites do sort of turn but not really on their own.  With the Invid "transcending" the creator of the Haydonites wakes up and basically the synthetic Haydonites and their planet are hijacked to do his will.  They could have done something like that in the movie where with the Invid gone some big bad activates a Trojan horse in the Haydonites sort of like the REF weapons.  It wouldn't have been so off-putting.

It might also have not been off-putting if they hadn't shown Rick Hunter with white hair like he was supposed to be 80 or something.  I mean if it's 2044 and the original series started in 2009 that's only 35 years and he's like 18 when that starts so he'd only be 53.  They invented some bullshit reason for it but come on it was really because some dumbass didn't know the source material.  That's the kind of shit that pisses fans off.  Someone couldn't have gone in and just recolored those couple of minutes showing him so he wouldn't look so old instead of making up some BS reason?

I'm not sure even those tweaks could have saved the project since it sounds like with typical Harmony Gold management they ran into problems with their animators and they were still hoping to make a live action version.  Like they're ever going to get their shit together enough for that.

I haven't even bothered to make one of my fake movies for that because it seems like it'd be pretty simple.  I'd want a trilogy based on the first series because trying to do all of that in one movie would be pretty hard.  It could be done if you cut a bunch of stuff out.  Just have the SDF-1 go to Pluto and highlight a few battles (Saturn's rings, Mars, Rick/Lisa/Max/Ben Dixon being taken aboard Breetai's ship) and then go back to Earth for a final battle.  And cut out all the Reconstruction stuff.  But 3 movies would be a lot better.  I mean if they can do it for The Hobbit, why not Robotech?  Then later do the other series.  Though I'd prefer to just skip the second one altogether.

#AtoZChallenge Bonus: The Curious Case of Robotech: The Movie

As popular as Robotech the TV series was in 1985 a movie seemed like a natural next step.  Hasbro was already doing that with Transformers, GI Joe, and My Little Pony.  Of course Hasbro not being complete cheapo jackasses (not completely) was actually making movies from scratch.

That would be much too smart for Harmony Gold.  I mean come on they made their fortune by reediting and redubbing Japanese anime shows so hell why not do that for the movie too?  Hence the flaming dung heap that was Robotech: The Movie.

To this end the plan was basically to redub a Japanese movie called Megazone 23.  Which naturally had nothing to do with the main Robotech story.  According to Wikipedia the original idea was that it would be set during the period the SDF-1 was coming back to Earth from Pluto and the main character would be said to be a relative of Rick Hunter.

But that didn't work out because the makers of the Japanese Macross series had their own movie coming out and didn't want people getting mixed up thinking it was related to theirs.  So they rejiggered the movie so it would take place between the first and second series.  To this end they even spliced in footage from the second series.

When this finally came out in 1986 they decided to test it in the Dallas market.  And it bombed so hard that it never was released anywhere else.  They can blame marketing and stuff but there were a few obvious reasons why it bombed:

First and most obvious, there's really none of the Robotech characters in it.  They spliced in a couple of Southern Cross leaders like Rolf Emerson and Anatole Leonard but there was no Rick Hunter, Lisa Hayes, Dana Sterling, or Scott Bernard.  I mean imagine if Marvel said Avengers 5 wasn't going to have any of the established characters, just a bunch of new people no one's heard of?  It'd probably bomb just as hard.  If you claim it's a Robotech movie, people might actually want some Robotech in it.  Crazy, right?

Second and I'm sure it was obvious when they were doing it, they tried splicing together a movie and a TV show.  They were apparently on different film stocks and thus blending the two together looked anything but seamless.  It's like the Simpsons episode where they're making a Radioactive Man movie in Springfield and Milhouse gets the sidekick role.  When he goes missing they try to splice in footage already shot, which looks ridiculous.  That's basically what Harmony Gold did and tried to actually pass it off as a movie.

There were also issues with sexuality and graphic violence that stopped parents from taking kids to it or walking out during it.  Which just compounded the problems.

Other than a few VHS tapes released overseas there was never a real release of the movie.  Like Roger Corman's Fantastic Four you can only see bootleg copies sold on the Internet and at conventions.  Hell, I've never seen it.

About the closest I've come is the 20th book in the series, The Masters's Gambit, incorporates a lot of the events of the ill-fated movie.  But when I was buying the series on Kindle I don't think they made one of that so you can only get it in paperback.  It seems the whole project is jinxed.

Although I'm not sure if I'd rather have a movie with none of the main characters over one like Transformers the Movie that kills off most of the main characters you cared about.

#AtoZChallenge Reflections

It's time to reflect on this year's A to Z Challenge.  I guess I got my link posted early enough that some people actually saw it so I got a few random visits.  Not that those people could bother actually reading the entries or even take the time to understand what the blog was about.  Like this comment:

I'm not really sure what's going on here - I assume this is an outline of some characters from your books, or from something you like? Either way, it's well-written. Found you through AtoZ.

