Posted by Michael Pinto on May 31, 2008 in Star Trek
The music of Alexander Courage set the mood for every Star Trek TV series and movie to come — the tone is clearly that of a swashbuckling naval adventure set in the stars. This is amazing when you think about the fact that that approach was so out of style by the 60s, and yet Courage manages to reinvent it. And if I do say so, the music holds up rather well — it doesn’t feel dated, it’s a real classic is every sense of the word (it’s also important to note that he did this before Kubrick used classical music in 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968). Alexander, thank you for being a special part of the soundtrack of my childhood:
“His most famous work is undoubtedly the “Star Trek” theme, which he composed, arranged and conducted in a week in 1965. “I have to confess to the world that I am not a science fiction fan,” Courage said in an interview for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation’s Archive of American Television in 2000. “Never have been. I think it’s just marvelous malarkey. … So you write some, you hope, marvelous malarkey music that goes with it.”
Courage said the tune, with its ringing fanfare, eerie soprano part and swooping orchestration, was inspired by an arrangement of the song “Beyond the Blue Horizon” he heard as a youngster. “Little did I know when I wrote that first A-flat for the flute that it was going to go down in history, somehow,” Courage said. “It’s a very strange feeling.”
Courage said he also mouthed the “whooshing” sound heard as the starship Enterprise zooms through the opening credits of the TV show.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 31, 2008 in Videogames
It’s berry good news! In 1988 Ralston Cereals (yes the pet food folks!) produced the Nintendo Cereal System. The box featured fruity-flavoured Marios on one side and Zelda berry-flavored boomerangs, keys, and shields. Each box also featured a sticker of a Nintendo character and a set of trading cards. You have wonder why with all of those goodies they bothered to even have cereal in the box?
I’m sorry but I grew up hating Kiss! They always seemed just a little too manufactured to me, as opposed to say Led Zeppelin which was a “real band”. Although decades later I’ve learned to accepted the campyness of the 70s into my heart, even including * cough * disco. And so it was with this in mind that the Kiss edition of the Bearbricks designer toys caught my eye. It manages to turn the Kiss stage personas of The Demon, Starchild, Space Ace, and The Catman into something iconic and collectable.
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 29, 2008 in Star Wars
Star Wars Adventures In ABC was published in 1984 by Buena Vista Records and included a audio tape with a 4 page read along book. Another book and cassette tape set in this same series was Star Wars: Adventures in Colors and Shapes which featured C-3PO and R2-D2 try to help Han Solo and Chewbacca repair the Millennium Falcon. The ABC book featured a different item from the Star Wars universe to illustrate each letter of the alphabet — starting with “A is for AT-AT”:
The Grand Space Voyage (Bolshoe kosmicheskoe puteshestvie) was shot in 1974 in the Soviet Union by director Valentin Selivanov. The plot of the film follows two boys and a girl who are sent into space for a heroic adventure and a light dash of romance. The look of this film reminds me a great deal of Gerry & Sylvia Anderson’s UFO TV series. By the way the little girl in the film is Mila Berlinskaya, who went on to become a world-famous classical pianist who now lives in France (she sings that song too).
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 28, 2008 in Comic Books
Jules Feiffer has done it all: He wrote for Will Eisner’s Outer Space Spirit, illustrated the classic children’s book The Phantom Tollbooth and an extract from his book The Great Comic Book Heroes was used by Quentin Tarantino in the film Kill Bill. However he’s best know to me and a few generations of comic book fans for his Pulitzer Prize winning work in the the Village Voice here in New York.
So I was very pleased to find out that Fantagraphics will be publishing a collection of Feifffer’s early work for the Voice, the book will be titled Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-1966). Here’s a description from the publisher:
“In 1956, a relatively unknown cartoonist by the name of Jules Feiffer started contributing a strip to the only alternative weekly published in the US, a small radical newspaper called The Village Voice. His strip tackled just about every issue, private and public, that affected the sentient American: relationships, sexuality, love, family, parents, children, psychoanalysis, neuroses, presidents, politicians, media, race, class, labor, religiion, foreign policy, war, and one or two other existential questions. It was the first time that the American public had been subjected to a weekly dose of comics that so uncompromisingly and wittily confronted individuals’ private fears and society’s public transgressions.”
Here are some samples from the book (click on to view at full size):
And here is Mr. Feiffer at his drafting table in 1958:
This Sydney Pollack interview is from 1992 and was shot while he was working on Tootsie. I love his advice to upcoming film directors (i.e. “just do it”) and the difference between film and video. Here’s the scene that he acted in (and also directed) from Tootsie:
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 28, 2008 in Science
It looks like the International Space Station is having some issues with its only toilet which is seven years old at this point, NASA is trying to send up parts for a replacement on the next shuttle launch but Discovery is currently overloaded with another payload:
“The international space station’s lone toilet is broken, leaving the crew with almost nowhere to go. So NASA may order an in-orbit plumbing service call when space shuttle Discovery visits next week. Until then, the three-man crew will have to make do with a jury-rigged system when they need to urinate.
