The Battlestar Galactica Reboot Was Ahead of Its Time In Some Unfortunate Ways

 After watching the original Battlestar Galactica, I got around to watching the reboot series finally.  I started watching it on TubiTV like the original but then realized it was on Peacock for free and that in some ways worked better.  My brother said when I talked about the original that it went downhill halfway through the third season but for me it was really the end of the second season.  So it had two good seasons and then it just got harder and harder to watch, though ironically I watched those last seasons faster so I could get through them.

Anyway, watching it now you do have to consider the context of when it came out.  In 2004 most basic cable channels were still mostly showing reruns of old shows and movies.  Some like FX, USA, and the Sci-Fi Channel had original content, but not as much and most of it was pretty low-grade PG-13 at worst.  There was The Sopranos on HBO but this was still before Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Walking Dead, and other R-rated shows.  This was before Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, and a plethora of streaming services all coming out with original content too.

So this show with its grittiness, violence, cursing, sex, and adult situations was still somewhat new for basic cable.  And as the title says, it was ahead of its time in some unfortunate ways.

Like the original, this starts with a miniseries that sets up the series.  For a long time the 12 Colonies, pretty much all with some bastardized Greek astrology name, have been at war with the Cylons, a race of robots humans had created originally as servants.  The Cylons became self-aware and turned on the humans and a long and bloody war ensued.

But for 40 years the Cylons have been gone and the colonies have been at peace.  Then on Armistice Day, the Cylons launch a sneak attack and nuke all 12 colonies.  They wipe out most of the Colonial Armed Forces by exploiting the networked computers of the colonial forces.  The titular Battlestar Galactica survives because it was old and being turned into a museum, sort of like the aircraft carrier Intrepid in New York harbor, so it didn't have any networks for the Cylons to exploit.  It also had older model Viper fighters that the Cylons couldn't turn off.

Along with Galactica there's a group of civilian ships that manage to flee the carnage.  Their first stop is at an old supply depot so they can get munitions to carry on the fight.  With some cunning and desperate maneuvers they manage to escape the Cylons and then start to look for the mythical "13th Colony" called...Earth.  But the Cylons are still in pursuit and there are human-looking ones who could possibly be spying on the humans.

Almost all the characters from the previous series are in this, but many have been changed.  A key difference is that in the old series everyone pretty much just had one name.  Commander Adama was Adama.  Apollo was Apollo.  Starbuck was Starbuck.  And so on.  In the reboot they have full, normal sounding names like Lee Adama, Kara Thrace, and Sharon Valeri while "Apollo," "Starbuck," and "Boomer" are callsigns or nicknames like "Maverick" and "Goose" and "Ice Man" in Top Gun.

Another major change is that in the original Adama was head of the military and civilian government.  But in the reboot he's commander of the military while the head of the civilian government (and ostensibly Adama's boss) is Laura Roslin, the Secretary of Education who was aboard Galactica for the ceremony to make it a museum.  She's the only Cabinet member to survive the attack and thus becomes president.  The caveat is that Roslin has terminal cancer and has only months to live.

In the original Baltar is a traitor who convinced the colonies to let their guard down for peace talks, during which the Cylons ambushed them.  He was then given his own Cylon base ship to hunt down the Galactica and civilian ships.  In the reboot Dr. Gaius Baltar is a supposed genius who inadvertently allows a Cylon agent to access the Ministry of Defense computers to let the Cylons take down the defenses of the colonies.

Near the end of the miniseries, it's learned there are 12 models of human-looking Cylons with many copies of some models.  At the end we see that Sharon "Boomer" Valeri is one of those, only she doesn't know it yet.  As the first season begins there's a second Sharon model on the Colonial capital planet Caprica who is seducing Karl "Helo" Agathon, who gave up his seat on a rescue ship so the "brilliant" Baltar could survive.  Through the first season Helo and the Sharon are on the run, though he doesn't know it's really an elaborate experiment to test whether the Cylons can fall in love and make babies with humans.

Meanwhile the Galactica and its civilian ships are on the run in space.  Boomer goes into a trance and blows up much of the ship's store of water but then is the one who finds an asteroid containing water to replace it.  At the end of the first season they have to take out a Cylon refinery to capture a supply of tylium fuel.

In the second season they work in a couple of stories from the old show.  First is the discovery of Kobol, the place where the colonies came from.  In the old show it looked like ancient Egypt but in the reboot it's British Columbia--where they were filming, I assume.  There's this whole overcomplicated thing where they need the "Arrow of Apollo" (the god not the character in the show) and so Starbuck goes back to Caprica to find it, which takes a large chunk of the season, during which she finds some resistance fighters led by a former pro athlete who played "pyramid," a sort of basketball-handball-rugby game introduced in the original show.  Starbuck escapes with the arrow but she can't take the others and promises to return later.  In an Indiana Jones-style way the arrow shows them a view from Earth to help guide them.

Later, they find a second Battlestar that survived the attack, the Pegasus.  In the old show it was captained by Lloyd Bridges and after two episodes it disappeared, never to be seen again.  In the reboot it's captained by the former Ensign Ro of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Her name is Admiral Cain, like the old Bogart war movie The Caine Mutiny and like him, she's a hard commander who really has no problem sacrificing anyone or anything to get the job done.  When she met some civilian ships, she had them cannibalized for parts--and personnel.  (More on this is shown in the movie Razor, which was included at the end of season 3 on Peacock.)  Since Cain is an admiral, she outranks Adama and takes over the fleet--until she's conveniently killed off and Adama is promoted to admiral.  Her second-in-command is then bumped off by the mafia and then John Heard of Home Alone and Sharknado fame takes over for an episode where he dies like Spock in Wrath of Khan.  And then Adama puts Apollo in charge.

And then for me the series takes a nose-dive.  There's an election where Baltar defeats Roslin.  In an ironic twist for 2021, Roslin was going to rig the election but Adama convinces her to do the moral thing.  What's the worst that can happen, right?

The worst is that scouts have found a habitable planet and Baltar decides to settle everyone there on "New Caprica."  The show then in mid-episode jumps forward a year to where Galactica and Pegasus are being run by skeleton crews and most everyone is living in tents on the surface.  Because they don't have trees to make cabins or something?  They don't know how to make cement?  They don't have empty shipping containers or something?

Oh, and everyone is pairing up and getting married!  Starbuck rescued the resistance fighter Sam on Caprica and married him.  Apollo married Dualla, his XO on the Pegasus.  Chief Tyrol, the head mechanic guy, married his subordinate Cally, whose jaw he broke like two episodes ago.  Roslin is teaching school on the surface while President Baltar is using his interns like a harem.  And Adama grew a really crappy mustache.

Then Cylons show up and the colonial ships all jump away, leaving those on the surface to get taken over by the Cylons.

The next season picks up 4 months later with the Cylons occupying New Caprica with Baltar in charge of the vichy government and recruiting humans to police it.  Colonel Tigh had an eye taken out and is tortured by the Cylons until his wife manages to get him sprung by banging the head Cylon.  Meanwhile Chief Tyrol and Starbuck's husband Sam are leading a resistance similar to Iraq or Afghanistan.  Out in space, Apollo is wearing a fat suit and his dad still has a crappy mustache.  Eventually they rescue most everyone on New Caprica, at the cost of losing the Pegasus.  If the show had been called Battlestar Pegasus or Battlestars or something they probably would have done the smart thing and sacrificed Galactica since it was older and crappier.

Then after that the season goes all soap opera-y for a while as Apollo and Starbuck cheat on their spouses with each other and Chief Tyrol and Cally struggle with their marriage and blah blah.  Eventually they find a planet with a lot of algae they can use for food but also on the planet is some kind of weird temple that should help them find Earth, but the Cylons get there at the same time and there's a standoff that's interrupted by the system's sun going nova.

The end of this season has Starbuck going crazy and disappearing in a storm and then returning a month or two later in a nebula.  Also in the nebula, four people hear that Hendrix song, "All Along the Watchtower" and realize they're Cylons.  They're Tigh, Tyrol, Sam, and Tory, the president's aide.  They're four of the "Final Five," which is a big thing for the Cylons because they were like the first Cylons or some shit.  But why weren't they mentioned earlier?  Because other Cylons are programmed not to think about them, sort of like Robocop was programmed not to think about Directive 4 in the original movie.

But who's the final Final Five member?  It has to be someone important, right?  Adama, Starbuck, Apollo...or maybe someone new and important?  Or it could just be a character we didn't care much about who was thought to be dead.