Duuuuh, I can't take a minute to figure out what your blog is about--now go to my blog!  Gee, thanks.  I don't know, maybe I should have put an introduction at the top of every entry for people too lazy to go read the post describing my challenge this year?  Of course I never considered it because the last couple years I've hardly gotten any randos visiting.  It's like if for Halloween one year you buy a lot of candy and hardly get any kids so the next year you buy less and then more kids show up so you wind up short.  I'll have to make sure to sign up later next year.

Now, what can I do for next year that no one will care about?  I did Transformers, GI Joe, and Robotech.  Plus the Scarlet Knight books, gender swap books, and books that were also movies.  Then I was thinking that over the last 18 months I watched a ton of Rifftrax and MST3K on Pluto TV and Amazon, enough that I could do an A to Z Challenge on it.

At first I was going to just do one movie or maybe two for each letter.  But then I realized that was pretty much just skimming the surface.  There were 10 seasons of MST3K and there are a lot of Rifftrax (the complete videos not the riffs you can download to play during a movie you own/rent) so picking just 26 is less than 10%.

Then I thought of doing a theme for each day.  That way I could cover a lot more ground.  Not that anyone will care.

So here's the first draft, subject to change:

• Alien invasions:  Alien From LA, Alien Outlaw, Galaxy Invader, Killers From Space, Plan 9 From Outer Space
• Bikers:  Stone Cold, Side Hackers, The Hellcats
• Cyborgs:  Cyborg Cop 2, Cyber Tracker, ROTOR
• Dark Times:  The Dark Power, The Dark, Dark Future
• Edgewood Studios: Time Chasers, Pressure Point, Icebreaker
• Future Cops:  Future Force/Zone, Omega Cop, Abraxas
• GI Jokes:  McBain, Red Zone Cuba, the Starfighters, Deadly Prey
• Haunted Houses:  Ghosthouse, The House on Haunted Hill, Hillbillys in a Haunted House, The Screaming Skull, Rock n Roll Nightmare
• I Believe in Santa Claus:  I Believe in Santa Claus, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny, Santa Claus
• James Nguyen Spectacular (Fails): Birdemic, Julie & Jack
• Kung Fu Fighting Everywhere:  Miami Connection, Honor & Glory, Samurai Cop, No Retreat/No Surrender, Kill & Kill Again
• Lasers:  Laser Mission, Laserblast
• Monster Mash:  Gamera, Gorgo, Arachnia, Giant Gila Monster, Beginning of the End
• Nights of the Shorts: featuring the Norman Cycle, Setting Up a Room, and more!
• Outer Space:  Oblivion 1 & 2, This Island Earth, Last Spaceship on Venus
• Psycho Killers:  Psychotronic Man, Ice Cream Man, Fever Lake, Last Slumber Party, Terror at Tenkiller, Jack Frost
• Quests:  The Magic Sword, Jack the Giant Killer, Prisoners of the Lost Universe, Sword and the Sorcerer, Ator, Cave Dwellers
• Rebels Without a Clue:  The Violent Years, The Rebel Set, The Beatniks
• Super Zeroes:  Supersonic Man, The Pumaman, Neutron the Atomic Superman, Samson the Silver Maskman, Superargo, Firehead
• Tribulations:  Day of the Animals, Grizzly, Rocket Attack USA
• Undercover Agents:  Danger Death Ray, Code Name Diamond Head, Radical Jack, Wonder Women, Missile X
• Valentine's Day Massacre:  The Brute Man, The Indestructible Man, Tormented, Ruby
• Wastelands:  Warrior of the Lost World, Warriors of the Wasteland, City Limits
• X Files:  To Catch a Yeti, Curse of Bigfoot, Legend of Boggy Creek 2, Bermuda Triangle
• Youth Isn't Served:  Cool as Ice, Reefer Madness, Fun in Balloonland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
• Zombie(ish) Apocalypse:  Night of the Living Dead, Mutant, Nightmare at Noon, The Incredible Creature...

Or whatever.

The Somewhat Grumpy and Extremely Spoilery Review of Avengers Endgame

Does anyone still care about spoilers at this point?  It's been like 3 weeks so you have to think most of the people who would care have already seen it--and probably don't read this blog.

Anyway, I watched it last Tuesday because I decided I probably should go watch it before people spoiled too much of it.  The thing about spoilers is not so much knowing what's happening it's that you get other people's perceptions of the things that happened.  For a movie I'm on the fence about or don't care about it doesn't really bother me but for a movie I legitimately want to see I don't really want other people's opinions on what happened until I can see it myself and make my own conclusions.

Truth be told I wasn't all that excited then about seeing this.  The 3 hour runtime was one thing.  It's not just the movie's runtime but with all the time getting there and commercials and previews and stuff you're talking about more like 4 hours.  It's kind of annoying to fit that in unless I were going with other people.  Which I wasn't.  I just ducked out of work an hour early and went to a 3:45 showing, which wasn't populated all that much so that was nice.