While one of the crew was using the Russian-made toilet last week, the toilet motor fan stopped working, according to NASA. Since then, the liquid waste gathering part of the toilet has been working on-and-off. Fortunately, the solid waste collecting part is functioning normally. Russian officials don’t know the cause of the problem and the crew has been unable to fix it.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 27, 2008 in Animation
One of my favorite teachers Howard Beckerman taught me that “animation is the art of movement, not the movement of art”. The above pencil animation by James Baxter is a great example of this…
At this point in time I’ve seen too many cheesecake anime model kits aimed at fanboys, so it was a nice break for me to see something aimed more at the fangurls for a change. Shown above is Clamp in 3D Land Vol. 7 which features five ever so cute heroes and heroines. For those of you who don’t know Clamp too well, they’re a collective of manga artists and and many of their projects have become anime (a good example would be Cardcaptor Sakura). The characters shown above are:
– Kamui Shiro (translation: Power of God) from X
– Su from CLOVER
– Nokoru Imonoyama from CLAMP School Detectives
– Hikaru Shidou from Magic Knight Rayearth
– Sakura (Princess of Clow Kingdom) from Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
I was just saddened to read that Sydney Pollack just passed away. What’s amazing about Pollack is not just the wide range of films that he directed and produced, but for me what I admired about him was that he was also an actor. In fact my favorite scenes from the Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut are when Pollack playing Victor Ziegler tells the score to Tom Cruise who is playing Dr. William “Bill” Hartford. In those scenes he was so believable as the character even though I’d seen him interviewed on the small screen for quite a few years.
I’ve noticed the trend in the last few years to focus on the “Summer Blockbuster” which always seems to be a multimillion dollar special effects film based on a very well known franchise. As much as these films are my generational comfort food (Indiana Jones = Mac and Cheese?) my own personal nostalgia is more for the 90s which were a mini-golden age of indie film making. It’s for this reason that I’ve always been a fan of Stanley Kubrick, because while he made his fair share of blockbusters he was never afraid to take chances and get out of his comfort zone.
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 26, 2008 in Science
The year is 1976 and there is no such thing as a cell phone, the web, DNA testing, or cloned animals: Yet the Viking spacecraft lands on Mars and takes some photos. I’m sorry but thirty years later I’m not going to get excited about the Phoenix landing on Mars. We’ve been there and done that already. If you want to get me excited then have a team of humans building sandcastles on the Martian surface and then I’ll be impressed. The state of NASA is depressing, never mind having a moon base — we can’t even find a replacement for the space shuttle. In thirty years we’ve made so little progress with space exploration it’s disheartening.
The only silver lining to these gray clouds is the amazing discoveries made by astronomers of planets outside of our solar system. But how can we even dream of interstellar space travel when a fellow earthling can’t take a stroll on Mars? As a kid I grew up watching science fiction TV shows like Space:1999 and Star Trek — as I get old I fear that I was just watching fantasy and didn’t know it. As a global civilization humanity is slipping…
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 26, 2008 in Comic Books
For too many people Memorial Day is just another three day weekend, so with this in mind I was curious about the history of the day. So I was surprised to find out that the tradition dates back over a century ago to right after the Civil War when a day set aside to honor those who had died in battle.
