The curse of narrative thinking.

 

Hello again. I've been away from collecting for awhile, but it's not a bad thing. I've actually been more active in creative fields - both writing and cartooning. And more recently, I've been actively collecting with different focus, so I'll have more to write about shortly.

But right now, today, I want to ask if any writers out there, or even dedicated fans of TV and films, suffer from occasional bouts of narrative thinking paralysis.

Not sure what I mean? It can happen anytime. It happened to me recently:

I was talking with my friend Shelby - or texting, I actually don't remember which - and she asked if my wife and I had any plans for the weekend. We usually don't particularly, but this week we did. But before I could answer, narrative paralysis set in. I thought:

If this is a movie about me, Shelby asking what my plans are is a harmless exposition scene to establish the general path of the film.

...but...

If this is a movie about Shelby, her asking what my plans are will establish why I'm gone, then I come back in act III with either some terrible event from the weekend, or don't come back at all.

...or even...

If this is a horror film about me, something terrible is going to happen to me, AND Shelby is going to get pulled into it in Act III.

Crazy? Trained from structuring out dozens of stories, and also from watching and studying hundreds more, I applied Chekhov's gun to real life. Like, if I say plans out loud, there's a "narrative reason" for it, and something will come of it. 

You know that's not what I mean.

I only  paused a moment, and I did give a real "normal" answer, but I found the thought very interesting. And for the weekend, as we drove out of town in unfamiliar places down unfamiliar roads, I occasionally considered - am I in a narrative?

Has this ever happened to you?

In the beginning, there was Sealab. 2021.

I've been think about the evolution in animation at Cartoon Network that led to the creation of The Venture Brothers, one of my favorite series. At times it seems like it's particularly aimed at a fan-collector-geek of my generation. 

So, Cartoon Network announced way back in the 90s they were going to start creating "Adult oriented" animation for their late night block. I was skeptical at the time, but quickly came to love it.

Sealab 2021 begat Harvey Birdman Attorney at law, both of which were important steps in the de-sanctification of the networks animated archive, but also the rebirth of it as an age-appropriate appreciation of baby boomer and GenX Saturday Morning Nostalgia.

One small but crucial element was "The Night of the Living Doo," this spin on the classic Scooby Doo Movies, with celebrities David Cross, Gary Coleman, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. How 90's!

I originally caught this only by literally changing the channel to Adult Swim just as it was starting to air, and franticly hitting my Tivo record button. I have a homemade DVD of this somewhere that's quite clear, but for online, this fuzzy Youtube video will have to suffice for the moment. Enjoy!

What Is... the "Best" Romance in Comics? New Comics Eve 2/9/16

The Curious Tale of Monkey Island

I was very sorry to hear "Dickie" Jones, best known as the voice of Pinocchio, passed away this week.  I really only ever met him once, but surprisingly, it had almost nothing to do with Disney.

A few years back when I was very into "Searching Ebay For Cool Old Stuff," I came across this matchbook cover for Monkey Island:

This looked fascinating to me.  "1000 Monkeys running loose!  No Bars - No Cages - No Danger."  Even better, the address put it pretty close to where I lived in Hollywood.  Cahuenga Boulevard now has the 101 freeway alongside it through "The Pass," and this address put the site of Monkey Island very close to my home, and right near what is now the Barham Blvd. exit from that freeway.

A little Googling led me to sites like this that gave the history of Monkey Island: basically, it was a concrete island surrounded by a concrete moat filled with water.  Here, as one account put it, "You paid a quarter to watch monkeys watch you watch them."  Apparently, it was also a popular place for divorced Hollywood dads to take their kids on weekends.   But most interesting to me it mentioned Dickie Jones as one of the celebrities who had visited.

Now, I happened to be reading on this on the day after one of the Disney Legend Ceremonies, where I had seen Dickie on the Studio lot, attending as a previous recipient.  My curiosity to hear an eyewitness account of the place led me to track down his phone number, and I placed a call a few days later.  I admittedly felt a little silly, and perhaps a little presumptive and rude, to be calling a stranger about something so obscure, so long ago. 