Yeah, it's that one.  It turns out Tigh and his wife  have some kind of Hawkman/Hawkgirl thing going on where they keep resurrecting and finding each other or whatever.  When Tigh's wife comes back to life on the main Cylon ship, she remembers everything.  And though I just said the Cylons were not supposed to think about the Final Five, apparently now they know who she is and apparently always knew and bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

The Final Five get together and with Starbuck's help they find Earth.  Except it's all ruined and radioactive like the end of Planet of the Apes, though nothing as iconic as the Statue of Liberty is shown.  Apparently the 13th Tribe already made their own Cylons and the same thing happened.  Meanwhile Starbuck finds her crashed fighter and dead body, but she doesn't vaporize or anything.

The Final Five realize that they came from this Earth.  They were real humans back then working on creating Cylons.  They transferred themselves to Cylon bodies when the planet was destroyed and then somehow got to the 12 Colonies and the cycle began all over again...or something.  The idea like in the crappy Matrix sequels is that Cylons destroying humanity is inevitable.  Um...I guess?

Everyone is super bummed they found "Earth" and can't live there.  Dualla kills herself; the vice-president and some officers launch a space mutiny; and they find out the ship is literally falling apart and will need to be scrapped.  On top of that turd sundae, a half-Cylon/half-human child made by Helo and his Cylon wife Sharon is kidnapped and taken to the big Cylon base that's located by a black hole.

Adama rounds up some volunteers and the Galactica goes on one final mission to get the kid because she's important...somehow.  There's a battle but a truce is worked out when the Final Five agree to help the other Cylons get their resurrection device back...until Tyrol realizes that Tory murdered his wife because Cally found out about them.  He kills her and the truce is off but the head evil Cylon kills himself for...reasons and the Galactica escapes when Starbuck plays "All Along the Watchtower" on the FTL control keyboard.

They wind up appearing at...Earth!  You see that other Earth wasn't the real Earth, as in the one we know.  This is our Earth...except it's 150,000 years ago!  Somehow the rest of the fleet shows up and everyone embraces Apollo's idea that instead of building cities and stuff they should hunt and gather and live like fracking primitives.  Why would everyone instantly embrace this stupid idea?  I mean all these people have done is bitch and whine since Day 1 and now they just submissively agree to give up everything and live the simple life on Earth?  Well, I guess it was the last episode, so we need to wrap things up quick.

Roslin dies, Adama buries her, Starbuck vanishes without a trace, and everyone else scatters to start a new life...

Baltar, the dick who got all but 50,000 people slaughtered, gets to go riding off into the sunset with his Cylon girlfriend.  That seems fair, right?  In the present of 2009 Baltar and his girlfriend are there except it's not really them, they're "angels" or something.  The half-Cylon/half-human girl was found in Africa and classified as a missing link.  Hooray?

I did really like the first two seasons but then it got all caught up in its own bullshit with this phony mystical crap.  By the end I was thinking to myself, "Remember when this was a show about humans in space fleeing from robots with lots of cool battles and shit?"  What happened to that show?

The whole concept of the Cylons in some ways didn't make sense.  They were referred to as "machines" and "toasters" and that they have "software" instead of brains yet the human ones are indistinguishable from normal humans.  In the miniseries when they're having sex the human Cylons's spines turn bright red but that's discarded later.  If the human-looking Cylons really were machines, wouldn't they be like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator:  skin over metal?  In which case shouldn't they have been easy to identify?  Or were they some kind of biological hardware?  It's never really defined all that well, though I suppose by now there's plenty of fansplaining on the Internet.

Getting back to my title, the last two seasons seemed very much like Game of Thrones and Walking Dead where it seemed like the writers/producers were actively trolling the audience by killing off everyone good or just turning them into assholes.  

No one was that more obvious with than Dualla.  At the start she was a crewmember on the bridge and she and the president's dorky aide Billy had a thing going on.  Then all the sudden she's hooking up with Apollo for no reason, Billy is killed, and she's marrying Apollo.  They mostly just argue and then she pretty much disappears for a large chunk of the 3rd/4th seasons before killing herself for no real reason.  Her and Billy were a cute couple in a Rom-and-Leeta-on-DS9-way but then they had to fuck that up to hook her up with Apollo, who apparently only married her because Starbuck was taken.  Ugh.

Her crewmate Gaeta was similarly fucked over.  At the start he was a dorky tech guy on the bridge.  Then he becomes Baltar's aide on New Caprica and secretly provides the resistance with information.  Then he doesn't do much for a while until he gets shot in the leg, has it cut off, and turns all bitter.  He helps organize the space mutiny and winds up getting executed by a firing squad.  Ugh.

Chief Tyrol initially was awesome in a Chief O'Brien on ST TNG and DS9 way as the heroic blue collar everyman.  Then they had to fuck that up with him going all PTSD and beating up Cally and then they inexplicably get married and then he finds out he's a Cylon.  After his wife dies he shaves his head and goes all nuts and then murders Tory for murdering his wife.  Ugh.

One great episode Tyrol and the rest of the crew make a stealth fighter called the Blackbird out of spare parts.  The project brought everyone together and was a rare bright spot.  So of course two episodes later it gets blown up and they never make another one.  Ugh.

On top of that they made Starbuck a raving lunatic most of the 4th season and then she just disappears.  Adama and Roslin had a thing building up the whole series and when they finally can get together, she dies.  And so it goes...

Like those later shows, the last couple seasons especially seemed determined to suck all light and hope from those watching.  Then like GOT the end was really unsatisfying.  It really sticks in my craw because it started out so well.

Fun Facts:  My brother mentioned this before but the national anthem of the colonies is the theme song of the original series.  As well the older model Cylons and their ships are the same designs as in the original series.  The older model Vipers are also the same (or really close) as in the original show.

Original creator Glen A Larson was attached as a consulting producer and original Apollo Richard Hatch frequently guest starred as Tom Zarek, a political prisoner who becomes vice-president and a couple times actual president.  I didn't recognize any other familiar faces but there might have been some.

In the TV show, pilot Lee Adama is the son of Commander Adama.  In real life, the pilot known as "Hot Dog" was played by the son of Edward James Olmos, who plays Commander/Admiral Adama.  Fake and real nepotism!

Co-creator Ronald D Moore and some of the cast voiced characters in my favorite Robot Chicken episode, the first one of season 4.  In the opening, Robot Chicken creators Seth Green and Matthew Senreich go to see Moore to ask for a job and he says, "What do I need help with?  I just throw a dart at a cast list and they're a Cylon!"  At the end of the episode, there's a sketch for a new thing called "Just the Good Parts" that will only show the important parts of a TV show or movie--like the "I am your father" part of Empire Strikes Back.  For Galactica it's just everyone saying, "I'm a Cylon."  There was another sketch in a different season where they make fun of how the show uses the made up curse word "frack" and then has them making up a bunch of other ridiculous curses.  Then it cuts to an FCC censor who says, "What the fuck are they saying?"

Speaking of Robot Chicken, Katee Sackhoff, who played Starbuck, is a frequent contributor as the voice of "Bitch Pudding," a Strawberry Shortcake parody character.  Like Harley Quinn it's a character that was probably supposed to only show up once but became insanely popular even though I never really liked her.  There was even a whole special episode devoted to Bitch Pudding.  Star Wars fans would recognize Sackhoff more as the live action Bo Katan in the second season of The Mandalorian and I assume she'll show up again in season 3.

Ronald D Moore worked on Star Trek TNG and DS9 and there are some parallels with DS9.  Besides the grimmer, grittier tone, there's all the mystical religious bullshit like "The Prophets" and all that Bajoran stuff in DS9.  In DS9 Constable Odo was a shapeshifter and then in season 3 it's revealed that his people are "The Founders," the rulers of the Gamma Quadrant.  When the Founders go to war against the Federation and its allies, they use their shapeshifting to infiltrate Federation ships and even Earth.  It provides the same sort of paranoia and mistrust as with the human-looking Cylons in Galactica.  Dr. Baltar is kind of a mix of Gul Dukat and Dumar in that he starts out as a bad guy, then becomes a leader of a sham government, then becomes a religious figure, and then becomes a hero--though unlike Dukat and Dumar he doesn't die.  In the third season the crew opens a bar that's kind of like Quark's, only crappier.

The creator of Quantum Leap worked on the original series and one of the stars of Quantum Leap, Dean Stockwell, frequently appears as the evil Cylon Cavil or John.

I mentioned how the Cylons took advantage of the colonial network computers to deactivate their weapons.  This same trick was used a couple years later in Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles when the robotic Haydonites put backdoor code in the weapons they make for the Robotech Expeditionary Force so they can shut them off when they're ready to reveal themselves as bad guys.  And like Galactica, the only ships that were safe were those too old or down with maintenance.  Another similar Robotech thing was in the penultimate episode the Galactica rams into a Cylon station and from the front of it a bunch of troops pour out into the enemy station.  There was a similar tactic frequently used in the first series of Robotech where the SDF-1 would use the aircraft carrier Daedalus welded onto it like an arm and punch an enemy ship.  Then the front of the carrier would open and a bunch of robots would fire missiles into the enemy ship to blow it up.