I liked this slightly better than Infinity War but it was still far from a perfect movie.  To demonstrate that I'm going to go through the whole movie to highlight the many, many problems.  It's kind of a mini-Rifftrax session.

It starts at Hawkeye's house where he's hanging out with his family when they suddenly vanish.  The part that didn't make sense is didn't people turn to ash and blow away?  So shouldn't there have been some sign of their being gone?  Shouldn't he have seen a bunch of ash and wondered where it came from?

Then it goes to Tony Stark and Nebula in space.  They're in the Guardians ship that's dead in space after a battle with...someone.  We last saw them on Titan so I don't know when that happened.  Anyway, Tony recording a message was the first trailer and I immediately thought, "Captain Marvel will come along and save him."  Guess what happened?  Captain Marvel came along and saved them.  How did she find them in the middle of nowhere in space?  Maybe she has some space bloodhound thing?  I didn't see her movie so maybe that's one of her powers?

Then it's funny that she takes the ship to the Avengers compound and no one seems to question who the hell she is or what the hell she's doing there.  And then almost instantly everyone except Iron Man is on the road again because conveniently they've figured out where Thanos is.  Conveniently Thanos has destroyed the Infinity Stones, badly injuring himself in the process.  Otherwise he could have just snapped his fingers and killed all the Avengers.  Instead Thor chops off his head.  Better late than never, I guess.

So then they go back home and Five Years Later our heroes being heroes they've fixed the world, right?  Um, no.  Not at all.  Mostly they're sitting around on their asses.  Captain America is holding group therapy sessions in New York.  Tony Stark is hanging out at a lake house with Pepper and his daughter Morgan.  Banner is posing for Instagrams or something.  Thor is playing video games and guzzling booze and looking like The Dude with a beer gut. (He lives in a colony called New Asgard in Scandinavia, but weren't all the Asgardians on the ship Thanos destroyed? Heimdall sent Thor to Earth but how did others escape?)

(One thing I thought of later:  why is Tony's daughter so exceedingly normal?  I mean Tony is a genius and Pepper is pretty smart and capable on her own.  Tony's father was a genius too so obviously it runs in the family.  So even if she's only 4 or so, shouldn't she be like composing symphonies or building protocol droids out of spare parts or something like that?  Unless the latent sexism is that the Stark genius wouldn't be passed on to a girl.  Or maybe she's a late bloomer?  Or more likely the screenwriters just didn't give a fuck about it.)

Since he lost his family, Hawkeye copes by becoming a murdering vigilante called Ronin who culturally appropriates a ninja outfit.  Which makes sense since Hawkeye totally had so much interest in ninjas and Japanese culture before, right?  Right?  [Crickets.]  But it was pretty much better than Hawkeye in the first two  Avengers movies plus Thor 1 and Civil War.  Not that there was much competition on that score.

Black Widow is still at the compound coordinating with War Machine, Captain Marvel, the Dora Majae (spelling?), Rocket Raccoon, and Nebula to fight fires around the world.  OK, now really Cap, Iron Man, Thor, and Hulk should be embarrassed that Rocket and Nebula are being more heroic than they are.  I mean America is in crisis and Captain America is sitting around in church basements like a recovering alcoholic?  All his money and genius and Tony Stark is puttering around by a lake like he's on vacation?  Thor is supposed to be a god but he's acting like the stereotypical gamer living in his mom's basement?  With great power comes...no responsibility, I guess.

Michael Offutt compared this to PTSD and I guess that makes sense a bit.  Though it seems more like self-pity to me.  A 5-year self-pity party.  It was pretty lame.

Then a rat runs over a keyboard on Hank Pym's van and triggers Ant-Man's release from the quantum realm.  So for five years this van was moved into a warehouse and shit and no one touched that button until some random fucking rat walks over it?  Really?  Then he goes to his wife's old house to find his young daughter is now 28 a teenager.  How old was she "five years earlier" like 7 or 8?  Yet now she's like supposed to be in high school.  Apparently she had one of those Pebbles and Bam-Bam growth spurts.

Though Scott Lang is a former thief he somehow figures out that they could use the quantum realm to go back in time to stop Thanos.  Except you can't actually change the past to, say, just kill Thanos as a baby or kill him before he gets all the Infinity Stones because...sciencey stuff.  Something quantum as the late Sir Terry Pratchett would have said.

But fortunately Tony Stark can solve the problem of time travel in one night at his cabin.  And so soon enough they're ready to do some time traveling to pull a "time heist" for the six stones.  Black Widow is the one who figures out 3 of the stones (time, space, and mind) are all in New York in 2012.