His answering machine picked up, and after his cheery, slightly familiar but much more mature voice greeting and the beep, I left my message:

"Hi Mr. Jones, I saw you at the Studio the other day, but I'm not calling about Pinocchio.  Uh, I saw an article that said you once visited 'Monkey Island' in Hollywood, and I was just wondering if you might remember anything about the place-"

I was cut off by a sudden clattering as if someone desperately grabbed for the phone.  Then, a gravelly voice, fraught with drama, grimly rasped five words I will never forget:

Dickie:  "They learned how to swim!"

Me:  (a pause): "What?"

Dickie:  "They learned how to swim!  There were monkeys all over Cahuenga Boulevard when you drove up there.  At night, they'd go back to the island to eat, but they were all over the place!" 

A few months later he was at the Studio to record an interview, and I introduced myself as the guy who called.  "Monkey man!" he happily named me, and shook my hand enthusiastically.  He was very happy to receive printouts of the matchbook and other images I'd found of Monkey Island online.  I was most curious about his reaction to this one. Another copy of it (which I can't find now, sorry) had the original caption attached which positively confirmed this is Dickie, "enjoying" an experience most visitors never had, of being on the island itself literally up to his knees in hungry monkeys:

This looks like a terrifying experience to me.  Perhaps it was, worthy of repressing, because to my surprise Dickie looked at this photo and said with a deadpan face:

"I have no recollection of this at all!"

That's the whole story.  Rest In Peace, Dickie.

Postscript:  Awhile after that, my friend Dave Kooi and I visited the site of Monkey Island today, following vintage and current aerial photos to find the exact spot.  It is now the El Paseo De Cahuenga Park, a tiny little square of green almost exactly the size of the original Island location.  There's one tree in between the park and the freeway that's old enough to have shaded some monkeys.

Nice to know

I like both George Takei and Penn Jillette very much, so I was quite glad to see Takei comment on meeting Penn on "The Celebrity Apprentice":

He especially enjoyed working with Penn Jillette, whom he found to be "an extremely well-read person, a walking encyclopedia. Where most of us forget or bury details in the back of our minds, he has the ability to recall dates and places and historic elements in conversation. When he's interested in something, he really digs in and explores it, and when he talks about a subject like that, you feel like you're getting a college lecture." Takei expects to catch a Penn & Teller show "the next time I'm in Vegas."

On the internet, nobody can hear you scream first.

I rarely try to be particularly timely in my posts here - to provide breaking news on geekdom happenings - but the look at the Prometheus trailer that premiered online today does make me want to jump into the pool of voices eagerly crying it's either a prequel or otherwise related film to the Alien movies - and particularly to the 1979 classic that started the series.

First, take a look at the trailer here.

Despite overall feeling like the Alien series - which could be simply dismissed as both being science fiction films from the same director - there are two dead giveaway elements from the first film.

1) The space jockey.

As he was called, the dead pilot of the alien ship found by the Nostromo in Alien. His seat, at least, is clearly seen in the trailer at 0:39.

2) The ship.

Several shots reveal the same horseshoe shaped spaceship that the Nostromo discovered crashed, and explored:

Here's another image from Prometheus, clearly showing the whole horseshoe shape:

This is all news to me, but if you search the internet, you'll find plenty of references to the upcoming film, and even a quote from Scott confirming it is about the space jockey from the original film. I don't know how many of these are true, but I know I'm looking forward to this one with almost the same anticipation I felt for the first when I went to see it in theaters back on my 13th birthday in 1979.

This also underlines how much movie making has changed since the first sequel Aliens was released in 1986. Then, returning to the ship depended on the existence of the model, which had been stored somewhat exposed to the elements in a driveway in Burbank CA for several years.

Damage to the model had lead to the idea that a lava flow had cut through the ship since Ripley had last visited, but now I can't recall if that appears in the film or just in the comic book / novel adaptations.

The space jockey couldn't have appeared again without CGI (hence adding to the need for a path into the ship that didnt pass him). I'm told the original giant space jockey, sculpted out of foam, was on display in the forecourt of the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood when the film premiered, until a stray cigarette caught it on fire and destroyed it in a matter of seconds.

Egyptian Theater photo swiped from here.

Next time: 'Tis the Season to Collect....

Apparently, we have a new theme.