I deliberately mentioned a "space mutiny" a couple of times because the crappy movie Space Mutiny used footage of the original Galactica series for its space battles and ships.  In a late episode, Starbuck's husband Sam needs brain surgery and Doc Cottle says to get "the brain guy."  This was funny to me because in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 seasons that were made for the Sci-Fi channel from 1997-1999 there was a character called "Brain Guy" played by Bill Corbett.  To add to the fun, the "brain guy" was played by John Hodgman, who has worked with Corbett and the other Rifftrax guys in some of their SketchFest shows in San Francisco.  It's all connected!

Facts more fun than the show itself.

Representation Scorecard:  If you want to tally the score on representation, in some ways this was worse than the original.  In the original Tigh and Boomer were both black men, but in this reboot Tigh is white and Boomer is an Asian woman.  Adama is Latino instead of white, so there's also that.  But really the only black main character was Dualla and look what happened to her.  

This series does score better on gender representation as besides Boomer, they also gender swapped Starbuck and there were a lot more female pilots.  Unlike the original they didn't really make an issue of whether women could fly Vipers.  I'm sure at some point it passed the Bechdel Test but I wasn't really keeping track.  Probably when Starbuck and the other hotshot female pilot Kat were talking about shooting down "Scar" a sort of Cylon Red Baron would count as passing that.

Though the show was liberal in a lot of ways there really weren't any gay characters.  I think there was a girl-on-girl kiss at one point but that was about it.

So it's kind of a mixed bag if you're the type to keep score on that.

In Covid Times Mike Tyson Mysteries Somehow Became My Go-To Show

 Before the pandemic shut down everything, I had watched the first two seasons of Adult Swim's Mike Tyson Mysteries.  I even bought Season 1 on DVD for like $10.  That being said it wasn't really among my favorite shows.  And yet somehow it became my go-to show as the pandemic has continued.  I think in the last year I've watched all 70 episodes at least 4 times--maybe more!

The caveat is the episodes are only 11 minutes long--including credits.  So if we do the math (70*11)/60=12.83 or roughly 13 hours to go through the whole series.  If I watch that 4 times that's 52 hours or 2 days and 4 hours.  When you spread it over a year, is that really so much?  Yeah, probably for just one show.

I don't remember when I started to watch and rewatch it.  From my Amazon purchase history I bought seasons 2 and 3 in December 2019 on Prime Video.  It wasn't until April Fool's Day of 2020 when I got season 4 on Prime Video too.  So it was probably around then I watched it for the first time.  And then somehow I watched it again and again.

I'm sure none of my Phantom Readers have even seen the show so let me tell you what it's about.  It's about former heavyweight champ Mike Tyson and three others going around in a van and solving mysteries.  The obvious way to explain it would be to say it's kind of a Scooby-Doo parody and the animation is similar.  But being on Adult Swim it's a lot more grown up with bad language and allusions to sex and genitalia and stuff like that.

And yet it's not completely lowbrow either.  The pilot episode has the team going to the house of author Cormac McCarthy to try to help him get over writer's block--or that's what they think they're there for.  But then there are a couple of twists.

Like in The Hangover, Tyson plays basically a parody of himself as a hotheaded, not-too-bright celebrity who lives in Las Vegas.  In this alternate reality he has a teenage Asian daughter named Yung Hee who was left on his doorstep when she was a baby.  The ghost of the Marquess of Queensbury (whom rules of boxing were named after or something) also lives with him as does Pigeon, who is obviously a pigeon but who was a man.

Really I tend to think the supporting characters are more fun than Tyson himself, especially Pigeon.  Pigeon (voiced by SNL alum Norm MacDonald) is a foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, drug-taking sociopath who basically does whatever he wants.  He's similar to Roger the alien in American Dad, only he doesn't get to disguise himself as human characters.  His interaction with the flaming-yet-repressed homosexual Marquess (voiced by Jim Rash of Community fame) and the straight-laced Yung makes for comedy gold. Tyson is more the catalyst for the episodes but his cluelessness makes him kind of cuddly even when he's cursing and punching people and stuff.

I wouldn't say it's a great show; in fact a lot of the episodes are kinda stupid.  But that's also what makes it rewatchable:  it's fun and stupid and you can just turn your brain off and laugh for 11 minutes.  The Chuck Mangione-esque theme song at the end is also very soothing.  In most of the credits the real Tyson will briefly appear to answer some goofy question or something that might be related to the episode.  Like an episode about a grocery store murder they ask him what he thinks a gallon of milk costs and it's probably not too far off the mark.  Because it's so short, a lot of rewatching was done when I was sorting laundry or pills in the bedroom and just wanted something quick and commercial-free on the tube so I'd put on an episode (or two) and then go back out to the living room to do other shit.

Other times I did binge watch a bunch of episodes, really when I just wanted something light and fun.  Like one night I watched this movie called Vivarium that's about a couple who get stranded in this weird subdivision and can't find their way out.  Pre-Covid it probably would have just been an OK horror movie but in the midst of the pandemic the thought of being trapped in a house was really hitting home--pun intended.  So after that I put on some Mike Tyson Mysteries to chillax and decompress a bit.  It's been helpful like that.

I'd say the first season isn't quite as good as the other three.  It's the kind of show that took a few episodes (most of that first season) to really gel.  The first four episodes involve celebrities like Cormac McCarthy, Bobby Fisher (the chess guy), Robert Redford, Elton John, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and Buzz Aldrin (none of whom actually voiced themselves) but once they started getting away from that to more down-to-earth plots it got better.  I bought seasons 2-4 from Amazon Prime Video but then a little later found out that all 4 seasons had been added to Hulu, so at least for now you can watch them there--potentially with commercials if you don't pay to get rid of ads.  I'm not sure if that will move to another service like HBO Max eventually the way Robot Chicken did.

I was bummed to read the show has no plans for another season.  There was no reason given but some speculation was Tyson might be too busy.  In which case I'd say they could spin off the other characters and find some other celebrity.  Like I said, the other characters--especially Pigeon--are the ones who provide the comedy, so just have them go join some other dipshit celebrity and the formula would still work.

For now I'll just have to content myself with the 70 episodes that helped make this pandemic time slightly more bearable.  Appropriately the final episode ended with Mike inadvertently killing God; I suppose you couldn't do much better than that.

Star Wars Shows Keep Closing Old Holes and Opening New Ones

 In theory on Monday I talked about The Bad Batch, the latest Star Wars show that like The Clone Wars, Rebels, Resistance, and The Mandalorian is both a sequel to some stuff and a prequel to other stuff.

If you put them in order, The Clone Wars takes place between Episodes II and III.  The Bad Batch picks up after Episode III and before the start of Rebels.  Rebels begins about fifteen years after Episode III and about 5 years or so before Episode IV/Rogue One.  The Mandalorian takes place a few years after Episode VI and many years before Episode VII.  Resistance takes place right before and then during Episode VII and Episode VIII.  Got it?  No?  Good.

So really what each of these shows does is to fill in some of those blanks in the timeline between episodes and to a lesser extent to patch up some of the plot holes or other questionable things between movies.  In The Clone Wars it was obviously what happened during the Clone Wars that began in Episode II and ended in Episode III.  With Rebels it was to show how the Rebellion began to come together and also how the Empire went from the former Republic at the end of Episode III to the Galactic Empire of Episodes IV-VI.  The Mandalorian helps to fill in some of what happens after the fall of the Empire in Episode VI and before the rise of the First Order in Episode VII.  And Resistance tried to fill in the rise of the First Order in Episode VII.

The Bad Batch comes in then to help fill in the transition from the Republic to the Empire.  Most importantly it helps to explain why the Empire didn't use the clone troopers the Republic had grown and trained in their war.  And also it helps to explain why no one, like the Rebellion for instance, could go and clone their own army to fight the Empire by hiring the Kaminoans.

The only problem is the same as these other shows:  for all the holes they fill in, they open up new ones.  The Bad Batch were introduced during the Disney+ season of Clone Wars as basically mutants with special powers.  The question then was:  what happened to them?  Why weren't they in anything else?  The practical answer is because they didn't exist yet, but fans don't like practical answers.  So now we have a show to help try to tell us that.

The show then introduces its own characters like the young female clone Omega and the evil Admiral Rampart.  So now we have to wonder what became of them.  Why aren't they in anything?  Which should be answered whenever the show folds, but in the meantime we don't really know.