So then it turns into Back to the Future 2 as Cap, Iron Man, Hulk, and Ant-Man go to New York during the Avengers 1 to get the stones.  I skipped out to the potty while Banner was going all Rufus in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, telling the "Ancient One" they'd be sure to put everything back once they were done to avoid time tangents.  Meanwhile the others have to get the Tesseract and Loki's staff with the mind stone that gave birth to Vision--who is never mentioned at all.  They brought in Frank Grillo and even Robert Redford to recreate the SHIELD/Hydra agents from Captain America: The Winter Soldier (the first Marvel movie by the Russos) who take the Tesseract.  In a nod to recent comics, Captain America whispers "Hail Hydra" to one agent to get him to hand over Loki's staff.  Except Cap then winds up fighting himself--they're so evenly matched!

But meanwhile Iron Man and Ant-Man bungle getting the Tesseract so Loki disappears with it to...somewhere.  Was that an end credits scene?  I wasn't staying through 12 minutes of credits for that if it were.

Tony realizes they could find the Tesseract back further in the past but they don't have enough Pym particles to go back and then return to the present.  Instead of just going to San Francisco to ask Hank Pym for some more particles, Cap and Iron Man go to 1970 to the army base where SHIELD used to be headquartered.  (Again going back to Winter Soldier.)  But this does allow Tony Stark to have a nice moment with his father to trade notes on parenting and let Steve Rogers peep on Peggy Carter.

Meanwhile Thor and Rocket go to Asgard in 2013 during The Dark World.  Prior footage of Natalie Portman reprises her role as...prior footage of Natalie Portman.  Meanwhile Thor runs into his mom who instantly knows he's from the future because...witchcraft.  I guess they couldn't get Anthony Hopkins to show up as Odin or maybe that would have been redundant with Tony and his father meeting up.  Before he leaves, Thor summons his old hammer Mjolnir (spelling?) back to his hand, proving he's worthy still.  (So, um, what happens to the Thor already there?  Shut up, that's what.)

Also meanwhile War Machine and Nebula get stuck going to the planet at the opening of GOTG 1 to find the power stone.  I guess they're both kinda cyborgs so it makes sense to put them together.  For convenience's sake Nebula's brain connects with the Nebula already in 2014 to alert Thanos to what the Avengers are planning.  War Machine leaves with the stone but Nebula is knocked offline and replaced by (more) evil Nebula.

And also meanwhile Hawkeye (or Ronin) and Black Widow go to the planet where Red Skull is hanging out to get the Soul stone.  To do that they fight each other over who gets to commit suicide to become the stone.  And then Black Widow dies like the climber at the beginning of Cliffhanger with Hawkeye as Sly Stallone.  I guess it made more sense since he had a family who could be snapped back life.  Michael Offutt said he found that heartbreaking but I never really cared about either of them so it didn't matter much to me.  (Though I'd have killed Hawkeye just for his stupid horse-looking haircut.  What the hell was that?)

So eventually everyone gets back to the present so they can put the stones on an Iron Man gauntlet--foreshadowing!  Since Hulk strongest there is he uses the new Infinity Gauntlet to snap everything back.  Except because Tony doesn't want to lose his daughter all the people who disappeared will reappear 5 years later only as they were beforehand.  So 3.5 billion people (give or take a few million) get Flight of the Navigatored.  Or The 4400-ed.  Or whatever that show on NBC was about a plane that disappeared and reappeared like 3 years later.  So all the massive damage and stuff will still be there plus things will be really weird for those who were gone for 5 years and haven't aged while those around them did, but Tony's daughter will still be alive.  That's what heroes do, right?  Screw over billions for themselves?

Evil Nebula could have sabotaged all this by blowing the gauntlet up or killing Banner or stealing the gauntlet or something, but instead she just somehow brings Thanos's flagship into the present.  Thanos blasts the Avengers compound from the air and then decides to literally sit on his ass to wait for his minions to bring him the gauntlet.  The thing he wants most in the whole world, but nah I'll let my minions go find it.

So Cap, Iron Man, and Thor take him on.  The coolest thing about this is when Captain America is able to use Mjolnir (spelling?) and use it against Thanos.  But they all still get their asses kicked by Thanos.  It was also cool when Cap gets back to his feet to face the enemy army alone--that's the character in a nutshell. Why wasn't he like that the whole movie? But then Dr. Strange and Wong begin beaming in all the un-dead heroes like Black Panther, Wasp, Spider-Man, and Star-Lord.  Yet there's someone noticeably absent:  Earth's mightiest hero who shares a name with the comic book company responsible for the characters in this movie.  I guess it does make sense since she never met Dr. Strange (presumably) though if he saw 14 billion futures or whatever shouldn't he know she exists?

The battle then is like some Marvel fanboy's wet dream as you have all these heroes running around fighting miscellaneous bad guys.  It made me think of Ready Player One where they were storming the castle where the final Easter egg was and the good guy army was made of characters from popular culture like Harley Quinn, Freddy Krueger, and that chick from Overwatch.  It's like, Oh, there's Black Panther's sister Shuri!  There's Drax!  There's Groot!  There's Scarlet Witch!  We didn't get to see a lot of them but at least they were there!