It's "footage of 1970's TV spaceships that ends up in karaoke videos on new programs." Last week's episode of Community featured scenes of Joel McHale as Jeff Winger and Jim Rash as Dean Pelton (that's him on the left screaming) making karaoke videos in the mall. They break into a fight as another video starts rolling behind them, and there once again appears the Salvage 1 spaceship on network screens for the second time in thirty years. (See the last entry if you're confused at this point).

Is this a new trend in television? Or the last time it'll ever happen? How odd.

Quark flies again - sort of...

Just a few weeks ago I was watching Breaking Bad - easily one of the best dramas on TV today - when something very unusual but very familiar caught my eye.

Not to give away any spoilers, a side plot involved viewing a karaoke-style video one of the characters had made to the tune of Peter Schilling's Major Tom. Behind him ran mostly space themed stock footage.
And, unmistakably, footage of the space ship from Quark.
In fact, it was clearly from the episode "The Good, the Bad, and the Ficus," which is about the ship being pulled through a black hole and, with dazzling disco-y effect, splitting into two copies - one good one evil. (Ficus, being the emotionless Vegeton alien, is neither good or evil - hence the title). I recognized the ship right away not just because it's so distinctive -
but because I had recently commissioned this model of it online, and had sent the manufacturer every angle of the ship I could find on the show. They built it with the garbage collecting door open, and the trash bag collecting arms extended.

Once you're commissioning models, I think you have to admit to a certain obsession with a show - or at least, in this case, an obsession with collecting everything possible on the program. With this model, plus all the scripts (except one) and dozens of press stills and more, I think I can safely literally say what I once joked: I almost certainly have the largest collection of Quark stuff assembled.
The music video also included footage from a show even more obscure than Quark, if only because it was never released on DVD.
That odd 3-engined rocket is Salvage One, the ship from the Andy Griffith show by the same name. Griffith played an ex-astronaut who used NASA surplus to make his own rocket to go to the moon and salvage everything NASA had left behind, plus bring back his own moon rocks too. I don't remember much about the show, but I remember enjoying it.

A bit of trivia: Quark may be about the only science fiction show that never named it's spaceship - all the scripts only call it "Quark's ship."

More soon!

Big Bang 5.0

I'm writing this up just as the season 5 premiere of "The Big Bang Theory" is recording on my DVR upstairs. Thinking back to the start, it's a tribute to the cast and crew that the show was 1) created in the first place, and 2) good enough to last this long. (Also notable, it garnered what I believe is still the best syndication deal ever for a TV show.

I've been collecting stuff from the program since the beginning, and it's worth noting that without the San Diego Comic Con, there'd be a heck of a lot less stuff out there to collect. Probably the prize of my collection is the set of posters from each season, signed by the cast at Comic Con. These are all framed similarly and hanging near each other in the living room.

Above is the latest, which for the first time is illustrated: a super-hero version of the whole cast. This one includes seven signatures, including both Mayim Bialik (Amy) and Melissa Rauch (Bernadette).
Last year's poster featured the cast in a tribute to, um... the Beatles? Barbarella? Casino? I feel like there's a specific pop culture reference being made here that's eluding me. (If you know, please fill me in). In any case, they look cool. Signed by the 5 cast members.

Season two's art featured a "Usual Suspects" style line up, equating each character's height with their relative IQ - and Penny breaking the rank to come out on top. Five signatures.

Finally, the first year's art features Sheldon and Leonard in their Flash costumes, with the rest of the cast represented in small photos at the bottom. This one is notable because it's not only signed by the 5 cast members, but also producers Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady.

I'm not sure how many of these they sign each year - maybe 100 at most? But I'm guessing the first is the rarest simply because they had no idea what to expect at the Con. According to Johnny Galecki at their second Con, it was the overwhelming response at the previous show that first showed them how big the show was catching on.

More soon...

Mystic Warlords of Ka'a comes to life!

I didn't see these at all while at Comic Con, but that's easy to understand: it's a big place. Ultra big. Like, there was a full size recreation of the town of South Park across the street, and we didn't even notice it for the first two days.

Anyways, these cards started showing up on Ebay and, after noticing the address on one and dialing in, I discovered there's a real live version of the collectible card game "Mystic Warriors of Ka'a" up on facebook!