But really there are only two answers for most of these: 

1. They died
2. They went far away somewhere

The Clone Wars was the first show that started with a theatrical movie.  That movie introduced Ahsoka Tano, the young padawan of Anakin Skywalker.  It also introduced Ventress, the student of the evil Count Dooku.  Through the seasons of the show those characters had whole arcs where they both wound up dropping out of their respective orders and going out on their own.  I forget what happened to Ventress, or maybe they just never said.

Meanwhile, an adult Ahsoka appeared in Rebels as the mysterious "Fulcrum" who provided help to the Rebels.  She died in a fight with Vader until Ezra went back in time to save her.  She and Sabine Wren at the end of that show were going to find where Ezra went.  Then a live action version appeared on season 2 of The Mandalorian, where she was searching for Grand Admiral Thrawn.  So she wasn't in Episode III because she had left the Jedi by then.  And then she wasn't in Episodes IV-VI because she was looking for Ezra or whatever.  And she's not in Episodes VII-IX because she's out looking for Thrawn.  In each case she went far away somewhere.

The Clone Wars and Rebels also brought Darth Maul back to life before ultimately killing him.  He also had a small cameo in Solo, which in continuity is before Rebels.  So he wasn't in Episode II because he hadn't regained his sanity yet from wherever he wound up.  And he wasn't in Episode III because he was on the run after his former master destroyed his criminal enterprise (or whatever) and then he was dead by Episode IV.

Clone Commander Rex is introduced in Clone Wars and then shows up again in The Bad Batch, where he's left the Republic Empire and an old version of him shows up in Rebels.  I forget if he actually died in that, but even if he didn't, he was pretty old, so it would make sense he wouldn't show up in Episodes IV-IX.

Hera Syndulla originated in Rebels but a young version of her was included in The Bad Batch.  The final episode of Rebels says she was in the Battle of Endor and maybe some future "Special Edition" will show the Ghost there.  It was part of the fleet in Episode IX.

Though not a TV show, Rogue One infamously killed off its entire main cast by the end of the movie.  That way there could be no question why they weren't in Episodes IV-IX.

Anyway, the problem with all these new properties is that while they help to clear up some stuff about the timeline, whenever they introduce a new character, they then have to figure out how to explain why that character(s) isn't in the movies.  And as I said more often than not that means killing them off or just having them somewhere else or otherwise not involved in anything.

Right now The Mandalorian has that problem since Grogu ("The Child") went off with Luke Skywalker.  So you have to wonder if Grogu was killed by Ben Solo in his rebellion or if he had already gone somewhere else.  And if the latter, why wasn't he in Episodes VII-IX?

Marvel has had the same problem as the Cinematic Universe has grown and it's only getting worse.  Because you might wonder why Captain Marvel didn't fight Loki and the alien invasion in The Avengers or Ultron in Avengers 2?  And now with The Eternals, you have to wonder why they didn't appear in any of the Avengers movies?  The obvious answer again is they didn't exist then but there will have to be some explanation for the fans, which will probably be that they're far away doing other shit.

So far the Marvel TV shows take place after the movies so they don't really open up questions like that, but that might be a different story down the road.  The good thing for them is they can do the whole "Multiverse" thing and just reset the continuity when they want; Star Wars doesn't really have that luxury.

As they add new shows and eventually movies, it's only going to add even more characters who will then have to be disposed of somehow.  Of course they could always do sequels instead of continuing to stuff things into the movie timeline or go way back in time like the books are with this "High Republic" thing.  But then again, seeing how much Disney fucked up the sequels maybe it's not such a good idea.

Maybe they should have listened to Princess Leia in Episode IV when she told Tarkin the more the Empire tightened its grip the more star systems would slip through its fingers.  In the same way, the more they try to shore up the timeline and fill in continuity, the more it keeps slipping through their fingers.

The Bad Batch Isn't Bad, Merely OK

The final episode of the Star Wars Clone Wars spinoff The Bad Batch aired on Friday the 13th and unlike the Disney Marvel series I was actually watching it episode-by-episode, usually on Saturday morning.  Overall I thought it was OK but frustrating in that it never really seemed to nail down a concept.  I'd warn you about spoilers, but there isn't really much to spoil.  The series has already been renewed so it should be obvious not everyone dies.

In the original 4 episodes of Clone Wars last year, the "Bad Batch" were introduced as four clones who were essentially mutants, each with a special ability:

1. Hunter:  the leader, has sort of Wolverine like abilities in smelling and tracking and stuff
2. Wrecker:  is really strong but at the cost of not being very smart
3. Tech:  is Wrecker's opposite in that he's really smart but not nearly as strong and often seems like he's somewhere on the autism spectrum
4. Crosshair:  has uncanny sighting abilities to make him a super sniper

In those four episodes they rescue a clone called Echo who has had a bunch of cybernetic enhancements to sort of become a living computer.  He joins the Bad Batch as their fifth member.

The spin-off starts off as Order 66 comes down.  The Bad Batch are on a remote world when the regular clones kill their Jedi.  Hunter chases after the Jedi's Padawan, but lets him go; the Padawan will go on to become Kanan Jarus in Rebels.  Crosshair is pissed at Hunter for not following orders.

Later the Bad Batch are ordered to take out Saw Guerra and a bunch of civilians.  Hunter, Wrecker, Tech, and Echo refuse though Crosshair is insistent upon following orders.  So Crosshair winds up joining the newly-formed Galactic Empire while the rest of the Bad Batch go on the run.

It seemed like a good setup for an A-Team kind of show.  They don't exactly fit those roles except for Hunter as the leader and Wrecker as the muscle but it's close enough.  But that's not what happens most of the season.

The next few episodes have the Batch fleeing from the Empire and trying to protect a young female clone named Omega.  They try to get her to go with a civilian family but she winds up joining them on their quest to...survive, I guess.

A few episodes later bounty hunters come after Omega, first the female one from The Mandalorian and then Cad Bane from Clone Wars.  So now is the show going to be like The Mandalorian where the hardened guys are trying to protect a child?  Um...not really because then the Empire is after them again.

There are a couple of A-Team-ish episodes where they go to Corellia to try to get a hard drive from a strategy droid and have to compete with two girls who worked with Ahsoka in that final season of Clone Wars.  Being on Corellia you'd think there'd be a Solo reference, but not really.  And there's another episode where they have to rescue a baby rancor meant for Jabba the Hutt.  Their employer is a lizard alien called Cid (voiced by Rhea Perlman) on Ord Mantell, which was mentioned in Empire Strikes Back as where Han ran into a bounty hunter, convincing him he needed to square things with Jabba.  I always thought of Ord Mantell as more of a space station than a planet, but whatever.

There's a two-episode arc where they have to travel to Ryloth to rescue a young Hera Syndulla (who like Kanan would appear in Rebels) and her family from the Empire.  It was a nice prequel if you like Rebels, but otherwise didn't really do a lot--or wouldn't if there were some kind of overall story arc.

The season ends with the Bad Batch going home to Kamino, which has been overtaken by the Empire.  They find their old friend Crosshair and the five of them plus Omega get left in the floating city as the Empire starts blowing it up with cruisers.  The final episode is sort of like The Poseidon Adventure as they have to escape the sinking, exploding city.

In the end they leave Crosshair to maybe get picked up by the Empire and go...who knows.  There's no cliffhanger, no cookie scene, or anything else to set up the next season.  That's what irritates me; there never really seemed to be any sort of purpose for this series.  It helps to fill in a sliver of history between Episode III and the start of Rebels, but otherwise why does this need to exist?

The problem is they never committed to any kind of overall story so like the Bad Batch it's just flitting around doing stuff that never amounts to much.  That would be easier to swallow in an A-Team-type show where they're going around helping people survive the Empire or whatever, but since the series doesn't really lean into that it just feels like some stuff that happened.

I was a disappointed in the show when it revealed the reason the Kaminoans wanted Omega so badly is because she had "pure" Jango Fett DNA.  So what?  If all you want is her DNA, you just needed to take some blood or hair or whatever.  You didn't need to abduct her.  If that was all you wanted, I'm sure Hunter would have let them take a sample of Omega.  But then on Facebook people try to fansplain that they might need lots of samples or fresher samples or whatever.  Still, Jango Fett DNA isn't really that interesting of a plot point.  Sadly that was about as big of a twist as there was in the whole season.  I thought maybe she'd have some Jedi DNA or something, but nope.