As I was wondering if they had just forgotten about Captain Marvel she finally made her big entrance to blow up the flagship.  Better late than never, I guess.  But not even Earth's Mightiest Hero could beat Thanos.  (Earth just sucks, I guess.)  Though it's kind of disingenuous when all the female heroes come to Captain Marvel's aid.  They might as well have held up a sign saying "Marvel [heart] Girls!"  Of course Marvel loved girls so much we wouldn't greenlight a Black Widow solo movie or any other female solo movie until after DC greenlit Wonder Woman.

In all the fighting in Infinity War the one thing no one ever thought of was to just take the stones out of the gauntlet.  That's why Tony Stark is a genius because that's what he does.  (Maybe it was just easier with his gauntlet than Thanos's?)  He puts the stones on his glove and snaps his fingers to kill Thanos and all his minions.

Which something I wondered is why do you have to snap your fingers?  I mean couldn't you wave or do a peace sign or flip Thanos the bird?

Then we go into Return of the King mode with Tony's funeral and everyone saying goodbye and stuff.  Thanks to all the money they've made Disney/Marvel has the power to reduce veteran actors like Michael Douglas, Marisa Tomei, Angela Bassett, and Michelle Pfeiffer into extras just standing around.  Hooray?

For...reasons Thor decides to leave Valkyrie in charge of "New Asgard" because she showed her leadership by...fishing?  Having a flying horse?  Shut up, that's why.  Then he goes off with the Guardians of the Galaxy to maybe be in the next movie?  Or not?  When's his contract up?

To fulfill Hulk's promise to the Ancient One Captain America is tasked with putting all the stones back...somehow.  How's he going to put the ones in space back?  Did he take a spaceship with him?  Does he know how to fly a spaceship?  And what about the Soul stone?  I mean he can't really put that one back, can he?  He can't un-kill Black Widow.  Shut up, that's how.

And then using Forrest Gump reasoning Captain America decides that well since I have a time machine, I might as well go back to 1945 and marry Peggy Carter.  I guess it's OK since the other him is in the ice.  And I guess nothing he does in 75 years affects the timeline at all because...sciencey stuff.  Take that, butterfly effect!

I didn't really like this part.  It seemed forced and contrived as a way to write Chris Evans out.  With the world in chaos, Iron Man dead, Black Widow dead, the Avengers compound destroyed, and Banner injured, would Captain America really decide right then was the time to go off and retire?  I don't think so.  That's not the character.  Really he should have gone back and had that dance with Peggy and then explained that he had to go back because the world needed him, which she would understand.  But we need to get rid of this guy, so the hell with consistent characterization!

So somehow geriatric Cap is suddenly at the funeral and gives his shield to Sam Wilson despite that Sam has no powers, not even a robot arm like Bucky.  He doesn't even have the power to talk to birds like the comic book version of Falcon.  But he does have a flying suit, so that's cool.  Maybe he'll be more popular than comic book Sam Wilson Captain America who lasted about 2 years before being replaced by...wait for it...Steve Rogers.  This a few years after Bucky Barnes Captain America was replaced by...wait for it...Steve Rogers.  Just some historical perspective.  The one difference between comics and movies though is that the actors age in real time and you have to pay them so while it's easy to bring Steve Rogers back after he dies/gets old/turns evil it's harder to bring Chris Evans back again and again.  Even more so for Robert Downey Jr since he's older.  That gives replacement characters a better chance in movies than in comics.

Anyway, while this isn't a bad movie you can see it's got as many plot holes as a slice of Swiss cheese.  And it leaves a real mess for future movies starting with Spider-Man Far From Home to try to clean up.  But like The Flash on CW now we can blame any inconsistencies or stuff on time travel and multiverses.  Hooray?

You do have to admire the ambition of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and all the Easter eggs and cameos and whatnot in this movie really bring home the scale of it over the last 11 years.  And now that Disney has Fox Studios it can get even bigger!  Hooray?

Filler Faves: The Comeback

Unlike most of the others, The Comeback was actually pretty successful.  Probably because I did a Goodreads giveaway back when those were still free and some other stuff to promote it harder than other books.

Most of the reviews were good, which is nice because it's also my favorite Eric Filler book--to date.  It's really more of a romance than an erotica story and more literary than a lot of the Eric Filler stories.

I had a little fun at the start by setting it in Auburn, Michigan, which is a real place though I took a few liberties.  A washed-up hair metal singer/guitarist named Alex Axx is supposed to appear at the "Corn Festival" that night but first he gets drunk and screws a middle-aged woman.  So that night when he has to perform he winds up taking a nasty fall off the stage.

When Alex wakes up he's in a hospital in the middle of Lake Michigan.  It's really more of a prison than a hospital.  Anyway, he's injected with an experimental drug that turns him into a 16-year-old girl.