While it seems to be a little buggy, it's kind of fun, as the characters from the show appear to teach you the rules and then, play against you.

I'm still checking it out myself, but go try it out and have fun! Link here.

Stan in the picture...

Just a quick update here - last season, Stan "The Man" Lee made an appearance as himself on The Big Bang Theory. But did he enjoy it? This image shot off a monitor at SDCC proves that indeed he did. Confirming what my good friend Josh Shipley from The Josh and Croz Show told me after he was lucky enough to interview the Man himself, "The Man" has a photo of himself on the set of BBT right by his desk in his Beverly Hills office. (Upper right). And just in case you can't make it out, he's in the living room with the whole cast, and it looks like Kaley is giving him a smooch! Who said comic book guys don't get girls?

The Oversized Carry-all Anticipation

Hopefully, I'll be using Comic-con to jump start my regular posting here again. For now, though, I just want to preview the new Big Bang Theory Bag that'll be at this year's con:

You can see the rest of the bags for this year here.

The Second Final Frontier

I recently viewed the latest Star Trek film for the second time. First was in the theaters, second at home on Blu-Ray, much later, much removed from all the hype about whether or not J.J. Abrams was destroying the franchise, or broke the Prime Directive, or any of that. I was watching it as pure entertainment, as a science fiction fan but also a lifelong Star Trek fan.* ("Spoilers" follow if you're actually reading this before you've seen the film).

I thoroughly enjoyed the film. Abrams played it safe - or smart - by setting his Trek in an alternate universe created when the uber-Romulan villain bounced back in time and attacked the USS Kelvin, just as one James Tiberius Kirk happens to be born. So, everything we see in this timeline is completely new and therefore free from any continuity scrutiny you can apply.

Ordinarily, a film set in the formative Star Fleet Academy years of our heroes would require - at least to the hardcore continuity buffs - a look somewhere between Captain Archer's Enterprise and Captain Pike's Enterprise as seen in the original pilot "The Cage" or the two-part episode "The Menagerie." But since the film starts with a disruption to the time stream - a huge, deadly attack by an unknown enemy that never happened in "our" Trek history - all bets are off. Assuming a greater focus on offensive and defensive power for starships after that, there's no reason to insist anything in this film has to match anything we've seen before. Only that brief scene on the Kelvin needs to fit into the original timeline,** and I'm surprised on close inspection to believe that it does:

On Captain Archer's Enterprise (left), the controls are large manual slides and hard buttons, like on a 1980's stereo console. By the time of Kirk's Enterprise (right), controls are very simple and very solid, like a 1960's cassette player. The detail of the Kelvin shuttle from the film (middle) shows nice, hard-wired type toggle switches, like a 1970's mixing board (Ok, I'm guessing on that one). To me, a believable intermediary step. (It was already interesting to note, once the original series was placed in a timeline between the movies produced in the 80s+, and "Enterprise" produced in 2001-2005, both with greater detailing to the sets, it implied there was an intentional decision around the time Captain Pike came along, to make the starship corridors very plain and straight, and consoles made up of simple hard buttons. Maybe one too many "Fire torpedoes" apps froze up when they pressed their touch screens...)

That's the really picky, tech analysis of the film. In any case, I found it very entertaining, and most of the performers captured just enough nuances of the original characters to feel true to them without just spewing bad imitations of the originals.
Simon Pegg's wry half-smile perfectly evoked James Doohan's good-natured performance as "Scotty."

It's an interesting study of the nature of "suspension of disbelief" what is the only part of the whole movie that, as a Star Trek fan, gave me pause: the size of Engineering, when Kirk and Scotty beam into it. It's HUGE.

Huge, with lots of empty space, and apparently a lot of it constructed out of concrete, as well. I know the Enterprise is big, but this amount of space looks like it should literally take up the entire secondary hull and then some. (Some of this concrete construction is seen on the Kelvin, too).

On the original series, Engineering looked big, but believable. You could at times see a couple levels, and maybe a ladder poking up higher, but it looked like it was built with an economy of space (no pun intended) in mind.