While doing my research I was take aback by the above political cartoon that I found to be quite touching. In my mind I associate most political cartoons from the turn of the century with likes of Thomas Nast making satirical comments on political corruption. So to me it was quite a contrast to see the tone of this illustration by John T. McCutcheon which is set in a Civil War graveyard and has this caption:
“You bet I’m goin’ to be a soldier, too, like my Uncle David, when I grow up.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 26, 2008 in Science
Those of us fanboys who work at our day jobs in the computer biz are well aware of the concept of Moore’s Law which is that as time goes on more sophisticated hardware becomes cheaper to manufacture at an incremental rate. Well it seems that now some folks who develop photovoltaics (PV for short) think that they may see their technology reach a turning point by 2015 which is only seven years away:
“In recent years, global PV production has been increasing at a rate of 50 percent per year, so that accumulated global capacity doubles about every 18 months. The PV Moore’s law states that with every doubling of capacity, PV costs come down by 20 percent. In 2004, installing PV cost about $7 per watt, compared to $1/W for wind, which at that time was beginning to stand on its own feet commercially, Last, year, as recently noted in this blog, average global solar costs had come down to between $4 and $5 per watt, right in line with the PV Moore’s law. Extrapolate those gains out six or seven years, and PV costs will be below $2/W, making photovolatics competitive with 2004 wind.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 25, 2008 in Comic Books
As part of our ongoing campaign to support the destruction of superheroes I’ve decided to shine some light on publisher :01 First Second books. What I like about these folks is that they’ve done an amazing job bringing high quality yet quirky graphic novels to a world that’s been lost to the epic battle of comic book clichés. So here’s a title from their back catalog which I think is worth checking out:
Lat is very much a local legend: At the young age of thirteen his first comics were published in the Majallah Filem and Movie News and by age 23 became editorial cartoonist of the New Straits Times, a large Malaysian newspaper. Lat is best known his creation which is the Kampung Boy series, of which Town Boy is the second book. What makes Lat’s work so enjoyable is that he draws what he knows, so while you won’t find any giant robots what you’ll experience is a vivid visual sense of what it’s like to live in Malaysia through the eyes of someone coming of age:
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 25, 2008 in Star Trek
As usual TrekMovie.com is doing some great coverage of the upcoming Star Trek film. However sadly the news is bad for us fanboys who grew up with William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk. I think it’s crappy how they’ve treated Shatner who played such a huge role in making the series what it was:
Newsweek: What’s the latest on the upcoming “Star Trek” movie remake that J.J. Abrams is doing? Have you been hearing from him at all? Shatner: I know nothing. I had a meeting a couple times with J.J. Abrams, who actually came down one time to where we shoot “Boston Legal” to visit with me—and I don’t know what it was about. He never called back, and I’m not in the movie. I’m disappointed.
Newsweek: Were you offended? Shatner: I would have liked to have been in the revival of “Star Trek.” More than that I’m fascinated by the business decision of not including that popular character and the actor who has a lot of popularity still, as opposed to anybody else in the cast who’s either unknown or not in the public eye particularly.
Newsweek: Why do you think you were left out? Shatner: They, in all likelihood, couldn’t solve the storytelling problem and decided to ignore it.
…would it hurt so much to give the guy a five minute walk on role? WTF!
“The technology needed to send a robotic probe to another solar system is far in the future at best. But one scientist says it’s not too soon to start thinking about how to avoid contaminating extrasolar planets with hitchhiking microbes from Earth. Even today’s fastest spacecraft would take tens of thousands of years to reach the Sun’s nearest neighbours, Proxima and Alpha Centauri, which lie just over 4 light years away and may host an Earth-like planet. But some proposed technologies – such as nuclear propulsion, solar sails, and antimatter drives – could theoretically get a spacecraft to other solar systems in a human lifetime.”
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 24, 2008 in Comic Books
As part of our ongoing campaign to support the destruction of superheroes I’ve decided to shine some light on publisher :01 First Second books. What I like about these folks is that they’ve done an amazing job bringing high quality yet quirky graphic novels to a world that’s been lost to the epic battle of comic book clichés. So here’s a title from their back catalog which I think is worth checking out:
A dog and his robot, what else would you need? This graphic novel follows the adventures of a lonely dog who finds companionship with a mail order robot. While the setup of the plot sounds silly (and yes the book is filled with whimsy) Sara Varon’s work is unique in that it also manages to be rather touching at moments. Her work reminds me of the Peanuts school of comic art in that personality of her characters aren’t one dimensional even though they’re drawn that way. Yet unlike Charles Schultz, Varon’s work features few words — it’s like looking at stills from a classic silent film where the pictures do the work of storytelling:
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 24, 2008 in Comic Books
I’m bringing this to your attention because Indiana Jones and Iron Man are just so last week:
Shown above is an action packed scene from the upcoming Incredible Hulk film in which our green protagonist takes on Abomination. My first thought: “This looks like a flick designed to sell a videogame!” And of course I was right, below is a “making of video” on the videogame:
Although I have to admit that if the actual film is nothing but a two hour long fight scene with zero dialogue that would be worth waiting in line for!
Posted by Michael Pinto on May 24, 2008 in Comic Books
On May 29th Ms. Marvel #27 hits the newsstands! While I like the technique that Greg Horn is using in the above cover illustration the subject matter just looks so damn silly to me with the contrast of the blazing fire and the sexy superhero pose in the foreground. I’m not sure just who Marvel is trying to target with this book: Is it female teen manga readers who hate comic book stores? Or is it twentysomething guys who don’t want to date the Supergirl next door? Marvel should just make this book a comedy title, just look at this cute clichéd description:
“There is a Skrull in Lightning Storm’s midst. There is a secret truth to the life of Ms. Marvel’s lover, William Wagner. Something happens between Ms. Marvel and Wonder Man that can never be undone. And an era comes to an explosive end in a pivotal moment in the life of the most important woman in the Marvel Universe.”