Besides the bounty hunter from The Mandalorian and a few characters from Rebels and Clone Wars, the only major Star Wars guest star was Grand Moff Tarkin--or whatever rank he was.  No Emperor, no Vader, no Obi-Wan, no Yoda, no Chewbacca, no Ahsoka, no Maul, no Thrawn, or really anyone people might give a shit about.  And whose leg at Disney do I have to hump for a Mara Jade reference?

The bigger disappointment is a lot of people like me after the debacle of the sequel movies lobbied on social media for Dave Filoni to take over the Star Wars universe having done such a good job with Clone Wars and Rebels and contributed to The Mandalorian.  Resistance could be forgiven because the sequel movies were such a mess.  Disney basically acquiesced to people's demands, making Filoni the Executive Creative Director for Lucasfilm.  And the first thing to come out of that is this show.  Meh.  Not a good omen.

Of course some shows need time to gel and get going, so maybe next season will do that and maybe find some kind of real purpose to get fans like me excited about...something.  Otherwise I'm not sure I'd look for a Season 3.

Planned Obsolescence is Everywhere

 Monday I talked about Amazon sabotaging one of my books.  And then August 1 I was trying to load another book when Amazon was sabotaging not just me, but everyone by suddenly making it so you couldn't download a MOBI file to preview your book on a Kindle.  And they replaced it with...pretty much nothing.  You could download it as an HTML file, which seems pretty useless, especially since it parses your book into like 7 files.  Or you can use their previewer, which is great if you want to sit at your computer and read the whole book off the screen.

I think a lot of it is they wanted to force people into using their "Kindle Create" app.  I put my book in there and really all it did was make my titles huge.  If you play around I guess you can get fancy drop caps and insert pictures and stuff like that.  It's not really anything I have need for.  And I still couldn't put it into a file that my old Kindle Touch could read.

In the end I had to go outside Amazon.  You can use other programs like Calibre or there are sites where you can instantly convert a DOC to MOBI file.  Another way I tried is I set up the book on Draft2Digital, downloaded the MOBI, and saved it as a draft instead of putting it for sale.  Still, it irks me because when I did it through the KDP page I got a file that was the same as what people would get when they bought the book.  By this point I don't usually have formatting glitches but it's still good to be able to check.

This planned obsolescence always chafes me.  Like with my Planet 99 Publishing website last year, I had to completely rebuild my page because Wix decided it wasn't going to support whatever template I had been using for that page, so they froze it, making it so I couldn't add any new books.  I literally then had to spend hours and hours rebuilding the whole page just because of some stupid company's arbitrary decision.  Which my thought is:  why can't you just let me keep using it without your "support?"

A lot of the time the problem is companies get rid of something and replace it with...nothing.  For years there's been this ongoing push to get rid of Adobe Flash.  But the problem is there are still sites that use Flash and Adobe has replaced Flash with...nothing.  So it keeps sending me messages about uninstalling Flash but if I do that what happens when I go to a website that still uses it?

I don't know about other car companies, but I heard a while ago that GM is no longer putting CD players in their cars--unless you buy it as an option.  Because everyone uses satellite radio or streaming now, right?  My car has a satellite radio in it but I never used it except occasionally on free previews.  It didn't really have much of an advantage over traditional radio.  I mean you still get commercials and you still have to flip around a lot to listen to songs you like.  As for streaming, I have the audio jack in there I can hook up my phone or MP3 player to but usually I use that with my Kindle and listen to books.  When I'm not listening to books, I use the CD player because it's easier than getting my phone or MP3 player to work, especially if I'm on the road.

Starting about 15 years ago companies stopped making VCRs because everyone has DVRs right?  I never really wanted a DVR because there wasn't much stuff I wanted to record, so I never had need of an expensive subscription.  Now days most everything is streaming either on some service like Hulu or Netflix or Amazon or it's on the Internet so I suppose it won't be long until DVRs are also put out to pasture even when there isn't really a replacement.

Video games are another area where this can really be annoying.  When I played NHL 95 on my SNES there was a fun practice feature that I liked to play around with.  But in the next versions of the game, they eliminated that.  I did eventually buy NHL 2004 for my PS2 and it was pretty good, but EA Sports lost my business for a few years because they eliminated my favorite feature:  the Create A Player.  That had been a feature since at least NHL 95 and then for...reasons they got rid of it.  Which was total BS.  I made entire teams of players and now I can't have any?  Also other people would use it to update rosters for rookie players or players who came up from the minors during the season.  Now you have to wait for maybe EA to put them on an update?  Lame.

EA has the same issue with The Sims series.  It was cool in The Sims 3 that you could manually recolor hair styles, accessories, and outfits, but in the Sims 4 you were limited to whatever color palette EA or the creator of the item came up with.  I think in the Sims 2 basically any hair style would work with any age character but then in The Sims 3 you needed to have separate ones for adult and child characters.  In The Sims 4 they completely eliminated the toddler age group for a while, until I guess popular demand forced them to put it back in an update.

I don't mean to pick on EA because I'm sure other companies do it.  Microsoft does that whenever they update MS Office.  Stuff gets moved around or eliminated and it's a pain in the ass trying to find the button or feature that you're used to using.  The Blogger page I'm writing this in was revamped a year or so ago and really it's not an improvement at all.  They just moved stuff around and changed the look so it's prettier.  And we could probably make a pretty lengthy article about all the bullshit changes Facebook makes, almost none of which have really been for the best.

The common denominator in all of these things is a problem of a company not really thinking it through and knowing their users.  They just listen to some focus group or some "efficiency expert" or some other dumbass.  Or some programmer geeks think it'd be cool to add some useless feature and to make room for that, why not remove something people like me actually use?  

Or maybe a company eliminates something like VCRs or CDs in cars to try to get you to buy a more expensive product.  Or phone and computer companies stop supporting a version of their phone or operating system to strong-arm you into "upgrading" to a new phone or operating system you don't really need.

Writers can run into the first issue of not really knowing their audience.  They might kill off a character people really like because they don't realize how much people like that character.  In my case with a lot of Eric Filler books I'd write a story that didn't end Happily Ever After or have too much "punishment" for some whiny crybaby readers.  Early on it was that I didn't really get how important that was to some people but now if I do it, it's more that I don't care.  I mean sometimes you just have a story that can't work out Happily Ever After, so fuck it.

The problem of strong-arming people into upgrading isn't so much a book problem.  Though it can still happen, like how publishers all but eliminated the "mass market paperback" that retailed for cheaper to put most paperbacks into a larger and more expensive format.  This is something seen more with college textbooks for instance where every year a company will change maybe 1% of an expensive textbook just to force students to have to buy a "new" textbook instead of being able to buy a cheaper used one.  Professors are usually complicit in this scam by requiring the new book instead of allowing the old one that is 99% the same.  That was always a pain in the ass back in college because accounting textbooks back then could run like $150-$200 and I'm sure it's double or triple that today.

Is there anything you can do about it?  In most cases, not really.  You can complain to the company, but they probably won't do anything unless you can get a lot of support.  Good luck with that.

Back to the Long Way

 Back in February I talked about how I'd turned my car into a mobile home office to write in outside during the pandemic.  Through the spring and summer I have still been doing that, though sometimes I also will just go sit at a picnic table in the park--which I wipe down with sanitizer wipes first and really not just because of Covid.

Anyway, something else that I've started doing in the last couple of months:  writing by hand.  Like with a pen and paper.  When I was a kid we didn't have computers so I wrote stories that way and I probably still have a couple of really old stories in notebooks.  But for the last 30 years I've written almost entirely with computers or word processors.  I did still sometimes write notes or outlines by hand, just not really actual material for stories.

But recently I started writing in notebooks again.  With the warmer weather and the days getting longer, sometimes after dinner I like to go outside, usually to the park nearby.  But I'm not really going to spend a lot of time out there, maybe an hour or so until it starts getting dark and bugs get too bad.  So I found the notebook is more convenient in that case because there's less stuff to take with me and I can pretty much sit anywhere without having to worry about balancing it and reaching the keys and all that.  I don't necessarily do a lot of writing, just a couple of pages, but it has helped to keep the productivity going.

One thing that wasn't as much of a challenge as I feared is reading my own handwriting.  When I was a kid my handwriting was pretty neat but when I got to college and I had to start writing faster, it really got sloppier and it hasn't really gotten better since then.  Sometimes I'll look at a word for an extra moment or two but most of the time I can figure out what I mean by the context when I'm typing up the stuff I wrote.  A secretary or assistant would probably have a harder time, but fortunately I can't afford one of those.

Last year when I had a little eye strain I did also write in a notebook.  Then I tried using the speech-to-text feature in Google Docs, but it was predictably a disaster.  Sometimes it would show the sentence correctly and then change it to something ridiculous.  So I do still have to type up anything I write in a notebook.