This kind of detail shouldn't pull you out of the narrative, but it often does. The truth is, they found some kind of real - world refinery or such to film in, and decided it looked futurey enough to be the Enterprise. Money saved on building a set or even rendering one.
It's not as if the Enterprise is the size of the Red Dwarf, which is established as having thousands of levels, a Huge prison system entirely hidden from the normal crew, and cargo bays big enough to dwarf T-Rexes. Anything goes there, and they often shot in real world industrial plants that looked perfectly like part of the ship.

Not that this is a review, but I enjoyed the film even more the second time than the first, and watchign it at home gave the chance to look closely for all those details of design and performance that you miss on first viewing.
Plus, you gotta love outtakes where you get to see the Vulcans crack up...

*That's, right, Star Trek fan. Not a Trekker, or a Trekkie, just a fan of the whole franchise.

**Okay, bonus points if you wanted to point out that Ambassador Spock's ship is from our timeline too, but since it's from the farthest future point we've ever seen in that Universe (and perhaps ever will?) it's safe from scrutiny too.

I don't like yer mug.

Mugs strike me, personally, as generally uninteresting - probably because I rarely drink hot liquids, and usually intake a larger quantity than your typical mug can hold. Still, a few mugs made it into my collection and stay there permanently. From left to right:

Bluth Company: Fox made this available on their web site early in the third season of Arrested Development, just as Michael Bluth began sipping from one at his desk on the show. Remember an easy way to build on your prop budget is to develop merchandise that works on screen as part of the show. Even so, I don't think there're too many of these around.

Oceanic Airlines: This belongs to the airline from Lost, and like the Bluth mug above, appealed to me as a prop replica. If it's something a character on the show would hold, I usually want one.

Drew Carey: This, on the other hand, appears to be a cast and crew gift, meaning there are very few around. Found it in a Salvation Army store in Pasadena.

MST3K: I inherited 2 Mystery Science mugs, one with Mike and one with Joel. Interesting, and just meaningful enough to hang around.

Oh - and Happy New Year! Hoping 2011 is a considerable improvement over 2010; it's already looking like an improvement.

'Big Bang' creators given science honors

'Big Bang' creators given science honors

French Fries Parmesan, please?

I have been very neglectful of this blog of late, but for good reason. I recently started a new job after 17 years in the same place. The curious thing is that, in my old position, I enjoyed writing at home for a change of pace. Now, I write in the daytime - incredibly satisfying, but it does burn up that creative urge. 'Nuff said.

In any case, I wanted to take a moment to share these images from my visit to Syracuse earlier this year. My mother and I went out to dinner to a small Italian restaurant in Liverpool (north of Syracuse) that she had long liked. While eating, I happened to notice something odd about the stained glass windows in the front of the restaurant. Take a look.

That's right - Fry guys from the old McDonaldland characters of the 1970's. At some point, plastic windows from a McDonalds were salvaged and placed in this restaurant. they make a nice enough accent, as long as you don't take close notice of the bug-eyed little sneaker wearing freaks jumping around in them.

That's all. More of a placeholder and a hello than anything real to say. I hope to be back soon.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: No Spoilers, and a lesson in swag

About a week ago, I had the opportunity to see the new movie Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. This is a good time to state my Rule #1 for this blog: no spoilers, ever. I have no interest in seeing something early to run home and write out my synopsis of the movie or show. If I like it, I like the way they told the story, and I don't think you're going to appreciate it better by reading my truncated summary. The most you'll get from me is "it's good. I think you'd like it if..." In this case, gamers, comic book fans, and music fans are all likely to enjoy this film. From the director of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. 'Nuff said.

The funny thing is, only after leaving the theater and seeing the poster in the lobby did I realize I had picked up a ton of swag for the film at Comic Con. in fact, my fiancee and I stood in a line across from the convention center to each get a bag of stuff:
See? Stuff. They were giving it away right at the "stuff" sign. I didn't make it upstairs, so I don't know what kind of party / immersive environment they had going on up there, but it looks like more t-shirts were involved. Here's the free stuff they gave us:

T-shirts, a bag, post cards, free online stuff - all sorts of things. notice the bag says "Scott Pilgrim vs. Comic Con." These are the kinds of things a completist collector of Scott Pilgrim will be wanting to track down.