This new Alex has to adjust to her new body and get some strength back.  As she does, she meets some of the other patients there.  One girl named Sandra takes a shine to her and encourages her to play guitar and sing in their little band for a talent show.  As they practice for that Alex and Sandra fall madly in love and start sneaking off to the janitor's closet to make out.

But just after winning the talent show, Alex is forced to leave the island by her former manager now her legal guardian.  Her "mom" has signed her up for an American Idol-type show as Alex Axelrod.  Soon Alex finds that instead of a hardcore rocker she's become a teen idol.

As she's rising to stardom again, Sandra visits her to encourage her to run away together, but Alex refuses.  Sandra leaves and Alex is heartbroken.  Then she's reunited with another girl from the hospital/prison named Dakota who's to be her new social media coordinator since Alex doesn't really know much about Twitter, Facebook, and so on.

Dakota shows Alex a young fan on Twitter who's dying of cancer, which helps Alex see the plus side of her new life.  She goes to visit the girl in the hospital, but is heartbroken again a few days later when she finds out the girl died.

Meanwhile Alex has made it to the top 6 on the TV show and it looks very likely she'll win the whole thing.  She and Dakota are starting to fall in love and Dakota reveals that she took the same drug Alex did.

Before the last episode of the TV show, though, Alex goes to Dakota's room to find she's dying.  The drug that turned Dakota into a girl is breaking down and causing severe problems.  Ultimately Dakota passes away and yet again Alex is heartbroken.

She goes on stage for the final episode and sings a song she wrote for Dakota.  Afterwards, Alex sneaks out of the building to run away.  And who does she soon run into but Sandra!  Sandra has been watching her career with keen interest and hoped to meet her again.

This time Alex decides to run away with Sandra.  In the epilogue Alex is playing folk guitar on the streets of Seattle.  The music is no longer about money or fame or glory; she's doing it purely for the love of it now.  She and Sandra are still together, surviving thanks to Sandra's job at Starbucks (the original Starbucks) and hush money from Alex's "mom."  And they live happily ever after...maybe.

So it's a nice story.  There's not a lot of sex to appease the "Bear Hunter" types but it's a nice romantic story about overcoming loss and heartbreak and finding redemption.  The parts where Alex visits the little girl with cancer and later sits by Dakota's bed as she's dying I channeled a little bit of the grief from my sister dying that year so the story is also a bit personal for me, which is probably another reason I like it.

But it's always nice when me and the readers can both like something and it sells pretty well too.  That's a win-win-win I guess.

Like Casting Change, this is one where even if you don't like gender swap stories you might still be able to enjoy it.

May 9, 2019

Today is the 10th anniversary of the release of Where YouBelong, the first book I ever released for Kindle.

To this date Where You Belong is still the book that’s sold the most individual copies.  I think that is a testament to marketing.  I mean I did a blog tour, ads, a website, and so on.  I really pushed it and in the end it probably did come out a bit ahead on what I spent.  But it’s not something I would do for every book.  And as the marketplace is a lot more crowded than 2009 I’m not sure it would work as well.

To revisit the story, Where You Belong was the ahead-of-its-time opus involving gay marriage.  In 2008-2009 when I was writing it only a handful of states or cities allowed gay marriage; it hadn’t been legalized by the Supreme Court yet.

But to say it’s “about” gay marriage would be a misnomer.  It’s about relationships in general.  The message wound up being pretty simple:  it doesn’t matter where your genitals are so much as what’s in your heart.  Compatibility in spirit is far more important than compatibility in biology.

The story focused on a guy with the unlikely name of Frost Devereaux.  He was born in Iowa in 1973 to a mother who got knocked up one snowy night by a low-rent card shark.  When his mom finds out she’s pregnant, she drags the father back to Iowa from Vegas, though they don’t really live together. 

When Frost is 3 his mother is killed in a car accident and part of his face is badly burned.  His father can’t deal with that and so runs off, leaving him in the care of an aunt who spends most of her time watching TV and talking on the phone about it.

Most of his time Frost hangs out with redheaded twins Francis and Frances.  (Or Frank and Frankie.)  Being rich and new kids they were almost as outcast as Frost.  Growing up it’s Frankie that he’s infatuated with.  She doesn’t really feel that way about him until she gets lonely and desperate enough to marry him.  They spend a few years together before Frost finds out Frankie is cheating on him--with a woman.  So they get a divorce.

After a few years of making a living as a writer (though never a popular one), he and Frank finally hook up.  Frank’s had a crush on Frost his whole life, but Frost was focused on the sister.  Frost goes to live with Frank in a posh Manhattan apartment and things are OK. 

When a town in upstate New York allows gay marriages, Frank talks Frost into going there to get married.  But it soon turns into an ugly scene with protesters and counter-protesters including Frankie.  An important friend to Frost is murdered.