Really the first couple of times I did this I didn't even have notebooks.  Like one time I was waiting around the Meijer parking lot for a prescription to get filled so I just found a couple of sheets of paper, like the invoice from my last oil change or something, and scribbled on the back of that.  But then I found a few old notebooks and made sure to have one in my car with a pen and another in my backpack for work so I pretty much always have one lying around if I feel like jotting something down.

It's just something else you might want to try if your productivity is lagging a bit during the endless pandemic.  Right now notebooks are probably really cheap with Back to School sales, so maybe stock up now.

Listen Up Y'All It's A Sabotage: Amazon is Your Frenemy, Ad Nauseum

 About a month ago Eric Filler released his next magna opus:  The Magic Panties 2.  Mostly because The Magic Panties 1 sold pretty well and inexplicably got good ratings.  And I had an idea I pulled from a manga I read where to get a girl to like him, a guy wears a girl's name in his underpants.  That gave me the idea of using sort of a similar device:  a dorky high school kid wants the most popular girl to like him, so he uses this magic spell while wearing a stolen pair of her panties.  But instead of getting her to like him, he becomes a girl, but in the process she does finally notice him and goes out with him, so in a way it does actually work...

Anyway, this was the original cover I loaded using a picture I found online.  It is a bit risque..

Apparently it was so risque that when I went to the book's page on Amazon there was no cover image!  They didn't block the book or send me an email to tell me to change it.  Nope, they just didn't show it.  Not on any of the subsidiary sites either--or the ones I checked.

I waited a day or so in case it might show up, but when it didn't, I tried another cover.  I'd say it's less risque...

But apparently Amazon didn't think so because still there was no cover image!  I waited a while and then finally said the hell with it and just used one of their images on their templates:

I think on the very bottom left are panties!

It sucks, but apparently that's all Amazon will let me do.  I could probably go find a bunch of other books that have as risque or even more risque covers.  It's like how Amazon won't let ME do age regression books anymore, but it's perfectly OK for everyone else to do it--even after you tell Amazon someone is doing it in clear violation of their rules by putting it in the Erotica category.

Anyway, I just felt like they were sabotaging me by putting the book up but not including the cover.  Not having a cover would probably hurt my sales.  And then I have to use some crappy template.  Argh.  It's a real pain in the rectum.  And on top of that they aren't showing the number of pages, which is something that used to only happen to books in Erotica, which this isn't.  I'm not sure how important that is, but it's just irritating, especially when they didn't do it to books I loaded afterwards that were in the same categories.

So for the nth time:  Amazon is your frenemy.  They'll sabotage you if they feel like it while still taking their 35% of your sales.  And you might say:  well you shouldn't post such a risque cover!  Yeah, sure, but if you don't like it, just tell me that.  Block the whole book or send me an email.  Blocking just the cover without explanation is passive-aggressive bullshit.  It's...

In the 1950s, the S on Superman's Chest Stood for 'Sociopath'

On Facebook I often get ads for Comixology because I buy comics from there on occasion.  Their ads usually show various comics, often tied to something I'd bought or looked up.

For some reason one of the comics it showed was issue 10 of Superman's Girl Friend Lois Lane from back in the 50s.  On the cover Lois has turned into a baby and Lana Lang is trying to convince Superman to adopt her.

Since I've written literally hundreds of age regression stories, I finally got curious to see how a "professional" did it.  Or if maybe this was one of those fake-out covers where it shows something that doesn't really happen in the story.  And since it was old, it didn't really cost much to satisfy my curiosity--though the Comixology price was probably about 20x what it originally sold for.

This turned out not to be a fake-out cover, as what is shown on the cover does actually happen.  Lois and Superman go to some scientist's office and since Lois has seen a few wrinkles lately, she decides to use the professor's "youth ray" to make herself a little younger despite Superman's warning not to mess around with the thing.

The ray works, but it works too well as she turns into a teenager and then keeps getting younger until she's a baby.  Supposedly the only way to change back before she can regress into nothing is a burst of Superman's "X-ray vision."  What was confusing to me is that the writer seems to use "X-ray vision" to mean both the kind that sees through walls and stuff and the "heat vision" that can melt stuff.  Lois dresses as a teen and then a Girl Scout and then a little kid to try to get Superman to use his "X-ray vision" but he doesn't and she turns into a baby and he takes her to Lana Lang to care for the baby until he can find the baby's parents--because he supposedly doesn't know the baby is Lois.

Then there's an M Night-style twist.  Superman reveals that he's known all along what Lois was doing but he wanted to teach her a lesson for being impetuous.  He let her regress into a baby just to teach her a lesson about defying his warning and playing around with the machine.  And all along he's had some formula that can change her back--though it would work overnight.  And just to top off the creepy sundae, he threatens to spank her if she doesn't drink the formula.

Yeah, so Superman is basically a sociopath.  I mean, how else could he let it go that far without doing something?  Wouldn't her turning into a teenager or a little girl be enough of a "lesson?"  He has to let her go all the way back to a baby?  

We tend to think superheroes being fucked up started back in the 70s or 80s when stories got all grim and gritty, but what was considered "normal" back in the 50s was pretty fucked up already.  I think I read something in Comic Book Resources or one of those clickbait sites that the kind of story I read was pretty typical.  Back then, Superman was kind of a dick to Lois and Jimmy Olsen with "pranks" like the one above.

The two other stories in that comic basically have Superman stalking Lois to bail her out of jams.  In one she goes to Italy and meets some con artist and falls madly in love with him.  Superman follows them around to try to find out what the guy is up to.  Eventually the con artist tries the scam with another woman and Superman stops him.  

The last story had Lois pretending to be a medium to capture some bank robbers and Superman secretly helps her to pull it off and winds up busting some mob guys.  It was slightly less creepy and sexist than the other two.

It's another example of how the "good old days" weren't really that good.

But as is common, it did give me an idea for a gender swap story.  If Amazon still let me do age regression stories I'd do it that way, but instead I'm doing it a different way.  The story tentatively called The Exclusive, is about a reporter who used to be a big time network anchor until a scandal got him fired.  He's doing a story about some scientist's machine to reverse the aging process and when he triggers the machine, it turns the reporter into a hot young woman who soon gets a new lease on her career but has to deal with sexism and other stuff in the process.  And then things take a turn for the worse...

So provided I finish the story and release it, I should make back what I spent on this comic book--and then some.  That way I can call it a business expense, right?

Shrunken Heads and the Importance of Consistency

 Look, I get that while I fracking love Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax movies, the people who occasionally read my blog don't.  I mean, Tony Laplume even took a shot at it in one review, saying, "I am not a fan of schlock cinema. I don’t make a point even to watch it if it’s the subject of sarcastic commentary."  Which I find amusing because he hates "schlock cinema" but likes schlocky pseudosports like the WWE.  To each his own schlock I guess.

Anyway, like the Tool Time segments in Home Improvement, I think seeing things done wrong can often be instructive in telling you how to do things right.  Watching the recent Rifftrax of the 1994 movie Shrunken Heads provided a good illustration of how important it is to be consistent because this movie is not consistent in anything--except how bad it is. 

Shrunken Heads was made by Full Moon Studios, who also made the far better (but obviously still not great) sci-fi Westerns Oblivion and Oblivion 2:  Backlash.  It even stars Meg Foster, who was in both of those movies.  And it was directed by composer Danny Elfman's brother with Danny Elfman contributing the title theme to the soundtrack.  As far as pedigrees go it's not great, but it's not exactly amateur hour either.

The problem is as I said:  consistency.  The movie is supposed to take place in the present day of 1994 in New York or Baltimore or somewhere like that.  But the street gangs and shopkeepers in the movie are ripped right from West Side Story, which leads the riffers of the movie to describe it as the "Fifties-Nineties."  

The main characters of the movie are three young teenagers (15 or so) who mostly sit around reading DC comics, debating whether Green Lantern is better than Krypto the Dog.  I mean, that seems like a pretty obvious argument to me, but whatever.  Those relatively harmless teens record one of the street gangs chopping up an old lady's car and give the tape to the police.  And then the teens are brutally murdered and turned into shrunken heads by the Haitian newsstand owner to take revenge on the gangs.  Wait, what?

The lead teen has a crush on a girl who was going out with one of the gang members.  After he's turned into a shrunken head, the teen visits the girl in the cemetery and finally expresses his love...by flying up her shirt to suckle from her breast.  Um...what?