In fact, if you were really serious about wanting to collect all Scott Pilgrim stuff, you'd have to track down the Comic Con badge from somebody who stood on that line, because they stamped your ID with an oh-so-neat Scott Pilgrim rubber stamp to make sure you didn't come back in line the next day and get another bag of stuff.

If it sounds ungrateful of me to not know I already had all this stuff from Scott Pilgrim (or at least, maybe, that their promotion was unsuccessful in my case) it may help to consider all the free stuff that is given out at the San Diego Comic Con. To help, I laid it out on the living room floor and photographed it:
Free comic books, cards, magazines, buttons, t-shirts, patches, Dexter cheek-scar tattoos, trading cards, Mad Men paper dolls, Archie wedding invitations (both Betty and Veronica), etc. Somehow, I managed to be given four copies of a comic called "radical" over the week without realizing it. Granted, much of these are advertising flyers and catalogs, but it shows how the stuff adds up.

(Collectors note: even though I am not particularly interested in collecting the "Showtime" buttons for Dexter, Weeds, Nurse Jackie, and Californication, it does bug me that I got 3 Weeds buttons and no Nurse Jackie. Just a little bit of OCD manifesting itself...)

A lot of stuff, right? But that doesn't include all the bags I was given there, shown below (with a t-shirt from the "Green Hornet" car garage that I forgot to include above):

Some people list their Comic Con swag on Ebay and try to sell it all for 50, 100, even 200 dollars to recoup their expenses for attending - and I guess people do pay it. Let's face it, if you collect Mythbusters, there isn't all that much different stuff out there to collect, so you'll be wanting their oversized Comic Con bag.

Oh - and to be fair, the above didn't include the free stuff for The Big Bang Theory that I already pulled out into that collection:

No, I don't need four copies of the TV Guide - I'll probably end up giving or trading some to other collectors. But looking at all of this stuff, it occurs to me someone could have a very interesting collection of stuff if all they ever did was go to Comic Con every year and save all the free stuff they got. That would be an interesting cross-section of pop culture.

Hmm. I wonder where those free pogs I got there back in '93 are now...

Post# 150: Our "Secret" Identity Revealed

For our first 149 posts, fancollectorgeek has been curiously anonymous - "curiously" because the only people who likely noticed it was anonymous all knew who was writing it, and no one else likely cared. It has been easy enough to figure out who's writing, either from my Dad's obituary recently linked, or from the many links from the excellent (and personally inspirational) blog of Jim Fanning, Tulgey Wood that identify me by name.

The reason for this (however transparent) anonymity has currently been suspended, making this an excellent time to share the collectible, below, which bears my name:

Astronaut Edgar Mitchell was the sixth person to walk on the moon, in 1971. It also happens that his first and last name are the same as my first and middle - a coincidence, I'm named after my father's uncle, Edgar Mitchell Davis. Still, that coincidence was enough to make me very interested in the space program when I was a kid. I was only four years old when Mitchell walked on the moon during the Apollo 14 mission, but I vividly remember watching it on TV while visiting my grandmother's house in Akron, NY that summer. I had never heard of anyone that had any name in common with myself (well, unless I had heard of Edgar Allen Poe by that age), so I was very interested in his exploits.

When I heard that you could order an autographed photo from Mitchell's website, I decided I wanted to own one myself. Like actors like William Shatner and June Lockhart, many astronauts charge a premium for signed items. The high demand from fans who want to be sure they're getting the real thing makes it a very lucrative sideline for them. It's my understanding that for years Lockhart didn't do autographs at all until finally, in the early 90's, she acquiesced to sign at a Lost In Space convention in Los Angeles for the then unheard of price of fifty dollars a pop. Fans lined up by the hundreds keeping her busy the whole time she was there.

Now, if she was signing at the same rate that Mickey Rooney was (every 12 seconds, five signatures a minute) when he put his scribble on a Fox and the Hound photo for me, she cleared about fifteen thousand dollars an hour that day - slightly less if she took a break to stretch her wrist or get a drink of water.

Nice work if you can get it!

(Just for the record, Mickey Rooney charged 20 dollars a signature, and for charity. not bad).