Eventually Frost starts to realize that Frank doesn’t really love him; Frank just loves having control of him in large part to spite his sister.  And so Frost decides to leave him and be on his own for a while.

The moral of the story:  never marry.  Or never marry redheaded twins.  No, really it’s that if you marry someone for the wrong reasons, things won’t work out.  It’s more important than whether you’re straight or gay or whatever.  A simple message and I think far less preachy than saying whether gay marriage is “right” or “wrong.”  The reality is that any marriage can be right or wrong depending on who’s involved.  That’s why 50+% of marriages don’t work.

The story was largely inspired by the works of John Irving, one of my favorite authors.  I used the similar cradle-to-grave structure, though not as far as the grave part.  There are a lot of oddball characters and locations and so on.  And the main character is a writer.  Though there’s not enough wrestling, Vienna, or bears to be a real Irving novel.  If you’ve followed me for a while then you probably know I sent him a copy of the book and he sent a nice letter back.  A real letter, not some boilerplate thing.  So that was nicer.  (Nicer still would have been if he’d passed it on to his agent or publisher, but you can’t have everything.)

I haven't really toyed with the idea of a sequel, though recently I was thinking of the area one might go in.  I've seen this PSA on Pluto TV approximately 200,000 times in the last 18 months:

It's about a lesbian couple who take their baby to a pediatrician who refuses to see her because her parents are gay.  Religious freedom!  Like the PSA says though, you're denying service to the baby, so it's her you're hurting, not the lesbians.  And for fuck's sake you're a doctor; you should be above thinking lesbians--and those related to them--have cooties.  It's so fucking stupid, which was pretty much why I decided to write Where You Belong.

And really it'd make sense since at the end of the book Frost goes off to DC with his reporter friend and her baby.  And with the Maguire twins and Frost getting older, families would make sense, right?

So maybe first Frankie comes to Frost and asks him to make a baby with her--not necessarily with sex.  Eventually Frankie gets pregnant and has a baby.  Then there's some incident like in the PSA.  Meanwhile Frost's reporter friend maybe has her own issues with her baby.  Maybe Frank decides to adopt a kid for himself.

And the end message would be pretty much the same:  it's not the genitals of the parents that matters so much as the love and care they provide.

But I haven't sold a copy or even had any pages read on Kindle Unlimited since January 2017 of the first book so it’s not like people are clamoring for a sequel anyway.

Maybe if I’d put as much effort into other books as I did that one I’d be a small-list author like some of my “friends” on Facebook.  Probably still would never have gotten to be a household name with movie or TV deals.  I think Where You Belong could make a good movie, but you’d need to cut out some stuff so the book would probably still be better.  But if anyone from Hollywood reads my blog, let’s do lunch!

Filler Faves: Casting Change

There were actually two inspirations for this book.  One was some terrible query someone on Critique Circle kept flogging about a guy replacing a famous actress with an android but then for some stupid reason having the actress voice the character.  The whole thing was rife with stupid plot holes but the dummy is probably still trying to sell it.  The other inspiration was my 2002 story The Leading Men about three men who are brought together to make a superhero TV show in the 60s.

The end result is Casting Change!  In the 60s there's a producer named Gus who's recently had an expensive flop that's put him on the outs with the studios.  But he gets a chance at redemption so long as he can do one thing:  recruit his ex-wife Lizzy Siskind to star in the movie.  There's just one problem:  Lizzy is pregnant! 

There are a couple of contrivances in that he has to use Lizzy or the author of the book the movie is based on will terminate the licensing rights and also that the movie has to be made in time for Christmas.  That way Gus can't just use someone else or wait until Lizzy has the baby.

After looking at some other options, Gus is put in touch with a woman who makes a magic potion that can turn someone into an exact double of Lizzy.  Gus decides to use the potion on himself to avoid letting anyone else know about the secret.

Gus thought being a producer was hard work, but he soon realizes just how hard it is to be a famous actress in Hollywood.  Not only are there 16 hour work days, but there are events and appearances and there's also a lot of casual--and less so--sexual harassment.  So it's not exactly a picnic.

The real Lizzy coaches Gus on how to be her and in the process they start getting a lot closer.  A LOT closer.  It turns out Lizzy is such a good actress she fooled everyone--including Gus--into thinking she likes boys when in reality she likes girls a whole lot more.

Eventually Gus finishes making the movie and changes back, but he soon finds Lizzy doesn't want him back.  Not as a man.  So he decides to become a woman again, only not an exact double of Lizzy this time.  He and Lizzy still have to keep things on the down low for the sake of her career, but at least they'll be together in some way.

It's a little bittersweet, but not an unhappy ending either.  I really hoped this would do a lot better than it did because I spent a few months writing it.  At 182 pages it's actually a novel, albeit on the short side.  Unfortunately the sales weren't really all that great despite that I did giveaways on my newsletter and LibraryThing.