The Haitian shopkeeper seems like a wise old sage, but he repeatedly brags about being a member of the Tonton Macoute.  Who were they?  "The Tonton Macoute or simply the Macoute was a special operations unit within the Haitian paramilitary force created in 1959 by dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier."  In other words, they were a death squad akin to the Nazi SS.  Imagine if one of the "heroes" of your story bragged about being a former SS officer...yikes.  He should probably have been in prison for crimes against humanity.  And on top of that, this guy who's so nice to the teens steals them from the funeral home, saws off their heads, and then spends a year training them to be killing machines.  It's all pretty macabre.

Remember what I said earlier about Danny Elfman contributing the title theme?  The problem is he ONLY did the title theme.  The rest of the music then is some awful public domain Muzak shit.  It's a real one-eighty bouncing from a professional soundtrack to cheap, generic crap.

So pretty much at every level you have inconsistency, from the music to the setting to the characters to the story itself.  I mean did this want to be a brutal revenge story like Robocop, Darkman, The Crow, or Chance of a Lifetime?  Or did it want to be more of a Goonies or Stand By Me story with the relatively innocent and harmless teen main characters?

Like a movie, a book needs to stay consistent in its genre and tone.  You can't go bouncing from harmless YA stuff to grim and gritty neo-noir stuff and back again.  It will confuse the readers and it makes it harder to find readers who will actually like the book because some will expect one thing and some another thing and in the end neither will be happy when the book isn't delivering.  Unless maybe the whole point of the story is someone changing from a hard-bitten old detective to a cute young lady like in Chance of a Lifetime.  Most readers didn't really seem to mind that.

Anyway, maybe now you learned something.  Or not.  

Hi

 Coming Soon...

It Turns Out Invincible is Better on TV

 A couple of months ago I watched Invincible on Amazon Prime Video.  It's an adaptation of the comic by Robert Kirkman of Walking Dead fame.  Amazon Prime had the first three volumes of the comics, or issues 1-13, for free through Prime Reading so I checked them out and finally got around to reading them last month.

And as the title says, it turns out that the TV show is better.  The TV show and comics have a lot of the same elements, but the storytelling in the TV show is a lot more focused and paced better.

One of the major differences is the murder of the Justice League-type team in the TV show takes place at the end of the first episode.  In the comics it doesn't happen until about issue #7.  It's actually a lot better more towards the beginning because that gives more time to turn it into a mystery.  In the comics the Guardians of the Globe are killed by Mark's superhero father and 2-3 issues later he confesses everything.  The demon detective investigating the case doesn't find anything and Mark's mom doesn't get suspicious of anything either.

It's a lot better in the TV show where it's more drawn out.  Even though we know Mark's father did it, it's better wondering if the other characters will figure it out versus it just being solved almost right away.

Quite a few other things were just glossed over in the comics that were explored more in the TV show.  The most prominent is Mark has a crush on a girl at school named Amber.  He starts going out with her and has to juggle being with her and school and being a superhero.  In the comics we see her passing him a note to call her and then it's just mentioned in dialogue that they're going out.  But we never actually see them interacting at all.

In the TV show Mark, Amber, and William go to Upstate College and are attacked by robo-zombies.  In the comics it's just Mark and William and William spends more time bitching about people not wanting to call him by his full first name than they spend being accosted by robo-zombies.  There's a brief fight and then the robo-zombie vanishes; we never find out who built them or why.  In one episode of the TV show Mark and the "Teen Team" (their version of the Teen Titans) fight an alien invasion.  The aliens come from another universe where time runs differently so the first time they end up dying of old age after a short time.  In the TV show they come back a couple more times, each time having developed better weapons.  In the comics there's just one battle and it's Mark and his dad.  In both his dad winds up going through a portal to the alien dimension.  In the comics he comes back later and says he led a revolt and a couple of scientists helped him get home.  In the TV show he brutally slaughters pretty much their entire world, demonstrating that the murder of the Guardians of the Globe was not an isolated event.

The battle between Mark and his father is more drawn out in the TV show.  Before they fight, the government sics conventional weapons, nukes, robo-zombies, and a kaiju on Mark's father.  In the comics it's just Mark and his dad.  There's more of an emotional moment in the TV show when Mark's father thinks back to cheering his son in Little League and then disappears.  In the comics he just stops and disappears.

There are a lot of subplots in the TV show that weren't in the first three volumes of comics.  They might have come up later--or not.  I'm not sure and don't feel like spending a bunch of money to find out.  For instance in one episode Mark helps a villain take down a gangster, only for the villain to take over the gangster's rackets.  Over the course of a few episodes, Robot, the leader of the Teen Team, develops an attraction to Monster Girl, a young girl who turns into a Hulk-type creature, though when she does she gets 1 week younger.  Robot blackmails a couple of alien clones into making a human body for him so he and Monster Girl can be together.  None of that has happened--yet.  Over a few episodes Atom Eve, a member of the Teen Team who also goes to school with Mark, leaves the team when she finds her boyfriend cheating on her with another member of the team.  Then she goes off on her own to help people on her own terms.  In the comics she catches her boyfriend cheating but the rest of the stuff doesn't happen--at least not yet.  In one episode Mark goes to Mars with a space shuttle flight and inadvertently unleashes an apocalypse there.  But that hasn't happened yet in the comics either.

The TV show also does better with representation.  In the comics Mark and his mom are Asian but other than that there aren't any other minority main characters.  Female characters are portrayed a little better in the TV show.  As I said, Mark's girlfriend Amber is barely shown in the comics while in the TV show she's a main character--and black instead of white.  In the TV show his mom is a realtor while in the comics she's just a housewife sitting around all day waiting for her husband and son to come home from saving the world.  I'm not sure either version passes the Bechdel test but the TV show is much closer.  In the TV show Mark's friend William is gay, which becomes especially clear when they go to the college and he's going out with some dude there.  Such does not appear to be the case in the comics and there are no other gay characters.  When Mark takes William up into the air he even says, "This is so gay," using it as a slur.

So in the end I think the first season of the TV show was a lot better.  The pacing was better and there was a lot more depth than in the comics.  From reading some of the notes in the comics, part of it might have been that they weren't really sure if the comic book would be able to get much past 12 issues.  Besides sales the original artist who worked on it got busy and they had to change.  With the TV show they already had an order for 8 45-minute-ish episodes so there wasn't as much pressure to rush things along, allowing them to develop characters and situations more.

Anyway, it's definitely better on TV and for most people I suppose that would be easier too.  It's a win-win!

Is It Better to Not Be Connected?

 Recently I finally got around to reading Tom King's Superman series, Up in the Sky.  The 12-issue series was originally published as part of these "Walmart Giants" where they reprinted a bunch of old comics but also included a little new material and then sold them exclusively at Walmart.  And maybe just for fun they had the writers of Batman and Superman swap series so that King, who was writing Batman at the time, did a Superman series and Brian Michael Bendis, who'd recently taken over Superman, wrote a Batman series.  Inevitably they reprinted the new material on its own.

I enjoyed King's series like I enjoyed most of his work to date that I've read.  Like his other work, King is able to really humanize an iconic comic book character and even make the Man of Steel seem vulnerable.  The story revolves around a little girl who's kidnapped from Earth and taken into space, so Superman leaves Earth to find her.  Over the 12 issues he goes to a variety of planets and faces a variety of challenges.  On one planet he fights a mercenary in a boxing match to obtain information; the mercenary has Superman-like invulnerability and stamina so it's a pretty equal fight.  Another time he's injured and picked up by a ship where the alien doctor gives his life to save Superman's.  At another point he crashes on a planet and is split into Kryptonian and human halves that eventually have to reunite.  There was a "controversial" issue where he's at an alien call center to try to contact Lois and keeps imagining horrible ways she could be dying while he's out in space.  Idiots thought she was actually dying or something stupid and DC had to actually pause the series for a little bit.  Eventually he goes to New Genesis to make a devil's bargain with Darkseid and finds the girl and saves the day.

What I got to thinking is that most of King's work for DC isn't really connected to much else in the DC universe.  Even his run on Batman didn't really connect to other stuff going on in the DC Universe.  The two "Night of the Monster Men" crossover issues early on were written by someone else.  It wasn't like with previous writers where they had story arcs running through every Batman title or even every DC title.  King's Batman run was for the most part its own self-contained universe where the stuff going on in Detective Comics, Batgirl, Nightwing, or Justice League didn't really affect it.  This was also the case for Up in the Sky, Mr. Miracle, Omega Men, and I'm pretty sure also for Strange Adventures, Rorschach, and the upcoming Human Target.

Is that a bad thing?  I don't think it really is.  And then it got me thinking that a lot of the really good stories in comics were not really connected.  Iconic stories like The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Arkham Asylum, All-Star Superman, or Superman: Red Son were not part of the main DC Universe.  I'm not sure about some others like The Killing Joke, Batman: Year One, The Long Halloween, or Hush; they might have started off as not really in the continuity and then became part of the continuity later on.

I'm less familiar with Marvel but there are also good non-continuity stories like Spider-Man: Life Story or Marvels.  And then of course you have thousands of small publisher or independent graphic novels.

Anyway, the point is that I think when something doesn't have to be in continuity it's able to tell its own story.  In most cases that means smaller, more meaningful stories rather than big events.  In superhero comics, big events almost inevitably will end up as slugfests that might be entertaining but don't have much meaning.  Authors like Tom King, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, or Neil Gaiman are much better when they're able to create on their own terms rather than having to incorporate the work of lesser authors.

Think of it this way:  would you get a better story from Stephen King by himself or Stephen King if he had to incorporate chapters from EL James, Stephanie Meyer, and Eric Filler?  [Or whatever other hacks you want to throw in there.]  Collaboration can be fun but groups tend to water down ideas to reach consensus.

And when comic book authors aren't dealing with continuity and whatnot they also don't have as much pressure from the editors and publisher to do something big and flashy to drive sales.  There's the room then to work ideas on a smaller, quieter level.

That's not to disrespect Golden Age writers like Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel & Joe Schuster, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, and so on.  They created the continuity in the first place.  But back then comics were mostly aimed at children and the storytelling tends to reflect that.  Writers from the 70s and on were allowed to be more grown up and explore more adult themes.

Or maybe I'm just talking out my own ass--it wouldn't be the first time. 

The Big Fat Truth

 On Facebook a few weeks ago there was a clickbait article on my feed saying that Brendan Fraser should be having a career renaissance after his work in some movie.  Feeling a bit naughty, I decided to drop a truth bomb:  he'd be getting more work if he got back into shape instead of looking like he ate his younger self.

The reaction was predictable:  you're a bully!  Body shaming!  Troll!  You can say that and use all the stupid memes you want, but it doesn't change the truth.  And sorry, but it is the truth.

One person said, "There are parts for people of all sizes!"  Yeah, that's great, but that's what you tell little kids.  Adults should know better.

It's really simple:  the world is shallow and superficial and nowhere is that more obvious than in Hollywood.  When Brendan Fraser was buff and young and had hair, he could get leading roles.  Now that he's middle-aged, fat, and balding, it's not going to happen.  He can get supporting roles and voice work like in Doom Patrol, but no one is going to cast him as the lead in anything major.  Career-wise that can work out fine for steady work.  Guys like Ned Beatty, Charles Durning, and Ernest Borgnine did that for decades.  But no, he's not going to be headlining big action movies like The Mummy anymore.  It's just a fact.  Deal with it.

Since it's I think Insecure Writer's Support Group Wednesday, it seemed appropriate to air this little insecurity.  And of course it's not this way just in Hollyweird; it's that way everywhere.  I'm sure I'd have a much better job and thus be living a lot better if I were thin and had a full head of hair and two good eyes and good teeth.  If I did I'd have a lot more confidence and thus I'd be able to do a lot better in interviews.  And interviewers wouldn't shut down the moment they see me.  

Seriously, that's happened.  Like one time a lady from a temp agency calls me and is breathlessly telling me about all these jobs she has open for me.  I drive 40 miles to her office the next day and suddenly no jobs are available.  Hurm...what changed?  Or other times I show up for the interview and they bail out after one or two questions so the interview is pretty much over in five minutes.  Or a couple of times when they sent me a form rejection email about an hour after the interview.  I mean,  how much consideration could they really have given it?

We tend to think about prejudice as just applying to skin color or religion or age, but there are a lot of other factors too.  And despite all the TV shows and books and movies telling kids to be themselves and tolerate people who are different, that's not how the world works.  You can call me a bully or troll or give me your SJW hippie-dippy politically correct bullshit, but it won't change anything.  It won't change reality.

Is that insecure enough for you?

Here's an appropriate song, John Prine's "Big Fat Love" played by some guy on YouTube.

Loki Was Good Even Though Loki Didn't Really Matter

Like the other two Disney+ Marvel series, I didn't rush to watch Loki.  I waited until all the episodes were up and then binged it.  I planned to spread it out over a few days like Captain America Falcon and the Winter Soldier but I wound up doing it all in one night instead.  In part because I was bored but also because the show was really intriguing.

The thing is, I'm not really a big fan of Loki, not like my sister, who even named a cat after him.  I will say he's the best villain in the MCU if only because Marvel sucks at creating villains with any depth, mostly because they get bumped off after one movie.  By default Thanos is the second-best villain because he didn't get killed right away.  It just annoys me that like with Magneto in the Fox Marvelverse, they're always trying to make Loki seem like a good guy despite that he's killed thousands or maybe even millions of people by now.  I don't need villains to be mustache-twirling clichés but it sucks when they're wishy-washy.

This show is the latest attempt to redeem Loki.  During Endgame, a Loki from 2012 (during the first Avengers movie) escapes, but he's quickly apprehended by the mysterious Time Variance Authority or TVA.  While most "variants" like him are "pruned" (ie beamed to a desolate wasteland at the end of the universe) he's recruited to help find another variant Loki in sort of a Silence of the Lambs arrangement.

Soon Loki finds out that this other Loki is hiding in natural disasters throughout time and they're able to find her.  Yes, her.  It's a lady Loki who calls herself Sylvie.  The TVA tried to prune her when she was a child but she escaped and has been killing TVA agents and stealing their "reset" bombs to get to the "Time Keepers" who supposedly control all time.

The 2012 Loki and Sylvie wind up stranded on a planet about to be destroyed by a rogue moon but when they're about to get romantic it creates enough of a variance or whatever that they can be rescued.  Soon Loki and Sylvie uncover that the Time Keepers aren't real and there's a man behind the curtain who's called "He Who Remains" but comic fans would know better as Kang the Conqueror, a villain from the future who repeatedly tries to take over the universe and is repeatedly stopped by the Avengers.

Anyway, he offers Loki and Sylvie the choice of death or taking over the TVA to carry on his work.  Loki would gladly take over the TVA to use it as a stepping stone to ultimate power but Sylvie would rather just kill Kang, which she does.  Loki ends up back at the TVA base but now no one remembers him and instead of the "Time Keepers" there's one Kang in charge of everything.

To Be Continued...[ominous music]

I already knew some of the stuff that would happen just from people's spoilers, but it still drew me in to see what exactly was going to happen.  In that sense it was a success.  What really keeps bugging me though is that Loki--the Tom Hiddleston version--is one of the least important characters in a show named for him.  Sylvie is the one who really stirs the drink here.  Her and Kang are the two most important characters to the plot as the central conflict really revolves around them.  The Loki we're familiar with finds Sylvie and then accompanies her but the show could easily have been the same without him.  The only real reason he's there is they needed a familiar face to sell the show to the public.

In that sense it's appropriate because Loki is the god of mischief and lies, so why shouldn't his show be one big convoluted lie or misdirection?  There were a few moments where Loki was allowed to shine, like when he finds out what happened to his original self and the destruction of Asgard and death of his adopted mother and his sorta creepy relationship with Sylvie.  There's not enough to where I'd say this is a great show, but it was decent and it helps set up all the multiverse crap that's going to happen with Dr. Strange 2, Spider-Man 3, and Ant-Man 3, the latter featuring Kang as a villain.  It probably could have been even better if it had tried a little harder to focus on its main character and give him a real character arc instead of making him a sidekick in his own series.

For comics fans there were plenty of Easter eggs, especially in the 5th episode when they go to the TVA's dump for all the shit that got "pruned."  There are other variant Lokis like the classic one (I have an action figure of that one), a child one, a black one, an alligator one, and another Tom Hiddleston one who was running for mayor or something.  At one point you can also see the infamous frog Thor and there's a helicopter with "Thanos" written on it from some ridiculous old comic book story.  And probably more shit I wouldn't know about because I haven't read that many Thor/Loki comics.  

Other than Lady Sif appearing in a cameo there aren't really any other MCU guest stars except in footage of previous movies.

Much was made about Loki being DB Cooper but it was kind of a fake-out that didn't make much sense.  Apparently it was just a prank Loki pulled.  He came to Earth and somehow flawlessly impersonated a normal human to hijack a plane and steal a bunch of money and then jump out and get beamed up by the Bifrost?  It didn't really make any sense and contributed nothing to the plot.  Really if Asgardians were hanging around Earth or "Midgard" back in the 70s why didn't Thor know much about our customs in the first movie?

Anyway, this show didn't really make me want another season about Loki so much as it made me want a series focusing on Sylvie.  Which is good in a way but also not good if your title character is less interesting than someone else.