It's really one of those that I think people who think gender swap stories are weird might still enjoy because there's a good story at the core about two people rekindling their love with the help of some magic.  So stop being snobs and give it a chance!

Filler Faves: Only Human

This was another one of those stories where I tried something different and people didn't really go along with me.  Not that anyone said anything bad about it (one person on Amazon liked it) but the sales weren't all that great.  That's what I get for trying something new.

After doing my A to Z Challenge on Transformers I decided to do a gender swap story that was sort of based on the 3rd season episode "Only Human" where four Autobots are turned into humans when their bodies are stolen. 

Only in this case there are three "Justibots" who come to Earth looking for a crashed ship.  To blend in with the population they adopt human guises.  Inadvertently they each get stuck with a female disguise. 

To have some fun each of them gets a disguise that's inverse to their previous body.  So the youngest one gets the oldest body, though it's only a woman in her late 30s, not really old.  The smartest one gets the sluttiest body.  And the strongest one gets a 12-year-old's body. 

As they explore a small town in Arizona they learn about human culture and uncover a plot involving the crashed ship and a comrade of theirs.

As a Transformers fan I got to work in some references here and there and goof around a bit, which made it fun for me.  Though what's fun for me and what's fun for the reader are probably not the same because most of the readers are probably not really into Transformers.

Since the original characters were robots (or cybernetic organisms) it wasn't a traditional gender swap story.  But still pretty close. 

I was a little bummed it didn't sell because I had ideas for sequels.  The second story probably would have involved three bad guys coming to Earth and adopting female bodies of their own.  And that would have set up a big battle between good and evil in a third story.  But no money, no sequel.  Sad.

Filler Faves: Fourth Wall

Transformed Into a Little Girl Too was the first sequel in the series, though neither story was actually a sequel.

The first story in it was called "Fourth Wall" and it was a fun romp with comic books.  There was basically a Superman-type hero who's trapped by a mad scientist Lex Luthor-type villain.  He's hit with some radiation and wakes up as a puny little first grader named Sarah.

The even stranger thing is when Sarah reads a comic book to find what happened to her is related in the book.  There are even drawings of her and her bedroom and mother and everything.  Which freaks out her and her mother. 

They eventually seek out the writer of the comic book at a convention.  The Scottish writer very loosely based on Grant Morrison agrees to help Sarah get back to her "real" world in the comic book.  They can't do it straight off because that would be jarring for the comic's readers.  So what happens is Sarah grows up over a few issues and regains all her superpowers, which is a bit dangerous when she starts breathing fire and floating into the air.

Then there's trouble at a supercollider and Sarah goes to lend a hand.  She winds up getting caught in an explosion that catapults her back into the comic book world, where she's a man again.  He defeats the villain and all is right again.  But it's a bummer in the real world where Sarah's mother has lost her daughter.

This was one of those fun stories to write.  It was a little bit experimental in all the reality bending and stuff.  Definitely not your typical gender swap story, which is probably why if people didn't hate it they just didn't ever love it enough to say anything either.  But really, sometimes you have to take chances and try something different or it gets really boring.

Tony Laplume would know this, but the reason I used Grant Morrison as the basis for the writer is that he's done fourth wall-breaking stories similar to this in comics like Animal Man and The Multiversity.  Just saying.

Filler Faves: Graveyard Girls

Transformed Into a Goth Girl was probably the most successful book on my list, though in this case it's probably "sold" a lot more since I made it free a while back.

Anyway, the first story in the book is one of my favorites.  It's called "Graveyard Girls" and it's about a guy named Terry who's about to go off to college but during the summer is cleaning up the attic after his girlfriend dumped him.  There he finds an old record from a group called the Graveyard Girls. 

When he plays a really sad song on an old record player he finds himself suddenly changed into a Goth girl like the band.  Fiddling around with the record player he winds up regressing from a college freshman to a high school freshman.

No one else seems to notice this change, not even his mom.  He ends up going to the mall and running into another Goth girl, who was a supporting character in a story from the previous book Transformed Into a Dominatrix.

Doing some research, Terry finds out the band who made the record is in San Fransicso, so he and his friend start out on a road trip from Virginia to California.

Along the way they fall in love, have a falling out, and then reconcile.  In the process, Terry (now Teri) decides she's happier as a 15-year-old Goth girl than she was as an 18-year-old boy.  So the two Goth girls go back home to Virginia.

In an epilogue years later they finally do go to the San Francisco area for college.  At a bar Teri meets a woman who offers to change her back into a man, but Teri refuses because she's happy with her new life.

So it was a happy ending.  Kind of a nice romance, I thought.  Of course not everyone thought that.  There used to be a negative review on Amazon but it got purged.  Maybe it's still on Goodreads.  Anyway, I thought it was one of the better stories.  Typically the better stories are the ones that don't involve a guy turning into a hot blonde chick to have sex with someone.